Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Theater elizabethan acting elizabethan acting Elizabethan acting was far from ‘naturalistic.’ This statement is a widely debated topic. The repertory of the Elizabethan period was highly differed from that of today as was the demands on Elizabethan actors compared to today’s actors. Elizabethan playhouses in two weeks could often present “eleven performances of ten different plays”. Playhouses would not repeat the same play two days in a row. As an actor from the playhouses could often be all or a lot of these plays that were all running at the same time, the demands on the actor were huge. “In the total winter season from August 25, 1595, through February 28, 1596,” one company gave “one hundred and fifty performances of thirty different plays.” Actors were not only required to “commit to memory an amazing number of new plays each season,” but he also had to retain old and previous performances in case they were to be performed again. “A leading actor of the Lord Admiral’s company… , had to secure and retain command of about seventy-one different roles, of which number fifty-two or fifty-three were newly learned.” The huge repertory demands of the actors gave them little time for interpretation of roles. Since 1939 debate has been waged over the Elizabethan acting style. Alfred Harbage wrote that two styles of acting could have been present in the Elizabethan period. They were natural or formal. Harbage wrote: Natural acting strives to create an illusion of reality by consistency on the part of the actor who remains in character and tends to imitate the behavior of actual human being placed in his imagined circumstances. He portrays where the formal actor symbolizes. He impersonates where the formal actor represents. He engages in real conversation where the formal actor recites. His acting is subjective and “imaginative” where that of the formal actor is objective and traditional. Whether he sinks his personality in his part or shapes the part to his personality, in either case he remains the natural 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 viewed as natural by the Elizabethan audience. In order to determine the style we must look at it from the Elizabethan views of natural. In either case, formal or natural the actors “must achieve a level of reality sufficient to involve us.” This holds true whether the illusion is “an imitation of contemporary life, historical life, or mythical life,” the concern is not by which means this illusion is created whether it be “conventional and symbolic or contextual and descriptive,” but that it is created. Actors perfected all the new and old roles that they had and the presentation of these roles did not change over time, there was no “invention of new devices and characteristics.” They performance of a role that at one point may have been considered natural may, in latter performances have been considered formal even if the performance of the role was the same on both accounts. For although the roles were performed and acted did not change the audience did change over time and the audience’s perception over what was considered natural would have changed. Bibliography: Word Count: 838
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