Article
Tears
Robert
Cohen
TEARS (AND ACTING) IN SHAKESPEARE
Did
Shakespeare’s actors actually cry on stage? And if so,
how did they manage to do it? And what might that say about
the emotional "realism" of the acting in Shakespeare’s
company?
Characters
shed tears throughout the canon; moreover, they do it while
being observed by other characters. The words "weep"
and "tears" appear more than 600 times in the plays,
almost always in reference to someone sobbing in front of someone
else: Othello, for example, weeps when he confronts Desdemona
("Am I the motive of these tears, my Lord?" she asks
[4.1.43]); Menenius sobs before Coriolanus ("Thy tears
are saltier than a younger man’s," says Marcius [4.1.22]);
and Romeo wails in the Friar’s cell ("There on the
ground, with his own tears made drunk" complains the Friar
[3.3.83]). Often the sobbing is before a larger public: Claudio
has "wash’d" Hero’s foulness "with
tears" in front of the whole wedding party (Ado
4.1.153-54); and Enobarbus weeps openly amidst Antony’s
brigade of also-sobbing soldiers ("Look, they weep, And
I, an ass, am onion-eyed" [A&C 4.2.34]).
Sometimes
the weeping is contagious, as in the ubiquitous lachrymosity
of Titus Andronicus:
Titus:
...behold our cheeks
How they are stain’d, like meadows yet not dry,
With miry slime left on them by a flood?...
Lucius:
Sweet father, cease your tears; for at your grief
See how my wretched sister sobs and weeps.
Marcus:
Patience, dear niece. Good Titus, dry thine eyes.
Titus:
Ah, Marcus, Marcus, brother! well I wot
Thy napkin cannot drink a tear of mine,
For thou, poor man, hast drown’d it with thine own.
Lucius:
Ah, my Lavinia, I will wipe thy cheeks...
(3.1.136-39,
41-47)
Occasionally,
the weeping is from joy, not sadness. Timon cries with happiness
during his first banquet ("Mine eyes cannot hold out water,
methinks" [Timon 1.2.106-07]), provoking tears
of sympathy from his guests ("Joy had the like conception
in our eyes, and at that instant like a babe sprung up,"
says one [1.2.108-09]), as Apemantus confirms with "Thou
weepest to make them drink, Timon" (l. 109) Richard II
cries in rapture before his whole kingdom:
I
weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again...
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee my earth...
(3.2.4-5,
8-10)
That
Richard cries "as a... mother" implies a gender distinction
in the act of crying, which is often present in the Shakespearean
universe. When Flavius sobs, Timon looks at him in some astonishment:
"What, dost thou weep? ...Then thou art a woman and I love
thee," (4.3.482-83). In Shakespeare’s world, women
are expected to cry and men are not. "Tears do not become
a man," says Celia (AYLI 3.4.3). Contemporary
studies indicate Shakespeare echoes a genuinely physiological
gender trait. Further Shakespearean examples are in the endnotes
to this essay.
But
did the actors playing these parts produce real tears - meaning
wet ones ("Be your tears wet?" Lear asks Cordelia
[4.7.70], presumably determining the affirmative) - on stage?
And if so, how did they accomplish this? By some sort of technical
trick, or by somehow inducing a feeling of actual sadness?
Weeping
real tears "on cue" is of course a very difficult
feat: the physiology of crying is not subject to ordinary conscious
control, particularly under the pressure and enhanced self-consciousness
occasioned by public performance. But producing tears at the
right moment has always been the acid test of the actor’s
art in emotional roles, known since ancient times as the only
way to move the audience. Plato reported on the phenomenon in
his Ion dialogue, where Ion, the famous rhapsode (reciter
of poetry), tells Socrates that "[when I recite] the tale
of pity my eyes are filled with tears" and goes on to say
that his weepiness, then produces "similar effects"
on his spectators. Ion’s crying, Socrates guesses (and
Ion confirms) comes from the performer’s "inspiration,"
from having his "soul in an ecstasy," from being "out
of his senses...out of [his] right mind."
The
acting maxim of Horace, in his subsequent Ars Poetica,
was si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi:
"If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel
grief yourself. Actors in the ancient world went to some extremes
to "feel" this grief themselves. The Greek actor Polus
grieved for his "Orestes," while playing Electra,
by placing the urn of his real son’s ashes on stage with
him. The actors of the Renaissance had models, then, for crying
onstage, and for stimulating these tears emotionally.
Certainly
a verisimilitude of feeling was requisite in Elizabethan acting.
With all the crying depicted and talked about onstage, and with
the audience so close to the action (up to 3,000 people within
sixty feet of the center of the action), the "crying"
would appear ludicrous without glistening cheeks. John Webster
defined "an excellent actor" by declaring that "what
we see him personate, we think truly done before us," clearly
implying a demand for performance that directly reflects the
text. The anonymous eulogist of Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s
leading actor, said of that great performer that the roles of
Hamlet, Lear, Hieronomo, and Othello "lived in him,"
predating the Stanislavski dictum that the actor must "live
the life of the character on stage" by three hundred years.
In describing Burbage’s Hamlet, the eulogist effused that:
Oft
have I seen him leape into a grave
Suiting ye person (which he seemed to have)
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That then I would have sworn he meant to die...
That
"true eye" of Burbage/Hamlet must have been a wet
one, as immediately thereafter Hamlet offers to compete with
Laertes in a crying and fighting competition to determine who
loved Ophelia most: "Woo’t weep? woo’t fight?
...I’ll do it." (5.1.272-73,76) Burbage cried, somehow,
with Hamlet’s tears. "I would have sworn he meant
to die," said the eulogist of the actor. How did he do
it?
There
are several specific metatheatrical discussions in Shakespeare’s
plays, describing characters who are themselves actors, or are
acting or seeking to act, and who cry (or seek to cry) during
the performance of "plays" within Shakespearean plays.
Shakespeare’s
first reference to "performed" crying is in The
Comedy of Errors, and involves a crude gimmick: a manual
massage of the tear glands. Shortly after Adriana promises to
"weep what’s left away, and weeping die;" she
changes her mind: "No longer will I be a fool, / To put
the finger in the eye and weep" (2.2.203-04). Digital lacrimal
duct stimulation can, in fact, set teariness aflow, and presumably
that’s what Adriana tries to do.
Falstaff,
in improvising the "role" of King Henry at the Boar’s
Head, employs a biochemical stimulus to give the proper dimension
to his performance: "Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes
look red, that it may be thought I have wept, for I must speak
in passion" (1H4 2.4.384-86), he commands. Apparently some
sort of cognitive dissonance soon takes over the Knight, for
by the end of the skit he admits to be crying indeed: "now
I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears" (ll. 414-15).
The mere appearance of weeping, together with the passion of
the moment (and the headiness of the sack), has presumably lead
to Falstaff’s real (if unexpected) teariness.
A
different biochemical stimulus is employed in The Taming
of the Shrew, In the play’s induction, the First
Lord asks his page, Bartholomew, to perform a woman’s
role in the play-within-the-play, suggesting that the lad employ,
in the inevitable crying scene, a specific and time-tested technique:
And
if the boy have not a woman’s gift
To rain a shower of commanded tears,
An onion will do well for such a shift,
Which, in a napkin being close convey’d
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye. (Ind.1.124-28)
The
performer’s "watery eye" can arrive either by
"gift" or "shift," the Lord has made clear.
But as the gift is strictly feminine (as women cry more often
then men in Shakespeare’s universe, as noted above), some
special techniques must be employed by male actors - which,
of course, means all the performers in Shakespeare’s era.
The Lord’s "shift" is the hidden-onion trick,
which in fact leaves the boy like Enobarbus, "onion-eyed,"
when he ("she") enters, "her" tears "like
envious floods [having] ...o’errun her lovely face."(Ind.2.64-65).
Physical/biochemical stimulations (and crying simulations) of
Adriana, Falstaff, and Bartholomew are, of course, crude mechanical
devices (even if, as in Falstaff’s case, they lead to
a deeper emotional acting "connection" to the "role").
They have led some commentators to believe these were standard
Elizabethan/Jacobean acting techniques, however, and that Shakespeare’s
professional actors employed like devices. But we must not forget
that none of these three characters are actors. Falstaff, laments
Mistress Quickly, "doth it as like one of these harlotry
players as ever I see!" (2.4.395). In no way are their
techniques representative of the best stage acting methods in
Shakespeare’s time.
When
Bottom the Weaver is asked - in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream - to prepare the "role" of Pyramus, he
immediately realizes his greatest task: "That will ask
some tears in the true performing of it..." (1.2.25-26).
As contrasted, Bottom must realize, to a false performing
of it. Bottom’s Pyramus is a "sad lover," as
is Burbage’s Hamlet in the eulogist’s reference,
and as a sad lover Bottom seeks the audience’s empathy.
Only his own tears, Bottom knows, will generate like tears from
the audience: "If I do it [i.e. weep]," Bottom boasts,
echoing Horace, "let the audience look to their eyes"
(1.2.26). Bottom indeed tries to evoke his tears when he gets
to his epiphanic moment as Pyramus ("Come, tears, confound,"
Pyramus urges himself [5.1.295]). Shakespeare doesn’t
let us know if the tears ever arrive (Bottom is an amateur,
after all), but the task is clearly approached.
Bottom
proposes a situationally-related method to bring himself to
teariness: "I will condole in some measure,"
the Weaver declares (1.2.27). What Bottom refers to is what
actors today call "playing an action;" specifically,
in this case, the action of condolement, or grieving. Playing
an action - one drawn from the play itself - is surely more
emotionally consonant with the dramatic situation than poking
a finger in the eye, quaffing a cup of sack, or secreting an
onion in a napkin; it is also infinitely less cumbersome, requiring
no hidden props or slight-of-hand. Moreover, it is an "inner"
method, implying the actor perform with his own emotions, and,
consequently, be "moved" in the same way as his character
is, generating the same empathy described by Horace and others.
The employment of a performed stage action, expressed in an
active verb (to condole), becomes a durable link between actor
and character; between, in this case, Bottom and Pyramus. Bottom
will condole, Pyramus will cry, and the audience will look to
their eyes. Thus does an actor’s (own) self-expression
(and resultant emotionality) combine with the mimesis of character
simulation (text, gesture, costume) to equal theatre magic.
Action - or, as we often say today, "playing the verb"
- is a more useful, and convenient acting technique than digital
or biochemical manipulation of the actor’s physiology.
But
for what (or over whom) does Bottom condole? For an imaginary
dead-Thisbe? Or for an imagined-dead "Flute," (the
character who plays the role of Thisbe)? Or does the actor playing
Bottom grieve, in imagination, for an imagined-dead Thomas Pope,
who (possibly) was the actor playing the role of Flute-playing-Thisbe?
Or did the actor playing Bottom condole for something/someone
else altogether? Someone in his real life, as the actor Polus
did with his own son? In sum: if "condole" is the
verb, what is its object?
Bottom
doesn’t say, and, in this play at least, Shakespeare doesn’t
either. To do so would be to leave the light-hearted comedy
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and negotiate through
the multiple paradoxes of acting theory.
In
Hamlet, which is a play about (among other things)
acting, Shakespeare portrays an actor crying in much greater
detail. When the Player delivers Aeneas’ speech (presumably
from a version of "Dido and Aeneas"), Polonius (an
amateur actor himself) is amazed to see the Player cry real
tears, exclaiming, "Look! where he has not turned his color
and has tears in’s eyes!" (2.2.519-20). Apparently
the old counselor is so alarmed (or piqued by the professional’s
skill) that he makes the Player cease "acting" on
the spot. Clearly, the Player is a virtuoso of his craft.
Alone,
Hamlet soon meditates upon this player and this event:
Hamlet:
Is it not monstrous, that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit,
That from her working all the visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit?" (2.2.550-57)
As
Ion was "out of his ...right mind" so the Player was
"in a dream of passion," and thus able to "force
his soul" into a physiological state ordinary persons cannot
will themselves into. But this is, at the moment, "monstrous"
in Hamlet’s mind, and for two reasons: first, because
Hamlet cannot so force his soul ("I know not seems,"
the character had earlier claimed [1.2.76]); and second, because
acting itself is, in Hamlet’s terms, a Satanic conceit.
Only "the dev’l hath power / T’assume a pleasing
shape," Hamlet will say (2.2. 598-89). It was the Duke
of Gloucester, soon to be the "monstrous" Richard
III, who claimed he could "wet my cheeks with artificial
tears, / And frame my face to all occasions." [III
Henry VI, 3.2.184-85.)
That
acting - the contrived simulation of feelings - is monstrous
is a traditional medieval and Renaissance assumption. The Greeks,
after all, called the actor hypokrite. Even Plato,
while admiring it, condemned it morally. Bottom, when offering
to play the role of Thisbe, realizes he will have to "speak
in a monstrous little voice," (1.2.52). But forcing the
soul into the "conceit" (contrivance) of a written
text and premeditated directorial instructions is the traditional
soul of acting; a Neitzschean synthesis by which drama’s
Dionysian expression and ecstasy is marshaled (and this is the
"conceit") into suitably Apollonian "forms."
Acting
is monstrous, to Hamlet, but also essential: before he can become
a king, or kill a king, he somehow must be able to "act"
a king, and act a king-killer; he must, like the actor, learn
to unleash his powers and act on his feelings. (The Prince must
become a Player - in both the classic and the modern sense).
Thus the Prince’s celebrated dalliances with the Elizabethan
players are no mere diversions, they are part and parcel of
Hamlet’s learning process, a sequence of "rehearsals"
that will, during the course of the play, teach him how to play
Dido, how to play Pyrrhus, how to play Lucianus, and how, finally,
to play (and then to become, to declare himself) "Hamlet
the Dane," revenger of his father’s murder, and heir
to his father’s title. (Hamlet claims this title while
leaping into Ophelia’s grave - and crying.) In Hamlet,
therefore, Shakespeare embarks on an inclusive - if abbreviated
- analysis of acting, beginning with the metonymic problem of
tears on cue. But how does he get into the player’s "dream
of passion?" It is the same way that Stanislavski was later
to describe: through motivation.
...What
would he [the Player] do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears...
(2.2.560-62)
The
sentence incorporates three key words of Shakespeare’s
- and more recent - acting theory: motive, cue, and passion.
With motive, Hamlet recognizes that acting - and action
("what would he do") - must spring from a
motivation; and consequently that crying - which is an action
- must have a motivationally inciting force. It is not a unique
discovery in Shakespeare ("Am I the motive of these tears,
my Lord?" Desdemona asks Othello [4.1.43]), but an important
one. Motive, etymologically, is the animating propulsion, the
"motor," of both conscious and unconscious human behavior.
It is also the engine of emotion; indeed, these two words have
a common root (Latin: emovere), reflecting the medieval
and Renaissance belief that human feelings result from actual
movements of bodily fluids: the "humours" (blood,
phlegm, bile, and tears) and/or "vital spirits" whose
travel through the body links affect to behavior, and propels
feeling into action. Current physiology accepts this, although
the terminologies have been changed to neural transmissions,
hormonal flows, and the chemical homeostasis and imbalances
that generate emotional behavior.
But
the fluid mechanics of the stage are, by necessity, the
actor’s, not the character’s. Only the
actor’s blood (and phlegm, bile, neurons, and hormones)
can actually move; only the actor has a character’s "chemistry."
The character, mere words on paper, is finally a literary artifact.
The Player know this, and so "moves" himself to deep
feeling (and therefore effective persuasion) by wholly absorbing
Aeneas’ (and through Aeneas, Hecuba’s) motive. Through
the Player’s "acting," and pursuit of the Aeneas’
(the character’s) motive, he (the Player) becomes emotionally
powerful and rhetorically intense. These are lessons Hamlet
needs to learn himself.
Thus
a notion of character "motivation" - rather than mere
external theatrical imperative - appears implicitly in Shakespeare
as the linchpin of effective acting. That Stanislavski elaborated
on this idea three centuries later in no way suggests it was
the Russian director/teacher’s invention.
Hamlet has his motivation, and his "cue for passion"
which should trigger it, but unlike the Player he cannot yet
"act;" something is still missing. And Hamlet knows
what it is.
Yet
I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause
And can say nothing... (2.2.566-69)
Hamlet
still finds himself where the Ghost had warned earlier: "duller
...than the fat weed/ That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf"
(1.5.32-33). He like John-a-Dreams, not in a dream of passion.
He can "say nothing" and, unlike the Player, he cannot
even drown the stage with tears even when he tries ("O
Vengeance! / Why what a fool am I."). The reason: Hamlet’s
motivation to act is powerful, his cue for passion has arrived,
but he is unpregnant of a cause. Motivation and cause,
though often used interchangeably, refer to wholly different
temporal perspectives. Motivation stems from events in the past;
cause leans aggressively into the future. Cause includes a goal
as well as a rationale; it integrates energy with analysis;
it races towards its own completion as much as it serves as
a point of departure. Cause provides the force and focus of
action; it becomes the "higher calling" that makes
action become surrational and (dramatically) inevitable; it
provides the specific direction for motive, giving it focus
and a future expectation. While a cue can compress the fires
of feeling into a timed explosion, cause can put that explosion
into a rifle’s barrel. Cue fires the powder; cause selects
the target and aims the gun. "I’ll be an auditor.
An actor too, if I see cause," puns Puck (MSND
3.1.80).
And
now we must see beyond the peculiarity of the phrase "unpregnant
with my cause." The cause that Hamlet seeks - and which
the Player has - is not merely intellectual, and it cannot be
acquired through merely rational means: true passion-animating
cause enters the body not through the head but through the viscera;
its assault is sexual, biotic, and corporally transporting.
The great actor (as well as the great tragic hero) is pregnant
with cause: cause has become the seed of a new life within,
and a new power without. Transcending merely rational, or Horatian,
or even Apollonian models, Shakespeare reaches down to the carnal
- and up to the spiritual - realms of Dionysus. Acting, in the
Hamlet model, synthesizes earthly fertility and divine rapture.
The great actor does indeed ape the monstrous, and becomes,
in the French phrase, a monstre sacré; on a
plane beyond both the mortal and the quotidian. But he/she also
becomes the new life force: reproductive and fecund. And when
the (male) actor becomes pregnant with (his character’s)
cause, gender limitations disappear: the male assumes the "woman’s
gift," along with the male’s, and cries and fights
(as one "splenetive and rash" [Ham. 5.1.261])
in an androgynous, self-fertilizing consummation, one (perhaps)
devoutly to be wished. Cause has become, as an embryo, a new
and inner life, growing within the body; maturing, assuming
an independent existence; joining with the character to become
the actor’s alter-ego. It is the ecstasy of play transmogrified
(suited) into the formalism of the play. It is Burbage’s
emotion shaped into a Hamlettian mimesis.
The
preceding paragraph extends, of course, into speculation and
perhaps meditation (if not whimsy). It is of no consequence
in the vast critical literature on Hamlet. But I think
it touches on clear indications from Shakespeare as to the life
of the actor, the actor (Burbage) in whom Hamlet lived, and
to the emotion that great actors feel when these parts live
in them, and their tears flow from them.
ENDNOTES
