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Overview
The idea that actors are hypocrites and fakes and therefore dangerous to society was widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fangs of Malice examines the equation between the vice of hypocrisy and the craft of acting as it appears in antitheatrical tracts, in popular and high culture, and especially in plays of the period. Rousseau and others argue that actors, expert at seeming other than they are, pose a threat to society; yet dissembling seems also to be an inevitable consequence of human social intercourse. The “antitheatrical prejudice” offers a unique perspective on the high value that modern western culture places on sincerity, on being true to one's own self.
Taking a cue from the antitheatrical critics themselves, Matthew Wikander structures his book in acts and scenes, each based on a particular slander against actors. A prologue introduces his main issues. Act One deals with the proposition “They Dress Up”: foppish slavery to fashion, cross-dressing, and dressing as clergy. Act Two treats the proposition “They Lie” by focusing on social dissembling and the phenomenon of the self-deceiving hypocrite and the public, princely hypocrite. Act Three, “They Drink,” examines a wide range of antisocial behavior ascribed to actors, such as drinking, gambling, and whoring. An epilogue ties the ancient ideas of possession and the panic that actors inspire to contemporary anxieties about representation not only in theatre but also in the visual and literary arts.
Fangs of Malice will be of great interest to scholars and students of drama as well as to theatre professionals and buffs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587294174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2005 |
| Series: | Studies Theatre Hist & Culture , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fangs of Malice Hypocrisy, Sincerity, & Acting
By MATTHEW H. WIKANDER
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2002 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-809-8
Chapter One Scene One AS SECRET AS MAIDENHEAD When Duke Orsino speaks to Viola, disguised as Cesario, of his attractions in Twelfth Night, it is in a language loaded with suggestion:
Diana's lip Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman's part. (1.4.31-34)
Modern audiences immediately understand what is happening here: the duke is unconsciously responding to the sexual potentiality visually represented to us by a sexually mature actress wearing boy's clothes. The key to Viola's virgin mystery (she describes her history as "[a] blank, my lord" [2.4.110]) lies in visualizing the woman's body wrapped in inappropriate costume: one kind of "worm i'th'bud" (2.4.111). Her "growing to perfection" (2.4.41), like the unfolding of a rose, is an unclothing. Wistfully, Viola seems to recognize that her blooming as a woman necessarily implies the violation and end of her virginity - again represented in terms of costume by those "maiden weeds" (5.1.255) whose recovery is blocked by Malvolio's suit against the captain at the end of the play. Orsino's refusal to kiss Viola until she dresses appropriately in "other habits" (5.1.387) suggests a kind of stalemate.
But the emphasis on costume and the theatricality of the bawdy phrase "woman's part" should lead us to wonder how Viola's blossoming into womanhood would strike an audience used to seeing women's roles enacted by boys. What the actor playing Viola will himself blossom into is not a woman at all, but a man. "For they shall yet belie thy happy years / That say thou art a man," Orsino says (1.4.30-31). The histories of the boy actors Nathan Field and Edward Kynaston indicate that these apprentices could grow up to play adult lovers and tyrants or could grow up and continue to play women. Thus the actor playing Viola, a boy figuring a woman disguised as a boy on the Elizabethan stage, stands poised at a critical moment in a professional progression from "woman's part" to "man's estate."
"Let the usurping actress remember that her sex is a liability, not an asset," Harley Granville-Barker remarked as he coined the expression "boy-actress." Granville-Barker's nostalgia for an idealized "celibate stage" finds some interesting echoes in recent feminist criticism. Stripped of its misogynist language, Granville-Barker's idea that the boy-actress's lack of what he called "feminine charm" could be an "asset" anticipates Juliet Dusinberre's assertion that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were "freed" by the convention of cross-dressing in the theater and in the plots of plays to "explore ... the nature of women untrammeled by the customs of femininity." "Obliged to convince the audience of the boy actor's femininity even when he looked, because of his disguise, exactly like the boy he was, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights created a femininity to outlast the boy actor's changes of costume" (Shakespeare, 257). Thus both Dusinberre and Granville-Barker in their different ways suggest that the institution of the boy-actress provides a key to understanding Shakespeare's women. But Granville-Barker failed to follow through on this idea in his actual discussions of the plays, and Dusinberre's declaration of "Shakespeare's feminism" offers little help in deciphering the multiple sexual ambiguities that crown the Illyria of Twelfth Night.
For psychoanalytic critics, these ambiguities are seen as comprehensible in terms of adolescent development. "The sexual ambiguity of this stage," says W. Thomas MacCary, "reflects itself in sexual ambivalence, all of which Shakespeare figures in his use of transvestitism." For Coppélia Kahn, this confusion is shared by the audience: "We experience the state of radical identity-confusion typical of adolescence when the differences between the sexes are as fluid as their desire, when a boy might feel more like a girl than a boy, or a girl might love another girl rather than a boy." But neither MacCary nor Kahn addresses the physical fact of the boy-actress's own adolescence: the androgyny of figures like Viola or Rosalind remains for them confined to the play's written texts. Joel Fineman recognizes the importance of theatrical convention: "A playwright such as Shakespeare, whose psyche assembled around and responded to polarities, doubling negations, structures of distributive reciprocity, had available to him a theater whose forms and conventions gave flesh to just such structures." Rosalind's epilogue in As You Like It is an unmasking: when "the actor who plays Rosalind shows himself a boy, he accomplishes with the nakedness of his masculinity a final unmasking, pointing thereby to the play's last disguise and to the conditional that is the premise of the play itself" (Representing Shakespeare, 92). Shakespeare's use of disguise in Twelfth Night is special, Fineman argues, because "disguise by itself constitutes the play's problem" (79). For Fineman, though, the problem remains in Shakespeare's "psyche." Twelfth Night ends with no such unmasking: Viola remains trapped in her boy's clothes; the boy-actress remains trapped in the role.
Anthropological approaches to Shakespeare have also engaged the vision of adolescence that Viola embodies. Her desire at the beginning of the play not to "be delivered to the world, / Till I had made mine own occasion mellow, / What my estate is" (1.2.42-44) suggests to Marjorie Garber and Edward Berry that the whole play is in some way a rite of passage from childhood to maturity. Berry has linked the Elizabethan institution of apprenticeship with rites of passage in other cultures as a process by which a boy becomes a man and achieves a place in society through the mastery of a trade. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that "characters like Rosalind and Viola pass through a state of being men in order to become women," in a society in which both boys and women are perceived as incomplete men. The positive androgyny seen in Viola by feminist critics, the fluid adolescent sexuality seen by psychoanalytical critics, and the magical liminality seen by anthropological critics are all aspects of the real adolescent playing the role. At this phase of his career, the boy-actress is neither male nor female, fish nor fowl; his ability to play both boy and girl may signify the beginning of his acting career as a man or the end of his acting career as a woman.
More recent discussions of the boy-actress on the Renaissance English stage have gone further and disclosed this figure to be transgressive in a number of ways. In the process, they vigorously embrace the antitheatrical slander that the desire the boys provoked in male audience members was homosexual desire. One of the most famous and most frequently cited examples comes from Phillip Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses. When the plays are done, Stubbes claims, "everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves, covertly, they play the sodomites or worse." Prynne, as Stephen Orgel notes, endorses Stubbes, "citing this passage as a proof of the specifically homoerotic character of the stage":
The assumption here is first that the basic form of response to theater is erotic, second that erotically, theater is uncontrollably exciting; and third, that the basic, essential form of erotic excitement in men is homosexual - that, indeed, women are only a cover for men. And though the assumption as Prynne articulates it is clearly pathological, a reductio ad absurdum of antitheatrical commonplaces, it is also clearly related both to all the generalized anxieties attendant upon the institutionalization of masculinity within the culture, and to the sanctioned homoeroticism that played so large a role in relationships between men.
Orgel argues that theater frighteningly blurs a line between the sexes that is historically blurry in the Renaissance. Anatomically, women were men whose development had been arrested; and the process could be reversed. For Bruce R. Smith, "Shakespeare sees in cross-dressing just what his Puritan detractors did: a particularly volatile symbol of liminality, a relaxation of the social rules that hold man's animal passions in check." Orgel follows Barish in describing the antitheatrical tracts as pathological, but he joins with them in finding the boy actor to be what Marjorie Garber calls "a sign of the homoerotic subtext of Renaissance theater." "In Shakespeare's plays, Stubbes and his kind may have good reason for their suspicions," Smith agrees.
"Gender is performance," Laurence Senelick has declared. Alisa Solomon has argued that female impersonation is "originary" to Western theater: because gender identities only exist in and through performance, "acting is bound up with 'femininity.' And," Solomon continues, "because patriarchal culture has sustained an ideal of the artificial, malleable, and changeable woman, 'femininity' is bound up with acting." The threat of this kind of binding could be expressed in physical, anatomical terms, as Orgel suggests. Seventeenth-century English antitheatrical writers, according to Laura Levine, shared a "fear - expressed in virtually biological terms - that theater could structurally transform men into women." Levine argues that neither the essentialist notion of an unchanging own self nor the new historicist assertion of the self as wholly socially constructed can account for this fear. Yet her answer - that at this historical moment "a cultural prejudice burgeoned into a personal symptomatology" - is likewise evasive. Antitheatrical writings reveal a problem representing and staging gender in the early modern period, but it is a problem, as Solomon points out, that has always been and is still part of Western humanistic discourse.
Marjorie Garber, too, advocates a transhistorical look at the ubiquity of such models. "[W]hat if that 'boy' were to be taken seriously as what it most disturbingly represents: the figure of the transvestite? Rather than appropriated, erased, or wished away, rather than taken primarily as a role model for female empowerment or gay - male or female - homoerotic play, this 'boy' is a provoker of category crises, a destabilizer of binarisms, a transgressor of boundaries, sexual, erotic, hierarchical, political, conceptual. The changeling boy." For Garber, transvestitism is category crisis, and it emerges from an original concern with clothing as a social marker. Her wide-ranging argument rests on the assumption that transvestitism is usually "looked through rather than at in critical and cultural analyses," noting "how often, indeed how insistently, cultural observers have tried to make it mean something, anything, other than itself." And it is also based upon the somewhat dubious assumption that the "changeling boys" of the Renaissance stage were themselves, in some essential way, transvestites. It might be useful to turn Garber's formulations around a bit. If the Renaissance boy-actresses provoke cultural anxiety by disrupting sexual and social binarisms, it might be possible to argue that they do so not because they are transvestites but because they are actors. What actors signal is a permeability of boundaries, in Michael Goldman's terms, a reciprocal joining of "Self and Other, actor and character, we and they, comedy and tragedy, what is outside the boundary and what within." The category confusion and boundary crossing that Garber celebrates in transvestitism and Goldman in all aspects of theater prompts the panic of antitheatricalists. They revolt from the blurring of boundaries.
But Viola shows that boundary-crossing of another sort is at work in Twelfth Night. She not only is representative of a disturbingly androgynous "poor monster" (2.2.34) but also participates in a metatheatrical language that throughout the play identifies her as a "changeling boy" of a special kind: an actor at a decisive moment in his career. It is as an actor-in-training that Viola first presents herself to Olivia. Confronted with two veiled female figures, Viola - one of the two "ladies" of the play - repeatedly insists upon identifying the "honorable lady of the house" (1.5.164) before delivering her speech, afraid that it might be "cast away" upon the wrong person (168-69). The nautical language here and in Maria's attack - "Will you hoist sail, sir?" (198) - suggests an identification between the shipwrecked Viola and the speech itself. "I have taken great pains to con it," she says; and as Olivia presses her with the question "Whence came you, sir?" she insists upon her lack of improvisatory skill: "I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part" (170, 173-75). While Viola's adoption of the part of Cesario bespeaks great skill in improvisation - "Are you a comedian?" asks Olivia - boy performers on the Elizabethan stage were not given the company's fool's freedom to range beyond the scripted part. "You might do much," says Olivia after Viola's passionate rendition of the "willow cabin" speech (271). Her assessment of Viola as a performer moves into a social interest: "What is your parentage?" Viola responds in character as a young professional: "Above my fortunes, yet my state is well. / I am a gentleman" (272-74). Of course, Cesario is a "gentleman" insofar as Viola was born a lady; the boy-actress is both lady and gentleman only insofar as he is a "comedian." A full member of an Elizabethan theater company might, like Shakespeare, aspire to (and gain) the status of "gentleman": a first step on the way for an apprentice would be aspiration to full membership in the company.
What in the first exchanges between Olivia and Viola seems sexual rivalry might then also be construed as professional rivalry, for both "ladies" enjoy the same marginal status in the company of which they are apprentice members. "Excellently done," says Viola, "if God did all" (231) when Olivia unveils. And the play's interest in social mobility - Malvolio's desire to be Olivia's "fellow" (3.4.78) is seen by the others as madness - has a special resonance here. Viola does receive an invitation to marry above her station; Olivia, played by the boy-actress who remains constant to the part of the lady, is married to Sebastian, who is of her own social rank. The identity suggested by the anagrams Viola and Olivia is challenged by Viola's superior virtuosity.
"I would you were as I would have you be!" Olivia blurts in their second important duet (3.1.142). "Would it be better madam, than I am? I wish it might be, for now I am your fool" is Viola's curious reply. It is Olivia who is here making a fool of herself; but the play suggests throughout a connection between Viola and Feste, the professional Fool. As Cesario, Viola claims that she is no comedian. Although in the first act she proposes herself as a singing "eunuch" in "service" to Orsino (1.2.56, 59), when Orsino requests a song of her in 2.4 it is Feste "that should sing it" (9). The central scene of the play is the dialogue between Viola and Feste, in which the two improvisers play with words. "They that dally nicely with words may make them wanton," Viola observes sententiously; "I would therefore my sister had no name, sir," responds the clown (3.1.14-16). In the scene immediately preceding this, Malvolio has construed his name from the letters "M. O. A. I."; in the scene before that, Viola has told the story of her sister's history - "a blank, my lord." Malvolio's social climbing, Viola's strategy of "concealment," and the Fool's nihilistic dexterity become linked. And the scene has professional overtones again. "Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard," says Feste, receiving a coin. "By my troth, I'll tell thee, I am almost sick for one - [aside] though I would not have it grow on my chin," Viola replies (3.1.44-47). Among its other associations - some quite aggressively bawdy - the beard can symbolize coming of age in the company. Viola's sickness can be seen not only as sexual desire but also as professional ambition, and her anxiety about beards as the boy-actress's worry at the peak of his career. Viola's commentary on Feste's skill - "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit" (59-60) - reflects an awareness of a kind of folly radically different from the idiocies of the Illyrians. Robert Armin's identity with the role of Feste has traditional authority; as a skilled improvisatory artist he commands the boy-actress's respect. And as a vengeful and cruel punisher of Malvolio he insists upon the stability of rank.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fangs of Malice by MATTHEW H. WIKANDER Copyright © 2002 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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