Elizabethan England was in many respects a performance culture, where life is most vitally lived in the public display of oneself to spectators, and ‘All the world’s a stage’ is a thought that recurs again and again in Shakespeare’s plays. This course will explore how his understanding of human personality and behaviour is illuminated by the idea of theatrical performance.
We shall be looking closely at three plays in which a sense of crisis is generated when a gap opens up between the actor and the part he plays. Richard II shows us monarchy as theatrical performance – something Elizabeth understood well – but it is when Richard loses his political power that he becomes most self-consciously theatrical, most aware of his life as a series of performances that alienate him from himself. ‘Thus play I in one person many people / And none contented.’ Is this just the mark of his breakdown and decline, or does he come to understand something about the performance of the self that is both difficult and profound?
In some ways, Hamlet begins where Richard leaves off. ‘These are actions that a man might play’. Hamlet loves the theatre, but he hates ‘seeming’, and he is conspicuously bad at playing the role of revenger that the plot-situation requires of him. Instead, he spends much of the play trying out for the part of the Fool-or-madman, with an extravagance that rivets his audience’s attention, while preventing them from seeing who he is. ‘Hamlet’ is, famously, the most theatrical role in Shakespeare, but is it compatible with authentic feeling, serious action? That is the question. How is it that the Player can weep, but Hamlet cannot?
Coriolanus is Hamlet’s opposite: authentically himself, unhesitatingly heroic on the battlefield, and allergic to any scenario that might require him to play to the crowd, or to the gallery. ‘Would you have me / False to my nature? Rather say I play / The man I am.’ But his phobia towards public display and self-performance is so extreme that it itself becomes the object of the play’s attention. There is tragic irony in the way that he cannot carry through his heroic role, but feels himself to be, at the crisis, an actor who has forgotten his lines.