Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies
Character as Form

Characters are strange things. They are not persons, not exactly. They belong to the page, the stage, the screen, and it is central to our experience of them that we know they are fictions. Yet we feel for them nonetheless: we sympathize with them, root and fear for them, and get annoyed by them, too. When Hamlet pondered the player—“What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”—this was the paradox that left him mystified: how is it that an imagined person can generate real and potent feelings? In Astrophil and Stella, written some years before Hamlet, Philip Sidney explored the same riddle. The forty-fifth sonnet in the sequence begins with a familiar lover's lament: although Stella sees his suffering, Astrophil complains, she “cannot skill to pity” him. Stella is not utterly impassive, however: when she hears a tragic fable of “lovers never known,” Astrophil reports, pity moves her...