9780230276420 01 prexii · 2016-08-05 · 1 Introduction What this book is about Gesture is a kind of speaking with the body. The body makes pictures, and these pictures seem to speak

v

Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Series Editors’ Preface ix

Introduction 1

What this book is about 1

Formal versus naturalistic Shakespeare 2

Contemporary approaches 4

The thesis of the book: gesture, cognition and morality 6

Higher purposes and self-fulfilment 8

Structure of the book 10

Part I Theory 13

1 What is a Gesture? 15

Historical definitions 15

The contemporary definition 17

2 Ideas of Gesture: Before and After Shakespeare 21

The classical background: the open palm of rhetoric 21

Summary of the classical precepts 25

Shakespeare’s use of classical rhetoric 27

Passions and humours 29

Christian contexts 32

Smoothness 35

After Shakespeare: the neoclassical language of gesture 39

Charles Darwin and the modern era 48

How smoothness connects with social morality 50

Part II Practice 55

3 Shakespeare’s Practice 57

Uses of the word ‘gesture’ in Shakespeare’s plays 57

Copyrighted material – 9780230276420


vi Contents

Supplication 60

Prayer 62

Cue-taking: interaction gestures 65

Face acting 67

After Shakespeare: John Bulwer 70

4 Eighteenth-century Gesture 74

Thomas Betterton 74

The Restoration theatres 76

The rise of the actress 77

Aaron Hill and the rules of gesture 80

Sensibility 82

Points and starts 85

5 Gestural Landmarks from Garrick to Irving 87

David Garrick 87

Garrick’s debt to Charles Macklin 94

Sarah Siddons: neoclassical authority and Romantic melancholy 97

True and false gestures 105

Edmund Kean 107

Henry Irving’s Darwinism 111

6 Modern and Postmodern Gestures 116

Stanislavski’s Othello 117

Modernism and the East 120

The modernism of Les Kurbas 121

Cinematic gestures 124

Postmodernist gestures 126

Robert Lepage 126

The Wooster Group: Troilus and Cressida 128

Dreamthinkspeak: The Rest is Silence 130

Gamification of gesture 132

7 The Use of Video in the Study of Gesture 136

Ian McKellen 137

Tim McInnerny 141



Contents vii

8 Interviews and Closing Thoughts 146

Siân Williams 146

David McNeill 153

Conclusion 159

Further Reading 160

Bibliography 162

Index 177



1

Introduction

What this book is about

Gesture is a kind of speaking with the body. The body makes pictures, and these pictures seem to speak. What the pictures say, though, is not always quite what they show. For example, if I want to sew a button on a shirt, I will put my hand into a particular shape to hold the needle. If I make the same hand shape while talking to you, I will create an idea about myself that I hope will be planted in your mind. Exactly what idea, though, would depend on the way in which I perform the gesture – in other words, upon my behavioural style. It may be that I try to cre-ate the idea that I have a precise grasp of the subject under discussion; in this case, my intention may be to show you that I am a precise, i.e. conscientious, competent person. Or perhaps the gesture says that in my opinion things are OK between us, so by performing it I may be try-ing to show you that my intentions towards you are warm – that I am a sociable, agreeable kind of person. In this book, then, I am less inter-ested in how gesture adds information to a person’s speech – which is a common belief about gesture – and more in how gesture may be used to create an idea about the speaker in another person’s mind.

This transformation of an action into a gesture is a metaphoric proce-dure. In my example, the physical act of holding a needle between the index finger and the thumb is translated into an idea that exists only in the imagination – in this case, a belief about competence or warmth. The idea is communicated via a metaphor that makes use of our sensory knowledge of the real object (in this case, a needle), including how it can be used; in this way sensory metaphor helps to get the idea out of one person’s head into the head of another. Poets like Shakespeare have always understood that metaphors emerging from sensory experience are sticky: that is, they are memorable. One of my beliefs about gesture is that, as a tool for sharing thought and feeling, it aspires to that same social stickiness by appealing to shared physical experience. The sense that cognition is embodied underpins the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s contention that metaphor and metonymy ‘are not figures of speech – at least not at the outset. They become figures of speech. In principle, they are acts’ (Lefebvre 1991: 139). Metaphor is, as Lefebvre claims, a



2 Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice

process whose ‘point of departure’ is ‘the body metamorphosed’ (ibid.). Recent evidence from cognitive psychology has helped advance this insight regarding embodied cognition – the view that, at a basic level, our thought processes make use of metaphors arising from bodily expe-rience (see Gibbs 2005). To put it simply: we think with our bodies.

This book is about how actors think Shakespeare with their bodies. More broadly, it is about how gesture offers a metaphoric window into thought and feeling, and thus into personality. There is nothing partic-ularly new about this notion as far as contemporary scholarship is con-cerned. What is perhaps new is that I connect the premise that gestures are embodiments of cognitive acts with morality. I consider cognition not as an individual act but as a social one, subject to shared under-standings about what is right and wrong. I believe that shared moral understandings expressed in gesture do not originate in some abstract symbolic realm: they emerge from bodily perceptions and experiences. Thus, to reflect upon gesture in Shakespearean practice is to engage with the way that people form moral judgements. This deployment of ges-ture in the service of moral beliefs is also part of how a person tries to create an impression of her- or himself in the mind of another.

The book also tries to answer the question of how a performance achieves its effect – as opposed to what it might mean, or why it is the way it is. By narrowing the focus down to gesture in Shakespearean per-formance, I hope to engage with a relatively unexplored subject, as well as offer a range of case studies and examples. Inevitably, the discussion will at times venture out of the immediate zone of gesture into related fields involving the body, psychology and cultural history. That said, the subject is vast and the book cannot be an exhaustive study.

Formal versus naturalistic Shakespeare

Gesture is a difficult area for scholarship to deal with, since it would seem to require for evidence what has either already vanished into the past, or what is always fleeting and intangible – that is to say, acts of non-verbal communication. The lack of a complete and reliable visual archive of gesture (certainly before the year 1700) could be seen as the Achilles heel of the enterprise. It necessitates a degree of speculation that may seem to contradict the motive for writing. At the same time, if we fail to take account of gesture, we are in danger of missing a cru-cial ingredient in Shakespeare’s practice. And if we fail to account for the gestures we see in our own encounters with Shakespearean perfor-mance, we may as well close our eyes.



Introduction 3

To begin, I would like to give a flavour of some of the issues that arise from looking into the current state of scholarship. Discussion of gesture in Shakespearean performance has often been annexed to the debate on formal versus naturalistic acting. This debate has been around since at least Alfred Harbage’s essay on ‘Elizabethan Acting’ in 1939. In sup-port of him were Waldo McNeir (1941), Robert H. Bowers (1948), A.G.H. Bachrach (1949) and Bertram Joseph (1960). The reaction against their formalistic approach was spearheaded by John Russell Brown (1953), and gained support from Marvin Rosenberg (1954).

Since then, a middle ground has been articulated by Peter Thomson (1992) and John Astington (2010) among others. Bernard Beckerman summarized the debate: ‘The formalists describe the means at the actor’s disposal, the techniques of voice and gesture; the naturalists, the effect at which he aimed, the imitation of life’ (Beckerman 1962: 111). This would seem to place someone like myself, who is concerned with the how of gesture in performance, in the camp of the formalists – except that I consider the distinction between means and effect to be false, as did many Elizabethans, who were fond of remarking that eloquence and wisdom were the same thing (Enterline 2012: 3).

David Bevington, in his book Action is Eloquence (1984), approached the subject by noting actions assumed to be called for in the playtext: kissing, kneeling, handshaking and so on. Bevington gives an edge to what would otherwise seem self-evident by arguing these actions have a contradictory aspect. While they appear to be displays of Shakespeare’s commitment to Tudor hierarchy, in performance some gestures take on subversive resonances in instances of what he calls ‘violated ceremony’ – as when Cordelia spoils the ritual set up by her father in the second scene of King Lear. The notion that a gesture can have contradictory aspects in performance is interesting, and I will elaborate upon a related point in my exploration of competing social moralities in Elizabethan culture below.

There have been no book-length studies of Shakespearean gesture apart from Bevington’s (at the time of writing Farah Karim-Cooper’s The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage is in press). Existing articles range from those of Steven Urkowitz (1986), who deploys gesture to support a the-ory about Shakespeare’s authorship of ‘bad’ quartos, to Harold Frisch’s 1987 attempt to classify functions of gesture (he doesn’t make use of existing classifications from gesture studies). In a book on staging (2000), Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa discuss the meanings of clutching one’s head with both hands, a gesture they think Hamlet makes when he says ‘Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a




seat/In this distracted globe’ (1.5.95–7). This is encouraging material to read, but it doesn’t lead the authors into the subject any further. Finally, Ros King’s article on ‘Sound and Gesture in The Winter’s Tale’ (2007) contains much I find myself in sympathy with. Yet having promised in her title that she will consider the subject of gesture she leaves it alone, focusing instead on sound patterns in the text. She suggests that the actor playing Hermione would indicate pregnancy in the character’s opening scene ‘perhaps by the physical stance’ (ibid.: 395). Two refer-ences to a posture as opposed to a gesture, plus a mention of Leontes wiping his son’s dirty nose – King’s article is representative of a general reluctance to tackle the specifics of the subject.

There are two main reasons for this. One is, as I hinted above, the pau-city of visual evidence, especially where one would most want to find it – in Shakespeare’s own context. But that is not to say that there is no evidence at all. There is some visual material, such as paintings and woodcuts, as well as some written description, and some thoughts can be extrapolated from this material. After the revolution in mass publishing around 1700 the situation improves considerably. And of course with the arrival of cinema in the late nineteenth century, things really begin to look up. Best of all, modern video technologies have made it possible to access recordings of live performances that can be paused, replayed and analysed for the study of gesture. So, while it is necessary to recognize gaps in the evidence, that is no reason to stay silent on the subject. The other issue is that acting technique as such is not an area of expertise for many Shakespeare scholars. They are sometimes more comfortable with textual analysis than with talking about how actors use their bodies. However, this is changing, in part due to the efforts of a new generation of academ-ics who are able to draw upon practical experience of theatre-making.

Contemporary approaches

Some recent approaches have made use of paradigms and concepts from cognitive semantics. A basic premise of this work is the continuity prin-ciple: the idea that human behaviour, since it is founded upon biology, must be continuous with the behaviour of those higher-order mammals from which humans evolved. As Bruce McConachie has argued, the dis-tinctions that we make between our thoughts, feelings and actions and those of, say, chimpanzees (with whom we share at least 97 per cent of our DNA) are not ontological. They are not differences of kind; they are differences of degree. For writers like McConachie, performance is a pat-tern of behaviour that evolved from animal play. As well, the continuity



Introduction 5

hypothesis insists that even the most abstract cognitive reasoning pro-cesses are grounded in biology (see McConachie and Hart 2006 for a representative anthology).

A lot of recent work attempting to find synergies between cognitive science and performance has fastened upon the theory that there may exist mirror neurons in an area of the human brain called Broca’s Area. This area is implicated in both speech and hand gestures. The theory holds that these neurons activate not only when the individual carries out an action but when the individual observes another carrying out an action. This discovery has been used to support a conception of ‘simu-lation’ as the basis for empathy – motor mimicry, it seems, affords you the capacity to read the intentions of another person. It is a seductive theory, but it must be treated with caution. These neurons were origi-nally found in macaques, not a species known for imitative behaviour; to extrapolate their functions to the brains of higher-order primates is something of a leap in the dark. In addition, you may observe me per-forming an action, and your mirror system may fire up in response – but that does not mean you feel what I feel. Mirror neurons (if they exist in humans) may play a role in the perception of a person’s actions and intentions in relation to a physical object, but empathy is rather more than action perception. At least as important is the effect upon social behaviour of hormones such as oxytocin, which is strongly associated with feelings of warmth and trust (see Churchland 2011). Mirror neu-ron theory cannot as yet account for human interaction in all its com-plexity. That said, the theory has influenced the work of scholars like Evelyn Tribble (2011) and Amy Cook, who treat gestures as evidence for embodied cognition in Shakespearean text and performance. In Shakespearean Neuroplay (2010) Cook introduces some concepts drawn from gesture studies (in particular, from the seminal work of psycho-linguist David McNeill) but, coming then to Hamlet, she fails to find a way to deploy them, reverting instead to a more conventional literary criticism of the text that avoids talking directly about bodies. That said, and while there have been voices urging caution regarding some of the larger claims of neuroscience with respect to performance, this is never-theless an exciting field of research which is already building promising bridges between ‘the two cultures’ of the humanities and sciences. At its heart is a strong call for the centrality of embodiment to all cognitive acts, and this book is in part a reply to that call. In these pages I try to expand the field of debate by connecting performance practice to paradigms of social morality that have both a foundation in embodied cognition and specific historical manifestations.




The thesis of the book: gesture, cognition and morality

A central thesis of this book is that gesture offers a window not only into the mind of the actor but also into the wider socio-moral background in which the actor operates; in fact I do not separate the two. In the book I will refer to something called social cognition. This is most simply described, in the words of the neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman, as ‘thinking about other people, oneself, and the relation of oneself to other people’ (Lieberman 2013: 18). Thinking about your relationships to others is not something you choose to do when you feel in the mood (although of course you can); it is what your brain automatically does when it is not doing anything else, because of a ‘default network’ that turns on like a reflex when your attention is not fixed upon a task. It is ‘the brain’s preferred state of being, one that it returns to literally the second it has a chance’ (ibid.: 21). The default network directs you to consider people not only as physical things in the world but as creatures with minds, feelings, intentions and plans. It is present at birth, before babies can even focus their eyes properly, and thus ‘precedes any con-scious interest in the social world, suggesting it might be instrumental in creating those interests’ (ibid.: 20). Quite simply, whenever you are not doing something specific, your brain immediately engages in social cognition.

Morality is basic to social cognition because it influences the process by which people form impressions of others and build their own repu-tations. My view is that it is fundamental to behaviour that people try to manage ‘how they come across’ to others, although much of the time this management happens below the level of immediate aware-ness: people do not always know they are doing it or why they are doing it. Nonetheless, it is inherent in almost every social context, and this was just as true in Shakespeare’s day as it is in ours. As the social histo-rian Keith Thomas says: ‘In early modern England, the desire to secure the favourable opinion of other people was a primary determinant of human behaviour’ (Thomas 2009: 147). What has changed over time are the specific ways in which people go about securing that favourable opinion. In early modern England, according to Lord Burghley, honour was ‘the greatest possession that any man can have’ (quoted in ibid.: 148); nowadays, you may well be more concerned about the number of ‘likes’ you can get for a comment on Facebook. Yet both activities are tied into the same process of what is called social morality.

In the words of the legal and political scholar Edward L. Rubin in Soul, Self and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State (2015), social



Introduction 7

morality is ‘a body of beliefs by which people organize their lives and form their judgments’ (Rubin 2015: 3). Thus, by morality I mean the structure of values and beliefs that lead people to act, and that work to secure a person’s social reputation. Morality tells you whether a per-son you encounter is honest, sincere or trustworthy. Some recent work in social psychology suggests it is the primary driver of social judge-ment. In this view, when you encounter another person, the first thing you need to know is whether or not that person constitutes a threat to your safety – and, if not, whether instead that person represents an opportunity (see Brambilla and Leach 2014). In the field of social psy-chology, this aspect of judgement goes under the name of warmth; its primary component is a sense of morality defined as a person’s basic honesty, sincerity or trustworthiness, while its secondary component is a sense of the person’s sociability – their aspect of openness, friendli-ness or kindness. The next thing you need to know in your encounter is whether the other person is actually capable of carrying out their intention with regard to you. This component is often called compe-tence, and signals whether the person’s behaviour seems efficient, intel-ligent, strong or otherwise capable of expressing their power to carry out actions designed to influence you.

Morality is not simply a private matter or even a matter of micro- interactions between individuals. It has a two-way causal relationship to political governance – ‘the particular way by which the government con-trols and manages the behavior of the people who lie within its jurisdiction’ (Rubin 2015: 5). The notion that social morality has a dialectical aspect resonates with the central argument of Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal work of new historicism Renaissance Self-Fashioning: that there was in the early modern period ‘an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ (Greenblatt 1980: 1) which led to attempts to control behaviour from the institutions of the state and church as well as from within the individual. This for Greenblatt is linked to ‘manners or demeanor, particularly that of the elite … hypoc-risy or deception, an adherence to mere outward ceremony; it suggests rep-resentation of one’s nature or intention in speech and actions’ (ibid.: 3). As influential as his work was in its time, Greenblatt’s study should be placed within a context stretching back at least to Norbert Elias’s monu-mental 1939 work on The Civilizing Process. Behind both works is a key assumption that identity is constituted in large part by acts of repression – whether ideological, as with Greenblatt, or psychological, as with Elias. That assumption is in my view open to debate, but the belief that people are driven to create an idea or impression of their own personality (their




‘self’) in others, and that this process is subject to environmental and cultural influences, is one I share.

Morality in the sense I am using the word, then, has a large-scale social and cultural dimension. Of course, to be culturally influential, there needs to be embedded in any moral framework some claim to a shared referent. In Elizabethan culture, the large-scale sociocultural dimension of morality was reflected in a well-known metaphor. In the case of Shakespeare’s theatre, the basic metaphor that served as a shared referent was made quite explicit to the spectators – in fact it was written on a sign outside the Globe: ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’. Everyone is an actor. It was a commonplace metaphor in his day as it is now. Yet at root it expresses a contradiction. On the one hand, it seems to say that you have a fixed role allotted to you in life. On the other, it sug-gests that you are not identical with your role, but rather you perform it, which means that in principle you could adopt a different role, or switch between roles if you prefer.

Higher purposes and self-fulfilment

The notion that you had a fixed role was very much in keeping with the official morality of Tudor England promulgated by the preachers, philosophers, teachers and writers who allied themselves to their elite patrons. Here is a typical example from a pamphlet entitled Certain Sermons or Homilies published in 1547:

Every degree of people in their vocation, calling, and office hath appointed to them their duty and order. Some are in high degree, some in low; some kings and princes, some inferiors and subjects; priests and laymen, masters and servants, fathers and children, hus-bands and wives, rich and poor; and every one hath need of other so that in all things is to be lauded and praised the goodly order of God without the which no house, no city, no commonwealth, can continue and endure. (in Joseph 1971: 34)

Here is how the Archbishop of Canterbury expresses it in Henry V:

Therefore doth heaven divideThe state of man in diverse functions, Setting endeavour in continual motion, To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,Obedience. (Henry V 1.2.184–8)



Introduction 9

In this moral framework, what mattered was not your pursuit of per-sonal happiness, but rather a higher purpose: the salvation of your soul. You achieved salvation by serving God and your monarch. You served God by keeping the Ten Commandments and going to church. You served the monarch by performing your allotted role in life in an appro-priate manner. You did not choose your role: God chose it for you; it was your calling, and you served the community by heeding it. Your reputation – called, variously, ‘honour’, ‘credit’, ‘good name’, ‘respect-ability’ and, a particular favourite of Shakespeare’s, ‘honesty’ – was held to rest upon your sticking to the calling that God had meant for you. In this way, it was believed, a stable social order would be maintained. If you did not stick to your calling, say by aspiring to better yourself, you could be accused of ‘ambition’, a word with mostly negative connota-tions in Tudor England.

Such concerns with honour or reputation were not merely the pre-serve of the nobility and their apologists, as Keith Thomas states: ‘In the early modern period, the aristocracy was unique in managing to pass off its particular ethic as synonymous with honour itself. But every sector of society had its own values; and its members gained reputa-tion by conforming to them’ (Thomas 2009: 174). The economy, for one thing, was built almost entirely upon personal trust: there was no proper banking system, trade agreements were not formalized in writ-ten contracts, and there was a crisis in the supply of money. Worse still, there was no properly functioning welfare system. Without a good name, you simply could not find the means to live beyond bare subsist-ence level (ibid.: 176).

Yet, for all the official talk, there was social mobility in Shakespeare’s England – as long as you had the income or occupation to avoid manual labour, to keep yourself in the manner of a gentleman, and to pay a fee to the College of Heralds, then you could cross that fundamental dividing line between ‘base’ and ‘gentle’. Shakespeare was himself an example of such mobility. The alternative reading of the metaphor that everyone is an actor, with its suggestion of fluidity of role, can be seen to indicate a new social morality, one that in Shakespeare’s lifetime was coming into being and that later came to dominate the Western world. The new social morality insists upon self-fulfilment as of paramount importance. Your life is, in this view, a journey full of experiences, not leading towards a higher purpose such as salvation, but more or less meaningful in itself. The new morality is largely conditional upon your seeing yourself as free and equal to all other humans, with as much right to choose how you live as anyone else – provided you do not




trample on other people’s equivalent rights. And anything that gets in the way of personal fulfilment is increasingly regarded as immoral. Your reputation now is premised upon how successful you are in achieving your individual goals, such as getting a higher-paid or more rewarding job. Of course, people have always wanted a fulfilling life. The matter is how you define what that is, and how you go about getting it, par-ticularly when the opportunities available to you are limited, as they were for almost everyone in early modern England (see Thomas 2009: chapter 1).

One of the reasons for writing this book is to explore how gesture could provide evidence for this historical seismic shift from what Edward Rubin calls the morality of higher purposes – the moral frame-work that dominated English culture in Shakespeare’s time – and the new morality of self-fulfilment – whose time had not yet fully arrived but whose outline Shakespeare was able to perceive. The situation was (and is) complex, since moral codes do not simply efface each other but tend to co-exist and overlap in time. In addition, the early feudal hon-our code, understood for centuries as the recognition of the superior worth of high-status people, had not withered away, but was increas-ingly being reconfigured as ‘honesty’ and applied to all walks of life. ‘In the early modern period,’ writes Thomas, ‘when social mobility was upsetting traditional hierarchies, the need to assert one’s superiority was felt intensely, by the old-established and the parvenu alike’ (Thomas 2009: 151). Such complex moral layering would be reflected in the uses of the body. One of the interesting things about gesture is that while its forms – the hand shapes that people use when gesturing – follow recur-ring patterns through time and across cultures, these forms are then filled with shades of meaning determined by particular contexts. In other words, the metamorphoses of gesture reflect the metamorphoses of social morality.

Structure of the book

In the next chapter, I consider the changing meanings of the word ‘ges-ture’ through history, and how they can be seen to reflect changes in social morality, before giving an outline of how contemporary gesture scholars define it.

Chapter 2 looks at the broad context of influences upon Shakespeare, making reference to the rhetorical tradition inherited from classical antiquity and to the Reformation. Out of this I define and elaborate upon a central concept of the book – ‘smoothness’. This is essentially a



Introduction 11

quality of movement that aims to create an impression of self-posses-sion. Movement that displays such a quality has a conspicuously precise feel to it; indeed, its precision is amplified in order to plant an idea about status in the mind of the observer. I move on to outline how gesture theory flowered in the eighteenth century through a reconfiguration of the classical tradition. I then indicate how the practice of gesture was, and still is, influenced by Darwin. This gives a context for the examples of Henry Irving and Stanislavski that I will examine in Chapters 5 and 6. In each case, I aim to suggest how connections can be forged between my core idea of smoothness in performance and the wider background of social morality.

In Chapter 3, I describe some issues and examples relating to gesture on Shakespeare’s stage. The chapter is of necessity speculative in places, since there is a paucity of hard evidence. However, some reflections are offered on what I take to have been the acting style of the company. As well, I consider the possibility that the ‘chirosopher’ John Bulwer may have had Shakespeare’s company in mind when he created a taxonomy of gestures.

Chapter 4 offers a brief contextual background leading into some case studies from the eighteenth century. I show how gesture in Shakespearean performance was conditioned in part by space. As stages and auditoria grew larger, gesture in performance adopted a more statu-esque form modelled upon classicism. In Chapter 5 I consider Henry Irving’s performances from the perspective of Darwinism.

Chapter 6 considers the arrival of the intimate spaces of realism and naturalism, when Shakespearean performance adapted by revalu-ing psychology. Stanislavski’s Method of Physical Actions, created in part out of his struggle with Othello, outlines a gestural economy that aligns closely with my core concept of smoothness. I also briefly sug-gest how some modernist discourses of gesture have reconfigured the meaning of smoothness, partly in response to a rediscovery of Asian performance traditions like Noh theatre. A modernist alternative to the gestures of naturalism is considered through the avant-garde styliza-tions of Les Kurbas. I then look at the postmodernist Shakespeares of Robert Lepage, dreamthinkspeak and The Wooster Group. At the close of this chapter I reflect upon the impact of digital technologies such as performance capture upon Shakespearean practice. In Chapter 7, I offer an analysis of some recent examples of gesture in Shakespearean prac-tice through the figure of Iago, examples which propose a video-based methodology for the study of gesture in performance. The final chapter of the book consists of transcriptions of discussions with the influential




scholar David McNeill and the choreographer Siân Williams, together with some closing thoughts on possible future directions for research into Shakespeare and gesture.

At this stage a proviso is warranted. In this book I am talking about Shakespearean performance, and I am dealing in the main with actors who managed to gain social status for their efforts. My agenda is in part to describe how that status was won. I am not making claims for other kinds of performances such as the popular entertainments that held sway in English suburbs and provinces. I agree with Tracy C. Davis when she writes that we must not take the behaviour of (very often white male European) elite actors as representative of all performance everywhere (see especially Davis 1991: chapter 1). Neither am I dis-counting the significant work of scholars, for example in the field of historical materialism, who have argued for an ideological component to the cultural construct known as ‘Shakespearean performance’. My aim instead is to relate those non-verbal features of acting that often go under the name of ‘technique’ to a larger discursive frame that will, I hope, allow for a range of viewpoints. The next chapter concerns itself with some of the theoretical issues that underpin this frame.



177

Actio, 22, 27Adaptor(s), 25, 46, 48, 50, 100, 105,

114–15, 124, 131, 134, 140object adaptor, 46, 114–15, 124self-adaptor, 46, 74, 109, 138–9,

142, 145see also self-touching

Adlocutio, 66–7Affect display(s), 45, 48, 70, 85, 105, 137Alexander (technique), 150Alexander the Great, 92–3Alleyn, Edward, 36A Matter of Chance (The Kosh), 148Anti-theatrical prejudice, the, 52–3Appetites,

concupiscible, 29, 31irascible, 29

Aristotle, 29, 31Aquinas, Thomas, 29Asbury, Nick, 125Astington, John, 3, 160Aston, Anthony, 75–6, 84As You Like It, 57, 78Augustine, St., 29, 31–2Augustinian (doctrine), 33–4Augustus, Emperor, 38Austen, Jane,

Pride and Prejudice, 158Austin, Gilbert, 41–2, 44–5, 47–8, 98

Bachrach, A.G.H., 3Bacon, Francis, 21, 34, 70, 86Barnett, Dene, 40–2, 45–6, 48, 83,

106, 160Beach, Thomas, 99Beat (gesture), 45, 144Beckerman, Bernard, 3Beerbohm-Tree, Herbert, 108Behaviourism, 111Bell, G.J., 100, 102, 104Belsey, Catherine, 34Benedetti, Jean, 119, 160

Benediction, 64‘Betterton’ (American critic),

108–9Betterton, Mary, 78Betterton, Thomas, 74–6, 81, 84–5,

88, 91Bevington, David, 3, 65Billington, Michael, 128, 131Blackfriars theatre, the, 77Boaden, James, 98, 100–3, 106–7Bonifacio, Giovanni, 39, 60Booth, Edwin, 114, 117Bowers, Robert H., 3Brambilla, Marco and Leach, Colin

Wayne, 7Brecht, Bertolt, 120, 123Breeches roles, 77–8, 104Bremmer, Jan, 61

and Roodenburg, Herman, 160Breton, Nicholas,

Wits Trenchmour, 30Bright, Timothy, 29Brilliant, Richard, 66British Museum, the, 111Brook, Peter, 127Brown, John Russell, 3, 64–5, 125,

138, 141Brown, Roger, 154–5Bryher, Michael, 131Bugaku (court dance), 121Bulwer, John, 11, 43, 70–3, 82, 99

foveo, 43ploro, 70profero, 71–2, 82, 100

Burbage, Richard, 35–6, 65, 72–3, 75, 77, 80–1

Burghley, Lord, 6Burke, Edmund, 97Burke, Peter, 37, 160Burwick, Frederick, 99, 103–5Burton, Richard, 129Bush, Kate, 146

Index



178 Index

Caesar, 27, 60Café Chaos (The Kosh), 151–2Cage, David,

Beyond: Two Souls, 133Calvin, Jean, 34Carolingian (period, renaissance),

62, 67Carroll, Tim, 148, 153Castiglione, Baldassare, 37, 50Catholic(ism), 33–4Certain Sermons or Homilies, 8Chardin, Jean Siméon, 84Charles II, King, 76–7, 81Charisma, 52–3, 63, 104, 152Cheating, 83Chekhov, Michael, 50, 158Chin-stroke gesture, 139Christian (cultural tradition), 21, 32,

34, 39, 61, 64, 67, 96Churchland, Patricia, 5Cibber, Colley, 84, 90–1, 94Cicero, 22–7, 29, 37, 50, 60, 68–9, 103Cinema, 4, 50, 124, 141Classical (cultural tradition), 10, 11,

21, 24–5, 27, 31, 34, 36–8, 61, 97, 99, 101, 111

Classicism, 11, 32, 40, 53, 69, 81Clews, Richard, 130–1Closed fist (gesture), 143Clune, Michael, 53, 97Clusters (of behaviour), 19Cognition,

embodied, 1–2, 5, 119social, 3, 6, 50, 136, 141, 145see also competence; warmth

Cognitive semantics, 4Coldewey, John H., 34–5Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 138College of Heralds, the, 9Collier, Ann, 147Comedy of Errors, The, 16, 125Commedia dell’arte, 89Communicative dynamism, 154–5Competence, 1, 7, 37, 42, 50,

141, 145Conduit metaphor, 42Container metaphor, 42Continuity principle, the, 4, 49Contrapposto, 85, 90, 97

Cook, Amy, 5Cook, Dutton, 114–15Cook, Thomas, 103Cooper, Helen, 33Copeau, Jacques, 120Cornford, Tom, 158Coriolanus, 35, 78, 126Crowne, John, 78Cue (parts), 65, 82Cumberland, Richard, 87Cymbeline, 42, 78

Dafoe, Willem, 133Dalcroze, Emile-Jacques, 120Darling, Peter, 126Darwin, Charles, 11, 34, 48–50,

111–12, 115, 139, 160Davenant, William, 75–8Davies of Hereford, John, 29Davies, Thomas, 94Da Vinci, Leonardo, 98Davis, Tracy C., 12, 79Decere, 22, 27Decorum, 25, 27, 39, 50, 63, 69, 92,

101, 110Deictic(s), 41–2, 113, 138, 144–5Della Porta, Giambattista, 49Deportment, 15–16, 98, 108, 120, 147Descartes, René, 31, 84, 93Dexter, Sally, 127Diderot, Denis, 112Disney, Walt, 134Dodwell, Charles, 66–7, 160Doran, Gregory, 134, 148Dreamthinkspeak (theatre company),

11, 117, 130–2, 161Dromgoole, Dominic, 148, 151Drugger, Abel (character in The

Alchemist), 92–3Drury Lane theatre, 89, 95, 98–9Dryden, John, 78Duncan, Isadora, 122Duncan, Susan, 153Dürer, Albrecht, 30Durfey, Thomas, 78

Eisenstein, Sergei, 121Ekman, Paul and Friesen, Wally, 41,

45–6, 70, 160



Index 179

Élan (Lecoq), 120, 136Electrodermal (response), 71, 85–6Elias, Norbert, 7, 37, 160Elsinore (Lepage), 126Emblems, 46Emotional (attitudes, expressions,

reactions), 28, 32, 45, 48–9, 57, 69, 82, 85, 89, 96, 112, 133

Emotion(s), 23–4, 26, 49–52, 68–9, 72, 83–4, 99, 106, 116, 119, 124, 140, 147, 160

Empathy, 5, 88see also sensibility

Enargeia, 26–7, 34, Encomium, see oratory, epideictic Engel, Johann Jakob, 105–7Engels, Friedrich, see Marx, Karl andEngquist, Gretchen, see Newtson,

Darren Ennius, 60Enterline, Lyn, 3, 30, 160Entwistle, Christine, 125Erasmus, 38, 50Evaluation gesture, 138–9, 141Everyman, 33

Face acting, 67–9, 124Facebook, 6, 129Fantham, Elaine, 22–4, 160Fechter, Charles, 114Festina lente, 38, 50, 85, 119–20Feudal (honour code), 10, 37,

61–2, 64Firbas, Jan, 155Flecknoe, Richard, 80–1Flow (Laban), 120Formal versus naturalistic acting, 3

style of gesturing, 60Friesen, Wally, see Ekman, Paul and

Friesen, WallyFrisch, Harold, 3Frustration gesture, 137, 139

Galen, 30Gamification, 132–3Garrick, David, 36, 48, 83, 86–100,

102–3, 113–14, 132, 134–5, 154, 160

his widow, 107

Gest, 16Gesta Romanorum, 124Gesticulation(s), 84, 95Gesture and Thought (McNeill), 154Gesture Lab (University of Chicago),

153Gestures-for-speaking, 18, 34Gestus (Brecht), 124Gibbs, Raymond, 2, 31Gielgud, John, 129Gildon, Charles, 40, 42, 47, 74, 83Gladstone, William, 112Globe Theatre (London), the, 8, 57,

72, 89, 134, 141, 147–51, 153Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 45Goffman, Erving, 51Goodall, Jane R., 112, 160Goold, Rupert, 128Gould, John, 61Grace, 22, 25, 39, 83, 109, 120Grandage, Michael, 137Grand Theft Auto (computer game),

133, 135Greenblatt, Stephen, 7, 51Griffith, D.W., 122Guardian, The (newspaper), 125, 128,

131, 159Gurr, Andrew, and Ichikawa, Mariko,

3, 160

Hakkebush, Liubov, 123Hall, Peter, 125Hamilton, Mary Sackville, 104Hamlet, 5, 30, 44, 50, 57–8, 62–3, 69,

85, 90, 126, 129, 135, 136title character, 3, 26–7, 29–32, 37–8,

45, 51, 53, 67–70, 84, 120, 124, 135Beerbohm-Tree, Herbert as, 108 Betterton, Thomas as, 75–6Burbage, Richard as, 36–7Booth, Edwin as, 114, 117Garrick, David as, 89–92, 95, 102Hogg, Edward as, 131Irving, Henry as, 112–15, 132Kean, Edmund as, 108, 110Kemble, John Philip as, 106–7Macready, William as, 108Siddons, Sarah as, 104Taylor, Joseph as, 75



180 Index

Handy, Scott, 128–9Hankey, Julie, 117, 160Hapgood, Robert, 43, 89, 114Harbage, Alfred, 3Harlequin, 88–9, 96Harlow, George Henry, 104Harrison, Peter, 32–4, 72Harvard Center for Cognitive

Studies, 154Hazlitt, William, 98, 107–8Heffernan, Stewart, 131Henrietta Maria, Queen, 77Henry IV, Part 1, 78Henry IV, Part 2, 17, 78Henry V, 8, 31, 57Henry VIII, 35, 103Henslowe, Philip, 36Herod, King, 88Heywood, Thomas, 69, 72Hill, Aaron, 80–1, 93Hill, John, 82, 88Hilliard, Nicholas, 63Hitchcock, Alfred, 132Hoby, Sir Thomas, 37Hogarth, William, 85, 90, 134Holland, Peter, 33, 125, 138, 141Homer, 60Horace, 27Howe, Elizabeth, 77–9, 160How Language Began (McNeill), 158Hugh of Saint Victor, 32Humours (theory of), 29–32, 94, 96, 160Hunt, Leigh, 107–8Hunter, Kathryn, 125Hunter, Paul, 125Hutch, Johnny, 147–8Hypnerotomachia, 38Hysteria (Charcot-Freud), 115

Iago (character in Othello), 11, 58–9, 118

Irving, Henry as, 114 Kean, Edmund as, 110McInnerny, Tim as, 141–5McKellen, Ian as, 137–41, 145

Ibsen, Henrik,Ghosts, 116

Ichikawa, Mariko, see Gurr, Andrew andIchikawa, Sadanji, 121Iconic(s) (gestures), 33, 42–4, 129

Iffland, August Wilhelm, 105Imagistic gestures, see iconic gesturesImitatio, 31Imitative gestures, see iconicsImmersive (theatre), 131–2Impression management, 6–7, 51,

104, 111Indicative gestures, see deicticsIncongruence, 58Interaction(al) gestures, 34, 65–7,

71, 131Interludes, 35Irving, Henry, 11, 49, 87, 111–16, 124,

132, 141, 160Isaiah, the Book of, 62

Jaeger, C. Stephen, 110James, William, 116James-Lange theory, 116Jelgerhuis, Johannes, 47Jest, 16–17, 124Jo-ha-kyu, 120–1Johnson, Dr., 81Jordan, Dorothy, 104Joseph, Bertram, 3, 8, 30, 72Junctis manibus, 62

Kabuki theatre, 120–1Kahan, Jeffrey, 108, 160Kampen, Claire van, 148, 150Kant, Immanuel, 31 Karim-Cooper, Karim, 3Katz, Richard, 125Kaut-Howson, Helena, 148Kean, Edmund, 107–10, 112–13, 160Keats, John, 107Kemble, John Philip, 97, 104, 106–7Kemp, Will, 16Kendon, Adam, 41, 44, 61, 71–2,

81, 160Kessel, Ferdinand van, 84Kien, Jenny, see Schleidt, Margret and

Kien, JennyKilligrew, Thomas, 76–7King John, 105King Lear, 3, 121

Garrick, David as, 94–5Irving, Henry as, 112

King, Ros, 4Kirkman, James Thomas, 95



Index 181

Komissarzhevskaya, Vera, 118Koivumaki, Judith Hall, 136Kosh, The (theatre company),

147–9, 151Kozintsev, Grigori, 121Kurbas, Les, 11, 116, 121–4, 160

Laban, Rudolf, 17, 50, 98, 120, 124, 161Lady Macbeth,

Hakkebush, Liubov as, 123Siddons, Sarah as, 97, 100–3

Lairesse, Gérard, 46, 49Lamb, Warren, 17Lang, Franciscus, 47, 83Lange, Carl, 116Laocoon (sculpture), 103La Primaudaye, Pierre de, 29Lass, Ruth, 131Laurier, Angela, 127–8Leach, Colin Wayne, see Brambilla,

Marco and Le Brun, Charles, 46–7, 49, 84, 90, 99LeCompte, Elizabeth, 128Lecoq, Jacques, 120, 125–6, 158, 161Lefebvre, Henri, 1Leichtigkeit (Brecht), 120, 136Lepage, Robert, 11, 126–8, 130, 161Lessing, Gotthold, 40–1, 103–4Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 83,

90–1, 93Lieberman, Matthew D., 6Line of action, the, 134Livy, 27, 60Logic, the closed fist of, 21, 28London College of Dance and Drama,

146–7Longleat manuscript, the, 63Louis XIV, King, 76Loutherbourg, Philippe de, 88–9Love’s Labour’s Lost, 38Ludus Dance Company, 147Luther, Martin, 34, 62

Macbeth, 116, 122–3, 126, 132title character, 100–2Garrick, David as, 92–4, 96Irving, Henry as, 112

MacDonald, Glynn, 150Machiavellian(ism), 38, 68, 79, 141Machon, Josephine, 130–1, 161Macklin, Charles, 94–7

Maclise, Daniel, 108Macready, William, 108Magni, Marcello, 125Mahood, M.M., 65Mander, Karel, 46 Mansfield, Richard, 111Marlowe, Julia, 44Marr, David and Vaina, Lucia, 18–19Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, 122Mass, the, 62Matthew and Mark, the Gospels of, 64McBurney, Simon, 152McConachie, Bruce, 4–5McInnerny, Tim, 141–5McKellen, Ian, 137–41, 145McNeill, David, 5, 12, 41–2, 45–6, 66,

138, 146, 153–60McNeir, Waldo, 3McPherson, Heather, 99Measure for Measure, 31Medici Venus, the, 111Melancholy, 29–30, 32, 99, 101Memoria, 27Merchant of Venice, The, 64Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 31Merwitzer, Michael, 147, 149Metaphoric (gesture), 1, 42, 66, 114,

140–1, 144, 155Method of Physical Actions, see

Stanislavksi, ConstantinMeyerhold, Vsevolod, 120–1, 124Middle Ages, the, 15–16, 32, 84, 124

German, 62Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 126–8, 151Milam, Wilson, 141Milton, John,

‘Il Penseroso’, 99Mimismetic (gestures), 106–7Mirror neurons, 5Mirror(s), 67–8, 74, 131Modernist (gesture, performance,

Shakespeareans) 11, 115–16, 121–2, 126

Montage, 121Morality, 2, 6–8, 29

of higher purposes, 7–10, 67, 107, 115of self-fulfilment, 7, 9–10, 15–16,

48–9, 84, 97, 107, 109, 115–16, 128, 132, 136, 154

social, 5–7, 10–11, 15, 30, 50, 53, 59, 64, 70–1, 79, 87, 107, 115, 159



182 Index

Motion capture, see performance capture

Mykhailivna, Ludmyla, 123

Nagel, Thomas, 127Napier, John, 23, 155Naturalism, 11, 34, 87, 112–13, 116Neoclassical (cultural tradition,

principles of gesture), 39–48, 53, 85, 92, 97, 104

Newcastle Playhouse (theatre), 130Newtson, Darren and Engquist,

Gretchen, 19New Yorker, The (magazine), 132Nochlin, Linda, 34Noh theatre, 11, 117, 120–1

see also Zeami, MotokiyoNunn, Trevor, 137, 141

Observer, The (newspaper), 133O’Neill, Eliza, 105Open hand/palm gesture(s), 62, 144–5

prone, 128supine, 61, 71, 82see also palm up gestures; Bulwer,

John proferoOpenness (gesture), 142–3, Oratory, 22, 109

deliberative, 28epideictic, 28manuals of, 40, 46, 154

Origen, 32Origo, 138Othello, 11, 58, 77, 79, 116, 119,

137–45, 160Irving, Henry as, 114Kean, Edmund as, 109Salvini, Tomasso as, 117Stanislavski, Constantin as, 117–19

Ovid, 27, 60Oxytocin, 5

Page, Ellen, 133Palfrey, Simon, 66Palm addressed (gesture), 144Palm up gestures, 61, 71, 100Pantomime (gestures), 26, 42, 44, 49,

84, 88, 96, 106, 145Parker, John, 35Parrish, Sue, 148

Passing, 36, 97Passion(s), 23, 26–7, 29–31, 33, 40,

46–8, 53, 58, 60, 63, 68, 81–2, 84–6, 88–9, 91–4, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 108–9, 160

anger, 17, 23, 28–9, 40, 47, 69, 103aversion, hatred or refusal, 29, 48contempt, 22, 29, 40, 47, 100–1,

103, 105courage, 29desire, 29, 84 despair, 29, 46disgust, 23, 29, 40, 48, 69fear, 29, 69, 86, 90grief, 29, 31, 46–7, 49, 52, 70–1,

96, 108hope, 29, 100horror, 40jealousy, 47–8, 58, 66, 79joy, 23, 29, 96scorn, 40, 48shame, 47–8, 105sorrow, 29, 68surprise, 47–8, 63, 69, 100, 139 welcome, 48

Paster, Gail Kern, 30, 160Peacham, Henry, 63Péchantrés, Nicolas, 40People Show, the (theatre company),

148Performance capture, 11, 133–5Peri Epideiktikon, 28Perkins (Garrick’s dresser), 92Personification, 33Philosophical Society, the, 105Phrenology, 109Physiognomics, 49Physiognomy, 84, 109Pickering, Roger, 90Plato, 24, 29, 31Plautus, 27Plett, Heinrich, 21, 26, 160 Pointing gesture(s), 25, 42, 67, 88,

103–4, 106, 139, 142–3, 145see also deictics

Points, 85–6, 108, 111–12Polygraph (Lepage), 126Pöppel, Ernst, 17–18Postmodernist (performance, gestures

etc), 11, 115, 126



Index 183

Posture(s), 4, 15–18, 22, 25, 30, 38, 42, 47, 57, 75, 97, 99, 101–4, 140

Potter, Lois, 118, 160Power grip (gesture), 23, 40, 114, 117,

139, 155Pragmatic gestures, 44, 105Prague School (of linguistics), 155Prayer, 62–3Precision grip (gesture), 23, 25, 40, 42,

139, 155Preparation phase (of a gesture), 18,

45, 66, 85, 121, 138Prima Porta Augustus, 66Pritchard, Hannah, 102–3Progymnasmata, 27Pronunciatio, 27Protestant(ism), 33–5, 58–9, 62–3, 67Psychological gesture (Chekhov), 158Psychological predicate (Vygotsky), 156Pullen, Kirsten, 79, 160Punchdrunk (theatre company), 132–3

Quin, James, 87–8, 90Quintilian, 24–7, 37, 39–40, 42, 48, 70Quirey, Belinda, 147

Ramage, Edwin, 26Ravenhill, Mark, 128Ravid, Ofer, 158Realism, 11, 26, 34, 69, 87, 107, 117 Recovery phase (of a gesture), 18Reformation, the, 10, 32, 34, 39, 53,

59, 62, 68, 160Renaissance, the, 15, 22, 28, 38, 47,

49, 70, 72, 85, 97, 120, 160Representational gestures, 105Reputation (management), 6–7, 9–10,

39, 75, 82, 86, 89, 97, 110, 113, 118–9, 134

see also impression management Rest is Silence, The (dreamthinkspeak),

130–2Restoration (theatre), the, 75–7,

80–1, 113Reynolds, Joshua, 99Rhetoric, 10, 21–9, 31, 34, 36, 39, 61,

70, 72, 93, 130, 160the open palm of, 21, 28

Rhetorica Ad Herennium, 27Ribot, Théodule-Armand, 118

Richard II, 68–9Richard III, 90, 126

title character, 35Garrick, David as, 90, 95Kean, Edmund as, 107, 109–10

Richards, W.A. see Rubin, John M. Roach, Joseph, 47, 52–3, 92–3, 98–9,

104, 160Robson, William, 108Rodin, Auguste, 30Romantic(ism), 87, 99, 101, 109–11, 114Romeo and Juliet, 126

title character (Romeo), 35Romney, George, 99Roscius, 22–3Rosenberg, Marvin, 3Rowe, Nicholas, 79–80, 87, 113Royal Academy, the, 80Royal National Theatre, the, 127Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC),

125, 128–9, 134, 137, 148, 155Royal Shakespeare Theatre (Stratford-

upon-Avon), 125Rubin, Edward L., 6–7, 10Rubin, John M. and Richards, W.A.,

19, 85Russell, Edward R., 114Rylance, Mark, 43, 148Ryrie, Alec, 62–3

Sachsenspiegel manuscripts, 62‘sacramental gaze’ (Scribner), 32, 34Sallust, 27, 60Salvini, Tommaso, 117–18, 132Scheflen, Albert, 18Schleidt, Margret and Kien, Jenny, 18Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 105Scott, Clement, 112–13Scribner, Robert, 32–3Self-touching (gesture), 100, 141Seneca, 24, 27Sennett, Richard, 109–10Sensibility, 82, 88–9, 149‘Shakespeare’s Globe 360’ (phone

app), 132 Sharp, Michael William, 105, 107Sharps, Tristan, 130Shlovski, Viktor, 123Shylock (character in The Merchant of

Venice), 95–6, 108, 110



184 Index

Siddons, Henry, 103–6, 139Siddons, Sarah, 36, 42, 48, 97–105,

110, 123, 132Signa, 32–4, Sleep No More (Punchdrunk), 132–3Smoothness, 10–11, 24, 26–7, 35, 38,

50–4, 84, 96, 104, 118, 120, 136, 141, 159

Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare), 31Sonnet 94 (Shakespeare), 68Sprezzatura, 37, 50, 93, 104, 136Stanislavski, Constantin, 11, 116–19,

122, 132, 154method of physical actions, 11, 119psychophysical acting, 119tempo-rhythm, 119

Start(s), 85–6, 89–91, 94–5, 113Status, 10–12, 23, 36–8, 51–3, 61,

65, 68–9, 75, 82, 92–3, 95, 104, 109–10, 127, 130, 159

Stefflre, Volney, 154–5Stern, Tiffany, 65, 160Stoker, Bram, 112Stroke (phase of a gesture), 18–19, 45,

66, 137, 140Subtext, 107, 124Sullivan, Frances A., 60Supplication, 60–4, 104Suspension of disbelief, 51Sutherland, John, 159

Talma, François-Joseph, 112Tate, Nahum, 78Taylor, Frederick, 124Taylor, George, 82, 85, 93Taylor, John, 96Taylor, Joseph, 73, 75, 77Temperance, 26–7, 31–2, Tempest, The, 59–60, 78, 126, 134Temporal integration, 17Terence, 27, 67Terry, Ellen, 103, 111Theatre de Complicite, 125, 155Theatrical portrait (genre), 90‘theological gaze’ (Scribner), 33–4Thomas, Keith, 6, 9–10Thomson, Peter, 3, 160Timon of Athens, 59Timothy, the Book of, 62

Titus Andronicus, 27–9, 34–5, 60–1, 63

Tolstoy, Leo, 119Tormoz (Meyerhold), 120, 136Travels of the Three English Brothers,

The, 16Tripartite structure (of a gesture), 19Troilus and Cressida, 128–30True and false gestures, 105–6Twelfth Night, 31Twitter, 129Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 148

Urbanitas, 26Urkowitz, Steven, 3

Vaina, Lucia, see Marr, DavidVerfremdung (Brecht), 124Vertical palm gesture(s), 66–7,

128–9, 144Vesalius, Andreas, 34Vickers, Brian, 28Video (-based methodology,

technology), 4, 11, 129–30, 131, 136–7, 142, 145

Virgil, 27, 60Vygotsky, Lev, 156

Walker, John, 43, 47, 83Warmth, 1, 5, 7, 50, 145Watt-Smith, Tiffany, 113Webster, John, 36Weever, John, 35West, Shearer, 97–8, 113–14, 160Wilkes, Thomas, 94Williams, Siân, 12, 146–53Wind, Edgar, 38Winter’s Tale, The, 4, 16, 33, 59, Wolk, Emil, 147Women’s Theatre Group, the, 148Woo, Celestine, 85, 88, 104, 160Wooster Group, The (theatre

company), 11, 117, 128–30Wright, Thomas, 29–30, 72

Yugen, 120, 136

Zeami, Motokiyo, 117, 120–1Zeno, 21



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9780230276420 01 prexii · 2016-08-05 · 1 Introduction What this book is about Gesture is a kind of speaking with the body. The body makes pictures, and these pictures seem to speak