ABSTRACT

Chapter 3, ‘A brief history of . . . type’, outlines the long history in Western literature –from Theophrastus and Plutarch to medieval prayer manuals, thence to Renaissance books on gentlemanly conduct by Castiglione and della Casa and seventeenth-century manuals of gestural rhetoric – that a person’s physical demeanour is indicative of their personality. And, therefore, that by making changes to the body one can alter the personality. The chapter also surveys related historical understandings of the notion of type and looks at the way in which type has influenced the conception of dramatic characters. In particular, the chapter examines the emphasis placed in characters conceived as representatives of a type on the social dimensions of personality: class, gender, education, wealth, etc.; what Elizabeth Fowler defined as the different “social persons” contained within a fictional character. An analysis of the character of Portia in The Merchant of Venice illustrates the main theoretical points. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the role of physical ‘signs’ (posture and gesture, or accents and dialects, for example) in conveying identity in a language shared by actor and spectator alike.