Revels End, and the Gentle Body Starts

Summary

You can recognize the queen of the gods not by her face, nor by her clothing, but by her bearing. 'Great Juno comes', says Ceres in The Tempest, 'I know her by her gait'.

In a production of the play that wanted to ensure, rather than estrange, the wonder of the masque, Juno's bearing would not work to establish personal idiosyncracy - a characteristic slouch, for instance - but would produce instead a sense of typical majesty and divinity. And an audience would probably have little problem in sharing Ceres' ability to recognize a person from the way she holds herself. They haven't seen Juno before, but she must be the one with the divinely queenly pose.

This seems commonsensical stuff. But it begins to unravel when we ask how a divine bearing actually holds itself. What makes it distinct from a mortal stance? And do queens move differently from ladies, from serving-women, from kings? These questions are not just relevant to actors, whose work is to make the representation. They are also relevant to those who watch and interpret the representation, in that modes of bodily organization don't only suggest social status, category or occupation, but at the same time imply qualities - seriousness, wastefulness, triviality, majesty, etc. An audience can be made to feel that a queen is dignified or that she is affected, that she has natural authority or unnatural pomp. In other words, insofar as it suggests that which is natural, right, proper, good, the movement of the body plays a key part in the ideological work done by a play.