moral handbook;‘rewarding’the characters at the end isn’t always successful
in banishing the enjoyable impression of vice.^46 Many of the famous
Shakespearean parts are those of villains of a sort, whether Richard III,
Iago or Lady Macbeth. Although they come to no good in the end, this
hardly cancels out the enjoyment and fascination that their evil doings pro-
duce. This is of course connected with thefirst point: if the punishments
happen at the very end, in a contrived and unbelievable manner, then the
overall effect may be the memory of the attractive, evil character.^47 One
should not, incidentally, conclude from this that plays should showonly
virtuous characters. Lessing puts the objection well: it would not only lead
to very bad plays, it would also make virtue seem such a commonplace
that it’s hardly worth striving for. He makes these comments having
watched a play that suffers from an abundance of Christians desperately
trying to get martyred. If everyone’s doing it, it’s not that impressive.^48
There is onefinal criticism of the claim for justice, which turns the
original and supposed advantage of theatre on its head. Suppose theatre
can (and does) show virtue rewarded and vice punished; and suppose that
real life does not. The suggested advantage of this was that theatre could
school us about virtue, better than real-life examples. But there is a
danger here. If theatregoers are led to believe that the world is such that
good people are rewarded and bad people are punished–when in fact
that isn’t true–then they are less likely to want to change the world and
transform it into a place where that really happens. There is a risk, then, that
showing comforting stories in which the bad people always get what they
deserve could really deceive us and make us think that we don’t need to
work to make things better. Relatedly, some philosophers have plausibly
argued that confronting and engaging with immoral works–ones that
certainly don’t present virtue in a good or comfortable light–can itself
offer an important ethical function, challenging us to develop our ethical
outlooks and respond in new ways. Our moral views, after all, are not set
in stone; there are prominent examples of plays (like Ibsen’sGhosts) that
seemed atfirst to be scandalously immoral, but that could no longer
provoke such an extreme reaction and may even seem to have lost their
moral edge.^49
The ethics of the actor
So far, we have considered some of the arguments for and against the
theatre as a school of morals. In his proposal for the Geneva theatre,
D’Alembert notes a concern that the people of Geneva have about the
construction of a theatre:‘they fear, it is said, the taste for adornment,
dissipation, and libertinism which the actors’troops disseminate among
the youth.’^50 D’Alembert doesn’t in fact deny that such fears are well
A school of morals? 113