ABSTRACT
This essay contends that the emergence of modern drama between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries should be regarded as an important development in what the author calls the “pre-history of performance philosophy”. The essay considers the relationships between a wide range of theatrical figures, including Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, O’Neill, W.B. Yeats, Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, and philosophers from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, to Kierkegaard. Through these examples, the chapter argues that the particular way in which the relationship between philosophy and theater starts to be conceived during the period of modern drama and the increasing frequency with which dramatists considered and spoke of the art of playwriting as an explicitly philosophical act during this epoch presages important aspects of what has become known as performance philosophy. The author acknowledges that many of the artistic assumptions of the period run against contemporary approaches to performance practice – most obviously the privileging of literary authorship in the figure of the playwright and the idea of theatrical performance as an orchestrated, iterable enactment and instantiation of literary texts. But he goes on to propose that behind and alongside these ideas ran a powerful sense that the theater itself was a place where philosophical meaning might not just be communicated, but actively constructed – not just a more entertaining version of a lecture hall but what George Bernard Shaw potently called an actual “factory of thought”. If, as has long been observed, the modern drama marked a distinct moment where the theater moved decidedly closer to philosophy, it also constituted a reverse motion away from a particular hierarchized version of that relationship. Drawn to philosophy but wary of being made a mere mouthpiece of any individual philosopher’s ideas, given to expressions of philosophical capacity while also advocating for the intellectual potency of its own natural tools, the modern drama was a pivotal site of negotiation between the previously separated realms of performance and philosophy. The modern dramatist – the vaunted playwright as a thinker – stood at the heart of these negotiations.
