CHAPTER VII

CHARACTERIZATION

IN drama, undoubtedly the strongest immediate appeal to the general public is action. Yet if a dramatist is to communicate with his audience as he wishes, command of dialogue is indispensable. The permanent value of a play, however, rests on its characterization. Characterization focuses attention. It is the chief means of creating in an audience sympathy for the subject or the people of the play. “A Lord,” "A Page," in a pre-Shakespearean play usually was merely a speaker of lines and little, if at all, characterized. When Robert Greene or his contemporaries adapted such sources for their stage, with sure instinct for creating a greater interest in their public, they changed these prefixes to "Eustace," "Jacques," "Nano," etc. Merely changing the name from type to individual called for individualization of character and usually brought it. Indeed, in drama, individualization is always the sign of developing art. In any country, the history of modern drama is a passing, under the influence of the audience, from abstractions and personifications, through type, to individualized character. In the Trope, cited p. 17, one Mary cannot be distinguished from another. In a later form it is not a particular unguent seller who meets the Maries on the way to the tomb, but a type, - Unguent Seller. When a writer of a Miracle Play first departed a little from the exact actions and dialogue of the Bible, it was to add abstractions - Justice, Virtue, etc. or types: soldiers, shepherds, etc. From these he moved quickly or slowly, as he was more or less endowed dramatically, to figures individualized from types, such as the well-characterized shepherds of

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the Second Towneley Play. The Morality illustrates this same evolution even more clearly. Beginning with the pure abstractions of Mundus et Infans or Mankind it passes through type characterization in Lusty Juventus or Hyckescorner to as well individualized figures as Delilah and Ishmael in The Nice Wanton.1 Abstractions permit an author to say what he pleases with the least possible thought for characterization. Type presents characteristics so marked that even the unobservant cannot have failed to discern them in their fellow men. Individualization differentiates within the types, running from broad distinctions to presentation of very subtle differences. Because individualization moves from the known to the less known or the unknown, it is harder for an audience to follow than type characterization, and far more difficult to write. However, he who cannot individualize character must keep to the broader kinds of melodrama and farce, and above all to that last asylum of time-honored types - musical comedy.

Fundamentally, type characterization rests on a false premise, namely, that every human being may be adequately represented by some dominant characteristic or small group of closely related characteristics. All the better recent drama emphasizes the comic or tragic conflict in human beings caused by many contradictory impulses and ideas, some mutually exclusive, some negativing others to a considerable extent, some apparently dormant for a time, yet ready to spring into great activity at unforeseen moments. Ben Jonson carried the false idea to an extreme when he wrote of his "humour" comedies:

In every human body,

The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually

1 For all of these except Hyckescorner see Specimens of Pre-Shakespearean Drama. J. M. Manly. 2 vols. Ginn & Co., Boston. For Hyckescorner see The Origin of the English Drama. Vol. I. T. Hawkins, ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

In some one part and are not continent,
Receive the name of humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition:

As when some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits and his powers,
In his confluctions, all to run one way,

This may be truly said to be a humour.1

Were Ben Jonson's physiology sound, we should have, not occasional cranks and neurotics as now, but a race of nothing else. Today modern medical science has proved the bad physiology of his words, and dramatists have followed its lead.

What gave the type drama its great hold, in the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence, in Ben Jonson and other Elizabethans, what keeps it alive today in the less artistic forms broad farce, pure melodrama — is fourfold. Type characterization, exhibiting a figure wholly in one aspect, or through a small group of closely related characteristics, is easy to understand. Secondly, it is both easy to create, and, as Ben Jonson's great following between 1605 and 1750 proves, even easier to imitate. Thirdly, farce and melodrama, indeed all drama depending predominantly on mere situation, may succeed, though lacking individualization of character, with any audience which, like the Roman or the Elizabethan, gladly hears the same stories or sees the same figures handled differently by different writers. Much in the plays of Reade, Tom Taylor, and BulwerLytton 2 which passed, in the mid-nineteenth century, for real life, depending as it did on a characterization which barely rose above type, was only thinly disguised melodrama. The recent increasing response of the public to

1 Induction, Every Man in His Humour. Mermaid Series or Everyman's Library. ? See Two Loves and a Life, The Ticket of Leave Man, The Lady of Lyons. All published by Samuel French, New York.

better characterization in both farce and melodrama has tended to lift the former into comedy, the latter into storyplay and tragedy. Just here appears a fourth reason for the popularity of characterization by types. Though entertaining plays may be presented successfully with type characterization only, no dramatist with inborn or acquired ability to characterize, can hold consistently to types. Observation, interpretative insight, or a flash of sympathy will advance him now and again, as Jonson was advanced more than once, to real individualization of character. Contrast the thoroughly real Subtle, Face, and Doll of The Alchemist1 with the types, Ananias and Sir Epicure Mammon; contrast the masterly, if very brief, characterization of Ursula in Bartholomew Fair2 with the mere type of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. An uncritical audience responding to the best characterization in a play, overlooks the merely typical quality of the other figures. That is, the long vogue of types upon the stage rests upon ease of comprehension, entire adequacy for some crude dramatic forms, ease of imitation, and a constant tendency in a dramatist of ability to rise to higher levels of characterization. Now that we are more and more dissatisfied with types in plays making any claim to realism, the keen distinction first laid down by Mr. William Archer in his Play-Making becomes essential. If type presents a single characteristic or group of intimately related characteristics, "character drawing is the presentment of human nature in its commonly recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension." Mr. Galsworthy in The Silver Box and Justice

1 Belles-Lettres Series. F. E. Schelling, ed. D. C. Heath & Co.; Mermaid Series, vol. III, or Everyman's Library.

* Mermaid Series, vol. II. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York. Play-Making, pp. 376, 378. Small, Maynard & Co., Boston.

Mr. Archer regards as a drawer of character; in Strife1 as a psychologist. He holds Sir Arthur Pinero a characterizer of great versatility who becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of feminine types—in Iris, in Letty, in the heroine of Mid-Channel.2 By this distinction, most good drama shows character drawing; only the great work, psychology.

Drama which does not rise above interest in its action rests, as has been said, on the idea that most people are simple, uncomplicated, and easy to understand. Great drama depends on a firm grasp and sure presentation of complicated character, but of course a dramatist has a perfect right to say that, though he knows his hero-Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance-may have had many characteristics, it is enough for the purpose of his play to represent the vanity, the audacity, and the underlying tenderness of the man. It is undeniable, too, that particular characteristics of ours may be so strong that other characteristics will not prevent them from taking us into sufficient dramatic complications to make a good play. In such a case, the dramatist who is not primarily writing for characterization will present the characteristics creating his desired situations, and let all others go. Conversely, he who cares most for characterization will try so to present even minor qualities that the perfect portrait of an individual will be recognized. Often, however, the happenings of a play may seem to an audience incompatible, that is, the character in one place may seem to contradict himself as presented elsewhere. Just here is where the psychologist in the dramatist, stepping to the front, must convince his audience that there is only a seeming contradiction. Otherwise, the play falls promptly to the level of simple melodrama or farce. That

1 Plays. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York.

2 Walter H. Baker & Co., Boston; W. Heinemann, London.