often appealed to for practical advice and education as well as for models
of virtue, in a way that is unthinkable today.^10 In an attempt to bridge
this gap, modern interpreters of Plato have likened his concerns about
tragic poetry to modern concerns about the influence of television or
popular music.^11 We might worry that exposure to soap operas and
romantic comedies gives a young person a hopelessly unrealistic and
ultimately harmful notion of human relationships; we might worry that
her attitudes to others might be adversely affected by the songs she listens
to, which glorify violence and sexism; we might worry that a child who
wants to become a doctor as a result of watching medical dramas on TV
has no idea what a real doctor’s life would be like. Undoubtedly, these are
Platonic concerns. This family of concerns is not exactly aimed at theatre
(or dramaticmimesis) as such, but rather at the effect of particularly pop-
ular and widespread forms of theatre or popular entertainment and the
attitudes of audiences towards them. It would be possible in principle, if
aesthetically scandalous, to insist on a certain kind of accuracy in imita-
tions, such that (say) dramas about doctors really did reflect the life of a
typical doctor. Then the child who grew up wanting to be a doctor based
on dramatic portrayals would have less to worry about. More generally,
these objections are more about which kinds of imitation-mimesisare good
and which are bad; they do not attack themimesisitself.
However, some of Plato’s concerns seem to be aimed atallimitations,
no matter the accuracy: imitations take us further from the forms, so,
howeveraccurate they are, they can never be as good as the things that
they imitate; this, for Plato, is their fatalflaw. Thisflaw is clearly a
function of imitation-mimesis, as the comparison with painting demon-
strates: the painter might try to make his portrait look like the subject;
but neither the painter nor the portrait is pretending to be the subject in
any obvious way. As far as Plato is concerned, then, theatricalmimesisis
aiming to copy or imitate precisely the appearance of the original. This
accounts for his criticisms of theatricalmimesis: however good the imita-
tion, it’s still just the imitation of an appearance.^12 Notice that one
doesn’t need to agree with this second, metaphysical objection (about the
forms) in order to make thefirst objection (about theatricalmimesisand
role-models); as it happens, though, Plato offers both.
InterpretingThe Republic
Before I explore some criticisms of Plato’s claims, a note on the inter-
pretation of his arguments inThe Republic. Few texts have been examined
in as much detail, or with such varied results, as this one. I have pre-
sented the relevant part of his argument against theatre-as-imitation as it
seems to me to be presented in the text and in a way that is not
26 From the World to the Stage