The Mask and the Giant: Shakespearean Acting and Reputation Management

Abstract

I use Shakespeare to teach acting to students. A key to my work is impression management: what Shakespeare called reputation. I view the management of reputation as a route into Shakespearean character, which I present to students as a mask attuned to sacred values. The physical basis from which the actor can discover the mask is what Hamlet calls ‘smoothness’, which I explain with an acting exercise. We discover the force of sacred values by noticing the ubiquity of keywords in the text such as honor, virtue, reason, shame and faith. By holding characters to the fire of their sacred values, I shift the actor’s attention from an individualist idea of authentic representation towards a sense of character as a battleground of mind-shaping. The resulting performance work is scaled up to a more expansive and energized degree than the actor may be used to delivering in a social media-saturated environment in which what is often prioritized is a quasi-confessional self-revelation. The revelation of an inner life then emerges through a committed exploration of antithetical relations, a strategy basic both to mask work and to Shakespeare’s poetics. The actor finds their personal connection to the material by facing the contradiction between the objective standards of behavior demanded of the character and the character’s attempt to control their status, that is, how they are seen. The final value of the performance work is that the actor learns how to manage their reputation so that they come to appear like a giant who is seen from a distance.

Since 2007 I have been working as an acting teacher—since 2015 at the Guildford School of Acting (GSA), a conservatoire housed within the campus of the University of Surrey in England. What unites all the cohorts I have taught is that they enter a training program desirous to learn about the business of becoming a professional actor. The work then is primarily vocational. And when I have asked my students what they wish for from their time at a conservatoire, very often they have told me that they want it to include some training in Shakespeare. To be a professional actor in one of my cohorts means spending at least some of your time investigating what a training in Shakespearean acting might be, what it might ask of you and what it might offer you.

There are two aspects to this training I want to draw attention to here. The first is that an institution like GSA is interested in giving student actors an understanding of what we call ‘technique’. Of course, the business of what we are doing when we teach technique has become a contested territory; perhaps it always was. There is no shortage of debate in and between UK conservatoires on that subject. Nevertheless, I am committed to the belief that there exists such a thing as acting technique, and that my job is to teach it. But my belief is complicated by the second point I want to address here, which is that I also believe to build a career as an actor one should come to terms with something very basic and very important about human behavior. This is quite simply that if you can learn to manage how you ‘come across’ to others you will gain a benefit. It seems obvious to me that getting control over how one comes across to others matters to professional actors; it matters to actors because it matters to everybody. The water we all swim in is an ocean of social judgment. The difference is that this matters to actors in an unusual way, as we will discover. All that said, my point is that there is a common ground of technique which in a sense embodies a common ground of social judgment. The reason for this common ground is that our feelings about ourself, including feelings about the nature of our freedom in the sense of agency or authenticity, are not separable from our feelings about how others see us—which is what the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley meant by the looking glass self (Cooley 1998).

Of course, it is impossible to completely control what others think of us, or even to fully know it. That aside, and to unpack the idea in what is perhaps a rather blunt way, some people are better at self-control than others, and on the whole our society is more inclined to reward them for it and to punish those who do not show the capacity to control their own behavior. Indeed, the point seems so obvious—it is taken for granted that we should reward self-control—that one might wonder whether it is worth making at all. But my claim is that actors are in the business of both mind-shaping and mind-reading, and both mind-shaping and mind-reading require that we learn to see ourselves as others see us—that we try to understand the nature of our looking glass self.

By self-control, I mean the capacity to regulate one’s behavior in accordance with both internal and external standards. There is much argument over the reasons for individual differences in self-control. That said, considerable evidence exists for a genetic factor at work: Willems et al. (2018), for instance, taking a sample of over 20,000 children from the Netherlands Twins Register, found that genetic influences accounted for a majority of individual differences in self-control across youths aged 7–16 years. While the social psychology of self-regulation is a well-trodden path, recent work on the polyvagal theory (Porges 2001, 2007) reveals that heart rate variability (HRV) is a biomarker of cognitive, emotional and attentional self-regulation (See Groß 2021). Polyvagal theory explains the critical role that the vagus nerve (the largest nerve in the human body) has for human behavior. There are two kinds of vagus nerve, myelinated and unmyelinated. Myelin is a fatty substance that, by sheathing the nerve fibers, acts as an insulator and thus speeds up transmission of impulses through the nerve. It is the myelinated branch that matters most here, as it facilitates regulatory—and therefore prosocial—behavior. Thus, the executive functions in the brain that are thought to play a key role in self-regulation, which are mainly found in the prefrontal cortex, have an almost wholly genetic origin. Yet to point to a physiological and genetic basis for self-control is not to argue for a deterministic view of human personality: that would mean adopting an outdated, overly simple conception of how genes relate to behavior. Indeed, whatever the causes of its unequal distribution in society, self-control is something that can be improved for most people if they work on it, and I see it as part of my job to help my students work on it.

For example, and this is for me one of the very first lessons in technique, I will ask my students to stand in front of a chair and sit down in it without looking at it. They do this several times, and I invite them to try doing it without ‘showing an attitude’, that is, as economically as possible. Of course, it is not humanly possible to not show an attitude—even indifference is an attitude. The aim is simply to begin by seeking the most biomechanically efficient way of sitting. From there, I introduce two musical terms: legato and staccato. To sit down with a legato quality in the body means to create an idea of ease, of lightness, of smoothness in the movement. In order to achieve this, the actor must develop self-possession. By this I mean the actor will realize that in order to create an impression of lightness, they must hold steady the ‘core stability’ muscles in their torso so that they can place their body into the chair with no more force than is necessary. Actors who have trained in dance or undertaken a course in Pilates or a related movement discipline will usually understand this idea quicker than others. It is then extended to the whole body, especially the limbs, so that one learns to walk with lightness instead of giving one’s weight to the floor too much, and to manipulate objects with lightness.

Inevitably, learning to move with lightness requires the actor to slow down at first—to ‘put the brakes on’, a term that translates the great director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s concept of tormoz. But when it comes to working on the quality of staccato in the body, it turns out the same principle must be applied: the actor sits down as fast as possible without crashing into the chair. It is essential for me that the actor learns to work at speed, since the moment people start to move quicker, they will become more physically aggressive. Aggression on stage must be held in check, not simply released. Inexperienced actors will often think they must ‘express’ themselves—that is, they must let out their emotions in full. It is at these dangerous moments that the acting will become too physically tense. The actor loses their self-control, and the audience no longer feels able to trust them to communicate the play accurately. Of course, for some this aggressive behavior can appear like a dazzling firework, or a magnificently animal spectacle. In sport, players are often lionized for ‘leaving everything on the pitch’. Yet even during a game like a football match a too-aggressive player will be sent off for dangerously out of control behavior. When actors ‘leave everything on the pitch’, they become less, not more, charismatic; we feel we have seen what they have to offer. It is not how the actor expresses their feelings that reveals who they are. There are, after all, a limited number of ways in which people non-verbally express primary emotions like anger and sadness—that is to say, emotions that have physical symptoms that can actually be observed by an audience. Rather, what is truly revealing of character are the myriad ways in which people try to mask what they secretly think and feel.

Why, then, do I teach this exercise? Principally because it effects a remarkable change in the actor. From the moment the quality of lightness in the body is discovered, the actor can create an idea that they have self-control in the minds of the audience. Recall that self-control is socially rewarded. It signals trustworthiness, competence, coolness of judgment, confidence—all high-status qualities; the actor’s work develops what Hamlet describes as a ‘temperance that may give it smoothness’ (Hamlet 3.2.8; all citations from Shakespeare are taken from Shakespeare 2011). And, once having achieved a feeling of ease, of smoothness in the body, the actor is invited to carry over this feeling into the way they speak on stage, to speak with legato and staccato. For me, this is the ground upon which character can be built, as the actor learns to modulate their performance in relation to the baseline of self-control.

Getting control over how one comes across to others is nowadays often seen in terms of managing one’s reputation on social media; since 2021 there has been a waterfall of academic papers produced, as a brief Google Scholar search reveals, and a great many of these papers are published in journals devoted to business marketing, branding and so on. But reputation management is nothing new. Courtesy of the influential sociologist Erving Goffman, it was previously labeled ‘impression management’ (see Goffman 2004), but the word Shakespeare prefers (and so do I) is ‘reputation’, which occurs 42 times in his writings (Word Counts Are Drawn from the Online Concordance to Shakespeare n.d.). From the Latin reputare, meaning ‘to consider again’, it came into English use from the end of the 14th century. Shakespeare’s world was one in which, given the relative paucity of rigorous legal contracts (although the rise in the number of lawyers over this period indicates the sands were shifting slowly towards impersonal contracts), an individual’s word was their bond; thus, to be of good reputation was essential for the maintenance of trust, the basis upon which the entire social fabric was (and is) constructed. Trust being not at that time a matter of useful institutions—there was, for example, no Bank of England to trust with one’s money until 1694—one had to earn and take care of one’s reputation.

It may seem that this view of acting is rather unpoetic, perhaps even cynical. But to point to the realities of reputation management for actors is not to undermine the actor as an artist. Quite the contrary: I am simply pointing to social benefits and costs at stake and to an underlying explanation for our interest in such things. In fact, the art is much of the time in controlling how one appears to others such that the audience does not spend its attention on considering how such an act of control is taking place. If the game is to absorb the audience in a fiction, to allow for a mental transportation into the imagined world of the play, then the actor who can hide the game will win the game.

But there is a paradox here, because reputation requires that you wear a mask. This mask shows that you are aware of the external standards of behavior in one’s society—that you have adequate control over your inner life so that it is not subject to unwanted ‘leakage’, such as inappropriate outbursts of aggression. In this, you are like Hamlet: you have ‘that within which passes show’ (Hamlet 1.2.85)—you do not show it because it is unruly, appetitive, selfish, animal, and that makes you look bad in the eyes of others. Your desire for status, for instance, is a basic human attribute. We do not just want to get along with others: we want to get ahead in life. All people, more or less, hunger for status not because it feels good in itself—we may think some people simply enjoy exercising power for its own sake, but the reason we think that is because it suits us to hide our own motives from ourselves, and it is perfectly obvious that people who have more status obtain more valuable resources. It may be the resources that we truly hunger for, but to confront that truth is to face an unlovely self in the mirror, just as to be seen to play a status game consciously is to risk the loss of the very status you are seeking. Hence, you wear a mask. Why is this paradoxical? Because you must wear a mask and yet give the impression that you are sincere. In effect, the best way to play the game is to believe that you are not playing a game at all—that your behavior is authentically driven by the kinds of motives that are morally acceptable to others, which are mostly a matter of that other basic human desire, to associate with people in groups. Beyond the primary biological needs of humans, we are social animals that crave both connection to a group and status within it: we need to walk the tightrope between getting along and getting ahead.

The mask, as I am using the word here, is not a real mask that I deploy in my classes on Shakespeare. The point is not to learn how to ‘play a mask’, that is, how to perform a character with a particular mask stuck on your face. The point is to hold one’s face itself somewhat like a mask. In fact, one’s whole body is held in a mask-like attitude to begin with. I ask the actor to create a whole-body attitude that for them expresses an essence—to embody a fundamental idea. I might elicit this idea from the actor first by asking what the character wants the other character in the scene (or the audience) to think, feel, say or do—what is the ‘objective’, to use Stanislavski’s term. Let us say character X wants character Y to treat them with more respect. Why? The theory of the looking-glass self tells us that an obvious, almost tautological, reason would be because at the moment character X thinks character Y does not sufficiently respect them. The desire to be treated with respect is translated into ‘You should believe I am more respectable than you seem to think I am’. What non-verbal behavior might provoke character Y to treat character X with more respect? Let us say, for the sake of argument, the impression of having purity regarding one’s intentions. The actor makes a full-body mask of purity; it is better, in my view, to think of it as a mask rather than a picture, a statue or a painting because it is more than a surface: there is always something else in tension with it, which is called the ‘counter-mask’. The actor performs the relevant part of the story (which of course could be anything from the whole scene to a single moment within it) investing energy in displaying this body mask. Then I ask them to internalize the mask: in other words, to imagine that they are still filling out the body pose of this mask while they speak. What character X wants from character Y is not outwardly displayed but exists forcefully in the imagination—that is what is mask-like about it: it is in hiding, as one’s actual face is in hiding when one wears a mask, yet its influence is transformative upon the actor’s behavior. In my experience, the persona of the actor who allows their imagination to be fully engaged with the internalized mask seems to grow larger, their words and actions more powerful. Their status goes up.

This mask-like attitude emerges from the actor’s response to certain words in the plays that speak to sacred values. A sacred value has a non-utilitarian representation in the brain, such that the outcomes of cost/benefit trade-offs are deprioritized (Berns et al. 2012): I mean that sacred values are core values that people hold to be inviolable to their identity regardless of how they influence the individual’s prospects for success. They make for strong drama because they are not easily subject to negotiation—they make conflicts much tougher to solve, because they are at the crux of the getting along/getting ahead dilemma. Shakespearean sacred values might be gleaned from a word frequency count: honor (651 appearances in the plays and poems), shame (346 appearances), virtue (203), reason (298), faith (420)—these are the currency of social judgment, of the looking glass self, in the plays. They are not guides to Shakespeare’s personal belief system, but rather indices of external moral standards of the day articulated by his characters, including the persona he adopts for his poems. I think many people have seen Shakespeare as a kind of classical humanist insofar as he is reticent about his religion, but while the lack of overt religious expression in the plays might be suggestive, the word ‘God’ or ‘god’ appears 796 times in his writings, the word ‘soul’ 454 times and the word ‘spirit’ 259 times, while ‘devil’ appears 225 times.

I ask of the actors I train that they see how Shakespeare holds characters to the fire of their professed sacred values, that the actors discover which of these values are truly sacred to the character when tested in the crucible of experience. In other words, to use the opening lines of Hamlet, ‘Who’s there?/Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself’ (1.1.1–2)—meaning, as the play unfolds itself in a series of testing experiences, we watch a human being unfold himself to finally reveal who he is: in this case, an embodied ambivalence, a contradiction.

Such unfolding is especially marked in Hamlet but is not exclusive to that play; I would suggest it is the mark of all Shakespeare’s great dramatic characters. An especially intriguing and clear example of such testing is Act 2 Scene 4 of Measure for Measure, in which the novitiate Isabella visits the recently appointed magistrate of Vienna Angelo in his house to ask that mercy be shown to her brother, who under a newly reinstated Viennese law has committed the crime of getting his lover pregnant before their marriage. Angelo’s mask of ‘law’ (200 appearances in Shakespeare’s work) almost slips off immediately on seeing her enter and hearing her say that she is ‘come to know’ his ‘pleasure’: ‘That you might know it, would much better please me,/ Than to demand what ‘tis’ (Measure for Measure 2.4.31–3). My Arden edition has this response of Angelo’s as an aside, but not all editors agree about that, and it makes for an interesting moment of choice for the actor. When I have worked on this scene with young actors (which I have done rather often), I have found that their own sacred values interfere with those of the characters: it is quite typical for them to say things like, ‘Angelo is really creepy’. He represents for them a toxic male—a disgusting, manipulative sexual predator and bully, just the worst person for a young woman to find herself alone in a room with. But in the scene Isabella does not simply express physical (sexual) disgust but moral outrage, which motivates her attempt to make him feel shame at his hypocrisy: he asks her to believe on his honor that his words express his purpose, to which she responds: ‘Ha! Little honour to be much believ’d,/And most pernicious purpose! Seeming, seeming!’ (148–9). What comes first is the social judgment, the attempt to shape his mind, to make him think differently about who he is. A sense of physical disgust is captured only later in her soliloquy after Angelo has gone, by the phrase ‘abhorr’d pollution’ (l.182), as her mind turns on the ramifications of his ‘appetite’ (l.175) and on how her brother has ‘fall’n by prompture of the blood’ (l.177). This disgust is to be understood in relation to her sacred value of chastity, rather than (say) a healthy relationship based on attractiveness and likability. It is this sacred value of chastity that is subjected to the reality tests of the drama. Chastity is Isabella’s core belief at the beginning of the play. She has this belief because she wants to be a nun. In other words, her acceptance into the convent depends on her actively believing in chastity: it is the cost to be paid for joining her chosen community, and will be the means by which she gets status in that community. She is at this point in the drama identified by that central belief; her perception of the world is in thrall to it, and she finds it hard to think straight: she honestly believes that her brother, who has done nothing wrong, will be better off dead than that she give up her chastity, and what is more, she believes he will gladly sacrifice his life for her chastity. Of course, in reality he will do no such thing, because he does not share her sacred value of chastity. In that sense, her belief is a mask that she nonetheless wears totally sincerely; to repeat myself, by ‘mask’ here I mean the fundamental attitude that possesses her and conditions how she presents to the world in her words and actions. Her mask, her story of herself, is quite simply that she is chaste.

Why is it a mask, which after all is an object associated with disguise, with insincere performance? For two reasons. Firstly, because a mask when worn does not necessarily hide the self but may in fact reveal it by giving the person the illusion that, since their face cannot be seen, they have permission to express who they really are. Secondly, because the mask, even if it seems to express the essence of one’s sacred belief, can still be taken off given the right incentive, such as a drastic loss of status. I mean that ultimately even a sacred value, when it collides with a sufficiently hostile reality, may be subject to incentives and trade-offs. The mask, then, is capable of expressing a paradox—one that might remind us that people in Shakespeare’s day almost never saw their own faces, unless darkly, in a watery reflection for example. The word ‘mask’ meaning a covering that hides the face only comes into English in the early-mid 16th century, around the time that mirrors made of Venetian glass were appearing in Europe, while in England pocket mirrors were rare and extremely expensive luxury items. Hamlet promises his mother that he will hold up a ‘glass’ so that she can see—not her face as such, but ‘the inmost part of you’ (Hamlet 3.4.18–19). The mirror had not until this time been read as a physical object which merely reflected back a likeness, but rather had the property of a symbolic, magical object, in which one saw not one’s face but, say, a memento mori like a skull. As with the mask, the mirror offered up a fundamental attitude.

A mask, then, can be a method for the actor of bringing out a sacred value so that you can commit to it. The mask is irreducibly a social object: it is tied to communal standards of behavior, to what one believes is permanently true because others also believe it; it is in this sense that Isabella’s sacred value of chastity is worn sincerely and also like a mask for others to notice. And it is expressive, although not in the sense indicated earlier as ‘squeezing out feelings’. Rather, by ‘expressive’ I mean its function is to send information to others so as to stimulate a psychological reaction in them. It is intended to change the mental state of another person, without explicitly drawing attention to the intention itself.

Masks have a social origin in ritual that continues to speak through them, however softly. This is achieved in part by the esthetics of the mask, which are simplified, and thus exaggerated. This is a helpful feature of the mask for training actors, as it can serve to counterbalance what seems to me a prevalent notion that good acting is a release of sincere personal feelings or ‘impulses’ that are considered authentic, a notion that is to my mind megaphoned by some of the messaging of social media influencers, whose true motive is to monetize their online performances through advertising products. This supposed authenticity of the performer is then read as what the director and acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski called perezhivanie, which is a contested term, but is nowadays often taken to mean something like ‘lived experience’. Of course, the vast majority of an individual’s lived experience, in most cases, is just not very dramatic, and in order to make it seem so we ‘story’ it—in other words, we simplify and exaggerate what we then insist to others is an authentic reality. The conceptual field in actor training has circled for a long time now around the word perezhivanie, which has in my view become a hall of mirrors in which one tends to see what one wants to see. Meanwhile, the prevalent demand for authenticity fails to acknowledge the rather obvious truth that most people never feel more authentic than when they are imitating the behavior most approved of by their ingroup. We are social animals, and we learn who we are not by distinguishing ourselves from the pack but by imitating the high-status figures within it. From this point of view, our social mask—the looking glass self we present to the world—is a more faithful reflection of the authentic person. That Shakespeare made this a principle of characterization can cause, in my experience, feelings of unease among young acting students who struggle to find themselves in the plays. But Shakespeare’s idea of identification is not ‘I find myself in the character’: it is ‘The character enlarges what is possible for me’. Ophelia, peering through mad eyes into an abyss of insight, expresses it pithily: ‘Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be’ (Hamlet 4.5.43–4).

Some readers may detect a whiff of Jungian archetypes behind what I am saying. And it is true that Carl Jung is not a stranger to the studios of some acting schools in the UK, including my own. It is not hard to see how archetypal ideas about character can be made to map onto Shakespearean contexts such as the theory of the four humors. In fact, there is already a map available courtesy of Michael Chekhov, who was the playwright Anton’s nephew, and a student at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislavski before becoming director of that studio, then later moving to England and America. Chekhov taught what he identified as four qualities of movement—molding, floating, flying and radiating—that correspond to Earth, Water, Air and Fire. I think the map can be a useful one for actors in navigating Elizabethan ideas of personal temperament, and I have no particular issue with the idea that people do have unchangeable temperaments; but my interest is not so much in retrofitting Jungian archetypes to the Tudor context; rather, I want to deploy the mask to signal one’s awareness of the continual assault on one’s sense of self by external judgment—that is to say, the mask, including its moments of slippage, signals the disguised negotiation of the game of ‘What I think you think I am’ that makes up such a great part of one’s social life.

Seen in this way, using the mask as a strategy in the game of social judgment, in which one’s reputation is constantly in play, will often both energize and enlarge the performance, as the actor engages with the serious business of defending an idea of the self from the seemingly constant threat of attack. The actor, seeing now that ‘What I think you think of me tells me who I am’ is far more important than they previously realized, pays closer attention to the signals of the scene partner—all the while, attempting to hold the mask in place so that the game is not given away. After all, to give the game away is to lose the game. You are, you want people to believe, not trying to manipulate their attitude to you: you sincerely mean everything you say. Character, in this context, becomes a battleground of mind-shaping, marked by duality, ambivalence, mystery, conflict. Hamlet presents himself as a hero and a coward, a prince and a clown, a philosopher and a madman, depending on what he thinks Claudius, or Gertrude, or Ophelia, or Horatio thinks he is; thus, there is a thought that I will try to inculcate in my students, going something like, ‘Judging from your behavior towards me now, I imagine what you think of me is A, but I need you to think of me as B, because I need you to be/to do C, so I must reshape what you think of me’. With time to practice, the actor learns how to hold in place this frame as the viewpoint of the character, the glasses through which they look at reality. Thus, it is no longer a matter of calculation but of feeling, intuition, inference, which is how the game is played typically in life—that is to say, mostly just beneath the radar of conscious awareness. As their work on the character evolves through practice, the actor’s instinct is replaced by a knowledge of the character’s instinct, that is, what the character would notice, pay attention to, care about—or not. And this also helps the actor to find ‘the hook’: the trigger in the previous speech that causes the character to respond in the way they do, creating a sense of causative flow to the scene.

Thus, the actor’s use of the (imagined) mask helps in embodying the connective (associational, metaphorical) and competitive (conflictual, antithetical) relationships that are also characteristic of Shakespeare’s poetic writing, and this is by virtue of the fact that duality is of the essence of mask work: the mask, the outward show, contains its own opposite, the counter-mask. A physical mask will often have a characteristic basic emotional expression—angry, fearful, sad, hilarious, etc. The actor will get a feel for this expression and move and behave in harmony with it. A simple exercise for practicing the counter-mask is to give the mask a dramatic moment that elicits a clashing emotion, as when an angry mask finds a stash of money lying in the street and reacts with joy. (This exercise, known as ‘Crossing the Room’, is described in Wilsher 2007, p. 47). When it comes to the very much more complex representational field of Shakespearean character, it becomes necessary to connect the symbolic mask to the game of social judgment, marked in the script by terms of value such as honor, shame, honesty and so on. People do not see each other as neutral figures—we load our judgments of others morally according to external standards of conduct that are more or less internalized. Nobody escapes the matrix of social judgment in which ‘The fault…is not in our stars/But in ourselves’ (Julius Caesar 1.2.139–40); speeches that involve praising or blaming characters are structured into the plays as epideictic, while there is nowadays an entire industry devoted to consumer novelties that pay homage to the art of Shakespearean insults. I think the more one looks, the more one realizes that there is simply no value-free, judgment-free dialog in the plays anywhere: the game, which is so often a game of status, is continuous, and forms the substance of the drama. Shakespeare’s universe, no less than ours, was a universe of social judgment. In rehearsals, I take the time to tease out this social judgment dynamic from moment to moment, and I ask the actors to write it down in their script alongside their dialog, and to put it into practice.

This, then, is the source of the actor’s personal connection to the material, and the bridge to the character’s inner life: how the person believes they are seen; the ways they try to gain control over how they come across in the face of objective (that is, external) standards of behavior, manifested as these standards are in the conventions, rituals, habits and interactions of their social world. There is no escaping judgment in that fictive world, as there is none in our reality beyond it. For this reason, I think the final intrinsic value of the live performance is to be found in whether the actor is able to achieve self-possession, that is, to control how they manage their reputation. So there is a radical sense in which the character that the actor presents in the drama is a reflection of the essential human work of reputation management.

The character appears to us as if far away, removed in time and space. And yet the character seems also to be bigger than us, scaled up by the drama into something with a masklike, even monumental, presence. The actor steps temporarily into the character and is apparently absorbed by the bigger presence; in this movement of stepping into, the actor’s status, their reputation, is enhanced, and for a while they seem like a giant, seen from a distance.