Some kinds of poetry, Socrates explains, involve narration; others
involve narration andmimesis; others involvemimesis only. By narration,
Socrates roughly means an indirect description of the story, in the third
person:‘the priest asked the Greeks to return his daughter for a ransom’.
Bymimesis, in this instance, he clearly means somebody pretending to be
the priest, seeming grief-stricken, and desperately uttering words along
the lines of:‘I’m begging you Greeks to give my darling Briseis back. I’ll
give you anything you want.’It’s clear fromThe Republicthat readers of
Homeric epics would often deliver speeches from Homer imitatively, so
one could imagine a combination of narrative (‘the priest went to the
Greeks and said...’) andmimesis([wailing, desperate]‘I’m begging you...’).^4
However, themimesisof the Homer-reader (known as a‘rhapsode’)waspart
of an overall act of story-telling or narration. Tragedy and, by extension,
theatre in general is always a matter ofmimesiswithout narration–at least
according to Plato.^5
Having explored some various senses of‘mimesis’, we might wonder
what Plato has in mind here. In fact, Plato correctly discerns that theatre
typically makes use of bothmimesisas imitation andmimesisas imagination.
As for imitation: scenery made to look like the front of a house and its
garden; actors impersonating various people, dressing up, mimicking
accents. As for imagination: the actors are pretending that they are Aga-
memnon, Clytemnestra and so on. These two senses ofmimesis, although
distinct, could well be related.^6 We’ll have more to say about their rela-
tionship once we’ve looked more closely at each in turn–first, at Plato’s
account (and criticism) of imitation-mimesis; second, at the kinds of
imagination that take place in theatre.
Mimesisas imitation
Our starting point here is the question ofwhatis being imitated. Plato
develops, inThe Republic, what has come to be known as his theory of forms,
according to which there are single, unchanging, ideal so-called‘forms’,
which are instantiated by objects in the world. In one example, he explains
that there is one (eternal, unchanging) form of a couch, to which all (transient,
impermanent) couches in the world correspond (and are imitating). When the
carpenter makes a couch, he is in some sense modelling his creation on this
single couch-form. The claims about theatre, then, follow on from an ana-
logy with painting. When the painter paints a couch, he is making an image
of the carpenter’s couch, which is in turn a copy of the form of the couch:
SOCRATES: We have these three sorts of couch. There’s the one which
exists in the natural order of things [i.e. the form]. This one, I imagine
we’d say, was the work of a god. Or would we say something else?
24 From the World to the Stage