The Idea of the Actor

by William B. Worthen

Overview

Analyzing the relationship between dramatic action and the controversial art of acting, William Worthen demonstrates that what it means to act, to be an actor, and to communicate through acting embodies both an ethics of acting and a poetics of drama.

Originally published in 1984.

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:	9780691612065
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #538
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Idea of the Actor

Drama and the Ethics of Performance

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By William B. Worthen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06623-3

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CHAPTER 1

Is it not monstrous: The Demonic Dialectic of Renaissance Acting

    Is it not monstrous that this player here,
    But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
    Could force his soul so to his own conceit
    That from her working all his visage wanned,
    Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
    A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
    With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
    — Hamlet, 2.2.556-62

A man playing a man called Hamlet watches another man playing a man, called simply "player," who plays a man in a play. Visibly moved by the player's performance, the man called Hamlet rebukes himself for failing to make his own actions in the court suit with such expressive forms to his conceit. Hamlet's self-criticism is fitting, for he has been playing a host of parts: Gertrude's melancholic son, Old Hamlet's dutiful heir, Horatio's thoughtful companion, Ophelia's distracted lover, the antic actor plaguing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius, the hectic raging in Claudius' court. And at this point, Hamlet has yet to reach the full stretch of his riddling play. The masks of betrayed lover, playwright-director, scold, murderer, duelist, and fallen soldier still wait, in Fortinbras' words, to be put on.

A reflexive concern for the histrionic dynamics of drama is by no means unique to Hamlet or to Shakespeare. Actors like Hamlet's player frequently complicate the action of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, both as professionals — in The Taming of the Shrew, or in Massinger's The Roman Actor, for instance — and as well-meaning amateurs like Peter Quince and Bottom, or Beaumont's Rafe. Nor is acting solely the player's province. In an important sense, role-playing is the exemplary activity of English Renaissance drama, and the blending of artful dissembling and subtle intrigue surely provides one of the drama's conceptual conventions. The major figures of the drama are obsessed with disguise and deceit, with their ability to entertain, manipulate, cozen, seduce, murder, or get and keep a kingdom through feigning and impersonation. Much as the unlocalized platform suits the epic sweep of Shakespearean history, so too do the histrionic designs of their many players fulfill the history plays' commanding image of the political stage. Think of Richard, still Duke of Gloucester, vowing to "Change shapes with Proteus" (3H6, 3.2.192) to pluck the English crown, or of Prince Hal plotting the course of his prodigal youth, only to redeem time with a splendidly dramatic peripeteia. This histrionic talent, and the metatheatrical sensibility it often implies, is even more thoroughly implicated in the ethos of revenge drama. In revenge tragedy, the revenger's disguise and the "mousetrap" play he puts on combine with other symbolic motifs — his madness, delay, and death, the vengeful ghost, the atmosphere of violent excess — to give a coherent expression to a peculiarly Elizabethan angst. The revenger's theatrical expertise dramatizes the difficulty of taking consequential action in a world dominated by illusion, by irrational and chaotic seeming. In short, revenge drama meditates on the meaning of moral action in a theatricalized world, where the authority of the natural order has been critically weakened. The genial enactment of comic players like Olivia's Cesario or Morose's Epicoene reflects the revenger's histrionic response to the occasions that spur him in a more benign light; like avengers, these actor-actresses negotiate the snares of romantic intrigue through a keen sense of the uses of play.

The theatrical self-consciousness of Renaissance drama, especially of Shakespeare's plays, has been well and amply explored. But what meaning did acting — as an art, a profession, a language — hold for Shakespeare and his contemporaries? Acting has always been a highly suspect activity, and even a brief survey of theatrical pamphlets — Th'overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), A Mirrour of Monsters (1587) — reminds us that violent antipathy toward the theater and its actors flooded the presses and the pulpits during the most explosive period of English theatrical culture. Acting was both a morally and a socially sensitive endeavor. Although in 1572 actors retained by noblemen could escape arrest as rogues and vagabonds only by being classed among protected retainers like fencers and bearwards, by the turn of the century several actors had risen to hitherto unknown national prominence, and a few, like Alleyn and Burbage, had amassed considerable wealth. But such glittering success was emphatically not the rule. As Middleton's Sir Bounteous Progress laments, players "were never more uncertain in their lives. Now up and now down, they know not when to play, where to play, nor what to play; not when to play for fearful fools, where to play for Puritan fools, nor what to play for critical fools."

The actor straddled a remarkably controversial imaginative boundary. The theater became a dominant influence on urban life in Elizabethan London, and provided a crucial metaphor of its culture. Celebrated in plays and imitated in courtly pageantry, the theater and its practitioners were nonetheless widely vilified. Outcast by society, actors could practice their profession only on the unrestricted margins of city life. And yet acting offered, as Michael Goldman argues, "one of the lightning careers of a speculative and chaotic age." Acting epitomized man's ability to mold himself into the perfect courtier, the crafty new man of the Tudor bureaucracy, the eminent poet, the wily admiral, figures who share the actor's freedom both to transcend and to subvert the hierarchic order of Elizabethan society. The actor's art coordinates two sharply divergent world views and sparks a bitter clash between the "puritan" distaste for theatrical artifice — feigning, multiplicity, sensuality — and a "neoplatonic" sensibility that values all acts of creation as potentially godlike. Each of these views has its spokesmen, and various roles in the drama — Faustus and Prospero, for example — may seem predominantly colored by one attitude or the other. But the problem is more complex than either pro- or antitheatrical partisans will allow. Performance in the theater concentrates this unabated strain between demonic and sacred impulses on the actor himself. The actor's playing releases an electrifying ethical tension: acting images a Satanic duplicity, a "blasphemous" subversion of the order of things, while at the same time acting imitates the creative principle that sustains that order. The drama appeals to its audience by dramatizing this sense of theater.

The task of elaborating the ethics of acting in the Renaissance is a difficult one, for a number of reasons. Each side of the theatrical controversy is remarkably unwilling to engage, or even to acknowledge, the opposing position. A writer like William Prynne can hardly be aware of the subtle and qualified defense of the theater that emerges in plays like The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream; not surprisingly, the playwrights themselves are often more scrupulous in their criticism of the theater than their enemies are. And yet, despite the virulence of the Puritan assault on the stage, the theater voices no effective rebuttal, even though several writers treat the stage indirectly or by analogy to poetry as Sidney does. Many scholars have addressed the obscure problem of Elizabethan acting technique, but the "men or marionettes" dilemma sheds little light on the meaning that performance itself — whether formal or natural in style — held for an audience. In the absence of an Elizabethan Stanislavsky, the meaning of acting must be gleaned from more remote materials, from conduct books, from remarks on acting in the popular antitheatrical press, from the few apologies for the stage and for literature in general, and more distantly from the literary use of actor and theater as metaphors. The drama is also an extremely articulate source. For all their lampooning of Puritan manners and morals, playwrights in the period are especially sensitive both to the artistic deficiencies of their theater, and to the provisional morality of theatrical feigning. Through role-playing characters, actors, and plays-within-the-plays, dramatists explore the actor's double valuation, and critically examine the purpose and meaning — the ethic — of the actor's performance.

Acting is a creative and imaginative effort, and becomes an important focal point in the Renaissance controversy regarding the moral value of the feigning arts. We can take initial bearings on histrionic feigning from a passage in Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612), where Heywood apostrophizes the "bewitching" power of stage representation:

what English blood, seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as beeing wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the Personator were the man Personated, so bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.

Heywood's Apology is a notoriously confused work, and throughout it Heywood unwittingly reinforces his opponents' arguments. Here, for instance, he blithely claims that the spectators are unable to distinguish the actor from his role, a charge that Puritan writers like Prynne will raise incessantly to scourge the theater's hypocrisy. Nonetheless, Heywood's text conveniently locates the two central themes of the critical discussion of acting: the potential of dramatic literature and its performance to encourage moral behavior in the audience, and the nature of the audience's response to the actor's feigning. In this passage, Heywood turns to the history play to introduce his consideration of the instructive virtues of the various dramatic genres. Predictably enough, the violent mayhem of tragedy is said to "terrific men from the like abhorred practices" of murderous revenge; comedy uses amorous intrigue to reward virtue and ridicule folly; satire exposes the "subtleties and snares" of urban vice; and pastoral presents a pleasing image of rustic harmony, "the harmelesse love of sheep-heardes diversely moralized, distinguishing betwixt the craft of the citty and the innocency of the sheep-coat." The histories have a more immediate purpose, to instruct "such as canot reade in the discouery of all our English Chronicles" through the medium of the stage (F3r-F4v).

The history play, with its evident mingling of fact and fiction, becomes the test case in the evaluation of stage feigning. Heywood commends both the subject matter of the dramatized "domesticke hystories" and their salutary effect on an audience. Both of these points are sharply refuted by critics of the theater, "puritans" in sect or simply in disposition. To present history on the stage violates the Puritans' sense of what A. C. Patrides has called the "horizontal unity" of recorded history, the perception of history from the Creation to the Last Judgment as the singular expression of God's will for mankind. However popular among audiences, historical drama demands the translation of the providential structure of history into the fictional structure of well-spirited drama, a recasting of absolute truth in a feigned form that seriously vitiates the didactic pretensions of such plays. The necessary fictions of the historical drama undermine the instructive powers traditionally ascribed to history, and obviate the distinction between the "truthful" subjects of history plays and the more overtly feigned inventions of the other dramatic modes. As Stephen Gosson argues in Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582), the transformation of history into drama inevitably falsifies it. Like other plays, histories "are no Images of trueth, because sometime they hadle such thinges as neuer were, sometime they runne vpon truethes, but make them seeme longer, or shorter, or greater, or lesse then they were, according as the Poet blawes them vp with his quill."

The discussion of dramatized history epitomizes the wider debate concerning the didactic purpose of feigned literature in general. In An Apologie for Poetrie (publ. 1595) — partly conceived as a response to Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse (1579) — Sidney attempts to conflate the philosopher (teacher of abstract moral truth) and the historian (teacher of observed, material truth) in the role of the poet. Sidney's poet transcends both philosopher and historian by moving men to virtue by means of a feigned and liberating image of perfected nature; as William Rossky notes, the poet's superiority to the historian lies precisely in this "power to distort." Unlike the poet, who imagines a golden world, the historian is tied to the lessons of the temporal world, "not to what shoulde bee but to what is, to the particuler truth of things and not to the general reason of things." Moreover, Sidney's Neoplatonic understanding of poetic invention rests squarely on the principle of the poet's godlike creativity. His poet, rather than elucidating the moral precepts of revealed nature, "dooth growe in effect another nature, in making things either better then Nature bringeth forth, or, quite a newe, formes such as neuer were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her guifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his owne wit" (p. 156). To Sidney, the poet's feigned second nature renews God's creation, extending and perfecting nature through the poet's imagination. Instead of rivaling the natural world, the arts so depend on nature that they become "Actors and Players, as it were, of what Nature will haue set foorth" (p. 155). As Puttenham remarks in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), since poets are "able to deuise and make all these things of them selues, without any subiect of veritie," they are "as creating gods." The godlike poet fulfills the animating principle of Perdita's great creating Nature; his feigning peoples the natural second world of art.

The humanists' vision of the poet's divine creativity breaks the bounds of literary dispute, and implies a sense of human identity as malleable and self-created. The poet enlarges the scope of divine creation through imitation. He is a maker of forms both in art and in life, and as Castiglione's Courtier (English version 1561) attests, the courtier's — and the courtly poet's — identity is constituted by a ceaseless, apparently effortless, series of posturings. Castiglione's histrionic courtier realizes himself much as Sidney did, through the commanding performance of a variety of roles. Renaissance humanists generally envision man as such an acting animal. In the most familiar case, the Adam of Pico's Oration (1495) has no defining role in nature, and is unconstrained by any limitation. God tells this "indeterminate" creature, "thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine." Similarly, when the man of Vives' short Fable About Man (written 1518) astounds the gods with the wealth of his role-playing, including an impressive impersonation of Jove himself, he is invited to join their feast. At this point in the narrative, he asserts his essential humanity with a revealing gesture: "He put on his mask, which he had meanwhile laid aside, for this stage costume was so greatly honored. Since it had so well met the needs of man, it was deemed worthy of the most sumptuous feast and of the table of the gods."

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. ix
• The Idea of the Actor: Introduction, pg. 1
• 1. Is it not monstrous: The Demonic Dialectic of Renaissance Acting, pg. 10
• 2. Realize the feelings of his Character: Gesture, Feeling, and Community in the Sentimental Theater, pg. 70
• 3. Self-Betrayal: The Optics of Modern Acting, pg. 131
• Postscript, pg. 229
• Notes, pg. 233
• Index, pg. 261