also a school of morals, implicitly defendsPhèdreon 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 thefirst 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 actuallyseeing
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 Con-
sidered 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 fromKing Lear,
when his white hair streams in the wind and he tells the raging elements
how unnatural his Regan has been, when his furious painfinally 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!^22Schiller’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 thefirst, 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
106 From the Stage to the World