Occasional Prose Read Online Free PDF Page B

sequence of somebody’s chickens (Tartuffe’s, Count Almaviva’s) coming home to roost. Chiaromonte’s principle of the drama as reasoning action can be extended, moreover, to fit the characters, who are often logicians, reasoners, even hair-splitters ( vide Shakespeare, Shaw), litigants, like Bérénice, like Antigone, forcefully stating their case, pleaders like Uncle Vanya.
    Yet if the theatre, as Chiaromonte says, has a unique relation with what is and cannot be otherwise, this relation—strangely enough, as it would seem at first glance—has always been posed in terms of masks and illusion. Not only are the playactors pretending to be what they are not—Oedipus or Caesar—but the theatre loves disguises (“Enter Duke disguised as Friar”), in other words travesty, double impersonation, for the “Duke” disguised as a friar is an actor twice dissembled. Worse still, Viola, in Twelfth Night , traveling about disguised as a youth, Cesario, is not just a girl dressed up in boy’s clothes but a boy (the actor) dressed up as a girl dressed up as a boy. The sphere of ultimate, irreducible reality which is the stage is also the licensed sphere of illusion. Actors, flesh-and-blood creatures, induce our belief in immaterial brain-products, inventions of an unseen author. Meanwhile the reasoning, debating action pursues its irreversible course through a mirage of false semblances, error, mistaken identities, till it arrives at anagnorisis: the knowledge that nothing can be done to controvert that which is laid down (doom)—Oedipus is the slayer of Laius; Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane.
    Chiaromonte liked to contrast masks with illusion, preferring the mask (characteristically) because it is frank: the man in the mask is clearly an actor , not someone who is half-persuading you with grease paint and false whiskers that he is King Lear. For my part, I do not see that the difference is important except in terms of styles. The masked actor will be skilled in histrionics—the mode of declamation, close to song or chant; the actor in grease paint will be skilled in the mode of mimesis. But nobody is really deceived in the second case: we know that Laurence Olivier in blackface is not a real Venetian general. And in antique comedy and tragedy there must have been some force of illusion working through the mask; otherwise why would the Greek word for actor be “hypocrite,” one who plays a part, who pretends?
    It appears to me that the whole business of dressing-up and make-believe, the “magic” of the theatre, must be a prime ingredient. We consent to the pretense, just as children consent to the notion that the man in the red suit and white whiskers is Santa Claus down from the North Pole even when they are sure there is no Santa Claus and pretty sure that they recognize their uncle. The longing to be deceived, to “dress up” or otherwise alter reality, is both satisfied by the stage and dispelled, as we are obliged to watch it objectively, at work in the dramatis personae. If my contention is right, it does not undermine Chiaromonte’s fundamental thesis; it confirms it.
    The stage, he says, is the place where men who, unknown or known to themselves, have no choice but to play parts (of king or model housewife or gallant, it does not matter) are slowly divested of their outer garment—the protective casing of hopes, dreams, fictions—and confronted with naked reality. The actor, willing or unwilling, in each of us perceives his prototype on the stage, a walking shadow, the shade of a shade. The theatre is seen finally to be its own subject: a cleansed, stripped model of the world of the watchers beyond the proscenium arch, who, led to examination by the dramatic logic, recognize their lives as they truly are. When this recognition is forcible, the theatre becomes a tribunal, as in Ibsen and Genet: the watchers, the bourgeois of the audience, are on trial.
    Now insofar as we are all actors or doers (it comes