2000/01/01 by Peter Thomson · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism #Theater, Performance, and Music History #Theatre and Performance Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/14682761.2000.10807019
openalex publication_date 2000/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Whilst there is no denying the tendency, common to actors and audiences in the twentieth century, to focus on character as the main prop of Shakespearean performance, this essay is concerned to question the historical justification for such a focus. Psychology was in its infancy at the end of the sixteenth century, and the word ‘character’ was generally confined to the vocabulary of calligraphers and printers. Hard-pressed professional actors, straining to commit a sequence of parts to memory, were better served by understanding the ‘purpose’ than what we might now call the ‘character’ of a role. It is the crossing of purposes, not the clashing of subjectivities, that drives Elizabethan drama, and it was only the exceptional actor (Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage, say), who could seem—presumably by sheer force of personality—to control the narrative. ‘Temperament’ is a safer word than ‘character’ if we are to come to an understanding of the Elizabethan actor. Even so, there is a discernible development, best observed in the sequence of plays Shakespeare wrote immediately after his encounter with Plutarch, in the nature of the demands a major playwright might make on his actors. Beginning with Brutus, and reaching its climax in Hamlet, Shakespeare created roles in which (probably) Burbage was asked to present people at cross-purposes with themselves as well as with other people. Perhaps for the first time, an actor was being asked to conceal himself inside a role. The shift from presentational to representational acting is adumbrated in the ‘Hecuba’ exchange between Hamlet and the First Player. But Shakespeare's subsequent heroes are more easily played along traditional lines of temperament, and we should not fall into the trap of believing that Shakespeare rejected presentational performance. He, like his audiences and perhaps unlike Jonson, was not a purist. He shared the delight of his fellow-dramatists in the creation of composites.