Chapter 8 THEATER
We sit in the darkened theater with many strangers. We sense an air of anticipation, an awareness of excitement. People cough, rustle about, then suddenly become still. Slowly the lights on the stage begin to come up, and we see actors moving before us, apparently unaware of our presence. They are in rooms or spaces similar to those that we may be in ourselves at the end of the evening. Eventually they begin speaking to one another much the way we might ourselves, sometimes saying things so intimate that we are uneasy. They move about the stage, conducting their lives in total disregard for us, only hinting occasionally that we might be there in the same space with them. At first we feel that despite our being in the same building with the actors, we are in a different world. Then slowly the distance between us and the actors begins to diminish until, in a good play, our participation erases the distance. We thrill with the actors, but we also suffer with them. We witness the illusion of an action that has an emotional impact for us and changes the way we think about our own lives. Great plays such as Hamlet, Othello, The Misanthrope, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Long Day’s Journey into Night can have the power to transform our awareness of ourselves and our circumstances. It is a mystery common to much art: that the illusion of reality can affect the reality of our own lives.
Aristotle and the Elements of Drama
Drama is a collaborative art that represents events and situations, either realistic and/or symbolic, that we witness happening through the actions of actors in a play on a stage in front of a live audience. According to the greatest dramatic critic, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the elements of drama are as follows:
1. Plot: a series of events leading to disaster for the main characters who undergo reversals in fortune and understanding but usually ending with a form of enlightenment—sometimes of the characters, sometimes of the audience, and sometimes of both
2. Character: the presentation of a person or persons whose actions and the reason for them are more or less revealed to the audience
3. Diction: the language of the drama, which should be appropriate to the action
4. Thought: the ideas that underlie the plot of the drama, expressed in terms of dialogue and soliloquy
5. Spectacle: the places of the action, the costumes, set designs, and visual elements in the play
6. Music: in Greek drama, the dialogue was sometimes sung or chanted by a chorus, and often this music was of considerable emotional importance; in modern drama, music is rarely used in serious plays, but it is of first importance in the musical theater
Aristotle conceived his theories in the great age of Greek tragedy , and therefore much of what he has to say applies to tragedies by such dramatists as Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE), especially his trilogy, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Sophocles (ca. 496–406 BCE) wrote Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus; and Euripides (ca. 485–406 BCE), the last of the greatest Greek tragedians, wrote Andromache, Medea, and The Trojan Women. All of these plays are still performed around the world, along with comedies by Aristophanes (ca. 448–385 BCE), the greatest Greek writer of comedies. His plays include Lysistrata, The Birds, The Wasps, and The Frogs. These plays often have a satirical and political purpose and set a standard for much drama to come.
Plot involves rising action, climax, falling action, denouement . For Aristotle, the tragic hero quests for truth. The moment of truth—the climax—is called recognition . When the fortune of the protagonist turns from good to bad, the reversal follows. The strongest effect of tragedy occurs when recognition and reversal happen at the same time, as in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (Figure 8-1).
The protagonist, or leading character, in the most powerful tragedies fails not only because of fate, which is a powerful force in Greek thought, but also because of a flaw in character (hamartia) , a disregard of human limitations. The protagonist in the best tragedies ironically brings his misfortune upon himself. In Oedipus Rex, for example, the impetuous behavior of Oedipus works well for him until he decides to leave “home.” Then his rash actions bring on disaster. Sophocles shows us that something of what happens to Oedipus could happen to us. We pity Oedipus and fear for him. Tragedy, Aristotle tells us, arouses pity and fear and by doing so produces in us a catharsis , a purging of those feelings, wiping out some of the horror.
198
FIGURE 8-1 Oedipus Rex. In the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre production, 1973, the shepherd tells Oedipus the truth about his birth and how he was prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother.
Courtesy Guthrie Theater. Photo: Michael Paul
The drama helps us understand the complexities of human nature and the power of our inescapable destinies.
Dialogue and Soliloquy
The primary dramatic interchanges are achieved by dialogue, the exchange of conversation among the characters. In older plays, the individual speech of a character might be relatively long, and then it is answered by another character in the same way. In more-modern plays, the dialogue is often extremely short. Sometimes a few minutes of dialogue will contain a succession of speeches only five or six words in length. The following is an example of a brief dialogue between Algernon and his manservant, Lane, from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
1. Algernon: A glass of sherry, Lane.
2. Lane: Yes, sir.
3. Algernon: Tomorrow, Lane, I’m going Bunburying.
4. Lane: Yes, sir.
5. Algernon: I shall probably not be back till Monday. You can put up my dress clothes, my smoking jacket, and all the Bunbury suits—
199
1. Lane: Yes, sir. (Handing sherry.)
2. Algernon: I hope tomorrow will be a fine day, Lane.
3. Lane: It never is, sir.
4. Algernon: Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist.
5. Lane: I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.
In this passage, Algernon plans to visit an imaginary friend, Bunbury, an invention designed to help him avoid dinners and meetings that he cannot stand. The dialogue throughout the play is quick and witty, and the play is generally regarded as one of the most amusing comedies. As in most plays, the dialogue moves the action forward by telling us about the importance of the situations in which the actors speak. This example is interesting because, while brisk, its last line introduces an amusing irony, revealing the ironic soul of the entire play.
The soliloquy , on the other hand, is designed to give us insight into the character who speaks the lines. In the best of soliloquies we are given to understand that characters are speaking to themselves, not to the audience—the term “aside” is used to describe such speeches. Because the character is alone we can trust to the sincerity of the speech and the truths that it reveals. Hamlet’s soliloquies in Shakespeare’s play are among the most famous in literature. Here, Hamlet speaks at a moment in the play when the tension is greatest:
1. Hamlet: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep— No more—and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. [3.1.57–64]
There is nothing superficial about this speech, nor the many lines that come after it. Hamlet considers suicide and, once having renounced it, considers what he must do. The many soliloquies in Hamlet offer us insight into Hamlet’s character, showing us an interiority, or psychological existence, that is rich and deep. In the Greek tragedies, some of the function of the modern soliloquy was taken by the Chorus, a group of citizens who commented in philosophic fashion on the action of the drama.
PERCEPTION KEY Soliloquy
A soliloquy occurs when a character alone onstage reveals his or her thoughts. Study the use of the soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.3.73–96, 4.4.32–66) and in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (Tom’s opening speech, Tom’s long speech in scene 5, and his opening speech in scene 6). What do these soliloquies accomplish? Is their purpose different in these two plays? Are soliloquies helpful in all drama? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
Archetypal Patterns
Theater originated from ancient rituals that had their roots in religious patterns such as death and rebirth. One such pattern is the ritual of sacrifice—which implies that the individual must be sacrificed for the commonweal of society. Such a pattern is archetypal —a basic psychological pattern that people apparently react to on a more or less subconscious level. These patterns, archetypes , are deep in the myths that have permeated history. We feel their importance even if we do not recognize them consciously.
Archetypal drama aims at symbolic or mythic interpretations of experience. For instance, one’s search for personal identity, for self-evaluation, a pattern repeated in all ages, serves as a primary archetypal structure for drama. This archetype is the driving force in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and many more plays—notably, but by no means exclusively, in tragedies. (As we shall see, comedy also often uses this archetype.) This archetype is powerful because, while content to watch other people discover their identities, we may find that we are not the people we want others to think we are.
The power of the archetype derives, in part, from our recognition of a pattern that has been repeated by the human race throughout history. The psychologist Carl Jung, whose work spurred critical awareness of archetypal patterns in all the arts, believed that the greatest power of the archetype lies in its capacity to reveal through art the “imprinting” of human experience. Maud Bodkin, a critic who developed Jung’s views, explains the archetype this way:
The special emotional significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain.1
The quest narrative (see Chapter 7) is an example of an archetypal structure, one that recurs in drama frequently. For instance, Hamlet is seeking the truth about his father’s death (Aristotle’s recognition), but in doing so, he is also trying to discover his own identity as it relates to his mother. Sophocles’s Oedipus is the story of a man who kills his father, marries his mother, and suffers a plague on his lands. He discovers the truth (recognition again), and doom follows (Aristotle’s reversal). He blinds himself and is ostracized. Freud thought the play so archetypal that he saw in it a profound human psychological pattern, which he called the “Oedipus complex”: the desire of a child to get rid of the same-sex parent and to have a sexual union with the parent of the opposite sex. Not all archetypal patterns are so shocking, but most reveal an aspect of basic human desires. Drama—because of its immediacy and compression of presentation—is, perhaps, the most powerful means of expression for such archetypes.
Some of the more important archetypes include those of an older man, usually a king in ancient times, who is betrayed by a younger man, his trusted lieutenant, with regard to a woman. This is the theme of Lady Gregory’s Grania. The loss of innocence, a variation on the Garden of Eden theme, is another
201
favorite, as in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and The Wild Duck. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia combines two archetypes: loss of innocence and the quest for knowledge. However, no archetype seems to rival the quest for self-identity. That quest is so common that it is even parodied, as in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
The four seasons set temporal dimensions for the development of archetypes because the seasons are intertwined with patterns of growth and decay. The origins of drama, which are obscure beyond recall, may have been linked with rituals associated with the planting of seed, the reaping of crops, and the entire complex issue of fertility and death. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye associates comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, irony and satire with winter. His associations suggest that some archetypal drama may be rooted in connections between human destiny and the rhythms of nature. Such origins may account for part of the power that archetypal drama has for our imaginations, for the influences that derive from such origins are pervasive in all of us. These influences may also help explain why tragedy usually involves the death of a hero—although, sometimes, as in the case of Oedipus, death is withheld—and why comedy frequently ends with one or more marriages, as in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with their suggestions of fertility.
CONCEPTION KEY Archetypes
1. Whether or not you do additional reading, consider the recurrent patterns you have observed in dramas—include television dramas or television adaptations of drama. Can you find any of the patterns we have described? Do you see other patterns showing up? Do the patterns you have observed seem basic to human experience? For example, do you associate gaiety with spring, love with summer, death with fall, and bitterness with winter? What season seems most appropriate for marriage?
Genres of Drama: Tragedy
Carefully structured plots are basic for Aristotle, especially for tragedies. The action must be probable or plausible, but not necessarily historically accurate. Although noble protagonists are essential for great tragedies, Aristotle allows for tragedies with ordinary protagonists. In these, plot is much more the center of interest than character. Then we have what may be called action dramas, never, according to Aristotle, as powerful as character dramas, other things being equal. Action dramas prevail on the popular stage and television. But when we turn to the great tragedies that most define the genre, we think immediately of great characters: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Prometheus, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear.
Modern drama tends to avoid traditional tragic structures because modern concepts of morality, sin, guilt, fate, and death have been greatly altered. Modern
202
psychology explains character in ways the ancients either would not have understood or would have disputed. Critics have said that there is no modern tragedy because there can be no character noble enough to engage our heartfelt sympathy. Moreover, the acceptance of chance as a force equal to fate in our lives has also reduced the power of tragedy in modern times. Greek myth—used by modern playwrights like Eugene O’Neill—has a diminished vitality in modern tragedy. It may be that the return of a strong integrating myth—a world vision that sees the actions of humanity as tied into a large scheme of cosmic or sacred events—is a prerequisite for producing a drama that we can recognize as truly tragic, at least in the traditional sense. This may be an overstatement. What do you think?
The Tragic Stage
Our vision of tragedy focuses on two great ages—ancient Greece and Renaissance England. These two historical periods share certain basic ideas: for instance, that there is a “divine providence that shapes our ends,” as Hamlet says, and that fate is immutable, as the Greek tragedies tell us. Both periods were marked by considerable prosperity and public power, and both ages were deeply aware that sudden reversals in prosperity could change everything. In addition, both ages had somewhat similar ideas about the way a stage should be constructed. The relatively temperate climate of Greece permitted an open amphitheater, with seating on three sides of the stage. The Greek architects often had the seats carved out of hillside rock, and their attention to acoustics was so remarkable that even today in some of the surviving Greek theaters, as at Epidaurus, a whisper on the stage can be heard in the farthest rows. The Elizabethan stages were roofed wooden structures jutting into open space enclosed by stalls in which the well-to-do sat (the not-so-well-to-do stood around the stage), providing for sight lines from three sides. Each kind of theater was similar to a modified theater-in-the-round, such as is used occasionally today. A glance at Figures 8-2 through 8-4 shows that the Greek and Elizabethan theaters were very different from the standard theater of our time—the proscenium theater.
The proscenium acts as a transparent “frame” separating the action taking place on the stage from the audience. The Greek and Elizabethan stages are not so explicitly framed, thus involving the audience more directly spatially and, in turn, perhaps, emotionally. In the Greek theater, the action took place in a circle called the “orchestra.” The absence of a separate stage put the actors on the same level as those seated at the lowest level of the audience.
Stage Scenery and Costumes
Modern theater depends on the scenery and costumes for much of its effect on the audience. Aristotle considered these ingredients as part of the spectacle, what we see when we are in the theater. Greek drama used a basic set, as seen in Figure 8-5, with an open space, the orchestra, and a building, the skene, against which the actors played.
Greek actors wore simple clothing and distinguished their parts by the use of elaborate masks, some of which included a megaphone to help project the voices. The paraskenion provided entrances and exits, and the skene usually represented a home or palace against which the action was set. The presence of the altar indicates the religious nature of the festival of Dionysus, during which plays were presented. Because the Greeks held their festivals in the daytime, no special lighting was necessary. Shakespearean and Elizabethan plays were staged in the afternoon and used little stage scenery. The words of the play established the place and time of the action.
Elaborate lighting and painted flats to establish the locale of the action became the norm in the late seventeenth century and after. Candlelight was used ingeniously in the late seventeenth century, but by the eighteenth century oil lamps replaced lights in the theater and onstage.
The Drury Lane Theatre in London was the most popular theater of its time. As seen in Figure 8-6, it made extensive use of artificial lighting, while the stage was decorated with detailed painted sets simulating the environment in which the actors moved. Such efforts at realistic staging had become the norm with impressive speed, and even today we expect the stage to produce a sense of realism.
In Shakespeare’s time, some of the most impressive and imaginative costumes were not on the public stage, but in the special entertainments at the courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James, as shown in Figure 8-7. They were called masques, entertainments with mythic narratives, elaborate music and costumes, and much dancing. Masques were very expensive to produce and were usually performed only once for special celebrations.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
For a contemporary audience, Romeo and Juliet is easier to participate with than most Greek tragedies because, among other reasons, its tragic hero and heroine, although aristocratic, are not a king and a queen. Their youth and innocence add to their remarkable appeal. The play presents the archetypal story of lovers whose fate—mainly because of the hatred their families bear each other—is sealed from the first. The archetype of lovers who are not permitted to love enacts a basic struggle among forces that lie so deep in our psyches that we need a drama such as this to help reveal them. It is the struggle between light and dark, between the world in which we live on the surface of the earth with its light and openness and the world of darkness, the underworld of the Greeks and the Romans, and the hell of the Christians. Young lovers represent life, the promise of fertility, and the continuity of the human race. Few subject matters could be more potentially tragic than that of young lovers whose promise is plucked by death.
The play begins with some ominous observations by Montague, Romeo’s father. He points out that Romeo, through love of a girl named Rosaline (who does not appear in the play), comes home late in the morning and locks “fair daylight out,” making for himself an “artificial night.” Montague tells us that Romeo stays up all night, comes home, pulls down the shades, and converts day into night. These observations seem innocent enough unless one is already familiar with the plot; then it seems a clear and tragic irony: that Romeo, by making his day a night, is already foreshadowing his fate. After Juliet has been introduced, her nurse wafts her offstage with an odd bit of advice aimed at persuading her of the wisdom of marrying Count Paris, the man her mother has chosen. “Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.” At first glance, the advice seems innocent. But with knowledge of the entire play, it is prophetic, for it echoes the day/night imagery Montague has applied to Romeo. Shakespeare’s details invariably tie in closely with the structure. Everything becomes relevant.
When Romeo first speaks with Juliet, not only is it night but they are in Capulet’s orchard: symbolically a place of fruitfulness and fulfillment. Romeo sees her and imagines her, not as chaste Diana of the moon, but as his own luminary sun: “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!” He sees her as his “bright angel.” When she, unaware he is listening below, asks, “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” she is touching on profound concerns. She is, without fully realizing it, asking the impossible: that he not be himself. The denial of identity often brings great pain, as witness Oedipus, who at first refused to believe he was his father’s child. When Juliet asks innocently, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet,” she is asking that he ignore his heritage. The mythic implications of this are serious and, in this play, fatal. Denying one’s identity is rather like Romeo’s later attempt to deny day its sovereignty.
When they finally speak, Juliet explains ironically that she has “night’s cloak to hide me” and that the “mask of night is upon my face.” We know, as she speaks, that eternal night will be on that face, and all too soon. Their marriage, which occurs offstage as act 2 ends, is also performed at night in Friar Lawrence’s cell, with his hoping that the heavens will smile upon “this holy act.” But he is none too sure. And before act 3 is well under way, the reversals begin. Mercutio, Romeo’s friend, is slain because of Romeo’s intervention. Then Romeo slays Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, and finds himself doomed to exile from both Verona and Juliet. Grieving for the dead Tybalt and the banished Romeo, Juliet misleads her father into thinking the only cure for her condition is a quick marriage to Paris, and Romeo comes to spend their one night of love together before he leaves Verona. Naturally they want the night to last and last—again an irony we are prepared for—and when daylight springs, Romeo and Juliet have a playful argument over whether it is the nightingale or the lark that sings. Juliet wants Romeo to stay, so she defends the nightingale; he knows he must go, so he points to the lark and the coming light. Then both, finally, admit the truth. His line is “More light and light—more dark and dark our woes.”
Another strange archetypal pattern, part of the complexity of the subject matter, has begun here: the union of sex and death as if they were aspects of the same thing. In Shakespeare’s time, death was a metaphor for making love, and often when a singer of a love song protested that he was dying, he expected everyone to understand that he was talking about the sexual act. In Romeo and Juliet, sex and death go together, both literally and symbolically. The first most profound sense of this appears in Juliet’s pretending death in order to avoid marrying Paris. She takes a potion from Friar Lawrence—who is himself afraid of a second marriage because of possible bigamy charges—and she appears, despite all efforts of investigation, quite dead.
When Romeo hears that Juliet has been placed in the Capulet tomb, he determines to join her in death as he was only briefly able to do in life. The message Friar Lawrence had sent by way of another friar explaining the counterfeit death did not get through to Romeo. And it did not get through because genuine death, in the form of plague, had closed the roads to Friar John. When Romeo descends underground into the tomb, he unwillingly fights Paris. After killing Paris, Romeo sees the immobile Juliet. He fills his cup (a female symbol) with poison and drinks. When Juliet awakes from her potion and sees both Paris and Romeo dead, she can get no satisfactory answer for these happenings from Friar Lawrence. His fear is so great that he runs off as the authorities bear down on the tomb. This leaves Juliet to give Romeo one last kiss on his still warm lips, then plunge his dagger (a male symbol) into her heart and die (Figure 8-8).
Earlier, when Capulet thought his daughter was dead, he exclaimed to Paris, “O son, the night before thy wedding day / Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowered by him. / Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir.” At the end of the play, both Juliet and his real son-in-law, Romeo, are indeed married in death. The linkage of death and sex is ironically enacted in their final moments, which include the awful misunderstandings that the audience beholds in sorrow, that make Romeo and Juliet take their own lives for love of each other. And among the last lines is one that helps clarify one of the main themes: “A glooming peace this morning with it brings. / The sun for sorrow will not show his head.” Theatergoers have mourned these deaths for generations, and the promise that these two families will now finally try to get along together in a peaceful manner does not seem strong enough to brighten the ending of the play.
PERCEPTION KEY Tragedy
1. While participating with Romeo and Juliet, did you experience pity and fear for the protagonists? Catharsis (the purging of those emotions)?
2. Our discussion of the play did not treat the question of the tragic flaw (hamartia): the weakness of character that brings disaster to the main characters. One of Romeo’s flaws may be rashness—the rashness that led him to kill Tybalt and thus be banished. But he may have other flaws as well. What might they be? What are Juliet’s tragic flaws, if any?
3. You may not have been able to see Romeo and Juliet, but perhaps other tragedies are available. Try to see any of the tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Shakespeare; Ibsen’s Ghosts; John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea; Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie; or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Analyze the issues of tragedy we have raised. For example, decide whether the play is archetypal. Are there tragic flaws? Are there reversals and recognitions of the sort Aristotle analyzed? Did the recognition and reversal occur simultaneously? Are the characters important enough—if not noble enough—to excite your compassion for their sorrow
