Aspects of Acting in Eighteenth-Century European Theater

Abstract

The four papers published here are the revised versions of papers that were read and discussed at the panel session “Aspects of Acting in Eighteenth-Century European Theater,” which was held as the regular meeting of the Society of Comparative Theatre at Seijo University on October 13, 2012. This panel session was originally inspired by a collaborative research project, “Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Drama,” which was conducted at Seijo University for three consecutive years beginning in 1984. This research was a critical and comprehensive discussion of several aspects of eighteenth-century European drama, which had not received much attention in Japan, and the detailed records from the research have since been valuable sources for scholars in this field. In this research, however, one subject had remained untouched — the aspects of acting. For this reason, we chose “acting” and “theories of acting” in eighteenth-century European theater as our themes for the panel session. A pre-panel session was held at Meiji University on July 7, 2012, as preparation for the main session. At that time, five speakers read papers concerning topics that not only discussed some concrete aspects of acting and theories of acting in eighteenth-century European theater, but also outlined their development in European countries throughout the century. The papers read at the pre-session (except for Ms. Osaki’s which is published here) were published in the third volume of Nihonbashigakkan University’s booklet, The Development of Acting in Eighteenth-Century European Theater. The panel session in October was then based upon and developed from the results of the pre-session.