Against mimesis

pp. 77-125

in: William Gruber, Offstage space, narrative, and the theatre of the imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

The foregoing passage from Book 3 of The Republic is often overlooked in favor of Plato's more famous criticism of poetry in Book 10, where he condemns tragic poets not only because their imitations are three degrees removed from God and truth, but also, he says, because "poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled." In Plato's view, to be sure, it is not just poetry that ought to be banished from the ideal state; all mimetic art is suspect for the reason that people who are exposed to it are deceived by the alluring qualities of the represented figures or images. Yet Plato aimed his criticism mainly against those poets who wrote for the stage, and it is here that his influence has been felt most keenly in subsequent discussions about the proper place of the arts in human societies. His insistence that spectators to theatrical performances are somehow unable to shake off habits of behavior they picked up from watching dramatic performances, whether tragic or comic, has been carried forward virtually unchanged for well over two thousand years of antitheatrical polemic. It forms the basis of every major subsequent antitheatrical discourse, being repeated (usually without acknowledgment of its ancient roots) in the seventeenth-century Puritans' or Jansenists' attacks on theatre or in the contemporary debate about the influence of hip-hop music.