included) would now take Plato’s metaphysical claims about the forms
seriously; but we are more concerned with his claims about theatrical
imitation, so I won’t pursue his metaphysics here. In any case, as we have
seen, many of the objections he makes to theatre may be removed, intact,
from his metaphysical arguments.
Imitation as simple verisimilitude
A second challenge to Plato would consider more directly his concept of
imitation-mimesisas applied to theatre. Indeed, the notion of imitation-
mimesisat work in Plato’s description of the playwrights is simplistic, but
it’s worth spelling out. As we’ve seen, the best imitations are those that
seem most like the original–i.e. that resemble most closely its appear-
ance (such that they may fool gullible people into thinking that they are
the real thing).^23 The most successful imitation would therefore look and
sound just like the depicted events would have looked or sounded like to
someone who was there. Hence Plato’s criticism that it’s only theappear-
ancethat’s being imitated and, therefore, that poets don’t need to know
about the real thing. Nehamas puts this nicely:‘it is almost as if the
imitator lifts the surface of the imitated object and transfers it into
another medium.’^24 Broadly speaking, such a notion falls under the con-
cept of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude, in general, means ‘truth-like’–
bearing a likeness to truth or having the appearance of truth. Plato’s
account of theatrical imitation-mimesisis that it means being as verisimilar
(as true-seeming) as possible (although, being a copy, it must ultimately
fail). Of course, the notion of verisimilitude is a general one. But in
Plato’s case, he is appealing to what I’ll call‘simple verisimilitude’: the
imitation on stage must, in terms of how it looks and sounds, seem to be
as much like the real-life events it is depicting. This notion of theatrical
mimesis as simple verisimilitude has been a powerful one in the history of
theatre theory, but when we consider it in more detail, it can quickly
become problematic.
First, even accepting that Plato is right about theatrical imitation–
that theatre aims at imitating the appearance of the everyday world as
closely as possible–we should remember that this in itself is not an
uncontroversial task. In the history of theatre theory and criticism, ver-
isimilitude (in this simple form) has been appealed to on both sides of a
number of debates. For example, when setting a play, should one keep
the action in the same place or allow different scenes to be set in different
locations? (This is the debate about so-called‘unity of place’.^25 ) One can
make an argument from verisimilitude in either direction. On the one
hand, it could go against verisimilitude to expect the stage to represent a
room in an English palace at one moment and then an openfield in
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