The writings of two philosophers – teacher and pupil – have shaped our politics, our religion, our art and our science. And although we should not flatter ourselves into thinking that either of them considered it the most important of topics, Plato and Aristotle both wrote about theatre. In many respects, their concerns set the tone for large parts of this book, whether we address them explicitly or not. I've already argued that it's not going to be possible to come up with a perfect definition of theatre. But when these two Greek philosophers tried to define it, they were quick to identify one word as central: mimesis. Apart from that, Plato and Aristotle agree upon little else. As we'll see, they don't even agree on what mimesis is, when it comes to theatre. But both agree that, where there's theatre, there's mimesis. Even before we acquaint ourselves with the various meanings of mimesis, we can get a sense of it by thinking about a typical theatrical performance. When you watch a play, actors dress up and speak like kings, sets make the stage look like Thebes or Verona. The whole play is an enacting, an acting out, an imitation (however inaccurate) of what the story might have looked like if (or when) it happened; and you, an audience member, are engaged in a kind of pretence that the story is unfolding before your very eyes. Each of these various activities could be described as mimesis. This chapter uses Plato and Aristotle to begin our analysis of philosophy and theatre. Through their opposing views about mimesis, we open up a much wider debate about what theatre is and what it can do.
Unfortunately, English doesn't have a word that's the equivalent of mimesis. The closest we have is ‘imitation’, a word I'll use for part of our discussion; but it's not quite right. The important thing to note about mimesis is that it can be used to describe a family of different notions, which can be broadly grouped in the following way.1 First, visual imitation: the columns on that building look like palm trees. Second, behavioural imitation: when husbands commit adultery, their wives often imitate them or follow their example. Third, impersonation or mimicry: Dionysus gets dressed up like Heracles in order to fool people into thinking he's Heracles; a human can mimic perfectly the sound of a nightingale. Fourth, imagination or play-acting: children imagine that they are their favourite heroes and re-enact a famous story.2 Finally, a slippery notion of ‘metaphysical mimesis’, which involves some kind of correspondence relation between the world as it seems to be and the world as it really is.
There are some features that all of these cases have in common. We can discern, in each example, an original and a kind of copy: the palm trees (original) and the pillar (copy); the husband and the wife; Heracles and Dionysus; hero and child; the real world and the world as it appears to be. We should add two points about this copy. First, it should be obvious from the examples that ‘copy’ here means something other than ‘exact replica down to the last detail’: the adulterous wife is probably not doing exactly what the adulterous husband did; Dionysus doesn't look exactly like Heracles – just enough to pass for him. So the copy needn't be an exact copy – just a copy in some relevant way. But, to move to the second point, we shouldn't go to the other end of the spectrum and claim that the copy needn't correspond in any way to the original. Despite the different kinds of example, we can say that the copies do more than merely represent the originals. On a treasure-map, the symbol, ‘X’, marks the spot where the treasure is buried. The correspondence between the ‘X’ and the treasure is merely symbolic, conventional. It could have been an ‘O’ or a ‘T’. But the examples of mimesis that we've seen are something more than that: the copy corresponds to its original in more than a merely conventional or symbolic way. The copy is, in some sense, like the original.
Common features can also be identified among a subset of the meanings of mimesis. Visual imitation, behavioural imitation and impersonation lie more or less comfortably within our standard use of ‘imitation’. This is less true for the last two, for play-acting and metaphysical mimesis. If we saw a group of children playing at being characters from films or players on a football team, we wouldn't naturally say that they were ‘imitating’ those characters; we'd say that they were pretending to be them, or imagining that they were them. As for the final category, metaphysical mimesis, we'd have to use up more space than is available understanding the metaphysics in each separate instance to understand what is implied and whether it's covered by ‘imitation’ or some other term.
Setting the metaphysical aside, and concentrating on the first four conceptions of mimesis, it may be helpful to think of the first three kinds (visual, behavioural, impersonation) as occurring at the third-person level, and the fourth, imagination, as occurring at a first-person level. It is to a third party, that is, that the columns should look like palm trees and the voice sound like a nightingale. In the case of the adulterous spouses, it's not that the imitation is designed for a third party (as in the previous two); but, at the very least, it's available to be recognised by a third party. Although, as we've seen, there are many differences among them, I shall refer to this group collectively as kinds of ‘imitation-mimesis’. With imagination, however, the story is different. The children pretend to be their heroes. They aren't trying to look like their heroes, or to pass themselves off as their heroes. The crucial point, therefore, is the imaginative act of pretending that takes place within each child. Note that to say the pretending is ‘first-person’ doesn't mean it is necessarily first-person singular. There's no reason why a lone child can't successfully engage in playacting; but many types of play-acting involve more than one person, imagining together. I shall refer to this as ‘imagination-mimesis’. Now that we have some hold on the various meanings of mimesis, we can move on to consider what Plato says about its relation to theatre.
Plato's claims about theatre are not always clearly distinguished first of all from his comments about other kinds of art, such as painting, and from his claims about other kinds of poetry. But tragedy, in particular, comes in for a lot of attention in Plato's The Republic; and this attention is famously and almost exclusively negative. Plato did not intend to give a careful definition of theatre, but he takes some time to explain the kind of mimesis that he thinks is at work, and it is helpful to spell out his claims.
The context of Plato's most famous remarks on theatre is The Republic, a dialogue between Socrates and a number of Athenian youths, including Glaucon and Adeimantus (Plato's brothers). As always, Plato does not speak directly in his dialogues, but rather explores the ideas through the figure of Socrates, who can neither be identified with Plato nor be completely isolated from Plato's own views. The conversation turns to the concept of justice, and Socrates, with the help of his interlocutors, begins to describe an ideal, just city. The rules for how this ideal city is set up have a variety of implications for education, family, political organisation and, of course, for poetry (tragedy and comedy being, for the Greeks, a kind of poetry). There is some debate about whether Plato intends to ban all mimetic poetry, or whether it is only certain kinds, but clearly, he subjects the most significant and successful Greek poets to scathing attacks and (imagined) censorship.3 Theatre comes in for particular criticism. For now, the important thing is that Socrates' criticisms of theatre depend upon his understanding of what theatre requires compared with other kinds of poetry. What it requires is mimesis.
Some kinds of poetry, Socrates explains, involve narration; others involve narration and mimesis; others involve mimesis only. By narration, Socrates roughly means an indirect description of the story, in the third person: ‘the priest asked the Greeks to return his daughter for a ransom’. By mimesis, in this instance, he clearly means somebody pretending to be the priest, seeming grief-stricken, and desperately uttering words along the lines of: ‘I'm begging you Greeks to give my darling Briseis back. I'll give you anything you want.’ It's clear from The Republic that readers of Homeric epics would often deliver speeches from Homer imitatively, so one could imagine a combination of narrative (‘the priest went to the Greeks and said…’) and mimesis ([wailing, desperate] ‘I'm begging you…’).4 However, the mimesis of the Homer-reader (known as a ‘rhapsode’) was part of an overall act of story-telling or narration. Tragedy and, by extension, theatre in general is always a matter of mimesis without narration – at least according to Plato.5
Having explored some various senses of ‘mimesis’, we might wonder what Plato has in mind here. In fact, Plato correctly discerns that theatre typically makes use of both mimesis as imitation and mimesis as imagination. As for imitation: scenery made to look like the front of a house and its garden; actors impersonating various people, dressing up, mimicking accents. As for imagination: the actors are pretending that they are Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and so on. These two senses of mimesis, although distinct, could well be related.6 We'll have more to say about their relationship once we've looked more closely at each in turn – first, at Plato's account (and criticism) of imitation-mimesis; second, at the kinds of imagination that take place in theatre.
Our starting point here is the question of what is being imitated. Plato develops, in The Republic, what has come to be known as his theory of forms, according to which there are single, unchanging, ideal so-called ‘forms’, which are instantiated by objects in the world. In one example, he explains that there is one (eternal, unchanging) form of a couch, to which all (transient, impermanent) couches in the world correspond (and are imitating). When the carpenter makes a couch, he is in some sense modelling his creation on this single couch-form. The claims about theatre, then, follow on from an analogy with painting. When the painter paints a couch, he is making an image of the carpenter's couch, which is in turn a copy of the form of the couch:
SOCRATES: We have these three sorts of couch. There's the one which exists in the natural order of things [i.e. the form]. This one, I imagine we'd say, was the work of a god. Or would we say something else?
GLAUCON: No, I don't think we would.
SOCRATES: Then there's the one made by the carpenter. […] And then the one made by the painter, isn't there?
GLAUCON: Let's take it there is.
SOCRATES: Painter, carpenter, god, then. Three agents responsible for three kinds of couch.7
The ‘imitator’ (i.e. the painter or his theatrical equivalent), Socrates goes on to say, makes that which is ‘two removes from nature’ – in other words, from the form. So, when imitation happens in poetry, it, like painting, is the imitation of an imitation – two removes from the real thing. And theatrical poetry, unlike other kinds of poetry, is exclusively imitative. Plato sets this up in order to lay his charges against imitative poetry and imitative art in general.
First, a metaphysical charge, based on the forms. Imitation-mimesis is never as good as the real thing (the thing it's imitating): no couch is as perfect as the form of a couch and no couch-painting as perfect as a couch. Second, an ignorance charge. The poets and painters don't really need to know about the things they imitate – they just have to know about the superficial appearances of those things: to write a play about a carpenter you don't need to know how to build a table. This, in itself, would not be so bad, if it weren't for the third, ‘spectator's gullibility’ charge. People tend to take the false or deficient poetic imitations for the real thing or, perhaps, they put too much faith in or are not sufficiently sceptical about the imitations.8 It's important to note the complexity and variation in the notion of mimesis invoked by Plato, which underlies his charges: plays use imagination-mimesis on the part of the actor and the audience (the actor imagines being the priest and says: ‘I, the priest, would like my daughter back’. and he sounds like he means it; the audience imagines that he is the priest) to create a kind of imitation-mimesis (what the play looks like to the audience) of a world (ours) that is, itself, a mimesis of another world (of forms).9 A further sense of mimesis invoked in the third charge is that naïve audience members may go on to use characters from plays as role-models, falsely taking them to be the real thing (or sufficiently like the real thing).
Looking over these criticisms, it's clear that some are directed at imitation-mimesis as it tends to occur (and as audiences tend to respond to it) in Plato's context; but some seem directed at imitation-mimesis as such, with little scope for better or worse kinds. As for the former: much of Plato's discussion of poetry in general and theatre in particular focuses on ways in which the famous poets get things wrong – for example, they misrepresent the gods in showing them to be deceitful and unjust. Furthermore, it's widely acknowledged that in Plato's time, poets were often appealed to for practical advice and education as well as for models of virtue, in a way that is unthinkable today.10 In an attempt to bridge this gap, modern interpreters of Plato have likened his concerns about tragic poetry to modern concerns about the influence of television or popular music.11 We might worry that exposure to soap operas and romantic comedies gives a young person a hopelessly unrealistic and ultimately harmful notion of human relationships; we might worry that her attitudes to others might be adversely affected by the songs she listens to, which glorify violence and sexism; we might worry that a child who wants to become a doctor as a result of watching medical dramas on TV has no idea what a real doctor's life would be like. Undoubtedly, these are Platonic concerns. This family of concerns is not exactly aimed at theatre (or dramatic mimesis) as such, but rather at the effect of particularly popular and widespread forms of theatre or popular entertainment and the attitudes of audiences towards them. It would be possible in principle, if aesthetically scandalous, to insist on a certain kind of accuracy in imitations, such that (say) dramas about doctors really did reflect the life of a typical doctor. Then the child who grew up wanting to be a doctor based on dramatic portrayals would have less to worry about. More generally, these objections are more about which kinds of imitation-mimesis are good and which are bad; they do not attack the mimesis itself.
However, some of Plato's concerns seem to be aimed at all imitations, no matter the accuracy: imitations take us further from the forms, so, however accurate they are, they can never be as good as the things that they imitate; this, for Plato, is their fatal flaw. This flaw is clearly a function of imitation-mimesis, as the comparison with painting demonstrates: the painter might try to make his portrait look like the subject; but neither the painter nor the portrait is pretending to be the subject in any obvious way. As far as Plato is concerned, then, theatrical mimesis is aiming to copy or imitate precisely the appearance of the original. This accounts for his criticisms of theatrical mimesis: however good the imitation, it's still just the imitation of an appearance.12 Notice that one doesn't need to agree with this second, metaphysical objection (about the forms) in order to make the first objection (about theatrical mimesis and role-models); as it happens, though, Plato offers both.
Before I explore some criticisms of Plato's claims, a note on the interpretation of his arguments in The Republic. Few texts have been examined in as much detail, or with such varied results, as this one. I have presented the relevant part of his argument against theatre-as-imitation as it seems to me to be presented in the text and in a way that is not idiosyncratic. However, there are some reasons to be suspicious of this mode of presentation, which it seems appropriate to flag up at this point.
First, I note that I'm taking a very strict, rather literal and perhaps therefore ungenerous interpretation of his comments on theatre. There are many signs in The Republic that Plato's understanding of and appreciation for mimesis is not nearly as one-sided as I have suggested. For one thing, I'm assuming that Plato is using Socrates as his mouthpiece, which is always a dangerous assumption to make. I'm also not addressing the very reasonable point that Plato, in choosing to write a dialogue, makes use of much that is ‘theatrical’ in his own work.13 Recall the story (of questionable accuracy) that Plato himself was a playwright before he met Socrates; even if this was just a rumour, it is ancient enough to indicate a regard for Plato's artistic abilities. Furthermore, since many of the conversations he writes involving Socrates took place in Plato's absence, it's hard to take seriously his (or Socrates') claim that there are just true stories or false stories. Plato's dialogues often tell stories – both stories about the characters in the dialogues and, more interestingly, myths about the afterlife or about how the world was made; indeed, The Republic itself ends with a myth. Are these stories true or false? The answer, of course, is somewhere in between.14 Indeed, within the imagined, just city described in The Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors certainly allow for the rulers to make claims or tell stories to the rest, which only the rulers know to be false, but which serve some kind of higher purpose or general benefit.15 This is the so-called ‘noble lie’ or ‘noble falsehood’. Although it is depicted as part of Socrates' imagined just city, it has been tempting for commentators to take the dialogues themselves or the myths within them to be a kind of ‘noble lie’ told by Socrates to his interlocutors or by Plato to his readers. At least, they leave open the intriguing possibility of a mimesis that Plato is happy to sanction.16
The question of the truth or falsehood of particular dialogues should also give us pause for thought. In the case of The Republic, for example, it has been shown that the combination of real people and real events brought together in the dialogue would have been historically impossible – as Plato and his contemporary readers would probably have known.17 Elsewhere, Plato's Symposium reports a drunken evening, in celebration of the playwright Agathon's victory in a dramatic competition. During the evening, Socrates argues with Agathon, a tragedian, and Aristophanes, a comedian (amongst others, of course). The reader of the dialogue is told the story by Appolodorus, who wasn't there, but has heard it from Aristodemus, who was. Much of what Socrates says is a report of a conversation he has had with Diotima, sometime before the event takes place. As Freddie Rokem points out, Plato's attempt to distance us from the true event puts us twice removed from the ‘real thing’, just as mimetic art for Plato is twice removed from the reality it attempts to portray.18 Whatever Plato meant by repeatedly distancing himself from the events of his dialogues, it's clear that he doesn't share Socrates' claim that either a story is true or it is false. Barish puts it nicely: ‘The Platonic dialogues, in general, one suspects, would have trouble with the proposed Platonic censor.’19
Finally, I have separated Plato's claims about the copying of appearances (imitation-mimesis), which primarily occur in Book 10 of The Republic, from his criticisms of what I'm calling imagination-mimesis, which primarily occur in Books 2 and 3. Again, although this is not an unusual division, we should note that Plato does not explicitly distinguish them as I have done, so many critics have taken on the challenge of trying to unify these notions of mimesis together with the criticisms Plato applies to them. Because there is little agreement on how this should be done, and because it invariably requires an intense examination of the whole of The Republic, together with other Platonic dialogues, I have chosen not to pursue this line here.20
Despite these important reservations, Plato's claims about mimesis as twice-removed from reality – broadly speaking as I have presented them – are clearly and forcefully put. Certainly, they have been taken very seriously by philosophers interested in theatre. For that reason, it seems appropriate to offer some criticisms of Plato's arguments when interpreted in this way.
First of all, Plato's claims about mimesis in theatre do not come from nowhere. He has a metaphysical theory about how the world is: the three-tiered structure described above. And he has a theory about what we ought to be doing about it: turning towards what he considers the real world (of forms) and away from the one that we take to be real but isn't (i.e. the world of regular, carpenter-built couches). This is what he considers the task of philosophy – to direct our attention away from what most people take to be the real world.21 As Socrates puts it: ‘nothing in human affairs is worth taking that seriously’.22 Philosophy and theatre, then, pull in completely opposite directions: one brings you closer to reality, whereas the other drags you away from it. Hence, one strategy to combat Plato is to deny that his metaphysical claims about the forms are correct. If there isn't this world of forms of which the everyday world is a kind of imitation (or mimesis), then theatrical imitations of the everyday world are not imitations of imitations. Of course, few philosophers (myself included) would now take Plato's metaphysical claims about the forms seriously; but we are more concerned with his claims about theatrical imitation, so I won't pursue his metaphysics here. In any case, as we have seen, many of the objections he makes to theatre may be removed, intact, from his metaphysical arguments.
A second challenge to Plato would consider more directly his concept of imitation-mimesis as applied to theatre. Indeed, the notion of imitation-mimesis at work in Plato's description of the playwrights is simplistic, but it's worth spelling out. As we've seen, the best imitations are those that seem most like the original – i.e. that resemble most closely its appearance (such that they may fool gullible people into thinking that they are the real thing).23 The most successful imitation would therefore look and sound just like the depicted events would have looked or sounded like to someone who was there. Hence Plato's criticism that it's only the appearance that's being imitated and, therefore, that poets don't need to know about the real thing. Nehamas puts this nicely: ‘it is almost as if the imitator lifts the surface of the imitated object and transfers it into another medium.’24 Broadly speaking, such a notion falls under the concept of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude, in general, means ‘truth-like’ – bearing a likeness to truth or having the appearance of truth. Plato's account of theatrical imitation-mimesis is that it means being as verisimilar (as true-seeming) as possible (although, being a copy, it must ultimately fail). Of course, the notion of verisimilitude is a general one. But in Plato's case, he is appealing to what I'll call ‘simple verisimilitude’: the imitation on stage must, in terms of how it looks and sounds, seem to be as much like the real-life events it is depicting. This notion of theatrical mimesis as simple verisimilitude has been a powerful one in the history of theatre theory, but when we consider it in more detail, it can quickly become problematic.
First, even accepting that Plato is right about theatrical imitation – that theatre aims at imitating the appearance of the everyday world as closely as possible – we should remember that this in itself is not an uncontroversial task. In the history of theatre theory and criticism, verisimilitude (in this simple form) has been appealed to on both sides of a number of debates. For example, when setting a play, should one keep the action in the same place or allow different scenes to be set in different locations? (This is the debate about so-called ‘unity of place’.25) One can make an argument from verisimilitude in either direction. On the one hand, it could go against verisimilitude to expect the stage to represent a room in an English palace at one moment and then an open field in France in the next (as in Henry V). It's hardly an everyday, life-like experience to see a single place (the stage) change from a palace to a plain. On the other hand, if the stage represents the same room all the way through the play, then the plot can be stretched to breaking point by expecting all the significant events of the story to take place in the same room. Are we really to believe (as in Racine's Phèdre) that Phèdre and Hippolyte just happen to reveal their respective secrets to their respective companions and that Thésée calls down his terrible curse in exactly the same location?
Equivalent points have been made about the unity of time: in a sense it's more verisimilar to perform a play in ‘real time’ – such that one hour on stage represents one hour of action; but, then again, if one tries to write about a significant dramatic event that takes place only in the time allotted to the play, it can end up feeling artificially compressed and hence not verisimilar at all. By convention, French tragedians in the seventeenth century would write plays depicting no more than sunrise to sunset. This drew criticism from both sides: if it's necessary to make theatrical time correspond to real time, then why can we stretch two hours to become more like sixteen hours? Or, if we're allowed to stretch two hours to sixteen hours, then why can't we stretch it to a week or, as in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, sixteen years? As with the unity of place, forcing all the action to take place in one day can also lead to very compressed plots; hence, Lessing's complaint that playwrights who claim to respect the unity of time often do so by not letting their characters go to bed.
The debate about verisimilitude even crops up in unexpected and apparently clear-cut cases. The (now practically obsolete) debate about whether to use masks on stage featured arguments from verisimilitude on either side. On the one hand, obviously, people in everyday life don't wear masks – so masks aren't verisimilar. On the other hand, as Lessing argued, masks have the advantage of hiding the accidental expressions of the actors – tiredness, frustration, annoyance – expressions that the characters they portray would not in fact exhibit in real life.26 (If this seems completely counterintuitive, then think of the potentially distracting effect of having real children or real animals on stage, as opposed to having dolls, which at least won't get bored or start acting up.) All of this goes to show that, even if Plato were right about the aim of theatre, there'd be a lot more to say about how it should go about achieving that aim. Of course, for Plato, the aim itself is a suspect one, and so how the aim is achieved is of comparatively little importance.
Second, though, Plato's account of theatrical imitation, taken as simple verisimilitude, is a poor description of what plays, including those in Plato's time, are attempting. Theatre in Athens was part of an elaborate religious festival originally associated with a festival of new wine (and the god of wine – Dionysus). In its mature form, this festival hosted plays in an open-air theatre that could seat about 14,000 people. Plays included song and dance and often depicted supernatural events. None of this is in any way conducive to imitating real, everyday life.27 Aeschylus could hardly have thought that the best way to imitate the disastrous return of Agamemnon from Troy as accurately as possible (in Plato's sense) was to begin with a masked actor pretending to be a watchman, shouting to himself about the stars. Watchmen on duty do not typically speak in such a way that they can be overheard by 14,000 people. And if the idea is to imitate the action as accurately as possible, then why all the singing and poetry?28
Even once all of these things have been discarded (as many subsequently were in Western theatre), one still has a stage and an audience and a number of insurmountable obstacles to ever finding on stage a simple imitation of how the world is. Diderot asks us to imagine a foreigner who has never heard of theatre being brought to a performance and watching it through a grille (so as not to see the audience). The foreigner, Diderot claims, wouldn't think for a moment that the events were real. The reasons for this are many, but they include the strange way the actors speak (so as to be heard) and the impossible amount of action condensed into such a short space of time. Not to mention that the play is often ‘set’ somewhere other than its actual location. What would the foreigner make of all these people talking as if they were in Thebes or Trézène, when they're actually in Athens or Paris?29 Even supposing that the foreigner would never be tricked into thinking that the play was real, one might imagine that plays could be more or less verisimilar; hence, some of the debates mentioned above might find a place. But theatre doesn't look like real life and it doesn't seem like a very good description of the work of most playwrights to say that this is what they are intending. If that's the case, then it may count against Plato's analysis of what theatrical imitations are (his metaphysical objection), and also against his criticisms of their effect on gullible audiences (his ‘audience gullibility’ charge). If we know that what we're seeing isn't (and isn't trying to be) a copy of everyday life, then perhaps we won't have such a gullible attitude towards it.
Plato claims that imitation directs our attention away from the universal, unchanging world of forms. We've already seen two ways to combat this claim – first, to deny the world of forms; second, to deny that Plato's understanding of imitation is the correct one. But as a follow-up to the second point, the idea of theatre as an imitation that in some sense aims at displaying the world to its audience can survive (and has survived). It's just that the simplistic notion of a theatre that tries to be as true to the appearance of life as possible isn't terribly convincing. Hence, a third line of response to Plato: obviously, theatre can't and shouldn't try to imitate the appearance of the world as closely as possible; but it can still, via imitation, tell us about the world. As Hegel remarked, if all art wanted to do was to imitate nature, then it would be just like a worm chasing after an elephant.30 And in such a case, Hegel adds, we could only admire the artist for his sleight of hand – never for any ultimate, successful achievement. But supposing we accept that theatre isn't aiming at simple verisimilitude. Perhaps, then, theatre can still imitate certain selected features of the world; perhaps, in fact, it can do this very effectively and convincingly. And perhaps, in doing so, it can lead to a greater understanding of (aspects of) the world, which would otherwise be harder to grasp – harder, say, than if confronted in the swirl of everyday existence.
The first response to Plato amounts to a denial that his metaphysics is correct. The second response denies that his analysis of what playwrights are doing (and how audiences respond) is correct. But this third response is compatible with his views on both of those subjects (although it doesn't presuppose them). We could accept that there's a ‘more real’ world, say, of forms; it's just that theatre needn't direct us away from that real world – it can bring us closer to it. And part of the reason that it brings us closer to the real world is that audiences take these imitations seriously (if not uncritically). This, then, amounts to more than just a defence of theatre against Plato. It suggests that Plato, on his own terms, would do well to take theatre seriously.31 There is, not accidentally, a parallel here with Christian debates about art in general: art can direct the viewer's attention away from the message of the gospels; or perhaps, if used in a certain way, it can highlight and emphasise certain key messages, hence playing a crucial role. Still, just as with Plato, whose account of the world (as forms and their imitations) led to his views about theatrical imitation, so with the other philosophers we'll consider: what you think theatre can and should imitate depends on what you think the world is and ought to be like. What I want to consider now is a response of this third kind, written by Plato's pupil, Aristotle.
Aristotle writes about theatre in his Poetics. Again, a word about the text. The Poetics doesn't read like a completed, published volume, but rather as a series of notes, possibly unfinished. The aims and context of Aristotle's writing are hard to know with any certainty, but the Poetics is obviously directly concerned with theatre (and tragedy in particular – it refers to a parallel text on comedy, which, if it was ever written, has not survived) in a way that The Republic is not. Aristotle does have brief comments to make about epic poetry, but dramatic poetry is his main focus. The Poetics has much to say that may be taken in response to Plato's The Republic – and indeed some critics take him to be responding directly to Plato's text – but all agree that Aristotle goes far beyond Plato and many of his concerns are independent of The Republic.32 To state one obvious point: Aristotle is interested in what makes one play superior to another play. This is of no interest to Plato, because, as we've seen, all plays involve imitation and as such are to be condemned. So Aristotle can offer us not only a response to Plato, but also some new thoughts about theatrical imitation.
Aristotle's celebrated definition of tragedy has imitation at its heart:
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.33
The centrality of imitation (mimesis) to this definition might initially seem akin to Plato's claims about theatre. But Aristotle's claim for poetry (and he has tragedy foremost in his mind) is that it ‘tends to express universals’, which means that it presents ‘the kind of thing that would happen’.34 In claiming that theatre can present universals, Aristotle may be seen to answer Plato's objections.35 For Plato, theatre takes its audience one step further away from the world of forms than they already are in the world of everyday objects. Both Plato and Aristotle posit larger or more general truths beyond our everyday world. If we loosely equate Plato's world of forms with Aristotle's universals (both offering a kind of fact or truth that cuts across everyday experience and goes beyond the specifics of time and place), then we can take Aristotle's claims about theatre and universals to be a response (of the third kind, above) to Plato: theatre doesn't take us further away from universals; it brings us closer to them.36 But in turning to universals as the focus for tragedy, Aristotle rejects Plato's idea that what matters in theatrical imitation is simple verisimilitude. He does this in two important ways: first, theatrical imitation can leave things out; second, imitation is permitted to be, in various ways, untrue.
First, Aristotle is clear that the playwright needs to be selective in what he presents on the stage. You can't tell the whole story, so you shouldn't try. If you do try to present, say, everything that happens to a particular character, then you will certainly fail and, in the process, end up with something that's unnecessarily complicated (and probably very long).37 Aristotle is clearly interested in describing a skill that Plato doesn't acknowledge: playwrights have to select which parts of a story to imitate on the stage, because they can't try to imitate everything. Hence, for example, we may not need to know all that much about Hamlet's relationship with his father or exactly where it is that Hippolyte and Phèdre are talking. In both these cases, one could argue that leaving out this information makes the plays better. The audience might suffocate under the weight of too much information. We all have, as Aristotle notes, a limited memory for details.38 So a part of the playwright's skill lies precisely in omitting details. This may be connected with the goal of presenting what is universal: unnecessary detail would simply be clutter, obscuring the significance of ‘the kind of thing that would happen’ – which, after all, is what's most significant about the drama.
Second, theatre for Aristotle can imitate falsely in a way that Plato obviously doesn't allow. This has two different features. First, the subject of the play – what is to be imitated – can be something that is not and never was the case:
The poet is engaged in imitation, just like a painter or anyone else who produces visual images, and the object of his imitation must in every case be one of three things: either the kind of thing that was or is the case; or the kind of thing that is said or thought to be the case; or the kind of thing that ought to be the case.39
Of these three options, Plato only seems to rule out all but the first. He is critical of poets for getting their facts wrong (e.g. about the gods); although he is then critical even of factually accurate imitations, on the grounds that they are still imitations.40 However, for Aristotle, plays can imitate not only what is (as in Plato) but also what is not. Like Plato, he draws a comparison between the poet's and the painter's imitating – but they are no longer merely imitating how the world appears to be. Instead, they may imitate things people say are the case and they may imitate things that ought to be the case. Now, of course, much of what people say is false; and, sadly, much of what ought to be the case is not. Again, we may understand this with reference to the poet's aim of expressing the universal: Aristotle clearly holds that a story that never took place may well be a better expression of the universal than a true story.41
The second way that theatre can imitate falsely is not spelled out clearly in the Poetics. But what Aristotle does say is that imitations are relative to a purpose. So, to borrow his example, if the purpose of an imitation is zoological, then one has to depict the correct (anatomical) features of an animal in order to train students of zoology; but if the purpose is theatrical or artistic (perhaps to have a greater emotional effect on the audience or viewer) there may be overriding reasons to get some details wrong. A painter, for example, might deliberately alter the proportions or perspective of her subject in order to produce a certain effect (examples of this are easy enough to find in the work of modern painters). This is rather different from the first case, in which the playwright tells a story that isn't true. For Aristotle might allow the playwright to write about a mythical or fictional event, without allowing him to alter such basic things as anatomical details of animals. If such alterations can be part of successful artistic imitation, then Aristotle has obviously moved far beyond Plato, for whom the artist was merely trying to copy as closely as possible the appearance of things. Clearly, Aristotle doesn't make the same demand on imitation that Plato had made.
I am suggesting that Aristotle's claims about imitation are connected with his claim about poetry and universals in two ways: first, the claim that poetry expresses universals provides an answer (of sorts) to Plato's criticisms of imitation; second, the differing way that imitation is licensed in Aristotle, as opposed to Plato, is a result of his commitment to the expression of universals in drama. Nonetheless, Aristotle's claim that dramatic poetry expresses universals may be separated from his analysis of theatrical imitation. Criticisms of his claim about universals are explored in Chapter 2, in the context of a discussion about truth on the stage. But one can criticise (as I shall) his account of theatrical universals, whilst maintaining that his view of imitation is superior to Plato's. As Aristotle correctly saw, playwrights do not merely seek slavishly to reproduce the appearance of everyday events: in producing imitations of actions, they omit parts of the story, they invent a great deal, and, on occasion, they imitate falsely because it improves the artistic value of their work.
As we've seen, the imitation element of mimesis is given extensive treatment in Plato's and Aristotle's accounts of theatre. We saw how, for Plato, the imitation of the everyday on stage takes us further from the true world of forms; and how, for Aristotle, the notion of imitation is much broader and encompasses artistically necessary inaccuracies as well as omitting irrelevant subject matter. But, as we saw at the start of our analysis of Plato, there's another sense of mimesis that is clearly involved in a typical performance: namely, a kind of imagining, play-acting or pretending. This kind of mimesis is also discussed in Plato and Aristotle, in relation to theatre. It contains, I would suggest, a cluster of rather different notions, which it is helpful to distinguish. Having done so, we can go on to say something about the relationship between the two different types of mimesis.
So far, all we've said is that, in addition to imitation-mimesis, theatre involves some kind of imagining or play-acting. These terms could then be used to describe two different things: what the audience is doing and what the actors are doing. Plato, for example, seems to be concerned with what actors do; for example, he is worried that the guardians of his ideal city, in pretending to be evil or immoral people, would take on the characteristics of those people.42 Regardless of whether Plato's concerns are justified, we can see why he holds that actors in some sense pretend to be or imagine that they are some particular character. But there's no doubt that the audience is also engaging in a kind of mimesis. When we sit at the theatre, the curtain goes up and a person walks out onto the stage, we see that person not (or not merely) as some old British actor whom we once saw on a TV show about people who spend too much money on their pets, but as Oedipus, by now a blind old man who has suffered at the hands of fate. We do not see him as Oedipus because he looks like Oedipus (imitation-mimesis). Nor do we see him as Oedipus because the actor is himself pretending to be Oedipus. Indeed, no matter how much the actor pretends to be Oedipus, no matter how much he behaves as Oedipus would behave, we still won't engage with him in the right way unless we, too, are (in some sense) imagining that he is Oedipus.43
The kind of mimesis that takes place on the part of the actor is different from that which takes place on the part of the audience. First of all, actors are encouraged in some sense to respond (physically) to what is going on. Oedipus is old and blind, so the actress playing Antigone must guide him and help him sit down. The audience pretend that they are seeing a blind man aided by his daughter; but they aren't supposed to help him out, or physically respond in any obvious way. On the other hand, in a typical performance, the actors are under relatively strict instructions to respond with certain words, gestures and actions; these limits do not apply to the audience members, who, within the confines of their seats, are free to respond as they wish. It's perfectly normal for audience members to check their watches, for example – a freedom that does not extend to actors. A second point about the difference between audience and actor mimesis is obvious: actors need practice and training, whereas the audience doesn't.44 At least part of the training of that actor, one might suppose, consists in learning how to pretend, imagine and so on, in relation to different parts (or types of parts). Finally, although human actors (I would suggest) are engaged in pretending when they're on stage, there are successful performances in which the characters are played by machines or puppets. In such cases, the audience is still required to play their part in the mimesis, but clearly the ‘actors’ are not in any reasonable sense ‘pretending’ or ‘imagining’. For this reason, I shall look more closely at audience-mimesis than at actor-mimesis; we have a chance to discuss actors in more detail in Chapter 5.
So far, we have discussed imagination, play-acting, make-believe and pretence, without really distinguishing between them. I don't intend to draw careful distinctions between all of these terms, but some distinctions are relevant to our discussion of theatre. First, I'll say something about imagination, then about make-believe.
Philosophers writing about imagination have had a wide variety of targets in mind. First, one can talk about the imagination of the artist – in other words, her creativity or ingenuity. We might praise the imagination of, say, Goethe or Strindberg; and in doing so, we suggest that there's something innovative about them – that they have created new genres, or that they are notable for writing in an unusual variety of styles. This focus on the creative imagination of the artist finds particular attention in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement [46–50]. However, our current focus is the audience at a theatrical performance, and clearly this is not the notion of imagination that we want. When I watch a play, I engage imaginatively with what the author and actors produce; but I myself am not thereby being especially imaginative or creative.
A second notion of imagination is not concerned with artworks in particular, but rather with our everyday engagement with the world. When we watch a plane disappearing into a cloud, we do not immediately assume that the plane has really disappeared; we are able, instead, to ‘fill in the gaps’ in our perception. This ‘filling in the gaps’ is a kind of imagination: the plane-watcher uses the information she has, but adds some suppositions of her own and draws a sensible conclusion. Hence Hume, for example, holds that the imagination is what, in everyday situations, ‘convinces us of the existence of external objects when absent from the senses’.45 The key point about this kind of imagination is that it is not only typical, but it might even be necessary for everyday functioning. We need to think that objects that disappear from sight are still there – not being able to do so would make (e.g.) riding a bike down a street a difficult exercise. Note that this kind of imaginative engagement with what is not directly present to the senses can extend beyond the plane behind the cloud – that was merely the simplest case. One could argue that this imagination is in play when we think about past events or about people who are far away.
This kind of imagination is not about making things up that aren't true, or pretending; it's a necessary feature of correctly understanding the world: if you imagine the plane moving in the cloud, you might well guess accurately when and where it's going to emerge from the cloud. This makes it different from the first, artistic kind of imagination. The artist might well be fanciful or creative with her imaginings; but that is not required of the person who correctly uses imagination to fill in the gaps in sensory perception. The gap-filling imagination is certainly required of the theatre audience; but it's not peculiar to theatre, or to art in general – as we've seen, it's something we make use of all the time.
What we're looking for is what audiences typically do during a theatrical performance (but don't typically do once the performance is over). And here, it seems, we're talking about imagining that fills in gaps, to be sure, but does so in a less sober manner than the Humean version we just discussed. In the prologue of Henry V, the Chorus asks the audience for help: they must supplement the action with their imagination:
O pardon, since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i'th’ receiving earth.
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,
Turning th'accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass[…].46
What the Chorus asks of the audience is a kind of gap-filling, to be sure, but it isn't the same as what's required of the plane-spotter. There's obviously a difference between imagining the plane in the cloud and imagining that one man is an army. The kind of day-to-day, spatial imagination would tell us that there's one man there (and that he doesn't completely evaporate when he exits stage right); it isn't what we're doing when we turn the single man into an army. I do not wish to assign to Shakespeare (let alone to ‘the Chorus’ of Henry V) a particular notion of imagination, but the Chorus could be asking the audience for help in a number of different ways. Consider the following three cases:
1. I imagine seeing horses in front of me. (Sensory)
2. I imagine that there are horses in front of me. (Propositional)
3. I act as if there are horses in front of me. (Make-believe)
Setting aside 3 for the moment, it will be helpful to spell out the difference between 1 and 2 – a difference commonly noted by philosophers.47 In the case of 1, the imagination is a matter of visualising, or seeing ‘in the mind's eye’. When I imagine the horses, I am imagining a visual perception of the horses.48 In the case of 2, the imagination involves supposing that some statement is true (without necessarily believing that it is true). The point is that imagination of the second kind (propositional) is possible without imagination of the first kind. I can imagine, say, that somebody other than Shakespeare was in fact the author of Henry V, without using any kind of sensory imagination. Of course, I could also use sensory imagination in relation to this thought – I could imagine (or visualise) Shakespeare tiptoeing into someone's room, stealing a manuscript and so on. But I don't have to. Looking back to the words of the Chorus, we see that both sensory imagination and propositional imagination are suggested. The audience is invited to imagine seeing the horses, their hooves pressing into the ground. But it is also to imagine that certain facts are the case, for example that years have passed in the space of a couple of hours. When the audience imagines that years have passed between scenes, this is obviously not a matter of visualising the years passing, but of supposing or accepting the claim that years have passed.49 If interpreted in this way, the Chorus' request seems general for theatre: the audience has to imagine seeing certain things, and it has to imagine that certain things are the case.
The third category, above, was a kind of make-believe response – acting as if something is the case. Following 3, I would behave as if there were a horse there, using appropriate gestures and so on. When Aristotle speaks of the pleasure that children take in mimesis, it is not clear which of the many meanings of the term he has in mind; after all, children like drawing, copying and play-acting.50 But, regardless of what Aristotle meant, we can be reasonably sure that even young children show an impressive capacity to engage in make-believe, with relatively elaborate rules.51 What distinguishes make-believe or play-acting from the kinds of sensory and propositional imagining is its focus on action. Make-believe, at least in an everyday sense, suggests an emphasis on responses to certain imagined states of affairs. If two children play a game in which they make believe that a tree-stump is a bear, then the important point seems to be that they act as if it's a bear. This is not the same as visualising the bear; nor is it the same as simply supposing (entertaining the proposition) that the stump is a bear. An important feature of make-believe is that, unlike sensory imagination, it can occur at a group level. I can play a make-believe game of catch with a friend, and our imagination is focused and unified around the game – indeed, the game may require both of us in order to function; but if we were both merely to visualise a ball, there would be little that our imaginings would have in common. The idea that artworks offer us a kind of unified, rule-bound way to make believe (including as a group) is a central tenet of Kendall Walton's highly influential Mimesis as Make-Believe. Ever since the publication of that book, the notion of play-acting or make-believe has had an important place in philosophical discussions of art and aesthetics. This is certainly not restricted to theatre: Walton's view is meant to extend to paintings and novels as well as to photos and films. This is not the occasion to enter into the details of Walton's theory. Readers should note that Walton's notion of ‘make-believe’, although it begins with examples of the children's games like the bear-stump game (the example is his), has a broader application. Hence, for Walton, anyone looking at any picture is engaging in make-believe.52
Setting aside Walton's specific use of the term ‘make-believe’ in his general theory of the arts, then, it seems to me that ‘make-believe’, in its everyday use, gives an emphasis on action as a response to what is imagined, which doesn't quite get the audience's response right. When we see the actor playing Oedipus appear on the stage, we're not meant to take part or get involved. Indeed, the standard notion of make-believe looks like a better description of what the actor is doing than what the audience is doing. That would suggest that the audience is perhaps watching a kind of make-believe; but, because they play no part in the action, their imaginary participation doesn't seem best characterised as make-believe or play-acting. Nonetheless, what is useful about this term (in relation to mimesis and theatre) is that it reminds us of the sense in which, at a typical theatrical performance, we're all ‘in on it’. I am reluctant to characterise an audience as ‘playing a game’ at the theatre; but it is certainly involved in a kind of group pretence – even if that pretence does not require acting or responding in the manner suggested by the term ‘make-believe’.
We began this chapter with Plato, noticing that theatre looks to require two different kinds of mimesis: imitation and imagination.53 On the one hand, things on stage look like their real-life counterparts. On the other hand, theatre requires pretence, imagination of various kinds, perhaps make-believe. Although they are clearly distinct, we can see that these two broad kinds of mimesis are related to one another in a number of ways. It might be, for example, that (say) dressing up the actor to look more like a Greek warrior (imitation) makes it easier for the audience to pretend that they are watching Agamemnon (imagination). Or, going back to the actor's mimesis, it might be that pretending to be Agamemnon (imagination) makes you look more like a Greek warrior (imitation). And sometimes, of course, a failure of imitation (a poor accent from an actor, an error in the scenery) makes it harder to engage imaginatively with a performance: poor imitation can undermine imagination.
It might be tempting to conclude from examples of this kind that the more successful the imitation, the more useful it will be as a guide to the imagination. Thus, for example, if the Chorus of Henry V had more space, more men and more horses at his disposal, then he wouldn't have had to go on stage and beg the audience for its indulgence.
I would like to warn against this view. First of all, as the discussion of Plato and Aristotle suggested, theatrical imitation doesn't merely seek to reproduce the appearance of everyday life: there's more to imitating a story than imitating exactly what it would look like if it really happened. Second, even if (following Plato) the purpose of imitation were to reproduce the appearance of everyday life, it's not clear that the more successfully it achieved this goal, the better it would aid our imagination. In his essay on the hobby-horse, Gombrich notes that for the ‘hobby-horse’ (a broomstick, or a simple horse's head attached to a stick) to become a horse in the imagination of the child, it is not necessary for the broomstick to look very much like a horse at all.54 Indeed, it is likely that if the broomstick or toy horse were too much like a real horse, then it would ruin the imaginary game. Real horses, after all, are often too large or bad-tempered to be ridden by small children.55 The same might be said, more generally, for the cavalry of Henry V: hundreds of real horses moving across an enormous stage would arguably ruin the effect that the Chorus seeks to produce. The key factor, Gombrich suggests, is not successful imitation but interest; it's got to be worth engaging with. We will go a long way with our imaginations – turning the stage into France and England, or the word ‘barn’ into a barn – if we think there's something in it for us. And whether we are interested or not has as much to do with the subject matter (i.e. what is being imitated) as the likeness.
Up to this point, I have been keen to keep these two mimesis families apart. But I would like to end by suggesting that the way that they interact on the stage (complex as it is) must be a central, perhaps even unique feature of theatrical performance. To do so, I shall consider a case-study: Gloucester on the cliffs of Dover.
In Act IV Scene VI of King Lear, the blind Gloucester is led by his son, Edgar, who is disguised as the madman, Poor Tom. Gloucester wants to kill himself, but Edgar devises a scheme to cure him of his suicidal thoughts. He tells Gloucester that he is leading him up a steep slope to the cliffs of Dover; in fact, they are in a flat field. Standing at what Gloucester thinks is the very edge of the cliff, Edgar, as Poor Tom, tells him:
How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one's eyes so low.
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge,
That on th'unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.56
Now that we have analysed the term, we are in a position to appreciate the varieties of mimesis used in a performance of this scene. As for imitation: the actors may be dressed to look like their characters (Gloucester's eyes may really look damaged, having been ‘plucked out’ on stage); Edgar is dressed up as a beggar; Edgar himself is impersonating a mad man (and there are hints in his conversation with his father that he isn't very good at it). More generally, the scene is part of a longer story, an action that, in Aristotle's terms, is being imitated before us. As for imagination: certainly, we are to imagine that we are in Dover, hence that the characters have travelled some distance and that certain other facts hold. But we are also to imagine the flat field and hence the difference between where they ‘really’ are and where Gloucester thinks they are. Sensory and propositional imagination are required, then, to fill in the gaps in the story and the scene itself. But as we listen to Edgar's powerful and imaginative description of the edge of the cliff, we also imagine the cliff-face and the vertigo felt by Gloucester as he waits to jump. We are, therefore, in three places at once: at a performance, with two actors on a simple stage; in a field in Dover, with Edgar and his blind father; at the edge of the cliffs of Dover, with Gloucester and a madman called Poor Tom.
Watching this scene (if suitably immersed), we do not congratulate ourselves for the complex interplay of imitation and imagination – and I am not suggesting that we should. Indeed, what's more remarkable is that, immersed in the action, we don't stop to think about it, because we are engrossed in the mimesis. It is not my aim in this book to make a case for theatre, as something unique or highly valuable. But it strikes me that no other artistic medium could provoke complex relations of mimesis that we find in a performance of this scene: a novel would erase the actors, with their impersonations and resemblances; a painting, as well as removing the actors, would leave out the features of the plot that enliven our imagination; even film, which has so many similarities with theatre, would lessen the role of imagination – it would probably take us straight to the field, obscuring the three-way relation between stage, field and cliff.
As we've seen, the single word, mimesis, unlocks very different families of concepts – imitation and imagination – each of which, in turn, reveals different and interrelated notions. Plato takes imitation to be copying the appearance of the everyday; but for Aristotle, it includes omitting details and even getting things wrong for the sake of poetic effect. As for imagination, we noted the difference between actors and audience; and between creative, gap-filling, sensory, propositional and make-believe imagination. I have suggested that these families of notions interact in a particular way on stage. But with all the different senses of mimesis in mind, we can see why it's not merely a feature of theatre, but also of other kinds of artistic and non-artistic activity. Far from meaning the simplistic copying of everyday life, mimesis, taken as a whole, looks to be a feature of everyday life, perhaps an important feature.57
Plato's The Republic and Aristotle's Poetics remain the key historical texts for the discussion of theatre and mimesis. For a sample of relevant discussions of mimesis and The Republic, see Nehamas (1982) and (1988); Burnyeat (1999); Halliwell (2002: 37–147); Moss (2007); Cain (2012). On Plato and the theatre: Barish (1981: Ch. 1) offers an overview of Plato's arguments against theatre, while Puchner (2010: Ch. 1) attempts to salvage Plato's reputation as a dramatist of sorts; Rokem (2010: Ch. 1) has a challenging reading of Plato's Symposium, in which Socrates discourses with playwrights. Santas (2006) and Ferrari (2007) are helpful general collections on The Republic. On mimesis in the Poetics, see Halliwell (1986: 109–137) and Woodruff (1992); on the Poetics in general see Halliwell Heath (1996) and the collection of essays in Rorty (1992). See Halliwell (2002) and Huhn (2004) for more detailed and historically sensitive accounts of the concept of mimesis in the ancient world and in the eighteenth century, respectively. For a general account of theatre and mimesis, see ‘Mimesis’ in Woodruff (2008). Walton (1990) remains the central text on mimesis in contemporary analytic philosophy, although its focus extends well beyond theatre.
1 The best summary of the meanings and uses of mimesis in Greek writing is found in Halliwell (1986). My categories and examples, broadly speaking, follow his. See Halliwell (1986: 111–5).
2 Note that play-acting and imagination are not quite the same; we shall come to the difference shortly, but for the moment I would like to keep this as a general category, distinct from imitation.
3 References to Plato's The Republic give standard section references rather than page numbers; all translations are from the edition listed in the bibliography. It is a well-known conundrum that the discussions of mimesis in Books 2 and 3 license some (although not many) kinds of imitations (see e.g. The Republic 395c), whereas Book 10 opens with Socrates and Glaucon agreeing that all imitative poetry was banned. Some take this as evidence of inconsistency; Nehamas (1988) and Moss (2007) suggest solutions.
4 The Republic 393b. See also Plato's Ion, in which Socrates discusses poetry with a rhapsode.
5 The Republic 394b; but I seem to recall the part of ‘narrator’ being an important and coveted role in primary school Christmas plays.
6 Broadly speaking, Socrates is concerned with the former in The Republic, Book 10 and the latter in The Republic, Books 2 and 3. Both are referred to as mimesis and he does not distinguish them explicitly.
7 The Republic 597b. Speakers' names added for ease of reference.
8 There are other criticisms, too, some of which are explored in Chapter 5.
9 The question of what kind of imitation is being appealed to in the relationship between this world and the world of forms is complicated and has to be set aside. Halliwell (1986: 109–137) has some discussion.
10 See, e.g., Barish (1981: 8); Moss (2007)
11 See Nehamas (1988), Burnyeat (1999: 249–255) and Woodruff (2008: 130–5), from whom the following examples are developed.
12 Barish (1981) raises the question of just what the equivalent of the form of the couch is, in the case of theatrical mimesis. For the painter, the three parts are painted-couch/couch/form-of-couch. But theatre looks to imitate action, and forms, being unchanging, are unlikely to be actions (Barish 1981: 6–8). In a sense, Moss (2007) provides a speculative answer, claiming that the ‘appearances’ imitated by poetry should be understood as ‘false appearances’ or things-as-they-appear-to-be-but-in-fact-aren't. Poetry imitates what virtue appears to be and in fact isn't: namely, they present it as something shifting and varied, when in fact it is simple and unchanging.
13 Puchner (2010) has recently made a case for reinterpreting Plato as a dramatist, reforming the theatre of his day.
14 We can make room, of course, for ‘false’ stories that contain deeper truths; the point is that Plato's Socrates, if we take him at face value, doesn't seem to. O'Connor (2007) gives a reading of The Republic, looking closely at how it interprets and reworks some of the poetry it criticises. For an analysis of The Republic's final myth, see Halliwell (2007).
15 The Republic 389b, 414b–415c.
16 See Lear (2006).
17 Nails (2002: 324–6).
18 Rokem (2010: Ch. 1).
19 Barish (1981: 11).
20 See e.g. Nehamas (1982); Belfiore (1984).
21 This is one of many conventional interpretations of Plato, presented in this chapter, which is challenged in Thakkar (2013). (In fact, at this point in his helpful notes to my manuscript, he wrote: ‘I just think this is totally, heinously false.’)
22 The Republic 604c.
23 The Republic 598b–c; also 599.
24 Nehamas (1988: 220). Socrates' use of an analogy between a painting and a mirror serves to emphasise this reading – see Cain (2012). But see Halliwell (2002: Ch. 4) for an alternative reading of the mirror analogy in the context of Plato's writings on visual art.
25 Unity of place is often claimed, falsely, to be a feature of Greek tragedy. Even Aeschylus writes a play in which the setting shifts from Delphi to Athens.
26 Lessing (1962: Section 56, p. 162).
27 However, for an argument that theatre was considered verisimilar see Nehamas (1988: 222–225).
28 Nietzsche's view of ancient tragedy, as we see in Chapter 3, emphasised the musical and poetic elements far above the imitative.
29 Quoted and discussed in Lessing (1962: Sections 84–5).
30 Hegel (1993: 48).
31 For those who treat Plato's dialogues as a kind of ‘theatre’ or ‘drama’ – as discussed above -Plato does take theatre seriously by writing his dialogues in conformity with his own philosophy and hence creating a kind of theatre or drama that does bring us closer to the forms.
32 It is generally but not universally accepted that Aristotle is responding to Plato in the Poetics; there is no explicit reference to Plato. Note that to say Aristotle is responding to Plato is not to say that he is responding to any particular Plato text. And, even if one denies that Aristotle has Plato in mind at all, one can still develop a response to Plato based on the Poetics. This last point is acknowledged even by those who seek to deny any other connection. See Woodruff (1992) and Woodruff (2008: 113). At the other end of the spectrum, some critics have entertained the idea that Plato's The Republic is itself a response to his young pupil, Aristotle. See Janko (1992), Halliwell (1986: 1) and see also Barish (1981: 7).
33 Poetics 49b. References to Aristotle's Poetics give traditional line references rather than page numbers; quotations are from the translation listed in the bibliography.
34 Poetics 51b.
35 As Woodruff (1992) notes, in claiming that tragedies express or present universals, Aristotle is not saying that they imitate universals. Instead, a tragedy presents universals by imitating (particular) actions. It is precisely the relationship between the actions and the universals that is so difficult to determine, as I argue in Chapter 2.
36 Of course, Aristotle's universals are not Plato's forms. Indeed, Aristotle explicitly criticises Plato's view. See Fine (1993).
37 Poetics 51a.
38 Poetics 51a.
39 Poetics 60b.
40 See The Republic 376e on stories as either ‘true or false’; and, e.g., The Republic 377–9 on censuring the poets for getting the facts wrong.
41 Aristotle has more to say about this, which we discuss in the analysis of history plays in Chapter 3.
42 The Republic 395c. Or see The Republic 398a for the perfect actor, who would be immediately expelled from the city. We discuss his fears about the immorality of actors in Chapter 5.
43 The example is adapted from Woodruff (2008: 123).
44 The audience may need to have practical knowledge of certain conventions; and certain kinds of training may help them appreciate a performance on a deeper level.
45 Hume's Treatise, 266, quoted and discussed in Lamarque and Olsen (1994: 246).
46 Henry V, Prologue, lines 15–31.
47 For similar and related distinctions, see Sartre (2004: 8) on conceiving as opposed to imagining. See also Lamarque and Olsen (1994) Ch. 9 and Lopes (2003).
48 By calling this kind of imagination ‘sensory’, I do not wish to obscure significant differences between actually seeing the horses and having an imaginary visual image of the horses. Sartre (2004), for example, takes great pains to highlight such differences.
49 One could (visually) imagine years passing, but it would require the assistance of a certain kind of (authorial) imagination to do so. Take, for example, the middle section of Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
50 Poetics 48b.
51 Gendler (2003) gives examples and discusses empirical evidence.
52 See especially Walton (1990: 11–69). Indeed, Walton uses (and freely admits to using) many familiar words in an unfamiliar, technical sense, including ‘fiction’ (and ‘fictional’), ‘prop’, ‘representation’. Music, for example, counts as a prop. We discuss his view as it relates to art and emotion in Chapter 6.
53 That these two kinds of mimesis are analytically distinct is uncontroversial. Woodruff (2008) posits a unifying structure to mimesis in general, which appeals to the ‘natural effect’ of the original object (although I note, in passing, that I am sceptical as to whether all original objects could be said to have a ‘natural effect’ in this sense); Belfiore (1984) argues for a unified account of mimesis in Plato's The Republic.
54 Gombrich (1978: 8).
55 Sartre (2004: 28), makes a similar point about a stage impressionist, impersonating Maurice Chevalier: the more we look for particular resemblances, the harder it is to imagine the impressionist as Chevalier.
56 Lear, V.4.11–23.
57 Walton (1990: 7), Woodruff (2008: 124) and others certainly take this view of mimesis.