Role-playing in Shakespeare

The idea that the world is a theatre in which each individual human being plays out the part assigned to him by God, who is both the playwright and the producer of the drama of life, was one of the great commonplaces of the Renaissance and one to which Shakespeare alluded frequently.

Shakespeare’s plays, however, transformed this familiar notion from a cliché to a fertile source of invention. In the past two decades, and especially since the publication of Anne Righter’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play in 1962, the idea has received considerable critical attention. This new work supplements and extends recent studies by examining in detail the function of the histrionic metaphors, both verbal and other, in Shakespeare’s plays.

In Role-playing in Shakespeare, Professor Van Laan argues that the theatrical allusions, disguises, impersonations, and conscious or unconscious self-misrepresentations which abound in these plays exemplify a basic concern with role-playing that substantially affects characterization, action, structure, and theme. Surveying the evidence contained in the plays themselves, he defines the term ‘role’ and proceeds to explore some important general aspects of the topic, including the conception of identity implicit in Shakespearian characterization, the relation of role-playing into dramatic structure, and the recurring theme of the discrepancy between the actor and his part. He then describes the patterns that the role-playing materials assume in the various dramatic genres, comedy, history, and tragedy. The final chapter is a study of one of the primary sources of action in Shakespeare, the internal dramatist.

The wide scope of this enquiry, taking in all of Shakespeare’s plays, and the thoroughness with which Van Laan has pursued his argument provide a coherent and illuminating perspective on two of the most intriguing qualities of Shakespeare’s work as a whole: the sense of continuity and the sense of an underlying unity within such great variety.

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