Chapter 4 - Baroque Acting

Summary

In this chapter I show how the job of the Baroque actor was to embellish the dramatic poem, and as it were to colour in the outline provided by the text. Actor and writer: Racine coached young actresses in exactly how to deliver his lines, but experienced actors wanted more autonomy. ‘Action’ in sacred oratory: Louis de Crésolles’ Jesuit treatise on acting atomized the body, and allowed Christians to think in a technical way about their performance methods, but Le Faucheur’s Protestant manual placed more emphasis on authenticity of feeling. Mondory and Corneille: A reading of Le Cid reveals the physicality and emotionalism expected of the celebrity lead actor, in a balance of power between actor and writer that would subsequently be eroded. The first manuals dedicated to stage acting: Perrucci and Gildon look back to seventeenth-century practice, as does Jean Poisson, the first professional actor to offer advice about performance to non-actors in a printed manual of 1717. Another actor, Luigi Riccoboni, in 1728 published a manifesto for novice Italian actors, warning them against French formalism and arguing for the primacy of feeling. He is less interested in the work of the voice, and more concerned with the way feeling operates on the body.