"Goats and Monkeys" and the "Idiocy ofLanguage": Handke's Kaspar and Shakespeare's Othello

Abstract

The Austrian-born playwright Peter Handke has said repeatedly that his conception of theatre is one in which the objects and actions of the theatrical production bear minimal if any relationship to the objects and actions of the real world. For example, in a 1969 essay, "Theatre and Film: The Misery of Comparison," he refers to the theatrical experience as one in which actions and words "become incidents which show nothing else, but present themselves as theatrical events;" in an interview the same year, he defines the "basic idea" of his plays as "Making people aware of the world of the theatre-not of the outside world"; and in the preface to Kaspar, he reinforces his idea by insisting that the audience "should recognize at once that they will witness an event that plays only on stage and not in some other reality."