Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth Century Acting

Abstract

In an earlier paper, I undertook to show that the style of acting in the serious drama of the eighteenth century closely paralleled the general interest of the century in the imitation of nature—of nature methodized. Four principal “schools,” varying in technique but not in purpose, were examined: Betterton, the Cibber-Booth-Wilks Triumvirate, Macklin-Garrick, and Kemble-Siddons. The fourth school, with which the paper arbitrarily ended, extends well beyond the eighteenth century and provides a natural introduction to the study of acting techniques in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Like the eighteenth, the nineteenth century is primarily a century of great actors rather than great plays, and it is to the actors, rather than to the playwrights, that we must turn to find the theatrical expression of the spirit of the times. Edmund Kean and William C. Macready represent the earlier and later stages of romanticism as accurately as Shelley and Tennyson, and Victorianism is as plainly marked in Alfred Wigan and Irving as in Ruskin or Trollope.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.