Shakespeare's Sense of Character

On the Page and From the Stage

Michael W. Shurgot, Yu Jin Ko

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056010
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Théâtre antique et classique

Making a unique intervention in an incipient but powerful resurgence of academic interest in character-based approaches to Shakespeare, this book brings scholars and theatre practitioners together to rethink why and how character continues to matter. Contributors seek in particular to expand our notions of what Shakespearean character is, and to extend the range of critical vocabularies in which character criticism can work. The return to character thus involves incorporating as well as contesting postmodern ideas that have radically revised our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. At the same time, by engaging theatre practitioners, this book promotes the kind of comprehensive dialogue that is necessary for the common endeavor of sustaining the vitality of Shakespeare's characters.

PART 1
Shakespearean Persons

Chapter 1
How Dark Was It in That Room? Performing a Scene Shakespeare Never Wrote

Michael Bristol

What do Shakespeare’s characters do when they’re offstage where we can’t see them? Ellen Terry wondered how the boy in Henry V learned French.¹ And how did Mariana get away with tricking Angelo into thinking she was Isabella in Measure for Measure?² If you think these are naïve questions, you may not want to read any more of this essay because it will just annoy you. But before you move on to the next chapter you may want to consider that Shakespeare deliberately provokes your curiosity by organizing his stories around incidents that happen offstage. These are the scenes Shakespeare never wrote, structuring absences indispensable for understanding what goes on in the scenes he did write.³ Elizabeth Inchbald thought that Mariana and Isabella didn’t actually succeed in fooling Angelo, which would account for his exacerbated vindictiveness towards Claudio.⁴ Maybe Helena, in All’s Well That Ends Well, didn’t fool her mean begrudging husband either. I once met a flight attendant who thought Lady Macbeth had a child out of wedlock with Duncan, which helps explain her murderous hatred of the King.⁵ You have to read with a lot of imagination to come up with stuff like this, but why would you want to suppress your imagination when you read a Shakespeare play? Ellen Terry, Elizabeth Inchbald, and the flight attendant were all actresses; this is exactly what they might do in order to perform one of these roles. It is difficult to see what it would mean for them to “play a part” without having a robust sense of a dramatic character as a complete person.⁶

It is said that there are married couples who like to meet in a singles bar and make believe they are strangers. They have a drink and then check into a hotel room where they have a one night stand or else the wife pretends to be a call girl. While I have no personal experience with such doings, I have read about it in magazines, so it must be true. Shocking. I know. This is not exactly what happens in All’s Well That Ends Well, although what does happen is just as shocking. Bertram, the husband, is ordered by the King to marry Helen. He refuses to consummate the marriage and runs off to war, without so much as kissing her good-bye, leaving Helen with nothing but a brief letter.

HELEN Look on his letter, madam; here’s my passport.

She reads the letter

‘When thou canst get the ring upon my finger which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband.
But in such a `then’ I write a `never’.
This is a dreadful sentence.⁷

Helen eventually succeeds in performing both these impossible tasks through the same strategic device. When Bertram makes an assignation with another woman, Helen substitutes herself in the bedroom, where she finally enjoys his embrace, becomes pregnant, and acquires the ring all at the same time. Later, when the truth of the matter comes to light, Bertram has a profound change of heart and all is well in the end—or is it?⁸ A lot of disapproval has been expressed about the means Helen uses to achieve her purpose. Some critics, mostly men of my own generation, are really bothered by what they see as the “shotgun wedding” scenario and they condemn Helen for the deception of Bertram. Others have concluded that the sex must have been joyless and demeaning. But is there anything really wrong with the means or its relationship to the end? Is the sex in the story crassly instrumental or does it have other valences? The encounter in that darkened room is crucial to the story. But how can anyone perform a scene Shakespeare never wrote? The text gives us no specific instructions for how the scene ought to be performed. We can only imagine why it might have worked in the performances of the two characters.

I could never do that!

First of all, how did she get away with it? Is it really possible for a woman to convince a man he’s going to bed with someone else? I suppose—hypothetically—that my wife could really get me going by playing the role of an expensive call-girl if she did it with enough conviction and dramatic art. But that would be consensual making believe. What would happen if I called an escort service, set up a rendezvous, and my wife showed up at the place of the assignation? What on earth would I be thinking just at that moment? “Oh my God, I’m busted” is one possibility. “So that’s what she’s been up to when I’ve been off at work” is the other. It would be next to impossible to actually go through with it. Of course if one had sufficient aplomb and presence of mind it could be exciting to play along, enjoy the experience, and, at the end of the evening pay the agreed upon fee along with a generous tip. This would be taking consensual make believe to a much more intense level. Nobody would actually be fooled, and a whole lot of significant questions would remain unanswered, but there could be an interesting bond of complicity as long as no one was to cop out. On balance, however, the bed trick would appear to be a non-starter. Nevertheless, it is definitely true in the fiction that Helen succeeds in getting into bed with Bertram, even though he has gone to considerable lengths to avoid just exactly that, and so it must also be true in the fiction that some effective means were employed to accomplish this end.

Jacob was beguiled by his Uncle Laban into marrying Leah when she took the place of Rachel on their wedding night. How this was done is not explained in scripture, but it must have been very dark on the wedding night, because Jacob only found out the next day: “in the morning, behold, it was Leah.” Perhaps Helen’s trick was accomplished by a similar combination of darkness and not much talking. In fact this is the general outline of the proposition Diana makes when she agrees to surrender to Bertram’s soliciting.

DIANA When midnight comes, knock at my chamber window.
I’ll order take my mother shall not hear.
Now will I charge you in the band of truth,
When you have conquered my yet-maiden bed,
Remain there but an hour, nor speak to me. (4.2.55–8).

In addition to the time limit, there are two other circumstances working in Helen’s favour. First, Bertram has no idea that his detested wife is anywhere nearby and so he does not even consider the possibility that the woman he will embrace could be Helen. Second, the intensity of Bertram’s desire for Diana, matched paradoxically by the intensity of his aversion to Helen, actually facilitates the deception. Since he is so swept up in his own fantasy he may not notice all that much about his actual partner. Even under these evidently favourable circumstances Helen will have to play her part with real conviction and dramatic art. But she is an accomplished dissembler, performing the role of a grieving daughter, a learned doctor, and a devout pilgrim. Performing the character of the about-to-be-conquered-and-willing-maiden ought to be a snap for her. On stage it would even be possible for the actress playing the role of Helen to appear as “Diana” in the scene just cited to test out the credulity of Bertram. Besides, she really doesn’t have all that much to lose.

There are some ways for Helen to avoid being discovered; partners don’t have to be face to face to have sexual intercourse, for example. One time when I raised these possibilities with colleagues at an academic conference I was told that Helen was confident she could get away with it because she knew that it was the sort of thing that’s possible in a fairy tale. In other words, the relevant background knowledge for All’s Well That Ends Well is recognizing what kind of story is involved rather than indiscreet speculation about what goes on in bedrooms.⁹ Different kinds of stories have different conventions—interstellar travel is a convention of science fiction just as bed tricks are a convention of romance. To inquire into the actual circumstances of its execution is to exhibit vulgar and deplorable curiosity. I think there are theoretical problems with these arguments in the case of All’s Well That Ends Well, since it is true in the fiction that Helen succeeds with the bed-trick, but it is not true in the fiction that she thinks she is a character in a fairy-tale. On the contrary, she has some definite ideas about how to make her scheme work, so our vulgar curiosity is really entirely justified as an effort to account for her sexual exploits in more explicit detail.

The bed trick is fundamental to understanding the story of All’s Well That Ends Well. Helen takes advantage of Bertram’s sexual fixation with Diana to get herself into bed with her husband. And in the fiction Helen intends for her deception to succeed. For Helen the question of the bed trick is anything but a “convention of the genre.” To the contrary, the bed trick is the only possible solution to her difficulties. Of course I understand perfectly well that there are narrative conventions that require suspension of disbelief.¹⁰ But with Shakespeare things are generally not that simple. His stories often disrupt conventional narratives by including details that require us to take things more literally. And, as I will show later in this discussion, All’s Well That Ends Well goes even farther, bringing out some of the actual details of what happened in that darkened room as a way to suggest why things turn out the way they do.

The resistance of my colleagues eventually led me to realize that asking how Helen was able to succeed with the bed trick is not an adventitious question. In fact the character of Helen is defined by her boldness in conceiving such an outlandish scheme and by the resources she can draw on to carry it off.¹¹ The complexity of the situation, however, can only be fully understood through a consideration of the motivational scenarios involved in Helen’s fixation on Bertram and on Bertram’s equally compulsive rejection of her. Helen is the heiress of a famous doctor, who has passed on to her the secrets of his practice. Although she seems to be grieving over her father’s death, in fact she is consumed with sexual desire for a man who has no interest in her

HELEN My imagination
Carries no favor in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone. There is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. . . .

‘Twas pretty, though a plague,

To see him every hour, to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart’s table—heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favor.
But now he’s gone and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics. (1.1.84–100)

For Helen, Bertram is a fantasy constituted by her visual imagination. She is not the only one of Shakespeare’s heroines to look at a man, to construct the object of her desire by means of that looking, and to make an active attempt at staging the erotic mise-en-scene she has imagined. What distinguishes Helen from other Shakespeare characters who actively pursue a man is the boldness and the reckless perversity of her act.

Within the normative horizons suggested by this play, marriage is a bond or obligation sealed between two men in which a young woman (sometimes supplemented by substantial material property) is “the gift.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helen’s medical knowledge is the stake that puts the King of France in her debt. She travels to the court and introduces herself as the healer of the King’s infirmity. Helen’s proposition is that if she fails at curing the King’s sickness she will be publicly humiliated, tortured and killed. If she is successful, however, she expects a lavish reward.

HELEN	… Not helping, death’s my fee, But if I help, what do you promise me?
KING	Make thy demand.
HELEN	But will you make it even.
KING	Aye, by my sceptre and the hope of heaven.
HELEN	Then thou shalt give me with thy kingly hand What husband in thy power I will command. (2.1.188–93)

The pay-off in this bargain is that a nobleman of her own choosing will be given to her as a husband. The key point is that a man will be made a gift to her in a bond of mutual loyalty between a man and a woman. When she is successful, she chooses Bertram from among all the lords of France and the King, a man of his word, fulfils his part of the bargain by declaring them to be husband and wife. Bertram, however, refuses to accept.

KING Why, then, young Bertram, take her. She’s thy wife.

BERTRAM My wife, my liege! I shall beseech your Highness,

In such a business give me leave to use
The help of my own eyes. (2.3.106–109)

Bertram’s refusal to accept Helen is obviously connected with pride over his aristocratic standing, but it is also an expression of shame over his sexual abjection. The real insult is to Bertram’s masculinity, the denial of the autonomy of his own sexual will and the shamefulness of being disposed of as an object in front of his own peers. The King has made a bargain with a woman here that nullifies the central principle of the masculine sexual economy, an economy in which the positions of looking and of being looked at define the respective sexual positions of men and women. Helen is utterly captivated and undone by the way Bertram looks. Bertram, by contrast, can’t stand the sight of Helen—or maybe it’s even worse—he won’t even look at her.

In order to make the bed trick seem more plausible, the actresses who play the two women should probably have a strong similarity in complexion, size and physical proportions. The more they look like each other the easier it is for an audience to suspend their disbelief. But this would make Bertram’s insistence on choosing with his own eyes a matter of considerable ambiguity, to say the least. If I want my girlfriend to be somebody who looks exactly like Scarlett Johanssen, why would I refuse the offer of a date with Scarlett Johanssen herself? But then, come to think of it, why would I agree to a date that only lasts an hour, takes place in utter darkness, and we don’t even get to speak to each other? On the other hand, if the casting were to suggest a strong physical contrast between the two women, then the idea of Bertram’s preference seems more credible, but the success of the bed trick much more puzzling. If I am extremely besotted with Scarlett Johanssen, I might be entirely unmoved by the attractions of Natalie Portman. You would perhaps understand why I would have a strong preference, even if your own were very different. But then you might wonder how on earth I would fail to notice the substitution no matter how dark it was in that room. Either way it would seem that Bertram’s sexuality is strangely disembodied, much less a matter of his actual object choice than of his imagination. His assertion of male sexual autonomy is thwarted when he agrees to an assignation under conditions of darkness and silence. But the defeat of masculine sexual will goes even farther, because what happens in that dark room is that Helen enjoys Bertram sexually without obtaining his consent.¹²

The question of how Helen managed the bed-trick is something I would often ask graduate students to consider in their analysis of All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. At more or less this point in the discussion one year, one young woman suddenly exclaimed, “Well, I could never do that!” It was not because she didn’t think she could ever accomplish such an action in a practical sense. Her response was provoked by the thought that it might actually be possible for her to succeed.¹³ “Do you mean you wouldn’t have the nerve to try it, or do you mean that you wouldn’t feel right tricking someone like that?” She was admirably candid: “For me it’s not a performance. I want to be loved for who I really am—or not at all.” Getting away with it was hardly the problem. The bed-trick was about a deeper question of self-acknowledgment and self-respect. At the heart of the matter is moral agency, or what is now generally referred to as a person’s character. The crucial problem for my student was in being constrained to deny who she really was or to deform her character to be more pleasing for someone else. To be rejected by someone you love would be bad, but faking your way through a sexual encounter to attain a token of that love would be a whole lot worse.

Saying “I could never do that” means that my student possesses a strong sense of her own virtue, where virtue has the sense of strength of character, of being fully answerable to one’s own self. Virtue can refer to abstinence from certain bad habits like overeating, or cheating on exams, or turning tricks in bedrooms. It can also refer to enduring qualities like courage or generosity or prudence that we reveal in actio...