Atop a raised pedestal leans the man himself (Fig. 1). He wears pink breeches, white hose, an orange cloak draped open to the ground, and a blue jerkin beneath it, from which a muslin-colored shirt protrudes, these last two liberally gilded. His posture is in obvious if distant emulation of the Kent and Scheemakers memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey: the left elbow rests on a closed book with gilt-edged pages, the legs are crossed at the knee, and the ball of the left foot is perched in front of the right, jauntily askew, a position that makes the paint loss of its black slipper especially pronounced. Both hands rest at waist level, one clutching a page of manuscript at which the other points. The pose is puzzling, since the “writing” that appears there is just a scrawl of lines and dashes that shows where text ought to be, but conspicuously isn't. Left to index nothing that anyone has bothered to transcribe, the gesture is a lazy indication of literary noteworthiness, not unlike the women who sit at the poet's feet, gazing upward in an attitude of vague, noncommittal reverence. They might be heroines from the plays or they might not be; their contrasting costumes and identical expressions convey nothing beyond the usual laudatory relation of figural base to subject. Between them, garlanded with oak leaves and acorns, is the dial of a clock, its numbers and hands painted into place with the same gold that decorates the author's ensemble. The time is, and forever shall be, nine minutes past five.

If theatre historians had been paying attention to the proceedings at a Gilbert and Sullivan conference in Lawrence, Kansas in 1970, they would have heard a gauntlet strike the ground when Michael R. Booth delivered “Research Opportunities in Nineteenth-Century Drama and Theatre.” He called for research on audiences (“cultural levels, class origins, income, tastes, and development”), performance in the hinterlands (“we know that in 1866 60% of the theatre seats in metropolitan London were outside the West End”), economics (“theatre profits and losses, actors' wages, authors' income, management and organization, the pricing of seats”), and performance techniques (“technical developments in set construction, staging, lighting, traps, and special effects” as well as acting style). This cri de coeur to break the hegemony of literary teleologies is recognizable, in 2015, as a mandate to reorient inquiry toward how repertoires were delivered rather than how authorial talent was paramount, what buttressed profitability rather than what constituted fame, and who sustained a gamut of theatres rather than what demarcated elite taste. It set the agenda for aligning theatre studies in wholly new directions, and without citing a single source or calling out any particular historian it inventoried how theatre history could come into line with social history.