In 1758, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a chastising letter to his former colleague (and editor of the Encyclopédie) Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Rousseau’s criticism centered on d’Alembert’s proposal for the establishment of a theater in Geneva, whose “Lacedaemonian” culture, he lamented, lacked the “urbanity of Athens.” D’Alembert’s essay drew a connection, which Rousseau took up in his response, between the arts and mores. But where d’Alembert considered the potential consequence of this entertainment as nothing more than an increase in the “fineness of tact” and “delicacy of sentiment,” Rousseau saw an impending degradation of the virtues that held together the public and private sphere of that small city.

Today, raising this Rousseauian consideration is, as Allan Bloom noted, “most naturally viewed by us with suspicion as arising from illiberal interest of party or sect.” This is both too true and too bad, especially when a play like Yaël Farber’s Salomé comes to the Shakespeare Theatre Company, located in my very own polis of Washington, D.C.