Fangs Of Malice: Hypocrisy Sincerity And Acting

Scene Two. Putting on The Cloth

Scene Two putting on the cloth “Art thou a churchman?” Viola asks Feste (Twelfth Night, 3.1.3); “I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown,” Feste says as he costumes himself for his baiting of Malvolio (4.2.5). In an utterly different context, Søren Kierkegaard also points to the way that preaching and acting tend to blur into each other. “To be appropriate to you, the alternatives must naturally be bold,” writes the ethical man, B, to the aesthetic man, A, in Either/Or: “either a pastor— or an actor.” The opposition is as extreme as B can imagine. “Here is the dilemma,” B continues: Now all your passionate energy is aroused; reflection with its hundred arms seizes the idea of being a pastor. You find no rest; day and night you think about it; you read all the books you can find, you go to church three times every Sunday, make the acquaintance of pastors , write sermons yourself, deliver them to yourself; and for half a year you are dead to the whole world. Now you are ready; you can speak with more insight and seemingly with more experience about being a pastor than many a one who has been a pastor for twenty years. When you meet them, it arouses your exasperation that they do not know how to expectorate with a completely different eloquence . You say: Is this enthusiasm? Compared with them, I, who am not a pastor, who have not dedicated myself to being a pastor, speak with the voice of angels. That may very well be true, but you nevertheless did not become a pastor. Now you conduct yourself the same way with the other alternative, and your enthusiasm for art almost exceeds your ecclesiastical eloquence.36 B’s concern is with his friend’s inability to choose, to settle. He illustrates that with an example of a contrast that is as “bold” as possible: between a pastor and an actor. He does not describe the zeal with which A might throw himself into the art of acting; but he does not have to. For the process of becoming a pastor, we notice, is described by B as a rehearsal process. A is throwing himself into the role of pastor , and A’s complaint that the real preachers lack “enthusiasm” is an actor’s critique. Himself a parson, Jeremy Collier differed in A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaneness of the English Stage from other seventeenthcenturyantitheatricaldiatribesbydevotingasubstantialchapterto “The Clergy Abused by the Stage.” He apparently considered any portrayal of organized religion a slap in the face to the clergy, for he cites, in addition to a number of parson-scenes from comic drama, the “swaggering against Priests in [Dryden’s] Oedipus.”37 Collier was particularly distressed by the appearance on stage of actors dressing as priests performing ceremonies or of actors playing characters who then dress as priests and perform ceremonies. Blurring the boundaries between ritual and performance, such mock rituals struck him as blasphemous. A long tradition in English antitheatricalism identifies Roman Catholicism with imposture and “masquery.” In early modern England the theater “caught up into” itself the iconographic richness of the old religion, and the Protestant commentators expressed unease and distaste for the “gay gazing sights” it offered.38 Any kind of priesthood, as Collier makes plain, could be interpreted to represent established religion , and the ease with which true religion could be distorted into stage playing is cited again and again in antitheatrical literature. John Rainolds, recalling the “profane and wicked toyes of Passion-playes” in the days of the old religion, denounced “Popish Priests”: “as they have transformed the celebrating of the Sacrament of the Lords supper into a Masse-game, and all other partes of the Ecclesiastical service into theatricall sights; so, in steed of preaching the word, they caused it to be played; a thing put in practise by their flowres, the Jesuits, among the poore Indians .”39 Not only do the Papists transform worship into ridiculous performance, but they impose the hollow shows of the mass upon the hapless victims of colonialism. Perhaps the most famous imposture associated with the clergy, however , is not an imperialist exercise. The priestly impostor is Tartuffe, and no one knows exactly what kind of garb the hypocrite wore on the occasion of the play’s first performance. The controversy about the original costume of Tartuffe circles around a vacancy. The unanswerability of...