Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 109
To find the essence of a piece of mimetic theater, identify the main character
(or characters) and the principal conflict (or conflicts) that are resolved in the
plot. By “plot” I mean the structured action that keeps our attention and
measures the time for a theatrical performance. By “character” I mean some-
one who attracts our close attention. (Woodruff 2008, 55)
In the case of Hamlet , for example, the barest essence of the play is that its
main character is Hamlet and that it is about resolving certain conflicts gen-
erated by Hamlet’s felt need to seek revenge for the killing of his father. It is
not necessary, for a performance to be of Hamlet, that the dialogue specified
in the text of the play be retained, or even that the outcome of the plot be
identical. Woodruff allows that one could play Hamlet with a happy ending
as long as one stuck closely enough to the structure of the play in other
ways (2008, 61). If so, it might seem that what Berthold and Magda saw was
indeed a performance of King Lear , as were the 1681 performances directed
by Nahum Tate in which the Cordelia character was also spared, albeit in a
less flamboyant fashion.
Woodruff mentions but accords relatively little significance to something
that might be thought to be at least a necessary constraint on a performance’s
being of a particular play – namely, that it stand in an appropriate historical-
intentional relation to the authoring of the play. In Chapter 4, we endorsed
an analogous constraint upon something’s being a performance (but not
a work-instance) of a given musical work. Woodruff only comments that
standing in a Hamlet “tradition” is not what makes a performance a perform-
ance of Hamlet (2008, 60). This is certainly true but it doesn’t indicate what
significance standing in such a tradition does have. However, it would not
be difficult to supplement Woodruff’s account with a historical- intentional
condition on a performance’s being of a given work.
A more serious concern is that, if we identify the essence of a play with its
“characters and plot” in such a way that we allow at least some Nahum Tate-
like performances to count as genuine performances of Hamlet or Lear , then
it is not clear what justifies claiming that the characters in these perform-
ances are Hamlet or Lear. In a sense, we have exchanged one problem – what
is essential for something to be a performance of a given play? – for another
problem – what is essential for a character to be a particular character from
a particular play? – without any obvious gain in tractability. What is it, for
example, for the main character of a play to be Hamlet? Not, surely, just
that he is a prince who is concerned to avenge the supposed murder of his
father by his uncle possibly acting with the tacit collusion of his mother.
Woodruff suggests that the more we supplement this thin description with
other characteristics, such as being disturbed, brilliant, passionate, reflec-
tive, book-loving, yet capable of violence (2008, 50), the more willing we