The term ‘declamation’ shifted its meaning from a training and display exercise undertaken by orators to a mode of speech used by tragic actors. By the end of the seventeenth century, the logic of grammar had suppressed the vagaries of orality, and the term ‘declamation’ served to define that which separated dramatic speech from the speech of everyday life. Because speech is driven by the breath and produced by the body, the thought or idea expressed by the actor could not be dissociated from their feeling or passion. In the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth century the dramatic text was conceived as sonorous matter, a visual sign of corporeal actions. The second phase follows from words becoming the arbitrary signs of ideas. From the perspective of a modern taste for self-expression, the earlier conception of the text as a score places unwelcome constraints upon the actor’s freedom.

Pre-modern acting theory was framed around emotion, not character, and in this chapter I explore what ‘emotion’ is. There is growing recognition today that emotions have a history, and neurology has suggested new ways of thinking about the mind–body connection. The assumption that humankind has distinct fundamental emotions remains a widely held position today. Passions and emotions: the question of terminology: in addition to the distinction between passions and emotions, I interrogate notions of mind and soul, complicated by questions of translation. Early Modern England: Hamlet seen through the lens of the contemporary Jesuit Thomas Wright, who negotiated competing theories of emotion. The Cartesian turn: I consider Mondory as a pre-Cartesian actor, and the fundamental influence of Charles Le Brun on acting as well as paining. David Hume and English acting theory in the Enlightenment: the multiplication and refinement of emotions as reflected in the theories of Aaron Hill. Two examples of playing the passions: Lekain’s Herod and Nossiter’s Juliet: I draw on Lekain’s manuscript notes and on Morgan’s account of Nossiter’s performance. Rousseau and the ideal of emotional authenticity: Rousseau’s Pygmalion attempted to reconcile the needs of rhetorical delivery with a new sense of emotional truth.