I think everyone knows, or at least everyone of a certain age who went to public school somewhere in the US (and probably the UK as well) knows that Shakespeare’s plays are full of plays within the plays. Maybe the most famous one is “The Mousetrap,” as the play staged in Hamlet is called. What perhaps is less well known is the idea that a great many of Shakespeare’s plays are centrally about performance itself.
Consider a little further the scenario that we encounter in Hamlet, for instance. Claudius is performing the role of the good, competent monarch—and in fact does a damned good job of it except for the minor point of his having murdered his own brother. Ultimately that catches up to him, so to speak, in his response to the performances that Hamlet himself puts on. Before he puts on his “antic disposition” Hamlet tries out a costume or two—his inky cloak, let’s say—and afterwards another costume, with “doublet all unbraced” and all the accoutrements of the madness he’s performing. At any rate, the antic disposition engages almost every one of Hamlet’s actions—acts?—from his treatment of Polonius to his treatment of Ophelia, poor young woman.
And then there are the comparatively minor performances. There’s Polonius’s advice to Reynaldo on how to catch the truth of Laertes’s behavior in Paris, to use “indirection,” which is to say to perform, so as to “find direction out.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fall into the same thematic frame, although their acting abilities are so poor that Hamlet susses them out within five minutes of their arrival. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead riffs on their performative incapacity. Only Ophelia, poor young woman, and perhaps Laertes, seem not to perform. Certainly Ophelia’s actual madness is meant to contrast Hamlet’s performative madness. And although Laertes at the outset may be performing the dutiful son and brother, when he returns from Paris there is no performance in his anguish at his father’s and then his sister's death. Even that peacock, Osric, performs, although his act is so stereotypical a role that Hamlet mocks him from the moment he enters to the moment he exits the scene.
But Hamlet is not unique in the thematic focus on performance. Henry V is one performance after another, a concern beautifully captured in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play, in which it becomes difficult to determine where actual behavior begins and performance stops. Performance is the heart and soul of As You Like It, of Twelfth Night, of Measure for Measure, of Timon of Athens, of The Winter’s Tale—and so on.
The serious, crucial corollary of the plays’ concern with performance is deciphering those moments and those characters that are authentic. My favorite conundrum in that regard involves Horatio. Is he really what he seems to be? Or is he just a better actor than Hamlet’s old buddies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? If Horatio is indeed Hamlet’s buddy, then how does he end up being a flunky in Claudius’s court?
I’ve worked through these points regarding Shakespeare’s plays because our current world is so full of performance that I find it more than difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not, so that, a bit like Macbeth, my “function / Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not.” Take a trivial example that is currently in every Swiftie fan’s mind. Isn’t it wonderful that finally Taylor and Travis have agreed to tie the knot! And those pictures of Travis kneeling at Taylor’s feet are just so . . . so . . . so . . . practiced? I’m not doubting that the two people are really in love and are really getting married. But I am definitely doubting that the scene with the kneeling groom is an authentic moment. To my mind, it’s clearly a made-for-the-web opportunity.
More serious in many ways are all those fake pictures, videos, texts, written and peopled by artificial “intelligence” rather than by actual human beings. The danger those phenomena represent can’t be overestimated. I can envision a moment when a deep fake is so provocative that it provokes indeed, even to the point of causing a war to break out.
Even more crucial, I think, is the everyday performance that everyday people enact in every minute of their lives. Is the clip on TikTok of little Susie and little Johny disporting themselves on the beach or sharing a lovely breakfast in a fancy restaurant or passionately embracing in the shadow of the Tour Eifel a moment of real joy? Or is it joy performed for the ever-focused eye of the iPhone camera and the every-watching eyes of Susie and Johny’s online followers? And can Susie and Johny tell the difference?
Is there a difference? Aristotle says that one is what one does. Althusser agrees. Taking that idea to its logical conclusion, then, Susie and Johny’s performance is not merely a performance. If not an actuality, it is a reality in the making. The performative joy becomes the grounds for the eventual actual wedding. So too Hamlet, putting on his antic disposition, becomes an antic in fact. Hearing a noise behind the arras, in a moment of antic madness he kills Polonius.
Is authenticity itself a performance? Laertes and Hamlet, coming to the point of fisticuffs at Ophelia’s grave—an authentic moment that grows from performance? The Beatles’ solution to the question is a bit nihilistic—“nothing is real; there’s nothing to get hung about.” My worry, though, is that every performance is or becomes real. So Donald Trump performing the tough guy on TV becomes Donald Trump performing the tough guy in the Oval Office becomes Donald Trump being the tough guy who sends the Marines to pacify American cities.
That seems to me something definitely to be hung about.
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