The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities; What Would Garrick Do, Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century

Laura Engel’s The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities is intended to be “read as a visual exhibition” (3). In a short monograph, structured on the Cambridge Elements model, it offers a wealth of information about female performativity in the long eighteenth century.Arrestingly, the introduction opens with an ending—Nell Gwyn’s epilogue following John Dryden’s Tyrannick Love, Or the Royal Martyr (1669), in which she had just starred as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (who declined sex with a monarch). In the epilogue she stars as herself—Charles II’s playful mistress conveying the popular spirit of Restoration theatre and what Joseph Roach has called the “aftermath” that lingers after presentation (63–66). Gwyn’s portrait, and other images of influential eighteenth-century women, their afterlives, and their connections with each other are explored in the following four sections, which are helpfully divided with subheadings.Engel’s choice of pictures supports her discussions. It is easy to agree that the pearls, traditional symbols of purity and prosperity, as depicted on eighteenth-century actresses, female royalty, courtesans, female aristocrats, writers, and artists, become more ornate as the century progressed. This highlighted women’s increased visibility, status, and agency. Further connotations of fertility, the exotic, and empire are exemplified in Pierre Mignard’s (1662) painting of a Black girl wearing a pearl choker, offering Louise de Kéroualle, who maternally embraces her, a conch shell full of pearls. Kéroualle’s thrall as King Charles II’ s mistress might be suggested by a choker evoking a slave’s collar (16).Mignard’s portrait is reproduced in The Art of the Actress in black and white, as are all the images in this book. They occupy half a page at most and may show more clearly in digital versions of the book (which I have not examined). In the printed edition, details that color makes evident are somewhat obscured, making words on the drawings themselves faint as well as small. Nevertheless, the images as printed are certainly sufficient to guide the reader to better reproductions on the internet. The book is fully referenced although, inevitably, several URLs no longer function. Some go by variant titles, but I found that the algorithms of the best-known search engines will usually make them appear. Some of the pictures discussed in the book are only verbally described.Engel draws attention to Restoration artists, Joan Palmer Carlile (1606–79) and Mary Beale (1633–99), and poet and artist Anne Killigrew (d. 1685), who painted themselves wearing pearl chokers. Such jewelry may only have existed as examples of painterly skill. Faked pearls might increase the value of the pictures and their creators and connect them with women whose real jewelry existed as portable capital, such as Margaret Hughes. Hughes, an actress and Prince Rupert’s mistress, loaned a pearl necklace to Gwyn for use in a portrait and then sold it to her. That necklace had once belonged to Prince Rupert’s mother, Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. If, as Engel reports, Gwyn paid four thousand pounds for the necklace, the pearls would have been natural (15). Pearls were cultured in live mussels in China as early as the thirteenth century, but the practice was not widespread until the nineteenth century.The consensus is that jewelry worn onstage was “paste”—beads fashioned from ground glass, but Engel suggests that wealthy women sometimes loaned their jewelry to actresses. This prompts consideration of what was gained by such theatrical connections—possibly association with a fashionable trend set from the stage. The heavy pearl necklaces in portraits of Hannah Pritchard (27) by Simon François Ravenet (1765), Elizabeth Farren by Johan Joseph Zoffany (1780), and Sarah Siddons (1787) as The Tragic Muse (26) by Joshua Reynolds might first have been seen on Hermione in contemporary productions of The Winter’s Tale (25). Engel notes the resemblance of these full-length portraits to classical sculptures, also suggested in the classically influenced portraits and self-portraits of Angelica Kauffmann and the sculptures and amateur theatricals of Anne Damer. Engel finds “a shared narrative of female solidarity and emotion” in Kauffmann’s Cleopatra Adorning the Tomb of Mark Anthony (1769–70) and Damer’s sculptural relief of the death of Cleopatra displayed at the Boydell Gallery in 1789 (44).The final two sections comment on men’s imaging of women. “Mary Anne’s Muff—Actresses and Satire,” focuses on Mary Anne Clarke, the Duke of York’s mistress. Thomas Rowlandson’s 1809 etching, The Road to Preferment though Clarke’s Passage, responds to Clarke’s arraignment for trading army promotions and shows her in a cockaded hat (54–55). Engel shows that the hat recalls that of another caricatured royal mistress, Dorothy Jordan, in the 1791 portrait by John Hoppner.The epilogue to the book considers unfinished portraits of Elizabeth Inchbald; Sarah Siddons’ daughter, Maria; and Lady Emilia Cahir by Thomas Lawrence, asking questions that might usefully apply to other artists and subjects. One answer from Lawrence is his inscription, “painted by Thomas Lawrence in a fit of folly,” written on his unfinished portrait of Emilia, Lady Cahir, Later Countess of Glengall. It was intended to show three different faces of Emilia, who had been his leading lady in a Bentley Priory amateur production of Inchbald’s Wedding Day (1794). The canvas, begun in 1803, shows only two of those faces. He abandoned the work in 1805, when he started a portrait of Isabella Wolff. Finished in 1815, the Wolff portrait presents her reading about and posed as Michelangelo’s Delphic Sybil. The painting is less Lawrence’s objectification of a female sitter than her own fashioning of her identity as a self-styled art connoisseur. (68).In What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth-Century, James Harriman-Smith addresses the fashioning of identity for stage performance. Harriman-Smith’s book is aimed at theatre practitioners as much as theatre historians and offers a fresh approach to understanding the cultural values of the eighteenth century. As the title suggests, David Garrick’s context and reports on his work are referenced throughout this exploration of how theories and practices of drama ascribed to the eighteenth-century might help twenty-first-century actors learn “how to express different states of being” (208).In part 1 of the book, there are nine chapters reflecting on the skills, principles of expression, and cross-disciplinary knowledge that an eighteenth-century actor was expected to embody. Harriman-Smith explains the importance of “sensibility” and the audience’s taste for an actor’s display of “passions” in key speeches from plays—particularly those by, and adapted from, Shakespeare, which Garrick staged. Harriman-Smith’s work is particularly valuable as it reports on his own findings from facilitating drama workshops based on eighteenth-century acting theory and practice. Workshop participants were of various ages and career stages in several different areas of England. Harriman-Smith collaborated with each workshop facilitator and led practical exercises.Part 2 is a manual, outlining fourteen of the exercises explored in these workshops and recommending how they might be combined and sequenced. Some exercises were run as competitions, judged democratically, and reflections and discussions of individual experience are integral. The appendix to the book includes photographs of classical statues used for imitating “attitudes,” gestures made by performers as indicators to the audience of who to watch on a stage that was shared with privileged spectators until 1762. Harriman-Smith also includes a list of seventy-six different emotions (some expressed through gesture alone) drawn from James Burgh’s Art of Speaking (1761). Each emotion listed encourages the actor to think about its external and particular effect on the body.Garrick once staged the effect of changing emotions on his face at a Parisian dinner party (23). From this comes an exercise for the facial muscles and imagination, which Harriman-Smith calls “Garrick’s Scale,” although it drew on a performance by the celebrated French actress Clairon and probably commedia dell’ arte practices. Garrick had witnessed Clairon’s performance and wrote about it, describing the power of genius but opining that she lacked it (157). He was also dismissive about men writing about his craft (3). His satirical “Essay on Acting” and four-line rhyme, “The Art of Acting,” suggest that if he taught the lively “natural” acting style he was credited with launching it was in performance. Harriman-Smith also sources exercises from the writings of John Hill, Aaron Hill, Leman Thomas Rede, Charles Macklin, and others with experience of theatre and of oratory. Today’s theatre practitioners may have encountered similar exercises. The persistence of tradition in theatre discipline and pedagogy suggests that the requirement for emotional and mental awareness and physical and vocal skill that an actor needs to perform has not changed. What has certainly changed is the mode of rehearsal.Eighteenth-century company rehearsals were usually limited to mornings, running through plays, afterpieces, prologues, and epilogues that might need to be performed that same week. Because paper was expensive, an eighteenth-century actor rehearsed “parts” from scripts only showing his or her dialogue and the last lines of the previous speaker’s dialogue. Harriman-Smith adapts this to an exercise that should promote listening, called “Cue Script.” However, the pressures of preparing so many ensemble pieces make it likely that exercises to develop skill were practiced alone or in a “nursery” for actors—like that run by Charles Macklin. When Macklin instructed Miss Ambrose and Mr. Philips to approach repeatedly and greet each other with the same words in different styles, always using their own names, he might have wanted them to explore what they could bring to drama from the “self.” Nevertheless, as Harriman-Smith points out, Hannah Pritchard was praised for losing herself in a character. However that may be, “Macklin’s Garden,” as adapted by Harriman-Smith, certainly seems an excellent creative warm-up exercise for acting groups today.As a solo performer, writing and performing my own scripts, I use exercises much like Harriman-Smith’s “False Tone” (mismatching tone to sentiment), “Emphasis,” and “Five Rooms,” in which the same speech is given as if in different environments. These practices enliven my line learning and explore vocal possibilities and interrogations of the text. Harriman-Smith proposes “attitude” to encourage attention to body language and the effect on voice, regardless of the body shape or gender which eighteenth-century practitioners may have assigned to a pose. “Proteus,” and “Scenario” are two of Harriman-Smith’s developmental exercises which may inspire improvisations as background to existing plays as well as new performances and scripts. “The Hiss,” an exercise during which one person delivers memorized lines while being heckled mercilessly by fellow actors, is good preparation for stand-up comedy. Harriman-Smith draws a parallel with the disruptions from the audience that twentieth-century director Augusto Boal encourages. Boal invites the audience to comment during a performance, which may change how a piece proceeds in creative and more relevant ways. I have seen this working well with children and young adults.Although he is keen to hear how others apply his exercises, the feedback Harriman-Smith has collated so far shows the exercises to be stimulating and informative for group dynamics and cohesion. What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth-Century is a wide-ranging book. By taking eighteenth-century acting theory and practice as its focus and considering how those practices might work today, it will stand out to academic theatre historians. Both Laura Engel and James Harriman-Smith are indicative of the range of responses and perspectives eighteenth-century theatre history has gathered in a still developing field. There is much to enjoy and learn.