Fangs Of Malice: Hypocrisy Sincerity And Acting

Prologue. The Actor as Hypocrite

Proo
ue the actor as hypocrite “Are you a comedian?” Olivia asks the disguised Viola in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “No, my profound heart,” she replies ; “and yet, by the very fangs of malice I swear I am not that I play” (1.5.178–80).1 Swearing, as Juliet reminds Romeo, requires a constant term to swear by: “O, swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon,” she pleads in the balcony scene (2.2.109). The fangs of malice, then, must be constant at least in Viola’s mind. Viola also invokes “my profound heart”: in fact, both her profound heart and the fangs of malice attest to the truth of her confession: “I am not that I play.” Viola is determined (perhaps overdetermined) that Olivia not mistake her for a professional actor (a comedian), but the malice she invokes—gossip, scandal, slander—is in some special ways a constant companion to members of that profession. Viola is in a bind here, because she wants to make it clear that while she is acting, playing the role of Cesario, Orsino’s page, she is not untrustworthy, like a comedian. She wants to assure Olivia of her private, personal integrity and wants especially to distance herself from the charge of hypocrisy. That is, both Viola’s desire to repudiate Olivia’s suspicion that she is an actor and her fear that the “fangs of malice” will always attach themselves to this repudiation stem from a futile attempt to separate the notion of acting from the idea of hypocrisy. It is futile because, unable to declare the full truth about herself, Viola is engaged in the very kind of entrapment—“Fortune forbid my outside hath not charmed her!” (2.2.18)—that she associates with malicious gossip about comedians and not with herself. The idea that acting is hypocrisy was a constant in moral pamphleteering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France. The malicious charge that an actor must necessarily be a hypocrite , false at the level of the profound heart, finds expression in innu- merable tracts railing against the theater. These diatribes express, less ambivalently but with no less moral passion, Viola’s anxiety that her acting can be mistaken for the social sin of hypocrisy. “If we seriously consider the very forme of acting Playes,” William Prynne argues in his mighty volume Histriomastix, “we must needes acknowledge it to be nought but grosse hypocrisie.” Quoting “sundry Authors and Grammarians ,” Prynne forges the etymological link to “stile Stage-players, hypocrites; Hypocrites, Stage-players, as being one and the same in substance; there being nothing more familiar with them, then to describe an hypocrite by a Stage-player; and a Stage-player by an hypocrite.”2 Prynne sticks to “Latine Authors”; had he turned to the Greeks, he would have discovered a closer connection. On the ancient Greek stage, as Gerald Else has pointed out, the professional actor—the actor who was not the tragedian , the actor who was only an actor—was dubbed the answerer or hypokrites.3 The etymology proves the point: an actor is a hypocrite, nothing more, nothing less. In a lively false etymology, John Northbrooke, one of the first of the English antitheatrical polemicists, moves in another direction, linking Histriones, actors, to Histrices, porcupines: “Histrix is a little beast with speckled prickles on his back, which he will cast off and hurt menne with them, which is, as Plinie sayth, a porkepine.”4 Stay clear of actors; they only look harmless, Northbrooke suggests. But what exactly are the “speckled prickles,” the quills in the metaphor as it attaches to actors ? The porcupine shoots its quills into the unwary person who pets or strokes it or tries to pick it up: so too do actors “hurt menne” who trust them, who believe their protestations of good faith, who place credence in their tears. “What wouldst thou think of me if I should weep?” Prince Hal asks Poins, confessing that his “heart bleeds inwardly” at the thought of his father’s illness. “I would think thee a most princely hypocrite,” Poins rejoins, and the prince ruefully agrees: “It would be every man’s thought, and thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks” (2 Henry IV 2.2.49–53). The prince is in a sense doomed to act the part of indifference to his father’s sickness lest his true feelings be interpreted as feigned. Where Viola swears...