Seventeenth Century Natural Acting Essay -- European History Essays

Seventeenth Century Natural ActingAs we read through the standard accounts of seventeenth-century playing, observers display the same desire to cogitate in the fictions of the actors as their twentieth-century counterparts. Webster said of An Excellent Actor that what we see him personate, we conceive of truly done before us (An Excellent Actor, 1615, in Overburys The Wife) An unnamed elegy on the death of the famous actor Richard Burbage (d.1619) recalls, Oft use up I seen him leap into a graveSuiting the person (which he seemed to have)Of a distressing 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. wish well spectators today, the Jacobean spectators had strong ideas ab push through what constituted penny-pinching acting. Thomas Heywood notes that right looks, combined with type moulding, are important actors should be me n pickd out personable, according to the parts they present (An Apology for Actors 1612). In the fictional acting lesson in The Return from Parnassus, Part II (c. 1601-03), the Burbage character remarks to his student, I same(p) 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 cover trippingly on the tongue (Hamlet, III.2, c. 1603), and Heywood adds that the actor should observe the structure of his texts, and with design to observe his commas, colons, and full points his parentheses, his breathing spaces, and distin... ...n the mens companies seem to have lettered more from examples that from a curriculum. In The Return from Parnassus, Part II, both Burbage and bequeath Kemp are shown teaching by imitation BURBAGE I think your vowe l system would serve for Hieronimo observe how I act it, and then imitate me. here we run up against the bugbear of historically informed performance. So galore(postnominal) of the treatises (in music and dance as well as in acting) depend 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 period aesthetic. However, by constructing exercises along the lines of a Renaissance aesthetic, we may demonstrate some of the differences between what the Shakespearean listening saw, and what the North American audience sees today.