5 A School of Morals?

 

 

 

The Encyclopaedia or, to give it its full alternative title, The Systematic Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences and Crafts, stands as the greatest monument to the French Enlightenment. It is a systemised, catalogued summary of human knowledge, guided by reason, which stretches in its completed form to a colossal 20,000,000 words. The Encyclopaedia boasted a number of well-known contributors, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot and D'Alembert. Of these, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were, amongst other things, philosophers and playwrights. Voltaire's plays, although now virtually unknown to English-speaking audiences, were enormously successful in his time – and were praised to the skies, not least by Voltaire himself. Rousseau was better known as a writer of operas (both music and libretti), but he was also a moderately successful playwright, as was Diderot.1

Given this star-studded setting, the huge public spat over the ethics of the theatre that followed the publication of an article in the Encyclopaedia in 1757 is surprising.2 For one thing, the author of the catalyst article was D'Alembert – not a playwright, but primarily a mathematician and philosopher (also, for some time, a coeditor of the project, with Diderot). For another thing, the article concerned had ostensibly nothing at all to do with theatre – its subject was Geneva, ‘situated on two hills at the end of the lake which today bears its name but which was formerly called Lake Leman’.3 The final surprise was who took issue with this article and chose to register his objections the following year, in no uncertain terms: none other than the playwright, philosopher and erstwhile Encyclopaedia contributor, J-J. Rousseau. What had irked Rousseau the most, as a proud citizen of Geneva, was the suggestion, so brief one would scarcely notice it, that Geneva might benefit from the construction of a theatre, albeit strictly regulated to avoid moral corruption:

in this way, Geneva would have the theatre and morals and would enjoy the advantages of both; the theatrical performances would form the taste of the citizens and would give them a fineness of tact, a delicacy of sentiments, which is very difficult to acquire without the help of theatrical performances.4

That is, although D'Alembert acknowledges that the Genevans are in some respects two hundred years ahead (of educated, late eighteenth-century Parisians) when it comes to morals, there's something lacking that could be provided by the theatre. As he later put it, the theatre is ‘a school of morals and virtue. […] It is morality put into action, it is precepts reduced to examples’.5 As well as benefiting from an improvement in moral sentiment, the theatre at Geneva would provide the city with ‘decent pleasures’ – that is, well-earned amusement and entertainment.

The two claims that D'Alembert makes for theatre – that it entertains, and that it can be moral – can and have been made either separately or together in defence of theatre. Certainly, they go back as far as Horace's claim for poetry in general, that it should be useful and pleasant (‘utile et dulce’). We shall look at each in turn.

Pleasure and entertainment

First, a word about the difference between pleasure and entertainment. For our purposes, distinguishing between three ideas is helpful: first, pleasure as a sensation; second, pleasure in general; last, entertainment. First, for some, pleasure is best understood as a kind of bodily sensation, perhaps as an opposite to pain; this, roughly speaking, is the view that Aristotle presents in his Nichomachean Ethics.6 Pain, following this line of argument, is the feeling that we get when something is going wrong with the body – it is an indication that the body is being hurt, damaged or over-exerted in some way. So when I put my hand into very hot water, the pain I feel is an indication that the body is being harmed. Correspondingly, pleasure is the sensation that we get when we are doing something that is naturally good for us: warming my cold hands by the fire. Although it might cover some of what we call pleasurable, this view can't be all there is to it. For one thing, it can't easily explain why, for example, some food gives us more pleasure than other food. Sadly, the food that is most pleasurable to eat isn't always the food that gives us the best nourishment. But even among foods that are equally nourishing, it's normal to get more pleasure from one than the other. So if I prefer my eggs boiled, rather than poached, the difference in pleasure isn't reducible to a difference in how nourishing they are. Furthermore, there are things in which we take pleasure that don't look natural at all (but that don't look perverse or unnatural either).

Second, then, we speak about taking pleasure from activities, where it's clear that this is neither a bodily sensation nor a natural improvement. Writing poetry, playing music or watching sport may be pleasurable, but it seems reasonable to say that this pleasure is neither a bodily sensation nor related to the satisfying of some natural need (music and poetry aren't natural, that is, in any obvious way). Broadly speaking, we are talking about things that ‘please us’, which is not the same as giving us a particular bodily sensation. Indeed, some activities in which we take pleasure might be thought to be precisely the opposite of natural, bodily pleasure – i.e. they might be harmful, even painful.

This brings us to entertainment, which, I suggest, has two features. First, an entertainment is something the specific and primary purpose of which is to bring pleasure to those involved (usually in the second sense, above). One might take pleasure (in the second sense) in all sorts of things that have some completely different purpose. If I enjoy my walk to work, the walk is a pleasure but not an entertainment. Note, however, that an entertainment need not (and probably doesn't) bring pleasure to all concerned: people who organise or perform at ‘entertainments’ may find them unpleasant and tiresome, and may just do so for the money; a sporting event may be pleasurable for the crowd, but that's probably not how the players on the losing team would describe it. Second, an entertainment is something that has been organised, planned or structured; it has something non-spontaneous about it. So although the unplanned, unprompted stroll after dinner might have pleasure as its object, it isn't an entertainment; but the organised walking-tour is. Theatre looks pleasurable in the second sense, but not the first; therefore, when I speak of ‘pleasure’, I mean this second sense of pleasure, unless otherwise stated. (Of course, not everybody finds theatre pleasurable and, sadly, not every performance is pleasurable.) And it looks very much like an entertainment, as defined.

In fact, Rousseau's argument is against theatre as entertainment, but not as pleasure. He notes that humans have a short life span and therefore that our time is precious. In the context of such a brief life, we must make use of those moments that we have: ‘every useless amusement is an evil.’7 To this, Rousseau adds that going to the theatre must necessarily replace some other activity; he considers the duties of ‘a father, a son, a husband, a citizen’ more natural and therefore more fulfilling than the artificial pleasures of the theatre. Man's natural pleasures ‘are born of his labours, his relations, and his needs’.8 Theatre is bad, because unnatural – that is, presumably, unrelated to man's labours, relations and needs. Looking back to our distinction between pleasure as sensation and pleasure in general, it's clear that Rousseau doesn't object to pleasure as a sensation, nor to taking pleasure in certain things. Rousseau is not therefore objecting to pleasure as such, but rather to entertainment as such. Pleasure can and should accompany duty; so, when there's duty to be done, why create useless amusements and diversions?

Actually, Rousseau's attack on theatre (as entertainment) is a little more complicated than that: a pleasurable but inherently useless entertainment (like theatre) might indirectly be useful and advantageous, if all the people who attend it would otherwise be doing much more unpleasant things like stealing, flattering and fornicating. But if they would otherwise be engaging in useful, natural activities, then entertainment becomes suspicious.9 This is hardly a defence of theatre that any sympathiser would welcome and seems more a rhetorical device than a serious claim. It's also hard to escape the conclusion that this is a comparison between fornicating Parisians and hard-working citizens of Geneva – or at least between Rousseau's idealised conception of the two. D'Alembert's perfectly reasonable response to Rousseau on the brevity (and misfortune) of human life is: well, then why not have a little fun?10 However, the key point for Rousseau is obviously that theatre is unnatural – hence it's not useful, just mere entertainment.

As we saw above, one can distinguish different kinds of pleasure – specifically the natural, bodily sensation can be distinguished from simply taking pleasure in a variety of different things. Rousseau evidently thinks that pleasure should be connected with natural activity and hence that pleasure deriving from artificial (i.e. non-natural) activity is somehow inappropriate.11 Pleasure ought to be natural: natural pleasure is good because natural; and artificial pleasure is bad because non-natural.

There are at least two ways to respond to Rousseau on this point. The first is to argue that theatre is in fact natural (whether by Rousseau's or another standard). The second is to argue that using nature as a criterion for which pleasures are and aren't acceptable is deeply suspicious. First, then, one could point out that theatre brings people together, stirs their emotions and (sometimes) gives them pleasure – and, in doing so, satisfies some natural inclinations (just as in religion, sport, and so on). Theatre, for example, moves people; and people, in general, as D'Alembert remarks, need and like to be moved.12 This, as I suggested above, seems rather tenuous. Another line might be that the mimetic element of theatre (discussed in Chapter 1) is somehow naturally pleasurable: it's a natural desire to imitate, copy, enact the doings of others around us; indeed, Aristotle suggests this in the Poetics.13 Second, and more convincingly, one could question the notion of ‘nature’ as a good criterion for making judgements about whether things are good or bad, useful or useless. One should always ask, first, how one can possibly know what is natural and what is not? Is this a matter of what animals do, what humans used to do a long time ago, or what you think humans would ideally do, if not interfered with in various ways? Each answer is unsatisfactory, for any number of reasons.14 We might wonder, contra Rousseau, whether being a ‘citizen’ is all that natural – or what ‘natural’ means if it is. Note that this objection also counts against the first response to Rousseau: if we don't know what's natural and what isn't, then we can't defend theatre on the grounds that it's natural. Second, one should ask why it matters whether something is natural or not. Presumably, by most standards, antibiotics and life-saving surgery are unnatural; but nobody seems to be crying to get rid of them. As so often, the appeal to nature is a thin veil for whatever bigotry the author happens to have inherited or taken on. In Rousseau's letter, this becomes particularly clear when he comes to discuss women. In defending his claims that a married woman should keep away from all men other than her husband, that women belong at home with children, that ‘there are no good morals for women outside of a withdrawn and domestic life’, Rousseau simply appeals to nature: ‘Nature wanted it so, and it would be a crime to stifle its voice’.15

The school of morals

D'Alembert was neither the first nor the last to take the view that the theatre could be not merely entertaining, but also a school of morals. Unsurprisingly, this claim was often made by playwrights – among them Lessing, Schiller, Racine and Voltaire.16 (That said, it was by no means a universal view among playwrights – towards the end of his career, Goethe, for example, denies that theatre has a beneficial moral effect on the audience.7) When we assess moral defences of theatre, it's helpful to bear in mind that they are often directed towards Christian criticisms. The conflict between the theatre and the church has a long history – about as long as the history of the church itself. And it has only really ceased as both have ceased to be taken seriously as venues for public moral learning. This was not so in the past. For the early Christian church, Greek theatre was objectionable because pagan; but, even worse, it was part of a festival for Dionysus, a particularly unchristian deity, who symbolised, amongst other things, intoxication, subversion and orgy. There were also other standard church criticisms of theatre, besides its pagan origins: its allegedly inherent use of illusion and deception, which were seen to contradict Jesus' demands for truth; its effect on the emotions of the audience, taking their minds away from God. In as much as the church was (and is) an actively political organisation, theatre also represented an inherent political threat, for reasons discussed in Chapter 7.

Of course, as with music, painting, sculpture, war, politics and everything else, the Church was happy to make use, for its own purposes, of those things it openly and vociferously opposed.8 Hence we find early Christian tragedies, Jesuit didactic theatre, medieval pageant plays and so on. Nonetheless, the Christian message on theatre has for the most part been overwhelmingly negative and the claims of the playwrights (and philosophers defending them) to be presenting a school of morals should be seen in that light. Hence Racine, although claiming that Greek theatre was also a school of morals, implicitly defends Phèdre on Christian grounds. In this play, he says, thinking about an act is punished as harshly as carrying it out would be; this connects his play to the specifically Christian doctrine preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, according to which thinking about a sin is as bad as committing it.19 Still, if criticisms of the theatre were often Christian-inspired, one can put many of them in non-Christian terms. And nobody did this better than Rousseau, when he came to answer D'Alembert's proposal for a theatre in Geneva: ‘Theatre and morals! This would really be something to see, so much the more so as it would be the first time.’20

We shall look at the typical moral defences of theatre and how Rousseau (and others) attacked them. The specifics may vary, but the same points frequently reoccur, and they come down to what I'll call ‘immediacy’, ‘emotion’ and ‘justice’.

Immediacy

Of course, one can always teach abstract moral codes, but actually seeing good and evil deeds before your very eyes has a much clearer and more powerful effect. In this regard, Schiller's early speech ‘On Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution’ (1784) is typical.21 It's all very well to tell people, as for example in the Bible, to respect and honour their parents; but show them the scene from King Lear,

when his white hair streams in the wind and he tells the raging elements how unnatural his Regan has been, when his furious pain finally pours out from him with those terrible words: ‘I have given you all!’ – How detestable does ingratitude seem to us then? How solemnly we promise respect and filial love!22

Schiller's suggestion is that the direct witnessing of good and evil that theatre offers to its audiences gives them an alternative to a prescriptive, theoretical morality. If this claim seems a little overblown, then we should admit that humans learn a great deal by example, not merely by sets of rules. However, the claim that theatre teaches us about morality in a kind of immediate way stumbles against two kinds of objection: one worry is how we recognise these kinds of moral messages; the other is whether, even if we could, that would do any good.

As to the first, we should also note the recurrence of a problem we've already seen in another context: the problem of generalising from theatrical examples. As we saw when discussing Aristotle's claims about theatre and universals, trying to spell out just what the general claim is from a specific narrative looks difficult, perhaps impossible. Plenty of people, one supposes, watch Lear without taking home any message about how children ought to behave towards their parents. But even if, say, Schiller is right that watching Lear sends home a message about the importance of filial loyalty, one question Lear asks (I would suggest) is how far filial loyalty may be stretched – at what point (if any) does a father's behaviour become unreasonable and intolerable? One wonders, for example, what Schiller would make of Hebbel's Agnes Bernauer, in which Albrecht's father disinherits Albrecht and then quietly arranges for the murder of Albrecht's innocent wife. Modern debates about the relation between art and morality also stumble upon these straightforward, interpretative problems: hence, two philosophers will offer different accounts of the role of idleness in The Cherry Orchard.23 If the message is ambiguous, then the alleged moral effect is at least diluted. Worse still (as Rousseau suggests), individual spectators will probably find confirmed in an ambiguous narrative whichever morals they took in with them in the first place; if so, the possibility for a real moral confrontation is limited.24 What's more, I take it that we don't typically think that the best plays are those with clear, unambiguous morals; it's probably part of what we think is appealing about The Cherry Orchard that it provokes this kind of discussion.

Suppose that a play does communicate something unambiguous about right and wrong. Defenders of the school of morals nonetheless stumble across a further problem, namely that theatre doesn't ask us to do anything in response. That is, in the most general sense, theatre doesn't ask that we change in any way. Defenders of the theatre claim that it is better than being told a moral principle, because it directly shows the terrible effects of immorality. However, all the audience is required to do is to sit there and privately condemn what's going on. They are not required to act in any way. In Schiller's Lear example, we may promise to honour our parents – but do we ever actually fulfil such promises? For Rousseau, this is not merely a limitation on the effectiveness of theatre as a tool of moral instruction – it actually makes its effect immoral:

In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains.25

By setting plays in distant times and places (as French tragedians always did, and many playwrights have done and still do), theatre actually makes morality more distant – something for far-off people in far-off places, nothing to do with the audience when they leave the theatre. Furthermore, condemning the immorality of other people has never been something that we find difficult – especially when those ‘other people’ are fictional characters, played by actors. The difficulty comes in applying these thoughts to ourselves – but theatre enables us to forget this obligation and to feel smug about how moral we are.26

Emotion

Plutarch tells the story of a murderous tyrant, Alexander of Pherae, who has killed many men, but who weeps at the sufferings of the characters at a tragedy and walks out of the theatre: ‘he was ashamed that his citizens should see him, who never pitied any man that he murdered, weep at the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache’.27 We shall look at theatre and emotion in detail in a separate chapter. However, the connection between them is often given a definite moral angle, which deserves a mention here. Abstract moral theory presents itself to reason, to the intellect. But the theatre makes you feel the terrible effects of evil (and the wondrous effects of good). Alexander of Pherae may have been told, one supposes, that forcing others to suffer was wrong; but the presentation of the suffering Trojans at the theatre produced an emotional response that he could not ignore. This can be taken further by defenders of the theatre, to suggest that repeated watching of plays can train one's feelings, so that one becomes more sensitive to the effects of good and evil in everyday life. The point of this is to distinguish between theatre and, say, a moralistic fable. At the end of Aesop's fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf, one learns the principle that one shouldn't lie, because liars aren't believed even when they tell the truth. Few have claimed that good theatre could or should leave the audience better able to recite moral principles, or a moral of the story. But many have thought that theatre can be particularly effective in stimulating certain emotional responses and understanding the emotional responses of others.

Perhaps surprisingly given its quaint and optimistic ring, the idea that narrative artworks have a special or privileged role in moral, emotional development has seen a strong revival in the last few decades – often combined with claims that fall roughly under the ‘immediacy’ bracket discussed above. Views of this kind have been advanced by a number of philosophers, primarily in relation to novels, but also poems and plays. Typical, in this context, would be Cora Diamond's claim that ‘poetry […] helps develop the heart's capacities that are the basis for the moral life by deepening our emotional life and our understanding of it’.28

Behind the view that theatre trains our moral, emotional responses, there often lies a view both about the emotions themselves and about the way they are connected with morality. For some philosophers, particularly in the Aristotelian tradition, a moral person is characterised by her appropriate emotional responses. Hence, if theatre can train us to respond appropriately to the world, then it would make us more moral; and it might do so without pretending to communicate any easily verbalised moral principles. Adherence to such a view will depend upon how seriously you take the connection between being moral and having appropriate emotional responses to the world. For some, this is an appealing thought; for others it is a diversion. Worth mentioning, too, is that emotional response – viewed as something that clouds judgement and gets in the way of reason – has been taken to be dangerous by many, including Plato of course. If that's the attitude you have towards the emotions, then the idea that theatre stimulates emotions at all may be seen by some as a blemish; hence, for example, Tertullian complains that ‘there is no spectacle without violent agitation of the soul’.29

Even assuming that being moral and being emotionally responsive are closely connected, one thing we ought to ask is whether our emotional responses to plays are all that much like our emotional responses to real life – hence whether theatre can be a useful training. We'll see in our separate discussion of theatre and emotions that some philosophers doubt whether this is the case. Without going into the details at this stage, it seems plausible that my attitude towards the characters appearing before me on the stage is and ought to be different from my attitude towards real people whom I meet on the street. As we have already said, characters on the stage are isolated from my own actions and there's not much more I can do for them than sit there and emote. What's more, the properties of at least some fictional characters are so different from those of real people that making close connections between the two just misses the point: their lives, their speeches, their actions are neat, limited and finite in a way that the lives of the living can never be, which might make our responses to fictional characters and our moral pronouncements about them artificially simple or at least substantially different.30 If so, perhaps what I feel for Hamlet really ought not to have any effect whatsoever on what I feel for someone real. Certainly, we shouldn't assume that I should behave towards theatrical representations of events in the same way that I should behave towards their real-life equivalents.31

Even supposing that there is a close connection between my emotions as spectator and my emotions in everyday life, some have concerns about whether that connection should be all that positive. First, we might think that the person who cares a great deal for fictional characters ought to divert her attention back towards real people. When we look at the relationship between theatre and the emotions, I'll discuss my response to Uncle Vanya – feeling desperately sorry for Vanya and Sonya, wasting away their lives; but it might be that spending that kind of time and energy getting upset and worrying about fictional characters is a diversion or a waste: perhaps I should have been worrying about the countless real people more deserving of my attention. Second, even supposing that plays give some special emotional insight, there's a gap between gaining emotional insight into the lives of others and using that insight for good. As it happens, Alexander of Pherae wept for the Trojans and left the theatre – but one might imagine such a tyrant learning from the emotional insights of the great playwrights and using them to further his cruel ends.32 In fact, Plutarch's story suggests that Alexander, far from learning to be more merciful, was concerned that the theatrical performance was making him appear weak. Alexander echoes Plato's concern that theatre makes us sympathetic to feelings that we pride ourselves for avoiding outside that context. For Plato, then, the emotions that we experience at the theatre certainly can have an effect on the way we feel when not in the theatre: but that, for him, was exactly the problem.33 Emotional responses that we wouldn't experience or respect under everyday circumstances should not, he thought, be given some special status just because we feel them in response to plays. Hence Rousseau (familiar, of course, with Plato's criticisms) questions why we should risk emotional moral training at all – that is, why reason shouldn't be sufficient for loving virtue and hating vice.34

One further suspicion, already evident in Plato's writing: whereas modern philosophers have tended to focus on the novel and its effect on the individual reader, the typical spectator at the theatre is part of an audience and subject to a kind of group psychology. We feel things in a group, which we probably wouldn't feel on our own. This seems true both for what we find moving and for what we find funny. Philosophers in general, it is fair to say, have often been suspicious of ‘the crowd': Chrysippus the Stoic is reported to have said, when asked if he was following the crowd to hear a speaker, that if he had wanted to follow the crowd he wouldn't have studied philosophy.35 For Plato, the fact that we wouldn't feel such things on our own was reason to be suspicious of group emotions; hence, Martin Puchner has suggested that Plato's dialogues, read aloud to small groups of students, should be understood as an attempt to escape from the perils of the theatrical crowd.36 Against Plato, of course, we could maintain that the mere fact that I wouldn't feel a certain way unless part of a group does not entail that that feeling is illegitimate. There are many things that we can achieve only as part of a group, and many things we dare to do only as part of a group. These achievements should not thereby be discounted. If I do or feel, as part of a group, something that I would avoid on my own, there's no reason to suppose that the latter judgement cancels out the former.

In summary, although nobody doubts the ability of the theatre to move us, we are a long way from thinking that being moved entails a lasting or significant moral effect at all – let alone a positive effect. And even if we did think that some plays could morally educate through the emotions, we would not have shown that all plays have such an effect, or that the plays we think are the best (as works of art) have such an effect.37

Justice

The final defence for the theatre as the school of morals is that it shows justice being done. Put simply: plays show virtue rewarded and vice punished. Hence they have considerable power over a world in which this so evidently fails to happen. What's more, the idea that your wrongdoing will later be punished is central to Christian theology and, subsequently, to the Kantian moral tradition.38 Plays which show virtue rewarded and vice punished – ‘poetic justice’, as it came to be known – are therefore educating their audiences with regard to a central tenet of moral understanding, at least according to one highly influential worldview. Hence, the theatre is a better place to learn about the rewards of virtue and the horrors of vice – in Schiller's words: ‘in its [theatre's] fearsome mirror, the vices are shown to be as ugly as virtue is shown to be lovable.’39

The first and most obvious objection to the claim of the theatre to show justice is that it simply doesn't. The failure to show virtue rewarded and vice punished can occur in two different ways: first, virtue is punished (or not rewarded), vice is rewarded (or unpunished); second, it's not clear who is or is not virtuous. There is a further division to be made in the second case between (1) plays that are ambiguous about who is virtuous and who isn't and (2) plays in which the question of virtue and vice simply doesn't arise.

First, then, we find candidates for successful plays in which vices go completely unpunished. One might think of The Winter's Tale, in which Leontes, in a fit of jealousy, attempts the murder of both his childhood friend and his daughter, and indirectly causes the death of his son and, so he thinks, his wife. In the end, his wife forgives him and they are reconciled. Elsewhere, we find virtuous people (perhaps with minor faults) punished severely. In Racine's Phèdre – which Racine defends explicitly on grounds of moral instruction – Hippolyte is cursed by his father and dies after being attacked by a sea-monster – a slimy, coiled, scaled, yellow, horned, bellowing bull-dragon; this, for the crime of loving someone he shouldn't. In King Lear, the vicious sisters Goneril and Regan certainly die; but then so does the virtuous Cordelia.40

Second, theatre can fail to show virtue rewarded and vice punished by not showing, with any clarity, who is virtuous and who is not. Büchner's Danton's Death, in which questions of virtue explicitly arise, might be said to fall into this category. And in Molière's The Misanthrope, the question of just who is virtuous and who is vicious proved one of the central problems of interpretation – an ambiguity that may have contributed to the play's continuing success.41 The playwright Michael Frayn cites, with approval, Friedrich Hebbel's dictum: ‘in a good play, everyone is right’; or, put the other way around, if it's clear that one side is right and the other side is wrong, then you've got a bad play.42 Finally, as I suggested, for many of the best and most popular plays, notions of virtue and vice are hardly at the forefront; characters are all complex, often flawed in some way, and the conflict arises from character and circumstance. Romeo and Juliet is a well-known example of a play that lacks obviously virtuous or vicious characters (even although they all might make mistakes or get carried away); recall Johnson's complaint that Shakespeare ‘carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong’.43 Similarly, we can very seriously doubt first, whether, say, Oedipus Tyrannus is in fact best understood in terms of virtue and vice, and, second, whether this first point makes any difference to how we should understand its merits. Aristotle's claim for tragedy was that it represented the fall of someone greater than us – this certainly seems like a better description of the fate of Oedipus, Othello or Hippolytus than the claim that they are like naughty schoolboys punished for misbehaving. It should be noted, then, that trying to seek out virtue or vice in specific characters is often an extremely bad way of reading and interpreting plays. What's more, one might go further and argue that, in the case of tragedy in particular, the presentation of a morally satisfactory world-order – one in which the good are rewarded and the bad punished – simply cuts against the requirements of the art form: a tragic world just is a world in which suffering is unavoidable or incomprehensibly basic.44

However, as Rousseau argues, even assuming that plays really do show virtue rewarded and vice punished, there are a number of reasons to question the moral efficacy of theatre. First, says Rousseau, they often do so in such an unbelievable way that people can't take this lesson seriously. Suppose we agree that, in Phèdre, Theseus acts rashly in cursing Hippolytus and that he gets punished accordingly by the death of the latter: even so, Rousseau might claim, the manner of punishment – the (notoriously) sudden appearance of the deadly sea monster – is so absurd that nobody in their right mind would be influenced by it.

Second, there's an age-old problem about vice being good fun to watch. As Rousseau notes, applause at the end of plays often goes to the wicked, entertaining characters rather than the virtuous ones, who can often seem boring.45 This is a familiar problem in other areas of literature – such as in Milton's Paradise Lost, in which the author struggles (and fails) to avoid making Satan the fascinating if tragic hero of the tale. A useful example from prose fiction is Fanny Hill, the first pornographic novel in English: after a series of less-than-virtuous adventures, Fanny learns the pleasures of the mind and gets happily married; but the ‘virtuous’ ending to the book is hardly grounds for claiming that it was or should be read as a moral handbook; ‘rewarding’ the characters at the end isn't always successful in banishing the enjoyable impression of vice.46 Many of the famous Shakespearean parts are those of villains of a sort, whether Richard III, Iago or Lady Macbeth. Although they come to no good in the end, this hardly cancels out the enjoyment and fascination that their evil doings produce. This is of course connected with the first point: if the punishments happen at the very end, in a contrived and unbelievable manner, then the overall effect may be the memory of the attractive, evil character.47 One should not, incidentally, conclude from this that plays should show only virtuous characters. Lessing puts the objection well: it would not only lead to very bad plays, it would also make virtue seem such a commonplace that it's hardly worth striving for. He makes these comments having watched a play that suffers from an abundance of Christians desperately trying to get martyred. If everyone's doing it, it's not that impressive.48

There is one final criticism of the claim for justice, which turns the original and supposed advantage of theatre on its head. Suppose theatre can (and does) show virtue rewarded and vice punished; and suppose that real life does not. The suggested advantage of this was that theatre could school us about virtue, better than real-life examples. But there is a danger here. If theatregoers are led to believe that the world is such that good people are rewarded and bad people are punished – when in fact that isn't true – then they are less likely to want to change the world and transform it into a place where that really happens. There is a risk, then, that showing comforting stories in which the bad people always get what they deserve could really deceive us and make us think that we don't need to work to make things better. Relatedly, some philosophers have plausibly argued that confronting and engaging with immoral works – ones that certainly don't present virtue in a good or comfortable light – can itself offer an important ethical function, challenging us to develop our ethical outlooks and respond in new ways. Our moral views, after all, are not set in stone; there are prominent examples of plays (like Ibsen's Ghosts) that seemed at first to be scandalously immoral, but that could no longer provoke such an extreme reaction and may even seem to have lost their moral edge.49

The ethics of the actor

So far, we have considered some of the arguments for and against the theatre as a school of morals. In his proposal for the Geneva theatre, D'Alembert notes a concern that the people of Geneva have about the construction of a theatre: ‘they fear, it is said, the taste for adornment, dissipation, and libertinism which the actors’ troops disseminate among the youth.’50 D'Alembert doesn't in fact deny that such fears are well grounded. Instead, he says, although this reputation is probably deserved, if we were to treat actors with more respect, then perhaps they would behave a little better.51 One wonders whether actors would have been grateful for this defence. So far, we have considered two claims made on theatre's behalf – that it brings pleasure and that it can be morally instructive. In both cases, the arguments concern the effect that the plays have on the audience. But, as D'Alembert's remarks should serve to remind us, there is an equally long and well-established tradition, at least among critics of theatre, of targeting not the audience, but the actors. We are certainly not the first generation to accuse actors of being shallow, self-important, attention-seeking hypocrites, prone to histrionics, any more than we are the first to accuse philosophers of being useless, bearded, impractical dreamers.52 We should recall, as noted in Chapter 1, that theatre is possible without actors, perhaps without human performers too. Not all theatrical performers impersonate, so criticisms relating to impersonation simply would not arise under those circumstances. Nonetheless, acting – in the sense of an actor playing a character – is familiar enough that concerns about the ethics of acting should find their place here.53

When D'Alembert speaks of the barbarous prejudice against actors, he might be looking to Greek sources for support. Plato (as we shall see) speaks of the dangers, for actors, of engaging in mimesis. Even Aristotle, for all his desire to defend theatre, acknowledges the vulgarity of acting and of performance in general.54 His response to this is to downplay the actors’ importance: tragedy is fundamentally a matter of plot and character – so it has its most significant effects when read. Thus in an important sense, it needn't be performed at all, and playwrights who rely on the ‘spectacle’ of theatre are inferior.55 In fact, the Greek disdain for actors is, by later standards, relatively mild. Rousseau, feeling the need to excuse this mildness, suggests that because the Greek actors were respected citizens (as opposed to the Roman slaves or contemporary professionals), male (as opposed to contemporary mixed troupes), and taking part in a sacred festival (not an evening entertainment), there was less room for contempt. However, the Romans treated actors with disdain, not only by reputation, but also by law.56 With the increased hostility from the church towards theatre in general, the lot of the actor hardly improved. A mediaeval English play specifically designates actors as agents of Satan, and some Tudor townsfolk were so fearful of the corruption brought in by actors that visiting troupes were quite often paid not to perform at all. 57 But for some of the more aggressive tirades against actors, D'Alembert could look much closer to home – no further, in fact, than his fellow Encyclopaedia editor, Denis Diderot. In The Paradox of Acting, Diderot claims to have great respect (in principle) for the profession of the actor; but, he goes on to say:

In society, unless they are buffoons, I find them polished, caustic, and cold; proud, light of behaviour, spendthrifts, self-interested; struck rather by our absurdities than touched by our misfortunes; […] isolated, vagabonds, at the command of the great; little conduct, no friends, scarce any of those holy and tender ties which associate us in the pains and pleasures of another, who in turn shares our own.58

And then, of course, there's Rousseau, who summarises the reputation of actors as follows:

I see in general that the estate of the actor is one of license and bad morals; that the men are given to disorder; that the women lead a scandalous life; that both, avaricious and spendthrift at the same time, always overwhelmed by debts and spending money in torrents, are as little controlled in their dissipations as they are scrupulous about the means of providing for them. I see, moreover, that in every country their profession is one that dishonours, that those who exercise it, excommunicated or not, are everywhere despised.59

Rousseau's statement about the universal unpopularity of actors is a prelude to a claim that, in effect, well, there's no smoke without fire.60 His remark about actresses leading scandalous lives should remind us that, whatever insults have been directed at actors, the same have always been directed at actresses, normally with the charge of sexual wantonness thrown in for good measure. Prynn the puritan's pithy remark – ‘women actors, notorious whores’ – is just the tip of the iceberg in this regard.61 Even factoring in the miserable, ever-present sexism of so many of those who have shaped our thoughts, the abuse levelled at actresses is impressive, not to say surprising. One is reluctant to look for ‘reasons’ for this prejudice, in just the same way that one is reluctant to look for ‘reasons’ for anti-Semitism or racism, but those offered include: a simple failure to understand what a virtuous woman could possibly be doing outside the home; the tendency of the beautiful actress to become an object of desire for men and envy for women; and the idea that, in charging money for people to watch her, the actress puts herself on sale and is therefore a prostitute.62 (Rousseau, incidentally, argues all three.) Because none of these amounts to a serious argument – however representative and damaging they have all proved to be – we won't pursue them any further here. However, we should note that the ability of theatre to subvert certain norms, including putting women on stage (in a context of extreme restrictions on what women were allowed to do) does have a political potential, which is discussed in Chapter 7.

Where one does find defences of the acting profession, they tend, like D'Alembert's, to be less than satisfactory from the actor's point of view. So, for example, we find Pinciano claiming that actors are necessary for the theatre and so, because we like theatre, we might as well tolerate actors.63 Unfortunately, considerations similar to these led to the claim that theatre would be better off without any actors at all. Lessing thought that actors are at their best in mediocre plays, that their artistic success is transitory, depending on the whims of the audience and that they are frequently better off masked; Kleist claims that marionettes would be more graceful; and then in the twentieth century, E. Gordon Craig developed the influential idea of the actor as an ‘Über-Marionette’, based on his view that acting, as mere impersonation, is not really an art.64 The remainder of this chapter looks at the most common complaints made against actors and actresses.

Becoming what you pretend to be

As we saw in Chapter 1, Plato treats theatrical mimesis as comprising a third-person and a first-person component: the stage looks like something (from the audience's point of view); and the actors are pretending to be people whom they are not. We've already looked at Plato's objections to the former; he also has objections to the latter. In The Republic, Socrates is concerned that imitating someone, although at first it requires work, can increasingly become natural – so much so, that one can begin to take on characteristics of the person one is imitating.65

To understand Socrates’ claim, it may help to recall (from Chapter 1) that one of the meanings of mimesis – the word here translated as ‘imitation’ – describes one person using another person as a kind of role-model or exemplar. Hence, in one of the examples we used in Chapter 1, the cheating wife who followed her cheating husband's example would have engaged in a kind of mimesis. Obviously, she isn't pretending to be her husband or trying to pass herself off as him. However, Plato is obviously positing a link between mimicking someone and treating them as a role-model: pretending to be an evil character has a tendency to lead one to use that person as a role-model, to take on some of the characteristics of that person.

This, of course, leaves room for imitating (i.e. pretending to be) good people and thus developing their good characteristics, which, Plato thinks, is possible in principle but extremely rare in contemporary tragedy and comedy: ‘If [the guardians of the city] do imitate anything, then from their earliest childhood they should choose appropriate models to imitate – people who are brave, self-disciplined, god-fearing, free, that sort of thing.’66 In other words: there's obviously nothing wrong with using other people as role-models – and, consequently, there's nothing wrong (in principle) with acting. You just have to use the right role-models and act the right parts. The trouble with theatre, of course, is that typically speaking, if the play is to be of any interest at all, there have to be some characters who are, to put it mildly, not the kind of people you'd want your children to grow up to be. And even if vice is punished on stage (which we've seen reason to doubt), the actor still has the experience of pretending to be somebody unworthy of imitation.

If Plato's proposed ban on imitating the bad sounds like the outpourings of an elegant and tyrannical hysteric – as Plato's The Republic in general often does – then we should remind ourselves of the perceived importance of role-models to this day. Needless to say, the theatre is no longer the place to look for them; but athletes, film actors and other public figures are chastised for their failure to be ‘role-models’, to be appropriate people for children to imitate.67 Furthermore, to continue the analogy with modern child-rearing, part of the concern with toy weapons or violent computer games is surely that it's not a good idea for children to imagine, to play at being violent. This is the modern equivalent of Plato's point: if you don't want people to be X, you shouldn't allow them to imaginatively pretend to be X.68 A further comparison with modern debates might be the thought that ‘playing’ a hideous character – say, a historical serial-killer – inevitably invites (or even requires) the actor and perhaps the audience to sympathise with that character. Actors who are interviewed about playing certain roles are often asked about this.

Of course, one might well have objections to Plato's line. For one thing, it's not obvious that actors pretending to be certain characters really do take on such traits of these characters, or use them as role-models. Do we really find in old, experienced actors nothing but a cluster of contradictory and confusing personality traits, gleaned over time from all the characters they've played? What's more, because the parts played in theatre repertoires are not always simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the process of imitation might also be one of coming to understand another complex, human perspective – a more practical and hygienic equivalent of Atticus Finch's wise advice, namely that you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. The very ability or capacity to pity someone – seen by many, including Rousseau, as a moral virtue – might be said to depend in some sense on imaginatively pretending to be them.69 And perhaps, in response to the fears of sympathy with evil characters, one might think that such characters really do deserve sympathy, at least up to a point. Finally, one might argue exactly the opposite point to Plato and claim, following roughly Freudian lines, that the mimetic acting out of certain activities (or audience's watching them) might provide a kind of substitute satisfaction. In other words, imaginatively pretending to X might be a way of not in fact doing X, rather than (as Plato would have it) an encouragement to X.

Deception and inauthenticity

Once he's finished setting out the general reputation of the actor, Rousseau gives his view of what being an actor actually consists in:

What is the talent of the actor? It is the art of counterfeiting himself […] of appearing different than he is, of becoming passionate in cold blood, of saying what he does not think as if he really did think it.70

There is no doubt, of course, that acting typically involves pretending to be somebody else. Then again, of course, it's hardly as though the actor expects to get away with it, against the audience's will. Somebody who pretends to be me in order to withdraw money from my bank account does not produce programme notes for the cashier, in which he details all the people from whom he has previously stolen money. Anticipating precisely this response, Rousseau admits that actors aren't actually deceiving people when they're on stage. But, he complains, they do learn the tools for deception, for seeming to be other than they are when they are off the stage; and by teaching actors to dissemble, and rewarding them when they do it well, we encourage them to make use of these skills in everyday situations.71

All things considered, actors probably don't learn useful tools for deception in everyday life (rather than tools for a highly restricted, minimal kind of play or impersonation in the peculiar setting of the theatre). But although I see no reason to take Rousseau very seriously here, I do think he points us in the direction of a more interesting discussion of theatre, deception and authenticity. Anybody familiar with the classical theatre repertoire will be aware of the importance that the twin notions of deception and authenticity have on the stage, as part of many theatre plots. Seeming to be what you're not – and the failure to discern that someone else is other than he seems – are among the most common themes of theatrical work. Think of the Shakespearean comedy, with all its dressing up and misrecognition; or of the tragedy in which the failure of the hero to recognise another (or himself) is what brings about his downfall. To name but a few well-known examples, this forms much of the subject matter of Othello, of The Merchant of Venice, of The Misanthrope and so on. In this context, it seems peculiar to attack theatre for something that it often addresses head on: the danger and perhaps also the necessity of seeming to be other than you are.

A second, and more sceptical, point should also be made with respect to the claim that acting encourages inauthenticity. The central notion for ‘authenticity’ is one according to which a person has a kind of genuine ‘centre’ or ‘essence’. The authentic person is then someone who acts in accordance with this genuine centre or essence – who seems to be nothing other than he really, essentially is. This presents us with a static picture of human beings, according to which one is either being genuine (action corresponding to essence) or not. Needless to say, a full discussion of this idea is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a couple of broad concerns can be made clear. First, why can't it be part of somebody's ‘essence’ or ‘authentic centre’ to be different things to different people at different times? Second, can't the actor, in playing different roles in different contexts, be a very good indication of what we all do in one way or another? Anybody who, for example, has taught in a classroom will have an idea that teaching is very often a kind of acting. And people often talk about being different at work, and at home, and with their friends. These variations needn't be seen as a failure to be authentic; they might just be perfectly understandable adaptations to differing circumstances. Indeed, this thought has been taken further, by those who think that we are in some sense acting or performing all the time – that when we interact with other human beings, and perhaps even when we present ourselves to ourselves, we are acting or playing a part. Such ‘role-playing’ needn't be understood as deceptive or treacherous, but rather as a necessary and often benign function of human social interaction.72

Emotion or craft?

The claim to inauthenticity might be spelled out in a rather different way, without appealing, as Rousseau does, to the idea that the actor will, once the performance is done, go about using his special deception skills to steal your money and your dutiful, housebound wife. Diderot's Paradox of Acting is a reaction to a long tradition, traceable to Aristotle and to Horace, of viewing the art of the actor as that of being emotional in accordance with the part.73 According to the view Diderot opposes, that is, the actor succeeds best when he feels, say, the wrath of Lear at his daughters’ betrayal or the intoxicating passion of Romeo for Juliet. This makes the actor a person of extreme passion, of sensibility – someone who gets very emotional very easily. If that is the case then Rousseau is wrong to cast suspicion on the actor for getting emotional ‘in cold blood’. If the actor really does feel the part, then it's not a question of pretending to be emotional, it's just a matter of getting emotional very easily.

For Diderot, this gets things exactly wrong. If actors were so emotionally fragile, they'd have trouble appearing every night, remembering their lines, and knowing where to stand.74 An actress who really felt the intense passion of Phèdre would have great difficulty remembering and reciting such beautiful poetry. An actress who was sufficiently emotional to feel that distraught every night would frequently be so completely incapacitated by excesses of emotion that she wouldn't leave her dressing room at all. In fact, the successful actress is precisely the one who doesn't get emotional, who keeps under control at all times, and never lets herself go.

Diderot's remarks should also be understood as an attack on theatrical verisimilitude, which we discussed in relation to Plato (in Chapter 2). If actors really did ‘feel’ the parts they were playing, then they would perhaps look more realistic – more like ordinary people, in such circumstances, would look. But because the theatre is not at all verisimilar, this would hardly help matters. For example, he points out, death on the stage – quick, poignant and often beautiful – looks nothing like the slow, grubby, agonising deaths of real life.75 Similarly with excesses of emotion: when one is really angry or passionate, one typically says very little.

Diderot is therefore making two separate and independent claims about, for instance, the actor playing an angry character on stage: (1) that the actor does not feel angry at all and (2) that the external signs that the actor makes to indicate anger do not look like anger as it really is in the world. For Diderot, we read emotions off actors by way of a kind of convention or symbolism: the audience knows that certain gestures (when performed by an actor on the stage) indicate anger, even although, on reflection, real, everyday anger looks nothing like that.

For our purposes, what's important about Diderot's argument is this: acting is not just an extension of everyday passions; it is, instead, a craft by which one learns to mimic certain outward signs of emotion, without inwardly feeling anything at all. After all, says Diderot, actors need to know where to stand and what to say; they need to react to new and unpredictable situations (e.g. another actor forgetting his lines); they must remember not just the script but certain emphases, phrasing and accentuation. In the depths of their ‘passion’, they must look in the right direction for the light, they must make the correct outward signs and gestures. In all of this, there can be no room for the supposed passion that is being portrayed. A passionate person would forget all of this. Hence the conclusion: ‘it is we who feel; it is they [actors, but also playwrights] who watch, study, and give us the result.76 Acting is therefore inauthentic in this sense: that there is no correspondence between the emotions that the actor displays (or indicates by certain conventions) and the emotions that the actor feels. He is not what he seems to be.

Both of Diderot's claims seem extreme and are open to more moderate versions. As for the notion of emotional conventions, it seems more likely that actors exaggerate or caricature typical emotional reactions – rather like cartoon versions of surprise or fear. Hence, the ‘symbols’ or gestures that indicate some emotion are related to the everyday non-theatrical counterpart ofthat emotion. This leaves room for the stage version of the emotion to look very little like its counterpart, thus preserving Diderot's central claim. It also fits with Diderot's claim about actors studying us to learn about our emotional responses. If emotions were a matter of pure convention, then there would be no point studying us at all (except perhaps studying our responses to conventional emotion-symbols).

As for his second claim about actors feeling nothing: one might wonder, and some indeed have argued along these lines, whether there might be some interplay between putting on certain outward signs of fear, anger, etc., and then, in consequence, actually feeling them to a certain extent. There might not be such a sharp line, that is, between feeling the emotion and showing the outward signs of the emotion. So, for example, clenching your fists might actually make you feel angry. The extent to which one accepts this interplay relates to the point just made about Diderot's first claim. If the outward signs of emotion, as used by the actor, are not in fact the real things, but rather a matter of stage convention, then putting on those outward signs should have no effect at all. So looking afraid, on the stage, looking nothing like looking really afraid, will do nothing to trigger fear.77

Diderot's claims about acting, if accurate, have positive as well as negative implications – as he clearly acknowledges. For one thing, it makes space for acting as a genuine technical skill. Good actors aren't merely people who feel strongly and on cue – they study people's expressions, movements and voices and they must train and practice like a musician or an athlete. When an actress portrays a distressed mother, claims Diderot (perhaps hyperbolically), her cries are planned to the nearest twentieth of a quarter-tone.78 Diderot's claims about actors are informed by his friendship with the famous English actor, David Garrick. Garrick, says Diderot, would practise different facial expressions, one after another, representing strong and contrasting emotions. All the while, he would feel nothing at all.79 One is reminded of a musician practising scales. Diderot was writing as the social status of the actor, although still not respected (as Rousseau argues, above), was certainly better than it had been. Some actors (and even some actresses) were able not only to make a living, but even to become wealthy by their profession. Mme Clairon, mentioned in the Paradox of Acting, is one example. Garrick is another: not only was the word ‘star’ (meaning a successful actor) first used for him; he would subsequently have the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey. Just fifty years earlier, in France, the police had, under cover of darkness, tossed the body of the celebrated actress Adrienne Lecouvreur into an unmarked pit.80 The conception of acting as a craft was made all the more plausible once it was, relatively speaking, more profitable and more socially acceptable.

Second, if he's correct, Diderot makes Plato's case against acting a lot more difficult. If actors don't really feel, don't really sympathise with their characters; if, at the end of the performance, the deception is all on the side of the audience and the actor is only weary as a gymnast is weary, then it's hard to make the case that an actor playing an evil character is likely to turn evil. Of course, the actor will need to learn how to mimic the outward appearance of certain emotional states that relate to that character; but that's hardly the kind of imaginative sympathy that seems to have alarmed Plato.

Finally, far from fitting nicely together with Rousseau's attacks on the actor, if Diderot is correct about the actor's representation of emotion looking little like the real life equivalent, then he may be seen to answer Rousseau's concerns about deception and inauthenticity. For Diderot, that is, nothing happens on stage as it does in nature.81 If so, actors pretending to be angry or in love in everyday situations (i.e. when not on the stage) would simply be laughed at, even although the same technical skills, on stage, bring the audience to tears:

They are well enough on the stage […], with their actions, their bearing, their intonations. They would make but a sorry figure in history; they would raise laughter in society. People would whisper to each other: ‘Is this fellow mad? […] In what world do people talk like this?82

Where Diderot does criticise actors, it is for having the misfortune to possess the skills to please everyone. The actor, he claims, is rather like the courtier – someone who is allowed no autonomy, no say in what he does; instead, he must please those around him, and bend to their will. Where the courtier always has to think of the king, the actor always has to think of the poet and, of course, of the audience.83 During the course of this process, the actor is allowed nothing of ‘himself, no opinion, no personality, no independence.84 Diderot was hardly the first to make this connection: Raphael Holinshed, the chronicler who provided the sources for a number of Shakespeare's plays, writes that Edward II (he of the notoriously unpleasant death) ‘furnished his court with companies of jesters, ruffians, flattering parasites, musicians and other vile and naughty ribald, that the king might spend both days and nights in jesting, playing, banqueting and such other filthy and dishonourable exercises’.85 The further suggestion, in Diderot's comparison with the courtier, is that the actor is a kind of useless flatterer, someone who has no real purpose other than to please the ruler (or the audience). Contrary to the claim (under ‘deception and inauthenticity’, above) that actors do what we all do anyway, this marks out the courtier and the actor as different from the rest of us. It's not that we don't ‘act’ in everyday life – it's that, when we do so, we are permitted ‘to delight some and to weary others’.86 If, by profession, one has to please, then the option of taking an independent route (which others may or may not like) is closed off.

If this is a criticism of the acting profession, then it is a much milder one than those of Plato and Rousseau (as Diderot no doubt would acknowledge). In combination, these claims about the actor amount to (1) that the purpose to which he is tied is, like that of the courtier, one of flattering and bringing pleasure and (2) that he has little room for independence beyond the pen of the poet and the whims of his audience; hence, like the courtier, he is a kind of puppet. As for (1), we should question whether the comparison with the courtier is really appropriate. The point about courtiers is that they are useless flatterers – and, even more, that they might be damaging to the ruler, by constantly telling him how good he is and how everything he does is right. This is not exactly the actor's role. As we've seen, the theatre does provide pleasure, but this is hardly an objection in itself, without some further background views; and, indeed, for many it is an advantage. Furthermore, many of the most famous and popular plays, although bringing pleasure of a certain kind, tell dark, unpleasant stories, which (to say the least) don't tell us flattering, unambiguously positive things about what it is to be human. There's no clear analogy with the courtier making the king feel good about himself. As for (2): not many of us, in our working lives, have complete independence in what we do. Whether it's the demands of a boss, of a company or institution, or even just of the market, complete freedom to offend or please whomever we like sounds like a far-off dream. And despite the frequent (and often unfavourable) comparisons made between the actor and the puppet (or marionette), a successful or lasting substitution seems a long way off.87

Conclusion

Even to pose questions about theatre and morals is to walk into a minefield of shifting moral belief and cultural practice; it is unlikely that we would get to a final message about theatre and morality, and it's unclear why we would want one. Theatrical performances don't happen in isolation – moral or otherwise – from our everyday experiences and our deep cultural attitudes. But many ambitious claims have been made about the ethics of theatre, from the rather grandiose defences of the school of morals, to Rousseau's savage attacks. We have now had a chance to look at some of the main lines of argument. For the reasons we have discussed, it is just as unlikely that theatre, taken as a whole, corrupts or improves: where the moral message of a play is clear (which, often, it isn't), that still leaves the question of whether an audience will approve of that message or be provoked into challenging it further – and, even if they approve, there's the question of whether their approval will translate into any meaningful change. As for the charges against actors, we have seen that many of these, on closer inspection, look unfair or rest on questionable premises.

Further Reading

For Plato's attack on the moral effects of theatre, see The Republic (and relevant further reading from Chapter 2, above). Rousseau's Letter still packs a powerful punch and addresses many of the better-known arguments both for and against the moral efficacy of theatre; Barish (1981) includes a chapter on Rousseau. Contemporary philosophical writing on art and morality (or literature and morality) has tended to leave theatre behind; but two collections – Levinson (2001) and Gardner & Bermúdez (2003) – are nonetheless useful. Gardner (2003) offers a comprehensive analysis of (unsuccessful) attempts to combine tragic drama with moral doctrine, especially in the German philosophical tradition. As for acting: Diderot's The Paradox of Acting remains highly engaging; his other writings on theatre are collected (in French) in Diderot (1936); Mason (1982) provides an accessible introduction to various aspects of Diderot's thought, including his aesthetics. Generally, Benedetti (2005) is an accessible introduction to various theoretical approaches to acting; and for a more challenging collection of essays on acting, see Zarrilli (1995).

Notes

  1 Diderot's most important play, The Head of the Family (Le Père de Famille) would be performed in 1761.

  2 This chapter uses texts from Rousseau, Schiller, Diderot – among others – to think about theatre and morals. The eighteenth century offers such a heated and richly rewarding set of debates on the subject – which are of sufficiently general application – that I feel this focus is warranted. But of course such debates neither began nor ended with the Encyclopedia - and Rousseau is clearly responding to a long tradition; for more, see the further reading.

  3 D'Alembert (2004: 239).

  4 D'Alembert (2004: 244).

  5 D'Alembert (2004: 356–7).

  6 Aristotle's view of pleasure is more complex than this would suggest: his remarks in Books VII and X of his Nichomachean Ethics have been taken by some to suggest not one but two ‘theories’ of pleasure.

  7 Rousseau (2004: 262).

  8 Rousseau (2004: 262).

  9 Rousseau (2004: 293–4).

10 D'Alembert (2004: 354).

11 What matters to Rousseau is the connection (or lack of connection) between pleasure and nature; he is less concerned with whether or not pleasure is a bodily sensation. Nor is Rousseau being utilitarian: he doesn't think that pleasure is a good in itself.

12 D'Alembert (2004: 361).

13 Poetics, 48b.

14 E.g. animals do such a wide variety of things that no general rules emerge; ‘humans a long time ago’ leaves open the tricky question of which humans and at which time; and what humans ideally would do begins to look like a matter of dogma, rather than nature.

15 Rousseau (2004: 311–3). Rousseau associates arguments for male/female equality with city-dwellers – i.e. with those who know and understand nothing of ‘nature’, here understood as a kind of idyllic rural life.

16 Lessing (1962: Section 2); Voltaire quoted in Carlson (1993: 147); Racine (1991: 23); Schiller (1962).

17 In his Nachlass zu Aristoteles Poetik; for discussion see Carlson (1993: 182).

18 For the example of art and music, see Augustine's Confessions (X: 50, p. 208).

19 Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 27–8.

20 Rousseau (2004: 299).

21 Schiller (1962: vol. 20, pp. 87–100). Translations are my own. The speech is reprinted under its original title as ‘Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’ (What can a good repertory stage actually accomplish?). Note that this is an early speech and does not represent Schiller's later views – some argue that it may also have been tailored to fit the views of his particular audience. (See Sharpe 2007: 101.) Nonetheless, it is typical of contemporary moral defences of the theatre.

22 Schiller (1962: vol. 20, p. 93).

23 Carroll (2001: 147); Hamilton (2003: 38–9).

24 Rousseau (2004: 264). Strictly, this is an argument for why theatre can't improve morals; there are other reasons, he thinks, why it can damage them (pp. 292–3).

25 Rousseau (2004: 269); see also Diderot (1883: 56): ‘A member of the audience is not excited to offer help, but only to grieve.’

26 Rousseau's objection may also count against some of the more recent versions of a moral account of theatre. Feagin (1983), whose view we explore in the next chapter, suggests that tragedy in particular helps us to test out our moral responses to the world – but, Rousseau might argue, a test that doesn't require us to do anything is no test at all. The same might be said for Woodruffs claim that theatre helps us to understand what we ought to do, even if we don't actually have to act on it (2008: 162–4): the failure to do what we know we ought to do is, often enough, a serious failing in itself.

27 From Plutarch's ‘Life of Pelopidas’ in Plutarch (2001: vol. 1, p. 403).

28 Diamond (1982: 31). Other defenders of this kind of view include Beardsmore (1971), Palmer (1992) and Nussbaum (1990), who has made this view highly influential; but in her case, this is particularly in regard to novels, which, she thinks, have a special status. Woodruff (2008) has recently offered a version of this view, specifically in relation to theatre.

29 Quoted in Carlson (1993: 28). Williams (1973: 207–229) offers a helpful discussion of the relationship between morality and the emotions. The anti-emotional stance of much of the philosophical tradition is something that Nietzsche was particularly good at locating and mocking. See ‘Reason in philosophy’ and ‘Morality as Anti-nature’ in his Twilight of the Idols.

30 See Vogler (2007).

31 See Jacobson (1997: 186).

32 See Hamilton (2003: 39–40) for discussion of both of these concerns.

33 The Republic 492b and 605c.

34 Rousseau (2004: 267).

35 Reported in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, p. 291.

36 Puchner (2010: 3–35).

37 I have not ventured into a separate and popular discussion among philosophers of art, stemming in part from an offhand remark of Hume's, about whether moral ‘defects’ in works of art necessarily undermine them aesthetically. The answer is: no. But for discussion see Jacobson (1997) and Hamilton (2003).

38 For discussion, see Gardner (2003); Gardner argues that philosophers in the Kantian tradition failed (with good reason) to reconcile the demands of morality, as they saw it, with tragedy.

39 Schiller (1962), vol. 20, p. 93.

40 These remarks on virtue and vice in Shakespeare, Racine and others are in no way meant as criticisms of the plays. I simply point to problems with the strategy of defending them morally on the grounds of justice. If that strategy yields hopeless interpretations of great works of literature, then that is one more reason to abandon it.

41 Among the apologists for the character of the misanthrope is Rousseau. Historians suggest that this probably wasn't the attitude taken by Molière's audiences.

42 Frayn (2010: 137).

43 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), quoted in Gardner (2003: 239).

44 See Gardner (2003). Gardner also offers a critical analysis of some of Schiller's later and more philosophically complex attempts to reconcile tragedy and morality; these include the attempt to replace tragic fate with the demands of moral reasoning and, elsewhere, the view that tragedy presents its characters as capable of moral vocation, if not worthy of moral praise.

45 Rousseau (2004: 267).

46 On the ‘moral’ ending of Fanny Hill, see Haslanger (2011).

47 This is not meant to suggest that Shakespeare was trying to show virtue rewarded and vice punished although that claim, as a defence of theatre, was certainly available at the time – it was used by George Whetstone in 1578, in the preface to what would become the source play for Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (see Carlson 1993: 79).

48 Lessing (1962: Section 1, p. 7).

49 Jacobson (1997) develops this thought using the reception of Ibsen's Ghosts, amongst others.

50 D'Alembert (2004: 244).

51 D'Alembert (2004: 244).

52 The word ‘hypocrite’ comes, of course, from the Greek for actor, and ‘histrionic’ derives from the Etruscan word for the same; on philosophers, the best formulation probably belongs to Lord Macaulay: ‘They promised what was impracticable; they despised what was practicable. They filled the world with long words and long beards; and they left it as wicked and as ignorant as they found it.’

53 For a fine-grained discussion of the relationship between performing and acting, see Kirby (1995).

54 Poetics 62a.

55 Poetics 62a. One doubts whether the same could possibly be said of comedy.

56 Rousseau (2004: 307).

57 Wiles (1995: 87); Thomson (1995: 178). Generally, see Barish (1981).

58 Diderot (1883: 62–3).

59 Rousseau (2004: 306).

60 Rousseau (2004: 307).

61 Quoted in Thomson (1995: 202).

62 On the second point: Samuel Pepys, for example, notes how many men ‘hover about actresses’ once they leave the stage – although it's clear from his diaries that he wasn't afraid of doing so himself. See, e.g. Thomson (1995: 208).

63 Quoted in Carlson (1993: 60).

64 Kleist (1978); Lessing (1962: Sections 25, 56); Craig (1911).

65 The Republic 395c.

66 The Republic 395c.

67 This condemnation certainly occurs, even if it's often nothing more than a thin pretext for envy, frustration and social conservatism.

68 See Nehamas (1988). I write as somebody who was never allowed to play with toy guns as a child, for precisely this reason.

69 See Barish (1981: 269–70).

70 Rousseau (2004: 309).

71 Rousseau (2004: 310). On the question of how (if at all) spectators are deceived by theatre, see Chapter 3 and Chapter 6.

72 Goffman (1956) is the classic statement of this kind of view.

73 Aristotle's Poetics 55a. Horace writes: ‘If you wish me to weep, you must feel sorrow yourself.’ (Ars Poetica, II, 102–3) Diderot is specifically responding to Garrick, ou les Acteurs Anglais by Sticotti.

74 Diderot (1883: 43–4).

75 Diderot (1883: 23).

76 Diderot (1883: 14).

77 See, for example, Lessing (1962: Section 3, p. 12); for accounts of the ‘circle of effect’ response to Diderot, see Carlson's helpful discussion of the reception of Diderot's work – Carlson (1993: 233–4).

78 Diderot (1883: 15).

79 Diderot (1883: 38). Benedetti (2005) notes that Garrick was perfectly happy to acknowledge that, on certain occasions, he suffered profoundly with his characters when on stage (p. 81).

80 Holland and Patterson (1995: 296).

81 Diderot (1883: 5).

82 Diderot (1883: 20).

83 Diderot (1883: 61).

84 Rousseau (2004: 310) also speaks of the actor annihilating himself in the course of his profession.

85 Thomson (1995: 173).

86 Diderot (1883: 61). The idea that actors (and courtiers) are not permitted to be displeasing may be a further cause for the comparison between actresses and prostitutes.

87 As in Kleist (1978), Diderot (1883: 61), Lessing (1962: Section 4).