Characters

Abstract

The animation of the character of Richard the Second for a hundred lines or so, in word and deed, spoken and unspoken thought, impulse, deep feeling, and deliberate choice, exemplifies Shakespeare’s basic means of setting the plays in action. But no more than that. From the first, he continued to experiment constantly and showed a seemingly endless interest in how persons presented themselves and were revealed without their knowledge. He must have watched actors closely, as well as persons in real life, and studied with great care all the complicated processes of speech. There was no scope in his manuscripts for long descriptive stage-directions about behaviour or intention, and he could not know whether his original punctuation would be preserved in the ‘parts’ which were written out by playhouse scriveners for use by the actors. He therefore had to learn how to orchestrate speech and performance solely by the words set down to be spoken, with the help of few and minimal directions, which might or might not survive unaltered into a promptbook or other copies. Such conditions did not daunt him; they seem, rather, to have stimulated new endeavours and refined his ways of using words.