Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
7 - The tragic actor and Shakespeare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
In a searching essay on the principles of acting, the French actor François-Joseph Talma writes that the tragic actor must preserve the characters imagined by the playwright 'in their grand proportions, but at the same time he must subject their elevated language to natural accents and true expression; and it is this union of grandeur without pomp, and nature without triviality - this union of the ideal and the true, which is so difficult to attain in tragedy'. Although Talma is writing of French classical tragedy, his understanding of acting as the representation of the grand through the embodiment of the natural articulates well the basic dynamic of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. We might add that in tragedy we see the general through the lens of individual experience and the symbolic through that of the personal, a series of perspectives perhaps more effectively realised by Shakespeare than by any other tragic playwright. But to fulfil the task set by Shakespeare is no easy undertaking.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage , pp. 118 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002