Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 111
why the characters act as they do – our interest in what motivates them – and
in what actually occurs in the plot. When an artistic manifold presents a nar-
rative, both an internal and an external interrogative interest in that manifold
are elements in a proper engagement with it as an artistic manifold.
But, second, it is crucial that we do justice to the manner in which the
point of a standard dramatic work is embedded in the particularity of the
narrative of that work. A related issue arose in the previous chapter when we
considered Randall Dipert’s observation that an artist’s intentions are hierar-
chically ordered, with high level intentions that pertain to certain effects to
be elicited in the audience. Aron Edidin, we may recall, notes that a compos-
er’s high level intention is not merely to produce a certain kind of effect in
the listener, but to produce such an effect by particular musical means. In the
same way, we might insist that the point of a play is not something that can
be expressed in abstraction from the kinds of artistic material with which
the artist is working. The point of King Lear , for example, is not merely to
bring out for the viewer the supreme importance of certain human virtues
in the face of the unbearable tragedies that beset us in our flawed attempts
at happiness, but to do this through the viewer’s reflection on the particular
character and situation of Lear, as defined by the broad features of the plot.
Thus, in stressing the importance of being true to the spirit – the point –
of King Lear in performances of the play, we are not denying the relevance
of character and plot. Rather, we are insisting that the import of depart-
ing from specific aspects of the scripted characters and plot can be gauged
only when we weigh those aspects in the balance of the point that the play
is making by means of those characters and that plot. This kind of complex
measure of being true to a play might allow us to argue in a principled way
that the relocation of modified versions of the characters and plot of Measure
for Measure in Prohibition era Chicago is a genuine and interesting perform-
ance of Shakespeare’s play while also arguing that what was presented before
Berthold and Magda was not a performance of King Lear.
The kind of complex measure of truth to a play just sketched would, I think,
provide us with the resources needed to defend the application of the classical
paradigm to the kinds of contemporary dramatic performances we have been
considering. It allows us to allocate such performances to particular perform-
able works in a principled way, by requiring of a performance of a given work
W that the performers stand in the right kind of historical-intentional relation
to the authoring of W and intend that their performance be true to W in the
sense defined. This construal of what it is for a theatrical performance to be of
a performable dramatic work parallels in structure the account given earlier
of musical performances that fall under the classical paradigm: the difference
lies in the construal of what it is to be true to a work. And it also allows us
to give a clear sense to the idea of correct performance in terms of success