Granted that not even the most insistent chorus can control our view of a presented dramatic action as the narrator who filters our entire experience of a novel through his selective voice can; still, t he ways in which our angle of vision is aligned with or distinguished from those of the various participants in a play and the consequences of such alignments for our sense of the play we are watching offer a ‘problem’ of genuine interest to the student (as well as the writer) of drama; and that problem (though I would prefer a term that smiled more invitingly toward our inquiry) surely concerns us with point of view, or perspective. In fact, the twofold implications of these terms make them especially appropriate for my purposes. On the one hand, they emphasize the actual spectator in the theater and the activity of watching the performance taking place. In this sense, ‘point of view’ more literally describes an audience’s experience of a play than it does a reader’s experience of a novel. At the same time, like perspective, point of view suggests the attitude we adopt toward the action we watch and toward the characters who perform it for us. It is precisely that complex activity, the process of forming a particular attitude toward the characters acting before us, that I want to trace as accurately as I can. 2
If even as an audience our perspective may be limited—if we sometimes know less than certain characters, and if plays vary in the degree of foreknowledge they allow us and the kinds of ‘mysteries’ with which they may leave us—it is nevertheless true that by the end of the play we have usually seen things more completely and more distinctly than we are able to do outside the theater or than the characters who come and go are able to do within the play itself. 3
That they come and go while we watch them all is a crucial factor distinguishing our larger view from their limited perspective, of course. But even characters who see what we see may be most notable for their failure to understand as we do and for the consequent disparity between their view of the action and ours. 3
Similar situations are a staple of English Renaissance drama, and though hierarchies of awareness add interest to plays in every theatrical mode, the soliloquies and asides that facilitate our appreciation of them on Shakespeare’s open stage make them especially effective there. 4
Whatever attraction these four schemers hold for us has little to do with sympathy or kinship. 5
His monstrous appearance [Richard], of which he makes so much, naturally works to preclude such identification, and the fact that he is a virtual grotesque may actually make it easier to enjoy his villainous fun without seeing ourselves in his image. 5
…and the alien, bottle-nosed Barabas, to name a few. 5
We can share a knave’s enjoyment of his own sport at a foolish victim’s expense without likening ourselves to him. 6
I want to show how the dramatist uses his theatrical art to draw us into or distance us from a given character’s viewpoint, and I will try to make my argument stand firmly on such demonstration rather than on assumptions about the psychology of the audience. 6
It should be clear, for one thing, that the understanding my readings aim at has more to do with the experience of each play as it confronts its audience than with a ‘meaning’ or ‘theme’ that might be extracted from it by studying its verbal or structural patterns or its historical context. 7
I am not thereby disclaiming any interest in what a play makes us think. Rather, I am asserting my primary interest in how it makes us see, feel, and think as we watch and respond to its characters in action, and how our attitude toward what they say and do is made to correspond with or differ from theirs. Pursuing such questions involves, as an almost inevitable corollary, the habit of referring to the posited audience as ‘we’ or ‘us,’ a habit I have already indulged in this Introduction. 6-7
That each play ‘implies’ an audience to appreciate it in its own terms. 8 [FN]: Janet Adelman : “a play must teach us how to see it” (The Common Liar, 11)
Except for The Jew of Malta’s clear indication that its professedly Christian audience would normally enjoy the sport of Jew-baiting… 8
…prefer to align itself with wit rather than folly when the two meet onstage. 8-9
The contradictory attitudes these knaves almost inevitably provoke in us make our relationship with them, or the play’s use of our point of view toward them, a more complex process than it would be in the cases of their near kindred on either side, the blameless wits who entertain us in many comedies and the joyless or foolish villains whose deeds we readily condemn in various tragedies. 9
If the comedy approves their goals, rakish gallants who would never be allowed to enter Dame Custance’s prim parlor can nonetheless engage us in their schemes without troubling our consciences. 9
On the other hand, the absence of this puckish spirit of sheer, mischievous fun can leave us totally detached from a villain who has no other capacity to involve us (as Macbeth surely does involves us) in his problems. Paradoxically, the more detached a knave can remain from the self-serving goals of his scheme—the more, that is, he approximates the spirit of Puck’s ‘sport alone’ as he plays on his victims—the more engaged we are likely to be in his fun and his point of view.
Successful knaves customarily invite our participation in their fun by sharing it with us through soliloquies and asides that confirm the mutual superiority of our awareness over their hapless dupes. There is, however, nothing intrinsically winning about confidentiality. A villain’s soliloquy, even when it provides our heightened overview of the action, can a easily make us abhor or oppose him as enjoy him. 10
When a villain’s soliloquy simply invites us to look into him and consider his villainy, it speaks to our normal judgment of such crimes without engaging our natural theatrical attraction to playful wit and creative dramatic art. 11
It is, then, the combination of puckish sport and malicious crime that distinguishes the knave from either honest wits on the one hand or solemn villains on the other and complicates our relationship with im in the plays to be discussed here. 11
…how audiences are actually made to act out their rejection of the Vice. 11
But the basic problem remains the same. We may be quite properly laughing at Tom Tosspot or Cuthbert Cutpurse, but if we are laughing altogether with the Vice, Nichol Newfangle, as he snares his victims into the Devil’s party, we are sharing a point of view that is perilous for us according to the play’s morality. 13
[direct address from Everyman, 15]
Even when (and perhaps because) the Vice took over a larger proportion of the action in the later interludes, most dramatists were careful to prod the audience into acting out its dissociation from the Vice early in the play, in the very process of being entertained by him. 17 [FN]: Bevington: From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe
Since some of these later knaves are as vicious as Iniquity could ever hope to be, and since they oppose ‘Virtues’ as pure as Richmond and Celia, the distinction is not a moral one but one of theatrical mode. Though the Shakespearean villain and Johnsonian knave make direct appeals to us from the stage, they do not openly interact with us or even overtly acknowledge our responses as an audience, except by way of inviting our applause at the end of a comedy. 17
For all the versatile theatricalism that allows them their explanatory soliloquies and mocking asides, the knaves to be considered here do not jostle us as they enter or exit, do not taunt us about our displayed behavior toward them, and do not invite us to join in their activities as did their earlier counterparts in the moral interludes. In the move from hall to theater, from ‘place’ to stage, the Vice’s knavish heirs distance themselves from us to this extent. They still play to us, but they do not force us to be participating actors in their plays and do not therefore make us self-consciously act out our conspiratorial engagement with them [short example] or our dissociation from them [short example]. 18
In Weimann’s terms…It would be fair to say, for example, that we become more detached from Richard as he moves from his early platea-oriented position near the audience to the locus-based throne. 19
The nature of our engagement with Richard depends partly on the degree to which he remains within the self-contained world of the play rather than breaking through it in Nichol’s overt manner. 19
Flexible theatricalism 19
Its flexible theatricalism, rather, allows dynamic interaction with the audience without insisting that we reflect on that experience or consciously assess the relationship between our ‘real world’ and the presented dramatic illusion. Of the four plays to be considered here, only The Jew of Malta makes such an assessment an important element in our relationship with the presiding knave. In that case, Marlowe stands Weimann’s scheme on its head, for it is the audience-oriented Barabas whom we are encouraged to place in a fictive (if scarcely ‘ideal’) play world and the self-contained Ferneze in whom we recognize ‘the real world of everyday experience.’ 20
Such reflective moments in the play overtly express its solid moral overview, I believe, and it is mainly by ‘pondering the play’ at their own discretion that skeptics call that moral overview into question. I am not faulting the method, but simply distinguishing it and its results from mine. 23
Rather than attempting to harmonize the play, my own reading attends instead to the jolting shifts in perspective that its sudden turns force upon an audience. Where our normal expectations are assaulted so violently…23
[FN]: Harry notes that Barabas has more lines than any other Marlovian character.
Evasiveness violates the normal rules of our relationship with knaves, who fool everyone else but are ‘honest’ with us. Barabas fools us on occasion as well, which is one reason why our relationship with this buoyant knave is such a volatile one. 63
The normal behavior for Prologues was courteous address, and their normal function straight, informative explication of the piece to follow. 64
This division of the world into two kinds of Machiavels, the open advocates (but where are they among us?) and the secret admirers, puts a snaffle in disapproval’s mouth. Our very rejection of the creed that follows identifies us, in such a world, as covert Machiavels. 63
In fact, the play shows us a world divided just along the lines the Prologue has drawn for ours. On the one hand, there is Barabas, whose stage villainy makes him all too apparent a Machiavel; on the other, Ferneze, on whose cold lips the master’s name would never appear and who is therefore a more truly effective disciple. 66
But a greedy Jew fondling his ill-gotten gains? We know well enough how to ‘grace him as he deserves’! 6
There are other Jews in
Though we see his point of view here (as his baffled brethren do not), he shares no joke and no scheme with us. In fact, we may be stung by Barabas’s taunts into a less-than-Christian gratification that he is hailed so summarily out of his countinghouse by the Maltese authorities, or be lured into supposing him too naively secure when he brushes aside the apparent threat to his ‘peaceful rule’ (though his final solitary scrutiny of Turkish policy should dampen any such hope). If so, we are picking up the habit of matching wits with Barabas and of measuring ourselves against him that the play will encourage to the end. In any case, we are in the hands of a very different sort of knave than Richard. 70
We may have been prepared to enjoy the rich Jew’s discomfiture, but we cannot evade the clear justice and accuracy of his changes against his Christian persecutors. 72
We need not accept all Barabas’s arguments in the ensuing debate in order to be impressed by the fact that he alone attempts to stand out against the clear injustice. 73
In spite of Barabas’s previous resolve to ‘make sure for one,’ everything that follows his muttered surprise at the government’s terms (‘How, a Christian! Hum, what’s here to do?’ [74-75]) has encouraged us to believe that the wily Jew has actually been caught out and, in his anger and grief, is reaping the bitter consequences. If we have been drawn into generously acknowledging his grievance, then he has made fools of us along with everyone onstage. And his knavish confidentiality after the fact is, therefore, a slap in the face that lumps us with the other simple ‘base slaves’ who have underestimated him.
We learn the hard way not to trust Barabas and not, by all means, to pity him again.
[FN]: But the Vice’s customary way, like that of other knaves who aim at a comic response, is to confide in the audience first and to let us share the joke of his ‘hypocrisy’ with him.
And we won’t let the comfortable detachment of our comic pleasure at Barabas’s sudden reversal slip back into any serious investment in his plight. We will sit back, rather, and watch him ‘sink or swim’—his own terms for his options here. 75
But he has put us off so effectively that now, when he starts a plot in motion with our full awareness for the first time in the play, we can watch his ‘shifts’ with impartial amusement. 76
As Barabas repeatedly thrusts poor Abigail off and then yanks her back again for another anxious aside, we are bound to laugh; and such asides make him more the object than the director of our fun. 76-77
On the very heels of the soliloquy in which he has insulted us for trusting his grief. 77
In this context, when she gives herself so completely over to her father and his stratagem, we are more likely to condescend to her as the Jew’s fool than look up to her as our humane exemplar. We are simply not allowed to watch this play through Abigail’s soft eyes. 77
Barabas’s tragedy is our comedy. Nothing could amuse us more at this point than the sight of ‘poor Barabas’ running ‘vex’d and tormented’ with thoughts distempered by miserly greed. That his lament (laden as it is with sad presaging ravens and the contagion of night’s sable wings) verges on parody makes our amusement all the easier to enjoy. 78
Rather than the commanding Jew who surprised and offended us in the first scene or the wily Jew who fooled and insulted us in the second, we now finally have what we expected but did not get at the beginning: the caricature Jew ‘who smiles to see how full his bags are cramm’d.’ 79
But if he is now master of the action that he both presents and directs, and if that action is now played primarily for our amusement, we nevertheless continue to enjoy Barabas and his show from the superior perspective he afforded us in his miserly ecstasy. 79
If he is so nasty and so noxious, how can we be amused by Barabas and his villainy? Partly because he is so nasty and so noxious, of course. 81
[FN]: Barabas and Ithamore make “a diabolical comedy team” (Douglas Cole, “Comic Accomplice...”)
Neither setting Abigail’s suitors (and later the friars) at self-destructive odds nor poisoning the nuns’ rice requires any remarkable ingenuity; so when we are asked to marvel at the performance (‘Why, was there ever such villainy…), we won’t respond in kind, as we do when Richard puts this sort of question to us [example]. 84
…but we smile at the extremity of Barabas’s showiness. 85
But most of Barabas’s scheming is conducted with such a flurry of explanatory asides and such an elaborate shuffling back and forth between dupes who are only too willing to be moved about like wooden pawns that we are more amused by the ‘busyness’ of his knavery than by its wit. He ‘acts’ his villainy in a manner that is as hyperbolically stagy as his description of it to Ithamore had been. 85
In the two brief scenes in which Ferneze first allies himself with the Spaniards (act 2, scene 2) and then defies the Turks (act 3, scene 5), there are no confidential asides or soliloquies, no villainous leers or wicked smiles, no propped-up friar’s corpses or poisoned pots, and no indecorous jokes—none of the things, that is, that make the antics of Barabas and Ithamore so pointedly theatrical. 85
…we must now rely entirely on our own shrewdness to penetrate the diplomatic smokescreen. 85
…reveals the solemn governor and the grotesque Jew as brothers under the skin—politicians both, who use similarly deceptive means to self-serving ends in a world where ‘the wind that bloweth all’ is ‘desire of gold’… 87
The real distinction between the Jew and the governor, then, is not a matter of morality but of theatrical mode. Set against Barabas’s stagecraft, which appeals so openly to our sense of theater, Ferneze’s careful statecraft calls inevitably on our sense of reality: this, we recognize, is how actual policy works. 88
But our very capacity to understand Ferneze’s political world without any explanatory asides inevitably reduces Barabas’s ostentatious villainy by comparison to something less ‘serious,’ less challenging and more entertaining. 88
…between the intellectual demands of what we take to be a mirror of reality and the easier pleasures of that which we place as fiction. 88
It may be significant that Ferneze adopts so easily the appropriate hyperbolic mode when he enters Barabas’s “play,” whereas Barabas later cannot manage successfully the shift into Ferneze’s political world. 89
Barabas’s stagecraft and Ferneze’s statecraft now meet head on. We can no longer give each its distinctive due in alternate scenes. We must now respond to each more directly in terms of the other, as Barabas tries to convert Ferneze’s solid political arena into his own garish brand of theater. 92
From Ferneze, who never in his tenure as governor spoke a private word our way. 94
But our strongest impression of Ferneze and Barabas, confirmed more than ever by their conclusive showdown, is of their radical difference in kind, not their likeness. 96
…but all his elaborate preparations are going into the construction of a stage on which he will act his last scene. Only he could have contrived this spectacular finale for us, a theatrical coup that more than makes up for the anticlimactic moment in act 5, scene 1, when flat Ferneze had left both Barabas and the play apparently dead. But Ferenze is content to let Barabas have the show; he will settle for the governorship. His single aside in the entire play is a quiet and condescending appreciation of the Jew’s closing performace:… 96
This refusal to tip us a wink makes Ferneze theatrically unattractive, but politically perfect. 97
The norm of the age’s drama, however, is a multiplicity and variety of focus through which our view of any one character, even those who are most important to us, is modified or mediated by others who also demand our attention. Often, and in the nature of the case, characters who stand somewhat aside from the center have a more openly directive effect on our point of view than the highlighted principals themselves. Nor need such directive characters be mere choruses. 151
But nowhere in the period is our interest focused more intensely through characters who manage both to be at the center of the action and to attempt a directive presenter’s overview of it than in the four plays discussed here. 151
What we should think is scarcely a problem here, but the art with which Shakespeare engages us theatrically and then steers us toward a ‘proper’ view surely merits our study. 153
Showing these differences, as I hope my study has done, emphasizes the dramatic life of a play as we experience it rather than treating it as a thesis on policy or revenge. 153
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