Podrás probar, de este libro, este saber

 Podrás probar, de este libro, este saber: https://www.academia.edu/1051702/

How to Make Artificial Persons

  

 

Mi artículo sobre el dramatismo de Hobbes, en dos versiones escritas, y con una introducción en audio:

_____. "How to Make Artificial Persons: Hobbes's Dramatistic Theory of Interaction and of Political Representation." AI podcast on José Angel García Landa's paper. Online audio at Academia 24 May 2026.*

         https://www.academia.edu/68132891/

         2026

 

 

The Woman in White

Mi blog sobre LITERATURA INGLESA

 

Mi blog sobre LITERATURA INGLESA— que muchos años la estuve enseñando, el siglo pasado y éste también.   

Vanity Fea: (Literatura inglesa) (José Angel García Landa, U de Zaragoza).*

https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/search/label/Literatura%20inglesa

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/search/label/Literatura%20inglesa

         2026

 

 

 

Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Beckett

 

An AI podcast on my bibliography of Beckett's works. From More Pricks than Kicks, and before, to Worstward Ho, and beyond....

_____. "Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Beckett" AI podcast on José Angel García Landa's "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)." Online audio at  Academia 13 March 2026.*

         https://www.academia.edu/405477

There are not that many podscasts done on bibliographies, so do your best to enjoy this one.

 

 

 This bibliography can also be found here:

_____. "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 5 (1992): 213-39.*

         https://www.ua.es/dfing/publicaciones/raei/5/abstracts5.htm#Garc

         2000 DISCONTINUED 2020

         https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.1992.5.17

         2020

_____. "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)." Online PDF at RUA: Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Alicante.*

         http://hdl.handle.net/10045/5459

         2010

_____. "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)."  Academia 8 Jan. 2011.*

         https://www.academia.edu/405477

         2015 (+AI podcast, 2026)

         https://www.academia.edu/104883538/

         2023

_____. "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)." Zaguán 4 Feb. 2012.*

         http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/6827

         2012

_____. "A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) / Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)." SSRN 10 Jan. 2011.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=1736784

         2011

English & Commonwealth Literature eJournal 10 Jan. 2011.*

http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-Commonwealth-Lit.html

2012

_____. "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett." ResearchGate 28 July 2012.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39438812

         2012

_____. "Bibliografía de las obras de Samuel Beckett." Semantic Scholar.*

         https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Bibliograf%C3%ADa-de-las-obras-de-Samuel-Beckett-Landa/8c938ccca030ae8b7f2c31d4faf1b0bc63e9af0a

         2020

Ackroyd's Shakespeare

 Retropost, 2006:

Tras la excelente biografía de Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, aparece Shakespeare: The Biography, de Peter Ackroyd, y nos ofrece un Shakespeare con muchos puntos en común con el de Greenblatt, pero menos genial: un hombre casi al margen de su obra, un personaje práctico, sin ningún idealismo ni generosidad, un negociante y un prosaico trabajador de las letras, o más bien del teatro. Si bien Ackroyd nos recuerda una vez y otra los puntos inciertos de la biografía y persona de Shakespeare, muchas veces se aventura en conjeturas, hilando los datos con hipótesis, y nos ofrece así en las distintas secciones de su libro una carrera que, si bien es plausible, también es un tanto atípica entre los biógrafos de Shakespeare, por la asociación que postula de éste con tantas compañías teatrales.

Así, tenemos como fases de la vida de Shakespeare las siguientes: Stratford-upon-Avon - The Queen's Men - Lord Strange's Men - The Earl of Pembroke's Men - The Lord Chamberlain's Men - New Place - The Globe - The King's Men - Blackfriars. Se observará una ligera descompensación, más peso dado a los primeros años, y es que Ackroyd coloca mucho énfasis en la ambientación local (especialidad de Ackroyd—o una de ellas): "the sense of place that binds and determines the nature of those who grow up on a certain spot of ground" (8). Así, Shakespeare, aunque trabajase en la ciudad, venía del campo, de Stratford: "It remained the centre of his being" (44). Bonito, por ejemplo cómo analiza Ackroyd la etimología de "Stratford-upon-Avon", en la que convergen los idiomas céltico, inglés y latín, o cómo observa que en el arco número 18 del puente de Stratford se sigue haciendo un remolino que aparece en una imagen de The Rape of Lucrece. Impactante la descripción de la comunidad criptocatólica de Stratford (porque el Shakespeare de Ackroyd, si bíen descreído, tiene sus raíces en la "vieja fe"). Contactos familiares, disciplina paternalista y férrea en la sociedad, agudo sentido de la comunidad, de la vergüenza y de la observación mutua, con nula intimidad, en el ambiente social temprano de Shakespeare; no hay vida "privada": algo tanto más notable al ser Shakespeare uno de los poetas que han desarrollado el sentido de la interioridad y la subjetividad (16). Y allí en Stratford, Shakespeare era un burgués, no un humilde campesino, y buscaba los provechos del burgués sin ningún sentimentalismo y con alto sentido del negocio. La ruptura oficial con la "vieja fe" católica y la diferencia entre el campo y la ciudad también acentúan el sentido de transición social y de crisis de valores tan prominente en sus obras, "time out of joint"....

Magnífico el repaso de Ackroyd a los círculos familiares y vecinales de Shakespeare, chapeau. Es curioso el sentido chistoso u obsceno del nombre de Shakespeare (20)—creo que Shakespeare hace alusión a él en el soneto 151, cuando dice a su dama que su carne "rising at thy name doth point out thee"... No se corta Ackroyd de usar las abundantes leyendas imposibles de comprobar sobre Shakespeare; después de todo, es lo que tenemos, y una frase del tipo "suele haber parte de razón tras una leyenda" reaparece numerosas veces en el libro (p. ej. sobre el grano de verdad de las tradiciones teatrales, 235). Incluso la leyenda de Shakespeare como cazador furtivo la lleva Ackroyd hasta especulaciones un tanto remotas de su base, según admite (75). En menor proporción que el libro de Greenblatt, Ackroyd utiliza la obra para hacer lecturas biográficas de ella. Sólo en menor proporción porque Ackroyd elige centrarse menos en la obra a todos los efectos. El biógrafo no tiene otra cosa que hacer con las obras que sea de su incumbencia, y tanto Greenblatt como Ackroyd lo hacen maravillosamente (patéticas y ciegas parecen, en comparación, las objeciones de los críticos que quieren ignorar la conexión entre el autor y la obra). Así pues, vemos que ningún dramaturgo isabelino utiliza tantas alusiones domésticas como Shakespeare, o que en Hamlet se presupone una doctrina católica del purgatorio, algo a relacionar con el hecho de que la madre y la hija de Shakespeare fueran católicas...

Leía mucho Shakespeare, y su educación era latinizante y retórica: ya estaba entrenado desde la escuela para argumentar, teatralmente, un lado u otro de una cuestión, y a dar importancia central a la elocuencia. Shakespeare era una mente vivaz, práctica, rápida. "Prefiere los principios de los libros o de las Escrituras, a sus conclusiones" (54). Siendo un muchacho privilegiado en el pueblo, supuso para él una crisis la pérdida de prominencia o crisis financiera o problemas religiosos de su padre, antiguo alcalde, aunque Greenblatt ponía en esto más énfasis que Ackroyd. En cualquier caso, "If the nominal head of the family has failed, it becomes quite natural to create an idealised patriarchy or an idealised relationship between father and son" (Ackroyd 69) - Shakespeare también extrajo de aquí probablemente la determinación de no fracasar, de no buscarse problemas por cuestiones de religión, y de atrincherarse financieramente, sin compromisos con ningún tipo de idealismos. Por cierto, que por debajo de las alabanzas superficiales a su señora la reina (en El sueño de una noche de verano) se trasluce en la obra de Shakespeare una hostilidad hacia Isabel, la destripadora de curas y decapitadora de católicos. Así cuando bautiza con el nombre de Somerville (uno así llamado quiso asesinar a la reina) a un paisano ficticio suyo, en Henry VI. El teatro sirvió en cierto modo de sustituto a los elaborados rituales católicos (supongo que empezando por el teatro católico); "It fulfilled the audience's appetite for significant action and iconic form" . . . "Shakespearian tragedy, in particular, has some deep affinity with the experience of Catholic worship and the sacrifice of the Mass" (367). Elementos de ideología católica hay reconocibles en Shakespeare: así la distinción entre el hombre falible y la función sagrada del rey...; también contempla Shakespeare con escepticismo las escenas de juramentos públicos (algo de esperar en quien procede de una familia de criptocatólicos). Sus frailes en Romeo and Juliet y Much Ado aconsejan mentir como mal menor para alcanzar un bien mayor. King Lear o Pericles eran obras favoritas en círculos católicos, por su calidad un tanto hagiográfica. Pero poco más le permite a Shakespeare su prudencia (o su posible descreimiento...). Ya es bastante alarmante haberse visto mezclado indirectamente en la conspiración de Essex.

Fuesen lo que fuesen sus creencias particulares, poco dogmáticas sin duda, o sus lazos sociales y familiares con la vieja religión, Shakespeare debió ser "oficialmente" un anglicano conformista, si no no hubiera podido ser padrino de sus ahijados. (Nótese en un curioso parlamento de Love's Labour's Lost, sin embargo, su escepticismo hacia la figura de los padrinos). Ackroyd (que es católico, y ha escrito abundantemente sobre la Inglaterra católica) duda sobre la religiosidad de Shakespeare, aunque se inclina por creer que, criado en una familia criptocatólica, conservó simpatía hacia esa fe, si bien optando por conformarse superficialmente al anglicanismo, como tantos contemporáneos. No hay pruebas concluyentes de que Shakespeare fuese católico practicante.

So there is only evidence by default. He seems to have avoided attending Anglican worship. There is no record for him in the token books (to prove that he had received holy communion), or vestry minute books of Southwark; he may have moved in with the Mountjoys since, as a member of a Huguenot household, he was not bound to attend the Anglican service. But, on the other hand, there is also no reference to him in any of the prolific records of Catholic recusants. he made no protest and incurred no fine. Once more he becomes invisible.That invisibility, or ambiguity, is reflected in his work itself. Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself. In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god. (...) The church bells did not summon him to worship. They reminded him of decay and time past. Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs. He subdued his nature to whatever in the drama confronted him. He was, in that sense, above faith (473-74).

Seis de sus conocidos murieron por su asociación al catolicismo... razón más que suficiente para ser prudente. Y sin embargo ahí está la discreta conexión social con círculos católicos. Hasta la casa que Shakespeare compraría en Londres en 1613 al lado de Blackfriars tenía (como indica el nombre) conexiones con el catolicismo, y con el criptocatolicismo. Y en lo tocante a los primeros años de su carrera teatral, apuesta fuerte Ackroyd por la conexión "Lancashire" de William "Shakeshafte", y a través de ella por la conexión con Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. (Que tenía compañía dramática propia, en la que pudo quizá iniciarse Shakespeare). La familia Stanley es bien tratada en las obras históricas, quizá como homenaje a un mecenas (151). Aún en 1611, un tal "Wilhelmi" devuelve a la biblioteca de la viuda de Lord Strange un ejemplar de Plutarco que le habían prestado... Lord Strange, quizá asesinado a consecuencia de las conspiraciones en torno al trono de Elizabeth, era parte prominente del círculo criptocatólico. Es también curiosa, e intrigante, la anécdota de la muerte de Katherine Hamlett en el río Avon, por las fechas en que Shakespeare "viaja" al norte; aunque la conexión con Shakespeare podría ser tanto inexistente como muy profunda. En cualquier caso, tras su hipotético paso por el norte, Shakespeare vuelve a Stratford, donde se casa en un matrimonio de conveniencia, según Ackroyd. Aquí va éste a contrapelo de las interpretaciones usuales: no tiene nada Ackroyd contra Anne Hathaway, y coge siempre la interpretación que menos quema sobre la distancia entre Shakespeare y su esposa: ni siquiera le parece ofensivo al biógrafo lo de que a Anne le legase únicamente su "segunda mejor cama" después de haber pensado inicialmente no legarle nada. Separación sexual sí hubo de hecho: ­­ ¿"quizá el nacimiento de Hamnet y Judith le causó algún tipo de daño" a Anne? (100). Y el matrimonio no pudo ser completamente feliz, o no se hubiesen separado. En cualquier caso, el Shakespeare de Ackroyd es en su vida privada un businessman que no tiene tiempo para rencores ni rencillas; simplemente actúa como cualquier otro parroquiano en cuanto puede permitírselo. Tampoco quiere especular Ackroyd con "Anna Whateley de Temple Grafton" con quien supuestamente se iba a casar un bígamo Shakespeare... es sencillamente Anne Hathaway.

Y durante un tiempo fue Shakespeare posiblemente un humilde pasantillo antes de dedicarse al teatro; de ahí la obsesión con términos y documentos legales en su lenguaje. Se unió quizá a los Sirvientes de la Reina hacia 1587, cuando visitaron Stratford, y así viajó a Londres. Por cierto, de Stratford a Londres en jet (o sea, en caballo) había más distancia que hoy en día de Stratford a New London, Connecticut: dos días...
Londres: un hervidero de gente (un tercio de la población de Zaragoza hoy...), mescolanza social, peste, insalubridad y alta tasa de mortalidad: "The expectation of a relatively short life must have affected the conduct and attitude of many Londoners. They were consigned to a short burst of existence with the evidence of disease and mortality all around them. Their experience was all the more vital and intense. This is the proper context for the growth of drama" (111). Era el lugar donde poder a la vez mantener lazos en secreto y desprenderse de otros no deseados, el lugar de la ambición y el ascenso social... el teatro del mundo, el lugar idóneo para Shakespeare (112). Es el nodo de la modernidad, donde suceden las experiencias que jamás han tenido lugar antes. Y es un sitio intrínsecamente teatral: "More and more significantly the city itself became a form of theatre. London was a forcing house for dramatic improvisation and theatrical performance. It encompassed the ritual recantation of the traitor at the scaffold and the parade of the merchants at the Royal Exchange. It was the world of Shakespeare" (114). El teatro es "heightened life", pero es intensificación de una vida que ya es teatral de por sí. (Hay aquí, claro, en especial en un teatro tan metadramático como el de Shakespeare, un potente fenómeno de realimentación entre realidad y representación). Los encuentros casuales, el comportamiento de las masas... Y el igualitarismo potencial de todos los actores bajo su disfraz. Otras tantas experiencias de la ciudad que alimentan el teatro de Shakespeare. Ackroyd, el novelista de la sedimentación histórica de Londres, es especialmente bueno siguiendo a Shakespeare por sus barrios y alojamientos y movimientos por la ciudad. Un lugar muy insalubre, por cierto, el Londres de Ackroyd.

Socialmente, el Bardo es el apologista del poder real; desprecia a los artesanos incultos, y es enemigo de los movimientos del populacho (así, se sale de sus fuentes para vilificar al rebelde Jack Cade). Observa Ackroyd también a Shakespeare el observador del lenguaje no verbal, al irónico, al que no aguanta la solemnidad y no puede resistirse a mofarse de ella. Un personaje quizá prudente en su comportamiento social, pero posiblemente agudo y punzante en privado. Y a ello se mezclaba su capacidad de proyección: "he had a sympathy so fine that no belief could injure it" (124). En cuestiones de dinero, iba muy a lo suyo y sin ningún idealismo ni sentimentalismo. Trabajador y ahorrador como la hormiga que desprecia Robert Greene; también buen negociante. Y posiblemente con conflictos interiores (proyectados a su drama), con tendencia a la melancolía y al asco de sí mismo. Una combinación compleja, claro: como de todo hay en Shakespeare, de algún sitio tiene que venir. Pero Shakespeare está a la vanguardia de la consciencia humana en algunos sentidos. "If human will rather than providence was the source of significant event, then drama had found a new subject. It could be said that Shakespeare was present at the invention of human motive and human purpose in English history" (181). El teatro ayuda así a concebir la historia como resultado de las acciones humanas.

Shakespeare reelabora las convenciones para expresar su visión personal, y eso le lleva a reinventar los senderos de la consciencia humana (196). Hasta en la variabilidad de su nombre (Shakspeare, Shaxberd) ve Ackroyd una indicación de la fluidez de este personaje, cuya presencia en el mundo no estaba plenamente determinada. En dos documentos, "signed within hours or even minutes of each other, he signs his name in two completely different ways" (200). De hecho, otra cuestión peculiar en la sensibilidad de Shakespeare es la alienación de sí: "Self-estrangement has become so obvious a topic of Shakespearean commentary that it is often forgotten that it is peculiar to, and symptomatic of, his genius" (193). Es la experiencia íntima del actor, y quizá más del dramaturgo-actor, que es por otra parte quien está en situación de dramatizarla explícitamente.

"There is a phrase in the 121st sonnet, the words of which echo through his plays, 'I am that I am'. It is of course a repetition of God's words to Moses on Mount Horeb. Burt the phrase may also be compared to Iago's remark that 'I am not what I am'. Shakespeare is both everything and nothing. He is many and yet no one. It might almost be a definition of the creative principle itself, which is essentially a principle of organisation without values or ideals. . . . His presence is conspicuous by its absence. He had an excess of selflessness, a negative so deep that it became a positive. This may have been at first a matter of instinct, or of vital necessity, but at some point it became part of a deliberate pattern" (313).

El primer teatro del Londres isabelino no fue The Theatre de James Burbage, sino The Red Lion en Mile End (1567), de John Brayne, cuñado por cierto de Burbage, y que construiría The Theatre a medias con él. Había habido teatros, claro, en el Londres romano, y hay alusiones a teatros en documentos medievales. O sea que quizá los teatros isabelinos no sean tan radicalmente nuevos como se suele decir.

Convenciones del teatro isabelino... "On the stage of the Globe an actor would enter at one door and exit at another. When a character or characters left the stage, they would not be the first to appear in the subsequent scene. There were important principles, designed to lend the impression of a dramatic world in process; theatrical life continued, as it were, "behind the scene." There was an illusion of a flowing imaginative world, of which the actors on the stage were the visible token" (354). Los espacios son fluidos, abstractos; la actuación e interacción lo era todo: "The actor would come forward, and then deliver his lines to the audience. He did not enter a particular location; he entered in order to address or confront another actor" (355). Había una mínima coordinación por parte del "book-keeper", pero no se dirigía la actuación del actor. Aunque hay una tradición de que Shakespeare "instruyó" a algunos actores sobre cómo interpretar tal o cual personaje. El libro, por cierto, era cosa única, preciosa, y autorizada por la firma del Master of the Revels. Los actores sólo tenían transcripciones de sus papeles, no de la obra entera. En caso de roles múltiples, hacen falta como mínimo 27 versos intermedios para permitir a un actor el cambio de papel, dice Ackroyd. Es moderno Ackroyd en su concepción de la "versión final" de la obra: no existe tal, sino que la obra es un proceso colaborativo, "it is never finished, in other words, but subject to a continuous and inevitable process of change" (364). En Hamlet, modelo y cumbre, el personaje es fluido, nunca fijo en una actitud, y sus monólogos son los de una mente en proceso de desarrollo: "in this play he refines his art to the extent that the soliloquy seems to become the index of evolving consciousness. It is no longer a summary of 'this is what I am' but, rather, of 'this is what I am becoming' (396).

Shakespeare también es flexible, oportunista en su uso de los materiales, improvisa, va directo a lo que puede usar, "His knowledge ... is extensive rather than profound; his alertness and power of assimilation were unique, so that he seems to know 'more' than his contemporaries. He picked up everything" (429). "It is also worth noticing that the first scenes of the play are also the most inventive. That is frequently the case in Shakespeare's dramaturgy, where he is often more spirited and emboldened at the beginning of each enterprise" (435).

Actor de papeles secundarios, Shakespeare haría quizá del Fantasma en Hamlet, y de Prólogo en Enrique V. Ackroyd desmiente la interpretación más habitual de la carrera de Shakespeare, y coloca sus primeras obras, en primeras versiones, en los años 1580. Así da a su carrera un aspecto global más coherente ("on the assumption that he began his playwriting career in 1586 or 1587, the rate of composition remains approximately the same throughout his life" 436). Quizá los primeros años de Shakespeare en Londres eran los años del primer Hamlet (¿de Shakespeare posiblemente?). Se reinterpreta aquí su colaboración con diversas compañías y dramaturgos (Kyd, Marlowe, Lord Strange's Men, The Queen's Men...). Tampoco establece Ackroyd una diferencia radical entre lo que es y lo que no es de Shakespeare, pues éste dramatizaba relatos o quizá retomaba viejas obras revisándolas, quizá en compañía... no se sabe. "There may, in other words, be a great deal more Shakespeare than is currently included in scholarly editions" (152). Y las obras tal como nos han llegado no están "acabadas", son versiones siempre provisionales, quizá variables en cada representación. El texto, así, también es fluido. Shakespeare revisaba sus obras, hacía versiones cortas y largas; el primer Hamlet que tenemos no es un bad quarto, sino una versión intermedia de una obra anterior, versión con características propias, y que luego sufrió añadidos, revisiones... "His was always a work in progress" (450).

No hay pues "años perdidos" para Ackroyd. Así, en 1588 su Shakespeare pasa (con paso casi firme) de los Queen's Men a los Lord Strange's Men (que según Henslowe tenían un "harey the vi", probablemente una versión temprana del de Shakespeare). O tomemos por ejemplo esta frase de Nashe en 1589, diciendo que "English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth; and if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But o griefe! Tempus edax rerum, where's that will last always?" (155). Hay dos "will" en esa frase, por cierto. Otros envidiosos criticaban a Shakespeare, no sólo Greene. Y hacia 1590-91 hasta se mezclan promiscuamente las compañías teatrales y tenemos a Shakespeare en compañía de Edward Alleyn—¡como en Shakespeare in Love, vamos!—aunque sin Henslowe. Hasta Spenser alude a Shakespeare en Colin Clout's Come Home Again (1591):

A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found:
Whose Muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound.

Y hasta pudo pasar Shakespeare por los Earl of Pembroke's Men, antes de acabar en su grupo estable, los Lord Chamberlain's Men. Con estos actuó en unas ochenta localidades y 30 casas nobiliarias, además de en Londres. Un Shakespeare más viajero de lo habitual.
Era un trabajo intensivo el del teatro, representar una obra distinta cada día seis días a la semana, constantemente retomando obras viejas y ensayando obras nuevas... el teatro demandaba autores. Shakespeare aprende de sus colegas y los imita: a Lyly, a Kyd, a Marlowe. Con Kyd lo asocia su falta de formación universitaria. Era Marlowe la voz más personal e impresionante (en la ambición sin límites de Tamerlán reconocemos la de su autor). Shakespeare se apropia de esa voz: es actor y autor, el primer autor que sale de las filas de los actores. Ackroyd sigue sus hipotéticas giras con las compañias por distintas ciudades, con más detalle que otros biógrafos. En tanto que actor, hará un teatro fundamentalmente de hombre del teatro, no de literato. A Ackroyd, que escribió un libro sobre el travestismo, le interesa, claro, este fenómeno en la experiencia teatral de la época, tanto hombre vestido de mujer. Como en el caso de los Sonetos, tampoco aquí Ackroyd nos da un Shakespeare gay, ni siquiera bisexual, sino más bien teatral, juguetón, ambiguo y escurridizo:

No other dramatist employed the devices of cross-dressing so frequently or so overtly as Shakespeare. It is clear why he was enamoured of it. It is ingenious and strange, allowing much subtle play and allusiveness. It offers rich comic possibilities, but it also invokes the spirit of sexual liberty. It is perverse and pervasive, representing the licence of Shakespeare's imagination. (482)

Y también enfatiza el trabajo de los actores como trabajo en equipo, con Shakespeare haciéndolos y ellos haciéndolo: "It was a society of friends and colleagues, in other words, with common interests and common obligations". Y fue ésta la generación que creó al actor como artista, por encima del vagabundo y el acróbata (226-227). Al énfasis de Shakespeare en la interioridad y la psicología se une una nueva manera de actuar desarrollada por Burbage y sus contemporáneos, "a style of acting in which the player tried to feel or express that passion. This new emphasis can be identified with the new role of individualism in social and political life, displacing any sense of symbolic or divinely appointed hierarchy" (229). Además, por necesidad en obras tan populosas, se doblaban muchos papeles: actuación sobre actuación, por así decirlo. Eso no quita para que esa forma de actuar hoy la encontraríamos seguramente formalizada, grotesca, y en absoluto realista: insiste Ackroyd en que hay un desarrollo de las formas dramáticas anteriores – y no una ruptura, que hubiera sido rechazada por el público. Era un fenómeno de su tiempo, irrepetible en otro contexto. El genio de Shakespeare es el de un asimilador que capta y usa todo lo que le proporciona un magma lingüístico y social en ebullición. Llena sus obras de alusiones contemporáneas: nada de limitar su vista a lo universal (pace Johnson). Escribe sus papeles a la medida de los actores de que disponía en la compañía, de sus talentos o apariencia. Era además, seguramente, el jefe de la compañía, si no oficialmente sí de facto.

En cuanto a su manera de escribir, es también fluida, abierta, omnívora; no es cauto ni calculador, como él mismo hace decir al Poeta en Timón de Atenas: "Poetry creates itself in the act of being created; it needs no external stimulus but provokes itself and streams forth with its own insistent momentum. He was always, as it were, in a state of suspenseful attention, not knowing precisely where he was going" (Ackroyd 277). Así improvisa, pierde a veces el interés en motivos, personajes o argumentos, pasa a otra cosa, cambia a Hamlet de personalidad a mitad de obra. ¿Defecto? ¿Genio? Algunos dirán que es cálculo, pero estas cosas huelen mucho a espontaneidad e improvisación. (279). No impone una visión final: los personajes son en última instancia ambiguos (468); y el dramaturgo no toma partido en los conflictos que retrata: "There is no need to 'take sides' when the characters are doing it for you" (469). (Yo diría más bien que aparentemente sí toma partido con mucha frecuencia, pero que no es ese partido tomado lo más interesante de las obras, sino sus ambigüedades y ambivalencias). En cuanto a las obras, aparte de su fluidez original, van cambiando... por ejemplo en la compañía se les añaden divisiones en actos a partir de 1609, inexistentes antes (467).

Hay algún pronunciamiento cuestionable en el libro de Ackroyd (pocos), como la aseveración de que "in any one period, all the manifestations of culture are of a piece" (115)—Yes but. O cuando da por hecho que tal o cual obra temprana relacionable con las de Shakespeare ya era, de hecho, obra de Shakespeare. Frente a los exclusivistas, Ackroyd parece dispuesto a atribuir a Shakespeare todo lo atribuible: Edmund Ironside, King Leir, A Shrew... etc. No cometamos la falacia retrospectiva, parece decirnos Ackroyd; no serán obras muy "shakespeareanas", quizá, "But Shakespeare himself was not immediately 'Shakespeareian'. Early Wilde was not 'Wildean', and the young Browning was not in the pattern of the mature Browning" (163). Aparte, el Shakespeare de Ackroyd revisó y embelleció sus obras, Más que el de Ben Jonson, desde luego.

De hecho Ackroyd es muy omnívoro: en su biografía admite, ya sea como hecho o como probabilidad, casi cualquier pista que nos pueda conducir a Shakespeare. La anécdota de "William the Conqueror". El personaje de "Prickshafte", la historia de Willobie His Avisa, el elemento autobiográfico de los Sonetos... esto nos lleva a un Shakespeare unido a intrigas sexuales, y quizá a enfermedad venérea. En cuanto al misterio de los Sonetos... aquí no son publicados por un espontáneo, pues el pirateo era cosa muy penalizada. Es otra publicación "de peste" quizá, en un momento de baja actividad teatral, pero decidida por el propio autor. Por cierto, para Ackroyd tampoco hay "piratas memorísticos", y los cuartos malos son primeras versiones, no textos pirateados de memoria. El único pirata memorístico es el propio Shakespeare, que utilizaba todo lo que pillaba, pero con criterio: "he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuous process of self-distillation" (238). Al contrario que Bloom, Ackroyd no interpreta Titus Andronicus como una parodia grotesca. Ni tanto ni tan poco, quizá: Greenblatt parece más afinado en este punto (el Shakespeare de Greenblatt se deja ir, pierde el control; por ejemplo en mi momento favorito, cuando Tito hace que su mano cortada la transporte Lavinia en la boca).

La dedicación a Southampton de los poemas largos de Shakespeare sugiere a Ackroyd que de él recibió el autor el dinero necesario para hacerse accionista de su nueva compañía a partir de 1594, los Lord Chamberlain's Men, y por tanto la base de su prosperidad futura. Quizá A Midsummer Night's Dream también celebra una boda en la familia de Southampton, la de su madre en segundas nupcias. En cambio, Ackroyd se inclina más por la asociación de los sonetos con Pembroke. Pero solo a modo de ocasión: los interpreta más bien como ejercicios dramáticos que como obra autobiográfica; la cuestión de su autenticidad autobiográfica es, dice, un problema sin respuesta posible. (Aquí no parece sentir que esto desafíe al sentido común). Es curioso que Ackroyd, que ha ido rastreando todo indicio remoto y posible alusión a Shakespeare, se resista a usar autobiográficamente los sonetos. Hasta el triángulo amoroso es una convención para Ackroyd: "It seems to have been forgotten by these clandestine biographers that one of the conventions of the sonnet sequence consisted in the poet magnanimously awarding his mistress to his close friend. Shakespeare was following the tradition in his own explosive way" (309)—aunque a pesar de lo "explosivo" resultó, quizá, algo anticuado, nos dice; de ahí el silencio que acoge esta obra. Y, sin embargo, le tienta a Ackroyd relacionar a Shakespeare con Emilia Lanier... Lo que no le tienta nada nada es hacer de Shakespeare un homosexual. (Es curioso, también en su biografía de T. S. Eliot rechazaba Ackroyd la homosexualidad de Eliot como una entelequia; al parecer para Ackroyd quien no tiene relaciones homosexuales bien conocidas e indudables no es homosexual). Claro que es más plausible hablar de Shakespeare como bisexual que como homosexual. Para Ackroyd sí hay una sexualidad ambigua en Shakespeare, como la hay en el teatro en general, y Shakespeare gusta de travestismos y de crear personajes femeninos desde adentro, pero... "This does not imply that he was in any sense homosexual but suggests, rather, an unfixed or floating sexual identity. He had the capacity to be both female and male, and the scope of his art must have affected his life in the world" (316). No es casual tampoco que no conozcamos el nombre del misterioso Amigo, si éste es también una entelequia: "In the sonnets Shakespeare is musing essentially upon the true nature of the selfhood. His subject was his own self, and in that cunning and witty solipsism others were lovable in so far as they loved him" (312). Y el daño y humillaciones que sufre en el amor lo transforma en solaz del pensamiento. (313). Sí aprecia Ackroyd una escasez de parejas felices en Shakespere, y una asociación frecuente de la sexualidad a la vergüenza, asco y horror. Pero, curiosamente, Ackroyd se resiste a biografiar mucho en este tema. "Shakespeare's comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage (the auspices are rarely favourable), and the couples are in a sense unconsummated" (366).

Ambigüedad, inestabilidad y perspectivismo introduce Shakespeare en el concepto de carácter: "Is Brutus deluded or glorious? Is Caesar matchless or fundamentally flawed? Shakespeare seems almost deliberately to have established a new kind of protagonist, whose character is not immediately apparent or transparent to the audience" (375). Lo mismo en Enrique V: no es posible fijar una actitud simple del dramaturgo hacia su personaje. Aunque en este caso sugiere Ackroyd que se deja llevar Shakespeare por la erótica y poesía del poder que rodea a Henry. Esto no parece muy crítico por parte de Shakespeare, claro, aunque elementos críticos haya también en la obra. Los reyes no siempre aparecen favorablemente representados en la obra de Shakespeare, "but nevertheless he evinces collaborative sympathy with them" (377). En Measure for Measure parece apoyar (un poco a lo pelota) la teoría de James I sobre el derecho divino de los reyes (434). Suele dar la última palabra al personaje de más rango. (Aunque, también con frecuencia, le sigue el epílogo de un actor o payaso, añadiría yo)... "There is indeed a natural consonance between the player and the king, both dressed in robes of magnificence and both obliged to play a part. It may have been one reason why Shakespeare was attracted to the profession of acting in the first place" (378) y hay cierta tradición de que solía representar papeles de rey él mismo.

Otros trocitos de vida interna sí entrevemos a través de la obra. En King John, reescribiéndolo, Shakespeare añade un fragmento en el que una madre lamenta la muerte de su niño. Iría contra el sentido común, dice Ackroyd, creer que esto no tiene que ver con la pérdida de su hijo Hamnet (288). Para Ackroyd, Shakespeare no abandona a su familia, ni es tacaño con ella, sino que les envía grandes sumas de dinero. John Shakespeare, su padre, muere en 1601, y esto parece llevar a la nueva versión de Hamlet (la nuestra), "a play that was composed during the obligatory period of mourning" (395). No es extraño que en las circunstancias reviviese Shakespeare la muerte de su hijo Hamnet... además, "The available evidence supports the belief that Shakespeare himself played the part of the dead father" (396). Padres e hijos están en este período muy presentes en el funcionamiento de su imaginación. Y Ackroyd está de acuerdo con los románticos y con Bloom en que Hamlet es el más radical personaje shakespeareano, y el más cercano a su autor "Hamlet has no reason to exist except as a projection from Shakespeare... Like his creator, his centre is nowhere and his circumference is nowhere" (397). Además señala Ackroyd que "his soliloquies often have a dubious relation to the action of the plot" (397). Y, ciertamente, sin llegar a decir como Bloom que Hamlet es el único personaje de Shakespeare que podría haber escrito las obras de Shakespare, sí dice Ackroyd que "Hamlet could only have been written by a consummate actor" (397). Pero el Shakespeare del teatro, y de las proyecciones imaginativas, no era el mismo que el que volvía a veces por Stratford: "His life as a dramatist, and his life as a townsman, were separate and not to be confused" (409). Ah, y si hubo "período oscuro" fue únicamente en términos dramáticos, no biográficos. No hay depresión en el Shakespeare de Ackroyd, persona cauta, discreta y buen burgués medio de puertas para afuera. Todo se le iba, al parecer, por la pluma. Es curioso que, habiendo sido Shakespeare criticado por especular almacenando grano, sea él mismo quien denuncia a esos especuladores en Coriolano (76-77): "a most extraordinary act of theatrical impersonality, suggesting very forcefully that his imagination was not violated by sentiment of any kind" (469)... (¿o no será además un ejemplo de descarada hipocresía y señal de blindaje del instinto práctico frente a la conciencia moral, digo yo?).

Un episodio político extraño tiene lugar al verse involucrada la compañía en la conspiración de Essex para destronar a la reina (1601), representando la obra Richard II, donde un 'hombre fuerte' destrona al rey y se hace con la corona. En esta ocasión, sin embargo, la Reina fue más fuerte que el aspirante; el apuesto conde salió decapitado, y Shakespeare indemne... aunque en el acta de acusación a Essex se habla de "that most treasonous booke of Henry the fourth", identificando el libro de Hayward y la obra de Shakespeare diciendo que el traidor del conde había aplaudido en "the playing thereof" (se refieren a Richard II, no a Henry IV, nos aclara Ackroyd (389) ). Es curioso que el papel no sólo del actor sino del dramaturgo Shakespeare fuese considerado irrelevante en este asunto; para mí dice mucho del status del dramaturgo popular en este momento: al parecer es inexistente como sujeto de responsabilidades legales. Ackroyd supone que la participación de la compañía de Shakespeare en la intriga de Essex fue más o menos forzada, no una cuestión de conjurados activos, aunque observa sobre la obra de Richard II, resucitada para la ocasión, "although it had no doubt been revived in the interim, its reconstruction at such short notice is still a very remarkable achievement" (391)—algo que más bien nos debería dar causa de dudas, quizá... El hecho es que "a week after ... interrogation, the Lord Chamberlain's Men were once more playing before the Queen. On the day after that performance, Essex was beheaded" (392). Terrorífica escena tipo Ricardo III: "el que esté conmigo, que se levante y me siga"... Es posible que Elizabeth, como James tras ella, "viewed theatrical representation as but a shadow of the real spectacle of power and authority" (424): Shakespeare desde luego era muy consciente de la teatralidad de ambos.

Entre 1603 y 1605 (listas de actores de Sejanus y Volpone) Shakespeare al parecer se retira de las tablas ("was it right, for a landed gentleman, still to tread the boards?"). Hay una biografía ficticia de un criminal, Gamaliel Ratsey, publicada en 1605, donde parece aludirse a él, hablando de actores que "are grown so wealthy that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be cojunct in authority and to sit with men of great worship" (440). Y vuelve a residir en Stratford, aunque para Ackroyd no hay por qué suponer que se considerase "retirado" de la escritura, ni de que se autorretratase en la figura de Próspero enterrando su magia. Esto se contradice un tanto con el hecho de que Shakespeare decidiese al parecer vender sus participaciones en los teatros del Globe y Blackfriars por la fecha en que se retira a Stratford: el mismo Ackroyd reconoce que "It is possible that he gave up playwriting when he gave up his shares, a practical end to a thoroughly pragmatic career" (500). Desde luego, si Shakespeare tenía cierta fama de poner la pela ante todo, Ackroyd no se la va a hacer perder, ni nos va a dar un Shakespeare más romántico e idealista, lejos de eso. "His principal concern seems to have been with the preservation of his own finances" (409). Si idealiza a Catalina de Aragón en Henry VIII no es tanto por su posible catolicismo cuanto por moda, o por interés político favorable a España detectado por el autor en James I.

Al volver a Stratford sí se hace más consciente el autor de ciertas relaciones familiares. En sus últimas obras, significativamente, abundan las escenas de reconciliación y de lazos entre padre e hija. "In the late plays, when Shakespeare himself was reaching the end of his life, an ageing father is reunited with a long-absent daughter; there may be feelings of guilt and shame associated with this absence, but all is forgiven. There are rarely mothers and daughters in Shakespeare's plays. The essential bond is father and daughter. It may not be the pattern of his life, but it is clearly the pattern of his imagination" (449).

Shakespeare se lleva bien con uno de sus yernos, John Hall, esposo de su favorita Susannah, que lo familiariza con las hierbas y la medicina natural. Y se lleva mal con el casquivano marido de Judith, a quien cuida de desheredar. En cuanto a su mujer, Ackroyd sospecha que estaba inválida por alguna razón, por el vacío que la rodea.
Al parecer muere Shakespeare no de una cogorza sino de fiebre tifoidea, como muchas otras personas de Stratford, quizá infectado por el insalubre riachuelo que corría al lado de New Place. En el testamento Ackroyd quita hierro a la sospechosa cesión a su esposa de "su segunda mejor cama": "He is unlikely to have wished to snub his wife at the last minute" (513) (... bueno, bueno... visto lo visto, es más de lo que sabemos). En su testamento favorece el autor claramente (como en sus obras) los privilegios del patriarcado. Los anillos regalados a sus futuros editores Heminges y Condell sugieren que en Stratford Shakespeare estaba revisando sus obras con vistas a la publicación. Dejó buenos recuerdos, pero no una escuela, ni un biógrafo... ni libros ni papeles a nadie.
Otra última historia curiosa, sobre el testamento de Shakespeare. En la frase "mi firma y sello" se ha tachado la palabra sello, "como si Shakespeare hubiese perdido el anillo antes de firmar el documento"; y en 1810 una labradora encontró cerca del cementerio de Stratford un anillo/sello de oro, probablemente del siglo XVI, con las iniciales "WS" (90).

Cada capítulo de la biografía va precedido de una cita alusiva a su tema, extraída ingeniosamente de las obras de Shakespeare. Por ejemplo, cap. 65, "And Here We Wander in Illusions", describiendo la experiencia del teatro para el contemporáneo—y que quizá muchas de las sutilezas del teatro isabelino y shakespeariano sean "inventions of the scholars rather than the dramatists" (370). Es el efecto de inflación interpretativa retroactiva que Vico llamaba "the conceit of scholars". A veces duda Ackroyd de que su Shakespeare, o el nuestro, sea el que vivió y escribió... aunque en general más bien se resigna a creer que sí, por extraña que parezca a veces la evidencia, y dudosas nuestras reconstrucciones: "the appearance of the man may have been quite different from any mental or cultural image of Shakespeare that currently exists. He may have been swarthy. He may have worn an earring. He may in later life even have been fat". O quizá se parecía a Ackroyd... Shakespeare incorpora en sus obras todo lo que capta; se adapta a sus actores, a los intereses del rey (brujas, mascaradas, etc.); capta modas, retoma y reescribe argumentos, ilusiones teatrales; alrededor de él se mezclan documentos ambiguos, investigaciones contradictorias, leyendas... es difícil proporcionar un retrato convincente y coherente de un personaje tan fluido, pero on the whole Ackroyd does it quite admirably.

Retroposts

Recuerdos del viejo teatro

Según Charles Dickens, Un viajante, y no de comercio —cap. XII. 

El viajante vuelve a su ciudad natal y ve que todo es y no es lo que era, y que el tendero de siempre no lo recuerda siquiera.

 

Ya me había alejado de él algunos centenares de metros, con lo que había también mejorado mi humor, cuando pensé para mis adentros: "¡He ahí la diferencia entre marcharse de un lugar y seguir viviendo en él!" Y no tenia derecho, pensé, a irritarme con el verdulero por su falta de interés. Yo no era nada para él; él, en cambio, era para mí la ciudad, la catedral, el puente, el río, mi niñez y una gran rebanada de mi vida.

Desde luego, la ciudad se había empequeñecido de una manera espantosa desde que viví en ella siendo niño. Yo llevaba en mi memoria la impresión de que la calle Mayor era por lo menos tan ancha como la Regent Street, de Londres, o el Bulevar de los Italianos, en París. Ahora me pareció poco mejor que una callejuela. Había en ella un reloj público que yo me imaginaba como el más elegante de todos los del mundo: pero ahora lo encontré inexpresivo, descolorido, y el más apagado de cuantos relojes había visto. Pertenecía ese reloj a la Casa Consistorial, en la que vi en cierta ocasión cómo un indio (que ahora supongo no era tal indio) se tragó una espada (que también supongo ahora que no se tragó). En los tiempos aquellos  el edificio de la Casa Consistorial me parecía a mí de una construcción tan magnífica, que lo había señalado mentalmente como el modelo que el genio de la lámpara eligió para edificar el palacio de Aladino. ¡Y ahora me resultaba un ruin montoncito de ladrillos, parecido a una capilla que se hubiese vuelto loca, y en el que se veían unas cuantas personas provistas de polainas de cuero, que no hacían otra cosa que bostezar, rabiando por tener algo en qué ocuparse, mientras pasaban el tiempo con las manos metidas en los bolsillos a la puerta del edificio, que se daba el postíen de calificarse como bolsa del maíz!

Después de preguntárselo a un pescadero que exhibía en su escaparate, de una manera compendiosa, la mercancía consistente en un lenguado y un cuarto de libra de camarones, me enteré de que aún existía el teatro, y decidí reconfortar mi alma haciéndole una visita. Allí fue donde por vez primera se me apareció Ricardo III, envuelto en incómoda capa, haciendo que el corazón me dise un vuelco de terror y me obligase a retroceder hasta apoyarme en el palco proscenio donde presenciaba en pie la representación, mientras él peleaba a vida o muerte contra el virtuoso Richmond. dentro de aquellas paredes fue donde aprendí, como si estuviese leyendo una página de la historia de Inglaterra, de qué manera aquel rey malvado dormía en tiempo de guerra tumbado en un sofá demasiado pequeño para él y de qué manera más terrible la conciencia turbaba sus botas. Fue allí también donde vi por vez primera al curioso campesino de nobles principios, que lucía un florido chaleco, estrujar su sombrero, tirarlo a tierra, quitarse la levita y decir: "Maldito seáis, caballero; luchemos, pues, con nuestros puños!" Al oír lo cual la encantadora joven que iba con él (y que salía a escena hecha un pimpollo con un estrecho delantalito de muselina blanca cruzado por cinco hermosas tiras de cintas de cinco diferentes colores) sufrió tal miedo por lo que pudiera ocurrirle a su campesino, que se desmayó.

En aquel santuario me había enterado yo de muchos maravillosos secretos de la Naturaleza: no era el menos terrorífico de esos secretos el de que las brujas de Macbeth tenían un asombroso parecido con los jefes de clan y otros auténticos habitantes de Escocia, y el de que el buen rey Duncan no podía descansar en su tumba y salía constantemente de ella, llamándose a sí mismo por el nombre de otra persona.

Fui, pues, al teatro en busca de consuelo; pero el que conseguí fue muy pequeño, porque el teatro se encontraba en estado lamentable y en vías de ruina. Un comerciante en vinos y cerveza embotellada había metido ya a la fuerza su negocio dentro de lo que había sido taquilla, y el dinero se recogía—en las ocasiones en que se recogía dinero—dentro de una especie de fresquera que había en el pasillo de entrada. El comerciante de vinos y cerveza embotellada se había infiltrado seguramente también debajo del escenario, porque le oí decir que tenía varias clases de bebidas alcohólicas "entre la madera" y no había sitio alguno en qué almacenar ésta, como no fuese debajo del escenario (aunque quizá se refería a que tenía bebidas envasadas en barrilles de madera). Era evidente que aquel hombre se estaba comiendo poso a poco el teatro hasta el tuétano, y que no tardaría en convertirse en su único poseedor.

El teatro estaba, según anunciaba un rótulo, para alquilar, aunque sin esperanza para sus antiguas finalidades; desde hacía mucho tiempo no se había dado dentro de sus muros representación alguna, fuera de un panorama, y hasta éste lo habían anunciado como agradablemente instructivo, y sé demasiado bien el significado fatal y el alcance plomizo de esta clase de terribles expresiones. No, en aquel teatro no había consuelo para mí. Había desaparecido misteriosamente lo mismo que mi juventud. A diferencia de esa última, quizá aquél volviese algún día, aunque las esperanzas eran muy pequeñas.

 

Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation

 

Swift, Jonathan. "Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation." 1713. Quotidiana 19 Dec 2007.*

https://essays.quotidiana.org/swift/hints_towards_an_essay/

         2025

 

Shakespeare y los eclipses

 

Retropost, 2005: Shakespeare y los eclipses https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/10/shakespeare-y-los-eclipses.html

Trinity Personated

 

lunes, 3 de julio de 2023

Thomas Hobbes's materialist explication of the doctrine of the Trinity in Leviathan (Part III, "Of a Christian Common-Wealth"), on the basis of his dramatistic notion of personation as central to all aspects of human reality and social life. 

Of the Trinity

Here wee have the Person of God born now the third time. For as Moses, and the High Priests, were Gods Representative in the Old Testament; and our Saviour himselfe as Man, during his abode on earth: So the Holy Ghost, that is to say, the Apostles, and their successors, in the Office of Preaching, and Teaching, that had received the Holy Spirit, have Represented him ever since. But a Person, (as I have shewn before, chapt. [16].) is he that is Represented, as often as hee is Represented; and therefore God, who has been Represented (that is, Personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three Persons; through neither the word Person, nor Trinity be ascribed to him in the Bible. St. John indeed (I Epist. 5.7.) saith, There be three that bear witnesse in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these Three are One: But this disagreeth not, but accordeth fitly with three Persons in the proper signification of Persons; which is, that which is Represented by another. For so God the Father, as Represented by Moses, is one Person; and as Represented by his Sonne, another Person; and as Represented by the Apostles, and by the Doctors that taught by authority from them derived, is a third Person; and yet every Person here, is the Person of one and the same God. But a man may here ask, what it was whereof these three bare witnesse. St. John therefore tells us (verse 11.) that they bear witnesse, that God hath given us eternall life in his Son. Again, if it should bee asked, wherein that testimony appeareth, the Answer is easie;  for he hath testified the same by the miracles he wrought, first by Moses; secondly by his Son himself; and lastly by his Apostles, that had received the Holy Spirit; all which in their times Represented the Person of God; and either prophecyed, or preached Jesus Christ. And as for the Apostles, it was the Character of the Apostleship, in the twelve first and great Apostles, to bear Witnesse of his Resurrection; as appeareth exprssely (Acts I. ver. 21, 22.) where St. Peter, when a new Apostle was to be chosen in the place of Judas Iscariot, useth these words, Of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning at the Baptisme of John, unto that same day that hee was taken up from us, must one bee ordained to be a Witnesse with us of his Resurrection: which words interpret the bearing of Witnesse, mentioned by St. John. There is in the same place mentioned another Trinity of Witnesses in Earth. For (ver. 8.) he saith, there are three that bear Witnesse in Earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Bloud; and these three agree in one: that is to say, the graces of Gods Spirit, and the two Sacraments, Baptisme, and the Lords Supper, which all agree in one Testimony, to assure the consciences of beleevers, of eternall life; of which Testimony he saith (verse 10.) He that beleeveth on the Son of man hath the Witnesse in himselfe. In this Trinity on Earth the Unity is not of the thing; for the Spirit, the Water, and the Bloud, are not the same substance, though they give the same testimony: But in the Trinity of Heaven, the Persons are the persons of one an the same God, though Represented in three different times and occasions. To conclude, the doctrine of the Trinity, as far as can be gathered directly from the Scripture, is in substance this: that God who is alwaies One and the same, was the Person Represented by Moses; the Person Represented by his Son Incarnate; and the Person Represented by the Apostles. As Represented by the Apostles, the Holy Spirit by which they spake, is God; As Represented by his Son (that was God and Man), the Son is that God; As represented by Moses, and the High Priests, the Father, that is to say, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is that God: From whence we may gather the reason why those names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the signification of the Godhead, are never used in the Old Tesament: For they are Persons, that is, they have their names from Representing; which could not be, till divers men had Represented Gods Person in ruling, or in directing under him. 

Thus we see how the Power Ecclesiasticall was left by our Saviour to the Apostles; and how they were (to the end they might the better exercise that Power,) endued with the Holy Spirit, which is therefore called sometime in the New Testament Paracletus which signifieth an Assister, or one called to for helpe, though it bee commonly translated a Comforter. Let us now consider the Power it selfe, what it was, and over whom.

 

Hobbes's generalized notion of Person and Personation as a building block of human reality and a tool for social-dramatistic analysis is further commented here:

"How to Make Artificial Persons: Hobbes's Dramatistic Theory of Interaction and of Political Representation." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 10 Oct. 2015.

         Academia 14 Jan. 2022.*

         https://www.academia.edu/68132891/

         2022

—oOo—

 

El arte (dramático) de la Vida

 Henry Fielding, Amelia, I.1

Capítulo Primero: Que sirve de Introducción:

Veránse en esta Historia los diversos accidentes que sucedieron a dos dignos esposos después de su unión con los estrechos lazos del matrimonio. La mayor parte de las desgracias que tuvieron que sufrir fueron tan grandes, y los incidentes que las causaron tan extraordinarios, que parecen haber apurado toda la malicia y las invenciones más exquisitas que la superstición atribuye a la Fortuna. Que la Fortuna pueda tener parte en nuestras cosas, ni aun que exista semejante ente en el Universo, es lo qeu yo me guardaré muy bien de decir. En todos tiempos ha sido injusta con la Fortuna la voz pública, atribuyéndole gran número de sucesos, en los cuales no tiene ella parte alguna. Muy duro se me hace que no sea posible explicar por medios naturales la ventura de los malvados, las desgracias de los necios y todas las miserias que las personas sensatas se acarrean ellas mismas muchas veces por abandonar las sendas de la prudencia, y seguir ciegamente los movimientos de su pasión dominante; en una palabra, todos aquellos acontecimientos de que se acusa por lo ordinario a la Fortuna, aunque no se tenga más fundamento para ello ,que el que uno que juega mal tiene para quejarse de su desgracia en el ajedrez.

Si los hombres maldicen las más veces sin motivo a este ente imaginario, también se hallarán precisados a recompensarle de este agravio, dándole en otras ocasiones el honor que no merece tampoco. Salir de las tristes consecuencias de una imprudente conducta, vencer a la desgracia luchando valerosamente contra ella, es uno de los más nobles esfuerzos de la prudencia y de la virtud. Y así el que llamase a semejante hombre afortunado, se explicaría tan impropiamente como el que diese el mismo nombre a un Escultor o a un Poeta por haber hecho una Venus o una Ilíada.

La vida, así como cualquier otra cosa  puede ser mirada como un arte, y no deben tenerse los grandes incidentes de ella por casualidad, como no se tienen por tales los diferentes miembros de una Estatua, o de un excelente Poema. Los Críticos no se contentan con ver en todo esto que una cosa es grande; quieren saber cómo y por qué lo es. Examinando con cuidado los diferentes grados, por los cuales todo modelo llega a la perfección, aprendemos a conocer verdaderamente la ciencia que con este modelo se ha formado. Ahora, pues, las historias del género de ésta pueden, con razón, pasar por modelos de la Vida Humana, y así el reflexionar sobre las particularidades de los diversos incidentes que se enderezan a la catástrofe o al complemento del todo, y sobre las más pequeñas causas que han atraído estos incidentes, es el medio más propio para instruirnos en la más útil de todas las artes, que yo llamo El Arte de la Vida.

 

Drama from the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

 

British drama c. 1700-1950—from the first edition of David Daiches' Critical History of English Literature:

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the Restoration dramatic works persisted for some time after the political and social conditions that bred it had disappeared before gradually giving way to a more moral and more sentimental kind of drama. The charting of the course of eighteenth-century drama is a tedious business, for, with a few exceptions, it is a drama of very little literary interest or quality. Indeed, this can be said for the great bulk of English drama between Congreve and Shaw. The drama was never to recover the central position it held in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The rise of the novel was partly responsible for this, as was the growing power of the theatrical manager, who decided what plays were to be accepted and, by putting on only what he thought could be relied on to appeal to popular taste, put the hack entertainer above the man of letters, thus eventually creating a damaging divorce between the theater and the creative literary minds of the age. Theatrical history after the seventeenth century has no necessary connection with literary history. True, the eighteenth century was an age of great actors and actresses, but their very acting skill had a blighting effect on the drama as literature, for they depended more and more on their virtuosity and less and less on the material with which they were provided, exploiting their abilities and personalities rather than the potentialities of the plays: it was the beginning, in a sense of the star system, which has done so much harm in our own time. Several paradoxes resulted from this situation. Shakespeare was regularly performed and was immensely popular, but the Shakespearean repertoire of the eighteenth century was a theatrical rag-bag of patched and "improved"plays and parts of plays which would horrify a modern producer. The reaction among serious critics was to lead them to see the true Shakespeare as a writer of closet plays, and the ignoring of Shakespeare's theatrical skills by men of letter went on through much of the nineteenth century. The dominance of the theater in the eighteenth century and the ignoring of the theatrical tradition in literary dramatic criticism in the nineteenth were equally harmful. It was all part of the divorce between art and entertainment which has been such a disturbing feature of modern culture. The dominance of the manager was part cause and part effect of the dominance of the audience; the audience dominated because a playwright was now dependent on the audience, rather than on aristocratic or royal patronage, for his success. The same can be said of the public for novels and other literature, but the effects here were not harmful in the same way, partly because the audience for literature was wide and more varied and at its best more intelligent than the audience for acted drama. There was a real drop in the intelligence of theater audiences in the eighteenth century, for reasons which are complex and not easily formulated.

Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) was effective as an attack on the immorality of the drama because it coincided with a rising tide of bourgeois opinion. Restoration drama was written for a homogeneous audience of court wits who looked with equal contempt on London merchants and country squires. But the homogeneity of theatrical audiences was rapidly giving way to something much more mixed; the rising middle classes, who have featured so often in the preceding chapters, were buying their way into the squirearchy and the aristocracy, and the same situation which led Addison and Steele to write essays to provide a cultural surface for Londoners seeking to move with some assurance in society led to the theaters being filled by people who did not quite know whether to be titillated or shocked by the Restoration ethos. The drama reflected this uncertainty. Instead of the witty play between the sexes in which the conflicting claims of security, reputation, and sensual appetite were balanced against each other in a fundamentally amoral manner, we find indecency and innuendo in the first four acts being replaced by repentance and moral sententiousness in the fifth, which was a way of having one's cake and eating it. This transitional and hybrid kind of comedy soon gave way to a kind more thoroughly sentimental and moral. These terms can be variously defined, but in this context "sentimental" implies the mixing and even interrupting of action with frequent displays and expressions of pity and other emotions indicating a tender mind and a heart easily moved, while "moral" means the equally frequent expression of edifying generalization, sometimes self-congratulatory, sometimes reproving, as well as a plot calculated to show virtue rewarded and vice frustrated. It is easy to be condescending about the influence of bourgeois morality on the drama, but we must remember that all great literature has a true moral pattern and the amorality of Restoration comedy, however brilliantly it might show, was based on a shallow and cruel view of life on which no truly great art coul be founded. Our condescension is inevitable, however, because the morality in so many early eighteenth-century plays is laid on so crudely and thickly and is not adequately realized in the texture of the work as a whole. Richard Steele, who made a genuine and praiseworthy effort to replace the hollow moral world of Restoration drama by something with more humanity and decency, produced four comedies (including The Tender Husband, 1705, and The Conscious Lovers, 1722) which are of interest because of the determined belief in the essential goodness of the human heart which they display, and the manner in which he manipulates the action to illustrate this belief, but though there are moments of tremulous emotion and intense pathos, as well as some lively dialogue and comic incidents, the plays are not true comedy in any acceptable sense of the term; they have not the wit of Congreve, the power of Ben Jonson, or the golden combination of humor and wonder we find in Shakespeare's "middle comedies"; they are of interest as indications of a trend rather than as fully realized works of dramatic art.

How strong the trend was, how deep-seated the popularity of sentimental drama in the eighteenth century, and to what an extent a strong moral and sentimental coloring with a plot contrived to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked would compensate in the eyes of contemporaries for literary quality, can be seen in the plays of Richard Cumberland, whose sentimental comedy The West Indian (1771) was immensely popular and is still mentioned respectfully by literary historians. The one good quality this play does have is speed of action: events bowl along at a great pace. But the dialogue, the situations, the characters, the plot, are all preposterous, all simply slick manipulations of what had by long become stock dramatic properties. The hero, a young man from the West indies of good heart but impulsive temperament (rather like Tom Jones) behaves with exaggerated and flamboyant generosity, gets himself involved in ridiculous misunderstandings with the other characters, who are either all equally goodhearted or else thorough villains, and in the end is proclaimed the long-concealed son of the goodhearted merchant in whose house the play opens. The following extract from Act V must serve as a sample of the dialogue:


Belcourt: Keep me no longer in suspense; my heart is softened for the affecting discovery, and nature fits me to receive his blessing.
Stockwell: I am your father.
Belcourt: My father! Do I live?
Stockwell:  I am your father.
Belcourt: It is too much; my happiness o'erpowers me; to gain a friend and find a father is too much; I blush to think how little I deserve you. (They embrace).
Dudley: See, children, how many new relations spring from this night's unforeseen events, to endear us to each other.

Writers of this kind of comedy never achieved a proper kind of stylization. Their plays were set in contemporary society, but the dialogue employed neither the stylized wit of the Restoration dramatists nor a language that was able to sustain any colloquial tone beyond a few intermittent sentences. As soon as the characters got under way they began expressing themselves in long, sententious speeches which are not artificial enough for a purely formal style and not natural enough for the illusion of realism. And the dramatists' horror of what was "low" closed to them a major source of robustness and vigor. It is only after reading many plays of this kind that one can appreciate the comic iconoclasm of Goldsmith and Sheridan in comedies which, though they may appear sentimental enough to modern eyes, were in fact directed against the sentimental gentility in the drama of the time. They had been anticipated in this by occasional satirical comedies—George Colman's Polly Honeycombe (1760) for example—but Goldsmith's The Good Natured Man (1766) strikes more directly at some of the most popular desires of the contemporary dramatists, even though he has his own moments of high sentimentality and he never really mastered the problem of stylization: his dialogue is often as cumbersome as Cumberland's.

 

 

In She Stoops to Conquer (1773), Goldsmith did very much better. Trivial though the plot is, and mechanical though the devices are which Goldsmith uses in order to project the humor (a young man thinks he is at an inn when he is really at a private house, and behaves accordingly, to the astonishment and indignation of his host), there is a rollicking ease about the play which had not been seen in English comedy for a long time. It is perhaps an indication of the poverty of eighteenth-century drama that this simple-minded comedy should enjoy the reputation it does, but it does possess genuine comic life. This is even truer of the comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). In The Rivals (1775) we can see Sheridan working toward his comic ideal, and trace the Restoration and Jonsonian elements he drew on; it is a spirited play with some lively Jonsonian humors and real comedy of character. Lydia Languish, the girl who is so soaked in romantic fiction that she will not marry unless she can elope under difficulties according to the best novels, is in the same ironic vein as Mark Twain's picture of Tom Sawyer's efforts to romanticize the escape of Jim in Huckleberry Finn; it is simpler and cruder, but it is dramatically achieved. And Mrs. Malaprop, though again a simple satiric conception, looks back, however faintly, to Shakespeare's middle comedies as well as forward to Dickens. The School for Scandal (1777) is Sheridan's masterpiece. It has a strong satirical note which is almost (but never quite) reminiscent of Jonson; but the wit is real, the character drawing vigorous and unsparing, the air of knowing the world as it is (something quite lacking in most eighteenth-century comiedies) genuine and refreshing. And Sheridan has learned how to handle dialogue that has both naturalness and order. The brief "afterpiece," The Critic (1779), intended to be put on after a full-length play, is admirable satire of the vanities and fashions of playwrights and critics and tells us much about the run-of-the-mill eighteenth-century tragedy which nobody now reads.

It is by the parodies of it that eighteenth-century tragedy can be best looked at from the perspective of the twentieth century, for the parodies are at least readable, and in some cases extremely funny. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb the Great (1730) is hilarious. By the time Fielding wrote, the moralizing, blank verse tragedy, generally conforming to the neoclassic "unities," on a theme from ancient or English history had become so standardized in manner and matter that it was clearly doomed as a dramatic form. Addison's Cato (1714) was the earliest successful play of this kind, a tragedy in end-stopped blank verse (mostly with "feminine" endings) with a minimum of action and a greta deal of complacent speeches about his own virtue by Cato, and a perfunctory love interest hitched on to a play whose real motive is (in Johnson's well-known description) to provide "a succession of just sentiments in elegant language rather than a representation of natural affections, or of any state possible or probable in human life." The whole thing is utterly lifeless, and the blank verse adds no poetic dimension of any kind to the total pattern of meaning. This is how Cato talks:

Then let us rise, my friends, and strive to fill
This little interval, this pause of life
(While yet our liberty and fates are doubtful)
With revolution, friendship, Roman bravery,
And all the virtues we can crowd into it;
That Heaven may say, it ought to be prolonged.
Fathers, farewell—the young Numidian prince
Comes forward, and expects to know our counsels.

When Juba, the "young Numidian prince," comes forward and hears Cato's resolution, he replies:

The resolution fits a Roman senate.
But, Cato, lend me for a while thy patience,
And condescend to hear a young man speak.
My father, when, some days before his death,
He ordered me to march for Utica
(Alas! I thought not then his death so near!)
Wept o'er me, pressed me in his aged arms. . . .

This is a fair sample of the wooden verse in which this lifeless play is written. One need not pursue this kind of tragedy through James Thomson's Sophonisba (1730) to Dr. Johnson's Irene (1749). The wonder is that the mode survived as long as it did.

Another kind of eighteenth-century tragedy aimed at pathos rather than at moralizing dignity. Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent, 1703 (derived from Massinger's The Fatal Dowry), was a fountainhead here; his other tragedies (Jane Shore, 1714, Lady Jane Grey, 1715) wring pathetic scenes out of the predicaments of historical heroines. The verse is the same sort of emasculated Fletcher we saw in Cato:

No, though the royal Edward has undone me,
He was my king, my gracious master still,
He loved me too, though 'twas a guilty flame,
And fatal to my peace, yet still he loved me;
With fondness and with tenderness he dote
Dwelt in my eyes, and lived but in my smiles.

But Rowe's plays have a real emotional pattern, and the pathos, if only pathos, is achieved. The eighteenth-century domestic tragedy, developing a similar kind of pathos from the misfortunes of middle-class characters, is closely related to the kind of play written in Rowe, but the shift in class interest is of the first importance for the future of the drama, for it set the pattern fro more than a century and a half of tragedy. This is the tribulations of ordinary people displayed in a prose drama in which the morality is emphasized by a simple division of characters into black and white and a perpetual uttering of moral platitudes by the good. George Lillo's The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731) tells the story of a good apprentice seduced by a wicked woman into, first, robbery of his master, and then, murder of his uncle. The merchant is the epitome of virtue and integrity, as are his daughter Maria (who loves the hapless George Barnwell) and his other apprentice Trueman—indeed, as is Barnwell himself, who is dominated and led astray by Millwood, the thoroughly wicked and cunning she-devil. Barnwell goes to the gallows repentant and sure of grace, after having vainly tried to turn his gallows-mate Millwood to God. His last words are: "Since peace and comfort are denied her here, may she find mercy where she least expects it, and this be all her hell"! Thorowgood, the good merchant, can only let justice take its course, advising his errant apprentice: "Bear a little longer the pains that attend this transitory life, and cease from pain for ever." His normal diction is more orotund, as is his reproof to Barnwell for not turning up one evening (he was in fact in Millwood's clutches): "Without a cause assigned, or notice given, to absent yourself last night was a fault, young man, and I came to chide you for it, but hope I am prevented. This modest blush, this confusion so visible in your face, speak grief and shame. When we have offended Heaven, it requires no more; and shall man, who needs himself to be forgiven, be harder to appease? If my pardon or love be of moment to your peace, look up secure of both." The real interest of the play lies in Barnwell's remorse and repentance. It is a sign of the general wretchedness of English tragedy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that The London Merchant is still discussed with respect by historians of the drama.

The eighteenth century was also the great age of pantomime and of spectacular shows depending on ingenious and abundant use of stage "machinery." The pantomime—developing as a result of converging strains from masque, mime, commedia dell' arte, and dance—was often performed as an afterpiece, but eventually became a full-blown and established form of its own; in the nineteenth century it became a peculiarly English institution. Italian opera was also opopular in England in the early eighteenth century, and it was as a patriotic reaction against it that the ballad-opera developed, set to native airs and written in English. The first and greatest of the ballad-operas is John Gay's The Beggars Opera (1728), discussed in Chapter 2. There were many imitations of Gay's successful ballad-opera produced in the first half of the century; it eventually gave way to the comic opera, where the music is specially composed instead of being taken from traditional airs. There were successful comic operas in the 1760's, and Sheridan's The Duenna (1775), a prose comedy with incidental songs composed by Thomas Linley, enjoyed enormous success. Love and intrigue form the main interest of late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century comic opera; it was left to Gilbert and Sullivan to rejuvenate a by then much jaded form by turning it to satiric purposes.

The literary currents of the late eighteenth century affected the drama in various ways, but again the divorce between literature and the theater kept most serious "Romantic" drama off the stage, and again the lack of mutual influence between literature and the theater was harmful to both. Blank verse tragedy on high classical themes gave way as the eighteenth century progressed to a tragedy differing little in technique and moral sententiousness, but using more exotic themes and, like the domestic tragedy, stressing the pathetic. John Home's Douglas (1756) took its subject from the Scottish ballad "Gil Morrice," and Robert Jephson's The Count of Narbonne (1781) is derived from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto. Stress on the sensational and the pathetic, and the ability to arouse tears as the principal criterion of dramatic excellence ("the ladies in the audience were distinguished by their virtuous distress," one critic remarked), were not conducive to the development of a serious tragedy. Various kinds of rhetorical plays, some with Shakespearean or would-be Shakespearean echoes, and all endeavoring to exploit the emotional moment, were produced at the turn of the century, but few had any success on the stage.

What kept the theater going were melodrama and farce, the former (in the earlier part of the nineteenth century) often with Gothic trimmings and atmosphere. Distressed virtue, hardhearted villainy frustrating innocent love, the manipulation of the action so as to expose and punish the villain, often with the revelation of a concealed crime, and to bring hero and heroine together, all done in a standardized rhetorical speech, became a regular formula for melodrama, which soon moved from the Gothic to the domestic, so that the tradition of Lillo's London Merchant can still be traced. Early nineteenth-century farce is a crude stuff, of no literary interest. Burlesque and extravaganza sometimes had rather more to offer; the latter, as developed by J. R. Planché, Robert Brough, and H. J. Byron, constituted the tradition taken over by W. S. Gilbert in the comic operas he wrote with Arthur Sullivan as composer. The tradition was to combine the supernatural, the gorgeous, and the satirical, to include burlesque and parody on the one hand and light fantasy on the other, while making lavish use of spectacle.

In the comedies of T. W. Robertson (Society, 1865, Caste, 1867, and others) there is a somewhat faint attempt to escape from the mechanical formulations and standardized sentimentalities of earlier nineteenth-century drama and cast an ironic eye on the social life of the time. But Robertson never really escaped from the conventions of his day: his ironies never cut deep, and they are compatible with an acceptance of all the Victorian moral and social commonplaces, but he did look at some contemporary social problems that other Victorian dramatists had wholly ignored. Put beside the domestic melodrama of Tom Taylor (Still Waters Run Deep, 1855), Robertson's plays represent an advance toward a more responsible and serious comedy. But there was no immediate response. The cloying sentimentalities of James Albery's Two Roses (1870) and the combination of melodrama and prettiness in the plays of Sydney Grundy as late as the 1890's show how strong the older tradition was.

With Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934), Victorian drama becomes more sophisticated, more technically accomplished, and concerned with moral problems more delicate and more contemporary than those dealt with in nineteenth-century melodrama. Both began in the older style, and worked their way out of it. Jones's The Silver King (1882) is in the sentimental melodramatic manner, brilliantly done in its way, almost the apotheosis of its kind; but Breaking a Butterfly (an adaptation of Ibsen's  A Doll's House), Saints and Sinners (both produced in 1884), The Crusaders (1893), and The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) are "problem plays" dealing with some of the moral dilemmas of middle-class life. The Case of Rebellious Susan was prefaced by an admonitory letter to Mrs. Grundy. Neatly constructed, with brisk dialogue and an air of knowingness, Jones's plays did not wholly escape from conventions of the melodramatic tradition, which are intermittently recognizable. Pinero's later plays concentrate on problems arising from the relations between the sexes in modern society: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) is his most serious effort, and the most "modern": it deals with the emerging dilemma of a "woman with a past," and forces the implications of attitudes to women's behavior in a man's world to a disturbing conclusion. But neither Jones nor Pinero were more than skillful theatrical practitioners who grew impatient with the mechanical patterns of drama as they found it and tried to provide novelty and depth by discussing problems of contemporary morality. They had the wit neither of Wilde nor of Shaw, nor did they have the literary imagination or the depth of moral and psychological understanding to be able to present a social problem as a tragic one.

The satirical wit, verbal dexterity, and keen eye for what was vulnerable in contemporary literary fashion, gave the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) a brilliance and a vitality like nothing else on the Victorian stage. H. M. S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance, (1880), Patience (1881), The Mikado (1885), and others are often thought of as delightful musical fantasies suitable for children, but in fact there is a comprehensiveness and a cruelty in Gilbert's destruction of the conventional romantic world by artful ridicule that strike at the heart of Victorian civilization. This may sound like a pretentious remark to make about a writer who was after all essentially an entertainer and who is generally regarded only as such; but a close look at his work reveals that behind the playfulness, the comic exaggeration, the absurd overemphasis of popular convention, there lies an almost nihilistic sense of the ridiculousness of human emotions and human dignity. It is unlikely that he was really aware of the implications he allowed into his own work, and there can be do doubt that Arthur Sullivan thought of his colleague's plays as nor more than gay and amusing parodies with moments of lyrical feeling to be set in appropriate tuneful music. Sullivan's music, admirably tuneful though it is, and sometimes most amusingly parodying Italian opera, lacks a dimension we find in Gilbert's words.

The plays of Oscar Wilde have more surface brilliance and less genuine satiric undertone. Wilde belonged to the fin de siècle esthetic movement which believed in art less an escape from that as a substitute for life: he acted out his estheticism in his own career, even to the extent of allowing his life to fall into a tragic pattern which he might easily have escaped, because he wanted to be hero in a trial scene and felt impelled to carry the play of his own life to its melodramatic conclusion. Wilde's estheticism was not essentially in conflict with Victorian melodrama; he wanted to subtilize it, just as he wanted to make sensationalism witty. The poets of the nineties who drank themselves to death or otherwise wore out their lives in suicidal poses were, like Wilde, acting out their esthetics. Though Gilbert, in satirizing the movement in Patience, was running together a number of different strains, including the Pre-Raphaelite, he was in essence right in presenting the behavior of the poet Bunthorne as a deliberate pose to shock and impress:

Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an
      apostle in the high aesthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily
      in your mediaeval hand.

That was in 1881; it was in the 1890's that the esthetic movement flourished most vigorously. Its members were out to shock, but also to demonstrate a way of life and a way of art (which were identical). The Yellow Book, which ran from 1894 to 1897, was in some degree the organ of these sophisticated and intelligent young men, though it contained a great deal more dull realistic fiction and conventional work of one kind or another than is generally realized and contained nothing by Wilde.

Wilde's plays were not the direct product of those views of arts and life which he expressed in his symbolic story The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) or in his carefully wrought fairy tales. In his comedies he wrote for the theater and for success. He thus took formulae from Victorian farce and melodrama, but treated the dialogue with a polished wit which really removed the whole action into a never-never land of ultrasophisticated stylization. The stylization is the very raison d'être of Wilde's plays. The plots are ridiculous, sometimes degenerating into cheap farce. But the dialogue imposes the order of an ideal wit on the society it portrays. He achieves this most perfectly in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a play wrought entirely out of the studied wit of the dialogue, which projects the society of upper-class leisure as an English world so emptied of earthiness and genuine emotional, moral, or physical reality, that it is pure style, a world where action exists in order to make possible the appropriate conversation and where the appropriate conversation is a ballet-like exchange of epigrams. It is not a profound art, if an extremely clever one, and it is not an art that could have any real influence. The tradition of wit which Wilde bequeathed to the modern comedy of manners proved too tenuous as well as too self-sufficient to be usable by others.

Meanwhile, the influence of Henrik Ibsen had been making itself felt in English drama. The propagandizing and translating by William Archer and the enthusiasm of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) helped to spread the influence but also conditioned the way Ibsen was understood in England. Shaw's study of Ibsen, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), presented the Norwegian dramatist as the exponent of a reforming naturalism with the emphasis on the prose "social plays," such as A Doll's House and Ghosts, and paying much less attention to the more poetic and symbolic plays. Suh a view suited Shaw's own ideas of the function of the drama. Shaw saw the drama as a vehicle for presenting in entertaining and provocative form for his views of the abuses and contradictions of the social order and his suggestions of the true way in which to view human experience and its institutions. His object was to satirize, no the invented characters in the plays, but the audience. "I must warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures." In his desire to shock rather than to lull, to provoke rather than to amuse, Shaw put into his characters' mouths discussions in which his characteristic wit and love of paradox were given full play. A favorite device of his was to stand the popular view on its head, thus both outraging and titillating his audience. Yet in many respects Shaw took over the idea of the "well-made" play from his predecessors. He had been a dramatic critic for years before he became a dramatist, and his experience in the theater had familiarized him with all the popular tricks of the trade, which he adopted and exploited with considerable virtuosity. Ibsen's great contribution, as Shaw saw it, had been twofold: the presentation on the stage of life as it is really lived in contemporary society, and the introduction of the discussion into drama. His own plays incorporated both features.

Shaw regarded himself as primarily an antiromantic. The romantic view, he claimed, got in the way of people's seeing what really went on in the world, with the result that it made them accept the most appalling horrors in the name of edifying slogans and under the guarantee of social approval. The Swiss soldier in Arms and the Man (1894) behaved as Shaw maintained a soldier actually does behave, not as the conventions of Victorian melodrama would have a soldier behave: the play exhibited what Shaw called "natural morality" as against the "romantic morality" of those who objected to it. But Shaw was too clever to present his natural morality directly. He took the accepted pattern of Victorian melodrama or farce or drawing-room comedy and, at the most effective moment, inverted it, as it were, transposing the parts of the conventional hero and the conventional villain; and then, having done that and having led his audience to believe that this is a revolutionary or an iconoclastic play, he inverts it again, and shows that the conventional hero is, after all, a hero—but in a new sense. This double investion is an immensely successful dramatic device, but it is more than that: it is part of Shaw's technique for making his audience look again and again at the particular situation he is presenting, until they have shed all illusions bred by either convention or by facile anticonventionality. The revolutionary hero of Man and Superman (1903) is built up into a conventional rebellious figure, then laughed at, then restored, in a different way, to his revolutionary status. The theme of this play is the way in which the Life Force works itself out in human affairs in order to improve the race—Shaw was a Lamarckian evolutionist influenced by Samuel Butler, believing that the Life Force cooperated with the individual will to achieve the further development of the human race. But he is least successful as a dramatist when dealing directly with such large themes. Back to Methuselah (1921), which he considered his masterpiece, is pretentious and dull, showing a most undramatic desire to reduce all human life to disembodied speculation.

In his Preface to Plays Pleasant(1898), Shaw wrote: "I can no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct shedding fictitious glory on robbery, starvation, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, cupidity, and all the other commonplaces of civilisation which drive men to the theatre to make foolish pretences that such things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial supremacy, national greatness and all the other names the newspapers call them. On the other hand, I see plenty of good in the world working itself out as fast as the idealists will allow it; and if they would only let it alone and learn to respect reality, which would include the beneficial exercise of respecting themselves, and incidentally, respecting me, we should all get along much better and faster." In the same preface, Shaw pleaded for a "genuinely scientific natural history." That is what Shaw considered his plays to present. In the Preface to Major Barbara, he called himself a "professor of natural psychology."

In other words, like so many great innovators in English literature, his cry was "back to nature"—and he used the word "nature" in Pope's and Dr. Johnson's sense of human nature rather than in Wordsworth's sense. Thus there were no conventional heroes and villains in his plays; but neither is there any of the worried pity that we get in Galsworthy's humanitarian plays. Shaw was not concerned with the pity of it: he was concerned to diagnose sham and release vitality. All Shaw's heroes and heroines—Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, Valentine in You Never Can Tell, Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Candida, Major Barbara—stand in their own way for vitality. And often the real villain is not a character in the play, but the audience. For the audience, the average playgoer, represents that thoughtless, complacent, sentimental society which, for Shaw, was responsible for so much distortion of vision and so much evil and suffering. readers of detetive stories have sometimes wondered whether a detective story could ever be written where the murderer turns out to be the reader; Shaw comes near to that in making his audience the true villain of his drama.

This kind of plan succeeds best when it deals with a social problem or situation familiar to the audience or at least recognizable to them as the kind of situation which, in however modified a form, might well arise in their own society. For Shaw, like the great eighteenth-century moralists, believed that generalizations about the society you know best, your own contemporary society, are valid for men at all times, and thus he cheerfully assumed that he understood Caesar or Saint Joan on the basis of modern analogies. But he did not understand them, for he lacked historical imagination; and these characters become in his hands modern Shavian heroes rather than convincing historical characters.

Shwa had his own sentimentalisms and theatricalities, as the character of Eugene Marchbanks in Candida (1895) clearly shows. Further, though he brought a new kind of intelligence to the drama, he did not create—or attempt to create—a new dramatic idiom in which the total dramatic meaning could be fully expressed. His long and detailed stage directions, in which not only the actions of his characters but their states of mind, emotions, tones of voice, and intentions are fully described as though in a novel, confirm by what is suggested by his criticism of Shakespeare—that Shaw had no conception of the drama as a literary art form in which the total pattern of meaning is achieved cumulatively and completely by the language put into the mouths of the characters as they talk to and interact with each other. Detailed psychological stage directions put the burden of conveying meaning onto the actor and producer and help to perpetuate that very dominance of the drama by the theater that Shaw as a dramatic critic had so deplored. Shaw, by challenging the censorship, bringing ideas back to drama, and using plays as a vehicle for intellectual stimulation and provocation, rendered an immense service to English theater. But his plays were not as new as drama as those early twentieth-century critics who talked about the "new drama" considered it to be. The Dutch-born drama critic Jacob thomas Grein founded the Independent Theatre in 1891, and it was the Independent Theatre Society that first presented Shaw to the theater-going public, full of exuberance about the "new drama." This movement was much influenced by Ibsen and sought to make the drama a vehicle for responsible discussion of modern problems. This is not in itself a dramatic objective. Neither Shaw nor any other Ibsenite worked out an essentially new way of exploring reality dramatically. Shaw's comedy of ideas is full of life and fun; comedies like Major Barbara (1905), Androcles and the Lion (1913) and Pygmalion (1913) are entertaining as well as critical and stimulating; but all this comes from the sparkle of Shaw's mind, not from a fully realized dramatic projection of a complex vision of life. Saint Joan (1923) is in many ways a brilliant play; it is not a tragedy, but a comedy with one tragic scene, and the comedy lies in the way in which Shaw interprets his historical characters in the light of his own modern understanding and preoccupations. He never really comes to terms with the miraculous in this play: he uses it for comic effect and to implement his view that sainthood is mrely inspired common sense, but, though this is amusing and even at first sight convincing, it begs too many questions to be ultimately satisfactory. Hens who have long ceased laying eggs aand suddenly start to lay when Joan appears provide a splendid comic opening to the play; but if miracles are simply natural events presented in such a way as to inspire faith (as Shaw argues), then how does he explain the eggs, or the miraculous change of wind? A miracle cannot be at the same time both a funny stage trick and a profound religious fact. The fact is that Shaw remained an entertainer and a master of all the tricks of the entertainment trade, and his wit and intellectual brilliance was never fully absorbed into a dramatic form of appropriate depth and scope. This is not to say that Shaw was a great writer whose plays do not fit into any accepted category, but rather that he was a dramatist of immense talent and prodigious wit whose limited view of the nature of literary art prevented him from seeing the limitations of his own artistic imagination and so from seeking a dramatic form which could contain all he had to say about man absorbed wholly into the dramatic texture. This is perhaps as much as to say that the greatest drama must be poetic, for it needs the extra dimension of expression if it is to achieve its complex pattern of meaning without expository or discursive glosses by the author.

Shaw's stature is most easily seen if we set his plays beside those by his contemporaries. St. John E. C. Hankin (1860-1909) attempted to deal seriously with the problems of contemporary society, but his plays lack both wit and the sense of life. A more accomplished dramatist was Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), whose sensitive and perceptive work as a critic and producer would seem to promise the subtlest kind of art in his own plays; but though a careful intelligence and a fine artistic sense are at work in The Voysey Inheritance (1905) and The Madras House (1910), they are too obviously contrived and lack the air of dramatic spontaneity.

How far technical theatrical skill could combine with a truly cunning exploitation of the sentimental tradition to achieve popularity in the age of Shaw is shown by James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937). Barrie was quite out of touch with the new literary movements of his time, but exploited with determination and professional assurance the emotions, whimsies, and sentimentalities implicit in the Scottish kailyard tradition and in so much Victorian and Edwardian middle-class feeling. He knew what he was doing; he wrought from the outside; as Edwin Muir has remarked, "his softness was really a kind of toughness, and the most deplorable fault of his work is not sensibility run to seed, but obduracy." The Admirable Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), Dear Brutus (1917) and Mary Rose (1920) are masterpieces of theatrical journalism. They are quite different in intention from John Galsworthy's (1867-1933) humanitarian fables of social and moral worry; such plays as Justice (1910), The Skin Game (1920), and Loyalties (1922) command respect and sympathy for their technical competence and humane feeling, but these two qualities are not enough to make a great dramatist.

For the most part, the mixture of drawing-room comedy and morality play hs continued to provide the ordinary fare of the British theatre-goer. After Wilde and Shaw some degree of wit and some degree of serious concern with the problems of modern social life have become de rigueur, except, of course, for pure knockabout farce or detective plays. Intelligent and skillful dramatists who artfully tailor their stories to the requirements of the theatre have not been lacking in the twentieth century: the tone can vary from sardonic irony to moral concern, the technique from straightforward use of realistically set scenes proceeding in chronological order to the use of flash blacks, single symbolic settings, or even a bare stage. Formulas once accepted are repeated again and again with minor variations.

By far the most interesting development in dramatic literature in the twentieth century has been the revival of poetic drama in the plays of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and T. S. Eliot (born 1888). Yeats began by writing dreamy plays on Irish mythological themes, but from the beginning he showed a symbolic power in both action and imagery which suggested levels of meaning that drama had not sought after for a long time. The Countess Cathleen (1892), the story of the Irish countess who sold her soul to save her people, but reached Heaven after all, is languid in movement and has an oddly mixed vocabulary, but its meaning came across clearly enough for it to cause riots among Dublin audiences. Yeats's treatment of the Deirdre story (Deirdre, 1907), concentrates (unlike Synge's in Deirdre of the Sorrows) on  the final moments with a heroic dignity which was part of his view of tragedy. His later plays are based on neo-Platonic and other mystic notions and symbols, and are highly stylized in a manner reminiscent of the Japanese no plays, by which Yeats was considerably influenced. Calvary (1929), The Resurrection (1931), Purgatory (1949), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) are strangely impressive symbolic plays for the full understanding of which some knowledge of Yeats's symbolic system is necessary but which even without this have a haunting suggestiveness that leads not to mere dreaminess but to ironic contemplation of human psychology and history. The language combines the colloquial and the ritualistic, and it is out of the way the two work together that the irony is distilled. His prose play The Words upon the Window-Pane (1934) stands alone in both theme and treatment; it is a powerful evocation of a few key scenes in the life of Swift.

Yeats's dramatic career transcended the Irish literary movement out of which it grew in the same way as his career as a poet transcended its Irish context. But the Irish background, the Abbey Thatre, the national consciousness, and the view of Irish and Anglo-Irish history are all important for an understanding of how Yeats came to be the kind of dramatist he was. The irish dramatic movement produced a number of humorous or sentimental quasi-realistic plays of modern Irish life. But it also produced, beside Yeats (whose later plays were not intended for the public theatres), the plays of John Millington Synge (1871-1909), including Riders to the Sea (1904), The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910). Synge turned to the speech and imagination of Irish country people to restore vitality to English drama. "On the stage," he wrote in his preface to the Playboy, "one must have a reality, and one must have joy: and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or an apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks." Synge deplored the debilitation of urban speech, and sought a vocabulary both poetic and real, both rich and natural. His own plays are not always successful in achieving this combination effectively, though the Playboy succeeds triumphantly as a comedy which is also a profound "criticism of life," while Riders to the Sea is a remarkable dramatic presentation of an elegiac situation redeemed from false pathos by the elemental dignity achieved by the language, and Deirdre of the Sorrows, in spite of its monotony of tone, is an experiment in a new kind of stylized, almost ritualistic, tragedy, that Yeats was to make much of.

Synge's poetic prose based on the speech rhythm of the Irish peasantry provided him with some of the resources of poetic drama. The other significant dramatist of the Irish revival was a purely prose artist. Sean O'Casey (born 1884) used Irish material as Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson and the other Irish national playwrights did, but in his best plays he used it with a sense of tragic irony, a violent species of humor, and a rich and hightly flavored language that gave his work real dramatic stature. His best play is Juno and the Paycock (1925), which successfully welds tragic melodrama (based in part on the real violence of the civil war), humor of character, and irony of circumstance into an original and impressive unity. The Plough and the Stars (1926) is a symbolic documentary play, tragic in tone, presenting the pattern of Ireland's tragedy. In his later plays O'Casey's own passions and prejudices tend to come between him and the dramatic work he is trying to create, and when in addition he turns to expressionist techniques suggested by German dramatists and by the American Eugene O'Neill the result is generally unsuccessful. The verbal vitality and vivid humor of his earlier plays gave way in his later to conventionally "colorful" language and a rather mechanical verbal symbolism.

T. S. Eliot's poetic dramas represent an attempt to restore ritual to drama in quite a different way from Yeats'. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) remains the most successful of his plays because the ritualistic element is implicit in the situation; the chorus of women of Canterbury are the archbishop's congregation and the archbishop's central speech takes ita place naturally as a sermon in an ecclesiastical context. But when Eliot moved away from the obviously ritualistic and tried to achieve overtones of myth and ritual in realistic plays of modern upper-class life, the clash of levels is dramatically disturbing. The Family Reunion (1939) is a most interesting attempt to render the theme of the Furies of Greek mythology and drama in contemporary terms. 

Eliot modulates the colloquial into the ritualistic and back again with impressive skill; the accents of conversation mingle or alternate with more formal kinds of utterance, choric or incantatory or stylized in one way or another, and the result is to build up a suggestive complex of meaning behind the overt action. But the attempt to deal with a religious-mythological theme in terms of the problems posed by family relationships in a modern country house is not altogether successful. Levels of meaning tend to get in each other's way instead of reinforcing or subtilizing each other. The hero's departure to expiate (in some unnamed way) his guilt is marked by his saying to his mother: "My address, mother, will be care of the bank of London until you hear from me," and this trivial precision about a detail of contemporary financial life tears the symbolic fabric of the action. In The Cocktail Party (1954) Eliot makes an even more strenuous attempt to combine the socially amusing with an underlying Christian-cum-classical symbolism, but the two levels never really come together, or, when they do, the result is likely to be embarrassing, as in the behavior of Sir Herny Harcourt Reilly in The Cocktail Party. The verse in these plays is so chastened and filed away that it is hardly recognizable as verse at all in the theater; it shows how far verse can be brought toward conversational prose without actually falling over the edge—a remarkable balancing feat.

In spite of movements toward new social responsibility and of every kind of technical experimentation in the theatre since the end of the nineteenth century, and in spite of a moderately successful attempt to bring poetry back to the acted drama., it cannot be said that the first half of the twentieth century pointed the way to any real resolution of the problem posed by the gap between art and entertainment which has been growing ever since the Jacobean period. The fragmentation of the audience, which has split the public for all the arts into highbrows, lowbrows, and middlebrows, and which is such a feature of modern civilization, has had more immediate and obvious effect on the theater than anywhere else. True, Eliot's later plays were box office successes, but his attempt to bring together drawing-room comedy and religious symbolism has not, as we have observed, wholly succeeded. The dramatist of the middle twentieth century has also got radio and television to contend with; whether these inventions will prove to be his salvation or his damnation depends on too many factors—social, economic, and educational among others—to invite prophecy.

British drama 1800-1950

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