The Actor-Character in “Secretly Open” Action: Doubly Encoded Personation on Shakespeare’s Stage

Abstract

Talk about “performance” in connection with Shakespeare more often than not tends to convey an interest in the performance of his plays; the play is viewed or even edited as a “play in performance” or, as the recent Cambridge University Press series has it, as the “play in production,” with particular emphasis on its “theatrical fortunes.” These no doubt are laudable projects, and I am the first to applaud the emphasis on the play’s text as a text written for and brought to life in the theater. And yet, this emphasis has its limitations, and these especially hinder a new departure in the approach to Shakespeare’s characters. Without in the least wishing to reduce an awareness of their literary quality (such as the huge debt they owe to Plutarch’s Lives), I propose to confront the text-related concept of character with a histrionic practice for which performance is so much more than the scripted performance of a text. In other words, let us push back the frontiers of characterization in search of an actor-character whose performativity exceeds the interpretation or the mediation of something. What in a new character criticism is at issue is the gestus and the language in which, to paraphrase the chorus to Troilus and Cressida, author’s pen is in (and beyond) actor’s voice while, simultaneously, actor’s voice is in (and beyond) author’s pen.1