god of wine–Dionysus). In its mature form, this festival hosted plays in
an open-air theatre that could seat about 14,000 people. Plays included
song and dance and often depicted supernatural events. None of this is in
any way conducive to imitating real, everyday life.^27 Aeschylus could
hardly have thought that the best way to imitate the disastrous return of
Agamemnon from Troy as accurately as possible (in Plato’s sense) was to
begin with a masked actor pretending to be a watchman, shouting to
himself about the stars. Watchmen on duty do not typically speak in
such a way that they can be overheard by 14,000 people. And if the idea
is to imitate the action as accurately as possible, then why all the singing
and poetry?^28
Even once all of these things have been discarded (as many subse-
quently were in Western theatre), one still has a stage and an audience
and a number of insurmountable obstacles to everfinding on stage a
simple imitation of how the world is. Diderot asks us to imagine a for-
eigner who has never heard of theatre being brought to a performance
and watching it through a grille (so as not to see the audience). The for-
eigner, Diderot claims, wouldn’t think for a moment that the events were
real. The reasons for this are many, but they include the strange way the
actors speak (so as to be heard) and the impossible amount of action
condensed into such a short space of time. Not to mention that the play
is often‘set’somewhere other than its actual location. What would the
foreigner make of all these people talking as if they were in Thebes or
Trézène, when they’re actually in Athens or Paris?^29 Even supposing that
the foreigner would never be tricked into thinking that the play was real,
one might imagine that plays could be more or less verisimilar; hence,
some of the debates mentioned above mightfind a place. But theatre
doesn’t look like real life and it doesn’t seem like a very good description
of the work of most playwrights to say that this is what they are intend-
ing. If that’s the case, then it may count against Plato’s analysis of what
theatrical imitations are (his metaphysical objection), and also against his
criticisms of their effect on gullible audiences (his‘audience gullibility’
charge). If we know that what we’re seeing isn’t (and isn’t trying to be) a
copy of everyday life, then perhaps we won’t have such a gullible attitude
towards it.
Imitating a deeper truth
Plato claims that imitation directs our attention away from the universal,
unchanging world of forms. We’ve already seen two ways to combat this
claim–first, to deny the world of forms; second, to deny that Plato’s
understanding of imitation is the correct one. But as a follow-up to the
second point, the idea of theatre as an imitation thatin some senseaims at
Mimesis 31