Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment

Writing about the history of emotions is akin to skating on thin ice, doubly so if the emotions in question are those expressed during theatrical performances played long before the advent of audio or visual recording technology. In this case, Glyn McGillivray’s Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century: Communities of Sentiment, part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions series, is a fine contribution to the kind of publishers’ grouping of thematic concepts that has done so much to promote research into disciplinary subsets that might otherwise have remained ignored. With chapter 1 being introductory (more of that later), chapters 2 and 3 are substantially about David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Chapters 4 and 5 are principally discussions of eighteenth-century theatres examined as enabling environments where emotions could be communicated, to and fro, between players and audience. There then follows a conclusion. If this gives a summary of the book’s content, with its sifting of many eyewitness accounts of performances, the chapters on Garrick and Siddons make McGillivray’s study a first port of call for anyone wishing to reconstruct the details of their acting styles at the micro level of their delivery of individual lines.However, as outlined in chapter 1, the book also sets out a much broader theoretical framework. This draws on the work of Arjun Appadurai, principally referencing “Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu,” which describes how Indian practices of social gesture embody communal emotion in performative discourses that are understood and reciprocated both by those who activate such gestural conventions and by their audiences/communities. Such continuing practices of praise and approval acknowledge and renew existing cultural bonds. As Appadurai puts it, in Indian Hindu culture there exists a “public negotiation of certain gestures and responses’ [sic] between the person praising and the person being praised … [that] if successful, creates a ‘community of sentiment’” (qtd. 16). Or as McGillivray writes: “Appadurai’s analysis of praise in Hindu India introduces the idea that emotions are not things we have but are practices we do” (17). Charles Macklin, a figure regularly referenced, parallels such perspectives in his advice to actors: “No; he must suit his looks, tones, gestures, and manners to the character:—the suiting the character to the powers of the Actor, is imposture” (qtd. 15). One implication of such a perspective, although McGillivray does not put it so crudely, is that actors follow where the audience leads.The impact of this approach is that, if it is correct, it essentially slows down rates of change in acting technique. Gesture, voice, and the heightened attention given to critically placed dramatic moments were envisaged by performers and audiences alike as susceptible to only gradual development. McGillivray argues that continuity rather than revolution is a major structural characteristic of the historical development of acting style and, by implication, a persistent constraint on theatrical expression. The historical outline for this argument is set out in chapter 2, particularly in the section “The Whig View of Theatrical History.” McGillivray notes that many eyewitness accounts of Garrick’s acting were written toward the end of his career when his celebrity had already been acknowledged. The same is broadly true of Sarah Siddons, whose elusive voice Judith Pascoe has written about, and McGillivray maintains a fascinating debate with Pascoe’s work. There were no moments of overwhelming transition à la Thomas Kuhn. Quite explicitly, in Garrick’s case this means junking “what Joseph Roach describes as ‘a theatrical version of what historians of science would term a revolutionary paradigm shift’” and acknowledging instead that “retrospective accounts of [Garrick’s] acting published after his death espoused Whig perspectives” (35, 41). That is, evolution is by audience consent, and that consent is primarily linked to contingent emotional changes in the spectators, not exclusively to the genius of the actors. The idea of an Enlightenment progression in acting may be illusory.Part of the evidence supporting such revisionism is presented by McGillivray’s repeated focus on what he identifies as theatrical “points,” the contemporary term for moments or sections in dramatic texts where the interpretation of passions received abrupt heightening in the actors’ spoken delivery: “Audiences … eagerly awaited the moments of high passion or ‘points’ in a play; these were connected by the ‘level scenes’, which were largely expository and called only for calm discourse’” (77). In the case of Garrick’s acting, the principal point McGillivray examines is the ghost scene in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. By collating several spectator sources as well as the evidence of the visual record, he argues that the styles adopted by actors at these crucial points were regulated by the audience’s expectation of how such scenes should (or could) be performed. In other words, the performers negotiated a continuous trade-off with the audience, introducing new interpretations of roles slowly and cautiously. The critical twist McGillivray brings is that it is not so much whether eyewitness descriptions of Garrick’s ghost scene concur in their detail as whether their diversity recovers the degree of consistency of the audience’s emotional reactions. Citing eyewitness accounts left by the German theatregoer and scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, his conclusion may seem to verge on paradox: “It is the material and social circumstances of Drury Lane in the late eighteenth century which allow and constrain how Lichtenberg and his fellow spectators feel what they feel in response to Garrick” (181). The intimacy of the playhouse auditorium, in all its material and social complexity, optimized the communality of shared emotions. However, as McGillivray nicely puts it, these spectators are not like ourselves but distanced by time and space: “Not too close and not too near, these historical foreigners resemble us in many ways even though they are not really the same” (3).Introducing such defamiliarizing perspectives on eighteenth-century performance requires highly credible primary sources. One of the best eyewitness accounts McGillivray uses is George Joseph Bell’s copy of Macbeth with its annotations documenting Sarah Siddons’s performances of Lady Macbeth (c. 1809). Marginal dashes (written, one notices, on a specially interleaved copy in Elizabeth Inchbald’s edition) recorded how Siddons slowed her delivery and even repeated a word for emphasis: “Lady Macbeth exclaims, ‘O, never “_ _ _ _ _ _ / (never) Shall, sun, that, morrow, see”!’” (qtd. 99). To this notation, Bell added a more elaborated description of her appearance in the sleepwalking scene: “‘her eye steadfast’” in “‘full deep voice of fixed resolve’” (99). Bell’s annotated texts are a gold mine for McGillivray, and rightly so. Deposited in the Folger Shakespeare Library (though now also available through the Adam Mathews online editions),1 they are still misleadingly designated as Shakespeare prompt books (which this one is definitely not). Bell’s scrupulous annotations regarding Siddons’s acting (he was a lawyer and legal scholar) bear resemblance in their exquisite detail to Lichtenberg’s descriptions of Garrick’s acting style. For some reason, testimonies from German visitors are particularly favored. Apart from Lichtenberg, these include C. A. G. Goede, Friedrich von Günd, Karl Gottlob Küttner, and Friedrich Wendeborn. Some of the more extended descriptions of acting tend to come from writers such as William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Henry Crabb Robinson, all well connected to established English literary circles, although the art historian Anna Jameson is an interesting find and there are several brief comments by actresses about their friends and colleagues. Although it may simply be a gap in the historical record, the paucity of extended commentary by women on performance is quite noticeable.This methodology (of collating disparate spectator reports) is not without its incidental problems. Noted but passed over without remark is that in 1788 Horace Walpole described Siddons’s voice, disapprovingly, as “‘hollow,’” yet, if one fast-forwards to c. 1809, Bell was evidently impressed by her “‘hollow whisper’” in Lady Macbeth (qtd. 101). One assumes that Walpole, Bell, and those well-to-do German visitors took the best seats available, shielding themselves from the noisier elements of the eighteenth-century theatre crowd. Even so, while the sincerity of their records is not in doubt, their aesthetic reactions to the voice they heard—and they all heard the same voice—clearly differed. Nevertheless, assessing the impact of the materiality of the acting and the auditorium space is something McGillivary does not evade. Indeed, his chapter 5 is probably the best account available of the physicality of contemporary theatres, the lighting included. He gathers information from a plethora of correspondence, diaries, and journals about the experience of a night in the auditorium. Whether one considers it a strength or a weakness, this chapter is centered on eighteenth-century playhouses’ retention—at least before the renovations of the 1790s—of the intimacy that was the essential vehicle for conveying actors’ representation of heightened emotions in dramas primarily based on spoken dialogue.There are limitations, however, to these approaches. These concern not only the status of emotions as empirical objects of study (e.g., the sheer feasibility of retrieving historical emotion) but also the claims made about the book’s scope. For example, some might question how widely, outside elite seating areas, those often compacted, boisterous theatregoers were capable of being exquisitely receptive to the tragedies the book overwhelmingly selects for reception analysis. Yet McGillivray is unequivocal: “The occupants of pit, boxes, and lower gallery aspired to be seen as men and women of feeling who possessed a nervous sensibility so acute, they could not help but respond to the pathos being depicted onstage. These emotional practices were both communal and performative” (119). When discussing the physical dimensions of Drury Lane’s stage and how its size may have been particularly conducive to the proximity to the audience Garrick and Siddons enjoyed, one suddenly remembers that key parts of the book are concerned with just this one playhouse (164). That is, the focus is quite narrowly drawn even though the resulting claims are not. This temporal and spatial compression of the “communities of sentiment” under consideration is problematic. Not commented on, for example, although the dates are cited, is that Siddons’s Drury Lane debut (as Portia) preceded Garrick’s farewell performance when he played Don Felix in Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714). Siddons and Garrick trod, quite literally, the same wooden boards and were programmed on the same bill several times in early 1776. The planks of Drury Lane’s stage would appear to circumscribe the radius of the communities of sentiment proposed in the book’s subtitle. This is a rather less sweeping prospect than the one overtly presented: “[W]hen actors and audiences interacted the ‘communities of sentiment’ they formed were based on a shared understanding of the gestural and vocal conventions used to communicate emotions’” (191).Again, one keeps coming back to the ambition of McGillivray’s thesis: “Unlike Appadurai’s Indians involved with praise performances, eighteenth-century English audiences would assume a correspondence between these outward expressions and some kind of inner emotional world of the actor; a ‘community of sentiment’ in a European cultural context does not automatically erase subjectivity” (192). It is not that McGillivray is unaware of or even uncomfortable with highlighting the paradoxes of performance history. The question of how one can ever know the “inner emotional world of the actor” is disarmingly answered in his striking retelling (in the conclusion) of an anecdote related by the actor Thomas King. King recalled an incident when he played in King Lear with Garrick: “‘[I]n the middle of a most passionate and afflicting part, and when the house was drowned in tears, he turned his head round to me, and putting his tongue in his cheek, whispered ‘Damme, Tom, it’ll do!’” (qtd. 193). In McGillivray’s analysis, even in those “most passionate and afflicting” moments, however often punctuated by “his tongue in his cheek,” Garrick’s Lear embodies a preexisting matrix of equivalent emotions already present in the Drury Lane auditorium: “When audiences let loose floods of tears in response to Garrick’s Lear and Siddons’ Jane Shore their grief emerged from a complex interaction amongst what the actors offered through their performances, their own emotional styles, and the environment which created and made such encounters possible” (194).Perhaps paradoxically, to McGillivray’s credit Appadurai’s communities of sentiment model is not quite sufficient to bear the weight of the data he brings to it. If a slower rate of cultural change was the trade-off innovatively minded actors needed to negotiate with their audiences, then Britain’s increasing global reach, accelerated after the collapse of Stewart irredentism in 1746, initiated a new wave of dramas demanding portrayals of people from different races and religions. At the very least, the absence of non-White performers necessitated techniques for falsifying the complexions of the races those dramas sought to represent. Yet as McGillivray writes about Siddons: “[T]he roles she played in the 1782–3 season stayed in her repertoire for the next thirty years: Isabella, Jane Shore, Belvidera, Calista, and Euphrasia” (4). Whether her favorites remained best suited to reflect perceptible change in moral sentiment beyond the auditorium is questionable. On 22 February 1786, for example, Covent Garden programmed Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), a show featuring not only a returning Jamaica planter served by “negroes” (i.e., White performers in blackface) but also Captain Dudley, a soldier down on his luck seeking a posting to “James’s Fort, in Senegambia,” one of the most notorious of the British-held West African slaving ports (28). The next night, one could stroll across to Drury Lane and watch Siddons in Thomas Southerne’s Isabella; or, The Fatal Marriage (1694). Did audiences weep with Siddons yet remain undisturbed by The West Indian? Sympathizing with Callista’s personal predicament was a very different emotional proposition to negotiating The West Indian’s foundational comic conceit that people who bought and sold other human beings were extremely rich and living in London. Are not these plays components in a rather more complex assemblage of theatrical sentiment, one part stable or declining and another part slowly emerging?In short, the worst that can be said is that Appadurai’s communities of sentiment model somewhat lacks a theory of emergence. One might almost be tempted to paraphrase its essential dynamic as “fluid yet frozen.” Nevertheless, McGillivray’s turn toward examining the audience as an active theatrical constituency is hugely welcome. A willingness at least to attempt to identify individual audience responses should be a routine strategy for assessing the robustness of any hermeneutic model applied to Georgian theatre. Quite clearly, some members of the audience recorded the phenomenology of the acting they witnessed in scrupulous detail and even tried to analyze their own emotional responses. It cannot be left to intermediate sources, such as caricature prints or the reports of journalists/reviewers, to simply backfill vague suppositions about contemporary audiences as if they were indiscriminate mass. As McGillivray demonstrates, they were arguably the most important people in the building. This is a hugely welcome book. It asks many difficult questions and sets a gold standard for understanding Georgian audiences.