Abstract
‘I see by this woman’s features that she is capable of any wickedness’.1 William Hogarth’s observation on Sarah Malcolm, whom he visited in Newgate two days before her execution for murder, is the keynote of his subsequent portrait of her. She sits at a table in a plain cell which is painted in broadly behind her like a set of theatrical flats. Her head and upper body are lit brightly from an unseen source. Her arms are folded on the table-top, and she stares vacantly a little to the side, into the empty space that takes up nearly half the picture, ignoring both the spectator’s gaze, and the rosary that lies on the table in front of her.
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Notes
For a useful introduction to renaissance ‘character’ writing, see Benjamin Boyce’s The Theophrastian Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947) pp. 36–52.
For B. L. Joseph, in Elizabethan Acting (Oxford, 1951) it is an injunction to an almost Stanislavskian ‘naturalness’, a position more recently taken by
Anne Pasternak Slater in Shakespeare the Director (Brighton, 1983). Lina Lose Marker on the other hand places the scene in the context of Elizabethan aesthetic terminology. ‘Nature and Decorum in the Theory of Elizabethan Acting’ in The Elizabethan Theatre II, ed. David Galloway (Ontario, 1970) pp. 87–101.
Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London, 1985) pp. 94–5.
Strasberg is quoted in Foster Hirsch, A Method to their Madness (New York, 1984) p. 142. The story of Polos is told by the second-century (A.D.) Latin writer Aulus Gellius, in the collection of anecdotes and observations known as The Attic Nights (Noctes Atticae) VI. v. 7. For Gellius the point of the anecdote is that while it seemed that a story (fabula) was being enacted, the action presented was that of real grief.
I am thinking in particular of three books that appeared during the course of my work on this—Francis Barker’s The Tremulous Private Body (London, 1984),
Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (Brighton, 1984)
and Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy (London, 1985). I will return to their work, and the issues it raises, in my final chapter
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960) pp. 9–10.
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© 1990 Edward Burns
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Burns, E. (1990). Introduction. In: Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09594-0_1
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