ABSTRACT
Let’s begin then with an idea already heard in discussions of the Warchus production of Hamlet: the claim that the play has a fixed and secure existence apart from production. This assumption that there is a ‘real’ Hamlet against which production can be measured is actually less certain than it may at first seem. James McLaverty memorably captured the problem with a philosophical brainteaser about the nature of art: ‘if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and Lycidas?’ 1 McLaverty, of course, was rephrasing (and so popularizing) F. W. Bateson’s defence of critical interpretation in face of claims by New Bibliographers to have developed mechanical means to resolve textual cruces once and for all. 2 Bateson’s discussion of art and interpretation included no riddle, however, since to his mind Hamlet, like the Mona Lisa, has a form of artifactual existence:
The fact that we can see a picture, whereas Hamlet is invisible, is because the picture’s physical basis is spatial and not temporal; it does not affect the general similarity of their aesthetic status. Hamlet then is an object; but it is a man-made object and only usable by human beings, like the Constitution of the United States. If it has no Supreme Court, to which we can appeal over differences in its interpretation, the consensus of scholarship is an obvious approximate equivalent to such a Court. 3
