Jarmila F.

Veltrusky

DRAMATIC CHARACTERS AND COMPOSITE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The characters whose interaction constitutes the plot of a play are sets of
meanings which build up images of the persons supposedly involved in the "story"
the play represents. Just as the "story" can be inferred from the plot, through not
always completely with assurance, so the person can be discerned through the char-
acter. But in both cases the playwrights artifact includes features that are extraneous
to the represented events or persons and arises from the process of dramatic repre-
sentation itself.
A complex semiotic entity, the dramatic character draws on many different sign
systems, both verbal and material. It is the product of a multitude of factors ranging from
the simplest utterance or gesture to the character's role in the plot as a whole, and includ-
ing everything said or done to or about the character, as well as the characters own
appearance, words and actions. A written text translates all the pertinent factors into the
medium of words and in the process indicates the general order of their significance. In
performance, where much of the work of signifying is taken over by material realities
(persons and objects, but also movements, spatial relations and so on), the situation be-
comes more complicated, because as sign-vehicles such realities are at once richer and
less sharply focused than words. When actors create the stage figures which are the char-
acters' concrete embodiments, they necessarily incorporate in them elements proper to
their own persons. Although an actor can variously disguise himself to fit the image of the
character he plays, his physical presence in the stage figure imposes certain constraints
on his freedom to give this image whatever form he might theoretically consider ideal. As
an aggregate of material realities, each of which can function as a sign-vehicle in its own
right, the stage figure is apt to convey a multitude of possible meanings, but less apt to
signal which ones are in fact pertinent or to indicate the order of their importance and
the relations between them. Where a text can pick out just one feature of a figure's ap-
pearance or prescribe the sense of a gesture without specifying its form, the material
realities used in performance are all equally complete and definite in physical terms, and
this tends to blur the hierarchy, as well as the diversity, of their semiotic functions. So it is
incumbent on the spectators to supply what E. H. Gombrich calls "the beholder's share",1
to sort out all the available features and fit them into sets which they can see as "making
sense".
Since every kind of performance has its own ways of signalling which features
and components are especially important and what they signify, most spectators are usu-
ally competent to construct the character as an image which is at least approximately
coherent in itself and consistent with the rest of the play, and to classify any item that does

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not fit into the image as irrelevant to the character, whatever its effect on the stage figure
as such. The task is relatively simple in plays which aim at mimetic verisimilitude, be-
cause these require the stage figure to project a completely homogenous image, where
the character absorbs the actor and exhibits no inconsistencies except such as might ap-
pear in a person in real life. But many more plays in the history of drama eschew this sort
of homogeneity, so that a given stage figure projects two or more different images. Some
highlight the dichotomy inherent in a character supposed to represent the author him-
self; some dissociate the characters from the actors; and some portray the characters
themselves as conjunctions of heterogeneous images. The semiotic entities projected in
these various ways are composite, a character being only one of the images that make
them up. They may be called characters in a broader sense, but for the sake of clarity the
term composite dramatis personae will be used here.
The present article examines these problems but does not aim to provide an
exhaustive analysis. It is based on a selection of plays dating from the 10th to the 17th
century.

I.

The dramatist communicates with his audience through characters who express
diverse views and pursue diverse aims; the sense he intends to convey emerges as the
outcome of their interaction. Hence any character who purportedly represents the au-
thor (whether the actual person the audience knows to be the author or a frankly
dramatic figment with no more existence outside the play than any other character) auto-
matically exhibits a particular kind of dichotomy. He offers two images, one of a
participant in the represented interaction, anchored in the same world as the other char-
acters, and one of the author who has shaped the interaction of all the characters,
including his own, in accordance with his predetermined intent. Since the author por-
trayed in the play can never be equated with the real author but constitutes a dramatic
image as do the other characters, the split between the two images tends to call into
question not only the relationship between the "inner" world the play represents and the
"outer" world in which the playwright creates it but also, more broadly, that between the
dramatic sign and the reality it signifies.
In the Jeu de la Feuillee by Adam de la Halle (late 13th century),2 the chief
character represents Adam himself, in circumstances corresponding to what is known of
his real life, and he was most probably played by Adam, too. But though the author,
character, and actor may be factually identified to a degree, yet the play opens a gap
between the character and the authors image. At first they seem to coincide; when the
character announces that he has decided to return to his studies in Paris and leave the
wife he once foolishly thought lovely but now finds repulsive, he appears to be expressing
the authors mind. But later, when a fairy whom the character has offended takes her
revenge by decreeing that this plans will come to nought and he will stay in Arras, lost in
the arms of his sweet and tender wife, there emerges an image of Adam the author who
makes the fairy assign him this fate in order to signal that he does not share Adam the
characters view either of his future or his wife.

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The image of the author, like the character, is a meaning created by the play;
both exist independently of the historical Adam and whatever views he may in fact have
held. Only the actor's image, the most time-bound of the three, depends to a significant
degree on whether or not it is the real Adam who is playing the part he has written,
purportedly about himself. For an audience composed largely of his friends and acquain-
tances, his factual presence in the role of actor would bring out the links but also the
divergences between the three images.
Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)3 introduces a character
called Asper who is supposed to be the author of the satirical inner play that makes up the
body of the whole work, as well as the actor of the main part in it, that of a character
called Macilente. Asper enters together with two friends with whom he discusses what he
means to achieve through the play and the risks involved in the project. After some fifty
verses he suddenly notices and welcomes the spectators, explains his aims further and
calls on the performers to begin; when they fail to do so, he joins them off-stage in order
to hurry them on and himself assume the guise of Macilente. The dramatis persona is
complicated by the fact that Asper is clearly Jonson's own representative, not as a direct
self-projection, but as a dramatic character, distanced from Jonson through his dialogue
with the two friends, his initial failure to notice the audience, his annoyance when the
play takes too long to start, and so on. His authorship of the embedded play is persistently
reaffirmed by means of the comments offered all through by the two friends, who exam-
ine it in the light of his declared aims.
The relationship between Jonson and Asper is roughly paralleled by that be-
tween Asper and Macilente. Though they are obviously akin, Macilente appears
separately in "The Names of Actors" and the character-sketches included in the printed
text; and the account Jonson gives of them there, as well as in the play itself, indicates that
he endorses Asper more completely than he does Macilente. Like Asper in the outer play,
Macilente in the inner bears every sign of serving as his author's special representative
within the dramatic world in which he is set. Besides this vital similarity of function,
Asper and Macilente share such seemingly incidental traits as a proneness to self-absorp-
tion which makes them fail to hear what is said to them; and this, together with the fact
that they are played by the same actor, tends to highlight their inseparability even before
the end of the play brings it out into the open by making Macilente converse directly with
Asper's two friends and then address the audience with the words: "Wei, gentlemen, I
should haue gone in, and return'd to you as I was Asper at the first; but (by reason the
shift would have been somewhat long, and we are loth to draw your patience farder)
wee'le intreat you to imagine it." (V, 11, 75-79).
The effect is to undermine the frontier not only between the inner and outer
dramatic world but also between the dramatic worlds on the one hand and the real world
of Elizabethan London on the other. This serves to drive home the play's attack on the
follies and vices of the age by suggesting that the effects of the pernicious "humours"
epitomized by the various characters are by no means confined to the world of drama. In
so far as some of these characters are satirical caricatures of well-known members of
contemporary London society,4 the implied continuity between the dramatic and the real
world tends to encourage the spectators to detect the likeness.

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II.

Many more plays create composite dramatis personae by utilizing the stage
figure's ability to project the image of the actor at the same time as the character. The two
images are not of the same order. The character is a meaning created by the play and has
no existence beyond the image the play projects. But the actor is a complex reality apt to
convey a whole range of different meanings depending on which of its aspects is high-
lighted as significant.
When a famous actor such as Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage appeared
on the Elizabethan stage, the audience no doubt perceived the image of his personal
identity at the same time as the character he was playing. Several lands of drama
highlight the actors sex by drawing attention to its discrepancy with the sex of the
character he enacts. For example, Shakespeare's practice of showing female charac-
ters disguised as boys owes much of its intended effect to the fact that the parts were
actually played by boys.
The Tudor comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle (published in 1575),5 which por-
trays a trivial action set among country bumpkins but which was in fact an academic
production, written by a Master of Arts (probably William Stevenson) and performed on
the stage of Christ's College in Cambridge, as the title-page tells us, evidently relied for
an important part on its effect on the contrast in social standing between the simple rustic
characters and the well-born scholars who enacted them. The conjunction of the two
images in the various dramatis personae clearly heightened the comedy.
Sometimes it is the dramatic dialogue itself that highlights the actor's image, not
only differentiating it from the character he represents but also endowing it with certain
specific traits. Thus in the bilingual German-Latin and Czech-Latin medieval Easter
plays, which seem to have been performed mostly if not wholly by students, various char-
acters refer to students in terms which evidently express the students' own opinion of
themselves, mocking but not seriously disapproving. For instance, when Lucifer sends
his agents into the world to fetch the souls of the diverse sinners who are due to be
damned, he excepts the students, on the grounds that if they were ever admitted into
hell, their notorious lechery and arrogance would cause havoc there. Characters involved
in the Spice Merchant episode, especially the merchant s wife and his servant, often refer
to the students' reputation for lechery in a similarly condoning, if not positively boastful,
spirit.6 A stage figure may also speak more directly in the person of the actor, as in the last
speech of the Innsbruck Osterspiel (14th century),7 where the apostle John invites the
audience to praise God for the Resurrection and to bring meat and pancakes for the poor
students who have nothing to eat.
In liturgical drama it is the performer's image as a cleric (or a nun) that re-
mains in view. The tenth-century Visitatio sepulchri found in St. Ethelwold's
Regularis concordia8 makes it quite clear that the three brothers vested in copes and
carrying thuribles who walk to the sepulchre during the last responsory of Matins,
and the alb-clad brother they find sitting there, are meant to be perceived simulta-
neously as the Marys and the Angel who met at Christ's tomb on the first Easter
morning and as monks celebrating the Resurrection in their medieval church. It is a

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mark of this type of drama that it situates the represented event in the distinctively
ritual time and place which transcends the opposition between the distant there and
then of the original event and the immediate here and now of the ritual that cel-
ebrates it as ever present. The characters take on an analagously ritual status,
transcending the opposition between the participants in the represented event and
the participants in the celebration. The images of the biblical persons remain trans-
parent, so that the images of the performers remain in view, but these appear not
simply as human actors but specifically as members of the religious community en-
gaged in the liturgical celebration to which the play belongs.
In periods fascinated with the nature of the theatre and its relation to real life,
the stage figure s ambivalence as the bearer of the actor's image as well as of the character
comes to be explored in terms of the dramatic world, where a character is an actor who
acts the part of a character belonging to the play embedded within the play. The famous
climax of Corneille's Illusion comique (first performed in 1635)9 is based on the ambiguity
not only of the individual stage figures but of the whole semiotic structure to which they
belong. By a process of drama-like illusion the magician Alcandre shows Pridamant epi-
sodes from the life of the son he seeks. After various adventures Clindor, the son, elopes
with Isabelle; in the next episode it appears that, tired of his wife, he harbors an adulter-
ous passion, as a result of which he is slain. Not only Pridamant but also the actual
spectators conclude that Clindor is dead. However, the next tableau reveals that he and
Isabelle have become actors and that what the previous episode showed was not a part of
their real life but the end of a tragedy they were performing. Having proved how "life-
like" it is, the play ends with a eulogy of the theatre of Corneille's day.
In Rotrou's Le Veritable saint Genest (first performed in 1645 or 1646)10 the
uncertain distinction between actor and character takes its place in a broader evocation
of the traditional idea of the world as a theatre watched by God and the angels. Genest is
a pagan actor who is invited by two fiercely anti-Christian Roman Emperors to perform a
play about the martyred St. Adrian. As he rehearses the part, he feels the growing urge to
become a Christian like Adrian. At first he resists, but during the performance in front of
the Emperors he adopts and proclaims not only Adrian's faith but also his resolution to
die for it. Unlike Corneille, Rotrou does not leave his audience in doubt as to when
Genest is acting and when he is speaking in his own person, but he attributes this doubt
to the audience of the play within the play, and makes the stage figure s ambiguity an
important feature of the embedded dramatic world. At the start Genest promises that
Adrian's death will be portrayed with such art that the imperial spectators will doubt if
they are seeing "l'effet meme ou bien la comedie" (1,5,306). When, just before the inner
play reaches the point of Adrian's martyrdom, Genest steps out of his part and speaks as
a Christian in his own person, his departure from the prescribed text is misunderstood.
His fellow actors suppose that he has forgotten his lines, and the imperial Roman specta-
tors, who imagine they have a more sophisticated insight, interpret his expression of
pious fervor as a further elaboration of his dramatic role. Genest finally ends the misun-
derstanding with these words: "This is no longer Adrian, it is Genest who speaks./ This
play is no longer a play, but a truth/ Whereby my action represents my self. . ."(IV, 7,
1324-1326).

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III.

While both the Illusion comique and the Veritable saint Genest, in their differ-
ent ways, actualize the stage figures' inherent ambiguity without undermining their inner
consistency, other kinds of drama take advantage of this ambiguity in order to present
dramatis personae which are not logically coherent at all but operate through a confron-
tation of discrepant images. An example is Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres (c.
1497).n The original performance was presented in two parts interpolated between
courses at a state banquet, before an audience composed of the feasting dignitaries but
also lower-ranking onlookers gathered in the hall to watch the banquet itself as well as the
accompanying entertainment. This situation forms the basis for the droll characters who
are called simply A and B in the text and remain nameless in the performance but whose
roles, while certainly ostensibly quite marginal, are in fact the linchpins of the whole
interlude. They present themselves as onlookers who strike up an acquaintance when A,
speaking as a visitor unsure of his right to be in the hall, informs the company in general
that he hopes to see some kind of show before the next course and B, seemingly more
familiar with the arrangements, assures him he will be allowed to watch the play which is
due to start soon. He claims to possess inside information about it, but when A asks if he
is an actor himself B hotly denies it and A, apologizing for his mistake, blames the current
fashion in dress which makes it hard to "Know a player from another man" (1,56). All this
time, of course, both figures speak in verse, so that their image as casually met bystanders
makes no claim to be taken seriously, even before they emphasize the joke by causing
these supposed bystanders to disparage the profession they are patently engaged in prac-
ticing themselves.
The joking ambiguity persists in their comments about the play's content. When
B explains that it shows the Roman Senator Fulgens and his daughter Lucres, who ac-
cepts a virtuous though low-born suitor as more truly noble than a high-born but
personally undistinguished one, they remark that the actors are taking a risk by raising
the controversial question of whether true nobility depends more on birth or on personal
merit (a highly sensitive issue in the political and social circumstances of Tudor England),
but conclude that at least they themselves have nothing to fear: "there can no man blame
us two:/ For why? in this matter we have nought to do!" (1,145-146).
After the first scene of the Roman play, when Lucres' Patrician suitor promises
good pay to any man who will help him win her hand, B decides to offer his services. A
tries to dissuade him, arguing that he will "destroy all the play" (1,363), but when B insists
and proposes to find him a similar post with the Plebeian suitor, A agrees on the grounds
that since both are out of work they should seize this chance of employment. From this
point on they hover between two fictitious images which are, of course, elements of their
actual leading role in Medwall s play: One belongs to the world of the banquet entertain-
ment, where they are employed as subsidiary actors; the other to the Roman story, where
they are employed as servants by the two suitors who involve them in their own rivalry.
Their different images constantly overlap and intercut in all sorts of incongruous
ways, as they sometimes telescope the world of Imperial Rome and the Tudor banquet-
ing hall and sometimes emphasize the contrast between them; or as, taking the

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fragmentation a step further, they highlight the gap between the fictitious and the factual
aspects of the Tudor world—on the one hand the feigned inadequacies of their perfor-
mance, such as a late entrance by B which leads to a quarrel between them, on the other
the real hearth and the audience in the hall, which they occasionally treat as part of the
Roman scene. For example, when A reports that Lucres promises to meet his master
"this night . . ./ Or tomorrow at the furthest/ . . . here in this place" he confirms the
message with the words "Yea, by this fire" (1,1299). A and B become involved enough in
the Roman world to compete for the favors of Lucres' maid Joan. When A catches B
alone with her, hears that they have been together for an hour and thinks the worst, B
reassures him with a reference to the play's audience: "Nay, nay! Here be too many wit-
nesses/ For to make such business/As thou weenest hardily!" (1,1016-1018). Later, when
Joan makes fools of them by getting them to fight and hurt each other, B curses her and
comments that the worst part is the shame: "Since it was done/ Before so may as here be
present!" (1,1327-1328). When Lucres chooses her husband for his virtue alone, A and B
dispute her verdict and appeal to the London audience to support their view. A wonders
what is supposed to happen next, and when B tells him that the play will be over as soon
as they two leave, he protests that he expected it to end otherwise.
The apparently incongruous mingling of heterogeneous images produces the
distinctively sparkling comedy that serves to lighten the interlude's serious substance, the
debate about the essence of true nobility. At the same time, the constant hovering be-
tween Imperial Rome and Tudor London tends to locate the debate close enough for the
spectators to grasp its relevance to their own society if they wish, but far enough for them
to confine it to the realm of antiquity if they prefer.
A still more extravagantly kaleidoscopic set of images makes up the character
of Rafe, the hero of Francis Beaumont's satirical Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607-
1610).12 He appears as a private person, as a spectator, as an actor and as a character
in the inner or embedded play in which he acts. All these images are quite elaborate.
As a member of the audience supposedly come to watch a play called The London
Merchant, he is a fatherless youth apprenticed to a grocer and his wife, who are re-
spectable though comically unsophisticated London citizens and kindly masters, fond
of him and proud of the admiration he has won among his friends as an amateur actor.
They challenge the Prologue from the midst of the audience and coerce the players of
the London Merchant to let Rafe take part in the performance. Thereafter they keep
his (fictitious) image as an actor in view by repeatedly commenting on his acting, and
they intervene in the action supposedly represented for their entertainment. Rafe's
image as a character within the inner play is itself fragmented and inconsistent. Though
it was agreed that this character would be heroic and "stately", his first appearance is
set in a grocers shop, that is, in what presents itself as a dramatic version of the sur-
roundings in which Rafe lives his "real" life as a grocer's apprentice. The scene shows
him reading a romance, deciding to become a knight like its hero, and turning his
fellow-apprentices into the squire and dwarf such a knight requires to attend him;
when a maid comes to buy a half-pennyworth of pepper he sells it to her in absurdly
high-flown language, before setting out on his adventures. Thenceforth he appears as
a burlesque figure of broadly quixotic type, whose determination to impose a chivalric

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interpretation on such banal incidents as a visit to an inn or an encounter with a barber

repeatedly lands him in trouble.
All the images are apt to intersect or merge at any moment. While the Citizen
and his Wife mainly comment on Rafe s skill as an actor, they feel so responsible for him
as their apprentice that when the character he plays is threatened with arrest because he
cannot pay his bill at the inn, they pay it with their own money. And when the King of
Cracovia's daughter offers her love to the knight he plays, he refuses it on the grounds
that he is already pledged to a lady in England, a cobblers maid called Susan. Much of
the play's ironic absurdity arises from the multifarious incongruities between the inter-
nally inconsistent images that make up a given dramatis persona as well as between the
image that comes to the fore at a given moment and the dramatic world into which it is
set.

IV.

Plays that present embedded dramatic worlds and characters that move be-
tween them offer as fertile ground for dramatis personae composed of disparate and
equivocally articulated images as plays that employ characters representing their own
author. Moliere combines both these procedures for the purpose of his polemical com-
edy L'Impromptu de Versailles (first performed in 1663),13 where he portrays himself and
the other members of his company, partly in their own persons and partly as actors in an
inner polemical comedy which they are supposedly rehearsing. Moreover, the main
theme both of the Impromptu itself and of the embedded or second-degree comedy is
Moliere's reaction to Boursault's he Portrait du Peintre, which was commissioned and
performed by the actors of the Hotel de Bourgogne as the vehicle of their spiteful attack
on Moliere the playwright and actor, but also the private man. The Impromptu, as origi-
nally performed by Moliere s troupe, thus sets before the spectators eyes highly complex
(though in this case internally consistent) dramatis personae, made up of images of
Moliere and his actors—the characters they play in the first-degree dramatic world of the
Impromptu, and the characters these in their turn play in the second-degree world of the
embedded comedy.
The actors are not only physically present in the stage figures, but their roles are
designed to produce the illusion that they are actually speaking and acting in their own
person; the constant references to their conflict with the Hotel de Bourgogne troupe also
point to their real-life situation. Moliere s image as an author is kept in view partly by the
nature of the whole play, clearly presented as his reply to his rivals' attack; partly because
it is reflected in the first-degree character "Moliere" who is his own self-portrait; and
partly because certain lines said to or by this character open up a gap between this
"Moliere" and the Moliere who actually wrote them. This is the case, for instance, when
"Moliere" snubs "Mademoiselle Moliere" and she protests that he would not have
treated her so rudely before their marriage.
The first-degree characters closely resemble their real-life models, not only in
their physical appearance and their names but also in the personalities and the profes-
sional acting skills ascribed to them. The character "Moliere" exhibits the mastery in

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acting that he shares with his model when he offers a series of parodies of the leading
actors of the Hotel de Bourgogne troupe. But however life-like they are, the characters of
the Impromptu are dramatic creations or meanings. They are set in a dramatic world
which is partly like that of Moliere s troupe but which differs from it to the extent that it
shows its "actors" unable to begin their performance at the moment when the real actors
are just finishing theirs. Moliere the author, director and actor of the finished play actu-
ally performed before the king portrays "Moliere" the character who is desperately
trying, in spite of various interruptions and his "actors" failure to learn their lines, to
rehearse his comedy before the king arrives to watch it.
The second-degree comedy is a lampoon against Moliere s aristocratic enemies.
Nearly all the characters it introduces are therefore not only different from but purport-
edly also personally hostile to the actors (and the "actors") who portray them. The
dichotomy is most elaborately worked out in the case of "Moliere". This character plays
the part of a ridiculous Marquis who criticizes Moliere and threatens to punish him. He
also declares " . . . je ne veux pas etre joue par Moliere" (Scene 3) and protests "Ma foi,
Chevalier, tu veux justifier Moliere . . ." (Scene 4). This Chevalier, played by the actor
Brecourt, does in fact justify Moliere and explain his intentions in a fashion that causes him
to be perceived as his spokesman. So while in the first dramatic world Moliere presents a
directly mimetic image of himself ("Moliere"), in the second he offers a self-projection
split between two opposed characters, the ridiculous Marquis who shares his body and the
intelligent Chevalier who upholds his point of view. The interplay of images receives a
further twist when "Moliere" steps out of his role as the Marquis and, returning to his task
as director, interrupts a long speech in which the Chevalier expounds Moliere s views and
pronounces it himself in order to show "Brecourt" how it should be said. The relations
between the various images through which Moliere presents himself in the course of
Impromptu are still more complicated. For instance, he makes the Chevalier declare that
Moliere utterly rejects the practice of portraying real people on the stage, yet one of the
highlights of the role he creates for "Moliere" is the series of parodic imitations of the
actors of the Hotel de Bourgogne, about which he makes several other characters remark
that they are easy to identify. This parallels a similar playful contradiction between
Moliere s actual polemical aim in writing the Impromptu and the rejection of such polem-
ics that he places in the mouths of his two spokesmen, "Moliere" and the Chevalier.

V.

Sometimes a composite dramatis persona is a conjunction of what are in effect

different characters, belonging to juxtaposed rather than embedded dramatic worlds.
This kind of dramatis persona is related, at least conceptually, to a less striking proce-
dure: certain plays create what may be simply called composite characters by offering,
successively or alternately, two or more distinct images of a given character. These images
may diverge only slightly, so that the coherence of the character s identity is not called
into question. But they may also be so disparate as to undermine this coherence and blur
the dividing line between such composite characters and full-fledged composite
dramatis personae.

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The bilingual plays which alternately employ Latin chants familiar from the li-
turgical drama and passages of vernacular spoken verse set up a certain dichotomy
between the images respectively projected through these two registers; in general, the
first are more hieratically stylized, the second more vividly mimetic. For the most part
the dichotomy concerns only the mode of representation; the images of the Marys cre-
ated by their Latin chants on the one hand and their vernacular speeches on the other
share the essential features of holy women mourning their dead master and seeking to
anoint his body. But the dichotomy may also extend to the subject of the representation,
as a given character incorporates an image of a different kind of person from that posited
by the story. For instance, the Apothecary is portrayed not only as the merchant who sold
embalming spices to the Marys but also as a burlesque charlatan who is the protagonist of
a farcical episode quite alien to the gospel story.14
A remarkable example is the grotesque image of Christ introduced into the epi-
sode where he appears to Mary Magdalen as a gardener before revealing himself as her
risen lord. Since the story itself turns on the difference between the two aspects he suc-
cessively offers to view, it causes the character to exhibit the superficial duality common
to all those who assume a disguise. But sometimes this is combined with a totally dispar-
ate, broadly comic image, like the surly boor who, in a Czech-Latin play entitled Ordo
trium personarum (16th century),15 threatens to whack Mary across the backside unless
she stops trampling his onions and wasting his time. The same sort of dichotomy can be
found in several German-Latin versions of the episode, including a very long one from
Sterzing (15th century).16 Here Christ the Gardener incongruously compliments Mary
on her beauty, then accuses her of roaming around the garden in search of boys and
trampling on his plants, and finally threatens to give her a thrashing she will feel for three
days. Later he actually informs her that the man whose body she seeks has risen from the
dead and is returning to his father in heaven, but immediately afterwards he launches
into a long account of his garden and the plants he grows there which has much in com-
mon with the typical charlatan's patter. Like the burlesque Apothecary of other Easter
plays, he rails against women, recommends violence and talks nonsense; he even pos-
sesses an impudent servant, who also abuses Mary.
The sense of such an image is hard for the modern reader to determine. The
interpretation according to which it reflects the interference of pagan ritual in Christian
drama has been strongly contested.17 At least part of the explanation may be sought in the
medieval tradition of festive laughter, and particularly the so-called risus paschalis which
concerned the same festival as the plays in question.18 But the incongruity of this image
with that of the risen Christ would also have led the medieval spectator, who was accus-
tomed to find figurative meanings in almost everything, to look for a hidden, symbolic
sense in the Gardener's seemingly absurd behavior.19

VI.

Certain dramatis personae are composed out of heterogenous characters in

order to drive home a polemical message. John Bale's Kingjohan (first version in 1538)20
deals with the historical English king who reigned 1199-1216 and with his significance

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 29

for the state of the nation in the playwright's own time. However, though it is crucial for
Bale's purpose that John's defense of his realm against the Pope's agents and his conse-
quent poisoning by Simon of Swynsett should be accepted as historically true, his
dramatic technique does not aim at mimetic verisimilitude but draws instead on two
broadly symbolic modes: the allegorical, which is chiefly associated with the morality
plays and interludes; and the figural, which operates mainly in plays on Old Testament
subjects. The characters include not only such historical persons as King John, Pope In-
nocent III, Stephen Langton and Cardinal Pandulphus but also two kinds of allegorical
figures, respectively representing social groups such as Clergy, Nobility and Commonal-
ity, besides Widow England herself, and purely abstract forces such as Sedition,
Dissimulation and Treason. What is even more significant than this mixture of heteroge-
neous kinds of characters is Bale's method of composing individual dramatis personae
out of correspondingly heterogeneous characters, so that the same dramatis personae
appears at one point as an abstract force, at another as a historical personage and even as
both at once. Sedition is coupled in this way with Archbishop Stephen Langton, Usurped
Power with Pope Innocent III, Private Wealth with Cardinal Pandulphus and Dissimula-
tion with the monk Simon of Swynsett.
The method combines two standard procedures: the plot device, whereby a
character assumes a disguise and so projects two images which impose a superficial dual-
ity on a consistent dramatic identity, and the theatrical practice of doubling, whereby an
actor plays two characters and so materially links two images which dramatically remain
separate. The procedures are semiotdcally quite distinct, but technically they are alike in
that both require a given actor to project two images. The play sometimes employs both
of them in the usual way, but above all it combines them in order to signify that images as
heterogeneous as a historical person and an abstract force are in fact united in a single
dramatis persona. The point is also brought out through the dialogue, as when Usurped
Power suggests that Sedition, just appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, should be called
Stephen Langton (v. 941); or as in the following exchange:

King John: Me thynke this bysshope resembleth moch Sedycyon.

Cardinal I cownsell you yet to be ware of wrong suspycyon.
This is Stevyn Langton, yowr meteropolytan. (w. 1783-1785)

The effect is to allegorize the historical persons, for instance to reduce the his-
torical Archbishop Langton to the embodiment of one abstract force, Sedition, and at the
same time to imply that he is only one of a long series of such embodiments, which
include all Archbishops of Canterbury, and indeed all clerics, who further the Pope's (any
Pope's) ambition to usurp the power that belongs to the king of England alone.
This allegorizab'on is coupled with a figural interpretation of the historical per-
sons and events, proposed by a character called the Interpreter in the final speech of Act
I. This sets them in a vast historical perspective where King John is the antitype prefig-
ured by Moses and David as champions of their people against Pharoah and Goliath,
figures of the Pope; while John in his turn prefigures Henry VIII who, according to the
Interpreter, accomplished the liberation of England from the Pope that John strove for in
vain.

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Together, these allegorical and figural approaches invite the audience to see
John's reign as just one more concrete manifestation of a divinely ordained interaction of
moral forces, which already governed the events of the Old Testament and which under-
lies the victory of the Protestant Reformation.
Thomas Middleton s A Game at Chess (1624)21 exemplifies a no less remarkable
though quite different technique of composing dramatis personae out of heterogeneous
characters for the purpose of polemical allegory. All the dramatis personae in the play
itself (excluding the Induction) appear simultaneously as chessmen and as recognizable
contemporary participants in the political struggle between Protestant England and
Catholic Spain. The White King is James I of England, the White Knight, Prince Charles
and the White Duke (or Rook), the Duke of Buckingham; the Black King is Philip IV of
Spain, the Black Bishop is the General of the Jesuit Order and the Black Knight, who
dominates the play, is Count Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador.
The fact that the play is meant to portray a game of chess, indicated in the title
and expounded in the Prologue, remains very much in evidence throughout, from the
opening scene, which represents a Queen's Gambit Declined, to the last, which repre-
sents a Discovered Mate and ends with the entire Black side imprisoned in the bag. The
intervening scenes do not match the course of a chess game quite so faithfully, but
the action is repeatedly interpreted in chess terms, as when a Bishop, anticipating an
attack by the Black Knight, refers to the chessmen's distinctive move: "I know the
Knight's walk in this game too well/ He may skip over me, and where am I then?" (Ill, 1,
29-30).
At the same time the characters represent contemporary personalities, easily
identifiable thanks to their role in the plot, which reflects a popular view of a series of
events still fresh in the spectators' minds, and this image is built up through various
mostly satirical allusions in the dialogue, in some cases apparently with the aid of physi-
cal mimicry. The Black Knight is derided for suffering from a fistula, as Count
Gondomar notoriously did; and the actor who played him was actually costumed in
Gondomar's own cast-off clothes and furnished with Gondomar's own famous special
litter and "chair of ease," which the troupe somehow acquired for the performance.
But all the portraits are allegorically simplified. On the moral as on the chess plane,
they are wholly Black or wholly White; and the fact that a traitor may temporarily hide
his blackness under a white garment only contributes to the play's polemical message.
The dramatis personae function on several mutually illuminating levels. The
White King is a chess piece; James I of England; the chief of the Protestant powers in
Europe; the safeguard of Protestant virtue. The Black Knight is a chess piece; Count
Gondomar; a typically unscrupulous agent of Spanish and Catholic machina-tions
against England; a personification of devious villainy; but at the same time, like the
Vice of the older Moralities, he is a powerfully comic figure, a prolific source as well
as a target of scurrilous mockery, whose exuberance counterbalances the ferocious
cruelty of the satire. The plays unique blend of political and religious polemic, moral
allegory, uproarious comedy and evidently spectacular visual effects provides ample
justification for the enormous popular success it enjoyed until the authorities
banned it.

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 31

VII.

These few examples barely hint at the vast range of forms and functions that
dramatis personae composed out of disparate images assume in different kinds of drama;
but they indicate the sort of contribution a more detailed analysis might make to the study
of dramatic character in general. They bring to light a component of this semiotic entity
that has been neglected in favor of those below and those above it in the structural hierar-
chy. On the one hand there are the units of meaning conveyed by individual utterances,
physical traits, gestures, props and the like. On the other, there is the character's overall
significance in the play, sometimes sought in the fate of the represented person, sometimes
in the character's role as a factor of the dramatic plot. All the basic units pertaining to a given
character may concur so as to build up a single, essentially consistent, image of a person
who interacts with others situated in the same dramatic world; in such a case the image is
coextensive with the character. Alternatively, they may resist integration in a single image
and create instead two or more disparate images, which together make up the composite
dramatis persona.
Such images are dramatically interdependent in that each reveals its full signifi-
cance only when viewed in relation to other components of the same persona. At the
same time they constitute sufficiently autonomous dramatic entities to function in some
measure as factors of the plot, analogous though subordinate to the dramatis persona as
such. As the different images meet within the dramatis persona they jointly compose,
they import into it something like the tension that usually exists between separate charac-
ters. Moreover, when a composite dramatis persona encounters another, one or more of
the images that make it up often enter into a particular interaction with the correspond-
ing (similar or antithetical) images of the other. The dramatic plot then unfolds on several
different planes, through multifarious kinds of interplay not only between dramatis per-
sonae but also between the diverse images that compose them.

Jarmila Veltrusky is an independent scholar working in Paris.

ENDNOTES
l
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 19724', 153-244.
2
Adam le Bossu, Lejeu de lafeuillee, Ernest Langlois ed. (Paris: Iibrarie Honore Champion, 19232>.
3
Ben Jonson, C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson eds. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1925-1952), vol. Ill, 405-604.
4
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923), vol. Ill, 360-361.
5
Edited by William Tydeman in Four Tudor Comedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984),
207-289.
6
Jarmila F. Veltrusky, Mastickdr: A Sacred Farce from Medieval Bohemia (Ann Arbor: Michigan
Studies in the Humanities, University of Michigan, 1985), 17-18.
7
Rudolf Meier ed., Das Innsbrucker Osterspiel. Das Osterspiel von Muri (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1962).
8
Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933), vol. I,
249-250.

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 32

9
Pierre Corneille, L'lllusion comique, Robert Garapon ed. (Paris: Societe des Textes Francais
Modernes, Librarie Marcel Didier, 1957).
10
Jacques Scherer, ed., Theatre du XVIIsiele (Paris: Nizet, 1975), 943-1005; for a study of Rotrou's
drama see Jacques Morel, Jean Rotrou dramaturge de I'ambiguite (Paris: A. Colin, 1968).
11
Edited by Glynne Wickham in English Moral Interludes (London: Everyman's Library, 1976),
73-101.
12
Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Michael Hattaway, ed. (London: Benn,
1969).
13
Moliere, Oeuvres completes, Maurice Rat ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), vol. 1,549-574.
14
Veltrusky, op. <At., 166-173.
15
Edited by Jan Machal in Staroceske skladby dramaticke puvodu liturgickeho (Old Czech Dra-
matic Compositions of Liturgical Origin), (Prague: Ceska akademie, 1908), 159-162.
16
Edited by Adolph Pichler in Uber das Drama des Mittelalters in Tirol (Innsbruck: Wagnerische
Buchhandlung, 1850), 152-160.
17
Rainer Warning, Funktum und Struktur. Die Ambivalenzen des geistlichen Spiels. (Munich:
Funk Verlag, 1974), 78-107; F. Ohly, review of Warning's book in Romanische Forschungen, Band
91, Heft 1-2,1979,11-141.
18
Hanns Fluck, "Der Risus paschalis", Archivfiir Religionswissenschaft, 31, 1934, pp. 188-212;
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge /London: MIT Press, 1968), 78-79.
19
Jarmila F. Veltrusky, "Jeux de Paques bilingues d'Europe centrale: leur duality et leur unite"",
Revue de Lttterature Comparee, Tome 61, no. 4,1987, 471-486.
20
John Bale, Kingjohan, Barry B. Adam ed. (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1969).
21
Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, J. W. Harper, ed. (London: Benn, 1966).

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