The Playwright's Guidebook: An Insightful Primer on the Art of Dramatic Writing by Spencer Stuart

Author:Spencer, Stuart [Spencer, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2002-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

SYMPATHY

Shakespeare’s Richard III is one of the most unpleasant characters in literature. Unless you also happen to be a ruthless murderer and plunderer, you probably do not find yourself in “harmony or agreement of feeling” (the dictionary definition of sympathy) with him.

I’m willing to bet that Shakespeare shared your feelings about Richard III. Yet most of us find ourselves engaged by him, just as Shakespeare must have. We may not have the urge to become his best friend, but neither would we avoid spending three hours in the theater with him, complaining that he’s an unsympathetic character. We become something like coconspirators with Richard. We may want him to fail, yet we’re mesmerized by his ruthlessness, creativity, and, above all, his self-justifications. He is sympathetic in the dramatic sense, even though we would despise him if we met him in real life.

What’s the difference between dramatic sympathy and real-life sympathy? To look for the answer, let’s divide dramatic sympathy into two categories: the sympathy that the playwright must feel for her characters, and the sympathy the audience must feel for them. Usually when we talk about a sympathetic character, we’re referring to the latter. But I want to begin by talking about the former, because it’s my feeling that one leads to the other.

Let’s say, for example, that you are writing a play about a certain very nasty man. You’re worried that you will not have sympathy for the character. But you don’t want to make your nasty character nicer, because that would defeat the whole point of writing about him. What do you do in order to make him sympathetic?

The first thing is to make sure you respect him. Whether you have simply dreamed up an unsavory type in your own imagination or based him on a real person, it’s important that the character be a worthy adversary. Make him human.

Let’s assume you’re creating a character out of whole cloth. Step back from what your own personal view of him might be if you actually knew him. Focus instead on how he feels about himself. No one, even the most cruel of us, thinks of himself as wicked. We may acknowledge that we have done wicked things, but we always have a justification—or at least we did at the time.

Consider the great monsters of the real world. Even Hitler did not wake up in the morning and think to himself, “I’ll be tremendously evil today for no good reason.” He would have been able to give you perfectly good justifications for his unspeakable acts—from his point of view. And in dramatic terms, his point of view is all we care about.14

“People always have their reasons,” the character Octave says in Jean Renoir’s film La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game). That is what’s terrible about those things that are truly evil—not that they are so fantastic or unfathomable, but that they are so perfectly reasonable to the one who is evil.

In life, people do indeed always have their reasons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.