"The purpose of playing": Theater and ritual in the Revesby Folk Play, "Summer's Last Will and Testament", and "Hamlet"

Esha Niyogi De, Purdue University

Abstract

This study considers some demonstrated recoveries of ritual within plots that initially seem only to confirm a nonritualistic theater. In each work, timeless ritual had seemed to be replaced by atomistic characters acting in a personal, sequentially terminated action, to which the audience is a largely detached witness. Each work, however, exercises a capability for retrieving theater from such atomization. Each then eventually discloses ritual formations of a manifold experience common to playwright and audience. To do so, each offers a "Fool"-protagonist who can reconstitute ritual from the husks of conventional theater. Because the "Fool" serves almost every theatrical function, he is both "in" and "out" of the plot, and is with, yet also removed, from the audience. At once subject, agent, interpretant and critical audience to the plot, this figure opens the play into a full exercise of theatrical and implied ritual significations. Of use in reading this "Fool"-related theater is the model of centrifugal and centripetal forces within language as explored by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination. His model suggests why the seemingly linear or "monoglossic" plot in each work is countered by forces arising from, and involved with, the "heteroglossic" ritual base. Within this disclosure of ritual grounds within relatively conventional plots, the Folk Play recorded at Revesby (1779) makes open use of a Fool to theatricalize and ritualize the very plot in which he as actor participates. Thomas Nashe, in Summer's Last Will and Testament, in turn causes his protagonist, Will Summer, not only to comment critically upon the plot, but also to refract and to ritualize it. With Hamlet, Shakespeare distinguishes but also recombines virtually every conventional and ritual theatrical function within Hamlet's conscious practice. Partly because Hamlet as protagonist critically employs the theatrical functions possible both to the revenge plot and to ritual, he with his considerations of theater moves from the revenge plot into the intimations of a ritualistic theatrum mundi. Within his experience of both, he positions a sense of the tragic. As shared with the audience, it both fulfills and supersedes the passional revenge plot and the implied impersonality of ritual.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lawry, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Theater

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