The tragic actor and Shakespeare

Abstract

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.