Characters and Persons
The usual way to
describe and discuss the dramatis
personae in a dramatic work is to read the text carefully, see a number of acted
versions, read the reviews in as many different moments of its acting history as possible, and imagine an
idealized performance. This allows us to
look see how a play is at once an artifact of the author’s creative mind in
collaboration with the members of the original troupe of actors, directros,
producers, set designers and so forth and their historical progeny, making each
character so realized on stage a cumulative and dynamic phenomenon. There are other approaches, as well. The persons represented on stage in the
actions ascribed to them by the playwright, producer and actors themselves also carry the burden of unconscious
messages, sometimes shaped as well by audience responses, including the
pressures of critics, government censors and the long-term transformation of
circumstances in which the drama comes into existence.
Unconscious here
refers to several related lenses for knowing, understanding, remembering, and
feeling the power of the various types of performance, real and imaginary. In one sense, the unconscious refers to the
unquestioned lack of awareness of those whose minds and memories are on other,
seemingly more relevant and persuasive facets of existence ; thus, if
pressed, the people involved could reshift their focus and be able to talk
about those aspects of the production and reception they are able to see and
hear. In another sense, there are
things—motives, expressive actions, consequences and implications—that only
come into focus, have words, images and concepots available for thought in
later historical periods or in radically different cultural situations, e.g.,
when the Holocaust sesnitizes audiences to the anti-Semitic tropes in
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. When issues of moral, ethical and political
significance disappear into the mists of history, audiences and theatrical
producers may not be aware of the full dimension of allusion and immediate
vitality in older plays, with other more general and superficial aspects made
central by changing the tones, textures and emphasises to accomodate current
interests. Modern players and audiences seem more atuned to individual emotional
states than earlier texts seem to deal with, except insofar as these old dramas
deal with social passions and rhetorically-charged moral problems.
Thus turning to The Second Shepherds’ Play we find that
the characters who walk and off the platea
in full view of the festive audience are morer varied, multi-layered and
complex than audiences usually expect from what they presume to be a
« primitive » pageant play.
Whereas the original audiences, who knew and appreciated the religious
dimensions of the Corpus Christi Day mysteries, modesrn spectators are at best
intellectually aware of those religious themes.
They are less connected also to the economic and social dimensions of
the drama, but can learn beforehand—from lectures, theatre handouts and
discussions amongst themselves during the interval—about the nature of the
shepherds’ complaints about poverty, injustice and absentee landlordism
afflicting them. The modern audience may
need more effort to come to grips with the domestic politics of the northern
families who seem in a perpetual ; state of conflict between the sexes,
between older persons and the young, and different classes with whom they
interact. Here are some of these
different roles schematized.
Characters are masks (personae)
and roles (scripted speeches),
Mimes and singers, dancers and tableaux
vivants,
Citizens of Wakefield,
Shepherds in the fields,
Angels from Heaven,
Demons from Hell,
Priests and Friars,
Sinful Jews of the Old Dead Law,
Personifications of the Saving Faith,
Communicants in the Mass.
The trouble with
this neat paradigm, with the notion that various audiences circle the players,
and that the partctpants of one become participants in the other grouping, is
not merely that it leaves out the Jews—and by that, we mean the different kinds
of secret, quadi and confused Jews : but because the whole schme can be
viewed only from one angle and places itself in a flat space of rational
contemplation. If we are to open up the
categories and their situation on the one-dimensional board of historical or
literary inquiry, we have to challenge all the assumptions about what
constitutes truth, history, mind and reality.[i]
Not opnly,. Then,
were there, as there always are, tensions between various hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic views of the world and between general stylistic trends and
individual eccentricities of taste and perception ; but there were, always
are, part of the production team and the wider audience—along with parts of
each individual’s own conscious experience and unconscious ontological coming
to awareness or its lack—non-conformists.
In one sense, the leading contendors for such a role is the Jew—or the
Jews in the plural in all the variety
previously expressed from practicing, educated rabbis through to ordinary
people barely aware of what reasons underlie their attitudes and customs.
Whereas the majority view in the late medieval society is based on corporate
and hierarchical Christian organizations of knowledge, feeling and memory, the
Jewish view is, as José Faur argues, horizontal, with the various departments
of the universe—from the heavenly courts down to the rabbinical academies and
even to the domestic household—all living in a tension of conversation,
argument, debate and interpretational controversy. Authority does not pass down from above to
below nor from primacy of appearance to later faulty imitations but is
determined for the moment by majority votem temnporary consensus, the
conditions under which decisions have to be made, the persuasiveness of the
argument. On the one hand, Jews must
live in communities (in order to have courts of law, professional butchers and
other specialists in the day-to-day organizartion of society) and need a minyon (ten adult males) to conduct
liturgical offices, but tghere is no inherited leadership, no status above
criticism, and no charismatic rule : for, on the other hand, every
individual counts and the voice of such opinions is judged by accomplishment,
experience and persuasiveness. In this
light, it will be possible to re-read the Wakefield Master’s text and our
imagined perfoamcne thereof as having a subversive Jewish anti-text.
[i] Jean-Paul Simon, “Meditation
and Social History of Art” Réseaux
3:2 (1995) 211-232 available online at http:www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/art/article/reso_969-9864_1996_ num_3 _2_3297.
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