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Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet's Dramatic Theory and Ours
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Abstract
Discussions of the relation between drama and performance have been dominated by two symmetrical, emancipatory impulses. Performance scholars have, for the past half-century, sought to liberate performance from the authority of the drama. Literary scholars have, for centuries, if not millennia, sought to distinguish a “literary” dimension of the dramatic text free of the flux of performance. his essay diagnoses in Shakespeare's Hamlet an alternative story about the relation between drama and performance. Paying refreshed attention to the earlier and less famous of Hamlet's statements of dramatic theory—his blurb for the “excellent play” featuring Aeneas's speech to Dido—I find Hamlet bringing drama, especially in its “literary” dimension, crashing back into performance. his collision does not reinstitute the authority of the text; rather, it radically democratizes the scene of dramatic performance by “indigesting” the behaviors of the participants therein.
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