Outface and Interface

To face: shifting attention from the noun to the verb changes the dynamics of the interface. To face a person, an object, or a situation is an act of volition. The actor’s own face becomes several things at once: an exteriorization of the actor’s will, an optical device to be looked through, a text to be read by other people. In this introductory essay Bruce R. Smith explores Shakespeare’s distinctive ways with to face as a verb. In plays written throughout his career, in comedies, histories, and tragedies alike, Shakespeare uses the verb to face in multiple senses: to defy, to challenge, to feign, to disguise, to transform. Particularly does Shakespeare seem drawn to the verb to outface. The “out” in that idiom catches the force and the directionality of to face as well as its reciprocity with the person or thing being faced. Those reciprocal dynamics are teased out in Richard II’s address to his face in the mirror: “Was this the face that faced so many follies,/ And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?” (R2 4.1.275-76). The “out” in to outface ultimately rebounds and returns the actor to the inter-face.

The Face of Judgement in Measure for Measure

Like a number of other Renaissance comedies and romances, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure ends with a scene of judgment in which punishment and reward is distributed among a group of characters. Measure for Measure insistently links judgment to the spatial and revelatory dynamics of facing and unmasking. Adducing evidence from two early modern archives – legal writing on the theory and practice of judgment and treatises on physiology and faculty psychology – Kevin Curran addresses two related questions: (1) What can a historical understanding of the face in early modern culture tell us about the phenomenology of judgment in Measure for Measure? And (2) how does Shakespeare’s staging of judgment create a participatory experience in the playhouse grounded in sensation? The essay ultimately argues that the face in Measure for Measure functions as a hinge between the ethical relation of judgment and the ethical relation of theater, one that insists of the embodied and affective quality of both forms of interaction.

Hamlet’s Face

This essay asks who, what, or where is Hamlet's face in contemporary theatrical production. As a play, Hamlet evokes theatre as a technology constantly changing in its instrumental, social, and cultural mechanics, implying a tension between theatricality as medium and the evolving, intermediating and often remediating technology of theatre. The remedial thematics of Hamlet are foregrounded in the technicities of contemporary performance, in which the distinctively facemaking activities of the stage—acting—transpire across a range of performance media: the mediation of the trained actor's body, for example, and the mediatized image enabled by simultaneous digital recording and projection. W. B. Worthen draws on Bernard Steigler's account of the human arising in the dynamic of the who and the what—"the dynamic of the who itself redoubles that of the what: conditioned by the what, it is equally conditional for it.” Worthen also assesses the figure of performance—theatre, acting, masks, and puppets—in Emmanuel Levinas's understanding of the ethical force of the Other. Worthen considers how the technicity of contemporary performance engages the face as an ethical problematic that is inseparable from the technologies native to the stage at a given moment of articulation.

The Face as Rhetorical Self in Ben Jonson’s Literature

In this essay, Akihiko Shimizu reconsiders the most widely accepted critical views on Jonson’s “flat” characters versus Shakespeare’s “round” ones. He argues that the Jonsonian concept of character—underpinned by classical rhetorical theories of Quintilian and Plutarch—should be understood as an effect of interaction and exchange and not as a manifestation of consciousness. Jonson’s characters are the effect of a simultaneous process of rhetorical self-enhancement and self-exposure. As these men and women attempt to depict their own worth by affecting humours, their interlocutors use rhetorical conjecture to expose what lies beneath this verbal disguise. Both Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s literature share an interest in performativity, acknowledging the impersonated character as inter-subjective, and prompting the audience to participate in deciphering the character from outward appearance and face.

Face to Face, Hand to Hand: Relations of Exchange in Hamlet

In this essay, Emily Shortslef reads three linked encounters between Hamlet and Laertes in Act 5 of Hamlet—their fight at Ophelia’s grave, Hamlet’s recollection of this event in his subsequent expression of remorse, and their fatal duel before Claudius—in relationship to Levinas’s conceptualization of the face-to-face encounter as the ethical relation. She shows how Levinas’s notion of the self as constituted through the encounter with irreducible and unknowable alterity makes these scenes visible as moments in which the self is called into question by the other. At the same time, in contrast to Levinas’s famously asymmetrical concept of relationality and responsibility, the relationality that emerges in these scenes—one generated by the risk inherent in fighting on stage—necessitates mutual awareness of the other’s presence, careful attunement to movement, and reciprocal gestures of provocation and response. Each character discloses himself through the way that their facing bodies sense and respond to the other’s motion. In these antagonistic but collaborative encounters between Hamlet and Laertes, Shakespeare stages a relation of exchange that at the end of the play will also enable an exchange of forgiveness.

‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’: Folie à Deux in Shakespeare’s Love Duets

Of the myriad versions of face-to-faceness in Shakespeare, an elementary case is what this paper calls the “love duet.” Lawrence Manley’s contribution pursues a formal and dramaturgical route into the broader problem of Shakespeare’s ways of depicting and understanding couples by focusing on a specific instance of the love duet in the earlier work of Shakespeare. The “unchaperoned duet” is a scene or portion of a scene in which the absence of third parties is a theatrical pre-condition and a token for the absence of inhibitions to erotic face-to-face encounter. The paper also considers the impact of inhibiting factors (such as separation, absence, the presence of other characters, impinging circumstance, and erotic betrayal) on the duet. Examples are set against both early modern contexts (ancient literature, Renaissance theories of sympathy, and the development of musical duets) and modern theories, including Beckerman’s taxonomy of duets types, J. L Austin’s speech-act theory, and the clinical diagnosis of “Shared Psychotic Disorder (folie à deux)”(DSM-IV) or “delusional symptoms in partner of individual with delusional disorder” (DSM-V).

Afterword: Theatre and Speculation

The face-to-face encounter is a figure for direct, immediate contact between two entities. It has a long history, from Paul’s assertion that what he sees now in a glass darkly he will some day meet face to face to Emmanuel Levinas’ attempt to refound philosophy as based on its confrontation with another. But in seeking to determine the conditions under which the face to face could take place—absolute transparency to the absolutely other—its writers have risked stripping it of the contingencies and particularities that actually mark face-to-face encounters in the world. They have accidentally rendered it as theory and as theophany. Theatrical performance shows another view of the face to face, restoring to it the confusions and quirks of the world, embracing the dark glass of Paul’s wordly speculation rather than the promise of a more perfect vision always still to come. By executing the clarities that are hoped for in the face-to-face encounter, theater shows its shortcomings and discovers in them unhoped for points of contact.

The Man of Sorrows: Edgar’s Disguise and Dürer’s Self-portraits

In King Lear, Edgar transforms himself from a young aristocrat into the mad beggar, Tom o’Bedlam. Naked except for the blanket that covers his loins, he assumes the image of the Man of Sorrows. He tells Lear that, in his former life, he was a dandy dedicated to cultivating his own looks, spending his time in illicit and multiple sexual relations, in drink and dicing. This is a homiletic picture of himself as a typical courtier, guilty of the deadly sin of vanity. The icon of the Man of Sorrows is familiar from countless paintings, and Shakespeare uses the traditional visual image, lifting it out of its religious context and giving it a Humanist significance. Perhaps the most pertinent visual images are those in which Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) represented himself as the Man of Sorrows. In his earlier self-portraits, he appears as a handsome young man, well-dressed and carefully coiffed, reminding us of Poor Tom’s account of his past as a frivolous courtier. In her comparative study of Shakespeare and Dürer, Hanna Scolnicov argues that recognizing the surprising images shared by the two helps uncover the conceptual world of the play.

Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth

How does the temporality of trust shift as one moves from face-to-face interactions to larger social, technical, natural, and supernatural environments? This essay juxtaposes the most visceral elements of trust with more abstract ones by attending to length of the time span across which trust is understood to operate. Jennifer Waldron shows how Shakespeare’s Macbeth juxtaposes the split-second timing of face-to-face trust in the present with an apocalyptic time frame that imaginatively extends over vast reaches of time and space. Waldron argues that Macbeth’s actions simultaneously rupture natural temporalities of trust and supernatural ones. During the course of the play, Macbeth desperately attempts to seal off time, to contain Banquo and Duncan in their graves, and to avoid countenancing his own act of murder. Yet in spectacles such as the appearance of Banquo’s ghost and the line of kings presented by the witches, theater audiences witness several different versions of an apocalyptic theater.

Introduction

The Introduction argues for the salience of the face to face for bridging the disciplinary divide between performance studies and ethical philosophy. The authors sketch three exemplary kinds of face-to-face engagement: the love duet, conflict, and recognition. Drama insists on faces in motion—turning towards and away; facing, defacing, and outfacing; saving face and losing face. Moreover, Shakespeare’s plays present the interactions between characters’ faces through the inter-face of theater, implicating the audience and its own judgments in the first-order movements of trust and betrayal.