Somewhere between fact and gossip lies the anecdote. Of dubious accuracy, yet vibrantly illustrative, anecdotes are often the most remembered and sometimes the only available details about a historical personage. A customary writerly move involves including one in the introduction of a scholarly article, only to have to concede its unverifiability even if it communicates something of a truth. Anecdotes can augment, obscure, or deviate from fact. Sometimes, however, they are all we have about a particular person or event. What then do we do?
Taking up such issues, the essays in Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie’s English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660–1800 grapple with anecdotes that have sometimes obscured and other times enabled theatre history. In this important collection, the first of its kind devoted to theatrical anecdotes of the period, several essays unpack anecdotes as having misled us about an actor, a performance, or a life lived in theatre. Others...
