Steven Mullaney

Steven Mullaney is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan (recorded in Philadelphia). Some of his publicatios include “Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45:2 (1994) and “The Place of the Stage in Elizabethan Culture,” Encyclopedia Britannica presents Shakespeare and the Globe: Then and Now.

Audio Excerpt

In 19th century theatre, Mullaney says, the actors were very much separated from the audience by “the fourth wall.” But in the interactive theatre of Shakespeare, that wall did not exist.

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See a list of publications.

Interview Excerpts

ON THEATRE AS A SOCIAL ART

STEVE MULLANEY: Well, I think, you know, theater, I am not a theater person when I know that theater is what, you know, playwrights like Shakespeare and Thomas Kid and Christopher Marlow, Thomas Middleton have taught me, I think in terms of theatrical performance now, but it is through the lens of these playwrights in this period, so, but one of the things I am convinced of is that theater is single thing, western theater is not a single continuous history. Theater is the most social of the arts. It only happens finally in performance and the audience is an important component in the final work of art. If the audience is not there, it does not happen. It does not happen on the page no matter how wonderful the poetry is, it just does not happen. So, theater, I think that also means that theater tends to be most respondent to historical changes, cultural changes, different needs that different cultures have and different societies have at different times, and I think this was a period after the reformation when the country became a Protestant country after being a Catholic country, a break-away Catholic country, a fiercely radical Protestant country, a Catholic country again, and then with Elizabeth, a country that, you know, the more radical Protestants did not think was really a Protestant country at all, but thought of itself as that. It was a confusing period of 20 or 30 years to live through for people for whom Catholicism had been the absolute truth for a long time for centuries.

ON THE FOURTH WALL

STEVE MULLANEY: That was one of the powers of the theater, that it had a dimension to it, actually, if you think of it in terms of spatial dimension, it had a whole other dimension to it that nineteenth century theater, where the audience was supposed to pretend that they are not there, where they are never addressed. Theater built around the idea of the concept of the fourth wall. I am just spying through this transparent fourth wall on the family dynamics of an absent play or something like that.

ON THE ANONYMITY OF SHAKESPEARE

STEVE MULLANEY: One of the characteristics of Shakespeare that many people have noted and commented on is the degree to which he explored lots of different avenues of identity and thought, and never showed his hand. Other playwrights made it very clear what their political and what their religious sentiments were. They proselytized. They wrote plays that are clearly sympathetic to a Protestant point of view, a Catholic point of view and what not. Shakespeare kept himself very anonymous. Not all scholars would agree with that. Some people think that you can shove, based on the plays, that Shakespeare was some kind of residual Catholic. I do not believe that and I have got of lots of company there. What Shakespeare seems to have done instead was to give his audience different components of different worlds simultaneously so that there would be different reactions. This was a fractured and fragmented audience due to what it had been through and what his parents, what the previous generations had been through, and it was an audience that playwright like Shakespeare brought out the differences in as much as he brought out the commonality and he did both. He presents in Hamlet a character who has been raised as a Protestant, often times, sounds as a Protestant. He has been to school in Wittenberg, Hamlet, with a father who seems to be coming back from purgatory where he is punished for the untrammeled sins he died with on his head because he was killed before he had a chance to make a very Catholic-sounding confession. The Protestant world got rid of purgatory. Purgatory does not exist in the Protestant world.  The ghost of Hamlet’s father would be either in hell or in heaven. At the moment when the ghost of Hamlet’s father is talking to his son, you have the Protestant world and the Catholic world on stage at the same time in an impossible fashion. Those two universes cannot co-exist. One is true and one is false, but you have both at once, and you have people in the audience responding to one, not the other. You have people in the audience responding to both with great confusion or whatever other reaction, those who realize what they are encountering, not everyone will. You have people responding in one fashion, but realizing that the person sitting next to them or the person they can see across on the other side of the stage is responding in a different fashion.

In Elizabethan theater, the actors are stepping out of their role and addressing the audience a lot. They are doing it very specific moments in epilogues, at the end of plays, sometimes it is a little queased, it is clear, it is happening, sometimes in the sides, but there is a lot of the actor peeping through the costume in this plays too, these are plays that did not try to fool the eye. They are not illusionistic drama. They are drama that takes advantage of the complexity of the mixture of virtual presentation and actual existences. To actually use the combination of those two to put together a reality that is not fully contained in the fiction of the play, and not fully contained in the audience’s reaction to it, but is a combination of the two, and those are terms, the virtual and the actual, that are actually very important.