‘Playing is a Science’: Eighteenth-Century Actors’ Manuals and the Proto-Sociology of Emotion

TANYA CASSIDY A N D CONRAD B R U N S T R ~ M

Eighteenth-century theories of performed emotion are seemingly unknown to sociological historiography, just as the history of sociological theory is largely unknown to specialists within ‘The Enlightenment’. Drawing together the fields of contemporary sociology and eighteenth-century studies, this paper attempts to negotiate a liaison between two modes of discussing the essence and expression of emotion, perhaps opening the way for new performance theories of socially-constructed feeling.

The crossover from social to literary studies was of course made long ago by Michel Foucault (who just as successfully invaded all other disciplines) but there are a number of other (perhaps less gregarious) sociologists who, we believe, can contribute to an analysis of this material. Erving Goffman, highly-influential sociologist of the Chicago School and innovator within what he himself called ‘dramaturgical theory’, famously described individual emotional expression in terms of ‘acting’, or ‘role-playing’, in his book Thr Presentation of SeZf in Everydcy Life (rc)59).’ Goffman evidenced a lifelong concern with what he called ‘social ritualisation - that is, the standardisa- tion of bodily and vocal behaviour through socialisation’(1983).~ Although Goffman himself did not integrate historical variety within his explanations, he actively advocated a vision of historical and cultural relativity. This relativism, however, also entertained notions of universal gestures, unintentionally echoing arguments made centuries before by authors of actors’ manuals.

The characterization that one individual can make of another by virtue of being able directly to observe and hear that other is organised around two fundamental forms of identification: the cntegoric kind involving placing that other in one or more social categories, and individual kind, whereby the subject under observation is locked to a uniquely distinguishing identity through appearance, tone of voice, mention of name or other person-differentiating device.

Following the great pioneer of historicist sociology and emotion Norbert Elias ( I 9 39),4 Goffman called his readers’ attention to ‘etiquette books’ which he cites with reference to their presentation of the rules regarding the ‘doers’ and the ‘done to’. It is our contention that eighteenth-century discussions of acting and oratory, meanwhile, provide base-level constructions of adult formulations of emotion. To quote Goffman again, they offer ‘a specialised

20 TANYA CASSIDY AND CONRAD BRrJNSTRiiM

communicative function in the stream of behaviour’.’ These manuals have the advantage of being more versatile than conduct/etiquette books in terms of class, age and gender.

Such data can of course be used to construct a historicised theory of acting, as evidenced by George Taylor’s 1972 essay, subtitled ‘Theories of Acting in the Age of Garrick’.‘ Taylor is interested in philosophical (largely Lockean) theories of emotional construction. We do not find, however, that he is interested enough in the complex reality of how emotion was conceived and within the ‘science’ of stage acting. Also, Taylor is too concerned to plot a developmental theoretical trajectory that embraces greater and greater ‘naturalism’. Our own reading evidences the persistence rather than the resolution of a conflict between naturalistic and mechanistic theories. Taylor summed up the ‘external’ approach to emotional truth thus:

If actors thought in terms of passion as separate states of mind, and if their whole approach tended towards external imitation, rather than internal recreation, then it is not surprising that we find descriptions of what actors of the past actually did on stage unconvincing and smacking of technique, even though their audiences acclaimed them for being n a t ~ r a l . ~

In other words, eighteenth-century actors’ manuals often treat acting episodically - frame by frame. Fidelity to a scene, a speech, or even just a word, is the desideratum, rather than any narrative sense of a character in the process of evolution. The predictive nature of emotional interpretation was a guarantee of socially understood authenticity.

The most extensive survey of the philosophy underpinning eighteenth- century actor’s manuals is, however, offered within a Joseph Roche’s 1985 study, The Player’s Passion.x Roche’s ‘history of the theatricalization of the human body’,Y which treats some of the material we shall mention, is interested in acting primarily in terms of its relation to philosophical, medical and mechanistic theories prevalent at the time. The book places theories of acting stretching from Ouintilian to the twentieth century within the larger framework of the history of science and of the body as focus of scientific authority. We, however, are more concerned to see constructions of stage performance as indicative of socialised and constructed expectations of emotional presentation in general.

The applicability and versatility of performed emotion is itself the focus of much eighteenth- (and nineteenth- and twentieth-) century discussion. Is there a universal grammar of emotion, lurking beneath the encrustations of class and culture; Whenever any discussion of any supposedly ‘universal’ feature of the human animal takes place, Charles Darwin is quoted. Writing in 1872, Darwin mused: ‘it seemed to me highly important to ascertain whether the same expression and gestures prevail, as has often been asserted without much evidence, with all the races of mankind’.’(’ The answer, as unfolded within his book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, is (eventually) yes. Darwin’s biological essentialism has been repeatedly

EiglitrcJritl.1-Ceritziry Actors’ Munuuls 21

challenged by twentieth-century cultural sociologists and anthropologists. Many of these social theorists have treated Darwin’s book as the beginning of a new scientific tradition, but Darwinian universalism is equally the culmination of another tradition, a tradition that can be illustrated by looking at acting manuals from the eighteenth century. Darwin himself seemed interested in theatre, and concluded The Phyrr’s Pnssiori by quoting from Hamlet’s soliloquy from Act 11, scene ii, where he famously complains of the player who

... in a fiction, in a dream of passion Could force his soul so to his own conceit.

Darwin’s fascination with Ha~i i l c t illustrates not only an absorption with the supposed acme of dramatic literature, but with a play that is largely aborrt acting. Darwin’s book is festooned with quotations from Shakespeare. and at times it seems as if the type of biologically inherited emotional universalism that Darwin is arguing for is vindicated by the fact that so many cultures authenticate Shakespearean passion. Possibly it is instead Shakespeare who serves to authenticate all these cultures.

In certain obvious ways Darwin is deeply antipathetic to eighteenth- century emotional theory. Darwin explodes the Loclcean tabulrr m a , with his genetically based universalism: our bodies, rather than our accumulated experiences, teach us how to feel. Without any organised theory of inheritance, physiologically-bascd theories of emotional universalism nonetheless managed to hold sway in the discussion of theatre in the eighteenth century. Long before Darwin, a normative comportment of the body was held to be the key to understanding the performance of emotional truth.

In 1710 Charles Gildon published what was in effect an actors’ manual, masquerading as a biography of Thomas Betterton. Gildon’s theories unravel in the course of an interview with the elderly actor. GildodBetterton claims that ‘there are certain Natural1 Significations of the Motions of the Hands, and other Members of the Body, which are obvious to the understanding of all sensible Men of all Nations’.” The book also argues that the theatre is the obvious focus of study for anyone interested in the variety of the human passions:

The Stage ought to be the Seat of Passion in its various kinds, and therefore the Actor ought to be thoroughly acquaiiited with the whole Nature of the Affections, and Habits of the Mind. or else he will never he able to express them justly in his Looks and Gestures, as well as in the tone of his Voice, and manner of Utterance. They must hiiow them in their various Mixtures, and as they are differently blended together in the different Characters they represent. ’’

The actor is, in other words, an expert in the ‘classification‘ of emotion, having an encyclopaedic awareness of emotional variety and context. Despite this great variety, GildodBetterton assumes, firstly, that all emotions

22 TANYA CASSIUY ANII CONRAD B R L J N S T K ~ ~ M

have an optimal standard mode of expression, and, secondly, that every ‘sensible’ (that is, sensitive) person will recognise this expression regardless of their cultural or historical place: ‘Every Passion or Emotion of the Mind has from Nature its proper and peculiar Countenance, Sound and Gesture; and the whole Body of Man, all his Looks, and every Sound of his Voice, like Strings on an Instrument. receive their Sounds from Impulse of the Passions.’T GildodBetterton hints at a mechanistic theory of emotional truth which unfolds more fully in the context of the extreme philosophical statement of physiological, universalist emotional theory offered by Aaron Hill’s Art of Acting (1747). In his dedication (to Lord Chesterfield) Hill writes: ‘The SOUL, inhabiting the Brain, or acting where it doubtless does, immediately behind the Optic Nerves, stamps, instantaneously upon the Eye, and Eyebrows, a struck Image, of conceiv’d Idea.’14 This is Lockean impressionism with a Berkeleian twist. A physical process is the derivative product of a prior spiritual reality. Hill’s reversible optic nerves can construct an empirical universe from inside out. Early in the text itself, Hill elaborates on this theme in a Georgic poem using couplets that serve to reinforce the very mechanical emotional automatism he is arguing for:

So. from injected Thought shoots Passion’s Growth; No Sprout spontaneous - no chance Child of Sloth: IDEA lends it ROOT - Firm, on touch’d Minds, Fancy, (swift Planter!) first, th’ Impression binds: Shap’d, in Conception’s Mould, Nature’s prompt Skill Bids subject Nerves obey th’inspiring WILL: Strung to obsequious Bend, the muse’ly Frame Stamps the shown Image, Pleasure - Pity - Shurne Anger, Grief, Terror, catch th’adaptive Spring. While the Eye darts it! - and the Accents ring.I5

The ‘obsequious Bend’ refers to an automatic and determinate relationship between an idea and a muscular response. Hill’s verse could itself be aptly described as ‘obsequious’. Not only is it ploddingly end-stopped with significant terms, this extract indicates the poet’s tendency to nail the caesura into place with a heavy hyphen. Obsequiousness is, however, the entire point. On Hill’s stage, the signified transparently directs the gestural signifier with confident immediacy:

No Visagp can conceal, What the rnark’d Muscle bids the Spirit feel.16

As this couplet shows, within this analysis, cause and effect are so effectively confounded and conflated that they are practically reversible. The emotion is not really prior to the expression, and so the expression can effectively produce the emotion. Hill is doubtless unaware of the prescient Derridean implications of his implied suggestion that signifiers can precede signifieds.

Eigh t w n t/i-Ct~ntiir!j Actors ' Mnriuals 2.3

Hill is, however, aware that his excessively mechanistic approach may irritate actors, who may dislike such demythologising technical transpar- ency:

It is difficult to meet with Players, who believe that there is such an Art, in Being: at least, that it can be reduc'd to Rules of Practice. They say, they are for trusting all to Nature: and (hey say it well and justly: -But they shou'd. at the same Time reflect, that Art Itself is Nature; when it teaches natural Principles. '

Perhaps the most important and thoughtful of such players who responded to mechanistic analyses of this kind was Thomas Sheridan, father of the playwright, husband of the novelist, son of the poet, himself one of the most distinguished actors and inspirational elocution teachers of the century. It is notable that Sheridan's vaguer, less mechanical definition of emotional truth is wedded to an abiding love of blank verse. Sheridan wrote often, and at length, on oratory, exhorting rather than explaining, preaching rather than prescribing. There is no one quotation from his many (repetitious) works that can do justice to his obsessive agenda, first developed in British Education (1756). The key to trying to make sense of Sheridan's notion of emotional authenticity lies in his concern with literature. Shakespeare and Milton are his literary models of emotive imitation. Aaron Hill uses predictive couplets to assert physiological automatism. Sheridan advocates instead the reading of blank verse as a way of cultivating the more complex frustrating syntax of emotional progression.

Sheridan offers a confusing praxis. On the one hand, he suggests that there is a single, universal, optimal performance of any given speech:

It was therefore incumbent on the orator to preserve. as much as possible, all the various loolts. gestures, and tones. which nature herself has annexed to the several passions and arfections. lo be an universal language. intelligible by all ranks of people. of whatever age or country.I8

Yet elsewhere, he makes it clear that there can be no single optimal exfoliation of language regardless of context:

Quantity with us is not always ascertained by the mere value of syllables considered as simple sounds, since it is in the power of emphasis to alter their quality. and to change a syllable, short in its own nature. into a long one. so that no-one can pretend to react harmoniously, who cannot also read sensibly. ''I

The mysteriousness of Sheridan's approach is the key to understanding the real terms of dispute. Discussants of dramatic theory and practice in the eighteenth century often all seem to be saying the same thing, whereas closer examination reveals that they are using the same popular but ambiguous terms to say very different things. A crude. but perhaps not inaccurate.

24 TANYA CASSIDY A N D CONRAU BRUNSTROM

division would be between actors and orators who grimace into mirrors, and those who sit re-reading Milton waiting for an inspired reading to ‘click’. Nature and Study mean very different things to different people.

Sheridan is supported in his vague, but earnestly literary, theory of emotional authenticity (or normative Nature) by Sir John Hill, author of The Actor (1750). Hill was a prolific and controversial doctor who recommends re-reading Pnrudise Lost as a cathartic ritual that should precede any other form of rehearsal: ‘Let him give himself up without restraint to the emotions he feels on this occasion, [reading Milton] and without addition, or abridgement, throw everything into action.”(’ The battle lines between theorists of performance are thereby drawn between two versions of emotional universalism, one in which mind and body are immediately and transparently linked versus another in which such links are asserted but mystified and endlessly deferred.

Thomas Sheridan’s most persistent opponent and rival elocutionist and lexicographer, John Walker (1782). reinforces Aaron rather than John Hill: ‘every passion, emotion and sentiment, has a particular attitude of the body, part of tone of the voice that particularly belongs to that passion, emotion, or sentiment’.’’ Gesture is particularly worthy of study because of its supposed ubiquitous automatism, an Ur-language free of social encrustation: ‘[Gesture] is the language of nature in the strictest sense, and makes its way to the head, without the utterance of a single sound.’’’ Gesture functions ideally (but never in practice) within a perfect ideogrammatic semiotic system.

Walker laboured long to produce perfect transparent signification, and his step-by-step guide to oratorical perfection is a work of remarkable optimism. He reprints famous parliamentary speeches together with famous dramatic speeches, carefully decorated with detailed and precise musical accents and rests, occasionally interspersed with additional italicised prompts as to tone and volume - all in order to clarify the absolute optimal pronunciation - painting by numbers. He admits that his notation may seem awkward and artificial at first:

A person who has learned to sing by ear, and but just commenced the study of Music. will find the notes puzzle him. and make him sing infinitely worse than he would do without them. The same is true of every art which is to be acquired by habit; before the habit is formed, the pupil is much more awkward than before he began: but when that habit is formed, it becomes part of his nature, and to ease and elegance adds correctness and propriety.13

This wads like an extrapolation, and perhaps thereby a perversion of a much simpler point made nearly forty years earlier by John Hill: ‘The reason why we sometimes discover the study’d action of the player, is not because he has been at the pains of studying it beforehand, but because he has not study’d it e n o ~ g h . ” ~ Acting is only laboured if it is lazy, the art that conceals art is the most sophisticated and successful art. Such are, of course, the critical truisms

of most eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse. Such truisms can be interpreted variously, however, depending on the reader’s understanding of the author’s understanding of the terms used. Study is a meditative discipline according to Sheridan and John Hill, a mnemonic habituation according to Walker and Aaron Hill.

Like Walker, William Cockin. author of The Ar t of Delivering W r i t t e n Language (r775), argues that second nature improves on the first. Cocliin specifically challenges Thomas Sheridan by trying to explode Sheridan’s opposition between custom and nature.2S Cockin remarks: ‘polite speaking I...] considers how to improve and render more agreeable the constituent principles of speech, as they discover themselves in simple nature’.2h The simplicity of nature is, of course, the very ground of dispute. Cockin’s Nature was made to be improved, whereas Sheridan’s oratorical utopia is a Paradise long Lost.

Probably the most explicit presentation of both playing as a science and emotion as a taxonomy is offered some years later in 1807 by Henry Siddons, the son of Sarah Siddons. He describes the varied empirical work to be done by the would-be performer of emotion: ‘The player who wishes to be accomplished in his art should not only study the passions on their broad and general basis; he should trace their operations in all their shades, in all their varieties. as they act upon different conditions, and a s the operate in various climates.’17 Siddons is translating and adapting an earlier ( ~ 7 8 5 ) German book on the passions by Johann Engel. Siddons’ book is illustrated with various figures frozen in attitudes of essential and immutable emotion. The numerous static passions offered by Siddons include such unlikely candidates as ‘thirst’, not to mention a supporting cast of hyphenated emotions such as ‘Jealous-Rage’ and ‘Painful Recollection’ (see Fig.1). ‘Painful Recollection’, like many of these representations of strong emotions, shows the heel of one foot off the ground and the body contorted. This figure is costumed as a somewhat vague ahistorical tragic figure, enforcing the supposed universality of the attitude, although the book cheats elsewhere - dressing the ‘timeless’ figure of devotion in clerical bands.

Siddons promises variety and complexity but delivers frozen archetypes. Walker concedes that emotional expression is vastly complex and nuanced, but he insists that only the steady acquisition of a memory bank of tones and gestures will produce the right attitude on cue.

our natural feelings are not always to be commanded. and when they are, stand in need of the regulation and embellishments of art; it is the business, therefore. of every reader and speaker in public to acquire such tones and gestures as nature gives to the passions: that he may be able to produce the semblance of them when he is not actually irnpassioned.lx

What is required is a memory for symptoms rather than causes. One does not study how to het.oi?ie impassioned.”’ Emotional authenticity produces a

I. ‘

-P+& ,--Y RiRidzTa rf$ _.* J?*.&,& rZg7 - d

Painful Recollection’, from Henry Siddons, Pructical llliistrntions Rhetorical Grstnre arid Action (1807)

Eighteri~t~z-Centz~r~ Actors’ Manuals 27

natural uniformity of emotional response. This uniformity produces the emotional vocabulary of voice, expression and gesture that the actor and the orator both need.

Where Siddons provides detailed illustrations, Walker offers close prose descriptions of the separate and distinct passions. For example, ‘Reproach’ is delineated thus: ‘the brow is contracted, the lip turned up with scorn, the head shaken, the voice low, and abhorring, and the whole body expressive of aversion’.3o The recipe is neither to be customised, nor otherwise interfered with. The static perfection of emotional correctness is preferable to the eccentricities of individual interpretation.

No one committed to Walker’s ploddingly phonetic notes could be said to be ‘reading sensibly’, with a view to meaning. Ultimately, language is not to be mastered by any system of notation. Instead, a deeply literate awareness of linguistic potential is to be carefully cultivated: ‘Let us examine our language with care, and search into its hidden treasures.’)’

Even the most mechanistic theorists of acting continue to assume that passions have real and distinct existences, however. The same very visual, static concept of the emotions is vindicated by an anonymous contemporary panegyric on Garrick:

Does is not seem probable then, my Lord. that the Genius of a Player is more analogous to the Painter and Musician. than to the Poet. He rather knows with what Attitude, Tone of Voice, and Expression, Characters already written, should be expressed and acted. [...I He can better adjust Sounds to poetical Compositions, than invent Poetry for Airs already made. [...I this Actor [Garrick] is [...I of a much superior Nature to a mediocre Poet, indeed, on a level with great Painters, and great Musicians, a Raphael, or Corel1i.j’

Garrick’s point of aesthetic reference is, in other words, external. Actors, like painters and Musicians, should be judged according to their mimetic fidelity to something other than their own imagination, either to a text or to a known ‘passion’.

The power of the actor is a power ol mastery of the passions. Another biographer of Garrick rhapsodised thus:

He was the master of the passions, and turned them to his will: he waked them, swelled them. soothed them: he melted them into softness, or roused them into rage. If he was angry, so was you; if he was distressed, so was you; if he was terrified. so was you; if he was merry, so was you: if he was mad; so was you. He was an enchanter, and led you where he pleased.”

Garrick’s power may seem autocratic, but the discrete integrity of the passions is preserved. Garrick can lead the viewer to and from any emotion he likes, but he will not smudge or confuse the passions, let alone try to invent any new ones. The presumed discrete integrity of the various passions is what justifies attempted dissections of theatrical performance. An externalised mimetic approach to acting assumes the communally under-

28 TANYA CASSIUY A N D C O N R A D BKUNSTRfiM

stood discrete identity of the passions. Denis Diderot, in his now famous (posthumously published) Parndoxe sur le corneifien (1773), made a similar observation relating to Garrick’s ‘mastery’ of the passions:

Garrick passe sa t2te entre les deux battants d’une porte et, dans I’intervalle de quatre ;i cinq secondes. son visage passe successivement de la joie folle a la joie moderee. de cette joie a la tranquillite. de la tranquillite a la surprise, de la surprise a I’etonnement, de I’etonnement ii la tristesse, de la tristesse a l’abattement, de I’abattement B l’effroi. de I’effroi a I’horreur. de I’horreur au desespoir, et remonte de ce dernier degre a celui d’ou il etait descendu. Est-ce que son ;me a pu eprouver toutes ces sensations et executer, de concert avec son visage, cette espece de ganime? Je n’en crois rien. ni vous non plus.34

Diderot’s reaction to Garrick’s party-piece was, according to Joseph Roche, to admire Garrick for having ‘professionalised feigned emotion into the realm of fine art’, having cut himself free of any ‘authentic’ passion.35 Mastery over the passions apparently presupposes disengagement from them. Diderot’s ‘mechanism’ differs markedly, therefore, from the mechanism of, say, Aaron Hill, in that Hill’s mechanical descriptions of emotional production refer to nll forms of feeling and expression. Hill’s actor differs from other human beings only in terms of enjoying a greater degree of control over emotional production. Diderot, however, suggests that performed emotions are simulacra of feeling and make sense only in the context of a self-contained sign system. Diderot’s theory of performed emotion cannot accommodate the idea that uZZ emotion has to be performed, an idea that Shakespeare endorsed when he had Helena from All’s Well That Ends Well (1.i) exclaim: ‘I do affect a sorrow, indeed, but I have it too.’

It needs to be stressed that a true picture of people’s expectations of emotional authenticity on stage requires something more than an analysis of formal, declared theory. The bulk of the most representative material is not to be found in the relatively few didactic pieces on how to act, but amid the prefaces to various works of comparative dramatic criticism. A full-length study of eighteenth-century ideas of performed emotion would need to wade through reviews, gazettes, private letters, poems such as Churchill’s Roscind. Lloyd’s The Actor, and any number of other sources. Criticism and biography necessarily produce arguments concerning the nature of emotional truth (Gildon’s ‘biography’ of Betterton is a case in point).

This essay does not seek to prove, in some ahistorical, essentialist fashion, that the modern sociology of emotion is merely appropriating arguments conducted using different language two hundred years ago. All we seek to demonstrate is that arguments about how to act on stage were informed by an awareness of competing understandings of how emotion itself is constructed and communicated. In a recent essay by the sociologist Tim Newton, entitled ‘Sociogenesis of Emotion’ ( 1998), within a suggestively titled subsection ‘Explaining Ahistoricism’. an agenda is offered for a new historicised sociological study of emotion:

once we assume that the ‘delivery’ of a blow, a smile, a grimace or a tear is variant across cultures (elicitation depending on the particular cultural context), then we are acknowledging that even the seemingly ‘basic’ non- verbal aspects of our practical consciousness have been strongly historically conditioned. 3’

The elusive search for emotional transparency has always been defined, fuelled, and finally inhibited by a fear that there are no common signifieds, that unspoken emotion exists as part of no shared consciousness, and that the creation of meaning is, and always has been, a performance. Dramaturgical sociologists such as Goffman argue that emotion has always been discovered and ‘acted’ in formative social settings. Historicist sociologists such as Elias have argued instead that emotion is contingent within time and space. Twentieth-century sociology and anthropology has defined itself largely around an opposition between a universalism based on biological determinism and a relativism based on cultural constructionism. By considering eighteenth-century actors’ manuals, sociologists can recover a universalism that does not lean on genetics, but which does posit the body as an intelligible if complex universal assumption. By discovering sociology, eighteenth-century specialists can discover a new context and a new set of theories through which to interpret these documents, and reimagine the ‘sociality’ of emotional ‘authenticity’.

As Margot Lyon recently commented, ‘Action in the world is necessarily bodily, but it is also complex, for movements are not simply individual ones: they are always associative and therefore communicative, a process in which emotion is ever implicated’. 17 Lyon’s interactional view of bodily expression candidly owes much to Goffman’s. As sociologists increasingly seek to recuperate the body. they have received theoretical help from that enthusiastically rediscovered contemporary of Durkheim and Weber, Georg Simmel, who argued that it is by means of the eye, the gaze, the spectacle, that universals are constructed, thereby materialising the semiology of social interaction and social formation. Simmel explores the primal socialisation associated with eye contact explaining:

why shame causes us to look at the ground and avoid the other’s look. This is certainly not merely the case because in this way we can at least avoid finding out sensorily that, and to what extent. the other is watching us in such a n embarrassing situation. Rather. the deeper reason is that lowering my gaze deprives the other of the possibility of finding out about me. The look into the eyes of the other person not only helps me to know him or her, but also him or her to know me: along the line which connects both sets of eyes. one‘s own personality, mood and impulse is carried to other.3x

If, as John Hill claimed, ‘playing is a science’, it is because of a belief that one can legitimately attempt to be objective about intelligible emotion, without necessarily being naively positivist. We believe that cultural constructionists, whether in sociology or in literary studies, need to continue to postulate universal observations, without having to panic about being

30 TANYA CASSIDY A N D CONRAD RRrJNSTROM

labelled Darwinian determinists. If emotion is, as Tim Newton suggests, 'strongly conditioned' by history and culture, it is not necessarily thereby determined and therefore estranged from all other ages and societies. Our own historical survey of ahistorical analyses indicates the persistent belief that human beings express themselves intelligibly surprisingly often, even if the grounds of that intelligibility are hard to delimit.

NOTES

I . Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in E i w y I q j Lik (New York 1959). 2 . Erving Goffman, 'The Interactional Order: American Sociological Association, 1982

Presidential Address'. Ainericnii Sociological Review 48 (February: 1-17), p.3. G o h a n died shortly before this address was to be given.

3. Goffman. 'The Interactional Order'. p.3. 4. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Proccw: Vol. I. The History of Manners (1y39: New York

5. Goffman. 'The Interactional Order'. p.3. 6 . George Taylor. "'The Just Delineation of the Passions": Theories of Acting in the Age of

Garrick', in Essays on the Eightemtli Centurg Stage, ed. Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson (London 1972). p.71.

1978).

7. Taylor. 'The Just Delineation'. p.71, 8. Joseph Roche, The Player's Pnssiori: Studies in the Scicnm of Acting (Ann Arbor, Michigan

9. Roche. The P l n y d s Passion. p.12. 1985).

10. Charles Darwin. The Expression of the L:niofions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman, 3rd edn (London 1998). 11. Charles Gildon. The Life oJ M r T I I O I ~ N S Betterton. the Late Emirierit Tragedilian. Wherein the

Action and Utterance of the Strye, Rnr. nnd Pulpit. are Distinctlg Considered (London 1710). p. 5 0 . 72. Gildon. hWJJaS Betterton. p.40. 13. Gildon. Tliornas Betterton. p.43. 14. Aaron Hill, The Art of Acting (London 1746). p.v. 15. Hill. The Art of Acting. p.1 I . 16. Hill. The Art of Acting. p.11. 17. Hill, The Art @"Acting. p.vii. 18. Thomas Sheridan. British Educrrtion. 2nd edn (Dublin 1757). 19. Sheridan. British Education, p.229, 20. John Hill. The Actor. quoted in Taylor. p.67. 21. John Walker, Elernents of Elocution. 2 vols (London 1781). ii.264. 22. Walker. Elements of Elocution. ii.260. 23. John Walker, Tlie Melodg of Speaking Delinecited: Or, Elocutioii taught like Music. by Visible

24. John Hill, Tlie Actor: A Treatise on tlw Art of Plaging (London 1750). p.233. 25 . William Cockin. The Art q/ Delivering Written Language; Or. A n Essriy on Reading. In

Which the Subject is Treated PliilosrqJliicall!/ ns Well I I S with n V i m to Practice (London r775), p.10-17.

Signs (London I 787), p.69.

26. Cockin, The Art q/ Deliiwirig Written Langunge. p.19. 27. Henry Siddons. Practical Illustrotions of Rhetorical Gtsturr (ind Action. by M . Engel.

28. Walker, Elements qf Elocution, ii.276. 29. Robert Lloyd comes closest to suggesting that players should genuinely 'feel' the

emotions they depict in 'Thc Actor' (1760): 'To this one standard make your just appeal, / Here likes the golden secret; learn tokel. / No fool, or monarch, happy. or distrest. / No actor pleases that is not possess'd.' (Robert Lloyd. Tlic Works or the Ihgl i sh Poets, f k ~ l l l C h n u r ~ ~ r to Cowper, ed. Alexander Chalmers. 21 vols (London 1810). xv.77.

Adap td to t l i ~ English Ilrmnn ( I 807).

30. Walker. Elenietits 01 Elomtion. ii.325. 31. Sheridan, British Edwatiorr. p.268.

Ei~Iiteerith-Centurll Actors' Maniinls 31

32 . Ohsc~rv~rtioris or1 M r Garri Aofiiig. i r i ii ktfoJr tu t l ic, Kiglit H m . The Earl of C'licslcrfidd

33. Thu Life and Death UJ David Garrick Esq. 2nd edn. by an Old Comedian (London T779). 34, Denis Diderot. Didurot's Writirigr or1 tlie T l i c w ~ r ~ , , ed. F. C. Green (Cambridge 1936). p . 2 7 ~ . 35. Roche, Tliu Plnger's Passion. p.138. 36. 'rim Newton. ' Sociogenesis of Emotions: A Historical Sociology?'. in Emotioiis in Socioil

LiJ?: Critical Tliarnes arid Contrnipornr!~ Lssiies. ed. Gillian Bendelow and Simon Williams (London 1998). p.67. 37. Margot Lyons, 'Limitations of Cultural Constructionism in the Study of Emotions'. in

Eincitimns in Social Life. ed. Redelow and Williams. p . 5 ~ . 38. Georg Simmel. 'The Sociology of the Senses'. in Siriiiiicl or1 Ciiltrrrc, ed. David Frisby and

Mike Featherstone (London 1997). p . 1 1 2 .

(1,;ndon 1758). p.23.