State-of-the-art impersonations for comedy and everyday.(Essay)

RECENTLY SOCK PUPPETRY HAS BEEN IN THE NEWS. IT IS CURIOUS HOW the latest means of faking identity can take on the names of age-old--in this instance also childish--games and performances. That nomenclature helps us understand what is going on, apparently. Puppet theater goes well back in history, and probably few children to this day have not played with a sock puppet of their own or others' making. Thus a headline across the top of the business section of the New York Times (2007: C1) reads, "The Hand that Controls the Sock Puppet Could Get Slapped." The article defines this puppetry as "the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one's self, allies or company," and that sounds like cheating. I don't know whether to be amused or indignant, and the headline writer seems to have reacted with the same double take. The case is serious, because the CEO of a publicly traded supermarket chain has been using a fake identity online for eight years, no less, to promote his company's stock; and the authors of the article cite, without naming, a journalist and others who have been playing similar games. No question: rapidly expanding information technology has in recent years multiplied many times over the opportunities for identity fraud.

Happily we have other institutions besides markets and newsrooms, regulatory agencies and courtrooms that cope successfully with fictions of identity and many more fictions. I mean literature and theater generally, where just pretending allows actors and authors, audiences and readers to explore human difficulties, reactions, and outcomes quite freely--though not altogether harmlessly, perhaps. Plato was famously opposed to both, and there is a persistent history of intolerance of theater in the West, sometimes of novel-reading also. For the defense, one need only recall the passionate scholarship that informed Jonas Barish's account of this history in The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981). If not by exploiting the capacity for experimental fiction and acting out, how ever should literature instruct as well as please? And why did Plato convey his opposition in such artful imaginary dialogues? Within their fictional worlds, moreover, novels and theater seem particularly fond of portraying falsified and mistaken identities: a fictional character who pretends to be someone else; an actor who impersonates someone in the act of impersonating another. In a medium so invested in acting, the acting out of a false identity or deliberate impersonation requires no more than an extra little push. Therefore, sock puppetry may be proportionately more often encountered in works of Western literature than in lives actually lived. It would seem that we enjoy pretending to be someone else when it is all make-believe.

The range of such impersonations is very wide, some lighthearted and others of life-and-death seriousness. Most readers of Joyce's Ulysses are at least initially entertained to discover that Leopold Bloom, under the pseudonym of Henry Flower, is conducting a postal flirtation with a typist who does not spell very well and signs herself Martha. As readers get to know the hero, this little avocation fills in one corner of his unique sexual life and posturings; but some may also worry about the impropriety of the deception and Bloom's treatment of his female correspondent. In Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities there is a clown-like Jerry Cruncher, a so-called resurrection man who unearths recently buried corpses in London for surreptitious sale to the medical profession. Cruncher not only himself leads a double life but endows each corpse he unearths with a second career. But there is nothing funny about the look-alike heroes in the same novel, Sydney Carton and Charles Damay, both in love with Lucie Manette and the latter condemned to the guillotine in Paris by the Terror. From beginning to end, A Tale of Two Cities plays on the theme of "Recalled to Life," and this is not the only late Dickens novel to dwell on the same deadly serious fantasy. How can one fault Carton for heroically changing places with Darnay in the prison and sacrificing his own life for the happiness of Lucie and his rival? As the trundle bears Carton through the Parisian mob to the guillotine, he solemnly repeats, "I am the resurrection and the life." Is he quoting Jesus (John 11:25) to comfort a young girl accompanying him, or impersonating the savior? It's one thing for Leopold Bloom unknowingly to have his day as the modern Ulysses, but another for Carton to confuse the task at hand--deceiving Darnay's persecutors--with playing Jesus Christ. Or am I being too severe? A very common article of faith--both ancient and multicultural--is that every human being is two persons, body and soul. Relatively few people over the ages have been content with being the one without the other--perhaps because life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde liked to say.

This essay will focus on a lively and enduring theatrical tradition: the kind of stage comedy that positively delights in faked and mistaken identities and that conveys the excitement, the advantages and perils of pretending to be someone else. Deception is almost a sine qua non of such comedies, which originated with ancient Greece, were reworked on the Roman stage and by Italian commedia dell'arte, thence taken up and transformed by such masters of the theater as Shakespeare and Moliere, eventually to find their way into silent films and clown acts such as those of the Marx brothers and many lesser talents. Moreover, these plays are often crafted so that the audience sides with the eager deceivers and impersonators: and how should that be, if we are truly able and content to be who we are? Just possibly we need more than one persona to get through this life on earth, never mind the hereafter. My invocation of the muse of Comedy will be defended below by appealing to a few sobering thoughts of Thomas Hobbes: readers who do not appreciate comedy may wish to skip directly to his Leviathan, Part I, chapter 16.

SHAKESPEARE WAS ACQUAINTED WITH THE TEXT OF MORE THAN ONE Roman play at first hand. The Comedy of Errors was directly based on Plautus's Menaechmi, except that Shakespeare twinned the slave characters as well as the principals. He adopts a highly conventional back-action that implausibly bestows the identical name as well as appearance on both pairs. The twin Antipholuses are the last to realize that they have been reunited; the audience knows from the start and has been waiting for them to stumble on stage together, face to face. When they finally do so, in the last scene, the duke remarks, "And so of these, which is the natural man, / And which the spirit?" (5.1.334-35). To find two actors who look so alike that wives and acquaintances cannot tell them apart would seem to pose a headache for casting and wardrobe, yet to go along with the fun, audiences willingly put up with even token resemblances. This comic tradition takes for granted the quite extraordinary powers of human recognition, the way we can tell one face from a thousand others and recognize an acquaintance from a hundred yards merely by the way she walks; but it also nervously calls into question these powers by bringing front stage clowns who cannot quite manage to achieve them.

What would life be like if we couldn't so easily distinguish between the faces we know and those we don't know?. The so-called new comedy of the Greeks--very little of it extant except for 21 revisions by Plautus and 6 by Terence for the Roman stage--routinely delays recognition by one character of another, or by both characters, as a typical scene gets under way. A character will enter from one of the doors at center stage and begin speaking, while another--often the person who is being spoken about--comes on stage left or right and may also speak.

Then one or both characters will peer in the right direction and ask aloud, isn't that so-and-so now?. Partly this routine contributes to the necessary dramatic exposition, but as I shall remark in a moment, it also can be used to instigate and manage ...