Do characters have souls?

MY ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, Are there characters after theory? is quite simple: yes. Further I would add there were characters before and after theory, and that in some respects the question is a mistaken one. For it is not "character" per se that has been the bone of contention in recent years but the "subject," the "individual," the "person," the "human."

This is not to suggest that there has been any doubt about the empirically verifiable existence of two-legged intelligent beings we describe as human. There has, however, been a great deal of concern about the description and the definition of those beings. To begin with, some humans who should fit this seemingly unobjectionable, rudimentary definition don't have legs at all. Further, they find themselves reliant on a technology that some disabled people claim is an integral part of their identity--as indeed cyber-culture makes technology part of all our identities, at least as they are understood in their most social manifestations. There has also been some contention about whether the much vaunted sense of human distinction from the rest of creation has rendered us oblivious to something more fully acknowledged in preindustrial eras, namely that, in some profound sense, our being is continuous with that of the plants and animals that sustain our existence and with which we share the planet, despite our (questionable) domination, and certainly, our abuse thereof. Marx, Freud, and Darwin have also done their share to unsettle a certainty about human identity that flourished in the Enlightenment, when "man's" right to self-sovereignty and supremacy over nature was based on reason. To be entitled to such "rights," however, those not assumed to be endowed by God and nature with rational capacities in sufficient quantities--women, people of color, and so forth,--had to stake their claim to being like "man" by suppressing their differences from him. Freud's discovery of the unconscious showed that rational capacities were only a small aspect of human identity; Marx declared that the material conditions in which people find themselves are on balance more important than the spark of consciousness that animates them; Darwin's theory of evolution implied that humans and apes shared a common ancestor, and that humans were thus less unique than we thought. In addition, Nietzsche dealt the fatal blow to Enlightenment verities with "God is dead."

The way was then paved for all manner of undermining of the "in-depth" or "bourgeois" subject. Indeed in twenthieth-century theory and criticism "man" became a very bare-forked animal indeed. Devoid of the divine spark, s/he was now a social construction whose inner life, or "interiority," amounted to little more than a hill of beans and whose existence, when it was not totally insignificant, was either all about social struggle or about a quasionanistic (or maybe orgiastic) "pleasuring the body." Of course, since there is some truth to the notion that there is nothing new under the sun, these positions were in some ways re-visitations of earlier ideas. The socially constructed subject, for example, bore an alarming similarity to the depraved sinner of Reformation thought, while the sybaritic subject returned us to classical hedonism. The postmodern subject was all matter and no spirit--a very long way from the glories of Pico della Mirandola and the Renaissance Neoplatonists--and in this returned us to one of the most longstanding dualities--matter or spirit?--and eventually to what is probably the most profound apprehension of human identity of all: we are both matter and spirit, body and soul.

But what do these philosophical understandings mean for "character" and Shakespeare studies? What is at stake here is our understanding of dramatic representations of human identity, and since theoretical and philosophical descriptions and definitions are also to some extent representations, they tend to determine the nature of critical discourse on character and even to color production choices about how characters are played. Now in the theatre of course, characters are given life, they play roles we recognize. While postmodern criticism may have tended to strip down the representation of humanity to its material elements, that is, to deprive it of precisely its humanity, its "soul," if you will, earlier criticism erred in the opposite direction tending to treat characters as if they were real people. Thus, influenced by the realist novel, which strives precisely to create the fiction that its characters are fully human and have an existence beyond the page (a la E. M. Forster's "round" versus "flat" characters in Aspects of the Novel), there was all manner of speculation about not just the inner life, but the previous and subsequent life of characters. (Anna Jameson's title The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines comes to mind). In a wonderful recent treatment of this topic, Laurie Maguire's Studying Shakespeare offers the following hilarious example from A. C. Bradley's excesses in his book Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): "The Queen was not a bad hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun, She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so." Aside from Bradley's quixotic animosity against sheep, one can quite sympathize with him. Shakespeare is so supremely capable of creating the lifelike that we do indeed take his characters as real people. In this vein Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World that Hamlet marks a new epoch in theater because in that play Shakespeare has developed a new way of representing inwardness.

It is tempting to read Hamlet's "well-roundedness" as a character as a function of the fact that by 1600, Shakespeare has learned his craft as a dramatist, that he has honed his skills. Hamlet's despair looks terrifyingly real, even familiar. It is tempting further to think that we are light-years away from the ostensibly more naive theatrical rendering of The Comedy of Errors. And indeed, for a long time, well into the twentieth century, The Comedy of Errors was dismissed by critics as a throwaway early work. Recent scholarship suggests that the play may have been written as late as 1594, and anyone who has seen it can vouch for its astonishing dramatic impact. I have far more to say about this play and its profound meditation on the nature of human identity than space allows here. Suffice it to say, however, that what makes Hamlet theatrically different (notice, I do not say, better, which would be to focus only on qualitative, aesthetic differences rather than on differences of dramatic technique) is that, unlike the Antipholi and the Dromios, he and his experience cannot be duplicated. Shakespeare not only addresses the big philosophical questions in The Comedy of Errors: how do we know who we are? and who do we think we are? and our longing to be recognized, but deals also with a fundamental theatrical problem familiar to all (honest) spectators, namely, the difficulty of telling characters apart. After all, who has never (except my husband) leant over to ask a companion at the theater or the cinema, "Is he the bald one who killed the blond woman, or is that the other bald one?" Shakespeare's play, then, addresses absolutely practical issues about character identification, as well as the more troubling issues of what constitutes individual identity. In a splendid discussion of this play in his book Shakespeare, David Bevington argues that the plot of The Comedy of Errors rehearses the cross-cultural joke about two people so alike that their spouses cannot tell them apart even in bed. This is surely a comic meditation on whether we are indeed substitutable. But the play also asks probing questions about whether we are ever psychologically and spiritually whole without our partners, our siblings, or our parents and our children.

The zanily implausible reunion at the end of the play, has both sets of twins, Adriana (the wife of the married Antipholi), the father, Egeus and the mother, Amelia (who suddenly pops out of the abbey where one of her sons has hidden), reunited, along with assorted townsfolk and the Duke, and puts us very clearly in the realms of comic romance and not of reality. While I think we can easily grant the sense that reunion and the recovery of what is lost are a very deep seated human desires--after all, one can see the grief of separation and the joy of reunion in airports the world over--the whole reunion after a shipwreck motif in the play seems a little over the top, even for a farcical romance. Certainly, it is a deviation from the source (in Plautus one of the twins more plausibly gets lost in a crowd). Surely the reunion after shipwreck is strained; surely Shakespeare departed from the urge to represent emotional reality even emblematically and symbolically? I have always had nagging doubts about this aspect of the play, doubts that no amount of erudition about shipwreck imagery and symbolism could allay. Then, over breakfast one morning, I came across the following newspaper article. Amid the tragic losses of the tsunami, one Indonesian father in search of his five-year-old daughter told reporters, "It came to me in a dream that she stayed alive." In fact, a teenage boy had rescued the girl, and when Save the Children organized a reunion on January 24, the man's daughter, little Rina Augustina, raced joyfully into her father's arms: "By the grace of God! I knew you were alive! I knew it!" her father said, "My precious little one. I did not give up. I kept looking." The archetypal elements of this newspaper report are striking, and they summon up the kind of emotional energy that Shakespeare both invokes and diffuses at the end of Errors. This play surely speaks to a notion of identity in which we come to know our fully individuated selves only through our relationships with one another. It is a "recognition" because it repeats, with a twist, an earlier cognizance of our identity, and it carries a powerful emotional charge.

While I would argue that Shakespeare certainly addresses the psychodynamics of identity, it remains the case that more than anything, the difference between an Antipholus and a Hamlet alerts us to distinct methods of characterization appropriate to different genres and productive of different theatrical effects as well as different emotional affects. Earlier emblematic and representational style with its emphasis on surface rather than on depth in dramatic characterization resounds in The Comedy of Errors, and I would say that postmodern theory permits us to understand and appreciate this anew. There is, paradoxically, something far from superficial about surfaces. The medieval dramatic tradition Shakespeare inherited was supremely cognizant of this fact.