Comparative Drama

David Kornhaber's Theatre and Knowledge is about as long, in terms of word count, as a typical academic essay, though it is published in the series 'Small Books on Theatre and Everything Else.' I mention this upfront to distinguish Kornhaber's book from typical, lengthier academic monographs. Kornhaber's "book" (paper? essay?) is—as the series Preface puts it—eminently "readable in one sitting by anyone with a curiosity about the subject." Theatre and Knowledge offers an enjoyable, breezy survey of questions that animate a variety of philosophical and theatrical traditions around the world: What does the theatre allow us to know? What is the relationship between philosophical knowledge ("justified true belief") and the knowledge claims made in theatrical presentations?

Kornhaber does an admirable job of introducing students to a range of key texts and traditions in which such questions take center stage. (Advanced undergraduate or post-graduate students—or the curious reader—seem to be the target audience of this book.) One of the most admirable aspects of Theatre and Knowledge is the range of its references—from Plato to the Sanskrit drama Sakuntalā (c. 400 CE), from medieval morality plays to Goethe and Stoppard, from Confucius to Deleuze. Kornhaber's examples are mostly, but by no means exclusively, 'Western'—and he provides his readers a keen sense of the sheer pervasiveness of the problems he raises, in a variety of religious, artistic, and philosophical registers. Students of comparative literature and drama would do well to note his example.

Because the book is a survey, it does not need to advance any groundbreaking new thesis about its topic. Nothing Kornhaber says is beyond question, and nothing he says—to this reader, at least—sounds any wildly false notes, either. The book succinctly and very ably recounts "ways in which merely entering a theater always ushers us into a direct encounter with knowledge," and it provides readers with many opportunities to further pursue this encounter in other works (5).

Kornhaber does slip in one claim which I found intriguing—he promises that his book will ask "what it is that the theater alone allows us to know" (19, my emphasis). By this he means: how the theatre "unsettle[s] and expand[s] the idea of knowing in ways that no other practice can achieve" (19).

No other practice? Given that Kornhaber turns—in the next sentence—to a religious drama (The Play of Adam in 1150 CE Normandy), one wonders whether or how the theatre manages to distinguish itself, as an allowance of knowing, from the historical development of religious rituals. Kornhaber's own examples, in fact, remind us of the way in which the theatre might arouse our "justified true belief" in ways or venues or occasions which can be very hard to [End Page 538] distinguish from, say, the Catholic mass or a Hindu festival or a social-religious processions in which suspended disbelief might be at play. Kornhaber wants to say something about the specificity of the theatre's relation to the allowance of knowing—yet, at almost every turn, that relation is shot through with religious (and, in this sense, with extra-theatrical) claims upon that relation. Kornhaber is well-aware of this, of course, which makes his promise to say something about what "the theater alone allows us to know" even more revealing. What is "the theater alone"?

In short—to pose the question that is begged by Kornhaber's book throughout—what could make the theatre itself into an object of knowledge (whose relation to knowledge as such could then be scrutinized)? How to say, with any confidence at all, that we know something about the "theater alone"?

Let us try this question one other way, slipping in a suggestion: if, as Kornhaber notes, Plato was the first to try to authorize philosophy by distinguishing philosophy from the theatre, then perhaps this was because Plato sensed that the achievement of any philosophical knowledge (well, of any knowledge whatsoever) somehow depended—at...