Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789
360
Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789
360eBook
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Overview
The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists’ lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts—histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays—and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi—the world depicted as a stage—in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378228 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/1991 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Lexile: | 1440L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 654 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Theater Enough
American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789
By Jeffrey H. Richards
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7822-8
CHAPTER 1
Politics, History, and Theatrum Mundi: Some Early Formulations
Even before the Virginia adventurers or the New England sojourners set sail, they are being shaped by another history than their exploits, a history that establishes the parameters of their soon-to-be transplanted figural imagination. The colonists create their new polities through contention and crisis and use a diction that often nurtures a personalized, dramatized view of political events. By the later eighteenth century, that language will resemble the characteristic turn of phrase that John Dickinson gives in an anti-Tea Act broadside (1773). The British East India Company, he remarks, having already ravaged Asia, "cast their Eyes on America, as a new Theatre, whereon to exercise their Talents of Rapine, Oppression and Cruelty" (A Letter from the Country; see P. Davidson, 15). Here, "Theatre" translates the whole affair into a performance; the British officials appear on stage as acting out nearly allegorical roles of villainy in a land converted for their pleasure into a playhouse. Dickinson's metaphor derives its power not only from contemporary Augustan rhetoric or even additionally from the tradition of theatrum mundi in America but also from further back, from deep sources of metaphorically theatrical thinking.
For as I have stated, the application of theater to political or historical issues has a long history itself; the trope of the world as a stage, theatrum mundi, is an old one, dating in the Western tradition from the ancient Greeks. Survey histories of the metaphor can be found in several sources (notably, Curtius, 134-44; Stroup, 4-11; Warnke, 68-89; and Burns, 8-21), and studies of theatrical figures of speech can be found for individual authors and periods, especially for Shakespeare and his contemporaries (for example, Anne Righter's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play). For early American usage, the brief discussion by Babette Levy of theatrical metaphor in seventeenth-century preaching (127-30) and the longer analysis of Revolutionary theater and theatricality in Kenneth Silverman's A Cultural History of the American Revolution provide useful insights and references. However, there is neither any full-length work that looks exclusively at early American usage nor one that treats the whole Western tradition comprehensively. To understand American applications of theatrical figures, one must go beyond simply repeating the clichés of a given era; consequently, I have chosen to look at the metaphor historically, as it may have been received by English colonists heading for the New World. A writer like John Dickinson draws upon a figure that appears to have a life of its own, removed as it is in America from the institution of the theater itself.
For this chapter, I have selected authors who either represent particular cultural-historical periods or whose formulations may have been influential in the codifying of theater metaphor. Because the metaphor has political applications in American writing, I have tried especially to attend to usages which emphasize the complexion of society, social roles, and the relationships of individuals to a state, to humanity in general, or to the divine. I do not intend that this discussion be read as a direct-link chain, though in some cases, later writers comment specifically on earlier uses of theater metaphor. Instead, I wish to show that these separate formulations contribute in their variety to the intellectual and cultural heritage that is drawn upon by English-speaking writers in the New World colonies.
PLATO
Politics and the Tragicomedy of Life
Renaissance writers sometimes claim either Pythagoras or Democritus as the originator of the theatrum mundi figure; Robert Burton's adoption of "Democritus Junior" as the theater-seeing prefatory persona in The Anatomy of Melancholy is clearly based on this tradition. But the twentieth-century scholar E. R. Curtius assigns the origins of theater metaphor to Plato, in whose writings, he remarks, "lie the seeds of the idea of the world as a stage upon which men play their parts, their motions directed by God" (138). Plato's tropes not only reflect an understanding of how the basic relationships among individuals, society, and the divine can be expressed as theater but also show how the metaphor becomes problematic once applied to the idea of humans as civic beings. In fact, his use of the metaphor at all is ironic, given his opposition to theater and art in Republic and Laws (see Barish, 5-37); but in a sense the works of Plato serve as a model for the later Puritans, whose own dual notion of theater contrasts the figural with the literal.
Plato (ca.429-347 B.C.) writes his dialogues at a time when great drama has already become a significant element of Greek culture. As has often been observed, his dialogues frequently show a dramatic freshness, especially those on the death of Socrates—Euthyphro, Crito, and Apology. The dramatic metaphor has a certain grandness, for instance, in the dialogue Philebus, when Socrates, discoursing on the conflict between and the mixture of pain and pleasure, says, "In dirges, tragedies, and comedies, not only on the stage, but in the whole tragi-comedy of life, distress and pleasure are blended with each other" ([50b]50). In the way that our individual lives can be seen as blends of conflicting feelings, so life in general has elements of both comedy and tragedy. This is not to say, however, that comedy and tragedy have equal weight. The well-led life will have in it more of the gravity and high seriousness of tragic poetry than it will of sense-based gaiety. In any event, Plato's idea of life as a kind of drama has other implications that he works out in the Laws for the relationship of human beings to God and to the state.
When he thinks about life theatrically, Plato, through the figure of the Athenian in the Laws, has in mind a potentially reductive vision as well, one where human beings are manipulated by puppet master gods who use them for devices beyond human understanding: "Let's consider each of us living beings to be a divine puppet, put together either for [the gods'] play or for some serious purpose—which, we don't know. What we do know is that these passions work within us like tendons or cords, drawing us and pulling against one another in opposite directions toward opposing deeds, struggling in the region where virtue and vice lie separated from one another" ([1:644d-e] 24-25). That humans, like puppets, can be jerked about by their passions between vice and virtue becomes in Plato an important element of his concept of the state, especially in its approach to art. Whereas in the Republic artists occupy a position of low degree—or are ideally excluded from the state—in the Laws they are permitted to perform their crafts, but under censorship by rulers. The theater, therefore, comes under close scrutiny. When it panders to popular taste and gives one debased pleasure (that is, does not engage the intelligence), a performance should be criticized in the interest of public good: "The true judge [at theatrical festivals]," the Athenian suggests, "will oppose himself to those who provide the spectators with pleasure in a way that is not appropriate or correct" ([2:659b-c] 39). Instead of allowing theater to be governed by democratic tastes, the state should use performances to educate and improve public morality. As the Athenian argues, "An audience should be continually hearing about characters better than their own, and hence continually experiencing better pleasure" ([2:659c] 40). Consequently, Plato suggests a hierarchy of theatrical performance, with puppet shows (and their appeal to the immature) on the bottom and with epic and tragedy (and their appeal to wiser, more mature minds) on the top ([658c-d] 38-39).
That humans are puppets of the gods (an idea repeated several times throughout the Laws) would seem, then, to make painfully obvious the low stature of the race, one greatly subordinate to the gods and to the state. But it is also true that if humankind is "the plaything of God," that connection, even if by a puppet's cords, "is really the best thing about it" ([7:803c] 193). In Plato's hierarchical vision, that which most imitates the good is best; and thus a state, ruled by those most capable of the knowledge of good, becomes an expression of wisdom and morality to which its citizens owe obeisance because they, too, are brought closer to the good.
Interestingly enough, Plato in the Laws envisions the state in metaphorically dramatic terms, the expression of a collective art as close to the ideally beautiful as possible. Were some peripatetic tragedians to enter the state, says the Athenian, and were they to ask to perform, they would have to submit their works to the rulers in order to measure them against the local art: "'Best of strangers,' we should say, 'we ourselves are poets, who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the most beautiful and the best; at any rate, our whole political regime is constructed as the imitation of the most beautiful and best way of life, which we at least assert to be really the truest tragedy'" ([7:817b-c] 208-9). The human puppet acts also in the tragedy of state, that is, in a drama that imitates the beautiful. Those who would act in the theater, Plato implies, simply imitate an imitation; those who act in the tragedy of state, however, seek to imitate "the most beautiful and best way of life," which Plato identifies in his dialogues as residing in the realm of the forms. For Plato, as for many later writers who voice objections to the theater, the drama provides a metaphor that as figure supersedes the acting on a material stage that inspires the metaphor in the first place. Thus, for a John Dickinson or any American author who re-creates history in theatrical terms, it is not necessary to have a stage in order to convert politics into a tragedy of state; indeed, the example of Plato suggests that the metaphor gains power when the actual theater is excluded.
Plato's metaphorical expression of life contains an "idea of a theater," to use Francis Fergusson's phrase, that reflects a concept of the human being implicit in Greek drama. In the play that Aristotle chooses as a model of the form, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, we can see, says Fergusson, that "in one sense Oedipus suffers forces he can neither control nor understand, the puppet of fate; yet at the same time he wills and intelligently intends his every move" (18). While the drama, as Plato does, gives voice to a dual-natured being, the puppet and the tragic striver, it should be noted that Greek tragic dramatists do not, as a rule, make self-referring observations about the world and play. This is not surprising given the reputed origins of drama in Greek religious rituals; theater from its beginnings encodes stories and rites that have already been known and gives them, through representation on stage, a new immediacy. It would be redundant to suggest to an audience who already believes it that what happens on stage is like life. Indeed, where tragedy also serves to teach, in a religious sense, nothing is gained by self-referring remarks to performance.
Nevertheless, turning myth into theater and citizens into a chorus, or in reverse, turning actors into heroes and gods, makes inevitable the likening of world to stage for audiences who, over time, become increasingly removed from the ritualistic origins of drama and respond more on an aesthetic or philosophical level. Thus Aristotle's Poetics, with its notion that dramatic art is an imitation of human actions, is only possible in a culture where the conditions of performance allow distance, that is, where one discriminates between real life and the quality of its representation on stage. Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs, with its satiric debate between Aeschylus and Euripides—and a history of dramatic competitions behind it—suggests to us that there is among the pre-Platonic Greeks at least a formal self-consciousness about theater.
Plato, then, makes overt what has been implied in the drama itself: not only is theater like life, but life is like theater, both tragic and comic. In fact, Plato seems to say that life is far more like theater than theater is similar to life (a point of view that Aristotle later contradicts). As material beings, acting within the limits of nature, humans are laughable puppets; as souls, pursuing knowledge of the good through dialectic, they achieve the sort of dignity that is represented in tragic plays. Theater may be proscribed or censored, but one may nonetheless render an elevated concept of civic duty as theater. Plato anticipates by two millennia how the figure will be applied by patriotic Americans to their own need for a dignified political identity.
PLAUTUS
Politics of Comic Reversal
Roman writers, living in a culture where playgoing is a chief diversion, find theater as a metaphor serves two primary functions: to lampoon pretension, and thus be used largely as a figure for satire, and to describe the relationship between humans and the divine. Indeed, perhaps more than the Greeks, the Romans live in a broadly theatricalized world, where plays coexist with a variety of entertainments,circuses, spectacles, mimes, puppet shows, and triumphs among them—not to mention the extensive rituals and rites associated with ancestor, god, and, later, emperor worship. Roman comic writers suggest that theatrical behavior pervades the culture; Stoic writers, however, take a more limited view, rejecting the histrionic aspects of behavior and asserting instead the need to act virtuously on a stage ordered by Providence.
As with the Greek, Roman dramaturgy implies a world view—or several such views—that ultimately inform both contemporary and modern expressions of theater metaphor. Unlike Greek tragedy, the plays of Plautus (ca. 254-184 B.C.) are comically self-aware expressions of a world used to seeing itself in theatrical terms. These comedies of manners, based on Greek New Comedy, exhibit characters from a histrionically lunatic and ludic world—swaggering braggarts, scheming slaves, lusty youths, and foolish old men, caught in the shape-shifting of lies, disguise, and role reversal—a world where the established order temporarily is turned upside down. With its audience-baiting prologues and applause-begging epilogues, its frequent interruptions of the action for asides and its plots built around playacting, Plautine comedy is manifestly play, a self-satirizing form that makes comedy as much out of viewing a play in the theater as it does out of presenting humorous scenes on stage. When the Prologue in The Prisoners (Captivi) begins to upbraid audience members for not paying attention to his setting of the scene, spectators realize that playfulness is everything: "Do you want to make a poor actor lose his job? I'm not going to rupture myself to suit you, don't think it" (57).
This self-conscious comedic world suggests itself as a metaphor, one that describes human behavior as a series of poses, either deliberate or naive. Oftentimes, lowlife characters have the upper hand; the slave Palaestrio in The Swaggering Soldier (Miles Gloriosus) serves as the designing intelligence behind the unmasking of Pyrgopolynices for the "swaggering braggart" soldier he is. No one can take being human very seriously after watching one of Plautus's plays: "Man is a thing of nought, you well may say, / As we perform, and you attend, our play" (59). If one is to ascribe any connection to the divine, then it is as part of a jest: "See how the gods make playthings of us men!" the Prologue reminds the audience in The Prisoners (58).
In his plays, Plautus focuses on human behavior as a series of performances that are either laughed up or down by the characters on stage; this is mirrored by the appeal of the actors at the end of the play for applause. On the one hand, Plautus leads us to a benign moralism in which the vices of the elite classes are ridiculed: "Spectators," says the Epilogue in The Prisoners, "you have seen today / A highly edifying play" (95). On the other hand, the embracing of comedy offers a perspective that continuously undermines—or comes close to doing so—not simply human pretensions but the structure of an ordered society. Platoin the Laws would prohibit any "poet of comedy, or of some iambic lampoon," from mocking a citizen ([935d] 338), for this would certainly deflect public attention away from those persons or behaviors that should be imitated. The conflict between the claim that comedy has social utility by routing vice and the counterclaim that comedy by its very nature corrupts the state plays itself out in England and to some extent in the New England colonies centuries later. For in a world conceived of in Plautine terms, a hierarch might fear more than loss of reputation. When servants become masters (The Prisoners) or a slave orders events (Pseudolus), the very structure of hierarchy is threatened. By granting slaves three days of free speech and activity per year during the December Saturnalia, the Roman elite defuse revolution; masters and slaves, as Horace suggests in the Satires, share the same vices.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Theater Enough by Jeffrey H. Richards. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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