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 spec-
tacle 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 somefictional 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 andfinite in a way
that the lives of the living can never be, which might make our responses
tofictional characters and our moral pronouncements about them artifi-
cially 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 forfictional 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 aboutfictional characters is a diversion or a waste:
perhaps I should have been worrying about the countless real people more
A school of morals? 109