17 Stendhal (1962: 24).
18 For a contemporary defence of a version of this response, see Suits (2006), who argues that,
given a more flexible notion of‘belief’, one can believe that what one watches is real while
simultaneously believing that what one watches is fictional.
19 See Eldridge (2003: 195).
20 The‘paradox of tragedy’is one of the few problems in the philosophy of art that, by name at
least, is connected with theatre. But writers on the problem often argue about whether it just
applies to tragedy, or whether it can be applied to other works of art. It seems clear that it also
applies, say, to films and novels. Other candidates include paintings, documentary films, roller
coasters, fine oratory and so on. Because our concern is with theatre, I won’t spend time
discussing how far the problem stretches.
21 Hume (1965: 185).
22 See Friend (2007); Feagin (1983).
23 Roughly, Hume thinks that the artistic elements of a performance‘convert’the negative
emotions to positive ones. For an excellent critical analysis, see Neill (1999).
24 Lennard and Luckhurst (2002: 134) even suggest that public slaughtering of humans and animals
in Rome accounts (in part) for the relative lack of appreciation and popularity of theatre.
25 Nietzsche has his prophet, Zarathustra, say that man is the cruellest animal because he enjoys
tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions (inThus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 3,‘The Convalescent’); a
more nuanced discussion of our pleasure in the sufferings of others (and ourselves) can be found
in the second essay ofThe Genealogy of Morality.
26 Burke (1998: 43–4).
27 Burke (1998: 43). Long before Burke’s time, the public execution and the theatre were often
compared and contrasted as public shows. Thus, in the middle of the seventeenth century:‘the
association of public executions and theatre was a commonplace. Executions were staged for the
edification of the audience.’(Thomson 1995: 203)
28 Hobbes (1994: 58); as Carlson (1993: 129) notes, these remarks are not explicitly about theatre,
although he does speak of the‘spectator’and the‘spectacle’.
29 The view that our security is the source of our pleasure at the suffering of others is one that, as
it happens, is explicitly rejected by Burke.
30 Thus I agree with Ridley that‘successful tragic drama–think of Lear, think of Oedipus–is simply
not all that pleasing’(2003a: 413); and with Woodruff that‘the best theatre is not the theatre
that gives us the most pleasure’(2008: 186). See also Budd (1995).
31 See e.g., Gardner (2003: 236).
32 See e.g. Neill (2003).
33 The medical example is developed from Shelley (2003).
34 See Shelley (2003: 178).
35 Shelley (2003: 183).
36 Shelley (2003: 185).
37 Feagin (1983: 98).
38 Feagin (1983: 98).
39 Friend (2007) makes a similar point.
40 We discussed this in Chapter 5.
41 Walton (1990). As he acknowledges, Walton’s solution to the paradox is independent of the
claims he makes about emotions and make-believe, which we discussed earlier in the chapter;
I have chosen to present it without using the rest of his theoretical apparatus.
42 A further question, unexplored here, concerns the unity not of the answer but of the problem or
‘paradox’that we began with: are we in fact dealing with a single‘paradox’or are we looking at a
series of overlapping concerns that deserve isolated treatment? Some have suggested, for exam-
ple, that the psychological question of what motivates us in going to the tragedy should be kept
apart from the moral question of whether it is permissible to enjoy depictions of the suffering of
others. I have treated them in a unified manner here, partly for simplicity, partly because the
answers are evidently related to one another (are our psychological motivations morally
permissible?). But see e.g. Neill (2003: 207–8) for elaboration.
Emotions 157