Shakespeare’s Mirror - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Shakespeare’s Mirror

Theatre and

MetatheatreSlide2

Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre

New buildings: The Theatre (1576); The Curtain (1577)

Philip

Stubbes

,

The

Anatomie

of

Abuses

, 1583

:

‘…

but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites, or worse. And these be the fruits of plays and interludes, for the most part. And whereas, you say, there are good examples to be learned in them: truly so there are

…’Slide3

Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre

‘…

if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod and mow; if you will learn to play the Vice, to swear, tear and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to

devirginate

maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, flay, kill, pick, steal, rob and rove, if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures, to practise idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery; if you will learn to deride, scoff, mock and flout, to flatter and smooth; if you will learn to play the whoremaster, the glutton, drunkard, or incestuous person; if you will learn to become proud, haughty and arrogant; and finally, if you will learn to contemn God and all His laws, to care neither for Heaven nor Hell, and to commit all kind of sin and mischief, you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays

.’Slide4

Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre

Sir Philip Sidney,

An Apology for Poetry

, c.1579 (published 1595):

‘To

the arguments of abuse, I will after answer, only thus much now is to be said, that the Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he

representeth

in the most ridiculous & scornful sort that may be: so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one. […] So that the right use of Comedy , will I think, by nobody be blamed; and much less of the high and excellent Tragedy, that

openeth

the greatest wounds, and

sheweth

forth the ulcers that are covered with Tissue, that

maketh

Kings fear to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours, that with stirring the affects of Admiration and Commiseration,

teacheth

the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations

gilden

roofs are

builded

.’Slide5

Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre

Thomas Heywood,

An Apology for Actors

, 1612

(some

of this is paraphrasing Sidney):

‘Plays

are writ with this aim, and carried with this method, to teach the subjects obedience to their King, to shew the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections […] If we present a Tragedy, we include the fatal and abortive ends of such as commit notorious murders, which is aggravated and acted with all the Art that may be, to terrify men from the like abhorred practises. [...] If a Comedy, it is pleasantly contrived with merry accidents […] to shew others their slovenly and unhandsome behaviour, that they may reform that simplicity in themselves […] or to refresh such weary spirits as are tired with labour, or study, to moderate the cares and heaviness of the mind, that they may return to their trades and faculties with more zeal and earnestness, after some small soft and pleasant

retirement

.’Slide6

The effects of drama upon its audience

Heywood’s view of the effects of drama tallies with Hamlet’s:

HAMLET.

I

have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions… (2.2.591-4)

Certainly Claudius’s abrupt exit from

The Murder of

Gonzago

suggests that the play has ‘caught his conscience’. Slide7

The effects of drama upon its audience

Hamlet has clear ideas about theatre’s potential:

‘Suit

the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you

o’erstep

not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure

.’

(3.2.17-24)

David

Bevington

on this:

‘The

play

Hamlet

, among its other amazing accomplishments, is an astute critical defence of

theatre

at its highest potential. …

Hamlet

as a play is serious about reform of the English

stage.’

(2009: 142

)Slide8

The effects of drama in Dream

Why are these utterances comical

?:

BOTTOM.

Write

me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that

Pyramus

is not killed indeed; and, for the more better assurance, tell them that I,

Pyramus

, am not

Pyramus

, but Bottom the weaver: this will put them out of fear.

(3.1.16-20

)

SNUG.

You

, ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fear

The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,

May now perchance both quake and tremble here

When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.

Then know that I one Snug the joiner am

A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam

.

(5.1.217-22)

Anne Righter on the

playlet

in

Dream

: ‘The interlude becomes, in effect, an essay on the art of destroying a play’ (1967: 97).

Irony of conversation

about

staging

moonlight (3.1.43-56

).Slide9

Anxiety about theatre in Dream

Puck’s epilogue: a genuine anxiety about offence?

Plato’s

Republic

(c. 380 BC): ‘

he [the poet] wakens and encourages and strengthens the lower elements in the mind to the detriment of reason, which is like giving power and control to the worst elements in a state and ruining the better elements’.

Theseus on the simultaneous romance and danger of fantasy:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:

That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-17)Slide10

Theatre as conjuring

Puck is a self-described ‘actor’ (3.1.74) and shape-shifter (2.1.44-57 and 3.1.103-6).

Titania

accuses Oberon of similar deception (2.1.64-8).

Love potion tricks the senses: does the enchantment and disenchantment of

Titania

and Lysander mimic the theatrical effect of the play?

What about Demetrius? (‘I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.’ 4.1.190-1)Slide11

Fantasy and shadows

John

Lyly, Court

Prologue to

Campaspe

, 1583:

‘

Whatsoever we present we wish it may be thought the dancing of Agrippa his shadows, who in the moment they were seen were of any shape one could

conceive.’

‘Shadows’ in

Dream

:

Oberon as ‘king of shadows’ (3.2.348)

Fiction as shadows: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’ (5.1.210-11)

Players as shadows: ‘If we shadows have offended…’ (Epilogue 1)Slide12

Onstage spectators

Shakespeare’s onstage spectators are far from idealised – the are disruptive in

Hamlet

,

Dream

and

Love’s Labour’s Lost

.

Hamlet makes it clear that he considers his own taste in theatre more refined than that of the masses:

‘…for

the play, I remember, pleased not the million.

’Twas

caviare

to the general. But it was – as I received it, and others whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine – an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning

.’

(2.2.438-43)

Polonius is a philistine: ‘This is too long’ (2.2.501)Slide13

Sly as onstage spectator

Why do the players

in

The Taming of the Shrew

’s Induction perform

for Sly? The real reason is not the one they tell him:

MESSENGER

.

Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment,

Are come to play a pleasant comedy,

For so your doctors hold it very meet,

Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood,

And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

Therefore they thought it good you hear a play

And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,

Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

SLY.

Marry, I will let them play it. Is not a

comonty

A Christmas gambol, or a tumbling trick?

BARTHOLOMEW.

No, my good lord, it is more pleasing stuff.

SLY.

What, household stuff?

BARTHOLOMEW.

It is a kind of history. (Induction 2.125-36)Slide14

Sly as onstage spectator

Sly in onstage, presumably, through much of the play. His final lines in Shakespeare’s play are after 1.1:

SLY

.

’Tis

a very excellent piece of work, madam lady. Would ’twere done. (1.1.251)

But Sly features more heavily in the anonymous 1594 play

The Taming of A Shrew

– a text whose exact relation to Shakespeare’s is the subject of much debate, but which may be either a source for

The Shrew

, an early draft of it, a memorial reconstruction, or an adaptation of a shared but now-lost original source.Slide15

Sly as onstage spectator

Like Shakespeare’s play,

A Shrew

opens with the gulling of Christopher Sly, but unlike Shakespeare’s, the framing narrative resurfaces throughout the play and is concluded at the end

:

TAPSTER

.

Ay, marry, but you had best get you home,

For your wife will course you for dreaming here tonight.

SLY.

Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew.

I dreamt upon it all this night till now,

And thou hast waked me out of the best dream

That ever I had in my life. But I’ll to my

Wife presently and tame her too,

An if she anger me. (15.8-21)Slide16

The effects of metadrama?

LUCENTIO.

But stay a while, what company is this?

TRANIO.

Master, some show to welcome us to town. (1.1.46-7)

PETRUCHIO.

He that knows better how to tame a shrew,

Now let him speak.

’Tis

charity to show. (4.1.196-7

)

Graham Holderness argues that the framing narrative ‘could have been performed in the self-reflexive,

metadramatic

and ironic manner of Brecht’s epic theatre’ (1989: 25). Slide17

The effects of metadrama?

If

this were indeed the case, continues Holderness, then Katherine’s final speech

‘…might

well have been delivered on the Elizabethan stage with appropriate detachment, distancing and irony to an audience highly sceptical of such propagandist rhetoric; offered as a challenge and provocation to debate rather than as an attempt at ideological incorporation

.’

(1989: 25

)

Elizabeth Schafer

suggests, though, that the

Sly episode can have

‘the

advantage of granting modern audiences permission to laugh at

Katherina’s

taming, because it is seen to be the sort of story that only drunken Elizabethan tinkers enjoyed or believed

in’

(2002: 52). Slide18

‘Shakespeare breaks the fourth wall…’

No, he doesn’t!

Sidney again:

‘Now

for the Poet, he nothing

affirmeth

, and therefore never

lieth

… What childe is there, that

comming

to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old

doore

, doth

beleeve

that it is Thebes

?’

Or as the author

of the second folio’s commendatory poem

On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems

(1632)

put it:

‘…

abused, and glad

To be abused, affected with that truth

Which we perceive is false; …

This, and much more which cannot be expressed

But by himself, his tongue and his own breast,

Was Shakespeare’s freehold

.’

(ll. 23-42) Slide19

‘Shakespeare breaks the fourth wall…’

In the words of Julia Briggs:

‘…

the performance requires the audience to believe and disbelieve simultaneously, yielding themselves up to it self-forgetfully, while letting the play work upon them, involve them, possibly even change them. It requires an immediate and unthinking response, yet pausing to consider the nature of the theatrical illusion makes its paradoxes of appearance and reality difficult to define

.’

(1997: 253-4)Slide20

Metatheatrical self-awareness

Shakespeare frequently draws the audience’s attention to the material realities of the playhouse and its actors, often at moments of heightened

emotion:

HAMLET.

…this

brave

o’erhanging

[firmament], this

majestical

roof fretted with golden fire … appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ (2.2.302-5)

HAMLET.

Remember

thee?

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe.’ (1.5.95-7)Slide21

Metatheatrical self-awareness

HAMLET.

My lord, you played once

i’th

’ university, you say.

POLONIUS.

That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.

HAMLET.

And what did you enact?

POLONIUS.

I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed

i

’

th

’ Capitol. Brutus killed me.

HAMLET.

It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there. (3.2.94-101)

Hamlet was played by

Richard Burbage,

who has played Brutus in

Julius Caesar

; Polonius/Caesar was

‘probably John

Heminges

’ (

Gurr

1996: 106).

Gurr

on this in-joke: ‘It reflects in the writers the expectation that their audiences would be well aware of their environs, and that the fictions were to be seen as open mimicry whose pretence at deceit was obvious

.’ (1996: 106

)Slide22

Metatheatrical self-awareness

Shakespeare’s most daring use of this technique is perhaps at the climax to

Antony and Cleopatra

:

CLEOPATRA

.

The quick comedians

Extemporally

will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’

th

’ posture of a whore. (5.2.212-17)Slide23

Metatheatre as ‘audience control’?

A reminder of the agreed rules underlying the fiction?

The nested

‘Russian doll’ of

metatheatrical

spectators and performers in

Love’s Labour’s Lost

is a self-consciously audacious theatrical game:

BIRON

.

All hid, all hid – an old infant play.

Like a demigod here sit I in the sky,

And wretched fools' secrets heedfully o'er-eye. (4.3.75-7)

‘The

idea of the multiple declarations of passion is implausible and frankly contrived.

Berowne’s

comments serve both to acknowledge and to smooth over the artificiality of the events represented on the stage

.’ (Righter 1967

: 135)Slide24

Metatheatre as ‘audience control’?

In a similar manner, argues Righter,

‘Puck’s

remark to Oberon

[see below]

forestalls possible objections to the artificiality of the scene which

follows’

(1967: 136

):

PUCK

.

Shall we their fond pageant see?

Lord, what fools these mortals be! (3.2.114-15)

QUINCE

.

…here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house… (3.1.2-4)

FABIAN

.

If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

(

Twelfth Night

, 3.4.125-6

)Slide25

Metatheatre as reflection of theatrical insufficiency?

BIRON.

Our wooing doth not end like an old play.

Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy

Might well have made our sport a comedy.

KING.

Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,

And then ’twill end.

BIRON.

That’s

too long for a play. (5.2.860-4

)

‘

Marcade

brings with him into

Love’s Labour’s

Lost

a sense of reality which has a profound effect upon the development of the comedy. Even as the masque of the Muscovites and the Pageant of the Nine Worthies were ruined by an intrusion of reality, so the joyous, untroubled existence of the park is destroyed with the coming of death

.’ (Righter 1967

: 100)Slide26

The life-as-theatre metaphor

The term ‘

metatheatre

’ was coined by Lionel Abel in his book of the same name (1963). In the 2003 reissue

Tragedy and

Metatheatre

, he writes:

‘The

plays I point to as

metatheatre

have one common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized

.’

(2003: vi)

JAQUES

.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

(

As You Like It

, 2.7.139-40)Slide27

The life-as-theatre metaphor

HAMLET

.

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’.

’Tis

not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected

havior

of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief

That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’,

For they are actions that a man might play:

But I have that within which

passeth

show –

These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)Slide28

The life-as-theatre metaphor

Life itself is a ‘performance’ for numerous Shakespearean characters

:

VIOLA

.

I am not that I play.

(

Twelfth Night

, 1.5.177)

IAGO.

I am not what I am.

(

Othello

, 1.1.65

)

EDMUND

.

…and

on’s

cue out he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy; mine is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like them of Bedlam.

(

King Lear

, 1.2.129-31

)

CORIOLANUS

.

Why did you wish me milder? would you have me

False to my nature? Rather say I play

The man I am. (3.2.13-15)

CORIOLANUS

.

Like a dull actor now,

I have forgot my part, and I am out,

Even to a full disgrace. (5.3.40-2)Slide29

Some things a person can ‘play’ in Shakespeare:

the villain (Iago on himself in

Othello

, 2.3.337)

the devil (the Bastard on himself in

King John

, 2.1.137; Gloucester on himself in

Richard III

, 1.3.343)

the tyrant (Cressida on Troilus, 3.2.114)

the cook (Titus on himself in

Titus Andronicus

, 5.2.205;

Belarius

and his sons in

Cymbeline

, 3.6.31 and 4.2.209)

the orator (Edward on himself and Gloucester on himself in

3 Henry VI

, 1.2.2 and 3.2.204; Buckingham on himself in

Richard III

, 3.5.95)

the humble host (Macbeth on himself in

Macbeth

, 3.4.5)

the pious innocent (

Dionyza

on Cleon in

Pericles

, 4.3.18

)Slide30

Some things a person can ‘play’ in Shakespeare (continued):

the penitent (Antony on himself in

Antony and Cleopatra

, 2.2.115)

the fool (Hal on himself in

2 Henry IV

, 2.2.133;

Gratiano

on himself in

The Merchant of Venice

, 1.1.82; Hamlet on Polonius in

Hamlet

, 3.1.143-4; Viola on

Feste

in

Twelfth Night

, 3.1.57)

the woman (Macduff on himself in

Macbeth

, 4.3.270; Wolsey on himself in

Henry VIII

, 3.2.504)

the housewife (Capulet on himself in

Romeo and Juliet

, 4.2.44)

the knave (Rosalind on herself in

As You Like It

, 3.2.285)

the swaggerer (Rosalind on herself in

As You Like It

, 4.3.14)

the swan (Emilia on herself, dying, in

Othello

, 5.2.288)Slide31

Gender as performance

LORD.

Sirrah

, go you to

Barthol’mew

, my page,

And see him dressed in all suits like a lady. […]

I know the boy will well usurp the grace,

Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman

.

(Induction 1.103-4, 129-30)

Transvestism was a central preoccupation for

anti-

theatricalists

; all female characters were, of course, played by male actors.

Cross-dressing heroines appear in

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

,

As You Like It

,

The Merchant of Venice

(three times),

Twelfth Night

and

Cymbeline

.

Rosalind in

As You Like It

especially draws attention to the codes of behaviour adopted by the different genders.Slide32

Power as performance

Stephen

Gosson

,

Plays Confuted in Five

Actions

, 1582:

‘We

are commanded by God to abide in the same calling wherein we were called, which is our ordinary vocation in a commonweal. … So in a commonweal, if private men be suffered to forsake their calling because they desire to walk gentleman-like in satin and velvet, with a buckler at their heels, proportion is so broken, unity dissolved, harmony confounded, that the whole body must be dismembered and the prince or the head cannot choose but sicken

…’

Is

Gosson

exposing the theatricality of everyday life here?Slide33

Power as performance

Stephen Greenblatt:

‘Theatricality

, in the sense of both disguise and histrionic self-representation, arose from conditions common to almost all Renaissance courts: a group of men and women alienated from the customary roles and revolving uneasily around a

centre

of power, a constant struggle for recognition and attention, and a virtually

fetishistic

emphasis upon manner. The manuals of court

behaviour

which became popular in the sixteenth century are essentially handbooks for actors, practical guides for a society whose members were nearly always on stage

.’

(2005: 162)Slide34

Statecraft as stagecraft in Hamlet

HAMLET.

…one may

smile

and

smile

and be a

villain.

At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark

.

(1.5.109-10)

HAMLET.

…my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give twenty,

forty, an

hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little

. (2.2.364-7)

HAMLET

.

They had begun the play… (on

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s

deaths, 5.2.32)Slide35

Statecraft as stagecraft in Hamlet

CLAUDIUS

.

…this vile deed

We must, with all our majesty and

skill

Both countenance and

excuse. (4.1.29-31)

CLAUDIUS

.

How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!

Yet must not we put the strong law on

him.

He’s loved of the distracted multitude,

Who like not in their

judgment

but their eyes

. (4.3.2-5)Slide36

Statecraft as stagecraft in 1 Henry IV

FALSTAFF

.

Shall

we have a play extempore

?

(

2.5.282-3)

PRINCE

HARRY.

Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my

life.

FALSTAFF

.

Shall I? Content. This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my

crown.

PRINCE

HARRY.

Thy state is taken for a joined-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown. (2.5.379-85

)

Falstaff mocks the discourse of stage royalty, improvising in iambic pentameter (2.5.395-401

).Slide37

Statecraft as stagecraft in 1 Henry IV

But Harry

is playing a double or even triple role in this

scene:

FALSTAFF

No, my good lord, banish

Peto

, banish

Bardolph

, banish

Poins

, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff,

Banish not him thy Harry's company,

Banish not him thy Harry's company.

Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

PRINCE HENRY.

I do, I will. (2.5.478-86)Slide38

Statecraft as stagecraft in 1 Henry IV

Harry let

us in on the secret at the start of the

play:

PRINCE HARRY.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humour of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. (1.2. 192-200)

Eventually, Harry, like Puck, uses the metaphor of the dream to describe his ludic role:

KING HARRY.

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;

But being awake, I do despise my dream. (5.4.49-51)Slide39

References

Abel, Lionel (2003)

Tragedy and

Metatheatre

: Essays on Dramatic Form

, New York: Holmes & Meier.

Bevington

, David M. (2009)

This Wide and Universal

Theater

: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now

, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Briggs, Julia (1997)

This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580-1625

, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen (2005)

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Slide40

References

Gurr

, Andrew (1996)

Playgoing

in Shakespeare’s London, Second Edition

, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holderness, Graham (1989)

Shakespeare in Performance: The Taming of the Shrew

, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Righter, Anne (1967)

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play

,

Harmondsworth

: Penguin Books.

Schafer, Elizabeth (2002)

Shakespeare in Production:

The Taming of the Shrew

, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.