Character, Agency and the Familiar Actor

Abstract

Dramatic characters as written, even when they are being read and not staged, imply the bodies of the actors who personate them. Indeed, we cannot discuss the characters in plays without conceding that the words are only one constituent part of the character, and that those words do not (indeed cannot) determine what the non-verbal elements of the character are. The theatrical absence in the book (the bodies of actors and audiences in particular) must therefore be acknowledged in even the most textual of character studies. Character itself must be considered most completely manifested in performance, when the scripted role is embodied—participated in Anthony Dawson’s resonant phrase—by the actor’s moving presence before an audience of his or her peers, regardless of how unsettling such infinite variety may seem for the textual critic who wants to constrain the limits of characterization.¹ Character is a nexus, an intersection of various, even dissonant, perspectives and generic technologies (the reflective processing of the book on the one hand, the kinetic semiotics of the theatrical space on the other), something whose full meaning is generated only when all the constitutive parts are present and engaged in a dynamic symbiosis. The character that takes shape in the minds of the audience members is thus particularly marked by the actor playing the role, by his style, competence, physical bearing, “presence,” gait, voice, charisma and soforth, regardless of whether such things are in any way prescribed by the text which is being played.