What This Reference Actually Gets Right
Most students grab the History Of The Theatre Brockett volume on day one of their survey course and treat it like a novel they need to finish before the exam. It does not work that way. The book is organized chronologically, which means you are not going to find a clean answer about how commedia dell'arte influenced modern improv by just flipping to a single chapter. You will end up skimming six different sections across three different centuries, getting frustrated, and then wondering why your paper feels scattered. I learned this the hard way in my junior year when I was writing about stage design transitions between the Italian Renaissance and Japanese Noh theatre. My professor handed out this massive hardcover and said read chapter fourteen. I did. Chapter fourteen covered Elizabethan playhouses. I spent three hours crying over a book that had nothing to do with what I needed. The workaround is to keep the index open while you read the text, cross-referencing key terms like proscenium, thrust stage, and trestle-and-plank before you commit to any chapter sequence. That habit alone saved me from failing that semester.
Using the History Of The Theatre Brockett Beyond the Classroom
The later editions add substantial appendices on primary source translations, which most people completely ignore. These sections contain actual playtexts, production contracts, and theatre owner correspondence from the 1600s onward. If you are doing serious research, skip the summary chapters and go straight to the documents. The documents tell you more than any secondhand analysis ever will. One thing the book handles unusually well is its coverage of non-Western traditions, particularly in the chapters on Noh, Kabuki, and Indian Kathakali. Previous editions of competing textbooks treated these sections as afterthoughts, a paragraph or two tacked onto the end. Brockett gave them proper weight, which is why I still reach for this reference even now when I am teaching an introductory drama seminar. That said, the coverage of African oral performance traditions remains thin, and the material on contemporary immersive theatre is basically nonexistent unless you are using the absolute latest edition, which comes out every few years and costs roughly eighty dollars used.
How to Actually Read It
The first few chapters move incredibly fast. You will get through the Greek section in about twenty minutes because Brockett summarizes the major developments rather than dwelling on individual plays. Then you hit the Medieval and Renaissance sections and the pace slows dramatically. The book devotes more pages to single directors and playwrights than entire centuries of theatre history in other texts. My recommendation is to read the table of contents first and map out what you actually need before you start. If you are preparing for an exam, focus on the chronological progression and the key figures listed in the sidebars. Those sidebars are actually useful, unlike most textbooks where they feel like filler. If you are researching something specific, use the bibliography at the end of each chapter to find deeper sources. The references are curated well, mostly academic presses and primary collections. There is a practical issue with the paperback edition that nobody mentions. The spine binding fails after about four library checkouts. I replaced mine three times before buying the hardcover. The hardcover version costs more upfront but will survive an entire degree if you take care of it. The ebook version exists but the page numbers do not match the print editions, which makes citing it for academic work nearly impossible. Just stick to physical copies.
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What It Misses
The book tends to center European and North American theatre as the default narrative, even in the later editions. The preface claims global coverage but the actual page distribution tells a different story. You get roughly two hundred pages on Western traditions from ancient Greece through the present day, and maybe fifty pages on everything else combined. If you are looking for extensive coverage of street theatre in Latin America or the puppet traditions of Southeast Asia, you will need supplementary reading regardless of which edition you use. Another gap is the treatment of audience history. Brockett focuses heavily on production, staging, and playwrights, but barely addresses how audiences actually experienced these performances. The social dynamics of the audience, ticket prices, crowd behavior, and the economic realities of attendance get short shrift. I found this limitation particularly frustrating when researching Restoration comedy audiences, and I ended up switching to Gary Taylor's work on the period for that topic. The indexing could be tighter. I have lost hours looking up specific terms that should have been straightforward entries. Cross-references exist but they are inconsistent, which means you might find a mention of a technique in one place and then struggle to locate related discussion elsewhere in the book.
Despite these limitations, the reference remains the standard in most university drama programs for a reason. The chronological framework gives students a solid foundation, the sidebars provide quick context, and the sheer volume of information packed into each chapter is hard to beat. Just do not treat it as the final word on anything. It is a starting point, not a destination.
