Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism in attitudes to theatre* (Stephen Halliwell, St Andrews) In 1920 the German playwright Walter Hasenclever wrote that ‘the end of Newton in mechanics signifies the end of Aristotle in drama’ (‘das Ende Newtons in der Mechanik bedeutet das Ende des Aristoteles in Drama’).1 This bizarre proposition, which indicates that Hasenclever’s logic could be as expressionist as his dramaturgy, strikingly illustrates how history sometimes endows the reputation of major thinkers with a symbolic status - whether as heroes or anti-heroes - in the staking out of ideological and doctrinal positions. This is probably truer of Aristotle than of any other figure in Western traditions of thought, at any rate before Marx, Darwin and Freud. It is certainly remarkable that the contested character of Aristotelianism, whether real or imagined, is a phenomenon which stretches beyond the central philosophical domains of logic, metaphysics, ethics and politics, into what might have seemed, if it were not by now so familiar, such an improbable context as arguments over the nature of drama and theatre. More specifically, Hasenclever’s remark exemplifies the repeated twentieth-century tendency to treat Aristotle as a figurehead of the entire premodernist tradition of theatre in the West - a tendency best known, of course, in its Brechtian version (which Hasenclever’s article just predates), but also associated in various forms with theatrical radicals such as Antonin Artaud and Augusto Boal. Brecht himself will be mentioned only at the margins of this paper, simply because his own variety of theatrical antiAristotelianism has been amply documented and worked over in the existing literature.2 But parts of my argument will contain some more general reflections on the modernist and postmodernist inclination, which Brecht did so much to generate and encourage, to use Aristotle as a symbolic figure in theories of theatre. If Aristotle has been castigated by the avant-garde for allegedly underwriting the bourgeois aims of theatrical mimesis (crudely understood as the ‘imitation of life’) and its associated psychology of empathy, he has also been frequently accused - especially by academic critics keen to dissociate themselves from anything redolent of cultural aloofness of sheer lack of interest in, even gross insensitivity to, the essence of theatrical experience. Oliver Taplin, for instance, has recently reiterated his claim that the attitude to opsis (‘spectacle’) found in the Poetics amounts to a ‘dismissal’ of the theatrical process, and he speaks of Aristotle’s ‘failure’ to grasp the real nature of theatre.3 In similar vein, Maria Grazia Bonanno does not mince her words by calling Aristotle ‘a theorist completely uninterested in performance’.4 Comparable sentiments have become something of a refrain among semioticians of the theatre. The two most prominent representatives of this class among Classicists are probably Lowell Edmunds, who has written of Aristotle’s alleged ‘disparagement’ and ‘repudiation’ of opsis, and David Wiles, who has recently made a hardhitting assault on what he sees as the Aristotelian cast of prevailing models of dramatic criticism, particularly but not exclusively where Greek tragedy is concerned.5 Part of Wiles’s aim is to ‘obliterate’ the conceptual distinction between the ‘inner life’ and the ‘external realization’ of a play, and this leads him, rather interestingly, to incorporate in his critique a sharp attack on Taplin’s brand of performance-criticism for itself promulgating what Wiles alleges to be a ‘strictly Aristotelian’ view of drama. Wiles supports this charge by referring to Taplin’s adherence to a liberal-humanist position (‘liberal-humanist’ being apparently a double-barrelled term of disapprobation for Wiles) which locates a universal meaning in ‘the play itself’, independently of the cultural specificities of particular performances, despite Taplin’s own avowed commitment to the values of performance.6 I do not have space here to follow all the ramifications of this criticism of Taplin, but I cite it because it gives us a glimpse of some of the criss-crossing complexities which start to appear, and in which the definition of (anti-)Aristotelianism can become entangled, when one scrutinises the polemics 1 of this subject more closely. Another, rather different, instance of such complexity which would repay examination in a fuller investigation of these polemics is the paradoxically positive acknowledgements of Aristotelian ideas which appear intermittently in Brecht’s writings. Even Brecht’s notorious and influential anti-Aristotelianism is a much less straightforward matter than is commonly realised.7 For better or worse, then, Aristotle has become an inescapable and controversial reference-point in arguments over drama and theatre, and especially over the relationship between them. If we want to think or rethink the nature of these concepts, it is hard to do without Aristotle - hard, that is, to avoid working either with or explicitly against ideas, categories and questions which have become historically imprinted with his name.8 Within the limited ambit of this paper I inevitably cannot tackle in anything like a comprehensive manner the place of Aristotelianism within theories of theatre, as well as the movements which define themselves by opposition to Aristotelianism. Instead I want to put down some markers that might help us construct an illuminating perspective on these extensive and important phenomena, and by doing so to reconfront what I take to be some persistent misunderstandings and distortions of Aristotle’s own views. We owe it to Aristotle to start by scotching the notion - especially when this is advanced as a quasi-biographical explanation of his attitudes - that he was uninterested in theatrical performance. Consider, as a conveniently indicative piece of evidence, the frequently ignored passage at Rhetoric 3.1404b18-24 where Aristotle, in discussing the persuasive power of (ostensible) naturalness in rhetorical language, introduces an obiter dictum on the tragic actor Theodorus, perhaps the most successful Athenian tragic actor of the second quarter of the fourth century. Aristotle compares the difference between the natural and the artificial in rhetoric to ‘the difference between Theodorus’s voice and those of other actors’: ‘his seems to belong to the character speaking, while theirs seem alien.’ Aristotle’s admiring observation, couched revealingly in the present tense,9 presumably appeals to widespread familiarity with Theodorus’s talents; but that does nothing to lessen the fact that its phrasing intimates not only relatively frequent experience of tragic performances on Aristotle’s part, but also a personal sensitivity to the vocal artistry of actors (an artistry we know that Aristotle linked to the expression of emotion).10 Notice, besides, that Aristotle apparently implies here a particular conception of good (‘persuasive’) acting, a conception which points towards the erasure (from the spectator’s point of view)11 of a sense of difference between performer and role - the very notion, in fact, which was one of Brecht’s main targets in developing his own anti-Aristotelian ‘epic’ theatre.12 I think, however, that Aristotle’s point is compatible with the supposition that in enjoying the powerful performances of an actor as impressive as Theodorus the audience is not passively submitting or surrendering to an illusion (as a Platonic/Brechtian critique might seem to suppose) but actively recognising and appreciating his artistic projection of a persona. Actor and audience, on this view, are connected by complementary uses of imagination; and the exercise of imagination, as we shall see, is central to the account I shall offer of Aristotle’s approach to questions of theatre. Aristotle’s praise of Theodorus is one of very few positive, first-hand references to individual actors in our classical Greek sources. But its emphasis on the voice - something distinct from the Poetics’ category of ‘spectacle’ - is very much in keeping with the overall impression of our ancient testimonies on the theatre, an impression easily summarised by the analogy between actors and orators which is not only implicit in this particular passage of the Rhetoric, but discussed explicitly at some length (under the shared heading of hupokrisis, ‘acting/delivery’) in this same book.13 Aristotle’s admiration for Theodorus’s voice can help, in its anecdotal way, to combat the image of Aristotle the untheatrical. But it can do so in part by showing us that certain silences in the Poetics, where we might like to hear more 2 about theatrical performance as such, are a matter of principle, not neglect. In fact, the Poetics hardly touches on hupokrisis, the art of the actor, which Aristotle evidently considers to be conceptually distinct from the art of poetry.14 Instead, it offers a number of observations on the visual elements of performance which are denoted by the term opsis, ‘spectacle’. These observations amount to a somewhat ambiguous but a nonetheless carefully considered position; they can be made to underpin the idea of Aristotle’s disregard for performance only by being treated reductively. I do not want now to go back over all the ground which I covered in my book on the Poetics, but it will be appropriate to offer a résumé of the three main claims I advanced there.15 First, in the Poetics Aristotle is apparently equivocal about the necessity of spectacle for tragic drama, sometimes treating it as integral (e.g. at 6.1449b31-3), but elsewhere rather sharply distinguishing it from the dramatic poet’s art (6.1450b15-16, 14.1453b1-14). Secondly, he directly acknowledges the emotional power, both positive and negative, of the visual dimension of theatrical performance (see below). Thirdly, Aristotle is to some degree caught between his own philosophical theory of drama and his historical recognition of tragedy as embedded in a tradition of performance. This adds up, I believe, to a complicated position, but not one which has anything to do with the caricature of an Aristotle insensitive to the value of theatrical experience. There are three passages in which Aristotle acknowledges the power of performance (i.e. performance qua ‘spectacle’). In the first, at 6.1450b15-16, he specifically says that opsis has strong emotional potency, and he does so by using the adjective psuchagôgikos (lit. ‘soul-arousing’), cognate with the verb psuchagôgein which he employs at 6.1450a33 to describe the emotive efficacy of the plot components ‘reversal’ and ‘recognition’. In the second passage, at 14.1453b1-14, he similarly states that opsis can in itself create, or contribute to, the desired tragic experience of pity and fear, though he goes on to voice concern about the abuse of spectacle for spurious, sensational effects. Finally, at 26.1461b26-62a18 Aristotle argues rather shrewdly against certain anti-theatrical circles in Athens (circles not necessarily confined, as sometimes supposed, to Platonists) which regarded the theatre as socially vulgar and culturally ‘low’; and in the course of working out his rather delicately balanced position in this section he seems to assert that the visual (as well as the musical) dimension of theatre can actually intensify emotion.16 Between them these three passages show how Aristotle adjusts the nuances of his attitude to theatrical spectacle according to context: thus in ch. 26, with an anti-theatrical set of opponents in mind, he gives opsis a somewhat stronger stress than in ch. 6, where he is preoccupied with emphasising his theoretical hierarchy of the parts of tragedy. But the immediate point at issue is not whether any of these passages would satisfy a modern enthusiast for the theatre. A more appropriate question is whether, if carefully examined, they collectively give the lie to the idea that Aristotle was blind to the distinctive power and importance of theatrical performance. I submit that they do just that. It will be instructive at this stage to remind ourselves of the manner in which, at Poetics 17.1455a22-30, Aristotle stresses the imaginative requirements of the process of dramatic composition. In effect, Aristotle here advocates that the composing poet should be a kind of rehearsing actor, even recommending that he should flesh out the plot he constructs with the aid of physical gestures - an idea whose comic counterpart in the Agathon scene of Thesmophoriazusae might prompt one to infer, even after Aristophanic absurdity has been allowed for, that Aristotle is thinking in terms which had roots in the earlier theatrical tradition itself.17 Central to Aristotle’s conception of the process of composition in this passage is the idea of ‘vividness’, enargeia. This appears again in the positive recognition of opsis already noticed at Poetics 26.1462a15-16 (spectacle can add great vividness to the pleasure of tragedy), and it gives us an important clue to Aristotelian priorities. Vividness, it 3 emerges, is a dramatic (as well as a rhetorical) quality which can be realised (or missed) in performance, but can also in principle be achieved in/through ‘reading’, whatever exactly Aristotle means by that.18 It is, in other words, a fundamentally imaginative quality, a dimension of the heightened state of awareness in which certain possibilities of experience are held before and contemplated by the mind. Aristotle’s prescriptions for the ‘actor-poet’ in Poetics 17 can be illuminated further by a memorable passage from the Rhetoric’s discussion of pity (2.1386a28-b8): ‘Since pity is aroused by sufferings which seem close... it follows that those who flesh out the effect (sunapergazesthai) with gestures, utterances, dress, and, in general, acting (hupokrisis) arouse greater pity, for they make the harm seem close by bringing it before the mind’s eye (pro ommatôn)... and likewise with signs, such as the garments and other belongings of those who have suffered, or the actions, words and other features of those in suffering (e.g. those on the very point of dying)... All these things increase pity by creating an effect of closeness... and because the suffering seems before our eyes (en ophthalmois).’ Although the word enargeia itself does not occur here, this passage contains significant affinities of language and thought with Poetics 17.1455a22-30. These connections confirm that Aristotle recognised the power of the visible, whether in a rhetorical or a theatrical setting (and clearly the passage identifies a degree of convergence between these categories), to intensify the emotional impact of a narrative, in the broadest sense of that term. To that extent this extract from the Rhetoric corroborates the implications I have already traced in the Poetics’ remarks about opsis. But it also makes it especially evident that Aristotle thinks of vividness not as direct presence but as what one might call, from the audience’s point of view, vicarious eyewitnessing. By definition this involves an imaginative (‘as though’) projection, linking performer and audience: the orator evokes the sufferings of the absent ‘as though’ present; and the ‘eyes’ that see, in the phrase pro ommatôn, are the metaphorical eyes of the listener’s/viewer’s mind, though they may naturally be stimulated - that is Aristotle’s point - by the actual sight of the orator’s/actor’s gestures or of the tokens of others’ sufferings which he displays.19 Having indicated some reasons for rebutting the notion that Aristotle was insensitive to theatrical performance, and having started to make a case for treating his view of the relationship between drama and theatre as dependent on a model of the imaginative nature of the experience of dramatic fiction, I want at this point to put Aristotle aside and to move beyond him into the larger terrain of Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism (categories around which one needs, when appropriate, to supply protective inverted commas), but in such a way as to maintain a dialectic between Aristotle himself and his later pro/antagonists in dramatic theory. One way of bringing Aristotle’s own position into sharper focus (or, equally, of using Aristotle’s position to clarify other options) is to juxtapose it with and distinguish it from some alternative propositions about the relationship between drama and theatre. I propose to concentrate on just two of these alternatives, but two whose contrast with the position I have sketched out for Aristotle himself will be sufficient to open up a wide range of issues. The first alternative to my version of Aristotle is the proposition that drama is incomplete without theatre. On this view, theatrical presentation is a necessary requirement, and the true telos, of drama.20 I mentioned earlier that there are passages in the Poetics where Aristotle himself seems to treat performance as a necessary part of tragedy: this is the case at 6.1449b31-3 (spectacle, as a ‘part’ of tragedy, follows from the enactive mode of dramatic poetry), at 6.1450a9-10, and at two places, 26.1459b24-6 and 1460a14, where the visible 4 presence of characters in tragedy is the basis of a contrast with epic poetry.21 I need to stress at this point, therefore, that I take these passages to reflect Aristotle’s acceptance that performance is/was the cultural norm for Attic drama, and not to express the theoretical tenet that performance is a strict requirement of the dramatic mode. If that is right, we cannot legitimately locate within the Poetics itself the idea that drama is incomplete without theatre, even though Aristotle sometimes speaks as though all the drama known to him is designed to be performed. The idea that drama is incomplete without theatrical performance is very familiar; many would automatically subscribe to it. But I want to try to probe some issues of principle by citing instances of this idea from two otherwise extremely different thinkers, Castelvetro and Hegel. In his massive and sprawling ‘exposition’ of the Poetics, originally published in 1570, Castelvetro explicitly contradicts Aristotle on this issue (as on others). In doing so he reasons from what I want to call a material logic. Castelvetro starts from the authentically Aristotelian principle that drama’s mimetic mode is ‘enactive’ (it uses direct speech to represent the agents ‘in action’, rather than by narrative description); but he deviates from the philosopher in construing this principle as requiring the maximum actualisation or ‘materialisation’ of the events concerned, and hence in insisting on the necessity of performance and ‘spectacle’ for the full realisation of a play.22 For Castelvetro, we can say, representation must be brought as close as possible to the condition of reality: or, in his own preferred terms (for he treats poetry as an ‘image or likeness of history’, ‘similitudine o rassomiglianza d’istoria’),23 fiction must be brought as close as possible to the resemblance of history. It is out of this nexus of thoughts that the now notorious requirements for unities of time and place, of which Castelvetro was almost certainly the first direct advocate, are developed.24 I have called Castelvetro’s logic, including the logic of the unities, ‘material’, because it entails, I suggest, a confusion between the medium or matter of representation and its ‘object’ or fictional content, and a corresponding devaluation of the power of imagination.25 My use of the term ‘material’ in this context connects with a wonderfully eloquent passage in Samuel Johnson’s ‘Preface’ to his edition of Shakespeare, where he combats the spurious principles underlying the unities of time and place that had become a central orthodoxy of neoclassical dramatic theory.26 ‘It is false’, writes Johnson, ‘that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever credible.’27 He goes on to argue that the theatrical spectator is engaged in imagining the scene represented on stage, not in believing in its material or literal actuality before him: ‘imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.’ There is accordingly no cogent reason why different parts of a play cannot be imagined as occurring in different places or at different times (‘time is, of all modes of existence, the most obsequious to the imagination’). It is in this context that Johnson makes his famous remarks that ‘the truth is that the spectators are always in their senses’, and that ‘a play read affects the mind like a play acted’.28 It is clear from the thrust of Johnson’s argument as a whole that this last proposition is not crudely reductive: it does not mean that any reading and any performance of the same play will have precisely the same effect on the mind, only that the fundamentally imaginative parameters of the experience are the same in both cases. The Aristotelian character of Johnson’s stance in this important passage helps to bring out, by contrast, the sharply anti-Aristotelian cast of Castelvetro’s attitude to theatrical performance and of his doctrine of the unities. Now, if we follow Johnson in thinking the unities misguided on the level of theory (which is not to deny that their application may have served to set a fruitfully creative challenge to a playwright such as Corneille), then we should suspect the underlying logic of the case for the necessary performance of drama. It does not 5 in fact take much reflection to see the reductio ad absurdum of any position like Castelvetro’s which is guided by a notion of verisimilitude that tends towards maximal ‘illusionism’ of artistic representation. This reductio is provided by the hypothetical case in which fiction is indistinguishable from reality and therefore, de facto, no longer fiction or performance at all - a point which Plato saw very clearly in his treatment of mimesis at Cratylus 432b-d. It can be argued that part of the value of an Aristotelian point of view lies in the possibilities that it offers for avoiding a literal-mindedly ‘material’ logic of theatrical performance such as that found in Castelvetro. Aristotle’s concept of mimesis is not committed to maximal illusionism, but depends on interconnected assumptions about intelligibility and emotional significance.29 Precisely one corollary of this is Aristotle’s principled distinction, to which I shall return, between dramatic meaning and the embodiment of that meaning in performance. If Castelvetro’s logic is material, Hegel’s is expressly metaphysical. Yet Hegel too, despite his rejection of the unities of time and place as resting on the spurious authority of the ‘prose’ of visible reality (as opposed to poetic truth), consistently contends that drama demands performance. At one point in his lectures on aesthetics he even proposes, in a gesture of returning to what he takes to have been the cultural conditions of classical Greece, that there should be a prohibition against the printing and dissemination of play-texts.30 This position reflects the fact that drama fulfils and illustrates a central part of the Hegelian project: it manifests and embodies spirit in sensuous form. But Hegel’s position is paradoxical in more ways than one. If drama requires sensuous embodiment, it is appropriate to wonder why so much drama, historically speaking, has taken the form of poetry, which for Hegel is the most inward, imaginative and subjective of the arts. Hegel’s proposed solution (for he sees the problem himself) is that drama constitutes a union of poetry with other arts. This is a solution which, significantly, could be translated back into the terms of the Poetics, where the distinction between drama and theatre depends on a distinction between poetry and other arts (those of the mask-maker, actor etc.).31 On another level, it is curious that Hegel takes drama to be about the ideal spirit or universal essence of action (which might make one think, though only loosely, of the universals of Poetics 9), yet still insists that it needs to be performed.32 The explanation of this further paradox lies, I think, in the recurrent concern of so many German Romantics with the problem of reconciling spirit with matter - the problem of incarnating spirit. So one finds just the same attitude to drama in, for instance, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s famous Vienna lectures on drama (delivered in 1808), where, despite the Romantic idealism which makes Schlegel a confirmed anti-Aristotelian in his aesthetics as a whole, theatrical performance is regarded as essential for the vivid apprehension of the truths expressed by dramatic poetry.33 It seems to have been easier for an English Romantic like Charles Lamb to sever imagination from sense-experience altogether, and thus to uncouple dramatic poetry from performance. Lamb’s famous essay on the staging of Shakespeare protests extravagantly against the cramping of imagination by the ‘strait-lacing actuality’ of stage presentation.34 Employing dichotomies of inner and outer, spiritual and material, which the German Romantics too espoused, but lacking their concern to reconcile these oppositions in a synthesis of form and content, Lamb’s logic effectively inverts that of Castelvetro by privileging the imaginative freedom of reading over the supposedly earthbound literalism of the stage. But from an Aristotelian perspective one could say that Lamb has mistaken the scope of imagination just as much as Castelvetro: what we need is not a mutually exclusive antithesis of seeing versus imagining, but a recognition of different ways, both theatrical and non-theatrical, in which the imaginative experience of drama can be made available. Hegel’s view of drama (to return to it briefly) is in part the product of a complex Romantic concern with the relationship between the worlds of Geist and of matter. 6 Regarding drama as the most perfect artistic synthesis of form and content (or, equally, of the subjective mode of ‘lyric’ with the objective mode of ‘epic’), Hegel insists on performance because without it a cleavage appears between the spiritual and the concrete.35 In psychological terms this generates an inescapable tension within his conception of the genre. As a subdivision of poetry, drama can be considered in purely poetic terms, and Hegel is apparently happy, on this level, to speak of drama as addressed to the mind and imagination.36 Yet this is exactly why, if drama is to achieve the union of form and content, it cannot be allowed to escape from the demands of physical realisation. ‘The action confronting us [in drama] is entirely the fruit of the inner life and, so viewed, can be completely expressed in words; on the other hand, however, action also moves outwards, into external reality, and therefore its portrayal requires the whole man in his body...’37 The pressures of Hegel’s dialectic are all too evident, here as throughout his discussion of drama. But they have an exemplary quality too, in so far as they encapsulate certain fundamental tensions which theorists of drama/theatre find it hard to escape. From the proposition that performance is a sine qua non of drama I want now to shift attention, though more briefly, to the radical conception that theatre is not just the necessary completion or embodiment of drama but the medium of a special, sui generis event and experience. In various forms this type of conviction has been common to most of the theatrical avant-garde of the twentieth century. A recurrent strand in its exploitation by theorists of theatre has been a desire to break down the distinction between performers and audience, actors and spectators. Of course, if that distinction were really discarded, then one might think that the very concept of ‘theatre’ would go with it; and in a sense that is the ambition of the most radical theorists and practitioners. Instead of being at some degree of spectatorial remove from reality, radical ‘theatre’ aspires to become itself a kind of first-order action/event - whether a mystical, ritualistic act (and I need not dwell here on the recurrent importance of ritual as a model for modernist theatre, from at least Artaud onwards),38 or a militantly socio-political act, a direct engagement with and intervention in the world (as, for example, with Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed, expressely conceived as a form of rehearsal for revolution). These two major ‘families’ of twentieth-century theatrical theory, the ritualistic and the political, are of course importantly divergent in ways which go well beyond the scope of my present enquiry, and can even come into direct conflict, as, for instance, in Grotowski’s rejection of the theatre of political action. But my contention is that they overlap at the point at which they both reject a traditional model of theatre as the realisation and instantiation of a structure of action that, in some way and to some extent, can be identified independently of any particular performance. In practice this model - to which even theorists like Castelvetro and Hegel, with their view of drama as requiring performance, nonetheless subscribed - conceives theatre as the staging of a dramatic ‘text’; and the ritualists and the revolutionaries, so to speak, concur in repudiating the dramatic text as possessing a (‘literary’) life outside the theatre. So the radicals do indeed, from their different angles, go against the grain of a whole tradition, and in the process develop a thoroughgoing anti-Aristotelianism. For the sake of a contrast with Aristotle, I want to add just one point to this rather brutally compressed formulation of an avant-garde conception of theatre, namely its typical emphasis on a communal, participatory model of experience. Now, in one respect this emphasis connects with older traditions of theatricality. This emerges, for example, in Brecht’s insistent objection to collective experience - above all, collective emotional empathy - as a defining feature of the psychology of bourgeois theatre. Brecht himself attaches importance to theatre as a socio-political event in which members of an audience can be made aware of their relationship to others around them, including their class-status; but this awareness requires a rational, self-conscious judgement on the part of each individual, rather 7 than immersion in mass feeling. In the ancient context, Plato had repeatedly and anxiously observed Athenian theatre as a strongly ‘democratic’ phenomenon, categorising it, for example, as comparable in its mass psychology to the institutions of the assembly and lawcourts.39 Aristotle, by contrast, nowhere explicitly addresses the communal or collective dimension of theatre-experience,40 a silence which fits with his overall conception of the relation between drama and theatre, to which I return for a few final remarks. Just as Aristotle resists the ‘logic’ of performance as the necessary completion of drama, so in the Poetics he disengages drama, for reasons of philosophical principle (and not, as I earlier stressed, from some shortcoming of sensibility), from the civic and political conditions of theatrical performance. This in no way implies that Aristotle overlooks or lacks awareness of those conditions; the last book of the Politics, in fact, shows that he can take account of them when he chooses to.41 Drama, for Aristotle, is a mode of poetic representation which displays hypothetical structures of action - structures of possible experience - with the directness of enactive, rather than narrative, mimesis. This directness lends itself to the quality of vividness or imaginative immediacy which Aristotle denotes by enargeia. But while tragedy and comedy had translated the enactive mode into physical performance, this is not strictly necessary, as Homer’s powerful use of dramatic mimesis within epic illustrates (a point made more than once by Aristotle). What matters about a dramatic structure is its form: a well-constructed form yields an intelligible fabric of meaning, and a major dimension of that meaning will be the capacity to arouse appropriate emotions in the mind which grasps and contemplates it. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, understanding and emotion are interlocked in Aristotle’s model of an aesthetic response; and Ismene Lada has given us some reasons to suppose that in this respect Aristotle was in tune with general attitudes to theatre in classical Athens.42 To follow and respond to the significance of a dramatic structure is, therefore, an act of imaginative contemplation which cannot in principle depend on the material embodiment of that structure in a theatrical performance (however effective such a performance may happen to be in communicating that meaning), still less on the proximity of other minds to contemplate the structure with one. Drama, on this view, has ultimately to be realised in the theatre of the individual mind, whatever the precise social and cultural contexts in which the experience may be made available. For an Aristotelian, this is no reason at all to disparage the potential of physical performance, to whose dynamics we have seen that Aristotle himself was not at all oblivious. But it is a reason for claiming that when August Schlegel appeals to a reader’s mental ‘staging’ of a dramatic text as a consideration supporting the necessity of performance,43 the logic of his argument is reversible. If every reading is a ‘virtual performance’ (as some semioticians of theatre would call it), it is equally true that every theatrical performance presupposes an interpretative ‘reading’. Reading is an imaginative-cum-interpretative act in its own right, not a mere derivative or shadow of inscenation. In Aristotelian terms, then, the relationship between drama and theatre is contingent, and we can always distinguish - where anything other than pure improvisation is concerned between a dramatic structure/form (in practice, a dramatic ‘text’) and its particular realisations in performance. To reiterate, whether or not one is satisfied with this position, it is a matter of principle, not of personal insensitivity to theatre. But is it also a reflection of Aristotle’s times, as often claimed? Do Aristotle’s references to reading as opposed to watching plays point to a growing book-culture in the fourth century, as both Edmunds and Taplin have recently reasserted? (Taplin goes so far as to speak of Aristotle’s ‘fixation with this new-fangled “reading” ‘.)44 I remain somewhat sceptical about this thesis, both because its historical basis is tenuous (we do not know that, or how many, more people were reading tragedies in 360 or 330 than in, say, 420), and because it distracts from the strongly philosophical cast of Aristotle’s principles. In so far as these principles were shaped by 8 historical circumstances, I am more attracted by the possibility that they were a response to developments within Athens’ theatrical culture itself. These developments, which included the increasing reperformance of old plays, the dominance of professional didaskaloi, and the growing influence of actors (as famously remarked by Aristotle himself at Rhetoric 3.1403b33-4), combined to accentuate a demarcation between theatrical functions (poet, director, actor) that had once been more closely associated. We are not dealing here with entirely new phenomena in the mid-fourth century, but with the consolidation of changes that had already begun in the fifth century.45 But in Aristotle’s time the history of the Athenian theatre had reached a juncture which offered less resistance than previously to a separation of dramatic form from Inszenierung. Aristotle’s version of this distinction, however, owes most to the conceptual and analytic resources of his own thinking, and very little, so far as we can tell, to changes in the culture of reading. Least of all, as I have been at pains to argue, does it reveal anything about the philosopher’s insensitivity to the kinds of experience that actors and theatres make distinctively possible. A final thought. When Aristotle contrasts seeing and hearing at Poetics 14.1453b114, and in doing so refers to the Oedipus Tyrannus, I suggest that he may have been responding subliminally to the Messenger who reports Jocasta’s death and Oedipus’s selfblinding in that play.46 The exaggellos seems to believe that seeing goes beyond hearing, where these tragic events are concerned. Having coupled the ideas of hearing and seeing at 1224, he proceeds to distinguish them sharply in prefacing his description of Jocasta’s suicide (1237-40); and various motifs of seeing or not seeing the tragic events is heavily as well as ironically marked in this stretch of the play (1229, 1253-4, 1263-7, 1287, 1294-6). But can understanding Oedipus’s tragedy (if we suppose we understand it at all), can responding to it with engaged emotion, depend critically on whether we see (an actor playing) Oedipus? Might not the sight of Oedipus all too easily degenerate into a kind of ghoulishness (a possibility cognate with the misuse of spectacle to which Aristotle refers in Poetics 14 itself)? And even if the mask-maker (Poetics 6.1450b21) has done his job well and created a powerful manifestation of this moment of pathos, how (an Aristotelian might still ask) could the appearance of a man’s blinded eyes be as important as the emotional comprehension of the structure of action and suffering that has led to the terrible fact of self-blinding? When the chorus eventually do look upon the man who has destroyed his own sight (1297-9), they soon find that they must look away (1303-6). Do they then or thereby understand less than before? Or does their aversion only go to show the difference between the physical position of real eyewitnessing and the imaginary position of theatrical spectators? These are questions which find echoes elsewhere in tragedy,47 and I suspect they were lurking in Aristotle’s mind when he reflected on the difference between seeing and hearing the story of Oedipus. But if so, it was with Sophocles’ Messenger, and not with Sophocles himself, that Aristotle was tacitly arguing. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barish, J. The antitheatrical prejudice (Berkeley, 1981) Bonanno, M. G. ‘All the (Greek) world’s a stage: notes on (not just dramatic) Greek staging’, in L. Edmunds & R. W. Wallace, edd., Poet, public and performance in ancient Greece (Baltimore, 1997) 112-23 Brecht, B. Werke, edd. W. Hecht et al., vol. 23, incl. ‘Kleines Organon für das Theater’ (Berlin, 1993) Burkert, W. ‘Aristoteles im Theater’, Museum Helveticum 32 (1975) 67-72 Castelvetro, L. Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. W. Romani (Rome, 1978-9) 9 Corneille, P. Théâtre complet, ed. A. Niderst, vol. 1 (Rouen, 1984) Dryden, J. Of dramatic poesy: an essay [1668], in J. Kinsley & G. Parfitt, edd., John Dryden: selected criticism (London, 1970) Edmunds, L. ‘Theorizing theatrical space’, in Theatrical space and historical place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Lanham, 1996), = revised version of ‘The Blame of Karkinos’, in B. Zimmermann, ed., Antike Dramentheorien und ihre Rezeption (Stuttgart, 1992) Esslin, M. The field of drama (London, 1987) Flashar, H. ‘Aristoteles und Brecht’, Poetica 6 (1974) 17-37 Friedrich, R. ‘Drama and ritual’, in J. Redmond, ed., Drama and religion [‘Themes in drama’ 5] (London, 1983) 159-223 Gavrilov, A. K. ‘Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity’, Classical Quarterly 47 (1997) 56-73 Halliwell, S. Aristotle’s Poetics (London, 1986; with new introduction, 1998) ----- ‘Authorial collaboration in the Athenian comic theatre’, Greek Roman & Byzantine Studies 30 (1989) 515-28 ----- The aesthetics of mimesis: ancient texts and modern problems (Princeton, 2002) ----- ‘Actors and acting in classical Athens’ (forthcoming) Hasenclever, W. Sämtliche Werke, edd. C. Brauer et al., vol. 5 (Mainz, 1997) Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics, trs. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975) Johnson, Samuel, Preface to The plays of William Shakespeare [1765], in F. Brady & W. K. Wimsatt, edd., Samuel Johnson: selected poetry and prose (Berkeley, 1977) Lada, I. ‘ “Empathic understanding”: emotion and cognition in classical dramatic audienceresponse’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39 (1993) 94-140 Lamb, C. ‘On the tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation’ [1812], in R. Park, ed., Lamb as critic (London, 1980) 85-101 Lanza, D. Aristotele Poetica (Milan, 1987) Loraux, N. ‘Les mots qui voient’, Étude de lettres (April-Sept. 1988) 157-82 Meijering, R. Literary and rhetorical theories in Greek scholia (Groningen, 1987) Morpurgo-Tagliabue, G. Linguistica e stilistica di Aristotele (Rome, 1967) Schlegel, A. W. Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. E. Lohner, vol. 5 (Stuttgart, 1966) Scott, G. ‘The Poetics of performance: the necessity of spectacle, music, and dance in Aristotelian tragedy’, in S. Kemal & I. Gaskell, edd., Performance and authenticity in the arts (Cambridge, 1999) Silk, M. S. ‘The “Six Parts of Tragedy” in Aristotle’s Poetics: Compositional Process and Processive Chronology’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994) 108-15 Taplin, O. The stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford, 1977) ----- ‘Opening performance: closing texts?’, Essays in Criticism 45 (1995) 93-120 Wallace, R. W. ‘Poet, public and “theatrocracy”: audience performance in Classical Athens’, in L. Edmunds & R. W. Wallace, edd., Poet, public and performance in ancient Greece (Baltimore, 1997) 97-111 Wiles, D. Tragedy in Athens: performance space and theatrical meaning (Cambridge, 1997) 10 * 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 The first version of my thoughts on this subject was stolen in Rome in April 1998 by an expert and respectable-looking thief (who may have been trying to teach me something about social drama). I am grateful to the audience in Nottingham, in May 1998, for having responded encouragingly to a more improvised version. Hasenclever (1990-97) V 276 (‘Die Aufgabe des Dramas’, orig. publ. in Der Zwinger [Dresden], 15 Oct. 1920, 493-4). See e.g. Flashar (1974), with Halliwell (1986/1998) 316-17. Taplin (1995) 94-5, picking up Taplin (1977) 477-79. Bonanno (1997) 121. See Edmunds (1996) 18, 20-1, Wiles (1997) ch. 1 (the immediate citation is to 14). Wiles’s use of ‘obliterate’ in this context is more rhetorical than intellectually cogent: nothing in Wiles’s book (which deals mostly in hypothetical or imaginary ‘realisations’ of plays) shows the untenability of a distinction between different performances of the same play, or of the logic of identity implied by this use of ‘same’. Wiles (1997) 5-14, esp. 6, where the reference to Taplin’s supposedly Aristotelian belief in ‘the universality of Greek tragedy’ suggests a misconception of what ‘universals’ meant for Aristotle himself; likewise, I think, Edmunds (1996) 17. I am thinking, for example, of the following sections of Brecht (1949): 4 (apparent acceptance of one version of catharsis), 9 (a subliminal echo of e.g. Poetics 18.1456a23-5, 25.1460b22-31), 12 (explicit agreement with Aristotle’s idea that plot is the ‘soul’ of drama). It might be suggested that my own working acceptance of a conceptual distinction between ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ already commits me to an Aristotelian position. If this is true, that is only, I would maintain, because Aristotle himself reasons from premises for which there are powerfully pragmatic justifications. The challenge is for anyone who wishes to discard the distinction altogether to explain how this might be done. Burkert (1975) uses this fact to try to date Rhetoric 3 and, by extension, the Poetics itself to relatively early in Aristotle’s first Athenian period (367-47); but note the caution expressed in Halliwell (1986/1998) 327. See the definition of hupokrisis at Rhetoric 3.1403b27-8. The context of Aristotle’s remark does not imply that such erasure is part of the actor’s own phenomenology; it may indeed imply the reverse, since the actor, like the orator, needs to cultivate a controlled ability to create a certain sort of impression. But this would still leave Aristotle able to regard what the actor does as an intense effort of empathetic imagination: cf. the quasi-histrionic imagination of the poet at Poetics 17.1455a22-32 (discussed in my text below). Brecht (1949) §§47-9, which rejects the ideal of complete psychological identification on the part both of audience and actor. I discuss this further in Halliwell (forthcoming). Poetics 1.1447a20 is probably, in part at least, a reference to the mimetic vocal artistry of actors. The only place in the Poetics where Aristotle connects opsis directly with hupokrisis is in his general remarks on performance in the first part of ch. 26 (see 1462a5 and 16). If Aristotle had considered the actor’s use of the body to be an important component of opsis, he would surely have indicated this at Poetics 6.1450b17-21 (the reference to actors at 1450b20 does not amount to such an indication). We are left, perhaps, with a sense that Aristotle may not have integrated 11 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 his concepts of opsis and hupokrisis. See Halliwell (1986/1998) 337-43 (Appendix 3); ambiguity in Aristotle’s attitude to performance is also diagnosed by Lanza (1987) 33-5. 26.1462a16-17. The text is problematic at this point, but I think we can be confident that this is the gist of Aristotle’s point. Even if one removes the reference to opsis altogether, as some editors have wanted, one would still be left with the following sentence’s acknowledgement of the power of performance. This passage of the Poetics in any case undercuts the claim of Silk (1994) 112 that opsis comes chronologically last in Aristotle’s hierarchy of parts: Silk’s attempt to address this point at 115 n. 21 is inadequate: at the very least Poetics 17 implies that the composing poet will anticipate aspects of opsis and integrate them into his plotconstruction. Although silent reading was probably more common at this date than has usually been supposed (cf. Gavrilov (1997)), I continue to think that by ‘reading’ Aristotle probably envisages reading aloud, even recitation, whether for the benefit of the reader alone or for a larger group: two reasons for supposing this are, first, the double reference to ‘hearing’ the plot of Sophocles’ OT at Poetics 14.1453b4-6, where the present participle ginomena (events ‘taking place’) implies a recitation rather than hearing a summary of the plot (cf. ‘hearing’ epic at 24.1459b30); and, secondly, the comparison to the reading of epic at Poetics 26.1462a11-12. On the relationship of Aristotle’s conception of theatre to the developing ‘book culture’ of the fourth century, see the penultimate paragraph of my text. On the phrase pro ommatôn see Halliwell (1986/1998) 181 n. 17, Meijering (1987) 14-21. On Aristotelian enargeia see Morpurgo-Tagliabue (1967) 251-86. For a standard modern statement of such a position see Esslin (1987), esp. 24 and 33. But Esslin, who astonishingly remains ignorant of the non-Aristotelian origin of the doctrine of three Unities (14-15, 40, 42), can only make radio-drama fit his schema by appealing to the power of imagination (30 n. 3, cf. 58), without noticing how this imperils his initial insistence on the necessity of performance. There are also telling references to the importance (though not the necessity) of performance at 13.1453a27 and 18.1456a18: in both cases the success/failure of certain plots on stage is taken as indicative of the correctness of particular dramatic principles. Characteristic statements of this point of view can be found at Castelvetro (1978-9) I 390, II 355-6. Castelvetro’s attitude is cited with approval by Barish (1981) 117 n. 71; see 331 for Barish’s own commitment to the ‘indispensability’ of performance. Castelvetro (1978-9) I 44. The unities of time and place are argued for at Castelvetro (1978-9) I 79-80, 148-9, 220-22, II 147-53. Castelvetro’s prescriptions are complicated by being predicated on the idea that the paradigmatic audience of drama is the crude masses, ‘la rozza moltitudine’ (I 46). It should be added, however, that Castelvetro has no difficulty acknowledging the power of imagination in the experience of epic. The doctrine of the unities depends on the fallacy that a representation necessarily aspires to the maximum resemblance to its ‘objects’: for two salient examples, see Corneille (1660) 223 (but with the contradictory appeal to imagination at 224), and Crites’ speech in Dryden (1668) 27, appealing to ‘the nearest imitation of nature’ (but, again, betraying itself with some qualifying reference to the licence of imagination). That Johnson could repudiate such doctrines while himself remaining a firm adherent 12 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 of a conception of artistic mimesis shows that neoclassical mimeticism was not, as commonly assumed, a monolithic movement of thought: see Halliwell (2002). Johnson (1765) 311, with my italics. Johnson (1765) 310-14, with quotations on 311, 312, and 313. Aristotelian eikos, ‘probability’ or ‘plausibility’, does not entail an exactingly literalminded strictness to ordinary reality, as in Castelvetro (1978-9) I 46, but a weaker requirement of fidelity to the ‘universals’ of a consistent conception of ‘what could occur’. One passage which brings this out, though in immediate reference to painting, is Poetics 25.1460b16-32. Hegel (1975) 1164-6 offers a (qualified) rebuttal of the unities of time and place; see 1158, 1165, 1181-5, 1192 for his view that drama demands performance, and 1184 for the suggested prohibition on the printing of plays. See Hegel (1975) 1181 for drama as a combination of poetry with other arts, and 1183-4 for a distinction between poetic drama and ‘stagecraft’ which is virtually a paraphrase of Aristotle’s position at the end of Poetics 6. Hegel knew the Poetics well, and quotes it several times (e.g. 1169 on unity of action). Drama and the essential, inner ‘spirit’ of action: Hegel (1975) 1170. Schlegel (1809) lecture 2 (ed. Lohner, V -----). For Schlegel’s argument that even reading involves mental staging, see my text below. Lamb (1812) 87 [check p no in Park 1980]. Drama as a perfect unity of form and content: Hegel (1975) 1158. Hegel (1975) 1159. Hegel (1975) 1181; the italics are mine, but they do no more than highlight the dialectical thrust of Hegel’s argument. For some discussion of the idea of theatrical ‘ritual’ in the twentieth century see Friedrich (1983) 203-12. Republic 6.492b-c. The nearest he comes is in a passing remark on the mentality of theatre audiences at Poetics 13.1453a33-5; but it should perhaps be added that Aristotle’s whole acceptance of pity and fear as defining of tragedy may presuppose a model of the mass experience of emotion in the theatre. See esp. Pol. 8.-, 1336b20-1 (…), 1341b8-42a8 (…). But Y. L. Too, The Ancient Idea of Literary Criticism (Oxford, 19--), -----, is wrong to claim that Aristotle’s whole approach to poetry is underpinned by a political outlook… See Lada (1993). Schlegel (1809), in Lohner (1966) V --- [check German, 4th para., incl. short 1st; quote in text?]. See Taplin (1995) 95, and cf. Edmunds (1996) 18-22 On ‘reading’ in the Poetics see n. 18 above. See Halliwell (1989) 526-7. I am here expanding a suggestion which I first mooted in Halliwell (1986/1998) 338 n. 6. See Loraux (1988), with 176-8 on the OT itself. 13