Abstract
According to Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors (1612), theater takes place in a place between—between the performance and the spectator as the above suggests, but also, as he elsewhere makes clear, between the performer and the performed; or, to use his words, between the “personater”[sic] and the “person personated” (B4r; C4r). The challenge, however, is to establish how persons were conceptualized, and by what process the person personated became, in a sense that both early moderns and we today might understand, a character. In addition, if it is, as Heywood suggests, spectators’ eyes that make a play bad or good, how are we to describe the contribution of the spectator to a discussion of character on the early modern stage?
Playes are in vse as they are vnderstood,
Spectators eyes may make them bad or good.
(F2v)1
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Notes
Edward Burns, Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 2.
Thomas J. Csordas, “Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the-world,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–24, explores the applicability of the Merleau-Ponty model to other disciplines, especially anthropology and ethnology. I see the present essay as working in a similar mode.
Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2002), 55.
Monika M. Langer, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Guide and Commentary (Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press, 1989), xv.
André G. Bourassa, “Personnage: History, Philology, Performance,” trans. Jennifer Drouin, in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 84–85.
David Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 225. Ironically, etymologically speaking it is the French word personnage which, according to Bourassa, “means more than ‘mask’ since its complete source is personam agere, that is, to make act, to manage the mask, which refers to agens, the agent or actor,” which carries the sense I am attributing to the early modern potential of the word “character.” In English, however, the word “personage,” in the early modern period as in our own, is closer to the word person and therefore, unlike the early modern sense of the word “character”, refers to an individual who might exist in the world.
Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 56.
B.L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting. 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) 1. Joseph, 3–5, even goes sofar as tofind in Hamlet’s description of the Player’s Hecuba speech the equivalent of Stanislavski’s “magic ‘if’.” While Hecuba is nothing to the Player, nor she to him, the Player has been able to “force his soul so to his own conceit” and in doing so produce Hecuba’s emotion.
Roach, Player’s Passion, 42; Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 58.
Robert Weimann, “The Actor-Character in ‘Secretly Open:’ Action Doubly Encoded Personation on Shakespeare’s Stage,” in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 177–93.
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Quotations from Hamlet are from this edition.
John Marston, Antonio and Mellida. The First Part. Ed. G.K. Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. and ed. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 18–19.
Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (Lyon, 1602; repr., New York: Garland, 1976).
John Bulwer, Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644), ed. James W. Cleary (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 6.
W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 110.
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 2nd edition, ed. J. R. Mulryne (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), xi.
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© 2009 Leanore Lieblein
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Lieblein, L. (2009). Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Creation of Early Modern Character. In: Yachnin, P., Slights, J. (eds) Shakespeare and Character. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584150_7
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