Selfhood on the Early
Modern English Stage
Selfhood on the Early
Modern English Stage
Edited by
Pauline Blanc
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage, Edited by Pauline Blanc
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Pauline Blanc and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-84718-451-0, ISBN (13): 9781847184511
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Pauline BLANC
PART I: SELFHOOD IN ITS EMERGENT STAGES
The Selfhood of Stage Figures and Their Spectacular Efficacy in Early
English Plays (c.1450-1528)
André LASCOMBES .................................................................................. 8
Wit and Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral
Drama
Jean-Paul DEBAX..................................................................................... 21
Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus
Norah Yvonne PHOENIX ......................................................................... 33
PART II: SELFHOOD: A CULTURAL AND LITERARY
CONSTRUCT
John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe: An Exercise in Tautology:
Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction
Francis GUINLE ....................................................................................... 50
Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine
Marie-Hélène BESNAULT ....................................................................... 65
“Cultural Amphibians”: Impersonating the Alien in Stuart Masques
Ladan NIAYESH....................................................................................... 86
vi
Table of Contents
PART III: SELFHOOD AND HAMLET
When Anamorphosis Meets Aphanisis: New Perspectives on (and from)
the Case of Hamlet
Richard HILLMAN ................................................................................. 102
“They are actions that a man might play”: Hamlet and Characterisation:
Theory, Performance, Criticism
Peter J. SMITH........................................................................................ 114
PART IV: SELFHOOD AND SIGNATURE
Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe
François LAROQUE ............................................................................... 130
Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self
Danièle BERTON-CHARRIÈRE............................................................ 147
PART V: SELFHOOD AND ROYAL AFFILIATION
The Magisterial Hero?: Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel
Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)
Greg WALKER ....................................................................................... 164
Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III
Catherine LISAK..................................................................................... 182
Editor and Contributor Biographies......................................................... 211
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My deepest thanks go to all who participated in the colloquium,
“Selfhood on the English Stage in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries,”
from which this collection springs; in particular to the director of the
research team of the Department of Languages at the University of
Lyon 3, Professor Hughes Didier, who sponsored the event which
took place at the university on April 7-8, 2006, and who suggested
that all the papers should be in English. I am grateful also to François
Ové, the director of the University’s publications department, for
permission to reproduce the majority of the essays of this volume,
which appeared in the proceedings of the colloquium published in
December 2007.
Special thanks go to Don Beecher, Michael Hattaway, and
Jacques Ramel for their support. Emeritus Senior Lecturer from the
neighbouring University of Lyon 2, Jacques Ramel has been
especially helpful with the typesetting of the volume, and without his
assistance it would not have seen the light of day. For their patience,
I thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Amanda Millar for all
the work involved in giving this book its final shape.
This volume is dedicated to my mother Doreen, and is in memory
of my father, Arthur S. Ruberry.
INTRODUCTION
PAULINE BLANC
The essays presented in this volume originate from the international
two-day colloquium entitled “Selfhood on the English Stage in the XVIth
and XVIIth Centuries” that I organized at the University of Jean MoulinLyon 3 in April 2006. The contributors are all specialists in the field of
early modern English drama working in France and in England. The aim
of the colloquium was to explore the matrix from which a plethora of stage
selves of the early modern period emerged. Different approaches are used
to account for the manner in which that fluid entity, the dramatis persona,
was gradually elaborated into a fictional self, as a result of the multifarious
shaping influences of early modern discursive and historical forces
existing beyond the theatre itself.
In the West, the notion of selfhood is generally regarded as being
essentially imbricated in surrounding contexts—natural and social,
material and human, theological, legal and political. The self lives in
exchange, is not forever fixed and can look to models from literature as
well as from life for ways to conceive itself. The mechanisms that accord
selfhood to stage and to real-life selves are basically the same, as this
collection of essays will reveal in its explorations of the elements that
fashioned the stage figures which occupied the playing areas of early
English drama, in which the dramatic conflict was to develop from a
psychomachia between good and evil forces to a striving for selfhood and
individuation, for the right to claim to be an “I.” The authors discuss a
broad spectrum of stage selves, starting with abstract, little-known figures
like Mundus and eventually incorporating more rounded, renowned stage
beings like Hamlet.
The first section consists of three essays which all reveal how certain
representational factors, personal motives and personalizing traits entered
into the composition of stage figures to augment or explain what was, in
the early drama, a conventional posture and to bring into existence more
compelling illusions of a self. The illusion of character is seen to grow
2
Introduction
away from abstractly registered Mankinds and Everymans, to incorporate
Free Wills and more fully developed characters endowed with a capacity
for emotion. André Lascombes, adopting a method based on the
conceptual principle underlying Greimas’s models for actantial analysis of
fictional constructs, begins by taking the reader onto the allegorical stage
of the second half of the fifteenth century to focus on the semantic essence
of the Tudor abstract figures, which he likens to “impressive totem poles”
that do not represent individual beings, but rather a combination of
energies capable of inducing human acts or passions. Jean-Paul Debax
contributes his discussion of the way the human self was represented
through the image of Mankind as conveyed by a selection of preReformation and contrasting Protestant-biased interludes. The relation
between created man and his Creator is expressed in these plays in terms
of the degree of independence of the creature, a Christian debate which,
dating from Augustine or even earlier, fuelled the controversy concerning
Determinism and Freewill and the efficacy of good works in the process of
salvation. Debax comes to the conclusion that both Protestant and Catholic
attempts at representing the workings of man’s soul failed to give a living
or credible account of the self. Yvonne Phoenix, on the other hand, finds a
considerable degree of psychological credibility in certain stage figures
that appear in two late Tudor interludes, Apius and Virginia (1564) by
R. B. and Cambises (1561) by Thomas Preston. Their capacity for
emotion, reflection and reasoning, their capacity to evolve and not remain
static makes them viable contenders for a place in the portrait gallery of
memorable Tudor stage selves.
In the second section of the volume, three essays illustrate how literary
and cultural influences shaped the construction of even more compelling
representations of selfhood. Francis Guinle discusses the way in which
selfhood in John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe of 1584 is the result of a
projected image found in history as well as in the different source texts
about Alexander the Great. Marie-Hélène Besnault explores the numerous
cultural and literary sources that helped shape Marlowe’s uniquely
delineated Tamburlaine: classical mythology, early English chronicles,
travel literature, the exploration of the body in Renaissance fine arts,
Renaissance moral philosophy and the dramatist’s critical fascination with
a newly developing acquisitive society. The focus then turns to the
representation of selfhood in a selection of Stuart court masques. Ladan
Niayesh analyses the way the embodiments of alterity and spectacles of
foreign otherness in these masques point to the ideological basis of a genre
which, contrary to the travel plays in the public theatres, did not roam the
Pauline Blanc
3
world but, with a self-serving purpose, brought the world back to
Whitehall for a universal tribute to the British crown in a context of
nascent imperialism. The barrier between the self and the foreign other
becomes porous, as the supposedly alien masquers leave the stage to take
partners from the audience, causing the masque to vacillate between a
spectacle of incorporation and one of contamination.
The third section of the collection is devoted to Hamlet. Richard
Hillman studies the relation between the two technical terms and effects
called “anamorphosis” and “aphanisis” and the representation of character
in early modern drama. His argument focuses on the way anamorphosis
and aphanisis enter into a mutually reinforcing dynamic with regard to
self-representation and guide the audience in changing its imaginary point
of view. Since the system is not hermetically self-contained, intertextual
signals may creep into the critical equation and introduce meanings
recognized by the audience but beyond the scope of the character’s
consciousness. In other words, language and behaviour may cue an
audience to view a character as having external rather than internal
“origins.” Hillman suggests that what criticism has tended to read as moreor-less incipient “selfhood” may indeed smack of authorial bricolage. The
essay develops this idea further as Hillman examines the possible shaping
influence on Hamlet of two hitherto-unrecognized sources, both accessible
to the original audiences: Histoire de l’estat de France, tant de la
république que de la religion, sous le règne de François II (1576) by
Louis Régnier de La Planche, and the fifth volume of Histoires tragiques
(1572) by François de Belleforest.
Peter J. Smith examines the vicissitudes of representing Hamlet, and
reveals the differences as well as the similarities between early
seventeenth-century notions of representation and contemporary ideas of
characterisation. The argument, he contends, is not merely between a postRomantic idea(l) of human and autonomous selves and the New Historicist
insistence on the relativity of subjectivity, but between actors on the one
hand and literary critics on the other. If critical accounts are teleological
(concerned with the manner in which the outcomes of the play are
accomplished by or consistent with its characterisation), on the contrary, a
performer’s approach is the reverse as s/he explores a way into the role,
asking questions relating to their character’s intentions. Smith goes on to
demonstrate how directors are able to construct Hamlet’s self/character
against the grain of the expectations of a knowing audience and how the
characterisation of the Prince of Denmark relies as much on the production
as on the script.
4
Introduction
In the ensuing section, François Laroque investigates the links between
various types of signatures in paintings by Van Eyck, Holbein,
Michelangelo and Caravaggio on the one hand, and texts by Donne and
Shakespeare on the other. Laroque seeks to uncover possible
correspondences between signing as self-portrait and statement of
selfhood, and to explain a number of ambiguous statements in poems or
plays of the period in which poet and playwright simultaneously assert and
erase their presence. Danièle Berton-Charrière focuses on the shaping
influence of Cyril Tourneur’s life and personality on the self-centred and
self-devoted villains of his The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) and of The
Revenger’s Tragedy, which was published anonymously in 1607, but later
attributed first to Cyril Tourneur and then to Thomas Middleton. As a spy
and double agent, Tourneur had to hide and adopt another self. It is not
suggested that his works are autobiographical, but he does leave his
imprint on Jacobean stage villains who, like him, constantly conceal their
identities by changing their costumes, names, and intentions to fit into the
tragic or satirical patterns that Tourneur actually defiles. Berton-Charrière
suggests that the treatment of a perverted self necessitated the perversion
of the dramatic frame itself.
In the last section, two essays focus on the shaping influence of royalty
on the dramatic representation of selfhood. Greg Walker discusses the
subtle representations of early Tudor politics and identity offered in
Rowley’s early Jacobean history play, When You See Me, You Know Me
(first printed in 1605). In particular, he looks at the curious mixture of
nostalgia and anxiety regarding memories of the reign of Henry VIII that
are seemingly manifested in the play. Rowley represents the King as an
embodiment of a highly personalised, masculine politics, juxtaposing him
with various representations of “indirect” forms of political action which
are posited as corrupt, “foreign” or effeminate. The particularly complex
form of masculine personal and political identity represented by Henry is
discussed in relation to both the complex legacy of the Henrician
reformation received in later periods and contemporary anxieties
concerning the early reign of James VI and I. Walker points out the
various paradoxes implied in this representation of the Henrician legacy—
in which tropes of male heroism and “effeminate” tyranny, romantic
heroism and practical politics, laddish roistering and sober statesmanship
all vie for attention—and addresses the question as to whether they can be
reconciled with emerging senses of the dramatic representation of selfhood
or whether the play is a harking back to earlier traditions of allegorised
characterisation.
Pauline Blanc
5
In the last essay, Catherine Lisak focuses on the episodic appearances
of the pastoral poetic mode in Shakespeare’s Richard III and discusses the
way codified pastoral imagery endorses the cult of the royal self in order to
challenge and dismantle the unified, singular, established court image of
Elizabeth I and of her father before her. Lisak shows how the play taps
into the lyrical imagination of the Elizabethan age, re-energizing several
highly-charged voices of the times—Edmund Spenser’s, Philip Sidney’s,
and John Lyly’s, as well as the Queen’s own—and calling up past voices
of the classical age in order to stage Elizabeth I’s motley of selves in a
disquieting manner which engages central questions concerning the
representative value of the royal self as “Elisa, Queen of Shepherds.”
This collection of essays illustrates the complexity and richness of the
matrix which the early modern dramatists drew upon in their endeavours
to bring alive a considerable range of compelling stage beings who, in
many cases, have managed not only to occupy the space of the stage but
also to impress a lasting vision of themselves upon their audiences. The
editor of this volume sincerely hopes that its thought-provoking pages may
contribute to elucidating reasons why certain early modern stage selves
still fascinate the theatre-goer of the twenty-first century.
PART I
SELFHOOD IN ITS EMERGENT STAGES
THE SELFHOOD OF STAGE FIGURES
AND THEIR SPECTACULAR EFFICACY
IN EARLY ENGLISH PLAYS (C. 1450-1528)
ANDRÉ LASCOMBES
Since the volume editor has avoided such anachronistic categories as
“characterisation” and “characters,” I will choose, when discussing the
intimate nature or “selfhood” of some anthropomorphic agents in the nonreligious English plays from the second half of the fifteenth to the very
first decades of the sixteenth century, to classify them as stage types or
figures, it being understood that most of them are abstract or allegorical in
nature. Once this initial convention is made clear, two more decisions
should be made explicit. One is my adoption of a method of analysis
founded on the principle that the identity of a dramatic agent (its selfhood)
is not primarily determined by its referential links to socio-cultural or
historical models, but in more cogent and relevant fashion by its logical
and syntactical function(s) within the fictional world to which it belongs.
While recognising my methodological debt to the propounder of the theory
behind such a view (Greimas’s models for actantial analysis of fictional
constructs), I must also make it clear at once that I have never been able
usefully to couch any spectacular artefacts of the western mimetic tradition
upon the Procrustean bed of that fairly abstract theory, better suited in my
opinion to the semantics of linguistic constructs than to those of the
theatre. 1 I therefore claim the right to be irrelevant here and to limit my
borrowing to the mere conceptual principle already indicated.
My third caveat is one which has been, over the years, repeatedly
sounded by practically all analysts of the Tudor and pre-modern English
drama, from T. W. Craik (1958) and Richard Southern (1973), more
recently in two articles, one by David Mills (1983) and one, more specific,
by Sarah Carpenter (1983), and forcibly highlighted once again by Greg
1
For an outline of this method see Greimas 1977. For a detailed access to
Greimas’s concepts and terminology, consult Courtès and Greimas 1979.
André Lascombes
9
Walker in his helpful selection of late medieval and early Tudor dramatic
material (2000, 250): this is the notion (addressed essentially to today’s
reader of theatrical texts) that (s)he should be aware that practically all
categories of dramatic agents affect the almost Brechtian stance of
“standing slightly outside [their roles], ‘showing’ or presenting [them] to
the audience” (Carpenter 1983, 21). As my diagram below tries to suggest,
the proximity to the play area of the encircling audience, which no
material barrier isolates from the world of fiction, ensures a quality of
audience-attention and participation which later conventions will be hard
put to preserve. The outer world of actual reality in which the audience go
on living and breathing, looking in, or even eating and drinking on some
occasions, vies for recognition with the world of fiction. Hence the notinfrequent forays into the outer world of some dramatic agent puncturing
the invisible partition, or even (in some bolder cases as in Henry
Medwall’s famous Fulgens and Lucres), the intrusion of someone from the
outer world, invading and possibly disrupting the fictional programme. In
such conditions the aesthetic rule of role presentation comes natural to the
generally highly-trained players/singers that operate in the fiction.
The only problem remaining at this point is to determine which body of
particular plays might make a sufficiently representative bunch, as singled
out from a corpus essentially to be defined in negative terms, such as
“Early Tudor non-biblical drama,” and which in fact includes a wide
variety of forms. My decision has been to welcome a large selection of
plays that resort to allegorical impersonation, written and performed
between the two termini indicated as my corpus of reference, uneasily
attempting to take into account a sufficient variety of cases while
concentrating on the fairly homogeneous ensemble of household plays.
Now, actively taking up the subject, I shall make a few brief remarks
about the main characteristics of the corpus. In a relatively short period of
time (1470-1528) it may be seen that the approximate score of plays here
considered easily fall into sub-groups which have much in common and
several distinguishing features. One of the traits each of them exhibits (to
varying degrees of course) is a love of disputation and debate, both
inherited from the medieval and humanist traditions. The argument may be
moral, such as the odyssey of the salvation of the soul in the Christian
perspective, as debated in the anonymous plays The Pride of Life, The
Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Everyman. It may also be of a
moral/political nature, either reconstructing the doctrine of kingship and
social authority (as in John Skelton’s Magnificence and in Fulgens and
Lucres), or redefining the relationships between the estates in the new
10
The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy
in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
context of mercantile power (as in Gentleness and Nobility 2 ). It may even
be an issue of intellectual nature and more general scope, as in Rastell’s
The Nature of the Four Elements, or again a renewed disquisition under
the light of humanism about the old Petrarchan conflicts between rights of
reason, rules of social order and the lawless powers of passion, as in
Fulgens and Lucres again. In all cases, the general adaptability of the
Interlude has long been recognised as its founding feature, one that also
ensures an evolutionary capacity which, in David Bevington’s view
(1975, 2), has made of that Tudor form the probable basis for so many
later elaborations in Renaissance drama.
It is no great wonder therefore that a dramatic structure, at once so
traditional and so ready to adjust its varying semantic substance to new
needs, should also favour the preservation of impersonation habits
inherited from the traditional models of the biblical epos (the civic cycles)
and from the fantastic romantic fabrications around heroic models of saints
(saints’ plays and miracles). The plays here considered may well bend to
their new ends the dramatic types and figures inherited from the traditional
corpus. Nevertheless, such dramatic agents are in their essential structure
recognisable heirs to the former models. For these two reasons, the
evolutionary quality of the type of play discussed and the capacity for
adaptation of its dramatic types, I shall use a very basic canonical
programme of actantial/actorial analysis derived from Greimas’s lesson to
sketch out the functional model of these dramatic types. Such a basic
pattern offers a design of only five or six cardinal positions, thereby
potentially applicable to all the key figures encountered in the plays
considered. The following provisional descriptive tool may enable us to
see better into the functional activity of these abstract or allegorical types:
Key figure 1: DESTINATOR (implicitly or explicitly present)
Key figure 2: THE HERO / LEADER
Key figure 3: THE ADJUVANT(S)
Key figure 4: THE ANTAGONIST(S)
Key figure 5: WITNESS / COMMENTATOR / MEDIATOR / FIGURE OF FUN 3
Key figure 6: THE AUDIENCE
2
This play has been attributed to John Heywood, but also to John Rastell.
This complex figure, endowed with flexible and multiple functions, which has
been studied from different angles by various scholars (see Happé 1964 and 1981,
and Debax 1987), is best left out of the present essay as functionally too different
from the other major figures.
3
André Lascombes
11
I must simply point out that each of the polar positions charted in the
suggested pattern is a mere occupational pre-orientation, inclining the
titular figure to postures and acts which are to be expected from the said
functional role. But such a pre-determination rarely prevents the figure
from enacting for itself a functional existence more precisely adapted to
the actual fictional context. It therefore follows that the said figure may
develop an intensity, magnitude, or role of its own, far in excess of the
potentialities of the original functional outline. This explains why the
various allegorical characters in plays ranging from Everyman to
Magnificence will be so notably different, depending on the dramatic
issues and the tone of each play.
With these various recommendations in mind we may now embark on
our study.
In Search of the Selfhood of the Tudor
Allegorical/Abstract Figure
The first important question about those stage figures’ selfhood can
now be addressed, even though the examination will be restricted to a few
cases only in significant plays. It concerns of course each of these figures’
semantic essence, the locus which can be determined as the true source of
its own self in a drama deeply dedicated to the argumentative and to the
exemplary. While there is no question of what Humanum Genus, or
Everyman really stands for in The Castle or in Mankind, nor about what is
represented by Titivillus in the latter play, or even who Jupiter is in
Heywood’s Play of the Wether, it is bafflingly difficult to get any deeper
than this first fundamental notion: Humanum Genus is frail humanity seen
in a Christian perspective; Titivillus is the archetypal image of absolute
Evil; Jupiter, as the magnificent sun-like symbol of absolute power at the
head of the state, obviously stands for King Henry VIII. But even if the
detail of the text will yield scraps of additional information confirming that
immediate identification, little informational light is finally added to the
initial notion. It is useless to gloss at any length here the trite remark, a
thousand times repeated, about the narrative or dramatic impersonations of
the allegorical mode: those larger-than-life figures, practically reduced to
one eminent semantic feature endlessly reverberated, seem impenetrable
structures of a glassy essence that brings the critic to the brink of despair.
The only discernible consequence of this is the incredible vehemence of
meaning which that semantic elementariness inevitably entails. These two
12
The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy
in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
tightly correlated features are the traditional ones that emerge in critical
commentary about those king-size creatures. King-size indeed for the
additional reason that, in such a simple programmatic pattern, with so few
actantial positions to hold, each of these figures looms large, more
threatening than benign, even when it embodies some sympathetic force
held in readiness to assist the hero. But these two features do not help in
any way to see better into the crux of the allegorical/abstract figures’ inner
nature.
To pore over the problem more closely, I should no doubt return to my
initial remark about their basic function, and focus on the incredible
banality of their semantic content. In terms of information quantity, these
figures carry a meaning which is at once fictionally enormous and
intellectually tenuous. Whether they suggest a debate about the Christian
ideology, or the doctrine of authority and kingship, or some other topic of
circumstantial value at the time of performance, the notional content which
they dramatize is a tissue of commonplaces whose interest essentially
seems to lie, rather than in their novelty, in their exemplarily perspicuous
formulation. In other words, remembering that we are in the theatre, it
would seem that those enormous figures rather serve a memorial, truly
gnomic function, like buoys marking out an ideological sailing-path clear
of reefs and shallows. Or, for a more theatrical metaphor, they are loudspeaking monuments issuing warnings and statements of policy for the
benefit of the assembled audience-congregation, or, as Walker has
convincingly argued, of their rulers. 4
Interpreted as resonant foci of meaning, redundantly mirroring an
explicitly traditional lore to congregation-like audiences, these unreadable
figures suddenly acquire a meaning much in excess of the dusty, paperthin existence to which a long critical tradition has confined them. Like
impressive totem poles, each bearing some roughly hewn feature for his
semantic signature, they serve the function of the immemorial maskfigures speaking or dancing in the ritual plays of some traditional cultures.
But one last remark is in order here to help us see them for what they
really are. In our culture, which has little use for such ritual masks, the
original meaning of the word “mask” has been perverted and means no
more for us today than the diminutive leather or cardboard covering worn
over human faces within the area of play or delusion. In contradistinction,
the totem poles of African or Amerindian tribes, or the ritual masks played
4
See Walker for a study of the links between early Tudor drama and the strategies
of political advice (1988 and 1991).
André Lascombes
13
in ceremonial plays of the Balinese theatre cover no face at all; each of
them is rather like the surface of a being devoid of individual lineaments.
Far from reproducing the imagistic replica of a human face, each is
modelled, deeply lined or distorted, into an other-than-human (ritual or
allegorised) body featuring a set of cosmic, psychic or supernatural forces
or dynamic qualities. Thereby they do not represent some individual being,
but a combination of the energies capable of inducing human acts or
passions (Evil, Envy, Luxury, Fright, Anger, Murder, Death, etc).
The word “energy” should actually be taken here in the full sense of
the Greek original, enargeia, which precisely refers to the violent impact
on sight of a lit-up object. 5 Such energy, stored up as it were in the maskfigure as in a kind of well, is ready to be unleashed when activated by the
staging. It is clear to all that such a notion and use of the theatrical figure
gradually perished in Europe with the arrival of the bourgeois theatre, only
to be reawakened at the very end of the nineteenth century when the
epistemological forces at work in the Western world, including a new
attraction for the values of primitivism and the need for a political theatre
amid the growth of world-wide propaganda, brought it back to embody the
awesome powers of political ambition and human perversity. But, during
the in-between period, criticism, primarily adjusted to reading audiences,
came to regard those potent wells of energy as imagistic and linguistic
structures conceived to be read on the page only, and it therefore lamented
the lifeless, dusty quality of the dramatic allegorical tradition. Today,
when the various European attempts at theatrical renovation (even based
on widely different premises) have favoured the revival of such stage
figures, it is possible to conceive again that they may have displayed in the
play-area of the Tudor age an exceptional theatrical virtue, actually far in
excess of what the imagistic individual character can offer. 6 Logically, my
5
See the entry “enargeia” in Bailly’s dictionary (1894, 670), and in his “Table of
Greek Roots” (2202), primarily relating its base element to “argos”, “bright, litup,” rather than to “ergon,” “activity.” I am obliged to Pauline Blanc for informing
me of Peter Schwenger’s discussion of the term and of his quotation of Quintilian’s
corroborating reading of it (Institutio Oratoria, 8.3.62) as referring to a “framing
effect” capable of lighting up and throwing into relief a linguistic passage or
element (1999, 102).
6
Among other signs, one may mention the world-wide prevailing masks of
political propaganda, such as the Russian Bear and the American Eagle during the
years of Cold War confrontation, and also note the fitful return to the nonpsychological character in plays by different dramatists, eminent or otherwise,
written or defended by various theoricians, from Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud or
14
The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy
in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
essay should now try to show how the mask-like figures of the early Tudor
stage, exploiting their enargeia to the full, vocally and visually impose the
spectacle of what they represent. This exploitation is achieved through the
three closely intertwined means at their disposal: a) their physical
appearance and acting; b) their oracular activity throughout the play; c) the
name by which they go. Since it is practically impossible to consider the
first two separately, I shall, in the space allotted, quote a few instances of
their interaction in one or two of the plays listed. That material might and
should be expanded at leisure. As to the third energy-factor (the name), I
shall briefly suggest how some of the great allegorical figures answer the
awe-inspiring question which Juliet puts to her enemy-lover: what is in a
name?
The visual and auditory resonance of the Mask-like
figure or icon
I shall provide here just a few instances from two representative plays,
one belonging to the late Medieval tradition performed in the round (The
Castle of Perseverance), the other to the effervescent new Tudor mode
(Skelton’s Magnificence), to be played in a hall. In the former play, most
readers/spectators today will feel assaulted by the strange anti-naturalistic
mode in which all prime stage figures present themselves. In turgid
truculent vocatives, launched at the audience as much and even more than
at his co-agonists, each of the four main protagonists (Mundus/the World,
Belyal/The Devil, Caro/The Flesh and Mankind/the puny hero) illustrates
that address-technique. Monopolising the general attention from the height
of the scaffold where he is enthroned (or from the central Castle for
Mankind), each of them in turn cries out his own pre-eminence, as actor
almost subsuming his own actant. Thus, like all medieval tyrants voicing
in geographical litanies the extent of their empires (see The Castle, 15782), Mundus is the whole of the world’s space; similarly, Belyal is the
irate violence of conquest and destruction (196-216); and Caro the
complacent blossoming out of the flesh (235-74). As noted earlier, their
semantic narrowness goes hand in hand with hyperbolic violence,
expressing itself in the extravagant piling up of things and sounds
Bertold Brecht down to Valère Novarina (e.g. his play L’espace furieux, and
complementarily some of the essays collected in Devant la parole, particularly the
first three [1999, 13-88], which summarize his meditations on theatrical speech,
space and impersonation).
André Lascombes
15
representing the speaker (the accumulation of first person singular
pronouns “I” in lines 164-78, but also the thronging of verbs expressing
frantic activism, as in lines 196-208). Another feature adds to the semantic
density of those soliloquised addresses, which in fact are furious fits of
self-prosopography, literally glutted with what I must call “integrated
stage directions.” These, used as mirroring replicas of the actor’s image,
proclaim the various semiotic elements composing the spectacular
speaking figure: its complexion, gait, clothing, gestures, and of course its
voice. Much has been written about Pilate’s voice in the cycle plays; more
should be said about the thunderous organ of the mask-like icons,
especially (but not only) in the early masterpiece morality called The
Castle of Perseverance. More interestingly, the orchestral quality of such
dramatic language efficiently combining the diverse functions of addressmaking, action-depicting and specular reverberation of the actor’s or
actant’s physical reality, deserves more space and attentive study, and so
does its possible link with the nature of the play-area. Lastly, one more
remark may prove useful for an evaluation of their spectacular virtue:
some of the semes highlighted in the icon-like figures violently clash with
each other. For instance, the pompous clothing of the three rulers, a
constant sign of their supreme majesty, utterly jars with Belyal’s furious
anxiety, or with the brutal disruptions of mood in Caro’s speech. Such
contradictions seem to point to an intimate schizoid trend in these gigantic
egos, an intimation of their latent monstrosity. But more importantly, in
spectacular terms, such discrepancies feed to the spectator a referential
uncertainty, a superposition of duplicitous images. And this eminently
theatrical phenomenon (which I once dubbed “theatre diaphora” 7 ) ensures
potent effects in reception.
If we now turn to the later play, Magnificence, we will see how the
importance of the vocal and the discursive elements is just as paramount,
though the effects created are very different. I shall borrow here from the
acute estimate of the play-as-linguistic-construct which Greg Walker gives
in his introductory lines. Here, we may note, the dialogical structure
prevails, with a constant turnover of brief, acute, sometimes murderous
exchanges, and the play, Walker remarks, also exhibits an astonishing
aptitude for constant word-play, use of proverbs and sententiae, by the
“goodies” mostly, or references to popular wisdom by the “baddies,” a
7
For a tentative definition of the nature, mechanisms and effects of “theatre
diaphora” and the techniques of “ostension,” see Lascombes 1979, 1989, 1992, and
1994 .
16
The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy
in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
verbal dexterity further echoed by an artful variety of the verse forms.
Walker specifically notes how the arrival of disorder with the promotion of
Fansy at court coincides with “the collapse of the ordered four-stress
rhyme royal stanza,” superseded by “a bravura array of forms” signifying
chaos, until the return of order and virtue restores the former measure
(2000, 350).
As in the former play, however, the spectacular elements, clothing,
gait, tone of voice are closely underlined, powerfully contributing to
impose upon our imagination the visual/acoustic icon of such malevolent
figures as Counterfeit Countenaunce, Crafty Conveyaunce, Clokyd
Colusyon or Courtly Abusyon.
What is in the name of the mask-like icon?:
the allegorical figure and onomasia 8
Nearly all the characters in The Castle of Perseverance (thirty-one out
of a total of thirty-five) are given what the Anglo-Saxon critics call “labelnames,” which is preferable to the more pedantic but more official Greek
term of “aptronyms” used in classical repertories, and which could be
translated as “names that cannot fly away” (Cuddon 1982, 53). The term
underlines the tightness of the link between name and bearer. Though
critics at large seem to have neglected the importance of such a
connection, audiences are, more than academics, alive to the stamp of
spectacular enargeia with which the allegorical character is endowed.
What follows is largely derived from the intuitive remarks of the few
authors who have sensed the aesthetic value of the link, even if it remains
a superficial exploration of the ways in which the onomastics of namegiving efficiently contributes to consolidate the actorial/actantial mask in
most allegorical figures. To keep to essentials, I shall simply refer to the
self-presentations already mentioned: the three pivotal Vice Figures in The
Castle, Mundus, Belyal and Caro. Going back to their highly stylised,
frantic ejaculations, we note how the first few lines of each address by the
three princes are blurted out in heavily alliterated lines whose hammering
effect is amplified by the systematic use of accented words which all begin
with the same sound-letter, so that this initial letter further reverberates the
initial sound-letter of the figure’s English name. Thus:
8
See Bailly 1894, and The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley
Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) s.v. “onomasia,” or “name-giving.”
André Lascombes
17
MUNDUS: Worthy wytys in all this werd wyde,
By wylde-wode wonys and every weye-went,
(157-58)
One will no doubt sense how the combination of devices reverberating the
initial onomastic phoneme, acting like a stamp of vocal tyranny, affixes
the phonological shadow of the princely being upon every single aspect of
the geographical reality which the lines evoke, and which in fact features
an aspect of the very body of princely Mundus.
The same trick is repeated, with an additional effect, when Belyal
enters (lines 196-99). Here, the combination applies to the four lines as
follows, amplifying first the Infernal Prince’s name, Satanas; then, his
innermost selfhood, Diabolus; and thirdly, the characteristic features of the
evil spirit confined in Hell (“champe,” “chafe,” “chocke,” “boystows,”
“bold,” “Belyal the blake” are all terms expressing the indomitable
violence of the fallen angel). Belyal sits all this while on the scaffold of the
devil, together with Pride, Envy, and Wrath:
Now I sytte, Satanas, in my sad synne,
As deuyl dowty, in draf as a drake.
I champe and I cha[f]e, I chocke on my chynne,
I am boystows and bold, as Belyal the blake.
(196-99)
We can note in passing how the text, here again, is one continuous stagedirection depicting the attitudes, gestures, mood and even black face and
apparel of the infernal figure, and how such deictic superfluity actually
controls and reinforces the combined linguistic and visual enargeia of the
speaking and acting figure. May I add that this is not confined to the
arrival of the three grand Vices, but will be repeated upon the entrance of
lesser characters, particularly the ancillary vices serving the three princes.
On each occasion, the speech, monopolised by the main figure, functions
as onomastic synecdoche of the all-powerful speaker. In so doing, the
writer, by instinct or science, resorts to the fundamental rule of focussing
and condensing, a basic potent trick which jointly ostends actor, action and
idea across the play-area. This form of onomastic highlighting, intimately
welded to the dramatic text, raises the label-name to the status and
efficiency of a primordial seme feeding its energy onto the actorial mask.
One instance of this occurs in the play (in lines 2968-94) when Humanum
Genus, about to die, learns that he must deliver his possessions to Garcio,
a boy. Garcio, as presumptive heir, mentions his name: “I-Wot-Nevere-
18
The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy
in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)
Whoo” (a nameless Nobody). Underlining the irony of disinheritance, this
apparent disclaimer of identity also symbolically shows that the
character’s name is the ultimate selfhood of the actor, its real anima. And
this is not an accidental occurrence in one particular play, but a constant
factor in the spectacular fabrication and operation of the
abstract/allegorical icon throughout the period. In the morality and
interlude tradition the power accorded to the practice of name-calling or
insult is only equated by the convention of onomastic disguise which
effects a change of identity more efficiently than any clothing. 9
To conclude, two remarks may help understand the influence of
onomasia on the way the allegorical figure works in the theatre. In the
naturalistic/imagistic tradition devoted to the mimesis of the realities of the
here and now, the mimetic presence of anthropomorphic agents (the king,
the lover, the killer) sufficiently legitimates and makes credible their
theatrical representation. But such a presence clearly does not suffice when
the focus of the dramatic agon is no longer the interplay of socio-cultural
forces, but mostly centres upon the transcendent values founding the
culture. Then, the clusters of meaning embodied by anthropomorphic
characters, operating in a diegesis which is mythical by nature, must be
housed otherwise and naturally go back for their roots to the sources of
language, where onomasia reigns as the voice of creative power, as shown
in the Biblical account of the Creation of the World. Another, more
linguistic reason may be called upon. Jean Piaget, to describe the linguistic
phenomenon of assimilation/accommodation, draws a pattern 10 which
Groupe µ borrow from him in the account they give of the uses of the
concrete and the abstract in lexical practice. 11 According to them, that
pattern highlights the fact that allegorical names, whether derived from
monosemic lexemes (such as Voluptas or Stultitia), or from substantives
designating concrete realities (Mundus or Garcio in The Castle), are
indifferently used to cover the two-way mental traffic from the concrete to
the abstract and the reverse. In either case, the allegorical name always
seems to be posted on the outskirts of the two modalities of thinking, and
9
Such widely-known plays as Mankind or Magnificence will easily provide
illustrations of this.
10
On such questions, see the studies of Parain (1942, chapters 2-3) and of Piaget
(1972, 63-75).
11
See Groupe μ 1982, 99-102. (In tribute to Aristotle and R. Jakobson, six scholars
from the Centre d’Études Poétiques de l’Université de Liège have chosen to
publish their collective work on rhetoric under the symbolic name of “Groupe μ.”)
André Lascombes
19
is therefore perfectly suited to the ambiguous figure called allegorical
personification.
Indeed, is the apparent paradox that the stage-figure on the pre-modern
stage may be no more than a function (theatrically boosted by physical
presence, verb and name) so very different a proposition from the way in
which the supposedly realistic “character” (meant to embody a psychic
and a social individual) is shown to work by critics of the drama?
Works Cited
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39-62. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
———. 1980. Everyman. Ed. Geoffrey Cooper and Christopher Wortham.
Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press.
———. 1997. Mankind. Ed. Peter Meredith. Alumnus Playtexts in
Performance. Leeds: University of Leeds.
———. 1979. The Castle of Perseverance. In Four Morality Plays, ed.
Peter Happé, 75-210. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
[Heywood, John?]. 1979. Gentleness and Nobility. In Three Rastell Plays,
ed. Richard Axton, 97-124. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Heywood, John. 1991. The Play of the Wether. In The Plays of John
Heywood, ed. Richard Axton and Peter Happé, 183-215. Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer.
Medwall, Henry. 1980. Fulgens and Lucrece. In The Plays of Henry
Medwall, ed. Alan H. Nelson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Rastell, John. 1979. The Nature of the Four Elements. In Three Rastell
Plays, ed. Richard Axton, 29-68. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Skelton, John. 1908. Magnificence. Ed. R. L. Ramsay. EETS, ES, 98.
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Bailly, Anatole. 1894. Dictionnaire Grec-Français. Paris: Hachette.
Bevington, David, ed. 1975. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Carpenter, Sarah. 1983. “Morality-Play Characters”: Reports on
Productions. Medieval English Theatre 5.1: 18-28.
Courtès, J. and A. J. Greimas. 1979. Sémiotique, Dictionnaire raisonné de
la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.
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Craik, T. W. 1958. The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume and Acting.
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Cuddon, J. A. 1982. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth, UK:
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Debax, Jean-Paul. 1987. Le théâtre du Vice ou la comédie anglaise. Thèse
d’État, Paris 4-Sorbonne.
Greimas, A. J. 1977. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse.
Groupe µ. 1982. Rhétorique Générale. Paris: Seuil.
Happé, Peter. 1964. The “Vice” and the Folk Drama. Folklore 75: 161-93.
———. 1981. The “Vice” and the Popular Theatre, 1547-80. In Poetry
and Drama, 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, ed.
Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond, London: Methuen.
Lascombes, André. 1979. Culture et théâtre populaire en Angleterre à la
fin du Moyen Âge. Thèse d’État, Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle.
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texte et du spectacle, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies, 66-80. Paris:
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———. 1994. Pour une rhétorique du spectaculaire: notes sur l’ostension.
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———, ed. 2000. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. London: Blackwell.
WIT AND WILL AND THE COHESION
OF THE HUMAN SELF
IN THE ENGLISH MORAL DRAMA
JEAN-PAUL DEBAX
Fashioning implies action and change. And fashioning of the self, that
is of a human being, and very often of one’s own self, is the most
mysterious and perilous undertaking imaginable. It is probably because of
a deep-rooted feeling of his own imperfection that man has invented in the
story of the creation of his species, a fall (the so-called original sin), which
is in fact not seen as consubstantial with his nature, but only an accident in
his early history. Adam’s disobedience was a personal decision which
totally upset the divine order of things. What is surprising is that this
world-shaking upheaval was interpreted as the foundation of a fixed and
permanent relationship between the different orders of the universe. But
this disobedience was neither motiveless nor totally voluntary, since it was
done, as it were, under pressure: a similar fall was imagined to serve as a
model for Adam’s gesture, the fall of the brightest among the angels,
Lucifer. The difference is that Lucifer was not egged on to his rebellion by
any outside influence, but only by his own perverted will, the
contemplation of himself instead of the permanent adoration eternally due
to God only. Furthermore, this Luciferian rebellion accounts for the
division of the universe between the two cities, heaven and earth (civitas
Dei et civitas terrena), seen as high and low, since the metaphor used to
describe them was that of the Fall. The usual explanation is that Lucifer
did not turn to evil, since there was no evil available in the world created
by God, but that the very fact that his will was no longer directed towards
a higher good, the Creator, but to a lower good (his own self, a mere
creature) turned his will into a wicked will. This explanation, mainly due
to Saint Augustine and known through Boethius’s Consolationes, was to
22
Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self
in the English Moral Drama
be accepted throughout the Middle Ages. 1 And so, Freewill and Divine
Harmony, also known as Reason, are lodged together in the superior level
of the medieval three-tiered conception of the Microcosm, and naturally
opposed as antithetic tendencies. The change of Reason to Wit creates a
phonetic similarity, and thus constitutes a sort of paronomasia, Wit and
Will, which knits the two terms together.
Thus, for the Christian tradition, man appears as a flawed being in a
flawed world, and seems to be defined by a permanent conflict between
these two opposed and incompatible principles. In this conflict where is
the self? It is not surprising that this conception of Mankind should have
inspired such a poem as the Psychomachia, famous throughout the Middle
Ages and emblematic of the medieval man’s view of himself. The success
of the Psychomachia raises two important points: the function of allegory,
and the existence of a battle within the mind of man. First question: are the
allegorical characters of the Psychomachia exterior influences,
representing abstract principles orientating man’s choices in life, or are
they the manifestations of inside feelings or tendencies? Are they the
causes or the effects? This ambiguity will remain as long as the device of
the allegory is used. The battle within man’s mind entails the passivity of
the individual who, to put it in military terms, is rather seen as the
battlefield than the control room.
Two texts of a slightly earlier period than the dramatic corpus we are
going to consider below will illustrate the commonly accepted value
attributed to the individual will towards the end of the fifteenth century.
The first is a short poem contained in scraps of vellum used to repair a
missal printed circa 1507, a sort of allegorical romance, which refers to
itself as a “long gest.” This poem was named by its editor The Conflict of
Wit and Will. It is the story of the battle between the rational and the
irrational “parts” within the soul, which reminds us of the homiletic
allegory Sawles Warde, in which the Lord of the Castle called Wit, with
the help of his four daughters (the four Cardinal Virtues), has to moderate
the whims of his capricious wife, Will, and her servants, the Five Senses.
In the end, Fear of Death brings her back to more holy thoughts. In The
Conflict, the battle between “Wille the Wick” and “Witte the Wise Kynge”
1
“When the evil will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it
becomes evil—not because that is evil to which it turns but because the turning
itself is wicked. Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil,
but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an
inferior thing.” On the City of God, XII.6, quoted by R. W. Hanning 1973, 46n9.