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Elizabethan Actors: Men or Marionettes?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Marvin Rosenberg
Marvin Rosenberg*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
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Extract

A good deal of critical energy has gone in recent years into the attempt to demonstrate that even the best Elizabethan actors were some kind of human marionettes. Some twenty years ago Miss M. C. Bradbrook wrote: the “general consensus of opinion on Elizabethan acting” was this: “There would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalised. Conventional movement and heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off the dramatic illusion.” Since then various articles in learned journals and sections of scholarly books have supported the “formalist” attitude, which now comes to this: that the Elizabethan dramatist's words were all that really counted, and that his actors were trained to be graceful, mannered mouthpieces who recited the dramatic poetry without letting their personalities or their personal ideas of the part played color the performance in any way; they acted formally, not naturally; they did not portray character, they symbolized it. Formalism has tended toward a rigid orthodoxy, although, as we shall see, one of the modern champions of the single style, Professor Harbage, seems to have moved away from his first strict view in the direction of a more liberal formalist attitude of the kind represented by S. L. Bethell. Bethell, frankly facing the rich and lively variety of the Elizabethan plays, noted scenes demanding something like “natural” treatment, and so he allowed a second, relaxed style subordinate to a conventional technique, or sometimes mixed with it. He also saw, as separate modes, the clowning, which he regarded as non-naturalistic, and the elements of vaudeville. But for the regular drama, he argued, “the poetry and its decent delivery were the only real essentials” and “I have no doubt that the formal manner of delivery was used.” The depersonalized actors, Bethell felt, could have made no “addition of ‘personality’ or ‘creativity‘” to their lines; they let the lines tell what the character was, instead of trying to be the character.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1954, pp. 915 - 927
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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References

∗ This is substantially the author's paper as read before the English Drama Group of the MLA, 29 Dec. 1952.

1 Alfred Harbage was willing to call them puppets, “Elizabethan Actors,” PMLA, liv (Sept. 1939), 703. Harbage has since altered some of his beliefs about Elizabethan acting, as will be noted. His 1939 arguments for formal acting are explored hereafter only when they represent opinions not known to be altered, or when they are representative of the formalist case generally. Harbage observed, in 1939, that Sir Edmund Chambers had left us, in the area of Elizabethan acting style, “a playground—one precinct free for untrammeled guessing” (p. 685). Harbage entered himself as a player in the “game,” which I am happy to join.

2 Elizabethan Stage Conditions (Cambridge, 1932), p. 109.

3 “Shakespeare's Actors,” RES, NS i (July 1950), 193-205. Bethell says his reading of Joseph's MS. before publication (see next note) convinced him that the Elizabethans used formal delivery (p. 202).

4 Elizabethan Acting (London, 1951), pp. 153, 123, 151-152.

5 To give a single instance: Garrick, with his “new style,” was unmistakably unlike old Quin; but we are told that he underlined the contrast by reintroducing the trance scene into his production of Othello, chiefly because his rival was too fat to perform it. See Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin (London, 1789), ii, 260.

6 Marston, in his preface to The Malcontent, wrote: “onely one thing afflicts me, to thinke that Scaenes invented, meerely to bespoken, should be inforcively published to be read… . but I shall intreate … that the unhansome shape which this trifle in reading presents, may be pardoned, for the pleasure it once afforded you, when it was presented with the soule of lively action.”

7 Harbage took the orthodox formalist view when he wrote, in a comment on J. Cocke's uncomplimentary “A Common Player” (1615), “Cocke's … word common means ‘typical’ and does not exempt such actors as Alleyn and Burbage, whose method—not skill— was probably quite typical” (Harbage, p. 687).

8 See Bradbrook, p. 113; Harbage, pp. 702-703; Robert H. Bowers, “Gesticulation in Elizabethan Acting,” So. Folklore Quart., xii (Dec. 1948), 270; Bethell, p. 205; Ronald Watkins, On Producing Shakespeare (New York, 1950), pp. 168-169.

9 The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton, 1927), p. 36. They had been with Beeston at the Cockpit in 1621, and the usual starting age, according to Baldwin, was 10-14.

10 Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (New York, 1888), i, 179.

11 Thomas Jordan, in Shakespere Allusion Book (London, 1909), ii, 87.

12 We have skilled actors playing women's parts excellently in furtive theatres in our major cities today. Their easy verisimilitude, that sometimes creates nervous embarrassment in modern audiences, was apparently taken for granted by the Elizabethans and post-Elizabethans—except those of Prynne's persuasion. Here I think even Granville-Barker allowed his Victorian background to confuse him, when he wrote: “it is Shakespeare's constant care to demand nothing of a boy-actress that might turn to unseemliness or ridicule” (Prefaces, London, 1927, 1st Ser., p. xxviii). Apparently the audiences forgot the “boys” were male—see the description, further in my text, of the performance of Othello at Oxford. In the 16th and early 17th centuries men who wanted to act like women must have seen the stage as a kind of natural home. I certainly do not mean to say here that most—or even many—of Shakespeare's “boy actors” were homosexual; but there may well have been some grains of truth in Prynne's furious assaults upon the “Sodomiticall” theatre.

13 See, e.g., Pepys's diary, 7 Jan. 1661, where “Kinaston” is described as “clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house.”

14 Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1708), ed. Montague Summers (London, 1927), p. 19.

15 Geoffrey Tillotson, “Othello and The Alchemist at Oxford,” TLS, 20 July 1933, p. 494.

16 Miss Bradbrook quotes several such satirical passages to support her formalist view. M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 21 ff.

17 Theatre Book of the Year (New York, 1944), p. 27.

18 Themes and Conventions, p. 22.

19 Bowers (see n. 8), p. 270.

20 Harbage, p. 704.

21 Themes and Conventions, p. 21.

22 Joseph, pp. 152-153. See also, for a fuller account of these wagers, Murray Bromberg, “Theatrical Wagers,” N&Q, cxcvi (8 Dec. 1951), 533-535.

23 Harbage (p. 698) in 1939 described this as a “Preface to a play still in manuscript, The Cyprian Conqueror, or the Faithless Relict,” and added that it probably appeared “after, but not long after, Prynne's attack of 1633.” In Harbage's review of the Joseph book —SQ, ii (Oct. 1951), 360-361—the find is described as “the anonymous Cyprian Conqueror with preface drawn from the Onomasticon and similar works … .”

24 Harbage (PMLA), pp. 698-699.

25 Chirologia and Chironomia, 2 works which appeared together and shared the same title page, 1644.

26 And even for orators, Bulwer left room for variation. See Joseph, pp. 56-57.

27 Richard Flecknoe, preface to Lottes Kingdom (1664), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1908), ii, 95.

28 New and Choice Characters (1615), ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford, 1936), pp. 76-77.

29 PMLA, lvi (June 1941), 581-582.

30 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), in the Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints edition (New York, 1941), n. p.

31 Harbage (SQ review), pp. 360-361.

32 T. S. Eliot has expressed this attitude in its raw form: “I rebel against performances of Shakespeare's plays because I want a direct relationship between the work of art and myself, and I want the performance to be such as will not interrupt or alter this relationship any more than it is an alteration or interruption for me to superpose a second inspection of a picture of a building upon the first” (Elizabethan Essays, New York, 1934, p. 15).