Will Personified: Viola as Actor-Author in Twelfth Night

What early-modern actors did when they stood before an audience to present a character was a mystery: contemporary commentators viewed them as anything from inspired rhetors (even magicians or protean figures) to "common players," second cousins to clowns, who offered either innocuous entertainment or even encouragement to sinful practices.¹ Mary Crane's work reveals that there was no fixed idea of what performance was; in fact, "the words 'perform' and 'performance' were not yet available in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to name the complex of things that they name for us." Instead, there was a spectrum of terms with specific meanings, ranging from the antitheatricalist notion that plays were frivolous and deceitful "shows," to words like "exercise" and "use," which suggest that plays involved acting that was imagined in terms of "material practices that could effect real change in the world."²

Although the identity and status of both plays and players was in flux throughout the period, there was a trend toward defining actors (as distinct from players), characterizing them in a positive light, and giving them status as professionals. Robert Weimann describes the gentrification of the theater that took place in the latter years of the sixteenth century; and he suggests that the shift from "body-oriented playing" to "text-oriented acting" was consciously spearheaded by Ben Jonson, who sought to establish a new kind of authority in the world of the Elizabethan playhouse, privileging writing over performance and the rights of the "poet qua dramatist" over those of the players and spectators, whom he treated with condescension.³

James Bednarz, in his comprehensive account of the Poets' War (1599-1602), argues that Jonson's invention of a new critical drama called "comical satire," in deliberate opposition to Shakespeare's popular romantic comedy—an opposition underscored with jibes and insulting innuendo—kicked off a clash of opposing ideologies of drama. "The Poets' War," Bednarz writes, "provides the fullest theatrical context . . . for understanding the interactive development of Shakespeare's art," and his study excavates "the first great dramatic criticism in England" from the public dialogue—at once personal and philosophical—among Jonson, Shakespeare, Marston, and Dekker that was carried out in their dramas through techniques they invented for mutual self-reflexivity.⁴ Bednarz's study focuses on the form of comedies, their philosophical underpinnings, and the status of the poet-dramatist; and my work builds on his by suggesting that theories of acting were also debated in the interactive context of this "war." Certainly Jonson's new comical satire that sought to reproduce social reality in order to transform it through authorially controlled criticism necessitated a new approach to acting that made actors "ministerial deliver[ers]" of text and imitators of recognizable social types.⁵ I will argue that Shakespeare resisted this approach to acting, and that this is seen most clearly in his study of Viola as actor-author whose performances are contrasted to the personations of Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1601).⁶

Personation—a word adopted by some of the dramatists involved in the Poets' War—takes us to the heart of the debate about acting. Not a new word, personate had most often referred to written representation, especially of a satirical, allegorical, or symbolic kind. Not until the late 1590s was it used to denote the process of playing the part of a character in a play—first by John Florio in his Italian-English dictionary Worlde of Wordes and, more significantly, by the dramatist John Marston (who wrote primarily for children's companies) in the induction to Antonio and Mellida (1599-1600).⁷ Andrew Gurr suggests that the term was "called into being "[by] . . . the kinds of parts given actors to play and their own skills in their parts—that made two great tragedians succeed the extemporizing clowns on the pinnacle of theatrical fame."⁸ Gurr interprets personation generally as the art of creating character, and other critics have applied it to suit their own ideas about early-modern acting. Most recently, Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster suggest that the word denotes a kind of acting...