Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance by Jelena Marelj (review)

Jelena Marelj’s smart and insightful book argues that Shakespeare’s characters come into being and gain their extraordinary sense of depth and richness from the specifics of their language. Marelj intervenes in the long tradition of character criticism by “approaching character from the field of linguistic pragmatics to examine how our impression of characters’ ontological reality is produced” (4–5). She challenges her readers to see that this impression, at least in the case of Shakespeare’s characters, is not that of “interiority,” or the sense of having an “a-historical and essential” inner being, but is rather of “anteriority,” or the sense that the character “pre-dates its fictional life as a dramatic speaker.” The keyword here is speaker, since Marelj’s analytical method is rooted in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that foregrounds context, turn-taking, prosody—in essence the performance of language (an obvious fit for the study of Shakespeare and of theatre in general). This engagement with pragmatics allows us to see how Shakespeare builds characters from words, words, words in the right place and time.

Marelj’s analysis of her chosen characters is rich and nuanced. She draws from pragmatics philosopher H. P. Grice the idea of “conversational implicatures,” or the implied meanings created by the use of language in a particular performance context, to illuminate the “excess meanings” produced by, for example, Falstaff’s many puns and insults (25). Falstaff’s speech early in 1 Henry IV, which begins by asking Hal the time of day and ends by requesting that his young friend, when a king, not hang a thief, is, Marelj shows, a complex series of puns on knights, booty, the moon, government, and stealing, leading to the implication that Falstaff, as noble knight and thief, is not that different from the thieving government of Henry of Bolingbroke. Falstaff’s point is not made directly, but arises in the performance of the text.

Marelj also uses what Grice called “maxims,” or universal and unspoken rules for conversations, such as the need to “avoid ambiguity,” “be brief,” and “make your contributions as informative as is required” to measure certain dramatic choices (27). Identifying where characters flout these rules provides her with particular passages of analytical interest. While her readings are firmly grounded in pragmatics, the value of this complex theoretical armature is not always evident. When performed by talented Shakespearean actors, for example, these meanings are clear even if the audience does not know what maxim has been broken. Perhaps this particular theoretical knife was necessary for Marelj to cut open these characters’ language, but as a reader, I found myself at once impressed by her insights into Shakespeare’s characters and un-persuaded to read Grice.

The characters that anchor her chapters are the ones that readily lodge themselves into readers’ and spectators’ minds: the larger than life, the confusing, the paradoxical. Her first chapter on Falstaff argues that his “roundness” as a character in 1 Henry IV comes from his “linguistic performances in a theatrical context” (26). When Falstaff and Hal take turns playing the king, their funny, metatheatrical performance of kingship works to highlight, according to Marelj, the ways in which the king himself is only “playing” at kingship. Falstaff, as she puts it, “shows the king to be a counterfeit in counterfeiting the king” (49). Hal, once he becomes King Henry in Henry V, uses the lessons in language he received in 1 Henry IV to establish his right to the throne through manipulative oratory.

Falstaff’s student receives greater attention in chapter 3, in which Marelj describes how both the episodic scene structure and the language that constantly shifts its perspective on the king and his history turn Henry V’s Henry into a strangely anamorphic character. For example, she points out that the juxtaposition of the scene with the noble traitors alongside the scene announcing Falstaff’s death frames Henry’s actions as similarly traitorous—or in...