Portraits in Early Modern English Drama

Visual Culture, Play-Texts, and Performances

Emanuel Stelzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138348394
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429791727
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama

Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues.

Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women's portraits in a theatre without actresses?

This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies.

Part I

The meanings of staged portraits

Theoretical and historical perspectives

1Interpreting portraits

Semiotic approaches

Among the aims of this book is to show that portraits are a special type of props. The semiotics of theatre and drama has always been deeply interested in the processes of sense-making that circulate between actors and spectators, and can underpin this claim.¹ In particular, useful resources can be extracted from the early findings of the Prague School, as well as from the application of Peircian semiotics. Throughout the book, I will keep the distinction between theatre and drama as delineated by Keir Elam: by theatre I mean “the complex of phenomena associated with the performer-audience transaction,” by “drama,” the “mode of fiction designed for stage representation and constructed according to particular (‘dramatic’) conventions” (Elam 1980, 2).

The writings of the Prague formalist school in the 1930s remain compulsory reading for anyone researching the semiotics of theatre. Of particular interest are their studies in the field of semiotisation. “All that is on the stage is a sign” was Jiři Veltruský’s formula (1964, 84). According to Honzl (1976), the actor represents a character, the scenery represents the locale of the play, and lighting, music, gestures, and so on render dramatic performance “a set of signs.” With his 1968 schema, Tadeusz Kowzan provided a preliminary typology of 13 sign-systems which would pave the way for structuralists, who went further by classifying many more possible configurations of signs. These results, however, have encountered negative criticism. It has become clear that such an all-encompassing classification cannot take place for several reasons: theatre entails a continuous process of semiosis, that is, a continuous production of meaning. Codes and systems often overlap and intersect, and, moreover, the reception of the audience cannot be channelled mechanically. Thus, it is helpful to think of sense-making processes in the theatre from the perspective of what can be called an ever-changing “ecology of signs” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, 16–17). Conversely, a portrait can communicate differently to different viewers, “speaking” to their personal experience, emotions, memories, and culture. We are all spectators in front of a portrait, just like in front of a theatrical performance, but this interaction is fluid and depends on many factors.

The role of the audience can be addressed through De Marinis’ notion of a modal tripartition for what he calls a “dramaturgy of the spectator”:

In more exact terms, we must ask what are the determinant features of this selective attention which is, and always has been, subject to manipulation by the producers of theatre. At the same time, it should be clear that it is not only a question of attracting the spectator’s attention towards one thing but also of distracting it from something else. […] From the receiver’s point of view, these modes can be labeled in more technical terms: focalization, defocalization, and refocalization. (1987, 107)

De Marinis is well aware that there is always an active dimension in this process: the spectator’s reception should not be seen “as some mechanical operation which has been strictly predetermined by the performance and its producers, but rather as a task which the spectator carries out in conditions of relative independence, […] in conditions of ‘controlled creative autonomy’” (101). I suggest that the display of a portrait on stage requires exactly these dramaturgical shifts of observation and attention-directing.

Peircian semiotics provides further methodological tools for this research (see Jappy 2013). For Peirce, a sign is “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP, 2.228).² According to their specific mode of representation, signs are either icons, indices, or symbols – Peirce’s best known tripartition:

The Icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected to them. The index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is established. The symbol is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist. (CP, 2.299)

This description of the three orders of signs is fraught with implications. Peirce’s semiotics is pre-eminently pragmatic: since “no two persons can have exactly the same experience of the world, it follows that different interpreters will interpret signs differentially” (quoted in Jappy 2013, 7). However, I posit that culture places in us a good number of entrenched connotations that transcend individual experience. Thus, theoretically, it may well be true that “there can be no strictly predetermined effect of a sign upon an interpreter, in spite of the wishes of the sign’s utterer or creator” (7). In practice, however, conventions play a major role in real life and drama has always “held the mirror up” to such connotations.

Shearer West applies Peirce’s tripartition to portraits, suggesting that they share features of all three types of signs: a portrait “resembles the object of representation (icon), it refers to the act of sitting (index), and it contains gestures, expressions, and props that can be read with knowledge of social and cultural conventions (symbol)” (West 2004, 41). For Peirce, genuine indices always have an iconic dimension: an index “involve[s]‌ a sort of Icon, although an Icon of a peculiar kind” (CP 2.248). A portrait is characterised by its iconic appearance: it recalls an image, but it also concretely refers to its absent dynamic object, the portrayed person. “The portrait is an index in that it represents the act of portrayal that produced it. Indeed, it is an indexical icon in that it purports to denote by resemblance the act of portrayal that produced it” (Berger 1994, 99). This was Peirce’s own view:

We say that the portrait of a person we have not seen is convincing. So far as, on the ground merely of what I see in it, I am led to form an idea of the person it represents, it is an Icon. But, in fact, it is not a pure Icon, because I am greatly influenced by knowing that it is an effect, through the artist, caused by the original’s appearance. […] Besides, I know that portraits have but the slightest resemblance to their originals, except in certain conventional respects, and after a conventional scale of values, etc. (CP 2.92)

Once the iconic resemblance is recognised and the physical link with the model assessed, the spectators rely on forms of “collateral knowledge,” that is, on aesthetic and ethical values and connotations they have both passively absorbed and actively elaborated from their cultural episteme.

In theatre and drama, indexicality plays an extremely important role because it can be expressed both physically and verbally. In the first case, it operates through the presentation of props and the actors’ gestures, while in the second case, it operates through deixis and anaphora. The very quality of portraits as indices, then, can bring to the fore these theatrical processes.

Portraits onstage are first of all “presented” objects, which are offered in display. This “presentation” is part of the notion of “ostension.” Umberto Eco recognised ostension to be at the core of drama: it “is the most basic instance of performance” (1997, 110). Similarly, according to Elam, ostension is “the most ‘primitive’ form of signification”:

In order to refer to, indicate or define a given object, one simply picks it up and shows it to the receiver of the message in question. Semiotization involves the showing of objects and events […] to the audience, rather than describing, explaining or defining them. This ostensive aspect of the stage “show” distinguishes it, for example, from narrative, where persons, objects and events are necessarily described and recounted. (1980, 29–30)

Veltruský even went as far as to advocate the mysterious agency of what he dubbed an “action force” connecting actors and objects in the living continuum of the performance. He claimed that this force “attracts a certain action” to the prop and “provokes in us the expectation of [that] action” (quoted in Paavoilanen 2010, 116–17). He cites the example of a dagger: when it is simply part of an actor’s costume, its role is complementary as a “static force of characterisation,” but when it is used to stab, then it exhibits its action force and will later become “a sign of murder.”

More recently, however, a few studies have questioned the dynamics of the theatrical sign. According to Andrew Sofer, objects become props only when “an actor-object interaction exists” (2003, 12): he denies any intrinsic “underlying logic.” Teemu Paavolainen concurs, arguing that “there cannot really be any objectively necessary and sufficient properties to stage properties” (2010, 117).

However, and at least in the case of portraits, I would disagree. Sofer himself refers to the portrait of the father in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891). Let us assume that one reads the play without having first seen a theatrical production. Except for the initial stage direction in Act 1, which informs us that “a large framed portrait of a cavalry general in full dress uniform dominates this smaller room” (2001, 5; italics in original), there is no further reference to the painting either in the dialogue or in any other stage direction. The reader may have utterly forgotten the presence of the portrait but, in the theatre, the visual effect of the epilogue is quite striking: “When the pregnant Hedda commits suicide under the portrait of General Gabler we are instantly aware of Ibsen’s emphasis on three generations united in death” (Doebler 1974, xi).

Portraits, at least in the corpus of plays I analyse, do not “transform” themselves once they are taken in hand: they cannot become signs of something different from the person depicted. The very nature of a portrait makes it, through metonymy, a direct substitute for, or, indirectly, a deictical indication of a person. A portrait “presents” an absence, but can become, as Elam remarks, “a transactional object, used to create a relationship not only between two characters but between the character-actor and the audience” (2010, 68). A picture, then, retains its inherent meaning when staged but, just like other props:

[its] impact is mediated both by the gestures of the individual actor who handles the object, and by the horizon of interpretation available to historically situated spectators at a given time. […] Invisible on the page except as textual signifiers, props seduce our attention in the playhouse as they become drawn into the stage action and absorb complex and sometimes conflicted meanings.

(Sofer 2003, 2)

It is important to point out that, in scholarly analyses such as this, the level of performance cannot remain “in its time-honored place in footnotes, where it is brought forward to illustrate a textual point” (Hodgdon and Worthen 2012, 21). I will try, whenever possible, to refer to recent productions of the plays I discuss and, in the case of lesser known play-texts, I will try to consider the historical and physical staging conditions of those specific scenes.

Studies of intermediality and multimodality can also offer important stimuli to this research and enrich semiotic interpretations. The theatre I am dealing with was characterised by a dynamic constellation of visual, aural, oral, tactile, and kinetic elements. The ostension of portraits could be a device to metatheatrically draw attention to the complex variety of configurations underlying theatrical performances. It is rather surprising that multimodal analysis has not devoted specific studies to drama this far, despite acknowledging that “the multimodality of drama is one of its prototypical qualities” (McIntyre 2008, 310). One reason behind this is the performative dimension of drama, which renders it unstable and liable to subjective evaluation. On the other hand, these fields can offer useful critical tools in the specific case of portraits.

Van Leeuwen and Kress, for instance, trace an interesting division between “‘demand’ pictures” and “‘offer’ pictures.” The first category is represented by pictures in which the represented participants look at the viewer, their lines of sight functioning as vectors that establish a reciprocal contact. When this happens, the picture “ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The meanings of staged portraits: Theoretical and historical perspectives
• Part II Case studies: Portraits in action
• Appendix
• Index