Theatrum Mundi

The ancient sense of man as spectacle for the gods is of course preserved in that old Shakespearean trope about the world being a stage - except the motif is pre-Shakespearean, inherited and transformed by him. This is the key. The world as stage is an emblematic image, one of a number that Shakespeare incorporates into his work only to hollow out and re-inflect. And the nature of this re-inflection is a seismograph registering a fundamental historical transformation. The medieval trope of the world as a stage involves the sense that we perforce play roles that we have not invented, and the sense of terrestrial unreality. It is inextricably bound up with a view of the world where supernatural agents determine human destiny, and where the secular is a place of illusion in contrast to a higher non-secular realm The seven stages of man, enacted on this stage are enacted in our spite, unconsciously. The ‘roles’ implied in this metaphor are ones we suffer, not create. And these roles are enacted for a gaze that is beyond our comprehension or ownership. There is some Other point of view from where our imaginary comforts and symbolic titles are hollowed out and rendered meaningless. Our truth lies outside us in the telescopic lenses of the gods, and this truth cannot be known or counterfeited by us. All in all, then, the metaphor points to the limits of agency, the hubris and vanity of our projects: emptiness, illusion, powerlessness. Understandably, the uses of the metaphor were religious, homiletic. The affects corresponding to this metaphor are those of melancholy.

But padlocked inside this metaphor, however, is a rather more subversive set of ideas and affects. If you take the metaphor rather literally in terms of the Shakespearean stage, what might it imply? The bare stage can mean anything, can represent any other space from a wood to a court, can assume whatever meaning we impute to it through theatrical convention. The meaning of objects on that same stage is likewise not fixed – a block of wood is now Lear’s throne, now a plinth for Hermione. The stage is defined by semiotic instability or easy reversibility. There is, moreover, an obvious split between actor and role. A commoner can play a king, a man can play a woman. Identities that had seemed pinned to particular categories of person turn out to be transferable or 'put on'. “The theatrical is the domain of liberty, the place where identities are only roles and one can change roles” (Susan Sontag).

In Shakespeare the stage is not simply given over to the ‘liberty’ of the theatrical. The first thing to underline is that, as so often in Shakespeare, the relics of the older world-view are still floating around, still allowed a weak power. Macbeth’s ‘brief candle’ speech, Jaques’ conventional plaint from AYLI both fall into this category. But such conventional expressions are now inside the theatrical frame rather than being the frame itself. In fact, everywhere in Shakespeare there are carriers of the old world view, those in thrall to superstition, religious piety, feudal hierarchy, chivalry. And there are those who, having cut loose from such ties, from the inherited roles which others venerate, are drawn to and made capable of self-invention. This self-invention can involve, simultaneously, the manipulation of those still bound by ancient bonds and pre-programmed roles. Iago, Edmund are close to the ‘intriguer’ mentioned by Walter Benjamin in his peerless Trauerspiel book. The intriguer is the choreographer of himself and others. The world presents itself as a scene and as a series of possible scenes, on which the other human beings are to serve as protagonists. For an Iago there is no inhuman presence watching or covertly guiding his actions. He is himself an inhuman presence, standing outside the roles and attitudes others suffer passively or readily internalise, changing and projecting roles and appearances as befits his design.. He delights in his own stagecraft, or that a scenario has been well executed, that someone has played his assigned role well. The actual protagonists, meanwhile, are unaware of being instruments in this private theatre of cruelty. As well as a choreographer, the intriguer is a consummate actor: Iago plays ‘honest Iago’ and plays it well. His appearance is controlled and projected, not confiscated by a hidden God. And that projected appearance fails to coincide with his essence. This is of course is the very definition of acting. It is what scandalised some Elizabethans about the profession – pretending to be something that you were not, forging a self (pun intended). But that something was capable of being forged cast doubts on whether it was so authentic anyhow. If a man could so easily play a woman, or a commoner so easily mime the gestures and authority of a king, is ‘womanhood’ or ‘kingship’ really a property of women or kings? Is womanhood or kingship not simply rhetoric, gesture, habitus?

The following quote is from Jean Agnew:

The old images of theatricality seemed no longer adequate. Where new theatrical groups were experimenting with new forms of cultural expression, introducing secular and sexual motifs, where actors were adopting and discarding the identities of the secular world like so many costumes and inadvertently revealing identity itself to be eminently transformable… revealing the roles and rhetorics of social life to be masterable and manipulable.. then the old medieval metaphor of the theatre as representing a lack of agency, a place of unreality seemed no longer quite right.

The metaphor can still stand, the world is a stage, but by re-assigning the parts of director, actor, audience, by seeing these as different moments of a single individual, its meaning has been turned round. This transformation in meaning was due not simply to sheer Shakespearean genius. It relates to historical changes in the nature of theatre and in the socio-economic system. Thus, the emergence of Public Theatres, the first buildings in England built specifically for theatrical performance & run by theatrical entrepreneurs, in a zone outside the city walls, is both a symptom and an agent of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Whereas previously, theatre had a) not had its own building and b) been subordinate to political spectacle (court theatre) or religious instruction (Mystery plays performed in inn yards), the Public Theatres’ degree of autonomy, in geographical, economic and political terms was a also space of both experiment and critical distance. But this space of experiment represents not ‘liberty’ in some transhistorical sense. It offers a certain model of personhood appropriate to a world emerging out of and in opposition to feudalism.

Comments

[Lars]

I like this post and the others in the category to which it belongs very much. They remind me of my favourite parts of Heidegger, early to late, as they pick up the related themes of witnessing/ being called/ being seen. I would like to write on these themes one day, remembering the criticism of the privilege granted to light, to seeing in many recent French philosophers (Deleuze and Foucault both reference Blanchot's 'To Speak is not to See'.

There is a great deal to be said on the topics you have raised, but I would like to ask you a little question instead: what of Hamlet and his use of the travelling players? Is he an 'intriguer'? I ask without any knowledge of Benjamin's study.

[Mark Kaplan]

Thanks Lars, an interesting question. Benjamin’s ‘intriguer’ is characterised thus in the Trauespiel book:

The organiser of its plot, the precursor of the choreographer, is the intriguer. His corrupt calculations awaken in the spectator … all the more interest because the latter does not recognise here simply a mastery of the workings of politics, but an anthropological, even a physiological knowledge which fascinated him. The sovereign intriguer is all intellect and will-power.

If ‘the intriguer assumes a dominant position in the economy of the drama’, it is because there is something inherently dramatic and daemonic about him: his detachment from this own role, his manipulation of others through spectacle, his assumption of the role of director and his ‘enjoyment’ of ‘scenes’ in terms that a dramaturge might use (Iago’s ‘It works well’) and excluding honour, morality etc. This can then be inverted in pointing to something daemonic in the dramaturgic intelligence as such, something I think Shakespeare recognises. I think that Hamlet does share much of this. His interaction with the players, his staging of the play, with the gratuitous and potentially confusing introduction of the Lucianus figure, all point to someone simply relishing the dramatic devices under guise of fulfilling the paternal mandate. My sense also is that once Ham has been detached from his inherited role of prince, he begins to relish the ‘roles’ and role-detachment which ‘madness’ authorises. The mousetrap is really a ‘daemonic’ use of Elizabethan court theatre – ie taking a form typically used to flatter the monarch and inverting it, using it against itself. What differentiates Ham from an intriguer, I suppose = ‘tortured inner self’ or illusion thereof (‘I have that within that passes show’ or the speech warning R&G away from trying to ‘pluck out my mystery’) and also the oppressive shadow of the paternal mandate, like some hangover from an older world.

Sorry, that’s a rather rushed response (just started teaching again!) but hope it goes a little way to answering your question.

[Matt]

Notable line from Shake:

"His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank;"

Mark, when you mention melancholy at first in this sort of dismissive way, as fundamentally associated with an old world view and metaphysical gaze (however much "the relics of the older world-view are still floating around, still allowed a weak power," or manifesting themselves in characters torn, and subject to manipulation--and I absolutely agree this is the fundamental tension in Shakespeare generally)...I'm left wondering about the limits of any such too-quick rescue of the "subversive set of ideas and affects," those "padlocked" within this metaphor. Whether the eternal risk of "that way lies madness" can be so easily assauged. Not to say that the materiality of the stage is unimportant (or that Shakespeare wasn't the very first Marxist--certainly he was more a cynic than a romantic in any case)...but to wonder whether the act itself of writing, and of staging, wasn't itself a kind of re-birth or encounter, and whether this remains what theatre, on some level...always is. The opposite of reverence...more real than reality, or a throwing 'out of joint' of the spectator, and the specator's time.

Perhaps you had it in mind already, but your post made me think of the final interview with the late Paul Ricoeur, who may have had Shakespeare in mind as well, who knows:

"PR: You know, the different ages of life meet with different kinds of happiness and unhappiness, as well as with, how should I say, different traps. The two traps of old age are sadness and boredom. Sadness? "It is so sad that one must leave all this, that one must prepare to go..." So here, I say, one must not succumb to sadness...To assent to sadness is what the old monks would call *acedia*. There is no modern word for *acedia*: it is a kind of melancholia, which is not Freud's melancholia, but perhaps it is Dürer's, when he paints Melancholia I, where one can see a woman, with her head lowered, a fist under her chin, looking at geometrical figures which no longer signify anything to her; and there is the clock which marks the hours. That is *acedia*: Dürer's *melancholia*. And the remedy is the pleasure of an encounter, the pleasure of always seeing something new, of rejoicing. And in the same gesture, I answer the second great temptation of old age--boredom. Not the boredom of children who, when bored, say: "Mummy, I don't know what to do." For me, it is the opposite. I do know what to do. But it is to say, "I have already seen all this, and I have already seen all that..." Well, the remedy is similar to that for sadness: to continue to be astonished. What Descartes at the beginning of his Treatise on Passions, called admiration."

To continue to be astonished...or, in Shakespeare's case, pehaps to astonish others?

http://www.janushead.org/

[Matt]

Not that I share such medieval views of course. But I do think the concept of melancholy is a harder nut to crack.

[Lars]

Cheers Mark, wonderful, really busy at the moment, wish I could respond in more depth, but perhaps you've saved my bacon because I'm talking on some of these topics at the dubious conference Infinite Thought mentioned a few days back.

[Mark K.]

Matt,

I wouldn’t want to dismiss melancholy at all, its one of my favourite indulgences as a matter of fact. Seriously, I’m not meaning to suggest that it is perforce linked to an outmoded world-view. But there is a version of it that is, and this version certainly appears in WS, sometimes as a ‘performance’ – as, arguably, in Hamlet’s ‘Withnail’ speech (‘I have of late..’). Indeed, I think H. both suffers and performs melancholy, and this ambivalence is interesting in its own right.

There’s some very interesting writing about melancholia in Agamben’s Stanzas (what I consider his best, most Benjaminian book). He talks about how melancholy (as opposed to the more modern category of depression, for example) involves the notion of a higher realm that has been ‘lost’ and/or that cannot be attained. One is paralysed by sloth on account of the enormity of the Ideals one has glimpsed etc.

Theatre is 'subversive', of course, not in absolute terms, but in relation to the old 'world view.' And I'm talking about Public Theatre. Court Theatre, for example, was a different story.