‘Empathic understanding’: emotion and cognition in classical dramatic audience-response

Abstract

In the closing chapter of hisGreek tragedy in actionOliver Taplin writes:Understanding, reason, learning, moral discrimination – these things are not, in my experience, incompatible with emotion (nor presumably in the experience of Gorgias and Aristotle): what is incompatible is cold insensibility […] our emotions in the theatre, far from driving out thought and meaning, are indivisible from them: they are simultaneous and mutually dependent.On the other hand, Malcolm Heath's work inveighs against Taplin's suggestion of a balance between reason and emotion, and proposesa third possibility: intense but ordered emotion, controlled not by intellectual interests, but by the coherence of the whole simplyasan emotional experience, by the aesthetic satisfaction which the audience receives through its experience of the emotions as an ordered sequence.