Shakespeare's Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role-Playing and Acting PDF
Preview Shakespeare's Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role-Playing and Acting
SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGINED PERSONS Also by Peter B. Murray A STUDY OF CYRIL TOURNEUR A STUDY OF JOHN WEBSTER THOMAS KYD Shakespeare's Imagined Persons The Psychology of Role-Playing and Acting Peter B. Murray Barnes & Noble Books First published in Great Britain 1996 by m MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-333-63448-9 hardcover ISBN 0-333-64836-6 paperback First published in the United States of America 1996 by BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS 4720 Boston Way Lanham, MD 20706 ISBN 0-389-21015-3 hardcover ISBN 0-389-21016-1 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for © Peter B. Murray 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Acknowledgements vi 1 Introduction 1 2 The Behaviorism of B. F. Skiner 23 3 Character Formation and the Psychology of Role-playing and Acting 38 4 Hamlet 57 5 Prince Hal - King Henry V 103 6 As You Like It 146 7 Absorbed Action: "Sure this robe of mine does change my disposition" 173 Appendix: The Psychology of Habits 179 Notes 19 Works Cited 215 Index of Names 245 Index of Subjects 251 xoj Acknowledgements I want to express my gratitude to a number of people who have contrib- uted to the development and completion of this book. These include sev- eral of my faculty colleagues at Macalester College who have read and advised me regarding the material on psychology. Henry R. West, a col- league in philosophy, read my discussions of Aristotle's writings on the psychology of behavior; Sears Eldredge, a colleague in dramatic arts, read the chapter on the psychology of role-playing and acting; and Walter D. Mink, a colleague in psychology, read the chapters on behaviorism and the psychology of role-playing and acting. Irwin Rinder, a sociologist and the psychologists Roxane H. Gudeman, Lynda LaBounty, and Charles C. Torrey have each read the chapters on psychology and have also team- taught courses with me that included much of the material on psychol- ogy. Charles Torrey and Lynda LaBounty have, in addition, advised me extensively during the writing of the book, Charles especially on the psy- chology of role-playing and acting, and Lynda especially in my efforts to understand B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. In this connection, I am also indebted to the late Kenneth MacCorquodale, a close associate of Skinner, for his generous praise of my interpretation of Skinner's work. In the field of English I want to thank Richard Wertime for encourag- ing me after reading an early version of my ideas about the psychology of role-playing and acting in Shakespeare. And I want to thank Thomas D'Evelyn for his careful reading and his suggestions for revisions of the manuscript. Giles Gamble, my colleague in Shakespeare studies at Macalester, has read and re-read every part of the book, and I am very thankful to him for the great help and encouragement he has given me over the years. I am grateful to Macalester College for a special leave for research that was supported through money from a grant provided to the College by the Mellon Fund. I am thankful to the staff of the Macalester College and University of Minnesota libraries, especially James Summerfield at Macalester, for their assistance in obtaining materials for my research. I also want to thank Charmian Hearne, the editor at Macmillan who took an interest in my work and has shepherded it through the process of publication. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to the people who have helped me by doing the word-processing for the manuscript, Marit Enerson, Diana Vll viii Acknowledgements Lundin, and more recently Rhonda Isaacs, who has seen me through a series of revisions. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Karen Olson Murray, for her unflag- ging interest and support as a scholar in helping me to think through the ideas the book presents and as a writer in helping me to edit the manuscript. The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright-material: Benziger Publishing Company, for the extracts from St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols (1947-8). Everyman's Library, David Campbell Publishers Ltd, for the extracts from The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 3 vols. The publishers and the Loeb Classical Library, for the extracts from Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921-2). Macmillan, for the extracts from Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (1962). Oxford University Press, for the extracts from The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 2 vols (1937). Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, for the extracts from William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham; The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys; Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins; King Henry V, ed. J. H. Walter; The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross; and The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford. In quotations, all texts using Early Modern English spelling have been modernized in spelling and typography. 1 Introduction According to the conventional wisdom of literary theory, it is not appro- priate to respond to characters in literature as if they were real people. Today, in the context of post-structuralist theory, some critics question whether art does or can create stable representations of the world, whether language as a medium is used or even can be used to create characters that seem to behave in ways that accord with human psychology.11 think the conventional wisdom and the post-structuralist views turn us away from important modes of response to Shakespearean drama that depend on construing characters much as if they were real people.2 In this study I will argue that Shakespeare's plays invite us to construct his characters as imagined persons, and I will explain how the psychology of his time and ours can be used to support this thesis. I want to make clear what my thesis does and does not entail. I will not argue that Shakespeare's characters are psychologically realistic in every way. In addition, my view is not that Shakespeare designed his characters to be subjected to psychological analysis, but that the intelligibility of their psychology was implicitly important to him as part of the basis for the audience's responses to his plays. My analysis is thus intended to help us respond to the plays, not to make psychology appear to be the subject of the plays for its own sake. In creating a character, Shakespeare drew on his dramatic, literary, and historical sources, and also, no doubt, on his observations of other people and himself. In addition, it is likely that some characters were partly shaped by unconscious projections from his own psyche. Thus as he shaped characters he may not have thought analyti- cally about psychology at all. Some of Shakespeare's characters can be construed as approaching an illusionistic realism at times, and most can be construed as psychologically coherent, but for some there are episodes when there is little or no psychological coherence or realistic motivation. Also, characters sometimes say things that seem more appropriate as utterances of the actor or dramatist. Finally, the use of such conventions as the actors speaking verse precludes any notion that Shakespeare's theater depended on inducing the audience to believe that what they beheld in the playhouse was actual rather than fictional behavior. It has been argued that many elements of Shakespeare's dramaturgy lead the audience away from responding to his characters as we would to 1
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