15 Rousseau (2004: 311–3). Rousseau associates arguments for male/female equality with city-
dwellers–i.e. with those who know and understand nothing of‘nature’, here understood as a
kind of idyllic rural life.
16 Lessing (1962: Section 2); Voltaire quoted in Carlson (1993: 147); Racine (1991: 23); Schiller (1962).
17 In hisNachlass zu Aristoteles Poetik; for discussion see Carlson (1993: 182).
18 For the example of art and music, see Augustine’sConfessions(X: 50, p. 208).
19 Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 27–8.
20 Rousseau (2004: 299).
21 Schiller (1962: vol. 20, pp. 87–100). Translations are my own. The speech is reprinted under its
original title as‘Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’(What can a good
repertory stage actually accomplish?). Note that this is an early speech and does not represent
Schiller’s later views–some argue that it may also have been tailored to fit the views of his
particular audience. (See Sharpe 2007: 101.) Nonetheless, it is typical of contemporary moral
defences of the theatre.
22 Schiller (1962: vol. 20, p. 93).
23 Carroll (2001: 147); Hamilton (2003: 38–9).
24 Rousseau (2004: 264). Strictly, this is an argument for why theatre can’t improve morals; there
are other reasons, he thinks, why it can damage them (pp. 292–3).
25 Rousseau (2004: 269); see also Diderot (1883: 56):‘A member of the audience is not excited to
offer help, but only to grieve.’
26 Rousseau’s objection may also count against some of the more recent versions of a moral
account of theatre. Feagin (1983), whose view we explore in the next chapter, suggests that
tragedy in particular helps us to test out our moral responses to the world–but, Rousseau
might argue, a test that doesn’t require us to do anything is no test at all. The same might be said
for Woodruff’s claim that theatre helps us to understand what we ought to do, even if we don’t
actually have to act on it (2008: 162–4): the failure to do what we know we ought to do is, often
enough, a serious failing in itself.
27 From Plutarch’s‘Life of Pelopidas’in Plutarch (2001: vol. 1, p. 403).
28 Diamond (1982: 31). Other defenders of this kind of view include Beardsmore (1971), Palmer
(1992) and Nussbaum (1990), who has made this view highly influential; but in her case, this is
particularly in regard to novels, which, she thinks, have a special status. Woodruff (2008) has
recently offered a version of this view, specifically in relation to theatre.
29 Quoted in Carlson (1993: 28). Williams (1973: 207–229) offers a helpful discussion of the
relationship between morality and the emotions. The anti-emotional stance of much of the phi-
losophical tradition is something that Nietzsche was particularly good at locating and mocking.
See‘Reason in philosophy’and‘Morality as Anti-nature’in hisTwilight of the Idols.
30 See Vogler (2007).
31 See Jacobson (1997: 186).
32 See Hamilton (2003: 39–40) for discussion of both of these concerns.
33 The Republic492b and 605c.
34 Rousseau (2004: 267).
35 Reported in Diogenes Laertius,Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, p. 291.
36 Puchner (2010: 3–35).
37 I have not ventured into a separate and popular discussion among philosophers of art, stemming
in part from an offhand remark of Hume’s, about whether moral‘defects’in works of art
necessarily undermine them aesthetically. The answer is: no. But for discussion see Jacobson
(1997) and Hamilton (2003).
38 For discussion, see Gardner (2003); Gardner argues that philosophers in the Kantian tradition
failed (with good reason) to reconcile the demands of morality, as they saw it, with tragedy.
39 Schiller (1962), vol. 20, p. 93.
40 These remarks on virtue and vice in Shakespeare, Racine and others are in no way meant as
criticisms of the plays. I simply point to problems with the strategy of defending them morally on
the grounds of justice. If that strategy yields hopeless interpretations of great works of literature,
then that is one more reason to abandon it.
A school of morals? 125