difference to us; it has no connection (I would suggest) with whatever it
is that we think we learn from plays like Hamlet.^20
That leaves‘words of wisdom’. The kinds of‘truths’expressed here look
rather more like what we might want to learn fromHamlet. In the case of
plays likeHamlet in particular, these are the sorts of phrases that get
quoted independently of their dramatic context. Of course, even if one
holds that some of the‘words of wisdom’uttered during the course of a
play are true, there may well be many that are false. It doesn’t seem right
to say that what is learnt from the plays is achieved by the spectator
sifting through the various‘words of wisdom’and accepting all the ones
that shefinds plausible. To put the point another way: if one were to go
through the text ofHamlet, locate all the‘words of wisdom’with which
one happened to agree, isolate them, and them get someone to read them
out on stage to an audience, our intuition, I suspect, would be that this
would be nothing like the ‘learning’ experience we talk about when
having gone to see a performance ofHamlet.This suggests that‘words of
wisdom’can’t be all there is to it.
This consideration of‘words of wisdom’has been a matter of explicit
statements in the text of plays. But, to state the obvious, words of
wisdom, even when they appear explicitly in plays, are often woven into
the action. They are not best understood as isolated statements by the
playwright, in which he discloses his general views about the world. That
is one reason why isolating the true words of wisdom fromHamletand
reading them out on stage would completely fail to have the right effect.
Similarly, the claim that we shouldn’t say that someone is happy until she
has died without pain is hard to separate from the story of Oedipus
himself. Putting this thought together with what we said earlier about
the non-propositional content of a play, we have an incentive to move
away from looking for truths in the explicit language of the play, and
look instead for implicit truths.
Implicit truths
In a typical performance, a great deal isimplied, rather than stated explicitly.
If the explicit propositions uttered on stage are of no use to us (on their
own), then perhaps we should turn to what is implied. Within what is
implied, it might be helpful to distinguish between the specific (or particular)
claims and general (or universal) claims.^21 Ibsen’sGhosts, for example,
implies the particular claim that Captain Alving had syphilis, although this
is never stated outright. It also implies the general claim that (contemporary)
society systematically disadvantages women.
When people talk about learning from theatre, one common suggestion
is that they are learning from implied, universal claims.^22 This thought is
Truth and illusion 51