philosophy and theatre an introduction

played by actors. The difficulty comes in applying these thoughts to ourselves–but theatre enables us to forget this obligation ...

conveys more truth with less distress.^33 This seems all wrong: we often praise tragedies for being moving in a‘tragic’way. Comp ...

appropriately to the world, then it would make us more moral; and it might do so without pretending to communicate any easily ve ...

clear that catharsis could function in that role. Setting catharsis aside, I shall consider three proposals which appeal to trut ...

deserving of my attention. Second, even supposing that plays give some special emotional insight, there’s a gap between gaining ...

keep them in) would surely pale compared with the discomfort of being surrounded by angry, venomous snakes; and if letting them ...

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 ...

to be made to feel a certain way in relation to a situation, but not be required in any way to act upon it. More importantly, th ...

continuing success.^41 The playwright Michael Frayn cites, with approval, Friedrich Hebbel’s dictum:‘in a good play, everyone is ...

emotion. The death of a loved one is obviously a terrible thing; but the feeling that one has in relation to that event is not n ...

moral handbook;‘rewarding’the characters at the end isn’t always successful in banishing the enjoyable impression of vice.^46 Ma ...

get from a particular tragedy may require self-examination, or perhaps literary criticism and analysis of the tragedy in questio ...

grounded. Instead, he says, although this reputation is probably deserved, if we were to treat actors with more respect, then pe ...

wrote itdown); if it indicates a completely different text on poetry, then that other text is lost. An answer to this riddle is ...

In society, unless they are buffoons, Ifind them polished, caustic, and cold; proud, light of behaviour, spendthrifts, self-inte ...

‘a grotesque monument of sterility’.^56 Nor is it surprising that the word ‘catharsis’, like‘freedom’and‘justice’, has been used ...

So, for example, wefind Pinciano claiming that actors are necessary for the theatre and so, because we like theatre, we might as ...

out of your system’, which, just as in English, could easily develop into metaphor. If vomiting is‘getting something out of my s ...

typically speaking, if the play is to be of any interest at all, there have to besomecharacters who are, to put it mildly, not t ...

because there was always trouble brewing. However, in the case of thea- tre, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious candidate for w ...