Inventer l'acteur: émotions et spectacle dans l'Europe des Lumières by Laurence Marie (review)

Scholars have known for decades that monolingual frameworks for studying the eighteenth century fail to address the period's robust circulation of ideas, texts, writers, actors, and performances. Interdisciplinary and multilingual research on the period, however, is no easy task. It requires broad knowledge of political and social history across (at least) Europe and demands that researchers engage with texts in (again, at least) English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and German. Truly interdisciplinary and multilingual research remains rare. Most of us return to the cultures and languages with which we feel the most comfortable, and only in the best of cases do we venture out into "foreign" fields to contextualize the novels, plays, poems, and philosophies of our scholarly "home." Laurence Marie appears quite at home in any major European tradition, which makes her comprehensive history of acting theories and practices from the second half of the seventeenth century to 1815 required reading for a wide range of historians, literature scholars, and theater experts. Marie's goal in Inventer l'acteur is to describe a "révolution esthétique" (14) that transpired when the theorization of acting was emancipated from neoclassical poetics. She divides her study into three parts. In the first, she details a process whereby actors gained social dignity and theoretical gravitas by attaching their art to longstanding rhetorical traditions. This legitimization of the actor sets up part two, in which Marie analyzes debates across Europe on the roles of emotion and imitation in conceptions of the actor's craft. She shows an essential break with the neoclassical tradition that occurred when the recognition of actors' bodies (and most notably, David Garrick's) diverted the normative flow of theorization from concepts and poetics to movements on stage. This "irruption du corps" (153) placed the body on center stage and catalyzed new approaches to acting but widespread disagreement on the art's "best practices." In part three, Marie shows the complexification of acting theories instigated by a new generation of post-Garrick players, such as Kemble and Siddons in England, Talma in France, Ifland and Schröder in Germany, and Alfieri in Italy. She describes the origins of modern acting theory as a tension among three schools at the beginning of the nineteenth century: sensualism, imitative sang-froid, and the fusion of the two, or what was called the "sublime" approach (303). Any critiques of Marie's study are minor and typical of the dissertation-to-book genre. At times, her strict categorization of ideas and movements into threes seems forced (there are three avenues, three ways, three approaches, and three directions in nearly all three parts of the book). But Marie's writing is lucid and light, and there are virtually no repetitions in almost 500 pages of tight analysis. Inventer l'acteur is an impressive tome that should be widely translated so that even more readers could benefit from the author's erudition and diverse approach. With many scholars (and politicians) retreating from Europeanwide projects, Marie should be applauded for her inclusive take on the Enlightenment and its fascinating theories of the actor.