Performance, Roles, and the Nature of the Self in Dickens

Abstract

It is a general rule in Dickens that a character’s readiness to cite authorities stands in inverse proportion to his reliability. One thinks of Mr Pecksniff, Mr Podsnap, Mrs General, or, in the colloquial line, Mrs Nickleby. Something like the same rule applies, I think, to academic essays, especially to their beginnings. Aren’t we all suspicious of papers that start straight off with references to the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance? One naturally assumes that the writer is more than a little shaky on the nineteenth century and that he is hiding out in the thirteenth, figuring he is less likely to be caught there. Well, according to the OED, the word performance has a cluster of meanings, beginning at the beginning and continuing until now, a cluster that divides roughly into two contradictory suggestions: one is to complete an imposed task, perform one’s duty; the other is to add what is missing, to ornament, to compose, to cause, to act or play, or to play upon.

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for

them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some

quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some

necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous

and shows most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

(Hamlet, III ii. 36–42.)