Inventer l’acteur. Émotions et spectacle dans l’Europe des lumières by Laurence Marie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventer l’acteur. Émotions et spectacle dans l’Europe des lumières by Laurence Marie Jeffrey S. Ravel Laurence Marie, Inventer l’acteur. Émotions et spectacle dans l’Europe des lumières (Paris: Sorbonne université presses, 2019). Pp 477; 25 color illus. €26 paper. This admirable book provides a panoramic view of changes in acting theory in western and central Europe from the mid-eighteenth century into the early-nineteenth century. Laurence Marie focuses primarily on printed treatises on acting theory during this period, supplemented by contemporary assessments [End Page 406] of celebrity actors. The major strength of this work, particularly in the context of increasingly transnational approaches to Enlightenment Studies, is that it does not focus exclusively on one national context. English and French-language texts and English and French-speaking actors play the leads in the story Marie tells, but there is also important material from the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, from the Italian peninsula, and, to a lesser extent, from Spain. Juxtaposing developments in these various areas over two generations suggests new perspectives on the stages of the Enlightenment and the Revolutionary period at the end of the century. Marie’s tale begins around 1750, when new assessments of acting styles began to appear in several European languages. These texts shared a common, innovative insight: critics and audiences were increasingly attentive to the physical aspects of stage representation, as opposed to the oratorical and declamatory styles of acting they had previously valued. In other words, pantomime, tableaux, and the embodiment of the dramatic text by stage performers were now appreciated as much or more than the recitation of printed theatrical texts. These issues famously led to debates among French theorists and critics about the nature of theatrical representation. Did actors truly experience the emotions they portrayed on stage, or did they coolly, rationally simulate them? In other words, were they faking it, and if so, was that desirable from a moral and technical point of view? Marie demonstrates that theorists in England and across the continent considered this issue, often drawing their examples from the performances of leading players in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and elsewhere. Furthermore, performers such as David Garrick, Henri Lekain, Michel Sticotti, and Conrad Eckhof traveled broadly during the period. They performed in many public, private, and courtly venues across the continent, engaging with authors, audiences, and critics in ways that led to evolution in acting styles. In a second phase of her story, beginning roughly in the 1780s and continuing into the first decades of the 1800s, theorists and performers moved beyond earlier questions of corporality on the stage to assess the ability of actors to evoke notions of beauty based in nature. Some critics advocated for the “beautiful,” or beau idéal, over a “truthful” replication of reality, while others looked to painting, sculpture, or music for representational techniques that might be adapted to the stage. Some even urged a return to the oratorical model of the pre-1750 period, wagering that words themselves were still sufficiently evocative to sustain the theatrical illusion. Throughout, Marie insists that there was no single, triumphant mode of theatrical representation that satisfied all audiences and critics, nor should there have been for an art form as closely allied with lived experience as the stage. Different modes emerged at different times and places in a dynamic, dialectical process that suited the most widespread form of public entertainment in the eighteenth century. In her conclusion, Marie sums up her investigation by reminding us of the general movement from theatrical imitation to artistic expression. It was a trend that increasingly shifted emphasis from the author to the player, and from the reader to the spectator. In this newly emerging performative space, players became celebrities, as Antoine Lilti has demonstrated elsewhere, and paying spectators with particular political, social, and cultural agendas became more important arbiters of nightly performances.1 In a coda, Marie provocatively asserts that modern debates about the merits of realism versus illusion in the theater, and about acting techniques, first took shape in the period she has studied. This book, as important as it is in advancing our transnational understanding...