Abstract
The Elizabethan development of a rhetorical theatre as the arena of politics and historical representation has at its basis assumptions to which middle-class Protestantism opposes itself — an opposition to the idea of a visible, common, indivisibly social life, an opposition that expresses itself in the construction of interiorities and in the assertion of an authoritative basis for the self in individual relation to God and his revealed word. But, as we have seen, that theatre, in its articulate self-reflexivity, its complex mapping of the unsaid against the spoken, can at least point to the opposite of itself. It has no simple unitary value as the symbol of a certain kind of social ‘order’. To examine the representation of the human as a political praxis (which is how Aristotle and the rhetoricians examine it) is to become aware of the complexity of Elizabethan theatrical practice, especially in an area that often unexamined notion of character has tended to obscure.
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Notes
Thomas Rymer, The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d and Examin’d by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the Common Sense of All Ages, in a letter to Fleetwood Shepherd, Esq/, in Curt A. Zimansky (ed.), The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer (Westport, Conn., 1956), p. 26.
A. Dacier, The Preface to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry (1705; repr. Los Angeles, 1959) A4r.
A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (first edn 1904, repr. London, 1976), p. 7.
See Joseph R. Roach, The Players’ Passion (Newark, 1985), pp. 29–31. Roach provides a valuable account of the links between rhetorical theories of acting and early medicine.
René Rapin, Les Réflexions sur la Poetique de ce Temps et sur les Ouvrages des Poetes Anciens et Modernes, ed. E. T. Dubois (Geneva, 1970), XVIII, pp. 98–100.
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, edited by Fredson Bowers (Oxford, 1974) Vol. II, Bk XVI, Ch. V, pp. 852–4, 856–7.
See especially George Winchester Stone and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: a Critical Biography (Southern Illinois, 1979).
See, for example, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s account of Macklin’s performance; A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York, 1952).
An often quoted remark. See, for example, Helen K. Smith, David Garrick (London, 1979), p. 12.
From Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1793) II. 222, quoted in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 6, 1774–1801 (London, 1981), p. 571.
Arthur Murphy, The Critical Heritage, Vol. 4 (London, 1976) p. 105.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford, 1894) Book II, Chapter 1, pp. 121–43.
Maurice Morgann, Shakespearian Criticism (1777; Oxford, 1972), p. 144.
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888, repr. 1964), Book I, Part I, Chapter I, pp. 1–7.
See Lawrence Gowring, Hogarth (London, 1972), p. 50.
Thomas Middleton Raysor (ed.), Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism (London, 1930), Vol. I, p. 82.
See Joel Peter Eigen, ‘Intentionality and insanity: what the eighteenth-century juror heard’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry (London, 1985), Vol. II, pp. 34–51.
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© 1990 Edward Burns
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Burns, E. (1990). Character and the Passions. In: Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09594-0_6
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