SOURCE: “Visible Art and Visible Artists: Reflexivity and Metatheatricality in As You Like It,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, January, 1998, pp. 1-15.

[In the following essay, Parry discusses Shakespeare's self-conscious representation of the nature of theater and the role of audience in As You Like It.]

Theatre is based upon twinned assumptions—that theatre is life-like because life is theatrical—which have survived so many changes in dramaturgical fashion that they may reasonably be thought to be foundational.¹ But critics with a heavy investment in beliefs about the differences between kinds or periods of theatre have often failed to notice or to stress the continuity that persists beneath disparate appearances. Thus, while we are happy to applaud the Renaissance stage's interest in reflexivity and meta-theatrical reflection, we are often anxious to avoid detecting the same in some more recent kinds of theatre.² Yet evidence is certainly against such prejudice. Ibsen, like most nineteenth-century dramatists, wrote for large, institutionalised theatres with stages set behind, between, and sometimes partially in front of, elaborately ornamented proscenium arches. Everything that spectators saw on these stages was framed by gigantic and ever-present signs of theatricality that are the dramatic equivalent of quotation marks. But Ibsen's suggested staging for Hedda Gabler, far from ignoring such unignorable theatricality, puts quotation marks around quotation marks. The stage is dressed as:

A large drawing-room, handsomely and tastefully furnished; decorated in dark colours. In the rear wall is a broad open doorway, with curtains drawn back to either side. It leads to a smaller room, decorated in the same style as the drawing-room. […] On either side of the open doorway in the rear wall stand what-nots holding ornaments of terra-cotta and majolica. Against the rear-wall of the smaller room can be seen a sofa, a table and a couple of chairs. Above this sofa hangs the portrait of a handsome old man in general's uniform.³

Here we witness theatre's imitation of a life that is in its turn an imitation of a theatre whose image is omnipresent throughout our viewing of the play: for what is this curtained opening if not the transparent fourth wall of an onstage-stage let into the second wall of a realistic box-set whose own fourth wall is framed for us by the proscenium arch? We see Hedda's death framed twice, within doubled marks of its own theatricality, as on this inner-stage—its curtains drawn and to the accompaniment of music—she makes her final exit, her greatest coup de théâtre. Ibsen's play, masterpiece of the naturalistic stage though it be, is as theatrically self-aware, self-presenting and self-reflecting as the best Renaissance comedies. Both Ibsen and Shakespeare issue an unembarrassed invitation for spectators to reflect upon theatre's founding insight: that all the world's a stage. But, according to Erving Goffman, Jaques' famous similitude ought to promote further questions: “All the world is like a stage, we do strut and fret our hour on it, and that is all the time we have. But what's the stage like, and what are those figures that people it?”⁴ My contention is that thinking carefully about As You Like It involves thinking carefully about theatre and theatricality in general.⁵

A stage is a platform upon which plays are performed. A play is the product of human activity in which x impersonates y in the presence of z. But which parts of this activity require human activity? In a play in performance an actor impersonates a character (x imitates, or pretends to be, or stands in for, or dresses up as y) in front of an audience: the verbs which name what the actor does, though often used interchangeably, have different valencies.⁶ To impersonate or pretend requires (human) consciousness on the part of the impersonator or pretender; to stand in for something requires no consciousness at all (a fork stands in for the Fifth Army in a tablecloth campaign); but to be perceived to be standing in for someone or something requires (human) consciousness on the part of the perceiver. Though actors are likely to be human (since, perhaps, you are only an actor if you know that you are one), their representational function, of making an absence present, does not require a human agent: puppet-shows and shadow-plays are genuine theatre, and there is at least one Dutch play in which all of the “actors” are alsatian dogs. The character impersonated is usually human, but is sometimes a supernatural being or an inanimate object: a god, Mrs McLeavy's corpse, a coffee table, or something odder still. In Howard Brenton's Epsom Downs one actor (“festooned with the regalia of the race”) impersonates The Derby, while another (who “smokes a cigarette in a long holder, wears a summer suit with two-toned shoes and carries a cut turf in the palm of a hand”) impersonates The Derby racecourse.⁷ A coffee table that does not talk (even one for whom an actor stands in) is perhaps a species of stage-prop rather than a character, but in The Gingerbread Man a saltcellar and a pepper mill sing and dance, and Brenton's racecourse is very voluble and has a definite personality of his (not its) own.⁸ But the z in this formula—the audience in whose presence the play is performed—is not only fundamental to the theatrical experience but can only consist of real human beings: one cannot substitute puppets or German shepherds or corpses or coffee tables. A play is a human activity not principally because of anything that happens on stage but because stage-plays are events that take place in the presence of human spectators and listeners.

One problem with this performance formula is that its linearity suggests that we come to audiences “last scene of all” (which, of course, mimics the rehearsal and production process); and, indeed, these spectators and listeners who are fundamental to the theatrical experience have been curiously neglected. Literary critics for the most part concern themselves with dramatists, whom they treat as though they are poets or novelists, and those critics whose object of attention is performance have traditionally spent most of their time worrying about actors: it is, thus, significant but not at all surprising that Diderot in his famous Paradoxe sur le comédien should say some hotly disputed but nonetheless worthwhile things about actors while accepting uncritically the most arrant nonsense about audiences. He argues that the greatness of great actors resides in their ability to imitate human conduct convincingly. But, since this ability is a skill that is for the most part consciously acquired and developed and displayed, it is an error to suppose that a great performance flows from an actor's spontaneously identifying with his character. Indeed, more usually (because a fundamental part of an actor's awareness is his awareness of himself acting), it is necessary that such identification should not occur. Precisely because the actor's art “consiste non pas à sentir […] mais à rendre si scrupuleusement les signes extérieurs du sentiment”, an actor need not feel (and probably does not feel) as his character may have done. Instead “il excelle à simuler, bien qu’il ne sente rien”.⁹ Nevertheless—and this is where Diderot's controversial but invigorating comment degenerates into twaddle—though the perfection of acting is achieved by actors who are thoroughly aware of what they are doing and are, like good plumbers or dentists, curiously neutral towards the whole procedure (“who, moving others, are themselves as stone”), that perfection consists in the encouraging of spectators to be willing (or even unwilling) victims of an illusion. The actor “n’est pas le personnage, il le joue et le joue si bien que vous le prenez pour tel: l’illusion n’est que pour vous; il sait bien, lui, qu’il ne l’est pas […]”¹⁰—or, in the words of “la favorite” in Les Bijoux indiscrets: “Je sais encore que la perfection d’un spectacle consiste dans l’imitation si exacte d’une action, que le spectateur trompé sans interruption, s’imagine assister à l’action même.”¹¹ But whether an actor is deeply moved or utterly unmoved during a performance is irrelevant to the questions of how, how far, and whether, an audience is moved and what it is moved towards. One can agree or disagree with Diderot's anti-emotionalist account of acting without needing to believe that his views on this issue have any consequences for spectators. In this respect William Archer, despite strongly rejecting Diderot's anti-emotionalist argument, is surely right: “If an actor can convincingly represent emotion, the critic […] need not inquire whether [the actor] experiences or mechanically simulates it.”¹² But what is involved in the spectator's judgement that an actor is, indeed, convincing? If we are able to claim that an actor has convincingly represented a character in the grip of a powerful emotion, surely our claim is compelling evidence that we are not illuded and have not been “trompés sans interruption”? (We may say that a Van Gogh canvas represents sunflowers convincingly, but we expect to smell paint not pollen.) If we are illuded how can we ever be in a position to say that an actor has convinced us? Actors presuppose performance; and our recognition of being in the presence of performance is incompatible with our being illuded.

Diderot was right (probably) about actors, but wrong (certainly) about audiences. Theatre, as is obvious if we synchronise our looking and our thinking, is the art of non-deceptive disguise and of non-duplicitous pretence. Yet the obviousness of this point and of its corollary (that theatre is always theatrical) creates resistance: somehow the rumour has got about that theatre is only convincing when it denatures itself: art needs to be artful but seem artless. And this rot goes deep. Of All My Sons—the eighth or ninth play that he had written, only the second that was produced, and his first theatrical success—Arthur Miller noted:

My intention in this play was to be as untheatrical as possible. To that end any metaphor, any image, any figure of speech, however creditable to me, was removed if it even slightly brought to consciousness the hand of a writer. So far as was possible nothing was to be permitted to interfere with its artlessness.¹³

It is easy to have a sense of Miller's dilemma: in the late 1940s, in the wake of the failure of so much untruthful and artificial playmaking, he wanted to avoid the merely smart exploitation of theatrical tricks in order that this play at least (which remains an unusually chaste example of his work) could engage directly with social issues and with extra-theatrical reality:

It began to seem to me that what I had written until then, as well as almost all the plays I had ever seen, had been written for a theatrical performance, when they should have been written as a kind of testimony whose relevance far surpassed theatrics.¹⁴

But, closet-drama apart, all plays are written for theatrical performance: why should it be thought right (and even natural) that they should seem not to have been? Besides, a certain kind of unnaturalness is permitted: a play may proudly bear the marks of having been written “as a kind of testimony”. Miller's plays have always seemed artificial in this sense, his characters speaking words that are palpably written for them rather than firing off their thoughts from the tops of their heads. When, right at the end of All My Sons, Chris tells his mother:

You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that's why he died […]¹⁵

it is obvious that this is not merely (or at all convincingly) a transcription of the way in which one character speaks to another but is also the kind of speech that characters in plays speak when the playwright wants to address an issue and an audience. Peter Szondi's account of how drama in the modern world operates and should operate both fails to describe twentieth-century theatre accurately and, with magisterial certainty, condemns much of Miller's achievement in terms (and this is the sad part) that Miller himself is anxious to endorse:

The Drama is not written, it is set. All the lines spoken in the Drama are disclosures. They are spoken in context and remain there. They should in no way be perceived as coming from the author […] the lines in a play are as little an address to the spectator as they are a declaration by the author.

(Szondi, p. 8)

Yet Chris's speech to his mother is both address and declaration.¹⁶ Szondi's dogmatism (his deriving a false is from a dubious ought) is easily exposed: what radiates from good plays whatever their period of origin is not the art that conceals art (which, were it effective, we should never recognise) but the art that reveals itself: plays are written for theatrical performance, declare themselves to be so frankly, and would be poorer plays were they not to do so. If Miller had indeed avoided all theatricality then how far, in that one respect at least, would All My Sons have differed from those “poetic” plays—“whose ultimate thought or meaning is elusive, a drama which appears not to have been composed or constructed, but which somehow comes to life on a stage and then flickers away”—that, earlier in his “Introduction to the Collected Plays”, he dispatches disdainfully?¹⁷ So is it a good or a bad thing for a play, which must in the nature of things be both composed and constructed, to seem “not to have been composed and constructed”? When Jane Austen tells us of the Bertram sisters that “their vanity was in such good order, that they seemed to be quite free from it” has she not got the moral measure of what is vicious whether in life or art or artlessness? Why attach value only to that art that conceals art: what about the art that reveals art and revels in what it reveals?

Shakespeare is not—no dramatist need be and no good one can be—invisible: the critic who wrote of Shakespeare's “apparent invisibility” was wittier than he guessed.¹⁸ More Shakespearean still was the innkeeper in The Invisible Man who “showed his dislike” of his strange guest “by concealing it ostentatiously”. Far from seeking to hide from us the fundamental structure of the theatrical event, Shakespeare “conceals it ostentatiously” in order that it may parade itself in the forefront of our attention. In his best work he reveals the art that conceals art, treading a fine line between concealment and revelation. Much of the pleasure that a Shakespeare play brings, both to a reader and in performance, comes from our treading that line with him: of our being not so much in two minds as two worlds (of fiction and of performance, of underlying story and its theatrical realisation) which are with us always in performance, and which are by no means so easily separated as simplifying theories—especially semiotic theories—would have us believe. Both worlds (and their complex interaction) are explicitly acknowledged by Shakespeare. In the induction to The Taming of the Shrew we see a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, who falls asleep. While he is unconscious a nobleman discovers him and decides to trick him by having a young servant dress up as Sly's wife. He is confident that the outrageous impersonation will be carried through effectively:¹⁹

I know the boy will well usurp the grace,
Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman.

Sly will be deceived (or the trick will fail), but the courtiers are not deceived (or the joke will not have worked). Secondly, in an unrelated incident, a troupe of travelling players appears and performs the story of Kate and Petruchio, for the benefit of the duped Sly, his false wife, and his bogus courtiers. Thus The Taming of the Shrew is set up in such a way that when we watch it we are aware that we are watching other people watching a play. Shakespeare's other plays are less explicit, but no less effective, in the way in which they air the linked issues of impersonation (x impersonates y) and spectatorship (in the presence of z).

Let us defy the linearity of our formula and begin, for once, at the receiving end. Shakespeare learned to write for, and to live with, dangerous audiences: his plays are alive with, and are alive because they are alive with, permanent awareness of an audience's potential disruptiveness. Most often the vehicle for such awareness is a play-within-a-play of the sort that we find in Love's Labour's Lost or A Midsummer Night's Dream or Hamlet. These intercalated plays are such frequently used devices because, by stressing the huge element of artificiality that is inseparable from theatrical viewing, they enable audiences to be relaxed about that initial act of artifice without which any dramatic performance cannot get started.²⁰ And what they show us about Elizabethan audiences is that they were accustomed to inspect performances vigorously and intervene as they saw fit. There is a model, though no doubt an idealised one, of the kind of interchange which seems to have been normal in Elizabethan performances in As You Like It (III.ii.222-44) where Ganymede keeps on interrupting Aliena's description of Orlando:

Rosalind:
Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?
Celia:
It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover;
but take a taste of my finding him, and relish it with good observance. I
found him under a tree, like a dropped acorn—
Rosalind:
It may well be called Jove's tree when it drops forth such fruit.
Celia:
Give me audience, good madam.
Rosalind:
Proceed.
Celia:
There lay he, stretched along like a wounded knight—
Rosalind:
Though it be pity to see such a sight, it well becomes the ground.
Celia:
Cry “holla!” to thy tongue, I prithee: it curvets unseasonably.—He
was furnished like a hunter—
Rosalind:
O ominous—he comes to kill my heart.
Celia:
I would sing my song without a burden; thou bringest me out of tune.
Rosalind:
Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.—Sweet,
say on.(21)

But then Orlando and Jaques enter and Aliena is forced to break off:

Celia:
You bring me out. Soft! comes he not here?
Rosalind:
’Tis he. Slink by, and note him.

They then move to one side of the stage in order to observe Orlando and Jaques, and in doing so convert themselves into one of the play's many examples of an onstage audience, and thus confer the status of play-within-play on the dialogue which follows (III.ii.245-85).

Similar movements, with identical consequences, are typical of the play: As You Like It in performance is stuffed full of interior and subordinate performances, which include a not very impressive wedding masque; five songs (more than in any other Shakespeare play); and also, in much subtler fashion, incident after incident that is shaped up (like the ending of Hedda Gabler) to replicate in the theatre an image of the theatre. In II.i Duke Senior claims to be able to find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (16-17) and illustrates his meaning by anthropomorphising deer as “native burghers of this desert city” (23). As an audience we both hear (and by convention overhear) what he says, but immediately Shakespeare constructs as a commentary on this passage a situation in which hearing and overhearing are highlighted, for an unnamed First Lord describes how Amiens and he stole up behind Jaques (who had himself stolen up behind a stricken deer) in order to listen to (to overhear) his moralised comments on what, emphasising the theatrical metaphor, Duke Senior terms a “spectacle”. And Jaques' moralised comments, which consist of finding human analogies for the animal activity that he is inspecting, in effect convert the deer into actors in a play, since they are made to stand in for the human beings whom they emblematise (52-6):

                                        First Lord
Anon a careless herd
Full of the pasture jumps along by him
And never stays to greet him. “Ay,” quoth Jaques,
“Sweep on you fat and greasy citizens,
’Tis just the fashion.”

So the deer are actors in a drama that Jaques witnesses.²² But he, who is audience of that drama, is a player within the drama that Amiens and the First Lord witness; and they, in telling their story at Duke Senior's rural court, convert him and his courtiers into another audience; and the real-life actors who impersonate these stage-beings do so for the benefit of that ultimate audience which is us. Multiple and gradated acts of audition correspond to that sense of plays within plays within plays that Shakespeare is so careful to foster. Every time that Jaques appears we are made aware of multiplied and interlocking audiences. Here (II.vii.136-9) is how Duke Senior introduces Jaques' most famous speech:

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy.
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than
the scene
Wherein we play in.

This is directed by the duke out to his companions, but by the actor (acting in his capacity as an actor) out to the audience in explicit allusion to the performance itself. And on the stage of the recently opened Globe theatre, whose motto was Totus mundus agit histrionem, Jaques deliberately echoes that motto in his opening words. On the boards of a public stage men who are players represent men and women who are in their turn actors in a greater drama.²³

Once one is made aware of the basic structure of As You Like It one begins to see evidence of it everywhere. At II.iv there is again an inlaid drama. Ganymede, Aliena, and Touchstone begin the scene speaking prose. Ganymede announces the entry of Corin and Silvius in words whose prosodic patterns are compatible with either verse or prose:

Look you, who comes here,
A young man and an old in solemn talk.(24)

But this transitional speech serves to introduce two shepherds who speak in verse throughout. When they leave, Ganymede has two lines of verse and then Touchstone reverts to prose. Why this strange pattern of verse and prose? It is absurd to suppose that agricultural workers in Elizabethan England were more prone to speak blank verse than were their social superiors. But it would be equally absurd to suppose that Corin and Silvius are in any respects portraits of real-life shepherds: they are pastoral figures who represent a contrast between youth and age, and they speak of love. Elizabethans—just like us, and just like all human beings (except actors) always and everywhere—spoke prose all their working lives. And so they spoke prose on their way to the theatre, and on their way home again afterwards. But briefly, for the two or three hours of performance, they saw men whom they knew to be actors (often, indeed, actors whom they knew by name) and they heard them speaking verse. Actors did not merely put on strange clothes but also assumed strange speech patterns: those patterns, like the clothes, were a disguise—and, like theatrical disguise in general, they were meant to fool no one. Blank verse was one of the great indices of the theatrical experience: an index that differentiated it from the life that surrounded it. Shakespeare uses prose and verse in this scene so as to emphasise that Ganymede, Aliena, and Touchstone are spectators at a theatrical event: that they are once again an onstage audience. And the ambiguous metrics of Ganymede's introduction to the spectacle and the undoubted verse with which she ends the piece serve to highlight her role here as prologue and epilogue. There is an actor who is Rosalind who is Ganymede who is a prologue; then there are actors who are Corin and Silvius who act out the ageless debate between youth and age; and then the actor who is Rosalind who is Ganymede becomes an epilogue and draws out the moral of the piece (41-2):

Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound,
I have by hard adventure found my own.

The answer to Goffman's linked questions (What's the stage like, and what are those figures that people it?) is that the stage is a machine for orientating art towards its audience, and that the figures that people the machine (“We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”) make sense only when we see them through the eyes of spectatorship.²⁵ Thus, though every actor is an x that impersonates a y, it is not the case that every actor is an x that is disguised as a y. And it is not so, because impersonation—defined as non-duplicitous pretence—is a fundamental of acting whereas disguise or dressing up is not, since x may or may not dress up as y in order to impersonate y effectively. Charles tells Oliver (I.i.117-19): “I am given, sir, secretly to understand that your younger brother, Orlando, hath a disposition to come in disguised against me to try a fall.” Orlando's disguise does not consist of altering his appearance or of putting on a costume (indeed in most modern productions he undresses for the wrestling match) but rather of his not telling spectators who he really is and of claiming to be some other person. And his disguise is utterly unavailing since, by a mechanism that Shakespeare never reveals, Charles has been “secretly” informed of Orlando's true identity. Because Orlando's disguise is perfunctory, transparent, and very much a matter of his simply asserting that he is someone else, it serves as a model for theatrical impersonation in general. Shakespeare, far from being bothered by the transparency of performance, multiplies and replicates pretence and disguise so that they are insinuated into the very centre of his play, not only refusing to disguise disguise but often making a joke at the expense of its obviousness. When, for example, Duke Senior and Orlando discuss Ganymede (V.iv.26-9):

Duke Senior
I do remember in this shepherd boy
Some lively details of my daughter's favour.
Orlando
My lord, the first time that I ever saw him,
Methought he was a brother to your daughter […]

they are not principally engaged in trying to assure a sceptical audience of the plausibility of an inherently implausible bit of plot. Those actors and directors who believe that Orlando knows who Ganymede is from the outset and keeps quiet in order to stay one step ahead of Rosalind might reasonably ask themselves why he fails to capitalise upon the rewards of his cleverness. There are, surely, no grounds for doubting that Rosalind's disguise is thoroughly convincing to those on stage, or that it was—and is—thoroughly unconvincing to an audience, and this perceptual discrepancy (which is at the root of our experience of theatre) is the target of Shakespeare's joke in this bit of dialogue.²⁶

What the superabundance of onstage disguise in As You Like It serves to highlight or foreground is that underlying activity of non-deceptive disguise that is fundamental to the art of the theatre. In III.ii Rosalind (or rather Rosalind disguised as Ganymede) tells Orlando that she (or rather he) will pretend to be a woman and that Orlando must address him as though he were Rosalind. In order to encourage him to comply with this rather strange suggestion Ganymede tells Orlando that he has worked a similar trick previously and that it has served to cure a love-sick heart (III.ii.385-94):

Ganymede:
Yet I profess curing it by counsel.
Orlando:
Did you ever cure any so?
Ganymede:
Yes, one; and in this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress;
and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish
youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical,
apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion
something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the
most part cattle of this colour […].

Here Goffman's question—of what we think stage-people are—resolves itself into the question of who we think speaks Ganymede's lines. Editors who follow the infuriatingly inconvenient practice of the First Folio simply ascribe all words that are spoken by the actor who plays Rosalind to Rosalind herself. But it is important when we read the play to have as firm a sense as we have in a modern performance of the difference between Rosalind's speaking in propria persona and Rosalind's speaking as Ganymede. In a modern performance we see a woman dressed as a man and we hear that man boast that he can counterfeit the actions of a woman to perfection. But Ganymede's bluff is undercut by Rosalind's counterbluff: Ganymede can act this part so well because, in this matter of impersonating a woman, Rosalind does not have to act at all. We witness, in short, a sophisticated joke.

Yet when we read the play, or watch a modern performance, we get only half the joke. We hear Ganymede speaking, and beneath him we hear Rosalind, but in the performance which Shakespeare sought to construct we hear beneath both of them the boy-actor talking about his art, for the task which Ganymede sets himself is the task that the stage conventions of the day set for every boy-actor. In every performance that he gave the boy-actor “being but a moonish youth” would “grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour”—so that, with that explicit linking of boys (the means of representation) and women (the objects of representation) Shakespeare's complex joke is complete. Shakespeare's joke is visual: we see the point. But it is also audible: a matter of who speaks the words and of who owns the words that are spoken.

At this point a speech-act theorist would wish to register dissent, since it is plainly inadequate to suggest that we here listen to the boy-actor talking about his art. To see the force of this objection we need—bearing in mind that though characters (figures in one world) talk to other characters, it is actors (figures in the other world) who do all the speaking—to ask ourselves a question: Does anyone talk to the audience? If this question seems odd, or even impermissible, it does so because a powerful assumption, widespread in modern mainstream theatre and in much critical (especially literary-critical) writing about drama, is that a play's actions are bounded by the limits of the stage, so that (whatever actors do) characters do not acknowledge the presence of an audience. Szondi puts the point with great clarity: “The actor-role relationship should not be visible. Indeed, the actor and the character should unite to create a single personage” (Szondi 1987: 9). What is the status of speech that is directly addressed to the audience? Recently, modern editors of Shakespeare have become utterly uninhibited, to the point of irresponsibility, about supplying a category of stage direction (indicating the object-of-address) that is entirely absent from the quarto and Folio texts of Shakespeare's plays. Yet they are very unwilling to see the audience as an object that is addressed. To whom is Oliver speaking in the following speech?

Now will I stir this gamester. I hope I shall see an end of him, for my soul—yet I know not why—hates nothing more than he. Yet he's gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved; and, indeed, so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprized. But it shall not be so long. This wrestler shall clear all. Nothing remains but that I kindle the boy thither, which now I’ll go about.

(I.i.153-61)

Granted, as a Folio stage direction makes clear, that Charles has left the stage before Oliver reveals his unmotivated malevolence, to whom is his malevolence revealed? Is not the simple answer: the audience? Granted that he speaks on an empty stage, to whom is his speech addressed? Is not the same answer obvious, available and correct? But what a powerful school of dramaturgical theorists would have us believe is that Oliver's monologue is a speech that is tethered to Oliver at one end (its point of origin) but is untethered at the other.²⁷ Since Oliver speaks upon an empty stage the speech cannot be addressed to anyone; it is a soliloquy, and soliloquies are internal monologues that audiences are by convention privileged to overhear. But this is a great deal of argument to cover an elementary case: why not say, altogether more simply, that Oliver addresses the audience?

In order to answer this question we need to look at Rosalind's epilogue, for that—when properly understood—reflects back upon the entire play and helps to form our understanding of it. Everything that the play is and does is implicit in the strange involuted structure of its epilogue—a speech that is so famous that we often forget what a strange beast it is, for prologues and epilogues, though commonplace in plays of the restoration period, are unusual in the Shakespeare canon. And when they do occur—in Henry V or A Winter's Tale or Pericles—they are generally spoken by a special character who takes no other part in the action. Epilogues spoken by one of a play's characters, who steps forward out of the surrounding action in order to do so, are still more unusual, and the epilogue to As You Like It is easily the best known of this kind. It is, moreover, the only epilogue in Shakespeare's works that is delivered by a female character and is the earliest such epilogue in English drama.

The clumsy locution “delivered by a female character” simply serves to remind us that in Shakespeare's lifetime Rosalind would have been impersonated by a man. Who, then, speaks the epilogue and in whose character? In one sense the answer is obvious: there is only one group of people which ever speaks in a performance and that group comprises actors not characters. So we can say, without fear of contradiction, that an actor speaks the epilogue. But, equally (and this is what was wrong with my earlier account of the boy-actor telling us about his art), there is no belief that the actor unloads upon us the spontaneous promptings of his own heart, or makes the words up as he goes along. There is all the difference in the world—in the world of the theatre at any rate—between (to take a very famous theatrical gaffe) Michael Redgrave's speaking the words that belong to Macbeth and his breaking down and telling an unappreciative audience of Liverpool schoolchildren that if they don't shut up he will go home.²⁸ So we say that the actor speaks not in his own person but in character, and we shall probably go on to say—a shade incautiously—that he speaks in the character of Rosalind: which is after all, in common parlance, simply to say that Rosalind speaks the words. Yet it is clear that Rosalind does not speak all of the epilogue in her character as Rosalind and thus clear that the boy-actor cannot be said to speak all of it in her character either, any more than (since no one supposes that he merely makes up the words) he can be said to utter any of it on his own authority:

I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

But, since Rosalind is certainly a woman, she cannot possibly say the line: “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards”. And in a modern production, where Rosalind will be represented by an actress, the line makes no sense either, and must be cut or reworded or hurried through in the belief that modern audiences do not need to understand what Shakespeare is saying; or perhaps (though I have no record that this has ever been done) the actress playing Rosalind quickly puts on some reminder of her disguise as Ganymede—a feathered hunting-cap perhaps—in order to speak these words. Yet in an Elizabethan performance the line makes perfect sense as it stands without such elaborate subterfuge: an Elizabethan spectator, if he could be bothered to spell out the obvious, would say without hesitation that Rosalind's epilogue is spoken by an actor in the character of an actor who represents Rosalind. It is that extra layer in the representational fabric—the actor acting in the character of the actor who acts in the character of Rosalind—that needs to be borne in mind and which the epilogue highlights, for the epilogue is not an isolated joke but rather gives expression to the sophisticated machinery of theatrical self-awareness that runs, and is seen to run, throughout the play; and which—despite superficial variations that are the product of theatrical fashion—runs, and is seen to run, throughout drama generally.

Notes

1. “The elementary mechanisms of human interaction and the elementary mechanisms of dramatic fiction are the same. […] Social life […] is designed as a continuous performance and, because of this, there is a link between theatre and life”: Umberto Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance”, Drama Review 21 (1977), 107-17 (p. 113). As Eco points out, Erving Goffman is one of the prime modern developers of this observation: see note 4 below.

2. The classic case of criticism driven by a need to assert a development (towards, in this case, “the absolute dominance of dialogue”) is Peter Szondi's Theory of the Modern Drama, edited and translated by Michael Hays (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 8-9. Future references to this work are incorporated into my text. (Szondi, whose book first appeared in German in 1956, takes a long view and by “modern” means post-Renaissance.)

3. Hedda Gabler, translated by Michael Meyer, in Henrik Ibsen, Plays: Two (London, 1980), p. 243.

4. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge Massachusetts, 1974), p. 124.

5. Unless otherwise indicated, references to As You Like It are to the Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Alan Brissenden, Clarendon Press 1993.

6. J. L. Austin, in an agonisingly nimble dance through the issues involved, says (a) that “mere imitation does not imply dissembling” and (b) that pretending is not what actors do, since their elaborate preparations persuade us rather to use of their activity such words as “impersonation or imposture or disguise”: “Pretending”, in Philosophical Papers, 3rd edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford, 1979), pp. 253-71 (pp. 265-8). But imposture, which always implies moral censure, is lowering the tone of the company it keeps.

7. Howard Brenton, Plays: One (London and New York, 1986), p. 231.

8. David Wood, The Gingerbread Man (London, 1977).

9. Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, ed. Marc Blanquet, Librairie Théâtrale (Paris, 1958), pp. 16, 77.

10. Paradoxe, p. 17. Emphasis added.

11. Denis Diderot, (Euvres complètes, Tome III, p. 163 (Les Bijoux indiscrets, edited by Jean Macary, Aram Vartanian, and Jean-Louis Leutrat [Paris, 1978], Part II, chapter 5 [chapter 38], “Entretien sur les Lettres”).

12. William Archer, Masks or Faces? in Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, translated by Walter Herries Pollock, and William Archer, Masks or Faces? (New York, 1957), p. 79.

13. “Introduction to the Collected Plays” (1957), reproduced in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (London, 1994), p. 128.

14. Theatre Essays, p. 129. Compare a more recent statement about Death of a Salesman: “Precisely what I had been after [was a play that] might seem so inevitable and natural that an author was hardly even required” (Collected Plays, II, [London, 1981], p. 1).

15. Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge/All My Sons (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 179. All My Sons was published in 1947. In his introduction to Collected Plays, II (London, 1981), p. 1, Miller claims to have written Death of a Salesman so as to avoid having to introduce “one or more speeches announcing in some overt way its philosophical intention”.

16. Indeed, in both manner and in mode of address, it parallels a famous speech from a British play that had appeared in the previous year: “But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone—but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering, and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.” (J. B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls, in Time and the Conways and Other Plays [Harmondsworth, 1969], p. 207). The status of Priestley's speech as testimony can hardly be doubted, but it is also, and inescapably, a speech written for performance, only at home upon a stage or kindred platform.

17. Theatre Essays, p. 123. Emphasis added.

18. Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton”, English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994), 283-314 (p. 314). Taylor, who is assessing evidence of Shakespeare's crypto-Catholicism, seems unaware of his invigorating oxymoron.

19. Ind.i.128-9. The Taming of the Shrew, ed. H. J. Oliver, The Oxford Shakespeare, Clarendon Press, 1982.

20. “Every dramatic performance […] is composed of two speech acts. The first one is performed by the actor who is making a performative statement—‘I am acting’.” (Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance”, p. 115.)

21. The dashes with which some of the lines end are Brissenden's way of signalling Rosalind's interruptions. That they are interruptions is clear from the dialogue.

22. George Steevens, in his “Observations on the plays altered from Shakespeare” (1779) noted that, in eighteenth-century performances, “the celebrated Speech that describes the wounded Stag, and the Behaviour of the humourist Jaques, is taken from one of the Lords, its original Proprietor, and is given to Jaques himself” (Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 (1774-1801), ed. Brian Vickers (London and Boston, 1981), p. 205. This is such a natural piece of theatre (why report a report?) that one is bound to ask why Shakespeare should have set up his text with such a different performance potential in mind.

23. In terms of the present argument, Alan Rickman (Brissenden, p. 151) was surely right in a 1985 revival to resurrect a traditional bit of stage business by miming each of the seven ages of man in turn, thus once again highlighting that act of acting that Shakespeare never seeks to hide from us.

24. II.iv.17-18. The Arden edition, ed. Agnes Latham (London, 1975), which is here cited, prints the lines in verse formation while Brissenden's Oxford edition (following the Folio arrangement) prints them as prose.

25. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (London, 1968), p. 47 (spoken by The Player).

26. In Shakespeare at the Globe 1599-1609 (New York, 1962) Bernard Beckerman says of the Elizabethan disguise convention in general that: “Disguise is signified to the audience. But the completeness of the disguise is insufficient to convince an audience that the character would pass undetected […] it is nominal, a token of disguise” (p. 199). But his argument requires more careful wording: precisely because stage disguise is accepted as “nominal, a token of disguise” it is perceived as being an adequate representation of a degree of disguise sufficient to enable a character to pass undetected. On the caution that we need to exercise when we pass from commenting on the actuality of performance to commenting on that counter-factual interpretation of what we see which is “the story of the play”, see J. O. Urmson, “Dramatic Representation”, The Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1972), 333-43 (p. 337).

27. In How to do Things with Words, second edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford, 1975), Austin says of a speech-act that it is a procedure that “must be executed by all participants both correctly and completely” (p. 15), and completeness ensures that “the performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake” (p. 117). Austin specifically cites speech “spoken in soliloquy” (p. 22) as an example of an etiolation of the moral responsibilities that normally attach to speech-acts. Much later in his lectures (p. 92) he lists the etiolations as occurring when (and whenever) “we use speech in acting, fiction and poetry, quotation and recitation”. Soliloquy is suspect because of doubts about uptake (rather as though one were to promise in the privacy of one's own bathroom); the other etiolations occur because of doubts over who owns—of who is responsible for originating—the words that are spoken.

28. One of the politer versions of this famous story is given in Richard Huggett, Binkie Beaumont: Eminence Grise of the West End Theatre 1933-1973 (London and Sydney, 1989), p. 387.