Recently returned from the University of Wittenberg, Hamlet thinks he knows what good acting is. He instructs the traveling players who have come to Elsinore to perform their parts with modest speech and restrained gesture, careful not to exceed either nature or the script. But what advice would those professional actors have given Hamlet if Shakespeare had allowed them to speak back? That is the driving question of David Wiles's book. Ranging across premodern Europe (with a focus on England and France), Wiles seeks to recover the “subaltern voice” of the professional actor (2). That voice, he argues, has been obscured by centuries of theorizing that privilege the authoritative playwright at the expense of the player's craft. Wiles looks for the actor's voice not only in acting manuals but also in scripts and sermons, letters and treatises, promptbooks and other playhouse manuscripts. The theatrical techniques that he uncovers vary across Europe and across the early modern period. Yet Wiles's central claim is that premodern actors shared a rhetorical method, a method founded on the precepts of Roman rhetoric. The primary aim of this method was not to produce interiority or consistent character but to move the audience's emotions through embodied speech. Over nine chapters, Wiles rigorously historicizes the rhetorical acting method, tracing its permutations—and eventual decline—across several centuries of European theater history.
The first chapter uses Hamlet to set the scene. Wiles views Hamlet as an “aspirant academic playwright” divorced from the realities of professional playing (20). In his second chapter, Wiles returns to antiquity. From the classical rhetoricians—Cicero above all—Wiles draws out a vocabulary and set of techniques for visualizing and conjuring scenes, for moving the audience's emotions, and for understanding the physiology of feeling. The next three chapters trace those acting techniques from sixteenth-century England to eighteenth-century France. Wiles first explores the Erasmian “speech-as-body metaphor” that made Renaissance preacher and actor alike the living, breathing voice of the (dramatic) creator (99). The Baroque Parisian actor, by contrast, aimed to embellish the poetic script through the expressive resources of voice and body. These embodied rhetorical methods persisted and continued to evolve in Enlightenment France, Wiles shows, even as Hamletesque intellectuals like Diderot scorned the knowhow of professional players. In the second half of the book, each chapter reprises the overall trajectory (Renaissance to Enlightenment) while tracking a single aspect of the rhetorical method: emotion, declamation, gesture, and training. Wiles returns to Hamlet intermittently throughout, finally summing up the play as “the story of a man learning to act, and fencing provides its resolution”—a skill that teaches Hamlet, as it did Elizabethan actors, to see “any action or utterance as a mode of acting upon the world” (318).
While Wiles generally strikes a skillful balance between broad-brush cultural history and careful close reading, I occasionally found the narrative a little too schematic. I am not sure that the dichotomy between Protestant inspiration and Catholic technique has quite as much explanatory power as Wiles attributes to it. Nor am I entirely convinced that Protestantism is to blame for the “English resistance to theorizing acting” (107). Indeed, Wiles overlooks a group of Elizabethan writers who did theorize acting, if in a highly tendentious fashion: the antitheatricalists. Stephen Gosson's claim that players “by the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde” sounds very much like the goal of Wiles's rhetorical actors (The Schoole of Abuse [1579], sig. B7r).
Yet Wiles takes care to probe the complexities of his sources. He resists homogenizing the competing theories and techniques that made up the rhetorical acting method, and he remains alert to the religious, scientific, philosophical, and political crosscurrents swirling around and through the professional theater. Perhaps most dazzling are his readings of dramatic text. Joining imaginative flair with meticulous scholarship, Wiles conjures the “sensuous movement” of the Renaissance actor, the “acoustical brushstrokes” of French declamation, the “twitching muscles and jangling nerves” mapped out in an eighteenth-century Hamlet promptbook (89, 243, 246). Wiles pushes Hamlet (and even Hamlet) into the background, making way for the multiplicity of actors’ voices ventriloquized by this learned and lively study.
