Even with regard to explicit statements, Russell’s claim requires serious
qualification. First of all, there’s a great deal more toHamletthan‘pro-
positions’(regardless of whether the propositions are true or false). First,
of course, there are sentences that are not propositions. So, for example,
neither the opening line (‘Who’sthere?’) nor the closing line (‘Go, bid the
soldiers shoot.’) is a proposition: they don’t make claims about how the world
is and they couldn’tbe‘true’or‘false’. There’s no reason why a play need
contain any propositions at all–plenty don’t.^11 Second, a play is more
than just a series of sentences, whether or not they are propositions, and
whether or not those propositions are true. Some plays have no words at all.^12
But even in conventional theatre, actions speak as loudly as words. Phi-
losophers who have written about truth and literature have tended to focus
on novels and poems–presumably because these artworks are (typically) a
matter of words alone. In theatre, words are only part of the experience.
Finally, however, although many of the explicit propositions uttered in
Hamletare indeed false, there’s no reason why some of them shouldn’t
be true. Plays often contain statements about the world that are true.^13
Here are three kinds. First, historical claims: when Horatio describes the
state of Rome before the death of Caesar, he is drawing on a description
from Plutarch.^14 As it happens, what he claims about Rome is probably
false: the dead, we may suppose, did not arise from their graves; but there
is no particular reason why we couldn’t imagine Horatio saying true
things about Caesar’s Rome. Second, simple, factual statements: when
Gertrude says‘there is a willow grows askant the brook’,^15 it may be that,
somewhere out there in the real world, thereisa willow that grows askant
a brook–hence, that particular claim is perfectly true. Third, what I call
‘words of wisdom’: Polonius tells Laertes that‘loan oft loses both itself
and friend’.^16 Similarly,Oedipus Tyrannusnotoriously ends with the‘words
of wisdom’:‘we should call no one happy, until he has crossed the border
of life without enduring pain’.^17 This kind of general claim looks true
(or, if one disagrees with these examples, one could at least imagine an
equivalent). All in all, the fact that there is no such person as Hamlet,
Gertrude or Horatio does not entail that every claim that they make
about the world is false. Indeed, one could imagine a play in which many
more true claims are made than inHamlet.^18
Can any of these true propositions help us to understand what we learn
from plays? In thefirst two cases, clearly not. As to historical claims, we
do not go toHamletto learn about Ancient Rome.^19 Second, suppose it’s
true that a willow grows askant a brook; Gertrude goes on to say that
Ophelia drowned in that brook, a claim that (if we follow Russell) we
must suppose is false, because there was no such person as Ophelia. In the
context of watching the play, we do not distinguish in any way between
these two claims, even although one is true and one is false; it makes no
50 From the World to the Stage