The Actor in the Script: Affective Strategies in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

The Actor in the Script: Affective Strategies in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra William E. Gruber Compare the part played by empathy then and now. What a contradictory, complicated and intermittent operation it was in Shakespeare’s theatre! Bertolt Brecht, “A Little Private Tuition for my Friend Max Gorelik”! Irregular, contradictory, simultaneously individuals and ideal types, the characters of Renaissance drama have at last been made safe from the attacks of realist and formalist critics; but modem readers, for all that, still tend to overlook an essential distinction between Renaissance dramatis personae and their representations on stage. Many continue to write as if Tudor and Stuart actors vanished behind their roles, or as if the play­ wrights’ illusions of character were always seamless.2 The argu­ ment of this essay is that Renaissance modes of dramatic characterization—and hence the visual rhetoric of Renaissance drama—cannot fully be understood unless one sees that the whole notion of “character” may be complicated by the actors’ presence. To suggest that actors may complicate the text is not to say that they necessarily violate it.3 It is my contention, however, that “character” in Tudor and Stuart drama is not usually visible except in terms of something which exists in relation to it: a resistance to character which constitutes one of the per­ ceptual focuses of dramatic performance.4 In order to test that hypothesis, I want to examine the introductory scenes of a single play, Antony and Cleopatra, for whatever information WILLIAM E. GRUBER, a member of the English Department at Emory Uni­ versity, is chiefly interested in modem drama and dramatic theory. He has previously published in a number of journals, including Comparative Drama. 30 William E. Gruber 31 they yield both as to Shakespeare’s affective strategy and to the half-hidden displacements of identity that characterize the per­ formance of any play in any period, especially one so volatile as the Jacobean. Admittedly the details of such a reading of Antony and Cleopatra will be largely conjectural.5 Taken together, nevertheless, they may help to reveal configurations of character and audience response which ideally mimetic readings commonly obscure. I. Waiting for Antony Elizabethan playwrights value spectacle a great deal, but even by contemporary standards few plays make so bold an appeal to spectators’ eyes as does Antony and Cleopatra. Shake­ speare stages a multitude of short scenes that follow one another in almost cinematic display, building a succession of “speaking pictures” or individual set pieces that remain frozen in viewers’ minds. Of the play’s many spectacular scenes, certainly the last is among the most visually daring. The play culminates in a remarkably extended tableau, when Cleopatra and her women lie motionless for 38 lines, inviting Romans and Jacobeans to contemplate death from a rare aesthetic angle. Yet this particular tableau differs considerably from modem cinematic freezes or Victorian pictorial realizations. On the seventeenth-century stage, as Huston Diehl has shown, mono­ graphic scenes such as this one often existed within a complex parodic environment—almost as if an entire age of dramatists had grown skeptical of the visual conventions and modes of representation upon which they based their art.6 In most theaters, emblematic displays normally depend for their effect upon static arrangements of actors within a set; but on Shakespeare’s stage the emblem of the Fallen Monarch is disturbed oddly by Caesar’s prosaic, disinterested inquiry as to the manner of the Queen’s death. Shakespeare foregrounds his tableau with the bustle of soldiers; one is struck by the playwright’s irreverence, as it were, toward his own visual display. There is, for example, a strong suggestion in the dialogue that Dolabella rudely pokes over Cleopatra’s body in an effort to discover what killed her: Here on her breast, There is a vent of blood, and something blown, The like is on her arm. (V.ii.346-48)7 The first scene of Antony and Cleopatra also offers spectators 32 Comparative Drama a familiar Renaissance stage spectacle, a court processional; and again the dramatic illusion is internally unstable: Enter Demetrius and Philo. Phi. Nay, but this dotage of our general’s O’erflows the measure...