CHAPTER 6

Character

The term character has taken on various meanings over time. It developed from a Middle English root associated with something fixed and permanent, like an identifying mark or a sign on a building. During Shakespeare’s time, character was still considered a permanent feature. It was said to stem from certain bodily fluids called humours that once were thought to shape a person’s disposition. In the nineteenth century, character continued to mean a fixed state of development, though with added moral implications as in, “She had character.” This meaning was associated with moral strength, self-discipline, and, most important to the Victorians, a sound reputation. The modern meaning of character is more comprehensive. Today we consider character the entire pattern of behaviors that identify a person. This is the definition we will examine in this chapter. In drama, character is not a static object fixed forever in time but rather a dynamic pattern of features that develops over the course of the play. Some writers think this suggests that characters can change during a play, while others claim they only reveal hidden traits. It’s an interesting puzzle, but it need not detain us here. To recognize that character is composed of a shifting pattern of mixed elements is satisfactory for practical purposes.

Although sometimes stage characters are studied as if they were real people, they are truly artificial because they are objects created by playwrights. It’s risky to depend too much on psychoanalytical methods, for example, to understand them. Psychoanalysis is a method of examining mental disorders, and its main purpose is medical treatment of those disorders. Its methods sometimes can be useful in artistic circumstances, but character analysis is an artistic enterprise, not a medical one. Dramatic characters may be performed by real people and their emotional lives may be similar to those of real people, but the resemblance stops there. Compared to real people, stage characters are very predictable. In life, few people are as relentlessly absorbed with a single overpowering goal as are characters in plays. The compact expressiveness of drama involves reduction to essentials. To portray character, the whole array of ordinary human behavior is condensed to a few selected features.

This chapter will study character under eight headings: (1) Objectives equip the characters with goals to aim for. (2) Qualities are the behaviors they use to pursue those goals. (3) Conflict describes the tensions in situations between conflicting characters, and (4) willpower is the amount of force they use in the pursuit of their objectives. (5) Values are the intangible things the characters consider good and bad. (6) Personality traits are those strokes of individuality that show how characters look, feel, and think. The topic of (7) complexity represents how much characters are conscious of their situations. Under (8) relationships are the primary and secondary associations characters develop with one another. These topics provide the general lines of inquiry that can be used to understand dramatic character. Some actors think of them as individual layers that combine to form the complete character. Rehearsing layer by layer is a useful way to come to terms with a character without having to deal with everything at one time.

OBJECTIVES

Character desires Stanislavski and his followers called objectives, or goals. Boleslavsky and the members of the Group Theatre (formed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford in 1929) and their students and followers have used the term spine or intention. Want is another variation. The terms may vary, but they all mean the same thing: the character’s basic desire or plan of action. Objectives are part of the soul, the inner life of the character. They stem from religious, social, political, or artistic feelings, from dreams of personal glory or empire, or from whatever controls the inner life of the character.

A single objective for an entire play can be a very extensive undertaking, however. It may be so large that it is impossible to complete all at once. For this reason, it is necessary to subdivide it into minor objectives that are easier to understand and accomplish. This turns out to be practical because objectives are tied to the progressions that already exist in the plot. The largest objective, called by Stanislavski the super-objective, is the one that arises from the whole play and governs its limits. Minor objectives are tied to beats, units, scenes, and acts and define their limits.

Objectives should not be complex, abstract, or literary statements. On the contrary, everyone, professionals and nonprofessionals alike, should learn to describe them in the form of simple human drives. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski suggested a number of guidelines for discovering, if not explaining, objectives. As usual, his guidelines are practical and easy to understand. Five of the most important are: (1) Objectives should come from the characters’ goals, (2) be directed at the other characters (as opposed to oneself or the audience), (3) describe the inner life of the character as opposed to the outward physical life, (4) relate to the main idea of the play, and (5) be framed in the form of an infinitive phrase from an active (transitive), concrete verb.

It is important that the last guideline be very clear. From Stanislavski’s point of view it was necessary for the actor to know the character’s objectives from the start. He asserted that objectives must lure the character into physical action while challenging the actor’s imagination. Burnet Hobgood has reminded us that Stanislavski was helped in this understanding of objectives by a grammatical feature in the Russian language called verbal aspect, which doesn’t exist in English. When Stanislavski described objectives, he always used verbs in the perfective aspect, which in Russian signifies future action. Stanislavski’s model objective goes, “I want to [verb] in order to [statement of purpose],” and the verb and its corresponding purpose are selected to explain the character under study. In English, the use of the infinitive indicates a similar sense of the future. By far the most common form of an infinitive in English is with the word “to,” as in “to walk,” “to cry,” “to eat,” “to fear.” This is known as the to-infinitive. Stanislavski’s grammatical practice supports his assertion that objectives express something the character believes will happen or is about to happen in the future. It helps to explain why he insisted that characters should be understood as striving to reach objectives that always lie ahead of them.

Objectives are best understood in relation to a specific play, so we’ll study A Raisin in the Sun. In order to learn Walter Younger’s super-objective for the play, first find out what he wants to do with his life. In a scene in Act 1, he tells his wife Ruth that he has been planning to use the life insurance money to invest in a liquor store. “I got me a dream,” he says, “I got to take hold of this here world … I got to change my life.” When Ruth expresses doubts, he responds, “This morning, I was lookin’ in the mirror and thinking about it … I’m thirty-five years old; I been married eleven years and I got a boy who sleeps in the living room—and all I got to give him is stories about how rich white people live.” From these lines and other evidence in the play we might agree that Walter’s super-objective is to buy a liquor store or to achieve success. This would be correct, but most readers would agree that it leaves out a large part of Walter’s character, notably his love for his family. A stronger super-objective would be to win the respect of his family. Several other workable alternatives are possible, but in any case, this is an acceptable choice because it conditions everything Walter does in the play.

Walter’s dream is an ambitious one. To accomplish it, he must subdivide it into more manageable pieces, the minor objectives that are tied to the individual progressions in the play. For example, in Walter’s first unit, he gives Travis extra spending money despite Ruth’s protests. His objective for this unit might be to appear generous or to win Travis’s admiration. In his next unit, Walter turns to Ruth to disclose his personal frustrations or to obtain Ruth’s sympathy. When his sister Beneatha enters, Walter wishes to belittle her or to destroy her expensive dream of becoming a doctor. In the important scene with his mother later in the act, Walter reveals how desperate he is to achieve his super-objective. Mama is a moral person, and objects to the prospect of anyone in her family owning a liquor store. Walter forces a confrontation with her over the issue. His objective here is to ridicule his mother’s doubts or to take the insurance money away from her. Each minor objective defines its own unique progression while also adhering to Stanislavski’s basic guidelines. Walter’s minor objectives follow from his super-objective; they are directed at specific characters and not at the world in general, and they relate to his inner life.

As mentioned earlier, successful super-objectives should also relate to the main idea of the play. Chapter 7 will explain the concept of the main idea, sometimes called the super-objective or spine of the play. For this discussion a convenient example will serve for demonstration. The main idea of A Raisin in the Sun is the struggle for a dream or to struggle for a dream. It is easy to understand how Walter’s minor objectives relate to these statements. For the description to be convincing for the whole play, however, the super-objectives of all the other characters should relate to it just as well. And they do relate to it because everyone in the play is struggling for a dream. Ruth’s main objective is to support Walter or to save their marriage; Mama’s is to help her children; and Beneatha’s is to become a doctor or to obtain an education. Although each of these super-objectives contains its own separate feelings and thoughts, each also relates to the main idea of the play: the struggle for a dream.

Director-critic Harold Clurman was always one of the strongest advocates of the use of objectives by actors and directors. In his writing, he cautioned actors against always looking for minor personality traits, which is a frequent temptation. He believed the actor’s most important analytical task should be to find the character’s super-objective, the basic drive that determines the character’s behavior in the whole play and throughout the acts, scenes, units, and beats of which the play is composed. He pointed out that, even though many of the characters will experience similar feelings of anger, joy, or sadness, it is their super-objective that explains these changing feelings and thoughts by showing that they are all related to a single permanent goal.

QUALITIES

Qualities are the behaviors that characters use to achieve their objectives. Sometimes they are called tactics. We might think of how a sailboat changes its course to adjust to opposing winds. To make headway, the captain employs a zigzag pattern in which each course of the boat is different from other ones or from the preceding one; so also a character uses different qualities to adjust to opposition from other characters when that character is working toward an objective. Characters employ not just one quality but rather a whole range of qualities, shifting from one to another to achieve their objectives. Readers familiar with the acting principles of Michael Chekhov will recognize the term qualities as an important part of his teaching. According to Chekhov, objectives express what happens and qualities express how it happens. In any event, qualities are inherent in the objectives already present in the play. Since qualities modify objectives the way adverbs modify verbs, qualities are often described using adverbs, such as happily, powerfully, wearily, proudly, skeptically, forcefully, etc.

Qualities can be illustrated in the units studied in A Raisin in the Sun. Recall that Walter’s main objective is to buy a liquor store or to gain the respect of his family. It follows that he also has a major quality or a dominant way of behaving that stems from his super-objective. He believes that he deserves the insurance money because his dreams are praiseworthy, his frustrations are real, and his scheme is a sure thing. It’s clear that his attempts to behave fairly or reasonably do not persuade his family, so he adopts different behaviors in an attempt to win them over. His major quality for the play is forcefully or maybe belligerently. Within this dominant quality, Walter adopts a variety of minor qualities to deal with the different obstacles with which he finds himself confronted. He behaves boastfully before his son Travis, reproachfully with his wife Ruth, mockingly with his sister Beneatha, and defiantly with his mother. These zigzag behaviors of Walter’s are the qualities he feels are necessary to adopt to achieve his objectives.

Here we are treating qualities that are written in a play itself. But qualities can also stem from the personality and imagination of the actors playing the roles. In fact, Michael Chekhov based his system of actor training on the principle that a character’s qualities ought to come from the actor’s imagination and not the playwright’s. Not all actors possess the brilliant imagination of Michael Chekhov, of course. What is more, some plays are more adaptable than others in their character qualities. Period plays, for some reason, seem to permit more flexibility in their qualities than do modern plays. On the other hand, screenplays and television scripts tend to offer more freedom in the choice of qualities than stage plays do (in general, broadly speaking, with exceptions and caveats). Maybe this is why Michael Chekhov’s teachings have been adopted successfully by so many film and television actors.

ROLE CONFLICTS

Since the subject of conflict comes up so often in discussions about plays, it is important to examine it closely. The word conflict stems from a Latin root meaning to strike together, from which comes its current meaning of a battle, quarrel, or struggle for supremacy between opposing forces. Does conflict appear in every play? If it is defined as open arguments between characters, the answer is no. There are few open arguments, for example, in The Wild Duck, Happy Days, or Mother Courage. Moreover, in these plays and in many others the characters do not even seem to struggle conspicuously to escape from their surroundings. Looking for traditional big conflict in situations like these is unrewarding.

Instead of being a single narrow concept, conflict appears in many different forms. There may be conflict between one character and another, between character and environment, between character and destiny or the forces of nature, between character and ideas, or even among forces inside a character. All these are legitimate types of conflicts, but not all of them produce the same kinds of tensions. Conflict from intellectual abstractions such as environment, society, or destiny, for example, produces intellectual tensions. These conflicts are useful for critics and academicians because they provide the intellectual material needed for scholarly work. They can also be useful for directors and designers in their creative work as will be seen in Chapter 7.

To achieve the kind of appeal necessary for acting, however, conflict must be more than an intellectual abstraction. It must be tangible and have a human face. In other words, it must involve the behavior and emotions of the characters. This kind of conflict stems from concrete conditions in the given circumstances and is grounded in the world of the play. It is the most productive kind of conflict in the rehearsal hall because it provides the inner tensions that stir actors’ creative imaginations. Conflicts in this concrete sense may be divided into two classes: (1) role conflicts stemming from characters’ opposing views of each other and (2) conflicts of objectives stemming from their opposing goals. Role conflicts and conflicts of objectives are parts of the characters’ outer selves; they help to shape the way characters relate to each other. That is why the subject of conflict occurs both in this chapter and in Chapter 7.

Role conflicts arise from characters’ opposing views of each other. Sometimes they are called conflicts of attitude or rite-role conflicts. They come from conditions in the given circumstances that cause one character to start a disagreement and that cause the opposing character’s counter adjustments. The reader’s task is to search the given circumstances for the right conditions and to think about them as the characters would. There may be a number of different role conflicts among the characters, each defined by its own conditions in the given circumstances.

For an explanation of how role conflict comes from the given circumstances, return to the scene between Walter and Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun. The given circumstances for the scene are: The year is 1959. The Youngers are an African-American family. They live in a crowded apartment building on the segregated South Side of Chicago. Thanks to the sturdy moral temperaments of Walter, Sr. and Mama Younger, the family has managed to endure most of the hardships African Americans encountered in the United States during the 1950s. To make ends meet, everyone in the family has to work hard at low-paying jobs without any future.

About 11 years ago, Walter Younger, Jr. married Ruth, and now they have a son, Travis. They have lived in the same small apartment with Walter’s father, mother, and sister Beneatha since they were married. Walter’s father died about a month ago, and Mama is about to receive his life insurance, amounting to $10,000, and a very large sum for the financially deprived Younger family. Walter feels humiliated at the prospect of becoming the head of the family without any future ahead of him. The most important given circumstance for him is the scheme he concocted with his friends to buy a liquor store with his father’s life insurance money. He feels that this project will give him a chance to become a successful husband and provider for the family. (Note once again the importance of economic given circumstances in this play.)

Ruth is disappointed in Walter. When she married him, she was excited about their hopes and dreams for the future. Now she’s become disillusioned with his endless scheming and lack of ambition. She has concluded that Walter no longer cares for her or the family. The crucial facts are that Ruth is pregnant with their second child and has not told Walter about it. Moreover, she feels that under the circumstances she must have an abortion, a prospect that disturbs her.

This summarizes the relevant given circumstances. After that it’s necessary to identify the character that controls the situation. The dialogue shows that Walter is the controlling character in this scene. He insists on pressing Ruth with his plans for the liquor store while she is trying to get the family ready for work and school. Ruth doesn’t want to listen to Walter. Therefore she is the one who starts the conflict and continues it. Without her resistance to Walter’s plan, there would be no conflict. Walter leads the attack and Ruth resists.

Now that the positions of the two characters are clear, the heart of the role conflict becomes clear. Walter’s given circumstances show why he is seeking help from Ruth in spite of her resistance. No one in the family is closer to Mama than Ruth is. She is not only Mama’s daughter-in-law but also her close friend and confidante. Walter needs Ruth to intercede with his mother on his behalf for the life insurance money. This is his side of the conflict. But his request upsets Ruth. Because of all the frustrations she has endured, she no longer shares her husband’s hopes and dreams as she once did. In fact, she does not even consider him her husband anymore. All she’s concerned about now is the baby and the disturbing possibility of an abortion.

The role conflict emerges. Walter sees himself as a good husband and father, and he expects Ruth to be a loyal, supporting wife. In contrast, Ruth feels that she no longer has anything in common with Walter because she considers him a failure. Their images of each other and themselves are in complete disagreement. The concrete cause that sparks the conflict is the insurance money. It constitutes the shared point of dispute that brings their conflicting views of each other into the open. Without the disagreement over the insurance money, the role conflict would stay hidden inside the characters.

CONFLICTS OF OBJECTIVES

A second category of conflict comes from the ideas of the nineteenth-century French critic Ferdinand Brunetière. His so-called law of conflict states that drama is defined by the obstacles encountered as a character is attempting to fulfill his objectives. The key issue in this understanding of conflict is obstacles, or complications. Characters have objectives, direct everything toward fulfilling those objectives, and try to bring everything in their lives into harmony with them. Obstacles in Brunetière’s sense are the opposing objectives of other characters that stand in the way of this process. In Stanislavski’s terms, the chain of opposing objectives forms the counter through-action. Minor and major climaxes occur at those points where one character’s through-action crosses the counter through-action formed by the opposing objectives of another character. These clashes in turn produce the scenes that make plays exciting. Aside from the emphasis on obstacles, conflicts of objectives share the same prerequisites as role conflicts do.

To prove this statement, we’ll examine A Raisin in the Sun one more time. Walter wants to buy a liquor store in order to gain respect, and the question is how he will succeed. He is prevented from fulfilling his super-objective by Mama’s super-objective, which is to invest the insurance money in the best way so that her children can fulfill their dreams. Their encounter fulfills the same requirements treated under role conflict. It arises from the given circumstances and is concrete rather than abstract; Walter controls the conflict and Mama resists it; the objectives clash; and the money constitutes a shared point of dispute. Walter overcomes his mother’s opposition, but he is defeated then by his friend Willy, whose super-objective is to get hold of the insurance money by deception in order to steal it. Does Walter’s encounter with Willy also fulfill the requirements of a conflict of objectives? It arises from the given circumstances; it involves a concrete dispute between Walter and Willy; Willy begins the conflict and Walter resists it; their objectives clash; and finally the shared point of dispute is again the money. It’s not hard to find examples of opposing objectives in other plays. The real effort is seeing their built-in opposition.

Of the two categories of conflicts we just explained, conflicts of objectives are used more often because they are more easily grasped and explained. Role conflicts may impose a more severe analytical test, but the reward is a larger assortment of acting options. Searching for either type of conflict will supply many alternatives. Assuming the conflicts have been accurately perceived, the final choice depends on the creative imagination of the artistic team and on what they decide to emphasize in production.

WILLPOWER

Will has been described as a strong wish, a firm intention, a power of choosing, a determination to do, and an inner force used to undertake conscious, purposeful action. The key words here are strong, firm, power, determination, and force. Will is associated with power because it is the driving force of drama. Strong-willed characters make things happen. Plays depend on them to keep the action moving. Some characters may not have strong wills, but if the leading character is also devoid of a strong will, the results may be unsatisfactory unless other compensations are provided. Because conflict always requires resistance, characters without strong wills are unable to create conflicts because they are incapable of resisting. They may participate in conflicts, but they seldom seem to instigate or influence them. They can’t struggle against their situations, and they are often the victims of the more willful characters who control them.

Modern artistic sensibilities seem to sympathize with victims more than heroes, but it’s not always easy to come to terms with passive, victimized characters. Before sympathizing with them, it’s necessary to try to understand the reasons for their relative inactivity. Instructive examples of such characters appear in Mother Courage and Hamlet. In Mother Courage there is Anna Fierling, the canteen woman who earns a living by following after armies on the march and selling necessities to them at inflated prices. The strength of her will shows up in the first scene of the play when she loses her son Eilif to the Recruiting Officer. She has been distracted by the chance to make a quick profit selling a belt buckle. We know that Anna is a shrewd and single-minded businesswoman, yet she does nothing when her son is taken from her, a fact that Brecht emphasizes in stage directions that state, “she stands motionless.”

Anna is unable to prevent her second son, Swiss Cheese, from being sacrificed to the war either. She compromises with the same Recruiting Officer by permitting him to enlist as a paymaster. She claims that at least he won’t have to fight, but she knows he’s simple-minded and will get himself into trouble because he can’t count. She’s troubled by these concerns, but she justifies her decision on the grounds that the war has been good for her business. Soon she finds that Swiss Cheese has panicked during an enemy offensive and unwittingly fled with the cash box. When he’s arrested, Anna haggles over the bribe to save his life. Meanwhile Swiss Cheese is taken before a firing squad and shot. She observes, “Maybe I bargained too long,” and the stage directions indicate once again that she “remains seated.” Afterward Anna refuses to acknowledge the body of her son rather than risk arrest herself. Later on she attempts to file an official complaint about it, but after thinking it over, she changes her mind.

In another scene, Anna’s son, Eilif, arrives to say good-bye before being taken away to be executed for a petty crime. Just then the cease-fire is cut short by the renewed outbreak of war. Anna is so excited by the chance to make money that she misses the chance to save Eilif’s life. Further on in the play, Anna finds herself in town on business when her remaining child, the mute Kattrin, is shot sounding an alarm to warn the town of an enemy attack. “Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t gone to town to swindle people,” a peasant says to her. “I’ve got to get back in business,” she replies. Then she hails a passing regiment and shouts “Hey, take me with you!” and the play ends.

Someone in Anna’s predicament should invoke sympathy, but Brecht attempts to dispel this natural inclination. He shows Anna Fierling as a character who lacks a mother’s most basic power to protect her children. This would be a formula for certain failure in the theatre, but there are deliberate compensations that stimulate interest and sympathy. Brecht tries to show that Anna’s helplessness is not her fault. The play argues that her power for good has been exhausted by the brutal economics of war. Compelled to choose between peaceful poverty and wartime affluence, she chooses the latter. She believes she can keep her family together despite the war by employing her business instincts. We are meant to feel that this choice hurts her even though she doesn’t know why. Anna Fierling never learns that she is mistaken. For many readers, Anna’s story is a vivid illustration of social and economic injustice.

Besides these thematic considerations, Anna Fierling’s apparent inactivity is further offset by other features in the play. The back-and-forth changes in the course of the war, for example, unsettle everyone. Also Anna’s daughter, Kattrin, and the prostitute, Yvette, show remarkable strength of will and even heroism. Other offsetting features are the earthy humor and homespun intelligence of the characters, and the play’s unusual production style, which employs signs, banners, musical interludes, poetry, and direct address to the audience. All these features give the play compelling social relevance, variety of feeling, and a special kind of excitement that compensate for the absence of traditional willpower in the leading character.

Another seemingly weak character who is attractive to modern audiences is Hamlet. A sensitive person, he is burdened with the responsibility of revenging his warrior-father’s murder. Hamlet has already neglected one of his royal responsibilities by standing aside while his uncle usurped the throne that is rightfully his. Nor did he do anything to prevent his mother’s overhasty and incestuous marriage to his uncle. By these examples of inaction, Hamlet seems to show weakness and even cowardice. At his first appearance in the play, Hamlet refuses to take part in the coronation ceremonies for the new king. His display of temperament in the scene is interpreted by the court as spitefulness stemming from immaturity and emotional instability. His strong conscience soon regains control over his grief, and he scolds himself for his inertia. He gets a chance to make up for his initial inaction when the Ghost appears and challenges him to take revenge, but here too Hamlet seems to miss one chance after another to carry out his duty. Instead of concentrating on revenge, he is trying to come to terms with the moral implications of the events in which he is participating. It is Claudius who provides the force behind the play’s conflict when he becomes worried about Hamlet’s moodiness, interpreting it as suspicion of his own guilt.

Hamlet is sensitive, introspective, and outwardly inactive, at least as compared to Claudius, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Despite appearances, however, his will is not weak, nor is he a coward. On the inside, where it counts, he’s the strongest character in the play. It’s his over-scrupulous conscience that drives him to undertake seemingly foolish schemes to test his uncle’s guilt and to gratify his own moral quest. This is what makes him so attractive to us. We feel somehow that he has the strength of will to do something extraordinary. To test himself, he disregards Horatio’s warnings and accepts Claudius’ challenge to duel with Laertes. In effect, Hamlet challenges Claudius to kill him.

Hamlet has enjoyed success on the modern stage in spite of, or perhaps because of, its externally weak leading character. It is the compensating features in the play, which provide the attractions. For one thing, Hamlet is likable. He loves his mother and honors his father. He has a sense of humor. He is a gentleman, a poet, a scholar, and a well-trained swordsman and soldier. He is not cowardly inside but morally brave, and of course he’s always driven to understand the true morality of the situation. Many of the other characters in the play are also interesting in themselves. There are the strong-willed characters of Claudius, Laertes, and Fortinbras, whose crusades for power offset Hamlet’s philosophical ennui. It is the combination of all these features plus the comic interludes and the language that make the play dramatic.

Nevertheless, Hamlet and Mother Courage are exceptions that prove the rule. In most cases, strong wills are essential to create the conflicts that make plays dramatically compelling in the accepted sense. The leading characters in Oedipus Rex (Oedpius), Tartuffe (Tartuffe and Orgon), The School for Scandal (Joseph Surface), and The Piano Lesson (Boy Willie), for example, are models of such strong wills. They are characterized by their determination to impose their wills on everyone else, regardless of the outcome. They drive forward the action in their plays and force things to happen. The leading characters in The Wild Duck (Hjalmar Ekdal), Death of a Salesman (Willy Loman), Streamers (Billy), Three Sisters (Irina), and Angels in America (Prior Walter) are technically weak. What are the compensating features that furnish the dramatic interest in these plays?

VALUES

Values are what characters stand for or against in the world of the play and their ideas of good and bad and right and wrong. To achieve their objectives, characters embrace the values that gratify them and reject, or at least struggle against, those that do not do so. Values tell characters how they can best get where they want to go. They affect their personal, family, and social lives, their work, and their leisure. They define their reasons for choosing to be who they are. Values arise from personal beliefs about such things as conscience, public- and family-mindedness, ambition, success, and physical pleasure. In some characters, these beliefs will form a pattern of virtues, while in others they may be vices. The deciding issue is whether the values are real convictions or merely tactics adopted for short-term ends.

Madame Pernelle, Orgon’s mother in Tartuffe, is an example of a character whose values are designed more for social utility than they are for true morality. On the surface her values are honorable. She advocates proper behavior, religious observance, modesty in dress, and respect for authority. She reveals her values in the opening scene when she reproaches the family for what she interprets as their immoral behavior. This is another way of saying that she disagrees with their values. She even criticizes Elmire’s clothes, which she believes are too showy for her position in society. Madame Pernelle also criticizes Cleante, Elmire’s brother, and Orgon’s brother-in-law, whose religious skepticism offends her. In spite of her protests, however, the most important value for Madame Pernelle is not virtue but the appearance of virtue, otherwise known as respectability. Her values are a behavior she has adopted to enable her to appear virtuous to other people, a fact that she naturally tries to conceal.

Values also play an important role in Death of a Salesman. As a traveling salesman, Willy believes in the traditional values held by many Americans during the period following World War II. He believes in material prosperity, that the world is a fair place, and that good friends and hard work will lead to success. Early in Act I, Willy tells Linda that he expects the same values in his son, Biff. He wants Biff to accomplish something in the all-American world of business. Although Biff has been on his own for ten years, Willy worries that he “has yet to take thirty-five dollars a week!” Willy believes that in “the greatest country in the world,” someone with Biff’s “personal attractiveness” and who is such a “hard worker” should be successful. Driven by his absolute faith in the necessity of success in business, Willy is determined to help Biff get a job selling. In the first flashback scene, where Biff and Happy are young boys, Willy reminds them of the values he believes to be important in life, “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

But if money and friends were Willy’s only values, he would not be a very sympathetic character. He values other things, too. First, he loves nature. Besides his garden, one of the things he enjoys most is the New England scenery he sees on his travels. Respecting people as individuals is also important to him, but he senses that this value is disappearing in America and being displaced by financial self-interest. He complains that selling is not as attractive as it once was for someone like him: “The competition is maddening!” Willy also values loyalty, hard work, and friendship, but perhaps most important of all, he values his family. He reveals to Linda that his deepest concern is the possibility of not being able to support them as a father should.

Willy’s sensitivity, kindness, sense of duty, and love for his family coexist with his selfishness. That he does not value material success in itself but rather what he believes it can do for his family is clear. His single-minded faith in the religion of business is at odds with his humane family values. In the end, the materialistic values he advocates are discredited. Willy dies for his son, yet Biff only has contempt for his father. It is the neglected son, Happy, who dedicates himself to upholding his father’s values. The central issue in Death of a Salesman is in large measure the conflict of values between a father and son.

Characters declare their belief in what is right and wrong throughout The Piano Lesson, another play about the clash of cultural values. Doaker Charles, a railroad cook, expresses his values with a railroad simile.

DOAKER

If everybody stay in one place I believe this would be a better world. Now what I done learned after twenty-seven years of railroading is this … if the train stays on the track … it’s going to get where it’s going. It might not be where you’re going. If it ain’t, then all you got to do is sit and wait cause the train’s coming back to get you. The train don’t never stop. It’ll come back every time.

Which is to say, stick to what you know how to do, mind your own business, and go along with the way things are. Doaker’s values are contested by his nephew, Boy Willie, who is from a younger generation and sees things differently.

BOY WILLIE

See now … I’ll tell you something about me. I done strung along and strung along. Going this way and that. Whatever way would lead me to a moment of peace. That’s all I want. To be easy with everything. But I wasn’t born to that. I was born to a time of fire.
    The world ain’t wanted no part of me. I could see that since I was about seven. The world say it’s better off without me. See, Berniece accept that. She trying to come up where she can prove something to the world. Hell, the world a better place cause of me. I don’t see it like Berniece. I got a heart that beats here and it beats just as loud as the next fellow’s. Don’t care if he black or white. Sometimes it beats louder. When it beats louder, then everybody can hear it. Some people get scared of that. Like Berniece. Some people get scared to hear a nigger’s heart beating. They think you ought to lay low with that heart. Make it beat quiet and go along with everything the way it is. But my mama ain’t birthed me for nothing. So what I got to do? I got to mark my passing on the road. Just like you write on a tree, “Boy Willie was here.”

In this speech, Boy Willie has also accurately, if coldly, characterized his sister’s values. Berniece thinks she understands her values when, earlier in the play, Avery asks her, “Who you got to love you, Berniece?”

BERNIECE

You trying to tell me a woman can’t be nothing without a man. But you alright, huh? You can just walk out of here without me—without a woman—and still be a man. That’s alright. Ain’t nobody going to ask you, “Avery, who you got to love you?” That’s alright for you. But everybody gonna be worried about Berniece. “How Berniece gonna take care of herself? How she gonna raise that child without a man? Wonder what she do with herself. How she gonna live like that?” Everybody got all kinds of questions for Berniece. Everybody telling me I can’t be a woman unless I got a man. Well, tell me, Avery—you know—how much woman am I?

Avery understands that Berniece’s way of thinking is more apparent than real, an expression of hurt more than anger. He is speaking about love, not power, he says.

AVERY

How long you gonna carry [your deceased husband] Crawley with you, Berniece? It’s been over for three years. At some point you got to let go and go on. Life’s got all kinds of twists and turns. That don’t mean you got to stop living. That don’t mean you cut yourself off from life. You can’t go on through life carrying Crawley’s ghost with you.…
    What is you [waiting] for, Berniece? You just gonna drift along from day to day. Life is more than making it from one day to another. You gonna look up one day and it’s all gonna be past you. Life’s gonna be gone out of your hands—there won’t be enough to make nothing with. I’m standing here now, Berniece—but I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna be standing here waiting on you.

Berniece is cutting herself off from the past and all the pain it represents to her. She is someone, perhaps like Willy Loman or the Prozorov siblings, who doesn’t comprehend what she really values. It takes someone who loves her, an Avery or a Boy Willie, to break through her façade and encourage her authentic self to emerge. August Wilson’s conception of authentic black values are the “lesson” of The Piano Lesson, and the number of lines devoted to talk about the characters’ values are the evidence.

PERSONALITY TRAITS

The word personality comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask or appearance, ergo the meaning of personality as the manner in which a character is perceived by others, the way he relates to others. Personality has certain definable features called traits that include outward appearance. Traits may change in a character depending on the situation, but there is a pattern that shows up under a variety of circumstances. This pattern allows for the collection of a personality profile. For some actors, personality traits are the choices that control how the character looks, sits, stands, walks, gestures, speaks, and behaves with other characters.

Personality traits classify characters into one or more categories, or types. One of the earliest known personality authorities was Hippocrates, the Greek physician responsible for promoting ethical behavior in medicine through the Hippocratic oath. He proposed that the highest amount among four bodily fluids, or humors, determined one’s personality type: blood (cheerful, active), phlegm (apathetic, sluggish), black bile (sad, brooding), and yellow bile (irritable, excitable). His personality theory was widely accepted in the West up until the eighteenth century. Although Hippocrates’ theory is obsolete, speculation about personality remains fashionable because personality traits are relatively easy to understand and apply in daily life as well as in dramatic literature. One modern version of character types is based upon the work of Carl Jung (a student of Sigmund Freud), in which people are classified on four dimensions: extraversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judgment-perception. Other familiar examples are narcissistic, perfectionist, aggressive, submissive, non-compliant, compliant, active, sociable, risk-taking, impulsive, expressive, reflective, responsible, confident, happy, anxious, obsessive, autonomous, hypochondriac, guilty, etc.

Personality traits, like other features of play analysis, should be described as simply and clearly as possible. Although the list is potentially endless, the process of determining them is not difficult. First, list all the traits the character shows in the play. At this point, it helps to think broadly better than narrowly. Next, reduce the list to manageable proportions by combining related traits and identifying those of central importance. The result will be a concise profile of personality traits. The most challenging part of the task is learning how to recognize personality traits from what characters say and do. Because personality is something all of us gossip about every day, close observation of human nature is required to distinguish clichés from real human behavior.

Willy Loman is a valuable character on whom to apply this process. He reveals several of his most important personality traits in the opening scene. There Willy is impatient, indecisive, impulsive, and unkind; “I said nothing happened. Didn’t you hear me?” When he explains why he returned home unexpectedly, he is worn out; “I’m tired to death … I couldn’t make it. I just couldn’t make it.” His explanation is also absent-minded, “I suddenly couldn’t drive anymore…. Suddenly I realize I’m goin’ sixty miles an hours and I don’t remember the last five minutes. I’m—I can’t seem to—keep my mind to it.” The mental confusion that underscores his line, “I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts,” shows anxiety. His rejection of Linda’s appeal to him to ask for a desk job reveals confidence; “They don’t need me in New York. I’m the New England man. I’m vital in New England.” Another important trait is cynicism, which appears when Linda reminds him that Biff and Happy haven’t been home for some time, “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.” There’s also evidence of loyalty and faithfulness, traits reflected in his public values. More traits appear as the action unfolds, but these traits provide the raw material for Willy’s personality profile.

For an example of personality traits in a historical play, consider Hamlet again. His objectives, dramatic actions, willpower, and values have already been discussed. What else can be learned about him? In the first court scene, he shows sensitivity as well as loyalty and devotion to his father. He displays a sharp wit and a lethal sense of irony. In his soliloquies, he shows his habit of intense self-criticism, his penetrating intuition, a mercurial nature, and profound curiosity. His frequent classical references and love of aphorisms indicate that he is intelligent and interested in classical learning. When meeting old friends or being introduced to new ones, Hamlet shows courtesy and sometimes a sunny disposition. He also has a reputation for being a skilled swordsman. Ophelia sums up the general view of at least the public dimensions of Hamlet’s personality:

OPHELIA

… The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;

Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,

Th’ observ’d of all observers.

The number and variety of traits in Hamlet’s personality make clear why he remains one of the theatre’s most appealing characters.

What are the personality traits that distinguish the four Prozorov siblings in Three Sisters? Olga is generous, gracious, considerate, and intelligent. As the oldest sibling, she has assumed parental responsibility for keeping up everyone’s collective spirits. This has come at the expense of her personal happiness, as expressed by her frequent migraine headaches. Irina is youngest of the four, excitable, sentimental, intelligent, spoiled and self-centered, and anxious about her future. The disintegration of her sentimental view of love forms the through-action of the play. Masha is thoughtful and intelligent, embittered about her failed marriage, and desperate for companionship and affection. Their brother Andrey is cultured, scholarly, kind, introverted, poetical, naive, and insecure. Note their common personality traits of intelligence and good breeding, which is puzzling since they cannot understand themselves or stand up for their own interests.

COMPLEXITY

Characters are interesting to us in relation to how much they know about their circumstances. Their awareness or lack of it is what connects them with the play and determines their importance in the overall dramatic scheme. This capacity for self-knowledge indicates their complexity. It is governed by what the characters respond to and by how they respond, whether ignorant, apathetic, and compliant or perceptive, intense, and self-conscious. The most complex character, the one who shows the most power to know himself or herself, is usually the main character. The others are arranged around this character in different degrees of complexity depending on their capacity for self-knowledge. This arrangement is not a defect in the writing but rather a technical necessity resulting from the inherent economy of dramatic composition.

The least complex characters are types. They display a single state of mind and are recognized as particular “types” of people found in everyday life. In this group are domineering spouses, slow-witted or quick-witted servants, absent-minded professors, and so forth. A few examples in the study plays are Cokes and Rooney, the braggart soldiers in Streamers; Howard Wagner, the heartless businessman in Death of a Salesman; and Osric, the foppish dandy in Hamlet. Character types show a minimum capacity for self-knowledge and reveal very little about themselves apart from the narrow limitations of their type. They may be interesting, but their dramatic significance stems from their influence on other characters.

The middle degree of complexity includes characters who are more self-aware than types but who are still not as knowledgeable about the whole situation as they might be. Intermediate characters such as Linda and Happy Loman, Mama and Ruth Younger, Gertrude and Ophelia, Natasha Ivanovna, and Doaker Charles are some of the most attractive roles in dramatic literature. By searching the given circumstances for playable potentials, talented actors in these roles often create the impression that their characters are more complex than they are in the script.

The most complex characters are those who are capable of knowing what is happening to them and who allow us to share in their knowledge. As a rule, there is only one character with this degree of complexity in a play, the main character. He or she forms the organizing principle for the play, and most of the action is devoted to this character. There are exceptions to this unitary principle but not as many as some may think. Walter Younger is the single main character in A Raisin in the Sun as are Anna Fierling in Mother Courage, Yank in The Hairy Ape, Prior Walter in Angels in America, and Berniece in The Piano Lesson. Their capacity for self-knowledge is one of the features that makes them sympathetic and identifies them at once as main characters.

Most plays may be considered biographies of one individual as these are, but sometimes a play may contain more than one complex character, more than one character capable of self-knowledge. Identifying the main character in such plays is not always easy. Is Death of a Salesman about Willy or Biff? Is The Wild Duck about Gregers or Hjalmar? Is Tartuffe about Tartuffe or Orgon? Is A Lie of the Mind about Jake, Beth, or even Lorraine? Who is the main character in Three Sisters, or indeed is there one in the accepted sense? Some of the issues involved in identifying the main character are discussed below. In any case, although there is only a single main character, there may be more than one character capable of self-awareness. We’ll learn more about this issue later on.

RELATIONSHIPS

The focus of dramatic interest of a play is the conflict between the leading character and his or her chief opponent. Citing Aristotle, writers call these characters the protagonist and the antagonist. The relationship formed by them comprises the main relationship in the play. Oedipus and Teiresias provide the main relationship in Oedipus Rex, Hamlet and Claudius in Hamlet, Walter and Mama in A Raisin in the Sun, Willy and Biff in Death of a Salesman, Berniece and Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson, and Prior and Louis in Angels in America. The relationships between these opposing pairs is purposely designed to be the center of dramatic attention. Incidentally, the fact that some plays contain only one character does not dispose of the concept of a main relationship. In such cases, the antagonist may be off-stage (the wife in Anton Chekhov’s monodrama On the Harmfulness of Tobacco, for example) or may be a different part of the main character (like young Krapp in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape).

The protagonist and antagonist’s relations with other characters can be considered minor relationships. Although these can be as interesting as the main relationship, they are nonetheless subsidiary to it for reasons of dramatic focus. They exist to underscore the main relationship thematically, and only enough of the minor relationship is furnished to fulfill this function. For example, Oedipus has minor relationships with Creon and Jocasta; these relationships, however, are a direct outcome of his main relationship with Teiresias. Walter Younger and his mother have minor relationships with Ruth, Beneatha, and Bobo. Walter and Mama are not continuously on stage together, but their relationship is developed by implication through these minor relationships.

There are differences of opinion about main relationships. Modern artistic conventions presume that our understanding of plays is not permanently fixed. Productions need to be single-minded, of course, but interpretations are expected to be diverse. Within limits, the inherent meanings of plays may change from one generation to the next as society changes. This is true as well in the choice of a main relationship, which should be a central issue in any new interpretation of a classic. In Tyrone Guthrie and Laurence Olivier’s famous Old Vic production of Hamlet in 1937, the main relationship was Hamlet and his mother. Guthrie professed to demonstrate how the Oedipus complex operated through them. Sigmund Freud’s theories were still novel enough in 1937 for the interpretation to cause considerable controversy. Some said that the production was revisionist, meaning that it was intentionally unconventional, made for the sake of shock value.

It is true that some of the unconventional main relationships in recent revivals of older plays are probably revisionist in intent. But theatre is not science. There is no law against a fresh understanding of the main relationship if it is based on an honest appraisal of the script and consistent with the sense of the production. A fair understanding of Hamlet, for example, might suggest other choices for the main relationship—Hamlet and his deceased father, Hamlet and Horatio, Hamlet and Laertes, Hamlet and Fortinbras, or (according to playwright Tom Stoppard) not Hamlet and anyone else, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What about the relationship between Walter and his deceased father in A Raisin in the Sun? Or between Jake and his deceased father, or Jake and his brother Mike, or Jake and his mother Lorraine in A Lie of the Mind? All of these are unconventional choices and yet all are based on a fair assessment of the information provided in the plays themselves. The key to identifying the main relationship is honest understanding based on a conscientious analysis of the script.

SUMMARY

Objectives are the specific goals that characters strive to achieve. They help make sense of a character’s different feelings and thoughts by relating them to a single commanding desire. Qualities are the behaviors that characters employ to achieve their objectives. Role conflicts consist of the tensions that arise from characters’ opposing views of each other. Conflicts of objectives result from their opposing goals.

The degree of force with which characters pursue their goals is their willpower. Although historical drama depends on strong-willed characters to make things happen, in modern plays many weak-willed characters and those with vacillating wills can often be found. When the leading character is weak-willed, there are usually compensating factors to sustain the play’s interest. The characters’ choices of the good and bad things in life define their values. A character’s situation in relation to other characters and his or her point of view to the world of the play is determined by his or her values. Personality traits are a character’s physical and vocal identification marks together with the impulses and inhibitions that reveal his or her individuality and how he or she relates to others. To focus attention, playwrights compose their characters in progressive levels of complexity. Ordinarily, the more self-aware a character is, the more important that character is in the play. The main character is the one who is most self-aware, or at least potentially so, although there are exceptions. Playwrights also arrange character relationships to further concentrate dramatic attention. The conflict between the main character and his or her main opponent is the main relationship. Other relationships are considered minor but contribute to the main relationship in some identifiable way.

All these features are carefully crafted by the playwright and form the collective pattern that we call character. Strictly speaking, dramatists create characters that exist only in the script. It is actors who create living characterizations from the raw material provided by written characters.

QUESTIONS

Objectives    What is the character’s super-objective in the play? What are the minor objectives for each scene, unit, and beat? (Super-objectives should be expressed using infinitive forms of active, concrete verbs.) How do the minor objectives for each character unite to form the through-action for that character’s super-objective? How do the super-objectives for each character unite in the super-objective of the play?

Qualities    What is the character’s main quality or behavior in the play? What are the secondary qualities for the beats, units, and scenes under study? For all the beats, units, and scenes in the play? Can a quality be discovered for each line of dialogue as well?

Conflicts    For the unit or scene under study, what are the characters’ opposing views of one another (role conflicts)? For the play as a whole? Do the characters’ super-objectives and minor objectives clash with those of other characters (conflicts of objectives)? Where do those clashes appear?

Willpower    How much power does the character possess to carry out his or her objectives? Why? Is the character’s willpower steady, does it vacillate or gain or lose force in certain circumstanes? If so, where in the play does it do so? Why?

Values    What does the character stand for and against? What does the character consider to be right and wrong? Good and bad? How do the character’s values relate to those of the other characters? To the world of the play?

Personality Traits    What is the character’s energy level? Is it consistent or does it vary from one scene to another? How old is the character? What occupation? How does the character look? How does the character move? How does the character sound? What is the character’s mental and emotional outlook? What are the character’s internal impulses and inhibitions?

Complexity    How self-aware is the character? Is the character a type or an intermediate or a fully complex individual? Why? Who is the most complex (main) character? Why? Who are the minor characters? Why?

Relationships    What is the main character relationship? Why? Could any other relationship be interpreted as the main relationship? Why? What are the minor character relationships? Why? How do they augment the main relationship?

POSTSCRIPT FOR ACTION ANALYSIS

After Action Analysis, search for the play’s Seed, or Subject, hidden within the characters. How does the Seed influence the characters? Why did the playwright choose these specific characters from the whole range of other possibilities? How would the play be different with other characters? In what way does connecting the Seed with the characters help the play grow and develop?

POSTSCRIPT FOR THE SCORE OF A ROLE

The Score of a Role was one of Stanislavski’s last contributions to his system of acting. Even as Action Analysis of a play is more or less equivalent to the Score of a Play, Action Analysis of a character is much the same as what he called the Score of a Role. As a result, the process of developing the Score of a Role closely corresponds to that described in Chapter 1, except that it is applied only to a single character. Actors will find the Score of the Role one of the most useful ways to take hold of a character as a whole. A Score is not a substitute for Formalist Analysis with all of its details and layers, but a Score usually provides enough groundwork to start rehearsals with.

To give a demonstration of the Score of a Role, we will analyze the character of Ophelia from Hamlet. Setting down the Score in the form of an outline reinforces the logic of its keystone, the Seed. Chapter 1 provided explanations for each concept and the procedure for establishing it. The practical value of the Score of a Role should become self-evident from the following account.

Sequence of Events: External Events

The Score of a Role is concerned with only those events in which the character appears on stage, whether speaking lines or silent. Ophelia is not in every scene of Hamlet; few characters are in any play. She plays a part in only six External Events:

1,2: Claudius takes over the throne

1,3: Laertes departs for France

2,1: Reynaldo departs for France

3,1: Claudius eavesdrops on Hamlet and Ophelia

3,2: The “mousetrap scene”

4,5: Laertes returns to Elsinore

This is how we defined the External Events in Chapter 1, when dealing with Action Analysis for the whole play. To establish the Score of the Role for Opehlia, we should revise the descriptions to center on her. The following descriptions do so while using the same kind of brevity and simplicity promoted in Chapter 1.

1,2: Ophelia attends the accession of Claudius

1,3: Laertes says good-bye to Ophelia

2,1: Ophelia seeks help from Polonius

3,1: Ophelia returns Hamlet’s gifts

3,2: Ophelia meets Hamlet in public

4,5: Ophelia presents flowers to Claudius and Gertrude

Reviewing the Facts

We can see the broad outline of Ophelia’s role emerging already. Consider: her father stops loving her, her brother abandons her, her lover rejects her, her father forces her to give up the only person she loves, her lover torments her in public, she escapes into the past where she used to be happy.

Seed

Previously, we determined that the Seed of Hamlet is idealism. Since by definition the Seed must influence all the characters, it follows that idealism also influences Ophelia. Her idealism is embodied in Hamlet, Laertes, and Polonius, each of whom she loves and each of whom turns on her and becomes her tormentor.

Sequence of Events: Internal Events

One by one, Ophelia’s ideals are destroyed. The Internal Events illustrate the assaults on her idealism.

1,2, External: Ophelia attends the accession of Claudius

1,2, Internal: Ophelia sees that Polonius supports Claudius and that Hamlet is distressed. Two of her ideals have suddenly become distorted.

1,3, External: Laertes says good-bye to Ophelia

1,3, Internal: Laertes, another of her ideals, deserts her

2,1, External: Ophelia seeks help from Polonius

2,1, Internal: She vainly seeks her Father’s help when Hamlet, her most sacred ideal, rejects her 3,1, External: Ophelia returns Hamlet’s gifts

3,1, Internal: Her father forces her to lie to Hamlet and Hamlet abuses her for lying

3,2, External: Ophelia meets Hamlet in public

3,2, Internal: Hamlet, once her ideal gentleman-courtier-lover, publicly torments her

4,5, External: Ophelia presents flowers to Claudius and Gertrude

4,5, Internal: Ophelia bids farewell to this ruthless world and returns to the ideal world where she remembers being happy

Three Major Climaxes

A role has a beginning, a middle, and an end just as a play does. With only six events to deal with, these points in Ophelia’s character are relatively easy to recognize. The First Major Climax occurs when her world, composed of her father, her brother, and Hamlet, changes with the accession of Claudius to the throne. The Second Major Climax, the middle or tipping point of her development, is 3,1, where she is forced to act in opposition to everything she holds good and true by lying to Hamlet about her love for him. The Third Major Climax, the end, is her farewell to this world in 4,5.

Theme

The Theme of the play is impossible idealism, but that description applies to Hamlet more than to Ophelia. Her idealism is not of the impossible variety. She asks only that Hamlet, Laertes, and Polonius love and understand her as they used to do. Moreover, she does not attempt to impose her idealism on others. It is the others who assault her with their distorted brands of idealism. Her fate may be compared with that of Hedvig in The Wild Duck. Thus, Ophelia’s variant of the Theme might be described as the destruction of innocent idealism.

Super-Objective

To ascertain Ophelia’s Super-Objective, ask, “What does she want from life?” Let’s make several tries at it. She wants Hamlet to love her; she wants to obey her father; she wants to please her brother; she wants things the way they were before Claudius took over; she wants a happy life once again. What unites these alternatives is Ophelia’s belief that something has gone terribly wrong, but that despite her best efforts, she cannot discover what it is. Maybe she has done something wrong, something to make everyone suddenly hate and abuse her? Therefore, her Super-Objective could be to find out what she has done wrong. There may be other choices for Ophelia’s Super-Objective, but this description is supported by a great deal of evidence in the play and offers a unifying line of development for her character. The submissive goal to find out is also consistent with her subordinate role. Ophelia is not in a position to influence significantly the actions of others.

Through-Action

The Through-Action is an account of a particular character performing a particular action under particular conditions. Who is Ophelia? The innocent daughter of a newly appointed government official. What is she doing? Trying to come to terms with her new world. Where is she doing it? In the corrupt court of Denmark. Hence, the Through-Action, the innocent daughter of a crooked government official tries to come to terms with the corrupt environment in which she is forced live. Ophelia is the daughter of a criminal who is forced to choose whether she wants to live in his morally corrupt world.

Counter Through-Action

Hamlet’s chief opponent in the play is Claudius, who is the cause of the corruption in the court. His relationship with Claudius forms the Main Relationship of the play. But Claudius does not directly influence Ophelia’s behavior. Her actions are influenced by Polonius, Laertes, and, above all, by Hamlet—all three of whom assault her innocence in one way or another. Most readers would probably agree that Hamlet is the character who influences her most and is the one in whom she is most disappointed. Hamlet occupies the other position in Ophelia’s Main Relationship. Accordingly, the Counter Through-Action for Ophelia’s character may be described as a passionately idealistic prince (unwittingly) destroys the woman he loves in a reckless attempt to purge the court of corruption.