In an interview published in New Theatre Quarterly in 1994, Ian Watson asked the American theatre historian Bruce A. McConachie whether he believed that theatre history was 'no longer an hermetic history of playscripts, performances, and/or personalities but, rather, their history in the light of their social and cultural milieu'. McConachie's response raised a number of issues relating to the nature of 'historical facts' as they may be reflected in the study of acts of theatre, leading to the assertion that '...for the theatre, one needs to go beyond empiricism and formalism to get at larger issues of how theatre works in history, how it works in society and culture'.

Until relatively recently, with a few notable exceptions, the study of Greek and Roman theatre was tied to the study of its texts. Not surprisingly this left a residue of feeling that classical theatre suffered from a kind of inverted Darwinism. Its zenith, history seemed to be telling us, was with Aeschylus, descending, gradually at first, and then by leaps and bounds, to end up with the grotesqueries of the Roman arena and the eventual excommunication of the mimes. That may be a fair comment on the drama as art, theatre as an aesthetic experience. From a historical perspective it is nothing like the whole story, though what that story is has to be gleaned not from a treasury of the world's greatest plays, but from threads and patches, anecdotes and incidentals. Most of the classical historians wrote of the major events: Herodotus, the conflict between Greece and Asia; Thucydides, Athens' great war against Sparta; Livy, the early years of Rome; Tacitus, the reigns of the first emperors; Plutarch, across the board. The theatre and, in McConachie's words, 'how it works in society and culture', until well into the time of the Roman empire, has to be distilled from less targeted sources but is maybe none the worse for that. With a throwaway art the unguarded comment can often be more revealing than the systematic narrative.