Who’s “there”?

One of the most well-known lines in Shakespeare’s plays is Bernardo’s question at the beginning of Hamlet: “Who’s there?” Who is that ‘who’ and where is that ‘there’? It is a doorway onto doubt. But it is also a question that cuts quickly to the ontological core of theatre.

“Who’s there?” can be asked of the characters in the play, just as it can be asked of the actors who embody the characters on stage. Although, as Richard Schechner points out, “actors exist in the field of a double negative. They are not themselves, nor are they the characters they impersonate. A theatrical performance takes place between ‘not me…not not me.’ The actress is not Ophelia, but she is not not Ophelia” (64).

It can be asked of the playwright, who is twice removed from the play, while still lingering in the play’s wings. If text is what stands in for the absent author, then the actors on stage stand in for text and author, but also for themselves. This nexus alone epitomises “who’s there?”

It can be asked of the ‘world’ of the play that supports that ‘who’ and that ‘there’; the conventions of writing that structure that ‘world’ and the materials (human and non-human) that give it shape and life on stage.

It can be asked of the play’s ‘others,’ which are the other plays or ‘worlds’ with which it communicates, either through textual cross-reference, adaptation, translation, embodiment or other means of representation. The traces that remain from these interactions may not be readily recognisable, they may even circumvent the logic of the archive, but these minute shifts have a cumulative effect over time on the state of a play’s evolving identity. How many Hamlets are there in the world? Too many to count.

The question “Who’s there?” can also be asked of audiences, ‘who’ go ‘there’ to collude in the realisation of this dramatic ‘who’ and ‘there,’ and who participate in this ‘worlding’ experience.

References

Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge, 2002.