Dramatis Personae: Between image and mask.

The stock characters are a group of seven around whom you can build a play at any moment. They are widely used for the standard reactions they elicit:

1) A young lover…A young person in love for the very first time.

2) An old miser…a niggard in youth, a miser in old age.

3) A jealous husband…a man whose wife is idol and whore and whom he can`t control which its going to be, but his wife knows!

4) An intriguing servant. … a man of all places whose ingenious ear is always warping the known truth.

5) A blustering soldier … a has-been warrior whose melodramatic flair for the real horrors of war makes them seem somehow wondrous and contrived with humanity and honour.

6) An ageing beauty … She, definitely not a he, though it could conceiveably be, is a femme fatale gone to the dogs and no she won`t admit it.

7) A pedantic official … A bilious bureaucrat whose appliance to every single comma or letter of the law is sacred, profane and irreversible.

John Downes in 1708 wrote of his experiences in the 17th Century theatre in his book Roscius Anglicanus. He was old and no longer accurate but his jottings are full of details which otherwise would be lost. One such detail is the tradition of actors handing down a part.

‘The Tragedy of Hamlet; Hamlet being performed by Mr Betterton (22), Sir William (having seen Mr Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company act it, who being instructed by the author Mr Shaksepeur) taught Mr Betterton in every particle of it’.

The Sir William is Davenant who claimed in his cups to be the bastard child of Shakespeare. Here is another anecdote on a different role.

‘King Henry the 8th – The part of the King was so right and justly done by Mr Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William, who had it from old Mr Lowen, that had his instructions from Mr Shakespear himself. The author it seems took pains to see his plays acted in a specific manner’.

This post explores the theatrical language of mask and image and show its shifting nature, defying concrete definition. A recent mask workshop I took in Amsterdam ties in with study on theatrical development and archetypes.

My starting point is Caroline Spurgeon’s theory of Shakespeare’s imagery designed to explore his personality, temperament and thought process. Image then is the stuff of language. Its component parts are rhetorical and poetical convention. Spurgeon spurns any discussion of their constituent parts such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and personification for fear of losing sight of the forest for the trees.

There is a distinction that must be made here between spoken and written imagery.
A written image is experienced internally and singularly, a spoken image is of a more exponential base.
The spoken image is subject to translation through a series of filters by the speaker. Language then encounters the masks of humanity. It is this filtering system that lies at the heart of dramatic performance.

The poet, the seer and the prophet all move us in a way impossible to account for rationally and logically. A play is not rational, nor is it logical except in that it chooses to be.

The dramatist is deliberately trying to awaken conflict in the viewer. More basically, without conflict there would be no drama. Drama though is required to be true to life to be truly effective.

Thomas Heywood in his ‘Apology for Actors’ called it,
‘doing it to life, lively and naturally, and appear to you to be the self same man’.

In other words the acting was informal and the language was formal. The discourse of themes and characters are partly blueprinted in the original text and this blueprint is repeatedly given life by the actor and his constructs.

The actor is the filter of our mutual humanity. Bernard Beckerman says,
‘The event the actor shows us is lifelike to the extent that we can conceive a human being engaged in it’.

Shakespeare imbues Hamlet with knowledge of this dichotomy in his speech to the players in Hamlet: 2.2. 540-
‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action’.

Richard Flecknoe in his ‘A Short Discourse on the English Stage‘ reiterates it,

‘An excellent actor still, never falling in his part when he’d done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still unto the heighths’.

The actor ‘realises’ the literary quality of the lines and the shaping of the plot and through him it becomes apparent to the viewer.

Beckerman again,

‘What is essential is that the actor go through a hypothetical action involving some aspect of transformation: narrative, emotive, rational. Humanity is unique among living beings for this need to engage with representational and cathartic events’.

The conclusion appears to be that the subjectivity of performance and performer can only bridge the gap between the subjective objectivity of the observer and writer if there is a semblance of life and reality. Their absence provides a vocabulary of ‘bad’ acting and an unacceptable representation.

Spurgeon is convinced that the function of imagery being fixed in the text means the characters’ interpretation is restricted also by the text. The consequence is that each actor has the same character image of the same role, although an individual method of embodying it in performance.

At the same time she sees the likes and dislikes of the author, plus his observations and interests, associations of thought, attitudes of mind and his beliefs. Her idea of imagery is actually a cumulative process. It is from the accumulation of particular images to the idea of ‘running’ or ‘dominating’ images through all the plays that she makes her distinctions of the man Shakespeare.

There are then different forces at work in any presentation. Each force is also determined to a partial degree.

I started this paper with a list of stock characters derived from the typology of Commedia del Arte. Shakespearean drama is often considered superior to this lowly form, quite wrongly I believe.

The Elizabethan actor certainly owed a great debt to oratory whose substance of external action was natural, lively and familiar. Oratory was an intellectually revisionist process stimulated by a Renaissance embodiment of Classical ideals. The grammar school education taught voice, countenance, life and spirit (vox, vultus, vita and animus) as the basis for oratorical splendour.

The well-known story of Demosthenes illustrates the next step. When asked ‘What was the chief part of an orator? he answered, Action; what next? Action; what next again? Action’.

Thomas Wright wrote in ‘The Passions of the Mind’ in 1604.

‘For action is either a certaine visible eloquence, or an eloquence of the bodie, or a comely grace in delivering conceits, or an externall image of an internall mind, or a shaddow of affections, or three springs which flow from one fountaine, called vox, vultus and vita…Action then universally is a naturall or artificiall moderation, qualification, modification, or composition of the voice, countenance, and gesture of the bodie proceeding from some passion and apt to stir the like’.

Wright saw that the passion in our breast is the fountain and origin of all external actions.

A humoral psychology dominated the passions of the time, in which there are four humours corresponding to the four elements. They are melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine and choleric matched with earth, water, air and fire.

These humours were used to determine a person’s temperament or complexion, with one usually dominant. These humours are the life-giving moisture of the body and they generate the life-principle of vital heat.

Vital heat passes into the body through the liver, i.e. natural heat; through the heart acted on by air from the lungs; and animal spirit acted on through the arteries to the brain, the seat of both the rational and the immortal. A humour could also be putrefied or burnt with excessive heat, which would make it abnormal.

Physiologically the diaphragm is the muscle that separates the lower and upper torso. The heart nestles between the lungs and rests on top of the diaphragm; the stomach, the liver and the kidneys lie just below it. The liver was thought to convert food into liquids known as the humours.

The diaphragm in Greek is called phrenos which means emotion. The diaphragm is a trampoline-like muscle with far reaching consequences. It assists in deep breathing, soft sighing, heaving guffaws and sobs of laughter or tears, as well as projecting the voice at whatever level is deemed necessary.