make-believe. Although they are clearly distinct, we can see that these
two broad kinds ofmimesisare related to one another in a number of ways.
It might be, for example, that (say) dressing up the actor to look more
like a Greek warrior (imitation) makes it easier for the audience to pre-
tend that they are watching Agamemnon (imagination). Or, going back
to the actor’smimesis, it might be that pretending to be Agamemnon
(imagination) makes you look more like a Greek warrior (imitation). And
sometimes, of course, a failure of imitation (a poor accent from an actor,
an error in the scenery) makes it harder to engage imaginatively with a
performance: poor imitation can undermine imagination.
It might be tempting to conclude from examples of this kind that the
more successful the imitation, the more useful it will be as a guide to
the imagination. Thus, for example, if the Chorus of Henry V had more
space, more men and more horses at his disposal, then he wouldn’thave
had to go on stage and beg the audience for its indulgence.
I would like to warn against this view. First of all, as the discussion of
Plato and Aristotle suggested, theatrical imitation doesn’t merely seek to
reproduce the appearance of everyday life: there’s more to imitating a
story than imitating exactly what it would look like if it really happened.
Second, even if (following Plato) the purpose of imitation were to repro-
duce the appearance of everyday life, it’s not clear that the more success-
fully it achieved this goal, the better it would aid our imagination. In
his essay on the hobby-horse, Gombrich notes that for the‘hobby-horse’
(a broomstick, or a simple horse’s head attached to a stick) to become a
horse in the imagination of the child, it is not necessary for the broom-
stick to look very much like a horse at all.^54 Indeed, it is likely that if the
broomstick or toy horse were too much like a real horse, then it would
ruin the imaginary game. Real horses, after all, are often too large or bad-
tempered to be ridden by small children.^55 The same might be said, more
generally, for the cavalry ofHenry V: hundreds of real horses moving
across an enormous stage would arguably ruin the effect that the Chorus
seeks to produce. The key factor, Gombrich suggests, is not successful
imitation butinterest;it’s got to be worth engaging with. We will go a
long way with our imaginations– turning the stage into France and
England, or the word‘barn’into a barn–if we think there’s something
in it for us. And whether we are interested or not has as much to do with
the subject matter (i.e. what is being imitated) as the likeness.
Theatricalmimesis:a case study
Up to this point, I have been keen to keep these twomimesisfamilies apart.
But I would like to end by suggesting that the way that they interact on
the stage (complex as it is) must be a central, perhaps even unique feature
Mimesis 41