European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900

Jim Davis, Jim Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351938297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This volume contains key articles and chapters which represent both seminal and innovative scholarship on European theatre performance practice from 1750 to 1900. The selected topics focus on acting and performance, staging (including set design and lighting), and audiences, and are approached with a broad perspective as well as with in-depth, focussed analysis. The volume captures the rich, dynamic and variegated nature of European theatre throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and provides a carefully selected body of significant texts on this important period of theatre history.

Part I
Acting and Performance

[1]
NATURE TO ADVANTAGE DRESSED: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ACTING

ALAN S. DOWNER

FOR the student of acting and actors, the Eighteenth Century is a rich period. Within a century the careers of such players as Betterton, Quin, Macklin, Garrick, and Kemble ran their courses; these were actors of varying techniques, yet they had in common their century’s earnest desire to imitate “nature” and they all subscribed to the same basic set of acting conventions. The century is rich too in theorists and critics: Gildon, John and Aaron Hill, Churchill, Lloyd, Hiffernan.

To be natural, to hold the mirror up to nature, is the chief, but not the sole, tenet of the actor’s creed. It is this tenet which caused Macklin to revolt against the furious rant of Powell, and probably Powell to revolt against the restraint of Betterton. Each artist is, of course, entitled to his own interpretation of nature. On the other hand, actors for centuries have been automatically gesturing with the up-stage hand, kneeling on the down-stage knee, making turns towards the audience, because the conventions of the theatre so dictate. For acting is an art handed on from generation to generation of players. Shakespeare directed John Lowin in Henry VIII at Blackfriar’s, and Davenant, with Lowin in mind, directed Betterton’s Harry a half-century later.¹ It is not the directors alone who cling to tradition; Betterton himself, as Alexander (in The Rival Queens),

when rehearsing his character, was at a loss to recover a particular emphasis of Hart, which gave a force to some interesting situation of the part; he applied for information to the players who stood near him. At last, one of the lowest of the company repeated the line exactly in Hart’s key.²

Although Davies intended this anecdote to illustrate the modesty of a great actor, it also illustrates the actor’s trust in tradition. “As I pronounced it to you” is not a covert warning but a tenet of the actor’s creed.

It will be instructive, at the beginning, to compare various actors in the same scene. This is, fortunately, a simple task since the eighteenth-century theater was a repertory theater, and critics and audiences were interested in “points.” One of the actor’s most telling points is found in Hamlet’s first meeting with the ghost of his father.

Thomas Betterton had inherited the Shakespearian tradition, and comtemporary writers seem to feel that he adhered to it closely. Colley Cibber thus reports Betterton’s action in the scene chosen for comparison:

This was the light into which Betterton threw this scene; which he open’d with a pause of mute amazement! then rising slowly to a solemn, trembling voice, he made the ghost equally terrible to the spectator as himself! and in the descriptive part of the natural emotions which the ghastly vision gave him, the boldness of his expostulation was still govern’d by decency, manly, but not braving; his voice never rising into that seeming outrage, or wild defiance of what he naturally rever’d.³

The key words of the description are solemn, trembling, and manly, which Cibber chose with care to contrast Betterton with a later Hamlet whose violence shocked him:

You 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, and the house has thunder’d with applause; tho’ the mis-guided actor was all the while (as Shakespear terms it) tearing a passion into rags.— I am the more bold to offer you this particular instance, because the late Mr. Addison, while I sate by him, to see this scene acted, made the same observation, asking me with some surprise, if I thought Hamlet should be in so violent a passion with the Ghost, which tho’ it might have astonish’d, it had not provok’d him?⁴

Davies identifies this later Hamlet as Wilks and records an anecdote which is perhaps more instructive than is the way of theatrical anecdote generally. Barton Booth played the ghost to Wilks’ Hamlet and, meeting him the next day,

‘I thought,’ said he, ‘Bob, that last night you wanted to play at fisty-cuffs with me: you bullied that which you ought to have revered.’⁵

Charles Macklin, revolting against the convention of violent acting, returned in his own way to the simplicity of Betterton.

After the short ejaculation of ‘Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!’ he endeavoured to conquer that fear and terror into which he was naturally thrown by the first sight of the vision, and uttered the remainder of the address calmly, but respectfully, and with a firm tone of voice, as from one who had subdued his timidity and apprehension.⁶

Respect and terror become the accepted emotions to be portrayed in the scene, as opposed to the bravado of the Wilks school.

When Mr. Garrick first saw the ghost the terror he seemed to be impressed with, was instantaneously communicated to the audience; his expostulations with the vision, though warm and importunate, were restrained by filial awe. The progress of his impassioned sensation, till the ghost beckoned him to retire with him, was accompanied with terror and respect.⁷

A comment of Dr. Johnson’s, however, indicates that Garrick had not thrown overboard all the tricks of his predecessors. Boswell had asked Johnson if he would not start, “as Mr. Garrick does,” if he saw a ghost. Dr. Johnson replied, “I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost.”⁸ The good Doctor was no doubt indulging himself to amuse Bozzy, but, as later evidence will show, he was not far from expressing the truth. Filial awe was present to satisfy the critics, but the terror instantaneously communicated to the audience must have been at variance with the calm and respect of Macklin’s interpretation.

John Philip Kemble went a step further:

In that truly celebrated scene, where Hamlet encounters his father’s spirit, Mr. Kemble shines with super-eminent lustre. Never was the poet’s meaning more strongly marked in the actor’s face than in his during the recital of the horrid deed. The performer’s reception of the Ghost can only raise one emotion in the minds of his audience, that of silent admiration: surprise and terror, in reality, benumbs all his limbs. When he arrives at that part where he declares,

“I will speak to thee; I’ll call thee Hamlet,

“King, father, royal Dane—Oh, answer me,” &c.

his gradual recovery from a state of the most uncommon amazement and terror to a more calm and composed turn of mind, plainly denotes the command he must necessarily have over the passions; and the succeeding interrogations,

“But tell me why,

“Thy cannonized bones, hearsed in death,

“Have burst their cearments?”

are finely marked by an earnest desire of information, mixed with a natural awe resulting from the fear of giving offense to the spirit. Some critics have objected to his making use of too much action during the succeeding conversation between Hamlet and the Ghost, and, perhaps with reason; yet his countenance is so highly expressive of that proper indignation against the murderer of his father, that we are inclined to make some allowance for the too frequent movement of his arms…. His behaviour on the departure of the Ghost presents us with a fine picture of filial reverence.⁹

As much sport was made, by his critics, of Mr. Kemble’s use of too much motion, as Dr. Johnson made of Garrick’s starts, and Booth of Wilks’ violence. Yet the actions of each of these players, as well as of Betterton and Macklin, were justified and approved by other critics, and accepted as true by audiences. Throughout the eighteenth century, this strange paradox of the actor persists. The art of acting is traditional, conventional, hereditary, yet the art of the individual actor is a constant revolt against tradition, convention, heredity.

2

There were, then, four “schools” of acting in the eighteenth century. For convenience, they may be called after their most important figures— Betterton, Cibber-Booth-Wilks, Macklin-Garrick, and Kemble. To call them simply Pre-Garrick, Garrick, and Post-Garrick, as is the tendency of stage historians, is to be unfair to a series of great actors. It is impossible, of course, to set exact dates for the flourishing of these schools. Betterton left the stage in 1710, but Bowman, “the last of the Bettertonian school,”¹⁰ was playing in 1731. Nearly half a century after Garrick had made his first appearance, a York paper of 1788 reported, “Mrs. Mills surpass’d our expectations in Lady Macbeth, for tho’ she represented the part in the old style, yet she was nevertheless pleasing, and gave general content.”¹¹ Styles of acting change, but the change is gradual. Not only the actor but the audience must change, for the spectator must be prepared to believe what he sees. This explains the long contest for supremacy between actors of such differing techniques as Quin and Garrick. The eighteenth century, however, recognized the distinctions between the schools and an examination of the practice of the leading actors of each school will establish the distinctions for the twentieth century.

I. Betterton. Even in the days of Garrick, critics looked back upon the early years of the century with considerable longing.¹² Betterton, Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Oldfield, these were the first immortals of the eighteenth-century stage. Their “school” of acting was a school of nature, insofar as the drama of the time allowed. Contemporary comedy, while mannered, was no more mannered than contemporary life, but the heroic drama would hardly permit naturalism in its actors. It was in the revivals of the earlier romantic plays that serious natural acting was employed, consciously and conscientiously. Betterton’s style of acting was restrained and grave, and his gestures were few and controlled. Aston records that the great actor rarely lifted his arms higher than his stom-ach,¹³ which would eliminate at once nearly the entire range of pompous and rhetorical gesture. Aston continues:

His actions were few, but just…. He was better to meet than to follow for his Aspect was serious, venerable, and majestic…. His Voice was low and grumbling; yet he could Time it by an artful Climax, which enforc’d universal Attention, even from the Fops and Orange-Girls. … Betterton kept his Passion...