This description is hardly complete; perhaps some of it rings a bell, and
perhaps not. But I hope it is not completely incomprehensible, at least to
those who have not immersed themselves in too much philosophical discus-
sion of art and emotion. I mention the various kinds of emotions produced
by the play in order to emphasise that a single theatrical performance
does not produce a single emotion, any more than, say, a funeral or an
ordinary day at work produces a single emotion. Our emotions during
and after the performance may well relate to characters, to actors, to
themes; to ourselves, to our friends, to others in general; some seem more
like moods, lenses onto the world that don’t have any particular object or
focus.^2 Some of them may be broadly characterised as positive emotions,
others negative, others not obviously either. It is true that we are not, in
general, very good at describing and expressing our emotions. Nor are we
very good at defining them, understanding what they are and how they
work. There are occasions when we know what we feel when we feel it;
but there are plenty of occasions when we don’t know until later, and
plenty when we need others to help us to understand or when we never
know at all. But in as much as we do feel, it seems evident that theatre
can produce such feelings, often to a surprising and powerful degree.
So theatre moves us. Not always, of course; but often. Most philosophers
who have written about theatre have agreed about that. But they have dis-
agreed about pretty much everything else. Some, for example, have held that
the production of certain feelings is the definitive feature of art in general. This
was Tolstoy’sview:‘Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s
consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has
experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experien-
cing them.’^3 If, say, a performance does not permit the communication of
feeling from the artist to the audience, then that performance simply is not
art. The result of this strong definition is that‘art which does not move us’is
a kind of contradiction in terms–the‘art’in question is not really art at all,
but rather something else, perhaps a kind of intellectual confidence trick. This
result was hardly accidental: Tolstoy’sdefinition is offered en route to claim-
ing that new so-called‘art’(by which he means late nineteenth-century art,
which includes, for example, late Ibsen plays) should not really qualify as art
at all, precisely because it leaves audiences completely unmoved.
Aristotle’sdefinition of tragedy, as we have seen, names not the produc-
tion of feeling in general, but that of two feelings in particular (and their
catharsis) as the goal of tragedy:
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and pos-
sesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated
in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting
through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.^4Emotions 129