Claudio Vicentini_Acting Theory in the Ancient World - Acting Archives

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AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 1 – April 2011which all human beings are induced to participate spontaneously in the same feelingsand the same passions that they see effectively expressed by others. 44The new theory thus managed to explain much more articulately the phenomenonof acting and its emotional characteristics. At this point, however, a major problemarose. According to the archaic conception the actor’s inner condition wasdetermined by divine action, which wrought havoc in his mind, generating a turmoilof feelings. In the new conception any reference to divine intervention disappeared,and rather than getting carried away, the actor had to feel a series of precisely definedpassions: anger, grief, joy, and all the variety of emotions that animated the characteras the story developed. An explanation was therefore required as to how through hissimple personal resources he could call them up in himself, scene after scene, just atthe right moment and with reference to the exact type of character.In actual fact Plato had spoken of a kind of influence that the character beingplayed could exercise over the actor’s inner frame of mind. Describing artisticcreation as a form of imitation in the Republic and the Laws, he had observed thatimitations extended over time ‘become consolidated into habits and constitute asecond nature’. It is something that happens, he explained, not only ‘for the bodyand the voice’, but also ‘for the thought’. 45Now the actor on stage produced an imitation of the character. Indeed, ‘imitatinganother in his figure or his voice’ was the ‘most excellent’ form of imitation, and theimitation inevitably involved the artist’s inner frame of mind. 46 Thus while those whoacted could not effectively represent figures too distant from their own nature, 47 atthe same time the character’s qualities and inner frame of mind could not fail toimpinge on the soul of the person rendering them onstage – to the point thatinterpreting inferior and unworthy figures seemed to Plato harmful and dangerous,and it became necessary to adopt some severe precautionary measures:those whom we claim to care for and who should be honest men, we shall not allow toimitate a woman, young or old, while she insults her husband or challenges the gods[…] Nor should they imitate slaves or slave-girls performing the work of slaves […]Nor bad men and cowards, it seems: men that behave contrary to what we have justsaid; who insult and mock each other and utter obscenities, drunk or sober; and allthese other unseemly things that individuals like this do to themselves and others whenthey speak and act. 48A state regulated by fair and wise laws, then, cannot allow its citizens to play thepart of low and ignoble characters. Yet someone has to, because ‘we cannot knowwhat is serious without the ridiculous, or any opposites without all their opposites’.Therefore we must have recourse to slaves and foreigners:Imitations of this kind should be performed by slaves and paid foreigners, yet peopleshould in no wise ever dedicate themselves to occupations of this kind; let no free manbe known to learn such things, no man and no woman. 4944 See Plato, Republic, 605e.45 Ibid., 395d.46 Plato, Sophist, 267a.47 See Plato, Republic, 394e-395a.48 Ibid., 395e-396a.49 Plato, Laws, 816e.12
Claudio Vicentini, Acting Theory in the Ancient WorldThis moral concern, then, gave rise to a vision of acting in which the actorassimilated the qualities and frame of mind of the character whose gestures andexternal behaviour he was reproducing. However, this process of internalassimilation took a considerable time. The qualities of the character gradually workedon the deep structure of the actor’s soul, where the vices and virtues of the figuresrepeatedly imitated were consolidated. It was therefore a process of moraltransformation that had little or nothing to do with the actor’s ability to draw out ofhimself instantly during the performance, a variety of passions that had to followeach other precisely, as quickly as was necessary for the progress of the scene.For his part, when Aristotle claimed that poets must ‘move from the same frameof mind as that of their characters’ and ‘experience each time the passions they wantto represent’, he had solved the question by appealing to a ‘natural gift’. But thissimply avoided the problem. Divine intervention able to suddenly unleash thenecessary emotional states in the artist had been replaced by a gift of nature that thepoet or actor could in no way solicit or regulate. 50 It was a mysterious faculty, beyondany form of control, impossible to excite by any conscious resource of the actor, orthrough any deft technical expedient.6. The Actor’s Art and the Orator’sThe principles Aristotle expounded imposed themselves on the aesthetic traditionof the ancient world and reappeared towards the end of the first century BCE inHorace’s Ars poetica, which insists on the coherence necessary for character-creationaccording to the canonical connection of fundamental character, passions andbehaviour, and also supplies an example of generational typology that includes thefigures of the child, the youth, the adult and the old man. 51 Above all the Ars poeticarepeated the need for emotional involvement in lines that were to become famous:Just as a man’s face smiles with those who smile, so it weeps with those who weep. Ifyou want me to weep, you must first suffer yourself: then your misfortunes will hurtme 52However, not even the Ars poetica explained how it was possible to arouse thenecessary feelings at the right moment. And the solution to the problem, at leastaccording to the surviving documents, was suggested in treatises by Cicero (Oratorand De oratore) and Quintilian (Institutio oratoria), written respectively in the middle ofthe first century BCE and towards the end of the first century CE. These works,along with Plato’s Ion, are, indirectly, the most extensive treatments of the actor’s artin the ancient world that are still available, and had a fundamental influence on actingtheory in the modern age, down to the late eighteenth century.Cicero’s and Quintilian’s writings actually concern the orator rather than the actor,but are full of comparisons between the techniques of oratory and acting, and startfrom the declared premise that they are very similar. 53 Above all oratory and acting,Cicero and Quintilian explain, are similar in their aims. When he declaims to an50 Aristotle, Poetics, 1455a.51 See Horace, Ars poetica, 114-118, 156-175 and 312-316.52 Ibid., 101-103.53 See Cicero, De oratore, III,83.13
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