IV. ACTING AND THE ELIZABETHAN VIEW OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR
The dramatic tradition, however, affected the general type of character rather than its specific form. In evolving this form the actor was guided by two influences: his own understanding of behavior and thought and the poet’s image of behavior and thought. In the first instance we must deduce the actor’s understanding from the outlook of Elizabethan society as a whole. In the second we can analyze the poet’s image in his plays. The poet’s unique outlook, infused in his image, is still a part of society’s conception of behavior and thought, and in the case of Shakespeare has come to represent the larger conception of the age. Together, age and poet present the psychological and philosophical foundation which the actors and audience took for granted and thus upon which the actors built their roles.
Study of characterization is complicated by the absence of decisive evidence. The literary practice of the time does not encourage a ready formulation of a poet’s idea of character. As Hardin Craig says:
One sees no evidence in the field of knowledge of the art of characterization as it is known in modern criticism. The art of characterization, as distinguished from simple biographical narrative, was there, but often not as a conscious factor.
Craig goes on to relate this lack of development to the Elizabethan idea of personality:
Indeed, the conception of human character as set down in formal psychology, and often evident in literature, taught instability in the natures of men, taught that there was no such thing as consistency of character, except in so far as it might result from “complexion” or be super-induced by training.[24]
It is in the works of “formal psychology” that the most explicit statements of the Elizabethan conception of human character can be found. But in offering a detailed exposition of how Elizabethans thought man functioned, the works are inconsistent. Miss Louise Forest has pointed out the contradictions in the theories and definitions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Instead of a scientific system with which the dramatists were familiar, we find that “Elizabethan popular psychology was simply every man’s private synthesis of observations of human behavior understood in the light of whatever selections from whatever authorities appealed to him.”[25] Although her criticism has won general approbation as a healthy corrective for facile and mechanistic application of “psychological” theory to literature, it has not undermined the conviction of scholars that the evidence of Elizabethan psychology can prove illuminating in revealing not necessarily what the Elizabethans thought, but how they thought.
Mr. R. A. Foakes admits that although the disagreement in detail hinders the application of Elizabethan psychology to literature, it does not hinder an understanding of “the general habit of thought from which the detail springs.”[26] The exposition of this “general habit of thought” has been set forth in part by Theodore Spencer, Lily B. Campbell, E. M. W. Tillyard, and John W. Draper, and most fully by Hardin Craig in The Enchanted Glass.[27] Against the broad and deep background painted by them, I shall consider the “general habit of thought” as it affected three aspects of character: decorum, motivation, and passion.
a. Decorum
Classical decorum in literature sought to reflect a broader decorum in life. As it came down to the playwrights of the Renaissance, however, it implied little more than a trite correspondence between character type and nature. Edwardes in The Prologue to Damon and Pithias (1565–1571) refers the audience to Horace as his model in the observance of “decorum”: