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

231 Pages·2023·5.984 MB·English

by  Glen McGillivray

PALGRAVE STUDIES
IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS
Actors, Audiences,
and Emotions in the
Eighteenth Century
Communities of Sentiment
Glen McGillivray
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions
Series Editors
William M. Reddy
Department of History
Duke University
Durham, NC, USA
Erin Sullivan
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions includes work that redefines
past definitions of emotions; re-conceptualizes theories of emotional
‘development’ through history; undertakes research into the genesis and
effects of mass emotions; and employs a variety of humanities disciplines
and methodologies. In this way it produces a new interdisciplinary history
of the emotions in Europe between 1100 and 2000.
Glen McGillivray
Actors, Audiences, and
Emotions in the
Eighteenth Century
Communities of Sentiment
Glen McGillivray
University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions
ISBN 978-3-031-22898-8 ISBN 978-3-031-22899-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22899-5
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To Joan Mary McGillivray 1930–2019
A
cknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge that I wrote this book on the land of the
Gadigal people of Eora, land that was never ceded: it was, is, and always
will be, Aboriginal land. I pay my respects to the Gadigal and other First
Nations people in whose lands I have spent my time completing this
project.
Many people have contributed in ways big and small to this project.
First, I would like to thank the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) whose first conference in
2011 encouraged my foray into this research. As an Associate Investigator,
my first scoping trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library (FSL) in 2014 was
funded by the CHE, which likewise contributed to my research there the
following year. A longer research period was made possible by a Short-
Term Fellowship the FSL awarded me in 2015; this allowed me to spend
three additional months with the Folger’s archive of eighteenth-century
theatre resources. I enjoyed the other fellows’ collegiality, and I thank the
Folger librarians for their patience and help. I want to thank, also, my copy
editor extraordinaire Michael Gnat for his meticulous work.
I am grateful to my home university, the University of Sydney, which
has further supported my research. I had two periods of research leave: the
first to take up my fellowship in Washington and the second to complete
a first draft of this book. I also received funding from the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences for a month’s research in the British Library in 2016.
In addition I was supported by the School of Literature, Art and Media
Research Support Scheme to employ Gabriella Edelstein as a research
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viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
assistant in 2014. Thank you, Gabby, for your hard work! Such institu-
tional support has been critical to this research.
I thank also Professor Emerita Jane R. Goodall, my first reader, who
read my penultimate draft before its initial submission and gave me helpful
and insightful comments on it. I appreciate the feedback I have received
on works-in-progress from my colleagues and graduate students at the
Friday Research Seminar held by my home department, Theatre and
Performance Studies, at the University of Sydney. Thanks also to my friend
and peer mentor, Kate Rossmanith, at Macquarie University who has
encouraged and advised me through the writing of this book.
A part of Chap. 3 appeared as ‘Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the
Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons’ in Theatre Notebook 71, no.
1 (2017): 2–20, and I published an earlier account of Lichtenberg’s dis-
cussion of David Garrick’s Hamlet (see Chap. 5) as ‘Motions of the Mind:
Transacting Emotions on the Eighteenth-Century Stage’ in Restoration
and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 28, no. 2 (2013): 5–24. I have
developed my analysis of emotions in the eighteenth-century theatre using
the work of Arjun Appadurai both through that article and ‘“Suiting
Forms to Their Conceit”: Emotion and Convention in Eighteenth-
Century Tragic Acting’ in Theatre Survey 59, no. 2 (2018): 169–89,
where I introduced the work of Monique Scheer. I thank the publishers
for their permission to republish.
This book has been a decade in the making, and its arguments have
been honed by the insightful comments I have received on my work from
the reviewers for journal submissions (whether successful or unsuccessful)
and from colleagues at conferences; especially those at the CHE confer-
ences in 2011 and 2013, and in the CHE collaboratory ‘The Voice and
Histories of Emotion 1500–1800’ in 2014. I thank, also, the anonymous
reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful criticism, which has made this
a much better book.
Lastly, I want to offer my love and thanks to my family: to my gentle
canine companion, Nell (now deceased), who thought working from
home was a wonderful idea; and especially to Nicky—you are my
foundation.
I have dedicated this book to my mother, Joan Mary McGillivray, who
instilled in me an early love for the theatre but did not live to see this book
published. As a historian, I am sensitive to spans of time. My mother’s life
spanned nearly ninety years; when she was born in rural Victoria, her
brother rode a horse to find a doctor; before she died, she was accessing
the Internet via her iPad.
A b
bout the ook
Actors, Audiences and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century examines how
audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre in the
middle decades of the century. This period was bookended by two great
stars of the century, David Garrick and Sarah Siddons, whose acting is the
focus of this study. Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of emo-
tions, it challenges the view that emotional interaction between actors and
audiences depends on empathy, or the idea that what an actor feels, an
audience must feel too. It analyses how actors emotionally communicated
emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences inter-
preted these performances and mobilised and regulated their own emo-
tional responses. In the eighteenth-century theatre, audiences carefully
appraised how actors used their faces, bodies and voices in relation to
accepted conventions, and their appreciation of actors’ performances was
closely tied to this. Significantly, the book explores how the theatre space
itself mediated behaviours, arguing that the analysis of emotions must
include not only how they are embodied, but also how they are emplaced.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Playing to Type 35
3 Communicating Emotions: The Arts of the Actor 73
4 Regulating and Mobilising Emotions: The Audience 117
5 Mediating Emotions in Place 149
6 Conclusion: “Damme, Tom, it’ll do” 189
Plays 197
References 201
Index 217
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