Chapter 7 - Declamation

Summary

The term ‘declamation’ shifted its meaning from a training and display exercise undertaken by orators to a mode of speech used by tragic actors. By the end of the seventeenth century, the logic of grammar had suppressed the vagaries of orality, and the term ‘declamation’ served to define that which separated dramatic speech from the speech of everyday life. Because speech is driven by the breath and produced by the body, the thought or idea expressed by the actor could not be dissociated from their feeling or passion. In the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth century the dramatic text was conceived as sonorous matter, a visual sign of corporeal actions. The second phase follows from words becoming the arbitrary signs of ideas. From the perspective of a modern taste for self-expression, the earlier conception of the text as a score places unwelcome constraints upon the actor’s freedom.