The most famous instance of supposed acting in ancient Greece was that of the actor Polus performing in the Electra of Sophocles, at Athens in the 4th century bc. The plot requires Electra to carry an urn supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes and to lament and bewail the fate she believed had overtaken him. Accordingly, Polus, clad in the mourning garb of Electra, took from the tomb the ashes and urn of his own son (who had recently died), embraced them as if they were those of Orestes, and rendered not the appearance or imitation of sorrow but genuine grief and unfeigned lamentation. Rather than mere acting, this was in fact real grief being expressed.

From antiquity, rival traditions of acting can be discerned—one stressing the externals of voice, speech, and gesture and the other looking to the actual emotional processes of the actor. Aristotle defined acting as “the right management of the voice to express the various emotions,” and this primacy of the voice as the actor’s outstanding medium has been widely accepted. “Dramatic ability,” he said further, “is a natural gift, and can hardly be taught. The principles of good diction can be so taught.” Aristotle did not fall into the common mistake of thinking that acting is only good diction; rather, he simply recognized that diction, unlike acting, can be taught. He was well aware of something more than diction in acting but he knew no way of training it. Aristotle saw good acting resulting either from a great natural quickness of parts or an enthusiasm allied to madness. “By the first of these, we mold ourselves with facility to the imitation of every form; by the other, transported out of ourselves, we become what we imagine.”

The dichotomy noted in ancient Greece persisted through ancient Roman theatre and into modern times. On the one hand, there was a recognition of the need for the actor to be affected by the sensations he wishes to arouse in others; on the other hand, a need was also seen for a precise system of expression—the peculiar look, tone, and gesture appropriate to every emotion of the mind.

Modern European acting began with the Italian commedia dell’arte, the earliest mention of which is in 1545. Until then, the actor was limited to illustrating the text by means of a narrow scheme of gesture and rhetorical speech. But in the commedia dell’arte the actor used only an outline, a plot; he improvised the play, giving free rein to the actor’s art, developing his own characters or masks that he repeated in each play. Each character became an extension of the actor’s own personality but elastic enough to respond to innumerable dramatic situations; thus, actors began to develop the distinctive stage character of the theatre, whereas previously the emphasis had been on its literary aspects. Since this demanded high skill, the actors joined into companies—in which, incidentally, women began to take major roles for the first time, female characters having traditionally been portrayed by men. The actors became professional, and, by doing so, they stimulated the development of modern drama.

The essential requisite for the drama is its performance. The dramatist’s creation finds its fulfillment not in the writer’s study but on the stage. This fulfillment can best be achieved through the contribution of the professional actor. Nonetheless, after the formation of acting companies, actors continued to learn by doing. Their schools were professional companies; their classroom, the stage; their teachers, the audience and their fellow players. Schools of dramatic art, isolated from theatres or companies, are a relative innovation in Europe and the Americas.

In contrast, ancient traditions of actors’ training have continued unbroken for many centuries in India and Japan, where particular types of theatrical experience are prescribed. India’s textbook for actors, the Nāṭya-śāstra, has provided specifications for the representation of emotions down to the smallest gesture for nearly 2,000 years, and its influence is still visible in such dramatic forms as kūḍyāṭṭam, which has carried on the traditions of Sanskrit drama for about a thousand years, and in the kathakali dance drama, a relative newcomer that emerged contemporaneously with Shakespeare. The Nō theatre of Japan, presently divided into five distinct schools, is directly descended from the theatre of Zeami Motokiyo (1363/64–1443), an actor and author of Nō plays who codified the form in 21 treatises, the most influential of which is the Fūshi kaden (1400–18; “Appearance of Flower Transmission”), also known as the Kaden sho. Zeami’s teachings, originally intended for his descendants in the Kanze school of Nō, discuss both philosophical and practical considerations regarding actors’ training, and his concerns for constant training and discipline anticipate many modern approaches to acting.

Diderot’s Paradox of Acting

The most significant statement on acting is Diderot’s Paradox of Acting. Because of its polemic brilliance, it remains the most widely known essay on the subject. In the 20th century it provided the guiding precepts for the influential work of the French director and actor Louis Jouvet. Outside France it has found little acceptance within the profession, though its famous paradox—that in order to move the audience the actor must himself remain unmoved—is still highly regarded.

However disputable the solutions it proposes, Diderot’s essay contains an excellent description of the actor’s problem. What bothered Diderot was the unsolved problem of how the actor, if he were full, really full, of feeling, could play the same part twice running with the same spirit and success and yet be worn out and cold as marble at the third performance. Diderot confirmed this phenomenon by noting “the unequal acting of players who play from the heart. Their playing is alternately strong and feeble, fiery and cold, dull and sublime.” This was the case with an actress who in her day was the outstanding example of emotional acting. “She comes on the stage without knowing what she is going to say; half the time she does not know what she is saying; but she has one sublime moment.” Diderot knew that actors do feel and experience; but he also knew that some actors refused to recognize the need for craft, for training.

Diderot asked how the actor, if he is himself while he is playing, is to stop being himself: how he is to catch just the point at which he is to stay his hand? Diderot demanded unity in a performance; he demanded respect for the author’s concept, and he understood the difficulty of repeating a performance. He demanded a definite course to the passion—a beginning, a middle, and an end. In Diderot’s day, however, the problem of developing a technique for creating inspiration in the actor remained unsolved.

The difficulty of solving the problem is illustrated by the work of the 19th-century French teacher François Delsarte, whose influence was widespread not only in France but also in the United States. Delsarte became dissatisfied with routine acting techniques. He observed their mechanical and stultifying character and realized that under the stress of natural instinct or emotion, the body assumes appropriate attitudes and gestures quite different from those described by his teachers. But when he attempted to formulate laws of speech and gesture, on the basis of years of diligent observation and study, he created a series of elaborate pictorial descriptions that were just as mechanical as those he had originally criticized. Knowledge of affective behaviour had not advanced far enough to serve as an aid in solving the problem of the actor: there was still too little understanding of human behaviour, of the relation between the conscious and unconscious, and of the role of the senses.