The Play and the Thing

Shakespeare’s Hamlet insisted that ‘the play’s the thing’; Edmund Husserl’s philosophy advised us to (re)turn our attention ‘back to the things themselves!’ How might a careful, detailed exploration of the basic ‘things’ of Shakespearean theatre illuminate his plays in performance? Taking up this question, The Play and the Thing offers the first book-length phenomenological study of Shakespearean stage craft, from the ground up. The book approaches the study of Shakespearean theatre by attending to the ways in which three of those basic things – Bodies, Objects, and Spaces – might appear to perception in the act of performance. As such, it demonstrates how the principal, if at times divergent, strands of phenomenological enquiry can offer insight into those particular things and the theatrical practices they engender(ed). Cutting across both early modern and modern-day performative and textual praxis, The Play and the Thing both explicates and enacts phenomenology as an illuminating approach to Shakespearean theatre.

Matthew D. Wagner is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey. He has written widely on Theatre and Temporality and on Shakespearean dramaturgy and performance practices. Previous publications include co-editing a special edition of the journal Shakespeare on Experiencing Time in Shakespearean Theatre (2019), co-editing the book collection Performance Phenomenology: To the Thing Itself (2019), co-authoring The Dramaturgy of the Door (2019, with Stuart Andrews) and Shakespeare, Theatre and Time (2012).