Claudio Vicentini_Acting Theory in the Ancient World - Acting Archives

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AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 1 – April 2011was closely linked with a new requirement, that of presenting rigorously andconvincingly the precise image of a particular character.In fourth-century theory, the character – its function in poetic composition andthe significance of its presence in making a work – had gradually become thedistinctive element of theatrical dramatic form. In the Republic Plato traced thedifference between ‘simple’ poetry and ‘imitative’ poetry, observing that in theformer the poet spoke ‘in his own person’, while in the latter he reported thediscourse ‘as if he were someone else’, and in this way suited ‘his own words to thoseof the individual character’ as far as possible. And, he concluded, the form of thispoetry is that ‘of tragedy and comedy’. 37 Aristotle later established the famousdistinction between ‘narrative’ or ‘epic’ poetry and ‘dramatic’ poetry, explaining thatin the latter it is the actors who directly represent the whole action ‘as if they werethemselves the characters who lived and acted’. 38It is the presence of the character, then, the living motor force of the action, thatconstitutes the distinctive element of dramatic form. If, however, the character is toseem convincing and effective onstage, he needs an indispensable quality: anunderlying ‘coherence’ in his essential nature, the passions that agitate him, and theactions he performs. He cannot feel passions that are ‘out-of-character’, or showmoral qualities that have nothing to do with the actions in which he is involved, orperform actions that seem improbable for a person of his kind. As Aristotle explains:given, for example, someone with a character of this or that kind, what he says or doesshould seem to emerge from his character in accordance with the laws of truth andverisimilitude. 39The figures in the drama were, then, a rigorously pre-arranged combination ofcharacter, passions and actions. The different forms this combination could takewere codified, and this defined a sort of gallery of figures, or a typology of exemplaryprofiles of various kinds of humanity, identified by generational, social, economic ormoral categories. The typology was widespread in treatises on rhetoric or ethics.Aristotle’s Rhetoric, for example, distinguished the categories of the ‘young’, ‘maturepersons’, and the ‘old’, or the ‘rich’, the ‘powerful’ or the ‘unfortunate’. Each of thesefigures was assigned specific forms of passion and behaviour. 40Thus, in a perspective of this kind, each theatrical character had to correspond tothe parameters of an established typology, and, to render him adequately on stage,the actor had to reproduce precisely his expected passions and behaviour, avoidingattitudes or ways of behaving that might clash with the accepted code. It wasabsolutely wrong, Aristotle insisted, for example, to represent ladies of the nobility asif they were loose women, or, observed Lucian, bold heroes with a languid andeffeminate gait. 4137 Plato, Republic, III,393a-c and 394c.38 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a.39 Ibid., 1454a.40 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1388b-1391b. The typology of characters, defined by social, generational andmoral categories, is also reflected in the form of the masks. On this see the list of masks described inIulius Pollux, Onomasticon, IV,133-154.41 See Aristotle, Poetics, 1462a, and Lucian, The Fisherman, 31.10
Claudio Vicentini, Acting Theory in the Ancient World5. The New Form of Emotional InvolvementRepresenting characters and displaying their passions and attitudes was, then, theactor’s fundamental task. But to really depict a character in action it was not enoughto coldly put together a combination of features that fitted together with each other.A simple combination of the kind would have seemed inert and unconvincing. Toanimate it, the artist had to really feel, in the act of creation, the passions experiencedby the character.This rule, according to Aristotle’s Poetics, concerned the poets above all:the most persuasive poets are those that start from the same state of mind as theircharacters, and experience each time the very passions they intend to depict: so that, forexample, one whose soul is in turmoil will succeed in representing a soul in turmoilwith much greater truth, one who feels angry a soul in anger. 42It was an opinion that had been widespread in the Greek world for some time.Eighty years before, Aristophanes had already used it satirically in a comedy, theThesmophoriazusae, in which the poet Agathon, whose homosexual tastes were wellknown, appeared, stretched out languidly on a bed, clad in female clothing andsurrounded by elegant toilet articles. He explained that he had to behave like this forpurely professional reasons, claiming that no poet could write his plays if he did notassume the manners of his characters. To depict the female figures effectively hetherefore had to adopt all their ways and costumes.Thus Greek culture from the late fifth century BCE reveals a new way ofunderstanding the artist’s emotional involvement at the moment of creation.Alongside the archaic way, which theorized divine intervention able to produce astate of hallucinated and uncontrollable frenzy, there was a more recent conception,in which the artist’s participation consisted in his capacity to reproduce in himself arange of passions that rather than being ‘extreme’ and ‘disruptive’, were precise andcarefully defined, following the indications dictated by the type of character.Given this premise, then clearly the actor could do nothing onstage withoutbringing his own inner self into play. To represent the character he must really feel itspassions, and only in this way can he effectively render its attitudes and expressions.This is a carefully controlled and moderate emotional involvement however: theactor uses his own interior tension exclusively to render, with voice and gesture, predeterminedexpressive attitudes that are rigorously coherent with the figure to berepresented.On the other hand, the control that the actor must exercise over his feelings by nomeans limits the intensity of the emotional effect of his performance on theaudience, which is led to suffer, despair or delight as it follows the vicissitudes of thecharacters onstage. The ability to unleash the audience’s passions remained, in theopinion of the time, the fundamental criterion for evaluating the mastery of aperformer, and it was not for nothing that the most famous actors continued toboast of their ability to make the audience weep unrestrainedly. 43 But the audience’sinvolvement no longer happened through a mysterious contagion of divine origin. Itwas the simple result of a wholly natural process, already described by Plato, by42 Aristotle, Poetics, 1455a.43 See Xenophon, Symposium, III,11.11
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