The Globe, Plato and the corrupting force of art

The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and their audience, would have met with no approval at all from Plato (c. 425-348 BC). For him, all poetry and the arts were corrupt, and in his Republic, a discussion of how an ideal state should be constituted, he called for them all to be banned.

Plato’s argument begins from exactly the same position as the Globe’s: that all art, but especially that which deals in words, has an educational effect. In other words, it instructs, whether it likes it or not (and Greeks did indeed argue that this was its effect, and even purpose). Consequently, Plato believed, unless it offered lessons of the highest moral probity, it was a corrupting force.

At one level, this was simply a matter of censoring those passages which caused maximum offence, e.g. the anger of the hero Achilles in the Iliad — the wrong model of heroic behaviour to set before Athenians.

But Plato went much further than that. Poets and playwrights dealt in illusion, a mere shadow of reality, all nothing but make-believe. Should not life itself teach us right and wrong, rather than ignorant, ill-informed, insubstantial shadows?

Then again, consider the results of such play-acting. Staged before mass audiences, tragedy and comedy (Greeks invented both formats) encouraged dangerous emotional responses — weeping and wailing, or crude, buffoonish laughter.

Plato imagined the state saying to such performers: ‘We should be absolutely daft, as would any state, to let you perform if the authorities had not decided whether your work was fit to be recited and suitable for public performance. So show us your work, and if your doctrines seem the same as — or better than — ours, you can go ahead; if not, not.