Originally compiled and published in 1970, this volume contains the full text of The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, written in 1710. For Charles Gildon, the text is little more than a skeleton upon which, as a dramatic critic, he might drape a full consideration of ‘the action and utterance of the stage,’ and so, the technique of acting and theatrical oratory.
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The stage of the 1700s established a star culture, with the emergence of such acting celebrities as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber, and Sarah Siddons. It placed Shakespeare at the heart of the classical repertoire and offered unprecedented opportunities to female actors. This book demonstrates how an understanding of the practice and theories circulating three hundred years ago can generate new ways of studying and performing plays of all kinds in the present. Eight short essays – on emotions, cultivation, character, voice, action, company, audience, and reflection – provide two things: a vivid introduction to the practice and ideas of the eighteenth-century stage, and the story of how these past practices and ideas were used in collaborative workshops around the UK to create new rehearsal exercises. Designed to work alone or in combination, these exercises are also open to further adaptation and analysis as part of a work that treats theatre writers of the past as potential collaborators for those interested in theatre today. Marrying academic and professional theatre expertise, this book ranges through a vast archive of writing about acting, from private letters and battered promptbooks, through to philosophical treatises and celebrity biographies. The exercises, stories, and ideas shared here capture the strangeness of this material – and sometimes its surprising familiarity, as questions asked of actors then seem to anticipate those questions we ask now. A truly unique offering, What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century offers a fascinating deep-dive into an important time in theatre history to illuminate practices and processes today.
The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the burgeoning eighteenth-century fascination with the human body as an eloquent, expressive object. This wide-ranging study examines the role of the body within a number of cultural arenas - particularly oratory, the theatre and the novel - and charts the efforts of projectors and reformers who sought to exploit the textual potential of the body for the public assertion of modern politeness. Paul Goring shows how diverse writers and performers including David Garrick, James Fordyce, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne were involved in the construction of new ideals of physical eloquence - bourgeois, sentimental ideals which stood in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Through innovative readings of fiction and contemporary manuals on acting and public speaking, Goring reveals the ways in which the human body was treated as an instrument for the display of sensibility and polite values.
