philosophy and theatre an introduction

Deception and inauthenticity Once he’sfinished setting out the general reputation of the actor, Rousseau gives his view of what ...

Aristotle, the purging claim faces all of this and more. For one thing, Aristotle has a particular view about what it is to be a ...

accordance with this genuine centre or essence–who seems to be nothing other than he really, essentially is. This presents us wi ...

suggested, along the lines that it offers a kind of moral training or edu- cation, which makes your emotions–and therefore you, ...

excesses of emotion that she wouldn’t leave her dressing room at all. In fact, the successful actress is precisely the one who d ...

general, we respond emotionally to fictional characters. And, before explaining how tragedy purges or purifies our fear, we migh ...

claim. It alsofits with Diderot’s claim about actors studying us to learn about our emotional responses. If emotions were a matt ...

17 Stendhal (1962: 24). 18 For a contemporary defence of a version of this response, see Suits (2006), who argues that, given a ...

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 ...

43 The only other mention of the word describes the‘purification’of Orestes’madness as part of a tragic plot. SeePoetics55b. 44 ...

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 do ...

73 Nussbaum (1992) rejects the idea that the virtuous person doesn’t need training–a virtuous person, she supposes, would be ope ...

many of these, on closer inspection, look unfair or rest on questionable premises. Further Reading For Plato’s attack on the mor ...

7 Collective Action: Theatre and Politics Caryl Churchill’sSeven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza premiered at the Royal Court T ...

15 Rousseau (2004: 311–3). Rousseau associates arguments for male/female equality with city- dwellers–i.e. with those who know a ...

with the British press may not be astonished at the outcome. TheGuar- dian’s critic found Churchill’s play‘a heartfelt lamentati ...

41 Among the apologists for the character of the misanthrope is Rousseau. Historians suggest that this probably wasn’t the attit ...

politics covers what one might expect tofind, for example, in the‘Politics’ section of a newspaper: parliamentary debates, elect ...

77 See, for example, Lessing (1962: Section 3, p. 12); for accounts of the‘circle of effect’response to Diderot, see Carlson’s h ...

were eventually suppressed by Henry VIII. The idea was partly to dis- courage the notion of robbing the rich to feed the poor an ...