Some disagreement existed over the completeness and ease with which a temperament could be transformed. Bright considers the complexion strictly fixed. Other writers believe that there is a strong tendency toward a specific temperament, but that an uncongenial passion could overpower natural resistance to it. As Forest has observed of these discrepancies in the Elizabethan views about complexion, it is difficult to establish any firm conclusions about the details of the subject. Generally, it can be said that each man was thought to have some definable central temperament which arose from the disposition of humors in his system, that his external and internal faculties corresponded in a broad sense with his temperament, and that he was liable to passions which were sympathetic to his temperament. And yet it was accepted that his natural temperament could be overpowered by passions in disharmony with it, that one passion could drive out another, and that the nature of the passion was not affected by his temperament. These two groups of concepts are at bottom mutually contradictory; the first visualizes relative stability and consistency in character, the second, virtually complete subordination of the individual to immediate impulses. These views reflect the desire for similitude and order on one hand and the awareness of the power of passion on the other. Without reconciliation they continued as habits of thought throughout the English Renaissance.
Both views acknowledged the swiftness with which passion could overwhelm an individual. Professor Craig explains sudden changes in Bellafront in The Honest Whore I and in Hamlet by reference to “the theory that one emotion or passion drives out another, and that the substitution is immediately operative.”[35] One passion yields readily to another, the concupiscible passion often giving way to the irascible, as hatred may give way to anger or grief to despair. Love at first sight, as R. A. Foakes points out, is a convention based on a reality and the “common and ancient thought-habit that the sight is the chief and most powerful of the senses.” Sudden emotional changes were either the daily acts of Elizabethan behavior or the usual explanation of more gradual alterations. In either case, the potential for such immediate transformation was thought to be ingrained in every man, just as at present the potential for repressed infantile conflicts is thought to exist in every man.
Furthermore, the ability to suppress the mounting passions within oneself was thought to be very slight. Once a passion subdued the reason, the reason was virtually powerless to control the passion. It coursed through the entire body, expressing itself in external signs. An individual of extraordinary will could suppress these signs, but the vast majority of people was helpless to hide the play of passion within their souls. A correspondence between the passions and the external signs was assumed, but as we found in the study of rhetoric, there was no clear codification of passions and symptoms. Instead, the habit of expecting an expression of emotion in recognizable symptoms rather than the repression of emotion in enigmatic behavior marked the Elizabethan age. The volatile and pervasive nature of passion, then, was one of the crucial assumptions of the Elizabethan period.
Thus, the Elizabethan conception of how human beings function and feel shows two principal tendencies. In a strictly regulated society such as the Elizabethan, the members were keenly aware of degree and order. So urgent was the impulse to find order in the universe, that an elaborate series of correspondences was observed between man and all other forces in nature as well as between man and all forces within himself. It was natural for the Elizabethan to look for correspondences, no matter how farfetched, and to insist on decorum, no matter how trifling. In conflict with this tendency toward order was the recognition of the tendency toward disorder. Largely, this was thought to arise from man yielding to passion. The orderly arrangement of the moral and political world could be destroyed by the unrestrained passions of man. As a result, the description and analysis of passion became a central function of Elizabethan psychology and philosophy. Bacon carries the condemnation of passion to such an extreme that he condemns love almost entirely. It is a weak passion, it is a “child of folly.” As we turn to a consideration of the plays themselves, we shall find that by and large the tendency toward order subsumed the actions, and the depiction of passion occupied the forefront of the Globe stage.
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.