GLAUCON: No, I don’t think we would.
SOCRATES: Then there’s the one made by the carpenter. [...] And then
the one made by the painter, isn’t there?
GLAUCON:Let’s take it there is.
SOCRATES: Painter, carpenter, god, then. Three agents responsible for
three kinds of couch.^7
The‘imitator’(i.e. the painter or his theatrical equivalent), Socrates goes
on to say, makes that which is‘two removes from nature’–in other
words, from the form. So, when imitation happens in poetry, it, like
painting, is the imitation of an imitation–two removes from the real
thing. And theatrical poetry, unlike other kinds of poetry, is exclusively
imitative. Plato sets this up in order to lay his charges against imitative
poetry and imitative art in general.
First, a metaphysical charge, based on the forms. Imitation-mimesisis
never as good as the real thing (the thing it’s imitating): no couch is as
perfect as the form of a couch and no couch-painting as perfect as a
couch. Second, an ignorance charge. The poets and painters don’t really
need to know about the things they imitate–they just have to know
about the superficial appearances of those things: to write a play about a
carpenter you don’t need to know how to build a table. This, in itself,
would not be so bad, if it weren’t for the third,‘spectator’s gullibility’
charge. People tend to take the false or deficient poetic imitations for the
real thing or, perhaps, they put too much faith in or are not sufficiently
sceptical about the imitations.^8 It’s important to note the complexity and
variation in the notion ofmimesisinvoked by Plato, which underlies his
charges: plays use imagination-mimesison the part of the actor and the
audience (the actor imagines being the priest and says:‘I, the priest,
would like my daughter back’. and he sounds like he means it; the
audience imagines that he is the priest) to create a kind of imitation-
mimesis(what the play looks like to the audience) of a world (ours) that is,
itself, amimesisof another world (of forms).^9 A further sense ofmimesis
invoked in the third charge is that naïve audience members may go on to
use characters from plays as role-models, falsely taking them to be the real
thing (or sufficiently like the real thing).
Looking over these criticisms, it’s clear that some are directed at
imitation-mimesisas it tends to occur (and as audiences tend to respond to
it) in Plato’s context; but some seem directed at imitation-mimesisas such,
with little scope for better or worse kinds. As for the former: much of
Plato’s discussion of poetry in general and theatre in particular focuses on
ways in which the famous poets get things wrong–for example, they
misrepresent the gods in showing them to be deceitful and unjust.
Furthermore, it’s widely acknowledged that in Plato’s time, poets were
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