The Elizabethan Player

Contemporary Stage Representation

David Albert Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351687614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In this book, first published in 1991, David Mann argues for more attention to the performer in the study of Elizabethan plays and less concern for their supposed meanings and morals. He concentrates on a collection of extracts from plays which show the Elizabethan actor as a character onstage. He draws from the texts a range of issues concerning performance practice: the nature of iterance; doubling and its implications for presentational acting; the importance of clowning and improvisation; and the effects of audience and venue on the dynamics of performance.

The author suggests that the stage representation of players is in part a nostalgic farewell to the passing of an impure but perhaps more vital theatre, and in part an acknowledgement of the threat the adult theatre's growing sophistication offered to its institutional and adolescent rivals. This title will be of interest to students of Drama and Performance.

1
Introduction A definition of the context of study

An Excellent Actor ... by a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention: sit in a full Theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the Actor is the Centre . . .

(John Webster)¹

This study is concerned to examine a series of extracts from play-texts which feature players as characters for the information they provide about the nature of Elizabethan performance practice. In their formative stage these texts were hand-written 'scripts', copied in parts for the actors, and intended for the two hours' traffic of the stage, and so they generally remained throughout their active life. In normal circumstances they were not printed, they did not become 'literature', until they had ceased to be of value in the playhouse.

'Scripts' too in the sense of being incomplete; only one element in a complex interaction between actors and audience, in which the desire for that interaction preceded, and, it might be argued, overrode, any specific text, however much it may have been revered subsequently. Too much attention to the text, in attempting to wrest from, it some absolute, timeless, objective 'meaning', so often the purpose to which it is now put, can distort our view of its place in the performance. Although the scripts are virtually all we have to go on, we must learn to look through and beyond them to the centre of the activity itself, to which they give testimony only obliquely but which gives them their quality and their raison d'être. 'The Actor', says Webster, 'is the Centre', and this is a statement both literal and metaphoric. Positioned towards the front of the stage and in the very middle of the auditorium, the Elizabethan player commanded the theatre like the hub of a wheel and was the focus of attention, whether he spoke or not. As this chapter will go on to suggest, there are particular circumstances which led to the special pre-eminence of the player on the Elizabethan stage and which justify a much greater attention to the characteristics of his performance style than they have generally received.

A play-text, however fine, can never be more than raw material, since the success of a performance depends upon the actor and audience achieving some significant shared perception of the human condition, and they do this by shaping whatever materials come to hand. This process involves therefore a fourth element in the interaction; the development of a common attitude towards the content of the script, and perhaps towards the way in which it is expressed by the playwright. A suggestion of some of the elements in this interaction is contained in the extract from The Mayor of Queenborough, which provides a double-role for the performer, assuming at one and the same time the role of foolish justice and the persona of the shrewd clown who plays him. In the tradition of Kemp, the performer shares with us his character's foolishness, inviting us to laugh both with and at the material; both distancing and then defining the comic world in which he lives, at once different from our world and from that of the serious plot. This process of distinguishing the actor from the material and commenting upon it is present, or potentially so, in all confrontations between performer and audience on the Elizabethan stage.

Rarely in modern criticism is the performer, as distinct from the character, recognized as a significant element in an Elizabethan play, and when he is the situation is regarded as exceptional. 'To some extent,' says Bernard Harris cautiously in his Mermaid edition, 'The Malcontent is a play for an actor's theatre.' Martin Wine, in his edition of the same play, is more thoroughgoing: 'the frank confession of theatricalism is at the heart of the play's meaning.' It is no coincidence that such judgements are often accompanied by comparisons with modern theatre. P.J. Finkelpearl likens Marston's work to Expressionist drama, G.K. Hunter compares him to Beckett, and perhaps the most popular comparison, shared by Wine and invoked on a large scale by Michael Scott, is with Genet.² This use of contemporary parallels, helped by The Malcontent's Induction and frequent self-reference, allows us more readily to perceive how this particular play achieves its ends by theatrical means. Our failure to do this in the study of other plays, successful in their own day, is perhaps more an indication of our own limitations than of a qualitative difference in the plays concerned..

Part of the problem lies in the very process of reading a play. We are accustomed to filmed versions of Shakespeare's plays, which speak in their own, visual, language. The images in our minds as we read are often influenced by the paintings of Fuseli and Millais and others. We may still be hampered by nineteenth-century stage directions such as 'another part of the forest which litter many editions. Modern productions of Elizabethan plays quite rightly address the expectations of their own contemporary audiences, often aiming for striking visual images, but generally performed in a post-Stanislavskian style of acting which deliberately fuses part and person. Hence the modern reader is likely to find the theatre-of-the-mind peopled not by actors, but by characters; and by literal, three-dimensional characters at that; real men and women, blackamoors and fairies in real woods or castles. In reading the plays it is difficult to take account of the dual apprehension, which the spectator is able to have, of actor and role as two separate, distinct entities; to which Hamlet's references to the clowns who speak more than is set down for them and to Lucianus's grimaces give ample, if negative, testimony. Instead many critics talk as though the central relationship were character-audience, rather than actor-audience. Even when actor/role disparity at its most extreme is thrust upon the critic, T.F. Van Laan, for instance, explains Cleopatra's reference to some quick comedian, who will 'boy' her greatness 'I' th' posture of a whore', as involving a momentary loss of what he calls 'her' identity, which, he says, is 'utter and absolute. But only for a moment . . .'.³

The seamless, delicate, evanescent worlds the texts can create in the mind, as well as study-bound misunderstandings about their dependence on theatrical illusion, need to be confronted by the rigour of actual performance conditions. Illusion, certainly of the sort available in the Elizabethan theatre, operated not through tricking the audience but through their active willingness to enter into the deception. An incident at a performance of Periander at Oxford in 1607/8 illustrates what happened when this was not invoked. One of the student actors pretended to be a member of the audience and hissed and shouted during the prologue, 'Pox: begin your play, and leave your prating.' An observer noted that:

The Chiefest in the hall commanded that notice should be taken of him, that he might afterwards be punished for his boldness, but as soon as it once appeared that he was an actor their disdain and anger turned to much pleasure and content.

(The Christmas Prince, p. 286)⁴

The spectators were angry whilst genuinely deceived, and indeed the heckler 'had like to have been beaten for his sauciness (as it was supposed)'. It was only when they were party to the deception that the spectators' anger turned to pleasure. Furthermore, given that 'being deceived' is a voluntary process, it will be seen that breaking and then restoring the illusion, in calling forth more frequently the active early stages of audience participation, only serves to strengthen it.⁵

As many of the extracts show, the nature of the activity of playing is determined to a very large measure by the composition of the audience and its behaviour, both in the local outcome of the particular performance, and in the wider assumptions which the audience brings to the activity; it establishes the occasion and the 'rules' by which the performance operates. In the amateur, dramatic 'offerings' of dependants to their lords, depicted in Shakespeare's early plays, notwithstanding earnest sentiments of goodwill, the plays do not 'take', partly because of the ineptness of the performers, but mainly because the aristocratic auditors do not for one moment forget their own superiority.⁶ At the other extreme spectators such as Sir Bounteous in A Mad World, My Masters, and Simon in The Mayor of Queenborough are so taken up by the dramatic fictions that they allow themselves to be humiliated and robbed. Only the more discriminating auditors such as Theseus and Sir Thomas More are able to follow the advice of the Chorus in Henry V in 'Minding true things by what their mock'ries be', perceiving both the falseness of playing and its value.

Audiences are apt to be thought of as straightforward receptors, responding directly to what they see, taking things as they are meant, but often the stage audience in an Elizabethan inner play responds inappropriately, as when Polonius bursts out at the climax of Priam's slaughter 'This is too long', and Hamlet is provoked to describe his taste, reminiscent of that of Captain Tucca, as 'He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry'. Hamlet dismisses 'a whole theatre' as 'unskilful', 'who for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise'; whilst sometimes the pleasure taken by more sophisticated members of the audience is seen to have little to do with the matter of the play, as with the Courtesan in A Mad World, My Masters, whose interest lies in the actors themselves, and the Empress in The Roman Actor who has a similar penchant and the position to satisfy it with private theatricals.⁷ These observations, however contemptuously presented, testify to the importance of non-intellectual, non-literary aspects of a performance, and the love of dumb-shows and noise, or the attraction wrought by the persons of: the performers, are not to be dismissed lightly. The theatre is in a large measure for itself and about itself; for its sensations, for the sound of the words, the shape of the stage configurations, the rhythms of the scenes, the process of enactment, the euphoria of collective participation. It is an art-form that speaks to us very largely through our feelings. Spectators are affected by the immediacy of the event, and by the effects of contiguity, here the primacy of the circle, multiplied by the rising galleries. Because a stage performance is of the here-and-now the audience has the sensation of witnessing something being summoned up in its midst, not unlike a religious experience or intimations from another world; uncertain and at least potentially upsetting. The extra devil that appeared at a performance of Dr Faustus in Exeter would have alarmed more than the performers.⁸ At one and the same time spectators both fear and crave for bodily change, that surge of adrenalin which is part shocking and part stimulating; hence much of the ambivalence expressed towards the spectacle, and towards the actor too. Performers of any kind stimulate both rapport and hostility in an audience, and their skill lies to a great extent in how they juxtapose the two.⁹ We can see this most clearly today in cabaret and club entertainers. Tarlton, their sixteenth-century equivalent, was by all accounts a past master at manipulating audience response; evinced in that special relief felt by every member of the audience who was not, for the moment, the victim of his witticisms. The extracts show too, in the antics for instance of Inclination in Sir Thomas More, and disastrously in Simon's contribution to 'The Cheater and the Clown', the survival of the medieval sense of the play as 'game', with the audience as in some sense participants, rather than merely observers.

It is very evident in the preparations for these inner plays, when the mechanics of a performance are laid out before us, how far the final product is the result of the physical processes that have led up to it, and in particular the organization and personnel of the troupe. As we grow more conscious today of the 'politics of theatre' we are beginning to discern in Elizabethan theatre a variety of aesthetic priorities consequent on differing production models. One of the most obvious of these is the four- or five-man itinerant troupe, so frequently illustrated in the extracts below, which reveal the effect of audiences, venues, and logistics on its dramaturgy and performance style.¹⁰ Aristotle reports that drama began in Greece with the separation of one actor from the chorus, followed by the introduction of a second actor and then a third.¹¹ With this, he thought, reporting in c. 330 BC on a festival theatre which had achieved its heyday a century or so earlier, the drama had attained its mature form. One actor must have reported his own death. Two actors could engage in dialogues independent cf the chorus. Three actors allowed the development of this process with a changing sequence of characters, and so on. Each change in performer resources affected th...