Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama

by Michael Goldman

Overview

Shakespeare's texts are seen by the poet and critic Michael Goldman as designs for theatrical experience—the complex emotional, physical, and intellectual transaction between actor and audience that brings alive Shakespeare's imagination and makes it immediate to our own. Mr. Goldman's particular concerns are these: what the audience responds to in an acted play; how Shakespeare controls and shapes this response; what the response means, and why it matters.

Originally published in 1972.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691646619
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1287
Pages:	188
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama

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By Michael Goldman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1972 Michael Goldman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06214-3

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Shakespeare's Bodies

When I talk about "meaning" in this book — as I often do — what I have in mind is the unique significance of our experience of a work of art. All experiences are unique, of course, just as all are to some extent interesting. Certain experiences, though, are of commanding interest — they awaken the mind to life, dominate memory, seem to enhance us to an extraordinary degree. It is natural and desirable to talk about such experiences and to try to say why and how they command us — what it is they do for and with our lives. In my view, this is what criticism should attempt for the experience of art, and the results it arrives at are what I call meaning.

Most of the experience I write about in these pages may be found only in the theater; my aims and methods spring from this fact. No single performance does justice to a great play, but plays exist in order to be made into performances. The experience of theatrical performance is so different from that of other arts that criticism must be very careful in approaching it. Drama confronts us with an unparalleled immediacy and inclusiveness. When we read a book many of the elements that Engage our awareness while we read are irrelevant — the room in which we sit, the people around us, the light, our physical contact with the book itself, the wandering of our attention, even our momentary doubts as to what is happening on the page. In the theater, all such facts of the moment are pertinent, and our experience is entirely of the moment — moment after moment moving forward, gathering together and piling up physical and mental impressions. In writing about Shakespearean drama, I have tried to take into account the quality of the whole theatrical moment — our entire accumulating relation with what takes place on stage — and to seek a meaning for each play in the human significance of our response as an audience, in the life it awakens us to, the awarenesses it builds upon.

Inevitably, then, this is a study — though always in terms of particular examples — of the nature and meaning of dramatic experience itself. How are we engaged by drama? How do the components — words, acting, the disposition of figures on the stage, plot, and the rest — join in our minds as we sit in the theater? And what does the excitement and satisfaction with which we respond signify? Finally, what are useful tactics for talking about such matters? Can the shifting, evanescent, and multiple modes of response we experience in the theater be made the subject of exact and circumstantial criticism? The chapters that follow seek answers to these questions. But they also depend on certain assumptions about drama and the suitable ways of inquiring into it, and with these I had better begin.

I start out, as I have already suggested, with a notion of the crucially distinctive character of dramatic experience. Above all, there is its unique focus on the body. The play may rise in Shakespeare's imagination and come home to our own, but it takes place between two sets of bodies, ours and the actors'. An actor's profession and desire are to interest people with his body, and in the theater we are especially conscious of bodies, the actors' bodies, the bodies of the more or less closely packed audience (more closely packed in Shakespeare's theater than in ours), and whatever other images of the body are established or roused in our minds by what we see and hear. Our response to what the actor does with his body, to the strains that are put upon it and the graces it reveals, are very strong components of our response to the play as a whole.

I should emphasize that I am not trying to exalt the actor at the expense of the text. In the theater there is no real separating of words and bodies. Shakespeare's text is primary, but the text implies an actor-a real person, not a puppet, not a reciter, not even an "interpreter." The personality and full bodily life of the actor are far more definitely present in his art than those of, say, the performers of music or ballet. These latter do not enact the works in which they appear; they are more nearly transmitters than actors. This is not to say that the pianist or dancer does not play a necessary or individual part in the experience of music or ballet, but to suggest their different relation to the work and to us. It is f air to say that musicians and dancers interpret the works in which they appear, and the verb is of course frequently applied to actors too; but in the latter case "interpret" should strike us as a little thin. "Mr. So-and-so will interpret the role of Antony tonight" sounds quaint, or as if the full power of the actor were not being invoked. The actor, we are aware, engages us in his presence as fully as he can. It is a created presence, to be sure, but created by him there and then, for us as part of an audience, an audience that comes to judge him and wonder at him and be delighted by him. We gossip more about actors' private lives than about other public figures' (and more about opera performers than pianists) because we have become involved with their bodies to a greater degree.

The audience is the other half of the dramatic equation, and its importance should not be overlooked. Throughout this book I have used the word "we" abundantly and unashamedly, not because I think I can speak for everyone's reactions, but because in the theater a play happens not to you or me but to us. It is our bodily presence, en masse, which completes the actor's being and sustains him in his quality, our heightened receptiveness as part of the peculiar community of silent strangers that constitutes an audience. We are intimately allied to our neighbors in the theater, responding not quite as individuals (the isolated laugh disrupts a comedy just as group laughter confirms it), and yet we are separated from them; once the play begins we no longer communicate with them freely, we do not behave (nor did Shakespeare's audience) like spectators at a sports event or political rally. We are more or less rapt, as if in the presence of a secret (in dreams, Freud tells us — in a remark that would seem to carry great relevance for the psychology of the theater — a group of strangers signifies a secret); part of the delight of the theater is that it recaptures the terror and pleasure of children spying on their elders. At the same time, though, the actor is like a child, performing as gracefully as he can to win the affection of the assembled grownups. Thus, our amusement and awe, pity and terror. And of course actors and audience are brothers, peers, adults, fully and humanly aware of each other — a relation which every Western dramatic convention modifies but must not destroy because its life as a convention depends upon it. The body of the actor works against the abstractness of his art; this is not a flaw in drama but its essence. All kinds of aesthetic distance may be established in the theater, but it will always manifest itself with a special tension because the interplay between live actor and bodily sensitive audience is constantly breaking the distance down.

We relate to each of the figures on stage, then, in a number of ways simultaneously. We relate to them as characters in a fiction, as real people moving and talking close to us, and as actors, who are at once both real and fictitious, and neither. Also we relate to them as parts of the entire stage activity, which likewise affects us bodily and directly. Ideally all these relations should be in our minds when we set out to examine a play; but there is also a need, at least at the present stage of critical understanding, to grow separately sensitive to the presence of each of the strands of feeling that run between actor and audience. In the chapters that follow I have taken advantage of the distinctive qualities of a number of plays to emphasize now one, now another aspect of our response in the theater, though my aim in each is to throw light on the total experience. Romeo and Juliet, for example, allows me to raise the question of theatrical meaning in a rather direct and concentrated form. We are all familiar with the strong kinesthetic impression Romeo and Juliet usually makes in the theater. What can we say about the impression as a whole and its command over our minds? When the play has ended, certain details are likely to remain fixed in our memories as part of the cumulative experience: the lovers in characteristic poses, for example; crowds and gangs rushing across the stage with swords or torches; puns; outbursts of impatience; Juliet repeating Romeo's name. What is the unique meaning of an experience that fuses such impressions?

My method in discussing Romeo and Juliet is to begin with the theatrical sensation produced by the play as a whole. In the next chapter, I approach the question of meaning from the opposite direction, and consider a single character. Falstaff is such an attractive figure that he threatens to break up his play; his appeal is so physical that it takes on the disarming clarity of an idea. What is the precise nature of our relation to Falstaff as character and actor, and as a projection of our own bodily life?

Critically speaking, Henry V has lately proved more of a "problem play" than either Romeo and Juliet or Henry IV. Its obvious appeal to traditional patriotism and the equally obvious ironies of its treatment of patriotism have seemed difficult to reconcile in a way that does justice to all its elements and pleasures. In dealing with it I start with the manifest theatrical attractiveness of certain familiar passages and develop a view of the play as a whole by analyzing the relation they create between actors and audience.

One assumption that becomes prominent in the discussion of Henry V is that the technical accomplishment of the actor will be an important part of our experience of the play and must be considered part of its design, even as the technical achievement of the lyric poet — rhyme scheme, patterns of sound, verbal resourcefulness — must be considered part of his poem's design. With acting, as with poetry, it is actually impossible to make a sharp distinction between "technique" and substance. Further, an actor may be expected to seek the maximum value that a scene allows him, and a good playwright should be expected to count on this. The theatrical weight of the wooing scene in Henry V, for example, must be calculated on the assumption that the actor playing the King will try to generate the most pleasure allowed him by the lines and the events of the scene. With Hamlet and King Lear I turn more comprehensively to the whole question of the actor as actor and the role as a chance to display powers which in themselves impress and delight an audience. Hamlet is a great acting part because (among other reasons) of the variety of actions he is called upon to perform, the quick changes he must make from one action to another. Lear is a great acting part because of what he must suffer, because of our sense that the actor who plays Lear must continually be outdoing himself in responding to pain. The contrast between the two kinds of acting achievement and our responses to 'them does much to characterize the two plays.

Another very important means of controlling our response in the theater is the orchestration of stage movement. From his earliest works, Shakespeare handles motifs of movement with the same richness of suggestion and recurrence that distinguishes his verbal imagery. A number of chapters, notably those on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, treat these effects in passing. My seventh chapter, however, takes as its central concern a particular piece of recurrent choreographic design in Coriolanus and considers how it affects our feeling for the hero and his situation. (Strikingly, the pattern of crowd movement discussed has perhaps its profoundest effect in a scene where crowds do not appear.)

No audience, finally, ever forgets it is at a play, and this self-consciousness contributes to the drama, too. It may make itself felt simply as expectation, a sense of the possible or permissible shapes the play may take. When Hamlet breaks in upon Claudius at prayer, part of our reaction to the scene depends on our confidence that the play is barely half over and that an "accidental" revenge is not what its machinery has been preparing us for. Part of our pleasure in Falstaff has to do with our knowledge that he has eventually to be removed from the stage in order for the necessary business of the play to continue. Here our expectation as to the shape and nature of the action unfolding before us enters into our local response.

In the chapters on Hamlet and Lear I have occasion to note another use of our self-consciousness. This comes at moments when our relation to the play involves an awareness of the special character of what is being done to us as an audience. Let me oversimplify a little for the present. We have to ask at moments in Lear, "Why so much torture?"; in Hamlet, "Why so much left in doubt?" At these points we are made aware — though perhaps not at a fully conscious level — of our theatrical appetites, of some of the desires we go to a play to satisfy. In the last plays, our appetite for a whole complex of dramatic satisfactions, particularly the happy ending, is played upon to such a degree that it becomes practically part of the story. The theme of "art" in The Tempest and The Winter's Tale is clearly understood, for example, only if it is seen as developed in the playhouse against the audience's sharpened sense of its relation, as audience, to the art of the theater. And it is in this self-conscious theatrical context that many of the plays' other themes fuse and have their life. The last plays may in fact be seen as Shakespeare's own exploration of the meaning of dramatic experience, and my concluding pages try to suggest what, in its broadest sense, I take this meaning to be.

It should by now be clear that when I say "body" I do not mean something distinct from mind. Our heightened bodily awareness in the theater includes all our modes of consciousness. It is an awareness of the self in its fullest presence — multiple, quickening, transient, solid, passionate, imagining, desiring. Indeed it is this special awareness of self that gives the theater its unique capacity — felt by audience and actors alike — to be both self-liberating and self-confronting. Discovery of the self and release of the self are not only common themes of the drama; they are what happens in the theater as the drama unfolds.

This is what lies behind my choice of Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse as a point of departure. It is only reasonable to relate everything we know about Shakespeare to his dramatic achievement. The impulse toward drama in an artist, like the impulse toward poetry, involves the whole disposition of the being. Shakespeare is not a poet with a knack for "dramatizing" his conceptions, any more than Dante is a Christian with a knack for poetizing his philosophy. Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry reflects his dramatic bent as anything about his life might be expected to — not because it shows us a gif t for action or dialogue (it doesn't especially), but because it shows us a response to life for which drama was finally necessary.

Accordingly, I begin with a chapter on Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the sonnets. In them may be discerned a bent for certain situations and arrangements of material which draw attention to what Shakespeare calls the "unsounded self," a condition of being that can be fully explored only in drama. What is involved is the sense of a self or selves within the self, of powers, feelings, and styles that come to fruition only through the stress of encounter. This implies a conception of human possibility, and indeed of human necessity, requiring drama for its articulation and satisfaction. As such it provides a basis for dramatic development that may be found in all the plays considered in this volume. The connection between this "pre-dramatic" material and the critical method I have been discussing is not at all adventitious. For I hope to make clear that it is exactly in this — the necessary relation between the fully "sounded" self and the special kinds of awareness that an audience has in the theater — that the meaning of dramatic experience ultimately resides.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama by Michael Goldman. Copyright © 1972 Michael Goldman. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. ix
• I. Introduction: Shakespeare's Bodies, pg. 1
• II. The Unsounded Self, pg. 12
• III. Romeo and Juliet. The Meaning of a Theatrical Experience, pg. 33
• IV. Falstaif Asleep, pg. 45
• V. Henry V. The Strain of Rule, pg. 58
• VI. Hamlet and Our Problems, pg. 74
• VII. The Worst of King Lear, pg. 94
• VIII. Coriolanus and the Crowd, pg. 109
• IX. The Winters Tale and The Tempest, pg. 124
• Appendices, pg. 151
• Index, pg. 175