ABSTRACT
The pleasures of emotional experience; laughter and delight; seeing accurate representations of what we are; hearing music, song, and language; learning, gaining wisdom, and being confirmed in own wisdom; thinking about life; feeling wonder; feeling exalted, ecstatic, and ennobled. On this definition of “entertaining,” William Shakespeare’s plays qualify as entertaining drama, since over the last four centuries many people have claimed to have had, these pleasures as a result of reading or seeing performances of them. For Aristotle and many others, one criterion for judging of the quality of any given tragedy is whether it causes the audience to have intense emotional experiences. The aim is to get away from thinking of the plays as monuments that are great in and of themselves, puzzles to be solved, or merely evidence of the nature of western society.
