The Actors
CONVENTIONS OF ACTING
In 1802 A traveller from Germany, C. A. G. Goede, passed a con¬
siderable length of time in London, where he was a constant and perceptive
visitor to that city’s theatres. His observations, translated five years later
as The Stranger in England , contain certain generalized impressions of the
way in which English, as opposed to German, actors comported themselves.
These remarks have an interest that is not always to be found in the reports
of native commentators on the stage, habituated as they were to the styles
of acting they so constantly witnessed.
The action [of English actors], upon the whole, is much more circumscribed
than that of the Germans ; and they do not so often violate certain rules of deport¬
ment. They never turn their backs on the public, and seldom show their faces in
profile, or hide them behind a pocket handkerchief, or their hands; they never
approach too rapidly; nor do they unnecessarily touch each other; nor do they
fight with their arms against the public, as if it were a ghost; they never cross their
legs in an affected manner, nor stretch them out as a fencing-master, nor twist
them as a dancing-master. ... An English actor is free from the embarrassment which
a German actor frequently suffers when he has nothing to say, and therefore knows
not what to do with his dear person. I27
This concluding statement has, in a way, a bearing on objections frequently
raised by English critics, i.e. that “Nothing can excuse a careless indifference
to the business of the scene, because at that instant the actor has no speech
to recite.”12® “Indifference” and “embarrassment” are not the same thing,
but Goede’s remark is a revealing one. Eighteenth-century London actors
were at home on the stage. If newcomers to it were for a time diffident,
they shortly discovered that although an audience was sometimes unruly
it was generous and eager to offer its protection. In the lighted auditorium
a familiarity was established — a sense of relaxation. The requirements of
the repertory system must, too, have played its part. The instinctive
knowledge of being conversant with, and able to perform with scarcely any
127 Goede, Stranger in England, IX, 208-9.
128 IForld, 11 Dec. 1790.
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