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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
What is the difference between a reading of a play and a performance of it? In both, the same text is uttered. Both may occur on stage. In both different people may recite the lines of different characters. But unlike a mere reading, in a performance of a play what happens on stage conforms to the text being pronounced.
1 Poetry readings are the model here, not silent readings. And as in some poetry readings, the text may not be read with any degree of expressive skill.
2 Walton, Kendall, “Pictures and Make Believe”, Philosophical Review 81/3 (1973)Google Scholar. Also, “Fearing Fictions”, Journal of Philosophy 75/1 (1978).Google Scholar
3 Aristotle, , The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Epps, P. H. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).Google Scholar
4 The reader may feel uncomfortable, as do I, with this use of the word “metaphorical”. I employ it for lack of a word with a truer ring that covers all the cases. (Sometimes “simulated” works; often it does not. The word “non-literal” covers too many cases.) My use of “metaphorical” is not entirely out of place inasmuch as (1) traffic signal arrows and walking men are not the real thing, literally arrows and walking men, and (2) nonetheless it is appropriate, knowing this, to call them “arrows” and “walking men”. I shall continue to use it in what follows.
5 The examples are taken from Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Hubler, Edward (Scarborough, ON: The New American Library of Canada, 1963).Google Scholar
6 It may be worthwhile to remind the reader that I am discussing here what actors have to do to be performing a play as opposed to merely reading through it, and not what they must do to be performing it well. In giving a good performance actors will doubtless go beyond this minimum.
7 Questions like these are discussed in detail in Daniels, Charles B., “A Story Semantics for Implication”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 27/2 (1986).Google Scholar
8 “Text” here and elsewhere in this article is meant to include just what the characters in a play say, not stage directions and other instructions included by the author.
9 Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956).Google Scholar
10 Interestingly, Gombrich seems to credit a shift from narration to dramatization in Greek theatre as providing the spark that started the “Greek revolution” in representative art. See 131.
11 Arguments will be offered to support this claim in §6.
12 For further discussion concerning these different kinds of symbols, see Daniels, Charles B., Freeman, James B., and Charlwood, G., Toward an Ontology of Number, Mind, and Sign (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press; Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
13 I can imagine a play in which the dialogue takes place among the characters only by two-way radio (or some similar device) and where no character is able to figure out how to go to where any other of the characters are. A suitable use of masks and lighting would do away with a great deal of spatial symbolism (of the “post-revolution” sort). But to do away with all spatial symbolism in the staging of such a play seems at the same time to do away with the distinction between having a reading of the play and having a performance of it, or to return us to the kindergarten type of performance.
14 An anonymous referee has suggested that certain forms of Eastern dance and the traditional Indian theatrical style, Kathakali, also fall into the category of the prerevolutionary.
15 It may seem odd that the perceived distance between the openings at the back of the stage is not symbolic, while the perceived distance between the actors in front of them is symbolic. Yet an analogy may be drawn to a phenomenon that occurs in normal vision. When we see, we normally focus. We are aware of more of the visible details of the things upon which we focus than we are of those things in our visual fields upon which we are not focused. It is as if the symbolism in the Terranee stage helps point us toward those things in the make-believe world represented upon which it is appropriate for us to focus.
16 Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN and New York: Bobbs-Merrill. 1968).Google Scholar
17 This may seem odd. Given our human powers of discrimination, there will be two clock settings which we, of course, do know to be symbols representing times, but are unable to tell by any humanly applicable method of measurement whether they represent the same time or not. And in light of this state of affairs, it would seem to be just to say that we do not know exactly what time each setting does represent. Since for any setting there will be another setting distinct from it, which we humans cannot detect to be distinct, it seems that we never do know exactly what any one of this family of symbols says. Yet none of this must be taken as implying that the symbol system of clock faces is somehow inferior or bad. We may not know exactly what any one of these symbols says, but we are not entirely ignorant. A clock face set at about three o'clock does not say that the time is four o'clock, two thirty, two forty-five, five to three, etc. While we may not be able to know that the clock says exactly three o'clock, we are able to have exact knowledge of these other things, and lots of them.
18 I persevere, however, have the works performed, and am rewarded when music critics begin to hail them as opening new and unexplored directions in choral composition.