Philosophy and Theatre by Stern Tom

Philosophy and Theatre by Stern Tom

Author:Stern, Tom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134575985
Publisher: Taylor and Francis


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’.



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