First, the idea that a play that focuses on achieving a certain practical
political outcome–fundraising, changing how people vote, demanding
industrial action–must therefore not have any duration as an artwork
assumes a dichotomy between political relevance and endurance, such
that the playwright must choose between the two. One response, then,
would be to deny that this dichotomy exists. A play might have a great
deal to say about its own time, using contemporary issues as a focus, but
also have resonance with later spectators–just as, by analogy, a historian
might hope that her work would both educate readers about some parti-
cular issue and, perhaps, tell them something general about human
affairs. Still, one might think that a play that looks to bring about a
highly particular, focused set of actions with respect to a particular
deadline–an election or a protest–might lose much of its significance
once that deadline is passed.
Thus, a second thought accepts the dichotomy–i.e. that a play must
be either eternal or politically relevant–and argues that aesthetic value
should lie with the latter. George Bernard Shaw claims that Ibsen’s play,
A Doll’s House, which highlights (amongst other things) the plight of
wives and daughters who are not afforded the same legal rights as their
husbands and fathers, will probably not endure in the way thatA Mid-
summer Night’s Dreamhas endured; that doesn’t matter, Shaw suggests,
because the former will have‘done more work’and is a better play.^10 In
his own work, Shaw did not shy away from claiming to be encouraging
specific, political actions from the spectators of his plays: hisfirst play,
Widowers’Houses, is (he wrote)‘deliberately intended to induce people to
vote on the Progressive side at the next County Council election in
London’.^11 If we accept the dichotomy, then it is a necessary concomitant
of the view that artworks should be eternal that they shouldn’t deal
exclusively or primarily with current affairs. As Shaw’s claims illustrate,
the reverse is also true: if you think dramatists should have something to
say about contingent features of their world, then obviously you won’t
think that the best artworks are those that audiences at all places and all
times can easily relate to. Following Shaw’s line, if plays can have an
effect on politics in the narrow sense, then the view that plays should be
judged solely by their longevity is as much a conservative’s view of politics
as it is an aesthete’s view of art.
Afinal word about longevity and aesthetic value: there may be many
reasons why a play endures (or not), which don’t have much to do with
the subject matter of the play or the intended political effect on the
audience or, in general, the aesthetic qualities of the work. If Aris-
tophanes’comedies rely on untranslatable Greek puns, then they willfind
it harder to appeal to audiences once Greek has become a dead language.
That does not, it seems to me, make his plays any the worse. It is a
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