continuing success.^41 The playwright Michael Frayn cites, with approval,
Friedrich Hebbel’s dictum:‘in a good play, everyone is right’; or, put the
other way around, if it’s clear that one side is right and the other side is
wrong, then you’ve got a bad play.^42 Finally, as I suggested, for many of
the best and most popular plays, notions of virtue and vice are hardly at the
forefront; characters are all complex, oftenflawed in some way, and the
conflict arises from character and circumstance.Romeo and Julietis a well-
known example of a play that lacks obviously virtuous or vicious characters
(even although they all might make mistakes or get carried away); recall
Johnson’s complaint that Shakespeare ‘carries his persons indifferently
through right and wrong’.^43 Similarly, we can very seriously doubtfirst,
whether, say,Oedipus Tyrannusis in fact best understood in terms of virtue
and vice, and, second, whether thisfirst point makes any difference to
how we should understand its merits. Aristotle’s claim for tragedy was
that it represented the fall of someone greater than us–this certainly seems
like a better description of the fate of Oedipus, Othello or Hippolytus than
the claim that they are like naughty schoolboys punished for misbehaving.
It should be noted, then, that trying to seek out virtue or vice in specific
characters is often an extremely bad way of reading and interpreting
plays. What’s more, one might go further and argue that, in the case of tra-
gedy in particular, the presentation of a morally satisfactory world-order–
one in which the good are rewarded and the bad punished–simply cuts
against the requirements of the art form: a tragic world just is a world in
which suffering is unavoidable or incomprehensibly basic.^44
However, as Rousseau argues, even assuming that plays really do show
virtue rewarded and vice punished, there are a number of reasons to
question the moral efficacy of theatre. First, says Rousseau, they often do
so in such an unbelievable way that people can’t take this lesson seriously.
Suppose we agree that, inPhèdre, Theseus acts rashly in cursing Hippolytus
and that he gets punished accordingly by the death of the latter: even so,
Rousseau might claim, the manner of punishment–the (notoriously)
sudden appearance of the deadly sea monster–is so absurd that nobody
in their right mind would be influenced by it.
Second, there’s an age-old problem about vice being good fun to watch.
As Rousseau notes, applause at the end of plays often goes to the wicked,
entertaining characters rather than the virtuous ones, who can often seem
boring.^45 This is a familiar problem in other areas of literature–such as
in Milton’sParadise Lost, in which the author struggles (and fails) to avoid
making Satan the fascinating if tragic hero of the tale. A useful example
from prosefiction isFanny Hill, thefirst pornographic novel in English:
after a series of less-than-virtuous adventures, Fanny learns the pleasures
of the mind and gets happily married; but the‘virtuous’ending to the
book is hardly grounds for claiming that it was or should be read as a
112 From the Stage to the World