Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment 3031228987, 9783031228988

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
About the Book
Contents
About the Author
Abbreviations1
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
‘Here lies the golden secret; learn to FEEL’
Doing Emotions
Chapter 2: Playing to Type
The Whig View of Theatrical History
Character Types
Macbeth
Chapter 3: Communicating Emotions: The Arts of the Actor
The Art of Gesture
Ranting, Canting, and Toning46
Siddons’ Grand Style
‘The lady is greatly improved’
‘It becomes as grand as it is petrifying’
Chapter 4: Regulating and Mobilising Emotions: The Audience
Sentimentalism
Emotional Navigation
Volatility
Generosity
Chapter 5: Mediating Emotions in Place
An Intimate Relationship
Glitter in the Light and Height in the Air
Talking to the Audience
Chapter 6: Conclusion: “Damme, Tom, it’ll do”
Plays
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century Communities of Sentiment

Glen McGillivray

Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions Series Editors

William M. Reddy Department of History Duke University Durham, NC, USA Erin Sullivan University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions includes work that redefines past definitions of emotions; re-conceptualizes theories of emotional ‘development’ through history; undertakes research into the genesis and effects of mass emotions; and employs a variety of humanities disciplines and methodologies. In this way it produces a new interdisciplinary history of the emotions in Europe between 1100 and 2000.

Glen McGillivray

Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century Communities of Sentiment

Glen McGillivray University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions ISBN 978-3-031-22898-8    ISBN 978-3-031-22899-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Robert Dighton, The Pit Door (1784) ©The Trustees of the British Museum This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Joan Mary McGillivray 1930–2019

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that I wrote this book on the land of the Gadigal people of Eora, land that was never ceded: it was, is, and always will be, Aboriginal land. I pay my respects to the Gadigal and other First Nations people in whose lands I have spent my time completing this project. Many people have contributed in ways big and small to this project. First, I would like to thank the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) whose first conference in 2011 encouraged my foray into this research. As an Associate Investigator, my first scoping trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library (FSL) in 2014 was funded by the CHE, which likewise contributed to my research there the following year. A longer research period was made possible by a Short-­ Term Fellowship the FSL awarded me in 2015; this allowed me to spend three additional months with the Folger’s archive of eighteenth-century theatre resources. I enjoyed the other fellows’ collegiality, and I thank the Folger librarians for their patience and help. I want to thank, also, my copy editor extraordinaire Michael Gnat for his meticulous work. I am grateful to my home university, the University of Sydney, which has further supported my research. I had two periods of research leave: the first to take up my fellowship in Washington and the second to complete a first draft of this book. I also received funding from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for a month’s research in the British Library in 2016. In addition I was supported by the School of Literature, Art and Media Research Support Scheme to employ Gabriella Edelstein as a research vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

assistant in 2014. Thank you, Gabby, for your hard work! Such institutional support has been critical to this research. I thank also Professor Emerita Jane R. Goodall, my first reader, who read my penultimate draft before its initial submission and gave me helpful and insightful comments on it. I appreciate the feedback I have received on works-in-progress from my colleagues and graduate students at the Friday Research Seminar held by my home department, Theatre and Performance Studies, at the University of Sydney. Thanks also to my friend and peer mentor, Kate Rossmanith, at Macquarie University who has encouraged and advised me through the writing of this book. A part of Chap. 3 appeared as ‘Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons’ in Theatre Notebook 71, no. 1 (2017): 2–20, and I published an earlier account of Lichtenberg’s discussion of David Garrick’s Hamlet (see Chap. 5) as ‘Motions of the Mind: Transacting Emotions on the Eighteenth-Century Stage’ in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 28, no. 2 (2013): 5–24. I have developed my analysis of emotions in the eighteenth-century theatre using the work of Arjun Appadurai both through that article and ‘“Suiting Forms to Their Conceit”: Emotion and Convention in Eighteenth-­ Century Tragic Acting’ in Theatre Survey 59, no. 2 (2018): 169–89, where I introduced the work of Monique Scheer. I thank the publishers for their permission to republish. This book has been a decade in the making, and its arguments have been honed by the insightful comments I have received on my work from the reviewers for journal submissions (whether successful or unsuccessful) and from colleagues at conferences; especially those at the CHE conferences in 2011 and 2013, and in the CHE collaboratory ‘The Voice and Histories of Emotion 1500–1800’ in 2014. I thank, also, the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful criticism, which has made this a much better book. Lastly, I want to offer my love and thanks to my family: to my gentle canine companion, Nell (now deceased), who thought working from home was a wonderful idea; and especially to Nicky—you are my foundation. I have dedicated this book to my mother, Joan Mary McGillivray, who instilled in me an early love for the theatre but did not live to see this book published. As a historian, I am sensitive to spans of time. My mother’s life spanned nearly ninety years; when she was born in rural Victoria, her brother rode a horse to find a doctor; before she died, she was accessing the Internet via her iPad.

About the Book

Actors, Audiences and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century examines how audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre in the middle decades of the century. This period was bookended by two great stars of the century, David Garrick and Sarah Siddons, whose acting is the focus of this study. Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of emotions, it challenges the view that emotional interaction between actors and audiences depends on empathy, or the idea that what an actor feels, an audience must feel too. It analyses how actors emotionally communicated emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences interpreted these performances and mobilised and regulated their own emotional responses. In the eighteenth-century theatre, audiences carefully appraised how actors used their faces, bodies and voices in relation to accepted conventions, and their appreciation of actors’ performances was closely tied to this. Significantly, the book explores how the theatre space itself mediated behaviours, arguing that the analysis of emotions must include not only how they are embodied, but also how they are emplaced.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Playing to Type 35 3 Communicating Emotions: The Arts of the Actor 73 4 Regulating and Mobilising Emotions: The Audience117 5 Mediating Emotions in Place149 6 Conclusion: “Damme, Tom, it’ll do”189 Plays197 References201 Index217

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About the Author

Glen McGillivray  teaches in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was an Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2014 and 2015) and a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2015). He has published work on theatricality, the archives of performance, and emotions and acting in the eighteenth century.

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Abbreviations1

Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. LS The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment…. 5 parts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–8. ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by David Cannadine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edition. OED Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. BD

Online edition.

Note 1. Note on pronouns: I have tried to keep my language gender-neutral. Where the gender of a person is specified, I have used the appropriate pronoun. When citing eighteenth-century sources where the author is anonymous, I have defaulted to the masculine pronoun because the writers were, generally, mostly male. Note on eighteenth-century typography: I have tried, where possible, to preserve the original typography of my primary sources including capitalisations, italics, and original spelling (when it does not obscure the word).

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

David Garrick as Richard III by William Hogarth, 1745 Macbeth, act I, scene V, Macbeth’s castle—[Sarah Siddons as] Lady Macbeth, 1800 by Richard Westall. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File S528m1 no.113 copy 2. Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, DC Drury Lane Theatre by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, ca. 1808. Rudolph Ackerman et al. The Microcosm of London, vol.1 (London: Methuen, 1904 [1808]), 228 Opera House [King’s Theatre] by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson. Rudolph Ackerman et al. The Microcosm of London or London in Miniature vol.2 (London: Methuen, 1904 [1808]), 213 The Pit Door by Robert Dighton, 1784 The Ghost Scene in Hamlet, ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us’, after a drawing by Thomas Rowlandson, 1743. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File S528h1 no.7. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC Mr. [William] Pelby (as Hamlet, at Drury Lane, Jan. 1826) by William Day, 1826. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File P381.4 no.1. Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, DC William Powell as Hamlet Encountering the Ghost, by Benjamin Wilson, ca. 1768–9. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, FPa88. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC

63

100 154

155 158

171

172 173

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9

Astonishment, Horror, and Fright, from Charles Le Brun, Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions. Amsterdam: François van der Plaats, 1702 [1698], n.p Horror, from Gilbert Austin, Chironomia. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1806, between 486 and 487 Mr. Garrick in Hamlet, act I, scene 4, by Benjamin Wilson, 1754. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File G241 no. 94. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

174 176 178

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

‘What is the nature of that peculiar faculty which makes one a good player’? asked James Boswell (1740–95) in his first essay ‘On the Profession of the Player’, written for the London Magazine in August 1770.1 Lacking any treatise on acting by David Garrick, the eighteenth-century exemplar of good acting, Boswell took it on himself to try and answer his own question. A ‘good player’, for Boswell, ‘is indeed in a certain sense the character he represents, during the time of his performance’, a view, he assures us had been confirmed by Garrick himself (‘that this is truly the case, I have been assured by that great ornament of the stage’) (14). However, being the character did not mean the actor believed it completely because, as Samuel Johnson (1709–84) observed, if this were the case for Garrick, then he would be either a ‘madman’ who needed to be locked up or ‘hanged’ as a ‘villain’ (15). Boswell wondered, then, what was the ‘nature of that mysterious power by which a player really is the character which he represents’ and concludes that ‘he must have a kind of double feeling. He must assume in a strong degree the character which he represents, while he at the same time retains the consciousness of his own character’ (18). For an actor to be in character meant allowing the ‘feelings and passions © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5_1

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of the character’ to ‘take full possession as it were of the antichamber [sic] of his mind’ while the actor’s ‘own character’ remained ‘in the innermost recess’ (18). At first glance, Bowell’s voice is surprisingly modern: A ‘good’ actor is the character while he acts, which involves allowing his character’s emotions to take hold of him. Here Boswell does not seem far from Stanislavsky, whose ‘system’ was founded on his belief that ‘acting’ was the same as ‘behaving’, and so if actors behaved onstage as a person would in life, they should invoke the same psychophysiological responses.2 But Boswell is silent on how an actor allows his emotions to ‘take possession’ of him, maybe because he leans (as many commentators did in the eighteenth century) on the Horatian commonplace: ‘As men’s faces smile on those who smile, so they respond to those who weep. If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself’ (‘ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adsunt humani voltus: si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi’).3 Horace’s saying is the epigraph to Boswell’s second essay and contextualises what follows: To ‘assume’ a character meant feeling that character’s emotions, and if an actor felt those emotions so, it followed, would the audience. We understand that people in strange lands do strange things and wear even stranger hats. We accept this is true, too, for people who look just like us but lived centuries ago (especially the bit about the hats). What is harder for us to accept, or even comprehend, is that how they felt or conceived of themselves as people might be profoundly alien to us; that yesterday’s humans might be as foreign to us today as many of today’s cultures are to each other. This insight is hardly new for anthropologists, as exemplified by Clifford Geertz who observed: ‘The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe […] is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures’.4 This idea of selfhood is just as ‘peculiar’ when considering people in the eighteenth century, and it was not how Boswell understood the self when he wrote on acting. The eighteenth-century self was not the ‘bounded, unique […] cognitive universe’ of the modern Western human but was intersubjective, mutable, and permeable. This is why Boswell can take his idea from acting and extrapolate out: ‘the double feeling which I have mentioned is experienced by many men in the common intercourse of life’ (19); but I want to stay in the theatre because the theatre—how it was produced and how it was experienced—provides unique insights into emotional behaviour

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especially in relation to other people. Here, the research data diverge from what Monique Scheer terms the traditional ‘royal road to individual feeling’ of emotions research, the ‘first-person accounts’ found in diaries and letters which tend to privilege subjective rather than intersubjective perspectives.5 How actors act, how audiences respond, and how these interactions are mediated are profoundly intersubjective: Actors, audiences, and mediating technologies need each other for anyone to feel anything at all. How actors performed emotions and how audiences were affected by these performances in the eighteenth-century theatre form the central enquiry of this book. The eighteenth century begins in the last years of the early modern period and ends on the edge of Michel Foucault’s biological episteme6 that began in the nineteenth century, and it is this combination of closeness and distance that makes an examination of how eighteenth-­ century actors and audiences ‘did’ their emotions so revealing. Not too close and not too near, these historical foreigners resemble us in many ways even though they are not really the same. In reconsidering emotions in the eighteenth-century theatre, this book focusses on two star actors, both of whom function as anchor points—one on each end, in the middle decades of the century—due to how they affected audiences at the time. Many who witnessed the acting of David Garrick (1717–79) and Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) left copious accounts of what they experienced. Both actors were celebrated as shining exemplars of their art: Garrick from his anonymous first performance at Henry Giffard’s Goodman’s Fields theatre as Richard III in 1741 and Siddons from her second London debut at Drury Lane, playing the eponymous heroine in Garrick’s adaptation of Thomas Southerne’s Isabella in 1782. To begin with Garrick is an obvious place to start; he was a European celebrity in his own lifetime and remains today the best-known English actor of the eighteenth century. He was also recognised as a game changer in terms of acting by his contemporaries. When Garrick appeared alongside the established tragedian James Quin (1693–1766) in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1702) at Covent Garden in 1746, the playwright Richard Cumberland (1732–1811) observed: ‘It seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene’.7 Not wishing to add to the vast body of Garrick literature that already exists I had hoped to write this book, not quite by avoiding Garrick’s acting, but by touching on it lightly. However, each path I followed seemed to lead to or from Garrick and the more “natural” mode of acting he purportedly began. But there were also contradictions; accounts written during his lifetime reveal the extent to which Garrick’s

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acting was firmly within the rhetorical tradition, and I will discuss these shortly. Sarah Siddons was the pre-eminent actress of the Romantic era, but most of her major roles were developed in the 1770s and 1780s. She debuted playing Portia at Drury Lane in 1775, the last season under Garrick’s management, but failed to impress in that or in any other role. Her contract was not renewed for the following season, and she returned to the provinces to work on her craft for the next six years. When she returned in 1782, it seemed she was a star fully formed but, as Chap. 3 will reveal, her own labour and the opportunity to play London roles in regional Theatres Royal allowed her to develop her craft. Some of the roles she played in the 1782–3 season stayed in her repertoire for the next thirty years: Isabella, Jane Shore, Belvidera, Calista, and Euphrasia.8 Performances such as these were characterised by a powerful emotionality that her audiences saw as “true to life” even though her acting seemed to reflect a return to the classicism that preceded Garrick. Siddons, like Garrick, acted using well-established conventions; nonetheless, audiences wept and shuddered during her performances, just as they did for him. If these two great actors were not diving deeply into wells of feeling to connect with their audiences empathically, then what was going on? How did their acting, using a conventional and formulaic repertoire of vocal and physical gestures, produce such powerful affective responses in its audiences? And was it just their acting, or was something else happening with audiences and how they were doing their emotions? I first noticed what seemed to be a contradiction in a letter written by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) to his friend and editor of the Deutsches Museum Heinrich Christian Boie on 1 October 1775 describing Garrick’s performance of Hamlet; it is an account which is frequently cited.9 The Anglophile Lichtenberg, a professor of physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the University of Göttingen, was making his second visit to England between August 1774 and December 1775. Lichtenberg’s letter describes the scene when Hamlet meets his father’s ghost: a key moment (or ‘point’) in the play for eighteenth-century audiences and a famous one for Garrick as an actor. Lichtenberg saw Garrick perform Hamlet twice, on 2 December and 12 December 1774, and after each performance made diary entries describing what he had seen.10 These diary notes, together with the later letter, describe in unusually great detail Garrick’s gestural and facial expressions. Lichtenberg brings to the task the sensibility of an experimental scientist and decodes how Garrick

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communicates different passions. He records in the first diary entry how Garrick’s Hamlet expresses ‘fear’ and ‘horror’ which ‘produce an astonishing effect’ (2 December), and in the second, he describes the passions Garrick performs as ‘astonishment’ and ‘horror’ (12 December).11 It should not surprise us Lichtenberg can readily identify these passions: What Garrick performs is easily recognisable from the descriptions in numerous English and European acting manuals which, with surprisingly little variation, detailed the same sets of expressions and gestures for Surprise or Astonishment, and Terror or Horror.12 Garrick used a conventional repertoire of gestures and facial expressions, a repertoire which had been systemised by all the theorists since Michel Le Faucheur and Charles Le Brun.13 But Lichtenberg offers more than an uninvolved reading of Hamlet’s passions; he records also how Garrick’s performance produced distinct physiological sensations in his own body, how a ‘cold shiver’ ran through him. From the silence in the auditorium, Lichtenberg surmises that the rest of the audience were similarly affected, and he describes how that silence lengthened and intensified (2 December); in the letter, he elaborates that the audience were ‘terror-struck’ into silence (1 October 1775).14 There is no distance between Garrick’s gestural representation of the passions and his audience’s profoundly embodied emotional response. Eight years after Lichtenberg witnessed Garrick, Sarah Siddons made her second and this time triumphant debut on the Drury Lane stage in 1782. A review of her as she appeared then was published five months later in The English Review (March 1783): So great too is the flexibility of her countenance, that it takes the instantaneous transitions of passion, with such variety and effect, as never to tire the eye. […] Her eye is large and marking, and her brow capable of contracting to disdain, or dilating with the emotions of sympathy or pity […] That nature might not be partially bountiful, she has endowed her with a quickness of conception and a strength of understanding, equal to the proper use of such extraordinary gifts. So entirely is she mistress of herself, so collected, and so determined in gestures, tone, and manner, that she seldom errs like other actors, because she doubts her powers or comprehension: she studies her Author attentively, conceives justly, and describes with a firm consciousness of propriety; she is sparing in her action, because nature, (at least English nature,) does not act much, but it is proper, picturesque, graceful, and dignified; it arises immediately from the sentiments and feelings, and is not seen to prepare itself before it begins. No studied trick or start can be predicted, no forced tremulation, where the vacancy of the eye declares the

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absence of passion, can be seen; […] no artificial heaving of the breasts, so disgusting when the affectation is perceptible […] she is an original; she copies no one living or dead, but acts from nature and herself.15

The Review’s author focuses on Siddons’ mobile face and how it could transition rapidly between passions, the pinnacle of the actor’s art in the eighteenth century and a talent she shared with Garrick. This ‘art of transition’, to use James Harriman-Smith’s term, was not only ‘a dynamic passage between two things’ but was itself ‘the iconic object of […] admiration, a moment of transformation or change’, and it is this aesthetic appreciation we can read in the account above.16 Siddons, as the Review’s author notes, has conceptual mastery of her parts founded in the playwright’s words, and she acts them ‘with a firm consciousness of propriety’. He emphasises how Siddons’ acting was always ‘proper, picturesque, graceful, and dignified’, but this graceful and picturesque acting emanates from ‘sentiments and feeling’ and appears to arrive spontaneously; it is not, in contrast, created through actor’s tricks, nor does the writer observe the empty performance of passions usually signified by the ‘artificial heaving of the breasts’ and ‘vacancy of the eye’. This writer, like Lichtenberg, had clear ideas about what constituted good acting and what bad, and much of what he observes correlates with good acting as we might understand it today; but we cannot assume from this, ipso facto, that Siddons’ acting was “good” because it was “natural”. Some critics have interpreted the above as commentary on the “naturalness” of Siddons’ acting,17 but the Review explicitly defines ‘English nature’ as being ‘proper, picturesque, graceful, and dignified’. By the late eighteenth century, the idea of nature improved through art was a commonplace, and wealthy English people and Europeans had been “improving” their gardens to a picturesque ideal for several decades.18 Throughout the Review’s description, its author highlights Siddons’ skilful use of her face and eyes, gestures, and voice; it is less her “naturalness” that impresses him than her command of acting conventions. He offers a close appraisal of her acting that suggests its affective power arose not despite her formal mastery, but because of it. Descriptions of Siddons’ acting, and Garrick’s even more so, are context sensitive; that is, they are inflected by who was writing and, more important, when. James Boaden (1762–1839), Siddons’ first biographer, quotes the Review’s account but makes some changes which, he claims, arise ‘more from a feeling as to composition than alteration as to sentiment’.19 For example, when recomposing the description of Siddons’ eyes,

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Boaden expands on the original: ‘Her eye is brilliant and varying like the diamond; it is singularly well placed; “it pries,” in Shakespeare’s language, “through the portal of the head,” and has every aid from brows flexible beyond all female parallel, contracting to distain, or dilating with the emotions of sympathy, or pity, or anguish’.20 Far from being minor, Boaden’s interpolations are significant and reflect over forty years of criticism since Siddons’ performance; this hindsight produces a more hagiographic account than in the original and distorts the focus of the (still complimentary) original review. And methodologically, so to speak, ‘there’s the rub’. The hindsight that both Siddons and Garrick became stars permeates retrospective accounts of their acting and how they affected audiences. So although we must, as Scheer suggests, ‘[attend] to observable behavior’, ‘third-person accounts’ such as Boaden’s need to be assessed in context if they are to be ‘valid documents of emotional practices’.21 Boaden’s language reflects the Romantic sensibility of the early nineteenth century: ‘Anguish’, for example, is not a passion mentioned in the original review. It is unsurprising that Garrick’s audiences recognised and acclaimed him for putatively “natural” performances; it is, after all, an axiom that every era sees the acting of the age that preceded it as less true to life than its own, which has supposedly advanced beyond the crudeness of the previous age. What was once thought “natural” is seen by later generations as mannered or a little hokey. Even though acting changes incrementally it is still possible to see, in retrospect, that those changes are greater than we thought. We need only look at performances by the great Hollywood actors of the 1970s to see how acting has changed. Although we may, even now, appreciate these performances as art, somehow their artfulness is more obvious. Marlon Brando won an Oscar for his portrayal of Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972) with padding stuffed into his cheeks; Garrick’s Hamlet made audiences shiver with terror while wearing a prosthetic wig to make his hair rise in fear.22 Using the beginning of Hamlet’s advice to the players (3.2.1–20) as a starting point, Paul Menzer argues how a persistent opposition between “artificial” and “natural” acting is maintained in criticism of early modern acting, and we can see the same dichotomy in discussions of acting in the eighteenth century, especially in relation to Garrick. Menzer argues that Hamlet’s speech ‘advanced a Whig history of mimetic style’, a history that promoted the plays and players of Shakespeare’s time as a triumph of sophistication over the ‘crudities of the past’.23 However, he observes, this ‘Whig’ narrative of theatrical history ‘fundamentally misunderstands trans-historical truths about performance:

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acting does not get better; it gets different. The best acting is “natural.” Bad acting is not’ (28). Eighteenth-century commentators employed the same arguments for the same reasons, and Hamlet’s advice was their touchstone, having gained additional authority with the passage of time. However, in the commercially competitive theatre world of mid-­ eighteenth-­century London, as in the early seventeenth century, actors struggled for economic and cultural capital; acting critiques such as Hamlet’s, writes Menzer, ‘deliberately fostered “naturalism” as a rhetorical/physical effect at the expense of the past’ (29). Menzer observes that the well-worn binary, between “artificial” and “natural” acting, pursues ‘an infinite regression—the explanation of one phenomenon by contrast with an earlier phenomenon that will in turn require the same type of explanation. In these terms, one can never arrive at the “natural”’ (29). This, he argues, is an effect of teleological history or history based in the unconscious biological metaphor of evolution—it moves constantly towards the “natural” which ‘exists at a vanishing point, to which acting is thought inevitably to progress but can by definition never arrive’ (30–1).

‘Here lies the golden secret; learn to FEEL’ Garrick had a highly mobile and expressive face, and he was famous for the rapidity with which he could transition between different passions, each new one as compelling as the last. It was this very facility, Roach observes, that made him a problem case for eighteenth-century acting theorists.24 In 1763, worn out from the stresses of managing the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for nearly twenty years, and appearing almost constantly onstage throughout that period, Garrick and his wife, Eva Maria (1724–1822), took their second tour to Europe, spending time in France and Italy.25 They were away from England for almost two years. In October 1764, the Garricks returned from Italy and spent several months in Paris, from December 1764 to April 1765, where Garrick was fêted in the great salons and met many significant figures of the Enlightenment, including Denis Diderot (1713–84). One evening in Baron d’Holbach’s (1723–89) salon Garrick performed his parlour trick of sticking his head out between two screens and cycling through a range of passions with his face. Diderot recalls in The Paradox of Acting (1773) that in the course of five or six seconds his expression will change successively from wild delight to temperate pleasure, from this to tranquillity, from

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t­ranquillity to surprise, from surprise to blank astonishment, from that to sorrow, from sorrow to the air of one overwhelmed, from that to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to despair, and thence he will go up again to the point from which he started.26

The great philosophe wondered whether the actor felt anything at all even though his audience, who included the editor of Correspondance Littéraire, Baron von Grimm (1723–1807), evidently did.27 As Grimm wrote, not long after the event, Garrick ‘indulges neither in grimaces nor in caricature; all the changes which take place in his features come from the manner in which his deepest feelings work. He never oversteps truth’.28 Diderot was not convinced: ‘Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face?’ he asked, and then answered, ‘I don’t believe it; nor do you’.29 When Diderot decided that it was impossible for Garrick to have felt anything, he displays a common fallacy of the audience: the belief that what an audience feels is in response to and reflects what an actor feels. The problem for Diderot, which he addressed in his Paradox, was how Garrick managed to evoke emotions in his audience when, apparently, he felt nothing himself. As Diderot wrote: The player’s tears 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.30

By comparing the crying actor to this series of different social performances, Diderot creates a sequence of analogies based on a binary separation between a performed exteriority and the apparently masked absence of an authentic interiority. Diderot argues that, even though the charlatan priest, caddish seducer, aggressive beggar, and heartless prostitute feel nothing, their false performances are nevertheless effective. To ‘strongly impress the illusion of his performance upon us’, wrote John Hill, the actor ‘must first impress it as strongly upon himself; he must feel every thing strongly, that he would have his audience feel’ to such an extent ‘that he for the time really is the person he represents’.31 The connection alluded to by Boswell is made explicit by Hill; following Horace,

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Hill suggests the actor only becomes the character when he feels it ‘strongly’, and that is how he can ‘impress’ it ‘upon us’. Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) approached the same question from the spectator’s perspective when he observed ‘whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator’.32 Here Smith examines the eighteenth-century idea of sympathy and emphasises its mutuality: The feeling can only be sympathetically felt by a spectator who is ‘principally concerned’ with the person expressing it. However, Smith argues such concern does not inevitably arise from viewing any passion, as there are certain passions which may excite quite different feelings (such as disgust) in the spectator; therefore, sympathy (or disgust) ‘does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it’.33 Smith’s sympathy is not analogous with empathy; if a tyrant is grieving the loss of his throne, then we do not grieve with him but may feel quite the opposite emotion. Our sympathetic feelings are aroused only when bad things happen to good people.34 And yet empathy, as defined by Horace, was at the heart of how eighteenth-­century theorists understood how actors felt passions or emotions and how audiences experienced them in turn. Written a century after Horace’s Ars Poetica, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was one of the eighteenth-­ century’s main classical sources, and in it he developed Horace’s fragment into a theory of emotion; to feel emotions so as to stir them in another person was, in Quintilian’s view, the ‘prime essential’.35 Working through what later became a significant paradox, Quintilian argued that ‘if we wish to give our words the appearance of sincerity’ [my italics] then we need to ‘assimilate ourselves to the emotions of those who are genuinely so affected’; in this way our ‘eloquence must spring from the same feeling’ that an orator sought to produce in his listener.36 The problem for Quintilian was: How would the actor or orator generate these emotions?37 Theorists in the eighteenth century attempted to answer Quintilian using variations on the same theme moving, as Joseph Roach shows, from mechanist theories early in the century to vitalism towards the end.38 Charles Gildon, supposedly assembling a collection of thoughts on acting shared with him by the great Restoration actor Thomas Betterton (1635–1710)—but in actuality, largely plagiarised from Le Faucheur’s work—proclaimed in his Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (1710) that ‘The Player […] ought to form in his Mind a very strong Idea of the Subject of

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his Passion, and the Passion it self will not fail to follow, rise into the Eyes, and affect both the Sense and Understanding of the Spectators with the same Tenderness’; similarly, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos claimed that ‘actors who truly impassion [se passionnent veritablement] themselves’ would not fail to move their audiences, for ‘men who are themselves touched [touchez] touch us without difficulty’; and Robert Lloyd maintained nearly thirty years after Dubos and half a century after Gildon that: ‘Here lies the golden Secret; learn to FEEL. / […] happy or distrest, / No Actor pleases that is not possess’d’.39 Although theories of how actors experienced emotions changed, for these writers and others, the end effect was always the same: Feeling the emotion in oneself was a necessary precondition for an audience to feel it too. Yet, from an earlier age, Shakespeare had Hamlet wonder at the player who, without any authentic motivation (the ‘motive and the cue for passion’), could convincingly represent fictional passions through his actions: ‘his whole function [suited] forms […] to his conceit’ (2.2.578–89). Hamlet still found himself moved by the player’s passion even though, despite appearances (‘visage wanned, / Tears in his eyes’), it seemed the player had no feeling for the role at all. Finding these authentic motives and cues for emotion are what modern actors are trained to do, and the cognitive turn in theatre studies has given this impetus. Bruce McConachie dismisses the social constructionist approach to emotions used by anthropology, preferring instead neuroscientific approaches, in particular, the work of Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp, who identify six basic systems of neurological functioning: ‘FEAR, RAGE, PANIC, CARE, PLAY and SEEKING’ [McConachie’s capitalisation].40 Through the biological theory of mirror neurons, McConachie links chemical brain-based operations to the operation of empathy which for him is ‘el camino real linking the emotional entanglements of actor/characters to the mirror neurons and chemical changes in the brains of audiences. We experience actor/Blanche’s PANIC and feel PANIC ourselves’.41 This, however, is not an explanation that takes us any further than Quintilian. It does not analyse nor account for how and in what ways ‘we experience’ the phenomenon of ‘Blanche’, nor does it explain how ‘Blanche’ is coded and presented to us; that is, as a particular character in a particular play in a particular genre of aesthetic performance that has its own, very specific, social, and historical conditions of emergence. As Joseph Henrich argues, universalist claims in relation to human psychology are based on data from studies which, overwhelmingly, have used North American college students (or those with a similar

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psychological make-up) as their research subjects; these epitomise what Henrich terms Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, and, he argues, the same conclusions cannot be reached when applied to the non-WEIRD societies that comprise the majority of the world’s peoples.42 Are the same neurological processes McConachie attributes to spectators watching A Streetcar Named Desire occurring in the mind of spectators watching Kathakali dance? Possibly they are, but as I discuss in the next section, they are not produced in the same way. According to Henrich, processes of cultural learning change brain chemistry, selecting for those cultural products and behaviours which, over time, are proven to aid survival and enhance life; at a societal level, he terms these processes ‘cumulative cultural evolution’.43 This means that the brain chemistries of different populations may diverge in small but significant ways, so we cannot take for granted apparently fundamental ideas—such as how we experience, communicate, and interpret emotions—as being the same for all people, in all places and at all times. Rob Boddice and Mark Smith also acknowledge, with a slightly different emphasis, the effect of culture on brain chemistry: ‘The brain–body and the world have become entwined in a dynamic of cause and effect that helps explain not only the historicity of language, but the historicity of the human itself’.44 Nevertheless, the assumption that whatever the actor feels an audience should feel too has become the orthodox view of how actors and audiences emotionally interrelate, not the least because of its impeccable classical antecedents. It is an apparent “truth” that allows, to follow Roach’s argument, a particular ‘paradigm’ of acting to be retroactively fitted to historical performance practices, conveniently ignoring and discrediting other possible paradigms.45 The problem for the historian is how to distinguish between what one can know or infer about historical acting practices, and one’s own contemporary assumptions about emotions and acting. Elizabeth Burns claims that contemporary humans living in the West have placed a ‘moral value […] on spontaneity and sincerity in personal relations [which] has produced a dichotomy between “natural” and “theatrical” behaviour’; therefore, we are suspicious of conventional or formulaic emotional expressivity, believing it to be both unconvincing and insincere.46 This problem of formulaic emotional expression and sincerity I will return to below, but historical hindsight does not bring insight when looking at the portrayal of emotions. Certainly, in the middle of the twentieth century, commentators on eighteenth-century acting still tended to

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fall on one side or the other of the externalist–internalist debates initiated by Diderot’s Paradox after its publication in the late nineteenth century. Garrick, in these accounts, was revolutionary because he apparently shaped his performances using internal motivation and attention to the given circumstances, unlike his peers who, as George Taylor concludes, supposedly relied on ‘external imitation, rather than internal recreation’.47 Taylor finds descriptions of eighteenth-century acting ‘unconvincing and smacking of technique’ and argues that it was only seen as ‘natural’ by audiences because ‘they too shared the common preconceptions of a more primitive psychology’.48 It is not my intention here to set up mid-twentieth-century theatre historians as straw men—my own research owes a great debt to the detailed empirical research carried out by these scholars—but Garrick’s reputation for naturalism persists if not in recent scholarship, then certainly in more popular accounts.49 Garrick created this reputation himself, as Leslie Ritchie argues, to delineate his “brand”, and it was then furthered by his peers after his death, many of whom had a stake in their continued association with his name; Garrick, she observes, was both the ‘entrepreneurial manufacturer and mediator of his own celebrity’.50 Even though his reputation is founded on the discursive opposition of “natural” acting and the conventionalised rhetorical style, if we examine Garrick’s acting through the lens of an eighteenth-century sensibility, it is a version of “nature” grounded in convention that we see. Critical audiences, schooled in the grammar of gesture and facial expression through painting, sculpture, and engravings, were well primed to appraise and emotionally respond to such performances. Replacing Quintilian’s rhetorical robes with the new clothes of neuroscience is not the answer. We need to go elsewhere for that.

Doing Emotions In ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, Arjun Appadurai observes that ‘praise, in both formalized and everyday settings […] has something of the formulaic and the hyperbolic about it. To the observer-analyst it often appears exaggerated, formal, and unrelated to the emotional interior of the person who praises’.51 Conventional representations of the passions in eighteenth-century acting can seem similarly ‘formulaic’ and ‘hyperbolic’ to modern eyes, which is why the conventionality of its greatest exponents tends to be downplayed, and the orthodox reiterations of Quintilian by eighteenth-century theorists are upheld as

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common-sense models of emotional interaction. But Appadurai offers another model that allows the ethnographic strangeness of past practices to return in place of our own common-sense ideas of empathy. Appadurai criticises Western universalist terms in relation to South Indian Hindu praise practices and, by refocussing his critical lens from the intercultural to the historical, we can ask the same questions of affect, emotions, and emotions work in an eighteenth-century context. He argues that emotions are not simply abstract states but live in ‘any culturally specific setting’ through how they are expressed in language, used in relation to others, and utilised to assert or undermine status, that is, used politically: These linguistic, public and political dimensions of emotions ‘engender formulaic modes of expression’ (92). We can see examples of how these ‘formulaic’ emotional modes are performed in footage of politicians paying their respects at shrines to their nations’ war dead: bowed heads, slow walk, restricted gestures; use of props, such as folding flags or laying wreaths; and so forth. It is the ceremonial framing of such actions that highlights the performativity of the emotions being enacted. In everyday life, as Appadurai observes, because emotions are embodied, we tend to see them as uniquely ours yet, at the same time, experienced and shared by all others. For these reasons we downplay the ‘formulaic’ linguistic and public/political aspects of emotions (92). What emerges, then, is a tendency to reify psychophysical responses in opposition to their codified or conventional verbal and gestural expressions but, as Appadurai argues, these are ‘merely our embodied doxa misrepresented as general theories about the relationship between affect and expression’; such theories, he writes, are anchored in specific ‘topograph[ies] of the self’ (92 [all italics in original]). For Appadurai, the binary relationship between an unchanging biological inner and a mutable social outer underpins all the ways in which emotions are spoken about in the ‘contemporary Anglophone world’, a relationship he traces back to the ‘New Testament, where, for the first time in Western History, a major normative claim’ was made that separated act from actor, intention from action, and ‘“inner states”’ from ‘“outer forms”’ (92–3). Fundamentally, what this means for Westerners is that the truth lies within, and nowhere is this more apparent than in theories of acting that follow Stanislavsky; as method acting teacher Edward Dwight Easty writes: ‘This truth can only come from the actor himself [sic] through […] long and sometimes arduous self-exploration’.52 The ‘topography of the self’ exemplified by method acting, demonstrates Appadurai’s Western topography, one ‘anchored in a spatial image of

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layers, of which the affective bedrock is seen as simultaneously the simplest, the most general, and the most directly tied to the somatic side of personality’ (93). Appadurai’s analysis provides both a salutary warning and a way forward: As twenty-first-century historians we need to be careful not to impose, as Taylor does, our own ‘topographies of the self’ on the past. Although the idea that an inward dwelling truth as the foundation for a private (and privatised) self emerged in the late sixteenth century, such a topography did not inform how actors prepared in the eighteenth century.53 For Charles Macklin (1699?–1797)—another actor extolled for his “natural” performances, and Garrick’s mentor—the labour involved with Shylock consisted of textual revision (he restored most of Shakespeare’s original script), observation, and quasi-historical research. How far he delved into his own mind, if at all, cannot be determined.54 Unlike a method actor, the eighteenth-century player saw himself as a conduit for the author’s words, and Macklin did not diverge from this. In his uncompleted notes on acting, ‘The Art and Duty of an Actor’, Macklin writes: As the Poet [playwright] has drawn an individual characteristic, so ought it to be represented: the Actor must take especial care not to mould and suit the character to his looks, tones[,] gestures, and manners; if he does so, it will then become the Actor’s character, and not the Poet’s.—No; he must suit his looks, tones, gestures, and manners to the character:—the suiting the character to the powers of the Actor, is imposture.55

Macklin’s instructions are explicit: The actor must represent what the playwright has written, and contrary to a method actor searching for “truth” from within, he must not ‘mould’ the character to himself, but himself to the character. By affirming the actor’s allegiance to the text, Macklin seems to pre-empt Stanislavsky, but any interiority is absent; instead of psychology he emphasises the actor’s facial expressions (‘looks’), voice (‘tones’), gestures, and deportment or figure (‘manners’). A ‘topography of the self’ that insisted on an “authentic” interior concealed by a falsifiable exterior would suggest that the acting espoused by Macklin was insincere and emotionally unconvincing because it lacked an inner dimension, whereas for Macklin’s audiences, his Shylock was definitive.56 This ‘topography of the self’ produces a discursive logic that forces any analysis into the dualist categories prosecuted by nineteenth-century acting theorists in response to Diderot’s Paradox: Does the actor act from the inside out or from the

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outside in?57 Consequently, a paradigmatic limitation is imposed because such analyses, Appadurai claims, lack any ‘consciousness that their constraining master image itself needs to be interrogated’.58 In his essay Appadurai offers a model of emotional interaction that does not conform to empathy theories because its theory of personality is not based on the layered Western ‘topography of the self’. If South Indian Hindus in their praise performances are not trying to communicate a sincere inner truth which is empathetically understood by the objects of their praise, then what are they doing? Rather than involving the ‘“inner” states’ of those involved, these performances of praise manifest as a ‘public negotiation of certain gestures and responses’ between the person praising and the person being praised, which, if successful, creates a ‘“community of sentiment”’ [italics in original] between them (94). Praise performances are public, and these performed gestures and responses are triangulated amongst a praiser, the object of praise, and any onlookers. Appadurai emphasises that it is not the ‘internal emotional world of the “actor”’ but the ‘emotional effects of praise’ [italics in original] which unites praiser and object of praise (and any audience) in a ‘generalized mood of adoration or admiration or wonder’ (109). There is a direct correlation between the words and gestures used by the praiser, interpreted by his or her target audience, and the feeling state that is evoked in the interaction. Appadurai turns to an analysis of rasa theory as it was first articulated in the second-century-CE text the Natyashastra of Bharat. The full extent of how bhavas (fundamental emotional states) are aesthetically transformed through performance into rasas (their ‘corresponding mood[s]’) is more complex than I can cover here (106).59 But it is how audiences experience rasas through a ‘publicly understood’ set of gestures which they critically appraise that resonates with eighteenth-century acting (107). The Natyashastra details how the performance codes must be learned by both performers and audiences, emphasising how expert appraisal is fundamental to a rasa performance. Royona Mitra writes that a ‘direct correlation’ between the ‘artistry’ of the performance and an audience’s knowledge of both that artistry and ‘the themes being communicated through it’ is needed for the ‘channel of communication to open up between their respective motor and sensory systems, to trigger transformation’.60 Significantly, there is no mention of empathy, of audiences feeling what the performers might be feeling. This theory also qualifies the action of mirror neurons suggested by McConachie; these do not fire automatically but depend on audiences having both the cultural and aesthetic

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knowledge to interpret and experience the performance. Rasa performances use a gestural and vocal techne ̄ that relies on shared expertise between performers and spectators; it is this that ‘triggers’ transformation.61 It is tempting to see similarities between the eighteenth-century’s ballets d’action and rasa performances, but the former drew from the same gestural well as eighteenth-century acting, and its principal elements— characterisation, facial expression—were inspired by contemporary acting practices.62 It is no accident, then, that one of its main exponents, the Swiss, Paris-based, choreographer, Jean Georges Noverre (1727–1810), had an ‘epiphany’ after seeing Garrick perform in 1755 and, as Edward Nye argues, his ‘repertoire show[ed] a marked change after this date which would seem to confirm the extent to which this was a defining moment’.63 Although the goal of eighteenth-century acting was not to aesthetically transform emotions into transcendent states, it still relied on similarly expert knowledge in its audiences, particularly amongst that section known as the Town. Expert appraisal was, after all, what Lichtenberg and the writer in The English Review were doing. Appadurai’s analysis of praise in Hindu India introduces the idea that emotions are not things we have but are practices we do. These emotional practices are not universal but occur in myriad ways according to how, where, and when they are practised. If Appadurai challenges the WEIRD universalism of Western approaches to emotions by emphasising the specificity of their cultural manifestation, Monique Scheer argues similarly they are ‘historical’: The body ‘cannot be timeless’ because it contains history within it, a history that consists of ‘sedimentations of evolutionary time’, of society, and of its ‘own history of constantly being molded by the practices it executes’.64 The everyday nature of emotional practices tends to elide this historicisation and leads to interpretive structures (or a ‘topography of the self’) such as interiority versus exteriority; as Scheer observes, if the ‘locus of “true feelings”’ is believed to be within, then the self that is produced is one that ‘daily engages in denigrating the “exterior” and “emancipating” the subject from it’ (206). This idea is the doxa that allows Western observers to judge Indian performances of praise according to their own standards of sincerity and insincerity which, in turn, arise from their own culturally specific ‘topographies of the self’.65 It is a misrecognition that occurs also in analyses of historical acting practices. Emotions cannot manifest without bodies and, because bodies are not timeless, it is necessary that we consider what Scheer calls the ‘doings and sayings’ upon which bodies depend; these include: ‘speaking, gesturing,

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remembering, perceiving sounds, smells, and spaces, manipulating objects’ (209). Scheer calls these ‘doings and sayings’ emotional practices and she organises them into ‘four overlapping categories’ which she suggests can be used for the historical analysis of emotions (209). Emotional practices consist of all the different ways in which we ‘do’ our emotions: Within ourselves, with other people, and in all the different places we inhabit. The practices that we use to try to achieve or to avoid different emotional states Scheer terms ‘mobilizing’ practices, and we use these to manipulate our bodies and minds so we can ‘evoke feelings where there are none, […] focus diffuse arousals and give them an intelligible shape, or […] change or remove emotions already there’ (209). These processes, Scheer writes, are commonly ‘referred to as “emotional management”’ and are part of the ‘ongoing learning and maintaining of an emotional repertoire’ (209). What is particularly relevant to the theatrical experience is that these processes of striving for, avoiding, or focussing emotional states do not occur within individual subjectivities but are ‘distributed’ and ‘carried out together with other people, artifacts, aesthetic arrangements, and technologies’ (209). One aspect of this which will become especially pertinent in later chapters is the sociality of emotional practices; Scheer argues that the presence of others and how they express emotions, especially when in a crowd, ‘can cause us to do an emotion and can lead to other managing practices’ (209). When literate and genteel members of the eighteenth-­ century audience experienced a tragedy, they would ‘do’ their emotions in a particular way; Boswell reveals how he mobilised his emotions in his account of preparing to see Garrick as King Lear: ‘I kept myself at a distance from all acquaintances, & got into a proper frame. Mr. Garrick gave me the most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, & I shed abundance of tears’.66 Even if Garrick was ‘feel[ing] grief’ (to return to Horace), Boswell did not expect his pleasurable tears to flow automatically in response to Garrick but recognised his own responsibility to manage his emotions. Twenty years later, audiences threw themselves into mobilising what Scheer terms ‘pleasantly unpleasant’ feelings in response to Siddons’ performances in displays of extreme emotional lability (210). Emotional interactions, however, rely on communicating emotions and, as Scheer observes, ‘The success of an emotional performance depends on the skill of the performer as well as that of its recipient(s) to interpret it’ (214). Such performances are context sensitive; to Indians engaged in praise performances, emotions are communicated appropriately because they understand both the genre and what is expected of

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praisers, the objects of their praise, and any onlookers. However, the form and content of this emotional communication is lost to a cultural outsider. Arguably, many of the interpretive skills possessed by eighteenth-century audiences are now lost to us also, and we would misunderstand both the context and way in which emotional communication occurred. For example, we would no longer recognise nor appreciate a quality such as decorum or possess the observational and linguistic skills necessary to describe it. Eighteenth-century actors were expected to please audiences when they communicated emotions through their voices, faces, and bodies. Audiences appraised actors’ vocal and physical grace and beauty together with an “it” quality: their sensibility or feeling for the role. All three were important: Feeling without the other two was unsatisfactory, just as voice and action without feeling failed to satisfy. Lichtenberg wrote of Ann Barry’s (1734–1801) Cordelia that he would ship all German actresses to London so they could ‘learn from Mrs. Barry how to use their arms’. Barry’s gestures, he continued, ‘are more supple and her air gentler. Her height and bosom could not be better. When in King Lear she raised her clasped hands to Heaven and then embraced her father, I was completely carried away’.67 Lichtenberg’s rapture at the not murdered Cordelia’s sentimental reunion with Lear (in Nahum Tate’s version performed in the eighteenth century) would not be shared by a modern audience, who in all likelihood would misinterpret and disparage her conventionalised gestures and her type-based acting. Another aspect of emotional practices that can cause intercultural and historical problems is Scheer’s next category, ‘naming’, which draws on William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotives’, a term which stresses the ‘performative nature of emotional expression’ (212). If emotional communication can be felicitous or infelicitous, based on context, then this can also occur when bringing emotions into language. In everyday life one might perform an emotive—for example, declare ‘I am happy’—but it is the context and situation which informs the meaning of the statement. There can be a disjuncture between the named emotion and the actual emotion, a split which has fuelled modern drama for over a century: characters in Anton Chekhov’s plays often exclaim they are happy when it is clear from the context that they are profoundly unhappy. Such splits occur rarely, if at all, in early modern plays where characters generally name the passions they are feeling. Onstage, emotives are also double coded: Audiences do not interpret actors performing emotions but interpret them performing the performance of emotions. Lichtenberg was able to name the passions

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he observed Garrick performing as Hamlet, because this is what emotives do; they allow us to reinterpret, re-experience, and understand emotional experiences after they have occurred (213). Emotives, as sociohistorically situated words and actions, are variable; a modern critic or actor would interpret Hamlet not according to an ideal character type but to a standard of believable psychology. The emotives they used might be different or, if the same, different in how they are used. This reinforces Appadurai’s and Scheer’s arguments: Emotions are cultural and historical; despite their biological universality, interpretative disjunctions do occur when the cultural or historical contexts of emotional expressions are misunderstood. Scheer’s last set of emotional practices are those involved with ‘regulating’ emotions. These are the social rules and expectations which govern how and in what ways emotions may or may not be expressed; in the study of emotions, these are called ‘emotional norms’ (215). Scheer observes that the practices regulating emotional expressions occur in any social group, and the ‘acquisition of the sensibility, or emotional style, of a group proceeds via tacit socialization as well as explicit instruction’ (216). The ‘emotional style’ of a particular group can be explicitly inculcated through ‘programs of teaching aesthetic appreciation of literature, art, music, and religion’, all of which assume a hierarchy of feelings between the ‘“highest”’ and the ‘“most true”’ versus ‘“primitive”’ reflexes of the body (216). Emotional responses are not simply learned conceptually but are embodied, so that the ‘imparting of the desired emotional response involves imparting the requisite bodily disposition’ (216). As I will discuss in Chap. 4, sentimentalism, the emotional practice that dominated the literate classes to such an extent it became a cultural phenomenon in the eighteenth century, was learned through the articulation of new emotional norms in literature which developed new languages of feeling, and these feelings manifested in new ‘bodily disposition[s]’ such as public weeping. Boswell’s response to Garrick’s Lear exemplified this new embodied disposition, and the audiences who cried and fainted in response to Siddons even more so. Scheer observes that an embodied disposition interacts also with ‘spaces, construing them, for example, as public or private’; in turn, emotional styles are ‘shaped by the kinds of spaces they are performed in’ (217). This is an important insight in relation to the theatre because not all theatre spaces are the same, and it is their particularity that mediates the theatrical event for both audiences and actors. Mark Seymour also recognises how different spaces provide ‘body-infusing [emotional] cues’, and

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he acknowledges this spatial characteristic through his term ‘emotional arenas’.68 The questions of how and why eighteenth-century actors performed in the ways that they did, and how and why audiences responded to them as they did, can be answered by considering how the theatre space itself mediated the interaction. As an ‘emotional arena’, a theatre is a very particular kind of public space, one that fosters and encourages the expression of emotions; but because these emotions are performed in the company of others, they are also subject to appraisal and regulation by other people. Audiences appraise not only actors’ emotional expressions but also their own, and regulate themselves accordingly. A theatre provides a uniquely contained and time-based environment that reveals how a society practices its emotions in all their complexity, and Scheer’s categories provide us with tools to ask several important questions of theatre in the middle of the eighteenth-century. What were the effects of social and aesthetic conventions both on actors’ performances and in the way they were experienced by audiences (including what gave audiences pleasure, and what did not)? What words did they use to describe their emotional experiences? How did emotional communication occur and when was it effective? What influenced this? What were the emotional norms that governed what could or could not be expressed, either by actors or spectators? And finally: What was the role of the theatre space itself in mediating emotional interactions? We can begin to find answers to these questions by analysing how historical subjects understood their own emotional arousals while bracketing out the implicit truth claims in their accounts. * * * Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century draws on contemporary accounts of actors’ performances, written from both sides of the footlights, and takes seriously how eighteenth-century people experienced the performance of emotions and the meanings they made of such performances. It is not an exercise in close reading, nor does it offer a detailed textual analysis of either play texts or the vast array of theoretical and other materials produced by various writers in the eighteenth century. Instead, following Scheer’s suggestion above, I have taken the textual sources used in this study largely at face value and as imperfect conduits to embodied action. Such an approach is consistent, too, with Boddice’s neurohistory, which ‘allows us […] to take historical actors at their word, with their perception of reality and their experience of it being both an

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expression of their cultural context and a manifestation of the way in which that context was embodied’.69 Like any historian who attempts to recover embodied behaviours from the pre-modern era, to understand how audiences and actors interacted I must rely on textual, and some visual, sources as evidence. Such a methodology is consistent with a ‘practice theory’ approach to the study of emotions which, writes Scheer, ‘also encourages us to read textual sources for traces of observable action’.70 For this study, these sources include published reviews, manuals of acting and rhetoric, diaries, poems, memoirs, biographies, and letters; they reflect the biases and prejudices of their authors, were frequently plagiarised, or were puff pieces written by or on behalf of actors (David Garrick most notoriously). They are particularly unreliable as objective evidence. But here I want to mark an important methodological distinction from scholarship with a more literary bent: The textual sources I use are not the objects of study in themselves but, rather, channels to embodied action. Accepting that I cannot, as Jean Marsden observes, ‘recreate the actual lived experience’ of eighteenth-century people, then I must employ an approach familiar to theatre historians of what she calls a ‘methodology of traces, probing archives for scraps of information that help piece together a history of performance and affect’.71 But where Marsden focuses on sympathetic effects in eighteenth-century play texts (except for her excellent chapter on Siddons), I concentrate on how emotions were produced between actors and audiences in theatre spaces. Emotions do not happen in a vacuum: They happen in bodies and in places, and a theatre is a cultural location that specifically allows and encourages emotional expressions. By reading this archival material for what it can tell us about actors’ bodies, bracketing out any truth claims different writers might make, what comes into focus is not so much the content of what they tell, but the terms they used to tell it. And these were remarkably consistent. Eighteenth-century commentators assessed actors’ voices, facial expressions (often focussed on the eyes), gestures, and deportment (often under the rubric of “figure”) and singled out actors for praise or condemnation in these terms. Such accounts are important because they reveal not only what critical observers saw as good and bad acting but, indeed, what for them was acting. Context is important so I am careful to distinguish, particularly when reading accounts of Garrick’s acting, between contemporary descriptions and those written in hindsight with hagiographic intent. Underpinning the critical categories of voice, face, and gesture was the idea of sensibility, which in the eighteenth century, according to Marsden,

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described a person’s ‘ability to feel, and thus be receptive to [moral] sentiment’.72 When critics referred to an actor’s sensibility, they were assessing both his or her feeling for a role and the extent to which the performance conformed to an ideal character type. To complicate matters further, sensibility was also an audience term, and most literate critics from the mid-­ century onwards took pains to perform, through their appraisals of actors, their own feeling responses as spectators. Here, again, when interpreting these appraisals, it is less important to know if audiences self-reported their emotional reactions truthfully, but more that they felt it necessary to represent themselves as responding in these ways. In either case, whether describing an actor’s feeling for a role or an audience member’s feeling response, we can think of sensibility’s broader, anthropological meaning as described by Geertz: ‘sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and […] the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep’.73 At risk of overstatement, one reason why the ‘Age of Sensibility’ got its name was because the ‘collective formation’ of mid- to late eighteenth-­ century English society—its ‘matrix of sensibility’, to use Geertz’s term—was its feeling for feeling.74 This is not to suggest, however, that audiences were homogenous in their responses. Such responses— often observed and noted by others present—were myriad, based on audience members’ class and gender, on the social and political contexts of individual performances, and on how audiences felt towards individual actors and theatre managements. Using David Garrick as its case study, Chap. 2 examines how an eighteenth-­century ‘topography of the self’, one that does not rely on the dichotomy of interiority and exteriority, can be discerned in how Garrick and Macklin approached their characters. Eighteenth-century actors interpreted their roles through a dramaturgy of character types which were defined by the passions that could be named with them; audiences, similarly, appraised actors’ performances on these terms. Garrick’s debut as Richard III in 1741 became the stuff of legends principally due to the retrospective accounts of two of his biographers, Thomas Davies and Arthur Murphy, both of whom promoted Menzer’s Whig view of theatrical history, emphasising the “revolutionary” impact of Garrick’s acting based on the “naturalness” of his portrayals.75 However, two earlier accounts, written without the benefit of hindsight—a letter to Garrick from the Reverend Thomas Newton (1704–82) and a review by Tobias Smollett (1721–71) writing as ‘Dramaticus’ in The Champion—exemplify how Garrick’s contemporaries focussed on the distinctiveness of his

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characterisations and his ability to transition rapidly between passions. Garrick’s performance of Macbeth demonstrates his virtuosic use of the dramaturgy of character types. His correspondence with two letter writers about Macbeth in 1744 and 1762 reveals how the common language of character types and passions is shared by his audiences. Although the writers disagree with aspects of Garrick’s interpretation, they still approach their own analyses from the dramaturgy of character types, and debate with him on these grounds. Staying with Macbeth, I turn to Jean Georges Noverre’s detailed description of Garrick performing Macbeth’s onstage death (in the eighteenth-century version of the play) which he enacted principally through his mobile facial expressions and elaborate gestural pantomime. Such acting, for Noverre, was consummate; Garrick embodied the death of a tyrant overcome by his conscience, and its effect on Noverre was gut-wrenching (‘il arrache les entrailles du Spectateur’).76 The dramaturgy of character types was fundamental to how actors approached their parts and how audiences interpreted their performances. Equally important was the ‘art of gesture’ used by actors to create their characters.77 Through facial expressions, gestures, and, not least, their voices, actors created moments of emotional intensity that audiences eagerly awaited. This art of the body was grounded in decorum, an ancient oratorical idea that referred to the physical grace and beauty expected of actors’ gestural performances. Decorum referred also to ‘propriety’, which The English Review lauded in Siddons, or how appropriately actors interpreted their parts according to character types. The same principle of decorum was applied also to actors’ voices, which were seen as central to how they communicated emotion, and Hamlet’s advice to the players (3.2:1–45) remained the touchstone for good acting in the eighteenth century. Chapter 3 examines how actors communicated emotions through their facial expressions, gestures, and voices and argues that successful emotional interactions relied on skilful interpretation by audiences. In the second half of that chapter, I focus on Sarah Siddons, whose career began with a failure to communicate: She blew her first big break because, despite her keen dramaturgical sensibility and ability to move audiences, the young actress’s voice did not meet London’s exacting standards. Although projection and volume alone do not guarantee a successful London performance, in Siddons’ case the failure to communicate emotions vocally hampered her ability to create ‘communities of sentiment’ with her audiences. After her dismissal from Drury Lane, Siddons honed her craft by playing in regional theatres—initially in the north of England, and then

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between Bath and Bristol—the smaller dimensions of which suited her voice. As Siddons developed as a regional actor, she met Thomas Sheridan (1719?–88), a key figure in the British Elocutionary Movement, who mentored her from her Bath days until his death. As an experienced former actor and manager, Sheridan coached Siddons and helped her select roles that showed her to advantage both dramaturgically and vocally. Siddons was at the height of her communicative powers when the Edinburgh law professor George Joseph Bell saw her as Lady Macbeth around 1809.78 Bell’s detailed notes of this performance help us to understand how Siddons used and stretched eighteenth-century rhetorical conventions to create a terrifying interpretation that redefined the role for generations. In the next two chapters I turn from examining actors’ communicating practices to the mobilising and regulating emotional practices of the audience. Chapter 4 reveals how eighteenth-century audiences, unlike modern theatre audiences, actively participated in the theatrical event: The social interaction between spectators, and between spectators and the stage, was fundamental. Audiences were anything but homogenous, and different groups of spectators came to the theatre with different intentions; these intentions affected how they participated in the experience and, consequently, how they practised their emotions. Siddons provoked extreme emotional responses from her audiences which, while not unknown in earlier decades, reached new heights from the 1780s onwards as the Cult of Sentimentality reached its peak. The mobilising and regulating emotional practices of audiences produced a distinct emotional style, sentimentalism, that was both communal and performative. No longer was it enough to feel the exquisite pain wrought by a tragic play; spectators now needed to express these feelings in the company of others. Reflecting the mutuality of the experience identified by Adam Smith, spectators would perform their sympathy for a character’s pain or suffering as a demonstration of their higher feelings. This moral sensitivity was coupled with a nervous sensitivity to which women and the young were thought to be particularly susceptible. When women shrieked with Siddons, cried and fainted, they mobilised their emotions in way that was consistent with the accepted emotional style, and regulating action was not seen as necessary. It was slightly different for men, who by the 1780s could cry at a play as a demonstration of their higher feeling but should not demonstrate the same excitability as women (although some did, and I begin the chapter with an example of male “hysteria”). The eighteenth-century theatre was

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notable for its high level of sociality, which was always present, and for the volatility and diversity of audiences that attended it. Audiences went to the theatre for a variety of reasons, not always for experiences of ennobling sentiment, and they might just as easily close a production down as ensure its success, irrespective of the quality of play or actors. Actors had to gauge the mood of the house finely for each performance as external events— such as political rivalries, perceived or actual misdeeds by actors or management—frequently imposed themselves on the theatrical experience. When all went well, when a popular play starring great actors such as Garrick or Siddons was on, and no external circumstances were agitating audiences, they might forget their factionalism. At these moments silence would descend. As the actors performed emotionally heightened monologues or scenes, they would gather the audience into the moment—suspended—until the end of the scene or monologue released them with a great cry and thunderous applause. This thundering applause directs us to how embodied emotions are always emplaced; in Chap. 5 I explore how the theatre space as an ‘emotional arena’ mediated what actors and audiences felt. The phenomenological experience of being in a theatre begins with the space itself; in the eighteenth century, this beingness came to the spectator, first, through noise and light, and next, through proximity to the stage. The noisy social interaction of spectators, and of spectators and actors, was produced by the fully lit auditorium and stage which enabled them to see each other. Despite the architecturally imposed class divisions of boxes, pit, and galleries, the theatre auditorium had a porosity that allowed the different classes to mingle: Servants held places for their masters in the boxes, and aristocrats, unable to secure a box seat, might fight for a place in the pit or galleries. Up until the 1790s when both Drury Lane and Covent Garden were significantly enlarged by Henry Holland (1745–1806), no place in the auditorium was far from the stage, with the best places being in the boxes flanking the forestage. Actors performed on that well-lit forestage, which positioned them in the centre of the house, with the audience on three sides. This relationship of stage to auditorium promoted a dialogic convention of actors including the audience as another interlocutor in the onstage conversation and created an intimacy between actor and spectator that was lost in the 1790s. The chapter concludes by returning to Georg Lichtenberg’s description of Garrick’s Hamlet, which he recorded in two diary entries shortly after seeing Garrick in 1774, and in two letters to Boie in 1775. Lichtenberg “decodes” Garrick’s ‘point’ of Hamlet meeting

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the ghost and names the emotions being performed by the actor; these conform to the conventional facial expressions and gestures codified in the acting manuals. But in sharing a detail from his experience of Garrick’s Hamlet, Lichtenberg illustrates how the theatre mediated his emotional response. Lichtenberg’s proximity to the actor (in all likelihood he was in the pit) allowed him to scrutinise Garrick’s face as if in a film close-up as he performed Hamlet’s first soliloquy. Garrick is as far downstage as he could go, his face lit by the footlights, and his performance draws Lichtenberg in, an experience he describes as ‘irresistibly poignant’.79 At its conclusion Lichtenberg and a stranger next to him cannot resist sharing their excitement about what they had just experienced. Their experience of communality typifies the emotional practices of audiences regardless of whether they were laughing or crying, mocking or rioting. The architecture of the theatres, which could function to separate audiences, on other occasions helped draw them together in ‘communities of sentiment’ with each other, and with the actors. In exploring this ‘foreign country’ of the eighteenth-century theatre, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century is fundamentally concerned with the bodies of actors and their audiences, how and where they interacted. It listens to voices from the past as ethnographic informants who have their own idiosyncrasies and biases and attempts to take them at their word. By listening to voices such as these, this book does not seek to confirm their claims—because sometimes their untruths may be more interesting than the truth, and because theatrical history, like the knowledge transmission of acting itself, is handed down through anecdote.

Notes 1. James Boswell, On the Profession of a Player [reprinted from The London Magazine for August, September, and October, 1770] (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1929), 11. All further citations within the text. For a full analysis of Boswell’s three essays on acting see James Harriman-Smith, ‘What James Boswell Tells Us about 18th-Century Acting Theory’, Literature Compass 17, no. 10 (2020): 1–11. 2. Rose Whyman, The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 42. 3. Horace, Ars Poetica; or, Epistle to the Pisos, in Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H.  Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

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University Press, 1926), 458; https://books.google.com/books?id=Cnst AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA458#v=onepage&q&f=false. 4. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Basic Books, 1983), 59. 5. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 218. 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 2nd ed. (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001 [1966]), 375–422. 7. Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, vol. 1 (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., 1807), 81. 8. Respectively from David Garrick and Thomas Southerne, Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage (1757); Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (1714); Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d (1755); Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1703); Arthur Murphy, The Grecian Daughter (1772). 9. This letter was published in 1776 in the Deutsches Museum, a literary magazine first published in January of that year, and Lichtenberg’s letters were written especially for publication. Mare and Quarrell write it was ‘one of the most influential periodicals of the day, and Lichtenberg’s articles on the English stage were widely read and discussed’. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits to England as Described in His Letters and Diaries, trans. and annot. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 9–11; 124. A second letter to Boie, dated 10 October 1775, will be addressed in Chap. 5. 10. Lichtenberg’s diary dates. LS confirms Garrick performed Hamlet on both these dates. 11. Ray Sutton, ‘Further Evidence of David Garrick’s Portrayal of Hamlet from the Diary of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’, Theatre Notebook, 50, no. 1 (1996): 8–9. 12. Dene Barnett (with Jeanette Massy-Winstrop), The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987). 13. Charles Le Brun, Méthode pour Apprendre à Dessiner les Passions: Proposée dans une Conférence sur l’Expression Générale et Particulière (Amsterdam: François van der Plaats, 1702 [1698]); Michel Le Faucheur, Traitté de l’Action de l’Orateur; ou, De la Prononciation et du Geste (Paris, 1657); Charles Gildon, Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (London: Robert Gosling, 1710); Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et la Peinture, 2 vols. (Paris, 1733). 14. Sutton, ‘Further Evidence’, 8; Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 10. 15. The English Review; or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1783), 259–60.

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16. James Harriman-Smith, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 7. 17. See Laura Engel, ‘The Personating of Queens: Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons, and the Creation of Female Celebrity in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Macbeth: New Critical Essays, ed. Nick Moschovakis (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 241. 18. Glen McGillivray, ‘Nature Transformed: English Landscape Gardens and Theatrum Mundi’, M/C Journal 19, no. 4 (2016); https://doi. org/10.5204/mcj.1146. 19. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors, vol. 1 (London: H. Colburn, 1827), 287. 20. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 1:288. 21. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 218. 22. Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993 [1985]), 58. 23. Paul Menzer, ‘That Old Saw: Early Modern Acting and the Infinite Regress’, Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 28. All further citations within the text. 24. Roach, Player’s Passion, 111. 25. From 1747 to 1762 Garrick performed 1557 times (excluding speaking prologues and epilogues). See George Winchester Stone Jr and George M.  Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 659. 26. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting [1773], trans. Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 38. 27. Roach, Player’s Passion, 111. 28. Cited in Frank Arthur Hedgcock, A Cosmopolitan Actor: David Garrick and His French Friends (New York: Duffield & Co., 1912), 234. (‘Garrick ne connaît ni la grimace, ni la charge; tous les changemens qui s’opèrent dans ses traits proviennent de la manière dont il s’affecte intérieurement; il n’outre jamais là vérité’; Correspondance Littéraire, 15 July 1765, 319). 29. Diderot, Paradox, 38. 30. Diderot, 17. 31. John Hill, The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing (London: R. Griffiths, 1750), 106. See also Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 170. 32. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A.  Millar; Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1759), 5. Thomas Dixon argues that, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the word ‘emotion’ did not encompass the range of mental and physical processes we use it for today.

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‘Emotion’, when the word was used (and Dixon argues, it was used rarely at this time), denoted ‘any kind of agitation or disturbance (of the mind, of the body, of a mass of people, or even in the weather)’. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 62; 63. Early thinkers on the subject, such as Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, distinguished between the troubling and disturbing passions and the milder, socially directed affections, and all the distinctions made in the eighteenth century could be traced back to this division. But, as Dixon observes, ‘increasingly, during the 18th century, “emotion” came to refer to the bodily stirrings accompanying mental feelings’ and by the mid-century “emotion” had ‘moved from the bodily to the mental domain’. Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review 4, no. 4 (October 2012): 339; 340. As we saw with Smith above, who used ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ in the same sentence, the slippage between these two terms was certainly happening by mid-century. 33. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 9. 34. For a discussion of Smith’s view of sympathy as a moral virtue and its relationship to theatrical spectatorship, see Jean I. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 21–2. 35. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.  E. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1922), vol. 2, VI.2.26:431–2. 36. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI.2.27:433. Also discussed in Roach, Player’s Passion, 24. 37. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI.2.29:433. 38. Roach, Player’s Passion, 58–115. 39. Gildon, Life of Betterton, 70; Dubos, Réflexions, I.iv:39–40, cited in Daniel Larlham, ‘The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 53, no. 4 (2012): 443; Robert Lloyd, The Actor: A Poetical Epistle to Bonnell Thornton Esq., (London: R. & J.  Dodsley, 1760), 4. For a discussion of Gildon’s biography see David Roberts, Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24–38. 40. Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 93–4. Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp, ‘Energetic Effects of Emotions on Cognitions: Complementary Psychobiological and Psychosocial Findings’, in Consciousness and Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice, and Selective Perception, ed. Ralph D.  Ellis and Natika Newton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2005), 23–56.

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41. McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 95. 42. Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2020), 56–7. Henrich’s acronym. 43. Henrich, Weirdest People, 65. Henrich writes that ‘Operating over generations, cumulative cultural evolution can generate increasingly sophisticated technologies, complex languages, psychologically-potent rituals, effective institutions, and intricate protocols for making tools, houses, weapons, and watercraft. This can, and often does, happen without anyone understanding how or why practices, beliefs, and protocols work, or even that these cultural elements “do” anything’ (65–6). 44. Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 21. 45. Roach, Player’s Passion, 11–17. 46. Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life (London: Longman, 1972), 4. 47. George Taylor, ‘“The Just Delineation of the Passions”: Theories of Acting in the Age of Garrick’, in Essays on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage, ed. Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), 71. 48. Taylor, ‘“Just Delineation”’, 71. Variations on these themes have persisted, for example in Mark S. Auburn, ‘Garrick at Drury Lane, 1747–1776’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2: 1660–1895, ed. Joseph Donahue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 147; Nicholas Dromgoole, Performance Style and Gesture in Western Theatre (London: Oberon Books, 2007), 137–40; Stanley Wells, Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 34. 49. See ‘David Garrick’ in Wikipedia, which makes the bold if unsubstantiated claim that, ‘As an actor, Garrick promoted realistic acting that departed from the bombastic style that was entrenched when he first came to prominence’ (accessed 21 October 2021). The pull of the dichotomy between real and rhetorical persists in scholarship that does not focus on theatre history as such. See Barry King’s chapter ‘Garrick as Personage’ (63–88) in his Taking Fame to Market: On the Pre-History and Post-History of Hollywood Stardom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), in which he affirms the rhetorical aspects of Garrick’s acting in faintly pejorative terms: ‘his approach to character playing […] was indicative or statuesque rather than existentially saturated’ (64). 50. Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1. 51. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine A. Lutz and

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Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105–6. All further citations within the text. 52. Edward Dwight Easty, On Method Acting (Orlando, Fla.: House of Collectibles Inc., 1978), 16. 53. See Geoff Baldwin, ‘Individual and Self in the Late Renaissance’, Historical Journal 44, no. 2 (2001): 341–64; and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 54. Jane Wessel, ‘Possessing Parts and Owning Plays: Charles Macklin and the Prehistory of Dramatic Literary Property’, Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (2015): 274–5. Tiffany Stern argues that Macklin and Garrick, the great innovators of the mid-century, instructed actors to imitate their own performances so that ‘the “new” acting was at least as prescriptive as the “old”’. Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 266. 55. Charles Macklin, ‘The Art and Duty of an Actor’, reconstructed in John Thomas Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, Esq., vol. 1 (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., 1799), 364. 56. The extent to which Macklin was seen as the ‘original’ Jew of Venice is discussed by David Francis Taylor, who makes the compelling case that Macklin’s body—‘always marked as static, solid, and abrasive’—which became withered and twisted as he aged in the part onstage, was fundamental to the ontological slippage between actor and character. David Francis Taylor, ‘Macklin’s Look’, in Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London, ed. Ian Newman and David O’Shaughnessy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022): 27–8. 57. See William Archer, Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888). 58. Appadurai, ‘Topographies’, 93. All further citations within the text. 59. See Bharat Gupt, ‘Rasa,’ in Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, vol. 5, ed. Karen Christensen and David Levinson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2002), 56–7. 60. Royona Mitra, ‘Decolonizing Immersion: Translation, Spectatorship, Rasa Theory and Contemporary British Dance’, Performance Research 21, no. 5 (October 2016): 92. 61. Mitra, ‘Decolonizing’, 92. Here I am emphasising transformation as an audience experience, but Gupt warns that who experiences rasa and how they do so is debated amongst scholars (Gupt, ‘Rasa’, 57). 62. Edward Nye, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: The Ballet d’Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 63. Nye, Mime, 90. 64. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 193; 201. All further citations within the text.

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65. Appadurai, ‘Topographies’, 92. 66. Entry of 12 May 1763. James Boswell, London Journal (New York: Dover, 2018), 189. 67. Letter to Ernst Gottfried Baldinger, 10 January 1775, in Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 68. 68. Mark Seymour, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 11. 69. Rob Boddice, ‘The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 62 (October 2017): 14. 70. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 218. 71. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling, 7–8. See Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A.  McConachie, eds., Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), especially essays by Vince (1–18), Donahue (177–97), and Postlewait (248–72). 72. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling, 13. 73. Geertz, Local Knowledge, 99. 74. Geertz, 102. See Northrop Frye, ‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’, ELH 23, no. 2 (June 1956): 144–52. I am mindful, in making this claim, of Rob Boddice’s argument that there was a ‘surfeit of cold-­heartedness and “unfeeling behaviour” [in the eighteenth century]. It is only in contrast to coldness, as it were, that sensibility derives its meaning. It is sensibility’s other, and examples of it are legion’. Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 132. 75. Menzer, ‘That Old Saw’, 28. 76. Jean Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets [première édition], par M.  Noverre, maître des ballets de Son Altesse Sérénissime Monseigneur le Duc de Wurtemberg, et ci-devant des théâtres de Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Londres, etc. (Lyon: Aimé Delaroche, 1760). Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/lettressurladans00noveuoft/page/210/ mode/1up, 210 , accessed 2 June 2020. 77. Barnett, Art of Gesture. 78. Transcribed in H. Fleeming Jenkin, Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., by the late Fleeming Jenkin …, vol. 1, ed. Sidney Colvin, M.A., and J. A. Ewing, F.R.S. (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1887), 1:45–66. 79. Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 15.

CHAPTER 2

Playing to Type

I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage, and pointing at the wittol Altamont and heavy-paced Horatio—heavens, what a transition!—it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene; old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward, bright and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age.1

At age fourteen, the playwright Richard Cumberland witnessed David Garrick and James Quin acting together on the Covent Garden stage in 1746 as Lothario and Horatio, respectively, in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1702)—with Lacy Ryan as Altamont. Cumberland’s account, now a cliché in Garrickiana, describes the radical contrast in acting between the twenty-nine-year-old Garrick and the fifty-three-year-old veteran, Quin. It is an often-quoted creation story in the apotheosis of David Garrick: Cumberland’s words are compelling and seem to offer a first-­ person account of what Joseph Roach describes as ‘a theatrical version of what historians of science would term a revolutionary paradigm shift’.2 Cumberland contrasts the lightness, ease, and vigour of Garrick with the heaviness and conventionality of Quin, and in doing so, reiterates the principal features of the Garrick revolution (‘old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward’). These features were established © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5_2

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from his debut in 1741 and repeated continually into the twenty-first century. Almost from the outset of his career, Garrick’s name was associated with an acting style that was seen as “natural” and true to life. His contemporaries, the former actor and bookseller Thomas Davies and playwright Arthur Murphy, wrote posthumous biographies that emphasised Garrick’s transformation of acting, a narrative reiterated by Percy Fitzgerald in the nineteenth century, by George M.  Stone and George M.  Kahrl in the twentieth, and by Jean Benedetti in the twenty-first (amongst many others).3 To view the impact of Garrick in such a light is beguiling, as Robert D. Hume writes: ‘This is exciting, satisfying: modernity sweeps away the rubbish of the dead past’. But, as he goes on to ask, ‘How much of this is true?’4 For Hume it was not true, and Garrick’s influence was not as decisive as Roach suggests. Evidence supports Hume’s assertion that ‘there is no reason several radically different acting styles cannot be practised at the same time even in the same city’ and, even though an ‘acting style may seem odd, or off-putting, or old-fashioned—but it is not wrong in the way that a discredited hypothesis is’ in science.5 Furthermore, Hume observes that as ‘no School of Garrick ever emerged’ he seems to have had little influence on acting styles later in the century, as exemplified by John Philip Kemble (1757–1823), a ‘stately, rhetorical actor whose style was radically unlike that of Garrick’.6 Garrick’s biographers notwithstanding, some historians have suggested, as Peter Thomson writes, that Garrick ‘did not dispense with the rhetorical style he inherited’; rather, as Alan S. Downer argues, he was in fact ‘more of a refiner than a reformer of previous acting techniques’.7 I agree; although acting styles do not remain static, they change incrementally as the theatre and society change. For these reasons it is important to situate Garrick as part of the rhetorical tradition which, as David Wiles observes, saw acting on the pre-modern stage as a ‘branch of rhetoric, a means of using embodied speech to sway the emotions of an audience’.8 These were the fundamental processes through which ‘communities of sentiment’ were formed, and they remained essentially the same—both before and after Garrick—with actors and audiences creating emotional bonds through their shared understanding of gestural, vocal, and character conventions. Moreover, as this chapter will explore, the ‘topography of the self’ understood by an actor like Garrick (and his audiences) was not the layered self, based on an ‘affective bedrock’, but was a self based on the ‘public negotiation of certain gestures and responses’ between him and his audiences.9 How these were interpreted and

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understood by audiences is a topic for later chapters. Using Garrick as its case study, this chapter will analyse how a dramaturgy of character types underpinned Garrick’s characterisations. Far from producing stiff and stereotypical characters, it was an approach that allowed talented actors considerable interpretive flexibility while still working within the bounds of convention.

The Whig View of Theatrical History Garrick’s origin story as the greatest actor of the eighteenth century is well-known, but still bears repeating for the tropes it establishes about his acting. He debuted as Richard III in London in the theatre at Goodman’s Fields managed by his friend Henry Giffard (1694–1772).10 The constraints of the 1737 licensing act, which established a monopoly restricting the performance of spoken drama to the two Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were ingeniously circumvented by Giffard. He offered evenings of musical entertainment, for which audiences bought tickets, followed by a play given for free. On 19 October 1741, Giffard presented Colley Cibber’s (1671–1757) adaption of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1721) with the role of the eponymous villain billed to be played by ‘A GENTLEMAN (Who never appeared on any stage)’.11 Garrick approached the task of becoming an actor seriously. His choice of Richard for his London premiere was based both on his understanding of character types and his awareness of what an audience would or would not accept. It was a play, wrote Davies, that ‘had always been popular’ due to the variety of its ‘historical and domestic facts’ and because it had ‘such affecting scenes of exalted misery and royal distress’.12 For Garrick in particular, ‘Richard was well adapted to his figure; the situations in which he is placed are diversified by a succession of passion [sic], and dignified by variety and splendor [sic] of action. A skilful actor cannot wish for a fairer field on which to display his abilities’ (38). Perceptively, Davies observes that any actor taking on an established role needed to contend with audience ‘prejudices […] in favour of an established performer’ but, with Colley Cibber having retired from the stage, Garrick’s only competitor was James Quin who, although ‘popular’, had a ‘manner of heaving up his words, and [whose] laboured action, prevented his being a favourite Richard’ (39–40). With no definitive models with whom to compete, the coast was relatively clear.

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Garrick had a small audience of friends and supporters on opening night but, as Davies implies, many were possibly just there to witness another theatrical aspirant humiliatingly fail in public, ‘stimulated’ as they were ‘rather by curiosity to see the event, than invited by any hopes of rational entertainment’ (39). At first Garrick’s ‘easy and familiar, yet forcible style in speaking and acting’ gave pause to critics who were ‘long accustomed to an elevation of the voice, with a sudden mechanical depression of its tones’ manipulated to create claptraps; but here they were confronted with the ‘just modulation of the words, and concurring expressions of the features from the genuine workings of nature’ (40). Nonetheless, once Garrick ‘had gone through a variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proofs of consummate art, and perfect knowledge of character, their doubts were turned into surprize [sic] and astonishment’ (40). Although the houses were not as full as later in the season, Richard III ran for seven nights in succession, returning slightly over £216.13 The crowds that flocked to Goodman’s Fields to see Garrick in Richard III drew audiences away from the two patent theatres on the nights he performed to such an extent that their managers protested against Henry Giffard’s ‘legal fiction’ and threatened to close him down.14 Charles Fleetwood (?–1747), then the manager of Drury Lane, secured the young star’s services for three performances at the end of the season on 26, 28, and 31 May 1742 for the unprecedented sum of £400; Garrick reprised Richard III and Bayes from George Villiers’ (the Duke of Buckingham) The Rehearsal (1701), and King Lear.15 Fleetwood quickly struck a deal with Garrick to perform at Drury Lane for the 1742–3 season for £500.16 Garrick soon dominated the London theatre world, first as an actor and second as a manager. He skilfully translated the cultural capital of a “new” style of acting into economic capital, initially by commanding impressive fees for his engagements; this put him in a position six years after his appearance at Goodman’s Fields to accumulate more cultural and economic capital by becoming the co-patentee, along with James Lacy (1696–1774), of Drury Lane in 1747.17 As Leslie Ritchie observes, Garrick transformed himself—in today’s terms—into a recognisable ‘brand’ with the following attributes: • variety, or the ability to play comedy and tragedy, and major and minor parts • nature, or the ability to produce a sense of affecting truth in performance with apparent ease

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• brilliancy and liveliness of eye • perfection of (small) proportion • vigorous action and elegance of gesture • pleasing vocal modulation and transitions on stage; and off stage, bluff, friendly, broken speech • prologue-smithery, epilogue-mastery, and play-writing and adaptation • harmonious domestic life and genteel reception of aristocratic favour • nationalism, British drama and Shakespearean drama18 Without doubt, Garrick was uniquely talented: as an actor and playwright, a theatre manager, and as a marketer. To distinguish himself within the competitive field of London theatre he recognised he needed to establish and promote himself as what Ritchie calls ‘Brand Garrick’, as being more en pointe than both his competitors and his immediate predecessors.19 The attributes that Ritchie synthesises in her list are closely tied to his acting, either to his talent or to his ‘pleasing’ and perfect physical attributes, and are repeated in both praise and criticism of the actor. Notably, in the six attributes that relate to his acting, only one refers to his “naturalness”, and this is qualified as the ‘ease’ with which he can produce ‘a sense of affecting truth’ in his performances. Garrick’s skill in writing testifies to his quick-wittedness with words, and the last two attributes speak to his moral character both as a man and as an English patriot. After his initial anonymous foray at Goodman’s Fields, Garrick’s name was always on playbills until he retired, except when he travelled overseas, and he had nearly daily exposure in the press.20 Name recognition, therefore, was very high, and what that name represented was well-understood; Garrick’s name, wrote Edward Purdon, ‘has given [Drury Lane] a lustre, which no efforts of the manager of the other house [Covent Garden] could ever attain to’.21 The Garrick ‘brand’ and what it meant provides the discursive context for claims about Garrick’s acting, especially in retrospect. Thomas Davies quickly established the Whig narrative when he wrote of Garrick’s debut in his biography of the actor: ‘Mr. Garrick shone forth like a theatrical Newton; he threw new light on elocution and action; he banished ranting, bombast, and grimace; and restored nature, ease, simplicity, and genuine humour’.22 Davies’ language is not accidental. In Alexander Pope’s intended epitaph for Isaac Newton, he wrote: ‘Nature, and Nature’s Law, lay hid in Night: / God said, “Let NEWTON be,” and all was Light’.23 One need only substitute Garrick’s name for Newton’s to get the same

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sense that Garrick en-lightened like Newton, but in a theatrical context. And Davies explicitly defines, forty years after the event, just what constituted the “Dark Ages” of acting (‘ranting, bombast, and grimace’) which were ‘banished’ by Garrick’s ‘new light’ (or luminosity, per Cumberland’s metaphor, above). Davies, together with his beautiful and more talented wife Susannah (1723–1801), had been an actor in Garrick’s Drury Lane company from 1752 to 1763 and, also like Arthur Murphy, had at times a rocky relationship with his manager. He eventually abandoned acting for bookselling and writing biographies, with which he had some modest success.24 Davies’ accounts reflect his knowledge of the field as a working actor in one of the patent companies and as one who experienced Garrick’s acting up close. He had played Ross in Garrick’s Macbeth and provides a vivid account from the wings of Garrick and Hannah Pritchard (1709–68) performing the murder scene. Davies is an acute and sympathetic reporter who wrote not long after the events he described, but as a Garrick partisan, and one who hoped to profit posthumously from his name, Davies had an investment in promoting his old manager. In another exemplary demonstration of theatrical Whiggery, Arthur Murphy wrote of Garrick’s debut: And yet the drama [of that time before Garrick] was sunk to the lowest ebb: in tragedy, declamation roared in a most unnatural strain; rant was passion; whining was grief; vociferation was terror, and drawling accents were the voice of love. Comedy was reduced to farce and buffoonery. Garrick saw that nature was banished from the theatre, but he flattered himself that he should be able to revive a better taste, and succeed by the truth of imitation.25

Murphy was writing sixty years after the event, and more than twenty years since Garrick’s death. As a playwright who fell in and out—and in again— with Garrick, and had many of his works produced by the manager, Murphy was not a disinterested party; like Davies, to the extent that Garrick’s legacy was upheld, so too would be Murphy’s, due to his close affiliation with the Garrick brand.26 Murphy reaffirms the fundamental discursive opposites: Against the overblown, tasteless, and artificial acting of the time, Garrick sought to restore ‘nature’ to the theatre, defined by Murphy as ‘better taste’ and ‘truth of imitation’. Cumberland’s anecdote which began the chapter, published in his Memoirs five years after Murphy’s biography, also had Garrick seeking ‘to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age’.27 For Cumberland and Murphy, the theatre needed to

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be “bad” for Garrick to make it “good” (both as an actor and a producer of their plays). The Whig narrative advanced by Cumberland and Murphy followed the logic of infinite regression by contrasting the theatre of Garrick as more ‘taste[ful]’ than what had come before. By the time he died in 1779, Garrick had transformed the English theatre. Unsurprisingly, retrospective accounts of his acting published after his death espoused Whig perspectives; the improvements Garrick made to the theatre and acting were, to these writers, inevitable. Hindsight imposes a powerful centripetal force that draws all later commentary to the one conclusion: that Garrick’s acting was revolutionary or paradigm changing. But was this really apparent from the start? What did his contemporaries writing at the time see as important? Boaden, after writing his biography of Siddons, published a collection of letters written to Garrick and letters written by him. Amongst the earliest of these was correspondence from the Reverend Thomas Newton (1704–82), thirteen years Garrick’s senior and, like him, originally from Lichfield. The well-connected Newton saw Garrick perform several roles, including Richard when he reprised it in December 1741 and again later in the season in April 1742. In a letter dated 19 April 1742, Newton takes the opportunity to compliment the young actor on his performance of Lear and comments on the singularity of each of Garrick’s roles: The thing that strikes me above all others, is that variety in your acting, and your being so totally a different man in Lear from what you are in Richard. There is a sameness in every other actor. Cibber is something of a coxcomb in every thing; and Wolsey, and Syphax, and Iago, all smell strong of the essence of Lord Foppington. [Barton] Booth was a philosopher in Cato, and was a philosopher in everything else. His passion in Hotspur and Lear was much of the same nature, whereas yours was an old man’s passion, and an old man’s voice and action; and in the four parts wherein I have seen you, Richard [III], Chamont, Bayes, and Lear, I never saw four actors more different from one another than you are from yourself.28

Although Newton praises the young actor, it is not yet the Whig perspective we see from later writers; what impresses him is the distinctiveness of Garrick’s characterisations. Colley Cibber and Barton Booth (1682–1733) were not bad actors—Cibber, after all, had just retired the part of Richard III, making it available for a newcomer, and it was his version of the play Garrick used—but the characters of the actors themselves tended to

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infiltrate every role; they were what we might call today personality actors. While Garrick biographies such as Murphy’s and Davies’ may be insightful and informed, they were still written after Garrick’s career had ended, and composed with the hindsight of their authors recounting the early days of future greatness. Newton’s letter, in contrast, is at the very beginning— just six months after Garrick’s debut—and, although he is clearly a fan, the full extent of Garrick’s impact on acting is still in the future. Although he could not know this, the roles Newton witnessed Garrick perform at Goodman’s Fields would become amongst his most performed roles: He played Bayes ninety-one times, Lear eighty-five, Richard eighty-three, and Chamont sixty-six times. In the following year, during the summer season in Dublin, Garrick would premier Hamlet, his most acted tragic role, which he would perform ninety times.29 But even at this early stage, the contours of what made Garrick’s acting so unique are starting to appear. Newton’s account, like the later biographies, clearly differentiates Garrick from his contemporaries and those who immediately preceded him, and the ways in which that difference manifests are clear. Tobias Smollett, writing as ‘Dramaticus’ in The Champion in October 1742, again highlights the distinctiveness of Garrick’s characterisations and provides further clues to what audiences found so compelling about his performances: He is not less happy in his Mien and Gait, in which he is neither strutting or mincing, neither stiff nor slouching. When three or four are on the Stage with him, he is attentive to whatever is spoke, and never drops his Character when he has finish’d a Speech, by either looking contemptibly on an inferior Performer, unnecessary spitting, or suffering his Eyes to wander thro’ the whole Circle of Spectators. His Action corresponds with the Voice, and both with the Character he is to play; it is never superfluous, awkward, or too frequently repeated, but graceful, decent, and various. In the Parts of Richard III, King Lear, the Lying Valet,30 and Bay[e]s in the Rehearsal, he is as different as they are opposite, and enters into their Spirit with great Justness and Propriety. […] the best and only Model is Nature, of which Mr. Garrick is as fine a Copy as he is of the Players he imitates [in the Rehearsal].31

Put together, the observations of Smollett and Newton reveal Garrick’s versatility; he could perform any role, whether high or low, in tragedy or comedy, and could apparently embody his characters so completely that each was distinctive. His voice was well-modulated and always suited to the character and action of the play, and he was devoid of the vocal sins of

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the old school: ranting, canting, and toning.32 Nor did he indulge himself in alarming lapses of character (which Smollett implies were frequent in other players) but remained focussed on the scene.33 Smollett emphasises how Garrick’s roles are ‘as different as they are opposite’ but that he performs them with ‘Justness and Propriety’, two important eighteenth-­ century acting values that no good actor could be without. ‘Nature’ gets a look-in at the end of the account but, ironically, in an observation directed to The Rehearsal, a satirical play about players rehearsing: Garrick copies nature, and ‘imitates’ the players. The ‘Nature’ copied by Garrick is metatheatrical. Seen through a Whig lens, these observations of Garrick’s early acting can, and have been, interpreted as harbingers of incipient realism on the stage, but only if certain aspects of his acting are cherry-picked at the expense of others. Garrick’s biographers, Stone and Kahrl, report that audiences experienced ‘the effects of ease, particularization, and credible depth, a freedom from the influence of convention, self-expression without self-consciousness, seeming freedom from premeditation and deliberate design, fidelity in representing attitudes or events, along with seeming spontaneity’.34 We need only look to the opposing qualities—stiffness, generalisation, shallowness, conventionality, and premeditation—and the distinction between “good” and “bad” acting seems obvious, but only if we accept the ‘topography of the self’ it implies. Stone and Kahrl’s list valorises qualities such as ‘self-expression’, originality, and ‘spontaneity’, which are inheritances of Romanticism; but these were not valued—or at least not to the same extent—in the middle of the eighteenth century. Newton emphasises the distinctiveness of Garrick’s characterisation: no ‘four actors’ in the four roles were, in his opinion, ‘more different’ than Garrick was from himself. And this was his job, as Smollett in the Gentleman’s Magazine observed, Garrick was ‘so much of the Person he represents, that he puts the Playhouse out of our Heads, and is actually to us and to himself, what another Actor would only seem to be’.35 These accounts of actorly transformation, Dror Wahrman argues, are not ‘metaphorical’ but describe what the writers see as ‘literal transformation[s] […] predicated on a looser and more mutable sense of what a person’s identity was to begin with’; these ideas were made possible by a ‘nonessential notion of identity that was not anchored in a deeply seated self’.36 Although he does not use this language, Wahrman defines an eighteenth-century ‘topography of the self’ as the ‘ancien régime of identity’, which he contrasts with the ‘modern regime of selfhood’ that emerged in the last decade

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of the century.37 So when Smollett as ‘Dramaticus’ takes us into the mirror maze of Garrick’s characterisations (copying Nature and imitating the players in The Rehearsal) he offers an ‘understanding of identity’, as Lisa A. Freeman argues, ‘not as an emanation of a stable interiority, but as an unstable product of staged contests between interpretable surfaces’.38 Smollett and Newton, like Garrick, are very much citizens of Wahrman’s ‘ancien régime of identity’, so it is the actor’s transformational characterisations and the grace and propriety of his voice and gestures (more of which in the next chapter) that critically occupy them. Unlike Cumberland, Murphy, and Davies, they do not see an epoch-changing actor, but recognise one of considerable talent renewing conventions which had become stale in the performances of lesser actors. Menzer argues, ‘actors constantly and necessarily update—though do not improve upon—expressive habits’; these renovations in acting styles ‘not only authenticate[ ] the actors’ bodies but simultaneously create[ ] a useful archaism’.39 The archaic style of acting that was apparently being superseded by Garrick became a useful straw man; this is why an actor such as Quin, acting with Garrick in 1746, was later positioned by the Garrick-Whigs as old-­ fashioned, despite his popularity and commercial appeal at the time.40

Character Types Jean Georges Noverre wrote that Garrick was ‘a faithful worshipper of nature [fidelle imitateur de la nature]’ but, and this is an important qualification, he ‘preserved that sense of propriety which the stage requires even in the parts least susceptible of grace and charm’ (Letter IX).41 To be a nature ‘worshipper’ (or ‘imitator’) according to Noverre did not mean that “good” actors discarded ‘propriety’; on the contrary, they reinforced it in the more graceless and charmless parts of their performances. Garrick, Noverre continues, ‘never over-acted or under-acted a character which he represented; he gave that exact interpretation which other actors nearly always miss; [Garrick possessed] that happy sense of proportion which characterises the great actor and which leads to truth’ (Letter IX). Noverre emphasises the moderateness and proportionality of Garrick’s acting, qualities which were equally extolled by Hamlet. These would unarguably be associated with “good” acting today but, as we shall see shortly, how an eighteenth-century actor like Garrick demonstrated these values in his acting was quite different.

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When Garrick faithfully imitated nature, he did not just portray social life as he observed it but passed the particularities of his observations through the lenses of general types. An account of how sophisticated such an approach could be is repeated by Diderot, who apparently overheard a conversation between Garrick and François-Jean de Beauvoir, Chevalier de Chastellux (1734–88): However sensible nature may have made you, if you only play yourself, or the most perfect object of nature that you know, you will only be mediocre […] Because for you, for me, for the audience there is an ideal man [homme idéal] who might exist and who, in the circumstances, would feel differently from you. That is the [imaginary] being [l’être imaginaire] you should take for your model. The more strongly you imagine him, the greater, rarer, more wonderful, more sublime you will be.—Then you are never yourself?— I take care not to be. Not me or anything I know in the world around me, Monsieur Le Chevalier. When I rend my heart, when I make inhuman cries, it is not my heart, they are not my cries, but the heart and cries of some other I have imagined but who does not exist [ce sont les cris d’un autre, que j’ai conçu, et qui n’existe pas].42

We do not know if Garrick spoke these words, or if Diderot was ventriloquising through him, but the actor had left Paris only two years previously and Garrick actively corresponded with members of Baron d’Holbach’s salon, the “Coterie Holbachique” (of which the Chevalier was also a member).43 Certainly, as we shall see below, the views being expressed by Garrick are consistent with how other actors viewed characterisation and with how Garrick did himself. Garrick invokes an ‘ideal man’ or ‘imaginary being’, shared by actors and audiences alike, that an actor should make his model. To merely imitate ‘nature’ is to produce mediocrity in performance. Playing types was an approach to characterisation that was common practice for actors in the eighteenth century, so Garrick is not telling the Chevalier anything new. Murphy claimed that Garrick spent a year in substantial private study before attempting to play Richard III, study which, in addition to reading Shakespeare, as Davies wrote, focussed on ‘a variety of parts in the different walks of acting. The Clown, the Fop, the Fine Gentleman, the Man of Humour, the Sot, the Valet, the Lover, the Hero, nay, the Harlequin, had all been critically examined, and often rehearsed and practised by him in private’, and, as we shall see below, these types were fundamental to how he and other actors interpreted their parts.44 What Garrick urges to the Chevalier is the need to create

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“unnatural” types, ‘sublime’ or transcendent character types that are brought into being through the force of his imagination. When they wrote about acting, critics tended to focus on abstract qualities attributed to the textual character (apart from some remarkably catty comments on actors’ bodies, or criticism of the most egregious miscastings). These included honourable qualities such as Innocence, Modesty, Manliness, Dignity, Love; or their shadows: Avarice, Treachery, Envy, Malice. When audiences appraised actors’ performances, they assessed whether their characters were convincing or plausible according to these idealised qualities rather than believable in the modern sense of having psychological coherence and depth. As Dene Barnett emphasises, ‘action and deportment’ were integral to the portrayal of noble figures in tragedy, not just as decoration but as an essential expression of what they were.45 The ‘ideal man’—a being who might exist but ‘would feel differently’ to how members of an audience might in the fictional situation—was central to how actors, including Garrick and Macklin, understood characterisation.46 This ‘idealization’ was embedded in the dramaturgy of tragedies and, as Jeanette Massy-Westropp argues, offered playwrights ‘notable advantages’ such as the ability to concentrate ideas and increase their ‘clarity and force’; these ideal character types which had expected patterns of behaviour ‘were instantly recognized [by audiences], in an age when the values they represented were universally accepted’.47 Audiences required actors to embody recognisable types, within the bounds of decorum, but they could add their own personal inflections and idiosyncrasies. There were, on occasion, successful reinterpretations of types: Macklin’s portrayal of Shylock as a figure of malice rather than of ridicule (as depicted in the Lansdowne version) was one example; Garrick’s reinterpretation of Macbeth (as I discuss later in the chapter) was another.48 Ideal character types were held firmly in the critical consciousness of audiences, and they expected to see them embodied by actors. Both Macklin and Garrick transcended the conservatism of their audiences through their performances—and the latter’s satirical pamphlet An Essay on Acting (1744)—but, in general, spectators had little tolerance for actors who failed to play the ideal character type or attempted something entirely new.49 It is this conservatism about which Cumberland complained in his account of Garrick’s 1746 performance in The Fair Penitent. Despite the dynamic newcomer, audiences still enjoyed Quin and Susannah Cibber’s performances, and although Garrick ‘struggl[ed] to emancipate’ them from the ‘slavery they were resigned to, and though at times he

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succeeded in throwing in some gleams of new born light upon them, yet in general they seemed to love darkness better than light’ [italics in original].50 Actors played character types and it was through these that their performances were appraised. Although he could not have seen her in her youth, Davies criticised Hester Booth’s (1690–1773) Ophelia by suggesting she failed to represent the ideal character type: her ‘figure, voice, and deportment, in this part, raised, in the minds of the spectators, an amiable picture of an innocent, unhappy, maid; but she went no farther’.51 The Theatrical Review criticised the talented Ann Barry in similar terms when she acted Juliet, claiming she was ‘too much of the Woman, and consequently less an object of Love’ in an otherwise complimentary account (‘the best Juliet now on the Stage’).52 The implication here was that, like Hester Booth, the more “natural” qualities of her performance actually detracted from her portrayal of the ideal type. Samuel Cautherley (1747–1805), Garrick’s ward, played Romeo to Barry’s Juliet, unsuccessfully, according to The Theatrical Review’s critic who thought him ‘unequal’ to the task, ‘having neither figure, features, voice, sensibility, nor expression, suitable to the Character’.53 Regardless of whether or not this was true, the criticism of Cautherley attacks his lack of propriety in voice, face, and body/gestures and his lack of sensibility or feeling for the role. The hapless Cautherley, whose last season at Drury Lane this was to be, neither looked like Romeo, sounded like him, nor had an appropriate range of emotional expressions which, all together, signalled his failure to portray in word, body, and feeling the character ideal of Romeo. ‘Sensibility’ was an important term in the eighteenth century, which I will examine in Chap. 4, but here it refers directly to the emotional quality of the character type which needed to be matched by the actor. Character types had a defining emotional quality (‘sensibility’) that actors were expected to portray and sustain throughout the performance. The toning Susannah Cibber, criticised by Cumberland, performed Isabella in Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage (1757)––later to be one of Siddons’ great roles–– and was described by Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle as having ‘a soul truly capable of every tender passion, a soul that feels, feels thoroughly, the contagion catches the audience; then find fault, if you can’.54 Spranger Barry (1719–77), extolled for his portrayal of tender lovers, apparently failed as Richard III in a performance at Covent Garden in 1757 because he did ‘not seem to carry with him that covered Spirit of Enterprize, which is so peculiar a Mark of Character: He is too turbulent in all the Scenes where he is alone; and the Humour of Richard, which

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never should take off the Mask, is with him too free and open’.55 What we see in these criticisms is a correlation between character types and emotions; naming an emotion, to use Scheer’s term, is to name also a defining type (e.g., Isabella, in the example above, must be defined by the quality of tenderness).56 Nowhere are the connections amongst actor, character type, and emotion more apparent than in Charles Macklin’s definitive portrayal of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. When Macklin presented his “revolutionary” reinterpretation of Shylock, he replaced one anti-Semitic character type with another: Lansdowne’s comic buffoon with the villainous Jew. Although to modern eyes Macklin’s Shylock was a stereotype and stage villain, eighteenth-century audiences found his portrayal terrifying because, as his biographer William Cook wrote, they ‘saw the passions of revenge and malice so forcibly and naturally displayed […] that they judged he must be something like the monster in private life which he was upon the stage’ [italics in original].57 Once again, like Garrick, it is the actor’s capacity for transformation that so affects his audiences, and it is this transmutable identity to which they responded. But before opening night on 14 February 1741, it was not a foregone conclusion that his portrayal would succeed, due to the immense popularity of the clown type established in Lansdowne’s adaptation, as his biographer John Kirkman wrote: ‘he was not quite sure of the kind of reception that he was to experience from a crowded audience, whose taste might be perverted, and whose attachment might be pre-engaged’.58 Macklin’s portrayal of a malevolent Shylock was a triumph, not least because his audiences saw it as being true to what Shakespeare wrote because it plausibly conformed with eighteenth-­ century understandings of a literary [stereo]type and with social prejudice. Just how ingrained this type was, is revealed by a reviewer who compares Macklin’s Shylock with that of John Henderson (1747–85). Henderson, a talented actor known as the ‘Bath Roscius’, played Shylock in London for the first time on 11 June 1777 during the summer season at the Haymarket theatre and later that same year at Drury Lane.59 Despite Henderson earning critical approval, the following account reveals how definitively Macklin held the role he had created thirty-six years earlier: Macklin looks more like a Jew than [Henderson] […] there is an inflexible severity of countenance about him, which, the least inflated with passion, gives the finest picture of the poet’s Shylock […] The part of Shylock, for the first two acts, and towards the close of the play, is level, deliberate speaking,

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[…] Here Mr. Henderson, indeed, has great merit, and it seems to be his forte; […] the comparison runs pretty equal, with this difference, that Macklin possessing the advantage of face, marks his sentences with additional force. […] I never saw Macklin in [the trial] scene, that, forgetting the fiction, my blood did not run cold at the spectacle. […] [in the 3rd act, Macklin] mingles the pang of avaritious [sic] sorrow, with the malicious joy of revenge, so naturally powerful, as harrows up the attention to the business of the stage […] in short, Henderson plays this scene very well, but Macklin does not play it [at] all; he is, for that moment, the Jew himself […] torn by the same contending passions, and exhibiting the result of all in the same voice and features.60

The hold that a character type can have on the public is apparent in the first sentence, which equates the craggy, hook-nosed Macklin/Shylock with the ‘Jew’ of Christian prejudice; Macklin presents ‘the finest picture of the poet’s Shylock’, a comment that echoes an aphorism often attributed to Alexander Pope after Macklin first performed the character: ‘This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew.’61 Once again we can see the reviewer naming passions (‘avaritious [sic] sorrow’ and ‘malicious joy’) and in the third act being convinced that, unlike Henderson, Macklin is not playing the role but has transformed himself into Shylock. Macklin achieves his masterful portrayal of a character type based on the playwright’s words through his ‘voice and features’; the reviewer can critically assess these and still ‘forget[ ] the fiction’ to such an extent that his blood runs cold. Returning to Wahrman’s argument discussed earlier, it is the eighteenth-­ century’s looser definition of the self that allows this reviewer to claim Macklin ‘is, for that moment, the Jew himself’ [my emphasis], and we see also the implied doubleness of being the character and not being it, wrestled with by Boswell. Macklin’s portrayal of Shylock was definitive, and all other actors attempting the role, no matter their talents, paled in comparison. The Garrick veteran Thomas King (1730–1805) played Shylock in 1771 at Drury Lane, and was compared in The Theatrical Review to Macklin, against whom he was judged almost ‘equal’ except in the ‘Level Scenes’, where he did not quite achieve the same ‘sententious gloominess of expression’ that Macklin had.62 The practice of actors “owning” the parts in which they were successful created a connection in the public mind between the character and the actor that was difficult to break; once his or her ‘special gifts’ were associated with the ‘particular part’, writes Percy Fitzgerald, an actor’s ‘appearance, […] tones, and manner, are

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curiously associated with it, [and] a new performer appears strange and unfamiliar’.63 This was why Drury Lane’s manager, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), objected to Sarah Siddons’ changes to the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth: because it differed from how her great predecessor, and Garrick’s co-star, Hannah Pritchard had performed it.64 Macklin, in a fragment of a lecture entitled ‘The Art and Duty of an Actor’, advances a theory of character types which attempts to articulate a relationship between particularity and generality. Macklin begins by stating that an actor’s ‘duty’ is to ‘know the Passion and the Humour’ of his characters so well he is able to ‘define and describe it as a Philosopher’.65 Macklin outlines an analytical practice for actors that begins with knowing how to perform with the face and eyes (‘looks’), voice (‘tones’), and body (‘gestures’) and links these to social and theatrical classifications of characters. With this awareness, the actor must mould himself ‘to the characteristic that the poet has given to a particular Character’.66 In the next paragraph, Macklin links his theory of the Passions to a classificatory system of character types: It is manifest, that Passions take their habits and characteristics in Attornies [sic], Barristers, and Judges; Subalterns and Generals; Curates and Bishops; Clerks and Merchants; Sailors, Midshipmen, Captains, and Admirals; Labourers, Farmers, Yeomen, and rustic ’Squires; Dancing-masters, Fiddlers, Toothdrawers, Music-masters, and Hair-dressers: they are all to be distinguished into genus, species, and individual characteristics, like Dogs, Fowl, Apples, Plums, and the like genus, species, and individuals of the creation.— Women must be classed in the same manner. Now, unless the Actor knows the genus, species, and characteristic, that he is about to imitate, he will fall short in his execution. The Actor must restrict all his powers, and convert them to the purpose of imitating the looks, tones, and gestures, that can best describe the characteristic that the Poet has drawn: for each Passion and Humour has its genus of looks, tones, and gestures, its species, and its individual characteristic.67

This theory of acting advanced by Macklin is not clear, and his attempt to frame his ideas within Carl Linnaeus’ (1707–78) binomial naming system only obscures things further.68 In Linnaean taxonomy, plants and animals (including humans) are divided, first, into a general type or family (genus) and next into specific examples within that type (species); after this binomial naming, a brief description of characteristics is added. In Macklin’s system, each actor should have many genera defined by their passions and

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humours (different character types), and how an actor performs the passions and humours defines each species. Although he offers no further explanation of his Linnaean taxonomy of acting in this fragment, a little further on, in another fragment entitled ‘On Acting’, Macklin asks: ‘What is Character?’ and answers his own question with: ‘It is that which is distinguished by its own marks from every other thing of its kind’.69 So how does that work? The occupational types listed by Macklin are not the genera but are grouped according to species: legal, military, religious, administrative, rustics, and entertainers (although with the curious addition of ‘toothdrawers’ here). Thinking of passions, then, one can have, for example, a vengeful general (passion and military species), but revenge can also exist in a range of species and through different genera. We need to turn to Davies’ earlier list of the types studied by Garrick (‘The Clown, the Fop, the Fine Gentleman, the Man of Humour’ etc.) so as possibly to get a clue to what the genera are in this context. Unlike Macklin’s list of occupational types, those apparently studied by Garrick were, in contrast, theatrical types. Although it is not clear if this is what Macklin meant, I believe that the theatrical types constitute the genera, and the occupational types define the species. This means that perhaps ‘Music-masters, and Hairdressers’ are species in the genus of fops, and the rustic group perhaps a species of clownishness. A vengeful, foppish Music-master is quite different from a vengeful, clownish yeoman, and both are different from a vengeful, heroic general. Despite Macklin appropriating contemporary scientific terminology to explain an approach to acting that had existed for half a century, he does nonetheless articulate the relationship amongst three aspects of an eighteenth-­century actor’s approach to characterisation: determining the general character type, delineating the appropriate passions and humours of the specific example, then finding the ‘looks, tones, and gestures’ actors must use to portray the type and passions/humours as specifically written by the playwright. Garrick’s ‘ideal man’, if we try and map him against Macklin’s ideas, would be defined by the passions and humours appropriate to his genus or character type (for example, hero or clown); his unique species would be his social or occupational role, which would have ‘individual characteristics’, all of which were written by the playwright. Although such an approach might suggest a cookie-cutter approach to characterisation, within these constraints there was still considerable room for an actor to individualise his or her performance. We need only look to two of Shakespeare’s characters—Othello and Macbeth: Both are Heroes

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(genus) and Generals (species), yet they are governed by different passions (Jealousy and Ambition) and are distinctly different in their characteristics. Garrick had befriended Macklin in 1741 and, although there is no evidence other than their friendship, it seems unlikely that someone as curious and ambitious as Garrick did not take advantage of his older friend’s experience, particularly after witnessing his Shylock earlier that year. William Cook writes that ‘Garrick, too, who, from the beginning of his public life to the end, never neglected the pursuit of any information relative to his art, must have seen in Macklin, talents, experience, and assiduity, which it was his interest to cultivate’.70 Macklin was consulted on the choice of Richard for Garrick’s debut and had ‘approved the young player’s motive for the selection of Richard—namely, its suiting his figure [his short stature] so much better than any other’.71 Even though they had recently fallen out due to a failed industrial dispute with Charles Fleetwood, Macklin still had influence on the young actor, and Macklin’s later pseudo-­ Linnaean “theory” of acting in fact describes what was then, and had been, common practice amongst actors.72 The theory of types articulated by Garrick to the Chevalier in Diderot’s Salon conforms to how he, Macklin, and other actors had approached characterisation for the past twenty years. Garrick’s purported conversation with the Chevalier would have occurred during his visit to Paris in 1764–5, and Macklin’s lectures were intended to be given at his short-lived coffee house (1754–5)— alarmingly named the ‘British Inquisition’—about which, Cook wrote, ‘it is impossible to think, without ascribing to the author a degree of vanity almost bordering on madness’.73 Ten years before Macklin’s ‘British Inquisition’, Garrick published an anonymous semi-satirical attack against himself before his new version of Macbeth, and as a pre-emptive strike against his critics.74 In An Essay on Acting (1744), Garrick begins his discussion by distinguishing between the passions and humours: the first he assigns to the domain of Tragedy and the second to Comedy.75 However, he muddies this distinction when he writes that ‘in some Cases, Passions are Humours, and Humours Passions; for the Revenges of an Alexander and a Haberdasher, may have the same Fountain, and differ only in their Currents’.76 The governing passion for both is ‘Revenge’, but whereas Alexander’s revenge will not be satisfied except by ‘the total Subversion of his Enemy’s Kingdom’, the Haberdasher’s will be satisfied by ‘rolling his Antagonist in the Kennel’.77 ‘Alexander’ (‘Hero’) and the ‘Haberdasher’ (‘Sot?’) are very different types (genera),

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and yet each experiences and is defined by the passion of revenge. How an actor would portray these differences is where individuation within these constraints would occur. Overall, the theory of character types corresponded with Wahrman’s ‘ancien régime of identity’, which emphasised membership of a defined group over individual identity; to know yourself ‘meant knowing the generic type to which you belong and abstracting yourself, as it were, into a collective category: its imperative was outward, not inward’.78 Modern minds, which tend to associate generic type with stereotype, struggle with this because of our own tendencies to equate authenticity with uniqueness and individuality. The ‘topography of the self’ suggested by Wahrman is relational, which leads us again to sensibility, which ‘in its eighteenth-­ century sense, did not originate in the heart: it originated in the surrounding environment, and only subsequently left its marks on the heart’.79

Macbeth Macbeth was one of Garrick’s most popular roles, and one of his most demanding, but he never performed it again after the retirement and death of his great co-star, Hannah Pritchard, in 1768. By examining Macbeth through the eyes of his contemporaries we can see the extent to which they understood these theories of types, passions, and humours together with the vocal and gestural arts needed to express them. As occurred throughout his career, Garrick engaged in several cordial exchanges with correspondents on his interpretation of the role, and although he left no treatise on acting (apart from the satirical Essay) his views on acting can be gathered from this substantial correspondence. Garrick premiered Macbeth in 1744, just three years after he debuted as Richard III and three years before he became manager of Drury Lane. The precocious young actor was taking some risks; not only was the veteran Quin a favourite in the role, but the version of the play he acted in was William Davenant’s version (1664), and London audiences had witnessed over two hundred performances of it in the preceding forty-one years. Garrick not only proposed taking on Quin, but Macbeth would be his first attempt at returning Davenant’s text closer to the original.80 As Macklin had discovered with Shylock, transforming a character type was not without risks, and Garrick was proposing to do so much more. Garrick’s version, according to his Essay, was to be ‘as written by Shakespeare’, which provoked Quin’s puzzled response: ‘What does he

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mean? don’t I play Macbeth as written by Shakespeare?’81 By publishing the Essay Garrick was shrewdly attempting to manage audience expectations of what was conventionally acceptable in acting the role; as Davies writes, Garrick knew his performance of Macbeth ‘would be essentially different from that of all the actors who had played it for twenty or thirty years before; and he was therefore determined to attack himself ironically, to blunt, if not to prevent, the remarks of others’.82 However, Garrick’s Macbeth was a success, and he performed it for the next twenty-four years. By considering two responses to his performance, one in 1744 shortly after Macbeth opened and the other in 1762, we can see how both Garrick and his correspondents had a common language of character types and the passions expected of them. What the letter writers and Garrick discuss, even though they politely differ in their interpretations, are the appropriateness of the passions he performs in relation to Macbeth as a character type. These exchanges demonstrate how, returning to Scheer, Garrick communicated emotions and how he and his interlocutors shared a language for naming them. The first letter was from an anonymous correspondent who wrote: I saw you last week act Macbeth, and was very well pleased with your performance in the fourth and fifth Acts; but can’t say the same of the three first. You did not seem to me to hit the character of the man; for you almost everywhere discovered an excessive dejectedness of mind, whereas Shakspeare [sic] represents him as a very bold and daring fellow.* I’ll grant you that, as he is not naturally malicious, as he bears no hatred to the man he kills, and is excited by his ambition only, the stings of conscience fill him with horror, and he appears greatly disturbed. But the passion, as you managed it, had more the appearance of grief than horror: and all those long pauses, those heart-heavings, and that melancholy countenance and slack carriage of body, were by no means proper to express remorse in a man so warm and full of courage. (17 January 1744)83

Clearly this writer knew the play well—in all likelihood, he was referring to Lewis Theobald’s 1733 version, rather than the earlier version by Davenant—and had formed very firm ideas about the character.84 His criticism focuses on Garrick’s characterisation, which ‘almost everywhere discovered an excessive dejectedness of mind’; this he felt was quite wrong because, as a type, Macbeth should be ‘a very bold and daring fellow’. Garrick’s interpretation apparently diverges from what this writer expects of the character type: a man ‘born to command’ should always be ‘great’

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in his behaviour, ‘even when he is most stung with his guilt’.85 Macbeth should feel ‘horror’ at his deed and not the ‘grief’ Garrick performs (‘all those long pauses, those heart-heavings, and that melancholy countenance and slack carriage of body’). The emotives here are very clear, and Garrick’s performance seems to embody Aaron Hill’s definition of Grief, which he articulated in The Prompter nearly nine years before. To perform Grief, writes Hill, the actor’s EYE will, in a Moment, catch the Dimness of Melancholy: his Muscles will relax into Languor; and his whole Frame of Body sympathetically unbend itself, into a Remiss, and, inanimate, Lassitude.—In such a passive Position of Features, and Nerves, let him attempt to speak HAUGHTILY; and He will find it impossible.86

The correlation between Hill’s ‘Lassitude’ in the ‘Frame of the Body’ and Garrick’s ‘slack carriage of body’ is explicit; his ‘melancholy countenance’ manifests in the ‘Dimness’ of his eyes. Both Hill and the later writer offer conventional definitions of Melancholy, hence the similarity, but unlike Garrick’s anonymous correspondent, Hill had distilled the conventional knowledge of the humours into a theory of acting. Garrick’s critic makes a humoral distinction between the melancholy humour that he perceives informs the actor’s interpretation and is the opposite to what he believes should be a choleric humour (‘warm and full of courage’) appropriate to the character type. Boaden makes an editorial interpolation at the asterisk (*) and argues for the dramaturgical correctness of Garrick’s interpretation: I interrupt the criticism for a moment, merely to afford, by a single sentence, a clue to the real character of Macbeth, and Garrick’s exhibition of it. “Thou may’st be VALIANT in a better cause, But now thou seem’st a COWARD.”Ed.87

Although Boaden would not have seen Garrick’s Macbeth (he was only six years old when Garrick stopped performing it in 1768), his retrospective defence displays his belief that Garrick based his interpretations on a close reading of the text, but it also displays Boaden’s subtle reinterpretation based on Romantic-era ideas about the part. Garrick’s own interpretation that he prefigures in the Essay (although the extent to which he followed

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it onstage is uncertain) describes Macbeth after the murder: ‘his Ambition is ingulph’d [sic] at that Instant, by the Horror of the Deed; his Faculties are intensely riveted to the Murder alone […] He should at that Time, be a moving Statue, or indeed a petrify’d Man’.88 For Garrick, Horror is the dominant passion, and possibly the slowness in his body is his attempt to represent this petrification rather than the Melancholy that the critic perceives. This is reinforced by Davies, who, as Ross, had witnessed Garrick in the scene: ‘The dark colouring, given by the actor to these abrupt speeches, makes the scene awful and tremendous to the auditors! The wonderful expression of heartfelt horror, which Garrick felt when he shewed his bloody hands, can only be conceived and described by those who saw him!’89 If Garrick answered his critic, we no longer have a record of his response. Eighteen years later, Hall Hartson (identified only as ‘H.H.’ in his letter), who was then unknown to Garrick, politely criticises his Macbeth in January 1762.90 There are three letters: Hartson’s first on 22 January, Garrick’s reply on 24 January, and Hartson’s reply to him on 29 January. Unlike the earlier correspondent, Hartson engages in a detailed analysis of how Garrick delivered his lines, paying particular attention to the emphases and pauses which affect meaning; to each of these Garrick offers his response.91 Revealing more than just the pernickety pedantry of eighteenth-­ century critics, their cordial exchange illustrates the extent to which some audience members were expert appraisers of acting. In discussing Macbeth’s response to the second entry of Banquo’s ghost, Hartson and Garrick disagree on the passions that the character experiences. Hartson believes at this moment Macbeth is in a ‘fixed immovable attitude of horror and amazement’, having being ‘totally overpowered by [the] supernatural appearance of Banquo’, and that his ‘faculties were all absorbed’; this interpretation differs from the ‘degree of resolution’ with which Garrick performed the moment (22 January 1762).92 Garrick agrees that the dominating passion is Horror, but disagrees with Hartson as to how it should be performed: Should Macbeth sink into pusillanimity, I imagine that it would hurt ye Character, & be contrary to the intentions of Shakespear—The first appearance of ye Spirit overpow’rs him more than ye 2d—but before it vanishes at first, Macbeth gains strength—If thou can’st nod, Speak too—Must be spoke with terror, but with a recovering Mind—and in the next Speech with him— He cannot pronounce Avaunt & quit my Sight! without a Stronger Exertion

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of his Powers under the Circumstance of Horror—the Why so—being gone— &c means, in my opinion,—I am returning to my Senses, wch were before Mad & inflam’d with what I have Seen—I make a great difference between a Mind sunk by Guilt into Cowardice, & one rising with Horror to Acts of Madness & desperation; which last I take to be the case of Macbeth—but I never advance an inch, for notwithstanding my Agitation, my feet are immovable. (24 January 1762)93

Garrick’s analysis follows the dramaturgical logic of the narrative which he maps through a sequence of passions. The first appearance ‘overpow’rs’ him, and he speaks ‘with terror, but with a recovering Mind’, but when the ghost next enters it provokes a ‘Stronger Exertion of his Powers under the Circumstance of Horror’. For Garrick, Macbeth’s mind is not ‘sunk by Guilt’ but is ‘one rising with Horror’. For a moment we see Garrick returning to the moment in his own mind as his language switches from third to first person: ‘I am returning to my Senses, wch were before Mad & inflam’d with what I have Seen’. Garrick is not empathising with the character of Macbeth but recalling the embodied affective sensations through which he moved while playing the character. We see, too, the fluidity of self in Garrick’s use of the first-person pronoun which switches from the ‘I’ of the character to the actor’s ‘I’ and back to the character (‘notwithstanding my Agitation, my feet are immovable’). He admits to a disturbance in Macbeth’s mind (‘my Agitation) but firmly rejects Hartson’s recollection that he is ‘advancing on the Ghost’.94 The passion of Horror might require an actor to recoil but, more commonly, he would remain frozen in the spot; knowing how Horror was conventionally performed allows Garrick to dispute Hall’s recollection of the scene. And yet, as every actor knows, not all necessarily goes to plan. Revealing how the passion of a moment may take over the actor’s mind, Garrick admits to Hartson that he might, in the heat of the moment, perform in opposition to his own intentions. He agrees that if he did deliver the line ‘Heavn’s Cherubin hors’d, wth a Stop’, as Hartson thought he did, it was ‘certainly wrong, & was not so intended to be spoken; but when ye mind is agitated, it is impossible to guard against these Slips’ (24 January 1762).95 This admission of spontaneity suggests that the conventions that governed Garrick’s acting were not as strict as we might think; rather, they provide the parameters within which actors could, in Scheer’s terms, mobilise their emotions. A little further on, Hartson observes that in the ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, &c.’ speech Garrick ‘start[ed]’ twice on

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Macbeth’s lines ‘Out, out, brief candle!’ each of which he accompanied ‘with a strong action of both hands’.96 Hartson argues that because Macbeth is meditating on the ‘insignificance of life’, it ‘should be spoken without any other emotion than a philosophical contempt’ (22 January 1762).97 Garrick concedes the point and answers, ‘surely I must have spoke those words quite ye reverse of my own ideas, if I did not express with them the most contemptuous indifference of Life’ (24 January 1762).98 Hartson acknowledges in his reply that, having studied rhetoric and oratory, he tends to be overly focussed on Garrick’s vocal interpretation of certain lines in the text, but he also recognises that, in itself, oratory is ‘rather inanimate’ and, having ‘little action’, requires scarce more than ‘bare propriety of elocution’ (29 January 1762).99 Graciously, Hartson concedes that his adherence to the rules of rhetoric ‘mislead in judging of stage declamation, which being impassioned, frequently to a degree of enthusiasm, does not admit of rigid correctness’ (29 January 1762).100 By invoking ‘enthusiasm’ Hartson implies several meanings: ‘private divine revelation’ such as was performed at the time by Methodist field preachers like George Whitefield (1714–70), ‘poetic inspiration’, or even ‘divine inspiration’ (OED). Garrick’s reply suggests that acting conventions, both spoken and moved, were not so rigid they prevented flashes of improvisational brilliance which might steer the actor from the path of rhetorical orthodoxy. Although ‘impossible to guard against’, Garrick realised that in ‘these Slips’ could lie, as he later wrote to Helfrich Peter Sturtz (1736–79), ‘the greatest strokes of Genius […] unknown to the Actor himself, ’till Circumstances, and the warmth of the Scene has sprung the mine, as it were, as much to his own surprize, as that of the Audience’.101 It is important to keep in mind here Garrick’s notion of l’homme idéal because, as he reveals a little later in the same letter, these improvisational ‘strokes’ of brilliance produce an almost magical transformation. Confiding in Sturtz, Garrick criticises the great French actress Claire Josèphe Hippolyte Léris, “La Clairon” (1723–1803), whom he had seen perform in Paris: Clairon possessed ‘every thing that Art and a good understanding, with great Natural Spirit can give her’; but her ‘Heart has none of those instantaneous feelings, that Life blood, that keen Sensibility, that bursts at once from Genius, and, like Electrical fire, shoots thro’ the Veins, Marrow, Bones and all, of every Spectator’ (3 January 1769).102 But further on, Garrick’s words suggest something a little more atavistic and

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closer to Hartson’s ‘enthusiasm’. In distinguishing between a ‘great Genius, and a good Actor’ Garrick argues that The first will always realize the feelings of his Character, and be transported beyond himself, while the other, with great powers, and good sense, will give great pleasure to an Audience, but never –––––– pectus inanitor angit Irritat Malis & falcis, terroribus implet Ut Magus. [With airy nothings wrings my heart, inflames, soothes, fills it with vain alarms like a magician.]103

Together with his earlier metaphors of explosive ordinance and ‘Electrical fire’ Garrick refers to an emotional force that ‘transport[s the great actor] beyond himself’. In a figurative sense, already in use by the eighteenth century, to be ‘transported’ was to be ‘carr[ied] away’ with the strength of some emotion; to be beside oneself, to be put into an ecstasy, to enrapture (OED). The ecstasy Garrick describes (literally ex-stasis—outside or ‘beyond’ oneself) gives credibility to Diderot’s report of his exchange with the Chevalier de Chastellux earlier. Garrick replies to the Chevalier that he takes care not to be either himself or ‘anything I know in the world around me’; he makes ‘inhuman cries’ which are not his own but come from ‘some other I have imagined but who does not exist’. Garrick describes an ecstatic force that works magically upon both actor and audience which, when seen in its own terms, is sublime. It is just such an ecstatic character type that Noverre described after seeing Garrick’s Macbeth, in all likelihood in October 1755, giving a vivid description of how Garrick combined voice, facial expression, and gestures to illustrate the character’s death.104 As we saw above, Noverre thought that Garrick imitated nature faithfully; moreover he felt that the actor combined ‘diction, delivery, fire, native wit and delicacy’ with ‘that rare gift for pantomimic expression’ which in his view ‘characterises the great actor and perfect comedian’ (Letter IX).105 In his detailed account of Garrick’s adaptation (after Davenant) of Macbeth’s death scene, Noverre describes in detail Garrick’s physical performance, which for him epitomised Garrick’s virtuosity. As Harriman-Smith observes, accounts such as Noverre’s contributed significantly to Garrick’s posthumous reputation and, as I argued above, the continuation of his brand.106

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In Shakespeare’s version, familiar to modern audiences, Macduff pursues Macbeth offstage where he kills and beheads him before returning onstage with the severed head. Davenant adapts the scene by having the two characters fight onstage with Macbeth expiring on a single line: ‘Farewell vain World, and what’s more vain in it, Ambition’.107 However, a dramaturgical decision that worked for the open stage in Shakespeare’s time affronted eighteenth-century dramatic sensibilities, so it was Davenant’s adaptation that continued to be performed; as Francis Gentleman (1728–84) wrote: If deaths upon the stage are justifiable none can be more so than that of Macbeth. Shakespeare’s idea of having his head brought on by Macduff, is very censurable; therefore commendably changed to visible punishment—a dying speech and a very good one, has been furnish’d by Mr. Garrick, to give the actor more éclat.108

It is unclear whether Gentleman is gently sniping at Garrick or not but, in either case, he emphasises how the dying speech, Garrick wrote to replace Davenant’s single line, provides an opportunity for the actor to shine; indeed, it calls out for virtuosity: ’Tis done! the scene of life will quickly close. Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled, And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror. I cannot bear it! let me shake it off— ’Twa’ not be; my soul is clogg’d with blood— I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy— It is too late, hell drags me down. I sink, I sink—Oh!—my soul is lost forever! Oh!109

In Noverre’s detailed analysis of Macbeth’s death onstage he reveals how true-to-type Garrick’s performance was. What Noverre witnesses is a ‘tyrant’ overcome by his ‘conscience’ and in his ‘repentance’ a triumph of ‘humanity […] over murder and barbarism’ (84). Noverre, the ballet-­ master, is attentive to physical detail, and his description highlights how ‘the approach of death showed each instant on [Garrick’s] face; his eyes became dim; his voice could not support the efforts he made to speak his thoughts’ (84). With voice failing, it is likely that the complex interplay of

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facial expression and physical actions he describes next follows on from the end of the speech: His gestures, without losing their expression, revealed the approach of his last moment; his legs gave way under him, his face lengthened, his pale and livid features bore the signs of suffering and repentance. At last, he fell; at that moment his crimes peopled his thoughts with the most horrible forms; terrified at the hideous pictures which his past acts revealed to him, he struggled against death; nature seemed to make one supreme effort. His plight made the audience shudder, he clawed the ground and seemed to be digging his own grave, but the dread moment was nigh, one saw death in reality, everything expressed that instant which makes all equal. In the end he expired. The death-rattle and the convulsive movements of the features, arms, and breast, gave the final touch to this terrible picture. (84–5)

Despite Noverre’s references to ‘nature’ and ‘reality’, he emphasises Garrick’s gestural pantomime, which suggests his idea of nature is nothing like our own. Garrick, as Davies observed, ‘excelled in the expression of convulsive throes and dying agonies, and would not lose any opportunity that offered to shew his skill in that part of his profession’; but for the modern reader, it is hard to read this account of him chewing up the scenery with a straight face.110 This is not to criticise Garrick, but to illustrate the distance there is between an eighteenth-century feeling for a role and a modern one. For Noverre, such acting was exemplary; it was ‘death in reality’. Gentleman, in contrast, was not so ‘fond of characters writhing and flouncing on carpets […] we think [Macbeth’s] immediate death most natural, we could wish it to take place’.111 Gentleman’s disquiet over extended death scenes played on a green baize cloth, six-foot square, spread on the stage to protect expensive costumes, is not unjustified.112 The Irish actor and playwright John O’Keeffe (1747–1833), recalls the unfortunate Irish actor Robert Mahon who, in his final convulsions as the dying tyrant in Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter, threshed around so much he managed to wrap himself up entirely in the tragic carpet until ‘nothing could be seen of him but the tip of his nose—red with fury’.113 But when Garrick performed, as Noverre wrote earlier in the same letter (IX), he was ‘so natural, his expression was so lifelike, his gestures, features and glances were so eloquent and so convincing, that he made the action clear even to those who did not understand a word of English. It was easy to follow his meaning’ (82). Again, what is ‘natural’ and ‘lifelike’ to Noverre depends upon Garrick’s ‘eloquent’ gestures, face, and eyes. The same phrase in French, however, does not imply naturalism as

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emphatically as does the English translation: ‘Il est si naturel, son expression a tant de vérité, ses gestes, sa physionomie & ses regards sont si éloquents & si persuasifs’.114 Rather than ‘lifelike’, Garrick’s facial expression had so much truth in it, and his gestures and looks were eloquent and persuasive (rather than ‘convincing’). Translating physionomie as ‘features’ is very narrow and, in the context, could mean general appearance or, as in English, his body; such a translation would take us back to two elements of our critical triad: face/eyes and body. Even in his dying passion Garrick’s gestures maintained their expressivity, and like Lichtenberg twenty years later, Noverre can observe his physical actions—the weak legs, the pale face— and turn them into emotives (spiritual suffering, repentance, terror). When Noverre describes Macbeth’s past crimes ‘peopl[ing] his thoughts with the most horrible forms’ we are reminded of William Hogarth’s famous painting of Garrick as Richard III, just before the Battle of Bosworth Field, painted in 1745, a year after his Macbeth premiered. Awoken from his hideous dreams Hogarth’s Richard/Garrick stares wildly over the viewer’s right shoulder, while the fingers of his semi-outstretched right hand fend off the unbearable truth of the vision (Fig. 2.1). Echoing Newton, Noverre comments that Garrick had ‘a different face for each part’ and represented them ‘according to the age, condition, character, calling and rank of the person’ he was playing, a comment that reflects his knowledge of character types (83). Recalling Garrick’s debut as Richard, Murphy observed that from the ‘moment he entered the scene, the character he assumed was visible in his countenance’; this character appeared as an expressive dumb show as ‘the passions rose in rapid succession, and, before he uttered a word, were legible in every feature of that various face’.115 This is what Davies witnessed also, returning to Macbeth, between Garrick and Pritchard in the murder scene: ‘Their looks and action supplied the place of words. You heard what they spoke, but you learned more from the agitation of mind displayed in their action and deportment’.116 When Murphy describes how Garrick ‘transformed himself into the very man’ through the ‘power of his imagination’,117 the phenomenon he is describing arises from Garrick’s precise and rapid rendering of different facial expressions appropriate to the passions transitioning in the character. Cook comments also on how Garrick used this facility as a party trick; when in company, Garrick ‘would convey into his face every possible kind of passion with an, infinite number of gradations’; the assembled watchers at ‘one moment […] laughed; at another, cried; now melted into pity; now terrified’.118 Laughter, sorrow, pity, terror, Cook names common passions before alighting on how Garrick affected his audience:

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Fig. 2.1  David Garrick as Richard III by William Hogarth, 1745

‘and presently they conceived in themselves something horrible, he seemed so much terrified at what he saw’ [italics in original].119 Cook offers a glimpse of the relational ‘topography of the self’ discussed by Wahrman where the effects of Garrick’s performance arise not from empathetic connection but from the mutuality of the experience. And this is what Noverre experiences; Garrick/Macbeth ‘clawed’ at the ground in an attempt, so it seemed, to ‘dig[ ] his own grave’ before he finally expired with a terrible ‘death-rattle’ and ‘convulsive movements of the features, arms, and breast’ (84–5). It is a pantomime that ‘made the audience shudder’ (84). For Noverre, Garrick’s acting epitomised the actor’s art; he was the ‘Proteus of our own time [who] understood all styles and presented them with a perfection and truth […] his pathos was touching; in tragedy he terrified with the successive movements with which he represented the most violent passions’ (82). Garrick’s face, wrote Cook, ‘was what he obliged you to fancy it—age—youth—joy—grief—every thing he assumed’.120 * * *

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Garrick acted superbly using the conventions of his time, and it was his expert and nuanced performances within these conventions that his contemporaries saw as being so true to life. Throughout the century, critics were quick to trot out Hamlet’s advice to the players, particularly his injunction to hold a mirror up to nature, but we need to be mindful of Roach’s reminder that in ‘Garrick’s day Romanticism, Naturalism, and Darwinism had yet to proclaim that we have more in common with the scum on the pond than with the statue in the park’.121 Critical distinctions made in Garrick’s own time and after, between his “new” style and the declamatory acting that preceded him, follow a ‘the rhetoric of the infinite regress’ which de-emphasises Garrick’s similarities with past acting practices and promote the newness and distinctiveness of what he offered.122 One cannot fault Garrick and his supporters for this boosterism; he was, after all, extremely talented and successful. Nevertheless, how Garrick used the dramaturgy of character types was virtuosic and his reputation as an actor was founded on the variety and distinctiveness of his portrayals, whether onstage, as noted by early commentators such as Newton, or through his rapid-transition-of-passions party trick that he performed for Diderot, Cook, and many others. But his approach to character was not new, nor was it unique. Macklin defined a character as being distinct from ‘every other thing of its kind’, suggesting a ‘topography of the self ’ not based in the inner “truth” of the character/actor but as determined by social type, theatrical type, and passions and/or humours. In the case of tragedy, as exemplified in Garrick’s purported exchange with the Chevalier de Chastellux, this character needed to be an ‘ideal being’ who was not of this world. Although they differed in their interpretations, the correspondence between Garrick and the anonymous letter writer and Hartson reveal the commonality of how each approached their analysis of Macbeth’s character. Garrick and his interlocutors debated how he should embody Macbeth, a discussion so detailed it could focus on the actor’s delivery of a single word. Although these discussions begin with the detailed knowledge each has of the text, from which they gain their ideas of Macbeth’s character type, it is Garrick’s body that becomes the site of their engagement, even for Garrick himself, as when in his response to Hartson he slipped into the immediacy of first-person address (24 January 1762). How Garrick enunciates a word, how long he holds a pause, moves his feet or doesn’t, how he gestures—all subtly inflect his correspondents’ interpretations of Macbeth’s emotions. These

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conversations reveal complex processes of naming emotions, and the emotives used in these exchanges, as Scheer observes, ‘acquire their specific meaning[s] only in their socially situated usage’.123

Notes 1. Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, vol. 1 (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., 1807), 81. 2. Joseph R.  Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993 [1985]), 56. 3. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq (London: for the author, 1780); Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq (Dublin: Wogan, Burnet, et al., 1801); Percy Fitzgerald, The Life of David Garrick (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868); George Winchester Stone Jr and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979); Jean Benedetti, David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre (London: Methuen, 2001). 4. Robert D.  Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 167. 5. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts, 169. 6. Hume, 168. In more recent research, Terry F.  Robinson argues that Siddons and Kemble were both influenced by Garrick and that ‘through their very dependency on the body as a central vehicle of communication, belied their indebtedness to Garrickian performance and supported the rise of spectacle’. ‘Recovery Acts: Romantic-Era Theater, the Performing Body, and the Crisis over Signification’, PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2010, 139. 7. Peter Thomson, ‘Garrick, David’, ODNB (online ed., 3 January 2008), n.p.; Alan S.  Downer, ‘Nature to Advantage Dressed: EighteenthCentury Acting,’ PMLA 58, no. 4 (December 1943): 1013. 8. David Wiles, The Player’s Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2. 9. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. C.  A. Lutz and L. Abu-­Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93; 94. 10. This is as the legend has it but, as Peter Thomson writes in ODNB, his first appearance was on the same stage replacing Richard Yates, who had fallen ill, as Harlequin. ‘It was not in Garrick’s interest to let it be known that he had made his theatrical début in a vulgar pantomime.’ ‘Garrick, David’, ODNB, n.p.

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11. Fitzgerald, Life of Garrick, 1:40 fn. 12. Davies, Memoirs of Garrick, 1:38. Further citations within text. 13. Davies, 1:41. Approximately £25,579  in today’s currency. National Archives, ‘Currency Converter: 1270–2017’, www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/currency-­converter. All further currency comparisons are from this site. In comparison, when Garrick performed Richard at Drury Lane in May 1742, the house took £150  in one night, or approximately £17,733 in today’s currency. Benedetti, David Garrick, 68. 14. Benedetti, 68. 15. Approximately £47,287 in today’s currency. Benedetti, 68. 16. Benedetti, 68. Approximately £59,109 in today’s currency. The National Archives estimates this as being the equivalent of five thousand days’ work by a skilled tradesman. 17. Stone and Kahrl, David Garrick, 68. 18. Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 88. 19. Ritchie, Mediation of Celebrity, 87–9. 20. Ritchie, 89. 21. Edward Purdon, A Letter to David Garrick, Esq; on Opening the Theatre (London: I.  Pottinger, 1769), 18. Cited in Ritchie, Mediation of Celebrity, 90. 22. Davies, Memoirs of Garrick, 1:43. 23. Alexander Pope, ‘Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’, in W[illiam]. Toldervy, comp. Select Epitaphs, 2 vols. (London: W. Owen, 1755), 2:143. 24. BD, 4:203–8. 25. Murphy, Life, 1:12–13. 26. Murphy’s relationship with Garrick ‘might be described as a lifelong dispute, punctuated by brief, but never lasting, intervals of friendliness’. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, The Letters of David Garrick, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 204, fn. 1. 27. Cumberland, Memoirs, 1:81. 28. James Boaden, The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831), 7. Chamont is a character from Otway’s The Orphan (1703), and Bayes, as noted earlier, is from Villiers’ The Rehearsal (1701). 29. Stone and Kahrl, David Garrick, 656. 30. David Garrick, The Lying Valet (1741), premiered at Goodman’s Fields on 30 November 1741. LS, 3.2:946. 31. [Tobias Smollett as] ‘Dramaticus’, ‘Character of Mr Garrick’, from The Champion, no. 455, October 1742, reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine 12 (October 1742): 527.

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32. Glen McGillivray, ‘Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the Eighteenth-­ Century Actor and Sarah Siddons’, Theatre Notebook 71, no. 1 (2017): 5–10. 33. Concentration on the scene seems to be an attribute of most great actors, and contemporary sources ascribed the same quality also to Thomas Betterton and to Sarah Siddons. Tony Aston writes of Betterton, ‘from the Time he was dress’d, to the End of the Play, kept his Mind in the same Temperament and Adaptness, as the present Character required’. Anthony Aston, A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq (London: for the author, 1747), 5. According to Boaden, Siddons ‘knew better than anyone how to individuate character; she was engrossed by it completely’. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors, vol. 2 (London: H. Colburn, 1827), 94. It is significant that Davies, who had been so close to Garrick, also observed of Siddons that she ‘excels all persons in paying attention to the business of the scene, her eye never wanders from the person she speaks to, or should look at when she is silent.’ Thomas Davies, Dramatic Micellanies [sic] …, vol. 3 (London: for the author, 1783–4), 249. 34. Stone and Kahrl, David Garrick, 50. 35. [Tobias Smollett], ‘The Character of an Excellent Actor’, from The Champion, no. 5, [January] 1743, reprinted in Gentleman’s Magazine 13 (May 1743): 254. 36. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 176. 37. Wahrman, Modern Self, 166–99; 265–311. 38. Lisa A.  Freeman, Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 27. 39. Paul Menzer, ‘That Old Saw: Early Modern Acting and the Infinite Regress,’ Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 38. 40. Recognising Quin’s box-office appeal, Garrick tried to entice him to perform in the 1750–1 season at Drury Lane. Quin leveraged the offer to demand a contract for £1000 from John Rich at Covent Garden (approximately £116,669 in today’s currency). ‘James Quin’, BD, 12:233. 41. Jean George Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1951 [1930]), 83. I note the significant discrepancy in the translation. In Noverre’s original Garrick is an ‘imitator’ or ‘mimic’ of nature. In English these terms have pejorative connotations and are translated by Beaumont to ‘worshipper’. Jean Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets [première édition], par M. Noverre, Maître des Ballets de Son Altesse Sérénissime Monseigneur

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le Duc de Wurtemberg, et ci-devant des Théâtres de Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Londres, etc. (Lyon: Aimé Delaroche, 1760), 211, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/lettressurladans00noveuoft/page/211/ mode/1up, accessed 2 June 2020. 42. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, vol. 2 of Oeuvres de Denis Diderot: Salons (Paris: Chez J.  L. Brière, 1821), 25–6. Cited in Benedetti, David Garrick, 189. 43. As they were disparagingly called by Rousseau. For membership of D’Holbach’s long-running salon, see Alan Charles Kors, ‘The Members of the Coterie Holbachique,’ in D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 9–40. 44. Davies, Memoirs of Garrick, 1: 42; Murphy, Life, 1:13–14. 45. Dene Barnett (with Jeanette Massy-Winstrop), The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987), 137. 46. Diderot, Salon de 1767, 25–6. Cited in Benedetti, David Garrick, 189. 47. Jeanette Massy-Westropp, ‘Idealization of Characters and Specialization of Acting in Eighteenth-Century Tragedy: The Villain’, Theatre Research International 9, no. 2 (1984): 112. 48. George Granville (Lord Lansdowne), and William Shakespeare, The Jew of Venice, 1701. 49. Anon. [Garrick], An Essay on Acting: In which will be consider’d The Mimical Behaviour of A Certain fashionable faulty Actor, and the Laudableness of such unmannerly, as well as inhumane Proceedings. To which will be added, A short Criticism On His acting Macbeth (London: W. Bickerton, 1744). 50. Cumberland, Memoirs, 1:82. 51. Davies, Dramatic Micellanies, 3:126–7. 52. The Theatrical Review; or, New Companion to the Play-House (London: S. Crowder, J. Wilkie, & J. Walter, 1772), 1:63. Drury Lane, 10 October 1771, LS, 4.3:1574. Ann should not be confused with her sister-in-law Jane Barry, who also performed as Juliet with Samuel Cautherley. As Jane died on 13 October 1771, and was normally billed as Mrs W.  Barry, I believe the Barry here is Ann. BD, 1:355. 53. Theatrical Review; or, New Companion, 1:63. Cautherley was rumoured to be a love child of Garrick and the actress Jane Hippisley, but this is not substantiated. Garrick became Cautherley’s guardian after the actor’s marriage in 1749 (ODNB). 54. Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, no. 59, 2–5 December 1757. 55. Barry premiered as Richard on 27 January 1757. LS, 4.2:578, dated 29 January 1757; Folger Shakespeare Library, A.2.1 1740–77, Anon. Scrapbook.

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56. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 212. 57. William Cook, Memoirs of Charles Macklin (London: James Asperne, 1804), 95. 58. John Thomas Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, vol. 1 (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., 1799), 257. 59. BD, 7:254. 60. Folger Shakespeare Library, A.2.1 1740–77, Anon. Scrapbook, n.d. The attention given to Macklin’s face by this review reinforces David Francis Taylor’s argument cited earlier (see chap. 1, n. 56); as Taylor observes: ‘It is not that Macklin acts naturally but rather that Macklin does not act at all. The very facts of his body are enough. He is the first and only genuine Shylock; he is always already Shylock’. David Francis Taylor, ‘Macklin’s Look’, in Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London, ed. Ian Newman and David O’Shaughnessy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022): 30. 61. Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, vol. 1 (London: J. Bell and York: C. Etherington, 1770), 292. 62. Theatrical Review; or, New Companion, 1:42. 63. Percy Fitzgerald, The Life of Mrs. Catherine Clive with an Account of Her Adventures On and Off the Stage (London: A. Reader, 1888), 41–2. 64. Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, vol. 2 (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1834), 38. 65. Kirkman, Life of Macklin, 1:362. 66. Kirkman, 1:362–3. 67. Kirkman, 1:363–4. 68. First published in his Species Plantarum (1753) and its companion volume Genera Plantarum, 5th ed. (1753). Linnaeus applied the same system to animals five years later in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758). 69. Kirkman, Life of Macklin, 1:366. 70. Cook, Memoirs of Macklin, 97. 71. Fitzgerald, Life of Garrick, 1:84. 72. Macklin and Garrick had fallen out only a few months earlier in 1743 due to the failure of the actors’ revolt against Charles Fleetwood’s chronic under- and non-payment of actors’ salaries at Drury Lane. Due to Fleetwood’s animosity towards Macklin, he offered a deal to accept all the seceding actors back except Macklin. Despite all Garrick’s efforts on his friend’s behalf, the intransigence of both men meant that Macklin was excluded. Garrick commends Macklin for his interpretation of Shylock in

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the Essay on Acting (10–11). Although later reconciled, they were never as close again. Stone and Kahrl, David Garrick, 62–5. 73. Cook, Memoirs of Macklin, 202. See Markman Ellis, ‘Macklin’s Coffeehouse: Public Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, in Newman and O’Shaughnessy, Theatres of London, 215–41. 74. George Winchester Stone Jr, ‘Garrick’s Handling of “Macbeth”’, Studies in Philology 38, no. 4 (October 1941): 610. 75. Anon. [Garrick], An Essay on Acting, 5. 76. Anon. [Garrick], 5. 77. Anon. [Garrick], 5–6. 78. Wahrman, Modern Self, 183. 79. Wahrman, 186. 80. Stone, ‘Garrick’s Handling of “Macbeth”’, 609–11. 81. Murphy, Life, 1:48. 82. Davies, Memoirs of Garrick, 1:133. 83. Boaden, Correspondence, 1:19. 84. Garrick consulted with Samuel Johnson and John Warburton, the foremost Shakespeare scholars of his day, and had created his own adaptation of the play. Stone, ‘Garrick’s Handling of “Macbeth”’, 615. 85. Boaden, Correspondence, 1:19. 86. [Aaron Hill] The Prompter, no. 66, 27 June 1735. Cited in Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 130. 87. Boaden, Correspondence, 1:19 fn. 88. Anon. [Garrick], Essay on Acting, 8–9. 89. Dramatic Micellanies, 2:149. 90. Performed 9 January 1762; LS, 4.2:911. 91. Garrick’s dialogues with his critics on the specifics of his delivery are discussed in Peter Holland, ‘Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick’, in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660–1800, ed. Michael Cordner and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 248–70; Stone and Kahrl discuss Hartson’s exchange with Garrick (David Garrick, 556–7) as does David Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969): 52–3; 57–8; 67–9. 92. Boaden, Correspondence, 1:134. 93. Little and Kahrl, Letters, no. 281, 1:351. 94. Boaden, Correspondence, 1:134. 95. Little and Kahrl, Letters, no. 281, 1:351. 96. Boaden, Correspondence 1:134. 97. Boaden, 1:134. 98. Little and Kahrl, Letters, no. 281, 1:351–2.

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99. Boaden, Correspondence 1:138. 100. Boaden, 1:138. 101. Little and Kahrl, Letters, no. 528, 2:635. 102. Little and Kahrl, no. 528, 2:635. 103. Little and Kahrl, no. 528, 2:635 and 636 fn. 6. 104. Noverre had visited London in April 1755 to negotiate the contract for the Chinese Festival and returned to France over the summer. He returned some time before the November performances and remained in London, working as Garrick’s ballet master, for the 1755–6 season. He went back to France at unspecified time in 1756 (presumably for the summer) but was again in London for the 1756–7 season, which he did not complete, and left in March 1757. Within this timeframe it is likely that the only performance of Macbeth he could have seen with Garrick in the title role was on 10 October 1755. BD, 11:73–4; LS, 4.2:499. In the later season, the play appears to have been performed just once, on 16 October 1756, with another actor, Henry Mossop (1729–73), as Macbeth. It seems Garrick did not play it again until 17 December 1757. LS, 4.2:635. 105. Noverre, Letters on Dancing, 84. Further citations from this letter in text. 106. James Harriman-Smith, ‘Garrick, Dying’, in Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture, ed. Emrys D.  Jones and Victoria Joule (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 84. 107. Stone, ‘Garrick’s Handling of “Macbeth”’, 619. 108. William Shakespeare, Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: John Bell & C. Etherington, 1774), 1:130. 109. Bell’s Edition: 1:129–30. Cited in Stone “Garrick’s Handling of “Macbeth”’, 620. Stone observes that this speech was retained until ‘well into the nineteenth century’ (620, fn. 20). 110. Davies, Dramatic Micellanies, 2:118. 111. David Garrick, The Plays of David Garrick, vol. 3: Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744–1756, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 72–3, fn. 81.1. Gentleman is not so dismissive in his footnote in Bell’s Edition. There he astutely notes the distinction between what might be thought of as “natural” and what works onstage: ‘we think his immediate death most natural, though probably not so well calculated for the stage’ (130). 112. Kalman A.  Burnim, David Garrick, Director (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 124. 113. John O’Keeffe, Recollections of the Life of John O’Keeffe, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 173. 114. Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, 209. 115. Murphy, Life, 1:16.

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116. Davies, Dramatic Micellanies, 2:149. 117. Murphy, Life, 1:16. 118. Cook, Memoirs of Macklin, 112. 119. Cook, 112. 120. Cook, 112. 121. Roach, Player’s Passion, 59. 122. Menzer, ‘That Old Saw’, 32. 123. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 213.

CHAPTER 3

Communicating Emotions: The Arts of the Actor

A puff’d, round Mouth, an Empty vagrant Eye, a solemn Stillness of Strut, a Swing-Swang Slowness in the Motion of the Arm, and a dry, dull, drawling, Voice, that carries Opium in its detestable Monotony,—THESE are the Graces of the modern Stage!—These are the Fruits of the Two Royal PATENTS!1

It is easy to mistake Aaron Hill’s condemnation of acting in the mid-1730s as a dismissal of the rhetorical style in its entirety, but his criticism in The Prompter was as much to do with bad acting as it was with a reformation in style. At the time Hill wrote his two essays on acting in The Prompter all the greats of the Restoration era (Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, Robert Wilks, Barton Booth) had died, and the new generation was yet to appear. The patent theatre system, in Hill’s eyes, produced mediocrity, and he railed against conventions in decay. By identifying the patent actors’ vacant wandering eyes, the repetitious boredom of their gestures, and their monotonous vocal delivery, Hill diagnoses problems with the actor’s art that needed to be remedied by focussing on the three elements of eighteenth-century acting to which all commentators returned: facial expressions, gestures, and voice. Dene Barnett argues that the gestural fundamentals of the actor’s art, including facial expression, remained the same throughout the eighteenth century and were used consistently across Europe; together with their corresponding vocal arts, these were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5_3

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fundamentally understood as acting by eighteenth-century audiences.2 When audiences appraised Garrick’s acting, they assessed his voice, his facial expressions, gestures, the overall grace and decorum expressed through his body, and how appropriate these were to the character types he portrayed. The ‘art of gesture’ did not preclude arousing powerful emotions in the audience; as Barnett observes, it functioned ‘to create for the eyes of spectators a concrete picture of the ideas expressed by the words’ and, furthermore, it ‘gave the actor opportunities to show precision, beauty, panache and, in the representation of extreme passion, to give a display which was Baroque in the amplitude of its intensity’.3 Noverre recalled the intensity he experienced witnessing Garrick/ Macbeth’s death scene; it ‘lacerated the spectator’s feelings, tore his heart, pierced his soul, and made him shed tears of blood [il arrache les entrailles du Spectateur, il déchire son cœur, il perce son ame, & lui fait répandre des larmes de sang]’.4 In translation, the spectator’s feelings are lacerated, but Noverre’s original words are more visceral than that: arracher les entrailles means literally to tear or wrench the guts of the spectator. But how did this happen? Appadurai writes that ‘communities of sentiment’ are created by the performance of ‘standardized verbal and gestural forms’ of which there is ‘no assumption of any correspondence between the words and gestures and the internal emotional world of the “actor”’; what is important here is that, when performed properly, a ‘special emotional bond is created’ between performer and audience.5 These bonds, created through a shared understanding of character types and vocal and gestural conventions, were powerfully affective. As we saw, Garrick and Macklin used a dramaturgy of character types to create their roles and, also, saw how audiences appraised actors’ success (or not) in embodying these types. This chapter begins by exploring the conventions that governed physical and verbal expression; in particular, the importance of decorum (or bienséance), a principle that referred not only to physical grace but also to appropriateness (justness and propriety) of interpretation.6 For actors to play character types successfully, they needed to demonstrate decorum in their faces and gestures, and to speak with harmonious voices that had the potential for force in moments of passion. Actors could fail through lack of skill in any of these areas or because they did not satisfy the tastes of demanding audiences. In the middle section of this chapter I explore how Sarah Siddons transformed her initial failure at Drury Lane into eventual triumph. Despite being precociously talented, and already demonstrating an acute dramaturgical

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sensibility, Siddons lacked the skills, particularly in her voice, to conquer the London stage. It was her hard work in regional patent theatres (which played the same repertoire as London) for six years, together with the mentorship of Thomas Sheridan, that produced the accomplished actress who created a new and definitive Lady Macbeth. I conclude the chapter with a detailed examination of this role drawn largely from the notes taken by George Joseph Bell (1770–1843), an Edinburgh law professor who saw Siddons’ late-career performance of Lady Macbeth around 1809.7

The Art of Gesture The ‘art of gesture’ was integral to eighteenth-century acting. When performing emotions actors used codified gestures and facial expressions which, although they changed in terms of timing and emphasis, remained consistent throughout the century. Audiences also expected decorum from actors, which meant performing with both physical and vocal grace and with sensibility: a feeling for the character type being presented. Physical expression had to suit the sentiments actors performed, and the sentiments needed to be appropriate to their character types. Barnett surveys and analyses the gestural repertoire of eighteenth-century performers, drawing from numerous manuals of acting, rhetoric, and oratory, from promptbooks and other stage documentation where available. However, it is Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia (1806) and Johannes Jelgerhuis’ Theoretische lessen over de gesticulatie en mimiek (1827) that are his main sources, both of which provide comprehensive taxonomies of gesture.8 Austin describes standardised techniques used in the eighteenth century which were largely based on the writings of classical and Renaissance rhetoricians; and Jelgerhuis, who was both an actor and a skilled illustrator, based his descriptions also on earlier writers, making only ‘small, ornamental changes’ to what they instructed.9 Both texts are useful compendiums of gestural and facial techniques employed by European actors and opera performers dating back to the late seventeenth century. By correlating descriptions of gestures found in one source with similar descriptions in others, Barnett argues for a pan-European ‘art of gesture’. Any differences in acting between the actors of the Comédie-­ Française and those of the English patent theatres, or of various city and court theatres throughout Germany, reflected regional differences in style rather than radically different approaches to acting. Although the genealogy of his sources is opaque—he sometimes finds textual correlations

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which are, in fact, straight plagiarisms10—Barnett demonstrates how persistent similar ideas about acting were throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth: ‘if words written by the rhetorician [Charles] Batteux in 1753 fitted a technique used by Bernier de Maligny [Aristippe] at the Comédie Française in 1826, then Bernier de Maligny was happy to adopt those words in his own book on acting’.11 These texts attend to how actors moved in space, their timing, and the amount of energy they used, all of which expressed the eighteenth-century desire for precision and elegance over an adherence to nature. Time and again the same theme is repeated in acting manuals and books on rhetoric and oratory. The French playwright Jean-François Marmontel (1723–99) argued in the Diderot–d’Alembert Encyclopédie, that ‘Society is an actor’s school; an immense stage on which all passions, all circumstances, all characters are in action’; however, he goes on to warn that an actor could be mistaken if he took these as his only model, lacking as they did, ‘nobility and propriety’.12 It was not, continues Marmontel, ‘enough for him to portray from nature, it is still necessary that careful study of the beautiful proportions and great principles of the design has put him in a position to correct it [nature]’.13 In a similar vein, the German playwright Friedrich von Einsiedel (1750–1828), argued that art should ‘present nature by approximation’ and never leave it to the ‘inartistic, harsh contour of reality’.14 Such harshness, as Bernier de Maligny warned, might emerge in the passion of anger, so that ‘the actor must be careful, more than in any other affectation of the mind, not to exaggerate it, or even to put too much truth in it’.15 Here de Maligny echoes Diderot, who wrote, ‘almost all the violent passions lend themselves to grimaces which a tasteless artist will copy but too faithfully, and which a great actor will avoid’.16 The dominant principle of eighteenth-century acting was decorum. Barnett observes that when expressed in ‘posture and gesture’, decorum manifested in ‘harmonious proportions and graceful contrasts between the various parts of the body: between arm and leg, between the two hands, between head and shoulder, forearm and upper arm, and including the smallest details of fingers and eye movements’.17 Austin wrote in Chironomia that ‘grace of movement’ needed to conform to Hogarth’s serpentine ‘line of beauty’: ‘Indentations too deep, and flourishes too much extended, fall into quaintness, or run out into bombast and wild extravagance, whilst the want of a certain degree of deflexion from the direct line, degenerates into stiff and cold formality. True elegance of gesture follows the graceful mean’.18 ‘Propriety of gesture’, as defined by

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Austin, was ‘called also truth of gesture, or natural gesture’ and consisted of ‘the judicious use of the gestures best suited to illustrate or to express the sentiment’.19 Here, echoing Hamlet again, the desire was for actors gesturally to perform the emotions of their characters, but not too little and not too much. Decorum was central to how eighteenth-century audiences appraised acting, and they looked for justness and propriety in actors’ voices, in their faces and eyes, and in their bodies and gestures. Actors’ voices needed to be strong, pleasant to the ear, and expressive in different modes, and without the vocal sins mocked by Hill above, and by Murphy in the previous chapter; their eyes and faces, as the primary instruments for expressing the passions, needed to be mobile and alive; and lastly, they had to be able to gesture gracefully and appropriately, have good posture, and move fluidly about the stage. As we have seen, critics distinguished Siddons’ and Garrick’s expressive faces and flashing eyes together with their physical grace and ease. The relationship amongst voice, face, and gesture was established by convention, as Austin wrote: ‘In calm discourse the words and gestures are nearly contemporaneous: and in high passion the order is[:] 1. The Eyes. 2. The countenance in general. 3. The gestures. 4. Language. But the interval between each is extremely limited’.20 Austin describes how the relationship between these elements changes, depending on the requirements of the scene. In the passionate moments the eyes and face are pre-eminent, followed by gestures, and by voice last of all, an ordering that reinforces the extent to which actors’ eyes and expressive faces were central to communicating the passions. The distinction Austin makes between two performance modes—‘calm discourse’ and ‘high passion’—requires no further explanation because to Austin and his readers it was fundamental to how eighteenth-century actors approached their parts. Audiences, often primed by newspaper reviews as much as by tradition, eagerly awaited the moments of high passion or ‘points’ in a play; these were connected by the ‘level scenes’, which were largely expository and called only for calm discourse. Eighteenth-century actors displayed character synchronically through these passionate ‘points’; understanding that plays were written and performed as a ‘sequence of passions’, as Harriman-Smith observes, alters how we understand both the dramaturgy of the plays and how actors approached their roles.21 Francis Gentleman, in The Dramatic Censor (1770), demonstrates this dramaturgical sensibility in his description of Macklin’s Shylock. ‘In the level scenes’, he writes, Macklin’s ‘voice is most happily suited to that sententious gloominess of expression [Shakespeare] intended; which, with a

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sullen solemnity of deportment, marks the character strongly; in his malevolence, there is a forcible and terrifying ferocity’.22 In the third act, when he hears of Jessica’s elopement, ‘where alternate passions reign, he breaks the tones of utterance, and varies his countenance admirably’.23 This relationship between text and its performance was well understood by eighteenth-century audiences, who as Paul Goring writes, expected a certain bodily eloquence from actors, an eloquence which arose ‘from the performance of an inscribed system of gestures and expressions’.24 Contemporary accounts reveal how some audience members, knowledgeable about vocal and gestural conventions, closely appraised actors’ ‘eloquent’ bodies.25 Paul Hiffernan wrote in Dramatic Genius (1770) that ‘the performer […] in general, ought to have a well-formed person, and a well-toned voice, since, the art of acting consists entirely in being seen and heard with pleasure’ [italics in original], a view shared by his contemporaries.26 Five years later Lichtenberg approvingly observed the decorum of the tragic actress Mary Ann Yates (1728–87), who was ‘so skilled in the management of her arms that from this woman alone could be made an abstract of the art of gesticulation’ (10 October 1775).27 William Hawkins, in the same year, rhapsodised in his Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1775) that the actor and theatre manager John Lee (1725–81) had ‘numberless beauties which are entirely his own […] built upon nature as his guide […] his features are expressive, his voice articulate and powerful, his action just and graceful, and his deportment tolerable easy and refined […] free from that stiffness […] many actors are subject to’.28 This emphasis on decorum was consistent throughout the century; in the Restoration era, John Downes (d. 1712), prompter at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre from the late 1600s to the early 1700s, described the actor Robert Wilks (1665–1732) as ‘Proper and Comely in Person, of Graceful Port, Mein [sic] and Air; void of Affectation’ in Roscius Anglicanus (1708).29 More specifically, the procedural order of eyes/face, gestures, and voice is marked by Tony Aston, who wrote in his Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq; His Lives (1747) that Elizabeth Barry composed ‘her Face, as if sitting to have her Picture drawn’ yet, at the same time, ‘Her Face somewhat preceded her Action, as the latter did her Words, her Face ever expressing the Passions’.30 This need for physical decorum was why Roger Pickering, in his list of ideal attributes for tragic acting, recommended training in dance and in fencing; the first because it ‘must direct [the actor] in the Management of his feet’ and the second because it helped him manage his

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hands; ‘both together’, he writes, ‘give Ease and Gracefulness to every Motion of Feet, Hands, Head, and the whole Body.’31 The lack of bodily eloquence was quickly noticed and rigorously policed by critics. In his 1759 Letter to David Garrick, the correspondent ‘H. W.’ (identified as Edward Purdon) railed against lesser actors because he believed they provided bad role models for young people due to their ‘vicious pronunciation’ and ‘ungraceful manner’.32 Davies criticised Colley Cibber’s portrayal of Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII because ‘his grief, resignation, and tenderness, were inadequate, from a deficiency of those powers of expression which the melting tones of voice, and a corresponding propriety of gesture, can alone bestow’.33 Joseph Haslewood critiqued Davies in turn when the latter still acted by observing that although he was a useful ‘Pack-horse’ able to play a range of roles, and despite having a ‘person and countenance [which were] genteel, and well adapted for the Stage’, Davies was ‘extremely stiff and inanimate in his deportment’.34 Davies’ good looks made him a serviceable second-stringer, but his lack of physical grace in body and gesture meant he could go no further. Echoing Pickering, Austin writes that ‘Graceful action must be performed with facility, because the appearance of great efforts is incompatible with ease, which is one constituent part of grace’.35 Hawkins, again, wrote that the actor Robert Bensley (1742–1817) had ‘neither face, voice, manner or scarce any theatrical requisite’, in short, Bensley had nothing to commend him. Hawkins offers faint praise, ‘his person to be looked at, is tolerable’, then quickly retracts it: ‘but as soon as set in motion, it becomes contemptible; or, at least, as much intolerable’.36 In a review of Hannah Cowley’s The Runaway (1776), in which the young Siddons appeared in her first season at Drury Lane, Bensley was condemned as having a ‘Countenance that is convulsed on all Occasions alike’.37 Critical responses to actresses were couched in similar terms but intensified by the misogyny of most critics. Earlier in the century, the then forty-four-year-old Elizabeth Barry suffered the following in the anonymous satirical dialogue, A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702): Ramb. I do think that Person the finest Woman in the World upon the Stage, and the ugliest Woman oft on’t Sull. Age and Intemperance are the fatal Enemies of Beauty; she’s guilty of both […] she still charms (as you say) upon the Stage, and even off I don’t think so rudely of her as you do: ’Tis true, Time has turn’d up some of her Furrows, but not to such a degree.

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Ramb. To the degree of Lothsomness [sic] upon my Faith; but on the Stage I am willing to let her pass for a Heroine’.38 Hawkins felt that Jane Pope (1774–1818), the comedic successor to Kitty Clive (1711–85), possessed ‘great spirit, and agreeable pertness in her manner’ but her figure was ‘rather bulky and unweildy’ [sic]; in a similar vein, Davies wrote that Christiana Horton (1698/9–1756), a notable beauty known for playing coquettes in her youth, ‘as she advanced in life, though she still retained great beauty of features, she grew corpulent; and, by striving to present the appearance of a fine shape, she laced herself so tight that the upper part of her figure bore no proportion to the rest of her body’.39 Physical attractiveness was as much an asset for an actor then as it is now, and both Siddons and Garrick were noted for their beauty. But beauty without decorum did not pass muster, whereas an actor with decorum could succeed, even if somewhat plain in their looks. The best actors had eloquent bodies and flexible and harmonious voices which, when combined with a feeling for their characters, produced performances that could transcend any plainness in appearance; therefore, aging actors and actresses could still perform the roles of their youth. Tony Aston wrote that Elizabeth Barry was not handsome, her ‘Mouth op’ning most on the Right Side, which she strove to draw t’other Way’; […] she was ‘middle-­ size’d […] and was in[d]ifferently plump’.40 Yet for Aston, in ‘Tragedy she was solemn and august—in Free Comedy alert, easy, and genteel—pleasant in her Face and Action; filling the Stage with Variety of Gesture’ (8). The same author described Betterton, ‘although a superlative good Actor’ (3), as labouring under [an] ill Figure, being clumsily made, having a great Head, a short thick Neck, stoop’d in the Shoulders, and had fat short Arms, which he rarely lifted higher than his Stomach.—His Left Hand frequently lodg’d in his Breast, between his Coat and Waistcoat, while, with his Right, he prepared his Speech.—His Actions were few, but just.—He had little Eyes, and a broad Face, a little Pock-fretten, a corpulent Body, and thick Legs, with large Feet.—He was better to meet, than to follow; for his Aspect was serious, venerable, and majestic. (3–4)

Despite these disadvantages, Betterton’s gestures were ‘few’ and, importantly, ‘just’; he remained the ‘most extensive Actor’ Aston had seen, with

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a repertoire spanning the classical tragedy of Alexander to the comedy of Falstaff (4). ‘If I was to write of him all Day’, Aston commented, ‘I should still remember fresh Matter in his Behalf’ (5). Colley Cibber recalled Betterton similarly: The Person of this excellent Actor was suitable to his Voice, more manly than sweet, not exceeding the middle Stature, inclining to the corpulent; of a ferocious and penetrating Aspect; his Limbs nearer the athletick, than the delicate Proportion; yet however form’d there arose from the Harmony of the whole a commanding Mien of Majesty.41

Aston paints a picture of a somewhat ugly man, and Cibber observes many of the same physical attributes. However, Cibber also comments on Betterton’s physical harmony that projected a sense of ‘Majesty’ in his bearing.42 Both Cibber and Aston refer to Betterton’s face, which was in Cibber words ‘ferocious and penetrating’ and in Aston’s ‘serious, venerable, and majestic’. Yes, physical attractiveness was an asset, but expressive faces and voices and graceful gestures and comportment meant more to audiences than physical appearance, especially if, like Betterton and Barry, actors could perform their character types with justness and propriety. Despite his apparent ugliness, both Aston and Cibber emphasised Betterton’s majesty, a quality necessary for playing tragic roles. Here decorum and character types intersect. Because a king cannot speak and move like a tinker, actors needed to be able to carry themselves with the nobility and grace of the aristocratic characters they played and, as Barnett observes, to ‘reflect the elevated and idealized nature of the great themes and eternal truths which were being represented onstage by such characters’.43 Writing of players on the earlier Shakespearean stage, Evelyn Tribble observes that ‘gesture and movement were viewed as the pinnacle of the players’ art, the “grace” that enlivened the words of the playwright’, an observation that holds, equally, for actors in the eighteenth century.44 Contrary to contemporary assessments of acting in the early modern theatre, which have tended to reduce the arts of gesture to a ‘set of hack routines’, Tribble argues it is more fruitful to ‘see such practices as shared assumptions undergirding a sophisticated techné’.45 Not understanding what these ‘shared assumptions’ were, we are surprised audiences had at times powerful emotional responses to these performances. These emotions, however, were not produced by gestures alone but through a

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combination of gesture and voice. It was an actor’s voice that made an audience thrill to his or her performance.

Ranting, Canting, and Toning46 When Murphy and Cumberland offered their condemnation of acting at the time of Garrick’s ascension they criticised actors’ voices using three common categories: ranting (shouting or ‘roaring’ the lines), canting (delivering lines in a high monotone or ‘whine’), and toning (delivering lines in a sing-song manner). Ranting, canting, and toning made an early appearance in Hamlet’s advice to the players (3.2.1–45) and then consistently reappeared as critical categories over the next two hundred years. There are in the first nineteen lines of Hamlet’s advice (3.2.1–15; 17–20) a series of instructions for how actors should use their voices: First, they should speak lightly and nimbly but refrain from over pronouncing or pompously proclaiming (‘mouth[ing]’) their words (OED).47 Hamlet’s next few lines relate to gesture but, in the context, can be applied to speech also: ‘temperance’ and ‘smoothness’ are also needed even when, or especially when, an actor is caught in a ‘whirlwind of passions’. Hamlet is ‘offend[ed]’ by the roaring actor who ‘tear[s] a passion to tatters’ with his shouting, deafens the groundlings (who appreciate little but the ‘noise’ he makes) and in his raging ‘out-Herods Herod’. In contrast, related to his earlier advice to perform with ‘temperance’ and ‘smoothness,’ Hamlet warns actors not to underplay either but to exercise their judgement by taking care not to exceed the ‘modesty of nature’. In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, this meant performing with decorum. Ranting, canting, and toning, however, should not be dismissed as aberrations characteristic of seventeenth-century tragedy which, the logic of ‘infinite regress’ would have us believe, gradually disappeared as the new century progressed; to the contrary, they should be understood as fundamental to the rhetorical conventions of tragic acting that persisted over the long eighteenth century.48 Tony Aston, looking back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, censured the choleric George Powell (1668?–1714), who ‘Out-Heroded HEROD; and in his poison’d, mad Scene, out-rav’d all Probability’; he contrasted Powell to Betterton, who ‘kept his Passion under and shew’d it most (as Fume smoakes [sic] most, when stifled)’.49 Colley Cibber also criticises an anonymous Hamlet—in all likelihood the actor and his co-theatre manager Robert Wilks—playing the ‘point’ where Hamlet meets his father’s ghost, in similar terms: ‘You

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have seen a Hamlet perhaps, who, on the first appearance of his Father’s Spirit, has thrown himself into all the straining Vociferation requisite to express Rage and Fury […] tearing a Passion into Rags’, all to the thunderous applause from the audience.50 In a similar vein, Thomas Wilkes wrote that tragic actors of the earlier era spoke either in ‘a turgid vociferation or effeminate whine, accompanied with the most outrageous and unnatural rants’ which were ‘mistaken’ both by themselves and their audiences ‘for the best display of the heroic and tender passions’.51 Of course, in Wilkes’ own time in the Age of Garrick, performances like these were no more because ‘the established maxim of our modern Stage is always to keep Nature in view, [therefore] a great part of this vicious action and utterance has been deservedly exploded; and I believe that, for this reason, Acting is in far greater perfection than ever it was in the days of our forefathers’.52 Here we see the critical ‘distancing’ identified by Menzer in action; acting of the present day is distanced from actors of ‘the recent past […] whose methods are “unnatural” by dint of being not now, but then’.53 But if we take even a cursory look at what commentators in the earlier part of the century thought about their actors, we get a different perspective. John Downes, reporting again on Robert Wilks, observed that the ‘Elevations and Cadencies’ [sic] in his voice were ‘just’; furthermore, the ‘Emission of his Words [was] free, easy and natural; Attracting attentive silence in his Audience, (I mean the Judicious) except where there are Unnatural Rants […]’.54 Here Downes highlights the musicality of Wilks’ delivery, the rises and falls (‘Cadencies’) of his voice that produce the effect of a relaxed delivery which Downes thought was ‘natural’. The distinction is important when it is contrasted with the moments when ‘Unnatural Rants’ are required of him. When Downes refers to ‘Unnatural Rants’ he means “not-of-nature” or “otherworldly” rather than “artificial”: It is a compliment not a criticism, just as it is when Thomas Wilkes uses the same adjective. Cibber wrote that Elizabeth Barry had a ‘Voice full, clear, and strong, so that no Violence of Passion could be too much for her: And when Distress, or Tenderness possess’d her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody, and Softness’.55 Barry’s gentle tunefulness gave her a ‘Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen’ in the ‘Art of exciting Pity’ (95). However, she also had the vocal capacity to deliver big passionate speeches: in ‘Scenes of Anger, Defiance, or Resentment, while she was impetuous, and terrible, she pour’d out the Sentiment with an enchanting Harmony’ (95).

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Although toning signified an antiquated acting style (and Cibber was notorious for his sing-song delivery), critics continued to value the music in actors’ voices long after the Age of Garrick. As late as 1796, the Oracle and Public Advertiser reported that the provincial actor Charles Murray (1754–1821), attempting Shylock for his premiere at Covent Garden on 30 September, seemed ‘to want tone—and his modulation of [his voice] is not seldom deficient’ (1 October).56 This lack of tone led to a canting monotony in Murray’s delivery, confirmed by the journal How Do You Do? which observed: ‘his tones […] smacked somewhat of the twang of the conventicle, and the drawling sounds that issue from the wide-opened mouth of a methodist-preacher’.57 As this criticism reveals, actors demonstrated their skills as performers through their voices before nearly anything else, and audiences, trained in rhetoric, possessed a critical vocabulary which they used to assess them. Actors’ communicated emotions through their voices, but had to do so within a regulated framework of decorum, justness, and propriety. Smollett’s account in The Champion succinctly describes how Garrick’s voice maintained harmony, allowed easy transitions between the passions, and suited each character he played. His Voice is clear and piercing, perfectly sweet, and harmonious, without Monotony, Drawling, or Affectation; it is capable of all the various Passions, which the Heart of Man is agitated with, and the Genius of Shakespear [sic] can describe; it is neither whining, bellowing, or grumpling,58 but in whatever Character he assimulates59 [sic] perfectly easy in its Transitions, natural in its Cadence, and beautiful in its Elocution.60

Twenty years later these qualities were still being highlighted. A ‘Critical Examen of Mr. [David] Garrick’s Abilities as an Actor’, published in The Theatrical Review in 1763, observed: ‘The voice of this performer is clear, impressive, and affecting; agreeable, though not harmonious; sharp, though not dissonant; strong, tho’ not extensive. In declamation, it is uncommonly forcible; in narrative unaffectedly simple’.61 The writer again emphasises clarity and sharpness even though he feels Garrick’s voice lacks harmony; nonetheless, it remains ‘agreeable’. Remembering the distinction between ‘points’ and ‘level scenes’ discussed earlier, we can see how Garrick achieves clarity in the ‘narrative’ (‘level’) sections and reserves ‘forcible’ declamation for the big speeches. Garrick’s rants lacked power so, as The Theatrical Review’s writer continues, it ‘sometime sinks where

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the passions meet with any violent agitation’.62 But Garrick could uniquely adapt his voice so that audiences barely noticed its weaknesses and were ‘almost induced to believe that it ought to rise no farther [than] it should rise’.63 Garrick’s voice was criticised throughout his career, usually for his inserted pauses that interrupted what critics saw as the correct scansion of a line, but here we see two aspects of his voice relating both to his skill as a performer and to his audiences’ expectations.64 First, Garrick seemed to literally run out of puff just when he should be building his vocal energy but, second, he skilfully convinced his audiences this was how it should be. The audience were primed by convention for the actor to deliver passionate moments in a thundering rant, but Garrick did not hit the same ‘points’ with the same force as his predecessors; nonetheless, he left his audiences enchanted. The polymathic John Hill, who authored two editions of The Actor (1750; 1755), astutely suggests Garrick’s pauses were less a vocal deficiency and more a dramaturgical choice made by the actor to compensate for bad writing. If the play being performed, Hill observes, had been written using sentences in iambic pentameter, the rhythm of which always ended the sentence on the tenth syllable of the second line, then ‘the poet is often blameable for forcing a sort of monotony upon the performer which he can no way avoid’.65 The actor, as a consequence, is ‘compell’d to deliver whole speeches in the same tone and cadence, and to make a sort of recitative of it, tho’ a very inharmonious one’ (200). To avoid such a ‘snare’ Garrick ‘lengthens or shortens the pause at every period, according to the circumstances, so that the rests are too much varied from one another to affect the ear as the same thing’ (200–1). One sympathises with actors forced to deliver long speeches composed in end-stopped sentences, and the sing-song monotony of many actors, as Hill observes, arose from the ‘necessity’ that they deliver ‘with a pompous accent a long chain of blank verses’ (199). Possibly it was this textual characteristic that tripped up Macklin when he started acting in the early 1700s and, I cautiously hazard, what may have led to a certain regularity in how actors such as Quin and Cibber delivered their lines. Macklin’s first London engagement did not last long because, he recalled, ‘I spoke so familiar […] and so little in the hoity-toity tone of the Tragedy of that day, that the manager [John Rich] told me, I had better go to grass for another year or two’ [italics in original].66 I suspect Macklin of retrospective myth-making because, from the 1740s, he promoted the “new” acting and its less-cadenced delivery: It was in his

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interests to enforce a separation from the recent past. In his updated version of The Actor (1755), published posthumously, Hill wrote that Macklin checked ‘all the cant and cadence [tone] of tragedy; he would bid his pupil first speak the passage as he would in common life, if he had occasion to pronounce the same words; and then giving them more force, but preserving the same accent, to deliver them on the stage’.67 (It is worth noting that an identical idea was espoused by Charles Gildon in The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, forty-five years earlier, who wrote that the ‘best Actors’ always spoke in the ‘same Tone on the Stage, as they would do in a Room, allowing for the Distance’.)68 To speak the same as one would in real life but more forcefully is a common-sense description of an actor’s projection that still makes sense to us today. However, in the 1750 edition of The Actor, Hill provides some details that link vocal delivery to how actors dramaturgically interpreted a play. He writes that Macklin made the clear distinction in tragedy between scenes of ‘sentiment’, wherein ‘a simple recital of facts was the substance of what was to be spoken, or when pure and cool reason was the sole meaning of the scene’, and those of ‘passion’.69 Although Macklin generally ‘banish’d noise and vehemence’ (or ranting) from passionate points, ‘he allow’d […] the pompous and sounding [toning] delivery were just, nay were necessary in this species of playing, and that no other manner of pronouncing the words was fit to accompany the thought the author expressed by them, or able to convey it to the audience in its intended and proper dignity’.70 Macklin, it seems, recognised the importance of hoity-toitiness—but in the right place!

Siddons’ Grand Style Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble acted with statuesque poses, expansive gestures, and stately and deliberate movement; as Patricia McLoughlin MacMahon notes, it was a distinctive ‘family acting style’ recognisable in all five Kemble siblings who were performing on London stages by 1784.71 To act with grace and decorum, as we saw above, reflected continental acting theories that were equally orthodox in England; as Joshua Reynolds stipulated in his Thirteenth Discourse to the Royal Academy: ‘even the expression of violent passion, is not always the most excellent in proportion as it is the most natural’ (11 December 1786).72 The principles of idealisation and the ‘grand style’ that Reynolds advocated in painting were even more applicable in the theatre where, he wrote, ‘every thing should be raised and enlarged beyond its natural state

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[in order] that the full effect may come home to the spectator, which otherwise would be lost in the comparatively extensive space of the Theatre’.73 By 1786 Siddons and Kemble had established themselves as leading tragedians and, as McMahon observes, Reynold’s Discourse contained ‘striking and unmistakable references to their “Grand Style”’.74 There was no one else but Siddons (who he had painted as the Tragic Muse two years earlier) that Reynolds could have had in mind when he wrote that it was ‘the deliberate and stately step, the studied grace of action, which seems to enlarge the dimensions of the Actor, and alone to fill the stage’.75 The grand gestural style of Sarah Siddons was matched by her vocal delivery. Her initial failure at Drury Lane seems largely due to vocal weakness, a deficiency she overcame through hard work in the provinces for six years. In 1780, Siddons started being mentored by Thomas Sheridan and put into practice many of his elocutionary principles. Sheridan, in his youth, before he turned to elocution, had been an actor who almost rivalled Garrick76, and was noted for being ‘very judicious in his Delivery […] Perhaps a truer Orator never trod the Stage’.77 Unlike the faltering girl who debuted in 1775, the mature actress playing Lady Macbeth, described by George Joseph Bell, had a voice that chilled and thrilled this auditor, a voice and performance which, he wrote, ‘never should be forgot, cannot be conceived or described’.78 The English Review’s description of Siddons’ acting which we saw earlier, published a few months after her triumphant return to Drury Lane, concludes by highlighting her originality: ‘she copies no one living or dead, but acts from nature and herself’.79 The Review’s author contrasts Siddons’ acting against the ‘disgusting’ affectations of other actresses and observes: ‘so natural are her gradations and transitions, so classical and correct her speech and deportment, and so exceedingly affecting and pathetical are her voice, form, and features, that there is no conveying an idea of the pleasure she communicates by words’.80 Here again a critic emphasises Siddons’ skill shifting from one clearly delineated passion to the next; these are ‘natural’ because they are performed with fluency, ease, and, as he wrote earlier, with rapidity. These observations are consistent with his next compliment: In voice and body, Siddons’ acting was classically correct or according to accepted conventions. When he observes how ‘exceedingly affecting and pathetical’ she is (and the ‘pleasure’ this brings), he seems to be suggesting a quality Siddons possessed which captured and held her audiences’ interest; a nebulous thing—charisma, ‘it’, or ‘stage presence’.81 He also names two emotions expressed by Siddons (‘affecting

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and pathetical’) which imply a particular effect on sensitive audience members who are predisposed to experience it. He continues naming the emotions expressed by Siddons; her voice is ‘remarkably plaintive, yet capable of all that firmness and exertion which the intrepidity of fortitude, or the impulse of sudden rage demand. […] her articulation [is] clear, distinct, and penetrating. […] no laborious strainings at false climax, in which the tired voice reiterates one high tone beyond which it cannot reach, can be heard’ [my italics].82 Boaden expands significantly on the first part of this description reinforcing the reputation of Siddons’ voice as it was heard in her heyday (but considerably diminished when Boaden wrote): ‘Her voice is naturally plaintive, and a tender melancholy in her level speaking denotes a being devoted to tragedy; yet this seemingly settled quality of voice becomes at will sonorous or piercing, overwhelms with rage, or in its wild shriek absolutely harrows up the soul’.83 Unlike Boaden’s account, the Review’s language is descriptive rather than evaluative. Here in the early 1780s, three years after the death of Garrick, the young actress’s voice is described as ‘plaintive’ but also forceful when the ‘impulse of sudden rage’ demands it to be. She is technically accomplished and pronounces her words clearly, and she never strains for a ‘false climax’ or tires herself by reaching for ever ‘high[er] tone[s]’. Reflecting the Romantic era in which Boaden was writing, there are some divergences between the original and Boaden’s quotation. In Boaden’s quote he describes the quality of plaintiveness in her voice as ‘natural’, but in the English Review’s description it is remarkable. Siddons’ vocal power is described with modest emotives by the Review, but the same passage in Boaden becomes excessively purple as, running out of emotives (‘rage’), he reaches for another metaphor to describe his embodied response to her ‘wild shriek’: It ‘absolutely harrows up the soul’. Despite their discrepancies, both the Review’s writer and Boaden’s adaptation of this source describe Siddons’ voice using the same critical categories that had been used to describe Garrick’s voice forty years earlier, and to articulate the same principles. These were the principles that Macklin espoused and were, as they were for all eighteenth-century commentators on acting, variations on Hamlet’s advice to the players. Actors spoke with lightness and musicality in the non-passionate level scenes, but when they hit passionate heights in their ‘points’, they did so with force and resonance (‘sonorous’), without overstraining.

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‘The lady is greatly improved’ When Siddons debuted at Drury Lane on 29 December 1775, she was twenty years old and had given birth to her second child a little less than two months before.84 The tremulous young woman who took to the boards that night, playing Portia, showed little of what she would become, and over the remaining six months of the season was equally unimpressive in her other parts, most of which tended towards a lighter form of comedy. She was dismissed from Drury Lane in June 1776 and spent the next six years playing in regional theatres. Demonstrating, once again, the old adage that ‘There’s no such thing as an overnight sensation’, in her years away from London the young Siddons honed her craft and tested her performances on diverse and often discerning audiences, especially before fashionable Londoners holidaying in Bath, where she acted for the last four years of her exile.85 Aspects of the Siddons style started to emerge in her years of regional touring, in particular, her astute dramaturgical sensibility, her capacity to evoke strong emotions in her audiences, and the incipient otherworldliness that would earn her later the soubriquet of the ‘Sublime Siddons’. Siddons gained several powerful and influential friends while in Bath, some of whom lobbied Richard Sheridan to re-engage her at Drury Lane—including his own father, Thomas Sheridan, who mentored her from 1780 until his death in 1788.86 Sheridan cannily chose Isabella in Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage (1757) for her second attempt at Drury Lane on 10 October 1782; this time the audience went wild, and Siddons went on to dominate the English stage for the next thirty years.87 The shy, diffident performer of 1775 now seemed to be, as William Hazlitt (1778–1830) later eulogised, ‘a being of a superior order [who] had dropped from another sphere’.88 The young actress who tried her luck on the Drury Lane stage in 1775 was no novice. She had been performing since she was a child in her parents’, Roger and Sarah Kemble’s, strolling troupe before taking roles in regional centres such as Worcester and Cheltenham. Possibly, the habits of provincial playing worked against her on opening night, as one critic observed a degree of canting in her delivery: ‘It is feared she possess [sic] a monotone not to be got rid of; there is also vulgarity in her tones’.89 Despite her experience it is more than likely that Siddons’ lack of presence on her opening night, noted by critics, resulted from her physically weakened state after recently giving birth. The picture painted by this critic bears no resemblance to the commanding actress described above: ‘On

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before us tottered rather than walked, a very pretty, delicate, fragile-­ looking young creature, […] She spoke in a broken tremulous tone; and at the close of a sentence her words generally lapsed into a horrid whisper, that was absolutely inaudible’.90 He does note, however, that ‘Towards the famous Trial-scene, she became more collected, and delivered the great speech to Shylock with the most critical propriety, but still with a faintness of utterance which seemed the result rather of internal physical weakness than of a deficiency of spirit or feeling’ [italics in original].91 Boaden thought Portia the wrong part for Siddons because there ‘was nothing to alarm, to excite, to fire with indignation, or subdue by tenderness […] Mere declamation, however grand or just, never did more than convince the reason; what was here required was to raise an interest by piercing the heart’.92 In other words, playing Portia did not allow Siddons to play to her strengths; there were no opportunities for the great displays of pathos for which she was, even at that young age, already gaining a reputation and which would later confirm her greatness. Boaden perceptively notes the lack of ‘points’ in the role and draws a comparison with Garrick’s acting: ‘Let it be remembered too, that she declaimed only in Portia; and that Mr. Garrick himself, excelled in the wild, and fiery breaks of passion’ [italics in original].93 His comparison to Garrick is revealing both for what it says about Garrick’s reputation and for the critical values it demonstrates: It was an actor’s ability to perform the big emotional ‘points’ that cemented his or her reputation. However, the criticism of Siddons for the remainder of her first season reveals that she did not appear to have improved greatly over the next six months. Why this was so is a mystery considering her capacity for hard work, quick study, and an acute dramaturgical sensibility that was even noted by the hostile reviewer above. Her last Drury Lane role was as Lady Anne in Garrick’s final performances as Richard III, late in the season.94 The bitchy ‘Theatricus’ described her as that ‘Abstract of Insipidity the inanimate Siddons’; but he also recognised ‘that Mrs. Siddons figured the character of Lady Anne better than he had [ever] seen it done’.95 An anonymous letter writer defended her by claiming ‘Theatricus must be a very surly Critic, or he would have taken Notice of the Modesty and pleasing Sensibility which this Lady displayed through her whole Part. I expected, that as a young Performer she would have escaped the Fangs of virulent, illiberal Criticism’.96 A number of commentators, including her biographers, have remarked on the roles she was given to play in the 1775–6 season, which were nearly

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all comic, and mainly in secondary roles to the queen of comedy Frances Abington (1737–1815) and the queens of tragedy Mary Ann Yates and Elizabeth Younge (1740–97), who, Siddons was convinced, were jealous of her and plotted her downfall.97 Garrick, she believed, used her to spite the other three (a tactic not beyond him), but Boaden makes a compelling case that the soon-to-be retired manager supported her.98 Clearly, her recovery from childbirth must have impacted on her debut as Portia, and the critical reception would have dented Siddons’ confidence, together with the antipathy of Younge and Yates.99 Fanny Abington, seeing no threat to her pre-eminence as the queen of satirical comedy, was the only person to question the wisdom of letting Siddons go at the end of the season.100 However, this was the same young actress who had precociously tried her hand as Hamlet, aged only nineteen, in Worcester early in 1775. She had debuted what would later become one of her defining tragic roles, Belvidera in Venice Preserv’d, in Cheltenham in 1774 and, as she recalled in her short autobiography, greatly moved Earl Aylesbury and his family in the role: the ladies of his family and thier [sic] whole Party had suffered from my performance of it; […] they had all wept so much and were so disfigured with red eyes and swoln [sic] faces, that they were this morning actually unpresentable being all confind [sic] to thier [sic] chambers with violent headachs [sic].101

Henrietta Boyle (1757/8–1793), the stepdaughter of Aylesbury, who would become Siddons’ lifelong friend, pressed her father to recommend the young actress to Garrick. Garrick sent to Cheltenham the veteran company member Thomas King, who reported enthusiastically on her Calista in The Fair Penitent.102 The following year, Garrick asked the editor and theatre critic Henry Bate Dudley to report on Siddons. Bate Dudley saw her perform Rosalind (while heavily pregnant) and, after complimenting her face, gestures, and deportment, remarked: ‘I know no woman who marks the different passages and transitions with so much variety and at the same time propriety of expression’.103 His only criticism was her voice, which he found ‘rather dissonant’ and ‘somewhat grating’, but thought it an ‘error of affectation’ from her strolling days that could easily be ‘corrected if not wholly emended’.104 Her voice, however, must still have been a problem later because a critic of The Runaway, where Siddons played the ingenue, Miss Morley, thought she had ‘but few

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Powers given her by Nature; she speaks disagreeably, and her Motions are like Twitches, and give Pain’ (although to be fair, he criticised most of the cast).105 Siddons learned of her dismissal from Drury Lane whilst on tour to Birmingham in the summer of 1776.106 Ironically, as Boaden writes, it was during her season in Birmingham that she caught the attention of the actor John Henderson, who wrote to John Palmer the Younger, theatre manager of the Theatre Royal in Bath.107 In Boaden’s admittedly partisan account, Henderson ‘was immediately struck with her excellence, and pronounced that she would never be surpassed’.108 Accompanied by her family, Siddons toured the northern circuit under the managements of Joseph Younger and Charles Yates, performing in Liverpool (October to December 1776) and Manchester (December to March 1777). She was then hired by the actor-manager Tate Wilkinson (1739–1803), who had an extensive circuit throughout Yorkshire, and performed for a season at the Theatre Royal in York, opening in Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter on 15 April 1777.109 Over the next eighteen months, with a short recess in the spring of 1778, the Siddonses divided their time between Manchester and Liverpool until October 1778, when her fortune started to change for the better. According to another account, it was less Henderson’s advocacy but that of a certain Mr Floor, the prompter at the Bath theatre ‘who had seen her act in Liverpool’ in 1777–8 and who recommended her to Palmer.110 Floor’s recommendation, together with Henderson’s early endorsement and Siddons’ growing reputation as an actress, persuaded Palmer to finally engage her to perform at both the Bath and Bristol theatres that were part of his circuit. From then on until her return to London, Siddons primarily performed in Bath and Bristol, performing six nights a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in Bristol, and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday back in Bath. This gruelling schedule often had her rehearsing in Bath on Monday morning, then to Bristol in the afternoon (a journey of 12 miles by coach), then back to Bath that night or the next morning for the Tuesday evening performance.111 Although regional touring could be hit and miss in terms of quality, Siddons had the good fortune to be engaged, at first, by Joseph Younger, the manager of the Liverpool Theatre Royal, and Charles Yates, who managed Manchester, and then for the season with Tate Wilkinson. The Liverpool Theatre Royal had gained its patent in 1771, and Manchester received its in 1775. Regional Theatres Royal had the same rights to perform scripted plays as the metropolitan patent theatres, so the repertoires

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were virtually identical to those performed at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.112 A significant difference was that Drury Lane seated more than two thousand patrons after Garrick modified it in 1762, whereas the Yorkshire theatres were far smaller, seating no more than five hundred people. There are three aspects to the foregoing that are worth consideration. First, because all the theatres Siddons performed in were patent theatres, and their managements professionally organised, Siddons was able to perform in conditions similar to those in London. Second, the patent theatres also allowed her to perform a London repertoire, and all the roles she performed in her triumphant return were tried out in the north and in Bristol and Bath. Third, the smaller sizes of the provincial theatres suited the scale of her acting which, according to the London critics, was too small for Drury Lane. Following barely a year from her London dismissal, a year in which she admits she fell into a depression, she had a triumphant season with Tate Wilkinson in York. Wilkinson recalled that ‘Her state of health appeared to me so injured (though I perceived every other requisite), that I actually trembled from her apparent weakness, fearing she would never be able to sustain that fatiguing character [Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter] with proper energy and spirit’.113 Nevertheless, she overcame her indisposition, no doubt buoyed by Wilkinson’s encouragement and York’s audiences: ‘I never remember so great a favourite, as a York actress, as Mrs Siddons was in that short period:—Every one lifted their eyes with astonishment, that such a face, judgment &c. could have been neglected by the London audience, and by the first actor in the world, (Mr. Garrick) as if not of sterling worth’.114 After a London premiere characterised by nervousness, timidity, and a faltering voice, a year later, in Campbell’s account, she ‘electrified the provincial theatres’.115 One suspects here some retrospective hyperbole as was the case with Wilkinson, who could never resist one-upping Garrick (even posthumously!). More reliably, the Bath Chronicle reported at the end of 1778, when she appeared as Elwina in Hannah More’s tragedy Percy (1778), that she was ‘the most capital actress who has performed here these many years’.116 Four months later, an anonymous letter writer reported in the Morning Chronicle: ‘The lady is greatly improved since she left Drury Lane theatre. Her powers of voice being limited, the compass of our play house suits them exactly. She rather over-figured the character, but played several of the principal scenes extremely well’.117 The writer notes her lack of propriety in gestures and, again, draws attention to her

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vocal limitations which, in the context, seem to be a lack of volume but which did not impact on her performance in the smaller Bath Theatre Royal. Little more than a year after this report, the Morning Chronicle was again publishing reports from Bath: The season closed with the tragedy of Douglas [1757], in which Lady Randolph received every possible advantage, that eloquence or elegance could give, from the representation of Mrs. Siddons—an actress whose greatness and graces rise every hour so much upon us, that we tremble whilst we admire, lest the metropolitan managers should hear of her wonderful improvements, and, as usual, snatch them from us. Our only hope is, that her voice may be thought too delicate for that roar which the Londoners have been taught to think natural; and which they love, notwithstanding the never to be forgotten example of David Garrick.118

Although this writer approved of her performance, there was still the caveat about Siddons’ voice (‘too delicate’) which suggests, that four years later, it still lacked the power and force (‘that roar’) needed for the London patent theatres. Couched as a compliment, this curious aside intimates that, perhaps, London acting had regressed; Siddons’ lightness of voice is linked to a similar quality in Garrick’s which served rather than detracted from his performances. Despite reviews such as these, Siddons was still two years away from her return to Drury Lane. In October 1780, she performed the role of Cecilia in Sophia Lee’s (1750–1824) comedy The Chapter of Accidents (1780) in Bristol. An observer, reporting back to the Morning Chronicle, observed that ‘Mrs. Siddons has not the genteel figure of Miss Farren, and therefore did not look Cecilia so interestingly, but she made amends by her playing, and impressed a very forcible idea of the author’s meaning on the audience’.119 Although Siddons did not compare to Elizabeth Farren (1759/62–1829), the rising comic queen of Drury Lane and Haymarket who had premiered in the role two months before, nonetheless, this critic commented on Siddons’ dramaturgical sensibility. The intelligence with which she interpreted her roles was a feature of her playing (that she shared with Garrick) and was apparent from a very early age. Recall the critic above grudgingly approving of the ‘propriety’ with which Siddons performed Portia’s trial speech in an otherwise disastrous first appearance and Bate Dudley’s use of the same word for her Rosalind earlier in Cheltenham. The commentator from Bristol concludes with a remark that was both a

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harbinger of things to come and a wry observation of the stoicism of Bristol audiences: ‘many of whom (strange to tell for Bristol folks) had handkerchiefs at their eyes a great part of the play’.120 A few months later, in December 1780, the pseudonymous ‘Lady Randan’ reported from Bath in the Morning Herald on Siddons as the eponymous heroine in William Mason’s tragedy Elfrida (1752): ‘She looked beyond this world […] in her vow of eternal widowhood. Painters and poets might have improved their sister arts, by surveying the character of her countenance in that affecting scene’ [italics in original].121 Predating Hazlitt’s identification of Siddons as ‘Tragedy Personified’ this review was already predicting her iconic appeal: Siddons would later become one of the most painted people of the eighteenth century.122 It is likely that ‘Lady Randan’ was Henry Bate Dudley, the new owner of the Herald, and the same early enthusiast and talent scout who five years earlier had recommended her to Garrick, so such partisanship is unsurprising. Although the role of Elfrida belongs more in her usual pantheon of roles than Cecilia, it was not to become one of Siddons’ “greatest hits”. This was not the case with Jane Shore, in Nicholas Rowe’s play of the same name, about the royal mistress of Edward IV. Siddons had played Alicia in the Tate Wilkinson season in York in 1777 and had played Jane in Bath in 1779; the role would be in her return season at Drury Lane and, like Isabella, would be one that she would play throughout her career. The Morning Chronicle reported on her benefit performance in Bath on 18 February 1781: Mrs. SIDDONS last night “set off more, than a mortal seeming.” The burst of the more generous affections, over every idea of personal apprehension, in favour of the “royal little ones,” communicated those ardours of patriotism and pity which she felt to her audience; and every heart beat at her summons, an alarm to compassion. […] The dying penitent struggled a while with her destiny, and then fell the victim of indiscretion and misfortune, before the eyes of an audience, at once melted, delighted, and agonized by the scene.123 [italics in original]

The Bath audience that witnessed this performance was, in the opinion of the above critic, both ‘the most crowded, and at the same time, most brilliant audience’ that had gathered at the Theatre Royal.124 Siddons was still twenty months away from her triumphant return to Drury Lane, but already the affective power of her acting was being experienced by Bath

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audiences. Although the emotional practices of eighteenth-century audiences will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, we need to keep the concept of mobilising emotional practices at the forefront of our minds when considering the reported effects of Siddons’ acting on her audiences. The Bath audience who were ‘melted’, ‘delighted’, and ‘agonized’ by Siddons’ performance were mobilising their emotions by focussing their ‘diffuse arousals’ and giving them ‘intelligible shape’; as Marsden observes, ‘the emotional response was in itself a pleasure; [theatregoers] went to the theatre to feel, and they wanted to feel to excess’.125 Siddons’ provincial seasons gave her the opportunities to play tragic or pathetic roles that would evoke extreme responses from an audience, particularly from elite audiences whose sentimentalist emotional practices involved the cultivation of refined sensibility. The roles Siddons perfected, particularly in Bath and Bristol, and the creation of ‘communities of sentiment’ with those audiences, would form the foundations of her future success. It was in Bath, too, that she came under the influence of Thomas Sheridan, who became an important influence on Siddons at a pivotal moment in her career. Sheridan had not been impressed by the young actress during her 1775–6 season at Drury Lane, but four years later, after seeing her perform in Bath (a performance in personal wardrobe because the costumes had not arrived in time from Bristol), he wrote that ‘no disadvantage of dress could conceal her transcendental merit’.126 Although he urged his son Richard to hire Siddons, apparently the terms were insufficient to induce her to return to Drury Lane.127 In his influential Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), Sheridan emphasised the importance of a ‘just delivery’, which consisted of ‘a distinct articulation of words, pronounced in proper tones, suitably varied to the sense, and the emotions of the mind; with due observation of accent; of emphasis, in its several gradations; of rests or pauses of the voice, in proper places and well-measured degrees of time’.128 Sheridan became a significant contributor to the British Elocutionary Movement (1702–1806), but he had developed his own ideas from his substantial stage practice (although he took pains to separate his elocutionary authority from his theatrical background).129 Unlike other elocutionists, Sheridan understood acting and the theatre; James Boswell reports it was Sheridan who had created the first ‘delicate & irresolute’ Hamlet.130 Emotion was essential to Sheridan’s rhetoric, but he had less to say about how such emotion should be signified; instead he fell back on the conventional idea that an orator must ‘speak entirely from his feelings; and they will find much truer signs to manifest themselves by,

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than he could find for them’.131 Goring argues that Sheridan ‘unequivocal[ly]’ rejected prescriptive rules for ‘the language of the passions’ but, nonetheless, underpinning all his writing was the ambition to rectify that ‘general inability [in the English populace] to read, or speak, with propriety and grace in public’.132 Sheridan, despite being vague about how actors/orators should emotionally charge their speaking, nonetheless recognised the importance of approaching vocal delivery in a systematic way and instilled this in his young student. There is a direct genealogy from Sheridan, the actor turned elocutionist, to Siddons, his most spectacular student. Siddons had, from a young age, the capacity to reduce audiences to tears long before Sheridan tutored her, but he distinctly influenced her later development, and she would become, as Conrad Brunström observes, ‘the embodiment of Sheridan’s highest ideals regarding the power of performed speech’.133 Siddons had attended Sheridan’s lecture series ‘Rhetorical Prelections’ in the 1780s, and it was his ‘vision of the high seriousness and dignity of the acting profession that she cherished’.134 When it came to training actors’ voices Sheridan brought a wealth of experience in acting, stage management, and managing the interaction of actors and audiences. It was Sheridan, Brunström argues, who transformed Siddons into a ‘phenomenon’.135

‘It becomes as grand as it is petrifying’ How Siddons used her voice in performance is scattered across several accounts which all highlight a number of characteristics: a deep tone, slow and deliberate enunciation of her words, and emotive cracks in her voice that, when invested with force, rose to her infamous soul-harrowing shrieks. The writer and art historian Anna Jameson (1794–1860) described Siddons’ voice as ‘deep-toned, measured’ and with ‘impressive enunciation’, qualities which, in conversation, Fanny Burney (1752–1840) thought were ‘formal, sententious, calm, & dry’, spoken in a voice that was ‘deep and dragging’.136 Siddons’ deep-toned voice seems to have been a phenomenon in itself, bringing qualities of the stage into everyday life. The artist James Northcote (1746–1831) repeats a gossipy anecdote about Siddons who, at supper with the young Princess Caroline, overawed the princess with her manner. Seeking to break the ice, after a ‘long and awful silence’, Siddons said to one of the servants ‘in her deep-toned manner, “I will thank you for a glass of table beer”. Upon this, the Princess

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burst into a fit of laughter’.137 Siddons herself admits to frightening a shop assistant in a dry goods store by interrupting his sales pitch with the query, ‘But will it wash?’ in her dramatically deep voice. As she laughingly reported to Campbell, ‘Witness truth, I never meant to be tragical’.138 The ‘just delivery’ Sheridan advocated in his lectures on elocution involved clear and proper pronunciation together with well-timed rests or pauses in speaking. These lessons were embodied in Siddons’ acting and those of her siblings, although Boaden suggests they were learned at a much earlier age from her mother, Sarah Ward Kemble (1735–1807), from whom she had ‘derived that exact and deliberate articulation, the ground of all just speaking.’139 Hazlitt recalled that ‘Mrs Siddons always spoke as slow as she ought’ but lamented seeing her in special performances after her retirement, because now ‘the machinery of the voice seems too ponderous for the power that wields it. There is too long a pause between each sentence, and between each word in each sentence’.140 For others in her family, who lacked her dramaturgical sensibility, slow and distinct pronunciation became a readily identifiable mannerism. When Siddons’ niece, Fanny Kemble (1809–93), attempted Belvidera, Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) observed that, in imitating her aunt, she ‘too doles out her words too much; dwells upon the vowels till they become double […] (which is occasionally natural where some more than ordinary emphasis of passion warrants it, but becomes a trick when used always)’.141 But this is the same vocal technique Siddons had employed to great effect. Playing Margaret of Anjou in Thomas Francklin’s The Earl of Warwick (1766) she announced that Warwick had ‘not an hour to live’; Sarah Bartley (née Smith) (1783?–1850), who played Queen Elizabeth with her, recalled that Siddons’ ‘dissyllabic pronunciation of the word hour was so powerful that it still seemed to vibrate in her ears’.142 We can surmise that Siddons’ voice was noticeably deep for a woman’s, and her manner of speaking, reflecting Sheridan’s stipulation for ‘just delivery’, was ‘deliberate’. Although a deeply toned voice need not preclude an actress from comic roles, eighteenth-century rhetorical conventions required lightness and vivacity for such roles, roles that needed dialogue to be delivered, as Hannah Pritchard did, with ‘humour, wit, or sprightliness’.143 In contrast, according to Campbell, ‘the burthen of [Siddons’] inspiration was too weighty for comedy’;144 hers was a tragic voice, a voice pitched for wronged wives and mothers, and imperious queens.

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Amongst all these queens, and the one that redefined the role for generations, was Siddons’ Lady Macbeth (Fig. 3.1), as Charles Lamb wrote: ‘We speak of Lady Macbeth, while in reality we are thinking of Mrs. S.’.145 Her London premiere of the role was on 2 February 1785, and it remained in her repertoire for the rest of her career.146 The performance witnessed by George Joseph Bell occurred nearly twenty-five years later. In his extensive notes, written in a crabbed hand in the margins of his copy of Macbeth, Bell focussed primarily on Siddons’ performance.147 The slowness and deliberation of her delivery is noted by Bell in the scene when Lady Macbeth receives news of the witches’ prophesies from her husband. Upon his arrival, Macbeth says that the king intends to stay with them that night and leave the following day. It is at this point that Lady Macbeth exclaims, ‘O, never ` _ _ _ _ _ _ / (never) Shall, sun, that, morrow, see`!’ (1.5.59–60) (54). Bell indicates Siddons had a downward inflection (marked`) on the first ‘never’ and on ‘see’ at the end of the line. He writes in a second ‘never’ that I assume Siddons inserted, then provides the following quite extensive note: A long pause [after the first ‘never’], turned from him, her eye steadfast. Strong dwelling emphasis on [the second] ‘never’, with deep downward inflection, ‘never shall sun that morrow see!’ Low, very slow sustained voice, her eye and her mind occupied steadfastly in the contemplation of her horrible purpose, pronunciation almost syllabic, note unvaried. Her self-­ collected solemn energy, her fixed posture, her determined eye and full deep voice of fixed resolve never should be forgot, cannot be conceived nor described. (54 n. 15)

Although Siddons may have been trying to smooth the meter of an irregular line, the long pause, which Bell marks in the text with six dashes, suggests she inserted a second ‘never’ to retain the sense of the line that she delivered with a ‘Low, very slow sustained voice’. Bell notes her pronunciation is ‘almost syllabic, note unvaried’, and he inscribes commas between each word to try to capture her timing.148 In contrast, when Kemble performed Macbeth’s monologue ‘If it were done, when ’tis done […]’ (I.7.1–24), Bell observes that he did so ‘like a speech to be recited’ (55). Although Kemble used the same deliberate articulation as his sister, in Bell’s opinion, he displayed ‘None of that hesitation and working of the mind which in Mrs. Siddons seems to inspire the words as the natural expression of the emotion’ (55). Horace Walpole did not share Bell’s

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Fig. 3.1  Macbeth, act I, scene V, Macbeth’s castle—[Sarah Siddons as] Lady Macbeth, 1800 by Richard Westall. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File S528m1 no.113 copy 2. Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, DC

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admiration of Siddons’ distinct articulation and thought that she was ‘hollow and defective in cool declamation’.149 Leigh Hunt shared his view and, echoing Hazlitt, wrote that in the ‘more level part of her style,’ the actress in her later years had a ‘tendency to dole out her words with too formal a solemnity’.150 For Bell, this solemnity in her speech suits the ‘level’ scene when Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to the castle: Her greeting is ‘Dignified and simple’, just as a ‘level’ scene should be performed (55 n. 20). In her ‘Beautifully spoken’ speech, Siddons is ‘quite musical in her tones and in the pronunciation, soothing and satisfying the ear’ (55 n. 20). These qualities of pitch, tone, and rhythm, by themselves, do not reveal much about Siddons’ voice that would explain her emotional impact. Speaking in a melodious tone was a desirable quality, but an unremarkable one in the eighteenth century. Bell’s notes, however, reveal another dimension to her voice which he found unnerving. In sixty-six notes, he refers nine times to Siddons’ Lady Macbeth whispering. When Lady Macbeth calls out ‘Come, all you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,’ these lines and those that follow are delivered by Siddons ‘In a low voice—a whisper of horrid determination’ (53 n. 11). Six lines later when she deliver the lines: ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers’ (1.5.46–7), Bell describes her voice as being: ‘quite supernatural, as in a horrible dream’ (53 n. 12). As will happen throughout his account, Bell follows this description with his own response, which reveals how she achieved her ‘supernatural’ effect: ‘Chilled with horror by the slow hollow whisper of this wonderful creature’ (53 n. 12). In addition to the ‘horrid’ and ‘hollow’ whispers just cited, he records how she ‘eager[ly]’ whispers with ‘anger and surprise’ and in ‘earnest’(55 n. 21; 56–57 n. 28) and again ‘eager[ly]’ in her final scene (66 n. 67). On five occasions Bell describes her whisper as ‘horrid’ or ‘horrible’, and in the sleepwalking scene she speaks in ‘A strange unnatural whisper’ (66 n. 64). He marks how she whispers the lines ‘Hark! Peace!’ in the murder scene with the onomatopoeic note: ‘Hsh! Hsh! Whisper’ (58 n. 32). In the banquet scene, when Kemble’s Macbeth is reacting to Banquo’s ghost, she says, ‘Why do you make such faces? When all’s done, / You look but on a stool’ (3.4.66–7), which Bell records as ‘In his ear, as if to bring him back to objects of common life’ (63 n. 54). The line may not have been whispered but certainly was intimate, and Bell describes its effect on him; slipping into second person in his commentary Bell writes, ‘Her anxiety makes you creep with apprehension: uncertain how to act. Her emotion keeps you breathless’ (63 n. 54). Whether

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Siddons’ whispers filled the barn of Covent Garden or the more intimate Edinburgh Theatre Royal, we do not know, but in a later performance, the journalist J.  H. Stocqueler, who was watching her from the door opposite prompt at Covent Garden, in the murder scene recalled ‘what a whisper was hers! Distinctly audible in every part of the house, it served the purpose of the loudest tones’.151 To understand fully the emotional impact of Siddons’ voice, we need to return to an earlier vocal innovation introduced by Macklin: the broken tone of utterance. Just as Macklin shifted conventions so that the heightened toning at the beginning of the century was reduced (but not eliminated), Siddons’ widened Macklin’s crack in the voice and introduced more discordant notes. Siddons took the nonlexical utterance, Macklin’s ‘broken … tone’, and invested it with a force and power that invoked fervid responses in her audiences (her soul-harrowing ‘shriek’). ‘It was in bursts of indignation, or grief, in sudden exclamations, in apostrophes and inarticulate sounds’, wrote Hazlitt, ‘that she raised the soul of passion to its height, or sunk it in despair’.152 A German visitor to England, Karl Gottlob Küttner, saw Siddons in 1783 in Isabella (1757) and was quite unnerved: ‘Her laughter and certain tones of her voice are truly harrowing, arousing unpleasant, distressing feelings’.153 For Hunt, Siddons’ performance as Constance in Shakespeare’s King John (ca. 1590–6) was an object lesson for young actresses, as it showed the great though difficult distinction between rant and tragic vehemence. In an inferior performer, the loudness of Constance’s grief would be mere noise; but tempered and broken as it is by the natural looks and gestures of Mrs. Siddons, by her varieties of tone and pauses full of meaning, it becomes as grand as it is petrifying.154

Although it is striking how forcefully Siddons’ vocal performances invoked embodied responses in her audience, such responses were not unknown in the eighteenth century. Earlier in the century, the Methodist field preacher George Whitefield moved large audiences to tears with his oratory. The evangelist Sarah Edwards (née Pierpont) (1710–58), in a letter to her brother, wrote that Garrick reportedly had said that Whitefield could ‘move men to tears or make them tremble by his simple intonations in pronouncing the word Mesopotamia’.155 In a more common variation on the story, Garrick apparently said, ‘I would give a hundred guineas if I could only say “O” like Mr. Whitefield’.156 Garrick recognised the

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performative force of Whitefield’s ‘O’ and, as Thomas Dixon writes, the frequently weeping preacher would often comment upon the tears of his congregations as signs of their devotional sincerity: ‘I see your hearts affected. I see your eyes weep.’157 Bruce R. Smith argues that the human voice in ‘crying, screaming, moaning, wailing, ululating […] emits sounds that are nonverbal if not preverbal … the primal [o:] represents a naked, spontaneous Gestalt of force, a projection of the crier’s body into the world’ [italics in original].158 Whitefield’s ‘O’s and Siddons’ shrieks and other nonlexical verbalisations were how they projected their bodies ‘into the world’, and it is on this phenomenological level that ‘communities of sentiment’ were created in churches, fields, and theatres, and on street corners. Maybe Siddons could ‘say “O” like Mr. Whitefield’; in The English Review article quoted earlier, the author observed of Siddons’ Belvidera that her way of pronouncing ‘oh!’ when the ‘passions are violently agitated, [was] one of her most marking beauties, and peculiar to herself’.159 Her pacing, her tone, her articulation, cries, and tears wrenched seemingly from her heart, these are what resonated with Siddons’ audiences. The Gestaltic force of Lady Macbeth’s final line emerges, literally, in three ‘primal [o:]’s, underlined by Bell for emphasis: ‘Oh! oh! oh!’160 The audience is not offered Siddonian shrieks but, as Bell reports, an ambiguous sound perhaps between a sob and a sigh: ‘This not a sigh. A convulsive shudder—very horrible. A tone of imbecility audible in the sigh’.161 * * * Hamlet’s advice to the players articulates foundational principles in relation to acting generally and to voice specifically. There must be force, variety, and musicality in how actors use their voices, and “good” acting is distinguished from “bad” by the extent to which “nature” guides their vocal choices. Shakespeare, through his character, also rehearses a critical argument that validates current acting practices by distinguishing them from and disparaging those of the past. It is a critical approach that consistently occurs not only because it serves the interests of practitioners and critics in any given era but because it also obscures how, just as consistently, opinions on “good” and “bad” acting remain the same. When studying eighteenth-century acting it is necessary to scrape off the critical barnacles that accreted with the advent of Garrick to discern the underlying regularities of acting practices. To perform, in Shakespeare’s words, with the ‘modesty of nature’ was to perform with decorum in face,

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gesture, and voice. Both ranting and toning were desirable, if used judiciously; canting was not acceptable at all, unless needed by the character type. Despite the importance of gesture and facial expression, voice remained the primary mode for expressing emotions; as Theophilus Cibber wrote, ‘The Emotions, in short, shou’d begin at the Heart,—and there’s no Doubt of the Voice and Body receiving such right Directions from it, as can never fail of making proper Impressions’.162 The critical distinction between declamatory and “natural” speaking does not capture the nuances of eighteenth-century criticism, which was happy with a bit of declamation in their “nature” and vice versa, notwithstanding retrospective and tendentious myth-making accounts. More relevant was the distinction commentators made between ‘level’ speaking and passionate ‘points’. Acting was synchronic, moving from one emotional moment to the next, but actors also had to perform the linking scenes in clear and melodious voices and with distinct, graceful gestures. Like Garrick’s, Sarah Siddons’ acting was both mythologised and satirised, particularly as it related to her voice. But the assured performer who took London by storm in 1782 had struggled with her voice for many years. Although she failed in the two-thousand-seat Drury Lane theatre in 1775–6, she succeeded in smaller regional theatres because there her voice carried and had impact; there she could wait, as Brecht wrote in his poem, for how her line fell ‘on the listener’s ear; […] wait and hear / The way it strikes’.163 The voice of the mature actress, secure in her powers, was deep in pitch, and Siddons, when speaking in a level voice, used a mellifluous, measured cadence. For effect, she could lower her pitch even further and drawl out the syllables of her words. But like the rapid facial expressions of which she was also capable, her ‘elocution varied its tones from the height of vehemence to the lowest despondency, with an eagle-like power of stooping and soaring, and with the rapidity of thought’.164 When the emotion of the scene required it, she allowed her voice to crack on certain lines, and on passionate exclamations released harrowing shrieks: These cries were echoed back by members of the audience in a performative exchange with the stage. In The Sarah Siddons Audio Files (2011) Judith Pascoe imaginatively travels to the foreign country of the past and finds that they do, indeed, do things very differently there. She imagines sitting with George Joseph Bell in 1809 and perceptively acknowledges her limitations as a modern person to be able truly to engage with Siddons’ acting largely because she lacked the ‘vast dramatic repertoire filed away in [her] brain, with subfiling

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for variant performances of particular roles’; as a result, Pascoe imagines herself sitting ‘like a listening-impaired lump, clutching a sad little clothespin bag of Shakespeare quotations, while Siddons made the rest of the audience resonate like harp strings’.165 Pascoe alludes here to one aspect of an eighteenth-century audience’s expertise—their knowledge of the repertoire—but they were equally skilled in their appraisal of actors’ facial expressions, gestures, and voices. Even if she could be seated amongst them, Pascoe can neither hear nor see like an eighteenth-century audience, which means she is unable to feel like one. She lacks resonance. In her short thought experiment, Pascoe begins to realise that her initial aim to rediscover ‘how Sarah Siddons sounded’ was turning out to be a quixotic quest.166 More profoundly, her imagined “failure” to appreciate Siddons reveals the insight that emotional practices are learned. This learning, to return to Scheer, occurs tacitly and explicitly; emotional practices are improvised in the company of others, and alone, and are both place and context specific.167 How this occurs will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, but, to underline Pascoe’s insight, an actor’s performance cannot provoke an emotional response in a spectator simply by being witnessed. Eighteenth-century audiences had a collective experience of Siddons’ and Garrick’s acting that eludes us because we do not share their embodiment, social values, beliefs, aesthetic principles, nor what gave them pleasure and displeasure. More fundamentally we do not share their ideas and experiences of what it means to be human; the world does not make its ‘marks on [our] hearts’ in the same way.168

Notes 1. [Aaron Hill], The Prompter, no. 66 (27 June 1735), n.p. Hill wrote a second essay that developed his ideas later in the year; The Prompter, no. 118 (26 December 1735). 2. Dene Barnett (with Jeanette Massy-Winstrop), The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987). 3. Barnett, Art of Gesture, 10; 11. 4. Jean Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W.  Beaumont (London: C.  W. Beaumont, 1951 [1930]), 82; Jean Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets [première édition] … (Lyon: Aimé Delaroche, 1760), 210. Internet Archive, https:// archive.org/details/lettressurladans00noveuoft/page/210/mode/1up, accessed 2 June 2020.

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5. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, edited by Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 109. 6. Joseph-Antoine-Toussant Dinouart, in L’Eloquence du Corps dans le Ministère de la Chaire (Paris: Claude Herissant, 1754), writes that ‘Bienséance of action [should be] consistent with the nature of the subject’ (117). 7. I am unable to confirm where Bell saw this performance. If he had been in London, then he would have seen Kemble and Siddons perform at Covent Garden, possibly at the reopening of the rebuilt theatre on 18 September 1809 (ODNB). However, Siddons’ son, Henry, had recently opened the New Theatre Royal in Edinburgh in November 1809 (ODNB) and invited his mother to perform there in 1810. Judith Bailey Slagle, ‘The Rise and Fall of the New Edinburgh Theatre Royal, 1767–1859: Archival Documents and Performance History,’ Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 30, nos. 1–2 (2015): 19–20. Siddons performed Lady Macbeth twice in Edinburgh, on 14 March and 16 March, but it is not clear if Kemble also appeared because, as Dibdin writes, the terms the siblings made with their nephew stipulated they would not appear on the same date. James C. Dibdin, The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage. With an Account of the Rise and Progress of Dramatic Writing in Scotland (Edinburgh: Richard Cameron, 1888), 260–3. From the detail in Bell’s notes, I am inclined to believe he did see her in the smaller Edinburgh Theatre Royal. 8. Gilbert Austin, Chironomia; or, A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1806). Johannes Jelgerhuis, Theoretische lessen over de gesticulatie en mimiek (Amsterdam: Meyer Warnars, 1827). 9. Barnett, Art of Gesture, 479; 487. 10. For example, he cites Charles Gildon, Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (London, 1710) as correlating a claim by Michel Le Faucheur in Traitté de l’Action de l’Orateur; ou, De la Pronunciation et du geste (1657), first published in English as An Essay Upon the Action of an Orator; as to His Pronunciation & Gesture (1702). Barnett, Art of Gesture, 109. As Wilbur Howell has shown Gildon plagiarised the English translation of Le Faucheur⁠ in at least twelve passages. Wilbur Samuel Howell, EighteenthCentury British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 186–8. 11. Barnett, Art of Gesture, 14–15. 12. ‘Déclamation théâtrale’, in Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris, 1754). Cited in Barnett, Art of Gesture, 140.

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13. Marmontel, ‘Déclamation’. Cited in Barnett, Art of Gesture, 140. 14. Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel, Grundlinien zu Einer Theorie der Schauspielkunst (Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1797), 63. Cited in Barnett, Art of Gesture, 141. 15. Aristippe, Théorie de l’Art du Comédien; ou, Manuel Théâtrale (Paris: A. Leroux, 1826), 329. Cited in Barnett, Art of Gesture, 141. 16. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 22. 17. Barnett, Art of Gesture, 91. 18. Austin, Chironomia, 451. 19. Austin, 456–7. 20. Austin, 381–2. 21. James Harriman-Smith, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 9. 22. Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, vol. 1 (London: J. Bell and York: C. Etherington, 1770), 292. 23. Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, 1:292. 24. Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5. Goring emphasises the crucial role of oratory in the development of eighteenth-century acting (9). 25. Goring, Rhetoric of Sensibility, 5. 26. Paul Hiffernan, Dramatic Genius in Five Books, Book 5 (London, 1770), 73. 27. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits to England as Described in His Letters and Diaries, trans. and annot. Margaret L.  Mare and W. H. Quarrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 14. 28. William Hawkins, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London: T.  Bell, 1775), 38–9. 29. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus; or, An Historical Review of the Stage (London: H. Playford, 1708), 51. 30. Anthony Aston, A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq; His Lives (London, 1747), 7. Barnett, Art of Gesture, 368–76. 31. Roger Pickering, Reflections upon Theatrical Expression in Tragedy (London: W. Johnston, 1755), 19. 32. Edward Purdon, A Letter to David Garrick, Esq; on Opening the Theatre (London: I. Pottinger, 1769), 30–1. 33. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Micellanies [sic] …, vol. 1 (London: for the author, 1783–4), 407. 34. Joseph Haslewood, The Secret History of the Green Room, vol. 2 (London: H. D. Symmonds, 1792), 133.

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35. Austin, Chironomia, 510. 36. Hawkins, Miscellanies, 47. 37. St James’s Chronicle; or, The British Evening Post, no. 2343, 17–20 February 1776, 2. 38. Anonymous, A Comparison Between the Two Stages (London, 1702), 18. Sometimes attributed to Charles Gildon. 39. Hawkins, Miscellanies, 26; Davies, Dramatic Micellanies, 1:185–6. 40. Aston, Brief Supplement, 7. Further citations in text. 41. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (London: J. Watts, 1740), 70. 42. OED defines ‘mein’ or ‘mien’ as ‘The look, bearing, manner, or conduct of a person, as showing character, mood, etc.’ 43. Barnett, Art of Gesture, 137. 44. Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. 45. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 2. 46. An earlier version of  this section was  published as  Glen McGillivray, ‘Rant, Cant and  Tone: The  Voice of  the  Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons’, Theatre Notebook 71, no. 1 (2017): 2–20. 47. Whether this advice reflected Shakespeare’s actual views or not is beyond the scope of this essay; however, commentators in the eighteenth century, as will become apparent, saw this speech as the Bard’s authoritative voice on the subject. For a discussion of early modern acting, see John H. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 48. See John Harold Wilson, ‘Rant, Cant, and Tone on the Restoration Stage’, Studies in Philology 52, no. 4 (October 1955): 592–8. 49. Aston, Brief Supplement, 5. 50. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (London: John Watts, 1740), 60. Cibber writes of Wilks, ‘I own the Half of what he spoke [as Hamlet], was as painful to my Ear, as every Line, that came from Betterton was charming’ (339). 51. Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage. By Mr. Wilkes (London: J. Coote, 1759), 107. 52. Wilkes, General View, 107. 53. Paul Menzer, ‘That Old Saw: Early Modern Acting and the Infinite Regress’, Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 34. 54. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 51. 55. Cibber, Apology (1740), 95. Further citations in text. 56. Oracle and Public Advertiser, 1 October 1796. 57. How Do You Do?, no. 6, 8 October 1796.

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58. This word does not exist in OED. In all likelihood, from the context, it is a derivation of ‘grumbling’, ‘a low rumbling sound; a murmuring’. 59. Obs., ‘To simulate, feign, or counterfeit’ (OED). 60. The Champion, no. 455, October 1742, quoted in The Gentleman’s Magazine 12 (October 1742): 527. 61. ‘Critical Examen of Mr. Garrick’s Abilities as an Actor’ in The Theatrical Review; or, Annals of the Drama (London: S. Williams; Wilson & Fell, 1763), 1:76. 62. ‘Critical Examen’, 76. 63. ‘Critical Examen’, 76. 64. Peter Holland, ‘Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick’, in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660–1800, ed. Michael Cordner and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 260. 65. John Hill, The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing (London: R. Griffiths, 1750), 200. Further citations in text. 66. Macklin’s first appearance was possibly at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Macklin’s early biographer, Francis Congreve, is the source for this, which he dates as 1725. However, Macklin’s entry in BD says there is no playbill verification for this, and his first advertised appearance was on 24 September 1730 during Bartholomew Fair (BD, 10:3). Cook, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, 13. 67. John Hill, The Actor: or, A Treatise on the Art of Playing (London: R. Griffiths, 1755), 239–40. 68. Charles Gildon, The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (London: Robert Gosling, 1710), 105–6. 69. Hill, Actor (1750), 194. 70. Hill (1750), 195. 71. Patricia McLoughlin MacMahon, ‘The Tragical Art of Sarah Siddons: An Analysis of Her Acting Style,’ PhD diss. (Yale University, 1972), 145 n. 1. As McMahon remarks: ‘Mrs. Siddons introduced her sister, Frances […] during the 1782–3 season at Drury Lane. The following year, her sister Elizabeth […] made her London debut. Both Kemble women resembled their older sister, but lacked her distinctive talent. Stephen Kemble appeared in 1783 at Covent Garden while his brother John bowed for the first time at Drury Lane a few days later. […] by 1784, any London theatregoer would have recognized the basic features of the family acting style.’ McMahon, ‘Tragical Art’, 145 n. 1. 72. Joshua Reynolds, ‘Discourse XIII’, in The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 3 vols., 2nd (corrected) ed. (London: T.  Cadell & W.  Davies, 1798), 2:111–43; 2:132–3.

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73. Reynolds, ‘Discourse XIII’, 2:133. The last part of this statement was certainly prophetic after both patent theatres were substantially enlarged in the 1790s, but when Reynolds delivered his lecture, the theatres were still relatively small by comparison. For Reynolds on the ‘grand style of Painting’, see his note ‘To the Idler’, no. 79, 20 October 1759, in Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2:229–34. 74. McMahon, ‘Tragical Art’, 150. 75. Reynolds, ‘Discourse XIII’, 2:133. 76. Sheridan, like Garrick, premiered playing Richard III (in Dublin at Smock Alley on 29 January 1743) and like him was advertised as an unknown (‘attempted by a young Gentleman’). Hearing of his success Garrick invited him to ‘alternate roles’ with him in the winter season at Drury Lane, but Sheridan declined. George Winchester Stone Jr and George M.  Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 54. He modestly writes that it would not be to his advantage to appear with Garrick, as ‘a well-cut pebble may pass for a diamond till a fine brilliant is placed near it, and puts it out of countenance’. He proposed instead that each played alternating winters in London and Dublin so that ‘we might, like Castor and Pollux, appear always in different hemispheres’ (21 April 1743). James Boaden, The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831), 15. Sheridan did appear at Drury Lane in 1744 before returning to Ireland to manage Smock Alley. He invited Garrick to co-manage the theatre in 1745–6, and the two actors engaged in a friendly rivalry in various parts. Stone and Kahrl, Critical Biography, 53–4. 77. Anonymous, The Present State of the Stage in Great-Britain and Ireland (London: Paul Vaillent & M. Cooper, 1753), 51. 78. H. Fleeming Jenkin, Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., by the late Fleeming Jenkin …, 2 vols., ed. Sidney Colvin and J.  A. Ewing (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1887), 1:54 n. 15. 79. The English Review; or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1783), 260. This and the following passage were reprinted in James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors, vol. 1 (London: H.  Colburn, 1827), 289. 80. English Review, 1:260. 81. See Joseph R.  Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Jane Goodall, Stage Presence (London and New  York: Routledge, 2008). 82. English Review, 1:259–60. 83. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 1:288.

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84. Sarah Martha was born 5 November 1775. Thomas Campbell, Life of Siddons, vol. 1 (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1834), 63 fn. 85. Siddons debuted in Bath’s Orchard Street Theatre on 24 October 1778. BD, 14:6. 86. These included the ‘Duchess of Devonshire, the Rev Thomas Sedgewick Whalley, Sophia Weston, Mrs [Hester] Thrale, Hannah More, Anna Seward, and the [family of Thomas] Linely[ ]’. BD, 14:7. 87. MacMahon, ‘Tragical Art’, 58; Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:155–6; Sarah Siddons, The Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons 1773–1785, ed. William Van Lennep (Cambridge: Widener Library, 1942), 9. 88. William Hazlitt, ‘Mrs. Siddons’, The Examiner (16 June 1816), n.p. 89. The Middlesex Journal (30 December 1775), cited in BD, 14:5. 90. Cited in Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:68. 91. Cited in Campbell, 1:68. 92. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons 1:32–3. 93. Boaden, 1:48. 94. 27 May, 3 and 5 June 1776. LS, 4.3:1982; 1984–5. 95. St James’s Chronicle, no. 2376, 1–4 June 1776. 96. St James’s Chronicle, 1–4 June 1776. 97. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:60. 98. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 1:34–5; 47–8. 99. Chelsea Phillips has written about the relationship of Siddons’ multiple pregnancies on her London career from 1785 onwards. However, she does not comment on how Siddons’ confinement with Sally impacted on her first London appearance ten years earlier. Chelsea Phillips, Carrying All before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2022), 114–60. 100. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:62. 101. Siddons, Reminiscences, 3. 102. This is the same King whom Boaden reported as a lacklustre Shylock against Siddons’ Portia. Macklin, still acting at eighty, would have ‘owned’ the part but he was by then at the other house. 103. Cited in Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (London: Heinemann, 1970), 23. 104. Cited in Manvell, Sarah Siddons, 23. 105. St James’s Chronicle, 17–20 February 1776. 106. BD, 14:5. 107. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 1:108. 108. Boaden, 1:108. 109. Wilkinson’s circuit consisted of the Theatres Royal in York and Hull and theatres in Leeds, Doncaster, Wakefield, and Pontefract. Ian Small,

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‘Building a Monarchy: Tate Wilkinson’s Yorkshire Theatre Circuit 1766–1803’, South Atlantic Review 76, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 82. 110. Belville S. Penley, The Bath Stage: A History of Dramatic Representations in Bath (London: W. Lewis & Son, 1892), 56–7. This, like the Henderson story, may be apocryphal, as I have not found another source for it. 111. Siddons, Reminiscences, 7–8. Manvell, Sarah Siddons, 57. 112. Small, ‘Building a Monarchy’, 82. 113. Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, vol. 1 (York: Wilson, Spence & Mawman, 1795): 253–4. 114. Wilkinson, Wandering Patentee, 1:254. 115. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:76. 116. Cited in McMahon, ‘Tragical Art’, 52–3. 117. Morning Chronicle, no. 3084, Friday, 9 April 1779. 118. Morning Chronicle, no. 3448, Tuesday, 6 June 1780. 119. Morning Chronicle, no. 3557, Wednesday, 11 October 1780. 120. Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1780. 121. Morning Herald (London), no. 44, Thursday, 21 December 1780. 122. Hazlitt, ‘Mrs. Siddons’, n.p. See Robyn Asleson, ed., A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists (Los Angeles: J.  Paul Getty Museum, 1999). 123. Morning Chronicle, no. 3671, Thursday, 22 February 1781. 124. Morning Chronicle, 22 February 1781. 125. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 209. Jean I.  Marsden, Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 64. 126. MacMahon, ‘Tragical Art’, 57–8; Sheridan cited in Yvonne Ffrench, Mrs Siddons, Tragic Actress (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1936), 61. 127. MacMahon, ‘Tragical Art’, 58. 128. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London: W. Strahan, 1762), Lecture I, 10. 129. On the British Elocutionary Movement, see: Goring, Rhetoric, 91–113, and Paul Goring, ‘The Elocutionary Movement in Britain’, in The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael J.  MacDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 561–9. 130. Wednesday, 6 April 1763, James Boswell, London Journal (New York: Dover, 2018), 167; J. Yoklavich, ‘Hamlet in Shammy Shoes’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3, no. 3 (July 1952): 209. 131. Sheridan, Lectures, Lecture VII, 121; Goring, ‘Elocutionary Movement’, 566. 132. Goring, ‘Elocutionary Movement’, 566; Sheridan, Lectures, Lecture I, 1.

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133. Conrad Brunström, Thomas Sheridan’s Career and Influence: An Actor in Earnest (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 16. 134. Brunström, Sheridan’s Career, 47. 135. Brunström, 47. 136. Anna Jameson, Sketches of Art, Literature, and Character (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866), 452. A certain Mr Stockdale reporting on the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1810 wrote that the ‘play proceeded in pantomime; not a word was heard, save now and then the deeply modulated tones of the bewitching Siddons.’ Cited by Campbell, Life of Siddons, 2:327 fn. Frances Burney, The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, vol. 2: 1787, ed. Stewart Cooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 229. 137. Cited in Shearer West, ‘The Visuality of the Theatre’, in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660–1800, ed. Michael Cordner and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 279. 138. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 2:393. 139. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 1:14. 140. William Hazlitt, A View of the English Stage; or, A Series of Dramatic Criticisms (London: Robert Stodart, 1818), 307. 141. The Tatler, no. 29, 7 October 1830, 116. Reprinted as Leigh Hunt, ‘Miss Fanny Kemble as Belvidera’, in Dramatic Essays, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (London: Walter Scott, Ltd, 1894), 153. 142. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:285. Bartley, as Sarah Smith, coincided with Siddons at Covent Garden only between 1805 and 1808, when she left for Dublin, so again this account is from the end of Siddons’ career and around the same time as Bell saw her. 143. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, vol. 5 (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832), 173. 144. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 2:112. 145. Cited in BD, 14:14. 146. BD, 14:14. 147. George Bell, ‘Annotations by George Joseph Bell on plays from Mrs. Inchbald’s British theatre’ [manuscript], ca. 1808, Folger Shakespeare Library, Vault (Deck C), W.a 70–72 (MS. content). H. Fleeming Jenkin, who first transcribed Bell’s notes, suggests they were made in ‘1809, or about that time’. Jenkin, Papers, 1:50. I have cross-checked Jenkin’s transcript against Bell’s original and noted any discrepancies where relevant. Further references from Jenkin in text. 148. The six dashes after the first ‘never’ and the commas between the other words are absent in the otherwise admirably accurate Jenkin transcription. Bell, ‘Annotations’, 20.

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149. John Doran, Their Majesties’ Servants’: Annals of the English Stage from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean, 3rd ed., rev. and ed. Robert William Lowe, vol. 3 (Edinburgh and London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1888), 174. 150. The Tatler, no. 29, 7 October 1830, 116. Reprinted in Hunt, Dramatic Essays, 153. 151. J. H. Stocqueler, Memoirs of a Journalist, enl., rev. ed. (Bombay: Offices of the Times of India, 1873), 17. The performance was at Covent Garden in 1816. Siddons had come out of retirement. Her former pupil, Charlotte, the Princess of Wales, had recently married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and the young wife had requested Siddons to perform Lady Macbeth for her husband. Stocqueler, Memoirs, 16. 152. Hazlitt, English Stage, 47. 153. John Alexander Kelly, German Visitors to English Theatres in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936), 95. 154. The Examiner, 3 June 1810, 344. Reprinted in Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, 1808–1831, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (Octagon Books, 1977), 39. 155. The letter is dated 10 October 1740, a year before the unknown Garrick burst into the public’s consciousness. Edwards’ letter is cited in Joseph Beaumont Wakely, The Prince of Pulpit Orators: A Portraiture of Rev. George Whitefield, M.A., Illustrated by Anecdotes and Incidents, 2nd ed. (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1871), 277. 156. Wakely, Prince of Pulpit, 226. 157. Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 73. George Whitefield, The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield (London: Edward & Charles Dilly, 1772), 5:47. 158. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 45. 159. English Review, 1:265. 160. Jenkin, Papers, 1:66. In Bell’s notes he sometimes underlines individual words in a sequence or draws a single line under a phrase. In this instance, despite Inchbald’s punctuation, which suggests three exclamatory ‘Ohs’, he draws a single line under the three. Bell’s note suggests that maybe the ‘Ohs’ were pronounced more like a single shuddering ‘Oh-h-h’. I suggest the reader does try this at home! Bell, ‘Annotations’, 62. 161. Jenkin, Papers, 1:66. 162. Theophilus Cibber, Cibber’s Two Dissertations on the Theatres (London: for the author, 1756), 57.

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163. Bertolt Brecht, ‘The moment before impact’, in Poems 1913–1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. Edith Anderson (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), 342. 164. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:210. 165. Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 103. 166. Pascoe, Siddons Audio Files, 10. 167. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216. 168. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 186.

CHAPTER 4

Regulating and Mobilising Emotions: The Audience

The previous chapters have shown how actors employed a sophisticated repertoire of facial, gestural, and vocal techniques in order to communicate emotions to their audiences. Successful emotional communication relies on both skilful performance and skilful interpretation but, as Scheer observes, ‘Composing emotion is facilitated by clear, socially agreed-upon signs, but these are no guarantee that the message will be read as intended’.1 Although I do not subscribe to the transmission model Scheer uses here, nor her implied metaphor of readers and texts, nevertheless, her fundamental point holds: There is ‘no guarantee’ that emotional performances will be interpreted as anticipated. Because ‘communities of sentiment’ are formed through the triangular interrelationship of actors, audiences, and theatre spaces, I now turn to how and in what ways emotions were interpreted and performed by audiences. Eighteenth-century audiences mobilised and regulated their emotions in response both to the codified ‘socially agreed-upon signs’ performed by the actors as well to the informal performance of these with each other. Theatregoing in the eighteenth century was characterised by such performances of affect such as, the outbursts of weeping performed by audiences at tragedies; these outbursts reflected the sentimental values of mid- to late eighteenth-century society.2 However, sentimentality was an aspirational value, one that audiences learned to perform as the century progressed. But theatres were also arenas for emotional performances that were less kind—performances of xenophobia and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5_4

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political and class conflict—and actors needed to negotiate this volatility. As this chapter reveals, how audiences performed as diverse emotional communities in eighteenth-century theatres complicates the dominant sentimentalist discourse. The diarist and journalist Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) was only twenty-two when he saw Siddons and Kemble act in George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1737) in 1797 and had this alarming experience: [Mrs Siddons] crouched and slid up to Wilmot, with an expression in her face that made the flesh of the spectator creep. Mr. Robinson said that from that moment his respiration grew difficult, and in a few minutes he lost all command of himself. When the murder-scene approached he laughed aloud, and there was a general cry in the pit to turn him out. The process of his ejectment was even begun, and he received some harsh treatment, when a humane woman interposed, who saw, and explained his real condition. He was in strong hysterics.3

As Robinson recalls in his Diary, he had told this anecdote to the actor Charles Mayne Young (1777–1856), who ‘thought he was at liberty to repeat it for publication’ and did so to Thomas Campbell, who recycled it in his biography of the actress.4 Robinson’s own recollections confirm Campbell’s account: his loss of control—‘I burst into a loud laugh, which occasioned a cry [from the audience] of “Turn him out!” This cry frightened me, but I could not refrain’—and the intervention of the ‘good-­ natured woman’ who told the irate audience ‘“Poor young man, he cannot help it”’, before rendering him succour with a ‘smelling-bottle’. Although this ‘quite restored’ him, still, he was ‘quite shaken, and could not relish the little comedy’ that followed as the afterpiece.5 By 1797, reports of extreme and, indeed, hysterical responses to Siddons’ performances were numerous, but emotionally distraught and fainting audience members characterised her first and subsequent seasons after her triumphant return to Drury Lane fifteen years earlier. Joseph Haslewood reported in The Secret History of the Green Room (1792): ‘It became fashionable for all the Ladies to weep, and sometimes to faint’.”6 Tate Wilkinson, the actor-manager who had acted in The Grecian Daughter with her in York in 1777, wryly observed that all these fainting ladies led to a rise in ‘the price of [smelling] salts and hartshorn’.7 Hester [Thrale] Piozzi and her husband saw Siddons as the eponymous heroine in Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage (1757) and wrote to Penelope Weston that ‘I have

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scarcely slept since for the strong agitation into which Sothern [sic] and Siddons threw me last night in Isabella’; to which her husband added the PS: ‘I assure you I cried oll [sic] the Tragedy’ (13 April 1789).8 Hyperbolic responses to the actress quickly became the norm, and when she toured to Edinburgh in the summer of 1784, audience members fainted in the hot and crowded Theatre Royal. As Campbell reports, Scottish physicians named the phenomenon ‘Siddons Fever’.9 When Garrick and Peg Woffington had toured to Dublin, forty years earlier, to perform at Smock Alley for the summer season in 1742, ‘Garrick Fever’ had infected Irish audiences. As Heather Ladd observes, even though there was a medical dimension to these ‘fevers’, which were brought on from a range of different sicknesses (including influenza or typhus) that infected the closely packed audiences in Dublin and in Edinburgh, what was noteworthy to commentators at the time was the “emotional contagion” spread by these stars.10 By the last decades of the century, emotional practices such as these demonstrated a distinct emotional style that the occupants of the pit and the boxes—both men and women—knew was expected of them. The occupants of pit, boxes, and lower gallery aspired to be seen as men and women of feeling who possessed a nervous sensibility so acute, they could not help but respond to the pathos being depicted onstage. These emotional practices were both communal and performative. Not only did audience members gain pleasure from their felt responses but, by performing them in public, they revealed themselves as having a higher and more refined sensibility than others. Recent research has highlighted the development of sentimental dramaturgy and its importance in reforming audience emotional responses along moral lines; such texts were crucial to the sentimental education of audiences and provided emotional schemata that allowed them to regulate their emotional practices in accordance with moral values.11 However, a claim such as Jean Marsden’s that ‘as long as the emotions enacted endorsed communal values consistent with Britain’s vision of itself as a moral society, they could be perceived as a positive and active virtue’12 is too universal; it insufficiently accounts for the multiplicity of emotional practices performed by audiences in eighteenth-­century theatres, not all of which were sentimental. Turning from the page to the stage, we must be careful not to conflate sentimental dramaturgy—the moral and pathetic elements of a play—with sentimental performance. Plays might call for certain pathetic expressions from actors, but actors did not necessarily need sentimental scripting to provoke sentimental responses. Both Siddons and Garrick could reduce audiences to

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floods of tears by performing big emotional ‘points’; at these moments, as Sophie von La Roche wrote after seeing Siddons as Belvidera: ‘one forgets the play, thinking and acting with her; one wants to weep, indeed to cry aloud’ (3 October 1786).13 Siddons’ acting typically overflowed the confines of the plays in which she starred; when she performed the title role in Robert Dodsley’s Cleone (1758), the reviewer in the Morning Herald disparaged aspects of her interpretation. As he wrote, a certain line ‘should have been in amazement, and not in a state of dejected woe, that sunk her to a kind of whimpering sorrow, a sort of whining, to which Mrs. Siddons has not hitherto accustomed herself’, a comment that once again reveals the interpretation of character through emotives (‘amazement’ rather the ‘dejected woe’ and ‘whimpering sorrow’) and their vocalisation (‘whining’ or canting) leading to a less than successful communication of feeling.14 Yet Siddons’ depiction of Cleone when her child is murdered was such that, as this review reported, ‘her screams behind the scenes affrighted the audience, and so froze their senses, that the tear of sorrow stood congealed in its fountain.’15 As Marsden observes, it was not just the play’s portrayal of infanticide that horrified audiences but Siddons’ acting as the maddened Cleone which ‘pushed audience response too far, “revolting” rather than delighting the sensibility of spectators’.16 The incident with Robinson reveals how audiences regulated each other’s emotions through interrelational processes of mutual regard and through what Erving Goffman calls ‘impression management.’17 As much as they were concerned with the behaviour of others, spectators equally assessed their own behaviour and the impressions they were making on their fellow audience members. They did this in two ways: First, the communality of mutual regard amongst spectators accounted for the “emotional contagion” produced through what Scheer describes as the ‘horizontal effects of the group experience on emotions’; second, spectators’ awareness of others’ scrutiny regulated how they performed their emotions.18 All the fainting, sighing, shrieking, and weeping over Siddons’ performances demonstrated a distinct sensibility which, when performed in public, revealed to others that the person so overcome was someone of feeling. To be a person of feeling was to conform to the expected emotional style of the mid- to late eighteenth century. William Reddy argues that ‘Emotional styles come and go, develop or decay, according to whether they work for communities’ but, more than cohering to a particular ‘cultural configuration’, as Sophie von La Roche’s account demonstrates, Reddy argues that ‘an emotional style’s

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characteristic emotional expressions must successfully call forth, in participants, responses that they recognize as warranting these expressions’.19 La Roche wants to weep and cry loudly in response to Siddons because the actress calls forth expressions of pathos recognisable to her audiences who participate in it by mobilising their own heightened emotional responses. Her response is consistent with the dominant mode of emotional expression in the late eighteenth century, or what Reddy terms an emotional regime. Using French seventeenth-century court behaviour as his case study, Reddy demonstrates how the absolutist power of Louis XIV produced a particular mode of emotional interaction regulating how and to what extent courtiers could express emotions. But in response to such a strictly regulated emotional regime, other arenas of social interaction emerged where the rules of the regime did not apply, and these Reddy terms emotional refuges.20 In France, sentimentalism, which allowed a freer expression of emotion, was one such refuge that emerged in the seventeenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century, he argues, sentimentalism had in turn become the dominant emotional regime.21 For Barbara Rosenwein, Reddy’s ‘bipartite society’, divided between emotional regimes and refuges, limits the range of possible emotional expressions, and she offers a more multivalenced definition: ‘emotional communities’.22 Rosenwein spatialises these as a series of small circles ‘distributed unevenly’ within a larger one: The big circle represents an ‘overarching emotional community, tied together by fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression’; the smaller circles, which can also be ‘subdivided’, reveal the ‘possibilities and […] limitations’ of the ‘larger one’.23 For Rosenwein, rather than being ‘constituted by one or two emotions’, emotional communities are better understood as ‘constellations—or sets—of emotions’, the ‘characteristic styles’ of which depend both on ‘the emotions that they emphasize’, including their contexts, and on the emotions ‘that they demote to the tangential or do not recognize at all’.24 Rosenwein, like Reddy, is alert to emotions that are permitted, recognised, and acknowledged as well as those that are forbidden, ignored, and disregarded. It is the ‘emotional norms’ and ‘emotional ideals’, or in Arlie Hochschild’s phrase, ‘feeling rules’, that govern what emotions a particular group values or devalues, what emotional expressions it allows or forbids, who it allows to express certain emotions and who not, as well as when and where a group deems it appropriate for certain emotions to be expressed.25 In other words, how members of a group mobilise their emotions depends upon how emotions

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are regulated because, to repeat Scheer’s point, the ‘acquisition of the sensibility, or emotional style, of a group proceeds via tacit socialization as well as explicit instruction’.26 There are two keys to understanding emotional styles: The first is their fluidity; they change over time and according to use, arising and subsiding within multiple emotional communities. The second is that they are performed. Here I use both an older sense of the word ‘perform’, as in to do or to make, as well as the common meaning of an action performed in the presence of another in a way that is either explicitly framed as a performance (as in theatre) or as a performance in everyday life.27 Emotional styles are made and enacted with and for others. In theory (because it is impossible to prove), Siddons would not recognise the emotional style of a Chekhov play and, despite her immense talent, would be unable to act it.28 On the other side of the footlights, a modern audience would not, in Pascoe’s evocative phrase, ‘resonate like harp strings’ in concert with Siddons because her emotional style differed from ours.29 This performative aspect is crucial in Reddy’s definition: An emotional style becomes established only when the ways in which it is expressed successfully evoke recognisable responses from participants. Participation is co-creative and requires those expressing their emotions to do so in a way recognisable to others who, in turn, respond in emotionally appropriate ways. Appadurai’s ‘communities of sentiment’ work similarly: Praise performances in South Indian Hindu communities are emotional expressions ‘characteristic’ of a particular emotional style instantly recognisable to others in that community (if not necessarily to Western observers).30 For Appadurai, these praise performances are part of the community’s ‘politics of everyday life’, a politics that is ‘cultural and not biological’ because of the ‘publicly expressed, construed, and appraised’ nature of its ‘messages’.31 Beggars, families in marriage negotiations, and politicians and celebrities with their hangers­on all perform distinct emotional styles within the ‘overarching emotional community’ of Hindu India and the emotional expressions it either allows or disallows.32

Sentimentalism The sentimentalist regime Reddy identifies in France was an emotional community that became dominant in the second half of the eighteenth century in England also. Known variously as the Age or Culture of Sensibility, or the Cult of Sentimentality, its key tenets first appeared in a

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literary form. Samuel Richardson’s (1689–1761) Pamela (1740) was the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century which, in a highly readable and accessible manner, Reddy observes, ‘presented a number of the essential doctrines of sentimentalism’.33 In Reddy’s summary, Pamela tells the tale of a virtuous chambermaid from a poor but worthy family, who through her sincerity and virtue repels the amorous advances of her rakish master. All this is told in an epistolary narrative through letters the guileless Pamela writes to her parents; when her master finds and reads these, ‘he is disarmed by their honesty and depth of feeling’, and in this way Pamela wins his love and ‘convert[s]’ him to a better path and marriage, despite their class differences.34 The sentimental discourse of Pamela was intended to induce a specific emotional response in its readers: the shedding of tears in sympathy with the trials of its heroine. These tears demonstrated that the reader, more than merely understanding the distress of another, could identify with it and feel it too. Reading sentimental literature had a performative dimension to it also, as Anne Vincent-Buffault writes: ‘the practice of reading provoked mild demonstrations of emotion in the eighteenth century. People enjoyed crying, the women in their boudoirs, the men in their studies, but tears were also shed when people read together’.35 The Cult of Sentimentality that emerged with Richardson’s novel in the mid-century was a delayed social response to scientific paradigm shifts that had occurred in the late seventeenth century.36 A key paradigmatic text was John Locke’s (1632–1704) Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which made possible a new science, as George S. Rousseau argues: the so-called ‘science of man’.37 According to Rousseau, Locke integrated a range of theories on the relationship of mind to body, in particular, the anatomical work of his teacher Thomas Willis (1621–75). Willis’ An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock (1681[1667]) for the first time limited the soul to the brain; if the soul was brain-based, then this increased the importance of the nerves, its messengers, which for most of the century were believed to be hollow tubes that conveyed animal spirits to all parts of the body and animated them.38 All subsequent debates amongst animists, mechanists, and vitalists, writes Rousseau, accepted the new paradigm of nerves as messengers from a brain-based soul, the central consequence of which was ‘the idea that nerves control human consciousness’.39 For Rousseau, it was Locke who had the insight to take Willis’ anatomical work and extrapolate more broadly, and who, in so doing, ‘deflected’ the work of subsequent eighteenth-century philosophers of the

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mind such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith.40 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the scientific premises of Willis’ work, integrated by Locke and expanded by others, formed the foundation for the cultural phenomenon called the Cult of Sentimentality. Rousseau elegantly summarises how this occurred: Crudely stated in the form of a syllogism: (1) the soul is limited to the brain; (2) the brain performs the entirety of its work through the nerves; (3) the more ‘exquisite’ and ‘delicate’ one’s nerves are, morphologically speaking, the greater the ensuing degree of sensibility and imagination; (4) refined people and other persons of fashion are usually born with more ‘exquisite’ anatomies, the tone and texture of their nervous systems more ‘delicate’ than those of the lower classes; (5) the greater one’s nervous sensibility, the more one is capable of delicate writing [or other art making, performing, or appreciating].41

A nervously ‘sensib[le]’ person was more likely to have a greater response to ‘delicate’ aesthetic experiences, and thus be more morally attuned to ideas of right and wrong, than one who lacked this physiological constitution. Stephen Gaukroger demonstrates how the moral and medical dimensions to ideas of sensibility were reinforced in the Diderot–d’Alembert Encyclopédie. Under the entry for sensibilité, they articulated its moral aspect: ‘Sensible souls get more out of life than others; both the good and the ill are increased for them […] sensibility makes a man virtuous. Sensibility is the mother of humanity and of noble-mindedness [générosité]; it increases worth, it helps the spirit, and it carries persuasion’.42 Similarly, the medical definition defined sensibilité as: the basis and conserving agent of life, animality par excellence, the most beautiful and most singular phenomenon of nature[… It] is in the living body, [and is] a property by which certain parts perceive the impressions of external objects, and in consequence of this produce motions in proportion to the degree of intensity of this perception.43

In both medical and moral terms, then, ‘refined’ people were physiologically predisposed to be more sensitive to the world around them; therefore, it followed they were more virtuous, due to their heightened sensitivity to good and evil. Contrary to eighteenth-century belief, this emotional sensitivity was not hardwired but, as Scheer argues, was acquired

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through both ‘tacit socialization’ and ‘explicit instruction’.44 When some eighteenth-century audience members were overwhelmed by their emotions in response to the moral dramaturgy of a sentimental drama or tragedy, their reactions exemplified learned responses that were based on the assumption, writes Scheer, that the ‘“highest”’ feelings could only be experienced after one had ‘acquired a certain acquaintance with the material’.45 This ‘training of feeling’ was acquired both conceptually (one understood what one must feel and why) and as a learned set of embodied responses, so that learning an emotional style required learning the ‘requisite bodily disposition’.46 We can see from this that there is both the desired emotional state (desired by both the individual and by the community more broadly) and a ‘bodily disposition’ which is learnt both tacitly and explicitly. In Robinson’s anecdote it is significant that he was a young man and that it was a woman who had the sensitivity to recognise what was happening to him, because women and the young were thought to be especially sensitive in terms of both their physiology and their moral sense. Fiona Ritchie argues that women were seen as being ‘particularly susceptible to their emotions’ and were ‘expected to respond more intensely to the drama’ than men.47 Through the course of the century, she writes, it was women who became moral arbiters in the theatres through their feeling-­ responses to performances; the success of a tragedy, sentimental drama, or comedy depended on the pathetic responses it evoked in audiences, responses characterised as particularly feminine.48 Because women were supposed to be more physiologically sensitive than men, they were seen as the more morally virtuous of the sexes. Women were hailed, if not actually fully enlisted, in the moral reform of the theatre in response to Jeremy Collier’s (1650–1726) attacks in the 1690s, and this, Ritchie believes, led to a sentimental dramaturgy in new plays such as Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722).49 It was women who through their capacity to feel deeply were able to ‘inspire virtue’ and, ‘by making their intensely emotional responses to drama visible in the theatre’, performatively demonstrated the ‘“proper” reaction’ to the plays and that they had, therefore, ‘internalised the moral lesson shown on stage’.50 Through their public performances of sentiment, women became exemplars to others in the audience, ‘encouraging [them] to improve their virtue by developing their own feeling response’.51

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Emotional Navigation Female emotional responses were central to how sentimental audiences learned to mobilise their emotions, and the eighteenth-century theatre shaped, and was shaped by, the emotional style of some of its audiences, a style characterised by effusive weeping. But it was an emotional style that emerged slowly. Reddy observes that emotional styles are neither solely ‘propositional’ nor ‘discursive’ but must be embodied and enacted through improvisational practices; they become ‘anchored in practice [only] through emotional navigation efforts’ which must be successful, to a greater or lesser extent, over time.52 Nearly thirty years before Robinson had his ‘hysterics’ in the theatre, Paul Hiffernan—a scurrilous pamphleteer, letter and paragraph writer, one of Garrick’s media attack dogs, and a failed playwright (none of his plays got past their first performance)53— complains how the desire of ‘spectators’ to indulge their sentimental feelings is inhibited by the social context of the theatre. These spectators, ‘from a fear of being seen by those near and around them, […] dare not venture to give a loose to their sighs, and tears, that with a bounteous indulgence, they might enjoy an effusive luxury [i.e., ‘refined and intense enjoyment’] of grief, for the affliction of others’.54 For Hiffernan, the spectator’s ‘pleasure’ is expressed through laughter at a comedy and tears during a tragedy; his qualifying adjectives, ‘bounteous’ and ‘effusive’, for the latter, testify to the liberality of the emotion of grief: Not only is it abundant and good, but it also overflows.55 When ‘refined’ persons sympathise with the troubles of others represented onstage they experience ‘intense enjoyment’. Hiffernan is espousing an emotional style centred on the sensuous enjoyment of pathetic feelings that had started to emerge in the mid-century, initially in literature, but increasingly in the theatre. He advocates for a new emotional regime in his writing, but he also emphasises the struggle to allow a male sentimental response to occur in practice, a struggle that reflects how new, gendered, emotional practices were being tried out in the theatre. Within the ‘overarching emotional community’56 of the Age of Sensibility, Hiffernan’s views are unexceptional, but they reveal Reddy’s ‘emotional navigation’ in action. Like Boswell in the 1760s preparing himself to shed an ‘abundance of tears’,57 Hiffernan is testing his desired emotional response within a spatial and social context that was changing. Hiffernan’s emotional ideal is markedly different to norms earlier in the century, as Dudley Ryder writes in 1716 after seeing Nicholas Rowe’s

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tragedy Tamerlane (1702): The ‘play itself is good, but I find myself too much moved and affected with tragedies to take much pleasure in them’.58 The difference here between Ryder’s response and those of Hiffernan, Boswell, and the Piozzis could not be more marked: Ryder does not take pleasure from the tragedy (it is too distressing) and wishes to avoid the pain it causes him, whereas Hiffernan and Boswell actively seek such pleasure. When Hester Piozzi and her husband write to their friend Penny Weston, they do so not to complain about how Siddons’ Isabella affected them, but to brag about it; in doing so, they perform their emotional refinement to her. Although the metaphor of emotional contagion suggests emotional expressions are somehow “caught” from others, we can see from Hiffernan’s and Ryder’s reactions that audiences assessed their emotional responses in relation to the presence of other people and regulated their emotions through an emotional style which had explicit or implicit affordances and prohibitions. Having internalised the language and ethos of sentimentalism, Hiffernan longs to perform his heightened sensitivity—to indulge in the luxury of grief—but feels inhibited in doing so. Such inhibition in the audience, however, is absent twelve years later. Boaden recalls both his own and other audience members’ responses to Siddons performing the title role in Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore (1714) in her return season in 1782. During one of the celebrated ‘points’ of the play, when the dying Jane begs her husband for forgiveness, Boaden writes: I well remember, (how is it possible I should ever forget?) the sobs, the shrieks, among the tenderer part of her audiences; or those tears, which manhood at first struggled to suppress, but at length grew proud of indulging. We then, indeed, knew all the LUXURY of grief; but the nerves of many a gentle being gave way before the intensity of such appeals; and fainting fits long and frequently alarmed the decorum of the house, filled almost to suffocation. [emphasis in original]59

The performance of female grief which, thirty years earlier, might have occurred only in the privacy of domestic spaces has now attained a public histrionic dimension. According to the accepted emotional style, nervously excitable women shrieked and sobbed; with nerves vibrating in sympathy with Siddons at their highest pitch and overcome by the heat and press of the overcrowded auditorium, female spectators fainted. This behaviour was outside usual social expectations, and it ‘alarmed the

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decorum of the house’, but importantly not to such an extent that regulating action was required. Although alarming, the social space of the theatre allowed the highly sensitive (female) person to be overcome by her emotions in a way in which, perhaps, she could not be elsewhere. The German critic, Ernst Brandes (1758–1810), observing female spectators at a production of Jane Shore during the 1784–5 season, wrote, ‘The sight is terrible […] I saw two ladies among the spectators fall into hysterics, and one of them had to be carried out, laughing convulsively’.60 The young Brandes (he was twenty-six at the time) is shaken by the terrible sight he sees but can frame his own feelings and the more extreme female responses within a theory of emotions that explains it: ‘Such representations of physical pain are too much for modern [female] nerves’.61 Even though “hysterical” female spectators provoked comment, their responses were still allowed because they were seen as “natural” for women, given their heightened moral and nervous sensitivity. It was an emotional style constructed by the interaction between a theory of emotions (vibrating and “highly strung” nerves), the regulation of an emotional practice (what is and is not allowed and by whom), and the places where these occurred (theatres). The same emotional style changed the regulation of emotion for men also, allowing them to mobilise their emotions in a more expressive way. The tears Hiffernan longed to shed were now not only permitted to men but were expected of them; now, they had become ‘anchored in practice’. But again, there was a socially sanctioned way for manly emotion to be expressed. Boaden’s response reveals how, through improvisation over time, an emotional style becomes not only accepted but expected, by demonstrating the masculine performance of sympathy. At first Boaden and other male spectators ‘struggled to suppress’ their tears before proudly indulging in them; now they can know the ‘LUXURY of grief’. Here the emotional style allows a particular performance of gendered emotion. Men mobilised their emotions by initially restraining their feelings, but at a certain point, if they see themselves as ‘Men of Feeling’ (and, in turn, want to be seen as such by others), they pleasurably surrender to their tears62—just what Hiffernan yearned for but felt too inhibited to do. Siddons’ performance is seared into Boaden’s memory (‘how is it possible I should ever forget?’) but we must remember that he is recalling in his sixties an experience that he, like Brandes, had as a nervously excitable man in his twenties. In any case, Boaden’s description demonstrates how emotional styles, for both men and women, are mediated in response to

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performances; in particular, the performance of a tragic ‘point’ by an exceptional actress. Performing overwrought emotions in response to Siddons exemplifies how this late eighteenth-century audience mobilised their emotions. Crying in sympathy with the pathos of a tragedy or sentimental drama allowed audiences to engage with actors and, writes Scheer, to mobilise their emotions in order to experience ‘pleasantly unpleasant’ feelings.63 Being able to cry unashamedly, and in company with others, expressed a particular bodily disposition, an emotional style, as Baron von Grimm wrote in Correspondance Littéraire (1 July 1760), produced by the embodied communality of the theatrical experience: Men are all friends when leaving a play. They have hated vice, loved virtue, cried together, developed the good and just elements of the human heart side by side. They have found themselves to be far better than they thought, they would willingly embrace each other […] To read in silence and in secret does not produce the same effect. One is alone, there is nobody to witness one’s honesty, one’s taste, one’s sensibility and one’s tears.64

Here the bodily dispositions occur in two parts, both of which depend on the shared experience: First, the good-humoured audience has been produced by the group experience of the performance; second, the kind of “man” one has become—honest, tasteful, sensible, tearful—needs witnesses who can be had only in the theatre. Reading alone cannot produce the ‘same effect’ because this tearful performance, both for one’s self and with others, is what distinguishes a sentimental bodily disposition.65 Furthermore, it is the theatre space itself which calls forth the communal shedding of tears because emotional styles are linked to the spaces where they are practised.66 Benno Gammerl argues that ‘diverging emotional patterns and practices prevail in distinct spatial settings. The supermarket calls for a different emotional repertoire compared to the beach or the office’.67 If we recognise that different emotional repertoires are required by different spaces (and we also cannot ignore Gammerl’s use of the word ‘repertoire’, with its distinct association with performance), then what emotional repertoires did the eighteenth-century theatre call forth?

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Volatility Theatres are sites of embodied interaction, places where bodies intermingle, jostling one against the other, an intermingling that happened with a restless intensity in eighteenth-century theatres. Through our exposure to film, television, and screens of every size, we tend to privilege sight, but, as Gay McAuley argues, it is the intercorporeal interactions that occur inside theatres that resist the ‘scopic drive’.68 In the theatre, she continues, sight is ‘subverted or displaced’ by the physical reality of actors’ bodies and the material reality of the theatre space itself, both of which ‘disrupt[ ] the fiction’.69 The stage fiction is also significantly disrupted by ‘periodic return[s] to the social’, those moments when the spectators interpose themselves for myriad reasons into the performance (whether laughing or crying or, as we shall see, much more); and by ‘institutionalized breaks’, disruptions that are conventionally established.70 In eighteenth-century theatres sociality was always present; like a constant sound that would rise and fall, something was always going on amongst the spectators. More than just being silent watchers, eighteenth-­ century audiences actively participated with the whole theatrical event, part of which was the play itself. Siddons’ performance provokes Robinson’s hysterical response which, initially misinterpreted, leads to his potential ejection. This disciplinary action is stopped by the ‘humane’ or ‘good-natured’ woman who intercedes on his behalf and deflects the ire of the pit by her performance of higher feeling. The anecdote is repeated because it was seen to exemplify Siddons’ affective power, but the disruption itself is so normal it does not warrant comment. In the version told to Young and related to Campbell, or in Robinson’s own Diary, there is no mention about what was happening onstage during his breakdown. Did Siddons and Kemble stop performing during a dramatic scene? Did they carry on regardless because such interruptions were the norm? As Siddons and Kemble were acting in the greatly enlarged Drury Lane theatre, did they even notice the kerfuffle in the pit?71 Unlike modern audiences, whose darkened auditoriums produce an emotional style of prim silence in the dark, eighteenth-century audiences interacted volubly with each other and the actors onstage. Even when they were not explicitly interrupting performances, audience-induced breaks in performance were a normal and expected part of the theatrical event. McAuley writes that the ‘primary fact of theatre, is […] the live presence of both performers and spectators, and from this flow two major

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consequences for the spectator: first, theatre involves an energy exchange among and between spectators and performers, and, second, the performance is necessarily embedded in a social event’.72 These consequences go both ways, creating ‘feedback loops’ of energy exchange from ‘performer to spectator and back again, from spectator to performer and back again’.73 Although this might suggest that the energy ‘loop’ begins with the actors, this is not necessarily the case; even before a show begins, actors attune themselves to the size and temperament of their audiences and pitch their performances accordingly. This was especially so in the eighteenth century when audiences were particularly volatile. Actors needed to be alert to numerous factors that might disrupt, derail, or end a performance entirely before they set foot onstage. A politically contentious play or playwright might provoke noisy confrontation between opposing factions; unpopular decisions by theatre managements, seen to infringe on the rights of audiences, might provoke rioting; unpopular plays might be hissed offstage; or actors might be abused for perceived or actual misbehaviour offstage or because, as happened with Macklin, a cabal had formed against them.74 Actors could expect that the presence of the king or other royalty might moderate audience behaviour (but not always), and they knew they would be on stable ground performing a popular and well-known play, with an audience favourite in the lead. But audiences could turn mutinous if the star were taken ill, as often happened, and the play continued with another actor in the role, or another play was substituted at the last minute. Leo Hughes argues that English audiences saw their participation in the theatre as an extension of their proudly held democracy, chauvinistically contrasted with the French “tyranny” across the Channel, and they reserved their right to praise or condemn a play, to interrupt the action, invade the stage, riot, and converse with each other.75 Theophilus Cibber defined the theatre audience in relation to the English body politic at large: ‘all Persons, who pay for their Places, whether Noble, Gentle, or Simple, who fill the Boxes, Pit, and Galleries, in a Theatrical Sense, form the Town’ [italics in original]; and their role is the same ‘as K—G, L—RDS and COMMONS, in a Constitutional one, [who] make that Great Body the NATION’.76 Despite its class-based seating arrangements, democracy ruled in the theatre in the sense that each could have his or her say, regardless of social rank. In the first half of the century footmen, who had accompanied their masters and mistresses to the theatre, were given free seats in the upper gallery; from there, exercising their rights as freeborn

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Englishmen, they would loudly engage with the evening’s performances even if that meant disrupting the enjoyment of their masters. Eventually tiring of the practice, and against much opposition from the footmen, the footmen’s gallery was finally curtailed by Garrick in 1759 when he introduced a charge for the upper gallery.77 The theatrical ‘Town’, however, was not as constitutionally cohesive as Cibber’s analogy suggests, nor as defined by class. Rather, spectators formed diverse emotional communities based on how they chose to interact either with a particular play or different aspects of the theatre event itself. According to Rosenwein, emotional communities are defined, in part, by how they cohere as a ‘group in which people have a common stake, interests, values, and goals’.78 Sentimentalism was one such emotional community with a distinct emotional style and, although prevalent, did not always dominate emotional practices in the theatre. But as Hughes reveals, there were several other emotional communities that might form in the theatre, often antithetical to sentimentalism; one of these comprised the ‘roisterers’ involved in ‘the “persecution of a play”’, who obtained pleasure and a sense of communality with each other by bullying a play off the stage.79 These young men considered it good sport to condemn a play, regardless of quality, so that it never got past the first night, or barely so. This particular cruel sport ran counter to sentimentalist ideals and happened when the Age of Sensibility was, as Boddice and Smith argue, actively reframing cruelty as an emotional category, one that ‘indicated a lack of feeling, or an insensibility, out of keeping with an age’ that sought to define itself by its ‘sensibility’.80 Other emotional communities might be formed by external political events which, in some way, were associated with the play being performed. Partisan ‘cabals’, again mainly young men, would come to the theatre and take sides either for or against the play: a conflict that would be fought out in the auditorium.81 Other audience members attended the theatre for no other reason than the social event and had little regard for the play being performed. This was an emotional community that attended the theatre only to see and be seen by others, and it included exhibitionist ‘beaux’, foppish young men and women who only went to the theatre to be seen, and ‘bored sophisticates’, who went only because everyone else did or because it was an opportunity for social assembly.82 Hughes observes that throughout his theatregoing career in London and Scotland, James Boswell played several roles in different emotional communities: ‘Exhibitionist’, ‘Playhouse buck’, ‘Patriotic Scot’, ‘Man of feeling’, ‘Squire of melting ladies’, ‘Wit among wits’, and

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‘Caballer’.83 We have already seen Boswell’s sentimentalist performance in response to Garrick’s Lear (‘Man of feeling’), but the variety in this list of different roles suggests how an intelligent, articulate, theatre-loving alcoholic moved easily amongst a variety of emotional communities, each with their own emotional styles. It rarely happens in the modern theatre that audiences intrude so much in a performance that they halt it or close it down entirely. But minor or major interruptions were common in the eighteenth century. Groups with their own agendas, such as the political cabals or play persecutors, were premeditated in their disruptive activities. But for others, interposing themselves into the theatrical occasion was a more ad hoc way of engaging with it. For example, servants and other workers in the gods (upper gallery), would pelt actors, musicians, and other members of the audience with a medley of different objects. The Public Advertiser noted complaints about barrages suffered by denizens of the pit at Drury Lane who were bombarded with ‘Apples, Potatoes and other things’; during a performance of John Brown’s new play, Barbarossa (1755), on 11 February 1755, ‘a young Lady in the Pit’ was ‘greatly hurt’ after being hit by nearly half a pound of hard cheese.84 On another occasion, the London Evening Post records how a performance of John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife (1721), also at Drury Lane, was interrupted when a ‘lighted serpent’ (a firework) was hurled from the gods into the pit.85 This ‘terribly frighted several Persons, and occasioned so great a Confusion, that two or three Ladies were thrown into Fits’; the perpetrator was detected and detained.86 When spectators were injured, managements felt compelled to respond sternly, either by remonstrating in person or in the press, or through legal action, but musicians and actors generally had to fend for themselves.87 Keeping audiences on side was a major reason why actors worked so hard to form an emotional bond with audiences, separate from the characters they played. Again, factors outside the actor’s control could intervene to shatter the fragile sociability they created with their audiences (as we shall soon see with Siddons). More commonly, unruly or disruptive behaviour was regulated by other sections of the audience, as we saw with Robinson. If things got really out of hand, order was enforced by martial authorities, but not always successfully. It took Charles Fleetwood, the manager of Drury Lane at the time, two weeks, from 19 February to 5 March 1737, to defeat the footmen who threatened the theatre with destruction because he tried to discipline their disruptive behaviour. Even the generally stabilising presence of

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members of the royal family at a performance on 5 March failed to moderate them.88 During Garrick’s tenure, the infamous Chinese Festival riots in November 1755 at Drury Lane divided along class lines, as Heather McPherson observes, with the ‘cosmopolitan nobility and people of fashion in the boxes’ drawing their swords against those in the pit and galleries who, whipped up by a Francophobic press, rioted to try and close the production down.89 The premiere on 8 November was a Royal Command performance but this did not prevent an ‘uproar’, nor did the presence of George II, who apparently turned his back in displeasure at the hissing, restore calm at the next performance on 12 November.90 Garrick attempted to pacify the audience by playing only on nights when the nobility were in attendance but, despite his efforts and personal popularity, a final great riot on 18 November forced the Chinese Festival’s premature closure with a loss of four thousand pounds.91 The emotional dimension to this rioting can be understood as an inversion of sentimentalism. Whereas the sentimental emotional community privileged pathetic emotions as the ‘purest and highest of human expressions’, a revealing of the private self, especially when performed in public, the nationalist xenophobia of the rioters was a manifestation of a public self which legitimated and mobilised the private emotions of hatred (of the French) and love (of country).92

Generosity The English public, writes Thomas Davies, was ‘the most critical, as well as most candid [generous], audience in Europe’.93 Despite their volatility, audiences formed ‘communities of sentiment’ with actors based on generosity, and actors did not take this for granted. Kitty Clive remarked to the ingenue Jane Pope, debuting as Corinna in John Vanbrugh’s comedy The Confederacy (1730): ‘The violent thunder of applause last Saturday on your first appearance was not all deserved, it was only benevolently bestowed to give you the pleasing information that they were well delighted, and had their warmest wishes that you would hereafter merit the kindness they bestowed on you.’94 In the veteran actress’s advice she names emotions which the house directed to the stage through their applause; the audience are benevolent and kind, they experienced delight from Pope’s Corinna, and had warmth towards her. Audiences formed generous ‘communities of sentiment’ with actors, a relationship that was negotiated in the social realm outside of the play. Through goodwill alone they were prepared to assist a new actor to succeed, and Clive was

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reminding her young castmate that she could not rely on their benevolence in the future. McAuley notes that in French, one term for the audience is l’assistance, a literal rendering of an audience’s role, particularly in the verb form, assister (to help).95 Such assistance was active in the eighteenth-­century theatre, and audiences might try to boost an actor’s performance or a play’s chance for further nights, but the reverse was also true: They might condemn a play to ensure it never played again.96 Actors knew to their cost what it meant to have an audience off-side; in itself, this could be enough to stop a performance. The explicit ‘emotional labor’ (to use Hochschild’s term) of fostering an audience’s love fell to actors even when they spoke the words of others and pleaded for favour on others’ behalf.97 Both actors and actresses performed the role of supplicant to their audiences, with the latter performing the gendered roles of coquette or virtuous woman. If he had recovered sufficiently, Robinson would have heard Siddons performing a formulaic address to the audience that acknowledged both their benevolence and her love for them. Siddons’ monologue, which marked the end of the season, coincided with her benefit night for Fatal Curiosity (which was another compelling reason for her address).98 In it she delivers a performance of ‘aching’ longing to the house: My own short absence, howso’er employed, Far from your smiles must feel an aching void; But whether joys, or pains, or some of all, Or duties merely, fill the interval, No time, nor distance, from my heart shall sever. Its last remaining sense of public favour.99 [emphasis in original]

The reciprocal relationship here is complex. Audience members had fought each other to witness Siddons perform, acting like devotees to their Tragic Muse; nonetheless, aside from the important remuneration from ticket sales, her monologue acknowledges her need for their warmth and favour even to act at all. The favour of audiences could be fickle and, as Siddons experienced at various times throughout her career, could be withdrawn for reasons quite unrelated to her acting. For actors to have successful careers, they needed to ensure they maintained a generous ‘community of sentiment’ with their public. An audience’s emotional assistance depends on a consistency in emotional styles between what an actor expects of an audience and what an audience expects to feel. Failure here is immediately apparent: when the

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jokes fall flat or, even worse, when histrionic emoting provokes laughter. Siddons didn’t quite experience the latter when she first toured to Scotland in 1784, but the emotional style she encountered was not what she had experienced in London. Siddons opened in Edinburgh with a signature role: Belvidera in Venice Preserv’d at the Theatre Royal on 22 May.100 Unlike London audiences who rapturously responded after every ‘point’, she noticed how her Scottish audiences withheld their appreciation until the end of the scene: ‘On the first night of my appearance […] I was surprised, and not a little mortified, at that profound silence which was a contrast to the bursts of applause I had been accustomed to hear in London. No; not a hand moved till the end of the scene: but, then, indeed, I was most amply remunerated’.101 Although they got there in the end, the emotional style of the Scottish audience differed from the English, which both unsettled Siddons and had an impact on her performance.102 Siddons found that the sentimental responses navigated by London audiences had not been entirely ‘anchored in practice’ by audiences in Edinburgh.103 Campbell encourages from Siddons a further, chattier, report of the ‘profound silence’ that illustrated how she struggled to win over her audience: The grave attention of my Scottish countrymen, and their canny reservation of praise till they were sure she deserved it, she said, had well nigh worn out her patience. […] Successive flashes of her elocution, that had always been sure to electrify the South, fell in vain on those Northern flints. At last […] she coiled up her powers to the most emphatic possible utterance of one passage, having previously vowed in her heart, that if this could not touch the Scotch, she would never again cross the Tweed. When it was finished, she paused, and looked to the audience. The deep silence was broken only by a single voice exclaiming, “That’s no bad!” This ludicrous parsimony of praise convulsed the Edinburgh audience with laughter. But the laugh was followed by such thunders of applause, that, amidst her stunned and nervous agitation, she was not without fears of the galleries coming down.104 [italics in original]

Siddons attempts to mobilise her audience emotionally with her voice, but the ‘flashes of elocution’ that had electrified the English failed to strike sparks from the flinty Scots. The energetic feedback loop on which she depends is absent, so she gathers all her energy to give it one last go. Once again, but now from the actor’s perspective, we see the performance held in a moment of energetic suspension that intensifies in the pause and ‘deep silence’ that follows. The release when it comes, provoked by the laconic

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understatement, is elemental in the thunderous, theatre-shaking, applause. There were also practical consequences of an audience not intruding regularly into the performance because, as Siddons remarks, frequent interruptions were ‘not only gratifying and cheering’ but gave the actor time to recover so that they could ‘carry […] on through some violent exertions’.105 Siddons may have been gently teasing her Scottish biographer and playing on a stereotype of dour and taciturn Scots; even if this was the case, her anecdote still highlights differences in emotional styles and the fact that they needed to be learned. From a more contemporary source, a review of her performance in the Edinburgh Evening Courant published the next day, it seems that her Scottish audiences were mobilising their emotions in much the same way as audiences in the south: Her wonderful powers were particularly eminent in the mad scene, which in ordinary hands is in general unnatural and disgusting. Her wild scream pierced the heart in a manner not to be believed. It conveyed at once the accumulated idea of the deepest horror, agony, and despair. There is little wonder that some ladies fainted at this part. (23 May 1784)106

Scottish ladies fainted and hearts were ‘pierced’ just as they were in London, which suggests, if the report is to be believed, that these emotional practices were either learned quickly or already established amongst Edinburgh audiences. How emotional styles are practised and regulated is suggested by the critic’s observation that in the hands of an average actor the scene is ‘unnatural and disgusting’; it takes an actor of Siddons’ calibre to invoke the higher pathetic emotions of ‘horror, agony, and despair’.107 After Edinburgh, Siddons toured to Ireland for seasons in Dublin and Cork which were again critically acclaimed and financially successful, but events there, external to the performances, proved how tenuous an actor’s hold on the audience’s favour could be.108 It was falsely reported back in London that she had refused to play a benefit for the veteran actor West Digges (1720?–86), who had suffered a stroke while rehearsing with her that July, unless she was paid a substantial appearance fee of fifty pounds. Contrary to this calumny Siddons had in fact pulled together a makeshift company from various country towns (the manager, Richard Daly, had taken the Smock Alley company to Limerick) and performed Belvidera for Digges’ benefit. ‘Oh! to be sure, it was a scene of disgust and confusion’, she told Campbell, ‘I acted Belvidera without having ever previously seen the face of one of the actors; for there was no time for even one rehearsal’.109

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Despite this, Siddons reported that ‘Poor Mr. Digges was most materially benefited by this most ludicrous performance’.110 Adding insult to apparent injury, rumours spread from Ireland that she had also demanded the full fee to appear in a benefit performance for her co-star that season in Venice Preserv’d (1755), William Brereton (1750/1–87), and then declined to perform. This rumour, coupled with her supposedly heartless behaviour towards Digges, insinuated both a lack of generosity and established an undeserved reputation for avarice, a slur that would follow Siddons throughout her career. Shortly before her London appearance, William Siddons published a letter in several newspapers on 30 September that sought to set the record straight by affirming his wife had performed gratis for Digges and had asked far less than her usual fee to perform for Brereton; she failed to appear for the latter only due to ill health.111 His letter was followed by one from Brereton, published four days later, that grudgingly confirmed William’s report.112 For the partisan Boaden, Brereton’s letter ‘had certainly done no good, it wanted warmth, [and] there was latent bile about it’; in his opinion, Brereton was aware that he was being eclipsed by the rising star of John Philip Kemble, so that even though ‘Venice might be preserved, […] [the role of] Jaffier was lost [to him] for ever’ [italics in original].113 Nonetheless, the damage had been done, and when Siddons performed again in London, it was clear she had lost her audience’s favour. Her appearance in London on 5 October in Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753) ‘was received with hissing and hooting, and [she] stood the object of public scorn’.114 As would happen with Robinson, years later, a white knight in the audience came to her aid, as Siddons recalled: Amidst this afflicting clamour I made several attempts to be heard, when at length a gentleman stood forth in the middle of the front of the pit, impelled by benevolent and gentlemanly feeling, who, as I advanced to make my last attempt at being heard, accosted me in these words: ‘For heaven’s sake, madam, do not degrade yourself by an apology, for there is nothing necessary to be said.’115

His intervention was to no avail, and the clamour continued for forty minutes until her brother ushered her from the stage, where she collapsed in his arms. Persuaded by Kemble and Richard Sheridan to return, she again went onstage for the opening scene between her character, Mrs Beverley, and her sister-in-law, Charlotte, played by Brereton’s wife,

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Priscilla (who had abandoned her onstage the first time). This time she was astonished ‘to find myself, on the second rising of the curtain, received with a silence so profound that I was absolutely awestruck, and never yet have I been able to account for this surprising contrast; for I really think that the falling of a pin might have been then heard upon the stage’.116 She then took the opportunity to make her case by addressing the audience directly: and from that time forth the generous public, during the remainder of the season, received my entrée each succeeding night with shouts, huzzas, and waving of handkerchiefs, which, however gratifying as testimonials of their changed opinion, were not sufficient to obliterate from my memory the tortures I had endured from their injustice, and the consciousness of a humiliating vocation. [italics in original]117

Despite Siddons recalling a more positive reception for the remainder of the season, both biographers report that she continued to be heckled, but that she ‘used to acknowledge by a reverence the applause by which it was overborne, and go on steadily with the character’; her manner, they noted, was noticeably ‘flattened’ and ‘damped’.118 It was to her audience’s generosity that Siddons made her appeal by referring to the ‘kind and flattering partiality’ she had experienced previously and her ‘respect for “the public”’ gave her confidence that, once the facts were known, she would be ‘protected from unmerited insult’.119 Siddons makes a point of acknowledging the generosity of audiences, even if it is only one person: The man she recalls intervening on her behalf acts out of ‘benevolent and gentlemanly feeling’. Here the gendered performance of a man rescuing a woman assailed by ruffians (the report of her collapsing in Kemble’s arms is itself theatrical) is a mirror image of the gendered performance of the “maternal” woman rendering comfort and assistance to the sickly young man overcome by Siddons’ acting. In each case, an audience member demonstrates a higher sensitivity than those around them and in doing so exemplifies the sentimental ideal. Although Siddons cannot ‘obliterate’ from her memory the humiliation of this event, nonetheless, she is at pains to affirm ‘the generous public’ who applauded her performances from then on. * * *

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Throughout this chapter I have referenced several analytical terms: emotional styles, emotional communities, emotional regimes and refuges, and ‘communities of sentiment’, each of which shares characteristics from one or some of the others. What Rosenwein terms an ‘overarching emotional community’ is very similar to Reddy’s emotional regime, but her deconstruction of Reddy’s bipartite structure into constellations of emotional communities is very useful for understanding the fractured eighteenth-­ century audience. Reddy’s emotional styles, however, highlight a fluidity perhaps not obvious in the idea of emotional communities; more important, he emphasises how emotional styles emerge through improvisatory practices and are established only if they work. Based on their success or failure, emotional styles come and go over time and are co-creative: Emotional expressions must first be recognised, and what follows determines whether they are allowed or not. Such regulation can be explicitly determined by social contexts (a particular occasion or place requires these emotions) and by tacitly internalised norms (a certain behaviour just does not “feel right”). An emotional style succeeds when its characteristic expressions call forth suitable responses. Because the eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire was limited, and the pool of actors who performed in the two London patent houses was also small, audiences became very knowledgeable about plays, playwrights, and actors.120 The intimacy with which audiences interacted with actors grew from such familiarity and from the porousness of the division between stage and auditorium: Social reality did not periodically intrude but was always present, erupting and subsiding throughout a play’s performance. ‘Communities of sentiment’ formed in the theatres: through emotional interactions between audience members and between audience members and actors, and as collective groups within the audience who imagined and felt together. The sentimentalist emotional style allowed the nervously sensible spectator to be affected by the pathos depicted onstage provoking him, or especially her, to respond with an emotional repertoire ranging from gentle weeping to hysterical paroxysms. It is not being unfair to Siddons’ talent to suggest that she was not the source of audiences’ feelings but was in fact a conduit for their feelingfulness. Her audiences’ values, their interests, and goals, created emotional communities that cohered around her charismatic performances. Audiences also attended the theatre for a variety of reasons, and not always for experiences of ennobling sentiment: Emotional communities that formed to persecute a play or riot against foreigners performed the

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shadow emotions (or what Boddice calls the ‘dark unsaid’) of the Age of Sensibility.121 In all cases, audience behaviour was outwardly directed for the attention of others: through personal displays of fine clothing or witty remarks, in demonstrations of political feeling that led to riot, through animus directed towards actors, playwrights, or management, or through bad behaviour simply for the fun of it. There were diverse emotional communities in eighteenth-century theatres, and Rosenwein’s idea of constellations of such communities is useful. The Chinese Festival riots bifurcated the audience along class lines, setting the cosmopolitan aristocracy in the boxes against nationalist and xenophobic rioters in the pit and galleries, with each group becoming its own emotional community. The emotional contours of this contest are distressingly familiar: a populist revolt that is directed, vertically, against apparently arrogant and self-interested elites and, horizontally, against a cultural Other. I have described the constant presence of the social as being like sound that swells and subsides; it is not an accidental analogy for, as we shall see in the following chapter, noise was a constant in eighteenth-century theatres. Except when it was not. Colley Cibber recalled that Betterton ‘never thought any kind of [applause] equal to an attentive Silence; that there were many ways of deceiving an Audience into a loud one; but to keep them husht [sic] and quiet, was an Applause which only Truth and Merit could arrive at’.122 These were the moments when great actors would gather these disparate and unruly emotional communities and transform them into a single ‘community of sentiment’. What Cibber meant by ‘Truth’ and ‘Merit’ we cannot know precisely, but it is clear he is describing a particular sensory experience, an experience produced and mediated by the theatre space itself.

Notes 1. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 214. 2. Jean I.  Marsden, Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-­Century Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Fiona Ritchie, ‘Women Playgoers: Historical Repertory and Sentimental Response’, in Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 141–74. 3. Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, vol. 2 (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1834): 213. Campbell uses a deliberately gen-

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dered term, ‘hysterics’, to describe Robinson’s response. As is wellknown, hysteria was deemed an emotional disturbance of women and, according to Hippocrates (5th century BCE), was caused by movement of the uterus around the body. By the eighteenth century, as I shall argue below, hysteria was seen as a nervous affliction experienced by highly sensitive and refined people. 4. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, vol. 1, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1872), 22. 5. Robinson, Diary, 1:22–3. 6. Joseph Haslewood, The Secret History of the Green Room, vol. 1 (London: H. D. Symmonds, 1792), 10. 7. Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, vol. 1 (York: Wilson, Spence, & Mawman, 1795), 150. 8. Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi, The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788–1821, ed. Oswald G.  Knapp (London and New York: John Lane, 1914), 19–20. The date of the performance cannot be confirmed as LS has the theatres closed 6–11 April 1789 for Holy Week, and the last performance of Isabella before that was 2 April. There were three performances in the 1788–9 season: 28 October 1788, 16 December 1788, and 2 April 1789. LS, 5.2:1106–44. 9. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:254–5. 10. Heather Ladd, ‘Theatre, Celebrity, and Contagion: David Garrick’s 1742 Dublin Visit and James R. Planché’s Garrick Fever’, Theatre Notebook 72, no. 2 (2018): 82. 11. See: Ritchie, ‘Women Playgoers’; Marsden, Theatres of Feeling. 12. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling, 15, and 175 n. 42. Although Marsden offers the caveat that such regulation did not prevent riots from periodically occurring, however, there are a range of other audience behaviours, as I discuss below, that demonstrate both the disruptive and disciplining actions of spectators. 13. Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 266. 14. Morning Herald, no. 1897, 23 November 1786. Performance on 22 November 1786, Drury Lane; LS, 5.2:933. 15. Morning Herald, 23 November 1786. 16. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling, 58. 17. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959): 208–37. 18. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 211. 19. William M.  Reddy, ‘Emotional Styles and Modern Forms of Life’, in Sexualized Brains: Scientific Modeling of Emotional Intelligence from a

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Cultural Perspective, ed. Nicole C.  Karafyllis and Gotlind Ulshöfer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 85. 20. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 129. 21. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 145–9. 22. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 23. 23. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24. 24. Rosenwein, 26. 25. Reddy, ‘Emotional Styles’, 81–100. Arlie Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 551–75; Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216. 26. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216. 27. Here I am using J.  Lowell Lewis’ distinctions between ‘special events’ and ‘everyday life’. Lewis, The Anthropology of Cultural Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–20. 28. When The Seagull was being rehearsed by the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1896, the leading actress Maria Savina was unable to recognise a female type she could play in any of the characters. Over the course of the seven-day rehearsal, she moved from Nina to Arkadina to Masha before withdrawing from the production entirely. Bella Merlin, ‘Which Came First: The System or “The Seagull?”’ New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1999): 218–19. 29. Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 103. 30. Reddy, ‘Emotional Styles, 85. 31. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,” in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine A.  Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 110. 32. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24. 33. William Reddy, ‘Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 121. 34. Reddy, ‘Sentimentalism and Its Erasure’, 121–2. 35. Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 3. 36. See Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993 [1985]), who draws on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the ‘paradigm shift’, as does George Rousseau in what follows. Thomas S.  Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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37. George S.  Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards an Anthropology of Sensibility’, in Enlightenment Crossings: Pre- and ­Post-­Modern Discourses: Anthropological (Manchester and New  York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 126. 38. As Roach discusses, in the eighteenth century this led to early associationist theory through the idea that the nerves were vibrating strings. Player’s Passion, 105–10. 39. Rousseau, ‘Nerves’, 130. 40. Rousseau, 131. 41. Rousseau, 133. 42. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie (Paris: Briasson, 1751–65) 15:52. Cited (as 2nd ed., 13:810) in Stephen Gaukroger, ‘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), 390. 43. Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 15:38. Cited (as 2nd ed., 13:780) in Gaukroger, ‘Realm of Sensibility’, 390. 44. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216. 45. Scheer, 216. 46. Scheer, 216. 47. Ritchie, ‘Women Playgoers’, 159. 48. Ritchie, 159. 49. Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London: S.  Keble, R.  Sare, & H.  Hindmarsh, 1698). Ritchie, ‘Women Playgoers’, 158. 50. Ritchie, ‘Women Playgoers’, 159–60. 51. Ritchie, 160. 52. Reddy, ‘Emotional Styles’, 96. 53. Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 140. 54. Paul Hiffernan, Dramatic Genius in Five Books, Book 2 (London: printed for the author, 1770), 51. ‘Luxury’, as Hiffernan uses it, refers to ‘refined and intense enjoyment’ and was first used in this sense by the physician and Whig minor poet Samuel Garth in his poem ‘Claremont’ (1715) (OED). The association of this particular pleasure to grief first occurs in 1749 in Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (London: printed for A.  Millar, 1749): ‘Sophia then returned to her Chamber of Mourning, where she indulged herself (if the Phrase may be allowed me) in all the Luxury of tender Grief’. Fielding, Tom Jones, III:vii.v.34. 55. Hiffernan, bk. 2.51. 56. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24.

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57. Entry of 12 May 1763. James Boswell, London Journal (New York: Dover, 2018), 189. 58. The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, 6 November 1716, cited in Leo Hughes, The Drama’s Patrons: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century London Audience (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1971), 159. 59. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors, vol. 1 (London: H. Colburn, 1827), 327. 60. John A.  Kelly, German Visitors to English Theatres in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936), 112. 61. Kelly, German Visitors, 112–13. 62. Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1771). 63. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 210. 64. Correspondance Littéraire, vol. 4, 15 July 1760, 263, cited in Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1991), 67. (Les hommes sont tous amis au sortir du spectacle. Ils ont haï le vice, aimé la vertu, pleuré de concert, développé les uns à côté des autres ce qu’il y a de bon et de juste dans le cœur humain. Ils se sont trouvés bien meilleurs qu’ils ne croyaient; ils s’embrasseraient volontiers. […] On ne sort point d’un sermon aussi heureusement disposé. Une lecture qu’on fait dans le silence et dans le secret ne produira jamais le même effet. On est seul, on n’a personne pour témoin de son honnêteté, de son goût, de sa sensibilité et de ses pleurs.) 65. Fiona Ritchie argues, after Paul Goring, that sentimental readers formed ‘interpretive communit[ies]’ which could, in turn, be ‘readily constructed in the theatre’ due to its spatial function as a place of communal activity. Although I agree with this analysis, I disagree with Ritchie’s emphasis as she interprets Grimm justifying the ‘necessity of community, and indeed theatricality, for reading’. The point Grimm makes suggests the opposite: Sentimental performativity is in fact produced by the theatrical experience and not by ‘secret’ and ‘silen[t]’ reading. Ritchie, ‘Women Playgoers’, 160. 66. Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (2012): 161–75. 67. Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles’, 164. 68. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 239. 69. McAuley, Space, 239. 70. McAuley, 239. 71. See Fig. 5.1 in the next chapter for a view of Drury Lane at that time. 72. McAuley, Space, 245. 73. McAuley, 246. 74. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, vol. 5 (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832): 425–30.

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75. Hughes, Drama’s Patrons, 15–16. 76. Theophilus Cibber, An Epistle from Theophilus Cibber to David Garrick Esq (London: R. Griffiths, 1755), 2. 77. Elizabeth Fitzgerald-Hume, ‘Rights and Riots: Footmen’s Riots at Drury Lane 1737’, Theatre Notebook 59, no. 1 (2005): 41–53; Kristina Straub, ‘The Making of an English Audience: The Case of the Footmen’s Gallery’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 131–43. 78. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24. 79. Hughes, Drama’s Patrons, 62–4. 80. Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 11. How such behaviour was regulated is noted by Boddice and Smith: ‘For once it is known that publicopinion leaders and even legislators have scrutinised an activity and found it to be cruel/callous, pointing out the pain and suffering caused, it is no longer possible to continue that activity without first having reflected on these charges. For those on the outside, the pursuit of these activities then fell into the category of “wanton” behaviour, where the motive for, say, fighting cocks [or “persecuting” plays], was said to implicitly include a pleasure in the pain caused. It was a pleasure or satisfaction experienced through the medium of a kind of anger and violence’ (12). 81. Hughes, Drama’s Patrons, 52–8. 82. Hughes, 59–62; 66–70. 83. Hughes, 77–9. 84. The Public Advertiser, no. 6334, 15 February 1755. Barbarossa premiered on 17 December 1754 and was performed several times in the 1774–75 season. LS, 4.1:458. 85. London Evening Post, no. 4989, 26 October 1759, LS 4.3:742. 86. London Evening Post, no. 4990, 27–30 October 1759. 87. Hughes, Drama’s Patrons, 49. 88. Hughes, 18–20. 89. Heather McPherson, ‘Theatrical Riots and Cultural Politics in EighteenthCentury London’, The Eighteenth Century 43, no. 3 (2002): 238. 90. McPherson, ‘Theatrical Riots’, 238. 91. McPherson, 239. 92. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 19. 93. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq., vol. 1 (London: for the author, 1780), 51. 94. Drury Lane, 27 October and 7 November 1759 (LS, 4.2:752; 754.) Cited in Tate Wilkinson, Memoirs of His Own Life, vol. 2 (York: Wilson, Spence, & Mawman, 1790), 128.

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95. McAuley, Space, 251. 96. In the forty years between 1737 and 1777, thirty-four out of sixty-four tragedies and twenty-seven out of fifty-two comedies that premiered ‘did not survive their first season’. James Jeremiah Lynch, Box, Pit, and Gallery: Stage and Society in Johnson’s London (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953), 23. 97. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012 [1983]), 7 n. 98. Although Siddons’ benefit was held on 1 May 1797, the Drury Lane 1796–7 season did not finish until 16 June. The text of her address, as was common, was published a few days later. 99. ‘A Short Notice of Farewells’, True Briton, no. 1360, 4 May 1797. 100. She performed the role again on her third night, 26 May. James C. Dibdin, The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage. With an Account of the Rise and Progress of Dramatic Writing in Scotland (Edinburgh: Richard Cameron, 1888), 188. 101. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:258. 102. Campbell writes extensively about the antitheatricalism of the Scots, who several decades earlier were burning down theatres in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Life of Siddons, 1:252–4; 255–7. 103. Reddy, ‘Emotional Styles’, 96. 104. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:259–60. 105. Campbell, 1:259. 106. Cited in Dibdin, Edinburgh Stage, 189. 107. There was never any doubt her Edinburgh season would be a triumph based on the demand for tickets: After nine performances, between 22 May and 12 June 1784, Siddons netted £967 in box-office receipts, pre-­ subscribed tickets, and gifts. Dibdin, 187. 108. The Belfast Newsletter, 10–14 September 1784, estimated that Siddons earned £1500 from Edinburgh and the same amount in Dublin. She paid £500 ‘for expenses’ for her Cork season. Cited in BD, 14:13. 109. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:265–6. 110. Campbell, 1:266. 111. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 2:106–7. 112. Boaden, 2:109–10. 113. Boaden, 2:112. But maybe not quite yet: Kemble debuted in the role with his sister on 11 February 1786. BD, 8:342. 114. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:277–8. 115. Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:278. 116. Campbell, 1:279. 117. Campbell, 1:281.

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118. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 2:118; Campbell, Life of Siddons, 1:282. 119. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 2:115–16. 120. Lynch writes that ‘audiences soon became familiar with the faces of the same actors and actresses, which they saw night after night in a variety of roles and in plays of all types.’ Box, Pit, and Gallery, 143. 121. Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 132. 122. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (London: J. Watts, 1740), 66.

CHAPTER 5

Mediating Emotions in Place

Experience of theatregoing teaches us to look at the stage, but the spectator in the theatre is always involved first and foremost in the phenomenological experience of being there, of the space in relation to oneself, of one’s self in the place, of the ‘height in the air’ [in Gertrude Stein’s words], of the ‘feeling’ (whatever that is) of being in a theatre. —Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 256

Gay McAuley’s observation directs us to the sensory experience of a theatre as a space, how it comes to us through our sight, smell, touch, hearing, and, to a lesser extent, our taste. This sensorial knowingness of space is before or below consciousness and gives us our “feel” for places. Before cognition organises our sensations, we know feelingly that a shopping mall is distinctly different from a church, an office from a bedroom, a forest path from a footpath. This is, partly, what Benno Gammerl means when he refers to spaces such as the beach and the supermarket determining the emotional styles appropriate to them;1 but there are also a range of conscious decisions that have been made along the way, instigated by the interaction of individual and social contexts, that affect emotional styles. Phenomenological experience, on the other hand, is before cognition; we find ourselves in a place but at the same time that place finds itself in us: as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5_5

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light, as odours, dust, vibrations, and so forth. McAuley reaches for the phenomenological thing itself (noumenon) of theatregoing and locates it not in the text, nor with the actor but, in the dual sense of ‘feeling’, in the spectator’s sensorial and emotional experience of theatrical space. More properly, McAuley seems to suggest, the thing itself should not be called theatregoing, but theatrebeing, as such beingness is the pre-eminent experience of the spectator. Looking at the stage is a cognitive learnt experience that comes later. Historical phenomenology allows us to consider the eighteenth-­century theatre in all its materiality and its difference from the modern experience of theatregoing. Kevin Curran and James Kearney write that fundamental to historical phenomenology are two premises: The first is that ‘feeling and sensing have a history’; therefore, we do not feel sad in the same way that Shakespeare did, and we smell perfume differently from Queen Elizabeth.2 Or, as Pascoe realised, we hear differently from an eighteenth-­ century audience.3 This premise intersects with the approach taken by the historical study of emotions pursued by Reddy and Scheer, and also by others, such as Thomas Dixon, who challenge the universalist theoretical approach taken by contemporary psychology.4 The second premise is that how people once felt an emotion or how they experienced a sense such as smell ‘are not historical artifacts in the same way we might argue a book, a building, or even an event is since feeling and sensing are embodied, subjective processes’.5 Feeling and sensing, write Curran and Kearney, ‘resist objectification’ because both are partially ‘inside us’ and they ‘depend upon social and material environments to occur’.6 Here historical phenomenology intersects with practice theory of emotions, even more so with the neurohistorical approaches developed by Rob Boddice and his collaborators.7 When considering embodied accounts of experience, Scheer reminds us ‘there are no thoughts and feelings that are not manifested in bodily processes, actions, in spoken or written words, or supported by material objects. It is their materiality that makes them available to the senses and to memory. What’s more, emotions cannot be conjured out of thin air’.8 So far we have examined two sides of the actor–audience–space triangle: the bodily processes with which actors mobilise and communicate emotions and how audiences mobilise and regulate theirs. But now we need to examine the third side, how the material conditions of the theatre space itself mediate these practices. How eighteenth-century audiences engaged with the theatrical event as a whole cannot be extricated from the

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theatre space itself: from how they bought tickets and secured a seat, to how they experienced plays in performance. As we saw, audiences could and did interrupt performances, but it was the space which encouraged their active engagement with each other and the stage. Consequently, they embodied ‘being there’ differently from modern audiences. So how did proximity, light, and noise affect an eighteenth-century audience’s feeling for being in a theatre and all that followed?

An Intimate Relationship The Theatre Royal Drury Lane was, as Allardyce Nicoll observes, ‘by far the oldest of London’s houses of entertainment; the foundation upon which all the others rested.’9 It was also the venue where Garrick performed for most of his career, and it was where Siddons debuted and performed in London throughout the 1780s. Garrick began managing Drury Lane in 1747 when it was essentially the same theatre Betterton had performed in, built in 1674. Christopher Rich (1657–1714) modified the theatre by reducing the size of the forestage and replacing two of the stage doors with boxes in 1696, and it was this theatre that, by the 1740s, could now seat 900–1000 spectators.10 In 1762, Garrick increased the size of the house to somewhere between 1800 and 2362 patrons; he later commissioned the architect Robert Adam (1728–92) to renovate it in 1775, without changing its capacity, and the remodelled Drury Lane opened in time for the winter season in September that year.11 This was the stage on which Sarah Siddons debuted during the 1775–6 season (Garrick’s last) and graced until the 1790s. The massification of the two London patent theatres began with the Henry Holland (1745–1806) rebuild of Drury Lane in 1791–4 which resulted in a capacity almost double to what it had been previously, seating 3600 people; Holland also redesigned Covent Garden, increasing its capacity from 2170 to 3013 seats.12 The impact of Holland’s expansion affected both how actors performed and how audiences experienced them in the last decade of the century; prior to this, Drury Lane’s auditorium capacity only doubled in size from the end of Betterton’s career until the 1790s. Garrick’s smaller theatre was the one in which he and Hannah Pritchard acted, and both had also performed in Rich’s earlier version when it was half the size again (as had Macklin). Both Siddons and Kemble performed on Garrick’s stage throughout the 1780s, and both shifted to the much larger Theatres Royal

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at Drury Lane and Covent Garden from the 1790s. Contemporaries have commented on changes to how Siddons performed on the Drury Lane stage after the Holland enlargement, but there does not seem to have been any equivalent commentary on adjustments Garrick might have made to his acting after the 1762 expansion. Through all these changes until nearly the end of the century, the proxemic relationship between stage and auditorium remained consistent; despite a house with a capacity in the thousands, the actual distance from the edge of the forestage at Drury Lane to the back wall of the front boxes was approximately thirty to thirty-five feet (9.0–11 metres), a distance not much larger than when Betterton and Elizabeth Barry performed in it.13 This created an intimate spectator–actor relationship which remained relatively the same across the century; therefore, the auditorium’s capacity only marginally affected how actors performed from the 1690s to the early 1790s. Even though the house gradually enlarged over the century, the fundamental architecture of Drury Lane’s auditorium did not change. The pit faced the stage, and around this curved the first tier of boxes in a horseshoe shape with two boxes at stage level flanking the acting platform, which projected beyond the proscenium into the audience. The side boxes continued on the second level but, at the back of the auditorium facing the stage, they became the first gallery. This division of the auditorium into box, pit, and gallery, writes Joseph Donohue, became a ‘normative idea’ from the Restoration onwards, regardless of changes in the sizes of the different theatres.14 Wealthy and fashionable people occupied the boxes, and seated in the pit facing the stage were the ‘“bucks”, “critics” and other men about town’.15 Behind them at the rear, in the first gallery, were where citizens and their wives were seated. In the upper gallery above this, were the notorious ‘gods’—the cheapest seats—where ‘Abigails, serving men, journeymen and apprentices’16 sat and as Friedrich Wendeborn, a German visitor to London in the 1780s observed, their behaviour frequently ‘govern[ed] the whole house, and the players are under a necessity to accommodate themselves to their whim, and to humour them’.17 Ticket pricing for these different tiers of spectators remained stable from 1747 through to the 1790s, when they were increased in the rebuilt Drury Lane. Until then, a place in the boxes cost five shillings, the pit three shillings, the first gallery two shillings, and the gods only one shilling; after the second act of the evening, any available seats were sold at half-price.18

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The proximity and relationship of audiences to actors were meditated by the theatres’ architecture; when actors performed on the forestage, the fully lit auditorium and nearness to the audience (especially in the pit and the front and side boxes) provided the spectators with a clear view of them and promoted McAuley’s two-way energy exchange between auditorium and stage. The communal experience created by this proximity was, as Nicoll observes, like ‘a kind of family party’.19 As one who had acted on both Drury’s original stage and on the later version, Colley Cibber lamented the loss of some ten feet from the Drury Lane forestage when Rich modified the theatre in 1696: But when the Actors were in Possession of that forwarder Space, to advance upon, the Voice was then more in the Centre of the House, so that the most distant Ear had scarce the least Doubt, or Difficulty in hearing what fell from the weakest Utterance […] Nor was the minutest Motion of a Feature (properly changing with the Passion, or Humour it suited) ever lost, as they must be in the Obscurity of too great a Distance.20

Cibber’s complaint emphasises the earlier stage’s intimacy which allowed audiences to appreciate nuances in voice and features (importantly, changing passions and humours); later, the larger Holland theatres would provoke similar objections and on similar terms. Cibber notwithstanding, the Drury Lane forestage still projected a serviceable acting space into the auditorium (despite now lacking one set of stage doors) which served the theatre well until the 1760s. When Garrick returned from France, he followed the example of the Comédie-Française and removed the chandelier over the forestage and, by using new French reflector technology, improved the throw of the footlights and the batten lighting behind the proscenium. These innovations in lighting gradually made upstage of the proscenium more useable for actors, but while there was a forestage that positioned them towards the centre of the house, actors continued to gravitate downstage so they could maintain intimate proximity with their audiences. The importance of such intimacy is expressed by John Byng (later Viscount Torrington) who, after seeing Siddons perform Katherine in Henry VIII on 14 May 1794 in the newly enlarged Drury Lane, laments the loss of the ‘warm close, observant, seats of Old Drury’.21 In this ‘vast void’ (Fig. 5.1), Byng can no longer observe the ‘nice discriminations, of the actor’s face, and of the actors feeling’.22 Addressing the departed Garrick he acknowledges how all the late actor’s art—‘thy finesse,—thy

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Fig. 5.1  Drury Lane Theatre by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, ca. 1808. Rudolph Ackerman et  al. The Microcosm of London, vol.1 (London: Methuen, 1904 [1808]), 228

bye [sic] play, thy whisper,—thy aside,—and even thine eye’—would be lost in the immensity of the new theatre.23 Like Cibber, Byng again asserts the primacy of actors’ faces to communicate emotions and observes that the enlarged space would obscure those very things that made Garrick’s acting great. Although he ‘enjoy’d the highly wrought exhibition of Mrs S[iddons]’ he felt it had been ‘lost and sent to waste in this wild wide theatre, where close observation cannot be maintain’d’.24 In 1792, as Drury Lane was undergoing the Holland rebuild, Siddons had her first experience acting on a significantly larger stage when the Drury Lane company relocated to the recently rebuilt King’s Theatre (1791–1867) designed by Michael Novosielski (1750–95) to stage Italian operas and ballet (Fig. 5.2). This loftier theatre produced changes in her acting, as Boaden observed: ‘Mrs. Siddons rendered distance only the means of displaying a system of

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Fig. 5.2  Opera House [King’s Theatre] by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson. Rudolph Ackerman et  al. The Microcosm of London or London in Miniature vol.2 (London: Methuen, 1904 [1808]), 213

graceful and considerate dignity, or weighty and lingering affliction […]. In the hurry of distraction, she could stop, and in some frenzied attitude speak wonders to the eye, till a second rush forward brought her to the proper ground on which her utterance might be trusted’.25 The King’s Theatre provided a template for what Drury Lane (and later Covent Garden) would become. In addition to reducing the forestage to an apron the size of one set of boxes, the 1794 Drury Lane had now lost the stage doors before the proscenium that led directly on to the forestage.26 As a consequence, the modification to Siddons’ acting style observed by Boaden—rapid movement, followed by an attitude—produced a mode of acting that was more pictorial than before.27 Even though

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the fundamental gestural repertoire used by Siddons and other actors had not changed, the perceptive Boaden comments that on a larger stage ‘the step is wider, the figure more erect, and the whole progress more grand and powerful, the action is more from the shoulder’.28 Always concerned about her voice, Siddons sought ‘proper ground’ as far ‘forward’ as she could go so that she could trust her ‘utterance’ might be heard. We can infer from Boaden’s comment that Siddons—trained on stages like Old Drury and various other, smaller Theatres Royal in England, Scotland, and Ireland, which had forestages projecting into the audience—like Cibber a century earlier, instinctively sought a similar connection with her audience by taking a position as far downstage as she could go.

Glitter in the Light and Height in the Air The architectural dimensions of the theatres and proxemic relationship of audience to actors establish two important spatial considerations: the crucial role of the forestage acting platform that brought actors’ performances to audiences on three sides, and the nearness of most of the audience to the stage. As we shall see in the next section, the three-sided forestage produced an acting style designed to bring actors’ performances closer to their audiences. But these spatial relations also defined the social dimensions of the theatre experience for audiences and helped to produce some of the performative behaviour discussed in the previous chapter. To enter an eighteenth-century theatre and greet one’s friends was, perhaps, little different from entering a large party and doing likewise, while someone was delivering a speech on the other side of the room. Spatiality and sociality were intertwined; the theatre space and the activities that occurred within it—both formal and informal—were mutually constitutive. The arrangement of pit, boxes, and galleries architecturally expressed class distinctions, and actors’ relationship to audiences was captured by Samuel Johnson’s chiasmus, delivered by Garrick in a prologue at the commencement of his management of Drury Lane in 1747: ‘For we that live to please, must please to live’.29 So what would it have been like being in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on a night some time in the middle decades of the century? Attending the theatre in the eighteenth century required more commitment and a greater hardiness from audiences than it does today: from waiting for the doors to open through to the end of the afterpiece, audiences may have been at the theatre for six to seven hours. Opening times

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were pegged to the midday dinner time which, by the mid-1760s, was 4pm; in the years 1715–75 the curtain time rarely varied from 6 to 6.30pm (if it rose on time). Nevertheless, an audience would be assembling outside the theatre by about 4pm, as Wendeborn reported: Before the doors are opened, there is generally for an hour and longer such a crowd, and such a mobbing, that many a one, who, perhaps is inclined to see a play performed, stays away, because he does not like to be jostled about for such a length of time, among a multitude, where the least politeness is entirely out of the question, and where pick-pockets of all sorts are extremely busy.30

When the four external doors were opened at 4–4.30pm, the audience would rush to get into the various lobbies that surrounded the auditorium. However, the doors to the interior pit and galleries would remain shut and not be opened until 5.15pm (or 5.30pm in the longer daylight hours approaching summer), about an hour before curtain time. Tickets were then sold for the next hour before the audience were let in, en masse once again, to the auditorium (Fig. 5.3). On a night with a capacity crowd, spectators may have been waiting for more than two hours before the evening’s performances began.31 Silas Neville, who attended a production of Hamlet starring Garrick, reported that he ‘went to Drury Lane, but could not get in. Stayed from half past 4, sometime at one Pit door, sometime at the other, till past 6, and got in at the right hand side just as the play began, and was dreadfully squeezed’ (Thursday, 28 May 1767).32 Neville was less successful when he attempted to ‘get into the Pit’ to see Garrick in Richard III; after being ‘forced into the 2 shilling gallery Passage & after being squeezed abominably for an hour’ he found himself again on the street (12 January 1769).33 This scrum getting into the pit and galleries (patrons in the boxes could reserve a place) was occasioned by the lack of numbered seating; instead, audience members exchanged payment for a token which they gave to a doorkeeper to gain entry to the auditorium.34 After such an entry audience members were anything but settled and were well-primed for adversarial encounters either with each other or with the actors. When spectators entered the theatre, the theatre entered them in the form of light: In an instant they found themselves in an environment more brilliantly lit than nearly anywhere else in London. The experience of darkness was what most eighteenth-century people were used to after

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Fig. 5.3  The Pit Door by Robert Dighton, 1784

sundown and, after standing for hours in the winter darkness of the street, they entered an environment that was one of the brightest and most glittering places they could go.35 An eighteenth-century audience’s phenomenological experience of light—their ‘feeling’ for it—was fundamental to

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their being in a theatre. Light also allowed audience members to appreciate the sumptuously decorated theatres. After Robert Adam remodelled Drury Lane in 1775, one anonymous commentator wrote in the Public Advertiser an extended description praising the changes. Notably, like Stein’s recollection, his initial impression of the theatre is that the ‘Height given to [it] increased greatly the Appearance of Magnitude in the House’. He then continues, describing its luxurious appointments: All the Ornaments in the Friezes and on the Dados, or Fronts of the Boxes, are elegant and splendid. Nothing can, in my Opinion, answer better than the Festoon Drapery upon the Front of the first Tier. The gilt Ornaments on the Faces of the two Orders of Pilasters (from whence the Branches for the Candles spring) ought not to be omitted in the Catalogue of elegant Ornaments. Neither must I omit the Decoration of the Cieling [sic], or Sounding Board, which […] give[s] the Cieling [sic] the Appearance of a Dome, which has a light and airy Effect.36

Audiences expected the patent houses and the opera theatre to be sumptuous, and such luxury was integral to their experience of the theatrical event. Over the years different colour combinations of paint and textiles were used to decorate theatres—white and gold, grey and red—but the colour overwhelmingly used at this time was green. The coverings on the backless bench seats were green, and a green velvet curtain was used to signal the beginning and end of plays (between acts, a painted act curtain would be dropped) so that latecomers would know if a play had started or not. The topmost boxes, closest to the proscenium, were called the ‘green boxes’, and the large room backstage where performers gathered was known, as it still is, as the ‘green room’.37 The colour even extended to the green baize carpet spread on the stage to protect actors’ costumes during death scenes at the end of tragedies.38 By being constantly lit, audiences could exchange pleasantries or insults, gossip and converse with fellow theatregoers, read the play, and exchange criticism and commentary with the actors.39 The noise would be deafening. In addition to audience members coming and going, banging up and down the hinged benches as they went, the franchised fruit and playbill sellers and prostitutes would be hawking their wares; box doors would slam as people arrived, exchanged seats with placeholders, or argued about where they should be sitting. Audience members seated in the pit stoically endured the shower of orange peels pelted from the gods, hoping not to

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be targeted for a weightier projectile such as a bottle, a tankard, or, like the unfortunate woman in the preceding chapter, a rock-hard chunk of cheese.40 Even after the performance had started, late-coming patrons, taking advantage of the half-price tickets sold after the second act, would enter squeezing their way to any available space they could find without regard for the full-price payers who were already there. Occupants of the boxes, convivial after their dinner, would arrive late, loudly greet others in their box, all accompanied by box doors opening and closing loudly several times as placeholders gave their seats to their masters. Despite audiences’ outrage at egregious interruptions to the performance, it seems that more run-of-the-mill interruptions were borne patiently by actors and audiences alike. Boaden recalls that the routine struggles to get into the pit while the play was on led to ‘fits among the women, and fights among the men, while the stage and the boxes alike suspended every other amusement, but looking on, till silence was restored’.41 Whereas modern theatregoers expect nothing to disturb their experience of a play, least of all other audience members, Boaden’s comment suggests that normal audience behaviour could and did regularly interrupt the action onstage and, at such moments, the actors waited before resuming the action. Kemble, Boaden recalls, watched with ‘calm attention’; Palmer, with a bow of ‘graceful ambiguity’; Elizabeth Farren ‘looked among her fashionable friends for pity that she should be so annoyed’; Dorothy Jordan (1761–1816) looked on ‘with the eyes of the character she most commonly performed’.42 Such disturbances were harder for Siddons because she could never be sure if they resulted from ‘the desire to see her, or the hysteric results of that painful pleasure’, as we saw with Crabb Robinson in the previous chapter.43 In this brightly lit theatre environment, curtain time was announced by the orchestra (or ‘band’ as it was called) playing three pieces of music. The prompter’s bell signalled the music and was then used throughout the evening for a range of tasks. Before the age of electrical transmission of voices, bells allowed effective cueing in a technically complex environment; bells were used comprehensively for a range of cues such as ‘Border bells, Cloud Bells, Wing Bells, Drop Cloth Bells, Curtain Bells, Trap Bells, Thunder Bells […] Sconce Bell’.44 Although these bells could be heard onstage, in the auditorium, and backstage in the green room, it was conventionally assumed that, along with other sounds, they were inaudible to audiences.45 Before an actor had even put one foot onstage, eighteenth-­ century theatre patrons were experiencing a rich sensorium of light, sound,

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and social interaction; how this environment entered them produced a feeling for being in the theatre unlike anything we would experience today. The prompter would ring his bell a second time to signal the end of the music and to settle the audience down in preparation for a prologue to the play. Programming for an evening was another feature of being in an eighteenth-­century theatre which, through its organisation of events, created a temporal experience more akin to a cabaret night than to playgoing as modern audiences would know it. Theatre managements presented what George Winchester Stone calls a ‘varied “whole show”’ and ‘would hardly have dared present unrelieved by dance, song, or farce, the purest Greek or Graeco-French tragedy’.46 Therefore, an evening at the theatre usually consisted of a prologue, a five-act main play—which was either a comedy, tragedy, or musical comedy—entr’acte dances, an epilogue, and a shorter two-act farce which might be performed before, but generally after, the main play (i.e., an afterpiece). Popular music was also played between acts and to fill in time, and during benefit season specialty acts were also performed.47 The two patent houses and the Haymarket theatre maintained corps de ballet, and these dancers were used in the entr’acte entertainment as well as in the pantomimes which increasingly became standard fare at all the theatres. As evenings at the theatre could be four to five hours long, providing intervals for patrons to stand and stretch their legs was a necessity. Again, the indefatigable Wendeborn observes that to maintain audience interest for this length of time it was ‘the more necessary to keep the stage, during that time, always busy, and that the dramatic writers should introduce as much variety in their plays, and multiply the situations in them, as much as possible.’48 Audiences could, and did, become tired and bored: It is, indeed, very visible in the theatres of London, that the eyes and thoughts of the generality of the spectators wander much about; that they begin to yawn, and forget the play. For this reason, good humour is to be kept up between the acts, by means of songs, dances, processions, and things of that kind. I have observed that this was necessary even in many of Shakespeare’s plays, to prevent drowsiness among the audience; though perhaps a Garrick, a [Henry]Woodward, or other principal actors, endeavoured to render them pleasing.49

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After the main piece finished, the actors would stand in a line behind the proscenium; one would detach him or herself from the ‘”group”’ (as it was called) and stand downstage as the green velvet curtain descended and deliver the denouement of the play or a moralising speech, called the ‘tag’.50 The same actor (or sometimes another) would ‘”give out”’ what plays were scheduled for the following evening or, when a play was successful, for further nights of the season.51 The announcement was generally presented at this point because it was when the maximum number of audience members would still be in the house (many leaving for supper before the afterpiece). Henry Bate Dudley’s comic opera The Blackamoor Washed White (1776), which premiered during Siddons’ inaugural season in 1776, was so poorly received by attendees that audiences rioted when it was announced that Blackamoor would play the next night. Only when Garrick had personally assured them that the author had withdrawn the play was the audience satisfied.52 Usually, the epilogue to the main piece would follow this announcement. On some nights the epilogue preceded the ‘giving out of the next [night’s] play’, and on these occasions the actor speaking the epilogue would deliver this announcement as well. Epilogues related to the main piece were delivered by one of the actors in character, directly addressing the audience.53 Alternatively, there could be an entirely unrelated performance, such as a comic monologue. Following a performance of Hamlet with a comic monologue such as Bucks Have at ye All appealed to an eighteenth-century audience’s need for variety, even though it would seem absurd and in bad taste to a modern one.54 In either case, this mini-performance would explicitly reference the audience and its relationship to the stage, and usually showcase an audience favourite (Garrick’s veteran talent scout, Thomas King, was a famous monologist who performed Bucks Have at ye All).55 There was not, in the eighteenth century, the convention of the curtain call; it was hardly necessary as audiences applauded actors throughout the play, not only following speeches, ‘but also single lines and even single words’.56 Actors on these occasions might acknowledge the applause with a bow or curtsey; in their final appearance for the season actors would, as Boaden reported of Elizabeth Farren’s final season, make ‘the three established curtsies [or bows], to the right and left sides of the house first [i.e., to the quality in the boxes], and then, in the front of the stage, to the general mass of the people’.57 In the fuller version of the Gertrude Stein quote excerpted in the epigraph, she summons up her childhood experience of a theatre; attempting to recapture her precognitive experience, Stein remembers ‘the general

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movement and light and air which any theatre has, and a great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air’.58 If emotions ‘cannot be conjured out of thin air’, as Scheer observed,59 then we recognise, following Stein, that there was nothing ‘thin’ about the ‘air’ in an eighteenth-­ century theatre space: Its volume was thickened with light that glittered off its surfaces, and its audiences produced a great deal of ‘general movement’. The embodied practices of audiences in the eighteenth-century theatres contributed to this corporeal thickness, whether they struggled for a place in the auditorium or aurally tuned out the cue bells they heard from backstage. It was this air of the theatre (and I am mindful, too, that in French, l’air means a ‘feeling of’, or ‘sense of’) that made the passions, expressed by actors, both on their faces and through their voices, ‘available to the senses and to memory’.60 In an eighteenth-century theatre, even more so than today, this process was especially material and tangible. Its unruliness, visuality, and noise were what constituted the theatre experience for eighteenth-century audiences, just as politeness, darkness, and silence are what constitute it for modern ones. But space also mediated performances in another way: The intimate proximity of actors and spectators produced a dialogic performance style which acknowledged the audience almost as though they were friends simply looking on.

Talking to the Audience In the hierarchically organised theatre architecture of pit, boxes, and galleries, an eighteenth-century audience was anything but homogenous. Footmen and servants in the ‘gods’ engaged in emotional practices that differed from their masters below, and the latter fought to regulate the behaviour of their often unruly underlings. Not that the denizens of pit and boxes were any less unruly (as the play persecutors and cabalists showed us; see Chap. 4), despite their own high opinions of themselves; and if one thing makes us pause to consider how different emotional practices were in the eighteenth century compared to modern times, it was the noisy sociability of theatre audiences. Nonetheless there were still occasions when great actors plunged the whole house, regardless of class, into silence. Later in this chapter, in the analysis of Garrick’s Hamlet as seen by Georg Lichtenberg, we shall see how a ‘community of sentiment’ was created by the emotional practices of an audience combined with the architecture of the theatre and a great actor’s performance.

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The intimate spatial relationship between auditorium and stage in eighteenth-­century theatres, up until the 1790s, produced an acting style that actively included the audience. How this operates has been revealed in practice-based research using extant Georgian theatres in Suffolk and Bristol. David Francis Taylor, who worked as a researcher with the company in the restored Regency Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, observes that the architecture of the theatre promoted a dialogic convention of actors including the audience as another interlocutor in the onstage conversation. Bury St Edmunds is smaller than the patent houses were (at 780 seats it is closer in size to Drury Lane in 1674) but has a similar spatial relationship of stage to auditorium as we know existed at Drury Lane before the 1790s; it can, therefore, be seen as a ‘laboratory’ for the effect proximity had on styles of acting. Taylor observed that, ‘more than the actor speaking at the spectator […] the rhythms and meanings of drama are determined through a process of sharing’ and that once they were in the theatre, ‘the intimacy of its space, particularly the proximity of the forestage—at the structural centre of the building—to the lit auditorium and stage boxes, actively encourage[d]’ actors to perform outwards; the architecture ‘compel[led] actors to share the large majority of their speech and action directly with the audience’.61 Mark Howell-Meri arrives at similar conclusions for the Bristol Old Vic theatre, Britain’s oldest theatre, built in 1766 from designs made by Garrick’s carpenter, James Saunders: a connection that explicitly links the Old Vic to Drury Lane.62 Citing Rachel Kavanaugh, who directed a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals at the theatre in June 2004, Howell-Meri maintains that ‘the concept of holding a continuous open “conversation” directly with spectators remained key to the success’ of her production.63 Bridget Escolme traces the convention of ‘talking to the audience’ back to Shakespeare’s time and argues that ‘these dramatic texts are dependent for their effects of subjectivity upon the potential for direct encounter between performer and spectator within a continually foregrounded theatre building’.64 The consistency, if not the continuity, of the link between the eighteenth-century theatres and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playhouses has been demonstrated by Howell-Meri, who argues that the dimensions of several theatres strongly suggest that ad quadratum ratios used in the earlier playhouses were still being used nearly two hundred years later.65 Although looking nothing like the playhouses in Shakespeare’s time, in one fundamental aspect eighteenth-century theatres until the 1790s were very similar: The spatial relationship of stage and auditorium was created through

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the same ad quadratum ratios used in the construction of the Fortune, the Rose, and the first and second Globes.66 If there was an ideal ratio for theatre dimensions then, it seems, ad quadratum would be it. This intimacy was not lost on audiences at the time. Richard Cumberland, who experienced both the smaller and larger versions of Drury Lane, lamented the barnlike Holland rebuild and what was lost. Reflecting on what the smaller theatre made available, he wrote: On the stage of the Old Drury in the days of Garrick the moving brow and penetrating eye of that matchless actor came home to the spectator. As the passions shifted, and were by turns reflected from the mirror of his expressive countenance, nothing was lost; upon the scale of modern Drury many of the finest touches of his art would of necessity fall short. The distant auditor might chance to catch the text, but would not see the comment, that was wont so exquisitely to elucidate the poet’s meaning, and impress it on the hearer’s heart.67

Cumberland, a playwright, does not lament the loss of his words (some of which might still be heard) but he misses the ‘comment’ made by an actor of Garrick’s calibre as the ‘passions shifted’ across his ‘expressive countenance’. Although Cumberland’s words might suggest a process of lucid transmission of the ‘poet’s meaning’ through the instrument of the actor to the audience—certainly this is how he would understand it—it is the theatre space itself which facilitates or hinders the process. Sitting in Holland’s massive Theatre Royal, Cumberland’s feeling for being in a theatre had changed, just as it had for Viscount Torrington seeing Siddons, and that was a feeling born from his closeness to the actor in the smaller theatre. Theatre spaces mediate how individual spectators experience a performance. More than being simply containers for play production, the type of space, what activities it affords, and how those activities are carried out influence how a performance is perceived and interpreted by an audience. For example, individual subjectivity in most modern theatres is enhanced by a darkened auditorium and sightlines that allow the spectator’s unobstructed gaze to the action onstage.68 However, in the theatre space as described earlier in this chapter, one that does not have the disciplining features of modern theatregoing, audience members are thrust into sociable and often contentious relationships with each other. McAuley observes that even though spectators may go to the theatre individually or more

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commonly as ‘subgroups (couples, families, groups of friends […])’ or in the different cabals or claques we saw in the previous chapter, it is ‘through the process of responding to the performance [that] they become a collectivity, a group with a particular quality that can be perceived by the actors and differentiated from other similar groups’ [italics in original].69 In what follows, I revisit Lichtenberg’s account of one of Garrick’s most famous ‘points’—Hamlet meeting his father’s ghost—to show how the theatre space enabled his close analysis of the gestural conventions Garrick used, and gathered him and his fellow spectators into a particular ‘community of sentiment’ at this moment. I will also argue that Garrick’s gestural repertoire was consistent with the principles of dialogic acting that always had the audience in mind. In William Oldys’ and Edmund Curll’s The History of the English Stage (1741), supposedly compiled from the papers of Betterton, they advise the actor to ‘always be casting his Eyes on some or other of his Auditors, and turning them gently from side to side with an Air of Regard’; at the same time, they advocate focussing on ‘the Person or Persons you are engaged with on the Stage’ and for ‘both Parties keep such a Position in regard of the Audience, that even these Beauties escape not their Observation, tho’ never so justly directed’.70 The apparent contradiction between addressing the audience and focussing on a stage partner is resolved when the writers compare the staging to ‘a Piece of History Painting, tho’ the Figures fix their Eyes ever so directly to each other, yet the Beholder, by the Advantage of their Position, has a full View of the Expression of the Soul in the Eyes of the Figures’.71 Such advice was consistent with the requirements of the three-sided stage that produced what Taylor terms ‘centrifugal’ acting directed to the audience.72 English actors generally performed in a conversational arc of forty-five degrees to the right or left of an axis perpendicular to the front of the stage. Such a conversational arc would allow the actor to direct his or her speech towards the other actor whilst encompassing the audience (particularly in the side boxes) and, most important, presenting his or her face to them. For an acting style that communicated emotions by showing passions transitioning on the face, staying turned towards the audience was essential. C. A. G. Goede, a German visitor to London at the end of the eighteenth century, reported that English actors ‘never turn their backs on the public, and seldom shew their faces in profile, or hide them behind a pocket handkerchief, or their hands; they never approach too rapidly; nor do they unnecessarily touch each other’.73 Numerous paintings and prints from the period depict actors awkwardly turned towards

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the audience while gesturing towards the other actor onstage. Because the painter’s frame suggests a theatrical scene framed by the proscenium arch, its effect is to efface the spectators as a group and emphasise the perspective of one viewer only, who is ‘absorbed’ into the dramatic fiction being represented.74 Further, the two-dimensional planes required of painting produce the static formality of the actors’ poses by flattening a scene played, not within the proscenium frame, but three-dimensionally on the forestage, in the centre of the house. The theatre that mediated Lichtenberg’s experience in 1774 was Drury Lane as enlarged by Garrick twelve years earlier, before the Adam remodelling of 1775, and it was this theatre’s intimate dimensions that allowed him to appreciate the nuances of Garrick’s performance. Garrick first performed Hamlet in Dublin in 1742 and went on to perform it ninety times; by the time Lichtenberg saw him, Garrick was fifty-seven years old and nearing the end of his career. Over the preceding thirty-two years, he had developed the role and, as we shall see below, had often taken the advice of interested audience members who corresponded with him.75 Hamlet meeting his father’s ghost was a well-established ‘point’, eagerly awaited by audiences, by the time Lichtenberg saw Garrick.76 Garrick performed Hamlet twice in December 1774, and Lichtenberg saw him each time;77 nearly a year later, he wrote to Heinrich Christian Boie and offered this description of Garrick’s performance the previous December: Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him; his hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, are stretched out nearly to their full length, with the hands as high as his head, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingers apart; his mouth is open: thus he stands rooted to the spot, with legs apart, but no loss of dignity, supported by his friends, who are better acquainted with the apparition and fear lest he should collapse. His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance this effect. At last he speaks, not at the beginning, but at the end of the breath, with a trembling voice […]. (1 October 1775)78

In this detailed word-portrait, Lichtenberg offers Boie a close description of how Garrick performed the ‘point’. There are several elements in his description that need to be highlighted because they demonstrate the

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interaction of conventionalised gestures and facial expressions, ideal character type, and affect in the audience: • Garrick’s abrupt turn and stumble; • his arms extended at head height towards the spectre, the left slightly more so and the right a little lower; • his splayed fingers; • his mouth gaping open; • the expression of terror on his face; • how he maintains ‘dignity’; • the embodied response from Lichtenberg; and, • how Garrick manages to silence the rambunctious audience at Drury Lane. Lichtenberg intended his letter to be published in Boie’s Deutsches Museum, but he had written two more accounts of the same ‘point’ in his diary a year earlier, both times immediately after he saw Garrick perform: When Garrick sees [the ghost], he does not make a bow, as [William] Smith once did, and because of it was called Sir Hamlet, but he suddenly starts back with buckling knees and outstretched arms and finally remains standing in this posture, legs well apart, with knees bent, supported by Horatio and Marcellus; thus he speaks. This expression of fear combined with the most chilling horror, which can be experienced only by a person who sees a ghost, from whom nevertheless he expects more good than ill, produced an astonishing effect. The absolute silence of the audience intensified everything so much more that, believe me, several times a cold shiver ran through me, even before he had begun his speech. (2 December 1774)79

Ten days later Lichtenberg returned to Drury Lane to see Garrick again, taking the occasion to observe ‘a few things more closely’.80 Although Sutton does not include Lichtenberg’s description of Hamlet’s initial meeting a second time, he observes that this ‘material is integrated with similar material from the previous Diary entry into the letter of 1 October’.81 Sutton begins the translation a little later when Hamlet re-­ enters with the ghost: In Hamlet’s starting back there is no affected stumbling; there is nothing clumsy or schoolboyish. Whilst the Ghost speaks, Garrick stands motionless, with sword drawn, the point of which, from an arm fully outstretched

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directly sideways, touches the ground, the left hand again half-extended, almost flat with the fingers spread. I employ here words the strictest meaning of which the thoughtful reader must infer for himself, in order to imagine the intrinsic beauty of the picture. The look expresses astonishment and horror; the mouth is slightly open and the eyes rather more so. (12 December 1774)82

Lichtenberg’s letter functions like a developed ethnographic field note which synthesises and elaborates on his immediate impressions recorded in the two diary entries on 2 and 12 December. Broadly, all three accounts record the same elements of Garrick’s performance highlighted in the list above, although they differ in the details they include or omit entirely. When read together the three accounts form a composite picture of Garrick’s performance. In each account, Lichtenberg mentions Garrick’s ‘start’, the small jump he customarily made before assuming an ‘attitude’. In the letter Lichtenberg describes Garrick staggering back and specifies the number of paces; he also adds the detail of Garrick’s hat falling off. The 2 December diary entry also notes Garrick’s start and his collapse, sharing the detail with the letter of his ‘buckling knees’, and being caught by Marcellus and Horatio. Ten days later Lichtenberg returns to Garrick’s ‘start’ but now seems to feel the need to justify it: It is not ‘affected’, ‘clumsy’, nor, intriguingly, ‘schoolboyish’.83 Garrick’s stage business could easily become a parody of itself, and his ‘start’ was an innovation which quickly became a mannerism satirised by friends and enemies alike.84 It is possible that Lichtenberg emphasises the decorum of Garrick’s performance particularly since, in the 2 December description, he contrasts it with a performance by William “Gentleman” Smith (1730–1819).85 Smith once used a piece of old-fashioned business, bowing as a mark of respect to the ghost because he is both Hamlet’s father and the king, which was why Lichtenberg had noted Smith mockingly being called ‘Sir Hamlet’.86 The bow was obviously a long-held convention, but one Garrick had abandoned having received, as will be shown shortly, critical feedback against it decades earlier. The two diary entries of December 1774 and the letter of the following October all refer to Garrick’s arms, especially his left arm, outstretched towards the ghost; the 12 December entry and the letter both draw particular attention to his spread fingers. The second diary entry also puts a sword in his right downstage hand, as does the letter, but in a different

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position; the significance of this detail is revealed in correspondence from one spectator during the Irish summer season in 1742 at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre. There is one thing that I must mention, which I think has but a very ridiculous appearance, although it has been practised by every one that I have seen in that character; and it is this: when the Ghost beckons Hamlet to follow him, he, enraged at Horatio for detaining him, draws his sword, and in that manner follows the Ghost; presently he returns, Hamlet still following him sword in hand, till the Ghost says “I am thy Father’s spirit!” at which words, Hamlet with a very respectful bow, sheaths his sword; which is as much as to say, that if he had not been a Ghost upon whom he could depend, he dare not have ventured to put up his sword. The absurdity of this custom is plain from the nature of spirits, and from what Marcellus a little before says, that “it is as the air invulnerable.” I think it would be much better if Hamlet should at these words, “By Heaven! I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!” only put his hand to his sword, and make an attempt to draw it. (14 August 1742)87

Garrick’s correspondent wrestles with the dramaturgical problems of swords and bows and how one relates to a spectral being who is not only the shade of one’s father and a king but also, potentially, a demonic manifestation. It is ambiguous whether he approves of the bow or not, but he questions the dramaturgy of the drawn sword. Hamlet draws his sword, initially against Horatio and Marcellus, but then keeps it drawn as he follows the ghost; it seems ‘ridiculous’ to Garrick’s correspondent that Hamlet should sheath his sword and bow to the shade at the beginning of their scene together. Like Hartson in Chap. 2, this writer demonstrates expert appraisal of Garrick’s performance. By the time Lichtenberg sees Hamlet, he reports in the letter that Garrick still ‘tears himself with great violence’ from his companions’ arms and draws his sword against them on the ‘By Heaven’ line; he then holds his sword ‘upon guard against the spectre’, in which position he follows the ghost offstage (1 October 1775).88 When he re-enters and the ghost begins to speak, the sword is held in his right arm ‘fully outstretched directly sideways’, but its point touches the ground; the suggestion here is that Hamlet’s sword dangles from his nerveless fingers (12 December 1774). It seems that Garrick has

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Fig. 5.4  The Ghost Scene in Hamlet, ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us’, after a drawing by Thomas Rowlandson, 1743. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File S528h1 no.7. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

solved the problem of the sheathed sword identified by the Dublin writer by holding it, unsheathed, slackly in his grasp. Both moments in the scene can be observed in two images, some eighty years apart, and although neither is of Garrick, the two sword positions are clearly shown: Although the makeshift theatre in Rowlandson’s sketch (Fig. 5.4) suggests a performance by strolling players, the conventions remain the same; as it is his first encounter with the ghost, Hamlet’s sword is in the en garde position and his left hand is averting the ghost. In the later picture (Fig.  5.5), William Pelby’s sword points downwards and not en garde, but, as the dialogue inscribed on it suggests—‘Hamlet: I’ll go no further. Ghost: Mark me. Hamlet: I will.’—the image portrays Hamlet’s re-entry with the ghost, rather than his initial confrontation. Although neither diary entry refers to Hamlet’s ‘dignity’ as the letter does, it appears that Lichtenberg retrospectively approves of how Garrick plays a type by not forgetting that Hamlet is a prince. However, in both

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Fig. 5.5  Mr. [William] Pelby (as Hamlet, at Drury Lane, Jan. 1826) by William Day, 1826. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File P381.4 no.1. Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, DC

diary entries Lichtenberg records that Garrick remains standing after his ‘start’; the bienséance of Hamlet’s princeliness manifests through his physical grace which has a distinct pictorial quality: the ‘posture [that] Garrick falls into at the sight of the spectre’ Lichtenberg suggests could almost

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serve as a model for a painting of the conversion of Saint Paul (2 December 1774).89 These pictorial qualities are, appropriately, replicated in a portrait of a Garrick protégé, William Powell (1735/6–69), who took over his roles when Garrick toured Europe in the 1760s. In Benjamin Wilson’s painting Powell’s body recoils in a graceful start against his companions, his left hand with splayed fingers thrust towards the ghost (Fig. 5.6).

Fig. 5.6  William Powell as Hamlet Encountering the Ghost, by Benjamin Wilson, ca. 1768–9. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, FPa88. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC

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Francis Gentleman, in The Dramatic Censor, also approves of Garrick’s ‘natural picturesque attitude’ and, further, emphasises Garrick’s ‘terror-­ struck features’ in the scene.90 Lichtenberg’s appraisal is more detailed: Garrick expresses ‘astonishment’ and ‘horror’ with his wide-open mouth and ‘eyes rather more so’, which all together create a picture of ‘intrinsic beauty’ (12 December 1774). In the 2 December entry, he only refers to Garrick’s ‘expression of fear combined with the most chilling horror’ which ‘produced an astonishing effect’. Garrick’s representation of these passions is nearly identical to those described in numerous English and European acting manuals whose ultimate source is Charles Le Brun’s Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698). Le Brun’s Méthode, published posthumously, was based on a series of lectures he gave in 1668 and, as Jennifer Montagu shows, spawned numerous editions and major derivations over the next hundred and fifty years.91 Le Brun describes in his entry for Fright, raised ‘Eye-brows exceedingly in the middle’; how ‘the Nose […] as well as the Nostrils, ought to appear drawing upwards’, and the ‘Eyes must look wide open’; how the muscles and veins in the neck and cheeks must be visible; and ‘the Hair of the Head standing an [sic] end, the colour of the face pale and livid’ (Fig. 5.7).92

Fig. 5.7  Astonishment, Horror, and Fright, from Charles Le Brun, Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions. Amsterdam: François van der Plaats, 1702 [1698], n.p

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With surprisingly little variation, the acting manuals detail the same expressions and gestures derived from Le Brun. When ‘surprise reaches the superlative degree, which I take to be astonishment,’ writes Thomas Wilkes, ‘the whole body is actuated: it is thrown back, with one leg set before the other, both hands elevated, the eyes larger than usual, the brows drawn up, and the mouth not quite shut’.93 The elements that Wilkes identifies here are the bodily recoil, raised arms and hands, wide eyes and open mouth, most of which are evident in Wilson’s painting of Powell (see Fig. 5.6), in Lichtenberg’s description, and in another representation, Wilson’s etching of Garrick (see Fig.  5.9). James Burgh, a grammar school headmaster, published a highly popular volume (that ran to multiple editions) entitled The Art of Speaking (1761); for the passion of Fear, Burgh also emphasised the staring eyes, the body recoiling, the open mouth, and the hands held up.94 In a later description of Wonder (a passion that he links to Fear) Burgh writes that ‘If the hands hold any thing, at the time, when the object of wonder appears, they immediately let it drop, unconscious; and the whole body fixes in the contracted, stooping posture of amazement; the mouth open; the hands held up open, nearly in the attitude of fear’.95 Garrick’s Hamlet does not drop his sword, but Lichtenberg’s description suggests he is barely holding it, and his expression combining, perhaps, Wonder and Fear may be why Lichtenberg associates this scene with paintings of the conversion of Saint Paul. A fellow German, the playwright Friedrich von Günderode, saw Garrick perform Hamlet about the same time: when the scene with the ghost came, when his soul was stirred to its depths, when he drew his sword and bravely followed the spectre while his hair stood on end with horror, I could perceive more plainly than ever that the man had absolute control over his features, and that he was completely absorbed in the impressions of the situation.96

Lichtenberg does not specifically mention Garrick’s hair standing on end, but the letter does describe his hair being ‘disordered’ as he follows the ghost out.97 In Rowlandson’s image above (see Fig.  5.4), the strolling player’s hair is also depicted as rising in terror, and it is thought that Garrick’s hair also rose with the help of a prosthetic ‘fright wig’.98 This might also be why his hat falls off, as Lichtenberg describes in his letter (1 October 1775). Such an effect was a conventional expression of fear (as shown in Le Brun’s Fright). The details of Garrick’s performance of terror

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that Lichtenberg observes—mouth and eyes opened wide, arms reaching, hands spreading, and body recoiling—are reflected in how the actor and teacher John Walker describes the portrayal of ‘Fear violent and sudden’, which opens wide the eyes and mouth, shortens the nose, gives the countenance an air of wildness, covers it with deadly paleness, draws back the elbows parallel with the sides, lifts up the open hands with the fingers spread, to the height of the breast, at some distance before it, so as to shield it from the dreadful object. One foot is drawn back behind the other, so that the body seems to be shrinking from the danger, and putting itself in a posture for flight. […] the whole body is thrown into a general tremor.99

Austin had a similar description, together with an accompanying illustration (Fig. 5.8), for the passion of Horror. The image is slightly different from what Lichtenberg observes, as Austin’s figure shows the actor’s right hand thrown back and up. More Fig. 5.8  Horror, from Gilbert Austin, Chironomia. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1806, between 486 and 487

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important than this deviation, and consistent with all descriptions of Garrick in the scene, the left hand with fingers splayed pushes away against the object of fear. This aversive gesture can be seen also in Benjamin Wilson’s illustration of Garrick, where the left hand extends but the right is held lower with arm slightly bent, just as Lichtenberg describes it (Fig. 5.9). What is clear from the above is that how Garrick performed Hamlet when Lichtenberg saw him is likely close to how he had always performed it, and conformed to how the role was conventionally performed. Although other superb actors had performed Hamlet—Henderson and Spranger Barry at Covent Garden, Thomas Sheridan in Dublin—the role was definitively Garrick’s. How he performed it was, by 1774, how an audience expected it to be performed: The ideal character type was set. What must not be lost from the foregoing is that Garrick’s performance worked. The combination of highly conventionalised vocal and gestural systems, together with Garrick’s undisputed star power, interacted with how audiences appraised and interpreted performances together with their own emotional practices. To assess Garrick’s performance in such detail required Lichtenberg to be close to the stage—really close. For an informed theatregoer of modest means, the best place to view a performance he or she could afford would be in the pit. Assuming that a box was beyond his means, it is likely that the pit was where Lichtenberg had struggled in the scrum to secure himself a place. In his letter to Boie on 1 October 1775 he offers a description that sets the scene, curiously folding the fictional events of the play into how they are staged: ‘it is a cold night and just twelve o’clock [in Elsinore]; the theatre [in London] is darkened, and the whole audience of some thousands are as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre; even from the farthest end of the playhouse one could hear a pin drop’.100 Lichtenberg’s conflation of fiction and staging reveals the power of illusion even in a theatre where volatile audience interaction was common, and in this account he seems to suggest that the silent, still audience is collectively holding its breath. His diary entry on 2 December 1774 records how this silence ‘intensified everything so much more that […] several times a cold shiver ran through me, even before he had begun his speech’. The attitude Garrick holds, described above, when Hamlet finally sees the ghost is ‘so expressive of terror’ it makes Lichtenberg’s ‘flesh creep’; ‘this effect’ produces in him ‘a sense of insecurity’ that is ‘enhance[d]’ by the ‘almost terror-struck silence of the audience’ (1

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Fig. 5.9  Mr. Garrick in Hamlet, act I, scene 4, by Benjamin Wilson, 1754. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, ART File G241 no. 94. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

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October 1775). In a similar vein Johann Grimm, who had spent two months in England, a little before Lichtenberg (12 March–12 May 1774), also saw Garrick in Hamlet; he reported that the ghost scene threw him into ‘a cold death-sweat’.101 Lichtenberg became so absorbed in Garrick’s performance that he was unaware of his surroundings until the tumultuous applause that followed the actor’s exit brought him to his senses: all this makes the scene proceed without your even once being aware of yourself, or of London, Drury Lane and Garrick. This happens only in the general clapping which follows the scene, and then one cannot help exulting in the great genius [Shakespeare] who has so ordered all this, and to marvel at the man [Garrick], who has so understood that great genius. (2 December 1774)102

Lichtenberg is totally involved in the scene—to the extent of losing all sense of time and place—and is brought back to his senses only by the general applause that erupts on Garrick’s exit. This collective exultation reveals the audience mobilising their emotions not just to release emotional tension but as a demonstration to each other, and to Garrick, of generosity. In a second letter to Boie on 10 October 1775, Lichtenberg provides a detailed observation of Garrick’s Hamlet, this time performing his soliloquy from Act I, Scene 2. The amount of detail in this account suggests that Lichtenberg must have been only metres from the stage. The last of the words: ‘So excellent a King’, is utterly lost; one catches it only from the movement of the mouth, which quivers and shuts tight immediately afterwards, so as to restrain the all too distinct expression of grief on the lips, which could easily tremble with unmanly emotion. The manner of shedding tears, which betrays both the heavy burden of grief on his heart and the manly spirit which suffers under it, is irresistibly poignant. But as soon as one is attuned to Shakespeare’s mind, each word, as Garrick speaks it, pierces one’s heart.103

For Lichtenberg to observe this so closely, Garrick would have been delivering his soliloquy downstage as far as he could go, lit by the reflector-­ backed footlights so that the audience’s attention was drawn to his face, not unlike a close-up in film. Lichtenberg names the passion being portrayed by Garrick, ‘grief’, but he also closely describes how Garrick communicates it. Garrick’s voice trails away into inaudibility so that the last

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line is ‘utterly lost’; it seems that Lichtenberg is lip-reading the actor, which also suggests both his prior knowledge of the play and his anticipation of this ‘point’. Garrick’s mouth ‘quivers and shuts tight’, a gesture that Lichtenberg interprets through the lens of the expected gender performance as Hamlet’s ‘manly’ suppression of his grief; a grief that is ‘all too distinct’ on his lips, pressed shut to prevent them from trembling with ‘unmanly emotion’. At this point, Lichtenberg’s description loses precision; there is no comment on Garrick’s expressive eyes, but we are told that he ‘shed[s] tears’, and the effect of this on Lichtenberg is ‘irresistibly poignant’. In his earlier letter to Boie, Lichtenberg had written that ‘[Garrick’s] gestures are so clear and vivacious as to arouse in one similar emotions. With him one looks serious, with him one wrinkles one’s forehead, and with him one smiles’, a comment that suggests a direct correlation between gestures and emotional responses from the audience (1 October 1775).104 Despite Lichtenberg’s intense emotional experience, he nonetheless cycles from his subjective experience back out to the social: [Hamlet/Garrick’s] grief is mingled with righteous anger, and on one occasion, when he brings his arm down sharply in a single movement, so as to lend emphasis to one word of invective, his voice is choked with emotion, when the audience is not expecting it, and he can only bring out this word after some moments amidst his tears. (10 October 1775)105

The unexpected gesture and Garrick’s emotionally cracked vocalisation in this moment arouses the audience and releases them into sociality. Lichtenberg turns to the stranger next to him, ‘to whom I had not as yet uttered a word’, and speaks excitedly about what they had both just experienced: ‘It was’, Lichtenberg reports, ‘quite irresistible’ (10 October 1775).106 This sociality, returning to Grimm in the previous chapter, demonstrates a bodily disposition where ‘Men […] would willingly embrace each other’, and it is this urge in response to Garrick that Lichtenberg and his neighbour find so ‘irresistible’.107 The theatre space facilitates the semiotic clarity of Garrick’s acting by drawing the actor and his observer into close proximity, and Shakespeare’s language in Garrick’s mouth ‘pierces [Lichtenberg’s] heart’. Although Lichtenberg subjectively experiences his emotions, they are not separated from the communal emotions which are publicly expressed; it is in this oscillation between the two that we see a ‘community of sentiment’ in action. This ‘community of sentiment’ is not produced by some

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empathetic magic but from feelings which, writes Boddice, are ‘formed and experienced in a dynamic relation of brain–body and world […] Individuals and groups have both to work out what they feel in a given circumstance and strive to emote, to express that feeling, in a way that makes sense in the context’ [italics in original].108 As I have shown, this ‘work[ing] out’ of what to feel is not conscious but it is contextual, and what ‘makes sense’ in a theatre—such as feeling for the plight of an imaginary being—will not necessarily make sense elsewhere. It is the material and social circumstances of Drury Lane in the late eighteenth century which allow and constrain how Lichtenberg and his fellow spectators feel what they feel in response to Garrick. Sensations such as light, sound, and proximity to other people, both onstage and in the auditorium, are sensorily experienced by audiences and mediate what they feel. Lichtenberg waits with Hamlet and his friends and feels Elsinore’s cold in Drury Lane’s darkness surrounded by ‘some thousands’ of silent faces.

Notes 1. Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (2012): 164. 2. Kevin Curran and James Kearney, ‘Introduction’ to special issue, ‘Shakespeare and Phenomenology’, Criticism 54, no. 3 (2012): 354. 3. Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 103. 4. See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Barbara H.  Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Ute Frevert et  al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5. Curran and Kearney, ‘Shakespeare and Phenomenology’, 354. 6. Curran and Kearney, 354. 7. Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, 2019); Rob Boddice, ‘The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 62 (October 2017); Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 8. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 219.

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9. Allardyce Nicoll, The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 36. 10. Nicoll, Garrick Stage, 40. 11. Nicoll, 35–40. Leo Hughes in The Drama’s Patrons: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century London Audience (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1971), 182, believes that Drury Lane’s 1762 remodelling resulted in a house no larger than 1800 patrons which he ‘consider[s] an absolute maximum’. Hughes disagrees with Harry William Pedicord in The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 11, who estimates it to be 2362, based on boxoffice receipts. Nicoll (40) settles somewhere in between with 2000 seats. The population of London at this time was 750,000 people, of which approximately 12,000 went to the theatre or opera each week in the season; ‘2,300 or so […] could have crowded into [the] Drury Lane’ in December 1780⁠. Mark S.  Auburn, ‘Theatre in the Age of Garrick and Sheridan,’ in Sheridan Studies, ed. James Morwood and David Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8. 12. Joseph Donohue, ‘Theatres, Their Architecture and Their Audiences’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 304. 13. Mark Howell-Meri, ‘Acting Spaces and Carpenters’ Tools: From the Fortune to the Theatre Royal, Bristol’, New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 2009): 154. Edward A. Langhans, similarly, estimates the distance from front of stage to back wall of the theatre in the various Drury Lane remodellings, until the Holland expansion, remaining consistently at 30–35 ft (9–10.5 m). In contrast, he estimates that the distance increased to 74 ft (22 m) after Holland’s rebuilding. Langhans, ‘The Theatres’, in The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 42. 14. Donohue, ‘Theatres’, 295. 15. David Thomas, ‘Audiences, Taste, Theatre Criticism’, in Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788: A Documentary History, ed. David Thomas and Arnold Hare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 394. 16. The trick of the town laid open, or a companion for country gentlemen (Dublin, n.d.), 37. Reprinted in LaTourette Stockwell, Dublin Theatres and Theatre Customs, 1637–1820 (Kingsport, Tenn.: Kingsport Press, 1938), 193. 17. Friedrich August Wendeborn, A View of England, vol. 2 [German original, 1785–8] (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), 248. 18. Hughes, Drama’s Patrons, 170–1.

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19. Nicoll, Garrick Stage, 91. 20. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, vol. 1 (London: J. Watts, 1740), 241. 21. John Byng, The Torrington Diaries, ed. C.  Bruyn Andrews, vol. 4 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1938), 18. LS, 5.3:1647. 22. Byng, Torrington Diaries, 4:18. 23. Byng, 4:18. 24. Byng, 4:18. 25. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors, vol. 2 (London: H. Colburn, 1827), 289. 26. Rand Carter, ‘The Drury Lane Theatres of Henry Holland and Benjamin Dean Wyatt’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26, no. 3 (October 1967): 203. 27. House size is often stated to justify Siddons’ grand style, but this occurred only after the modifications in the 1790s. See: Lindal Buchanan, ‘Sarah Siddons and Her Place in Rhetorical History’, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 25, no. 4 (2007): 422; Shearer West, ‘The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons’, in Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists: A Passion for Performance, ed. Robyn Asleson (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 21–2; Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (London: Heinemann, 1970), 176. 28. Boaden, Memoirs of Siddons, 2:291. 29. Samuel Johnson and David Garrick, Prologue and Epilogue, Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane 1747 (London: W. Webb, 1747), 3. 30. Wendeborn, View of England, 2:244–5. 31. LS, 5.1:xxii. 32. LS, 4.2:1252. 33. LS, 4.3:1379. 34. LS, 5.1:xxvi–xxvii. 35. Nicoll, Garrick Stage, 116. Others would be court (not available to all) and at ‘masquerades at the great pleasure gardens’. Auburn, ‘Garrick and Sheridan’, 10. 36. Public Advertiser, no. 14352, 30 September 1775. 37. LS, 5.1:xlvii. 38. LS, 5.1:xlvi–xlvii. See Chap. 2 regarding actor Robert Mahon’s mishap with this cloth. 39. LS, 5.1:lii. 40. Nicoll, Garrick Stage, 86. For the assault with the cheese see: The Public Advertiser, no. 6334, 15 February 1755. 41. James Boaden, The Life of Mrs. Jordan, vol. 1 (London: Edward Bull, 1831), 247. 42. Boaden, Life of Jordan, 1:247–8.

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43. Boaden, Life of Jordan, 1:247. 44. Leo Hughes, ‘The Evidence from Promptbooks’, in The London Theatre World 1660–1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 131. 45. Hughes, ‘Evidence’, 131. 46. LS, 4.1:xxiv. See also George Winchester Stone Jr, ed., The Stage and the Page: London’s ‘Whole Show’ in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 47. LS, 4.1:xxiv. 48. Wendeborn, View of England, 2:183. 49. Wendeborn, 2:183. 50. LS, 5.1:lxxxix. 51. LS, 5.1:xci. 52. Siddons had the misfortune to appear as Julia in Bate Dudley’s Drury Lane disaster. As reported ‘damnation reverberated from a hundred tongues’ from the gallery to the boxes. When it was proposed to be played a second night, ‘hissing, clapping, roaring, and thundering with sticks ensued’. General Evening Post, no. 6572, 1–3 February 1776. 53. LS, 5.1:xcii. 54. LS, 5.1:lxxxi. 55. First spoken by King at Smock Alley, Dublin, on 7 October 1754. It is attributed to James Love in the Huntington Library Catalogue with King as an alternative author. James Love, Bucks Have at ye All (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1971). 56. LS, 5.1:xcii–xciii. 57. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, 1825), 194–5. 58. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (London: Virago, 1988), 112; McAuley, Space, 256. 59. Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 219. 60. Scheer, 219. 61. David Francis Taylor, ‘Discoveries and Recoveries in the Laboratory of Georgian Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2011): 238; 240. 62. Howell-Meri, ‘Acting Spaces’, 148–51. 63. Howell-Meri, 156. 64. Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005), 8. 65. Ad quadratum, ‘from the square’, is a geometrical relationship between sequences of circles and squares nested in each other. The diameter of the second circle in a sequence is exactly the diagonal of the first square, or that square’s side times the square root of 2. See Meri-Howell’s diagram (152) for a simple illustration of this arrangement. He argues that ad

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quadratum ratios were used in ‘other historic English Theatres’ which ‘suggests this is not simply coincidental, but arises from common use of the ad-quadratum geometrical layout by theatre builders and carpenters’. Howell-Meri, ‘Acting Spaces’, 154; see also 158 n. 23. 66. Howell-Meri demonstrates similarities in the dimensions of the Bristol Theatre Royal and the earlier Fortune playhouse built by Peter Street in 1600. The excavated foundations of the Rose Playhouse reflect similar ad quadratum dimensions. Howell-Meri, ‘Acting Spaces’, 154. Tim Fitzpatrick has based his reconsideration of Wenzal Hollar’s sketch of the second Globe on ad quadratum calculations and mapped his and Russell Emerson’s version of the theatre against the foundations that were uncovered in 1989. Tim Fitzpatrick, ‘Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Second Globe Using “Computer Aided Design” (CAD) Tools’, Early Modern Literary Studies, special issue 13 (April 2004): 4.1–35, http://purl.oclc. org/emls/si-­13/fitzpatrick. 67. Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, vol. 2 (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., 1807), 385. 68. As is generally the case. Promenade or environmental performances, or productions in the round or on the traverse, may increase an audience’s awareness of themselves in relation to others. 69. McAuley, Space, 250. 70. Thomas Betterton, The History of the English Stage (London: for E. Curll, 1741), 94; 96. Supposedly by Betterton but really a plagiarism of Gildon’s earlier work, which borrowed liberally from Le Faucheur. See Wilbur Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 186–8. 71. Betterton, English Stage, 96. 72. Taylor, ‘Discoveries and Recoveries’, 238. 73. C. A. G. Goede, The Stranger in England, vol. 2 (London: J. G. Barnard for Matthews & Hill, 1807), 208. 74. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 75. George Winchester Stone Jr and George M.  Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 540–1. Garrick’s longevity in the role did not exceed Betterton’s, who performed it for forty-eight years. David Roberts, Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20. 76. Alan S.  Downer, ‘Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting’, PMLA 58, no. 4 (December 1943): 1002–5 for a discussion of this ‘point’ from Betterton to Kemble.

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77. Lichtenberg saw Garrick perform in a number of roles during September– December 1774: Lusignan (Zara, 13 October), Abel Drugger (The Alchymist, 24 October), Benedick (Much Ado about Nothing, 28 October), Archer (The Beaux Stratagem, 3 November), Sir John Brute (The Provok’d Wife, 16 November), Don Leon (Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, 24 November), and Hamlet twice (2 and 12 December). LS, 4.3: 1840–55. 78. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits to England as Described in His Letters and Diaries, trans. and annot. Margaret L.  Mare and W. H. Quarrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 10. 79. Translations of these diary entries by Ray Sutton, from his ‘Further Evidence of David Garrick’s Portrayal of Hamlet from the Diary of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’, Theatre Notebook 50, no. 1(1996): 8. Hamlet was among William ‘Gentleman’ Smith’s roles at Covent Garden. By September 1774, he was contracted to Drury Lane and alternated the role with Garrick. It is not clear if Lichtenberg actually saw Smith, but Smith had played Hamlet on 4 October 1774 during Lichtenberg’s time in London. This diary entry was from the next time Hamlet was performed at Drury Lane. 80. Sutton, ‘Further Evidence’, 9. 81. Sutton, 13. 82. Sutton, 9. 83. I diverge here from Sutton, who believes Garrick’s introduced a second start ‘at the re-entrance of Hamlet and the Ghost’. (13). 84. Boswell, in a well-known anecdote, asked of Samuel Johnson (1709–84), ‘Would you not, Sir, start as Mr. Garrick does, if you saw a ghost?’ To which Johnson answered, ‘I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost’ (15 August 1773). James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2nd ed. (London: Henry Baldwin, 1785), 31. 85. Smith was an actor at Covent Garden for twenty years before moving to Drury Lane in September 1774. A protégé of Spranger Barry’s, he took over the latter’s roles at Covent Garden when Barry went to Ireland in 1758. Smith was the model for, and played the role of, Charles Surface in Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal (1777). He also played Biron to Sarah Siddons’ Isabella in Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage for her triumphant return to Drury Lane on 10 October 1782. BD, 13:175; 181. 86. Sutton, ‘Further Evidence’, 12. 87. James Boaden, The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831), 13. 88. Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 10.

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89. Sutton, ‘Further Evidence’, 9. ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ Lichtenberg is referencing a common biblical subject of painting. 90. Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, vol. 1 (London: J. Bell and York: C. Etherington, 1770), 33. 91. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s ‘Conférence sur l’Expression Générale et Particulière’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994): 175–87. 92. Charles Le Brun, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions, Proposed in a Conference on Their General and Particular Expression, trans. John Williams (London: J. Huggonson, 1734), 31. 93. Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage. By Mr. Wilkes (London: J. Coote, 1759), 118. 94. James Burgh, The Art of Speaking (London: T. Longman et al., 1761), 17. 95. Burgh, Art of Speaking, 22. 96. John A.  Kelly, German Visitors to English Theatres in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936), 61. 97. Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 10. 98. Joseph R.  Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993 [1985]), 58–9. See also John Kleiner, ‘The Chairs—Hamlet and Stage Fright’, Literary Imagination 17, no. 3 (November 2015): 276–91. Kleiner argues that Garrick ‘embodied’ images in the text and ‘made visible to the audience an effect that would normally reside in the playwright’s language’ (283). 99. John Walker, Elements of Elocution, vol. 2 (London: T. Cadell, T. Becket, G. Robinson, & J. Dodsley, 1781), 329. 100. Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 10. 101. Kelly, German Visitors, 63; 65. Hamlet was performed only once at Drury Lane while Grimm was there, on 6 May 1774. LS, 4.3:1809. 102. Sutton, ‘Further Evidence’, 9. 103. Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits, 15. 104. Lichtenberg, 7. 105. Lichtenberg, 15–16. 106. Lichtenberg, 16. 107. Correspondance Littéraire, vol. 4, 15 July 1760, 263, cited in Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1991), 67. 108. Boddice, History of Feelings, 11.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: “Damme, Tom, it’ll do”

In the 2004 movie Stage Beauty, there is a scene in which Edward Kynaston (Billy Crudup), a Restoration actor who specialised in female roles, instructs a fictional actress, Maria Hughes (Clare Danes), how to play Desdemona in the murder scene from Othello. Kynaston was renowned for playing Desdemona, but since Charles II had allowed women onstage, his talent must now be turned to male roles—and instructing Hughes in his old part. There is a comfortable familiarity about how the actors rehearse; they explore intentions and actions in the scene and dissect the text in a manner not unlike a John Barton masterclass from the 1980s BBC series Playing Shakespeare.1 Searching for the “truth” in her performance, Kynaston does not want Maria, his apprentice, to copy him: ‘Not like that! That’s like me’, he commands as Maria strikes a pose on the bed. Instead of copying him or following convention, she must draw her models from life; to this end Kynaston musses up her hair and make-up and demands that she change her elaborate costume for a simple shift. To be a “good” actress, as Kynaston instructs, Maria must not act in various ways: She must not pose, must not adopt an attitude, nor deliver her lines in a sing-­ song manner. He insists her emotional responses should arise spontaneously, on impulse, and from the moment. Maria finally “gets it” when, running a sequence of rapid lines, Kynaston/Othello flings her onto the bed, and a cry escapes unbidden from her mouth. He stands watching her,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5_6

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a smile playing about his lips, and her eyes widen with delighted realisation. ‘See’, he asks, ‘what comes out of rehearsal?’ 2 It is a terrifically entertaining scene but profoundly anachronistic. What the scene shows is how actors rehearse in the Stanislavskian tradition, but actors will not start rehearsing like this until the twentieth century.3 Billy Crudup and Claire Danes might rehearse like this, but the characters they play would not. The playing represented in the film is anachronistic for the seventeenth century, and so are the assumptions that inform it: assumptions about psychology and biology, about what it means to be human, about emotions, what they are and where they come from. These assumptions reveal an implicit teleology in the scene: Acting based on an external semiotics of gesture and voice must give way before modern techniques founded on internal impulses and subtext, as in the following exchange: Hughes [as Desdemona]: ‘Send for the man [Cassio] and ask him.’ Kynaston: […] Easy to say, isn’t it? ‘Send for the man and ask him!’ Cassio’s name gives her the willies. Hughes: But she doesn’t say the name ‘Cassio’. Kynaston: Aha! Hughes: I’m lost.

Kynaston patiently explains that to find a plausible candidate for Othello’s jealousy, Iago needed someone to whom Desdemona was attracted. Desdemona need only say, ‘Call for Cassio’, but, as Kynaston explains, ‘his name doesn’t come easily’ because of her subtextual attraction. For actors in the Stanislavskian tradition such as Danes and Crudup, emotion hides within and needs to be ‘lure[d]’4 from the subconscious, and it is this anachronistic acting theory that informs how the seventeenth-­century rehearsal scene between Kynaston and Hughes is scripted. To act using a conventional or formulaic repertoire of gestures and vocal mannerisms is, the film suggests, as ridiculous and outdated as men playing women onstage. Despite being a popular cultural depiction of historical acting, Stage Beauty reflects a discursive effect in the history of acting: Acting of the present is always seen as more “real” than in the past. This is Menzer’s logic of infinite regress in action that juxtaposes the “newness” of Kynaston’s approach to what had come before; in doing so, the film presents two fundamental sets of binary opposites: “real” woman versus “pretend” woman, and “natural” acting versus “artificial” acting. Progress

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appears by matching the gender of the actress to her role and by discarding outmoded acting conventions in favour of modern conventions founded in the “authentic” expression of emotions. This narrative is persuasive because it is founded in the belief that emotions, like gender, are universal, fixed, and transhistorical. Kynaston’s “modern” approach asks Hughes to reject externalities and go inwards because it is there that she will find “real” emotions, and if she allows these emotions to affect her, she will in turn affect her audience. Once again, we have si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi. Actors in the seventeenth century did not act like Danes’ and Crudup’s characters, nor did they later in the eighteenth century, but this did not stop audiences having emotionally embodied responses to them. Echoing Henrich’s concept of ‘cumulative cultural evolution’ discussed in the Introduction, Scheer observes that the ‘body’s capacities and functions change, not only in evolutionary time but also in human history, which is to say that societies shape brain structures and organic functions’.5 Human history has shaped how we think about emotions in the twenty-first century, so a ‘topography of the self’ grounded in what Appadurai calls a ‘universal biological substrate’ of emotions unsurprisingly informs the representation of how emotions are performed in the scene between Kynaston and Hughes.6 Any other way would make little sense to a modern audience. However, Appadurai’s ‘community of sentiment’ emphasises the public and improvised aspects of emotional interaction, aspects which a ‘topography of the self’ focussed on interiority tends to dismiss, and it provides a useful lens for examining how emotions were practised in the eighteenth-century theatre. As I have argued in these pages, when actors and audiences interacted the ‘communities of sentiment’ they formed were based on a shared understanding of the gestural and vocal conventions used to communicate emotions. Moreover, these interactions were public, often political, and fostered by the theatre spaces that mediated them. Allan Botica writes that three characteristics defined the self-aware Restoration theatre audiences, and his words are equally true for audiences some eighty years later: ‘an extraordinary self-consciousness, a concentration on technique and detail and the understanding that character was neither consistent nor continuous, but was composed moment by moment before an ever-changing audience’.7 For Botica, such behaviour was ‘theatrical’ because it was self-aware and public; as such, it represents a ‘topography of the self’ that inverts modern emotional practices, which tend towards interiority and privacy.8 What Botica highlights is an audience’s

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‘attempt[s] to […] manage the impression they created’ (returning us to Goffman’s ‘impression management’)9—in Scheer’s terms, how they are regulating and mobilising their emotions—that is, emotional practices carried out with and for other people. If we think of eighteenth-century audiences as Rosenwein’s constellations of ‘emotional communities’, then what these different communities have in common are public and interactive practices of emotions.10 Botica could just as easily be describing how actors approached acting. We have seen how actors—through ideas such as decorum—did concentrate on ‘technique and detail’ and were closely appraised by audiences on the same terms. The dramaturgy of character types was based on discontinuous and synchronous characterisation that changed ‘moment by moment’ as actors moved from ‘point’ to ‘point’, between which lay the narrative ‘level’ scenes. What we see repeatedly in accounts of eighteenth-­ century acting are audiences naming and responding to the passions being performed by actors. It was Lichtenberg’s expert knowledge of vocal and gestural codes that enabled him to interpret Garrick’s Hamlet and emotionally bonded him to the performance. Unlike Appadurai’s Indians involved with praise performances, eighteenth-century English audiences would assume a correspondence between these outward expressions and some kind of inner emotional world of the actor; a ‘community of sentiment’ in a European cultural context does not automatically erase subjectivity. However, such an inner emotional world would not be idiosyncratically the eighteenth-century actor’s own—in the way it is for a method actor—but would be related to how he or she expressed universal passions related to the character, understood as an ideal type. Importantly, actors also exteriorised their emotions through conventions of voice and gesture. These conventions were shared and understood by audiences with the objective to create, in a similar way to praise performances, ‘a chain of communications in feeling, not by unmediated empathy between the emotional “interiors” of specific individuals but by recourse to a shared, and relatively fixed set, of public gestures’.11 In the accounts of Cumberland and Torrington quoted in the previous chapter, we see an eighteenth-century ‘community of sentiment’ at work, caught at a moment of tension when it is changing. And this change is brought not by transforming social practices, but by economic exigencies manifested materially in the theatre’s phenomenological foundation: space. For a century, as the social make-up of audiences transformed, theatre technology advanced, and emotional practices became more labile

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than before, the one constant was proximity. McAuley’s ‘phenomenological experience of being there’, of experiencing ‘the space in relation to oneself’, was fundamental to an eighteenth-century ‘community of sentiment’ which was based on complex and interactive processes of communication and appraisal of emotions.12 In defining a ‘community of sentiment’, Appadurai describes it, broadly at a societal level, as a fellowship of ‘imagin[ation] and feel[ing]’ in the sense of a shared feeling for something, someone, or some idea. 13 More narrowly, but still related, he describes its interpersonal and interactive dimension: Feelings manifest not through empathetic exchanges but through publicly negotiated and conventional repertoires of gestures and responses. Both aspects of his definition are important when considering how actors and audiences formed their ‘special emotional bond[s]’ in the eighteenth-century theatre.14 It is the shared experience and communality of attending the theatre which occurs repeatedly and informs the emotional practices of audiences and actors alike—whether they are weeping together, laughing, mocking, or rioting. This communality occurs not despite the theatre’s architectural stratification but because of it. Like an unruly family, box, pit, and galleries clashed and formed alliances or found common cause in condemning or praising a play, an actor, or a management decision. Audiences were crammed into hot, smoky, noisy proximity to each other for hours at a time, and actors had to fight for their attention. Theatres were not places for cool contemplation of decorous gestures and modulated tones. But neither was the reverse true. Despite their rambunctiousness, which at times turned the auditorium into something resembling a mosh pit, eighteenth-­century English audiences nonetheless did attend the theatre to hear a play, to be intellectually and emotionally engaged. Thomas King, who performed in King Lear with Garrick, recalled: ‘Why, Sir, I was playing with him one night in Lear, when in the middle of a most passionate and afflicting part, and when the whole house was drowned in tears, he turned his head round to me, and putting his tongue in his cheek, whispered “Damme, Tom, it’ll do!”’.15 King’s anecdote might suggest a return to Diderot’s disengaged actor pulling faces as a parlour trick, but it is also a story that speaks to actors from any era; it is a shared moment when two actors acknowledge the experience of having “nailed it” in their performance.16 Was Garrick being insincere in his performance? Well, if sincerity and insincerity are the only critical categories with which to assess a moment like this, then the answer is probably Yes, and we are returned, once again, to Diderot’s paradox. A more complex

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interpretation is revealed when we peel back the layers and examine not only the actor’s vocal and gestural arts, but also how audiences performed emotions and how theatre spaces mediated their encounter. Because emotional practices are emplaced and communicated through shared gestural and vocal conventions, the emotional styles of a particular culture or historical period reflect its doxa of emotions. One effect of this and, indeed, a marker of the success of an emotional style, is that emotional practices are naturalised, leading to the belief that if we feel emotions a certain way, then so must everyone else, and they must feel them in a similar way. The apparent “truthfulness” of our emotions manifests from their embodiment, which leads us to assume fallaciously that how we experience emotions is always the same, for all people in all places, and at all times. When audiences let loose floods of tears in response to Garrick’s Lear and Siddons’ Jane Shore their grief emerged from a complex interaction amongst what the actors offered through their performances, their own emotional styles, and the environment which created and made such encounters possible. It’s unlikely you or I would or could respond in the same way because, lacking an eighteenth-century Geertzian ‘matrix of sensibility’, it turns out that we are the foreigners.17

Notes 1. John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1984) and BBC series of the same name, first aired 29 July 1984. 2. ‘Tutoring Maria’, Stage Beauty, dir. Richard Eyre (2004, Brisbane, QLD: Magna Pacific, 2005), DVD. 3. Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. Stanislavsky wrote: ‘Our artistic emotions are, at first, as shy as wild animals and they hide in the depths of our souls. If they do not come to the surface spontaneously you cannot go after them and find them. All you can do is concentrate your attention on the most effective kind of lure for them’. Constantin Stanislavsi, An Actor Prepares. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 207. 5. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,’ History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 220. 6. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,’ in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93.

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7. Allan Richard Botica, ‘Audience, Playhouse and Play in Restoration Theatre, 1660–1710’ (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1985), 213. 8. Even television shows such as The Phil Donahue Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, which are based on performances of emotions, depend on the public revelation of emotions which are normally kept private. 9. Botica, ‘Audience, Playhouse and Play’, 213. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959): 208–37. 10. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 23. 11. Appadurai, ‘Topographies’, 107. 12. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 256. 13. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 8. 14. Appadurai, ‘Topographies’, 109. 15. The Monthly Mirror (January, 1807), 53. 16. King’s view of acting does reflect Diderot: ‘In fine, an actor may make others feel, without feeling himself, as a whetstone can work up steel until it cuts, which the whetstone never does’. Monthly Mirror, 53. 17. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Basic Books, 1983), 102.



Plays

The eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire consisted of plays dating back to the previous century. Many of these, as is well-known, were adapted to suit the tastes of eighteenth-century audiences, often several times. Although I have been able to determine the performance dates of most plays referred to in this book (thanks to The London Stage 1660–1800), keeping track of the different adaptations is harder. For consistency, then, I have used the play’s earliest eighteenth-century publication date, with the caveat that this was not necessarily the same text as was performed at different times throughout the century. For Shakespeare’s works, I have used Bell’s 1774 edition. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. London: J[acob]. Tonson, 1717 [1624]. Brown, John. Barbarossa: A Tragedy. As it is Perform’d at the Theatre-­ Royal in Drury-Lane. Dublin: J.  Exshaw, R.  James, R.  Main, and W. Whitestone & B. Edmond, 1755. Cibber, Colley, and William Shakespeare. The Tragical History of King Richard the Third. In Plays written by Mr. Cibber. In two volumes. …, vol. 1: Containing, Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion. The Tragical History of King Richard the Third. Love makes a Man; or, The Fop’s Fortune. She would, and she would not; or, The Kind Impostor. The Careless Husband. London: Jacob Tonson, 1721. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5

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PLAYS

Cowley, Hannah. The Runaway, a Comedy: as it is Acted at the Theatre-­ Royal in Drury-Lane. London: for the author, 1776. Dodsley, Robert. Cleone. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. Second edition. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1758. Dudley, Henry Bate. The Blackamoor Wash’d White. In Airs, ballads, &c. in The Blackamoor Wash’d White. A New Comic Opera. As it will be Performed this Evening at the Theatre-Royal, Drury-Lane. London: Cox & Bigg, 1776. Farquhar, George. The Beaux Stratagem. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Queen’s Theatre in the Hay-Market. By Her Majesty’s Sworn Comedians. London: Bernard Lintott, 1707. Francklin, Thomas. The Earl of Warwick, a Tragedy, as it is Perform’d at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane. London: T. Davies, 1766. Garrick, David. The Lying Valet. As it is now performing with Great Applause, at the Theatre in Goodman’s-Fields. Dublin: J. Rhames, 1741. Garrick, David, and Thomas Southerne. Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage. A play. Alter’d from Southern. As it is Now Performing at the Theatre-­ Royal in Drury-Lane. London: J. & R. Tonson, 1757. Granville, George (Lord Lansdowne), and William Shakespeare. The Jew of Venice. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre in Little-Lincolns-Inn-­ Fields, by His Majesty’s Servants. London: Ber. Lintott, 1701. Home, John. Douglas: A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. Edinburgh: G.  Hamilton & J.  Balfour, W.  Gray & W. Peter, 1757. Jonson, Ben. The Alchymist. A Comedy. As altered from Ben Jonson. Adapted for Theatrical Representation, as Performed at the Theatre-­ Royal, in Drury-Lane. Regulated from the Prompt-books, by Permission of the Managers. London: John Bell, 1791. Lee, Sophia. The Chapter of Accidents: A Comedy, in Five Acts. As it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in the Hay-Market. London: T. Cadell, 1780. Lillo, George. Fatal Curiosity. A True Tragedy of Three Acts. As it is Acted at the New Theatre in the Hay-market. Dublin: Printed by S. Powell, 1737. Mason, William. Elfrida, a Dramatic Poem. Written on the Model of the Antient Greek Tragedy. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1752. Moore, Edward. The Gamester. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-­ Royal in Drury-Lane. Edinburgh: Alexander Rannie, 1753. More, Hannah. Percy, a Tragedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. Belfast: James Magee, 1778.

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Murphy, Arthur. The Grecian Daughter: A tragedy: As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. London: W. Griffin, 1772. Otway, Thomas. The Orphan: or, The Unhappy-Marriage. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at His Royal Highness The Duke’s Theatre. London: Printed for R. Wellington, 1703 [1680]. ———. Venice Preserv’d: or, a Plot Discover’d. A Tragedy. Edinburgh: Printed for G. Hamilton & J. Balfour, 1755 [1682]. Rowe, Nicholas. The Fair Penitent: A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the New Theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. By Her Majesty’s Servants. London: Jacob Tonson, 1703. ———. Tamerlane. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the New Theater in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. By Her Majesty’s servants. Second edition. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1702. ———. The Tragedy of Jane Shore. London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1714. Shakespeare, William. Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London; Regulated from the Prompt Books … with Notes Critical and Illustrative; By the Authors of the Dramatic Censor. … Second Edition. 9 volumes. London: John Bell; York: C. Etherington, 1774. Steele, Richard. The Conscious Lovers. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane, by His Majesty’s Servants. Dublin: G. Risk, 1722. Tate, Nahum. The History of King Lear, Acted at the Queen’s Theatre. Reviv’d with Alteration. London: Rich. Wellington, 1702 [1689]. Vanbrugh, John. The Confederacy. In Plays written by Sir John Vanbrugh. In Two Volumes. Vol. I. Containing The Relapse; … The Provok’d Wife. Esop, … Vol. II.  Containing The Confederacy. The False Friend. The Mistake. A Journey to London. The Provok’d Husband. London: J.  Tonson, & J.  Watts; and for J.  Darby, A.  Bettesworth, & F.  Clay, 1730 [1705]. ———. The Provok’d Wife: a Comedy. London: T. Johnson, 1721 [1697]. Villiers, George (Duke of Buckingham). The Rehearsal, as it is Now Acted at the Theatre-Royal. London: Richard Wellington, 1701 [1671]. Voltaire. The Tragedy of Zara. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury-­Lane, by His Majesty’s Servants. [Translated by Aaron Hill]. London: J. Watts, 1736.

References

Ackerman, Rudolph, William Henry Pyne, William Combe, Augustus Pugin, Thomas Rowlandson. Microcosm of London. 3 vols. London: R. Ackerman, 1808. Anonymous [Charles Gildon]. A Comparison Between the Two Stages, with an Examen of the Generous Conqueror; and Some Critical Remarks on The Funeral; or, Grief A La Mode, The False Friend, Tamerlane and Others. In Dialogue. London, 1702. Anonymous [David Garrick]. An Essay on Acting: In which will be consider’d The Mimical Behaviour of A Certain fashionable faulty Actor, and the Laudableness of such unmannerly, as well as inhumane Proceedings. To which will be added, A short Criticism On His acting Macbeth. London: W. Bickerton, 1744. Anonymous. The Present State of the Stage in Great-Britain and Ireland. And the Theatrical Characters of the Principal Performers, In both Kingdoms, Impartially Considered. London: Paul Vaillent & M. Cooper, 1753. Anonymous. Scrapbook. Folger Shakespeare Library, A.2.1 1740–7. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ———. ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’. In Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine A.  Lutz and Lila Abu-­ Lughod, 92–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Archer, William. Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting. New  York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888. Aristippe [Bernier de Maligny]. Théorie de l’Art du Comédien; ou, Manuel Théâtrale. Paris: A. Leroux, 1826.

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Index1

A Abington, Frances “Fanny,” 91 Adam, Robert, 151, 159, 167 See also Drury Lane, Theatre Royal, changes to Appadurai, Arjun, viii, 13–17, 20, 33n65, 74, 122, 193 Art of gesture, 74–82 Austin, Gilbert Chironomia, 75–77, 79, 176 B Barnett, Dene, 28n12, 33n77, 46, 74–76, 81 See also Art of gesture Barry, Ann as Cordelia, 19 as Juliet, 47 Barry, Elizabeth, 73, 78–81, 83, 152

Barry, Spranger, 186n85 as Hamlet, 177 as Richard III, 47 Bartley, Sarah (née Smith), 98 Bell, George Joseph, 104 and Siddons’ Lady Macbeth, 25, 75, 87, 99–103 Bensley, Robert, 79 Betterton, Thomas, 73, 80–82, 141, 151, 166 History of the English Stage, The, 166 Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, The, 10, 28n13, 86, 106n10 Bienséance, see Decorum Boaden, James, 6–7, 41, 55, 88, 90–92, 98, 127–129, 138, 154–156, 160, 162 Boie, Heinrich Christian Deutsches Museum, 4, 167, 177–180 Booth, Barton, 41, 73

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. McGillivray, Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5

217

218 

INDEX

Booth, Hester, 47 Boswell, James, 1, 9, 49, 96, 126, 132 response to Garrick’s Lear, 18, 20, 133 Boyle, Henrietta, 91 Brandes, Ernst, 128 Brereton, William Brereton, affair, 138–139 Burgh, James, 175 Burney, Frances, 97 C Campbell, Thomas, 93, 98, 118–119, 130, 136, 137 Cautherly, Samuel as Romeo, 47 Chapter of Accidents, The, 94 Character types, 20, 23–24, 37, 44–54, 59, 62, 64, 74, 75, 81, 104, 168, 177, 192 Chastellux, Chevalier de, François-­ Jean, 45–46, 52, 59, 64 Chinese Festival riots, 134, 141 Cibber, Colley, 37, 41, 79, 81–85, 141, 153, 154, 156 Cibber, Susannah, 46–48 Cibber, Theophilus, 104, 131 Cleone, 120 Clive, Catherine “Kitty,” 80, 134 Collier, Jeremy, 125 Community of sentiment, 27, 36, 74, 96, 103, 117, 122, 134, 135, 140, 141, 163, 166, 180, 191–193 See also Appadurai, Arjun Confederacy, The, 134 Correspondance Littéraire, 9, 129 Covent Garden, Theatre Royal, 26, 37, 67n40, 106n7, 109n71, 113n142, 114n151, 177, 186n79, 186n85

Old Price Riots, 113n136 Cumberland, Richard, 3, 35, 40, 44, 46, 47, 82, 165, 192 D Davies, Susannah, 40 Davies, Thomas, 23, 36, 37, 39–40, 42, 44, 47, 51, 54, 61, 62, 80, 134 criticism of, 79 as Ross in Macbeth, 56 Decorum, 19, 24, 46, 74–82, 84, 86, 103, 127, 169, 192 D’Holbach Baron, Paul-Henri Thiry, 8 Coterie Holbachique, 45 Dialogic acting, 26, 156, 163–166 Diderot, Denis, 8, 9, 13, 15, 45, 52, 59, 64, 76, 124, 193 See also Paradox of Acting, The Diderot, Denis and Jean le Rond d’Alembert Encyclopédie, 76, 124 Digges, West, 137 See also Siddons, Sarah, Digges affair Dixon, Thomas, 29n32, 103, 150 Douglas, 94 Downes, John Roscius Anglicanus, 78, 83 Drury Lane, Theatre Royal, 24, 26, 37–40, 47–49, 53, 93–96, 104, 110n76, 118, 130, 133, 156, 157, 168, 179 audience proximity to stage, 164–165, 167 changes to, 151–156, 159 riots at (see Chinese Festival riots) Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 11 Dudley, Henry Bate, 94 Blackamoor Washed White, The, 162 recommends Siddons to Garrick, 91, 95

 INDEX 

E Earl of Warwick, The, 98 Einsiedel, Friedrich von, 76 Elfrida, 95 Emotional arena, 21, 26, 117 Emotional communities, 121, 122, 126, 132–134, 192 Emotional contagion, 47, 119, 120, 127 Emotional navigation, 126–129 See also Reddy, William M. Emotional practices, 7, 17–21, 25, 27, 96, 105, 119, 126, 128, 132, 137, 163, 177, 191, 192, 194 communicating, 5, 12, 18, 21, 25, 54, 73–105, 117, 120, 150, 154, 166, 179, 191, 193, 194 mobilising, 18, 25, 57, 96, 117–141, 150, 179, 192 naming, 19, 23, 27, 48, 49, 54, 62, 88, 134, 179, 192 regulating, 20, 21, 25, 117–141, 150, 163, 192 Emotional refuges, 121, 140 Emotional regimes, 121, 122, 126, 140 Emotional style, 20, 25, 119–122, 125–130, 132, 135, 137, 140, 149, 194 Emotives, 19–20, 55, 62, 65, 88, 97, 120 See also Emotional practices, naming Empathy mirror neurons, 11, 16 Empathy theory, 10, 14, 16 F Fair Penitent, The, 3, 28n8, 35, 46, 91 Farren, Elizabeth, 160, 162 as Cecilia in Chapter of Accidents, The, 94

219

Fleetwood, Charles, 38, 52, 133 Footmen, behaviour of, 132, 133, 163 G Gamester, The, 138 Gammerl, Benno, 129, 149 Garrick, David, viii, 6, 15, 17, 22, 26, 36, 50, 51, 74, 77, 82, 90, 93, 103, 105, 119, 126, 132, 134, 151, 153, 154, 161–165, 167, 192 and acting, 3, 12–13, 23, 36, 38–41, 43–45, 61–62, 64 as a “brand,” 13, 38–41, 59 Essay on Acting, An, 46, 52–54, 56 as Hamlet, 4–5, 7, 20, 27, 42, 157, 163, 181, 192 as King Lear, 18, 20, 38, 41, 42, 133, 193, 194 letter to Helfric Peter Sturtz, 58–59 as Macbeth, 24, 40, 46, 53–64, 74 as manager of Drury Lane, 4, 8, 38–40, 53, 91, 151, 156 as Richard III, 3, 23, 37–38, 42, 45, 52, 53, 90, 157; Hogarth painting, 62 rivalry with Sheridan, 87 voice, 84–85, 88, 94, 102 Gentleman, Francis, 60, 61, 71n111, 77, 174 Giffard, Henry, 3, 37, 38 See also Garrick, David, as Richard III Gildon, Charles, 10, 86 See also Betterton, Thomas, Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, The Goede, Christian Augustus Gottlieb, 166 Goffman, Erving impression management, 120, 192 (see also Emotional practices, regulating)

220 

INDEX

Grecian Daughter, The, 28n8, 61, 92, 93, 118 Grimm, Baron von (Friedrich Melchior), 9, 129, 180 Günderode, Friedrich von, 175 H Hamlet, 4, 11, 82, 88, 91, 96, 103, 166–172, 175, 177, 179, 180, 192 advice to players, 7, 24, 64, 82, 88, 103 (see also Menzer, Paul) Harriman-Smith, James, 6, 59, 77 Hartson, Hall correspondence with Garrick, 56–58 Hazlitt, William, 89, 95, 98, 101, 102 Henderson, John, 48, 49, 92 comparison with Macklin, 48 as Hamlet, 177 as Shylock, 48–49 See also Siddons, Sarah Henrich, Joseph, 11–12, 191 See also WEIRD Henry VIII, 153 Hiffernan, Paul, 78, 126–128 Hill, Aaron, 55, 73, 77 Hill, John, 9, 85–86 Hochschild, Arlie emotional labor, 135 feeling rules, 121 (see also Emotional practices, regulating) Hogarth, William “line of beauty,” 76 portrait of Garrick as Richard III Holland, Henry, 26, 151, 165 See also Drury Lane, changes to Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 2, 9, 10, 18 Hume, David, 124 Hunt, Leigh, 98, 101, 102 Hutcheson, Francis, 124

Hysteria, 25, 140 emotional responses to Siddons, 118–119, 128, 130, 160 I Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage, 28n8 Cibber, Susannah, 47–48 J Jameson, Anna, 97 Jane Shore, 28n8, 95, 127, 128 Johnson, Samuel, 1, 70n84, 156, 186n84 Jordan, Dorothy, 160 Justness and propriety, 42, 74, 77, 81, 84 See also Decorum K Kemble, Fanny Belvidera, 98 Kemble, John Philip, 36, 86, 87, 130, 138, 151, 160 in Fatal Curiosity, 118 as Macbeth, 99–101, 106n7 Kemble, Sarah (Siddons’ mother), 89 King, Thomas, 49, 91, 162, 193 as Shylock, 49 L Lacy, James co-patentee of Drury Lane, 38 Lamb, Charles, 99 La Roche, Sophie von, 120 Le Brun, Charles, 5, 174, 175 Le Faucheur, Michel, 5 Gildon’s plagiarism of, 10, 106n10

 INDEX 

Level’ scenes, 48–49, 77, 84, 88, 101, 104, 192 Lichtenberg, Georg, 4, 19, 62, 78, 163, 166, 192 description of Hamlet, 27, 167–181 Lloyd, Robert, 11 Locke, John, 123–124 M Macbeth, 52, 54, 60, 99 See also Davies, Thomas as Ross; Garrick, David, as Macbeth; Kemble, John Philip, as Macbeth; Pritchard, Hannah, as Lady Macbeth; Quin, James, as Macbeth; Siddons, Sarah, as Lady Macbeth Macklin, Charles, 23, 52, 53, 64, 74, 111n102, 131, 151 Art and Duty of an Actor, The, 15, 50–51 ‘British Inquisition,’ 52 as Shylock, 15, 48–49, 52, 77 voice, 49, 78, 85–86, 88, 102 Maligny, Bernier de (Aristippe), 76 Marmontel, Jean-François, 76 McAuley, Gay, 130–131, 135, 150, 165, 193 Menzer, Paul, 7–8, 23, 44, 83, 190 Murphy, Arthur, 28n8, 36, 40–42, 44, 61, 62, 77, 82, 92 Murray, Charles, 84 N “Natural” acting, 103, 190 Hester Booth as Ophelia, 47 infinite regression, 7–8, 41, 64, 83 internalist vs. externalist debates, 14–16 Macklin, Charles, 15, 48

221

Siddons, Sarah, 5–6, 87–88 See also Garrick, David Neville, Silas, 157 Newton, Thomas, 43, 44 correspondence with Garrick, 23, 41–42 Northcote, James, 97 Noverre, Jean Georges, 17, 24, 44, 59, 74 and Chinese Festival, 71n104 and Garrick’s Macbeth, 60–63 Novosielski, Michael King’s Theatre, 154–155 P Paradigm, 12, 16, 41 paradigm shift, 35, 123–124 See also Roach, Joseph R. Paradox of Acting, The, 8, 9, 13, 15, 76, 193 Percy, 93 Piozzi, Hester [Thrale], 118, 127 Points, 4, 26, 77, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 104, 120, 127, 129, 136, 166, 167, 180, 192 Pope, Alexander, 39, 49 Pope, Jane, 80, 134 Powell, William as Hamlet, 173, 175 Pritchard, Hannah, 98, 151 as Lady Macbeth, 40, 50, 53, 62 Propriety, 94 of character type, 5, 6, 24, 44, 47, 76, 81, 90 of facial expression, 91 of gesture, 76, 79, 93 of voice, 58, 84, 97 See also Decorum Provok’d Wife, The, 133 Purdon, Edward, 39, 79

222 

INDEX

Q Quin, James, 37, 44, 46, 53, 85 in Fair Penitent, 3, 35 as Macbeth, 53 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 10, 11, 13 R Rasa theory, 16 Reddy, William M., 19, 120–122, 126, 140, 150 Rhetoric, 75, 76, 84, 96 Rhetorical style, 4, 13, 25, 36, 73, 82, 98 Rich, Christopher (theatre manager), 151 Richardson, Samuel Pamela, 122–123 (see also Sentimentality, Cult of Sentimentality) Roach, Joseph R., 8, 10, 12, 29n22, 35, 36, 64, 65n2, 110n81, 143n36, 187n98 Robinson, Henry Crabb response to Siddons, 118, 120, 125, 126, 130, 133, 135, 138, 160 Rosenwein, Barbara, 121, 132, 140, 141, 192 See also Emotional communities S Scheer, Monique, 3, 7, 17–22, 48, 54, 57, 105, 120, 122, 124, 129, 150, 163, 191, 192 See also Emotional practices Sensibility, 53, 96, 122, 129 actor’s feeling for a role, 23, 47, 58, 75, 90 Age of Sensibility, 23, 122, 126 dramaturgical sensibility, 24, 74–75, 77, 89, 90, 94, 98

emotional quality of character type, 47 matrix of sensibility, 23 moral virtue, 124–125 nervous excitability, 25, 88, 118–119, 124, 127, 128, 140 person of feeling, 119–120, 132 sensibilité, 124, 145n64 See also Sentimentalism Sentimentalism, 25, 96, 117, 119, 121–126, 129, 132–134, 136, 139, 140 moral virtue, 23, 25, 30n34, 119–120 moral virtue and women, 125, 128 Sentimentality, 117 Cult of Sentimentality, 25, 122–124 person of feeling, 128–129 sentimental dramaturgy, 119, 125 Sheridan, Richard, 50, 89, 138 The Rivals, 164 Sheridan, Thomas British Elocutionary Movement, 25, 96 as Hamlet, 96, 177 as Richard III, 110n76 rivalry with Garrick, 87 and Siddons, Sarah, 25, 75, 87, 89, 96–98 Shylock, 15, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 69n72, 77, 84, 90, 111n102 Siddons, Sarah, 77 as Alicia (see Jane Shore) as Belvidera, 4, 91, 103, 120, 136, 137 (see also Venice Preserv’d) Brereton affair, 138–139 as Calista, 4, 91 (see also Fair Penitent, The) as Cecilia, 94 (see also Chapter of Accidents, The) as Cleone, 120 (see also Cleone) Digges affair, 137–138

 INDEX 

Drury Lane debut, 24, 74, 79, 87, 89–92 (see also Blackamoor Washed White, The) as Elfrida, 95 (see also Elfrida) as Elwina (see Percy) as Euphrasia, 4, 93 (see also Grecian Daugher, The) grand style, 86–87, 156 as Hamlet, 91 as Isabella, 4, 89, 95, 102, 118, 127, 186n85 (see also Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage) as Jane Shore, 4, 95, 127–128, 194 (see also Jane Shore) as Lady Anne with Garrick in Richard III, 90 as Lady Macbeth, 75, 87, 99–103 as Margaret of Anjou (see Earl of Warwick, The) as Mrs Beverly, 138–139 (see also Gamester, The) as Portia, Drury Lane debut, 4, 89–91, 94 as Queen Katherine, 153 (see also Henry VIII) second London debut at Drury Lane, 5 voice, 87–94, 97–103, 105 Siddons, William, 138 Smith, Adam, 10, 25, 124 Smith, William “Gentleman,” 168–169 Smock Alley, Theatre Royal (Dublin), 110n76, 119, 137, 170, 184n55 Smollett, Tobias (as “Dramaticus”), 44 on Garrick’s acting, 23, 42–43 Stanislavsky system, 2, 190 method acting, 14–15, 192 Steele, Richard Conscious Lovers, The, 125 Stein, Gertrude, 159, 162 sympathy, 5, 7, 10, 22, 25, 123, 126–129

223

T Theory of Moral Sentiments, The, 10 See also Smith, Adam Three-sided stage, 156, 166 See also Dialogic acting Topography of the self, 16, 17, 23, 36, 43, 53, 64, 191 Torrington, Viscount (John Byng), 153, 165, 192 Transition, 6, 8, 24, 39, 62, 64, 84, 87, 91, 104 V Venice Preserv’d, 28n8, 91, 136, 138 W Walker, John, 176 Walpole, Horace, 99 WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), 12, 17 Wendeborn, Friedrich August, 152, 157, 161 Whig view of theatrical history, 7, 23, 37–44 Whitefield, George, 58, 102–103 Wilkes, Thomas, 83, 175 Wilkinson, Tate, 92–93, 95, 118 rivalry with Garrick, 93 Wilks, Robert, 73, 78, 82–83 Willis, Thomas, 123 Y Yates, Mary Ann, 78, 91 Young, Charles Mayne, 118 See also Robinson, Henry Crabb Younge, Elizabeth, 91