Adam Smith and Scottish Theatre

From D. D. Raphael's discussion of The Impartial Spectator:

Smith's discussion of virtue in relation to beauty are often marked by a special interest in drama when drawing on examples of finding ethics in the arts. He refers to Sophocles' Philoctetes and Trachiniae, Euripides' Hippolytus, Thomas Otway's The Orphan, Racine's Phèdre, Shakespeare's Othello and Hamlet, Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage, and Voltaire's Mahomet and L'Orphelin de la Chine, as well as making some general comments on tragic drama in several places, sometimes coupling it with 'romance'.

To what extent could Smith have seen actual theatrical performances? Apart from the mention of Hamlet, which comes in the new part VI of the sixth edition of the Moral Sentiments, all the abover references were in the first edition of 1759, when Smith was teaching at Glasgow. Could Smith, at that time, have seen actual theatrical performances? We know that he enjoyed opera during his stay in Paris in 1766, and he may well have attended the staging of plays too. But what could he have seen in Scotland by 1759? There was no theatre in Glasgow at that time; indeed in 1762, strangely enough, Smith served on a university commitee that successfully opposed the establishment of a theatre in the city. Presumably there was also no theatre in Oxford, where Smith was a student from 1740 to 1746, for the anti-theatre petition of the Glasgow university committee in 1762 cited the example of Oxford in its support (14). There was a theatre of sorts, eking out a tenuous existence, in Edinburgh during Smith's sojourn there from 1748 to 1751, and he may have attended some of its performances (15).

Perhaps a more promising possibility lies in do-it-yourself exercises at his schoool. John Rae tells us, in his Life of Adam Smith, that acting in plays was a common pursuit in Scottish schools at that time (16). The practice was opposed by the religious authorities, but the town councils, which ran the schools, refused to be told by presbyteries what they should or should not do. At the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, where Adam Smith had his early education, the classics teacher was especially keen on drama. He wrote a play himself and got his pupils to present it in 1734. There is no evidence that Smith was one of the actors, but he would certainly have seen the performance and may have seen others. So he would have known that attending the performance of a play is far better than just reading it. When we add that to the abundant evidence of the Moral Sentiments that he found drama a rich source of ethical reflection, we are bound to be puzzled by his opposition to the project for a theatre in Glasgow. It no doubt says something for his innate aesthetic appreciation, but nothing for his enlightenment—or courage.

(14) Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 148.

(15) David Daiches, Edinburgh (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 111, 165-8.

(16) John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (London: Macmillan, 1895; repr. New York: Kelley, 1965), 5-6.

(The Impartial Spectator, 90-92).