were eventually suppressed by Henry VIII. The idea was partly to dis-
courage the notion of robbing the rich to feed the poor and the ritual
overturning of authority (i.e. the content of the plays); but it was also to
stop certain kinds of people gathering together, playing, marching,
revelling and so on.^5
Politics and political philosophy
Second, it may be helpful to draw a distinction between politics (in either
the narrow or the broad sense) and political philosophy. Political theatre
might be theatre that‘does politics’or theatre that‘does political philo-
sophy’; those two things are different. Political philosophy is the attempt
by philosophers to think systematically about politics. Where that is poli-
tics in the narrower sense, philosophers typically address questions that
directly affect some element of government. Well-known examples
include questions of authority (who gets to tell whom what to do?) or
questions of resource distribution (who gets what?). There are also, as one
might imagine, plenty of further questions about what those questions, in
turn, might mean, assume or imply.
The relationship between politics and political philosophy is not alto-
gether straightforward. It is clear that, in principle, if a political philo-
sopher argues that the redistribution of resources is justifiable only under
certain conditions and in a certain way, then that would (if it were taken
seriously by those in power) have an impact on politics in the narrower
sense. However, instances of such direct influence are extremely rare;
where there is influence from political philosophy to politicians, it tends
to be indirect and to require the transformation beyond recognition of the
philosophy in question.^6 In any case, politics in the narrower sense has
always involved ad hoc decision-making in response to specific circum-
stances–decisions in relation to which no political philosophy could offer
anything but the slightest hint of guidance. What, for instance, would a
utilitarian view suggest should bedoneabout the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Although this is the usual, contemporary sense of‘political philosophy’,
plenty of philosophers also want to think about the relations between
people indicated by politics in the broader sense: philosophers of this
kind might ask, say, what kinds of power there are operating in a parti-
cular social context or what kinds of concepts and ideals guide or inhibit
the activity of the people concerned. A philosopher might therefore be
political in the latter sense, without necessarily drawing any conclusions
about political philosophy of the narrow kind. Indeed, it would be possible
to draw from a political philosophy of the broader kind the view that politics
of the narrower kind (and the philosophy devoted to it) is somehow an
inappropriate or fundamentally unworthy activity. Nietzsche, it has been
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