melodie-avant-mots - Lacheret

are rolled out, as the poet’s voice comes to the fore and recedes, as the actor obtrudes
or vanishes behind her character, as our own self-consciousness rises and ebbs.
III.
Thus in great philosophical plays, the ‘play within a play’ may be especially
telling and is often the point at which the action shifts, where discovery and reversal
precipitate the play’s conclusion. In such dramatic interludes, the poet collects a stageaudience
to witness a staged action, all within the action of the play. That stageaudience
provides a middle term between the figures in the play and the paying
customers in the theater seats. In Doctor Faustus, the pageant of the Seven Deadly
Sins that Faustus witnesses with Mephistophilis, Belzebub and Lucifer is a comic
interlude whose last allegorical figure, Lust, presages Helen, the illusion that damns
Faustus at the very end, as he utters the most memorable lines of the play, and sounds
for all the world like Marlowe: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ And
burnt the topless towers of Ilium?/ Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss./ Her
lips suck forth my soul—see where it flies!/ Come, Helen, come, give me my soul
again.” In Hamlet, the whole play turns on the presentation of The Murder of
Gonzago, which then indirectly precipitates every murder to follow. In The Merchant
of Venice, where Portia is merely acting the role of a lawyer, risking her life to resolve
the conflicts created by the men around her, the court scene is also a play within a
play. In The Tempest, the marriage Masque is the crux of the play, when Prospero
suddenly remembers the almost uncontrollable evil that is about to undo his own
carefully laid plot, and utters the most beautiful lines of the play, perhaps in all of
English literature, where Shakespeare reveals himself as Prospero, as he will again at
the play’s Epilogue.
On the one hand, the interlude intensifies the illusion of the play, because we
the paying customers sit next to, almost next to, those other people in the stage
audience: this makes them more real. We are encouraged to identify the actor with the
role, as if the role were a real person. They witness what we witness, at the same time.
Thus Lucifer, Belzebub, Mephistophilis and Faustus stand beside us as we watch the
pageant of The Seven Deadly Sins; Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude sit beside us as we
watch The Murder of Gonzago; and Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand share our
marvel at the Masque that celebrates marriage.
On the other hand, the interlude undermines the illusion of the play, reminding
us, the ticket-holders, that the play is not real life. If we had been swept up in the
theatrical illusion, dissolved imaginatively in the plot of that second-hand life where
the roles are after all only placeholders and we can so easily insert ourselves, we are
set abruptly back down in our red velvet seats. For the play is only a play: the
characters in the play are bustling about writing and staging a play, in order to remind
us that it is all smoke and mirrors, baseless fabric, insubstantial pageant, rack.
And yet the play within the play must do both. Undermining the illusion of the
play, it brings our own voices to the fore, and reminds us too that the actors are people
like us, who are speaking someone else’s words, for a good reason. Intensifying the
illusion of the play, it lets us hear the poet’s voice, and the stable personages which he
has added to our social world, to whom the actors lend themselves. The result is the
polyphony I invoked earlier.
In Shakespeare and Marlowe’s plays, the polyphony is intensified, given even
more harmonies that underlie, dramatize and nuance the melodic interweaving of
voices, because the plays are written in poetry, the blank verse these two poets
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