Actor, Maschera, and Role: An Approach to Irony in Performance

COMPARATIVE drama 1 Volume 16 Fall 1982 Number 3 Actor, Maschera, and Role: An Approach to Irony in Performance Raymond J. Pentzell The humanist, dealing as he does with human actions and crea­ tions, has to engage in a mental process of a synthetic and subjec­ tive character: he has mentally to re-enact the actions and to re-create the creations. —Erwin Panofsky Gammer Gurton’s Needle is well known as one of the two earliest “regular comedies” surviving in English. In its five-act intrigue plot it sustains dramatic conventions of Graeco-Roman “New Comedy” reintroduced by Ariosto, Dovisi da Bibbiena, and Machiavelli during the first decades of the sixteenth century in plays written for the courtly festivities of fashionable Italian noblemen. The title page of its earliest edition (1575) tells us that the comedy was “played on stage, not longe ago in Christes Colledge in Cambridge” and was “made by Mr. S., Mr. of Art.” A reader new to the play would surely be pardoned for surmis­ ing that he was about to encounter a small, bright flower of Renaissance humanism in the North, sprung from the soil of RAYMOND J. PENTZELL is Professor and Chairman of the Speech and Theatre Arts Department of Hillsdale College. Of the plays treated in this article, he has directed Red Peppers and The Measures Taken. 201 202 Comparative Drama the New Learning, In the disputatious assemblies of a university galvanized by religious, political, and philosophical jolts,1 would not a Latinate comedy, no matter how lighthearted, seek its audience through urbanity of wit, and wear its erudition on its academical sleeve? Not Gammer Gurton’s Needle. Merely to read it is to see that the comedy is about as urbanely witty and erudite as “Snuffy Smith,” which in atmosphere it rather resembles. Frederick Boas long ago summed up the paradox: But for the statement on the title page no one would have guessed at first sight that Gammer Gurton’s Needle was of academic origin. Nothing could be more remote from the collegiate sphere than the life in a rural township where so trivial an incident as the loss of an old woman’s beloved needle sets up a train of complications and quarrels that need the intervention of the law in the person of the chief magistrate. . . .2 “One is almost tempted,” said Boas, “to wish that the extant copies of Gammer Gurton’s Needle had, like the Eton copy of Ralph Roister Doister, lost the title page.”3 None of this, certainly, is to suggest that Gammer Gurton’s Needle is a clumsy makeshift or that Mr. S. was an incompetent playwright. On the contrary, the play’s plot is almost as smooth a machine as Machiavelli’s Mandragola or Ariosto’s Suppositi, and its character-drawing gives evidence of an observation of rural villagers which is as deft as it is humorous. Finally, to quote Boas again, “There is true artistry in the ironic use of this elaborate machinery for such insignificant episodes.”4 Here, then, is a special irony, the irony of disproportion, of much ado about nothing, less matter with more art. “The Plautine five-act form is beautifully effective per se,” we may imagine Mr. S. exhorting his students. “To prove it, I shall write a complete and hilarious comedy on the most trivial incident you can think of, with the most unlikely, un-Roman characters. Give me a suggestion, this very moment!” Some such wager or dare may indeed lie behind the irony of Gammer Gurton’s Needle. But how would such irony be grasped, at a performance in mid-sixteenth-century Cambridge, by scholars who happened not to be aware of Mr. S.’s self­ challenge? Merely from the disproportion of art and matter? But then, how does a spectator, in the course of watching a play, distinguish ironic disproportion on such a scale from a simple but growing error of taste? Is the audience aided by Raymond J. Pentzell 203 other data, “signals” sent by the very circumstances of performance? One may look in two directions: to analogues within a broader matrix of educated Renaissance taste, and to conditions inherent in...