V. THE EFFECT OF THE GLOBE PLAYS UPON THE ACTING
The drama that appeared on its stage is the single most important witness to the acting style of the Globe company. Through this drama the general style of acting, which was a product of the conditions I have outlined heretofore, became refined into the specific style of the company. The wide gap between the quality of the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays in the repertory makes the delineation of this style extremely difficult. The differences are those of subtlety, insight, and penetration. Probably the acting wavered between the more obvious requirements of the non-Shakespearean plays and the modulations of the Shakespearean.
For the actor an important part of the drama was the distancing of the action. Almost every popular pre-Globe play is distanced in time or place or both. Plays such as Orlando Furioso and A Knack to Know an Honest Man are set in France and Italy respectively. The Troublesome Reign of King John and Fair Em are set back in English history, the latter to the days of William the Conqueror. Plays such as Selimus and The Battle of Alcazar are set back in time and place, to Islamic Turkey and Moorish Africa. Sometimes the action was placed in a mythical or semimythical land. But only three of the pre-Globe plays are set in London. Two are moralities of Robert Wilson, Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London. In these the allegory distances the action. Only A Warning for Fair Women is placed in contemporary England. Its realism, however, is somewhat removed by a morality framework in which Tragedy as a presenter moralizes upon the sins of lust.
This practice is followed by the Globe plays. Of the Shakespearean plays The Merry Wives of Windsor is usually thought to picture contemporary England. However that may be, the action is actually placed in the days of Henry IV or Henry V. Falstaff’s presence and Page’s references to Fenton’s escapades with the young prince identify the period. The compliment bestowed at the end of the play upon the worthy owner of Windsor Castle is anachronistic. Of the non-Shakespearean plays, four may be considered as taking place in contemporary England. Three of these are prodigal son plays, still close to the morality theme. The fourth, Every Man Out of His Humour, is clearly set in England, as the scene at Paul’s shows. But the characters have Italianate names. The effect is one of a double image, a removed intimacy.
The characters who are distanced are also typed. Most of them fall into one of several categories: the tyrant, the tyrant-father, the gull, the beloved, the lover, and so on. Usually they stem from generic types. Unlike the practices in the commedia dell’arte where the characteristics of the stock figures dictated the plot, in the English drama, as I have shown in [Chapter Two], the story dictated the handling of character. The types that existed were a function of the story. That is why the generic types did not develop into stock characters. As long as the story could wrench a character as it required, the stock type could not become solidified.
In Shakespeare the generic types are blended and enriched. An examination of all the characters in the Globe Shakespearean plays reveals the presence of a definite group of related characters. They are more than the repeated figures of any author’s art, for they hark back to the traditional types. The most frequently recurring and most sharply marked are the lovers, villains, clowns, gulls, loyal advisers, faithful friends, chaste maids, faithful wives, tyrant fathers, tyrant princes, and politic princes. One could go on multiplying subsidiary classes of characters as Polonius does classes of drama. Though certain types, such as the faithful servant (Adam, Provost in Measure for Measure, Corin in As You Like It), recur with some frequency, many do not. One type, the elderly grande dame, has only two representatives: the Countess in All’s Well, and Volumnia in Coriolanus. Nor do the types recur in the same form. Horatio is the faithful friend in Hamlet; Kent is also the faithful friend, but he has something of the court adviser in him too. From this it follows that the types are not differentiated clearly. Antony in Julius Caesar has some of the faithful friend in him, but as his character develops, he reveals something of the Machiavellian politician, and in battle shows himself the honest soldier. Furthermore, the same generic type may show strong differences in temperament. Lafeu, the court adviser of All’s Well, is a merry gentleman; Escalus, the same type of adviser in Measure for Measure, is sober and serious. They are both members of the same type whose quality is dictated by the function that it performs in the story. But the full range of the character does not remain within the confines of the types.
The combination of distanced action and generic type served to romanticize and symbolize the Shakespearean stage figures. No matter how reminiscent of a contemporary Londoner a character may have been, the audience reposed in the fiction that he was an Italian, a Roman, or an ancestor. With the Elizabethan’s insularity, the fiction took on imaginative reality and tinted the action of the plays with romance. The characters of this romance, who had a generic base, were not only individuals but also symbols of the host of kings, lovers, and clowns who peopled the world. Again, this is a reflection of the Elizabethan habit of seeing similarities rather than differences in human behavior. The interaction of these two qualities alone would have elevated the action into a wondrous world of imagination, untouched by real experience. But, as we shall see, other elements were at work.
Within the broad boundaries of the generic type, individualization of character took place. But in what manner was this accomplished by the dramatists, particularly by Shakespeare? Today we place great stress on motivation. Our plays constantly search the past to explain the present. In A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche is revealed and drawn in terms of her tortured past and her unfulfilled desires. In the Elizabethan period, as we found, there was little awareness of specific motivation. The plays reflect this condition. The motivation is usually generalized. Viola wishes to love and be loved, and Sir Toby wants to have an easy life. Antony wishes to love Cleopatra, Coriolanus to satisfy his pride. But little attention is directed to probing or developing these motivations. At the conclusion of these plays we do not understand the motives of these characters one whit better. Motivation is often assumed, as in Lear’s partition of his kingdom, or promised for the future, as in Othello when Iago persuades Roderigo to kill Cassio. In the same type of character there is little distinction in motivation. The motives for Horatio’s loyalty to Hamlet are no different from the motives for Kent’s loyalty to Lear. In the prodigal son plays, the motivations for the prodigality are barely noted. It is considered a condition to which all youth is liable. Motives for any act were so often assumed that they could not have demanded concentrated attention by the actors.
Another way in which the modern playwright individualizes character is through speech and gesture. This does not seem to have been a regular practice at the Globe playhouse. Here and there are hints that status may have been indicated by carriage and accent. In As You Like It Orlando questions “Ganymede” about his life.
Orl. Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so
removed a dwelling.
Ros. I have been told so of many. But indeed an old religious uncle
of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland
man.
[III, ii, 359-363]
In these externals the Elizabethans maintained a strict decorum. Yet the play does not reveal any difference between Rosalind’s and Corin’s speech insofar as breeding is concerned. References to fineness in speech, as in Twelfth Night (I, v, 311), place the character in a class rather than make him unique. Only in a few cases can we be certain that characteristic speech habits are used to individualize. The Hosts of The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Merry Devil of Edmonton have their tricks of speech; so does Corporal Nym. Edgar as Poor Tom alters his speech as an aid to his disguise. Other less certain instances are Osric in Hamlet and Thersites. But more important characters are not drawn in that way. Dogberry and Elbow both use malapropisms, but the characters are not distinguished by them. In fact, the linguistic twist tends to obscure the differences of character and emphasizes the likeness in type. The distinction between the two comes from Dogberry’s fatuous self-confidence and condescension in contrast to Elbow’s alternate deference to authority and scolding of Pompey.
If neither kind of motivation nor form of speech and gesture individualized the characters, perhaps the kind of action they performed did so. In modern drama this usually happens, for the action comes out of the character. But the narrative nature of Elizabethan drama, with its loose causation, makes this less possible. Plays based on the same narrative, for example, differ not so much in action as in character. Lear does contain a sub-plot, the Gloucester story, not present in King Leir. But this addition does not affect the character of Shakespeare’s Lear very much. In a number of scenes both Lear and Leir perform the same action, but there is a world of difference in the characters. Lear proposes the division of his kingdom upon entering, and then immediately questions his daughters. At Cordelia’s muteness his emotions mount in three stages: rejection of Cordelia, banishment of Kent, and dismissal of France. From the beginning Lear demonstrates authority and pride. Leir, however, reveals two reactions: delight at the flattery of Gonerill and Ragan, anger at the bluntness of Cordelia. But he does not have Lear’s intensity of emotional expression.
In their first realization of rejection, the two men repeat these differences. Leir mourns, repenting his folly, regarding Gonerill’s treatment as payment for his sins. This is the beginning in Leir of the grief that he shows throughout the play. Lear, on the other hand, demonstrates amazement, anger, scorn, all at a great height of intensity. This too is the beginning of the barely suppressed rage which finally drives him to madness. When, near the end, Leir’s request for Cordelia’s pardon emerges as grief, he is continuing the emotional quality he attained at the beginning. Lear, however, comes to that level of humility only after having passed through the fires of rage and madness. Of the central range of passion poured out by Lear on the heath, there is no sign in King Leir.
For it is mainly through the depiction of the passions that Shakespeare individualizes his characters. Just as the Elizabethan age envisions reason struggling with passion, so Shakespeare reveals the individual emerging through his passions. With the possible exception of Jonson, this was the general method of the other writers for the Globe company. By them too the generic type is rendered unique when passion is freshly portrayed.
A secondary means of individualization was the presentation of a character’s mind. Many of Shakespeare’s finest characters are distinguished by a profuse and keen wit. Rosalind, warm-hearted and merry, becomes the distinct figure she is through the play of her wit.[36] Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra is a man supremely guided by reason. In these cases wit or reason, rather than passion, controls the character. But in the gallery of Shakespeare’s portraits such characters are in the minority. Prepared as the actor had to be to render thought vividly, his main efforts had to be devoted to painting the varied passions of man.
The application of this interpretation will be more evident in an examination of Globe plays. For example, the faithful wife type appears in them with some frequency. In the prodigal son plays she is probably closest to a pure type. Luce in The London Prodigal does not wish to marry Flowerdale, but she is forced to do so by her father. After the marriage, when Flowerdale is revealed as a wastrel, the father commands Luce to leave her husband. She replies:
Luce. He is my husband, and his heauen doth know,
With what vnwillingnesse I went to Church,
But you inforced me, you compelled me too it:
The holy Church-man pronounced these words but now,
I must not leaue my husband in distresse:
Now I must comfort him, not goe with you.
Lance. Comfort a cozoner? on my curse forsake him.
Luce. This day you caused me on your curse to take him:
Doe not I pray my greiued soule oppresse,
God knowes my heart doth bleed at his distresse.
[Sig. E1r]
Her grief is conventional. It is echoed by the wife in A Yorkshire Tragedy and by Anabell in Fair Maid of Bristow. Shakespeare, however, assuming the conventional devotion, deepens the emotion of the wife. Virgilia in Coriolanus is the same type of character. Her only individualizing element is her readiness to weep at the slightest hint of her husband’s danger. This sensibility serves as a strong contrast to Volumnia’s Roman pride and honor. Portia and Calpurnia in Julius Caesar are other representatives of this type, yet they are distinguished from each other. Not through motivation: they both wish the well-being of their husbands. Not through action: they both try to persuade their husbands to another course of action. Portia demonstrates a stoicism, a suppression of fears, in order to persuade Brutus to reveal the reasons for his troubled state, only to give way later to her uneasiness. Calpurnia pours out her fears and forebodings, nagging and pleading in turn. Probably in manner, gait, speech, and gesture, this type would be played in the same way. Only the drawing of the different passions would transform them into distinct characters.
In many types this kind of differentiation occurs. Leonine and Thaliard are minor villains in Pericles. They are both commoners and servants, both are commanded to commit murder by their masters. Yet they differ from each other. In manner Thaliard is prompt, reflecting a cynical attitude toward his task. Leonine is reluctant, reflecting an innate gentleness. Dogberry and Elbow, as I have noted, are distinguished from each other by one being condescending, the other deferential. Kent and Enobarbus, faithful friends and advisers, have much in common: bluntness in speech, an unbreakable tie to their royal masters, loyalty in the face of disaster. Their abilities too are not so very different, though Enobarbus is a soldier. The distinction arises from their temperaments and passions. Enobarbus is critical and scornful, Kent is blunt and protective. But Enobarbus attains striking individuality only when he undergoes the pangs of shame for having abandoned Antony.
Implied emotion is not characteristic of the period. Today actors hint at unfathomed depths or suppressed drives which are ever on the verge of bursting forth. This was not the style of the Globe. Passions were immediately and directly presented. A character revealed the full extent of his passion at once. Our habit of seeing unplumbed depths in people may lead us to sense inner turmoil in Elizabethan plays where it does not exist. But this is in accord neither with Elizabethan thought habits nor with Elizabethan dramaturgy. Professor Albert Walker has shown that Shakespeare inherited conventional expressions of emotion and utilized them in a unique manner. A perusal of any of the Shakespearean plays will demonstrate the prevalence with which the overt expressions of emotion enumerated by Professor Walker are found.
One matter of the treatment of passion by Shakespeare remains to be considered, that of consistency. In analyzing the Elizabethan theory of passion, we discovered some dispute over the stability of temperament. Some writers believed that it was fixed and sympathetic to certain passions only. Other writers believed it was fairly flexible, that any passion could overwhelm the temperament. The same question arises in reference to the plays. Professor Draper, for example, has attempted, unsuccessfully, to prove that the Shakespearean characters fitted into one of six types of temperament. It seems to me that he attributes to a consistent temper what may only be the result of a dramatic type.[37]
Nevertheless, though it is unwise to press consistency of temperament too far, some characters seem to be controlled by a dominant passion. There is a distinction. Temperament differs from dominant passion by including a predisposition not only to a particular passion, but also to a specific physique, intellect, and morality. Malvolio is moved by self-love, a form of pride; Antony, by lust; Angelo, by self-righteousness. Malvolio’s temper is never superseded by another passion; Antony often gives way to self-chastisement or grief, yet fundamentally obeys his passion; Angelo is transformed into another man by yielding to lust and still another by yielding to penitence at the conclusion. Thus the degree of consistency varies with the individuals, yet even with the most consistent characters, the interest is not directed to incidental characteristics such as physique, but to the passions to which they yield. Only here and there do we find a man of balanced temperament who does not yield to passion. As we might expect, such a man, of whom Horatio is the most famous example, shows very little individuality.
All of the foregoing conditions, verbal and physical expression, theatrical tradition, playing circumstances, thought habits, and acting roles shaped the Globe actor. As he took on a role, he had to work with dispatch. In less than two weeks the show was to go on the boards. While he was studying a new role he was playing from eight to twelve others. Given a copy of his part, he depended principally upon himself for working up the role. Shakespeare might advise him about the interpretation, but in the time available not much group rehearsal could take place. Since most of the scenes in which he appeared involved only one or two other characters, little time had to be spent in worrying about blocking out the movements or about grouping.
The role he had been given most likely fell into one of several general types to which had become attached some conventions of portrayal. But these conventions were suggestive rather than absolute since the period had not developed a rigid correspondence of passion and external expression. The actor could rely on these conventions or habits because the basic outline of his character would fit into some social group. He endeavored to impersonate a typical character of this group in his walk, manner, character relationship, speech. Acutely conscious of ceremony, he infused these elements with an artistry which imitated the ideal rather than the specific. With his voice he did not attempt to imitate particular persons, but expressed the meaning of the speeches by accenting the figures of language. In all this he obeyed the tendency of the age to find similarities rather than differences in behavior.
This ritualistic acting, however, contained within it specific passions which burst from these typical characters. Unto the portrayal of these passions the actor had to give himself fully. Audacity and vehemency were required. He knew he had to feel the emotions himself if he were to move his auditors. Overtly expressed, the emotions came forth without self-conscious restraint. Perhaps in other acting companies the actors relied on conventional expressions of emotions. But Shakespeare gave his actors too rich a variety of emotions of too fine a subtlety to permit them to rely upon a stock rendition of outworn conventions. Although the actor did not have to search for the emotion, as actors do now, he had to discriminate among the various emotions and individualize each of them in order to project an effective character. His conceit or idea of the passion had to be keen to make the character come to life; he knew that without a vivid comprehension, the external expression would be hollow.
On stage, he shared his experience directly with the audience. He was part of an elaborate pageant taking place in a far-off land against an opulent backdrop. Yet on an emotional level he communicated intimately and directly with the audience. In more or less unrestrained utterance he portrayed extremes of passion, passion which was so alive and real that the audience might wish to say about the Globe player what Polonius said about the player in Hamlet:
Look, whe’r he has not turn’d his colour, and
has tears in’s eyes. Prithee no more!
[II, ii, 542-543]
At the peak of his passion he might well have fitted Hamlet’s description of the player who
in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That, from her working, all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit.
[II, ii, 578-583]
To this type of ceremonious acting, the heart of which was overwhelming passion intensively portrayed, neither the adjective formal nor natural applies. I suggest that we accept the inevitable adjective and call it romantic acting, but romantic acting understood in the finest sense before decadence and extravagance set in. The Globe company brought this art to perfection.