ions where they are no longer protected, since otherwise the playwright could prevent the use of his ideas, to which, apart from their expression, his prop erty is never extended_Nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary, and nobody ever can.13 This has become known as the pattern test or abstraction test, and has been widely cited in subsequent copyright decisions.14 In essence, for Hand, there is a sliding scale: at one end are plots so impoverished in detail that they qualify only as ideas; at the other are plots detailed enough to qualify as expressions. The less developed a plot, the less likely that it may be protected by copy right because it will qualify only as an idea. Con versely, the more detailed it is, the more likely it will be found to be an original expression of the idea, and thus be protected by copyright.15 So, while an author might legitimately use the same idea as another author (say, the very simple plot of 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl'), he or she cannot copy the detailed way that the idea is expressed in the plot of, for example, Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989). As such, while both Say Anything and Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) will embody the same simple plot of 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl/ this plot is so simple only to qualify as an idea, and since each fills out the plot in different ways, the latter does not risk infringing the former. The is sue, Hand states, is that the point where the plot becomes detailed enough to qualify as an expres sion (and is therefore protected by copyright) may well be impossible to fix.

Richard Wollheim famously understands pictures to be distinct from other kinds of representation in virtue of eliciting a special kind of experience: seeing-in. What a picture depicts is determined in large part by what appropriate observers can see in it. Many agree that pictures often evoke expe riences of seeing something in a marked surface, even if they do not assign seeing-in such a central place in their theories of depiction or characterize it in exactly the way Wollheim does. This article proposes a new way to understand seeing-in that is motivated by a curious Renaissance discussion of vision after death: heavenly sight.1 The first section introduces seeing-in as Wollheim understands it, while the second sec tion introduces heavenly sight. Heavenly sight is impossible, and it might seem unimaginable were it not for seeing-in. In fact, seeing-in is best under stood as an approximation to heavenly sight. This proposal conflicts with the way in which Wollheim explicated seeing-in, even though it remains true to the phenomenological desiderata that Woll heim suggested, or so this article argues. Section III unpacks and then rejects the reasons for which Wollheim would resist the heavenly sight pro posal, and it shows that there are problems with how Wollheim's own account deals with his phe nomenological desiderata. Section IV argues that experiences akin to heavenly sight are indeed pos sible, and Section V concludes by showing that this proposal does an excellent job accounting for seeing-in. In fact, this proposal avoids the prob lems that trouble Wollheim's account. Wollheim correctly characterizes the phe nomenology of seeing-in, but he overlooks a promising way of explaining the phenomenon in detail. Most discuss seeing-in as a tool for under standing what makes depiction a distinctive kind of representation. The focus here, by contrast, is on the nature of this special kind of experience. The exact relation such experiences bear to a cor rect account of pictorial representation is not of central concern.

Repetition is intrinsic to theater. Besides theater's improvisational forms, a theatrical performance presents before its audience a sequence of events that the actors have rehearsed and acted many times. More than a contingent requirement of the ater, repetition is intimately linked with aesthetic value. Successful repetition has been described (such as by Strasberg above) as the greatest chal lenge for an actor.1 Inferior acting discloses aware ness of what is about to occur, or projects the out come of a lived process before it has taken place, or rushes through a dialogue in a pace that can not realistically capture the actual temporality of a conversation. Such failures reveal an inability to repeat a lived process when one's prior knowledge is not fully suspended. As for the audience, it is tempting to suppose that it ignores or is altogether unaware of the fact that it is attending an act of repetition. Tempt ing, indeed, but probably simplistic. The audience knows that the actor crying now has wept at last night's performance too. If spectators watch the performance again, they will see tears shed at pre cisely the same moment. If asked, theatergoers would assert that they are fully cognizant that repetition is taking place. By ignoring the diffi culty that accounting for repetition poses for un derstanding theater, we risk missing the intriguing key that it provides for unlocking dimensions of theater's uniqueness. We are also likely to over look an aspect that fuels our persistent fascination with theater, a fascination that should have van ished with the heightened realism readily created by cinema. What is theatrical repetition? How does such repetition differ from duplication or exercise? What might be the significance of the audience's consciousness of attending a repeated event to the overall meaning of theater as a distinct branch of performing art? My objective in what follows is to unfold the role that repetition might play for both creating and watching theater (and proba bly the role it sometimes plays in other perform ing arts as well). The answers such inquiry leads to do not account for the content of specific the atrical performances (roles, themes, images), but for the ways in which structural features of play acting touch upon subjective experience. I argue that both theatrical repetition and the subliminal awareness that one is enacting or witnessing it play a crucial role in theatrical communication in gen eral and may partly account for the significance of live acting in particular.