David Hare’s Fanshen and Hannah Arendt’s Political Views on Action and Public and Private Realms

ABSTRACT The British dramatist David Hare (1947–) is a distinguished contemporary figure in the field of historical-political playwriting. To address the issues of his age, he makes use of history and the recent past as a model. Like Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the twentieth-century political theorist and activist, Hare conducts a pathological study of his surrounding environment and the world. Both Arendt and Hare benefit from the past, Arendt from the distant past or the ancient Greece and Rome and Hare from the immediate past, in order to understand the present better. Indeed, history is a source of inspiration to them both. This paper is a study of Hare’s historical-political play, Fanshen, based on Arendt’s political insights on action and public and private realms. The play mainly shows that, contrary to Arendt – for whom the public realm of politics and the private domain of economy are two separate fields – for Hare there is essentially an interconnection between public and private spheres.