itself to a narrow, traditional focus on a Western literary canon, to the
exclusion of other, marginalised forms of theatre that do not make use of
such a text. There is thought to be, then, a political agenda (broadly
speaking) to what counts as theatre, or what‘deserves’to be studied and
taken seriously. Even when there is a well-known play text, there’sno
aestheticlaw saying it must be used in a conventional manner–by which
I mean: each character assigned to an actor, each actor uttering the words
assigned to his or her character, stage directions diligently followed, and
so on.^26 There are many non-conventional ways of using play texts to
create performances, and even within the conventional model, there is a
huge variety, depending on artistic goals as well as on budget and loca-
tion.^27 So there’s no reason to think that there is one text/performance
relationship or that there ought to be such a thing. Nonetheless, for right
or for wrong, most of the plays discussed in the course of this book do
have corresponding play texts and that is the model I take as typical–
partly because that is the model assumed by most of the philosophers
whom I discuss and partly because that is still, to my mind, the domi-
nant model on contemporary stages. What’s more, the question of how to
characterise the relationship between play texts and performances has
been subject to some debate and it deserves a place in our discussion.
These debates sometimes attempt to use philosophical approaches to say what
sort of a thing a play or a theatrical performance is (ontology or, broadly,
metaphysics) and then move from there to discuss the role of the text. Such
discussions, it seems to me, are broadly motivated by two concerns: thefirst is
a philosophical puzzle about what constitutes‘the work of art’inthecaseof
theatre; the second is an aesthetic debate about the significance of the play
text in relation to the performance. We’ll look at each in turn.
On the face of it, we all know whatHamlet is: a play, written by
William Shakespeare at the start of the seventeenth century. But what
exactly is the play? It can’t just be the written text, because there are
three different extant versions, with significant differences; and there is no
simple or uncontroversial way of choosing which one should be the stan-
dard version or uniting all three into one definitive edition. In any case,
quite apart from these texts,Hamletis often something people think they
can go to see at a performance: I can‘seeHamlet’in way that I can’t‘see
War and Peace’. But when I see a performance ofHamlet, it is rare to see
any one of the three surviving texts performed without any editing or
alterations to the words; and there’s plenty on the stage that has not been
specified or implied by the text (examples might be scenery, staging,
casting, costumes). Nonetheless, I want to maintain that the performance
I see is a performance of Hamlet: I have seen Hamlet, not merely an
adaptation ofHamletor a performance of something else, which happens
to be inspired byHamlet. So couldHamletjust be the performance I am
12 What is theatre?