Category: Culture

I’m a pretty good judge of character. My profession as a theatre director trained me to understand a character in a play’s dramatis personae from reading a script. I hear you. That’s life on the stage. That’s make believe.

Here’s the secret. No character on a stage ever appeared for the first time in a play. They debuted in life and someone described them in words and brought them to theatrical life. Playwrights don’t create characters out of whole cloth. They, like poets and writers before them, write characters as they have experienced them in the real world, or borrow them from those that have written them before. We are a decidedly unoriginal species.

If you live long enough and pay attention to the world, you develop the same skills as writers and theatre directors. You quickly come to realize that there are indeed a limited number of character types around us and they are easily identifiable. There are apparently a finite number of molds we’re baked in.

Hell, dogs recognize good and bad characters much like humans. Often faster. So do children, but something happens as we mature that dulls that instinct.

Writers for the page, stage and cinema people their stories with recognizable types, not for lack of trying, but as recognition that we don’t really change that much through the ages. In the theatre trade we call these easily identifiable types “stock characters.” Stock, as in picking them down off of a shelf.

Aristophanes and Theophrastus for the Greeks, and Plautus for the Romans get most of the credit for this. Although most consider Plautus to have simply borrowed the concept. Later, Commedia dell’Arte became famous for its stock characters, and also the masks created for them. The humans behind the masks became less important to the story than the costume. That should tell you something.

Supposedly the first time the term “stock character” appeared in the English language was in the 1860’s. Other cultures had and have their own versions of stock characters. Asian and African forms of storytelling also developed their own easily recognizable familiar characters.

When it comes to literature and entertainment there haven’t been that many new characters recreated from life’s observances since antiquity. “Good” characters have a flaw or two or three. So do the “bad.” That’s what makes them human. Even the dramas written in the days of multiple gods featured those beings as flawed. Without flaws there is no conflict, no drama, no comedy.

In today’s highly charged political atmosphere, with villains currently holding winning hands here and abroad, looking for perfect characters to defeat them is a fool’s errand. And yes, there are more than plenty who fit the character mold of fool.

When a person creates a role behind a mask representing good character or one on a path of redemption, that’s an age old character trait also. Those characters always get their comeuppance in the end when the flaws are exposed. It’s only recently in the history of literature that we’ve forced happy endings that include the irredemable into the mix. It’s a sad and unfunny joke that people keep trying the trick. Audiences, like dogs, sniff it out.

When someone says a man or woman is of good character it doesn’t mean they’re perfect, pristine, or pure. We might like it to, but that’s wish casting. Flaws will always emerge. Otherwise the story generally sucks.

I wish we’d stop looking for those mythical creatures and recognize that the good and bad ones that populate our real life off the stage are just copying what came before and mirroring the life most of us lead.

(Image from mariesacha on Shutterstock)

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