Diderot has often been seen as a precursor of Brecht, though it is doubtful whether Brecht actually knew the Paradoxe sur le Come'dien. Diderot’s belief that the actor has, or should have, a double nature, being at all times both him/herself and the character, at the same time ‘‘the little Clairon and... the great Agrippina’’ (Diderot 1883, 11), resurfaces even more urgently in Brecht’s demand that the actor detach and dissociate himself as much as possible from the dramatis persona he is called upon to incarnate. Rather than fusing himself with his part in an emotionalist and Stani-slavskian way, he is required to ‘‘estrange’’ himself from it (the much discussed notion of Verfremdung), stand aside and criticize it. Actor and character ‘‘are not merged into one,’’ for the actor ‘‘never forgets, nor does he allow it to be forgotten, that he is not the subject but the demonstrator’’ (Brecht 1964, 125). Both ‘‘character’’ and ‘‘actor’’ are simultaneously laid bare to the spectator’s view:
The actor does not allow himself to become completely transformed on the stage into the character he is portraying. He is not Lear, Harpagon, Schweik; he shows them. He reproduces their remarks as authentically as he can; he puts forward their way of behaving to the best of his abilities and knowledge of men; but he never tries to persuade himself (and thereby others) that this amounts to a complete transformation. (Brecht 1964, 137)
In the manner of Dicaeopolis disguised as the Euripidean Telephus in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, the Greek tragic actor does not set out to display or draw attention to his own awareness of not being the character but merely the character’s imperson-ator/demonstrator. Keen to encourage the spectator to surrender, to suspend disbelief, and to lose sight of the very process of artistic transformation, the actor chooses to offer his audience a unified vision, the image of a thorough merging with his part. In Dicaeopolis’ words, a tragic actor will aim to ‘‘seem to be a beggar’’ (doxai ptochon einai), retaining his individual identity (einai men hosper eimi) but rendering it virtually invisible (phainesthai de me) (Aristophanes, Acharnians 440-41). The same idea of leading the spectator to imagine the presence of the ‘‘character’’ itself, while eliding the actor’s intrusive physical identity, underlies a scholiast’s comment on Timotheus of Zacynthus in the role of the Sophoclean Ajax: when he was falling on the sword, the audience was able to bring to mind the pathos of the hero himself:
It must be conjectured that he falls on his sword, and the actor must be strongly built so as to bring the audience to the point of visualizing Ajax, as is said of Timotheus
Of Acanthus, whose acting carried along and enthralled the spectators so much that he acquired the ‘‘tag’’ Sphageus [the Slayer]. (Scholion on Sophocles’ Ajax 864)
Even though the balance that the typical Greek tragic actor aims to strike between character and actor is clearly un-Brechtian, the complexities of a Diderodian and Brechtian double vision can be found glimpsed elsewhere, namely in the convention of the messenger speech. Viewed from a metatheatrical perspective, the tragic messenger is a good figure for the actor insofar as he doubles and divides himself: he is the part and not the part, he is himself (a shepherd, a servant) and not himself, appropriating an alien voice and an ‘‘I’’ (e. g., of Oedipus or Pentheus) which is not his own. There is a vital difference between this ‘‘internalized’’ actor and the rest of his coplayers. While the other tragic actors present the audience with one single dimension wherein performer and character are merged, the messenger, like the Brechtian ‘‘showman,’’ ‘‘must not suppress the ‘he did that, he said that’ element in his performance’’ and ‘‘must not go so far as to be wholly transformed into the person demonstrated’’ (Brecht 1964, 125).1
World History
