Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: Snark and other miscellanea

[mildred_of_midgard]

Flipping through Anisimov, I found this description of contemporary theater, which should put Garrick's innovations in context:

Of course, this theater only vaguely resembled the theater of today. Strictly bound by the dogmas of Classicism with its mandatory five acts, unities of place and time, and exalted language, it might appear to us pretentious, boring, and ridiculous. The actor's behavior, according to a contemporary textbook for the art of acting, was in no way supposed to resemble people's natural behavior. An actor was forbidden to put his hands in his pockets or form a fist, except when portraying simple folk, who were allowed to use such crude and unattractive gestures.

Here are the most important recommendations to an actor going on stage: expressing disgust, one should "turn the head to the left side, extend the arms and slightly raise them in the opposite direction as if pushing away the odious object." Expressing surprise, "one should raise both hands and place them on the upper part of the chest, palms turned toward the audience." "In great grief or sorrow it is possible and even praiseworthy and attractive to bow completely, cover the face for some time by pressing both hands or the elbow to it and in this position to mutter some words to oneself into one's elbow, even though the public might not make them out-the force of the grief will be understood by all this mumbling, which is more eloquent than words."

Having read this, try to reproduce at least one such figure before your unsuspecting family members and observe the resulting effect--it will no doubt be rather strong. But do not think that audiences during Elizabeth's times would react the same way. The language of their theater was as normal for them as the language of our theater is for us, and probably ours will be just as strange for future generations.

It also gives you a good idea of Anisimov's authorial voice, distinctive even through translation.

Re: Snark and other miscellanea

[selenak]

I know you're not into movies, but the film Stage Beauty, which I reviewed here, while taking great liberties with chronology within its Restoration context, does a reasonably good job reconstructing the stylized acting with attitudes as practised by Ned Kynaston at the start of the film. (And in a way that still gets across how good he is, and how effective it can be.) Personally, I suspect it might have felt somewhat similar to Japanese Kabuki theatre, which I did once have the chance to see performed when in Japan.

There's also the factor that every young actor, and more rarely, actress, is credited with performing more naturally when they get their star turn - after Garrick, it was Edmund Kean's time to be praised for his naturalness and for Garrick's era to be seen as stylized. A bit similarly to how Garrick was praised for bringing Shakespeare back to the British stage in the original form, except well, not as we'd see it today - he still worked with self written changes like letting Juliet wake up before Romeo dies (but after he's already drunk the poison) so that they can talk one last time, or the famous "Richard is himself again!" line he added to Richard III which became so entrenched in British performance practice for centuries that it's still in the Olivier movie) - but he certainly used way way more of the original text than was the custom before. (And no more happy ending for Lear!) It's always a matter of contemporary context.