Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T20:35:52.871Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Suiting Forms to Their Conceit”: Emotion and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Tragic Acting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2018

Extract

When Horace wrote in Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself” (“Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi), he expressed the ancient world's view that, in order to emotionally affect his audience, an orator needed to feel the emotion himself. This idea was widely subscribed to in the eighteenth century. In the modern era Konstantin Stanislavsky engaged in a sustained investigation of emotion and acting, stressing that the actor needed to experience “real feeling” in order for the audience to experience authentic emotions also. As a theory of emotional transmission, it seems like common sense. Yet, when Denis Diderot witnessed in Baron d'Holbach's salon David Garrick's parlor trick of sticking his head out between two screens, and cycling through a range of passions with his face, the great philosophe wondered whether the actor felt anything at all even though his audience, including Baron Grimm, evidently did. “Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face?” Diderot asked, and then answered, “I don't believe it; nor do you.” By deciding in the negative, that Garrick could not have felt anything, Diderot reveals a common fallacy of the audience: the belief that what an audience feels reflects, and is a result of, what an actor feels. The problem for Diderot, which he addressed in the Paradox of Acting (1773), was how an actor such as Garrick managed to evoke emotions in his audience when he apparently felt nothing himself.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Research for this article was made possible by funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe, 1100-1800 together with a short-term fellowship to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. I am grateful to both these organizations for their support.

References

Endnotes

1. Roach, Joseph R., The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, reprint ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993 [1985]), 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Diderot, Denis, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Pollock, Walter Herries (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 38Google Scholar.

3. “The player's tears,” wrote Diderot, “come from his brain, … he weeps as might weep an unbelieving priest preaching of the Passion; as a seducer might weep at the feet of a woman whom he does not love, but on whom he would impose; like a beggar in the street or at the door of a church—a beggar who substitutes insult for vain appeal; or like a courtesan who has no heart, and who abandons herself in your arms.” Ibid., 17. This sequence of analogies suggests the duplicity of a series of different social performances that, despite their falsehood, are nevertheless effective. The dualist thinking that underpins this is problematized through the work of Arjun Appadurai later in this article.

4. Frank A. Hedgcock repeats two possibly apocryphal tales of Garrick's ability to transform his face: he posed as Henry Fielding for a posthumous portrait of the author by Hogarth; and in Paris, he imitated the “visage of a Englishman who had been murdered, and so wrung a confession from the astonished and terrified assassin.” Hedgcock, Frank A., A Cosmopolitan Actor: David Garrick and His French Friends (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1912), 50Google Scholar.

5. Appadurai, Arjun, “Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,” in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Lutz, C. A. and Abu-Lughod, L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 92112Google Scholar, at 92–3.

6. Ibid., 94.

7. Scheer, Monique, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 193220CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 193–4.

8. Roach, 24.

9. Ibid.; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 6.2.29.

10. Roach, 58–115.

11. Gildon, Charles, Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (London, 1710), 70Google Scholar; Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, 2 vols. (Paris, 1733), I.iv: 3940Google Scholar, cited in Larlham, Daniel, “The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” The Eighteenth Century 53.4 (2012): 432–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 443; Lloyd, Robert, The Actor: A Poetical Epistle to Bonnell Thornton Esq. (London, 1760), 4Google Scholar. For a discussion of Gildon's biography see Roberts, David, “An Obstinately Shadowy Titan: Betterton in Biography,” in Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2438CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Gildon, 43.

13. See Barnett, Dene, Massy-Westropp, with Jeanette, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of Eighteenth Century Acting (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987)Google Scholar for a comprehensive overview of acting conventions in England and Europe.

14. See McGillivray, Glen, “Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons,” Theatre Notebook 71.1 (2017): 220Google Scholar.

15. Goring, Paul, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 5Google Scholar. Goring emphasizes the crucial role of oratory in the development of eighteenth-century acting (9).

16. Hiffernan, Paul, Dramatic Genius, in Five Books (London, 1770), 3: 73Google Scholar.

17. Downes, John, Roscius Anglicanus [1708], ed. Milhouse, Judith and Hume, Robert D. (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987), 106Google Scholar.

18. A Letter to David Garrick; on Opening the Theatre (London, 1769 [i.e., 1759]), 30–1Google Scholar; cited in Goring, 117.

19. The Theatre, no. 20, London Chronicle, no. 29 (5–8 March 1757): 231.

20. Tribble, Evelyn B., Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Benedetti, Jean, David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre (London: Methuen, 2001), 4770Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 184–200; quotes at 184, 186, 195.

23. See Taylor, George, “The Just Delineation of The Passions: Theories of Acting in the Age of Garrick,” in The Eighteenth-Century English Stage, ed. Richards, Kenneth and Thomson, Peter (London: Methuen, 1972), 5172Google Scholar; Woods, Leigh, Garrick Claims the Stage: Acting as Social Emblem in Eighteenth-Century England (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Auburn, Mark S., “Garrick at Drury Lane 1747–1776,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2: 1660–1895, ed. Donohue, Joseph (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 145–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 147–50.

24. Auburn, 147. Auburn uses the term “sympathetic imagination” after Stone and Kahrl (who borrowed it from Earl R. Wasserman). Stone, George W. Jr. and Kahrl, George M., David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 37Google Scholar; Wasserman, Earl R., “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Acting,” Journal of English and German Philology 46.3 (1947): 264–72Google Scholar. There is insufficient room here to address Wasserman's argument that, from the middle of the century, a heightened “sensibility” and emotional intensity were believed necessary for an actor to be deemed to have a “sympathetic imagination.” Although, as I address below, even though the way that emotions were mobilized and regulated changed later in the century, how actors communicated emotions through their bodies varied more in degree than in kind.

25. Stone and Kahrl, 31.

26. Ibid., 30.

27. Thomson, Peter, “Garrick, David (1717–1779),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004Google Scholar; online ed., 3 January 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10408, accessed 5 May 2016.

28. Downer, Alan S., “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA 58.4 (1943), 1002–37Google Scholar, at 1013.

29. Appadurai, “Topographies,” 105–6. Subsequent page citations of this work are given parenthetically in the text (as AA).

30. Easty, Edward Dwight, On Method Acting (Orlando, FL: House of Collectibles, 1978), 16Google Scholar.

31. See Baldwin, Geoff, “Individual and Self in the Late Renaissance,” The Historical Journal 44.2 (2001): 341–64Google Scholar; and Maus, Katherine Eisaman, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

32. Wessel, Jane, “Possessing Parts and Owing Plays: Charles Macklin and the Prehistory of Dramatic Literary Property,” Theatre Survey 56.3 (2015): 268–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 274–5. Tiffany Stern argues that Macklin and Garrick, the great innovators of the midcentury, actually instructed actors to imitate their own performances, such that “the ‘new’ acting was at least as prescriptive as the ‘old.’” Stern, Tiffany, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 266Google Scholar.

33. Macklin, Charles, “The Art and Duty of an Actor,” reconstructed in Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, Esq., comp. and ed. Kirkman, John Thomas, 2 vols. (London: Lackington, Allen, 1799), 1: 353–70Google Scholar, at 364.

34. Rasa theory is more complex than Appadurai's use of it. For the purposes of my argument, as I develop it below, I am using Appadurai to present an alternative to prevailing theories of empathy. In doing so I am not entering into a discussion of rasa theory per se.

35. Scheer, 193. Subsequent page citations of this work are given parenthetically in the text (as MS).

36. For more on distributed cognition in early modern acting, see Tribble.

37. Entry of 12 May 1763, in James Boswell, Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1950), 257. Cited in Marsden, Jean, “Shakespeare and Sympathy,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sabor, Peter and Yachnin, Paul (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 2941Google Scholar, at 35.

38. Lichtenberg, Georg, “Letter to Heinrich Christian Boie, 30 November 1775,” in Lichtenberg's Visits to England as Described in His Letters and Diaries, ed. Mare, Margaret L. and Quarrell, W. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 30Google Scholar.

39. See, for example, the reviews of Ellen McDougall's production in the Sam Wanamaker playhouse in March 2017 in The Independent, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/othello-sam-wanamker-playhouse-london-review-murder-by-candle-light-a7610361.html and The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/mar/07/othello-review-sam-wanamaker-playhouse-ellen-mcdougall, both accessed 30 May 2017.

40. Lichtenberg, 68. Ann Barry was Spranger Barry's wife; they had performed these roles in tandem since 1758, when she was still married to another actor.

41. Collier, Jeremy, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London, 1698)Google Scholar.

42. Ritchie, Fiona, “Women Playgoers: Historical Repertory and Sentimental Response” in Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 141–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 159–60.

43. See Roach, 56–7, who draws on Thomas Kuhn's idea of the “paradigm shift,” as does George Rousseau in what follows. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

44. Rousseau, G[eorge]. S., “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards an Anthropology of Sensibility,” in Enlightenment Crossing: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses—Anthropological (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 124–6Google Scholar.

45. See Roach, 105–7 for a discussion of the alternative theory that nerves were vibrating strings; “magical” on 43.

46. Rousseau, “Nerves,” 126–9; quote at 128.

47. Ibid., 133.

48. Jaucourt, Louis, “Sensibilité [Morale],” in Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot, Denis and d'Alembert, Jean le Rond (Paris, 1751–72)Google Scholar; cited in Gaukroger, Stephen, “The Realm of Sensibility,” in The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 391CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Henri Fouquet, “Sensibilité, Sentiment [Médecine],” in Encyclopédie; cited in ibid.

50. Ritchie, 160, 170.

51. Marsden, 29.

52. Cited in Ritchie, 160.

53. Ritchie, 160, citing Goring, 145.

54. Ritchie, 160.

55. Boaden, James, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, and E. Littell, 1827), 161Google Scholar; emphasis in the original.

56. Haslewood, Joseph, The Secret History of the Green Rooms: Containing Authentic and Entertaining Memoirs of the Actors and Actresses in the Three Theatres Royal, vol. 1 [of 2]: Drury Lane (London: H. D. Symonds, 1790): 8Google Scholar.

57. See Fitzgerald-Hume, Elizabeth, “Rights and Riots: Footmen's Riots at Drury Lane 1737,” Theatre Notebook 59.1 (2005): 4152Google Scholar.

58. Diary entry of 2 December 1774, cited in Sutton, R. B., “Further Evidence of David Garrick's Portrayal of Hamlet from the Diary of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,” Theatre Notebook 50.1 (1996): 814Google Scholar, at 8.

59. Nicoll, Allardyce, The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Rosenfeld, Sybil (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 3540Google Scholar; Joseph Donohue, “Theatres, Their Architecture and Their Audiences,” in Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. Donohue, 2: 292–308, at 304.

60. Buchanan, Lindal, “Sarah Siddons and Her Place in Rhetorical History,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 25.4 (2007): 414–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 422.

61. West, Shearer, “The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons,” in A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists, ed. Asleson, Robyn (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 139Google Scholar, at 21–2.

62. Manvell, Roger, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (New York: Putnam, 1971), 176Google Scholar.

63. See Patricia McLoughlin McMahon, “The Tragical Art of Sarah Siddons: An Analysis of Her Acting Style,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1972 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1972). Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global (288283616), 145 n. 1.

64. Howell-Meri, Mark, “Acting Spaces and Carpenters’ Tools: From the Fortune to the Theatre Royal, Bristol,” New Theatre Quarterly 25.2 (2009): 148–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 152–54. Edward A. Langhans, similarly, estimates the distance from front of stage to back wall of the theatre in the various Drury Lane remodelings, until the Holland expansion, as being thirty to thirty-five feet (9–10.5 m). In contrast, he estimates that the distance increased to 74 feet (22 m) after Holland's rebuilding. Langhans, , “The Theatres,” in The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, ed. Hume, Robert D. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 3565Google Scholar, at 42.

65. Nicoll, 91; Powell, Jocelyn, Restoration Theatre Production (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 87Google Scholar.

66. As has been argued by Bridget Escolme and others, this dialogic convention was established much earlier than the period I am discussing. See Escolme, Bridget, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar; Howell-Meri, , “Acting Spaces”; David Francis Taylor, “Discoveries and Recoveries in the Laboratory of Georgian Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly 27.3 (2011): 229–43Google Scholar.

67. D. F. Taylor, 240.

68. See, for example, the paintings by Johann Zoffany (1768) and Henry Fuseli (1766) of Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as the Macbeths just after the murder of Duncan. Fuseli returned to the scene nearly fifty years later in an expressionistic rendering that depicts the Macbeths as pure emotion, with Garrick and Pritchard barely recognizable.

69. Goede, C. A. G., The Stranger in England, 3 vols. (London, 1807), 2: 208Google Scholar. in The London Stage 1660–1800, pt. 5: 1776–1800, ed. Hogan, Charles Beecher (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968): xcivGoogle Scholar.

70. Cited in Cibber, Theophilus, “Cibber's Second Dissertation,” in Cibber's Two Dissertations on the Theatres (London, 1757), [2:] 43Google Scholar.

71. Davies, Thomas, Dramatic micellanies [sic]: Consisting of Critical Observations on Several Plays of Shakspeare [sic], 3 vols. (London, 1783–4), 3: 246Google Scholar.

72. The Morning Post, no. 15773 (Thursday, 4 October 1821).

73. Davies, 2: 319–20.

74. Lichtenberg, Letters, 7.

75. Ibid., 15.

76. Ibid., 16.