The Ethos of Drama: Rhetorical Theory and Dramatic Worth (review)

Basing his theory on Aristotle's teachings about the art of persuasion, Robert L. King offers his readers an investigation of how playwrights have used the art of rhetoric to make their characters credible and their dramas morally worthy so that their audiences will accept their dramatic vision. King teaches directors and future playwrights to think about how they can lead their audiences to moral maturity.

The Ethos of Drama contains a carefully crafted argument on behalf of a new approach to dramatic analysis and criticism. Like the Greek philosopher, King accepts the public utility of rhetoric: it is aimed at members of the polis, that is, the city as a community. King demonstrates that the most profound way to judge the quality of a drama is to examine how a play's characters' speeches and actions affect the pathos (passions), logos (reasoning), and ethos (moral character) of the play's audience. Good drama, as opposed to bad drama, is concerned with an idea of the Public Good. After articulating the complex nature of rhetoric and how playwrights from Shakespeare to contemporaries have used rhetoric to create believable characters and sympathetic dramatic vision, King demonstrates the rhetorical challenges for playwrights in light of the moral struggles induced by modern politics: class and race conflicts, and the Nazi Holocaust.

King's earliest examples of the use of rhetorical theory are taken from Shakespeare, who created characters who were unsuccessful in inducing visions of moral rectitude and political success. All of them were either monarchs or potential monarchs: Lear, Richard II, Richard III, and Hamlet. As he moves toward the modern period, he describes plays in which characters are incapable of escaping from the oppression that results from their acceptance of their society's social and commercial norms. In this vein, he analyzes Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, David Mamet's American Buffalo and his Glen Gary Glen Ross, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

King's most interesting treatment of rhetoric is expressed when he surveys theories of style and syntax in the speeches of a variety of plays, all the while demonstrating how a person's style of speech is a mirror of his or her soul. His interest is in giving greater thought to a moral view of syntax. Dramatic criticism is not merely an academic exercise, but like drama itself, participates in teaching audiences about the moral worth of the political and social environments in which characters exist.

In a chapter titled "The Worth of Words," he details two revolts against the traditional analysis of human language: one followed the seventeenth-century discovery that Nature's language is mathematics, the other the twentieth-century "discovery" that meaning and truth are relative to the observer of words and actions. Both revolts initiated a kind of counter-reformation in drama, which amounted to a defense of the existence of the highest human faculties that had been described by Aristotle. The first revolutionaries sought to turn humans into mechanical beings whose actions could be understood like inanimate objects. In doing so, they claimed that words like conscience were meaningless. By means of a detailed analysis of All for Love, King reveals how John Dryden affirmed the existence of ideals that humans "can aspire to" (80). Drama trumps science because it is not limited by preordained definitions, and thus it allows audiences to experience meanings, opening them to epiphanies that are more like inductive than deductive reasoning. King also demonstrates how two contemporary playwrights, David Hare and Tom Stoppard, have confronted critics who claimed that words like truth and faith are always indeterminate.

King extends his analysis of the counter-reformation in drama by taking up the subject of "Memory and Ethos." He demonstrates several methods by which playwrights have introduced recollection of the past as a technique for establishing dramatic worth. He considers the role of narrators, whose role is to encourage members of the audience...