DEL DOMINIO PÚBLICO MUNICIPAL I.DISPOSICIONES GENERALES

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare demonstrates how integral the virtual component is to the intelligibility of the theatrical performance by showing how awkward the performance would be when it does not take that component into account. In the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe, the mechanicals

start up with a highly presentational view which stresses the actual component of their performance. Then, afraid of the illusionistic power their performance might unleash, they switch to a ridiculously representational strategy. In both cases, however, they underestimate the imaginative powers of their audiences and their ability to generate the virtual referential reality which the performance is supposed to summon up. I shall deal with the representational strategies of the players and then show that their theatrical doctrine is at odds with Shakespeare’s practice in the larger play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

At the beginning of their preparation the mechanicals think that the audiences will take their performance at face value, taking the action onstage to present the real thing, which would result in a supremely illusionistic form of acting. For example, told that he is going to play Pyramus, the lover who kills himself for love, Bottom exclaims: “That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes: I will move storms” (1.2.19-20). When Bottom suggests that he play the role of lion to make excellent roaring, Quince warns against the response this will evoke in their female spectators:

QUINCE: An you should do it too terribly you would fright the Duchess and the ladies that they would shriek, and that were enough to hang us all. ALL THE REST. That would hang us, every mother’s son. (61-4)

Even though they may not be able to present the real thing itself, their aspiration for extreme life-likeness pushes them to use the most iconic signs at their disposal. When told that he should play Thisbe, a woman, Flute protests: “Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a beard coming” (39-40). So, they are aiming for a degree of verisimilitude whereby the actor bears such a close resemblance to the character he is acting that they would be hardly distinguishable. “Good acting would destroy acting, by turning a resemblance into the thing which it resembles" (Blits 2003, 47).

So far, the mechanicals’ view of their spectators is Castelvetro-like, in the sense that they believe that their audience are incapable of differentiating the thing represented from the representation. According to Ekbert Fass, “Even Bottom, perhaps mindful of Quince’s warning, exchanges a Castelvetro-type approach to one reminiscent of Buonamici” (1986, 67). However, their approach is hardly that of the Buonamici-like representationalism. While Buonamici thinks that the audience is capable of relating stage signs to their fictional referents,

the mechanicals take up the job themselves; they declare to the spectators the referents of the theatrical signs they are employing, and explain that they are just signs and not the real things themselves. For example, when the players are worried about another prop they are to use, that Pyramus will use a sword to kill himself, Bottom tries to avoid these unwelcome consequences by suggesting:

Not a whit. I have a device to make it all well. Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear. (3.1.15-20)

In the same token, the actors have to write a prologue to explain the reality of the roaring lion and so forth. The illusion depends on the actor behaving as if the audiences do not exist. So, the complete illusion they first sought is now shattered as they intend to speak directly to the audience. “Afraid of creating too much dramatic illusion, the artisans destroy what little they might have had" (Blits 2003, 176). This fear extends even to the use of the iconic signs which they first preferred. Perhaps aware of the dangers of iconicity, and the possibility that the icon may be mistaken for the thing itself (Elam 2002, 19; West 2002, 40-1), they even refrain from using the available iconic signs that may create theatrical illusion. When Quince expresses concern about the presentation of moonshine to the chambers where the lovers meet, Snout suggests using natural moonshine in their performance. Although they are informed that the moon, according to the calendar, will shine that night, they nevertheless revert to the other option of having an actor to play moonshine:

BOTTOM. Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window where we play open, and the moon may shine in at the casement. QUINCE. Ay, or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine. (3.1.48-53)

And they use the same strategy by presenting an actor to play the role of Wall. However, though it may have been impossible for them to present a real Wall, they were able to do that with the Moonshine. Their aversion to using real moonlight indicates their reluctance to create even the least illusion in their performance. Switching from one extreme to the other, from bland realism to sheer symbolism, is exposed to derision by Shakespeare. In their actual performance, they stick closely to their disillusionist aesthetics. Playing Wall,

Snout says: “In this same interlude it doth befall / That I, one Snout by name, present a wall” (5.1.154-5). When Snug comes forward as the Lion, he says addressing the ladies: “Then know that I as Snug the joiner am / A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam” (218-9). And Starveling presents Moonshine: “This lantern doth the horned moon present. / Myself the man i‘ th’ moon do seem to be” (235-6). The artisans violate the second prerequisite which Marie-Laure Ryan sets for fictionality, namely the embedded communicative transaction; for with these declarations, the transaction from actor to character is no longer embedded any more. Even recentering seems impossible with the actors’ declarations about who they really are and what they are representing. With these two prerequisites abrogated, it is not surprising to see how little illusion the artisans’ performance has produced.

This mode of disillusionist acting is subjected to harsh derision and ridicule by the audience for whose amusement it was originally acted. This is indicated by the audience’s incessant interruptions to the players, not to mention their direct negative comments such as Hippolyta’s “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (5.1.207). The exasperation on the part of the audience with this mode of acting may stem from their feeling that their intelligence has been underestimated by having explained things that they should conventionally be familiar with. Nevertheless, Shakespeare is indicating, via Theseus, that a one- sided participation, no matter how meticulous and detailed it might be, is hardly enough to create the typical theatrical experience. To Hippolyta’s above complaint Theseus replies:

THESEUS. The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worse are no worse if imagination amend them.

HIPPOLYTA. It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.

THESEUS. If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. (208-12)

So, the theatrical experience is still lacking unless the actors’ efforts are coupled with the spectators’ participation, through the imaginative involvement that the Chorus of Henry V has begged for. The cooperation of the spectators is thus conceived by Hippolyta as requiring ‘your imagination, then, and not theirs’. The mistake of the players is that they have left very little room, if any, for the imaginative participation of their spectators, the result being the ridicule of the very spectators they have striven to please. In terms of the communicative model suggested in this chapter, the artisans are breaching the communicative

protocols that are necessary for the fictionality of theatre to be operative. They underestimate the inferential abilities of the audience, which leads them to give too much information. According to Michael Quinn, the problem lies in the absence of a well-defined theatrical convention, which is itself based on precedents: the mistake they make is that "they communicate so much more earnestly than the situation requires. Conventions are not usually arranged situations of understanding; they are assumed understandings, and the amateur players assume too little in the context"(2006, 304). Seen from the perspective of fictionality as a game of make-believe, if one side does not take part in the game, then the game of make-believe is over, as Kendall Walton would have it. Their onstage spectators no longer consider themselves to be taking part in the fictional game of make-believe.

A piquant irony becomes clear when we compare the playlet with the main play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The main play is one in which all sorts of unrealistic actions have been presented onstage, such as the kingdom of fairies, the magic juice, and the improbabilities of the lovers’ behaviour. The main plot is so unbelievable that even Theseus, himself part of that world of wonders, has rejected these stories as “More Strange than true. I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys” (5.1.2-3). Yet even in such a world, Shakespeare never feels the need to apologize or diegetically explain what is going on in his play, nor would the audience feel the need to have these things explained to them. Pyramus and Thisbe, undoubtedly, does not go so far in stretching the audience’s imagination as does the main play. As J. L. Styan wryly observes, “If only Quince had been able to slip into Shakespeare’s audience and see the opening scenes!” (1988, 17). So, the mechanicals should not have shied away from what the whole play, of which they are part, has been doing. It is this difference of views about theatrical conventionality that triggers these different styles of performing. The richness of the virtual reality in the main play and the lack thereof in the playlet might have been an incongruity that Shakespeare skilfully crafted. Kiernan Ryan observes that “The buffoonery of Bottom and his stage-struck fellow craftsmen is first and foremost an affectionate study in theatrical naivety and ineptitude, which serves as a foil for the astonishing sophistication of A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself” (2009, 98).

This stark difference is also highlighted by Theseus’s paradoxical views about imagination. While Theseus is openly dismissive of imagination in the larger play, he seems supportive of imagination in the play-within-a-play. In his speech at the start of act 5, scene 1, Theseus presents a very derogatory view of the imagination, with which he associate three classes of people: the poet, the lover and the madman. Interestingly, what worries Theseus about imagination is the potential power of the virtual. Theseus insists that the madman can see “more devils than vast hell can hold” (5.1.9), perhaps echoing Christopher Marlowe’s ‘infinite riches in a little room’. This is, moreover, a problem with the transformative power of the imagination, the power that enables the lover to see “Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt” (11) and gives form and shape to ‘things unknown’ and gives a local habitation to ‘airy nothing’. It is the potential quality of the virtual that lurks within and gives the possibility of forever creating new things and new creatures out of nothing. Theseus is not at ease with this power of ‘seeing as’, which Walton and Saltz consider to be the essence of acts of fictionalizing. He detests this game-like aspect of imagination. When he slams at this aspect with which “How easyis a bush supposed a bear!” (22), Theseus is unwittingly anticipating Kendall Walton’s example of children’s games of make-believe. Surprisingly, Theseus, who is intolerant about the wondrous stories of the lovers in the main play, is strongly supportive of imagination in the playlet. The ‘amending’ to the awkwardness of the artisans’ playing consists in the same processes which he has just uncompromisingly rejected. In his latter suggestion Theseus seems to be more theatrically minded and expresses what the offstage audiences of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have been doing all along.

Thus, the play shows the unfortunate results when the players downplay the imaginative forces of the spectator and underestimate their capacity to project the possible worlds or virtual reality represented by the play. Had they done as their creator did in the main play, by relying on theatrical conventions and the spectators’ cooperation, they would not have been so derided. If Henry

V lays bare a convention that is otherwise silently accepted by theatregoers, A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows what happens when that convention is

transgressed. In the next section, we will turn to an analysis of the role of the virtual in Antony and Cleopatra. But whereas in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

we have been dealing with the use and abuse of theatrical signs, in Antony and

Cleopatra we will be chiefly concerned with the role of narration in the

construction of the absent virtual reality.