The ideas at the heart of Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien have extraordinary conceptual reach. It is my contention that they owe this reach, in part, to the work's sources. Although some research has been done into the origins of the Paradoxe, it is dwarfed by the quantity of writing which deals with the work's reception or its broader implications. After all, the Paradoxe, an open-ended dialogue that Diderot wrote and re-wrote for almost a decade, invites such treatment. Specifically, the thoughts of this text extend themselves in two ways. Firstly, beyond the figure of the actor, comparing the performer to the author or the statesman, so that it is now almost as common to find writing about the socio-political dimensions of the Paradoxe as it is to see it discussed as acting theory. 1 Diderot's ideas, however, also possess a second kind of scope, one that is now harder to appreciate in a world where theories of performance, be they Brecht's or Stanislavski's, are used by companies and critics all over the world, but which soon becomes clear when we look at the work's predecessors. Diderot's Paradoxe is remarkable as a piece of eighteenth-century writing about acting which aims to give an authoritative account of both the importance of a nation's own theatrical culture and those qualities common to great actors that precede localisation. To speak, in other words, as clearly about the mental processes of David Garrick at Drury Lane as it does about those of La Clairon (Claire Josèphe Hippolyte de La Tude) at the Comédie française. This is different from the comparisons between the English and French stages that predate the Paradoxe, one of which constitutes the work's starting point.Premier begins the dialogue by being coaxed into naming the flaws of Antoine-Fabio Sticotti's Garrick, ou les acteurs anglois, first published in 1769, and dismantled by Diderot for the Correspondance littéraire in his 'Observations sur Garrick...' (1770), a short piece that would grow through the 1770s into the full Paradoxe. What Diderot soon shows with Sticotti's text is that its way of comparing English and French acting is inadequate, since it has failed to find a language for describing the actor's craft that takes into account the differences between the two countries' theatrical cultures. As Premier puts it, Sticotti was blind to the fact that "the technical terms of the stage are so broad and so vague that men of judgment, and of diametrically opposite views, yet find in them the light of conviction." 2 The new ideas of the Paradoxethat the best actors have "no sensibility" and that they perform according to a modèle idéal of their rôleare announced soon after this passage and represent not only a departure from the idea that the best actors are the most feeling but also a higher order approach to the question of how a performer performs, one that avoids the errors of Sticotti. Thinking in terms of emotional constitution and the reflexivity it permits reveals to the reader that while Garrick and Clairon do not act in the s...
This article falls into two parts. In the first I show how David Garrick's performances and responses to them in various media intersected with a particular understanding of Shakespeare's beauties while also projecting across Europe a set of ‘Garrickean' attributes. The second section considers a French and a German translation of Macbeth, the composition and reception of which bear the marks of a Garrickean Shakespeare. Such marking indicates the joint influence of Garrick and Shakespeare outside England, and indicates how celebrity performance, despite the transience of the original events, can be reinscribed through translation and other kinds of international circulation.
Le jeu de Corinne dans le rôle de Juliette constitue un épisode important dans le développement du roman de Germaine de Staël. La présentation de la pièce de Shakespeare souligne le caractère italien, l’intimité et le rôle du destin dans la pièce, trois thèmes qui sont repris tout au long de l’oeuvre et à l’aune desquels il est possible de mesurer le déclin du rapport entre Corinne et Oswald ainsi que celui d’un esprit italien. À la fin du roman, les deux portraits du Prince Castel-Forte, montrant Corinne lors de la représentation de Roméo et Juliette à côté de son état actuel, invitent à cette lecture rétrospective du roman ; en revanche, l’intertexte shakespearien est devenu ici un moyen d’exprimer la détresse de l’héroïne et ne suffit pas à la compréhension des événements de l’histoire. Corinne, ou l’Italie s’intéresse surtout aux limites du travail artistique, que ce soit celui de Shakespeare ou de l’héroïne elle-même.
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