Conventions Of Realism Research Articles

The Convention of "Heart and Tongue" and the Meaning of Measure for Measure

LL literature uses conventions of one kind or another. There are the dramatic conventions of the stage, conventions in poetry of commonplace themes and figures, conventions in the novel of narration and description. As recently as March of last year the poetic dramatist Ronald Duncan has called for an abandonment of the lavish realistic conventions of the contemporary stage, and the exchange of a look in on life for what is greater than life.' T. S. Eliot made the same point a few years ago in A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry.2 Of course, abandonment of conventions is not envisaged by these writers; the convention of verse, which they both use, is part of their artifice. By a study of the use of poetic conventions, or of any one central convention, we can acquire a clearer knowledge of what the poem or play means. I intend to examine in detail Shakespeare's use of the figure of the heart-tongue in for Measure, in order to show that it faithfully reveals the meaning of the play. I am not putting forward a new interpretation of the play. It seems to me that the total complex of meaning lies in a judicious molding together of the views already put forward in Mary Suddard's Measure for as a Clue to Shakespeare's Attitude towards Puritanism,3 H. B. Charlton's study of the play in his Shakespearian Comedy,4 Elizabeth M. Pope's Renaissance Background of for Measure,5 R. W. Battenhouse's Measure for and the Christian Doctrine of Atonement,6 Clifford Leech's 'Meaning' of for Measure,7 M. C. Bradbrook's Authority, Truth, and Justice in for Measure,8 and G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire.9 I want to do .two things here: to show that the convention of heart-tongue is organic to the play; that is, that it is a dramatic figure by means of which Shakespeare's over-all poetic design is made manifest. And that as a result of

The Diction of Strange Interlude

actually rests, not on reality but on convention, as all technics at bottom do. When you go to a play, you know perfectly well (if you bother to think about it) that what happens on the stage is aimed at you and your fellows in the audience. But by the so-called realistic convention the actors ignore your presence and the action proceeds, in theory, as if you were not there at all. Every word spoken on the stage is meant for the ears of the audience, but it would never do to address those ears directly. The players ostensibly talk only to each other, and the audience are supposed to be a group of eavesdroppers who overhear what the players say. Along with this convention go others. Above all, the characters in a play must talk naturally. That is to say, they must use the kind of language natural to them in everyday conversation, since, by convention, their speeches are private give and take, not public oratory. Needless to say, Shakespeare and his age had a set of conventions very different from those I have just described. The Elizabethans did not ignore the audience, even in theory. Oratorical flights, appropriate to speakers addressing large assemblies, abound in Elizabethan plays, and soliloquies and asides, banned from the modern stage because they are direct communications from actor to audience, were in excellent dramatic standing in sixteenth century England. But, naturally, much of the business was between actor and actor, not between actor and audience, and in these parts of the dialogue the audience was out of it and was supposed to overhear rather than hear, precisely as in our theater of today. In sum, the chief difference between the two stages lies in the matter of consistency. We insist that the same technic be applied throughout; they shifted from one technic to the other at will in the same play. It has often been remarked that Eugene O'Neill, in Strange Interlude and elsewhere, turns away from the modern technic and goes back to the Elizabethan technic. The multiplicity of his scenes (or acts, if you will), and his free use of asides, are obvious and striking examples of this reversion. But the chief point, as we have seen, is that of consistency, and in the present study I will examine the language of Strange Interlude with a view to finding out, first, whether 19