Shakespeare, Theater Criticism, and the Acting Tradition

I

LEAR IS SUSCEPTIBLE TO CHARACTERIZATION as "ill-used father," "titanic, godlike Lear," "tough, arrogant, authoritarian King, who commits folly and invites retribution," or "the mad, or senile, old man, mad that is from the beginning." ¹ So runs Anthony Dawson's list of the dominant conceptions of characterization that lie before the actor who attempts the role of King Lear. Similar lists, Dawson shows, can be derived from seventeen other Shakespeare plays, and what is striking about them all is not so much their diversity as the almost total lack of controversy about them. We assent to them so freely, indeed, as to feel (without disrespect to Dawson) that we might just as readily have framed them ourselves. If these dominant conceptions lie before the actor as he prepares, they also come before him since they are within the public domain well ahead of his own rendition. Dawson's orthography is significant: the textual, already-written quality of those paradigms cries out for the qualifying quotation marks he supplies. The paradigms are, in fact, as much ours as the actor's, and—just as important—their idiom is barely divisible from their substance.

Although the notion of an already-written has been held to undermine any search for origins, the most constructive question to ask of Dawson's list may be posed in W. B. Worthen's terms: "Where do these paradigms come from?" ² Both Dawson and Roger Warren favor the playtexts themselves, a move that many would intuitively endorse. ³ Why is it, after all, that even the most Method-inclined actors generally don't envisage, say, Sir Andrew Aguecheek as an "ill-used father," still less as "titanic" or "godlike"? We might point as well to the schools, a major forum in which such paradigms are not only recycled but explicitly reassessed, one that promotes as its sine qua non the close study of Shakespearean texts. "Discuss the view that Lear is mad from the beginning," asks the schools examiner; "to what extent does Lear commit folly and invite retribution?" ⁴ Worthen, however, demurs. That the text is not irremediably static or its treatment hieratic is demonstrable in the way paradigms of performance such as Dawson's have "recompose[d it] as acting," thereby showing that "theatrical choices arise at the intersection between the text and the formal strategies of its meaningful production as theatre." ⁵ Paradigms of characterization become "part of the 'text' that actors and directors read when they imagine the play's possibilities and explore them in the idiom of stage behaviour." ⁶

Performance history at the popular end of the academic market—that is to say in paperback editions, guides, and electronic learning resources—generally falls into line with Worthen. There, it is implicitly actors who generate paradigms, so illustrating the continuous interaction of text with performance. In John Margeson's New Cambridge stage history of King Henry VIII, to take a good example, the eponymous role has been played by Donald Sinden as "a passionate nature that has never been checked," by Richard Griffiths as "a slow-moving, temperamentally withdrawn figure," and by Leon Pownall as "an insolent, energetic young king." ⁷ Arden Online brought the same approach to a broader historical span: George Frederick Cooke's Lear was "full of robust energy," Laurence Olivier played the king's "madness as spiritual illumination," while Anthony Hopkins was "bull-like . . . with an enormous sense of pathos." ⁸ These descriptions are cognate with Dawson's paradigms rather than identical to them—subordinate variations on his dominant conceptions—but they justify their characterization in Worthen's account as part of our escape route from the "theological text" that has for decades molded actors, directors, and performance critics to its own particular demands.

An obvious difficulty with this position is that, since much of Worthen's parallel "text" has been generated precisely by actors and directors working sedulously to the written text, their methods can't be such...