Theatre is performance

A published play is analogous in form to a published novel or essay; it comes as a book. But a play is a performance, and the printed text is no more than a set of notations on which the realization of the play is based, analogous to the music score which serves as the guide to a performance.  A published novel is a literary work complete in itself; it is meant to be read silently.  A published play is schematic and as such incomplete; it is unrealized.  Theatre as literature is a misconception as much as accepting a music score as the music performed and heard or as that which happened in the composer’s mind and, more likely thus realized, at least partially, say, on the piano.  Consider the multiple ways any line in a play might be enunciated and articulated in performance with variant vocal tones, pauses, and stretches, and acted out with different facial and bodily movements. There is no single true way of realizing a printed play; similarly, there is no single true way of performing a piece of music left by the composer in the form of notation.  Even poetry, before the invention of printing, was a performing art, transmitted and learned by oral tradition. That’s why I insist the best way to appreciate a poem is to read it aloud.  The best way to understand Shakespeare’s plays is to recite the text aloud; it is then a performance rather than literature, at least partially, in that it is vocalized if not physically acted out. The printed text of a play can be read, of course, as literature in its own right; Shakespeare is widely studied as literature.