atural actor. The Elizabethan actor is compared closely to the orator. Oratory and acting shared similar voice and gesture techniques and it was said that whoever knows exactly today what was taught to the Renaissance orator cannot be far from knowing at the same time what was done by the actor on the Elizabethan stage. The actor used conventionalized gestures that represented different emotions as in a sorrowfull parte, ye head must hang down; in a proud, ye head must be lofty. In Chirologia the book which is divided into three sections, lists and describes sixty-four gestures. By learning these conventionalized gestures actors could apply them to any role and any emotional state. The result was that the actor did not so much interpret his part as recite it. Each emotion had a specific gesture and an actor just needed to apply the gestures to the script, the actors own personality did not intrude, for his attention was devoted to rendering the literary qualities of the script. The Elizabethan actor played to the audience, not to his fellow actors. There is a small group of scholars who disagree with the theory that Elizabethan acting was formal and do in fact debate that the Elizabethan style of acting was natural. The scholars belief that the Elizabethan acting style and the style of the orator were not similar. The scholars argue that since Renaissance art sought to imitate life, the actors in harmony with this aim thought that they imitated life. The natural acting of today would admittedly be different from the view of what was naturalistic in the Elizabethan theatre. First it is necessary to comprehend what was the Elizabethan conception of reality. A compromise is that Elizabethan acting was neither exclusively natural nor exclusively formal, but rather it was a mixture/combination of both. It may be the case that what we today would see as dramatic conventions, such as the specific gesture for specific emotions was in fact vi...
