FIGURE 1.1 How to learn a natural language: gestural illustrations from Austin’s Chironomia (1806).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
Looks and gestures give direct access to the heart; and lead us to select, with tolerable accuracy, the persons who are worthy of our confidence. It is surprising how quickly, and for the most part how correctly, we judge of character from external appearance.
HENRY HOME KAMES, Elements of Criticism (1762, 1.443–44)
Next the long nerves unite their silver train,
And young Sensation permeates the brain;
Through each new sense the keen emotions dart,
Flush the red cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.
ERASMUS DARWIN, The Temple of Nature (1806, 1.269–72)
NEUROLOGY AND THE BRITISH ROMANTIC STAGE
THAT BODILY SIGNS provide a cloudless window to the soul, that they are therefore crucial for the judgment of character, and furthermore (as Lord Kames goes on to argue) fundamental to the maintenance of sympathy and the ability to communicate between societies—all of these points were already beginning to fray by the end of the Enlightenment and were worn through by the Victorian Age. For Erasmus Darwin, who bridges the periods, the “red cheek” of a blush still registers the truth of inner life, but attention has shifted now to the neural network that at once functions as a medium of communication and also, paradoxically, as that which is communicated; attention has shifted to the “long nerves” that “unite their silver train” to produce “Sensation” in the brain. Crucially, even the sense of “sense” in Darwin’s poem is starting to slip. What, after all, does he mean by “sense” when he writes that “[t]hrough each new sense the keen emotions dart”? As he is writing of an internal bodily process, “sense” cannot refer to one of the five senses, and as he distinguishes “sense” from “emotion” he cannot mean “sense” in the sense of feeling. Perhaps he is using the word as a synonym for “sensation,” which would render it nearly the opposite of its meaning in, say, Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and yet at the same time we are told that the emotions pass through “each new sense,” almost as though the senses were the “long nerves” themselves. Is sense a thought, a feeling, a nerve? Is it a cause, an effect, a conduit? We sense that the clear simplicity of Kames’s “looks and gestures” that “give direct access to the heart” has become muddled—or, more precisely, that Kames’s bright equivalence may be tipping toward some more potent confusion.
The relationship between bodily expressions and emotional impressions is, in the broad as well as the narrow sense of the word, a theatrical question, one that dominated discussion of the actor’s art in the eighteenth century. Where Rousseau, in his Letter to Monsieur d’Alembert on the Theatre (Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 1758), had dismissed the actor’s art as one of corrupting artifice and deception, Diderot’s Paradox of the Actor (Paradoxe sur le comédien, written c. 1770–1778, published 1830) praised it as one of calculated simulation, such that in order to move the audience the actor must remain herself unmoved. Against both of these poles (which share at least the notion that acting is fundamentally about pretense) was a perspective commonly associated with the English actor David Garrick, a notion that the actor’s expressions are properly rooted in felt emotions. This sentimental theory of acting gained ground with the rise of Romantic players such as Edmund Kean, Frédérick Lemaître, and Ludwig Devrient, reaching its apogee in the idea that the truly great actor wears no mask at all, that he offers his audience true feeling, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and unfiltered. The actor’s extraordinary, authentic personality became the benchmark of genius.1
Beyond such specifically theatrical debates, we must recall that the eighteenth century was a broadly theatrical age. “[S]ome words proper to the theatre, and which were at first metaphorically applied to the world,” writes Henry Fielding in Tom Jones (1749), “are now indiscriminately and literally spoken of both” (7.1.283). Numerous scholars have drawn attention to the ubiquity of this theatricalization. For many in the eighteenth century, as Richard Sennett relates, it seemed as though the once-metaphorical conception of theatrum mundi was becoming as literal as the sidewalks of city life, with profound consequences for both civic and private performance.2 Writing of Diderot’s France, Michael Fried has shown how deeply embedded were theatrical relationships between spectator and spectacle, a nearly ubiquitous theatricality against which modern painting came to define itself. Turning to the Britain of Shaftesbury, Defoe, and Adam Smith, David Marshall concludes that “the figure of theater provides a significant cultural paradigm for eighteenth-century English culture… . [I]t represents a locus where crucial issues in fiction writing, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and epistemology are addressed and acted out by a surprising variety of influential authors” (5). That modern French painting and the English novel should have been born from cultures so passionately theatrical may seem paradoxical—and yet is so.
This chapter examines that theatricality and its undoing. More precisely, it traces the decline of a particular aspect of eighteenth-century British theatricality—the semiotics of gesture—and the beginnings of a replacement of gestural by neurological signs as indications of inner life. The first part discusses some of the prevailing natural-language theories of gesture in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and reads Joanna Baillie’s play De Monfort (published 1798) as a work that extends this discourse in unusual directions, and nearly to the breaking point. The second part examines the neurological research of two Romantic-era physicians in order to show how these studies, despite their own intentions, undermine the natural-language account of gesture. The chapter concludes with a reading of Percy Shelley’s The Cenci (published 1819), a play that stages a collapse of communication and a rise of a new mode of interaction and knowledge.
The emergence of modern Western theater begins with the breakdown of gesture as a reliable medium for the communication of inner life.3 The crucial aesthetic, anthropological, epistemological, and political significance of gesture can be discovered in three of the most influential rhetorical handbooks in the period: Henry Home Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia (1806), and Henry Siddons’s Illustrations of Gesture and Action (1807). All argued forcefully for the natural and universal status of gestural language, as well as for the centrality of gestural language to the construction of society.4
Let us begin by returning to Lord Kames, a friend of David Hume and patron of Adam Smith—Kames, whose Elements of Criticism exerted a profound influence on British aesthetics through the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Kames takes up the topic of “external signs” (essentially gestures, tones, and countenances) in the fifteenth chapter of the work, where he argues that gestures arise from birth and are understood by all people everywhere, and so constitute a “natural and universal” language of the passions. There is an aesthetic as well as a moral aspect to Kames’s account, as the naturalness and universality of gestural language shows that “man, by his very constitution, is framed to be open and sincere” (451).
The most morally significant aspect of gesture for Kames, however, has less to do with individual sincerity than with the very possibility of society. Since words, unlike gestures, are “arbitrary and variable,” interior states would be largely impenetrable if humans were entirely reliant upon verbal discourse. Without the universal language of gesture, “the thoughts and volitions of strangers would be entirely hid from us; which would prove a great or rather invincible obstruction to the formation of societies” (435). Further, external signs work as powerful social adhesives; they “diffuse through a whole assembly the feelings of each individual, [and so] contribute above all other means to improve the social affections” (444). External signs are even “remarkably subservient to morality” in that one person’s painful or pleasurable feelings produce appropriate gestures, which in turn produce appropriate emotions in spectators, thus aiding the collective sympathy upon which society depends (445). Conversely, the universal language of gesture helps society root out “[d]issocial passions,” which “are noted by the most conspicuous external signs, in order to put us upon our guard” (444). In short, the language of gesture “inspir[es] sympathy, a passion to which human society is indebted for its greatest blessing”; more than this benefit, gestural language is what makes communication possible across linguistic divides and therefore aids universal human understanding. At the same time, gestural language enables cross-cultural dialogue: “as the arbitrary signs vary in every country, there could be no communication of thoughts among different nations, were it not for the natural signs” (435).
The notion of gesture as an original language and social adhesive recurs in the rhetorical treatise Chironomia, by the Irish minister and rhetorician Gilbert Austin (Figure 1.1). Published in 1806, though written in the late eighteenth century, Chironomia is at heart a creature of the Enlightenment period, whose views on gesture (including a long excerpt from Elements of Criticism) it compiles into a sort of summa. Austin argues that verbal language is a merely arbitrary cultural phenomenon—it “derives all its significancy from compact only”—and therefore isolates people within their own linguistic borders: “if men were limited in the expression of their wants and desires to the power of language alone, their communication would be extremely limited; and a man could not, without danger of every inconvenience, venture beyond the confines of his own tribe, or the narrow local prevalence of his own dialect” (467). For Austin as for Kames, verbal discourse fails to provide a conduit for universal human sympathy—but fortunately humankind is provided with “external signs” (i.e., tones, looks, and gestures) that are “so expressive … that all nature may be figuratively said to understand them” (468). Gestures in particular “discover the thoughts distinctly. Terror and indignation swell the breast, and oblige the lungs to breath short, and the heart to palpitate; gestures express also in universal language threatening or invitation, pity or contempt, shame and triumph, submission or command, and many other sentiments, passions and desires” (469). Again like Kames, Austin concludes that “bountiful nature” has kindly included gesture in her gifts to man precisely to enable universal communication and sympathy (467).5
FIGURE 1.1 How to learn a natural language: gestural illustrations from Austin’s Chironomia (1806).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
Chironomia appeared in the same year as the first publication of another influential rhetorical treatise, one more sharply focused on the arts of the theater in particular. This was Henry Siddons’s Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gestures, a translation and adaptation of Johann Jakob Engel’s popular acting and oratorical handbook Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785–1786).6 Given its late-eighteenth-century provenance, it is unsurprising that Siddons’s work, like Austin’s, is largely a synthesis of dominant ideas from the previous century.7 As with both Kames and Austin, the insistence on gesture as a natural and universal language is given a central place (Figure 1.2). Thus Siddons exhorts the reader to “abstract” his mind from the “characteristic shades” of “European” and “Oriental” customs, and to seek instead the “truly natural and essential part of the sentiment” that “will remain: to wit, the motion of the body” (6–7). This expression “is natural and essential, because it is general, and holds place with all the people, with all the nations, without distinction of their ranks, their estates, or their conditions” (7). “[U]pon these general, natural, and essential traits … ,” Siddons continues, “it would be possible to form a system of the highest possible utility to those engaged in a theatrical pursuit” (10). In this account, the actor’s art broadens to include that of the comparative anthropologist as well as the natural scientist: “The player who wishes to be accomplished in his art” should study gestures in a broad range of conditions and cultures, “should trace their operations in all their shades, in all their different varieties, as they act upon different conditions, and as they operate in various climates” (10). At the same time, the actor should become like the “amateur in natural history,” who “is able to imprint the shape of many thousand plants and insects in his mind, with such exactitude and precision that he can mark the slightest variations in their structures—the most minute deviation in their anatomical parts” (25).
FIGURE 1.2 Gesture for “Terror” from Siddons’s Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
In terms that recall Kames’s emphasis on the social utility of gesture, Siddons argues that the universal nature of gesture makes the theater a particularly vibrant site for social communication and the development of collective sympathy. In the playhouse, the enraptured audience member
imitates all he sees, even to the actions of the players, though in a mode less decisive. Without knowing what is going to be said, he is serious, or contented, according to the tone which the performers happen to take. His eyes become a mirror, faithfully reflecting the varying gestures of the several personages concerned. (35)
Gestures, for Siddons, are not merely expressions of inner passions, but also socially mimetic actions. Particularly in the auditorium, gestures spread not only from actors’ thoughts and feelings to their bodies but also from actors’ bodies to those of audience members. The audience member’s eyes, far from being a window to her soul, have become faithful mirrors, and the substance reflected, intriguingly, is not the inner passions of the observed characters (as in Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy) but rather the characters’ external behaviors. The result is a situation that muddies the waters of the simple claim that gestures are reflections of inner states; gestures are also, we discover, reflections of reflections, or perhaps even reflections of external signs wholly unmoored from feeling. Nowhere is this trouble more clearly exemplified than in the theater, where the very relation between actors’ behaviors and their feelings is already questionable, and imitation furnishes the very bricks and mortar of the art.
Another fault line of Practical Illustrations is that gesture, though a natural language, must be taught. At times the book seems to lurch in two directions, simultaneously advancing a theory of gesture as a universally legible language of the passions and providing detailed illustrations and instructions to aid the acquisition of this language. The book attempts to elide this supplementarity by marrying a quasi-scientific natural-language theory of gesture with a classical understanding of art as a unity of beauty and truth. While the actor is to study the natural forms of gesture in their primordial environment, he should also strive to elevate these gestures to their more ideal forms. “There are but two counsels to give the actor … : first, that he ought to seize all occasions of observing nature, even in those effects which are unfrequent in their occurrence; and, in the second place, that he should never lose sight of the main end and grand design of his art, by shocking the spectator with too coarse or too servile an imitation” (14). This “grand design” is a union of beauty and truth into a form that raises both to their highest:
Art will demand an answer to this interrogation—In the first place—What is beautiful?—In the second place it will inquire, What is natural, or true? Now, neither the one nor the other of these questions is to be neglected. Art will reunite them into a single proposition, and will ask—What is at the same time the most beautiful and the most true? (27)
Training in the language of gesture should produce a “second nature” in the actor (3), and this second nature is not merely a return but an idealization of highest truth as highest beauty.
Practical Illustrations strains, however, to synthesize the idea that gesture is an original language with the notion that art should be the simultaneous apex of truth and beauty. One trouble is that gesture, being a natural language, should be most easily found in unspoiled sources such as “[t]he vulgar, the child, the savage, in a word, the uncultivated man” (97). Such crude vessels “are the true models we ought to examine for the expression of the passions,” but the model holds only if “we do not seek for beauty, but merely for truth and force” (97). Already the drive toward truth, which drives one toward the savage, and the drive toward beauty, which drives one toward the refined, are at odds. Thus, if the actor seeks truth, he risks coarseness, but if he seeks beauty, he estranges himself from truth. Hence the actor, already counseled against vulgarity, is also warned against the imitation of those “who have been educated in the principles of what is termed, savoir vivre, or beau monde; an education of this kind teaches a man the art of dissembling in a double way: it gives him the power of hiding the real power of his sentiments, in attributing to them one which he does not possess” (96). The actor, in other words, must learn from the truthful gestures of the savage and simple while elevating these gestures into the highest realm of beauty, all the while avoiding the hothouse over-cultivation of the educated dissemblers. It is a fine line that will become a fault line of nineteenth-century dramaturgy.
Such rifts widen in one of the most ambitious dramatic projects of the British Romantic stage, the Plays on the Passions (1798–1836) of Joanna Baillie. The series of plays represented Baillie’s nearly four-decade-long quest to anatomize each strong emotion by making it the subject of both a comedy and a tragedy, a quest founded on a natural-language theory of gesture. In her “Introductory Discourse” to these plays, she describes the gestures that arise from strong emotions (“[t]he wild tossings of despair; the gnashing of hatred and revenge,” and so forth) as a “language of the agitated soul, which every age and nation understands” (73). Involuntary expression particularly fascinates her for its power to reveal concealed feelings and penetrate even through the trappings and suits of civilized behavior. It is by such unconscious gestures that “the learned and the wise” may “betray[] some native feature of their own minds,” even “when they have supposed it to be concealed under a very sufficient disguise” (68). As Alan Richardson argues, Baillie’s theories of gesture share common ground with those of Thomas Reid, Erasmus Darwin, Franz Josef Gall, and Charles Bell (“Neural Theatre” 133).
The most successful of Baillie’s plays was De Monfort, published in the first volume of the series in 1798 and first performed in 1800 at the Drury Lane, with John Kemble and Sarah Siddons (Henry Siddons’s mother) in the lead roles of De Monfort and his sister, Jane. The play was revived in Edinburgh in 1810 and again at the Drury Lane in 1821, where Edmund Kean played the title role. Hate is the central passion of the tragedy, and the plot involves a German nobleman named De Monfort, a man of admirable qualities who suffers from a festering and somewhat inexplicable loathing of another nobleman, Rezenvelt, whom he has known since childhood. De Monfort is ministered to by the angelic Jane, who tries to broker a reunion between the two; though Rezenvelt is eager to embrace De Monfort from his side (and twice refuses to kill him despite disarming him in duels), De Monfort can never shake his hatred. Ultimately deceived into the belief that Jane intends to marry Rezenvelt, De Monfort brutally murders his nemesis, realizes his error, submits to justice, and dies of misery.
De Monfort is among other things a play about the correspondence between thought and gesture, an extended refutation of the title character’s insistence that the soul of man cannot be deciphered. As De Monfort insists in the play’s second scene,
That man was never born whose secret soul
With all its motley treasure of dark thoughts,
Foul fantasies, vain musing, and wild dreams,
Was ever open’d to another’s scan. (1.2.95–98)
In fact, such a soul scan is not only possible in the play but also, as we subsequently discover, necessary, for De Monfort’s inability to read others rightly leads him both to trust the villain who lies about Jane’s relationship and to misread Rezenvelt as a deceitful wretch. De Monfort functions as a sort of anti-Hamlet, over the course of which we truly discover how to play the title character’s stops. As Frederick Burwick notes, the play therefore asks spectators to adopt the position of the physician, encouraging “attentive observation” and “deliberate questioning” of the subject (“Joanna” 55). It is a spectatorial position that, as we shall see in Chapter 6, returns with a vengeance in the stagecraft of Émile Zola.
The opening scene establishes the play’s peculiar central question: not what will De Monfort do? but rather what is De Monfort thinking? Even his loyal servant, Manuel, is bewildered, noting the features of De Monfort’s face but unable to establish their correspondence with his inner life, a lack of correspondence that is deeply troubling, threatening as it does the sympathetic relations that enable society.
MANUEL: But Monfort, even in his calmest hour,
Still bears that gloomy sternness in his eye
Which powerfully repels all sympathy. (1.1.78–79)
When De Monfort enters, Jerome continues Manuel’s investigation, which has become the audience’s as well, and attempts to secretly read the signs of De Monfort’s body.
(Jerome walks softly on tip-toes, till he gets near De Monfort, behind backs, then peeping on one side to see his face.)
JEROME (Aside to MANUEL): Ah, Manuel, what an alter’d man is here!
His eyes are hollow, and his cheeks are pale— (1.1.97–98)
This investigation reaches its apogee in act 2, scene 2, as Jane pressures her brother to confess his troubles; his “disordered air” speaks of inner turmoil, but does not speak eloquently enough. The scene opens with a refusal of revelation (“DE MONFORT: No more, my sister, urge me not again:/My secret troubles cannot be revealed.”), to which Jane counters with gestural evidence:
JANE: What, must I, like a distant humble friend,
Observe thy restless eye, and gait disturb’d,
In timid silence… ? (2.2.1–2, 5–7)
Jane’s extended exhortations produce in De Monfort an increasingly frenzied series of theatrical gestures as he tries to keep the truth buried, until at last he surrenders—“I’ll tell thee all” (78)—and relates, in roughly seventy lines of verse, the story of his lifelong, irrational hatred of Rezenvelt. The scene is a mise en abyme of the play as a whole. The language of gesture points to secrets of the mind that must then be ferreted out and verbally confessed to a character and to the audience: this is the basic dramatic structure not only of De Monfort but also of Baillie’s Plays on the Passions generally. These plays, with their anatomizing of each passion, redouble their formal structure in their narrative structure, such that the plays regularly involve characters attempting to decipher, partly through the language of gesture, the murky realms of one another’s mental states.
Once the audience has learned, over the course of the first two acts, to focus its attention on the penetration of mental states, the audience is then rewarded with the pleasures such analysis involves. Of particular appeal is the spectacle of the tormented soul viewed in a moment of lonely self-absorption. The theatrical event now centers upon the dogged investigation and agonized discovery of guarded psychological truth. After the revelation of 2.2, we are given a series of such spectacles: 3.3 begins with De Monfort alone “with his arms closed, with a thoughtful frowning aspect, and pac[ing] slowly across the stage”; alone again later in the scene he “[t]hrows himself into a chair, covers his face with his hand, and bursts into tears” (179); still later in the play he “is discovered sitting in a thoughtful posture. He remains so for some time. His face afterwards begins to appear agitated, like one whose mind is harrowed with the severest thoughts; then, starting from his seat, he clasps his hands together, and holds them up to heaven” (5.2).
For Baillie, such exhibitions, which serve as a leitmotif for all her Plays on the Passions, are a prime attraction of drama itself. Writing in her “Introductory Discourse” of our fascination with the demeanor of criminals who are about to be executed, Baillie notes that
there are very few who will not be eager to converse with a person who has beheld it [an execution]; and to learn, very minutely, every circumstance connected with it, except the very act itself of inflicting death. To lift up the roof of his dungeon … and look upon a criminal the night before he suffers, in his still hours of privacy, when all that disguise, which respect for the opinion of others, the strong motive by which even the lowest and wickedest of men still continue to be moved, would present an object to the mind of every person, not withheld from it by great timidity of character, more powerfully attractive than almost any other. (70)
Such insight into the gestures of man in a period of utmost solitude and terror might bring us as close as possible to the most hidden regions of the mind and thus provides one of the most powerful attractions in life. Where such insight is only rarely if ever available—and keeps “many away” due to its “horrour” (69)—the theater allows us to approximate such conditions.
Baillie’s theory of the theater is noteworthy in a number of respects. In Michael Fried’s terms, Baillie presents us with a vision of theater as essentially anti-theatrical, precisely as the distanced contemplation of an absorbed and “unwatched” figure. Thus a central tension of natural-language theories of gesture—the tension between the idea that external expressions reflect internal impressions, on one hand, and the idea that gestures reflect other gestures, on the other—is relieved, but only at the price of removing theatricality from the theater. Gestures can still be natural, universal, and true if—one is tempted to say only if—they are witnessed in secret. Turning from Fried to Foucault, we may further add that Baillie’s vision is one of discipline in extremis, in which the spectacle has shifted from public execution to the private reflections of an unknowingly observed, condemned individual. Whereas “[t]raditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown,” now “[i]n discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen”—even and especially in their intimacies (Discipline 187). In all of these ways, as we shall come to see, Baillie’s theatrical vision sets the stage for The Cenci.
Baillie’s account surprises not only by its disciplining gaze but also by its lack of any call for aesthetic idealization; Baillie’s maximally attractive spectacle is a sight of revealed truth as wholly stripped horror. The conflict between truth and beauty does not in fact present the sort of conflict for Baillie that it does for Siddons or for the mainstay of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Of course, Baillie’s plays themselves idealize this event by a number of conventional means (use of some stock dramatic characters and plot devices, use of dramatic verse, etc.) but there is already the hint, in Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse,” that such forms of aesthetic idealization are in the process of disappearing, that the discovery of emotional truth is not something that need be harmonized with beauty anymore but is a theatrical end—very nearly the theatrical end—in itself.
There is a distinctly scientific sensibility to Joanna Baillie’s vast project of cataloging, dividing, and investigating each separate passion in her thirty-nine-year cycle of dramas, a sensibility shared by two of the most prominent British neurologists of the age: Joanna’s brother, Matthew Baillie, and their mutual friend Charles Bell. (Joanna and Matthew’s uncles, it is worth noting, were the distinguished anatomist-physicians William and John Hunter.) Matthew Baillie, at one point court surgeon to George III, was author of The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body (1793), now widely regarded as the first systematic study of pathology. Charles Bell, a prominent surgeon and neurologist (“Bell’s palsy” is named after him) and prolific medical writer as well as an accomplished artist, was best known to the broader public as the author of a work that combined anatomical and neurological science with aesthetic criticism. Entitled Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806), it was later expanded and republished as Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824) and subsequently, in a number of revised editions, as The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression: As Connected with the Fine Arts.8
Matthew Baillie and Bell took principal roles in an extremely profitable convergence of neurological anatomy and pathology in Britain during the early nineteenth century, a convergence that emerged in the wake of the Scottish Enlightenment and also embraced the work of such experimental physicians as Robert Hooper, Richard Bright, James Hope, and Robert Carswell.9 Moreover, the Romantic period roughly corresponds to the emergence of what came to be called neuroscience. It is during this period that the brain was beginning to be understood not as a unified whole but as an amalgam of modular and to some degree independent parts, that experimentation on unconscious neural actions such as reflexes was coalescing, and that comparative neuroanatomy was becoming established. Such innovations were not, of course, limited to Britain: prominent anatomist-neurologists such as Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis in France, Franz Joseph Gall in Austria, and Carl Gustav Carus in Germany contributed to a truly trans-European project. The second decade of the century witnessed the first history of neurology (in John Cooke’s A Treatise on Nervous Diseases, 1820–1824), and subsequent decades saw a wealth of advancements. The scholar John D. Spillane notes that
by the end of the century we shall have seen the successful removal of tumors from the brain and the spinal cord, the electrical nature of the nerve impulse will have been established, and we shall have the doctrine of the neuron and the principle of the integrative action of the nervous system. These major achievements were based on a wide variety of studies, with new instruments and techniques, which revealed the microsctructure of the tissues of the nervous system and the regional manner in which its special functions were organized. All this against a background of increasingly competent clinical investigation and interpretation, and the growth of the science of pathology in all its forms. (168)
A host of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have shown not only the scientific importance of these discoveries, but also their profound sociological influences and effects.10
While neurological approaches to psychology were certainly not new in the period, and might even be traced to Galen of Pergamon in the second century a.d., the scientific and cultural landscape had shifted fundamentally since the mid-seventeenth century. Much of this shift may be traced to the works of Thomas Willis, probably the first to unambiguously advance the notion that the soul resides only in the brain; the impact of Willis’s writings, according to G. S. Rousseau, were central to the formation of the Age of Sensibility in the following century, as well as, more clearly, foundational to the work of such prominent eighteenth-century neurologists as David Hartley (160–178). The neurologists of the Romantic period were inheritors of a century and a half of neurological study, and their widely varying approaches were marked by deep divisions (of which the vitalist-materialist debate, though overstated, remains the best known). As Alan Richardson has shown, prominent Romantic-era neurologists (including Baillie, Bell, Darwin, Gall, and Cabanis) also shared a good deal of common ground, including the idea that mental and physiological functioning is best understood biologically rather than mechanistically; that the mind actively processes rather than passively receives experience; that the mind is located in the brain; and that mind and body are intricately intertwined (British 6; Neural Sublime 11).11
Both Baillie’s and Bell’s writings, like those of other British anatomists and neurologists, occasionally echoed the predominant natural-language account of gesture. In his Gulstonian Lectures to the Royal College of Physicians (1794), Baillie described a causal chain running from emotions, through nerves, to external expression. Gesture thus constitutes, in his words,
a natural language, and is perfectly understood in all countries; for it depends upon an universal principle in human nature, and is not connected with any arbitrary customs of society. The expressions of the countenance and attitude in anger, revenge, fear, &c., when strongly excited, are the same in every country, and are universally understood. (146)
For his part, Bell offered a similar account in the Anatomy of Expression in Painting and the subsequent Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. In the earlier volume, he argued that the “range of expression” in humans and animals forms a “universal language which has been called instinctive, which at least produces something like the effect of innate sympathy, and seems to be independent of experience or arbitrary custom” (88). He enlarged upon the claim in his revised work, stating “that expression is to passion what language is to reason” (139); just as “without words to represent ideas, the reasoning faculties of man could not be fully exercised, so there could be no violence or excess of passion merely in the mind, and independent of the action of the body” (139).
For Siddons, as we saw, the theater was an art of gestural imitation on at least two levels: first, on the level of the actors, who voluntarily imitate the gestures of the characters they portray; second, on the level of the audience, which involuntarily imitates the gestures of the actors before it. Matthew Baillie’s neurological account added to this the insight that such unconscious gestural imitation was specifically connected to the action of the nerves. “[T]he principle of imitation,” writes Baillie,
is sometimes quite independent of the will… . This state of mind acts through the intervention of nerves upon certain muscles, exciting them to action, and producing an imitation of the particular motion or gesture. This is so far from being dependent on volition, that the mind is often not conscious of its taking place; and whenever it becomes so, the imitation is repressed by an exertion of volition. (147–148)
The notion that the mind, operating through the nervous system, acts upon the muscles opens up still further questions: Might the nervous system act upon the mind? Might the nervous system be the mind? And how, in the end, do we separate emotions from the nerves that conduct them?
The issue of gestural imitation, mediated by the nervous system, profoundly disturbs the natural-language account of gesture. According to the natural-language account, the thought or emotion is passed like a missive from the mind through the nerves to the muscles, resulting in gesture. Put in linguistic terms, the chain looks like this:
referent (emotion) → medium (nerves) → signifier (gesture)
The issue becomes more confusing, however, when it is allowed that much of gesture is imitative. In this account, the gesture of one person (“A”) may operate on a second person (“B”), thereby provoking an involuntary imitative gesture from B, which may then provoke an involuntary imitative gesture from C, and so forth. For Baillie, this gestural imitation is a purely nervous action, yielding a far more complex linguistic chain:
referent (A’s emotion) → medium 1 (A’s nerves) → signifier 1 (A’s gesture) → medium 2 (B’s nerves) → signifier 2 (B’s imitative gesture) [… → medium 3 (C’s nerves) → signifier 3 (C’s imitative gesture) → …]
The picture that emerges from such a chain is no longer the simple one of inner states and their adequate gestural expressions; now it is a new and more complex one of gestures borrowed, possibly without intent, volition, or even knowledge, from other gestures, regardless of the emotions and thoughts of the borrower. The relatively straightforward equivalence of impression and expression, in other words, has become a far more complicated network. And the process is raised to yet another level of complication when the semiotic system is the theater, where the supposed referent (i.e., the emotion represented by the actor on stage) is itself an imitation (i.e., the actor’s imitation of the character’s emotion). The actor’s emotion, then, becomes a second referent held in ambiguous tension with the first, and the chain runs something like this:
referent (character’s emotion) → medium 1 (A’s nerves) → referent 2 (A’s emotion) → signifier 1 (A’s imitative gesture) → medium 2 (B’s nerves) → signifier 2 (B’s imitative gesture) [… → medium 3 (C’s nerves) → signifier 3 (C’s imitative gesture) → …]
The linguistic chain might be rendered in different ways while preserving the essential point: that the complexity of gestural imitation is a problem for Romantic theories of gesture because it undermines the natural-language account, and that, moreover, this problem is brought into especially sharp relief by the theater, a medium peculiarly reliant upon the imitation and reception of emotion and gesture.
To make matters yet more vexing, any conception of gesture as a translation or causal result of mental action, however indirect, was increasingly being challenged by neurological understandings of mind. In his enormously popular Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, Bell claims that it is precisely this question of the relation between inner passions and outward expressions that first led him to the study of the nervous system.
The discoveries which I have made in the Nervous System, observations too exclusively medical to appear in this volume, I owe originally to the investigation of my present subject; I saw that the whole frame was subject to influence in union with the expression of the countenance; I was led to the discovery of a particular system of nerves, the offices of which are to control the motions of the muscles in respiration in speech and expression. (192)
The adventure of discovery Bell describes here, moving from investigation of looks and gestures to investigation of nerves, crystallizes a transition that, while not entirely new, was beginning to profoundly destabilize both epistemology and aesthetics.
In the same edition, Bell argues for a corporeal and neural conception of the passions that largely undercuts his own embrace, elsewhere, of a natural language theory of gesture. Bell writes that the emotions have a physiological basis, centered on the heart and lungs, two organs “united by nerves, and consequently by the closest sympathy” (24). While the natural and universal language of humanity is still to be found in gesture, the hidden referent of this language is not the emotions but something at once more primary and more mysterious: the operation of these two internal organs, connected by a nervous system (Figure 1.3 and Figure 1.4). Especially important to the production of the emotions is respiration, which Bell, in the third edition of 1844, clearly connects to the nerves.
The nervous system is complex in an extraordinary degree; but the reader may not be deterred from attempting to understand at least so much, that there is a class of nerves appropriated to respiration. These nerves arise from the same part of the brain; the great central nerve descends into the chest, to be distributed to the heart and lungs; and the others extend to the exterior muscles of the chest, neck, and face. Under the influence of the central nerve, the diverging external ones become the instruments of breathing and of expression. (92)
From the conception of gesture as the natural language of emotion, we have moved to a very different idea, that breathing and gesture are intertwined, and that their common source and medium is the nervous system. If one takes such a model seriously, then the distinction between voluntary and involuntary gesture threatens to collapse, and with it any conventional sense of agency.
FIGURE 1.3 How impressions becomes expressions: diagram of the muscles of the face, from Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
FIGURE 1.4 Neither impression nor expression, but underlying both: diagram of the corporeal nerves, from Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
This anatomical and neurological account of the relation between body and mind brought the body directly to bear on mind, that bastion of autonomy, and, still more troublingly, identified the body with an invisible and largely mysterious realm, an interior corporeal network that underlies both mental impressions and bodily expressions. Such implications were sinking into the broader consciousness as never before, as witnessed by the unprecedented popularity of public presentations, including anatomical and neurological lectures, phrenological discourses, mesmeric healings, phreno-mesmeric acts, and demonstrations of electrical effects (the electrification of frogs, following the experiments of Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani, proving especially popular). The new mass appeal of “life sciences” can also be seen in the widespread interest elicited by controversies over the “atheistical” or “materialist” teachings of scientists such as William Lawrence.12 Though he often offered himself as a piously Anglican alternative to Lawrence, even Bell felt obliged to defend the very notion of a relatively holistic understanding of body and mind. “If, in the examination of the sources of expression, it should be found that the mind is dependent on the frame of the body,” writes Bell in the 1824 edition of Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression,
the discovery ought not to be considered as humiliating, or as affecting the belief of a separate existence of that part of our nature on which the changes wrought in the body are ultimately impressed. Since we are dwellers in a material world, it is necessary that the spirit should be connected with it by an organized body, without which it could neither feel nor react, nor manifest itself in any way. It is a fundamental law of our nature that the mind shall have its powers developed through the influence of the body; that the organs of the body shall be the links in the chain of relation between it and the material world, through which the immaterial principle within shall be affected. (16)
Bell’s tone, equal parts caution and reassurance, is meant to prepare the reader for the shock of the work’s emphasis on the bodily sources of many mental operations. A page later, the reader is more bluntly warned: “I am about to prove the extensive influence of the corporeal on the intellectual part of man.”
The defensive posture of such passages helps explain why Bell is elsewhere invested in an eighteenth-century notion of gesture broadly and the theater more specifically as a means for the unification of people in common sympathy. But Bell’s reinvention of this discourse is radical: in his account, heartfelt connections arise not through a sympathy of souls but, more basically, through a sympathy of internal organs: “uniformity is produced among men, in their internal feelings, emotions, or passions, from these organs [i.e., heart and lungs] moving in sympathy with the mind” (21). Yet more disturbingly, the breakdown of conventional distinctions between mind and body suggests that interior mental states may be subject to bodily gesture in many ways, that indeed the relationship between mental states and gestures could be reversed, such that it might “be possible to mould the body, and thus to steal into another’s thoughts” (141). The body, Bell concludes, not only shapes one’s own mind, but could steal another’s as well.
While it is unclear whether Percy Shelley knew of the neurological research of Baillie and Bell, he was certainly aware of such research more generally through his Oxford experiments with electricity, his wide reading in so-called materialist science (including the works of Cabanis, whom Shelley read in the 1810s), and especially his friendship (together with his wife Mary) with William Lawrence, who also served as their physician and whose “materialist” account of life provided one of the principle inspirations for Frankenstein.13 But whether the influence is direct or indirect, no play of the period captures the crisis of representation exposed by Romantic-era neurology more drastically than does Shelley’s The Cenci. The play centers on the central crime of Count Cenci’s rape of his daughter, Beatrice, and her successful plan to avenge herself by parricide. The single word that names Cenci’s crime is, famously, never spoken in the play, an absence that marks a more general collapse of language, which emerges as fundamentally inadequate to the task of communicating inner life. “Ask me not what I think;” says Beatrice’s brother Giacomo,
the unwilling brain
Feigns often what it would not; and we trust
Imagination with such fantasies
As the tongue dare not fashion into words—
Which have no words, their horror makes them dim
To the mind’s eye. (2.2.82–87)
In such a linguistic universe, wordlessness becomes a refuge and a mark of innocence, as with Camillo’s praise of Beatrice: “She is as pure as speechless infancy” (5.2.69).
As the play progresses and words are increasingly exposed as essentially deceptive representations of the mind, involuntary gestures become increasingly telling. In act 2, words are still markers of reason, as Beatrice attempts to prove her sanity to Lucretia by pointing to her speech: “You see I am not mad:” she says, “I speak to you” (2.1.34). By the third act, however, all this has changed. To speak is now to fall into the abyss, and mind finds expression only through the unconscious actions of the body. “Speak to me,” Beatrice’s mother Lucretia begs her. “Unlock those pallid hands whose fingers twine/With one another.” To which Beatrice responds
’Tis the restless life
Tortured within them. If I try to speak,
I shall go mad. (3.1.82–86)
The tongue, once a proof of sanity, now must keep still for sanity’s sake, but still the twining fingers tell all.14
And yet, though gesture may speak when words fail, the body ultimately provides no refuge from the deceitfulness of language. Cenci himself is a cunning manipulator of gestures, including those he makes to seem unconscious, and Orsino, too, knows how to “mask/Mine own in some inane and vacant smile” (3.1.276–277). Even Beatrice becomes a master performer in the last two acts of the play, as she denies complicity in the plot to kill Cenci. Advising her mother on how to lie before the law, she instructs Lucretia not to “[w]rite on unsteady eyes and altered cheeks/All thou wouldst hide” (4.4.29–30)—implying that even the blush, that last bastion of physiological authenticity, may be faked.15 When deceit runs so deep, it threatens to drag down authenticity with it, to reduce all the world to object relations and mere puppetry.
And so we find at the core of this play a thing we might call thing-ness. “’Tis an awful thing/To touch such mischief as I now conceive,” muses Cenci as he anticipates a crime whose only utterable name is “thing” (2.1.125). “O God! what thing am I?” cries Beatrice in the aftermath of the crime, and then, “Horrible things have been in this wild world” (3.1.38, 51). Her own thoughts of parricide partly echo those of her father: “Some such thing is to be endured or done,” she says as she ponders her revenge. When Lucretia accuses Cenci of his “enormous crimes,” Cenci seems to echo his daughter in turn, “Why—such things are,” as though the impersonality and inevitability of evil exonerates agency (4.1.36–37). And Beatrice’s most horrific vision, in the last act, is that the whole world should become so thing-ified: “No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world—/The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!/If all things then should be—my father’s spirit”—after which she laments, “How tedious, false, and cold seem all things!” (5.4.58–60, 80). The horror here is that Cenci’s spirit may in fact be the brute fact of the world, that the world has been unpeopled, and that all things have become things.
Joanna Baillie, as we saw, had found her model of spectatorship in a prisoner secretly observed on the eve of execution; the spectacle of such “very minutely” observed gestures and groans would be “more powerfully attractive than almost any other.” De Monfort provided just such a spectacle, as the title character’s guarded emotions burst forth from him in uncontrollable and unconscious bodily motions; the play marked a shift of attention from verbal to gestural language and from beauty to truth. The Cenci extends this direction while unraveling it, showing gestures to be as slippery as words and linking the quest for the inner truth of the other with inquisition.
In the end, The Cenci’s tragedy is not that truth is hidden; the tragedy is truth itself and the demand for its exposure. Every option is contaminated: to speak is to don a grotesque mask, to keep silence is to condemn others to torture, to seek out the truth is to terrorize.16 The final act of the play brings this crisis to a head. Beatrice embodies the impasse: her options all are cursed. The Judge threatens to “[l]et tortures strain the truth till it be white/As snow thrice-sifted by the frozen wind” (5.2.169–170), and her brother encourages her to honestly confess, else “[t]hey will tear the truth/Even from thee at last” (5.3.52–53), an exhortation echoed by her mother, who begs, “Oh, speak the truth! Let us all quickly die” (5.3.55). Beatrice continues steadfast in her refusal: “let us each be silent as a corpse;/It soon will be as soft as any grave,” though we know that that refusal will prolong not only her own tortures but those of her compatriots as well (5.3.49–50). The sinews of dramatic communication—dialogue, gesture, even silence—tear before us, just as anagnorisis, that most treasured moment of the Western stage, becomes an object of brutal inquisition and deceptive refusal.
This is not simply another instance of the old Romantic wordlessness, of the ineffable sublime. It is not even what Alan Richardson would call, in his study of cognitive theories and Romantic poetry, the “neural sublime.” 17 Rather, it is an awakening of something new—new, at any rate, for the European theater. While The Cenci stages a dramatic breakdown of language and gesture as expressive of internal states, it also suggests another form of discourse based not on linguistic representation at all but rather on material stimulation of the nervous system. This material and non-mimetic discourse does not exceed or overwhelm representation in the manner of the sublime—it simply eludes it.
The bluntest form of this discourse in the play is torture by means of the rack. Here is a direct material effect on the nervous system if there ever was one, and the means by which the Judge plans to “wring the truth/Out of those nerves and sinews, groan by groan” (5.2.194). As Elaine Scarry has famously argued, the body in pain refuses linguistic representation, at once consumes the mind and resists expression. Physical pain, she writes, “has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language” (5). The torture that not only ends the play but suffuses it is one foreclosure of the efficacy of language.
But a subtler and newer form of nervous discourse may also be found in Beatrice’s eyes. We are told of it already in the first act, when Orsino confesses his fear of
her awe-inspiring gaze,
Whose beams anatomize me, nerve by nerve,
And lay me bare, and make me blush to see
My hidden thoughts. (1.2.83–87)
This power of Beatrice’s, to anatomize another’s mind, to penetrate hidden thoughts and thereby potentially control them, has overtones of animal magnetism, also known as mesmerism.18 While the role of the magnetizer was generally seen as masculine and that of the magnetized as feminine, Shelley continued his reversal of these roles beyond The Cenci. In Pisa in 1820, Shelley submitted himself to a course of therapeutic magnetism in order to treat chronic kidney pain; his magnetizer was one Jane Williams, one of the very few female magnetizers, whose apparently curative effects on Shelley subsequently inspired his poem “The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient.”
Robert Southey’s Letters from England (1807), which Shelley read from 1800 to 1811 and again in 1815, contains two chapters on the Paris-trained magnetizer John Boniot de Mainauduc, the most popular mesmerist in England at the time. Southey discusses de Mainauduc’s theory as one in which “human nerves” are held to be “continuations of the atomospherical,” with the latter consisting of “innumerable strings of … component atoms; the business of these strings is to receive and convey, from and through every part of the atmosphere, of the earth and of their inhabitants, whatever impulses they receive” (306–307). The special abilities of the mesmerizer come into play due to the fact that
[t]he countless number of universal nerves which combine with, and are regular continuations of, those similar conductors called nerves in animal forms, are subject to the influence of man’s spiritual volition, and are affected or influenced if we strike one or more of them with the atoms which are continually flowing from us; that affection is conveyed on to such parts of the body as those conductors are attached to, and the nature and degree of the impulse will be according to the nature of the intention and the energy of the volition. (309)
In their pseudoscientific and quasi-mystical fashion, de Mainauduc’s theories (as Shelley would have encountered them) exemplified once more the broader cultural movement away from gesture and toward nervous action. While theatrical gestures (especially of fixating eyes and willful hands) were the most obvious aspects of mesmeric performance, in fact the “real” source of action was located beyond gesture, beyond thoughts, and beyond emotions, in an invisible, ubiquitous network of human and atmospheric nerves.
What we might call the magnetic gaze of Beatrice points, then, to a different order of communication—or perhaps it would be better to say interaction—between characters—or perhaps it would be better to say energies. The new order is at once terrifying and empowering, and it transforms Beatrice into something more challenging than a mere victim of Gothic romance. Perhaps the most perennially difficult aspect of this play is Beatrice’s repeated denial of participation in Cenci’s murder, a denial she sustains even though one of the murderers she employed has confessed under torture. Confronting the confessed murderer Marzio, she tries to overpower him with her gaze in order to compel him to claim, falsely, that she had nothing to do with the murder. She demands of him, “Fix thine eyes on mine;/Answer to what I ask,” to which Marzio responds by trying to avoid her eyes—“He dares not look the thing he speaks, but bends/His gaze on the blind earth”—until at last he crumbles. He is mastered not so much in his mind as in his brain.
Oh!
Spare me! My brain swims round—I cannot speak—
It was that horrid torture forced the truth.
Take me away! Let her not look on me! (5.2.88–90)
Preferring the rack to Beatrice’s gaze, Marzio begs for the torture chamber.
Oh, spare me! Speak to me no more!
That stern yet piteous look, those solemn tones,
Wound worse than torture. (To the Judges)
I have told it all;
For pity’s sake lead me away to death. (107–109)
After he recants his confession, we are told that he was bound again to the wheel, but held his breath, smiled, and died.
One wonders whether this catastrophe of language might have been one reason, perhaps the central reason, for Shelley’s ambivalence about seeing his play staged. According to a letter to Thomas Love Peacock of July 1819 cited in Mary Shelley’s “Note on The Cenci,” Percy Shelley wrote hopefully that the play is “in all respects … fitted only for Covent Garden”—that is, for broad public performance—and that “the principal character, Beatrice, is precisely fitted for Miss O’Neil [sic], and it might even seem written for her” (365). And yet when Percy Shelley sent the play to the Covent Garden manager Thomas Harris, Harris immediately and predictably dismissed it on grounds of its subject matter. Given Shelley’s desire that this work should find a broad theatrical public and not be consigned to the closet—as well as his desperate need for the money he hoped that such a staging might bring—it might seem strange that Shelley would choose to center his play on the utterly taboo topic of incest. But the puzzle unravels somewhat when we presume some element of self-protection in this self-sabotage—might Shelley, after all, have been guarding his nerves?
Returning to his letter to Peacock, we find that Shelley’s desire to have his heroine played by Eliza O’Neill, the most popular and dynamic English actress of her age, is followed by the remark “God forbid that I should ever see her play it—it would tear my nerves to pieces.” According to Thomas Medwin, that Shelley was extraordinarily “sensitive to external impressions” and might easily succumb to the gaze of Miss O’Neill’s Beatrice helps us understand both his attraction and his fear. “When anything particularly interested him,” Medwin observed of his cousin, Shelley “felt a tremendous shivering of the nerves pass over him, an electrical shock, a magnetism of the imagination” (191). We can almost hear the poet crying with Marzio, “Let her not look on me!” at the same time that he asks us to die smilingly with him on the wheel.
Such nervous tortures recall Antonin Artaud, whose Theater of Cruelty draws this book to a close. And indeed Artaud found in Shelley’s play a kindred cry: his own version, entitled Les Cenci, was performed at the Thèâtre des Folies-Wagram in Paris in 1935, with a soundscape designed by the composer Roger Désormière and sets designed by Balthus. Artaud himself played the Count.
That Artaud recognized in The Cenci a herald of his own dramaturgy points to its proleptic power, a prolepsis oddly rooted in the neurological discourse of its own age. How, in the wake of the breakdown of gestural communication and the rise of the much less legible, much more mysterious communicative regime of the nerves, might one know another’s thoughts and feelings? The Cenci not only staged this conundrum but also tumbled over it into an abyss, performing the collapse of even involuntary actions as a signifier of mental states and violently shifting the drama from words to gestures to nervous energies. We might call The Cenci the swan song of long-standing dramatic conventions of plot construction, poetic dialogue, and gesture. This, at any rate, was more or less George Bernard Shaw’s opinion of the play when he saw it performed at a private premiere in 1886. “It is a strenuous but futile and never-to-be-repeated attempt to bottle the new wine in the old skins,” wrote Shaw at the time. “The Cenci, then, is a failure in the sense in which we call an experiment with a negative result a failure” (372). But Shelley’s drama is more than just a revealing failure. It also stages a crisis of knowledge and communication, shows how this crisis stretches dramatic conventions past their breaking point, and gestures toward a new mode of performance. The Cenci, in other words, not only anticipates the rise of theatrical realism in the nineteenth century but also intimates the fault lines of that realism to come. In this latter sense, The Cenci points toward a non-mimetic, neural strain in the European stage, toward a theater not principally of representation but of sensation.
1 An excellent, concise survey of the conception of acting, and of identity, embodied in actors such as Kean, Lemaître, and Devrient, may be found in Fischer-Lichte, History 202–204.
2 “By the 18th Century, when people spoke of the world as a theater, they began to imagine a new audience for their posturing—each other, the divine anguish giving way to the sense of an audience willing to enjoy, if somewhat cynically, the playacting and pretenses of everyday life” (Sennett 34–35). William Worthen’s incisive account of the conflicts between various conceptions of the actor’s art, and their relation to eighteenth-century theatricality generally, further informs my own; see esp. Worthen chap. 2. As discussed in my Introduction, the parallels Roach draws between the history of theories of acting and the history of science forms one of the pillars of this present study (Roach, Player’s, esp. chaps. 2–5).
3 Here general bodily gesture should be distinguished from one of its subsets: facial expression. Appeals to the universal language of facial expression, especially of unconscious and “uncontrollable” expressions such as the blush, in many ways paralleled appeals to the universality of generalized gesture in the period. As opposed to gestures of, say, hands and legs, facial gestures proved a far more durable contender for the title of universal, natural, and generally trustworthy language of the mind (indeed, facial expression is still invoked as such by the psychologist Paul Ekman, the cognitive anthropologist Donald Brown, and the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, among others). See Richardson, “Facial”; T. W. Smith, On Flinching.
4 The idea that the soul can be read like a book through the language of gesture has a long history in the West and may indeed date all the way back to the Characters of Theophrastus (c. 371–287 b.c.). In the first century a.d., Quintillian espoused the notion that gesture constitutes a universal language. Such discussions became far more systematic, however, after the publication of Charles le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière in 1698, an illustrated work first translated into English in 1701 and thereafter translated, adapted, and expanded regularly over the course of the eighteenth century. The first English translation, by J. Smith in 1701, included a section on Charles Le Brun’s theory of physiognomy, and Le Brun’s theories also inspired Johann Caspar Lavater’s influential Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–1778). This latter text, again heavily illustrated, went through three English translations as well as several translations into French. One overview of philosophies of gesture from antiquity to the eighteenth century may be found in chap. 3 of Kendon.
5 Unlike Kames, however, Austin modifies his naturalizing account of gesture somewhat by further claiming that gesture, like certain plants, grows more bountifully in certain climes than it does in Britain. But this discrepancy can be redressed by careful cultivation: “[t]here may possibly be nations whose livelier feelings incline them more to gesticulation than is common among us, as there are also countries in which plants of excellent use to man grow spontaneously; these, by care and culture, are found to thrive also in colder countries, and by a little study we shall equal the most favoured nations” (12).
6 Engel was the director of the National Theatre in Berlin; Henry Siddons was the eldest son of the actress Sarah Siddons. While Siddons’s translation is relatively literal, he occasionally moves material from one section of Engel’s volume to another, substitutes English theatrical examples for German ones, and alters the illustrations, all with the aim of making the volume more appealing to a British audience. As the primary focus of this chapter is on the development of the English stage, I have chosen to quote from the Siddons translation/adaptation rather than the Engel original.
7 In this respect both Austin and Engel/Siddons’s works are typical of the turn of the century, which witnessed, according to Solomon, “a tremendous burst of enthusiasm and work in the study of acting technique. The work was accumulative rather than innovative in nature. Writers endeavored to rectify current practices in favour of re-establishing the traditional practices of the previous half-century. The result was an acculturation of gesturing, as nationalistic peculiarities in the acting technique of the 17th and early 18th centuries unified into conventions common throughout Europe” (551). Spoel associates such works with the broader “late eighteenth-century British project to standardize language use in general, whether through dictionaries, grammars, or handbooks of elocution” (6), and further connects this project to Foucault’s ideas (as elaborated in The Order of Things) of bodily discipline during the classical age.
8 Bell’s continuing importance is further illustrated by four conditions that still bear his name: the Bell-Magendie law, the long nerve of Bell, Bell’s palsy, and Bell’s sign.
9 An overview of this convergence may be found in Compston.
10 On the scientific importance, see, e.g., Clarke and Jacyna, Young; on the sociological influences and effects, see, e.g., Cooter, Golinski, and Youngquist. In truth, the distinction between history-of-science and sociological approaches is not quite clear cut in any of these works, and in, say, Reed the distinction hardly exists at all.
11 The challenge to mind-body dualism in neurological research of the period applies even to Bell’s writings, which are generally careful to avoid clearly anti-dualistic claims for fear of endangering the doctrine of the immortal soul. The implications of Bell’s writings, however, are clearly more holistic than his orthodoxy allows him to concede.
12 One of the chorus of scientists who accused Lawrence of “atheistical materialism” was Bell himself, who sided decisively with the vitalist John Abernathy in a series of contentious debates between Abernathy and Lawrence. Bell’s attacks against Lawrence, particularly in An Essay on the Forces Which Circulate the Blood (1819), served to somewhat obscure (and may have partly had the point, intentionally or not, of obscuring) the troubling nature of Bell’s own conclusions.
13 For Shelley’s reading of Cabanis, see Richardson, British 17. For a discussion of Shelley’s changing conceptions of mind, see Bruhn; Reed also briefly discusses the materialism of Shelley’s psychology, 45–49. A study of Shelley’s deep engagement with the materialist and vitalist debates of his day, and with the controversy between Abernathy and Lawrence in particular, may be found in Ruston. While Ruston devotes significant attention to this debate and its influence on Shelley, she devotes rather less attention to Lawrence’s writings on the brain and nervous system; this ground is covered by Richardson (British 25–29). It is also worth noting that Shelley was quite familiar with Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (Cox 66).
14 Her brother Giacomo also notices that, though “she speaks not,” Beatrice’s silent troubles are written on her body.
ORSINO: … you may
Conceive such half conjectures as I do
From her fixed paleness, and the lofty grief
Of her stern brow, bent on the idle air, … (3.1.349–352)
Beatrice is not alone in speaking most forcefully through gesture. Drawing his sword on Orsino, Giacomo cries, “Let the sword speak what the indignant tongue/Disdains to brand thee with” (5.1.55–56). And, facing tortures that threaten to wrest “[e]ach from the other’s countenance the thing/Which is in every heart,” Lucretia ultimately confesses not through words but through involuntary motion. “She faints,” says Savella, “an ill appearance this” (4.2.176).
15 In Descartes’s influential opinion, the involuntary nature of blushing made it a particularly inerrant sign of inner life. Siddons follows the main current of eighteenth-century thought by agreeing, “Notwithstanding the soul always preserves some power over the muscles, she has none over the blood, says Descartes; and this is the reason that sudden redness and paleness are always independent of the will” (23). And Bell notes that “[o]ver the motions of the body the mind has an unequal control. By a strong effort the outward tokens may be restrained, at least in regard to the general bearing of the body; but who, while suffering, can retain the natural fullness of his features, or the healthful colour of his cheek, the unembarrassed respiration and clearness of the natural voice?” (1824 edition; 22).
16 Stuart Curran captures this ubiquitous contamination well in his classic study of the play; see especially his point that, in the play, “to act is to commit evil” (132). I should add to this that, in the play, not to act is also to commit evil—and that the same may be said for speech and silence.
17 Richardson defines instances of the neural sublime as “moments when, through sensory or emotional or conceptual overload, or some combination of all three, the mind blanks out and seems to undergo a physical collapse or meltdown” (Neural 31).
18 While Thomas Medwin claimed that, before their arrival in Pisa in October 1820, “Shelley had never previously heard of mesmerism, and I showed him a treatise I composed” (2.49), recent scholarship indicates that, contra Medwin, Shelley had discovered mesmerism several years earlier. The evidence for the earlier dating is various. Shelley’s encounter with Robert Southey’s Letters from England, which described mesmerism at length, is discussed in the body of this chapter. Beyond this, mesmerism experienced something of a revival during the 1810s and Shelley’s poetry in that period contains a number of mesmeric tropes. Shelley may also have learned about mesmerism from Lord Byron’s physician John Polidori, who was a member of the famous Gothic confab (which was to inspire Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein) at the Villa Diodati in June 1816. Arguments for the earlier dating of Shelley’s familiarity with mesmerism, as well as an analysis of mesmeric tropes in much of his work (though not in The Cenci), may be found in both Leask (esp. 54–56) and Dawson.