Rachel Hunter

All the worlds a stage, And all the men and women, merely Players; They have their Exits and their Entrances (William Shakespeare c. 1595) How good is the analogy between the world and a stage?
A blinded and fragile old man enters the amphitheatre at the opening of Sophocles Oedipus Rex (401BC)1, led by a young woman. The two actors enter from the spectators left, traverse the 100 feet or more from the corner of the long hall, and arrive at the stage, where Oedipus will remain for the length of the performance2. The Greek amphitheatre, lit by sunlight and crowded with noisy theatregoers, is a far cry from the darkened auditorium of modern day Stanislavskian theatre, where a silent and attentive audience lurk in the darkness, hidden from the action. The function of Oedipus entrance is obvious: calling for the attention of the assembled spectators. At the opening of this tragedy no chorus appears, there is no burst of singing or dancing that seeks to grab the attention of the spectators, but instead attention is gradually turned to the two figures processing through the amphitheatre. The arrival of the players into an auditorium signifies the transformation of the performance arena into the world of the play, asking the audience to suspend their disbelief3 that what they are watching is fictional and recognise themselves, or even the society in which they live in the characters represented. The verb play defines as a decision to engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation4, and performers play characters for the recreation of others - a seemingly mutually beneficial relationship. The stage, as a confined space, is hardly a physical representation of the world, but the narrow perspective, the subjectivity of each character portrayed on that stage demonstrates their very humanity. Mortals, unlike gods, are not all-seeing, but only capable of viewing life from the spot in which they are stood, and the theatre provides the audience with a glimpse of godly omnipotence, of the possibility of surveying humanity with a degree of impartiality. In Shakespeares Othello (1603)5 the audience sees the protagonist murder his wife, and yet also sympathises with him, having witnessed his own manipulation by Iago. From the detached standpoint of the spectator lessons are learnt in the dealings of humanity, as summed up by Kottman in Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (2009): tragedies like Oedipus...ask us to consider how we can best and most desirably sustain and transmit the conditions of living with one another6(p.21) The characters performed by the players on the stage, just like the men and women of the world, are limited only in that they cannot see beyond their own personal experiences, and the audience, as the spectators of the action, is left to contemplate the morality of and sympathise with their tragic situations. The theatrical space, or the stage upon which a performance takes place, is a wholly unspecific concept. Theatrical spaces have changed enormously throughout the history of theatre, and the space for which the playwright wrote is not always the same as that in which the audience sees it performed. Different spaces and staging suit differing interpretations of a play. The Greek
1 The text used in this essay will be Sophocles I ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore translation Grene (1991) 2 Lowell Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, (1996) 3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817) 4 Oxford English Dictionary Online - http://www.oed.com 5 The text used in this essay will be taken from The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2008) 6 Paul A. Kottman, Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (2009)

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tragedians were writing for a space that did not entirely have the same offstage notion as the modern auditorium, where the actors simply disappear from sight. Exits and entrances, therefore, mean different things in different productions. The first few lines of Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus set up carefully the spot upon which all the action of the play will commence, Oedipus asking I am blind and old, Antigone, my child./ What country have we come to? Whose is this city? (1-2). The question poses a disjunction between khrus or place and polis or city. Antigones answer preserves the disjunction: she can see the towers of a polis in the distance, but here is a sacred spot (15). From this point until the end of the play all the action occurs at Colonus. The entrances and exits made by each character contributes to a picture built of the world outside of the performance space, and thus the audience is able to envisage the activities that make up the action offstage. An example of this is Ismenes arrival at Colonus to warn her father of the prophecies of Thebes: What I endured in looking for you, fatherin trying to find where you were livinglet me leave alone. I do not want to suffer twice over, in the doing and telling both (361-6) Ismene merely gestures towards the difficulties of her journey, claiming that she does not wish to relive them through telling. The goings on outside of the confined glade are muffled, only described when they contribute toward the onward movement of the narrative. The experience of Oedipus is the same as any human figure; he is only able to rely on the accounts given to him by those who he encounters of the places where he is not present, particularly the conflicts in the nearby cities. Parallels can be drawn between the action going on at Thebes and Athens, separated from that of the glade at Colonus, and the war that serves as a backdrop of Shakespeares Othello. Othello, like Oedipus at Colonus, is a highly focused tragedy, opening with a scene that takes place on the street and zooming inward until the focus is entirely on Othello and Desdemonas marriage bed, or the place of Othellos mariticide7. Yet the action of the play is complicated by the narration of a series of offstage incidents: the threat of the war against the Turks, the storm at sea that separates Desdemona and Othello, and Othellos adventure filled past. All are significant in explaining the high status of Othello the moor in Venetian society, and the reasons for Iagos grudge against him: For I do know the state (However this may gall him with some check) Cannot with safety cast him, for hes embarked With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars (which even now stand in act) that, for their souls, Another of his fathom they have none To lead their business (I.i.146-152) Othello, like Oedipus, is ostracised by the state in which he lives due to his status as a black ram (I.i.91), and yet, just as the place of Oedipus burial is significant to the city of Thebes, his skills are indispensable to the place he inhabits. The language of Iagos complaint is crude and embittered
7 As noted by Dr Hester Lees-Jeffrey in her lecture The Spaces of Early Modern Tragedy - 06/11/2013

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with short spitting vowel sounds, entirely contrasting to Othellos soft and eloquent speeches that denote his appearance in Act II. As the action of the play commences before the entrance of the eponymous character, Othello himself is external from the world of the play, from the space of the stage, before his arrival. If the stage is a representation of a small part of the world, each scene, each entrance and exit provides the audience with a glimpse into human life and interaction, and yet the plot is built, as it is around real human life, on hearsay and assumption, the players privy only to the information they learn, either onstage or offstage. Alan Ayckbourn, in House and Garden (1991)8 played with the notion of the onstage action being a mere section of the greater action of the play, and the play was performed with the actors entering and exiting into and out of the Olivier and Littleton auditoriums at the National Theatre from house to garden, with the audiences free to choose between. Interestingly, though audiences are allowed the opportunity of seeing two different stages at once, Ayckbourn in fact illuminated the human limitations of perspective: though two plays occurred, the audience could choose only one to follow. The men and women of the audience, like the players or actors of the play, were making their own entrances and exits, the stage recreating the world, art recreating life. Shakespeares argument that men and women are players within the world brings into question how far each human is a player in their own society; acting to fit within the demands of civil society rather than upon human impulse, and asks how important it is to succumb to the wills of other humans. Oedipus is in many ways a pawn between the prospective rulers of the lands that surround him, and yet he is resistant to his sons after his banishment from their house: But when my anger Was sated of itself, when living in that house had become sweet to me you threw me out, you banished me. In that day this kinship you speak of was no way dear to you (767-771) In pointing out his sons lack of obligation toward the oikos, or family, Oedipus also turns away from the demands of the polis. He refuses to comply with the settling of the Theban state as a result of his mistreatment by his family. Oedipus, who hands the responsibility of his actions entirely to the fate set out for him by the gods, absolves himself of any personal obligations or family ties. Even at the end of the play, when Oedipus is dying, the messenger reports that the old man sees benefit in the removal of his daughters obligation toward him now no more/ for you the heavy task of tending me (1613-4). Oedipus has found the space deemed for him by Eumenides, and it is the possession of this that is the cause of his content. Humanity as players within society, represented by players on a stage is no less of a key focus in modern day tragic theatre. Jez Butterworths Jerusalem9, performed at the Royal Court in 2009, is a production in which the action takes place in one single setting, a caravan in a wood near a small, devonshire town, and yet there is no shortage of the sense that this is the society of England. Lyn Gardner shrewdly notes: Butterworths England is...the country we recognise, scruffed right up against that dreamy, idealised place of popular imagination - that scepterd, green and pleasant land, stewed with an island that is squat and gristly
8 Alan Ayckbourn, performed at the National Theatre opening August 2000 9 This essay will refer to the text published by NHB Modern Plays at Royal Court Theatre (9/7/2009)

Rachel Hunter

and fierce10. The ethereal, mystical sense of the wood in which the action takes place, the missing may queen dressed as a fairy recalls the mystical prophecies of Oedipus tale, and yet Byrons utter refusal to be a player within the society to which he belongs, entertaining children with drugs and parties, paying no taxes, and mistreating those who live in the nearby town creates a figure who even after a beating nearly to death remains durable, defiant, and true to himself. This sense is encapsulated in the final lines of the play: Surrender, South Wiltshire! You are outnumbered. I have you surrounded. For at my back is every Byron boy that eer was born an Englishman. And behind them bay the drunken devils army and we are numberless. Rise up! Rise up, Cormoran. Woden. Jack-of-Green. Jack-in-Irons...You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come you giants! (p.61) Byron is far from a player in English society, yet he is a player his world, the world of south-west England. There is no idealism in Byrons speech, none of the green and pleasant land depicted in Blakes hymn Jerusalem; Byron is a part of the drunken devils army that continue across those green plains. Yet his words connote the mythical underside of English culture, the superstition and the paganism that lurks in the heritage of the country. Though Byron shirks the expectations that society places upon him, he remains profoundly and intently an Englishman. The actors on the stage recreate the men and women of the world, and in doing so demonstrate the workings of the society at the time the play is set, whether to demonstrate a defiance of it or to highlight its strengths and limitations. It is, of course, impossible to disregard the performative aspect, the pretence of theatre, when dealing with Shakespeares argument that all the worlds a stage. The player is none other than one of the men and women described in the quote (though for Shakespeare and for the Greeks it would have been specifically men). There is no analogy here, the men and women literally are the players of the stage, the ones performing the characters portrayed, bringing their own life experiences to the roles written for them. Lowell Edmunds argues in the theater [sic], it is the peculiar relation of instances of discourse to an already given stage space and an already given theatrical fiction that creates the metatheatrical potential. When an actor says I referring to him or herself, the reference is to the actors character. (p.20) In highlighting the difference between the performance and that which is being performed (the theatrical fiction), Edmunds touches on the limitations of actors as merely representing rather than embodying humanity. Greek theatrical practice, with the use of mask, has a far more easily recognisable role of representation, Oedipus mask would indicate his blindness and the mans facial expressions would have been disguised. There is, in the use of mask, a kind of distancing of the audience from the man playing the character, what Brecht would have called verfremdungseffekt or alienation effect. No longer is the audience confronted with a human playing another human, but a masked figure playing a human. Such issues were complicated by the time of Shakespearean tragedy, however, with the use of masks giving way to a desire to create a more real representations of humanity. Although theatre of the later centuries took a more serious turn, Shakespearean theatre was still bawdy, and the description of the performers as players rather than actors is incredibly significant. Scenes of emotional intensity in Shakespearean tragedy are interspersed with crude puns (Othello is making
10Why I love Jez Butterworths Jerusalem, Lyn Gardner The Guardian Online, 25/10/2011

Rachel Hunter

the beast with two backs (I.i) only scenes before suffocating his wife) simply to retain the connection with the rowdy audience. Shakespeares quote also touches on the idea of humanity as players themselves, both in the performing sense and as fun-seekers. The irony of tragic theatre as a means of entertainment is obvious, but theatricality provides a heightened version of normal life, in a world where men and women glorify in pretence and imagination. Kottman argues against the notion that actors are confined to creating characters that are merely representative of humanity: if Olivier is truly successful at acting Hamlet - meaning, here, if he succeeds in revealing to us something of why this individual called Hamlet might matter to us...then Olivier himself will also be recognised by us as Hamlet (p.19). Kottman is of course writing about more recent productions of Hamlet, but it is significant that he believes that Hamlet should matter to us, and so should Oliviers interpretation of Hamlet. There is here a gesture toward the collaborative effect of theatre, the script, actor, director and audience bringing their own perspectives to an interpretation of a character in order to derive an understanding of the motives of the character as a human figure, far more than a mere representation. There has, in fact, as illustrated in Butterworth Jerusalem, been a return to the idea of actor as player. When Byrons home is threatened, he turns to festivities: Dawn: I get here and youre sitting around, getting pissed with a bunch of kids. The police are coming. Theyre going to bulldoze this place. Youre having a party (p.36) The childishness of Byrons actions is, in some sense, endearingly human. Mark Rylance, in the 2009 Royal Court Production, moved with a sprightliness at odds with the characters state of health, particularly when telling stories that appeared to capture the characters delight in childish stories and fairy tales, a man who, against the requirements of the world, never ceases to be a player. Though Byron is a character, a heightened depiction of humanity, it is through the embodiment of the character by Rylance that the audience witnesses humanity (actor, director, playwright) colluding to depict a convincing version of humanity. There are endless connotations within Shakespeares analogy that All the worlds a stage. More entrances and exits that have not been touched on in this essay are the obvious: birth and death, the notion that humanity comes from the unknown, the offstage, and then returns to it. Though this is a justified argument, it is not the best reason why Shakespeares analogy is so good. The space of the stage shows glimpses of men and women represented but also inextricable from the humans or players that play them. The audience not only sees the interaction of varying viewpoints colliding, humans oppressing, tricking and killing one another, but also the more subtle ways in which the characters (through the interpretations of the players) achieve the empathy of the audience in their interactions. Rylance, at the Old Vic Theatre11, argued that different parts of a theatrical performance appeal to the experiences of different members of the audience, and that this should be celebrated. He argued that instead of the modern day expectations of a silenced, static audience that theatrical performance should return to the Shakespearean format, with the audiences able to make their own entrances and exits alongside the cast. Humanity are nothing if not players, pursuers of entertainment, playing along with society, and gaging their personal standing and morality from what they learn from others. The stage may not literally be the world,
11Mark Rylance: In Conversation. 18 September 2013

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but, as no human can view the world in its entirety, it is a platform upon which human conflicts can be portrayed and overcome, argued and represented.