contingent fact about the language he uses, which has now become
obsolete. Furthermore, plenty of the Greek works that do speak to us are
liable to contain references to contemporary events that are missed by
the modern audience. To take one minor example:Oedipus Tyrannusopens
with a plague devastating the city of Thebes, which acts as the catalyst
for Oedipus’ terrible discoveries; when it was performed, in Athens, a
plague was devastating the Athenians, killing many of theirfinest citi-
zens.^12 That people can appreciate the play without knowing about some
of the contemporary events to which it may have referred strikes me as an
accident of history as much as an aesthetic triumph on the part of the
playwright.
Textual politics
Setting aside the idea that, because of concerns about longevity, engaging
with politics necessarily damages the value of the play, we can ask in
what ways a play text could engage with politics. To do so, we’ll consider
four ways that a play text might want to contribute to politics: statements;
morals; questions; commands.
Statements and morals
A‘political play’may be one that makes a statement–a factual claim–
about a contemporary political issue. The play amounts to a communica-
tion of a certain kind of knowledge–or, at least, the attempt to convey a
certain kind of belief. Such beliefs may be about concrete political current
events or they may be about general political views or theories. There are,
broadly speaking, two ways of construing how such a claim could be
made. First, it could be a claim that the author is making, through the
play, to the audience. Second, we might prefer to leave out the author
and speak of a play making claims in its own right. (There are many
different ways to understand this, but the basic thought is that plays can end
up‘saying things’or‘meaning things’that the author didn’t necessarily put
in there.) Thus one might take Churchill–and some reviewers certainly
did–as making a claim about what Israelis think about the death of
Palestinian children during the Gaza War; or one might prefer to leave
Churchill out of the picture and speak of the claims made in the play. In
what follows, I’ll speak primarily in thefirst way–that is, in terms the
playwright making political statements through the play; but it seems to
me that these remarks apply more or less to the second construal as well.
In as much as political drama is a matter of an author making statements
through the play text, it is open to some familiar objections and concerns.
We have, in previous discussions, already found reasons to be suspicious
168 From the Stage to the World