Early Modern Actors & Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body by Evelyn Tribble (review)

One way to index how innovative Evelyn Tribble's book on early modern acting is would be to look at, well, the index. One would seek there in vain for entries on Harley Granville-Barker, Alfred Harbage, B.L. Joseph, Marvin Rosenberg, Bernard Beckerman, et al: the usual suspects in what Joseph Roach once called 'the tiresome debate over the relative formalism or naturalism of seventeenth-century acting style'.¹ Rather than further fatigue this weary debate, Tribble, mercifully, does not even mention it. Instead, she explores acting where it lives, in the skilled application of the human body to histrionic occasions. In other words, this exciting book ignores meaningless quibbles over whether early modern acting was 'natural' or 'formal' and looks, instead, at what actors do with their feet while dancing, their hands while fencing, and their bodies while clowning. As such, it resets the conversation about seventeenth-century acting from taxonomic (and largely literary) terms like 'naturalism', 'formalism', 'presentational', or 'rhetorical' and comes to grips with what early modern actors actually did when they took the stage, which was far more than simply 'speak the speech'. The book's subtitle is Thinking with the Body, and it fulfills its promise by thinking about the bodies that peopled the early modern stage.

Early Modern Actors & Shakespeare's Theatre must be viewed within Tribble's larger program, which has been to examine early modern acting through the lens of dynamic 'enskillment'. Drawing effectively and engagingly upon neuroscientific insights into cognitive development, Tribble is interested in 'corporeal eloquence' as a way to think about acting both in the past and in the present (102). This book therefore joins Tribble's earlier excursions into distributed cognition (2005, 2011) as well as her work on enskillment (2009, 2016).² Taken together, these books and articles offer nothing less than a paradigm-shifting rethink of our critical encounters with the boys and men who first gave flesh to the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and others.

In her latest work Tribble organizes her efforts around what first seems little more than a conceit, a mere opening gambit, but one that gradually materializes as an abiding presence throughout the ensuing pages. She starts with a discussion of Simon Jewell's box, left in his 1592 will to Robert Nicholls, a fellow player in the Admiral's Men's employ. Jewell bequeathed 'all my playing things in a box and my black velvet shewes' (1). The box is lost, of course, but that loss is Tribble's gain because it stands for the 'tool box' of skills, aptitudes, and habits that every actor brings to and develops on the stage over the years. Tribble uses this approach to overcome the challenge of writing about bodily practice at an historical remove. Focusing her chapters on topics such as 'The Skill of Weapon' and 'The Art of Dancing', Tribble is able to home in on the physically demanding practices repeatedly invited by early modern dramatic texts.

As an instance of Tribble's method, take this sentence: 'All of the movement arts that actors had to master—gesture, walking, swordplay and dance—are intimately linked to the development of a distinctive kinesic intelligence that could on the one hand emulate the elite and on the other hand descry a range of postures, body types and social classes' (115). The theatrical ecology of the early modern stage—including but not limited to its dramatic texts—relied upon, called for, and produced 'mindful bodies' (147), then. This might seem just a useful rejoinder to logocentric approaches to early modern acting except that Tribble here and elsewhere reminds us that speech is also an embodied practice. (Hamlet's 'trippingly on the tongue' is about the motion of the body, not the meaning of the text.) Moreover, Tribble is concerned here about the apprehension of the audience: its ability to assess just how mindfully, or mindlessly, the bodies...