Table Of ContentCHARACTER: ACTING AND BEING ON THE PRE-MODERN
STAGE
Also by Edward Burns
RESTORATION COMEDY: CRISES OF DESIRE AND
IDENTITY
THE CHESTER MYSTERY CYCLE: A MODERN STAGING TEXT
Character: Acting and
Being on the Pre
Modern Stage
Edward Bums
Lecturer in English Language and Literature
University of Liverpool
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-09596-4 ISBN 978-1-349-09594-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09594-0
© Edward Bums 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-44389-7
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Referenee Division,
St. Martin's Press, Ine., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of Arneriea in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-03152-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data
Bums, Edward, 1955-
Character: acting and being on the pre-modem stage/Edward
Bums.
p.em.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-03152-7
1. Acting-History. 2. Theatre-History. 3. Drama-History and
eriticism. 4. Characters and eharacteristics in literature.
I. Title
PN2122.B87 1989
792' .028· 89-30603
CIP
ISBN 978-0-312-03152-7
To Carolyn Fleming
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
I Reading Character 1
II Character, Acting and Rhetoric 6
1. Ancient Theories of Character 18
I Aristotle's Poetics 18
Ethos, Praxis and Pathos 18
Greek Tragedy and the 'Showing' of Ethos 21
Action, Choice and Recognition: Tragedy in Practice 24
II Character and Rhetoric in Post-Classical Tradition 28
Characters and Personae 28
Ethos, Biography and the Purpose of Writing 34
2. Rhetorical Character: History and Allegory 39
I Character and Allegory: Scaliger's Poeticae 40
II Prudentius's Psychomachia; Allegory and Subjectivity 43
III Allegorical Drama: The Tudor Interlude 49
IV Acting, Fame and the Historical Individual 64
V Character and Power: Shakespeare's Second History
Cycle 72
3. Shakespeare: Character as Political Praxis 90
I Troilus and Cressida: 'Common Commentaries' and
Truth's Authentic Authour' 94
II Antony and Cleopatra: Triumphs and Blemishes 102
III Julius Caesar: Rebellion and Interiority 111
4. Acting and Empathy on the Elizabethan Stage 120
I No Theatre, No World': Acting and Spectating as
Analogies for Human Being 120
Actors and Parts 121
Watching and Judging 126
Mirrors and Man: Hamlet I 132
II Hamlet II: Character, Action and Interiority 139
III Humour and Melancholy: Individuation and
Containment 155
vii
viii Contents
5. Character and the Passions 174
I Common Sense and the Universal Mind 174
II Unity of Character 184
III The mind and its movements' 192
Afterword: The Modern 'Subject' and Pre-Modern
Drama 203
I Brecht and the Formalists 203
II Substantive 'Character' in Soviet Aesthetics and in
English Studies 214
III Character and Subject: Some Post-Structuralist
Approaches 226
Index 232
Preface
This book was begun during a term's sabbatical granted by Liverpool
University English Deparlment. Sections of the Introduction and of
Chapter 1 were given as a paper to the Department's Renaissance
discussion group in November 1985: thanks to those who took
part - Philip Edwards, Kenneth Muir, David Mills, Nigel Bawcutt, Ann
Thompson, Helen Wilcox, Nick Davis, Mike Watson and Mike
Cladingbowl. A section of Chapter 5 formed part of a paper given at
the Durham Seventeenth Century conference in July 1987.
Thanks are especially due to Nick Davis and Carolyn Fleming, for
their interest, support and criticism, and to the members of the Early
Theatre Group, who have bravely over the last five years endured a
frankly experimental approach to performing a number of the plays
wriHen about in this volume - Youth, Wit and Science, Measure for
Measure, the 'Antonio' plays and Man equals Man among them. The
contribution of CJ uniquely (indeed bizarrely) loyal group has fed very
rewardingly into this study. And of course it would not have reached
its present form at all without the heroism of Tina Benson, Catherine
Rees and Fiona Johnstone in negotiating between my typescript and
the word-processor.
E.B.
ix
Introduction
READING CHARACTER
'I see by this woman's features that she is capable of any wickedness'.l
William Hogarth's observation on Sarah Malcolm, whom he visited in
Newgate two days before her execution for murder, is the keynote of
his subsequent portrait of her. She sits at a table in a plain cell which is
painted in broadly behind her like a set of theatrical flats. Her head and
upper body are lit brightly from an unseen source. Her arms are folded
on the table-top, and she stares vacantly a little to the side, into the
empty space that takes up nearly half the pidure, ignoring both the
spedator's gaze, and the rosary that lies on the table in front of her.
Hogarth's picture is a virtuoso demonstration of his powers as the
great painter of 'charader'. His virtuosity here is of a kind diredly
contrary to the flair with which his narrative prints invite exploration
of a rich diversity of clues, a layered reading of events and
relationships whose regression into almost infinite suggestibility is
kept in due proportion by the artist's rigorous compositional skills.
Narrative is eschewed here, the iconography of 'history painting'
absent, the composition deliberately simple. We are to see by the
woman's features, and by that alone, that she is capable of, not a
specific crime, but of any wickedness. Hogarth's aim is to depid her
charader, in the sense of her nature, as diredly as possible.
But if we did not know what she had done, would paint on canvas
tell us that she was a murderess? What, in any case does it mean to see
her as a murderess, as a being whose nature is that of a capacity for any
evil, rather than as a woman who had, at the age of 22, killed three
people, an old woman who employed her, and the woman's two
servants. Hogarth's painting imprisons her more completely than
Newgate did, in that it seeks to contain her essence; it condemns her
more decisively, f6r it defines her ads as her identity, and invites the
viewer to repeat the recognition the painter made on viewing her in
her adual cell, that that identity is present in every physical accident of
her being, written unmistakably upon her features. This of course says
very little for the perspicacity of her employers. But the power of the
painting is that it records, not a map of recognisable clues to
wickedness, but a moment of moral perception. Her'c harader' is this
perception, it is Hogarth's moment of seeing. What he sees is
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