Seventeenth Century Natural Acting Essay -- European History Essays

Seventeenth Century Natural ActingAs we read through the standard accounts of seventeenth-century acting, observers demonstrate the same desire to believe in the fictions of the thespians as their twentieth-century counterparts. Webster said of An splendid Actor that what we see him mortalate, we think truly done before us (An Excellent Actor, 1615, in Overburys The Wife) An anonymous elegy on the death of the famous actor Richard Burbage (d.1619) recalls, Oft have I seen him leap into a graveSuiting the person (which he seemed to have)Of a tragical lover, with so true an eyeThat then I would have sworn he meant to dieSo lively, the spectators, and the restOf his sad crew, while he but seemed to bleed,Amazed thought that he had died indeed. Like spectators today, the Jacobean spectators had strong ideas about what constituted good acting. Thomas Heywood notes that good looks, combine with type casting, are important actors should be men pickd out personable, according to the parts they present (An Apology for Actors 1612). In the fictional acting lesson in The relent from Parnassus, office II (c. 1601-03), the Burbage character remarks to his student, I like your face, and the proportion of your body for Richard the Third ... let me see you act a little of it. Shakespeares Peter quince and Holofernes go in for similar methods of casting in their amateur theatricals. Rhetoric and vocal virtuosity were also admired. Hamlet advises that the players speak trippingly on the tongue (Hamlet, III.2, c. 1603), and Heywood adds that the actor should observe the structure of his texts, and with judgment to observe his commas, colons, and full points his parentheses, his breathing spaces, and distin... ...n the mens companies seem to have learned more from examples that from a curriculum. In The Return from Parnassus, Part II, both Burbage and Will Kemp are shown teaching by imitation BURBAGE I think your voice would serve for Hieronimo observe how I act it, and then ensue me. Here we run up against the bugbear of historically informed performance. So many of the treatises (in music and dance as well as in acting) see on the students imitation of an admired master, and a gradual perfection of good taste as his society constructed that elusive quality. We cannot recreate those apprenticeships, those saturations in a spot aesthetic. However, by constructing exercises along the lines of a Renaissance aesthetic, we may expose some of the differences between what the Shakespearean audience saw, and what the North American audience sees today.