Pioneers of Life: Shakespeare's Amateurs

Sitting down to write something about Shakespeare’s actors, my mind turns to Marcus Green.  “Dr. Kietzman, how the fuck are you?” he yelled from a passing car after he’d been out of school for a couple of years.  I still remember the time he played Richard III for a scene in class, and refused to take off his crown and his hump back after the scene was over.  He sat through the class pretending to be Richard.  Hell, he may have limped around for the rest of the day.  There was something about Richard that mattered, that he connected with—probably Richard’s deep need, the domestic abuse, the suffering that turned Richard desperate and murderous.  Marcus clung to his part … even if it was just for a day or two.  That was something.

Shakespeare’s plays are not plot-based but part-based.  He imagined parts for men he knew well.  It is generally accepted that Shakespeare’s actors learned their parts without a detailed sense of how the play would unfold.  The script was copied, cut up, and parts for each actor were assembled.  Each actor was given his roll or part to study privately, and when he turned up for rehearsal, he would know his lines and cues but not how his part intersected and affected others—that was a mystery.  “For the actor with his fiercely possessed part is at once radically alone and reaching for others, his world pre-scripted only to the extent that it is also abyssally unknown.”

Shakespeare was fascinated by acting as a profession.  He got his start as an actor.  Perhaps the danger and thrill of freestyling characters on stage (even in school plays) enabled him to risk going to London and imagining his friends playing characters remarkable, unforgettable.  New Historicist critics in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly commenting on the possible relationship between the rise of the public theaters and new geographic and social mobility available in Elizabethan London—a society where, for the first time, the son of a glovemaker would not necessarily follow in his father’s footsteps.  Acting, critics speculate, encouraged people to consider fashioning and playing new social roles.  It is 2017 Flint Michigan:  the bottom has fallen out of the local economy, a mad money-god (worse than any Shakespearean tyrant) is president, and, perhaps worst of all, because Humanities curriculum in secondary schools and university is not valued, there is an anorexically slim chance of reviving the life of imagination in America.  We need to act.  But how?  We need to imagine new parts.  But how? 

Shakespeare gives us vignettes of ordinary people acting.  The “mechanicals,” referred to as “hard handed men,” stage a classical tale—“Pyramus and Thisbe”—in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The local schoolteacher, parish curate, a group of yokels mount a version of “The Nine Worhies” in Love’s Labor’s Lost.  Do these plays succeed or fail?  It’s hard to tell.  In both cases, the onstage audiences are aristocrats, who behave very badly, ridiculing the actors, while the live audience gives what the aristocrats withhold:  laughter and even love.  There is something pathetic about the way the rich folk bait the poor … snarl and snap like dogs rushing at a staked bear.  Bear-baiting competed with theatre for audiences in London’s “liberties” (zones just outside of the city limits—red light districts, if you will), and Shakespeare agonistically tones the theatrical shows of his amateurs to prompt the audience to want the non-professionals to succeed and do their collective best to help:  we laugh out our support and let laughter change to tears when an actor really gets into his character and speaks a speech affectively.

Unlike lots of critics, I do not think Shakespeare intends to mock amateurs or show off how much better his own professionals are.  Showing amateurs acting allows him to anatomize the craft … to examine what is scary about it, what is required for a good impersonation, as well as how acting impacts the real life of Bottom the weaver or Armado the buffoon.  What is more, it isn’t just mechanicals and country schoolteachers who stage plays and take on parts.  “Female” characters—like Viola and Rosalind—put  on pants to play young men (Cesario and Ganymede)—in order to save themselves and make themselves through acting.  Even Shakespeare’s tragic roles—the  great parts like Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Antony—involve the characters taking on an antic disposition, trading the role of king for that of Job, the famous biblical sufferer, strutting and fretting like a poor player to murder and go mad, trying to stand up and be the triple pillar of the world.  Amateur performance may make us hyper-aware of the homemade quality, but that quality is still something we feel when we witness the crossdressing heroine roles and those of the great tragic men .  What I am calling “homemade” or “makeshift” is, I think, the simultaneous awareness of the character and of the actor’s degree of impersonation or metamorphosis.  In almost all Shakespearean performance, we are aware of the actors reaching for something that is beyond them and only realizable in fits and starts.  We are used to method acting in which the actor strives to "become" the character; but Elizabethan auditors fully expected and valued some amount of visible interplay between actor and character.  Based on evidence within the plays, there seems to have been a much more interesting and sophisticated ability to acknowledge that character is a collaboratively created dramatic fiction and a tacit agreement that such fictions were useful tools with which to examine the psyche and all manner of social relations.  But the actors admit failure very often within a role, "Why what an ass am I!" exclaims Hamlet after a particularly histrionic bit.  It seems to me that William Gruber is right when he says that “there emerges in Shakespeare’s play a growing sense that the power to act meaningfully—to live up fully to a role—is an impossible task.” 

Because we treat Shakespeare so honorifically, it may be difficult to entertain the idea that his was an art of failure:  of actors trying, reaching, faltering, falling, being inevitably upstaged or outfaced.  But the conditions for writers and actors working in the Elizabethan theatre demanded improvisation.  Audiences, with few entertainment options, were hungry for new plays:  companies had, ready to play, 15-20 plays at a given time.  There were probably 3 or 4 rehearsals at most for new plays.  The actors came to rehearsal, clinging to their part and listening hard for opportunities to come in with their lines and, as they spoke them, must have been amazed as lines learned in private flowered in crazy ne’er before seen blooms, given the emotional heat from others they could not anticipate.  The American video artist Bill Viola once spoke of “falling” or faltering as the optimal state for making art.  Some artists take pride in striving where they risk failure.  Samuel Beckett:  “Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader:  “All is falling.”

“But did you die tho?”  My daughter is fond of this catch phrase, and I like to think that it reflects a healthy attitude to experimentation.  It also reminds me of all the “I’m not dead yet” moments in Shakespearean performance—the most memorable of all, perhaps, being Bottom’s repeated deaths in the role of Pyramus:  “Now am I dead, now am I fled, my soul is in the sky, tongue lose thy light, moon take thy flight, now die, die, die.”  Bottom and his ilk have much to teach us, through their parts, about being bold in the roles we attempt in our lives.  Here’s my short list of life lessons from Shakespeare’s actors:

1.)  Viola playing Cesario in Twelfth Night:  washed up on the shore of a new country after a shipwreck without her twin brother, whom she suspects is dead.  She picks herself up (not dead yet) and asks the sea captain, “What country friend is this?”  When she finds out that “this is Ilyria” and weeps for her brother in Elysium, she faces her predicament practically, “And what should I do in Ilyria?”  Within her first scene, she conceives of the idea of playing a boy—a eunuch—in order to slip into the court of Orsino, a potential love interest.  Acting a eunuch is something to hold onto, a part she can cling to in the midst of total uncertainty.

2.)  Bottom, like many of us, is enthusiastic.  He loves many different things.  When his friend, Peter Quince, is looking for actors to play in his play for the Duke’s wedding, Bottom wants to play all the parts:  a tyrant, a lady, a lion … anything and everything.  Choice and commitment are hard for many of us because they can seem so limiting.  From Bottom, we learn that there is pathos in the simple act of choosing who to be and how to act.  It is impossible for one man to play many parts:  so we must push ourselves to feel and hear the variety within one life, one self, one love, one day, one night. 

3.)  Not everybody will love us.  Holofernes, the schoolteacher playwright, who is excited by all the ideas swirling around inside his head … even if he does express them in a weirdly nerdy way.  When he plays Judas Maccabeus in the Nine Worthies pageant, the aristocrats joke about his name, call him an ass, and put him “out of countenance,” but he retaliates:  “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.”  No matter how small or “simple” our gift, we must be grateful for it and willing to defend it.  Here is Holofernes’ display of gratitude:  “a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions.  These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourish’d in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.”

4.)  The louder the derisive laughter, the more we must feel.  In a film performance of the Mechanicals’ play, the actor playing Thisbe (Juliet to Pyramus’ Romeo), who wears a wig of long hair, has absurdly rouged cheeks, and speaks in falsetto, finds her lover dead, with a sword sticking out of his body.  She utters these lines that move the audience to tearful laughter:  “Asleep, my love? / What, dead my dove?”  The actor knows he must do something, and so he rips off his wig and moves into his own voice, broken by real sorrow:  “O Pyramus, arise! / Speak, speak!  Quite dumb? / Dead, dead?  A tomb / Must cover thy sweet eyes, / These lily lips, / This cherry nose, / These yellow cowslip cheeks, / Are gone, are gone!”  Because the actor is feeling it, we feel it.  We must not be afraid to show our feelings.

5.)  Armado is the Spanish buffoon—a kind of court jester in the court of the King of Navarre, who doesn’t see himself as a clown … only a lover patterned on the model of Samson or Hercules—men of great carriage who were in love.  By the end of the play when he’s been recruited to play Hector in the Nine Worthies pageant, he has gotten Jacquenetta, whom he affectedly calls, “the child of our grandmother Eve,” with child.  So … one of his fellow-actors calls him out in the middle of his performance:  “Play the honest Troyan … the child brags in her belly!”  The actors begin to strip down to their shirts in preparation for a real brawl, but Armado avoids the fight by promising to do the right thing.  “Worthies”—like Samson and Hector—enabled this goony buffoon to accept his own desires and pursue the country wench he loved, and playing "Worthies" may have given him the soldier’s courage he manifests when promising to “hold the plough for her sweet love three years.”

“Actors are pioneers, writes Simon Palfrey, risking as daily craft the reality which the rest of us suppress.”  Shakespeare highlights the plight of the actor through amateurs—all are amateurs really—in order to encourage the men and women in his audiences to follow the example of his dramatic persons and be pioneers, too, speaking boldly our parts and improvising when necessary on the stage of the world.  So pick a part, cling to it, throw yourself into it, defend it in the face of detractors, and use it as a surfboard to ride the waves this summer.  Inevitably, you will fall.  Get back on the board, stand up proudly.  “Did you die tho?”