Alison,
I agree that theatrical works can be as ambiguous as poems can be. My point in saying in an earlier email that discussion about “Lear’s button” was not relevant to the discussion about an individual reader’s response to a poem, was merely to point out the very practical decisions that directors of plays have to make when staging them, in comparison to poetry reading, which I suspect the act of, for many people, has no practical considerations.
As you know, when staging a play one has to make interpretive decisions because more is at stake regarding meeting production schedules, budgets, etc. therefore indecisiveness is impractical. Privately reading a play, as an individual reader for pleasure, or watching one as a member of the audience, is, as you say, the same as reading poems privately.
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