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Iconography and Characterization in English Tragedy 1585 -1642 Huston Diehl Even though the characters of Renaissance drama are more highly individualized than their medieval predecessors in the morality plays, and are more closely “drawn to nature,” they have not altogether lost their symbolic function. With a new psychological complexity, these characters present an illusion of reality, but at the same time they often function as symbols of higher moral reality. Because of die psychological orientation of our own post-Freudian culture, however, readers of Tudor and Stuart plays today tend to emphasize either the psychological or the symbolic aspects of Renaisance characters; there is a tendency, in other words, to see these characters either as mod em and naturalistic or as medieval and allegorical, but not to see them as both. Critics who argue that the characters of the English Renaissance stage resemble real individuals usually focus on the playwrights’ desire to “imitate nature” and the actors’ desire to bring their roles to life on the stage. Andrew Gurr, for instance, argues that “Street reality obscured nature’s ideal forms, so far as the theatre was concerned, to the extent that the players actually intensified the individuality of the characters they were impersonating.” On the other hand, critics who argue that the characters of the English Renaissance stage are primarily symbolic reject the assumption that these char acters are either psychologically consistent or even particularly verisimilar. Irving Ribner, for example, emphasizes the char acters’ symbolic function: “These dramatists are always more interested in mankind than in individual men . . . they rarely hesitate to sacrifice the consistency of character portraiture to the needs of the larger symbolic statement.”l Both sets of conclusions about Renaissance dramatic char113 114 Comparative Drama acterization assume a dichotomy between the representational and the symbolic. This dichotomy, however, is a modem, not a Renaissance creation. This modem tendency to divide what the Renaissance saw as indivisible may be illustrated by a seven teenth-century painting by Jan Vermeer which depicts an artist painting a woman dressed as a personification of fame. Some modern art historians title this work “A Painter in his Studio” and stress its naturalism; others, however, title it “Allegory of Fame” and stress its symbolism. The painting is, of course, a brilliant fusion of naturalism and symbolism, its artist associat ing himself with the fame he desires, but our modem minds want to divorce the two, acknowledging either one or the other. Al though it is apparently difficult for us to see how a character can simultaneously be a realistic individual and a symbolic abstraction, the Renaissance mind nevertheless continually plays with this very simultaneity, this fusion of real and ideal. The idea that the individual embodies the universal is widely manifest in the culture of Renaissance England. Men of letters embraced Neo-Platonic philosophy, with its system of corres pondences, its belief that the physical things of this world par take of ideal forms. Courtiers sparked the imprese craze, adopt ing symbolic pictures to express their own personal desires. Poets, artists, and musicians created lavish masques in which court personages dressed as personified abstractions and acted out allegorical narratives which played upon a curious double reality. Even Queen Elizabeth nourished and exploited a cult in which she was simultaneously woman and goddess, queen and ideal monarch, unmarried virgin and chastity personified. Nowhere is this interconnectedness of individual and ideal more telling than in Renaissance portraiture, an art form where we would expect to find the desire to “imitate nature” far greater than the desire to create symbolic abstractions. Yet Elizabethan por traits frequently combine the physical likenesses of real persons with symbolic images which associate the human subject with concepts such as faith, justice, and chastity. Marcus Gheeraerts’ “Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I” is an illustrative ex ample; it depicts not only the monarch’s physical features, but also images of eyes, ears, a serpent, and a rainbow which sug gest her Platonic essence—political reason and imperial power.2 It is my contention that the Tudor and Stuart playwrights also routinely fuse individual character with Platonic essence, there Huston Diehl 115 by satisfying both the tendency to individualize and particularize and...
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