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Overview
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691639802 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #18 |
| Pages: | 194 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy
By Michael Goldman
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06630-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Acting and action — the two terms, obvious, vague, familiar, stand at the heart of the theatrical mystery. The novice playwright learns quickly that he needs two basic skills: the ability to write for actors and the ability to create action. Without these talents, no degree of genius in characterization, plot, or language will help him. Their importance being granted, however, it remains notoriously difficult to say how acting and action actually work in drama. I would like to suggest that we can go a long way toward understanding their operation if we think of them not as separate processes, but as intricately allied. Indeed, once we look carefully at the relation between acting and action, the vagueness and over-familiarity that attend the terms begin to drop away, and what comes into view is a strikingly detailed perspective on the playwright's art.
One must start by insisting on the significance of a fact so obvious that it is generally ignored: acting is the major source of any audience's experience of action. In the theater, our sense of action rises almost entirely from the performance of the actors. Whatever "action" may be, it is felt as something playable, an impulse thrusting out at us from what the actors do, moment by moment, an unbroken flow of energy carrying us forward in time. Moreover, as we shall soon see, an actor's performance, qua performance, may itself constitute an important part of the action of a play.
But the action we feel and see in watching a play is of many kinds, and it evokes many kinds of awareness. There is, first of all, our sense that a play itself, and each scene in it, has an action of its own, an informing drive, that basic through-impulse which moves us forward. Distinct from this are the various particular actions we see performed by the characters on stage. We usually connect these actions to actions in the outside world — again in a variety of ways. For instance, they may strike us as imitating the actions of "real life": a door is opened, a king is killed. We are also aware that the actions we are watching not only imitate the actions of real life but comment on them. They show us the way of certain life processes: ah, we say, these are the dynamics of infatuation; this is what it's like to plan a crime. Finally, theatrical action seems frequently to comment on human action in general — on the nature of action and the problems of acting in the world.
The playwright, then, makes action out of acting — or rather he makes many kinds of action and many references to action out of a particular kind of action that we call acting. I am interested in the many relations among these modes of action, all of which clearly flow into and out of each other, each having the power to affect and change our experience of the rest. Surely their interplay is likely to prove central to the effect of any drama, and this presents a valuable opportunity for criticism — to see how the different kinds of action are called together and made meaningful by dramatic texts. The essays in this book explore the possibilities of such a criticism. They are attempts to understand some of the ways in which acting and action are related in Shakespeare's major tragedies.
So far I have given only a schematic account of the relation. It will need to be described in greater detail before it can be wholly intelligible and before my emphasis on it can appear justified. In the rest of this introduction, I would like to explain more fully the basis for my approach, and then go on to indicate some critical procedures which seem to me to follow from it.
* * *
Let me begin by looking more closely at the idea of action itself. "Action" is a large foggy abstraction, and large foggy abstractions generally arise to meet urgent mental needs. There is no doubt that we are remarkably attracted by experiences to which we can attach the name of action. At one time or another, most of us have wished for a feeling of action in our lives (rather than, say, a feeling of disconnected activity). We like to be engaged in action, to see it, to think about it, to believe that it exists. People say, "Hey man, where's the action?" or that someone is a "man of action," or that tragedy must be concerned with action of a certain magnitude, and in each case they feel they are handling something that matters. To philosophers, action may be an obscure and refractory concept, but our casual use of the term plainly reflects the liveliest, indeed the most personal, of interest.
Action, as a concept, attracts the mind because it allows us to imagine a firm link between the self and the world. We cannot think of action without bridging the gap between what is inside a person and what is outside him. When we use terms like "man of action" we are raising the closely related question of significant action, a conception which suggests that, through the idea of action, we may think of important events as somehow connected to the person who sets them in motion — as belonging to him in some way. Action allows us to think of what happens around us not just as events but as deeds, and to think of our private selves as somehow issuing forth into the world and making a meaningful impact on it.
What I am trying to get at here is not an abstract formula about action, but the emotional strength of its appeal to us, the texture of its involvement, as an idea, with our lives. I can do this a little more clearly by following up a notion I have just mentioned — that when we think of an event as a deed, we conceive of it as in some sense belonging to its doer. I find it helpful to approach action through the feeling which underlies this notion — the emotional sensation of having, of personal possession. What a wonderful thing it is, to have! And on what flimsily supported faith the notion of having rests. Nevertheless, it moves us. The appeal, the pleasure and power of having controls men's lives and shapes their philosophical vocabularies. The whole notion of attributes, especially of moral attributes, rests on the assumption that being can be had. Aristotle's Ethics is based, as he perceived moral thought naturally to be based, on hexis or habit, that is on what man has. The love of wisdom and imagination has always been based on the faith that somehow the world can be put inside one's head. For every child, as for the artist or philosopher, the tactics of self-assertion — charm, tantrums, mastery of language, saying no or saying yes — are ways of demonstrating something he has already discovered not to be true: that he really has the breast that feeds him. And the idea of action, too, both practical and theoretical, is based on the desire to have the world — that is, on the feeling that it should be possible for the self to grip what is outside it.
This is plain from the way formal philosophy deals with the question of action. The recurring philosophical problem about action is a problem about having. When is an event an action? When it bears upon it the mark of agency, when it is someone's. When are a series of doings a single action? When they are linked by an informing efficacity. Is a man of action someone who does this and that, stubs out a cigarette, catches a fish? No, he is someone who makes a change in the world, a change to which he bears a significant relation. The difficulty always lies in bridging the gap between self and world; action is problematical because it is felt to be the bridge. In the symposium of the British Aristotelian Society, "What Is Action?" the issue which divides the participants is that of apprehending and defining the system of links between self and world that the idea of action is felt by all of them to imply. Is thought an action, or part of one? Is will? Is choice? Can the noun-copula syntax of formal logic do justice to the verbal quality of action? Is logical entailment a satisfactory model for the relation of doer and deed? And if we look at more recent examples, the work of Arthur Danto or J. L. Austin, say, or if we look back to Hegel, we find, for all their obvious differences, the same locus of difficulty. In every case it is clear that "action" hums with the ticklish relation of the self to the world and the self's hunger to be seen in that relation.
We need not lose ourselves in the philosophical niceties of the question. The relevance of the philosophical issue to our own everyday use of "action" lies in its demonstration that the word stands for a connection, however problematical, that we wish to make, seem to need to make, in thinking about an important phase of our experience. Action is a notion that allows us to think of a person as having what he does. Action, says Aristotle in the Poetics, springs from thought and character, and for "character" he uses hexis again — habitual predisposition to action, which, like our word "habit," derives closely from the verb "to have." Character is a hexis or having because it points to the difficult nexus between the self and its acts. Character is the quality by which our being may be said to have its doing.
Similarly, the idea of the action of a play reflects a desire for having. We talk about works of art because we wish to make them ours, to bring them within the boundaries of the self, to possess them in some way. Since we experience a play as a series of events occurring in time, any attempt to possess it requires a conception, such as the idea of action, which links separate events into a directed unity. The idea of the unity of action in drama is a way of allowing the play itself to have what happens as it runs its course, that is, of allowing us to have it as a complete experience. We watch Hamlet addressing the Players and we feel, or hope to feel, a larger efficacity of which this scene and all its apparent digressions are a fulfilling part. We seek the efficacity among the events of the play, a thrust playing through them, a single life informing them as the thrust of a man's being may be felt among the things he has done, if he has done certain things. We possess the life of the work through this principle. It is the way we have what the play does.
Often, indeed, we fail to notice how much our effort at possessing the life of the play contributes to our sense of its action. Our action as audience, in grasping and interpreting how the play "acts," can be very different from any of the actions we are witnessing on stage. A great playwright will often play the action of the audience's mind off against the action of his characters. Hamlet, for example, stabs through the arras simply and decisively. But when he does so, our minds go spinning around as we try to fit this event, which derails so many purposes, into a coherent picture of the play — of where it has been going, where it will go now.
One reason we like this kind of possession of Active action is that we cannot have it with respect to our own lives and doings. We know we do not have ourselves in so full and unified a way. We first become aware of self as part of an experience of deprivation, the discovery that we are not coextensive with the world. We learn that they lied to us when they told us we were everything. (One of the qualities that makes King Lear so poignant is that the old king goes through this shattering discovery of infancy as if for the first time.) Much as we want it to, the self can't repossess the world. We know we don't really have our acts in the way our language implies we can when it uses "action" to describe human character or the experience of literary and dramatic art. That is, we don't really experience our doing as having, the making of something we keep, a changing of the world that is the possession of a self.
Here, we must remember that the notion of having has to be stretched to accommodate the materials of human deeds or events. Our desire to possess may indeed underlie our feelings about action, but the possession we are talking about involves not an object we can put in our pocket but a steadily changing chain of happenings which we experience as possible contacts with life. The idea of action finally engages the mind, not in a sensation of ownership, but in a process of significant contact — the visiting of our inner life upon the world, the unfolding of great events from the depths of individual privacy, the issuing of self into deed. It is this kind of holding on to life we want from our actions but know we cannot have. The philosophical haggling over action reflects the impossibility of joining the self and its doing, just as the uses to which we put the word reflect its permanent attractiveness to the mind.
I refer to this, not to lament the instability from which all our pleasures spring, but to insist on the problematic character of action — and the deep-seated human difficulties to which the problems point. These difficulties are important to the study of drama — because they are bound up with the essential texture of dramatic experience. Nowhere do we feel the attractiveness of action more vividly than in the theater. When an actor steps before us at the beginning of a play, he appeals to us, above all, by communicating a promise of action. What we feel at this point is, I think, a promise of movement, or rather the presence of a complex of movements, already begun, which promise to continue for a satisfying period. The movement is primarily mental or imaginative — a movement of the spirit, Francis Fergusson calls it — but it seems to resonate with physical suggestion, for instance the suggestion of a thrust out from the performer toward us, as he "projects" the character he is playing. Our sense of multiple movements is a response to the basic energy of acting, to that displacement of self, that charge of aggression that comes from (1) playing a part, the provocative thrust of changing oneself into something other than oneself, and (2) the accompanying thrust of making this change available to an audience. This energy cannot be sustained except by another current of aggression, which comes from what the playwright has given the actors to do, a thrust forward in time which we hope will carry us along until the end of the play. It is this third current of aggression to which we normally give the name "dramatic action," but it is clear that all three movements affect us and give the performance momentum. In fact, it is somewhat misleading to talk of separate currents, because the first two — the actor's creation and projection of his role — depend on the dialogue and events of the script, the same materials that provide the third current. And the events and dialogue, in turn, are projected to us through the acting.
The point is that, in the presence of dramatic performance, we feel with particular strength and excitement a continued thrusting out of the self into the world. The actor who comes before us at the beginning of a play provides a basic model for the process of human action. His movement of self-projection, toward us and into a part, seems directed not only to particular actions, but toward the very gap between self and world which the idea of action seeks to leap. Indeed, the type of self to which we pay most attention in the theater — the "character" presented by the actor — could be said to have a unique ontological status. It is not the personal self of the actor, but the self he creates by acting. And in that creation the gap between self and deed seems curiously to vanish. A character in the theater, the created self, is identical with the actor's deed. It is a self we watch the actor making — or, rather, the self is the making. We may be aware that Antony had an historical existence, we may even entertain some guesses about his nature before he comes on stage, but the Antony we know in the theater is not a figure from the past. The man we are watching is alive now — his character takes shape in an actor's living body. The self we observe is the actor's action. "Antony" is what the actor is doing now and now and now. Again, the issue is not the correct philosophical description of a theatrical character in performance, but the way the phenomenon of acting engages our impulse to leap the gap between doer and deed, between self and world. In responding to the actor, we feel the pressure toward action, the pressure toward the leap, with heightened urgency.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy by Michael Goldman. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- I. Introduction, pg. 1
- II. "To Be or Not To Be" and the Spectrum of Action, pg. 17
- III. Othello's Cause, pg. 46
- IV. Acting and Feeling: Histrionic Imagery in King Lear, pg. 71
- V. Speaking Evil: Language and Action in Macbeth, pg. 94
- VI. Antony and Cleopatra: Action as Imaginative Command, pg. 112
- VII. Characterizing Coriolanus, pg. 140
- Notes, pg. 169
- Index, pg. 181