Beckerman, Bernard. “Shakespeare’s Dramaturgy and Binary Form.” Theatre Journal. 33.1 (1981): 5-17.

That tradition is of timely interest to us. Because it relied so utterly upon previous narrative sources, it vividly illustrates how a literary art is reshaped into a presentational one. When a playwright turns a story into a script, he has to arrange characters, events, and sentiments in a sequence of playable units or scene. 5

Central to presentation is the obvious fact that the performer, not the page, is the medium. He is autonomous, disconnected from text or creator, seeming to be his own creator, whatever persona he adopts. Moreover, because he carries out his work in immediate contact with an audience, his effectiveness directly depends on a capacity to make himself felt. He must not only be present before an audience in bodily form; he must be there before them as a vibrant presence. The dramatic writer has the task of devising scenes that support and utilize the presence of the actor. 5

As models they had the examples of morality interludes and the classic drama. They could pick and choose among several ways of formulating plays and scenes. Each choice entailed consequences that had to be faced. Take, as one case, the matter of cast size. The number of people a writer puts on stage at any one time keenly affects a player’s ability to make his presence felt. One performer can readily make contact with an audience. Two performers can relate either to the audience or to each other. As numbers grow beyond two, the possibility increases rapidly of diluting a coherent sense of presence unless the larger number of performers is choreographed carefully. The more a writer expands his cast, the more skillful he has to be in ordering the action to prevent the dilution of the performer’s presence. 6

But these occasional presentation where the performer is subordinated to the physical stage are not characteristic of Elizabethan theatre as a whole. There the players reigned, splendid in their sumptuous garments and masters of the open stage. 7

From a presentational point of view, a duet with only two people and a duet with mutes have analogous but not identical structures. While a mute servant may play a minimal part in the effect of a scene, the presence of Silvia and Thurio as witnesses of the duet between the Duke and Valentine adds a dimension to the action. In performance, they are bound to react to what is said though their reactions would be quite subsidiary to the main action. Shakespeare, however, does not give us a clue to their possible responses. Rather than diffuse focus, he is content to stress the binary nature of the scene. 7

As I have previously remarked, a static display may serve as a presentation. Its power will depend on a capacity to fill space with beauty and strangeness. But a static object has limited power to sustain attention. It is the active force in presentation, the temporal element that dominates, and the performer embodies or rather modulates that force. As a player, the performer engages in both showing something to the audience and transforming that audience. He works upon the audience’s sensibility and imagination. To do so requires considerable expenditure of energy, both to hold attention and to effect the transformation of the audience’s mind and heart. One way of doing this is by playing directly to the audience. 9

The audience’s laughter acts as a counterforce against which the actor playing Launce works. Ideally, the more he appeals to the playgoer, the greater should be the laughter, thus producing that fruitful tension which underlies so much of theatrical presentation. 9

Although the tone of Launce’s speech is softer, his working upon the audience is a direct descendent of the way the Vice worked upon audiences in the interlude. 9

By the time Shakespeare came to write Two Gentlemen of Verona in the early 1590s, however, direct contact like that of Launce’s with the audience was becoming increasingly rare. 10

At the same time writers sought to exploit the soliloquy more fully, not as an instrument of contact with the audience, however, but as a means of displaying passion and dilemmas. 10

As writers did before him, Shakespeare here introduces apostrophe as a device for channeling acting energies. This device is one of the most widely used to provide actors with lines that allow them to project presentational energy to an audience indirectly. For a time in the 1570s writers exploited this type of soliloquy fully, but by the 1590s, it too assumed less prominence in the total organization of a play. 10

As fundamental and as prevalent as the duet is in dramatic art, it deserves far greater study than it has received. If I am correct, a dramatist’s artistry is largely determined by his skill in shaping and ordering duets. 11