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Scene Two. Playing Joseph Surface
- University of Iowa Press
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Scene Two playing joseph surface In his discussion of the acting style of John (“Plausible Jack”) Palmer, Charles Lamb raises a question that lurks in the drama rather than in ethical tracts: if hypocrisy consists in the transposition of the theatrical into everyday life, how is hypocrisy then to be represented on the stage? Lamb avers that “Jack had two voices—both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his second or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one.” This voice “was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis personae were supposed to know nothing about it.” Lamb recalls the performance of Palmer from the early days of his theatergoing: “When I remember the gay boldness , the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice—the downright acted villany [sic] of the part, so different from the pressure of actual wickedness,—the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,—which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character , I must needs conclude the present generation of play-goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense.”20 Here Lamb explicitly locates the problem in his, and the audience’s, modernity, understood by Lamb as a condition of bringing the moral consciousness of real life into the theater, where (at least in terms of the comedies of the previous generation) it does not belong. “The times cannot bear them,” Lamb declares of “The Artificial Comedies of the Last Century”; nineteenth-century spectators “see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours duration, and of no after consequence , with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds” (62). Lamb’s vision is of the theater as an antitheatrical space: “The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with the images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule” (63). For Lamb, Plausible Jack Palmer’s performance is no longer possible not because the acting style went out of fashion, precisely, but because of a fundamental change in the audience’s consciousness— one that corresponds directly to Rousseau ’s and the moralists’ conviction that the infection of social life with playing is not funny, not comical, but serious business. What happens in Lamb’s essays on the theater is a transposition of this concern. To Lamb, audiences who bring the conscience of the real world into the theater, who “substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly ” (62), can never experience the pleasure of escape “out of Christendom into the land—what shall I call it?— of cuckoldry—the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom” (64). Lamb famously elides Collier’s strictures in this move, consigning the profane dramas that so unsettled the non-juror to the realm of cloud-cuckoo-land. The modern, bourgeois theater, with its moralizing , alienated audience, becomes an unsuitable venue not just for Restoration comedy, in Lamb’s criticism, but for Shakespeare as well. Watching Lear leads this audience to feelings of middle-class guilt: “We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me,” Lamb confesses (96). When Lamb and the audience that he imagines bring the real world into the theater, it is a world where the less fortunate require gestures of benevolence and cuckolds are more to be pitied than censured. “Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness,” Lamb proclaims with mock wistfulness . “We must love or hate—acquit or condemn— censure or pity— exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon every thing. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain—no compromise—his first appearance must shock and give horror—his specious plausibilities, which our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion” (67). There is no denying the playfulness of this essay, for it celebrates a playful way of playing: Plausible Jack’s Joseph Surface was “acted” (128), his hypocrisy comically telegraphed to the audience. As Michael Cordner has pointed out in a recent edition of Sheridan ’s plays, “[t]wentieth-century actors have rarely attempted a reading of Joseph...