characters; if, at the end of the performance, the deception is all on the side
of the audience and the actor is only weary as a gymnast is weary, then it’s
hard to make the case that an actor playing an evil character is likely to turn
evil. Of course, the actor will need to learn how to mimic the outward
appearance of certain emotional states that relate to that character; but that’s
hardly the kind of imaginative sympathy that seems to have alarmed Plato.
Finally, far fromfitting nicely together with Rousseau’s attacks on the
actor, if Diderot is correct about the actor’s representation of emotion
looking little like the real life equivalent, then he may be seen to answer
Rousseau’s concerns about deception and inauthenticity. For Diderot, that is,
nothing happens on stage as it does in nature.^81 If so, actors pretending
to be angry or in love in everyday situations (i.e. when not on the stage)
would simply be laughed at, even although the same technical skills, on
stage, bring the audience to tears:
They are well enough on the stage [...], with their actions, their bearing,
their intonations. They would make but a sorry figure in history; they
would raise laughter in society. People would whisper to each other:‘Is this
fellow mad? [...] In what world do people talk like this?’^82Where Diderot does criticise actors, it is for having the misfortune to
possess the skills to please everyone. The actor, he claims, is rather like
the courtier–someone who is allowed no autonomy, no say in what he
does; instead, he must please those around him, and bend to their will.
Where the courtier always has to think of the king, the actor always has
to think of the poet and, of course, of the audience.^83 During the course
of this process, the actor is allowed nothing of‘himself’, no opinion, no
personality, no independence.^84 Diderot was hardly thefirst to make this
connection: Raphael Holinshed, the chronicler who provided the sources
for a number of Shakespeare’s plays, writes that Edward II (he of the
notoriously unpleasant death)‘furnished his court with companies of jes-
ters, ruffians,flattering parasites, musicians and other vile and naughty
ribald, that the king might spend both days and nights in jesting, play-
ing, banqueting and such otherfilthy and dishonourable exercises’.^85 The
further suggestion, in Diderot’s comparison with the courtier, is that the
actor is a kind of uselessflatterer, someone who has no real purpose other
than to please the ruler (or the audience). Contrary to the claim (under
‘deception and inauthenticity’, above) that actors do what we all do
anyway, this marks out the courtier and the actor as different from
the rest of us. It’s not that we don’t‘act’in everyday life–it’s that, when
we do so, we are permitted‘to delight some and to weary others’.^86 If, by
profession, one has to please, then the option of taking an independent
route (which others may or may not like) is closed off.
122 From the Stage to the World