An analysis of acting and characterization on stage, covering theories of character from Aristotle to Brecht and approaches from formalism to post structuralism. The Early Theatre Group have, over the last 5 years, used an experimental approach to performing some of the plays written about here.

Introduction: reading character; character, acting and rhetoric. Part 1 Ancient theories of character: Aristotle's poetics "Ethos Proxis" and "Pathos"; Greek tragedy and the "Showing" of "Ethos"; action, choice and recognition - tragedy in practice; character and rhetoric in post-classical tradition; characters and "Personae"; ethos, biography and the purpose of writing. Part 2 Rhetorical character - history and allegory: character and allegory - Scaliger's poeticae; Prudentius' psychomachia - allegory and subjectivity; allegorical drama - the Tudor interlude; acting, fame and the historical individual; character and power - Shakespeare's secondary history cycle. Part 3 Character as political proxis - three plays by Shakespeare: "Troilus and Cressida" - "common commentaries" and "Truth's Authentic Authour"; "Antony and Cleopatra" - triumphs and blemishes; "Julius Caesar" - rebellion and interiority. Part 4 Acting, interiority and empathy on the Elizabethan stage: "No theatre, No World" - acting and spectating as analogies for human being; actors and parts; watching and judging; mirrors and man - "Hamlet"I; "Hamlet" II - character, action and interiority; humour and melancholy - individuation and containment. Part 5 Character and the passions - acting and theory in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; "Common Sense" and the "Universal Mind"; "Unity of Character"; "the mind and its movements". Part 6 "Human subject is decentred" - the modern "subject" and pre-modern drama; Brecht and the formalists; substantive "character" in Soviet aesthetics and in English studies; character and subject - some post structuralist approaches.