Appropriately, the greatest playwright of all has a phrase that sums up the political problems the Abbey Theatre has created for itself with this week's proposal to move across the Liffey.
"For 'tis the sport," as he puts it in Hamlet, "to have the engineer/ Hoist with his own petard." Or, in plainer English, to be blown up by your own bomb.
If, as seems increasingly likely, the Abbey's plan to move from the north inner city to the Grand Canal Docks blows up in its face, the explosives will have been supplied by the National Theatre itself.
The notion of rebuilding the Abbey has been on the agenda since at least 1995, when an independent analysis concluded the present building was becoming unsafe and unusable. Cramped, ugly and uninviting, it has never been popular, either with artists or with audiences.
The difficulty was that redevelopment would require tens of millions of pounds that the Abbey didn't have, and that the only realistic source of funding was the State. Getting the ear of a Government whose members are much more familiar with the contours of Leopardstown than with the inside of a theatre was never going to be easy.
Patient lobbying and the prestige which the Abbey's then chairman John McColgan had acquired through Riverdance, however, finally secured a serious hearing from the Taoiseach and senior ministers last March. That generated goodwill and a broad commitment to stump up the money. With remarkable political naivety, however, the Abbey has managed to put this achievement at risk.
In its approach to the Government, the Abbey outlined three options. One was to repair the present building. At a cost of £10 million in 1999 prices, this would have required spending a significant amount merely to retain an entirely unsatisfactory status quo. The second was to redesign and redevelop a new building on the present site. The third option was pretty much the one announced this week: to move to a new site and start from scratch.
The problem, though, is that this third option was emphatically rejected in the Abbey's own proposals. Even the then estimated cost of £50 million (half of what the Abbey now wants from the Government) was dismissed as "financially unrealistic". It would, moreover, require a shift from the "current historic site" which would "undermine the Abbey's historic association with Lower Abbey and O'Connell streets".
The Abbey's pitch to the Government highlighted the role a new building on the same site would play in regenerating a part of the city that badly needs a boost.
The pitch to the Government also runs contrary to the contention of the theatre's new chairman James Hickey and artistic director Ben Barnes that the present site simply cannot accommodate the demands of a 21st-century national theatre. The documents that formed the basis for that appeal insist that, by adding great height and digging a new level under the ground floor, the current site can be used for "a coherent and exciting architectural concept for the scheme, delivering a dynamic, fully accessible, safe, public building for the 21st century". This would include "imaginative theatre spaces conceived to bring together actors and audiences", an attractive new foyer, larger backstage areas, new rehearsal rooms and a rooftop restaurant. If all this is possible on the present site, what need is there to move? And what happened to the Abbey's commitment to act as a focus for the regeneration of a neglected part of the city? The only answer the Abbey seems to have is that the new site is free.
The ease with which the National Theatre managed to dump its own passionate arguments in the space of less than a year raises profound questions about the clarity of its vision for the future. The abandonment of its aspiration to contribute to the renewal of one of the city's most neglected areas suggests that big cultural goals are suddenly less important than the attractions of glitzy developments on the trendy south side.
In both political and cultural terms, that might be one of the Abbey's worst moves since it turned down the early work of John B. Keane. Keane's Big Maggie is back on the Abbey stage next week. The chances are that the Abbey will soon have to accept that the story it told the Government last year was a pretty gripping epic.