expressed by Aristotle, and I focus on his view, although he is by no
means the only one.^23 Aristotle, recall, argued that tragedy presents uni-
versals to its audience. In presenting universals (what‘would happen’),
plays can teach their audiences about the world. Aristotle’s claim about
universals has nothing to do with whether the explicit statements made
by particular actors are true or false. Tragedy is an imitation ofaction
(including verbal and non-verbal elements) and it is via the action that
universals are made apparent to the audience. The play distils universal
features of the everyday and then presents them on stage, such that what
the audience sees is a presentation of what types of people do in types of
situations. Hence the presentation of universal truths (about types of
people in types of situations) is perfectly consistent with afictional story,
featuring completely made-up characters, who utter no truthful statements
whatsoever; the universal truths must be implicit, not explicit.
When he wants to explain what he means by poetry expressing universals,
Aristotle states that it shows us‘the kind of speech or action which is
consonant with a person of a given kind in accordance with probability or
necessity’.^24 Two interesting problems immediately arise from this account.
First of all, what kinds of speech and action accord with probability and
necessity? Second, whatever they are, how do plays show them? To put
the point another way: if we want to know whether, say,Oedipus Tyrannus
presents the kind of thing that would happen, then we need to ask two
questions:first, what kinds of things happen? Second, what kind of thing
doesOedipus Tyrannuspresent?
Thefirst question–just what are the kinds of thing that happen?–is
obviously not just a question for the theatre. But I stress it in order to
distinguish between the (purported) message or claim made by a particular
play and the truth of that claim. Even if we accept that plays are able to put
alleged‘universals’ on show, there’s still a vast debate to be had about
what kinds of things are in fact universal. Aristotle clearly thought both
that certain types of people behaved in certain recognisable ways and that
people’s characters were relatively consistent over time. Plays–to express
universals–should therefore depict people who correspond to type and
who do so consistently.^25 This view has been a popular one: thus, fairly
strict limits have, in the past, been placed on which characteristics were
appropriate for which character types;^26 or actors and actresses could
specialise in being a particular character type, known in nineteenth-century
England and America as‘lines of business’.^27 Some of these‘types’look
false or dated now, such as Aristotle’s claim that it is inappropriate for
women to display certain types of courage, or Lessing’s view that women
couldn’t be viciously or cold-bloodedly murderous, although they could be
murderous as a result of jealousy or some other passion.^28 And August
Strindberg wrote, in the preface to his playMiss Julie, that the very idea
52 From the World to the Stage