Abstract
Working theatre artists invoke authorial intention as a means of self-justification, impugning to the playwright's authority their own aesthetic and interpretive decisions, once the cumulative weight of their production choices take on their own coherent logic and generate their own sense of inevitability. Rather than castigate theatre artists for the intentional fallacy, the performance historian—and, in particular, the historian of Shakespearean performance—should treat such invocations of authorial intentionality as historical gifts, evidence not just of what the artist (to use Terence Hawkes's phrase) “means by Shakespeare,” but of how the theatre artists of a particular period believe Shakespeare means, i.e., how the prevailing aesthetic paradigms silently operate in the ways theater artists understand the dramatist's script and how it “works.”
