From Theatre to Globe

Character is not, of course, the sixteenth-century word for the subject of this chapter. When Titinius asks the gods to give him “leave” to kill himself, he justifies his representation of the noble Roman suicide with a theatrical pun on the term still common: “This is a Roman’s part” (5.3.89). The Elizabethan character still had its origin in print, although it had begun the trajectory toward mentalité: “I will construe to thee,/All the charactery of my sad brows” (2.1.306–7). That which is written on his face and which Brutus will read to Portia has yet to shift into the signification of Brutus “himself,” behind his “sad brows.” This semantic trajectory offers a quintessential example of Lacan’s observation that words in modernity often cling to their usage and sense in the early modern period when the schism between subject and object was not yet complete. ¹ Furthermore, because “charactery” as writing can never achieve the transparency that modernity also begins to insist upon, character can only signify a concept of the printed part, like the corollary application of the word to the subjectivity of all men and women that are “merely players” and are construed in and constructed by discourse. It is, however, in the modern, popularly transparent sense that characters claim honorific place in literary criticism, even though in critical theory they are always already concepts of the parts and not to be identified with the printed—the materially charactered—part.