Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage
Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage
Edited by
Pauline Blanc
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage, Edited by Pauline Blanc This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Pauline Blanc and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-451-0, ISBN (13): 9781847184511
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Pauline BLANC PART I: SELFHOOD IN ITS EMERGENT STAGES The Selfhood of Stage Figures and Their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c.1450-1528) André LASCOMBES .................................................................................. 8 Wit and Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama Jean-Paul DEBAX..................................................................................... 21 Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus Norah Yvonne PHOENIX ......................................................................... 33 PART II: SELFHOOD: A CULTURAL AND LITERARY CONSTRUCT John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe: An Exercise in Tautology: Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction Francis GUINLE ....................................................................................... 50 Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Marie-Hélène BESNAULT ....................................................................... 65 “Cultural Amphibians”: Impersonating the Alien in Stuart Masques Ladan NIAYESH....................................................................................... 86
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Table of Contents
PART III: SELFHOOD AND HAMLET When Anamorphosis Meets Aphanisis: New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet Richard HILLMAN ................................................................................. 102 “They are actions that a man might play”: Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism Peter J. SMITH........................................................................................ 114 PART IV: SELFHOOD AND SIGNATURE Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe François LAROQUE ............................................................................... 130 Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self Danièle BERTON-CHARRIÈRE............................................................ 147 PART V: SELFHOOD AND ROYAL AFFILIATION The Magisterial Hero?: Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5) Greg WALKER ....................................................................................... 164 Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III Catherine LISAK..................................................................................... 182 Editor and Contributor Biographies......................................................... 211
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My deepest thanks go to all who participated in the colloquium, “Selfhood on the English Stage in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries,” from which this collection springs; in particular to the director of the research team of the Department of Languages at the University of Lyon 3, Professor Hughes Didier, who sponsored the event which took place at the university on April 7-8, 2006, and who suggested that all the papers should be in English. I am grateful also to François Ové, the director of the University’s publications department, for permission to reproduce the majority of the essays of this volume, which appeared in the proceedings of the colloquium published in December 2007. Special thanks go to Don Beecher, Michael Hattaway, and Jacques Ramel for their support. Emeritus Senior Lecturer from the neighbouring University of Lyon 2, Jacques Ramel has been especially helpful with the typesetting of the volume, and without his assistance it would not have seen the light of day. For their patience, I thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Amanda Millar for all the work involved in giving this book its final shape. This volume is dedicated to my mother Doreen, and is in memory of my father, Arthur S. Ruberry.
INTRODUCTION PAULINE BLANC
The essays presented in this volume originate from the international two-day colloquium entitled “Selfhood on the English Stage in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries” that I organized at the University of Jean MoulinLyon 3 in April 2006. The contributors are all specialists in the field of early modern English drama working in France and in England. The aim of the colloquium was to explore the matrix from which a plethora of stage selves of the early modern period emerged. Different approaches are used to account for the manner in which that fluid entity, the dramatis persona, was gradually elaborated into a fictional self, as a result of the multifarious shaping influences of early modern discursive and historical forces existing beyond the theatre itself. In the West, the notion of selfhood is generally regarded as being essentially imbricated in surrounding contexts—natural and social, material and human, theological, legal and political. The self lives in exchange, is not forever fixed and can look to models from literature as well as from life for ways to conceive itself. The mechanisms that accord selfhood to stage and to real-life selves are basically the same, as this collection of essays will reveal in its explorations of the elements that fashioned the stage figures which occupied the playing areas of early English drama, in which the dramatic conflict was to develop from a psychomachia between good and evil forces to a striving for selfhood and individuation, for the right to claim to be an “I.” The authors discuss a broad spectrum of stage selves, starting with abstract, little-known figures like Mundus and eventually incorporating more rounded, renowned stage beings like Hamlet. The first section consists of three essays which all reveal how certain representational factors, personal motives and personalizing traits entered into the composition of stage figures to augment or explain what was, in the early drama, a conventional posture and to bring into existence more compelling illusions of a self. The illusion of character is seen to grow
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Introduction
away from abstractly registered Mankinds and Everymans, to incorporate Free Wills and more fully developed characters endowed with a capacity for emotion. André Lascombes, adopting a method based on the conceptual principle underlying Greimas’s models for actantial analysis of fictional constructs, begins by taking the reader onto the allegorical stage of the second half of the fifteenth century to focus on the semantic essence of the Tudor abstract figures, which he likens to “impressive totem poles” that do not represent individual beings, but rather a combination of energies capable of inducing human acts or passions. Jean-Paul Debax contributes his discussion of the way the human self was represented through the image of Mankind as conveyed by a selection of preReformation and contrasting Protestant-biased interludes. The relation between created man and his Creator is expressed in these plays in terms of the degree of independence of the creature, a Christian debate which, dating from Augustine or even earlier, fuelled the controversy concerning Determinism and Freewill and the efficacy of good works in the process of salvation. Debax comes to the conclusion that both Protestant and Catholic attempts at representing the workings of man’s soul failed to give a living or credible account of the self. Yvonne Phoenix, on the other hand, finds a considerable degree of psychological credibility in certain stage figures that appear in two late Tudor interludes, Apius and Virginia (1564) by R. B. and Cambises (1561) by Thomas Preston. Their capacity for emotion, reflection and reasoning, their capacity to evolve and not remain static makes them viable contenders for a place in the portrait gallery of memorable Tudor stage selves. In the second section of the volume, three essays illustrate how literary and cultural influences shaped the construction of even more compelling representations of selfhood. Francis Guinle discusses the way in which selfhood in John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe of 1584 is the result of a projected image found in history as well as in the different source texts about Alexander the Great. Marie-Hélène Besnault explores the numerous cultural and literary sources that helped shape Marlowe’s uniquely delineated Tamburlaine: classical mythology, early English chronicles, travel literature, the exploration of the body in Renaissance fine arts, Renaissance moral philosophy and the dramatist’s critical fascination with a newly developing acquisitive society. The focus then turns to the representation of selfhood in a selection of Stuart court masques. Ladan Niayesh analyses the way the embodiments of alterity and spectacles of foreign otherness in these masques point to the ideological basis of a genre which, contrary to the travel plays in the public theatres, did not roam the
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world but, with a self-serving purpose, brought the world back to Whitehall for a universal tribute to the British crown in a context of nascent imperialism. The barrier between the self and the foreign other becomes porous, as the supposedly alien masquers leave the stage to take partners from the audience, causing the masque to vacillate between a spectacle of incorporation and one of contamination. The third section of the collection is devoted to Hamlet. Richard Hillman studies the relation between the two technical terms and effects called “anamorphosis” and “aphanisis” and the representation of character in early modern drama. His argument focuses on the way anamorphosis and aphanisis enter into a mutually reinforcing dynamic with regard to self-representation and guide the audience in changing its imaginary point of view. Since the system is not hermetically self-contained, intertextual signals may creep into the critical equation and introduce meanings recognized by the audience but beyond the scope of the character’s consciousness. In other words, language and behaviour may cue an audience to view a character as having external rather than internal “origins.” Hillman suggests that what criticism has tended to read as moreor-less incipient “selfhood” may indeed smack of authorial bricolage. The essay develops this idea further as Hillman examines the possible shaping influence on Hamlet of two hitherto-unrecognized sources, both accessible to the original audiences: Histoire de l’estat de France, tant de la république que de la religion, sous le règne de François II (1576) by Louis Régnier de La Planche, and the fifth volume of Histoires tragiques (1572) by François de Belleforest. Peter J. Smith examines the vicissitudes of representing Hamlet, and reveals the differences as well as the similarities between early seventeenth-century notions of representation and contemporary ideas of characterisation. The argument, he contends, is not merely between a postRomantic idea(l) of human and autonomous selves and the New Historicist insistence on the relativity of subjectivity, but between actors on the one hand and literary critics on the other. If critical accounts are teleological (concerned with the manner in which the outcomes of the play are accomplished by or consistent with its characterisation), on the contrary, a performer’s approach is the reverse as s/he explores a way into the role, asking questions relating to their character’s intentions. Smith goes on to demonstrate how directors are able to construct Hamlet’s self/character against the grain of the expectations of a knowing audience and how the characterisation of the Prince of Denmark relies as much on the production as on the script.
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Introduction
In the ensuing section, François Laroque investigates the links between various types of signatures in paintings by Van Eyck, Holbein, Michelangelo and Caravaggio on the one hand, and texts by Donne and Shakespeare on the other. Laroque seeks to uncover possible correspondences between signing as self-portrait and statement of selfhood, and to explain a number of ambiguous statements in poems or plays of the period in which poet and playwright simultaneously assert and erase their presence. Danièle Berton-Charrière focuses on the shaping influence of Cyril Tourneur’s life and personality on the self-centred and self-devoted villains of his The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) and of The Revenger’s Tragedy, which was published anonymously in 1607, but later attributed first to Cyril Tourneur and then to Thomas Middleton. As a spy and double agent, Tourneur had to hide and adopt another self. It is not suggested that his works are autobiographical, but he does leave his imprint on Jacobean stage villains who, like him, constantly conceal their identities by changing their costumes, names, and intentions to fit into the tragic or satirical patterns that Tourneur actually defiles. Berton-Charrière suggests that the treatment of a perverted self necessitated the perversion of the dramatic frame itself. In the last section, two essays focus on the shaping influence of royalty on the dramatic representation of selfhood. Greg Walker discusses the subtle representations of early Tudor politics and identity offered in Rowley’s early Jacobean history play, When You See Me, You Know Me (first printed in 1605). In particular, he looks at the curious mixture of nostalgia and anxiety regarding memories of the reign of Henry VIII that are seemingly manifested in the play. Rowley represents the King as an embodiment of a highly personalised, masculine politics, juxtaposing him with various representations of “indirect” forms of political action which are posited as corrupt, “foreign” or effeminate. The particularly complex form of masculine personal and political identity represented by Henry is discussed in relation to both the complex legacy of the Henrician reformation received in later periods and contemporary anxieties concerning the early reign of James VI and I. Walker points out the various paradoxes implied in this representation of the Henrician legacy— in which tropes of male heroism and “effeminate” tyranny, romantic heroism and practical politics, laddish roistering and sober statesmanship all vie for attention—and addresses the question as to whether they can be reconciled with emerging senses of the dramatic representation of selfhood or whether the play is a harking back to earlier traditions of allegorised characterisation.
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In the last essay, Catherine Lisak focuses on the episodic appearances of the pastoral poetic mode in Shakespeare’s Richard III and discusses the way codified pastoral imagery endorses the cult of the royal self in order to challenge and dismantle the unified, singular, established court image of Elizabeth I and of her father before her. Lisak shows how the play taps into the lyrical imagination of the Elizabethan age, re-energizing several highly-charged voices of the times—Edmund Spenser’s, Philip Sidney’s, and John Lyly’s, as well as the Queen’s own—and calling up past voices of the classical age in order to stage Elizabeth I’s motley of selves in a disquieting manner which engages central questions concerning the representative value of the royal self as “Elisa, Queen of Shepherds.” This collection of essays illustrates the complexity and richness of the matrix which the early modern dramatists drew upon in their endeavours to bring alive a considerable range of compelling stage beings who, in many cases, have managed not only to occupy the space of the stage but also to impress a lasting vision of themselves upon their audiences. The editor of this volume sincerely hopes that its thought-provoking pages may contribute to elucidating reasons why certain early modern stage selves still fascinate the theatre-goer of the twenty-first century.
PART I
SELFHOOD IN ITS EMERGENT STAGES
THE SELFHOOD OF STAGE FIGURES AND THEIR SPECTACULAR EFFICACY IN EARLY ENGLISH PLAYS (C. 1450-1528) ANDRÉ LASCOMBES
Since the volume editor has avoided such anachronistic categories as “characterisation” and “characters,” I will choose, when discussing the intimate nature or “selfhood” of some anthropomorphic agents in the nonreligious English plays from the second half of the fifteenth to the very first decades of the sixteenth century, to classify them as stage types or figures, it being understood that most of them are abstract or allegorical in nature. Once this initial convention is made clear, two more decisions should be made explicit. One is my adoption of a method of analysis founded on the principle that the identity of a dramatic agent (its selfhood) is not primarily determined by its referential links to socio-cultural or historical models, but in more cogent and relevant fashion by its logical and syntactical function(s) within the fictional world to which it belongs. While recognising my methodological debt to the propounder of the theory behind such a view (Greimas’s models for actantial analysis of fictional constructs), I must also make it clear at once that I have never been able usefully to couch any spectacular artefacts of the western mimetic tradition upon the Procrustean bed of that fairly abstract theory, better suited in my opinion to the semantics of linguistic constructs than to those of the theatre. 1 I therefore claim the right to be irrelevant here and to limit my borrowing to the mere conceptual principle already indicated. My third caveat is one which has been, over the years, repeatedly sounded by practically all analysts of the Tudor and pre-modern English drama, from T. W. Craik (1958) and Richard Southern (1973), more recently in two articles, one by David Mills (1983) and one, more specific, by Sarah Carpenter (1983), and forcibly highlighted once again by Greg 1
For an outline of this method see Greimas 1977. For a detailed access to Greimas’s concepts and terminology, consult Courtès and Greimas 1979.
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Walker in his helpful selection of late medieval and early Tudor dramatic material (2000, 250): this is the notion (addressed essentially to today’s reader of theatrical texts) that (s)he should be aware that practically all categories of dramatic agents affect the almost Brechtian stance of “standing slightly outside [their roles], ‘showing’ or presenting [them] to the audience” (Carpenter 1983, 21). As my diagram below tries to suggest, the proximity to the play area of the encircling audience, which no material barrier isolates from the world of fiction, ensures a quality of audience-attention and participation which later conventions will be hard put to preserve. The outer world of actual reality in which the audience go on living and breathing, looking in, or even eating and drinking on some occasions, vies for recognition with the world of fiction. Hence the notinfrequent forays into the outer world of some dramatic agent puncturing the invisible partition, or even (in some bolder cases as in Henry Medwall’s famous Fulgens and Lucres), the intrusion of someone from the outer world, invading and possibly disrupting the fictional programme. In such conditions the aesthetic rule of role presentation comes natural to the generally highly-trained players/singers that operate in the fiction. The only problem remaining at this point is to determine which body of particular plays might make a sufficiently representative bunch, as singled out from a corpus essentially to be defined in negative terms, such as “Early Tudor non-biblical drama,” and which in fact includes a wide variety of forms. My decision has been to welcome a large selection of plays that resort to allegorical impersonation, written and performed between the two termini indicated as my corpus of reference, uneasily attempting to take into account a sufficient variety of cases while concentrating on the fairly homogeneous ensemble of household plays. Now, actively taking up the subject, I shall make a few brief remarks about the main characteristics of the corpus. In a relatively short period of time (1470-1528) it may be seen that the approximate score of plays here considered easily fall into sub-groups which have much in common and several distinguishing features. One of the traits each of them exhibits (to varying degrees of course) is a love of disputation and debate, both inherited from the medieval and humanist traditions. The argument may be moral, such as the odyssey of the salvation of the soul in the Christian perspective, as debated in the anonymous plays The Pride of Life, The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Everyman. It may also be of a moral/political nature, either reconstructing the doctrine of kingship and social authority (as in John Skelton’s Magnificence and in Fulgens and Lucres), or redefining the relationships between the estates in the new
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The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
context of mercantile power (as in Gentleness and Nobility 2 ). It may even be an issue of intellectual nature and more general scope, as in Rastell’s The Nature of the Four Elements, or again a renewed disquisition under the light of humanism about the old Petrarchan conflicts between rights of reason, rules of social order and the lawless powers of passion, as in Fulgens and Lucres again. In all cases, the general adaptability of the Interlude has long been recognised as its founding feature, one that also ensures an evolutionary capacity which, in David Bevington’s view (1975, 2), has made of that Tudor form the probable basis for so many later elaborations in Renaissance drama. It is no great wonder therefore that a dramatic structure, at once so traditional and so ready to adjust its varying semantic substance to new needs, should also favour the preservation of impersonation habits inherited from the traditional models of the biblical epos (the civic cycles) and from the fantastic romantic fabrications around heroic models of saints (saints’ plays and miracles). The plays here considered may well bend to their new ends the dramatic types and figures inherited from the traditional corpus. Nevertheless, such dramatic agents are in their essential structure recognisable heirs to the former models. For these two reasons, the evolutionary quality of the type of play discussed and the capacity for adaptation of its dramatic types, I shall use a very basic canonical programme of actantial/actorial analysis derived from Greimas’s lesson to sketch out the functional model of these dramatic types. Such a basic pattern offers a design of only five or six cardinal positions, thereby potentially applicable to all the key figures encountered in the plays considered. The following provisional descriptive tool may enable us to see better into the functional activity of these abstract or allegorical types: Key figure 1: DESTINATOR (implicitly or explicitly present) Key figure 2: THE HERO / LEADER Key figure 3: THE ADJUVANT(S) Key figure 4: THE ANTAGONIST(S) Key figure 5: WITNESS / COMMENTATOR / MEDIATOR / FIGURE OF FUN 3 Key figure 6: THE AUDIENCE
2
This play has been attributed to John Heywood, but also to John Rastell. This complex figure, endowed with flexible and multiple functions, which has been studied from different angles by various scholars (see Happé 1964 and 1981, and Debax 1987), is best left out of the present essay as functionally too different from the other major figures.
3
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I must simply point out that each of the polar positions charted in the suggested pattern is a mere occupational pre-orientation, inclining the titular figure to postures and acts which are to be expected from the said functional role. But such a pre-determination rarely prevents the figure from enacting for itself a functional existence more precisely adapted to the actual fictional context. It therefore follows that the said figure may develop an intensity, magnitude, or role of its own, far in excess of the potentialities of the original functional outline. This explains why the various allegorical characters in plays ranging from Everyman to Magnificence will be so notably different, depending on the dramatic issues and the tone of each play. With these various recommendations in mind we may now embark on our study.
In Search of the Selfhood of the Tudor Allegorical/Abstract Figure The first important question about those stage figures’ selfhood can now be addressed, even though the examination will be restricted to a few cases only in significant plays. It concerns of course each of these figures’ semantic essence, the locus which can be determined as the true source of its own self in a drama deeply dedicated to the argumentative and to the exemplary. While there is no question of what Humanum Genus, or Everyman really stands for in The Castle or in Mankind, nor about what is represented by Titivillus in the latter play, or even who Jupiter is in Heywood’s Play of the Wether, it is bafflingly difficult to get any deeper than this first fundamental notion: Humanum Genus is frail humanity seen in a Christian perspective; Titivillus is the archetypal image of absolute Evil; Jupiter, as the magnificent sun-like symbol of absolute power at the head of the state, obviously stands for King Henry VIII. But even if the detail of the text will yield scraps of additional information confirming that immediate identification, little informational light is finally added to the initial notion. It is useless to gloss at any length here the trite remark, a thousand times repeated, about the narrative or dramatic impersonations of the allegorical mode: those larger-than-life figures, practically reduced to one eminent semantic feature endlessly reverberated, seem impenetrable structures of a glassy essence that brings the critic to the brink of despair. The only discernible consequence of this is the incredible vehemence of meaning which that semantic elementariness inevitably entails. These two
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The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
tightly correlated features are the traditional ones that emerge in critical commentary about those king-size creatures. King-size indeed for the additional reason that, in such a simple programmatic pattern, with so few actantial positions to hold, each of these figures looms large, more threatening than benign, even when it embodies some sympathetic force held in readiness to assist the hero. But these two features do not help in any way to see better into the crux of the allegorical/abstract figures’ inner nature. To pore over the problem more closely, I should no doubt return to my initial remark about their basic function, and focus on the incredible banality of their semantic content. In terms of information quantity, these figures carry a meaning which is at once fictionally enormous and intellectually tenuous. Whether they suggest a debate about the Christian ideology, or the doctrine of authority and kingship, or some other topic of circumstantial value at the time of performance, the notional content which they dramatize is a tissue of commonplaces whose interest essentially seems to lie, rather than in their novelty, in their exemplarily perspicuous formulation. In other words, remembering that we are in the theatre, it would seem that those enormous figures rather serve a memorial, truly gnomic function, like buoys marking out an ideological sailing-path clear of reefs and shallows. Or, for a more theatrical metaphor, they are loudspeaking monuments issuing warnings and statements of policy for the benefit of the assembled audience-congregation, or, as Walker has convincingly argued, of their rulers. 4 Interpreted as resonant foci of meaning, redundantly mirroring an explicitly traditional lore to congregation-like audiences, these unreadable figures suddenly acquire a meaning much in excess of the dusty, paperthin existence to which a long critical tradition has confined them. Like impressive totem poles, each bearing some roughly hewn feature for his semantic signature, they serve the function of the immemorial maskfigures speaking or dancing in the ritual plays of some traditional cultures. But one last remark is in order here to help us see them for what they really are. In our culture, which has little use for such ritual masks, the original meaning of the word “mask” has been perverted and means no more for us today than the diminutive leather or cardboard covering worn over human faces within the area of play or delusion. In contradistinction, the totem poles of African or Amerindian tribes, or the ritual masks played 4
See Walker for a study of the links between early Tudor drama and the strategies of political advice (1988 and 1991).
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in ceremonial plays of the Balinese theatre cover no face at all; each of them is rather like the surface of a being devoid of individual lineaments. Far from reproducing the imagistic replica of a human face, each is modelled, deeply lined or distorted, into an other-than-human (ritual or allegorised) body featuring a set of cosmic, psychic or supernatural forces or dynamic qualities. Thereby they do not represent some individual being, but a combination of the energies capable of inducing human acts or passions (Evil, Envy, Luxury, Fright, Anger, Murder, Death, etc). The word “energy” should actually be taken here in the full sense of the Greek original, enargeia, which precisely refers to the violent impact on sight of a lit-up object. 5 Such energy, stored up as it were in the maskfigure as in a kind of well, is ready to be unleashed when activated by the staging. It is clear to all that such a notion and use of the theatrical figure gradually perished in Europe with the arrival of the bourgeois theatre, only to be reawakened at the very end of the nineteenth century when the epistemological forces at work in the Western world, including a new attraction for the values of primitivism and the need for a political theatre amid the growth of world-wide propaganda, brought it back to embody the awesome powers of political ambition and human perversity. But, during the in-between period, criticism, primarily adjusted to reading audiences, came to regard those potent wells of energy as imagistic and linguistic structures conceived to be read on the page only, and it therefore lamented the lifeless, dusty quality of the dramatic allegorical tradition. Today, when the various European attempts at theatrical renovation (even based on widely different premises) have favoured the revival of such stage figures, it is possible to conceive again that they may have displayed in the play-area of the Tudor age an exceptional theatrical virtue, actually far in excess of what the imagistic individual character can offer. 6 Logically, my 5
See the entry “enargeia” in Bailly’s dictionary (1894, 670), and in his “Table of Greek Roots” (2202), primarily relating its base element to “argos”, “bright, litup,” rather than to “ergon,” “activity.” I am obliged to Pauline Blanc for informing me of Peter Schwenger’s discussion of the term and of his quotation of Quintilian’s corroborating reading of it (Institutio Oratoria, 8.3.62) as referring to a “framing effect” capable of lighting up and throwing into relief a linguistic passage or element (1999, 102). 6 Among other signs, one may mention the world-wide prevailing masks of political propaganda, such as the Russian Bear and the American Eagle during the years of Cold War confrontation, and also note the fitful return to the nonpsychological character in plays by different dramatists, eminent or otherwise, written or defended by various theoricians, from Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud or
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The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
essay should now try to show how the mask-like figures of the early Tudor stage, exploiting their enargeia to the full, vocally and visually impose the spectacle of what they represent. This exploitation is achieved through the three closely intertwined means at their disposal: a) their physical appearance and acting; b) their oracular activity throughout the play; c) the name by which they go. Since it is practically impossible to consider the first two separately, I shall, in the space allotted, quote a few instances of their interaction in one or two of the plays listed. That material might and should be expanded at leisure. As to the third energy-factor (the name), I shall briefly suggest how some of the great allegorical figures answer the awe-inspiring question which Juliet puts to her enemy-lover: what is in a name?
The visual and auditory resonance of the Mask-like figure or icon I shall provide here just a few instances from two representative plays, one belonging to the late Medieval tradition performed in the round (The Castle of Perseverance), the other to the effervescent new Tudor mode (Skelton’s Magnificence), to be played in a hall. In the former play, most readers/spectators today will feel assaulted by the strange anti-naturalistic mode in which all prime stage figures present themselves. In turgid truculent vocatives, launched at the audience as much and even more than at his co-agonists, each of the four main protagonists (Mundus/the World, Belyal/The Devil, Caro/The Flesh and Mankind/the puny hero) illustrates that address-technique. Monopolising the general attention from the height of the scaffold where he is enthroned (or from the central Castle for Mankind), each of them in turn cries out his own pre-eminence, as actor almost subsuming his own actant. Thus, like all medieval tyrants voicing in geographical litanies the extent of their empires (see The Castle, 15782), Mundus is the whole of the world’s space; similarly, Belyal is the irate violence of conquest and destruction (196-216); and Caro the complacent blossoming out of the flesh (235-74). As noted earlier, their semantic narrowness goes hand in hand with hyperbolic violence, expressing itself in the extravagant piling up of things and sounds Bertold Brecht down to Valère Novarina (e.g. his play L’espace furieux, and complementarily some of the essays collected in Devant la parole, particularly the first three [1999, 13-88], which summarize his meditations on theatrical speech, space and impersonation).
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representing the speaker (the accumulation of first person singular pronouns “I” in lines 164-78, but also the thronging of verbs expressing frantic activism, as in lines 196-208). Another feature adds to the semantic density of those soliloquised addresses, which in fact are furious fits of self-prosopography, literally glutted with what I must call “integrated stage directions.” These, used as mirroring replicas of the actor’s image, proclaim the various semiotic elements composing the spectacular speaking figure: its complexion, gait, clothing, gestures, and of course its voice. Much has been written about Pilate’s voice in the cycle plays; more should be said about the thunderous organ of the mask-like icons, especially (but not only) in the early masterpiece morality called The Castle of Perseverance. More interestingly, the orchestral quality of such dramatic language efficiently combining the diverse functions of addressmaking, action-depicting and specular reverberation of the actor’s or actant’s physical reality, deserves more space and attentive study, and so does its possible link with the nature of the play-area. Lastly, one more remark may prove useful for an evaluation of their spectacular virtue: some of the semes highlighted in the icon-like figures violently clash with each other. For instance, the pompous clothing of the three rulers, a constant sign of their supreme majesty, utterly jars with Belyal’s furious anxiety, or with the brutal disruptions of mood in Caro’s speech. Such contradictions seem to point to an intimate schizoid trend in these gigantic egos, an intimation of their latent monstrosity. But more importantly, in spectacular terms, such discrepancies feed to the spectator a referential uncertainty, a superposition of duplicitous images. And this eminently theatrical phenomenon (which I once dubbed “theatre diaphora” 7 ) ensures potent effects in reception. If we now turn to the later play, Magnificence, we will see how the importance of the vocal and the discursive elements is just as paramount, though the effects created are very different. I shall borrow here from the acute estimate of the play-as-linguistic-construct which Greg Walker gives in his introductory lines. Here, we may note, the dialogical structure prevails, with a constant turnover of brief, acute, sometimes murderous exchanges, and the play, Walker remarks, also exhibits an astonishing aptitude for constant word-play, use of proverbs and sententiae, by the “goodies” mostly, or references to popular wisdom by the “baddies,” a 7
For a tentative definition of the nature, mechanisms and effects of “theatre diaphora” and the techniques of “ostension,” see Lascombes 1979, 1989, 1992, and 1994 .
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The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
verbal dexterity further echoed by an artful variety of the verse forms. Walker specifically notes how the arrival of disorder with the promotion of Fansy at court coincides with “the collapse of the ordered four-stress rhyme royal stanza,” superseded by “a bravura array of forms” signifying chaos, until the return of order and virtue restores the former measure (2000, 350). As in the former play, however, the spectacular elements, clothing, gait, tone of voice are closely underlined, powerfully contributing to impose upon our imagination the visual/acoustic icon of such malevolent figures as Counterfeit Countenaunce, Crafty Conveyaunce, Clokyd Colusyon or Courtly Abusyon.
What is in the name of the mask-like icon?: the allegorical figure and onomasia 8 Nearly all the characters in The Castle of Perseverance (thirty-one out of a total of thirty-five) are given what the Anglo-Saxon critics call “labelnames,” which is preferable to the more pedantic but more official Greek term of “aptronyms” used in classical repertories, and which could be translated as “names that cannot fly away” (Cuddon 1982, 53). The term underlines the tightness of the link between name and bearer. Though critics at large seem to have neglected the importance of such a connection, audiences are, more than academics, alive to the stamp of spectacular enargeia with which the allegorical character is endowed. What follows is largely derived from the intuitive remarks of the few authors who have sensed the aesthetic value of the link, even if it remains a superficial exploration of the ways in which the onomastics of namegiving efficiently contributes to consolidate the actorial/actantial mask in most allegorical figures. To keep to essentials, I shall simply refer to the self-presentations already mentioned: the three pivotal Vice Figures in The Castle, Mundus, Belyal and Caro. Going back to their highly stylised, frantic ejaculations, we note how the first few lines of each address by the three princes are blurted out in heavily alliterated lines whose hammering effect is amplified by the systematic use of accented words which all begin with the same sound-letter, so that this initial letter further reverberates the initial sound-letter of the figure’s English name. Thus:
8
See Bailly 1894, and The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) s.v. “onomasia,” or “name-giving.”
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MUNDUS: Worthy wytys in all this werd wyde, By wylde-wode wonys and every weye-went, (157-58)
One will no doubt sense how the combination of devices reverberating the initial onomastic phoneme, acting like a stamp of vocal tyranny, affixes the phonological shadow of the princely being upon every single aspect of the geographical reality which the lines evoke, and which in fact features an aspect of the very body of princely Mundus. The same trick is repeated, with an additional effect, when Belyal enters (lines 196-99). Here, the combination applies to the four lines as follows, amplifying first the Infernal Prince’s name, Satanas; then, his innermost selfhood, Diabolus; and thirdly, the characteristic features of the evil spirit confined in Hell (“champe,” “chafe,” “chocke,” “boystows,” “bold,” “Belyal the blake” are all terms expressing the indomitable violence of the fallen angel). Belyal sits all this while on the scaffold of the devil, together with Pride, Envy, and Wrath: Now I sytte, Satanas, in my sad synne, As deuyl dowty, in draf as a drake. I champe and I cha[f]e, I chocke on my chynne, I am boystows and bold, as Belyal the blake. (196-99)
We can note in passing how the text, here again, is one continuous stagedirection depicting the attitudes, gestures, mood and even black face and apparel of the infernal figure, and how such deictic superfluity actually controls and reinforces the combined linguistic and visual enargeia of the speaking and acting figure. May I add that this is not confined to the arrival of the three grand Vices, but will be repeated upon the entrance of lesser characters, particularly the ancillary vices serving the three princes. On each occasion, the speech, monopolised by the main figure, functions as onomastic synecdoche of the all-powerful speaker. In so doing, the writer, by instinct or science, resorts to the fundamental rule of focussing and condensing, a basic potent trick which jointly ostends actor, action and idea across the play-area. This form of onomastic highlighting, intimately welded to the dramatic text, raises the label-name to the status and efficiency of a primordial seme feeding its energy onto the actorial mask. One instance of this occurs in the play (in lines 2968-94) when Humanum Genus, about to die, learns that he must deliver his possessions to Garcio, a boy. Garcio, as presumptive heir, mentions his name: “I-Wot-Nevere-
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Whoo” (a nameless Nobody). Underlining the irony of disinheritance, this apparent disclaimer of identity also symbolically shows that the character’s name is the ultimate selfhood of the actor, its real anima. And this is not an accidental occurrence in one particular play, but a constant factor in the spectacular fabrication and operation of the abstract/allegorical icon throughout the period. In the morality and interlude tradition the power accorded to the practice of name-calling or insult is only equated by the convention of onomastic disguise which effects a change of identity more efficiently than any clothing. 9 To conclude, two remarks may help understand the influence of onomasia on the way the allegorical figure works in the theatre. In the naturalistic/imagistic tradition devoted to the mimesis of the realities of the here and now, the mimetic presence of anthropomorphic agents (the king, the lover, the killer) sufficiently legitimates and makes credible their theatrical representation. But such a presence clearly does not suffice when the focus of the dramatic agon is no longer the interplay of socio-cultural forces, but mostly centres upon the transcendent values founding the culture. Then, the clusters of meaning embodied by anthropomorphic characters, operating in a diegesis which is mythical by nature, must be housed otherwise and naturally go back for their roots to the sources of language, where onomasia reigns as the voice of creative power, as shown in the Biblical account of the Creation of the World. Another, more linguistic reason may be called upon. Jean Piaget, to describe the linguistic phenomenon of assimilation/accommodation, draws a pattern 10 which Groupe µ borrow from him in the account they give of the uses of the concrete and the abstract in lexical practice. 11 According to them, that pattern highlights the fact that allegorical names, whether derived from monosemic lexemes (such as Voluptas or Stultitia), or from substantives designating concrete realities (Mundus or Garcio in The Castle), are indifferently used to cover the two-way mental traffic from the concrete to the abstract and the reverse. In either case, the allegorical name always seems to be posted on the outskirts of the two modalities of thinking, and 9
Such widely-known plays as Mankind or Magnificence will easily provide illustrations of this. 10 On such questions, see the studies of Parain (1942, chapters 2-3) and of Piaget (1972, 63-75). 11 See Groupe μ 1982, 99-102. (In tribute to Aristotle and R. Jakobson, six scholars from the Centre d’Études Poétiques de l’Université de Liège have chosen to publish their collective work on rhetoric under the symbolic name of “Groupe μ.”)
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is therefore perfectly suited to the ambiguous figure called allegorical personification. Indeed, is the apparent paradox that the stage-figure on the pre-modern stage may be no more than a function (theatrically boosted by physical presence, verb and name) so very different a proposition from the way in which the supposedly realistic “character” (meant to embody a psychic and a social individual) is shown to work by critics of the drama?
Works Cited Primary Sources Anon. 1972. The Pride of Life. In Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé, 39-62. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. ———. 1980. Everyman. Ed. Geoffrey Cooper and Christopher Wortham. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. ———. 1997. Mankind. Ed. Peter Meredith. Alumnus Playtexts in Performance. Leeds: University of Leeds. ———. 1979. The Castle of Perseverance. In Four Morality Plays, ed. Peter Happé, 75-210. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. [Heywood, John?]. 1979. Gentleness and Nobility. In Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton, 97-124. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Heywood, John. 1991. The Play of the Wether. In The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Richard Axton and Peter Happé, 183-215. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Medwall, Henry. 1980. Fulgens and Lucrece. In The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed. Alan H. Nelson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Rastell, John. 1979. The Nature of the Four Elements. In Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton, 29-68. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Skelton, John. 1908. Magnificence. Ed. R. L. Ramsay. EETS, ES, 98. Oxford: University Press.
Secondary Sources Bailly, Anatole. 1894. Dictionnaire Grec-Français. Paris: Hachette. Bevington, David, ed. 1975. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carpenter, Sarah. 1983. “Morality-Play Characters”: Reports on Productions. Medieval English Theatre 5.1: 18-28. Courtès, J. and A. J. Greimas. 1979. Sémiotique, Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.
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Craik, T. W. 1958. The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume and Acting. Leicester: University Press. Cuddon, J. A. 1982. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Debax, Jean-Paul. 1987. Le théâtre du Vice ou la comédie anglaise. Thèse d’État, Paris 4-Sorbonne. Greimas, A. J. 1977. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse. Groupe µ. 1982. Rhétorique Générale. Paris: Seuil. Happé, Peter. 1964. The “Vice” and the Folk Drama. Folklore 75: 161-93. ———. 1981. The “Vice” and the Popular Theatre, 1547-80. In Poetry and Drama, 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, ed. Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond, London: Methuen. Lascombes, André. 1979. Culture et théâtre populaire en Angleterre à la fin du Moyen Âge. Thèse d’État, Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. ———. 1989. La fonction théâtrale des personnages du Mal. Evil on the English Stage: Medieval English Theatre 11: 11-25. ———. 1992. Formes théâtrales du trope de syllepse. In Rhétoriques du texte et du spectacle, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies, 66-80. Paris: Belles-Lettres. ———. 1994. Pour une rhétorique du spectaculaire: notes sur l’ostension. Spectacle in Early Theatre, England and France: Medieval English Theatre 16: 10-24. Mills, David. 1983. Characterisation in the English Mystery Cycles. Medieval English Theatre 5:1: 5-17. Novarina, Valère. 1999. Devant la parole. Paris: POL. Parain, Brice. 1942. Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage. Idées. Paris: Gallimard. Piaget, Jean. 1972. Essai de logique opératoire. Paris: Dunod. Schwenger, Peter. 1999. Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Southern, Richard. 1973. The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare. London: Faber. Walker, Greg. 1988. John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. Plays of Persuasion: Dramatic Politics at the Court of Henry the Eighth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. 2000. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. London: Blackwell.
WIT AND WILL AND THE COHESION OF THE HUMAN SELF IN THE ENGLISH MORAL DRAMA JEAN-PAUL DEBAX
Fashioning implies action and change. And fashioning of the self, that is of a human being, and very often of one’s own self, is the most mysterious and perilous undertaking imaginable. It is probably because of a deep-rooted feeling of his own imperfection that man has invented in the story of the creation of his species, a fall (the so-called original sin), which is in fact not seen as consubstantial with his nature, but only an accident in his early history. Adam’s disobedience was a personal decision which totally upset the divine order of things. What is surprising is that this world-shaking upheaval was interpreted as the foundation of a fixed and permanent relationship between the different orders of the universe. But this disobedience was neither motiveless nor totally voluntary, since it was done, as it were, under pressure: a similar fall was imagined to serve as a model for Adam’s gesture, the fall of the brightest among the angels, Lucifer. The difference is that Lucifer was not egged on to his rebellion by any outside influence, but only by his own perverted will, the contemplation of himself instead of the permanent adoration eternally due to God only. Furthermore, this Luciferian rebellion accounts for the division of the universe between the two cities, heaven and earth (civitas Dei et civitas terrena), seen as high and low, since the metaphor used to describe them was that of the Fall. The usual explanation is that Lucifer did not turn to evil, since there was no evil available in the world created by God, but that the very fact that his will was no longer directed towards a higher good, the Creator, but to a lower good (his own self, a mere creature) turned his will into a wicked will. This explanation, mainly due to Saint Augustine and known through Boethius’s Consolationes, was to
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Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama
be accepted throughout the Middle Ages. 1 And so, Freewill and Divine Harmony, also known as Reason, are lodged together in the superior level of the medieval three-tiered conception of the Microcosm, and naturally opposed as antithetic tendencies. The change of Reason to Wit creates a phonetic similarity, and thus constitutes a sort of paronomasia, Wit and Will, which knits the two terms together. Thus, for the Christian tradition, man appears as a flawed being in a flawed world, and seems to be defined by a permanent conflict between these two opposed and incompatible principles. In this conflict where is the self? It is not surprising that this conception of Mankind should have inspired such a poem as the Psychomachia, famous throughout the Middle Ages and emblematic of the medieval man’s view of himself. The success of the Psychomachia raises two important points: the function of allegory, and the existence of a battle within the mind of man. First question: are the allegorical characters of the Psychomachia exterior influences, representing abstract principles orientating man’s choices in life, or are they the manifestations of inside feelings or tendencies? Are they the causes or the effects? This ambiguity will remain as long as the device of the allegory is used. The battle within man’s mind entails the passivity of the individual who, to put it in military terms, is rather seen as the battlefield than the control room. Two texts of a slightly earlier period than the dramatic corpus we are going to consider below will illustrate the commonly accepted value attributed to the individual will towards the end of the fifteenth century. The first is a short poem contained in scraps of vellum used to repair a missal printed circa 1507, a sort of allegorical romance, which refers to itself as a “long gest.” This poem was named by its editor The Conflict of Wit and Will. It is the story of the battle between the rational and the irrational “parts” within the soul, which reminds us of the homiletic allegory Sawles Warde, in which the Lord of the Castle called Wit, with the help of his four daughters (the four Cardinal Virtues), has to moderate the whims of his capricious wife, Will, and her servants, the Five Senses. In the end, Fear of Death brings her back to more holy thoughts. In The Conflict, the battle between “Wille the Wick” and “Witte the Wise Kynge” 1
“When the evil will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil—not because that is evil to which it turns but because the turning itself is wicked. Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil, but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an inferior thing.” On the City of God, XII.6, quoted by R. W. Hanning 1973, 46n9.
