Why the Theatre In Personal Essays

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WHY THE THEATRE

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors,

directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing
place in society.
The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience,
the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre
moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts
on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly
personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique
perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world
of the play into the fabric of our lives.
Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh
theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for
the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student.

Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida and a member

of the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. An actor and director in
professional and university theatres, he is the author or editor of 18 books on
Shakespeare and the modern playwrights.
WHY THE THEATRE
In Personal Essays, College Teachers,
Actors, Directors, and Playwrights Tell
Why the Theatre Is So Vital to Them

Edited by Sidney Homan

First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Sidney Homan to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Homan, Sidney, 1938– editor.
Title: Why the theatre : in personal essays college teachers, actors,
directors, and playwrights tell why the theatre is so vital to them /
edited by Sidney Homan.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035056 (print) | LCCN 2020035057 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367861889 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367861957 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003017615 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Theater and society.
Classification: LCC PN2049 .W459 2020 (print) | LCC PN2049
(ebook) | DDC 792—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035056
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035057
ISBN: 978-0-367-86188-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-86195-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01761-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Norma and all those who love the theatre
CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsx

Introduction: Why? 1
Sidney Homan

PART I
The Creative Role of the Audience 9

1 Vouchsafe Me Audience 11
Nick Hutchison

2 Training the Eye 17

S. P. Cerasano

3 Undeveloped Freight: Listening Together in

the Playhouse 24
Robert Price

4 A Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer 32

Alan C. Dessen

5 Acting the Storm: Twenty Years of Tempests38

June Schlueter

6 From Theatre to Classroom: Making Teaching Effective 47

Frederick Kiefer
viii Contents

PART II
The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright in
Performance55

7 Why the Theatre?: The Breaking of the Fourth Wall 57

Gary Lagden

8 Play, Devising, and the Creative Process 62

Brian Rhinehart

9 I Am Thrilled by an Impure Theatre 69

Sidney Homan

10 In the Nick: Theatre in and of Our Times 76

Jerry Harp

11 “The Play” May Not Be “The Thing”—But Something Is 82

Erica Terpening-Romeo

12 Why Butoh Theatre: Thoughts of the Actor, Questions

From the Director 87
Yokko (Yoshiko Sienkiewicz) and Brian Rhinehart

13 Amateur Hour, or Notes From a Hack Playwright 93

Paul Menzer

PART III
When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into the
Real World 99

14 Theatre for Health 101

Joanne Howarth

15 Why Make Theatre in the South Pacific? A Personal

View of Theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand 106
David O’Donnell

16 Empathy Is Essential 115

Kristin Kundert

17 The Art of Failure 120

Katherine McGerr
 Contents ix

18 Why Teach Theatre? 125

Gina MacKenzie

19 Making Theatre Around the World, and

What It Has Taught Me 133
Avra Sidiropoulou

PART IV
Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre
Can Do When Given Form Onstage 147

20 The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator:

Looking for an Essential Theatre 149
Ralf Remshardt

21 Theatre and the Digital Native 158

Donna Soto-Morettini

22 Remembering Dreams166
Fran Teague

23 Theatrical Pleasure and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel171

Joseph Candido

24 Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” as Theatrum Mundi 178

Daniel T. O’Hara

25 Why (Not) Theatre? Stage, Screen, and Streaming in

a Pandemic 184
Patrick Hart

26 Because 190
Cary M. Mazer

Epilogue: “Yeh, Boss” 196

Sidney Homan

About the Authors 198

Index204
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

William Butler Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” is by kind permission of United Agents LLP
on behalf of Caitríona Yeats.
INTRODUCTION
Why?

Sidney Homan

The main title of this collection, Why the Theatre, is a statement as much as a
question. I posed the question to 26 contributors: why is the theatre so impor-
tant to you? What in your experience as a teacher, scholar, director, actor, or
playwright, and—most certainly—a member of the audience would lead you to
convert that question into a statement of principle, belief, into a deep and emo-
tionally held conviction?
One of my graduate students observed that the question I posed

is in a way irrelevant because, of course, the theatre is as necessary to life as

breathing. We don’t need to ask why we breathe, any more than we need
to ask why the theatre. Both are simply . . . there.

True, the theatre is “there,” and conventional justifications or celebrations will

have a satisfying obviousness about them: theatre brings people together; it is an
escape from the stress of life; it shows you situations similar to your own; it mir-
rors the past and the present, and can anticipate the future; it allows you to learn
about yourself and to take pleasure in the skill of actors and directors.1
Still, in working with the writers in this collection, I found myself as much the
student of my colleagues as their editor. For they go beyond those well-intended
justifications just mentioned as they speak about what is ultimately their theatre,
the theatre they know, whether in the audience or onstage, in the classroom or
as seen through their own scholarship and writing. The theatre they define is,
at length, a personal one. In speaking about their real-life experiences with the
medium, they offer us, I believe, an alternative mirror to that of the stage itself,
a way of giving voice to our own experience, our own pleasure and profit from
attending a performance.
2 Sidney Homan

Of course, you could ask the same question, make the same statement, about
any art form—the novel, the cinema, poetry, sculpture. Each has its own aes-
thetic, its own justification and pleasures; each makes a special claim on us. But
the theatre, I would suggest, is among the most “real” of all art forms. It is live,
taking place in the same present space and time as ratified by an audience. We
watch fellow humans onstage, enacting illusory characters, to be sure, but illu-
sions that are palpable and reflect in part the performers’ own real lives. There is
a “presence” in the theatre that is unique to the medium.
In speaking in detail with passion and conviction of their actual encounters
with the stage, the writers here underscore why the theatre is vital for all of us,
why it stands as a reminder of what it is to be understanding and human. I should
add that several of the contributors respond directly to the current coronavirus
pandemic and the reasons why, especially during this crisis, the theatre is so neces-
sary. And while the contributors wrote before the most recent racial events that
have so exposed and torn asunder our communities, for me, the writers, in a
variety of approaches and styles, celebrate the theatre’s creation of a bond between
actor and audience, a community that is inclusive and productive—and an alter-
native to our national tragedy.
This personal theatre they share is expressed in the four sections in this col-
lection: the creative role of the audience; the life of the actor, director, and play-
wright in performance; when the theatre moves beyond the stage into the real
world; and theories and thoughts about what the theatre can do when given
form onstage. Still, I must confess that this four-part division is a bit artificial, for
I think that each essay could fit in two and in most cases three or even four of
the sections.
I offer below a brief preview of the essays with the hope that it will show the
reader the range of responses to this obvious but also, I think, vital question of
“why the theatre.”

Part I: The Creative Role of the Audience

In “Vouchsafe Me Audience,” Nick Hutchison celebrates a theatre where the
fourth wall is broken by design, but also even sometimes by accident. He recalls
a production of The Comedy of Errors where on Dromio’s last line, “like brother
and brother,” the cast “leapt into the auditorium and danced with the audience
in the aisles, shook hands with those who wouldn’t dance . . . [so that] . . . old,
tired building came alive in the sheer joy of what we had seen and shared.” He
then provides numerous examples from a theatre of “inclusivity” reminding both
audience and actor of “what it means to be human.”
In “Training the Eye,” S. P. Cerasano examines how a production’s vis-
ual dimension trains us to be more careful observers. She focuses on the actor
Anthony Sher, who excelled in such visual language, culminating in his playing
Lear, with the result that his movement and gestures had a “thrill” and also “an
 Introduction 3

intelligence of [their] own.” Beyond this, training the eye in the theatre “helps us
better perceive each other in everyday life, in ways that are unspoken.”
Robert Price in “Undeveloped Freight: Listening Together in the Play-
house” recalls a Richard III where the actor playing Richard, in a burst of
improv, delivered a very contemporary, gross insult to Buckingham, at first
onstage and then in the house. A King Lear tenderly kissing a dead Cordelia,
“the tiniest kiss heard from all the way up in the gods” and “in the cheap-
est of the cheap seats.” The change of a single word in a line from Brendan
Behan’s The Hostage in a production in Dublin during the ceasefire between
the ­British and the IRA, which led to an impassioned reaction in the audience
and backstage. For this actor–director, the theatre is “happening right here,
inside of us.”
In “A Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer,” Alan C. Dessen talks
about experiences as an audience that made him realize the gap between his
assumptions as a reader and the meaning of a play when staged. He tells of a
production of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life with its “unlikely, tacked-on happy
ending” that was so brilliantly acted, however, that “only when exiting into the
afternoon sun did I realize that I’d been had.” A forceful production of 3 Henry VI
showed this major scholar, who has reviewed hundreds of productions, his own
limitations as “a reader of playscripts.”
June Schlueter in “Acting the Storm: Twenty Years of Tempests” focuses
on the ways various directors have staged the opening storm scene, concluding
that each “consistently treated the storm as an event that takes place on a stage,”
thereby inviting the audience to be “willing participants in the make-believe.”
For her, Peter Brook’s 1999 Paris production of The Tempest was a further step
“toward such artifice and metaphor,” so that the text is always already waiting to
dramatize its own theatricality.
Fred Kiefer in “From Theatre to Classroom: Making Teaching Effective”
speaks of productions that have changed his attitude toward Shakespeare. An All’s
Well That Ends Well in 1981 by the Royal Shakespeare Company that combined
the elegance of the era with a class consciousness and led to his adopting for his
classes a play he had never liked before. Or how the director’s “visual imagina-
tion” in The Tempest revealed, for Kiefer, a new aspect of Shakespeare’s final play.
This change in attitude is at one with the notion that the audience collaborates in
the meaning of a performance.

Part II: The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright

in Performance
In “The Breaking of the Fourth Wall,” Gary Lagden traces his love of the theatre
to the storytellers in his dad’s workingman’s club and his upbringing in a com-
munity that celebrated Welsh culture. Learning how to bring out an actor’s free
physicality” and being “on voice,” he focuses on his most recent play, Fly Half.
4 Sidney Homan

Staged in his hometown before his neighbors, he experienced “the word, the
image, the story being shared in the moment with the audience.
In “Play, Devising, and the Creative Process,” Brian Rhinehart asks the ques-
tion, “How does one establish an atmosphere, space, and process for creativity
to take place?” He suggests that through the communal process of “devising,”
actors can let go of their inhibitions, be courageous, trust their imaginations, and
thereby share in the collective excitement and creative satisfaction that comes
from a group creating a work of art from nothing. He illustrates this with an
account of his devised production Dispersal in Germany and the United States,
from conception, research, rehearsals, to performance.
For me, theatre justifies itself, in a way rewards us, by moving offstage and
into our real world. In “I Am Thrilled by an Impure Theatre,” I tell of a tour of
Florida prisons with Waiting for Godot where the inmates insisted on being part of
the performance. Of an elderly couple who wove their own horrendous life in a
Nazi concentration camp into a performance of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And of my
own experience as an actor in Fredric Rzewski’s Coming Together where I “lost”
myself in the role, forgetting I was onstage as I delivered lines from the diary of
an inmate who had died in the Attica Prison riots.
Jerry Harp in “In the Nick: Theatre in and of Our Times” speaks of how
“the theatre ghost is some convergence of the remaining human energies circu-
lating in the place long after the final performance has ended.” Then, he offers
current examples of how such theatre is no less “a vital response to the living
moment.” Through a detailed analysis of the rehearsal process of Rebecca Lin-
gafelter’s staging of Anne’s Carson’s Antigonick, he shows how, by the very act of
coming to terms with the text, exploring “the [actor’s] voice as body and the
body as voice,” the director and cast affirm the essence, the significance of this
“sacred and secular space”—the theatre.
In “ ‘The Play’ May Not Be ‘The Thing,’” Erica Terpening-Romeo
describes a production of Romeo and Juliet by her Anonymous Theatre where
each actor rehearsed privately with the director, the cast coming together for
the first and only time on “opening night.” No less, the audience, “rendered . . .
indistinguishable” from the cast, became one with their fellow townspeople
onstage. Terpening-Romeo champions a theatre whose ultimate purpose is to
bring people together, strengthening our sense of community, especially in the
wake of the coronavirus.
In “Why Butoh Theatre,” the artist Yokko, interviewed by her director Brian
Rhinehart, describes her performance in the one-woman show Butoh Medea,
exploring the events and influences that led her to this powerful Japanese theatre,
built on what one critic calls a “visceral choreography.” For Yokko, “the impor-
tant thing is not what Medea did but what made her do it.” When onstage, she
seeks a “powerful presence when the audience cannot take their eyes off the
performer,” a moment where “the performer’s flower allows the audience’s own
flower to open.”
 Introduction 5

In “Amateur Hour, or Notes From a Hack Playwright” Paul Menzer calls

theatre “the art of social proximity, not social distancing,” then reminds us that
“it’s always closing time at the theatre,” that “theatre is in love with loss.” Describ-
ing himself as an amateur playwright, he reminds us that the words “amateur”
and “amorous” both “describe a condition of the heart,” and moves from here to
Shakespeare’s Pyramus and Thisbe, the “most elevated expression of love . . . pre-
sented by a group of blue-collar workers.” Our current crisis for the theatre may
be “a chance once more to overcome social distance, to get close to those special
things all of us non-geniuses love.”

Part III: When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into
the Real World
The veteran actress Joanne Howarth in “Theatre for Health” addresses the ques-
tion “why the theatre” with examples onstage and offstage in terms of how it
has been important for her “own health” in “body, mind, and spirit”—not to
mention “that of wider society.” Her heart was “opened” by the Lear of Glenda
Jackson, and she recalls times as an actor “hearing the voices, living inside the
skin of someone who is and isn’t me.” In highly personal accounts of her work
both onstage, as in Henry V, and off, she celebrates the “mind gym” provided by
the theatrical experience, which appeals to “the individuality of everyone in the
room to take us on a shared journey.”
In “Why Make Theatre in the South Pacific?” David O’Donnell, in what he
describes as a “personal view,” recalls a performance of Foreskin’s Lament that took
New Zealand’s obsession with rugby both literally and symbolically, eliminating
the barrier between stage and house and displaying for a “stunned audience” a
“culture defined by male aggression [and] an obsession with violent sport and
political division.” O’Donnell asks: can a theatre help define a nation? He speaks
of a theatre offering “the risks of experimentation, the joy of the avant-garde, and
the challenge of new perspectives.”
In “Empathy Is Essential,” Kristin Kundert celebrates empathy as a basic
theatrical principle, what she calls “the uniting of heartbeats and breath” dur-
ing a production. She traces her personal encounter with this empathy from her
experience in high school plays, to her work with Karamu House, the oldest
African American theatre in the nation, to her present role as Artistic Director of
Theatre at the University of Georgia, where she teaches her students how “to see
the ‘other’ as a living human being,” as a way out of our nation’s present malaise.
In “The Art of Failure,” Katherine McGerr defines the theatre as “the art
of making failure the beginning and not the end,” as “a rare place in our culture
where vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness,” a medium that, through the
process of rehearsal and performance, allows her to teach “resilience, empathy,
and adaptability to the next generation.” She talks about directing a musical where
her first goal was “to set up a space where everyone . . . felt safe failing in front of
6 Sidney Homan

each other,” and advises not to mistake what is lacking in one’s work for deficien-
cies in oneself.
Gina MacKenzie’s essay, “Why Teach Theatre?,” is based on her own consid-
erable experience working with young actors. Drawing on an array of plays—A
Chorus Line, Into the Woods, Godspell, and High School Musical, among others—she
combines her work as a director with analyses of the plot and lyrics to show how
the theatre, especially for young people, can nourish an acceptance of self, the
practice of empowerment, and the ability “to imprint itself on the heart of those
who have experienced the performance.”
In “Making Theatre Around the World, and What It Has Taught Me,” the
actor/director Avra Sidiropoulou recounts her varied experiences with produc-
tions around the world that celebrated her convictions about the theatre’s political
significance and the ways it can encompass various cultures, bring together actors
from different backgrounds, and adjust to local conditions and challenges. Unit-
ing and transcending differences among people, she describes herself as “rewarded
with the opportunity to inspire, to move, and, ultimately, to transform.”

Part IV: Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre

Can Do When Given Form Onstage
In “The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator: Looking for an Essen-
tial Theatre,” working from Artaud’s notion of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Ralf
Remshardt maintains that, with the pandemic in mind, “the truly dangerous
contagion of the theatre is psychic rather than physical.” He then provides
detailed accounts of his experience with what he calls a theatre of excur-
sion and immersion, offering “a rupture, an assault, a calling-into-question of
the theatre’s ordinary modes.” Encountering in Peter Brook’s L’Homme Qui
a patient who had lost all perception of the left side of the world, or Punch-
drunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2009), which “left its audiences trans-
formed in breath and brain,” he seeks those “experiences in the theatre where
the form renews itself.”
After examining research and commentary on how heavy internet usage has
diminished “empathy” for the “net generation” or “digital native,” Donna Soto-
Morettini in “Theatre and the Digital Native” asks how this omnipresent tech-
nological obsession of young people may affect theatre in the future. Or how
might we change the traditional “passive” theatre to allow, indeed encourage,
“the interactive, co-creative role that internet experiences provide?” How, she
asks, can we adopt “some of the attributes that attract digital native audiences,
[while] maintaining [the theatre’s] force in enhancing the basis for empathy?”
In “Remembering Dreams,” Fran Teague recalls trying to find out more
about a musical called Swinging the Dream, a show based on Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and with artists like Benny Goodman and Butterfly
McQueen. But with any detailed records of the production having been lost,
 Introduction 7

she realized that, “[though] I would never know certain things,” the production’s
“elusive nature was part of what fascinated me.” In live performance, memory,
like childhood, is ephemeral, with each of us retaining only “what is needed or
desired.” For her, “the ephemeral nature and self-conscious theatricality” of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and of Swinging the Dream remind us that “we are all in
the theatre, enmeshed in one another’s performance.”
In “Theatrical Pleasure and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel,” Joseph Can-
dido recalls a question by the great director/scholar George Kernodle: except
pleasure in the theatre, “what else is there?” Candido reflects on his experience as
an audience for Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, staged in 2017. He defines this
pleasure, inherent in the theatre, as one of “multifarious effects,” specific move-
ments, gestures, expressions, delivery, sometimes small or quiet, meant “to delight
and unsettle at the same time.” The “speaking pictures” of Intimate Apparel create
the pleasure by which the audience explores an “imaginative site” where they
hear “the still, sad music of humanity.”
In his essay, “Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ as Theatrum Mundi,” Daniel T. O’Hara
collaborates with the poet Yeats in justifying the theatre as a means by which
tragedy is “not . . . self-destructive” but “subsumed by the vision of [a] spiritual
quest.” This is a theatre that “permits” us to “imagine anew the tragedy of death,”
where, by the “equalization” or “compensations” of performance, “we return
exactly the same.” Suffering and return, this arc of “gaiety transfiguring all that
dread,” are prefigured in Yeats’s three smiling Chinese wisemen, looking down on
“all the tragic scene.”
In an essay especially provocative for this collection, “Why (Not) Thea-
tre? Stage, Screen, and Streaming in a Pandemic,” Patrick Hart argues that,
because of the pandemic, for “the vast majority of us the small screen at home
constitutes by far the more significant influence upon the cultural fabric of our
lives.” He points out that “both film and then television started out by feed-
ing parasitically upon the theatre.” In similar fashion, the novel “cannibalized”
older genres such as the epic, romance, and tragedy. He then envisions a theatre
that might “dispense with the need for an audience entirely,” one of “more
relaxed, inclusive spaces,” marked by a “responsiveness to the requirements of
local communities.”
In 50-some entries, each beginning with the title of his essay, “Because,” the
scholar/playwright Cary M. Mazer responds directly to the question of the col-
lection, “why the theatre.” At times he teases with a single sentence (“Because if
it isn’t here and it isn’t now, it isn’t theatre”), or plays with a line from Shakespeare
(“Because, when Hamlet says ‘now I am alone,’ he isn’t”). He speculates that
“when a person stands in a performance space and raises an arm . . . the act . . .
comes from a matrix of needs and desires and fears pointing to an imagined future
and impelled by a consciously or unconsciously remembered past.” And he recalls
how his own mother wept when she described a sentimental moment in a televi-
sion show of the 1950s.
8 Sidney Homan

Epilogue: In “Yeh, boss!” I remember a little girl, playing Puck, who in her
joy in getting a laugh from her audience taught me how to answer the statement
and the question posed by this collection.

Note
1. See Olivia Moloff, blog for The Old Creamery Theatre, “Why We Go to the Theatre
(And You Should Too),” Spring 2004 (accessed May 3, 2020), www.oldcreamery.com/
about-theatre/blog/why-go-theatre/.
PART I

The Creative Role of the

Audience
1
VOUCHSAFE ME AUDIENCE
Nick Hutchison

It is spring, 1976, and I am on a school trip, my first to the hallowed ground that
is Stratford-on-Avon, to see Measure for Measure, which we were studying in class.
However, on arrival we discover that an administrative slip-up meant we had
tickets for the wrong show: instead of that rather gloomy problem play, we were
treated, by some theatrical serendipity, to Trevor Nunn’s production of The Com-
edy of Errors, jazzed up into a modern-day Greek farce, with a stellar cast including
Judi Dench, Nick Grace, and Francesca Annis, and complete with added musical
numbers. It was wonderful: hilarious, outrageous, and life-affirming. But the key
moment for me came at the very end. In what I now recognize as a typical Trevor
moment, the cast sang the curtain call to a rousing version of Dromio’s last lines,
“like brother and brother,” and at the very end they ran in a line to the front of
the stage—and they kept going. They leapt into the auditorium and danced with
the audience in the aisles, shook hands with those who wouldn’t dance, hugged,
embraced those who were willing, and as the house lights came up everyone
in that old, tired building came alive in the sheer joy of what we had seen and
shared. As the broken shards of the fourth wall crashed around my eyes, I knew
this was where I wanted to be, that theatre was a world to which I had to dedicate
my life, that I wanted to make an audience feel that same joy and wonder.
I cannot in all honesty boast that I have achieved that ambition, but I do firmly
believe the reason theatre survives, despite centuries of doom-mongers predict-
ing its imminent demise, is this covenant with a live and present audience: that
it is the fact that we are there, watching, that makes theatre special; that it is our
awareness of the artifice of drama that makes it exciting, and that the more theatre
acknowledges its reliance on, and dialogue with the audience, the more that audi-
ence will keep on coming back.
12 Nick Hutchison

Of course, it is a given that the theatre needs an audience on the most basic
level: without tickets sales no show or company can survive, especially in these
days of diminishing government subsidy. Every actor will tell you the stories of
playing to two people and a dog in a dingy room above a pub in an unfashionable
part of town. From Shakespeare’s time on, the theatre has been driven by financial
considerations. Show business is first and foremost a business, and the history of
theatre is littered with the burnt-out carcasses of shows that didn’t make it, their
names whispered among theatre folk more nervously than naming the Scottish
Play and leaving behind them broken reputations and livelihoods: in my lifetime,
Bernadette, Fields of Ambrosia (“where everybody knows ya”), and The Hunting of
the Snark.
Similarly, theatre needs an audience not just to pay its way, but to justify its very
existence; there is simply no point in mounting a play if there is no-one there to
see it, a point brilliantly made by Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead, where the players gradually realize that they are performing to no one:

You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single
assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watch-
ing. . . . No one came forward, no-one shouted at us. The silence was
unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our
crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to
Elsinore.

You can see this existential need for an audience in all those Shakespearean epi-
logues where a character/actor asks for our approval to release them from their
theatricality: Puck, Rosalind, Pandarus, the King in All’s Well, and, of course,
Prospero. They all need our applause; they need us to finish the play for them, to
offer completion.
And there is no question that one slightly less high-brow reason we keep going
to the theatre is the sense of danger, the vicarious thrill at the possibility it could
all go horribly wrong. I’m sure the reason Shakespeare and Co charged more for
the first night of a new play was not just the frisson of being there at the start,
but also the added possibility it could all fall apart. Audiences love to share these
moments: I was there when the door wouldn’t open, when the set collapsed,
when the actor was drunk, when the hydraulics didn’t work and Idina Menzel
had to sing “Defying Gravity” while remaining prosaically earthbound. Hence all
the stories of the hell-raiser actors of the golden age: “You think I’m drunk; wait
till you see the Duke of Buckingham.” The plethora of anthologies of theatrical
disasters; hence, too, the success of Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong,
and its numerous offspring. It may not be laudable, but we do love to watch a
train wreck on stage.
But I believe the relationship between performer and audience is much
more potent, more symbiotic, than mere financial or existential necessity, or the
 Vouchsafe Me Audience 13

potential for disaster. It is in the communality of the storytelling, the “shared

experience,” as Mike Alfreds so notably coined it in the name of his company,
formed in 1975 and still going strong today, that theatre is most compelling, most
essential to our cultural life. I further believe that in the UK, at least, with the
proliferation of social media and streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, iPlayer),
theatre is moving more and more toward a recognition that its unique contact
with a live audience is what sets it apart. From its very origin, telling tales round a
campfire, through the community theatre that was the Miracle and Mystery plays
of the Middle Ages, via the Globe, Rose, and Blackfriars theatres of the early
modern period, through to our twenty-first century, theatre thrives best, achieves
most, when it includes the audience in the experience, acknowledges their exist-
ence and their contribution to the performance.
I am fortunate to have grown up through my professional life, as an actor and
now director in theatre, with the development of the Globe Theatre on Bankside,
and now the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse there, and I have been privileged to be
part of the early life of the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton Virginia, home of the
American Shakespeare Centre. These theatres, lit by daylight, candlelight, or an
equivalent thereof, reproduce the playing conditions of Shakespeare’s time, where
the audience are lit the same as the actors, where it is impossible to ignore from
the stage the throng of people watching, listening, and reacting to the perfor-
mance, where there is no fourth wall—nor third or second, for that matter. The
excitement before a show in these venues is palpable: the audience know they
are going to be a part of the performance, not merely passive spectators, and that
their reactions to the play will inform their understanding of it, and indeed, the
way the players perform it. (The only time I have felt such excitement before a
performance in a conventional proscenium theatre was before a performance of
Hamilton: the buzz of knowing that you are about to experience something totally
out of the ordinary—and have had to re-mortgage your home to do so.)
I can recall so many moments in these playhouses where our involvement was
integral: Tim McInnerny as Iago in Othello at the Globe in 2007, frighteningly
hilarious, with the audience wrapped round his fingers, and then the extraor-
dinary moment when he asked us directly, “And what’s he then that says I play
the villain?,” daring us to answer, and in the silence that followed making us all
complicit in his lethal intent. Mark Rylance, audience-manipulator extraordi-
naire, using a heckler in Hamlet to transform the “To be or not to be speech”
into something entirely spontaneous, not the most famous lines in dramatic lit,
but something immediate and from the heart. As the oh-so-hilarious groundling
yelled out “that is the question” just before Mark could speak it, he paused, con-
sidered, and finally agreed: “Yes! That is the question . . . whether tis nobler in
the mind” etc., etc. It was such an electrifying moment that there were apparently
people in the audience who thought the interloper must be a plant.
One of the most horrifying and awkward moments I have ever spent in a
theatre was Out of Joint’s production of Macbeth, which I saw at Wilton’s Music
14 Nick Hutchison

Hall in 2005. Set in an African republic civil war, the murder of Lady MacDuff
and her family was carried out off stage with machetes and a brutal soundscape;
then the director threw up the house lights and we were offered the opportunity,
for a pound I think, to go into the next room to see the carnage. I’ve never felt
an audience so shocked to be put on the spot so much: who wants to witness
butchery, but it’s only theatre and are you missing out if you don’t? A few souls,
braver than me, went, those of us who stayed rooted to our seats, relieved, morally
smug and left to wonder what we had missed. Sixteen years later, the moment
haunts me still.
This shared experience is by no means confined to those reproductions of a
bygone playing space, but is increasingly potent in modern theatre. We expect
that in Brecht we are going to be talked to, lectured even, and that the alienation
we will feel is essential for our political education, but what we tend to forget
is how good a writer he is at arousing those emotions he wants us to objec-
tively examine. I have directed several of the lehrstucke, learning plays, and while
I was nervous at first, I was delighted to discover how funny, how moving, how
superbly written and structured they are, and how the audience response to the
verfremdungseffekt is one of delight and excitement, rather than the sense of being
at a rather worthy political rally. This metatheatricality, the reminding of an audi-
ence that what they are seeing is theatre, is obviously not new; it dates back to
Shakespeare (“our wooing doth not end like an old play”; “If this were played
upon a stage now I could condemn it as an improbable fiction”) and further still
to the Greek theatre with its satyr dances after tragedy to distance the audience
from the horror of what has gone before. Still, whatever fancy name you give it,
it is ultimately just reminding the audience that it’s not real, that you are watching
something artificial that needs your input to work.
Many of my most memorable recent theatre trips have been where this inclu-
sivity is at its most obvious. Tom Morris directed Swallows and Amazons at the
Bristol Old Vic in 2010, and not only did we pelt the villain with (woolen) snow-
balls handed out to the audience during the show, but at the end of the play the
cast handed the front row two exquisite models of the eponymous sailing boats,
and we handed them back, delicately, carefully, row to row, to the back of the
auditorium, watching the salad days of the children of the play, and of our own
childhoods, retreating further and further into the past. A wonderful moment of
shared loss and wonder, audience and performance both merging into something
rich and strange.
Sally Cookson’s production of Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather in 2014/5 had
the same bravura approach to the audience, opening with the line “My name is
Hetty Feather, and this is my story,” and never allowing its circus design to dis-
tance us from the poignant story of our orphaned heroine. Emma Rice’s work
with Kneehigh; Frantic Assembly’s physicality, especially in the sensational Black
Watch for the National Theatre of Scotland from 2008 onwards; the physical
longing of much of Geko’s work on tour—these all take the audience with them
 Vouchsafe Me Audience 15

on a journey into storytelling. They include us, celebrate us, rather than pretend
we don’t exist.
Indeed, in the last decade I think the arc of theatre is toward more inclusivity,
probably as a result of the plethora of media mentioned above. The trend toward
immersive theatre is becoming pronounced. You Me Bum Bum Train, devised by
Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd in 2004, was one of the first immersive pieces
to really garner both critical appreciation and audience success, but it has been
followed by many others determined to put the audience at the center of the
action. Even the rival medium of film has muscled in on the theatre’s territory,
with Secret Cinema turning movie screenings into an interactive, theatrical event.
Back on the boards, both The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street have been
successes in offbeat venues in London, and former NT head Nick Hytner’s pro-
ductions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and most notably Julius Caesar at the new
Bridge Theatre in London introduced mainstream audiences to the delights of
the immersive experience. I remember all too well when Caesar was shot by the
conspirators and his security detail made all the promenaders hit the floor. This
audience member was of the mind that, at my advanced years, prostrating myself
on the ground was an immersion too far. Much to my children’s delight, a mem-
ber of Security (aka Stage Management) disagreed, and I was bundled down with
little ceremony. All or nothing: you awake your faith or you depart this place.
Even where there is no direct contact with the audience, there can still be
with the best theatre a sense of community engendered by the fact of having
shared something special: the RSC’s eight and a half hour Nicholas Nickleby in
1980, when seen in one day, had the audience chatting and comparing notes like
old friends. The sensation of having experienced something together at great
length left everyone with a mutual sense of well-being and camaraderie. I felt a
similar, maybe even stronger connection to the audience after the Elevator Repair
Services eight-hour Gatz in 2012 in London: the experience of sharing with an
audience every word of The Great Gatsby was powerful and moving; the fact that
after all that time you actually did not want it to end was extraordinary, those last
famous words ringing in your ears. Event theatre at its most potent.
If some of my most powerful theatrical experiences have been when the whole
theatre has been complicit in both the storytelling and the story told, I believe we
can throw the value of such experiences into sharp relief by thinking about the
opposite evenings in the theatre, those nights when you feel cheated and robbed
of your admission price. I have sat through too many productions where the cast
seem to be having a great time at the audience’s expense, without any acknowl-
edgment that their self-satisfaction is in inverse proportion to our enjoyment. Po-
faced productions of worthy plays that talk down to the audience or patronize us;
Restoration drama where so much work has gone into a meticulous vocabulary
of the language of the fan, but no thought has gone into why we should in any
way care. I personally cannot abide those authors who themselves, or via their
estate, preserve their works in aspic, so that we can look and admire but not be
16 Nick Hutchison

engaged (yes, the Beckett estate, I’m looking at you). Productions of Shakespeare
that treat it like gospel, handed down in tablets of stone from Mount Stratford,
but which make no attempt to touch our lives, or access our emotions, soaking
us in a warm bath of iambic emollient, but with no real contact with the story
they purport to tell.
If all the world is a stage, I think the stage needs to address all the world in
exchange: to include us in an experience that is, to quote Mike Alfreds again,
“different every night” but that speaks to us and with us—not at us. When eve-
ryone in the building is a part of the experience, when theatre acknowledges it is
theatre, but that the very artificiality of the experience is what makes it real, then
I know why theatre has survived and will continue to flourish: it offers a com-
munion of what it means to be part of a shared culture, what it means to be part
of a shared experience, what it means to be human.
2
TRAINING THE EYE
S. P. Cerasano

I was never a naturally “visual person.” Instead, I responded more to words and
sounds than to pictures. But when I was in the seventh grade, my mother took me
to see a production of The Tempest. I had seen some simple children’s plays previ-
ously, but this was different. It wasn’t a “kid’s play.” It was instead a play for adults,
with elaborate scenery and costumes and intricate stage business. If I close my
eyes, I can still see the delicate Ariel flying about, a frightening monster coming
up from below the stage, and a beautiful young girl finding love while her father,
a tall powerful magician, waved his staff, making it all happen. At that early age,
I don’t know that I understood much more than the plot. I recall that moments
were quite scary and the opening scene—the deafening thunder and lightning of
the tempest—was unforgettable. In short, the whole experience seemed ­magical,
and in retrospect, it was probably the event that set me on the path to where
I have ended up professionally. As I grew older, playing music consumed much
of my free time, but as theatre gradually drew me in, the one thing that I had to
learn was how to be a viewer. Not simply to listen to the verse, but to actually
catch the careful nuance of stage movement and to comprehend how significant
it is. As I have come to understand over the years, this is one of the most valuable
capabilities that we can learn from interacting with live performances. Theatre
not only encourages us to become better listeners, a skill often encouraged in
modern society, but also trains us to become more careful observers, an important
competence rarely discussed.
Shakespeare, in particular, pays meticulous attention to movement in some
texts, although it is often implied more than openly signaled. Of course, in offer-
ing advice to the traveling actors, Hamlet counsels the troupe to “suit the action
to the word, the word to the action.” Actions and words, he argues, must be com-
plementary in some way; “with this special observance,” Hamlet continues, “that
18 S. P. Cerasano

you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.”1 Today, Hamlet’s advice seems simplistic
and obvious: “drama should mirror actual life, so don’t overdo it.” Still, when it
comes to stage movement, Shakespeare has amazing powers of descriptiveness.
One delicious example occurs when Henry V is trying to prepare his frightened
soldiers to blast through the walls at Harfleur. Here he directs them to imitate the
action of a tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect . . .
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height!2

Doubtless the dramatist had seen tigers pacing in the royal menagerie at the
Tower of London, and he had watched closely enough to see the sinews and
nostrils gather together as the creature readied itself to spring forward onto its
prey. In the same place lion baiting was conducted, and in this context, observers
could witness a dog in pursuit of a lion “that will fly / With his face backward”
or the same animal “valiant” on the attack. Then there were travelers’ tales and
drawings of the “slow” elephant with its ponderous motion.3 According to the
Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare,4 the word “action” only made its way into
Shakespeare’s texts 115 times, with variable uses.5 Among them, kinds of action
are interestingly portrayed. There is, Cassius posits in Julius Caesar, the “personal
action” that defines a man.6 Or, as Morton explains the reasons for the failure of
the young Hotspur and his army in 2 Henry IV, there is the “action” that con-
notes the bodily strength:

that same word “rebellion” did divide

The action of their bodies from their souls,
And they did fight with queasiness, constrained.7

Then there is Cordelia’s assurance to her father that “no unchaste action or dis-
honored step / . . . hath deprived me of your [Lear’s] grace and favor.”8 In As You
Like It, Silvius warns Rosalind (disguised as Ganymede) of the sting that might be
hidden in a letter he is delivering as a result of the “waspish action” of its writer.9
Hamlet, the play in which the word “action” might reasonably be used often, if
only because the prince spends so much time pondering it, offers some interest-
ing variations, with “courteous action,” “pious action,” passionate action,” and
“piteous action.”10 Finally, in his well-known soliloquy “what a piece of work is
Man,” Hamlet portrays Man as “in action how like an angel.”11
In practice, I was awakened to the significance of stage movement—the actual
ways that actors walk, stop, turn their heads, extend their hands, and direct their
 Training the Eye 19

eyes—early on in my education, and it has made all the difference in my fascina-

tion with the theatre. This enchantment was fostered by observing the careers
of some very charismatic actors, a few who have gone on to become house-
hold names and others whose professional lives have played out more quietly.
In the 1980s, I became captivated by Shared Experience, an exciting London-
based acting company which performed in a small fairly intimate space called the
Bloomsbury near the public library up on Euston Road. The company’s specialty
was the adaptation of novels for the stage. On one occasion I attended repeat
performances of their production of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in an experi-
ment to see whether actors really did perform their roles identically night after
night. I learned that they mostly did, but that there were tiny differences. More
than this, I learned that one character, “Mr B.,” a gentleman–villain played by
Ian Reddington, created the most disdainful elements of his character not only
with salacious looks and leering glances, but with tiny gestures—a dismissive flick
of a hand, a confident, playful rub of thumb and ring finger which signaled his
calculations against the pitiful strivings of the serving maid that he sought to rape.
Later on, I trained my eye on an incredible actor, Antony Sher, whose aston-
ishing physicality in Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Richard III and
Tamburlaine the Great rejected whatever restraint Hamlet worried over when he
spoke of the “modesty of nature.” Instead, with bold strokes Sher taught me the
many ways in which movement molded and ultimately created character. At this
writing, Sher’s career has spanned nearly 35 years. I have never met him, but
I have heard him speak about acting. He is the rare kind of actor who can dis-
sect his roles in language that genuinely illuminates the work he does. To this
end, his three published production diaries are a gift for theatre historians who
will, for decades to come, be able to gain a sense of what it was like—from the
inside—to perform particular roles in some of the most significant productions
that the RSC has mounted, directed by eminent hands such as Bill Alexander and
Greg Doran. What interests me is to what a significant degree Antony Sher has
brought concepts of movement into both the conceptualization and the praxis of
his performances.
I first encountered Sher’s work when I was asked to write a review of the
RSC’s 1984 production of Richard III for Shakespeare Quarterly.12 There, in the
Barbican, in seat A34, Circle Left (I still have the ticket stub), I was treated to
one of the most illuminating experiences of my academic life. Following surgery
for an injured Achilles tendon, Sher decided to perform the role of “crook-
backed king” leaning on black elbow crutches. The effect stunned the audi-
ence, not only in terms of the fact that he then resembled the “bottled spider”
as Richard is described in the play, but that the implements became extensions
of his arms. Sher used them as weapons, as fingers to toy with the hem of Lady
Anne’s gown when he courted her, as appendages to bully the noblewomen
at court, holding them at length, accusing them of cruelty and attacking them
before they themselves could launch their own attacks on him. Later, at the Battle
20 S. P. Cerasano

of Bosworth Field, he exchanged the crutches for a sword and mace, scuttling
across the battlefield with terrifying alacrity. The spider had become a large and
horrific beetle, with legs that wielded weapons of war, the king lashing out at
his enemies, sometimes laughing maniacally even as the odds were against him.
Previously, Laurence Olivier had memorialized Richard III by what he had done
with Shakespeare’s verse, but his character was mostly static, in part because he
was carrying a large prosthesis on his back in order to shape the traditional image
of the “hunch-backed king.” In sharp contrast, the complexities of Sher’s action
found fresh new dimensions within the role that made visible the character’s psy-
chological convolutions. The image of the crutched king was chosen for the front
issue of the Quarterly when my essay appeared, and Sher’s first production diary—
Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook—has since become foundational
to understanding the play in performance, an invaluable “museum” of drawings
and commentary preserving a landmark production.13
After this, I followed Sher’s career assiduously. Seven years on, his performance
of the lead in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great demonstrated another
kind of athletic prowess, coupled with emotional and intellectual vitality, which
was coming to define some of his early roles. In the Sunday Times, reviewer John
Peter noted the carefully crafted detail that Sher wove into the role. He played it

with a rippling sense of relish. His eyes swivel and glint. His body is wiry
and athletic. In moments of pleasure he sticks out the tip of his tongue like
a cat which knows no one else will dare to touch the cream.14

Likewise, another reviewer noted that Sher portrayed a nomadic warrior, crouch-
ing and squatting.15 Benedict Nightingale wrote of the ways in which Sher cap-
tured the play’s primitivism: “He pads restlessly around the stage, sniffing blood
and, at one point, bathing in it. He crouches, spitting and barking like an embat-
tled chimp.”16 Most spectacularly, Malcolm Rutherford was impressed when “in
one scene he enters on a rope just like Tarzan, kicking down his enemies on
the way.”17
Because his stage career is so extensive, I will devote the rest of this essay to
more recent (and divergent) roles—Falstaff and King Lear.
In developing the character of Falstaff for the 2014 RSC Productions of 1,2
Henry IV, Sher described an interesting phenomenon, one in which his actual
practice of learning lines for the part of the wayward knight was assisted by physi-
cal movement. He started with the first Falstaff/Hal scene (1.2), noting “I saw
Falstaff’s first line ‘Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’ I say it again, and again,
pacing around. I move on to his next line . . . Then I say the two lines together.”
In the case where he found himself stumbling on a word or phrase, the task was
“one of repetition, of developing a kind of muscle memory with the line, like a
dance step or a fight move.”18 But concurrent with learning the scripts of both
Henry IV plays, Sher had begun to ponder how his Falstaff would be portrayed.
 Training the Eye 21

Initially, he thought that the character might be re-conceptualized as “a kind

of British version of a Vietnam vet. With a ponytail and bandana, an earring,
big scruffy beard.” Then, in conversation with the director both agreed that the
atmosphere of the plays was like “a love letter to an earlier England,” so the cos-
tume had to be Elizabethan, but perhaps with elements of the roughness proposed
earlier.19 In preparing for performance, first there was the under-costume that
would have to be built to bulk out Sher’s size. It would probably add weight, so
immediately Sher wondered how he would move around the stage. Some insight
was provided by Ralph Richardson’s famed performance in the 1945 Old Vic
production. Kenneth Tynan, who wrote a celebrated review, commented that
it was a serious Falstaff, “too rich and many-sided to be crammed into a single
word.” Moreover, Richardson performed the role with great dignity, “Sir John
first, and Falstaff second.” “There was particular dignity in his movement,” Tynan
observed. “As the great belly moved, step followed step with great finesse lest it
overtopple, the arms flapped fussily at the sides as if to paddle the body’s bulk
along.” Falstaff “proceeds at his own chosen pace, like a gorgeous ceremonial
Indian elephant.”20
Although Sher’s under-suit presented challenges, he found a way to make it
work for him. (“I try lying on the ground—good—I have to paddle my limbs like
a beetle on its back in order to turn over and heave myself up. I try ­walking—
good—a roll to my gait.”21) Nonetheless, when the audience first caught sight of
Sher’s Falstaff, he didn’t “enter” in any traditional manner. He emerged from a
prone position on the floor, from beneath a pile of blankets, having slept off last
night’s drinking match.22 How many readers, or even spectators, ever imagine
­Falstaff being prone? Mountains rise, and Falstaff is frequently described as a
towering mountain of a man with an overwhelming personality. It’s difficult to
­imagine how a character could “overwhelm” from the floor. But engulf he did, and
the unexpected entrance was the first glimpse into that combination of amusing
and farcical personality that was behind the old gray beard.
I surprise even myself by including Sher in the role of King Lear (performed,
as he records in his diary, in 2016 with the RSC) as the final example here because
the uses of movement were not embedded in the lead role alone. Nevertheless,
this didn’t mean that careful consideration to movement wasn’t given. It was. But
the main role was one in which movement was sometimes diverted into kinds of
mental action, the “tempest of the mind” evidenced by Lear, or the odd move-
ments built into other characters in the play, such as what Sher described as Poor
Tom’s “mad tumble” of language accompanied by a range of movements, “some
of them twisted and jerky, almost like cerebral palsy.”23 And Lear, as Sher notes, is
one of the three roles, along with Prospero and Falstaff, written for older men.24
(Presumably, who are not marked by a broad range of movement.) Yet, for Sher,
the requirements for the role differed greatly from those of Falstaff and, in this
new situation, he interestingly relegated some of Lear’s disability to mechanical
devices. For instance, at 1.1 Sher entered the stage carried aloft on a palanquin; in
22 S. P. Cerasano

a parallel gesture, at the end of the Dover scene he collapsed onto a little cart, and
in the final scene he was drawn onto the stage on the same cart holding Cord-
elia’s dead body in his arms.25 Lear was played as an older man from early in the
performance. In some sense he grew increasingly diminished as the performance
unfolded, turning into another version of the Fool, losing strength and physi-
cal fiber.26 Consequently, much of Sher’s earlier impulse to “action” was carried
by different performance elements, namely by verbal movements or actual stage
devices. And except for the slowing of any actor performing Lear as he moves
toward his eventual death, the physicality that was integral to Sher’s former roles
informed this performance differently. The usual outpouring of energy in Sher’s
movement was apparent only occasionally, as in the strength of Lear on the heath.
In closing, I would underscore that I have learned many things from actors.
One of these is that stage movement is not merely a support system for the poetry
of Shakespeare’s plays. Movement not only produces a thrill on stage, it also
also creates an intelligence of its own. It shapes a role, often in profound ways.
Furthermore, incorporating new actions into familiar roles can challenge the old
conventions of performing classic roles. In this way, stage action, used thought-
fully, can open up dimensions of characters that we think we have already pinned
down. Movement can catch us unaware; it can startle and mesmerize; it can revolt
and attract. After all, training our eyes to attend to movement, no matter how
small, is part of the truly humanistic training offered by the theatrical experience.
And perhaps, having done so, it potentially helps us better to perceive each other
in everyday life, in ways that are unspoken.

Notes
1. All of the Shakespearean quotations in this essay are quoted from Stephen Orgel and
A. R. Braunmuller, eds., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (New York: Penguin, 2002);
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. David Bevington (Peterborough: Broadview, Inter-
net Shakespeare Editions, 2018), 3.2.17–19.
2. William Shakespeare, Henry V (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1868), 3.1.7–9, 15–17.
3. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (London: Methuen, 1602), 1.2.20–21,
4.1.19–20.
4. Marvin Spevack, ed., The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1973).
5. An online concordance claims that there are 120 incidents of the word.
6. 1.3.76.
7. 1.1.96.
8. 1.1.227–28 (F1623).
9. 4.3.10.
10. 1.4.60, 3.1.48, 3.2.130 sd, 3.4.128.
11. 2.2.275.
12. S. P. Cerasano, “Churls Just Wanna Have Fun: Reviewing Richard III,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 36.5 (1985): 618–29.
13. Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1985). This was reprinted, with a new introduction, in the US, in 1992, and
remains in print today.
 Training the Eye 23

14. John Peter, “An Act of Sher Magic,” The Sunday Times (London), September 6, 1992,
pp. 8, 13 (Features).
15. Irving Wardle, “Marlowe’s Rambo Triumphant,” The Independent, September 6, 1992.
16. Benedict Nightingale, “Savage Ruler of a Human Jungle,” The Times (London), Octo-
ber 18, 1993, p. 34 (Features).
17. Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine,” Financial Times, October 16, 1993.
18. Antony Sher, Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries (London: Nick Hern Books,
2015), 56, 76.
19. Ibid., 31, 37–38.
20. Ibid., 51–52.
21. Ibid., 100.
22. Ibid., 116.
23. Antony Sher, Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries (London: Nick Hern Books,
2018), 186–87.
24. Ibid., 238.
25. Ibid., 197, 200, 223.
26. Ibid., 170.
3
UNDEVELOPED FREIGHT
Listening Together in the Playhouse

Robert Price

It has not been an easy year.

Perhaps they never are. Perhaps they never can be. But without any risk of
exaggeration or hyperbole, this one, 2020, the year of Covid 19, the year of the
virus, has been particularly horrid, and during plague years, as now, as formerly,
the playhouses, of course, are shut.
Personally, too, it’s been tricky, for on Friday, March 13, as it turned out, the
last day of live learning in the conservatoire, the final Friday that the pubs were
still open in Old London Town, on that Friday I resigned (after 11 busy years)
from my post as a voice coach and theatre director at the London Academy of
Music and Dramatic Art.
I will not dwell on the reasons for that decision here, but it was not, let us say,
either an easy or a happy one.
So . . . here I sit at home, unemployed, unemployable, amid a global pandemic,
with, at last, a little time to muse upon this excellent question: why the theatre?
So, why. Indeed. Why . . .?
And this is not, after all, either a meaningless or an easy question, for I have a
little painful admission to make, a confession if you will (phew, here goes, here
goes . . .).
You see, I make this confession despite an entire professional career spent mak-
ing theatre, spent acting in plays, spent directing them, and, especially in recent
years, spent training other deluded souls to try to act in them, at posh sounding
institutions with familiar names, at the LAMDA and the RADA and the Bada
and the blah blah blah—just big buildings in the end of course, despite their care-
fully maintained brandings, just buildings in our cities with large rooms in them,
rooms where experienced people converse with talented people in an attempt to
help them learn potentially unlearnable things.
 Undeveloped Freight 25

I make the confession despite the fact, indeed, that all of the most mean-
ingful relationships in my life, my dearest colleagues, my friends, my lovers,
my wife, and my children . . . all of them, all come specifically and directly
from the activities of making theatre. And this is not to mention my (slender)
income and (precarious) self-esteem . . . and please don’t get me started on the
fortunes (and hours) I’ve lavished on watching plays, or all the books I have
(nearly) read, the endless courses I have taken, the master’s degree I pursued from
The Royal-Central-School-of-Speech-and-Drama.
Despite all of that, you see:

I am not always entirely sure that I even actually even really like the theatre . . .

I certainly don’t like its ludicrous expense (for something so frequently so shock-
ingly mediocre); its predictability (the wearyingly compulsory agreed aesthet-
ics of the “biz”); the drone; the bit when we got the movement director in;
the whumph at the end; its risible snobberies and its institutionalized cruelties
(there’s no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools). Finally, more than any-
thing else perhaps, I do not like its tiresome trendiness. Oh, how I dread the end-
less dramas about lockdown to come, the dystopian meditations upon pestilence
and plague we’ll all have to sit through together, like that terrible decade when
every play simply had to have a waterboarding.
And, frankly, to be really, really honest, beyond not really liking the theatre,
sometimes—on a bad day—usually furiously disappointed and tipsy outside a
grand-royal-national something-or-other, I recall these lines from “A Scattering,”
Christopher Reid’s memorial to his wife, the actor Lucinda Gane:

The theatre is a big, ramshackle, blindly trundling machine.

With bits falling off it, it clatters through the generations,
more wasteful of lives than a losing army . . .1
. . . and I even positively despise it.

So, perhaps, in these unusual days of theatrical darkness, in this, the first time
ever (in my 51 years anyhow) that we can’t all just breezily roll into whichever
town we’re close to and catch that new thing at the whatchamacallit that everyone
says is really rather good, or scan the reviews for a clever, classy show to impress
someone cool on a date, or, alternatively, to set off swotty and solo to see that
play we’ve always been curious about, an obscure Rattigan, an early Coward, a
difficult Aphra Behn (the furtive and nerdy pursuits of a covert fan of the canon),
in this absence, perhaps, this question—why the theatre—is particularly ask-able.
Because now, without it, we can conduct a unique experiment; we can find
out, precisely and honestly, what it is (if anything) that we’re missing.
One thing we’re most definitely not missing in our dreary “lockdowns” is
entertainment—diversions, stimulation, even of the highest-brow kinds. For,
26 Robert Price

quite apart from the venerable pursuits of reading and watching DVDs, as long
as the electricity keeps flowing and the internet holds out, we have near infinite
resources of fine movies and TV to watch, as well as audio books and podcasts and
radio shows and archived recordings of all sorts of performances from all time and
around the globe to consume, all linked up for us by our thousands and thousands
of virtual friends—a vast collection, filtered algorithmically for our delectation.
And there really is some wonderful stuff . . . the theatre alone is astonishing:
Ariane Mnouchkine’s Moliere, Brook’s Beckett from the Theatre des Bouffes du
Nord, a different Schaubühne production every evening, Kama Ginka’s wonder-
ful, metaphysical Black Monk. We can fly virtually to Epidaurus and watch Nikos
Karathanos’ production of The Birds by Aristophanes or be astonished by the radi-
cal accomplishment the Red Torch Theatre’s signed Three Sisters in Novosibirsk.
Cripes!
A magnificently curated theatrical season you could only have actually wit-
nessed in the flesh if you’d been infinitely leisured and rich as Croesus. Available
and free (or, at least, cheapish) into that living room you now hardly ever leave.
Blow wind, come wrack: let the damn plague run its course! I’ve got my Amazon
Prime and my digital theatre +. I’ve got it covered!
So, again: what, exactly, are we missing . . .?
Oh, and here’s a thing for you: given all of these resources of home enter-
tainment combined with the invariable expense and frequent terribleness of live
theatre, why was it that on that Friday 13th 2020 I mentioned earlier, in Eng-
land at least, the last normal-ish day, the day that I huffed out of LAMDA, a day
when 250 people lost their lives to the virus in Italy, why was it that early on the
morning of that day, my wife Elizabeth, our eldest son Charlie, and I collectively
reached the conclusion (via an admittedly tense but still just-about civil family
conference) that it was, on balance, worth the risk for Charlie to travel up to
London, by train and by tube, to sit, surrounded by 1,126 people (more or less)
for seven hours in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre watching Rob-
ert Le Page’s (admittedly superb) Seven Streams of the River Ota? Why did we (even
ever so slightly) gamble with our firstborn’s health on this treacherously unreliable
activity of theatre going?
Why were we so irresponsible?
Well. I think the answer—or at least an answer—could be found by watching
the streaming one of those productions I mentioned earlier.
If you’d have been on top of your viewing game during the crisis of 2020,
you might have noticed the availability of the Schaubühne’s Richard III, free to
stream on April 3, a production that Charlie and I had been fortunate enough to
watch on its opening night at the Barbican in London, in the much happier days
of February 2017.
Although widely acclaimed, especially for Lars Edinger’s mesmerizing turn
as the megalomaniacal Richard, some critics, notably Michael Billington of the
Guardian, had criticized the director, Thomas Ostermeier, for failing to explore
 Undeveloped Freight 27

the contemporary political resonances of Shakespeare’s play. Billington, in his

review, went as far as to describe the production as “culpably evasive” for ignoring
these possibilities “at a time when the far right is on the move throughout west-
ern and central Europe,”2 a response that astonished me reading the papers over
coffee and muffins the morning after watching it because, for me at least, Oster-
meier’s production contained the single most politically provocative moment
I had ever witnessed in a playhouse, exquisitely realized through a sublimely
played ludic conceit by the Schaubühne’s skillful ensemble (not at all the begin-
ners’ metatheatre for the under-12s that settled into the Globe many years ago,
and increasingly bedevils the RSC, little more—let’s face it—than the relentless
pursuit of the cheap laugh).
About halfway through the evening, an increasingly erratic and frustrated
Richard/Edinger seemed to lose control of himself during a banquet scene and
lurched off-script, attacking the actor playing Buckingham by forcing food into
his face and then smearing it all over his suit. Both Richard’s conduct and the
wider company’s confused reaction to this violation suggested at the very least
an erratic improvisation gone a bit wrong or maybe even some kind of diva-ish
breakdown. Edinger then flipped out of German and taunted the terrified Buck-
ingham by seeming to coin the not quite plausible English phrase: “You look like
shit . . . have you eaten pussy yet today?” Richard/Edinger, apparently delighted
with himself, repeated the phrase several times, turning it over in his mouth, test-
ing it and tasting it, before looking to instigate an escalation of effect by spinning
out to the auditorium, and, via a chilling display of pantomimic capering, sought
to enlist the support of the 1,158 (or so) audience members by drilling us into a
chorus, yelling: “you look like shit have you eaten pussy yet today” back at the
woebegone Buckingham.
It was all very confusing and it seemed to me that as well as forcing some-
thing of a metaphor for the cruelty of the twentieth century into the tastefully
safe space of the Barbican theatre, the company were, brilliantly, exploring this
nastiness via a quintessentially Shakespearean irony, because we in the audience
weren’t quite sure if this was an actor pretending to be a character behaving
madly or a mad person getting away with pretending to be an actor. Where
were the boundaries? What was happening? Was it just schtick? Naughty fun for
grown-ups or Augusto Boal’s Forum theatre masquerading unvirtuously as meta-
misbehavior? And, as someone called out in a subsequent performance, “Why is
no one telling him to fuck off?”
Some groups and individuals joined in and some didn’t. You were forced to
make a choice, and Edinger took his time.
I’ve read about it since. It was contrived, crafted, an agreed space in the play
for this game to be played, a clever exploration indeed of the cruelty of power and
our willing and culpable complicity in its operation.
For me it was riveting and shocking and exciting and funny and sexy and
transgressive and offensive. Listening, I felt acutely and uncomfortably aware of
28 Robert Price

my teenage son sitting next to me. Sonically marooned among these tasteful well-
educated metropolitan types, many of whom were gleefully chanting this weird
(and problematic) phrase back at the stage.
So here we had a uniquely theatrical, viscerally powerful, exciting passage of
skillfully crafted dramatic art. Bravo! Thank you, Berlin!
And I wouldn’t dare to think that watching that passage of the play will have
made me a better person. But it did make me feel something deeply and it made
me think about cruelty and violence and anger and power and comedy, and
I think I understood something that night that I didn’t quite understand before
and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.
And of course, of course: it just doesn’t work in anything like the same way
when you watch it in your house on the telly. It just doesn’t explode; you can see
the workings of the choice; you can think about it dramaturgically; consider the
mise en scène; agree or disagree with the conceit; contest its misogyny; but that’s
it . . . you can only understand it . . . merely “read” it.
And the why of this failure of theatre to really translate into other media is
complex. It’s to do with atmosphere, I guess, synchronized heartbeats, per-
haps . . . the now-ness of live theatre. But partly, too, and for me most crucially,
it’s because of the sheer unmediated physicality of the behavior of sound in a
playhouse, the physiology of how voice and listening interact, their intimacy and
immediacy. The surprisingly folksy chain of subglottic pressure, adducting skins,
and compressed air composing the complex sound signal bouncing out from the
voice of the performer to thrum through the auditorium before finding its way
into the ear itself. Into us. Inside of us. And once it’s within us—without wish-
ing to spend too much time back in Speech Science 101—we can marvel at the
delicate transformation of this complex wave back into perceived speech: first
caught and communicated via the vibrations of the tympanic membrane (the
perfectly named ear drum), then transmitted onwards down a chain of three tiny,
vibrating auditory ossicles, amplified in its journey, before being handed through
the oval window (such a beautiful name) by the last of the ossicles, the stapes, and
transmuted from the trembling of bone into ripples pulsating through the spiral-
ing sealed pools of lymph contained in our cochlea. In the Barbican that night,
2,317 paired portable puddles of the inner ear all vibrated stereophonically and
synchronously in complex resonant sympathy to the actor’s voice and thoughts
before, finally, the ripples slosh against the Organ of Corti, where this oscillation
in the endolymph fires up the auditory nerve to stimulate the temporal lobe,
which, finally, concludes the process by decoding language out of neurological
signals from Edinger’s brain to my brain, with a delay (given the speed of sound
and the size of the Barbican theatre) of—at most—one-seventeenth of a second.
So, when Richard insults Buckingham, it’s not happening over there; it’s hap-
pening right here, inside of us: we’re physically complicit in the making of its
meaning, in real time, in a shared space. And you can’t turn away or turn it
off, even when you disagree, even when it’s rubbish. You can’t unfriend it. It’s
 Undeveloped Freight 29

already happened. And this intense and uniquely theatrical exchange of sound
and meaning between an actual ear and a real mouth can strike us within the unit
of a single word, a single syllable, even sometimes within a single sound, like the
time I caught the detail of King Lear pathetically kissing the forehead of his dead
Cordelia, the tiniest kiss heard all the way up in the gods, in the cheapest of the
cheap seats, a sound which in measurable intensity would be something like a
million times quieter than the screams and yells that accompanied the blinding of
Gloucester earlier in the evening.
And this collision between the audience and the actor, by the way, can shock
and excite in far less curated ways than in my example of the Schaubühne’s care-
fully constructed coup de theatre. The impact of a word can really surprise you, as
Emily Dickinson articulates in her poem of the unknowableness of the effect of
what we say to each other:

Could mortal lip divine

The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
’Twould crumble with the weight.3

I first understood this—first really got it— as an actor in Dublin in 1996.

I was playing Leslie, the captured English soldier, in a production of Brendan
Behan’s The Hostage in the Abbey theatre, one of my first professional gigs.
Behan’s play explores the trajectory of a political kidnapping through the rough
grammar of the music hall. The published version captures the processes of Joan
Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East where the play was first devised
and performed in 1958. So it’s more of a record of a devising process than a tra-
ditional text per se, and, because of that, there have always been various versions
of the script (as well as an English translation of An Giall — Behan’s original Irish
language one-act “Hostage” play) to work from in revivals.
Rehearsing a play about the troubles in Ireland’s National Theatre that win-
ter had been an intense experience, especially given how a 17-month cease-
fire, negotiated between the British government and the IRA, had been coming
under increasing strain during the previous year, as Parliamentary byelections
reduced John Major’s tiny majority and Ulster Unionist influence seemed to
grow at Westminster. It shattered—spectacularly—on February 9, during the first
week of our rehearsal period, with the detonation of a huge 1400 kg bomb in
Canary Wharf.
The mood in Ireland was one of fury: a once-in-a-generation peace had been
obliterated by a combination of Tory incompetence and Loyalist Machiavellianism.
In act two of The Hostage, Leslie (the conscripted soldier) and Theresa (a coun-
try girl skivvying in the brothel where he’s imprisoned) are forming the sweet
bonds of friendship and attraction that sit antithetically to violence and hatred
within the play’s dialectic. They flirt and find themselves rehearsing some of the
30 Robert Price

key arguments of the play, and when Theresa points out that the reason for the
armed republican struggle is the presence of British armed forces on Irish soil,
Leslie quips back: “And what about the Irish in London? Thousands of them.
Nobodies doing anything to them. We just let them drink their way through it.”4
Behan is flagging up and satirizing the stereotypical anti-Irishness of the
English working class. The line is provocative and might raise a giggle or a snarl
from an attentive audience, but in the Abbey archive I had found another ver-
sion of the scene containing a darker, more aggressive line for Leslie. Rather than
“drink their way through it,” someone—Behan, Littlewood, Alfred Lynch (who
originated the role of Leslie)?—had suggested, “We just let them bomb their way
through it,” an edgier, more hibernophobic line from an author who had himself
served time in an English borstal for attempting to bomb the Liverpool docks at
the age of 16.
Excited by my discovery, I suggested to the director that maybe we could try
it, sharpening the bite of our production and bringing something of the mood of
the current moment into the theatre. He’d thought for a moment and then said
a firm no.
Our show previewed and opened and the run was going fine—the reviews
were grand—the houses were okay. It was, in other words, the kind of mildly
disappointing experience that characterizes a life in commercial mainstream thea-
tre. Meanwhile, the IRA bombing campaign continued in London. Then one
night (I think it was the night after the bombing of the Earls Court Road), and
completely to my surprise, the director asked me to try the line, the alternative
line, the line with bomb in it.
So I did.
One word, from “drink” to “bomb.” A single syllable lasting a fraction of a
second.
What happened next is hard to articulate; there was a “for fuck sake!” from
the back of the stalls, someone else left the theatre, and a row broke out backstage
followed by raised voices in the foyer. A minor kerfuffle, then, but it wasn’t that:
it was the feeling of the air being sucked out of a communal space, the way the
atmosphere changed instantly, the feeling in the playhouse of an acceleration of
hundreds of hearts, an entire audience changing their minds about you, turning
on you—all of this freighted by a single syllable. And what was it that the audi-
ence were so angry about? National guilt? The stupidity and ignorance of the
British? The oppression of 800 years? All of it was there in that moment.
I came off stage that night shaking; the rest of the cast seemed angry with me
(although no one actually said anything). I had the nauseating feeling that I had
done something terribly wrong.
We changed the line back the following night. Whatever it had done had
been too unpredictable, too chaotic, but from that moment on I owned a certain
knowledge about the potential power of language in the theatre, and it’s kept me
going. It’s my answer to the question.
 Undeveloped Freight 31

Why the theatre? That’s why.

I have other stories I’d love to tell you, but there is no time to tell them here.
So, when the rain stops falling and the plague passes, put on a show. I’ll give
everything I have to be there with you, sitting in the dark, listening.

Notes
1. Christopher Reid, A Scattering (Oxford: Areté Books, 2009), 56.
2. Michael Billington, “We’re in Crisis—so Why Has Ostermeier Stripped Richard III of
Politics?” The Guardian, February 17, 2017.
3. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924);
Bartleby.com, 2000, www.bartleby.com/113/.
4. Brendan Behan, Behan: The Complete Plays (Grove Press: New York, 1978), p. 186.
4
A SHAKESPEARE PROFESSOR
BECOMES A PLAYGOER
Alan C. Dessen

As an undergraduate in the 1950s, I was exposed primarily to New Criticism (aka

Formalism), and as a graduate student in the early 1960s, I was imprinted with
what might be now termed Old Historicism. However, in the 1970s I stumbled
into theatre history and performance history, with the latter linked to the huge
number of productions I was able to see at various venues over the following
40 years. However, any answer to the “Why the theatre?” question was taken for
granted and not a significant part of this process.
Now that my hearing and, more important, my ability to process what I hear
has diminished, I no longer look forward to playgoing and belatedly have come
to recognize how much fun and enlightenment I had both in seeing so many
shows and being able to talk to astute theatre professionals about the work that
went into them. With Shakespeare scripts I often had information of potential
value to them, but they were far better informed on matters theatrical. Keeping
those conversations going in London; Stratford-upon-Avon; Ashland, Oregon;
and other venues has been a high point of my career.
My immersion in the world of theatre began at the Oregon Shakespeare Fes-
tival where, starting in 1974, I taught a summer course linked to that season’s
productions, often with an actor or director as co-teacher. As a novice playgoer,
I had many lessons to learn—and thereby hangs my tale.
One of the shows on offer in the indoor Bowmer Theatre in 1974 was Saroy-
an’s The Time of Your Life with its unlikely, tacked-on happy ending. The pro-
duction, however, was so well directed and the acting so compelling that I was
carried along by the experience, and only when exiting into the afternoon sun
did I realize that I’d been had—a telling introduction to how and why theatre
can be so special. Two years later, I arrived a day early for my class and got a last-
minute seat at a far corner of the large outdoor amphitheater. When the young
 A Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer 33

actor playing the Fool, Rex Rabold, delivered his lines to Lear in 1.5 that climax
with “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (44–451—it can
be a funny line or an amusing putdown), those seated around me laughed, but
three days later, when I was in the third row and saw that actor seated on a railing
with tears in his eyes, I could not understand why those idiots behind me were
laughing. Another lesson learned—this time about the role played by seating or
sightlines.
Looking back at those early years of my playgoing—essentially my post-­
graduate school education—several shows stand out. My first encounter with
King Lear (a now legendary 1964 event in Stratford, Ontario) was directed by
Michael Langham with John Colicos as Lear and a supporting cast of actors who
became festival regulars. In those days, I was not taking notes and cannot provide
details about what made this production so distinctive, but I do remember that
even at the outset of her distinguished career, Martha Henry was able to make
me and others really care about Cordelia to the extent that the final scene had an
enormous impact. If I count movie versions, I have now logged more than 60
versions of this tragedy—and perhaps if I saw this one today it would not have
the same impact—but I was not the only one in that huge auditorium too moved
to applaud at the end of the performance, the only time I have had that reac-
tion. Something very special had just happened—and hoping, perhaps naively, for
more such moments is why I kept going back to the theatre.
Two very different Oregon productions in the 1970s stand out for me. As an
undergraduate I had a one-on-one tutorial for which I was assigned The Winter’s
Tale, a play with a sequence of events I could not take seriously (and said so in my
session). A few years later I saw a touring production (with Bert Lahr as Autoly-
cus) that reinforced my dismissal of the script. In 1975 my co-teacher was director
Audrey Stanley, who was working with two wonderful actors, Jim Edmondson
and le Clanche du Rand, as Leontes and Hermione. In advance of my class, I was
worried about how to deal in depth with this play I had mocked as a know-it-all
student, but by the end of the two weeks it had emerged as (and remains) one of
my favorites.
Audrey and her creative team made inventive use of the resources of the
indoor Bowmer Theatre (e.g., to distinguish between winter and spring, to pro-
vide a huge shadow of a threatening bear), but the goal for her and the pay-off
for my class and me was the staging of the final scene. With all the actors dressed
in white, Hermione rose from below in a curtained kiosk clothed in an even
brighter white, and so motionless that playgoers kept consulting their programs to
see if she was indeed a statue. When Paulina called for music, we heard Pachelbel’s
“Canon in D” (in 1975 it had yet to become a musical cliché). At Paulina’s plea to
descend and “be stone no more” (5.3.99), there was a suspenseful pause, a grace-
ful movement down, and the clasping of hands (an onstage image that had been
set up by several earlier moments). I learned from an actor that the agreement to
descend was based on Hermione’s assessment at each performance that Leontes
34 Alan C. Dessen

had truly repented as displayed in how Edmondson delivered “I am asham’d”

(37). The payoff was in his three words (or two words and a sound): “O, she’s
warm” (109), which to me became one of the most moving speeches in the entire
canon—all this from a play I had mocked as a reader. I have seen 20 or more
versions of this moment since 1975, some of them very successful (though these
days the tendency is to have a cool Hermione–Leontes reunion and make the
Hermione–Perdita meeting the emotional high point), but I have been imprinted
indelibly with this 1975 joining of hands.
I saw this production four times, as did most members of our class (in those
beneficent days, the students who had purchased a full block of tickets could get
for free any unsold tickets on the day of the show). For performance number four,
I got permission for our group to watch the play from a sound-proofed booth
with the dialogue piped in so that Audrey could comment on details about the
staging as the scenes progressed (a fascinating and highly informative experience).
We were tightly packed into a small space, but when we got to that final scene,
I vividly remember a voice from behind me saying emphatically, “Audrey, shut
up.” All of us wanted to experience that ending one last time.
To complete a trip through the entire Shakespeare canon, the planners of the
Oregon program presented the three parts of Henry VI in three separate summer
seasons in the outdoor theatre. Part 1 was a romp with much action and move-
ment that included a version of “capture the flag” as one group, then another,
took hold of the upper stage and waved their banners. Part 2 (a script I much
admire as a reader) was heavily cut, with one reviewer describing it as a Shake-
speare spaghetti western. As with The Winter’s Tale two years earlier, with Part 3
in 1977 I was afraid that I would have nothing to say about a script I had so far
managed to avoid.
Again, I was surprised, and again, I learned some valuable lessons about my
limitations as a reader of playscripts. More than any other director during my
roughly 20 visits to Ashland, Pat Patton was the master of the outdoor Elizabe-
than stage. For this potentially confusing jumble of events and figures (often read
as no more than a prelude to Richard III ), he provided color-coded costumes
and props (e.g., roses, cloaks, banners) and framed the action by beginning and
ending with an empty throne. The narrative had an enormous thrust as events
rushed by with an occasional quiet moment involving Henry VI in bold relief.
I was impressed by Larry Ballard’s delivery of his speech (3.1.84–89) where he
compares men to a feather “commanded always by the greater gust,” a passage
to which I had never paid attention but aptly sums up the choices that follow
and emerged for me as the center of the play. Michael Santo got plenty of mile-
age out of the big speeches from the future Richard III and invested some lines
(again, several I had ignored as a reader) with a sly humor, as with his comment
when Clarence changes sides again: “Welcome, good Clarence, this is brother-
like” (5.1.105). The analogous actions in the script were clearly signaled, most
notably the three parents lamenting their murdered sons—Richard of York (1.4),
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obliged to adhere in communion. And consequently, this witness of
the Spirit, which shews that we christians are the sons of God,
cannot possibly be applied to the mere private testimony of the Spirit
given to our own consciences, to prove that we, or private christians,
are the sons of God and heirs of salvation, as is pretended by
modern enthusiasts.”

But does not his Lordship here argue from a mistaken

supposition, that the Apostle, in the 8th of the Romans, is speaking
of the miraculous power our Lord gave to his first Apostles to work
miracles, in confirmation that their doctrine was of God? Is there any
such thing so much as hinted at through the whole chapter? Is not
the whole scope of it to shew the privileges of those, who “being
justified by faith” alone, chapter 5th, “have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ?” Does not the Apostle therefore at the first
verse say, “That there is no condemnation to them who are in
Christ Jesus?” Does he not say, verse the 9th, that “the Spirit of
God dwelt in them?” Does not his Lordship allow, page 16, &c. That
the Apostle in this and the preceding verses treats of that “spiritual
principle in christians which enables them to mortify the deeds of the
body, and overcome carnal inclinations?” And what shadow of a
reason can be given to prove that the same spiritual principle is not
spoken of in verse 16th, as bearing witness with believer’s spirits
that they were the children of God? Is it not said, verse 15th, to be
something that they had received? “But ye have received the spirit of
adoption, whereby ye cry Abba, Father.” And is not the obvious
sense of these verses put together plainly this, “That true believers,
those who are christians indeed, have the Spirit of God dwelling in
them, verse 9th; are led by this Spirit, verse 14th; have gotten an
inward witness from this same Spirit, that they are God’s children,
and therefore need not be brought into bondage, and fear, lest God
would reject them, but may have free access, and with a full
assurance of faith, and a holy child-like simplicity, draw near unto
him, crying Abba, Father?”

His Lordship, to prove that this is not the sense of this passage,
but that the testimony of the Spirit here spoken of, is a public gift of
working miracles, refers, page 19th, to Galatians iii. 2. where the
Apostle puts this question to them: “Received ye the Spirit, (i. e.
according to his Lordship, the power of working miracles) by the
works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” which (says his
Lordship) the same Apostle presently after explains, when he says at
verse 5th, “He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and
worketh miracles among you, doth he it by the works of the law, or
by the hearing of faith?” But is not here a plain antithesis between
administring the Spirit and working miracles? Do they not evidently
imply two distinct things? And can it be supposed, that the Spirit
which the Apostle asks, verse 2d, “Whether they had received by the
works of the law, or the hearing of faith,” was a power to perform
such miracles, at least that only? Would it not then follow, since he
declares in the 8th of the Romans, “that if any man have not the
Spirit of Christ he is none of his,” that either all believers did receive
his Spirit in his miraculous gifts, or that no one is a believer that has
them not? And doth not the Apostle in this very epistle make it
appear, that the Spirit here spoken of is not this miraculous outward
testimony? For what says he, Galatians iv. 6. “And because ye are
sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts
(whereby it is plain the Spirit was received into the heart) crying,
Abba, Father?” And does not this quite clear up that passage of
Romans, chapter viii. verse 15. about the witnessing Spirit and the
Spirit of adoption, viz. that believers (besides seeing the miracles
which the Apostles wrought) had an inward testimony of the Holy
Ghost, he making an inward application of the merits of Christ to
their souls, and giving them an inward testimony that they were
indeed the adopted sons of God, and therefore in a holy confidence
they might cry, Abba, Father? Is there any thing forced in this
interpretation? And consequently (notwithstanding what appears to
the contrary from his Lordship’s explanation) may not persons
assert, that there is such a thing as a witness or testimony of the
Spirit given to our own consciences, to prove that private christians
are the Sons of God and heirs of salvation, without being censured
for so doing as modern enthusiasts?
 May I not likewise venture to affirm, that his Lordship is equally
mistaken in his interpretation of the 26th and 27th verses of the
same chapter, which runs thus: “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our
infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but
the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which
cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the heart, knoweth what is
the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints
according to the will of God?”

The Spirit here spoken of, according to his Lordship, was the
Spirit acting in the inspired person, who in the apostolical age, says
his Lordship, page 24th, “had the gift of prayer, and interceded for
the whole congregation; so that what is here said of the Spirit, is ♦by
an easy figure transferred to the spiritual or inspired person, who
prayed in that capacity, for the whole christian assembly. It is he that
maketh intercession with God for private christians, with vehement
and inexpressible groanings or sighs.” But however easy it may be to
find out a figure to transfer what is here said of the Spirit, to the
spiritual or inspired person, yet how will it be easy to find a figure to
interpret this of the spiritual or inspired person at all? For has it not
already been shewn, that this whole chapter is no where speaking of
any such spiritual inspired person, but of the Spirit of God dwelling in
all believers?

♦ “hy” replaced with “by”

His Lordship goes on, page ibid. to comment upon the 27th
verse: “And he that searcheth the hearts, knoweth what is the mind
of the spirit, (i. e. of the spiritual or inspired person) because he
maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” That
is, says his Lordship, “God knows the intentions of the spiritual
person, and judges of the vehemence of his desires in prayer for the
whole assembly, for whom he makes intercession, with regard to the
immediate subject of affliction; literally indeed, according to God
(kata Theon) or relatively to him, but by construction, conformably to
the will of God; namely, that in a most fervent manner, the person
that has the inspired gift of prayer, which he uses for the benefit of
the whole assembly, he, I say, leaves it entirely to God, whether it be
best that christians should suffer afflictions for the gospel, or be
delivered from them. And such an intention of his prayer cannot but
be highly acceptable to God, who searches his heart, and approves
of such an act of profound resignation to his will.”

Thus far his Lordship. But where is there through the whole
chapter any mention made of an assembly, or of any spiritual
inspired person praying in its behalf? Does it not require a very
profound understanding to search it out? Is it not more agreeable to
the whole scope of the apostle in this chapter, to believe, that this
spirit here mentioned as helping infirmities, or distresses, and
assisting in prayer, is the common privilege of all believers? Is he not
said to make intercession for the saints in general? And does not his
Lordship, page 22d, in effect own this? For what says his Lordship?
“Now on this occasion, he, the apostle, adds another proof of the
truth of christianity, and that christians are the adopted sons of God,
and more especially with regard to their sufferings at that time, for
the sake of their religion, says he, verse 26th. Likewise the Spirit
also, (or rather even, kai) helpeth our infirmities (or our distresses,
for the word Astheneiais signifies both.) And then he mentions in
what instances he does so, viz. in prayers to God about bearing
afflictions, or being delivered from them; and which of these two is
most profitable for us, the Spirit knows better than we ourselves, and
therefore instructs christians how to pray with regard to their
sufferings. We know not, says he, what we should pray for as we
ought; that is, whether it be best for us to bear afflictions, or to be
delivered from them according to our natural inclinations.” And after
writing thus, how inconsistent is it in his Lordship to say, that this is
done by the Spirit acting in the inspired person only, who made
intercession for the whole assembly? Is not the quite contrary, I
could almost say, self-evident? And how then can those who, from
this passage of the 8th of the Romans, humbly claim the gift and
grace of prayer now, as well as formerly, for so doing, be justly
termed modern enthusiasts.
 May we not further enquire, whether his Lordship’s interpretation
of the 4th and 5th verses of the 2d chapter of the first epistle to the
Corinthians be sound and consistent? The words are these, page
27th. “And my speech and my preaching were not with the enticing
words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of
power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in
the power of God,” As to the former part of these words, “My speech
and my preaching were not with the enticing words of man’s
wisdom,” his Lordship seems to agree with the interpretation put
upon them by those whom he is pleased to term enthusiasts; but the
latter, “The demonstration of the Spirit and of power,” his Lordship, in
pages 29th, 30th, 31st, and 32d, would fain shew, means no more,
than that the Apostle proved Jesus to be the Messiah by proofs out
of the prophecies of the Old Testament, and evinced the truth of
christianity by performing miracles.

And supposing this may be one sense of the words, yet if this be
the sole meaning of the Apostle’s expression, would it not have
better become such a scholar as Paul was, to have said, “He came
to them in the demonstration of the scriptures, rather than of the
Spirit?” Can any parallel passage be produced, where the word Spirit
is thus put for the scriptures? And therefore, by the demonstration of
the Spirit, may we not understand, that the Spirit of God himself,
whilst the Apostle was preaching, wrought a demonstrative
conviction in the souls of his hearers, not only that what he spake
was of God, but also that he was assisted in speaking by the Spirit
of God? Does not this agree with what he says, 2d epistle
Corinthians iii. 2, 3. “Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known
and read of all men: forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be
the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with
the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables
of the heart.” And though it should be allowed that the word Dunamis
(as his Lordship observes, page 30th) “in its ordinary sense in the
New Testament, must signify the power exerted in miraculous
operations:” yet how is it foreign to the Apostle’s purpose to interpret
it also of a divine power or energy, which ordinarily attended the
word preached by him; I mean such a power as accompanied the
word when the Lord opened the heart of Lydia, and when so many
were pricked to the heart, and made to cry out, “Men and brethren,
what shall we do to be saved?” Does not the word Dunamis seem to
carry this sense with it, 2 Corinthians iv. 7.? “But we have this
treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power
(Dunameos) may be of God, and not of men.” And is not Apollos
said to be (Dunatos engraphais) mighty, or powerful, in the
scriptures, though we do not hear that he performed any miracles at
all? And though his Lordship is pleased to say, page ibid. “For by this
power of God here spoken of, that it is a power to work miracles
appears expresly,” from the immediately following verse, in which is
assigned the reason for using this method of proving christianity to
be true, “that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in
the power of God:” yet will it not equally hold good, that their faith
stood not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God? If by the
power we understand a divine power attending the word preached in
convincing the conscience, and changing the hearts of men,
exclusive or besides a power of working miracles.

His Lordship in the same page proceeds thus. “By the power of
God therefore must necessarily be understood the miraculous
operations performed by Jesus Christ and his Apostles, as a divine
testimony of their authority.” He goes on in the 7th, 10th, and
following verses, to explain this “demonstration of the Spirit and of
power;” and tells us, “That this wisdom of God is a mystery, or
wisdom formerly hidden from the world, which was couched in the
types and prophecies of the Messiah in the Old Testament, under the
title of the Law of Moses, the Psalms, and all the prophets that were
actually fulfilled in Jesus Christ. For, says he, ‘the Spirit searcheth
all things, even the deep things of God. Now we have not received
the spirit of the world, (viz. of oratory and philosophy) but the spirit
which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given
to us of God.’ That is, that we might learn of the Spirit the true
meaning of those writings which he dictated himself, and which none
but the Spirit of God could know, since the gospel is the contrivance
of God alone for man’s salvation; and the benefits of it are freely and
of his mere grace conferred upon us.”
 But in all these passages, where is there a shadow of a proof,
that by the word power, the Apostle meant only that he worked
miracles among them? Is there any such thing so much as hinted at
in those verses? Or what greater reason is there to infer from hence,
that the demonstration of the Spirit means no more than proving
Christ to be the Messiah, from the books of the Old Testament?

His Lordship goes on, page 31st, to comment upon the 13th
verse of the 1st Corinthians 2d. thus: “The apostle adds, ‘Which
things also we speak not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth,
(viz. as before by oratory and philosophy) but which the Holy Ghost
teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.’ From which last
passage it appears that the words which the Holy Ghost is said to
teach, must be prophetical revelations made of Jesus Christ in the
Old Testament, which were clearly discovered to the Apostles, and
explained by them to the world by the same Holy Spirit, that perfectly
knew those deep or mysterious things of God in the holy scriptures,
which related to and were fulfilled in Jesus Christ; and whose
expositions of his doctrine were authorized by the miracles they
wrought in confirmation of it.”

But supposing this be in part true, have not the words a further
meaning? And by “Words which the Holy Ghost teacheth,” may we
not understand, words which the Holy Ghost did immediately put into
this and other Apostles minds whilst they were preaching, speaking,
or writing? Was there not such assistance promised to the Apostles?
Did they not speak as the Spirit gave them utterance? And since
Jesus Christ has promised in an especial manner to be with his
ministers, even to the end of the world, may they not humbly claim
the divine influence to assist them in a degree in preaching now, as
well as formerly, by bringing to their remembrance the words and
things he had taught them in the holy scriptures before, and so
opening a door of utterance to them, without being, for so doing,
justly stiled modern enthusiasts.

His Lordship, in order to give a sanction to these his several

interpretations, quotes Chrysostom, Origen, and Athanasius: but
does his Lordship deal candidly or simply in this matter? For though
they may in some respects agree with his Lordship’s literal
interpretation, do they not give a spiritual one also? Does not his
Lordship himself, page 42d, citing the authority of Athanasius, that
great light of the christian church, in effect confess this? Does he not
say, that he interprets the unction of the Holy One not merely of
divine grace? But does it therefore follow that he did not interpret it at
all of divine grace? Nay, does it not follow, that he did interpret it of
the divine grace of the Spirit of God dwelling in all believers, as well
at least as of the miraculous gifts of the Spirit? Does not Ignatius,
one of the most early writers, stile himself Theophoros, and the
people to whom he writes Theophoroi? And can it be supposed, that
Origen in particular, (who his Lordship professes again and again, in
his treatises against Woolston, to be such a spiritual interpreter of
scripture,) has in these passages so tenaciously cleaved to the literal
interpretation, as utterly to deny the indwelling and inward witness of
the Spirit? Is not this entirely opposite to the whole tenor of his
writings, as well as the writings of the most ancient fathers? And has
not his Lordship, out of his great zeal against enthusiasm, by writing
thus, unwarily run into an extreme? And as he justly charged the
infamous Woolston with sticking too close to the spirit, and not
minding the letter, has he not in this performance so closely adhered
to the letter, and so sadly neglected the spirit, as almost totally (if his
interpretations be true) to exclude the Holy Ghost in his operations,
since the primitive times, out of the christian world?

Is not this matter of fact? Are not these words of truth and
soberness? Be not angry therefore, but bear with me a little, if like
Elihu, “I speak that I may refresh myself. For behold my belly is as
wine which hath no vent, it is ready to burst like new bottles.” Let his
Lordship write what he pleases to the contrary, “there is a Spirit in
man, and a holy Spirit in believers, and an ordinary inspiration of the
Almighty, which now, as well as formerly, giveth them spiritual
understanding.” But supposing it was not so, and all his Lordship’s
glosses upon the forementioned passages, were as right as in my
opinion they are wrong, could you, Reverend Brethren, (I appeal to
your consciences) in your own hearts even wish that they were so? If
you should answer, Yes, (as your requesting his Lordship to print this
charge, gives me too great reason to think you would,) “Tell in it not
in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ascalon, lest the daughters of
the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised
triumph.” For if this be the case, in what a poor benighted condition
has the Lord Jesus left his church in these last days? And what
avails it to have his doctrines and divine mission evinced formerly by
gifts and miracles, if we are deprived of the inward teachings and
indwelling of the Holy Spirit? It is true, his Lordship does talk here
and there of the Blessed Spirit, and of his ordinary influences: but
what are his ordinary operations, if he is neither to dwell in us, nor to
give us an inward testimony in our hearts, that we are born of God?
What signifies talking of his assistances, and at the same time
declare, that they can neither be inwardly felt, or perceived, nor
believers be supernaturally assured thereby of their salvation? Or if
we are to expect no operations of the Spirit that are supernatural, as
his Lordship again and again intimates, what are the natural
operations that we are to look for? Or can there possibly be any
operation of the Holy Spirit which is not supernatural? What can
deists and the whole tribe of unbelievers wish for more than such
doctrine? Does not his Lordship, by writing thus, greatly hurt the
cause he would defend; and out of a zeal to prove christianity no
enthusiasm, unwittingly run into that fault which he would throw upon
these against whom his charge is levelled, page 2d; I mean, “does
he not act in concert with infidelity against our established religion,
our great common salvation?” How must the church of Rome also
glory in such a charge? Is it not after their own heart? Is not the
denying the witness of the Spirit in believers hearts, one of the main
pillars of Popery? Are not papists kept in slavery, and taught to trust
to the absolution of their priest; because it was one of the
determinations of the council of Trent, that none can here below
attain from the Spirit a certainty of their being finally saved? His
Lordship has done well in signalizing himself by writing against the
papists and infidels. But what will it avail, or how can his Lordship
flatter himself that the efforts of the latter, page 2d, “have been
sufficiently opposed:” since by writing against the witness of the
Spirit, he so nearly symbolizes with the one, and by crying down all
supernatural operations of the Holy Ghost, joins hands with the
other? Besides, “If there are no proofs of the truth of our religion by
the inward testimony of the Spirit, as his Lordship affirms, page 52d.
or even by the infallible application of the several marks of truth in it
by the Holy Spirit, to the minds of men, and his making so strong and
violent an impression on them, as to form (horresco referens) a new
unintelligible sort of divine faith, page 53.” how shall we distinguish
true and divine faith, from that which is false and barely historical?
Are not the devils capable of such a faith? Nay, have they not as real
faith as christians themselves, if there be no other faith but what is
wrought by external revelation and outward miracles? Do they not
thus believe and tremble? And can it be supposed, that all the
miracles that the Apostles wrought, and the glorious sermons that
they were enabled to preach, were only to shew people what
communion they were to be of? Is not this bringing the gospel down
to a mere history, which one may read of the exploits of an
Alexander; and making faith to be a bare assent of the
understanding, which a person may have, and yet be no more
benefited by the death of Christ, than Simon Magus was in
believing that he was crucified?

But further; supposing his Lordship had shewn, that every one of
those passages he has commented upon, had been misapplied by
modern enthusiasts; yet are there not besides a great cloud of
witnesses to be fetched from the lively oracles, to prove that the
indwelling, and inward witness of the Spirit, are the privileges of all
believers? Will you permit me to instance only in a few? What think
you of that passage in St. John’s gospel, chapter vii. 37, 38, 39. “In
the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood up and cried,
saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that
believeth on me, as the scripture hath spoken, out of his belly shall
flow rivers of living waters. But this spake he of the Spirit, which they
that believe on him should receive?” How, I pray you, are we to
understand that petition of our Lord for his disciples, just before his
passion, in the same evangelist, chapter xvii. 20, 21. “Neither pray I
for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through
their word: that they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I
in thee; that they also may be one:” And again, verses 22, 23. “That
they all may be one, even as we are one, I in them, and thou in me,
that they may be made perfect in one?” How would you explain that
question of the Apostle’s to the Corinthians, (a church famous for its
gifts above any church under heaven) “Know ye not that Christ is in
you, unless you be reprobates?” How do you explain that assertion
of the evangelist John, in his 1st epistle v. 10. “He that believeth hath
the witness in himself?” Or that of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians,
chapter i. 13, 19. And again, chapter iv. 30? How do you interpret
that passage, 2 Corinthians xvi. 16? Or what say you to that
exhortation of St. Jude, verse 20. “But ye, beloved, building up
yourselves in your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep
yourselves in the love of God?” Can any of these passages, with
any manner of consistency, be interpreted of the miraculous gifts of
the Holy Ghost, or be confined to the primitive church? Do they not
speak of an indwelling witnessing spirit, which all believers in all
ages have a right to expect, till time shall be no more?

And now, my Reverend Brethren, if these things be so, may not

that question be very justly put to you, which our Lord on a like
occasion asked Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: “Are ye masters of
Israel? Are ye ministers of the Church of England, and know not
these things?” What has his Lordship been doing so many years, in
professing to confer the Holy Ghost by imposition of hands on so
many ministers, saying unto them, “Receive the Holy Ghost by
imposition of our hands,” if there are none of those assistances from
the Blessed Spirit to be expected now, which were conferred when
our Saviour first spoke these words to his disciples? How can his
Lordship in conscience make use of the ordination office? Or how
could you, before many witnesses, publicly confess that you were
inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon you the
administration of the church? when you openly deny him in his most
powerful, and as to believers, in his common operations. Should you
not tremble to think, how much this looks like belying the Holy Ghost,
and acting the dreadful crime of Ananias and Sapphira over again, or
lying not only unto man, but unto God? And why are you so zealous
for the church, and continually crying out, “The temple of the Lord,
the temple of the Lord,” and yet trample her offices, collects and
articles in effect under your feet? With what consistency can you use
the baptismal office, and ♦ solemnly say unto God, “We yield thee
hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to
regenerate this infant with thy Holy Spirit,” and yet agree with his
Lordship, page 61, in asserting, “to that ♠ federal rite of baptism is
annexed the preventing or preparatory grace of God, as is likewise
(on a due improvement) that of the assisting kind?” Is this all that is
implied in the baptismal office? And is regeneration no more than
this? What a miserable condition then are those in, who have only
their baptismal regeneration to depend on? For who is there that has
improved, nay who is there that has not sinned away this preparatory
grace? Is not this directly contrary to the whole baptismal office? And
are not those to be reckoned friends to mankind, who bid them look
for a better regeneration than this amounts to? Again, with what
propriety can his Lordship, in the office of confirmation, pray unto
God to give the persons to be confirmed “the Spirit of wisdom and
♣understanding, the Spirit of counsel and ghostly strength?” Or how
can ministers in general, in the collect for Whit-sunday, say, “Grant
us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and
evermore to rejoice in his holy comforts?” Why are the passages,
wherein these blessings are promised to the first Apostles, appointed
to be read at this festival, if we are not in our degree to expect the
same mercies? And if these things are not to be inwardly felt, and we
are not to be supernaturally assured of our salvation, wherefore do
you make use of those words in the visitation of the sick? “The
Almighty Lord, who is a most strong tower to all them that put their
trust in him, to whom all things in heaven, in earth, and under the
earth, do bow and obey, be now and evermore thy defence, and
make thee know and feel, that there is none other name under
heaven given to man, in whom and through whom thou mayest
receive health and salvation, but only the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ:” Or with what propriety can you subscribe to the 17th article,
wherein we are told, “That the godly consideration of predestination,
and our election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and
unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in
themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ?” And if there be no
such thing as inspiration at all, how can you, consistent with your
principles, use the church collect before the communion office, and
pray “Almighty God to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the
inspiration of his Holy Spirit?” Or how can you agree with the 13th
article, which affirms, “That works done before the grace of Christ,
and the inspiration of the Spirit, are not pleasant to God?” Are not all
these things against you? Do they not all concur to prove, that you
are the betrayers of that church which you would pretend to defend?
Alas, what strangers must you be to a life hid with Christ in God,
and the blessed fruits of the Spirit, such as love, joy, peace, long-
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance; when
you know of no other first-fruits of the Spirit, than the miraculous gifts
of the Holy Ghost conferred on some particular persons in the
primitive church, which a man might have, so as to prophesy and
cast out devils in the name of Christ, and yet be commanded to
depart from him in the last day? How miserable must the
congregations be, of which you are made overseers? And how little
of the divine presence must you have felt in your administrations,
that utterly deny the spirit of prayer, and the Spirit’s helping you to
preach with power, and consider them as things that have long since
ceased? Is not this the reason why you preach as did the scribes,
and not with any divine pathos and authority, and see so little good
effect of your sermons? Have not your principles a direct tendency to
lull poor souls asleep? For if they are not to look for the supernatural
operations of the Spirit of God, or any inward feeling or perceptions
of this Spirit, may not all that are baptized, and not notoriously
wicked, flatter themselves that they are christians indeed? But is not
this the very quintessence of Pharisaism? Is not this the dark,
benighted state the great Apostle of the Gentiles confesses he was
in, before he was experimentally acquainted with Christ, or knew or
felt the power of his resurrection? Is not this a prophesying falsely, to
say unto people, “Peace, peace,” when there is no true solid
scriptural ground for peace? And are not you then properly the
persons his Lordship speaks of, page 1st, as “betraying whole
multitudes into an unreasonable presumption of their salvation?” For
is it not the highest presumption, for any to hope to be saved without
the indwelling of the Spirit, since the Apostle declares, in the most
awful manner, “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none
of his?” Is it not high time for somebody to rouze the sleepy world out
of this state, though it should cost them some melancholy thoughts?
May they not justly despond and despair too of being saved in such
a condition? For how can they possibly be good christians, or indeed
christians at all, unless they some time or other feel the Spirit of God
in their hearts? Or how can any justly be stiled enthusiastical
pretenders to immediate inspiration and new revelation, page 3d,
who only claim what is promised in the will of God already revealed,
and exhort all to add diligence to make their calling and election
sure? And why should that great man of God, Dr. Owen, be so
particularly mentioned by his Lordship, page 15th? Has there a more
solid critical learned divine appeared for many ages in the christian
world? Being dead, doth he not yet speak? Do not his works praise
him? Or supposing he was an enthusiast, as his Lordship calls him,
how can he be a modern one? Has he not been dead now above
fifty years? And why is he mentioned with an &c.? Would his
Lordship have us understand Dr. Goodwin, Mr. Baxter, and writers of
the Puritan stamp? But in reproaching them, does not his Lordship
equally brand Archbishop Usher, Bishop Hall, Bishop Davenant,
Bishop Hopkins, and others, nay all the godly reformers and martyrs,
and the compilers of our articles, homilies, and liturgy also? Were
they not equally enthusiastical with those, which his Lordship in this
charge would condemn; and may I not therefore say, if they were
enthusiasts, would to God you were not only almost, but altogether
such as they were? Has not his Lordship undesignedly put an
honour upon the Methodists, by joining them in such company?
Might not his Lordship easily foresee, that such a procedure as this,
would rather increase than diminish the progress of Methodism,
which his Lordship seems to have unwittingly prophesied of three
years ago, when this charge was first delivered? See margin of page
60. For what in an human way can have a more natural tendency to
strengthen the Methodists hands, than their having a public occasion
to shew, that they preach up the great doctrines of the reformation,
and are thrust out of the synagogues for no other reason, than
because they preach articles of faith, to which they have subscribed,
as the expression is in the literal and grammatical sense?
 ♦ “solemny” replaced with “solemnly”

♠ “fedral” replaced with “federal”

♣ “undestanding” replaced with “understanding”

O my reverend brethren, my heart is in pain for you: indeed I

could weep over you. Surely you are not all of his Lordship’s mind.
And yet the title-page of this Charge seems at least to imply, that it
was printed at the request of the generality of you. O be not angry if I
entreat you, if there be any consolation in Christ, or fellowship of
the Spirit, to think of these things, and lay them to heart. Remember,
I beseech you, remember the good confession you made before
many witnesses, when you professed that you were inwardly moved
by the Holy Ghost to take upon you the administration of the church.
And consider with yourselves, what a horrid prevarication it must be
in the sight of God and man, to subscribe to articles in the literal and
grammatical sense, which you do not believe? Reflect on what is
spoken by the Prophet, “They have run, and I have not sent them,
therefore shall they not profit this people at all.” Think what a
dreadful thing it is to preach an unknown, an unfelt Christ; and how
awful it will be to have the blood of thousands required at your hands
at the great day? As you have received an apostolical commission,
labour after an apostolical spirit. And do not set yourselves to
oppose or run down his blessed operations in others, because you
do not feel them in yourselves. Beware of thus doing despite to the
Spirit of grace: and be not like the Pharisees, who “neither entered
into the kingdom of God themselves, and those that were entering in
they hindered.” Seek you after a righteousness which exceeds
theirs. Call to mind, I beseech you, that ye are the lights of the world.
If therefore that light which is in you be darkness, how great must
that darkness be? “Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt hath
lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for
nothing, but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men.”
God seems now about to rise to shake terribly the earth. We hear of
wars and rumours of wars. O let your loins be girt, your lamps
trimmed, and be ye like unto servants that are waiting for the
bridegroom: that if he should come at the second or third watch, he
may find you so doing. Smite not your fellow-servants; but rather
take ye Gamaliel’s advice: “Refrain from these men, and let them
alone. For if this counsel or work be of men, it will come to nought;
but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it, lest haply ye be found to
fight against God.” The harvest is great, very great, and souls are
every where perishing for lack of knowledge. Why should the
labourers be so few? Think of that awful saying of the angel of the
Lord, “Curse ye Meroz, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof,
because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the
Lord against the mighty.” Shew that you love Christ above all
things, by feeding his lambs and his sheep; by being instant in
season and out of season. That so when the great Shepherd and
Bishop of souls shall appear, you may give up your accounts with
joy, and not with grief.

Suffer me also (as undoubtedly you requested his Lordship to

publish this charge for their instruction) to give a word of exhortation
to your Parishioners. You see, Sirs, that I have used great plainness
of speech in my remarks upon this charge of your Right Reverend
Diocesan. Do not without examination contradict and blaspheme, but
be noble, as the Bereans were, and “search the scriptures whether
these things be so or not: to the law, and to the testimony.” Let that
determine who are the seducers, who are the enthusiasts, and the
enemies to the Church; those who preach up the doctrine of
justification by faith alone in the imputed righteousness of Jesus
Christ, and the indwelling and witnessing of the Spirit; or those who
tell you, that they were the miraculous gifts of the Holy Ghost, and
not to be expected in these last days. Say not within yourselves, “We
have Jesus for our saviour, we have been born again in baptism, we
are members of the Church of England, we do nobody any harm, we
will do what we can, and Jesus Christ will do the rest;” but seek ye
after a better righteousness than your own, even that “righteousness
which is by faith;” and earnestly press after that indwelling of the
Spirit, and that true inward holiness and purity of heart, without which
no man living shall see the Lord. Get acquainted with the collects,
homilies, articles and old writers of that Church whereof you profess
yourselves members, and let not ignorance be the mother of your
devotion. Remember that “God is a spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.” See that your zeal be
according to knowledge: and count not those to be troublers of
Israel, nor like the misguided Jews, irritated thereto by the high
priests, raise mobs against them, as turners of the world upside
down, who out of love to your souls, have put their lives in God’s
hands, and shew unto you the true way of eternal salvation. Place
not holiness in outward buildings, nor reject the gospel because
preached to you in the fields, in the streets and lanes of the city. See,
hear, and judge for yourselves, and beware lest that come upon you
which is spoken by a Prophet: “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder
and perish: for I work a work in your days, which a man shall not
believe, though one declare it unto him.”

As for those among you, who in derision are termed Methodists,

be you thankful to that God, who I trust has made you wise unto
everlasting salvation, and given you not only to believe on the Lord
Jesus, but also to suffer for his name. You have lately been enabled
joyfully to bear the spoiling of your goods ¹. Think it not strange, if you
should hereafter be called to resist unto blood. Fear not the faces of
men, neither be afraid of their revilings. Having believed on the Lord
Jesus, with your hearts, in spite of all opposition from men and
devils, make confession of him with your mouths unto eternal
salvation. Contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the
saints, and sealed by the blood of your martyrs: at the same time,
“be ready to give a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness
and fear.” If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but
because you are not of the world, but the Lord Jesus hath chosen
and redeemed you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
Follow him therefore chearfully without the camp, bearing his
reproach. The more you are afflicted, the more you shall multiply and
grow. For verily no man hath lost houses or lands for Christ’s sake,
and the gospel, who shall not receive a hundred-fold in this life with
persecution, and in the world to come life everlasting. Persecution is
your privilege: it is a badge of your discipleship: it is every christians
lot in some degree or other. Only be ye careful to give no just
offence, either to Jew or Gentile, or the church of God. And as you
profess to have received the Holy Ghost in his sanctifying gifts and
graces, and to have the Spirit of God dwelling in you, be ye studious
to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit in your lives; that all who are
acquainted with you may take knowledge that you have been with
Jesus. Call no man master but Christ. Follow others only as they
are followers of him. Be fond of no name but that of Christian.
Beware of making parties, or calling down fire from heaven to
consume your adversaries. “Bless them that curse you, and pray for
them that despitefully use you.” Labour to shine in common life, by a
due conscientious discharge of all relative duties, and study to adorn
the gospel of our Lord in all things. If you are good christians, you
will fear God, and for his sake honour the King. Be thankful for the
many blessings you enjoy under the government of his present
Majesty King George, and continue to pray to Him, by whom kings
reign, and princes decree justice, to keep a popish Pretender from
ever sitting on the English throne. Be cloathed with humility: and
always count yourselves beginners in religion. Let it be your meat
and drink to do and suffer the will of your Master, and forgetting the
things which are behind, reach forward to the things which are
before, and never cease striving, till you are filled with all the fulness
of God. Determine to know nothing but Jesus, and him crucified.
Remember his agony and bloody sweat, his shameful cross and
passion. Chearfully pledge him in his bitter cup, and as he was, so
be ye in this world. Think of his last and new commandment, and
“love one another with a pure heart fervently;” looking and preparing
for that blessed hour, when he shall come and call you to sit down
with him at the marriage-feast in the realms of light and love, where
the wicked shall cease from troubling, and where your weary souls
shall be at rest.

¹ N. B. The Methodists in Staffordshire were mobbed the

Shrove-Tuesday before, and plundered of their substance
to the amount of seven hundred pounds sterling.
 Finally, I would drop a word to you, who have been lately called
out into the highways and hedges, and have been honoured as
instruments to compel many poor sinners to come in. Against you,
my brethren, his Lordship’s charge seems to be particularly levelled.
But I am persuaded you will be nothing terrified thereby, since you
know, I believe, by happy experience, what it is to have the hidden
mysteries of the kingdom of God opened to your souls, and to have
the Comforter come and abide with you. You have often felt his
blessed influences, whilst you have been praying to that God whom
you serve, dealing out the bread of life in his name to the people. Ye
are highly favoured. Having believed, ye speak, and in your degree
can say with our Saviour, “We speak the things that we know.” God,
who hath commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shone
into your hearts with the light of the glorious gospel. Put not therefore
this light under a bushel, but preach the word; “Be ye instant in
season and out of season; rebuke, reprove, exhort with all long-
suffering and doctrine. Do the office of evangelists, and make full
proof of your ministry.” And whilst others are calling for miracles from
you, to prove that you are sealed and sent by the Spirit, do you
labour after the conversion of precious souls as seals of your
mission, who shall be your joy and crown of rejoicing in the day of
the Lord Jesus. Whilst others are approving themselves ministers
of Christ, by dignities and great preferments, do you approve
yourselves as the ministers of God in much patience, &c. See 2
Corinthians vi. 4‒8. Set the glorious company of the Apostles, the
goodly fellowship of the Prophets, and the noble army of martyrs
always before you. O think how ♦abundant they were in labours, in
stripes above measure, in deaths oft, and how they rejoiced when
they were counted worthy to suffer shame for Jesus Christ’s sake.
Above all, look ye unto Jesus the author and finisher of your faith;
consider him who endured such contradiction of sinners against
himself, lest ye be weary and faint in your minds. Are you esteemed
mad? So was he. Are you termed deceivers of the people? So was
he. Are ye looked upon as actuated by an evil spirit? He was called
Beelzebub, the very chief of the devils. Are ye thrust out of the
synagogues? So was he. Do men hunt for your precious lives? So
they did for his. The Jews sought often to kill him, but they could not,
because his hour was not yet come: and so it shall be with you. You
are immortal till your work is done. The witnesses shall not be slain
till their testimony is finished. Set your faces therefore as flints: let
your brows be harder than adamant: fear not the faces of men, lest
God confound you before them. Give not place to those who oppose
the operations of the Spirit, no not for an hour. Go ye forth in the
strength of the Lord, making mention of his righteousness, and his
only. Remember that blessed promise, “Lo, I am with you always,
even to the end of the world.” Jesus is the same now as he was
yesterday. And if you are really thrust out into the harvest by Jesus,
he will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries
shall not be able to resist. You see how dreadfully the scriptures are
interpreted. Give yourselves therefore to reading. Search the
scriptures. But above all things, pray that ye may be taught of God:
without which, notwithstanding all critical and human learning, you
will never be scribes well instructed to the kingdom of heaven.
Continue to go out into the highways and hedges. Consider what
multitudes there are around you every where, ready to perish for lack
of knowledge. And though your enemies, for want of arguments,
should so far prevail, as to bring you before governors for so doing,
fear not, for it shall be given you, as well as unto the first preachers
of the everlasting gospel, what ye shall speak. O men, greatly
beloved, my heart is enlarged towards you. Give me leave to say
unto you, as the angel did to Daniel, “Be strong,” yea be strong: quit
yourselves like men: put on the whole armour of God. And then,
though you should be cast into a den of lions, that God whom you
serve, is able, and will deliver you. Though afflicted, destitute,
tormented here on earth, verily great shall be your reward in heaven.

♦ “abundandant” replaced with “abundant”

And now, my reverend brethren, to whom this letter is particularly

inscribed, what shall I say more? I commend it, and you, to the great
God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and
give you an inheritance among all them that are sanctified. I have
written to you out of the fulness of my heart; and praying that God