Boethius' use of the term (he also uses "individual" in a very modern  
sense -- and indeed seems to be the first to do so, and in the same  
passage) is, as I recall, dependent in part on a development of the  
vocabulary of "person" in Stoicism which is not much indexed in  
recent discussions of the term. In Cicero's account, probably based  
on earlier Greek texts now lost (De Officiis 1-107-118), individuals  
bear four "personae" or roles which provide them with forms of duty  
or obligation. There doesn't seem to be any strong sense of "masking"  
about these uses, which have less a theatrical than a juridical cast.  
Briefly, Cicero seems to adumbrate the possibility of an active duty  
of "personhood" which engages what we might now call "being true to  
oneself", but it's not the main framework of his argument at all and  
he may not even have recognised its implications.

Somewhere related to this strand is also the development of the term  
in theology, where "persona" translates not "prosopon" but  
"hypostasis". Augustine gives this an explicitly psychological turn  
in De Trinitate which, although it didn't become orthodox theology,  
was still available for those who wanted to think about "personhood"  
and the complex internal economy of the self, as Spenser often seems  
to be doing.

Tom


On 9/08/2007, at 9:20 AM, Harry Berger Jr wrote:

> Personando: sounding through. Wasn't there a megaphonic device in  
> classical masks that amplified the voice? I remember Boethius  
> somewhere (2nd theol. tractate?) connects this to person. When you  
> think about this sort of thing metaphorically and extensionally, it  
> generates Goffmanesque (i.e. cynical if sometimes hilarious)  
> fantasies about the megaphonic properties of presentations of self  
> in everyday, etc.  I wrote something about this once long ago, but  
> can only remember the reference to Boethius AND, more importantly,  
> the name of the essayist whose excellent article headed me there.  
> Mary Marshall—is that right? Was she at Syracuse? Was it the 70s?
>
> The spirit behind personando might well be epideictic in a sense  
> more general than Aristotle's. The megaphonics of representation,  
> or the production of Large Effects. It's the reflexivity of all  
> this, its conspicuousness as performance, that opens up on the dark  
> dank dismal dominion or lair of homo clausus, which emerges pale  
> and fluttering into light only as an ideology effect (an effect of  
> someone else's ideology).
>
> Just spinning a post-prandial wheel...............
>
>
>
> On Aug 8, 2007, at 10:09 AM, Marshall Grossman wrote:
>
>> A response for which I held my breath Andrew.
>>
>> From the OED
>> person, n
>> OF, /personne/, a personage, a person, a man or woman, It. / 
>> per'sona/--L. /persona/, a mask used by a player, a character or  
>> personage acted, one who plays or performs any part, a character  
>> relation or capacity in which one acts, a being having legal  
>> rights, a juridical person....Generally though to be related to  
>> L. /personare /to sound through; but the long o makes a  
>> difficulty. The sense /mask/ has not come down into Eng; and the  
>> other senses did not arise here in logical order.
>>
>> In my view, the etymological entanglement of person and persona  
>> represent not a confusion but an insight. In historical as well as  
>> in logical terms, neither the words nor the concepts they evoke  
>> are separable--exactly the point I wanted to make about Spenser's  
>> personifications. Take the word personification to mean strictly  
>> mask (although I do not think this a linguistically tenable taking).
>> What is a mask: a covering for the face, something spoken through.  
>> Like Spenser's embodied virtues, a mask is an idea (voice) made  
>> conformable to a material body, the face. It has its own  
>> characteristics, visual and acoustic, so that what is spoken  
>> through the mask is changed by it, does not exist in isolation  
>> from it, just as Red Cross's desire for Una as Holy Church does  
>> not exist in sterile isolation from his desire for Una, which,  
>> with a little string pulling becomes mixed up with his desire for  
>> Una as Duessa and his dire fantasies, delivered courtesy of  
>> Archimago, about the nature of Una's desires. Spenser's genius and  
>> his courage is precisely to personify: to put the concept of a  
>> virtue into the body of a man and see what sorts of difficulties  
>> and adaptations follow.
>>
>> But there is a further point--that I am urging literally.  If your  
>> experience is fairly normative, at some point very early on in  
>> Andrew Zurcher's life--on the cusp between infans and person, you  
>> discovered that he was Andrew Zurcher, and that Andrew Zurcher had  
>> existed as concept before Andrew Zurcher, infans, ever made an  
>> entrance onto the mortal coil. We alsmost all had a family history  
>> before we had a personal one, and--in an absolutely substantive  
>> way- when the name and the tyke came together, the former infant  
>> assumed a role, a persona, later to be developed and altered by  
>> will and circumstance.
>>
>> When we say that Spenser's characters are not people, I think we  
>> mean that they are not people in the way that people are not  
>> simply people. That is to say, they are not "realist"  
>> representations of people and that we ought not be led by the  
>> conventions of naive realism into inane observations, best  
>> exemplified for me Bradley's remark that Gertrude is a dull  
>> woman.  The thing is, were Gertrude a living person, the  
>> misprision would be more not less offensive.
>>
>> When I was a high school student, every year it was a given that  
>> every year from time immemorial, the New York State Regents  
>> Examination in four year English would include an essay question  
>> that began "In literature as in life..." and so, too, in Spenser  
>> and so too in life. We should not mistake Spenser's characters or  
>> the people we meet on the street for tidy bits of narrative ethos  
>> plotted according to the severely reductive conventions of  
>> "realism."  Insofar as Spenser's characters are not "like people,"  
>> they are more, not less, like us.
>>
>> And so end my manifesto.
>>
>> Marshall Grossman
>> Professor of English
>> University of Maryland
>> 3101 SQH Susquehanna Hall
>> College Park, MD 20742
>>
>> 301-405-9651
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>>
>>
>> andrew zurcher wrote:
>>> It's perhaps worth keeping in mind that 'persona' doesn't mean  
>>> 'person' but 'mask', and 'personification' is thus a direct Latin  
>>> translation of the Greek prosopopoeia (its modern sense results  
>>> from a shift in meaning that I take to be analogous to the  
>>> process that we are discussing here, in Spenser). If they are  
>>> persons, then, Spenser's 'figures' are masks through which  
>>> someone speaks; but that doesn't make them people.
>>>
>>> Having said that, I agree that we have to be constantly vigilant  
>>> to the plasticity of the mask metaphor -- the distance between  
>>> the mask through which the voice speaks, and the voice that  
>>> speaks through the mask, can be limited and enlarged, distorted  
>>> and compacted, depending on a range of interpretive factors. We  
>>> are all priests of this instability, I hope.
>>>
>>> az
>>>
>>> Andrew Zurcher
>>> Tutor and Director of Studies in English (Part 1)
>>> Queens' College
>>> Cambridge CB3 9ET
>>> United Kingdom
>>> +44 1223 335 572
>>>
>>> hast hast post hast for lyfe