What is transition? Transition names a process of change between objects whose properties define that transition: emotions, chords, gradients, colours, genders.1 It also names the moment, long or brief, in which such transformation occurs. To identify a transition is thus to acknowledge both the dynamic quality of a process of change and the iconic quality of a rich and recognisable moment. Further, the identification of transition appears to grant meaning: this came from that or that must lead to this; here was the moment when everything was possible or there was the point of no return. As a tool for the making of meaning, criticism has relied upon transition’s simultaneous invocation of the iconic and the dynamic. This reliance is particularly visible in eighteenth-century writing about the theatre but is by no means limited to it.
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Hamlet sees his father’s ghost, Zara questions the foundations of her faith, King Lear curses Goneril, Alicia goes mad, Macbeth sees an air-drawn dagger, and Jaffeir threatens to murder his wife. Known as ‘points’, ‘hits’, or ‘turns’, these moments were among the most criticised and celebrated of the eighteenth-century stage.2 One performer’s rendition of a point would be set against that of their rivals and predecessors in that role. A writer’s ability to create such striking moments was a key part of their appeal to audiences more interested in the pathos of a tragedy than its plot. It is the contention of this book that all such points, hits, and turns were often and may again be considered as expressions of what I call the art of transition. I give this name to both the writer’s capacity to connect powerful emotive subjects into a compelling sequence and the performer’s ability to give physical expression to that sequence through the presentation of sequential passions. Consider those points I just evoked, where we may find, as eighteenth-century audiences and readers were pleased to find, Hamlet’s sudden transition from scornful commentary on the state of Denmark to the terror of ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’, the frustrated anger that bursts through Zara’s avowal of her love for Osman, the melting conclusion of Lear’s imprecation against his ‘thankless child’, Alicia’s flights of hatred and despair, the restless combat between ambition and fear in Macbeth, and Jaffeir’s confused vacillation between rage and love. From scorn to terror, from love to anger, from fury to self-pity, from hatred to despair, from ambition to fear, from rage to love, each of these points may be understood as moments of transition.
We can distinguish different kinds of transition in these moments: there is the physical transition between performed passions, occurring in a flash or drawn out over several seconds; there is equally the conceptual transition between one idea and another within a text. We might call the former ‘embodied’ transition and ascribe it to the actor; we might call the latter ‘literary’ and ascribe it to the author. To do this too strictly, however, is to diminish the potential of transition as a critical concept and to repeat a move that occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century, when critics like Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt argued that no performance, with its physical transitions, could fully capture the intellectual significance of the sequences of thought and feeling written by the playwright. Instead of accepting such a hard division between the transitions of the actor’s body and those conceived in the author’s mind, this book recovers a more complex critical standpoint. Such a standpoint recognises that a performer might sometimes add new ideas to their script (for better or worse), and such a standpoint also reflects the belief that an author may sometimes write with such power or clarity that their words bring about a physical response in the actor, reader, or audience member. While the differences between performance and script remain important, what matters first is the very fact of transition itself. Take Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost on the battlements of Elsinore: this point is a moment of embodied transition, as the actor’s body tenses into terror; this point is also a violent shift of subject, from statecraft to the supernatural – yet it is the way all these changes are enfolded into the instant that make it one of the most famous passages both in the eighteenth-century theatre and in the period’s editions of Shakespeare’s works. A sensitivity to this point as a point of transition, both on the page and on the stage, allows us to see how it is not just famously iconic but changing and dynamic also. When we sense this, the movement inherent in the moment, we share in an eighteenth-century appreciation of dramatic art.
The successful practice of the art of transition creates a hit. This hit depends upon transition’s ability to imbue the iconic moment with dynamic potential, opening a range of little-understood pasts and possible futures. This is a key insight of eighteenth-century writing about drama, especially tragedy, and this book – itself mainly focused on tragic drama – both identifies how such an insight was made and examines how a sensitivity to transition can inform our own critical practices today. I draw my evidence from letters to, between, and about actors; manuals purporting to teach the art of public speaking; paintings of famous performers; promptbook markings that accentuate sequential patterns; periodical reviews and retrospectives; the notes and the punctuation of playscripts; and many other objects that fall within what James Boswell once called ‘literary productions relative to the art of acting’.3 By examining how these sources make use of the art of transition, I demonstrate the validity of transition as a fundamental concept for three things: first, for the analysis of the composition, criticism, and performance of eighteenth-century drama; second, for the reintegration of that drama into a multidisciplinary and multimodal environment; and third, for the tracing of an evolution in attitudes towards theatrical affect that runs from Shakespeare’s King Lear to the essays of Lamb and Hazlitt.
Transition, Attitude, and Tone
Jaffeir threatens to murder his wife Belvidera in the final scene of the fourth act of Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682). In his Dramatic Censor (1770), the critic Francis Gentleman offers his commentary on this famous point: his writing will serve here to ground the concerns of my work, from the importance of transition in writing about drama to the wider context within which this concept operates, both in the eighteenth century and now. As was typical for hits, points, and turns, Gentleman made use of Jaffeir’s threats as an arena for comparing two prominent figures in the London patent theatres: David Garrick, the actor-manager of Drury Lane, and Spranger Barry, the leading male actor of Covent Garden.4 Otway’s play was a staple of the repertoire at this time, and it tells the story of a failed attempt to overthrow the Venetian senate. Jaffeir’s friend Pierre is a part of this conspiracy, while his wife is the daughter of a senator. Treated poorly by his father-in-law, Jaffeir accepts Pierre’s invitation to join the ranks of the conspirators and places Belvidera in their custody, along with a dagger to kill her with if he betrays their loyalty. After one of the conspirators assaults Belvidera, she confronts her husband and forces him to reveal the plot to her father and the other senators in return for the merciful treatment of Pierre and his associates. But the senate breaks its word and condemns them to death. This brings us to the end of Act IV, when Belvidera tells her husband that all his co-conspirators have been arrested.
Gentleman compares the performances of Barry and Garrick through each of the turns of the drama. Up to this moment, they have been neck and neck: Barry ‘could not be surpassed’ in Jaffeir’s speeches to his father-in-law in the first act, but ‘we must give Mr. Garrick considerable preference’ for his version of the point ‘where Belvidera is delivered to the conspirators’.5 Now, however, when Susannah Cibber’s Belvidera tells Garrick’s Jaffeir ‘of the torments which are preparing for his friends’, the manager of Drury Lane decisively proves his superiority to his rival:
Mr. Garrick steps forward and beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes; the distracted confusion which flames in his countenance, and the gleams of love which shed momentary softness on the stern glow of rage, exhibit more complicated beauties than any other piece of theatrical execution we have seen.6
Gentleman’s praise for his friend and benefactor is hardly without bias, yet it contains in miniature two approaches to the definition of transition that will structure my discussion here. First, it places transition alongside ‘tone’ and ‘attitude’ as theatrical techniques employed by Garrick for the production of a spectacle that ‘beggars description’, and it is through comparison to writing about the other, better-known, technical aspects of performance that the peculiarities of transition become clear to us now. Second, Gentleman enumerates the feelings of ‘confusion’, ‘love’, and ‘rage’ that the actor’s techniques express in this point and thus indicates how transition – along with tone and attitude – intersects with eighteenth-century understandings of emotional and mental states. Something of the nature of that intersection is evident here in Gentleman’s praise of the scene’s ‘complicated beauties’ and his use of metaphors of fire to capture the unfolding dynamic of the passions of the point, as scripted by Otway and exhibited by Garrick.
To start with the trio of transitions, tones, and attitudes, a wealth of research in the fields of both theatre history and what Abigail Williams calls ‘the history of sociable reading’ allows us to define the techniques described by the latter two terms with ease.7 In Tiffany Stern’s overview of acting practice, she notes that attitudes were a crucial part of Garrick’s style, being moments when the performer paused and held a pose, thus ‘indicating (and encouraging) reflection about the part performed’.8 As Stern goes on to argue, such a technique produced either ‘applaudable tableaux, or high-class claptraps’.9 The hostile review in Theophilus Cibber’s Two Dissertations on the Theatres (1756) of Garrick’s performance as Romeo provides a counterpoint to Gentleman’s praise of this performer’s ‘picturesque attitudes’ in Venice Preserv’d.
He is now going to the Tomb […] Yet on the opening of the Scene, —the Actor […] advances about 3 or 4 Steps,—then jumps, and starts into an Attitude of Surprize:—At what?—why, at the Sight of a Monument he went to look for:—And there he stands, till a Clap from the Audience relieves him of his Post.10
Cibber’s dash-ridden prose offers a parodic re-enactment of what he considers to be the ability of attitudes to disrupt the smooth unfolding of a performance in favour of audience gratification. Yet whether praised or criticised, such poses were a well-established part of performance in the period. Barton Booth, who acted a generation before Garrick, is held up by Cibber as an example to follow, since his ‘attitudes were all picturesque’ and gained their grace from this actor’s study of classical sculpture and history paintings.11 This practice, first trialled by Booth in a performance of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), had itself been modelled on the Italian castrato Nicolò Grimaldi’s use of iconic poses in opera.12
In the noisy, fully lit, and undisciplined theatres of the eighteenth century, the execution of attitudes played an important role in engaging the eyes of the audience in the face of a host of other distractions. Tone had a similar purpose, compelling audience attention even from those unable to make out what was happening on the stage. As such, Glen McGillivray argues, tone was a crucial ‘part of the rhetorical […] armoury of the eighteenth-century actor’.13 Yet an actor’s tone of voice could, like the execution of attitudes, be both criticised and praised according to its variety and decorum. As Thomas Sheridan put it in 1762, ‘A just delivery consists in a distinct articulation of words, pronounced in proper tones, suitably varied to the sense, and the emotions of the mind’, and there are many examples of the judging of actors’ voices according to these criteria.14 Richard Cumberland, at a distance of sixty years, recalled the ‘deep full tone’ of James Quin and Susannah Cibber’s ‘high-pitched but sweet’ recitation of verse,15 while Thomas Davies, again at some historical distance, praised Booth’s ‘strong, yet harmonious pipe’, which could reach ‘the highest note of exclamatory rage’ without hurting the music of its tone.16
But what of the first term in Gentleman’s trio? With his ‘harmonious pipe’ and ‘attitudes […] all picturesque’, it should be no surprise that Booth was also held up as a paragon of transition, with Cibber praising the way in which, whenever this man assumed one attitude or another, he ‘fell into them with so easy a transition, that these masterpieces of his art seemed but the effect of nature’.17 As with all descriptions of historical practice, we should ask ourselves whether Booth ever actually did this (as Bertram Joseph has argued) or whether Cibber is simply using an actor who died in the 1730s to criticise Garrick’s dominance of the theatre in the 1750s.18 However, given my focus on how theatre criticism functioned in the eighteenth century, the settling of such a question is of less importance to me than the way in which Cibber here presents transition as something that occurs between attitudes.
Unlike the techniques of tone or attitude, both of which are keyed to the expression of something, especially an emotion, transition seems concerned with the arrangement of these subjects into sequence. It is, in Cibber’s account, the process by which Booth assumed an attitude appropriate to the material being performed. Yet the very nature of transition, as something at once essential but necessarily liminal, has made it resistant to definition, either by scholars of the long eighteenth century (who rarely discuss the term at any length)19 or even by those writing in the period itself.20 In 1800, Charles Newton admitted that he did not ‘recollect the Mention of this Grace of Oratory in any Author’ when he came to explain ‘Transition’ in the introduction to his Studies in the Science of Public Speaking.21 Yet, like Gentleman and Cibber, he also recognised its significance, arguing that ‘good […] Readers or Speakers’ are those who ‘nicely discriminate and strongly mark every Transition’.22 Newton offers a definition of the term in the context of public performance as ‘the passing on to an entirely new Subject, Sentiment, or Passion’, which he later condenses to ‘the passing of one Passion or Sentiment to another’.23 Strikingly, Newton’s effort at defining transition bears comparison to Samuel Johnson’s more general explanation of the word in 1756 as a ‘passage in writing or conversation from one subject to another’ (itself copied from the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française).24 Using these definitions, it appears that when Gentleman praised the ‘amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’ employed by Garrick in his performance of Jaffeir, he praised three distinct but interconnected things. Garrick’s voice was adapted to the character’s rage at one moment and to his love at another. Garrick’s body occasionally came to adopt a variety of held attitudes specific to such emotions too. And Garrick’s transitions functioned as a passage between distinct tones and attitudes, joining them together to form a compelling spectacle.
There is, however, another way of understanding transition. Gentleman’s placing of the word alongside tone and attitude suggest that it serves as more than the passage between different expressions of emotions and has instead the status of an object of appreciation in its own right. Consider, for example, John Hill’s comments in 1755 on Garrick’s performance as Archer in a production of George Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), where he claims that ‘Till this performer play’d this part, we never knew what beauties it was capable of, in the sudden transitions from passion to passion’.25 The actor’s ‘sudden transitions’ (or perhaps Farquhar’s scripting of them) are positioned here as one of the ‘beauties’ of the comedy. When writing about Garrick’s Lear, Gentleman makes a similar comment, arguing that ‘the transitions of Lear are beautiful’.26 In both these phrases, transition is less something that occurs between bits of a play and more one of the defining features of the drama itself. Transition here refers more to a moment of transformation or metamorphosis or, to use one of Johnson’s other definitions of the word, a ‘change’. A tension in how transitions might be apprehended now emerges. On one hand, it is seen as a dynamic passage between two things, and we find Jaffeir’s expression of his love so striking because Garrick transitions into it from rage; on the other, transition is itself the iconic object of our admiration, a moment of transformation or change that amazes us.
A description of what might constitute true excellence in acting written a few years before Garrick’s debut by Aaron Hill (no relation to John) captures this tension. Hill praised the performer who ‘stops short, upon pensive Pauses and makes Transitions (as the Meanings vary) into Jealousy, Scorn, Fury, Penitence, Revenge, or Tenderness!’27 Like Newton’s description of transition as a ‘passing’ and Johnson’s of a ‘passage […] from one subject to another’, Hill’s wish for an actor who ‘makes Transitions […] into’ new embodiments of emotion captures what we might call the dynamic quality of transition, operating to connect distinct subjects. At the same time, however, Hill’s placement of transitions ‘upon pensive Pauses’ both makes an important distinction between transition and pause and, crucially, intimates the iconic quality of such moments too: after all, the hypothetical actor ‘stops short’ at such places. A little later in the same text, Hill repeats the same tension when he describes ‘the very Instant of the changing Passion’ to be found in a point: this is a paradox brought about by transition, a technique which both operates as a dynamic passage between ‘changing’ passions and makes these changes into iconic ‘instants’ of metamorphosis.
Tone, attitude, and transition are thus all significant techniques for the performance of a text, but it is Gentleman’s third term that creates a productive tension between the iconic and the dynamic qualities of spectacle and, with its double logic, helps exhibit what he calls the ‘complicated beauties’ of the moment. ‘Exhibit’ is Gentleman’s term and reminds us that, while we may distinguish between the literary transitions written out by Otway and those embodied by Garrick, we should also recognise how closely intertwined the two phenomena are: the ‘complicated beauties’ of this moment are produced by both actor and author, since both figures seem to have used the power of transition to shape emotion into art. This becomes especially clear when we consider the intersection of Gentleman’s first tricolon of techniques (transition, attitude, tone) with his second tricolon’s elocutionist emphasis on emotional states (rage, love, confusion) and read Gentleman’s commentary alongside Otway’s script and other artefacts of Garrick’s performance.
The Language of Fire
Gentleman located Garrick’s rendition of Jaffeir’s feelings in the actor’s famously mobile face when he described how confusion ‘flames in his countenance’.28 Otway’s text also places these unstable emotions here by having Belvidera describe how her irate husband’s ‘lips shake’ and how his visage becomes ‘disordered’ as she tells him of Pierre’s fate.29 From this exchange on, it is easy to trace Gentleman’s ‘rage’, ‘love’, and ‘confusion’ through the remaining lines of the scene: Jaffeir calls his wife ‘Traitress’ and confusedly tells her ‘thou hast done this; | Thanks to thy tears and false persuading love’ (iv. 495–96), but seconds after saying the word ‘love’, he succumbs to that tender feeling, inviting his beloved to ‘Creep even into my heart, and there lie safe’ (iv. 499). This sequence is one of several within this point, for Jaffeir’s rage will soon replace his love once more. Again, there are textual triggers for this: Jaffeir calls his heart his wife’s ‘Citadel’ and then exclaims ‘— ha! —’ at the mention of this word, which recalls the Venetian prison where his friends are incarcerated and returns him to his rage, the dashes marking the transition (iv. 500). Newly aflame, he tells Belvidera to ‘stand off’ and finally draws out the dagger he has been fumbling throughout the scene (iv. 500–02). As his anger builds, Belvidera’s pleas for clemency fail to have any effect, until she throws herself to her knees and cries ‘Oh, mercy!’ (iv. 516). These words bring about another transition for the actors to embody. Jaffeir follows his wife’s cry by continuing the pentameter with a weakly phrased prohibition – ‘Nay, no struggling’ – but Belvidera completes the line with a much stronger, enjambed imperative – ‘Now then kill me | While thus I hang about thy cruel neck’ (iv. 516–17). Unable to do so, Jaffeir’s resolution breaks: proclaiming that ‘by immortal Love, | I cannot longer bear a thought to harm thee’ (iv. 522–23), he throws the dagger from him, embraces his wife, and closes the act with the wish that Belvidera speak to her father and ‘conquer him, as thou has conquered me’ (iv. 537).
By presenting Otway’s writing in terms of the emotional states named by Gentleman, I find myself repeating a distinctly eighteenth-century practice of thinking about drama as a sequence of passions. If a theatregoer had been particularly inspired by Garrick’s rendition of Jaffeir’s feelings (or Cibber’s of Belvidera’s), they might, for instance, have bought a copy of the recently published Art of Speaking so as to learn from its author, James Burgh, how to give similar performances at home.30 After a fifty-page essay dispensing advice on the most appropriate tones and attitudes to adopt when representing everything from affectation of piety (‘canting’ tone and hands ‘clasped together’) to desire (suppliant tone and ‘bending the body forward’), Burgh provides over eighty lessons to his reader.31 Each lesson – one of which is reproduced in Chapter 1 – consists of a short text accompanied by marginal annotation and in-line typographic symbols. Modern performers, employing Bill Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark’s technique of ‘actioning’, might work through such examples today by employing transitive verbs to describe what their characters are attempting to do to someone alongside their lines, writing out such things as ‘I greet’, ‘I question’, ‘I threaten’, ‘I reassure’, and so forth.32 Burgh, however, writes in the margin what emotion should be present at each point in a speech. He does not action scripts, but rather impassions them, reminding the performer to switch between the exhibition of ‘remorse’ and ‘despair’ when executing Claudius’s attempts to pray in Hamlet33 or to move between ‘vexation’ and ‘spiteful joy’ in a dialogue between Shylock and Tubal made famous after a performance of it by Garrick’s mentor, Charles Macklin.34 Each of Burgh’s examples is published under a header naming the key passions contained within, and, although Burgh does not include the confrontation between Jaffeir and Belvidera in his book, it would not look out of place with Gentleman’s enumeration of ‘confusion’, ‘rage’, and ‘love’ as its title.
Blair Hoxby makes use of The Art of Speaking to support his argument that approaches to tragic drama between the start of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century placed pathos (rather than plot) at their centre. Specifically, Burgh helps to indicate the extent to which passions, not actions, were the ‘dramatic units of crucial significance in early modern tragedy’.35 In addition to his ‘impassioned’ examples, Burgh also exemplifies this in his introductory essay, where he ties specific tones and attitudes to individual feelings. That tragic plays were about passions and that, accordingly, their performance was too is also clearly part of many of the examples already given here. Gentleman spends many more words discussing Garrick’s performance of Jaffeir’s love and rage and comparing this actor’s capacity for emotion to Barry’s than he does reminding his reader of the specifics of Otway’s plot. In Aaron Hill’s articles on acting, he imagines a performer capable of considering how ‘the Meanings vary’, but only as a way of guiding their transitions into the most appropriate passions. As for Newton, his definition of transition as ‘the passing on to an entirely new Subject, Sentiment, or Passion’ not only supports Hoxby’s claim to the validity of passion as the object of performance but also – thanks to his inclusion of the terms ‘subject’ and ‘sentiment’ – indicates how, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the specific emphasis on passion’s primacy had now declined. Indeed, it is essential to recognise that Hoxby’s case for the crucial dramatic significance accorded to the passions should be understood in terms of the evolving and uncertain definition of passion throughout the early modern period, ranging from the basic etymological sense of a powerful feeling that is suffered (from the Latin passio, and ultimately the Greek πάσχειν, itself at the root of pathos) to the elaborate categorisations of the philosophers and the priorities of elocutionists like Sheridan or John Walker.36 Different understandings of what constituted passion had, as Joseph Roach has shown, significant ramifications across the eighteenth century for the study of acting as the dramatic expression of a character’s feeling. Specific to my argument here, such definitions and redefinitions of the passions allow us to sharpen our understanding of how the emotional climaxes of dramatic, especially tragic, points might be considered as products of the art of transition.
René Descartes would recognise Jaffeir’s love for Belvidera as a ‘primitive passion’. In his Passions de l’âme (1649), he named wonder, hatred, desire, joy, sadness, and love as a specific set of passions, which – like the primary colours in painting – could, through their combination, produce the full spectrum of human feeling.37 For Descartes, Jaffeir’s love, along with any other passion, would be caused, maintained, and strengthened by some movement of the spirits.38 Descartes’s spirits, inspired by the animal spirits of Galen, act upon the soul when their movements agitate the pineal gland in which the soul resides. The movement of these spirits is also responsible for the distinctive bodily expression of each passion: from a Cartesian point of view, Jaffeir’s lip trembles because his animal spirits are shaking it as part of the rage he is experiencing. Such a mechanistic, even hydraulic, understanding of the passions serves to standardise human feeling into a set of operations that produce highly legible traces. Descartes’s writings thus proved extremely influential among not just those analysing human behaviour but those seeking to reproduce or represent it also.39 Translated into English in 1650 and much reprinted and discussed thereafter, the influence of Descartes’s ideas is visible in Otway’s writing: that Jaffeir’s ‘disordered’ face is a sign of rage and Belvidera’s ‘panting breasts, and trembling limbs’ a universal marker of fear means that the physical description of these characters serves to infuse spectacle with emotion for a time when passions were the paramount part of dramatic literature. As well as in the author’s implicit stage directions, we can also trace Descartes’s influence in advice given in the eighteenth century to those who wished to know more about the performance of such writing. Burgh’s description of the exact tones and attitudes necessary for the expression of a specific emotional state owes, for example, a debt to Cartesian schematisation of emotion. Earlier in the period, Charles Gildon, in a volume purportedly written by the actor Thomas Betterton, urged aspiring performers to imitate ‘History-Pieces’ when assuming a pose or attitude and so also encouraged a Cartesian approach.40 This was because one highly influential maker of such ‘History-Pieces’ was the painter Charles Le Brun, whose Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698) owed its standardisation of the appearance of the passions to the theories of Descartes and swiftly became an important transdisciplinary vector for the philosopher’s ideas.41
Nowhere, however, is the intertwining of a Cartesian understanding of the passions, as mediated by Le Brun, and the historical appreciation of theatre practice more apparent than in certain paintings that depict eighteenth-century actors performing the celebrated points of their time. Johan Zoffany painted Cibber and Garrick as Belvidera and Jaffeir in 1763. As Shearer West has made clear, this image is no record of performance, but rather an interpretation of performance based on a shared critical framework for the representation of emotion.42 On Garrick’s visage, as painted by Zoffany, the eyebrows contract, a clear symptom of the agony of Jaffeir’s soul, while Cibber’s upraised face and opened eyes speak to the tender feelings she experiences.43 Whether Garrick or Cibber ever adopted this precise attitude, or even whether this picture shaped either their subsequent performances or Gentleman’s own memory of the scene, is impossible to determine. What can be said, however, is that this point was significant enough to warrant immortalisation in oils and that Zoffany’s composition itself performs a representation of the passions, drawing on Cartesian traditions shared between discourses of painting and acting in order to produce an iconic attitude.
Yet the details of this painting, reproduced on the cover of this book, represent more than an iconic attitude.44 Like the theatrical point they remediate, they also incorporate the tensions of transition and thus the dynamic potential that such tensions grant. Garrick’s brow may be contracted, but the rest of his mobile face has few of the marks of rage; his hand holds the dagger aloft, but its point dips and the strength seems to drain from his wrist; Jaffeir may be standing over Belvidera, but the twist of his body and the distribution of his weight has as much fear and confusion in it as anger. Descartes and Le Brun can help us recognise the extent to which this painting, like other interpretations of this moment, is a portrayal of the passions of love and rage, but the iconic clarity of such a Cartesian approach has its limits: its mechanistic understanding of the way that the animal spirits generate passions has trouble accounting for the complex existence of those passions in time, and thus for the connective role of transition in a point. To return to Gentleman’s account of Garrick’s performance, he does not simply name the passions of love and rage that are expressed in this scene: he also writes of the ‘confusion’ that the actor must animate, an indeterminate emotional state that the discrete approaches of Descartes cannot adequately encompass. Such ‘confusion’ is one of a few distinctly non-Cartesian terms in Gentleman’s writing. The language of fire employed by him is another, used in an effort to capture the dynamic unfolding of human feeling through the turn: the ‘stern glow’ Garrick gives to Jaffeir’s rage is broken by ‘gleams of love’, while ‘distracted confusion […] flames in his countenance’. Fire provides Gentleman with a metaphor capable of capturing the dynamic transitional qualities of the scene, allowing him to depart from a basic Cartesian schematisation of the moment. Zoffany’s painting does something similar by using a variety of sources of light as visual metaphors for the complex existence of passions in time: the guttering lamp he places in the foreground burns like Jaffeir’s fitful anger, while the moon shines over the Grand Canal with the same calm and cooling light that seems to emanate from the skin of Belvidera.
It was the arc of light left by a burning coal as it flew through the air that inspired Isaac Newton’s reflections on the reception of impressions in time, and it is such later theorisations, more able to account for the unfolding of feeling, that allow us to explore the concept of transition further.45 With his example of the burning coal, Newton refuted Descartes and argued that we do not register impressions mechanically in an instant but rather continue to experience their effect for some time, as, in this case, ethereal particles continue to oscillate within the optic nerve following the impact of photonic particles upon it. As Roach argues, ‘it was a short step from [Newton’s] motor and sensory vibrations to the emotions’, a step made easier by the already well-established use of acoustical analogies to describe the physiology of the passions in time.46 Such analogies appear in acting manuals: Aaron Hill considered the passions to be ‘what the keys are in a harpsichord’ and John Hill, over a decade later, described actor and audience as ‘perfectly concordant’ strings.47 John Hill’s metaphor in particular may owe something to David Hume’s description of the human mind in the second book of his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), which nicely encapsulates the paradigm shift from the Cartesian ‘hydraulic or pneumatic push of animal spirits’ to ‘the acoustical metaphor of vibration’ associated with David Hartley:48
Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find, that with regard to the passions, ’tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music, which in running over all the notes immediately loses sound after the breath ceases; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays.49
Such a description of the human mind helps to explain what Gentleman’s invocation of a ‘variety’ of transitions, tones, and attitudes, not to mention his metaphors of fire, endeavours to express. The passions embodied by Garrick were not, in his view, simple frozen icons (and only become such in the hostile view of someone like Theophilus Cibber), but rather ‘complicated beauties’, unfolding in time, whose complexity depended on the tripartite union of transition, tone, and attitude to manifest. While the latter two terms here lend themselves to discrete, direct representation of an object, transition does not: it is simultaneously an object to be appreciated and a passage between emotional states. As such, transition is a concept that forces us to consider the expression of the passions (the prime subjects of tragic drama) as a sequence, and so chimes with an increasing eighteenth-century awareness of the existence of these passions as part of a sophisticated apparatus of sensibility, what Daniel Webb described in 1769 as the ‘chain’ that ‘runs thro’ our feelings’.50
The preceding summary of Cartesian, Humean, and Hartleian approaches to the passions provides an eighteenth-century context for understanding Gentleman’s and others’ appreciation of the transitions of Garrick’s Jaffeir as a powerful combination of iconic and dynamic qualities. To grasp the full power of this combination, however, it is necessary to examine the relationship between transition and the making of meaning. No author is a better guide to this than Hume, whose Treatise, besides its much-quoted description of our mind as a string instrument, also makes extensive use of the concept of transition in order to explain those apparent connections between our perceptions that make things meaningful to us.
Beggaring Description
Hume presents the human mind as the product of successive perceptions. These perceptions are of two kinds: ‘Impressions’ are those perceptions which ‘enter with most force and violence’ and include ‘all our sensations, passions and emotions’; ‘ideas’, by contrast, ‘are the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning’ (Treatise, p. 1). ‘Transition’ is one of a small number of words Hume uses to describe what occurs between perceptions. Hume thus examines ‘transition of passion’ (as a transition between impressions) but also transitions between two ideas and between an idea and an impression. Regardless of the kinds of perception in question, however, the key feature of almost all the transitions discussed in the Treatise is the ease with which they occur.
Hume explains these cases of ‘easy transition’ in several ways. As far as impressions are concerned, there is clearly ‘an attraction or association’ among them, ‘though […] only by resemblance’ (p. 283). One of Hume’s examples for such association of impressions would not look out of place in an eighteenth-century acting manual: when illustrating the way certain passions resemble others, he explains how this facilitates a progress by which ‘Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed’ (p. 283). As for ideas, ‘The rule, by which they proceed, is to pass from one object to what is resembling, contiguous to, or produced by it’ (p. 283). Thus ‘When one idea is present to the imagination, any other, united by these relations, naturally follows it, and enters with more facility by means of that introduction’ (p. 283). Perhaps Hume’s most famous observation of an easy transition, however, concerns the relationships between impressions and ideas. At the beginning of a section discussing sense impressions and memory in relation to knowledge and probability, Hume observes that ‘All our arguments concerning causes and effects consist both of an impression of the memory or senses, and of the idea of that existence, which produces the object of the impression, or is produced by it’ (p. 84). When, for example, you or I sense heat, we each have the idea that it is caused by the fire we stand beside (p. 87). Hume subjects such an inference to sceptical analysis by asking how we come to make the transition from heat to its supposed source in a fire and how we come to believe that anything is caused by something else. Ultimately, he shows that our inference is nothing more than a habitual, customary transition, built, for instance, upon our repeated experience of having always felt heat in the presence of fire. This results in what Hume calls the ‘most violent’ of all the ‘paradoxes’ of his Treatise:
The necessary connexion betwixt causes and effects is the foundation of our inference from one to the other. The foundation of our inference is the transition arising from the accustomed union. These are, therefore, the same.
We might seem to infer that fire necessarily causes heat, but what we are actually doing is performing a transition we have made so many times that it is now habitual. We can never thus truly know whether the fire caused the heat or not: instead, we have simply made the transition meaningful.
Hume shares with Gentleman, Hill, and many others examined in this book an interest in observing and evaluating transition. Yet it should be clear from the above summary that Hume’s transitions are, in some respects, very different from those taken up in accounts of performance. Whereas the transitions of Jaffeir are spectacular and arresting, those that Hume is interested in are often easy, unremarkable, and habitual. Yet, as Sarah Kareem has argued, Hume’s achievement in the Treatise was to make the gaps between our perceptions and the role of transition in our interpretation of them highly visible. This allowed Hume, and others, like Adam Smith, ‘to render the taken for granted world briefly available as an object of wonder’.51 In other words, it allowed Hume and Smith to treat our everyday perceptions of the world, and the habitual, scarcely perceptible transitions between them, as something that was as wondrous as the exceptional, spectacular transitions between Jaffeir’s love and anger performed upon the stage. When we feel heat, we might now think that it comes from some other source than the flame because we are conscious of the contingency of the connection between our two perceptions; when Jaffeir grows angry, we are struck by the extraordinary way that Otway’s script and Garrick’s body move to this passion from a state of loving tenderness. Smith and Hume themselves use the language of the stage to make this point, with the latter claiming the ‘mind is a kind of theatre’ (p. 252) and the former evoking the machinery of the opera house when trying to explain that ‘species of Wonder, which arises from an unusual succession of things’.52
Kareem’s work on Hume and Smith shows how their sceptical study of perceptions and the transitions between them creates an opportunity for wonder. The description of theatrical transitions undertaken by Gentleman, Hill, and others does something similar, as they hold up the transitions of stage and page for appreciation. Yet, as Kareem herself points out, the ‘critique of induction’s defamiliarizing effect’ – the sceptical attention to perceptions and transitions between them – ‘is inevitably temporary’.53 Smith writes of being ‘insensibly drawn’ to treating Newtonian principles ‘as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of’54 and Hume of ‘our natural propension’ to believe in the identity and simplicity of an object (p. 253). Something similar happens in writing about theatrical transition: sometimes the appreciation of an iconic and dynamic instant of change gives way to an effort to explain that instant and make it the subject of a new discourse, often in terms of the author’s or performer’s knowledge of human nature. Thomas Davies, for instance, praised Garrick’s performance of King Lear for the way in which the actor ‘had pursued the progress of agonizing feelings to madness in its several stages’,55 and William Richardson held that Shakespeare’s plays contained specimens from which one could extract ‘the laws that regulate the intellectual system’ of every human being.56 These are very different approaches to those espoused by Gentleman and Hill, not least because – by taking the spectacle of transition as a starting point – they inevitably look beyond that spectacle in an effort to find an answer to the very questions it provoked. To borrow once again from Kareem, it would be truer to say that an attention to transition creates meaning by providing an opportunity for two kinds of wonder: a wonder at the spectacle of the stage transition, with the attention fixed on its combination of iconic and dynamic qualities, and a wonder about that spectacle, with our critical attention instead driven by those same iconic and dynamic qualities to provide some kind of explanation for the moment they create.
Gentleman recorded that Garrick’s Jaffeir ‘beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’. In so doing and regardless of the historical accuracy of his account, he exemplified the critical standpoint that I recover in these pages: one which considered transition as a fundamental part of successful drama, both in the actor’s physical transformations and in the author’s scripting of sequential passions. Unlike the much-examined judgements of ‘tone’ and ‘attitude’ in a performance, writing about transition forces us to recognise a productive tension in drama between the iconic display of a passion and its dynamic potential. Aaron Hill captured such a tension when he wrote of ‘the very Instant of the changing Passion’ that an actor should strive to produce for audiences more interested in pathos than plot. Hill’s, Gentleman’s, and others’ writings about tragedy in particular all reflect developments in the period’s understanding of mental and emotional states, a development which, from Descartes to Hartley and Hume, provides a foundation for a critical focus on the peculiar status of transition for an artform that works in both time and space.57
That critical focus is far from monolithic across the eighteenth century. For Gentleman, Garrick’s performance ‘beggars description’, but, for others, this actor’s and his script’s transitions beg for description and explanation. Somewhat like the easy transitions that Hume unpicked to re-invest our everyday experience as something (briefly) capable of arresting our attention, the spectacular transitions of the stage gave to audiences both an object to appreciate and one to explain, one to wonder at and one to wonder about. In trying to answer the questions of why Jaffeir’s love returns and prevents him from killing Belvidera or how exactly Lear goes mad, critics like Richardson take transition as a starting point for a new discourse, and so risk minimising that powerful combination of dynamic change and iconic instant that had captured the attention of so many of their contemporaries for so long.
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Hamlet seeing the ghost, Zara questioning her faith, Lear cursing his daughter, Alicia losing her mind, Macbeth reaching for the dagger, and Jaffeir threatening his wife: all these points were once and may again be read as expressions of the art of transition; to do so, as I have argued, is to see them anew as instants of changing passion, of simultaneous stops and transformations, and as potent combinations of the iconic and the dynamic. Each of these examples appears in the pages that follow.
Chapter 1 examines the elaboration and growth of a set of critical priorities, transition prime among them, crystallised by Aaron Hill in the 1730s. Offering what he claimed to be a purified version of pantomime’s techniques for arresting attention, Hill wrote of how an actor could become a ‘true Faustus’ for the theatres through transition, creating iconic and dynamic moments of suspension during which they could shift mind and body from one passion to another. Hill’s emphases continue into the time of Garrick, whose ‘pensively preparatory attitudes’, particularly those of his Hamlet, were praised as intellectual achievements and blamed as pantomimical claptraps.58 They also provoked innovative attempts to notate them. Ultimately, pauses and the transitions that occurred upon them became moments when an actor could be described as asserting their artistic autonomy. Critics, identifying such pauses, revealed new rhythms and nuances in dramatic speech while also imposing and tightening focus to the point that their accounts sometimes amount to the treatment of the dramatic as the lyric. The realisation of Hill’s dreams – a theatre where sophisticated emotion replaced slapstick motion as the key source of spectacle – soon risked becoming a Faustian pact, for an insight into the transitions and passions of a play seemed to demand as much private attention to the page as public engagement with the stage.
No play of the eighteenth century better reflects the theoretical developments sketched in Chapter 1 than Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735), his translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732). Chapter 2 traces the fortunes of this play, from its first performance under Hill’s direction outside the patent theatres to Garrick’s reworking of it at Drury Lane. I show that Zara’s scepticism of established religion and her father’s deathbed proselytising are used by Hill to produce what his friend John Dennis called an ‘enthusiastic’ passion, and I suggest that Voltaire’s work may have appealed to Hill for its handling of religious material – material that, in Dennis’s view, was supposedly capable of producing the most extreme sequences of sublime emotions. Yet as well as a work rich in enthusiastic passion, Hill’s Zara is also an exposition of what this man would describe as ‘dramatic passions’. These ‘dramatic passions’ are not just the product of particularly powerful ideas but ideas in their own right: characters speak of what they and those around them feel, and the line between the idea that inspires the passion and the passion itself, so firm in Dennis, weakens. Hill’s dramatic passions are thus present as instruction and entertainment. Love is the supreme example of this, an idea and an emotion capable of including all others, and one which Hill’s English – through the nominalisation of French adjectives and verbs or through the use of typography – took care to highlight. Those who read, saw, or performed Zara could witness the outward marks of many passions and trace on stage and on the page their performance through transition to the very instant. Such opportunities made the play perfect for what Hill called an ‘Experiment’ on taste and acting in England in the 1730s. When Garrick came to revive this experiment twenty years later, Hill’s dramatic passions become the property of Garrick himself, as he re-writes sections of the play to favour his character of Lusignan, cutting lines whose effect can be achieved by fluid physical transition and making the actor-manager the centre of attention.
Descriptions of Garrick performing points made compelling through sequences of extreme passion are not confined to his acting of plays, and Chapter 3 considers his performance of odes in order to demonstrate both how eighteenth-century attention to transition crossed twenty-first-century modal boundaries and how the recovery of this approach might help us understand anew a form of public poetry that brought together star performers and musical accompaniment. Focusing jointly on two works of 1769, Garrick’s delivery of his Ode to Shakespeare and Daniel Webb’s Observations on the Correspondences between Poetry and Music, I show how transition, as a technique for emphasising the passions through contrast and comparison, aligns the dramatic and lyric modes. This is especially true of the Shakespeare ode, which positions the Elizabethan playwright as both Britain’s national dramatist and Britain’s national poet, a figure who is simultaneously lyric and dramatic through his mastery of the passions. Indeed, Garrick, who incorporated references to his own performances of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear into his ode, also might be seen to make the same claim for himself as the pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare.
King Lear, the subject of Chapter 4, was considered by Thomas Davies to outrank Hamlet as Garrick’s most significant part. I argue here that the scale of Garrick’s achievement in King Lear depends on the extent to which this play (following Nahum Tate’s and Garrick’s alterations of Shakespeare’s text) offered a remarkable sequence of contrasting emotions for performance. A key source for the extreme emotional variation inherent in each of the play’s points is madness. The representation of all the nuances of Lear’s insanity required a mastery of the art of transition, yet Garrick’s practice of such an art was not without its challenges. While both hostile and laudatory commentators on his performances explored the aesthetic, sociological, and psychological questions of how to perform a king’s madness, performance editions and promptbook markings reveal Garrick’s own efforts to perfect his rendition of the part’s transitions through the use of everything from innovative make-up to minute textual editing. Garrick’s edits included the reduction of Tate’s romantic subplot, yet he never, despite his many claims to be restoring Shakespeare’s Lear, excised it entirely. As the second part of this chapter shows, the Tate-Garrick versions of Edgar’s pretend madness performed an essential function, serving as a source of what Lord Kames called ‘seasonable respite’, a kind of structural transition designed to moderate and so maintain spectators’ emotional engagement in the tragedy.59 Such moderation is alien to Shakespeare’s play of 1608, and, while the eighteenth-century Lear can tell us much about the uses of transition to create a celebrated performance in Georgian London, it thus also serves as a critical standpoint for re-evaluating the structures of Jacobean tragedy.
Chapter 5 charts the uses of transition in literary criticism of drama and builds upon my use of Hume’s approach to transition in this introduction. First, I demonstrate the existence of an attention to transition as a key element in some prominent literary critical writing of the later eighteenth century. Second, I argue that, within such writing, the understanding of transition evolves from that explored in my earlier chapters. Borrowing a term that Elizabeth Montagu, William Richardson, and their contemporaries make frequent use of, one might describe this evolution as a shift from dramatic transition to ‘dramatic character’, motivated by what Hume and Smith identified as a quintessentially human urge to connect and explain sequential perceptions. Montagu does this as she argues for the moral impact of Shakespeare’s incessantly enthralling dramatic characters, and Richardson makes the same move when he claims that Shakespeare’s dramatic characters are such perfect imitations of life that their passions and transitions might serve as the subjects of philosophical enquiry into human nature. In the third section of this chapter, I use Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (1777) to illuminate the tensions inherent in such a critical standpoint, as efforts to explain moments of spectacular dramatic transition in terms of character risk minimising the spectacle that invited such explanation in the first place. This chapter is thus above all interested in the shift from pathos to pathology, from the critical appreciation of Constance’s pathetic articulation of her grief in King John to the philosophical diagnosis of maternal affection that motivates it.60
The pathologisation of pathos through the explanation of striking transitions between the passions anticipates certain Romantic attitudes to drama, which denigrate the performance of a character in favour of the study of that figure’s psychological constitution. With reference to Charles Lamb’s writing about Garrick, I thus sketch, by way of conclusion, the decline of the art of transition as something that was both embodied and conceptual after 1800. This decline has had a long-lasting effect, one which this book endeavours to counter by providing an exemplary sensitivity to the meaning of those movements inherent in a transitional moment. The argument of each chapter does this by demonstrating what might be revealed about performance history, translated tragedy, lyric poetry, Shakespeare, and character criticism when these subjects are considered in terms of the art of transition.
