Abstract
Does it make sense today to talk about dramatic characters in mimetic terms? The materialist critique of the “essential self” of “liberal humanism” brought a breath of fresh air to character criticism by reminding us that dramatis personae are verbal constructs and by recasting their apparently unique features as manifestations of social forces. Shakespeare’s protagonists, instead of being studied as lifelike, sovereign individuals endowed with agency, were broken down into subject-positions, vehicles of impersonal discourses, loci of linguistic capital, products of politeness strategies, and the like. In my opinion, these approaches, which have greatly enhanced our understanding of the plays, are by no means incompatible with a mimetic approach to character—provided we take character as an effect and not as an origin of speech. Fifteen years ago, Bert O. States made a powerful case for the quiddity of character without ever losing sight of its constructed nature as a textual artefact.1 In this essay, I argue that one major source of a character’s quiddity is the particular way he/she engages in verbal exchanges.
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Notes
Bert O. States, “Hamlet” and the Concept of Character (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 167, 171.
See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge MA): Harvard University Press, 1990).
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xxiii. Locating dynamic identity (initially) at the level of practical consciousness means that it can be documented from the surface phenomena of interaction, without having to posit, a priori, inwardness or an unconscious.
For this sense of ideologeme see Louise Schleiner, “Voice, Ideology, and Gendered Subjects: The Case of As You Like It and Two Gentlemen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 285–309.
Cf. James L. Calderwood, The Properties of “Othello” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 24: “Crude images of old black rams tupping white ewes … do not readily wash away despite the sponging motions of the Senate scene.” In “Hamlet” and the Concept of Character, States discusses the way “circumstantial insinuations” attach to Ophelia’s character (131ff.). He uses “gestalt” to refer to “a kind of tonal chord, a denotative center of energy (in word, gesture, manner, etc.) that announces a range of connotations to come” (19).
Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2005), 52, makes a similar point about Othello’s language.
For a subtle Bakhtinian reading of Shakespearean character see James R. Siemon, Word Against Word (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
Stephen Greenblatt, in Renaissance Self-fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), notes that “his identity depends upon … an embrace and perpetual reiteration of the norms of another culture” (245).
See Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 45: “Discursive consciousness means being able to put things into words.” Robert Y. Turner, in Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974), discusses the effect of making characters capable of self judgment: “Different from ‘characteristics,’ it creates the impression of a substance underlying and containing the characteristics” (235).
In Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse (London: Adam Islip, 1596), Sig. F 2, one of these “travailers,” whose name is “Lying,” had plundered the very Plinian materials from which Shakespeare (or Othello himself?) has built this passage.
“Uptake” is used in J. L. Austin’s sense of the hearer’s identification of the speech act intended by the speaker. Clearly, the illocutionary force of an actor’s utterances will be much affected by how an actor is costumed, where he looks and how he moves while speaking—aspects I have no space to tackle here. On the visual and kinesic dimensions, see Bruce R. Smith, “E/loco/com/motion,” in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 131–50; and Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare, Chapter 10.
See David Grote, The Best Actors in the World (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 130–34
Shoichiro Kawai, “John Lowin as Iago,” Shakespeare Studies (Japan) 30 (1992): 17–34.
Lowin played Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, and probably Falstaff, Morose, and Volpone (See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 233).
Richard Ohmann first pointed out that “the action [of a play] rides on a train of illocutions” through which the “movement of the characters and changes in their relations to one another” are expressed (quoted in Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama [London and New York: Methuen, 1980], 159).
Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 52–79.
Patrick Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).
Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, 72 ff. See also Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 79ff.
See also Scott McMillin, “The Sharer and His Boy: Rehearsing Shakespeare’s Women,” in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 231–45.
vol. 2 of Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 1650–85, ed. J. E. Spingarn (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 91–96.
See Janette Dillon, “Is There a Performance in this Text?” Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 74–86
Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Paul Werstine, “A Century of ‘Bad’ Shakespeare Quartos,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 310–33. Each have seriously challenged the traditional scenario of how the “bad” quartos were produced through memorial reconstruction.
Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422
Lucas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) have proposed alternative transmission scenarios such as the collaborative reconstruction of the text-as-performed by dictation to a scribe (from memory and/or written parts) by the actors involved— perhaps for a private patron. In this scenario, variants with respect to a “good” (authorial) text should carry traces of how individual actors actually spoke their parts. Although Werstine rightly insists on the difficulty of demonstrating that specific errors/variants originate with the actor and not, say, with the scribe or compositor, the sheer number of the phatic variants I discuss below seems to point overwhelmingly in that direction.
Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 135–46 surveyed actors’ variants in the BBC TV Shakespeare, and found that they matched the types attributed to early modern actors by W. W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) and others.
Cf. Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005), 16: “Shakespeare’s fictional figures undoubtedly have desires and interests that differentiate them one from another,” but “Shakespeare’s stage figures have another set of desires and interests, inseparable from those of the actor. They want the audience to listen to them, notice them, approve their performance, ignore others on stage for their sake. The objectives of these figures are bound up with the fact that they know you’re there.”
Lesley W. Soule, in Actor as Anti-Character (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), Chapter 5, shows brilliantly how the “performative plot” provided in As You Like It for the boy actor’s playful interaction with the audience enters into dialectic with the “mimetic plot” of the cross-dressed Rosalind to produce the richness and complexity of this stage-figure’s “character.”
Scholars usually classify actors’ errors or variants syntactically or semantically, whereas the concept of the phatic function of language (see Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960], 350–77, esp. 355–56), enables us to select out those which serve to stress/maintain/repair communicational contact.
Similar flexibility can be detected in the fluent style of the Mercutio actor and, in Q1 Henry V, of the Fluellen actor. Evidence of habitual improvisation by clowns and other comic actors is, of course, widespread. See David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
For examples of modern players actively constructing their character in collaboration with the audience, see Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare; Escolme, Talking to the Audience; Jonathan Holmes, Merely Players? (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
See Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown; Grote, The Best Actors in the World; Gurr, The Shakespeare Company; Richard Preiss, “Robert Armin Do the Police in Different Voices,” in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 208–27.
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Dodd, W. (2009). Character as Dynamic Identity: From Fictional Interaction Script to Performance. In: Yachnin, P., Slights, J. (eds) Shakespeare and Character. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584150_4
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