Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing by John H. Astington (review)

The publicists for John H. Astington’s Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time are keen to stress the book’s suitability for student use as an “up-to-date survey” that is “perfect for courses” (jacket cover). The aim and readership are thus evident from the outset, and consequently there is no polemical argument here; rather, Astington addresses the art of acting in England, synthesizing available theater history scholarship and revisiting historical documents pertaining to acting in order to provide students with a fresh view of the current state of the field. In brief, this survey draws on dramatic examples, such as Hamlet’s instructions to the actors, to arrive at a tentative conclusion about what was valued in acting by the early moderns; describes the institutionalized and less formal means of education and knowledge transmission; analyzes historical records that illuminate the complex relationships between the various participants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater; and utilizes all of the above in an attempt to recapture something of the essence of original playing conditions in early modern England.

Chapter 1 takes as its focus the “language that those most intimately involved in stage playing used about their art” (11), including the discourse of moral attacks, responses by contemporary playgoers, and the playwrights’ own criticisms, but mostly internal evidence from plays themselves. Shakespeare and Heywood are singled out because they were actors, as well as playwrights, but the real interest lies in the attention to a number of period-specific terms for acting, irrespective of the source of the words: shadowing, jesting, counterfeiting, limning, enacting, playing, and imitating. Occasional personal interjections make a welcome interruption to the survey of metatheatrical examples—for example, when Astington rebuts the notion that “passages in the plays of Shakespeare’s day which describe facial reaction in detail are amplifying what the audience could not perceive for themselves” with the observation “I find this altogether unlikely as a general rule, the more so after watching daylit performances in the rebuilt Globe on Bankside, London, where actors’ facial expressions can be seen quite well at a distance” (23). Astington attends to physical gestures via implied stage directions and contemporary responses, such as Henry Jackson’s notice of the expression on the dying Desdemona’s face at Oxford, 1610. He also draws on theories of acting and counterfeiting in general circulation during the early modern period. These include works on classical oration by Cicero and Quintilian and an account of how the three V’s of Latin (vox, vultus, and vita, or voice, face, and animation) were preserved as the two A’s of English (accent and action).

Chapter 2 examines the “connection between the performative arts of the stage and the select and remote realm of contemporary formal education” in terms of “scholarly achievement in oratory” (40). Astington demonstrates that “the model of dramatic performance as a teaching medium in early modern grammar schools in England was both widespread and persistent” (44). English comedies and Latin plays by Terence and Plautus were frequently staged to assist boys with their pronunciation and rhetorical skill (the unification of “verbal construction” and “vocal delivery” is cited as the point of strongest connection between the academic tradition and the professional stage) (45). He then explores the links between the various musical institutions in London, such as Paul’s Boys and Chapel Royal, demonstrating the (incidental) role of dramatic activity in promoting oratory skills and audacity. The chapter provides a helpful overview of the school and musical educations of boys in the late sixteenth century, and of the relationship between the choirs, the boy companies, and the adult companies at the turn of the century. “Theatre production in the universities,” Astington suggests, “was in certain respects a continuation of the school tradition, with the same pedagogical justification of its utility in building confidence and improving...