“(The) Play’s the Thing”: Shakespearean drama as an end in itself

Drama, more obviously than other genres of art, is a form of play; and play, according to Johan Huizinga, is essentially autotelic, or not a means to an end. Shakespeare’s plays are trivialised if they are seen essentially as means to other ends. Science conceives of the material world as an endless chain of causes, just as utilitarianism demands that all human artefacts and endeavours take their place on an eternal chain of purposes. This model devalues all its elements, for they acquire their worth only in terms of what appears next along the chain, never in or of themselves. The model is also counter-intuitive, since human experience values things, people and events differently from one another. Some items give us more pause than others; a few invite us to lose ourselves, as a child becomes lost in a game. Drama asks an audience to play along with its playing actors, pointlessly. If there is a point – moral or utilitarian – it is a mere side effect. A play, like Cleopatra’s hopping, is a digression from the straight journey of human lives toward death; and, as Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, detours are the only places in which the life drive makes any inroads into the death instincts’ relentless onward progress. Shakespeare’s dramatic works not only demonstrate play, and hook their audiences into the delightful, terrifying and all-absorbing world of (the) play, but they also provide a metanarrative about play, playing with the idea of playing. This essay resists the tendency to interpret Shakespeare’s dramatic works pragmatically, and instead shows, with examples from comedies and romances, especially The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and from tragedies including King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, how they refuse to be means toward other ends, but “play till doomsday”, throwing reflective aspects up to their audiences and defying the puritans to stop them as they do so.