typically speaking, if the play is to be of any interest at all, there have to
besomecharacters who are, to put it mildly, not the kind of people you’d
want your children to grow up to be. And even if vice is punished on
stage (which we’ve seen reason to doubt), the actor still has the experience
of pretending to be somebody unworthy of imitation.
If Plato’s proposed ban on imitating the bad sounds like the out-
pourings of an elegant and tyrannical hysteric–as Plato’sThe Republicin
general often does–then we should remind ourselves of the perceived
importance of role-models to this day. Needless to say, the theatre is no
longer the place to look for them; but athletes,film actors and other
publicfigures are chastised for their failure to be‘role-models’,tobe
appropriate people for children to imitate.^67 Furthermore, to continue
the analogy with modern child-rearing, part of the concern with toy
weapons or violent computer games is surely that it’s not a good idea for
children to imagine, to play at being violent. This is the modern
equivalent of Plato’s point: if you don’t want people to be X, you
shouldn’t allow them to imaginatively pretend to be X.^68 A further
comparison with modern debates might be the thought that‘playing’a
hideous character–say, a historical serial-killer–inevitably invites (or
even requires) the actor and perhaps the audience to sympathise with that
character. Actors who are interviewed about playing certain roles are often
asked about this.
Of course, one might well have objections to Plato’s line. For one
thing, it’s not obvious that actors pretending to be certain characters
really do take on such traits of these characters, or use them as role-
models. Do we reallyfind in old, experienced actors nothing but a cluster
of contradictory and confusing personality traits, gleaned over time from
all the characters they’ve played? What’s more, because the parts played
in theatre repertoires are not always simply‘good’or‘bad’, the process of
imitation might also be one of coming to understand another complex,
human perspective–a more practical and hygienic equivalent of Atticus
Finch’s wise advice, namely that you never really know a man until you
stand in his shoes and walk around in them. The very ability or capacity
to pity someone–seen by many, including Rousseau, as a moral virtue–
might be said to depend in some sense on imaginatively pretending to be
them.^69 And perhaps, in response to the fears of sympathy with evil
characters, one might think that such characters really do deserve sym-
pathy, at least up to a point. Finally, one might argue exactly the oppo-
site point to Plato and claim, following roughly Freudian lines, that the
mimetic acting out of certain activities (or audience’s watching them)
might provide a kind of substitute satisfaction. In other words, imagina-
tively pretending to X might be a way ofnotin fact doing X, rather than
(as Plato would have it) an encouragement to X.
A school of morals? 117