Francis Bacon: Revealing the Art of Acting
Deslie McClellan 2008
Email: familyplayhouse@rcn.com
Website: http://www.familyplayhouse.com
I was seven years old when my dramatics teacher introduced me to the character of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was my first acquaintance with William Shakespeare. Playing the part of this magical sprite opened up a whole new world to me—a theatrical life full of fancy and laughter, high passion and chivalry, truth and grave wisdom. As I progressed in my acting studies, nothing held more power over my heart than the characters of William Shakespeare and the poetic spirit that brought them so vividly alive in my imagination. To a romantic young girl, who couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be an actress or a saint, the works of Shakespeare offered a path to both.
When I was twelve years old and preparing for a grade examination in speech and drama, my teacher handed me a sheet of paper with information on William Shakespeare. A week later, after I had memorized the meager facts about his life, she told me that the man from the village with the pretty name of Stratford-Upon-Avon was not, in fact, the author of the Plays. William Shakespeare, she said, was merely a pen name, just as Mark Twain was a pen name for Samuel Clemens. The person who really wrote the Plays was Francis Bacon. There was, it seems, a great mystery surrounding Francis Bacon.
I didn’t know at the time why I felt excited; I just knew I was excited. I had been disappointed with the Stratford man. For someone who wrote so eloquently and understood exactly what people think and feel, especially when they fall in love, I expected William Shakespeare to be at least a nobleman or a knight, not a butcher’s apprentice who got drunk on his days off. The revelation that he was not the author of the Plays restored my innocent faith. As I think back now on the scene, it did more than that: it kindled a fire in my heart—a kind of dawning light upon a future quest. That fire grew as the years went by. Its clear, bright flame acted as a searchlight to penetrate that ‘great mystery’ hinted at by my teacher—a mystery not only of a mistaken identity but also of a man’s secret life. It was a quest that I was very motivated to undertake, for nothing less than a grand love affair had grown up between William Shakespeare and myself through the enchanted medium of his plays.
In discovering Francis Bacon, I also discovered why the Shakespeare plays so overmastered my heart, for the man is his art; his soul and spirit embody it. To know Francis Bacon is to love, nay, fall in love, with the art of acting. It was enough, of course, that the Plays were wonderful to read--and millions attest to this--but to act in them became a singular, transforming joy for me. And I was not the only actor so affected. To act Shakespeare, and act it well, is a thrilling experience. It is also the highest recommendation of an actor’s art. Playing Shakespeare is pure self-enlightened interest.
Why does Shakespeare generate such a special excitement among actors and all those who love the theater? There is a simple answer: the Plays possess greatness as actable works of art. The elements that make them so supremely theatrical are the very same elements that make them unforgettable literature. These elements are as follows: noble vision (or intention), high theme, unity of story action, richly wrought characterizations, and dramatic dialogue that expresses the most exquisite pathos and sweetness. The wonder of the Plays is that all these elements are bound together by an unprejudiced and altruistic love for humanity—in other words, by Francis Bacon’s mysterious spirit.
In this article, I wish to discuss the first of these elements:
Bacon’s noble vision (or intention)
Francis Bacon saw his fellow man through the lens of a practical idealism. It was a vision of man not as he actually was, but as he could be (or could be again, as in a ‘new’ Atlantis). This “mountaintop of the Ideal[1]” was the vantage point from which Bacon conceived his colossus of works. Among his masterpieces, it is the Plays that provide the practical means of bringing his vision near to the soul of man, since drama is the most human of the arts. He understood that belief in the ideal was man’s dearest possession; that the pure instincts born of idealism, allied to reason, are what make life noble and beautiful. He kept tryst with the ideal, suffusing his art with it. It is why the Shakespeare plays and sonnets possess a spiritual light and loveliness that never fails to touch the beauty in our hearts.
It is Art that can most expressly communicate idealism, for Art, or true Art, enhances everyday life to give it a divine glow and heroism. (Bacon used the words “rareness” and “magnaminity.”) It is the purpose and duty of art and the artist (and specifically dramatic art and the dramatic artist) to “instruct the minds of men unto virtue[2]”—in other words, to bring alive to our memories the virtuous (or divine) life. Bacon believed, as he quoted Plato, “that virtue if she could be seen would move great love and affection”[3]. Virtue is seen and represented in a lively and compelling way in drama for the very reason that it is “drenched in flesh and blood[4]” rather than merely preached about philosophically.
Drama “paints our virtue and goodness to the life [of the imaginative characters] and makes them in a sort conspicuous[5]”. Honor, courage, fidelity, modesty, temperance, trueheartedness—these are the virtues worth believing in. They are the virtues the Plays teach. And though “the course of true love never did run smooth[6]” true love never dies as long as we hold the vision of the ideal.
By perfecting and exalting nature, by distilling and contriving the particulars of nature’s virtues, to paraphrase Bacon, “Poesy conduces not only to delight but also to magnanimity and morality. Whence it may be fairly thought to partake somewhat of a divine nature; because it raises the mind and carries it aloft, accommodating the shows of things to the desires of the mind, not (like reason and history) buckling and bowing down the mind to the nature of things[7]”.
“Wise men and great philosophers,” he wrote, “account it [dramatical poesy] as a musical bow by which men’s minds may be played upon[8]”. This metaphor suggests that drama has the power to incline the mind upon which it plays to yield its consent, much as a magician would, with the subtlest movement of his staff, charm the spectator into coming under submission of his magic spell. “Poesy is as a dream of learning, a thing sweet and varied, and that would be thought to have in it something divine, a character which dreams likewise affect[9]”. If Bacon believed that art should contain in it the magic of “something divine”—that is, the concentrate of divinity, or virtue, then he certainly understood the high-minded significance of the theater and of its potent effect on men’s behavior.
Recalling Colin Clout’s words in The Shepherd’s Calendar, by “peerless Poesie’s aspiring wit[10]” we are given wings to fly heavenward and draw down the subtle fire that can transform our lives and our creative labor into something that is fine and beautiful. For this is exactly what Francis Bacon accomplished with the Shakespeare plays. Bacon wanted the Plays to speak to the best in us—of hope, courage, persistence in adversity, and generosity in triumph. He saw drama as a mirror of life, but a mirror titled upward in reflecting that life—“toward the cheerful, the tender, the compassionate, the brave, the funny, the encouraging[11]” - to quote actress Greer Garson, and not tilted down into the troubled vistas of conflict and despair. For without reference to humor, to hope, to faith, or to some rainbow hue of promise, we destroy the possibility of transcendence, which is what life (and therefore theater) is all about.
Russian director Constantin Stanislavski believed that “every human being deep down within himself possesses a natural longing to bring out all that is best within him[12]”. Hamlet spoke of that ‘best’ with unforgettable eloquence: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals![13]” Our best is all we can be. All we can be is God, or at least God in the making.
Stanislavski also stated that art should lend beauty and nobility to life, and “whatever is beautiful and noble has the power to attract[14]”. The Plays contain what is ‘beautiful and noble.’ It is why their appeal is irresistible. By bringing us in touch with the highest and best in ourselves, Bacon is really bringing us in touch with our original (though long-since forgotten) divinity—our true nature. The drama of the Plays “raises the mind and carries it aloft” to the beauty of the divine, not just the divine in a heaven far away, but also the divine that lives in each of us as that Spirit of God within.
Bacon created the Plays as the alchemical fourth part of his Great Instauration for the purpose of advancing a higher learning among mankind. The end of that learning, or true knowledge, is the discovery of the mystery of divine love. He set forth “actual types and models” of man’s nature in the form of imaginatively drawn characters whether from history, fable, or fiction, “choosing such subjects as are at once the most noble in themselves and the most different one from another, that there may be an example in every kind.” In this way, “the entire process of the mind, and the whole fabric and order of invention, from the beginning to the end in certain subjects and those various and remarkable should be set, as it were, before the eyes[15]”.
By these theatrical “inventions,” Bacon is able to enter quietly, but deeply, into the hearts of men--even the hardest of hearts--with vivid and living examples of and love for the eternal ideals of beauty, truth, and wisdom—beauty as a moral principle, truth as ‘true knowledge’ of oneself in the image of God, and wisdom as the ‘wise dominion’ over the self. Exhibited with a poetic form both fitting and rare in its sweetness, his comedies, tragedies, and histories powerfully communicate Bacon’s noble vision, and not merely to those who are open to his illuminating rays, but also to minds “choked and overgrown[16]” with ignorance.
“The entry of truth depends on the mind capable to lodge and harbor it[17]” wrote Bacon. This is an important point. The Plays have such a panoramic diversity and depth of incident and character that they are universal in their appeal. Much like the King James Version of the Bible, the Plays are layered in their meaning and potency to communicate the divine mysteries of the soul. There is something in them for everyone, from the littlest child to the aged philosopher. As Bacon told us in The Advancement of Learning, God finds many ways to reveal and conceal His secrets according to our individual capacity, “expressing and unfolding the mysteries as they may be best comprehended by us[18]”. He uses ingenious means to open up our understandings, “as the form of the key is fitted to the ward of the lock[19]”.
Bacon saw life—all of life—as a crucible, wherein the base elements of our human nature could be transmuted into the gold of our angel or divine nature. Thus the Plays are a kind of spiritual map that leads us through the labyrinth of man’s psyche, with an eye—always an inner eye—to the eternal. In the Plays “we may find painted forth with great life and dissected, how affections are kindled and excited, and how pacified and restrained, and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves, though repressed and concealed; how they work; how they vary; how they are enwrapped one within another; how they fight and encounter one with another; and many more particulars of this kind[20]…” (How the characters of Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello come vividly to mind!)
The Shakespeare plays, in this sense, provide our best instruction for playing (and playing well) the game of life, for in them we become intimately acquainted with the inner psychology of man, and thus our own personal psychology. We learn how to recognize the true from the false, how to correct the diseased “affections and perturbations of the mind,” and how to face injustice, betrayal, hardship, and suffering with courage and hope. Thus, Francis Bacon acts as our “Captain strategematic,” to borrow from The Art of Poesie. He is our navigator, physician, and spiritual mentor. Indeed, “poets and writers of history are the best doctors of this knowledge touching…the internal government of the mind[21]”. The Plays are a corrective medicine that has just enough sugar and spice mixed in to make it palatable to the soul.
Bacon never failed to apply eternal principles to life’s realities. It was his way of making sure that we see beyond the mere pageant of life, and, in the spirit of Aesop, do not take ourselves too seriously. As Bacon tells us in the words of Jaques: “All the world's a stage, /And all the men and women merely players:/ They have their exits and their entrances[22]”. Life is a play, and we are all players. What matter the part one is assigned? What matter the misery and suffering? To play the part well, with joy and courage, humility and faith—that is the essential thing, whether the player wear a crown or motley. We play our role upon the stage of life to learn the lessons of right action, purifying our heart in the process so it can love more purely. At the proper time we make our exit, only to return again upon that stage in a new role and garment of consciousness, carrying with us the momentum of the virtue we internalized “by an inward assent and belief,” from our former roles.
With the backdrop of the eternal before our eyes, our souls have true co-measurement of who and what we are, and of God’s dreams for us. Through the right use of God’s law, ultimately the law of love, we make those heaven-inspired dreams come true. Bacon counted on the fact that when we look at life through such a pristine mirror of faith, hope, and charity, we experience something of the divine, and that ‘something of the divine’ is transforming.
Bacon wrote of Dramatical Poesy: “For the stage is capable of no small influence both of discipline and of corruption. Now of corruptions in this kind we have enough; but the discipline has in our times been plainly neglected[23]”. Used for the purpose of discipline—that is, training the soul to exercise sounder and truer judgment, drama is a compelling tool, for it coaxes the spirit of man toward “a more ample greatness, a more perfect order, and a more beautiful variety than it can anywhere (since the Fall) find in nature. And…since the successes and issues of actions as related in true history are far from being agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, Poesy corrects it, exhibiting events and fortunes as according to merit and the law of providence[24]”. Bacon is here commenting not merely upon the makeover that Art performs on the long grey line of everyday existence, but also on the fundamental concept of the duality of role-playing in real life and on the stage. In simple terms, he saw drama as a means to teach us how to act better in real life. Without soiling our garments (of consciousness) we may learn the consequences of the free will choice of life—that which is the reward of virtue, and that which is the consequence, or wages, of sin, “according to merit and the law of Providence.”
Clearly, Bacon believed that this is how God, in his divine mercy, intended life to be: that we need not descend into utter darkness and despair to learn the fruit of right action, that we need not live out a life where “sorrows are our schoolmasters[25]” because we did not wisely rule our passions. The great drama of life is to realize our soul’s potential. As it’s true in life, so it’s true in drama—only through the climbing, not the leveling, can our best selves be realized.
As he tells us in The Art of English Poesie, Poesy acts as a crystal glass through which men can see their own image in the likeness of God’s—“all that [is] exceeding fair and comely…a representer of the best, most comely and beautiful images or appearances of things to the soul and according to their very truth [as heaven hath revealed that truth to man]. If otherwise, then doth it breed Chimeras and monsters in man's imaginations, and not only in his imaginations, but also in all his ordinary actions and life which ensues[26]”. In other words, if the poet’s inventions do not resemble man in the image of God, then theater is full of corruption, serving as a false glass that does then breed unlawful sensual pleasures and monsters in man’s imagination, and not only in his imagination, but also in the actions of his life. We might then conclude that Bacon sees the true poet as a practical magician of Light, a Prospero, teaching the power of true knowledge to free the soul, while the poet who corrupts the conscience of man is a sorcerer, a Sycorax, who would snuff out that lamp of God within and breed the beast of ignorance, a Caliban.
The temple of man is sacred unto the Almighty. Nothing should be mirrored in man that is not first correspondent in the crystalline globe of God’s mind. To paraphrase Bacon in The Advancement of Learning: God has truly framed the mind of man as of a glass, capable of receiving the light of His perfection, in order that man may desire that perfection as much as he desires his own eyes to receive the light of the sun.
Theater is the most powerful way to coax the divine spirit of man “as it were through a veil…to enable each one to receive and draw in such holy mysteries [of the ideal of the divine self][27]”. Why? Because theater is life (both the inner and outer life of man) heightened and held captive inside a make-believe frame that is outside time and space. The movement of life inside that frame, whether proscenium stage or celluloid film, is dynamic. It is made real, energizing, and forceful by the living imagination of the actors and the audience. When we watch a play, what we see and feel is larger than life—more vibrant and often more persuasive in its intensity than real life. This is so because within that magical frame the essence of life has been concentrated. Even while representing the full spectrum of good and evil in his characters, Bacon made sure that the concentrated essence he set before the eyes of the audience in “lively representation” was of the noblest and purest substance. He himself referred to it as “celestial dew” or “the excellent dew of knowledge[28]”.
The true magic of the Plays is that they address not only the mind and emotions of the audience, but also the inner world of the spirit, for Bacon understood that only at the level of the spirit—one with the divine spirit—can the soul receive that “excellent dew of knowledge,” and experience self-transcendence. He knew that he could not teach wisdom if he could not reach the spirit of man. The mind and emotions are easily manipulated into worshipping idols, but the inner spirit, where ideals live as fiery coals, is aligned to God. There alone is the altar of communion between divinity and humanity. The mind may create its own spirit idol, but not the inner spirit, which is copyrighted Imprimatur: God.
Because Bacon brought this noble intention to his art, the Plays provide the most poignant, the most perceptive, and the most penetrating energy of life to compel a soul higher. This then is the reason for drama. This is the reason for the enactment of sequences and slices of life: not to downgrade and depress the mind and heart, nor to titillate the senses, but to give a slice of infinity in time and space so that the souls who look through the proscenium wall may capture a vision and rise one step higher. The more engaging and entertaining the drama, the more effectively will that vision be felt and understood. The benefits for the actor playing the roles on the stage are even more profound: To walk in the shoes of different men and women, to enter into the spiral and the coil of their consciousness, is to increase one’s own understanding of self, while adding to that self successive layers of the nobler consciousness of the many ‘others’ he has the privilege to play on the stage. It is like trying on Joseph’s coat of many colors.
Though actors were not thought highly of in Bacon’s time, he doubtless understood, as did the playwrights of ancient Attica, that the actor can have a powerful influence for good when he unites art and life to the glory of God. Bacon would have agreed with Stanislavski: “The actor is the standard bearer of what is fine. Unless the theater can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it. Remember this from the very beginning of your term of service to art and prepare yourselves for this mission. Develop in yourselves the necessary self-control, the ethics, and discipline of a public servant destined to carry out into the world a message that is fine, elevating, and noble[29]”.
The actor’s task is to illuminate man’s spirit by revealing the startling beauty behind life’s masks of comedy and tragedy. “It is the faith of the actor, holding the torch handed him by the poet, that illumines every mind, every soul, and every sensibility[30]” wrote Sarah Bernhardt. She herself played only those roles that she felt possessed the “boldness, penetration, and luminosity” that could move and uplift the audience “toward the conquest of the beautiful.” That is what all the great actors of the past believed and expressed in their memoirs, especially those whose fame was wrought from their Shakespearean performances—actors such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Italian Tommaso Salvini and Eleanora Duse, American actors Edmund Kean and Edwin Booth, as well as the brilliant Sarah Bernhardt.
In speaking of how theater could be an influence for corruption, Bacon was a prophet, for there are few playwrights, directors, or actors today who cherish the high faith of these elder actors, or bring to their art the same noble intention. It is a fact that much of what we see in movies and on television is corrupt. Actors compete in prime time for roles that are lascivious, sleazy, and degrading (none more craven than those exhibited on the Reality TV shows). If we want to experience simple dignity and spiritual purity in acting roles, we have to watch the movies of the classically trained actors of a more romantic era—those of the distinguished repertory tradition, such as Laurence Olivier, Ronald Colman, Greer Garson, Leslie Howard, John Gielgud, Dame Edith Anderson, Dame May Whitty, Robert Donat, Gladys Cooper, Alex Guinness, Irene Dunne, and the ever gallant C. Aubrey Smith. These artists contributed a polish and elegance to the art of acting, personifying Hamlet’s prototype actor in every way. Their presence, whether on the stage or screen, was lucid and exalting.
No matter the madness or sanity, the humility or haughtiness, the innocence or immodesty, the gentleness or cruelty of the roles portrayed, these actors had a high sense of theater. They brought to every line of dialogue and every subtle gesture the command and integrity of their own hearts. They understood that theater is all about expressing the hope of something purer and better than what man lives and experiences in the real world. That was the noble intention and ‘grace’ they brought to their characters—a grace that American author Peggy Noonan describes as “a sensitivity, mercy, generosity of spirit, and a courtesy so deep it amounts to beauty[31]”. In my book Acting Magic, I analyze the various dramatic performances of many of these golden-age acting greats and compare them to those of our modern-day actors. Though I do not have space here to repeat everything I have written, suffice to say that we cannot have meaningful drama if actors do not found their art on moral and ethical moorings, for these are the “great bases for eternity[32]” that have long proven the making of the true hero and the true heroine, both on the stage and in real life.
It all goes back to Bacon’s vision. Whenever the ideal is appealed to in art, we have noble intention. By it, the actor lets his audience see the struggle of the soul to be true, not false; to strive after good, not evil (or suffer the consequences of that evil and grow as a result); and to have faith, not despair. Why do these intangibles matter? Because life is all about striving toward what is free and pure and good, no matter the personal price to be paid. In life, the ideal is greater than the reality because the ideal is what endures and gives life its meaning, romance, and preciousness. Imbued with noble intention, acting can be beautiful and complete in its magic. Bacon appealed to the best in us in the Plays because he knew that it is to the authentic light that the spectators bring the candles of their own hopes and dreams to be lit. His Plays are revisited time and time again in our hearts and imaginations because they fulfill the soul’s universal yearning for the divine ideal, for completeness, for wholeness.
If the task of the actor is to inspire others to live their lives more beautifully, this task is thwarted today by two present obstacles: firstly, the cynical vision of most of our entertainment makers as expressed through their “realist” subject matter, and secondly, the prevalence among our popular actors of “method acting”—an introspective approach to characterization that places far too much emphasis on the actor and his own reflected glory.
Of the first obstacle, we have a long history of realist drama with the plays of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and John Galsworthy, to mention a few. These writers asserted that imitation was the first aim of art and that the stage picture needed to be a photograph and not a painter’s ideal conception; however, their photograph of reality was explicit and selective. They chose only slices of human existence that fit their idea of life in its anguished state, and they found it necessary to pry into dark and hidden motives of abnormal behavior. Consequently, the drama of realism was characterized by pathological, criminal, or sexual-psychoanalytical components—with an obsessive amount of shocking or sensational revealment.
Multiply these same components ten times over, remove all moral guidelines, add in new genres of horror, dark fantasy, and pornography, insinuate a progressive social or political agenda, and we have a fair description of a good portion of today’s dramatic fare. Gone is the idealism. Gone is the love of military virtue. Gone is that subtler motive of self-sacrifice clothed with nobility, and that rare sweetness in the depiction of young love that we have grown to love so well in Shakespeare’s portraits. Much of our modern drama is as unlike Shakespearean drama in its vision as night is from day. It is, like our culture, careless, even derisive, of what is pure in heart, high in faith, and perfect in intention. It is neither instructive of a higher way, nor vibrantly theatrical.
Like the earlier social dramatists, Hollywood writers focus on hard-core realism. They have sacrificed the ideal of the divine self upon the altar of their idol, the corrupted human self. To paraphrase Bacon, we cannot fit the macro divine image (the mystical and sacred) into the puny micro frame (of the profane and human). Yet this is exactly what many of our industry artists are trying to do. They delight in the exploration of man’s perverted passions and conflicted emotions at the expense of the cultivation of his true nature. Though our humanity is the “rich effluvium…the waste and the manure and the soil,” to quote Ezra Pound, from which our Tree of Life grows, it is no more than that. If the purpose of art is to advance man toward self-knowledge, focusing almost exclusively on the corrupted ‘waste’ of human nature, though a valid subject for anatomy, will not lead us heavenward. If Bacon has taught us anything it is that “our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us[33]”.
Celebrities preach to us that society needs correcting, while promoting themselves as the priests and mentors of that correction. Though they congratulate themselves (at the Academy Awards and Emmy presentations) that they are exposing society’s ills, while freeing men from a confining, puritanical morality, they are merely trying to promote and give legitimacy to their own muddied fiction of life. To view life through the meaner and coarser lens of cynicism reflects a jaded perception of man and of the higher good. Too many of our celebrity actors display the ‘fallen man’ syndrome, or what Bacon described as “that proud and imperative appetite of Moral knowledge, defining the laws and limits of Good and Evil, with an intent…to revolt from God and to give laws unto himself[34]”. According to Bacon, those who have not the single eye on the enduring ideal or do not “have wits of such sharpness and discernment that they can of themselves pierce the veil [between the human and the eternal[35]]” are neither good teachers nor good [dramatic] poets. Only those with “a purified intellect, purged from fancies and vanity, and yet yielded and absolutely rendered up to Divine Oracles [that is, capable of receiving the impulses of the spirit], can render to Faith [our divinely invested hopes] “the tributes of Faith[36]”.
Bottom line: Great artists, like great art, make a martyrdom of the things of the divine, not of corruptible man.
When Bacon is talking about art, he is referring to true art—that is, art that is a reflection of God’s original artwork, which is Nature. God’s nature is clearly evident in what we refer to as ‘mother nature.’ But the ancient truths, which we call the mysteries of gnosis, refer to the nature of man, which is equally, in its pristine and original state, made perfect in God’s image. So Shakespeare uses art to show us the gold of that divine nature, while encouraging us to strive toward it. Human nature that is less than the gold is dealt with mercifully, but at no time given moral equivalence with the divine nature. As Bacon instructs, Nature is as God made us and as He beholds us. Art should be the mirror of this and not of man-made reality, which is, after all, nothing more than passing illusion.
Indeed, reality has precious little to do with art at all, especially reality that is a clinical slice of disillusioned living or heightened sexualized fantasy. In a 1983 BBC television interview, Bette Davis said: “The terrible thing about acting today is that it’s all so real. You can sit on a street corner and see real people…Acting is larger than life.” Theatrical life must be larger than life—brighter and more glorious. We go to the theater not to experience actuality but to transcend it. That is the true magic of theater.
Of the second obstacle—the cult-like popularity of method acting, much has been written. ‘Method’ puts the spotlight on the actor as he surgically dissects his role, searching out its organic truth by discovering that truth in himself. As a result, the actor “becomes” his role: The life of the character and the life of the actor are one. It is not possible for a character role to breathe with spirit when the actor fills up that role with his ego. The intrusion of the egoic mind with its obsessive emotion always cancels out that luminous space of clarity and creative stillness, wherein all magic is possible. The role inevitably becomes an inflated image of the actor himself rather than a theatrical life that can be transcendent and meaningful to the audience.
Stanislavski told actors to “love art in yourself and not yourself in art.”[37] This is a difficult thing to do when the actor has no distance from the character he creates on the stage or screen. He also wrote that narcissism, or the exploitation of art for personal celebrity, is the poison (“corrupting bacilli)[38]” that cripples the actor as a human being and destroys him as an artist in the theater.
Self-love in art as in life is the antithesis of altruistic love, which is ever pure and unfolds gently within the heart, like the petals of a rose. It is hard to imagine how far the celebrity star system has departed both from Stanislavski’s ideal and from Bacon’s noble vision. If young actors see their profession merely as a ticket to stardom and wealth and life on the fast track, without obligation to the profession they serve or to its aesthetic and altruistic purposes, then dignity and high-mindedness, no less than the good and the beautiful they impart, become things of the past.
Where there is a lack of high conception in the creation of character or a desire to tear down all that is beautiful and true, the actor is nothing more than a stand-in for a photographic recording of life in its temporal and corrupted state. Actors fail themselves and their profession when they espouse lewdness and condemn purity, when they scorn life’s opportunities and embrace cynicism, when they mock love’s ideal and forget the beauty of the divine. Unfortunately, in their feverish attempts to suit the play to the age, many theater companies have coarsened the rendering of even the great classic works—sweeping away all things of grace and noble intention. This is no more apparent than in the staging of the Shakespeare plays. I have written about this extensively in my book Acting Magic, and include here an excerpt:
“It is rather the exception today to experience ‘Shakespeare’ as it was originally conceived. Actors often lack the careful and polished stage technique and poetic spirit to perform it fittingly…The spiritual vibrancy of the Plays is often diminished in favor of a more sensually edgy composition that sacrifices poetic cadence to dull, prosaic rhythms that grind out a sexual subtext that was not there in the original writing. Even renowned English troupes prevent the audience from reaching the loftier heights that the verse inspires by grounding the Plays in a dense sexual magnetism, framed by dissonant music and anachronistic costuming and sets.
“The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford-Upon-Avon during the 1999 season exemplified this trend…Titania paraded before us as ‘The Great Whore.’ Her fairies, one of whom bawdily seduced Puck in the opening scene, were sluts of differing preferences. Oberon, his bald head and naked breast marked with cultist symbols, wove a dark, satanic presence as he performed mudras over the players and the audience—all this to a voodoo music score that throbbed out its frenzied beat while spotlights crisscrossed the room, casting a luminescence that simulated a speakeasy or a red light district.
“Oberon and Puck both made their entrances from beneath the stage floor, emerging out of a red smoke that reminded one of the “mist and murk” of Hell’s maw from which the conjuring Lemurs rose in Goethe’s Faust. Hermia and Helena, with their shortened hems and high heeled shoes, made their respective appearances as ladies of the night, while their lovers, Lysander and Demetrius, wore gangster trench coats and carried machine guns. The spectacle of scantily clad Bottom and Titania in her fairy bower (a double bed lowered from the ceiling) fit an R-rated category of public exhibitionism. In the scenes featuring the rustic actors, every conceivable sexual and homosexual meaning was insinuated into the verse…
“The director and cast used their exceptional talents and most privileged reputation to hoodwink their audience, duping them into believing that this was “enlightened” Shakespeare, or Shakespeare as it should be performed in these progressive days. In fact, the audience experienced nothing that spoke to the heart at all, nothing that brought the beauty of the verse into the soul’s keeping[39]”.
With the hope of drawing in a younger audience during their 2006 Complete Works Festival, the RSC continued the trend of giving the Plays a modern face-lift. Romeo and Juliet portrayed “erotically charged” encounters of cartel-crossed lovers in Mafia Sicily. Instead of the innocence and spiritual beauty that we have long associated with Juliet’s character, and of whom Bacon wrote with such tender care, we were shown a slip of a girl for whom, as one reviewer wrote, “sex and death became inseparable.”
The Tempest was even more radical. The setting of the Bermudas (intended to conjure the magic of a golden-age Atlantis) was changed to the icy and barren wastes of Antarctica. This transplant of the story ruptured the play’s coherence and the emotional life of the characters. The play opened with a large screen movie of a modern-day shipwreck. Once the ship sank, Prospero appeared center stage in a gruesome animal skin. Miranda, dressed like a 7th grader in a school tunic, Eskimo coat, short sox, and rock-climbing boots, was a cipher-like presence of utter stupidity from the first scene to the last. Patrick Stewart, in the role of the visionary Prospero, diminished the noble mien of his character by making him cower before Ariel.
Though Ariel is androgynous, Shakespeare addresses her as “delicate Ariel.” We therefore imagine a feminine sylph of the air, who embodies the grace and enchantment of nature’s elemental kingdom The Ariel of this production was a disembodied male spirit. He wore a black robe, set off by white face and greasy, slicked-back hair to enhance his spectral, ghostlike appearance. It created a nightmarish effect, best described by Gordon Parsons in his August 9th, 2006 review for the Morning Star daily: “With a chainsaw voice [Ariel] rises like a death’s head from a burning brazier and later from a ghastly cannibalized hamper as a blood-soaked skeleton.” Apparently, the director intended to showcase the principal influence of this “enlightened” dark spirit (an oxymoron in itself) over Prospero—thus ignoring Shakespeare’s conception of Prospero as a masterful and divinely inspired alchemist, endowed with a mysterious wisdom.
When you diminish or make obscure Shakespeare’s original intention by superimposing your own audacious intention (often in the name of originality), there can be no true pathos, and thus no transcendence. “The ends of knowledge,” Bacon wrote in the Preface to the Great Instauration, “are not for any selfish purposes, whether for pleasure, fame, power, but for the benefit and use of Life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity[40]”. The purpose of theatric art is to present to man his higher reality, to show him a form of deeper, finer living that is movingly expressive and alive to his spirit. For only in the spirit can the art of acting perform its magic—its power to transmute and transform the soul. As Bacon explains it, “art is [not] merely an assistant to nature, having the power indeed to finish what nature has begun, but it also has the power to “change…or fundamentally alter nature[41]”.The actor’s job, then, is to remain true to the divine ideal and lead the spectator by the grace and genius of his art to that higher revelation of life.
As a practical idealist Bacon saw with the eyes of the eternal. He believed in a paradise for men and sought to build that paradise on earth. The Shakespeare Plays were part of his great plan to fashion the architecture of the soul and spirit of man according to divine principles. The Plays, like the gospels of Christ, also represent their author’s personal life history. As Bacon himself used the dramatic arts to lift the hearts and minds of the people out of ignorance and moral turpitude, and toward the magic of divine love, or Charity, the Plays became the process by which his own soul could articulate his noble vision and thereby distill the essence, the “spiritus vitae,” of his own ideal of self. And thus the works of Shakespeare are his personal mirror, reflecting the depths of his near divine nature, while passing the torch to us to forge a new renaissance—even the revelation of a New Atlantis of divine artistry that can discover and recover the magic presence of God in man, and restore heaven on earth.
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WORKS CITED
[1] Ince, Richard. England’s High Chancellor. Page 153. London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1935
[2] Bacon, Francis. Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1640), Book II, Ch. XIII. Trans. Gilbert Wats
[3] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II, Ch. XIII. The Works of Francis Bacon. Collected
and edited by James Spedding, Robert Ellis and James Heath. London: Longmans & Co., 1870
[4] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II, Ch. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed)
[5] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II, Ch. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed)
[6] Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 1, Scene 1.
[7] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book II, Chap. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[8] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book II, Chap. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[9] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book II, Chap. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[10] Spenser, Edmund. The Shepherds Calendar, October Eclogue. The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser. Vol. IV.
Jacob Tonson, London, MDCCXV
[11] Garson, Greer. A Rose for Mrs. Miniver. Michael Troyan. University Press of Kentucky. 1998
[12] Stanislavski, Constantin. Building a Character. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1962
[13] Shakespeare, William. Tragedy of Hamlet. Act 2, Scene 2.
[14] Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1961
[15] Bacon, Francis. Instauratio Magna: Distributio Operis. Works…(Spedding, ed 1863)
[16] Bacon, Francis. The Masculine Birth of Time.
[17] Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum (1620), Book I, Aph XXXV. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1863)
[18] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II, Ch. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1870)
[19] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II, Ch. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1870)
[20] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). Book VII, Ch III. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[21] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). Book VII, Ch III. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[22] Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Act 2, Scene 7.
[23] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book II, Chap. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[24] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book II, Chap. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[25] Bacon, Francis. Promus. The Promus of Formularies and Elegances. Mrs. Henry Potts. London: 1883
[26] [Anonymous]. The Arte of English Poesie. London: Richard Field, 1589
[27] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II, Ch. XIII. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1870)
[28] Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning Book II, Ch XIII, 3. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1863)
[29] Stanislavski, Constantin. My Life in Art. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1948
[30] Bernhardt, Sarah. The Art of Theatre. New York: Dial Press, 1925
[31] Noonan, Peggy, Wall Street Journal, Opinion Editorial. December, 2006
[32] Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 23
[33] Reference: http://english-renaissance.net/baconquotes.html
[34] Bacon, Francis. Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1640), The Preface. Trans. Gilbert Wats.
[35] Bacon, Francis. Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1640), The Preface. Trans. Gilbert Wats.
[36] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book VI. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)
[37] Stanislavski, Constantin. Building a Character. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1962
[38] Stanislavski, Constantin. Building a Character. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1962
[39] McClellan, Deslie, Acting Magic: The Complete Guide to the Art of Acting. Honolulu: Playhouse Books, 2007
[40] Bacon, Francis. The Great Instauration. (1620). The Preface.
[41] Bacon, Francis. De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book II, Chap. II. Works…(Spedding, ed. 1858)