Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 107
that obtains in classical music. But why don’t such willful departures from
the requirements for correct performance of a work, as construed above,
discredit the performers’ claim to be performing that work? One way to
answer this challenge would be to sever the connection – central in the
musical case, as we have seen – between aiming to perform a given work,
on the one hand, and aiming to produce a performance that conforms to the
explicit and implicit instructions communicated by the author of that work,
on the other. A performer of a given theatrical work, it might be claimed,
must aim to be true to something somehow embodied in, but not identi-
cal to, the explicit and implicit instructions in the playscript. We shall turn
shortly to some ways in which this might be understood.
A third question that arises with respect to musical performances fall-
ing under the classical paradigm concerns the nature and value of authentic
performances. We saw, in Chapter 4, that historical authenticity is generally
glossed in terms of being true to the work in some sense. But, while many
performances seem to aim at being true to the text of a play, we find relatively
little artistic or scholarly interest in the idea of staging historically authentic
theatrical performances that, by analogy with historically authentic musical
performances, attempt to replicate an ideal period performance of a theatri-
cal work as defined by its contextualized playscript. There are indeed some
who try to define theatrical authenticity in such terms. For example, Robert
K. Sarlòs argues for the importance of reconstructing an ideal performance
of a dramatic work that not only meets the explicit prescriptions of the text
but also respects period performance practice in its style (see Sarlòs 1989).
But, where such performances are presented, their interest seems more anti-
quarian than artistic. Consider, for example, the interests that seem to moti-
vate the staging of Shakespearean plays at the reconstructed Globe Theatre.
This is, in fact, what we might expect if the defense of historically authen-
tic performance of musical works mounted at the end of Chapter 4 is on
the right track. The suggestion there, we may recall, was that performances
of musical works that use period instruments and conform to period per-
formative practice can serve our interest in understanding the performable
works by providing us with insight into their constitutive prescriptions. To
the extent that composers expect that their works will be performed in
a certain way, these expectations may affect what a composer prescribes,
given the kind of sound sequence he or she seeks to realize in performance.
An authentic performance can provide some insight into such decisions on
the composer’s part, and this can supplement other knowledge we may have
of the musico-historical context in which the composer was working.
In the theatrical case, on the other hand, where parallel contextual factors
may bear upon the construction of a play, we can usually understand why the
playwright constructed a play in a particular way in light of such factors merely