I had an AI program write this a few weeks ago and I forgot which one.
Here was the prompt:
"Plato famously called for the expulsion of all imitative poets and dramatists—specifically naming major Greek literary figures like Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes—from his ideal city. Please create a dialogue between Plato and Shakespeare about Plato's decision to do this."
A quiet room outside time. Shelves without end. PLATO sits with a wax tablet he is not writing on. SHAKESPEARE enters, glancing at the shelves as a man glances at a tavern he has heard stories about.
SHAKESPEARE: So this is the library where they keep the ones who were shown the door. I confess, I looked for my own name on the threshold.
PLATO: You were never in Athens to be shown anything, Master Shakespeare. My quarrel was with Homer, with Hesiod, with the tragedians who had the ears of my city. You came two thousand years too late to be exiled — and, I suspect, from an island too stubborn to build the kind of city I had in mind.
SHAKESPEARE: A mercy, then, that I missed the verdict. Though I'd hear the charge all the same. You banished Homer — Homer — the man who taught Greece how to speak of courage and grief in the same breath.
PLATO: I banished no man. I excluded a kind of speech from the education of guardians. There is a difference, though I grant it comforted Homer little in the imagining.
SHAKESPEARE: Comfort him with the distinction, then, and tell me the crime.
PLATO: Two crimes, if you will have them counted. First: the poets lie about the gods, and worse, they lie beautifully, which is the more dangerous kind of lying. They show Zeus deceiving, the gods brawling like drunkards at a wedding feast. A child raised on such stories learns that the highest things are petty, and so aims low, thinking it aims like a god.
SHAKESPEARE: And the second crime?
PLATO: That imitation, by its nature, is a copy of a copy. Consider a bed. The carpenter makes a bed by looking to the Form of Bed — the truth of what a bed is. His bed is already once removed from that truth. Now the poet or the painter comes and makes an image of the carpenter's bed — not the truth of it, only how it appears from one angle, in one light. Twice removed, and ignorant of the thing he copies besides, for the poet need not know how to build a bed, or command an army, or govern a city, to write convincingly of carpenters and generals and kings. He traffics in seeming.
SHAKESPEARE: By that reckoning the mirror is a liar for showing my face without a skull beneath it.
PLATO: The mirror does not ask to be believed. Your plays do. That is the third and worst of it, though I named it second: poetry does not merely copy — it seduces. It goes to the part of the soul that grieves and rages and lusts, and it feeds that part, waters it, lets it grow strong, when the whole labor of a good life is to put reason in the saddle and keep the passions bridled. I have watched grown men weep at a recitation of Homer's laments who would be ashamed to weep so nakedly at their own father's grave. The poem gives them license. It flatters the very part of us we ought to be governing.
SHAKESPEARE: And yet — forgive me, Athenian — you are the most dangerous poet in this room, and you have not written a single verse.
PLATO: Explain the charge before you enjoy it further.
SHAKESPEARE: Gladly. You banish imitation, and then you go and imitate. You want men to see the Form of the Good, which by your own account cannot be looked at directly any more than the sun — and so what do you do? You do not hand them a syllogism. You tell them a story about prisoners chained in a cave, watching shadows, and one who is dragged into the light and comes back blinking to tell the others, who want to kill him for his trouble. That is not argument, sir. That is theater. You have written the finest short play in the history of philosophy, and you did it because you knew — as every poet knows — that the soul is moved by an image when it will not be moved by a proof.
PLATO: (after a silence) The cave is a likeness, offered honestly as a likeness, pointing beyond itself to what cannot be shown. I do not ask you to weep for the prisoners. I ask you to notice your own chains.
SHAKESPEARE: And I do not ask my audience to weep for Hecuba because Hecuba is real. I ask them to notice, in the weeping of a hired player over a queen who never lived, something true about grief that they could not notice in their own, being too near it and too proud. You say poetry waters the passions until they drown reason. I say a passion witnessed at a safe distance, in the dark of a playhouse, is a passion examined — turned over, understood, and in the turning, some of its power over us is loosed. A man who has watched Macbeth murder sleep for a crown is a man a little less easily tempted to murder for one himself. I do not paint vice to recommend it. I paint it to anatomize it, the way a physician draws the body's inward parts not to make the sickness lovelier but to teach the cure.
PLATO: That is a fine speech, and I notice it is also a performance — which is my whole point returned to you unharmed. You trust the discernment of your audience to draw the lesson and refuse the poison. I do not share your confidence, and neither, I think, do you entirely: for you also gave the world Falstaff, who is far more delightful than he is instructive, and I have heard that men love him more than they love the prince who casts him off. The poet's skill outruns the poet's moral. That is precisely the danger — not the bad poet, whom no one is tempted to believe, but the great one, who makes vice charming almost despite himself.
SHAKESPEARE: Guilty, perhaps, of loving Falstaff more than was prudent. But tell me, Plato — in a city with no Falstaff, no Achilles sulking in his tent, no Oedipus discovering the horror of his own hands, what would your guardians know of a human heart? You would raise philosophers who have never wept at a story, and call that safety. I call it a kind of blindness dressed as virtue. Even your own Republic cannot do without the poets entirely — you keep the hymns to the gods, the praises of good men, some of the old modes and meters, so long as they are bent toward courage and moderation. You do not silence the Muse. You conscript her.
PLATO: I conscript her because a city, like a soul, must be ruled by its best part, and the best part is reason, and reason may use images as a general uses scouts — sent out, but not given command. What I will not permit is the poet as an independent power in the city, answerable to no one, praised for whatever most delights, regardless of what it does to the men who hear it. Delight is not the same as good, though your trade has an interest in confusing them.
SHAKESPEARE: And what is philosophy's trade, if not the delight of being right? You have simply hidden the pleasure of your art behind the frown of the dialectic, so that it might pass the customs house of your own Republic unsearched. I at least tax my audience honestly, at the door, in daylight, and call the fee what it is.
PLATO: (the ghost of a smile) You argue like one of my own interlocutors — which is either a great compliment to you or a great embarrassment to me. Very well. I did not close the matter so tightly as report has made it seem. I said, at the end, that if poetry could speak for herself — not merely charm, but answer, and show cause why she should be welcomed into a well-governed soul as something more than honey on the rim of a cup — I would hear the plea gladly. No one has yet made it to my satisfaction.
SHAKESPEARE: Then let this stand as the opening of the brief, and I'll furnish the rest across some thirty-odd plays already written, and trust the jury of every uneasy conscience that ever left a theater more thoughtful than it came. I ask no throne for the poets, Athenian. Only a bench in the same city as your philosophers — near enough to the fire to be useful, far enough not to be mistaken for its keepers.
PLATO: A bench, perhaps. Not a bench beside the rulers.
SHAKESPEARE: (rising, with a bow that is not quite sincere and not quite mocking) I have sat in worse places for less honest company. Good night, lawgiver. Dream of your sun, if you can bear to look at it.
PLATO: Good night, player. Mind that Falstaff does not follow you out.
Exeunt, in opposite directions, each glancing once at the other's shelf.
Note: This is an imaginative dialogue. Plato's arguments here draw on the actual positions in Republic Books II, III, and X (the theory of poetic imitation as thrice removed from the Forms, the critique of poetry's appeal to the passions, and his closing offer to readmit poetry if she could defend herself). Shakespeare's counter-arguments are speculative, built from ideas his plays dramatize — most explicitly Hamlet's remark that playing should "hold the mirror up to nature" — but he never wrote a defense of poetry in his own voice, so his side of this conversation is invention in his likely spirit rather than record.
