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The Art of Acting in Past
Centuries:
Reconstructing what
could not be preserved
Kristine Hecker (Modena)
Documentation et Art de
l'Acteur
Records and Images of the Art of the Performer
18ème Congrès
International, Stockholm 3-7 septembre 1990 /
18th International Congress, Stockholm 3-7 September 1990
Editor: Barbro Stribolt (Drottningholms Teatermuseum).
Stockholm : 1992, p. 69-75
Our subject, how the
actors can be preserved, is not merely a 20th century
concern. As quite a number of texts of the 18th century
show, both actors and spectators of that period were
aware of the problem. The ephemeral nature of this art
was pointed out by the then famous German actor A.W.
Iffland; speaking of K. Ekhof, a great actor of the
previous generation. Iffland came to the conclusion:
"What is left to the actor after the creation of a
masterpiece of acting, usually lasts no longer than his
exhaustion after the performance. And what masterpieces
Ekhof created, often dissipating all his spiritual
forces!" 1
Preservation was, of course, an insurmountable obstacle
in historical times, but many sources reveal attempts to
cope with the problem. In the introduction to the quoted
book, the author, a certain Böttiger, talks of a process
of "dissection", Zergliederung, a word
that recalls an anatomical procedure, as being the only
way to achieve a lasting record of a perfect
interpretation in acting. 2
His fourteen very detailed descriptions are not the only
document of this kind - the letters of the German
physicist G. Ch. Lichtenberg on D. Garrick 3 show exactly the same
vision and employ the same procedure: the will to
preserve the memory of a theatrical performance, at which
the person has assisted as an eye-witness, fully aware of
experiencing the creation of a masterpiece of acting, and
the attempt to preserve it by dividing up the totality of
the artistic event into a sequence of minute
observations. 4
Another attempt to preserve the actor's ability, at least
on the optical level, was to freeze stage-scenes
iconographically. The series of etchings depicting
Garrick on stage and the illustrations in the
Theater-Kalender of Gotha 5 are evidence of the desire to
preserve the image and the memory of great actors by
recalling a specific sentence of the dramatic text at the
moment of its utterance on stage.
We know that Garrick himself chose the etchings of the
scenes that he wanted to be reproduced, so that
presumably the image represented an aspect of his acting
which he deemed essential. However these iconographical
documents raise another problem, which concerns their
reliability. We can be sure that the eye-witness in the
theatre wanted to be objective and thus described what he
had seen or at least remembered seeing, whereas this is
not the case with commercially-sold images produced by an
engraver who probably idealized his subject 6, especially when these were to
be submitted to the actor. We know, for instance, from
impartial descriptions, that Garrick was quite short, and
by consequence often smaller than his female partners on
stage, a defect that was not depicted in the etchings. 7
There exists of course more direct, less codified
iconographical evidence than etchings - as for example
the drawings which an admirer of Iffland made during
several performances in the Berlin theatre.8 We don't know precisely what
these sketches were made for; they might have been
preparatory studies for future etchings, though the
eye-witness depicts only Iffland, leaving aside the other
actors, the stage- decorations and all the rest. So once
more an iconographical document gives us only a partial
view of the whole.
Thus, it seems obvious that the lack of means to preserve
the actor's art was seen as a problem in the 18th
century. Going back in time, we become aware that this
was not always so. In older descriptions of performances,
e.g. in those of the 16th century, the ephemeral nature
of acting is not a cause of regret nor is it even
mentioned. Obviously no attention was paid to this
question and we may presume that there was a reason for
such disinterest.
In a previous study I analysed the conception of acting
from the 16th to the 18th century. 9 The question was to find out
what authors, actors and spectators saw the task of the
actor to be and how they perceived his importance in the
performance as a whole. My research showed that, despite
a continuity ot terminology (for example the praise of
the "naturalness" of acting), there have been
different theories of acting throughout the centuries.
In order to understand these differences and find out the
importance of the actor and the evaluation of his task,
it seemed useful to analyse the relationship between
three essential elements in theatre: the dramatic text,
its performance and the actor.
In 16th century Italy the published text of a play was in
general considered a purely literary document. It had a
value in itself and was not necessarily conceived for
staging. The conception of the dramatic text did not
permit other words, such as stage directions, to be added
to the speech of the dramatis personae because
these practical instructions were seen as a foreign body
in the poet's text. In fact, even the most elementary
stage directions, indispensable for the understading of
the situation, like the "off" when a person
leaves, are missing in the editions of Italian
Renaissance plays. 10
According to the poetics of that time the staging of a
printed play was matter of chance and the text's
qualities were to be enjoyed through reading, not through
seeing it. An unusual position is that of Leone De'
Sommi, playwright and head of the troupe formed by
members of the Jewish community in Mantua, in charge of
organizing theatre performances and court festivities for
the Gonzaga dukes and therefore an expert in staging. As
he describes in his manual for future stage directors, he
chose the plays for his performances not on the basis of
their poetic value, but only on grounds of suitability
for staging, because "we have seen many times that a
bad, but well performed comedy, was more successful and
better enjoyed by the audience than a good one, badly
performed". 11
After this glimpse at the 16th century conception of
dramatic text and having pointed out its mainly literary
character, let us now look at the staging of the play.
Firstly, as regards the importance of the performance,
one should not forget the true nature of theatre in its
beginnings during the Renaissance: it was not an isolated
cultural event, an end in itself, but just only one
element in a more complex celebration ritual, the court
festivity, an occasion for the display of power and
splendour. Throughout the first sixty years of the 16th
century theatrical performances were embedded in court
events, as a visual and acoustic interlude between two
high points of the feast: the banquet, also organized as
a theatrical event, and the dancing. In general the play
was written just for that occasion, whereby plays were
rarely repeated.
Not only that - often more than one play was shown at a
time. 12 During a Venetian festivity on the 7th
February 1526 after a banquet, three comedies were
performed, each with five intermezzi!13 We can conclude that the
theatrical performance had little purpose in itself and
was seen merely as a part of a whole, one item in the
programme of court-entertainments.
If one tries to ascertain the importance of the actor in
this conception of making theatre, one realizes that not
much attention was paid to him. Whereas we find very
detailed descriptions of the stage architecture, costumes
and the like, the actor is hardly ever mentioned. Even
experienced stagedirectors, like Giraldi Cinzio,
Ingegneri and De' Sommi, devote few words to him. We
never come across a description that goes beyond general
statements such as "Zuan Polo was excellent" 14 or "Orlando Lasso was
brilliant in the part of Pantalone". 15
The reason for this silence becomes obvious on reading
the theoretical literature on staging: the task of the
actor was to resemble the character he had to play. The
requisite of similarity could be achieved only through
processes of stylisation, with the aim of getting close
to the ideal type, which - according to Aristotle - was
the union of all the essential elements. This idea is
made clear by De' Sommi: "The lover has to be
beautiful, the soldier athletic, the parasite fat, the
servant agile and so all the others". 16
According to this theory of acting the best
interpretation consisted in visualizing the established
type to the utmost and the best actor was the one who
succeeded in approaching the image of the figure he was
expected to represent. The lack of texts with detailed
descriptions of an actor during his performance is
probably the result of the fact that author, stage
director, actor and public had the same idea of what a
miser, or a rogue should look like, so that one could
only state that a certain actor was "an excellent
Zanni", certain in the knowledge that everybody knew
what an excellent interpretation of the part of the
servant Zanni was meant to be like.
A deep change took place in theatre towards the end of
the 16th century that had an influence on the art of
acting, too. One of the causes was the
Counterreformation, with its system of censorship, that
brought about the decline of literary comedy.
The result was a new division into genres that were to
last throughout the following century: one can be
considered the survival of comedy without written text,
partly improvised and enriched by nonverbal elements (a
type of theatre performed by professional actors which is
now generally referred to as Commedia dell'Arte); another
was the literary tragedy written sometimes even by
professional actors, often printed only to be read and
rarely staged, in part merely because the royal outfit
was too expensive, even for the aristocratic accademie
or literary circles; and finally, there were the new
genres like the pastorale (containing both comic
and tragic elements), in which music became more and more
important, ultimately developing into the dominating
dramatic forms, melodrama and opera. 17
This situation remained unchanged for more than a
century. In the 18th century, before the period of the
various attempts to "reform" theatre, we find
not one, but several ways of acting: there were different
styles for each genre and there were even different ways
of acting established parts (e.g. the gestures of the
servant etc.). Examining the theatre of that period on a
European level, we can furthermore observe different
national styles of acting. 18
From the 1730's onward there is a growing interest in the
question of acting. One of the first to express the need
for a general reform of the theatre was the Italian actor
Luigi Riccoboni, who, at the age of twenty, was already
head of a theatrical company. In his view, reform was
necessary of both texts and techniques of acting, since
the old established style, the Commedia dell'Arte (by
then 150 years old), was no longer capable of involving
the audience. Riccoboni, who was later the director of
the Italian Theatre in Paris and thus an intermediary
between the two cultures, wrote several books on the
subject, that influenced many writers throughout Europe. 19
Riccoboni was not the only one who took a specific
interest in acting, as the increasing number of
publications on the subject during the 18th century
shows. Whereas previously, the question of the nature of
acting had aroused little attention, this point becomes
central to the whole discussion. Curiously enough some of
the best analyses came from non-professionals, like
Diderot, who raised the question of whether good acting
involved identification with or distance from the
character. Clear indications, that a deep change in the
view of acting had been occuring, can be found in the
entry "declamation", in the French Encyclopédie.
The author, F. Marmontel, believed, that acting requires
"soul", "de l'âme", and that
the task of the actor is not to declame a particular
text, but rather "to fill in the gaps", which
every text contains. Marmontel's opinion is evidence that
acting was no longer seen as consisting in playing out an
ideal type, but on the contrary in individualizing the
character, previously defined by tradition.
The person who succeeded best in putting into practice
the new way of acting was Garrick. Descriptions of him
acting show how he managed to find "gaps" in
the dramatic text, and to "fill" them, thus
giving well-known plays a completely new dimension. It
also becomes obvious that he did not work to a fixed
interpretation of a play or even of his part in it (he is
also one of the first actors to play different parts in
the same play), but that he constantly developed it,
taking his spectators' suggestions into consideration,
also.
Coming back to our starting point, namely the
impossibility of preserving the actor's art in past
centuries, we see that our only substitute is an approach
that uses devices like the reconstruction of acting
through sources that have survived the theatrical event.
Of course, the very first step in this procedure will
always be to consult the theatre manuals, to the extent
that they have come down to us. Even from the Middle
Ages, a period in which we find a lot of
stage-instructions in the dramatic texts themselves 20, manuals exist, e.g. the one
published some years ago under the signigficant title The
Copybook of Secrets of a Stage Director during the Middle
Ages. Notes for the staging of a miracle. 21
From the 16th and 17th centuries not many manuals have
survived (at least as far as we know up to now); and the
ones published are rarely known outside of Italy, because
of the linguistic difficulties the reader has to
overcome, especially the fact that they are written in an
old-fashioned language. The previously mentioned book by
Leone De'Sommi on staging (about 1570) or the anonymous
manuscript entitled Il Corago, dated around 1630
and published for the first time only some years ago 22, are examples. Of course there
exist manuals of the 18th century, a point I will speak
about later.
Besides this most evident source, there are many other
texts that can help us in our reconstruction. One group
consists of direct descriptions by eye-witnesses, but, as
we have seen, in certain periods, these are very limited
in number. Yet the research has shown that theory and
with it obviously the practice ot acting have undergone
deep changes during the centuries; it is a logical
consequence that there are also different kinds of
sources for each period: different forms of acting
require different procedures of reconstruction, using
different sources.
As far as the 16th and 17th centuries are concerned, we
have more means at our disposal. Since the ideal of
acting was to get close to the stereotype of the figure
represented, all those sources will be useful that give
us information on what was thought to be typical of a
specific character (e.g. the miser), a social group (the
soldier), or psychological type (the lover). This is the
reason we should consult books on physiognomy 23, on gestures 24, on national types and on
costumes 25 etc.
Books that seek to develop a typology will rarely give us
any information about the art of the great innovatory
actors of the 18th century, such as Garrick, Iffland and
others.26 We do better to consult the huge number
of direct testimonies left by passionate spectators who
never tired of seeing their heroes on the stage - some
admirers went evening after evening to watch Garrick
playing the same part.
27 The fruit of these almost pedantic
observations can be found in texts like Böttiger's book
on Iffland, mentioned at the beginning.
Though the descriptions of the great actors also give us
indirect insight about the average player of the time by
underlining the innovations of the geniuses (e.g.
Garrick's revolutionary act of turning his back on the
public, or Iffland's moments ot immobility on the stage),
we will usually find out more about the average actor
through the manuals, since they reflect not a
revolutionary new technique 28, but the solid rules ot a
profession for those choosing to make a modest living out
of it. The conservative character of manuals is obvious
at least in the two Italian manuals of the 18th century,
an edition of which I am preparing.
One, entitled The Actor on the Stage, by an
unknown actor called Gianvito Manfredi, was published in
1546 29; the other, the anonymous The Teaching
of Theatre Playing in which are contained the rules of
Good Acting, to my knowledge completely unknown prior
to my discovery, was published in 1791. 30
Obviously the two books have a different aim. Whereas the
author of Gli insegnamenti comici tries to give
instructions on acting to non-professionals, Manfredi, a
professional, explains his art to a wider public. He
proves to have a good knowledge of his subject, by
quoting from antique and contemporary sources (both plays
and poetics). His conviction is that an actor needs a
good rhetorical training and erudition in order to
understand the texts he has to play.
The anonymous Gli insegnamenti are less elaborate
and give simple instructions to those who wish to become
actors. Both books give advice on how to behave on the
stage and how to avoid anything that would be seen as a
mistake. They give detailed descriptions of the
traditional roles in Italian theatre, such as the elder,
the servant etc. and their respective gestures, mimics
and so on. Manfredi explicitly indicates the danger of
improvisation, a form in which often too much space is
given to obscenity.
Thus reading the manuals one gets a vague idea how an
actor may have behaved on the stage in that period. Of
course, as we said at the beginning, such a
reconstruction can be only fragmentary. In order to
illustrate how approximative even the best procedure of
reconstruction is, I will use a metaphor chosen by an
enemy of theatre who wanted to prove, how dangerous this
art is to the human soul. For Del Monaco 31 the distance between the printed
text of a play (which the Counterreformation succeded in
keeping under control through censorship) and the
performance on stage (uncontrollable by censorship) is
like that between a dead corpse and a living person. To
stay within the terms of this metaphor: in comparison
with the experience of the performance as witnessed by a
contemporary spectator, even the best reconstruction will
look like a mummy. It shows the features in general, but
has no life.
Notes
1 [Böttiger, K.A.]: Entwickelung
des Ifflandischen Spiels in vierzehn Darstellungen auf
dem Weimarischen Hoftheater im April Monath 1796.
Leipzig, 1796. p. v. (back)
2 [Böttiger], op.cit., p. iv. (back)
3 Lichtenberg, C.Ch.: Briefe aus England.
(1776, 1778), in: L.: Vermischte Schriften.
Göttingen, 1853. vol. 3, pp. 199 ff. (back)
4 Cfr. also [Brandes, G.]: Bemerkungen über
das Londoner, Pariser und Wiener Theater. Göttingen,
1786; cfr. also the quotations in: Stone, G.W. and G.M.
Kahrl: David Garrick. A Critical Biography.
Carbondale, 1979. (back)
5 Cfr. the illustrations in Maurer-Schmoock, S.: Deutsches
Theater im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen, 1982. (back)
6 About the problem of idealization of
iconographical documents cfr. Molinari, C. in: Quaderni
di teatro, n. 14, 1981, pp. 3 ff. (Introduction:
"Teatro e arti figurative"). (back)
7 Cfr. the illustrations in Stone and Kahrl, op.cit.
(back)
8 Ifflands mimische Darstellungen für
Schauspieler und Zeichner, während der Vorstellung
gezeichnet zu Berlin in den Jahren 1808 bis 1811....
Berlin, 1811. (back)
9 Hecker, K.: "Dall'Arte rappresentativa
all'attore come artista creatore. La visione dell'attore
dal Cinque al Settecento", in: Quaderni di teatro,
year 10, nr 37, August 1987, pp.95-122. For further
bibliographical indications see this article which I
partly summarize here. (back)
10 The relationship between the staged comedies
and the printed texts is difficult to establish. It is
strikig that there are stage-instructions in texts that
have come down to us only as manuscripts which were
obviously not destined for publication, e.g. the
anonymous La Venexiana or Ruzzante's comedies
(edited by a friend after the author's death) or De'
Sommi's comedies. But we find stage-instructions (though
very few in number) even in a printed text, in the very
popular La Spagnolas by the actor Andrea Calmo of
which there were numerous editions in the 16th century.
The reason for this exception might be that this author
had no literary ambitions at all, whereas the majority of
his writing colleagues were keen to be considered poets
and therefore tried to give their comedies the aura of
literary texts. (back)
11 De' Sommi, L.: Quattro dialoghi. [around
1570]. Ed. by F. Marotti. Milano, 1968. P. 39, similar p.
22. (back)
12 Cfr. the documents in: Cruciani, F.: Teatro
nel Rinascimento. Roma 1450-1550. Roma, 1983. E.g. p.
35. (back)
13 Sanudo: Diarii. XL, 789, quoted from G.
Padoan: La commedia rinascimentale veneta.
Vicenza, 1982. p. 89. (back)
14 Sanudo: Diarii. XIX, 443 (9.2.1525),
quoted in: G. Padoan: Momenti del Rinascimento veneto.
Padova, 1978. p. 39. (back)
15 Troiano, M.: Dialoghi ne' quali si narrano
le cose più notabili fatte nelle Nozze dello ...
Prencipe Guglielmo VI, ... Duca di Baviera....
Venetia, 1569. Reprinted in: Die Münchner
Fürstenhochzeit von 1568. Massimo Troiano: Dialoge.
Ed. by H. Leuchtmann. München-Salzburg, 1980. p. 310. (back)
16 De' Sommi, p. 39. Similar in: Ingegneri, A.: Della
Poesia Rappresentativa et del modo di rappresentare le
favole sceniche. 1598. Reprinted in F. Marotti: Lo
spettacolo dall'Umanesimo al Manierismo. Milano,
1974. pp. 301 ff. (back)
17 Baratto, M.: La commedia del Cinquecento.
Vicenza, 1975. p. 38. (back)
18 We know, for instance, that the English style
was considered as violent by the other nations, the
French style too cold etc. (cfr. Hecker, op.cit.,
p. 109 ff.). (back)
19 As e.g. the German playwright Gottsched, who
admits in one of his prefaces his debts to the Italian
actor. The fact that Riccoboni wrote most of his works in
the "koine" French helped to spread his ideas. (back)
20 Cfr. the texts in Gustave Cohen's books on
medieval theatre; cfr. also the quotations of texts in:
Doglio, F.: Teatro in Europa. Milano, 1982 ff.,
vol. 1. (back)
21 Vitale-Brovarone, A. (ed.): II quaderno di
segreti d'un regista provenzale del Medioevo.
Alessandria, 1984. (back)
22 Fabri, P. and A. Pompilio (ed.): II Corago o
vero alcune osservazioni per metter bene in scena le
composizioni drammatiche. Firenze, 1983. (back)
23 Cfr. e.g. Della Porta, G.B.: De humana
physiognomonia. Vico Equense, 1586. Reprint of the
Italian edition (Napoli, 1610) Parma, 1988. Ed. by M.
Cicognani. (back)
24 Cfr. e.g. Bonifaccio, G.: L'Arte de'cenni....
Vicenza, 1616; cfr. also the books by John Bulwer. (back)
25 Cfr. e.g. Vecellio, C.: Habiti antichi e
moderni. Venezia, 1590. (back)
26 Though a book like Charles Le Brun's Méthode
pour apprendre à dessiner les passions... obviously
provided models of physiognomic expressions of which even
actors of genius like Garrick made use (cfr. Stone and
Kahrl, op.cit., p. 547).(back)
27 Cfr. Stone and Kahrl, op. cit.,p. 544. (back)
28 Even the writings of an excellent actorlike
Riccoboni have this lack of innovation, perhaps because
of their defensivecharacter: the author is too busy to
show his erudition (his book on acting is written in
verse) and to prove his moral integrity.(back)
29 G. Manfredi, L'Attore in scena,Verona
1546. (back)
30 Gli insegnamenti comici ne' qvalisi
contengono le regole di ben recitare, Jesi 1791.(back)
31 Fr. M. del Monaco: In actores etspectatores
comoediarum nostri temporis paraenesis. Padova, 1621,
quotedand translated in: F.Taviani: La Commedia
dell'Arte e la societàbarocca. La fascinazione del
teatro. Roma, 1969. p. 218f.
(back)
I wish to thank Richard
Francis for his help with the English version of this
article.
18th Congress
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