Dramatis Personae

3 Key excerpts on "Dramatis Personae"

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  Constructing Chaucer

  Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition

  • G. Gust(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  When personae are cited in a literary con- text, scholars primarily imply two main types, which I term “dramatic personae” and “I-personae.” The phrase “dramatic personae” echoes the Latin Dramatis Personae, and it is thus a general expression used to designate literary characters that are not meant to somehow represent the author and have, so to speak, their own distinct personalities. By their nature, all personae have a dramatic function, but the function of “I-personae” is very specific: I-personae are stand-ins for the writer that typically guide the narrative and may appear to embody the author him/herself. As a textual self-representation or bifurcated extension of the writer, it is this latter type of persona that functions as the “divided self”—although it is essential to note that both types of personae are related and both types are, in fact, crucially separate from the author. When faced with personae marked by a kind of self-division—such as “Chaucer the Pilgrim” in the Canterbury Tales 10 —it is difficult, or impos- sible, to determine what is “real” and what is not, to identify where one self begins and another ends. The “divided” I-narrator is indeed doubly challenging, for here a persona ostensibly portrays a particular individual in a fictional text that already, by definition, straddles the line between truth and fiction, so that this line becomes even more blurry and confus- ing. But this complexity becomes more manageable for the reader when it is realized that, as classical usage makes clear, any literary character who wears a mask is “assumed,” a mere “pretense” that does not depict the “true nature” of a given being, or a given author. This realization is criti- cal because it demonstrates that in the classical age—when I-personae were relatively rare—masking was not perceived as being somehow real or even meant realistically.

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  Shakespeare and the Theatrical Event

  • John Russell-Brown(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • The Arden Shakespeare

    (Publisher)

  These are complicated phenomena for which Shakespeare has been praised down all the centuries. When a play becomes part of a theatrical event, the audience watches its leading characters as they seem to be driven by their own thoughts and feelings in a course of action that leads to a conclusion that is both fitting and revelatory. With each new performance this process will change, sometimes very slightly, sometimes surprisingly so, offering the actors a journey of discovery. By the end of the play, if all goes well, both spectators and actors will have shared in the unfolding of a seem-ingly complete world that had lain hidden within the text and now has a life of its own. It can seem so effortless and inevitable that both audience and actors wonder how it has all been done. Shakespeare’s Concept of ‘Character’ Elizabethans did not speak of the individual characters in a play, as we do. The general use of character was for a letter of the alphabet, a distinctive mark or symbol, a style of handwriting, or a person’s appearance: all signs of one sort or another. This is far from our sense of 84 character as an individual person and still further from its use for the constituent mental qualities of any one indi-vidual. These meanings were introduced with regard to newly popular biographies and novels in the mid-seven-teenth century and only later used with reference to dra-matic texts and performances of plays. Until that time, characters in a play were referred to as persons . Prefatory notes to early printed editions use the word in various ways. The Latin Dramatis Personae is comparatively common and the phrase was varied in rough translations such as ‘The Persons Represented’ or ‘The Persons Presented’, that are found, for example, in the published texts of A King and No King (1626) and The Roman Actor (1629).

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  The Secret Life of Plays

  • Steve Waters(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Nick Hern Books

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Five

  Dramatis Personae: Constructing Character

  The Character Repertoire

  Shakespeare is often deemed the quintessential playwright because, as Vladimir Nabokov noted, he created an astonishing repertoire of characters, understood in range and breadth, loved equally and treated equitably. Michael Frayn has observed likewise that in the best plays all the characters are right, that they all possess their own logic and are not ciphers or monsters. Whilst we seek the voice and presence of a playwright behind their many stratagems, in any play there is at the same time a promise inherent of a realm beyond individual judgement, an ideal democracy where all its clamorous voices get their say. I find so much of John Osborne’s work intolerable because it flouts this promise, with many of his characters serving as mere foils to his hyper-vivid protagonists, whipping boys for Jimmy Porters.

  But life is rather narrow. Most of us, playwrights included, carry within us a circumscribed Dramatis Personae. How many people do we meet in a single lifetime who we really get to know – perhaps a hundred? And of those, how many could we honestly say we understand? Of course, there are tireless networkers out there who collect people as they might dolls, reducing them to a surface detail or trait under which to file them away – X is neurotic, Y holidays in Brazil, Z’s a former Marxist. As we grow older our social arteries harden and our address book is decreed full. We judge newcomers by precedent; any veteran teacher will reveal how quickly their fresh new class is assimilated into old categories – the cheeky one, the wimpy one, the sycophantic needy one – in lieu of the complex individuality of little Samuel, Becky or Jack.

  A play may be set anywhere – from the Dark Ages to contemporary London – but a writer’s archetypes will surface just the same, drawn from the palette of their limited experience. A play that does not in some way reveal its author is a chimera. Often, dramatists draw on the same quarrelling extended family they inherit from experience. Think of Ibsen’s archetypes:

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