Charles Gildon’s The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton (1710) is not really about the life of the famous actor, but rather has some claim to being amongst the earliest attempts at codifying acting in English. Given its novelty, the text unsurprisingly finds legitimacy where it can: the biographical skeleton offers an alluring framework and the placing of precepts in the mouth of a successful actor can only lend more weight to their injunctions. Similarly, Gildon’s work is riddled with classical references, often via French translation and including Quintilian, Lucian, Horace, Cicero and Plutarch. Not content with the conceit of a biography, Gildon also adds further protective frames, announcing that a digression on ancient dance comes from a friend’s manuscript, and inserting long passages from Pollux’s Onomastics on the propriety of pronunciation and from Saint-Evrémond on the insipidity of Opera.

From the early chapters of this book onwards, Gildon is keen to show the overlap between the stage, the pulpit and the bar, which is to say the similarities between actor, priest and barrister. Boswell continues this tradition, which has its roots in the the Ancient Greek and Roman world: many of the sources Gildon turns to for advice, such as Quintilian, are for orators not actors. This causes some problems. Quintilian is famous for arguing that an audience catches the emotion felt by an orator and expressed in his eyes, or, as Gildon puts, it “this Fire of their Eyes will easily strike those of their Audience, which are continually fixt on yours; and by a strange sympathetic Infection, it will set them on Fire too with the very same Passion.” However, whereas Quintilian is describing orators speaking directly to an audience, actors rarely address theatregoers directly and rather speak to each other: how then should they transmit the fire of their eyes out from the stage? This difficulty leads to a rather clumsy paragraph from Gildon:

I would not be misunderstood, when I say you must wholly place your Eyes on the Person or Persons you are engag’d with on the Stage; I mean, that at the same time both Parties keep such a Position in Regard of the Audience, that even these Beauties escape not their Observation, tho never so justly directed. As in a Piece of History-Painting, tho the Figures direct their Eyes never so directly to each other, yet the Beholder, by the Advantage of their Position, has a full View of the Expression of the Soul in the Eyes of the Figures.

The leap to painting as a field of reference (“History Painting” in particular) is also a tell-tale sign that Gildon’s conflation of orator/actor, the result of so many classical sources, has its limits.

Of course, it has its advantages too, for it allows Gildon to avoid, for the most part, naming contemporary actors. He worries, for example, about actresses taking offence at his strictures and so remains ambiguous. Later on, the density of classical examples helps to give the impression that Gildon is promulgating immutable rules of nature, as valid two thousand years ago as they are now.

But what advice does Gildon give? As with Wilkes, all such advice is, of course, also calculated to trigger admiration for those actors who have apparently followed it in becoming successful. This leads to some hyperbole, as praise and persuasion mix. In Gildon’s eyes, actors should, for example, be moral philosophers, sculptors and physically fit. Further, they should feel what they act, although here Gildon makes use of a very curious ‘instrument’ metaphor.

Every Passion or Emotion of the Mind has from Nature its proper and peculiar Countenance, Sound and Gesture; and the whole Body of Man, all his Looks, and every Sound of this Voice, like Strings on an Instrument receive their Sounds from the various Impulse of the Passions.

While this might look almost scientific and calculating to modern eyes, eighteenth-century understandings of the ‘artificial’ make it so that the human body is not so much the actor’s tool but rather the outward surface of the passions he has let take over his performing body. The metaphor is not of a wind instrument but of a violin, where the strings represent the body, vibrating with the energy of the bow.

This metaphor drops out of acting theories as the century goes on, but the general idea about the actor being subject to the passions of the role does not (at least until Diderot). Seeing that Gildon is so early and foundational, it is also worth asking what he has to say about Shakespeare. A cursory glance through the text shows a considerable number of references to Shakespeare’s works (far more than any other author), not to mention the repeated assertion that Shakespeare is the greatest of all playwrights. As well as this, Shakespeare is also a useful source of theatre lore himself. I’ll quote the section of Gildon in full by way of conclusion: it ties into the ‘sentimental’ view of the actor, constitutes yet another example of Gildon’s use of ‘authority’ to strengthen his advice, and – I believe – represents one of the earliest uses of Hamlet in such a context.

The Player therefore, nay, and the Orator too, ought to form in his Mind a very strong Idea of the Subject of his Passion, and then the Passion itself will not fail to follow, rise into the Eyes, and affect both the Sense and Understanding of the Spectators with the same tenderness. The Performance of this is express’d in Shakespeare’s Hamlet admirably well, and should be often consider’d by our young Players:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!

This shews that Shakespeare had a just Notion of Acting, whatever his performance was; for in these few lines is contain’d almost lal that can be said of Action, Looks, and Gesture.