16 - Shakespeare on the stage

Summary

The actor

The most important element that distinguishes Shakespeare on the stage from Shakespeare on the page is the presence of the living actor. Shakespeare was well aware of this; he built into his plays an extraordinary attentiveness to the physical being of the actor, or, to be more precise, the actor/character. The body on the stage belongs to the actor but is in a sense the character as well. At the end of King Lear, for example, the distraught king and father carries the dead body of his daughter Cordelia on stage. He is an old man ('four score and upward') and she a mature woman. It is no easy feat to carry her (here our awareness of the actor's burden may very well cross with our sense of the character's). But her very weight is part of the point - a physical manifestation of the burden of pain that so many of the people on stage have at this point to shoulder, Lear more than any other. He lays her down, mourning her fate. Briefly he revives, hoping for, perhaps believing in, a reprieve from all this pain: 'This feather stirs; she lives!' For a moment he seems to believe she breathes, but then distraction takes over as the others try to speak to him.