At that time and for hundreds of years afterward, male actors played the parts of women.) In doing so, he moved his Athenian audience deeply, but Polus's experiment was not easily duplicated and remained a historical curiosity. With the decline of the Greek theater by the 3rd century BC, the art of acting almost disappeared for a thousand years in the West. Theater existed and flourished during the Roman Empire and in European courts and cities during the Middle Ages , but actors themselves were normally regarded as unreliable vagabonds or social outcasts. Rarely were they accorded the status of true artists or professional interpreters of dramatic texts. Only in the 17th and 18th centuries did the perception of theater and acting change. Troupes of the commedia dell'arte, popular Italian comedy, spread throughout Europe in the early 1600s. Working without scripts on makeshift stages, the commedia companies, which included the first professional female actors, produced a new dynamic between performer and spectator. The sources of theatrical creativity sprang directly from the performers, who improvised their own words and comic actions around a basic plot and stock character types. Unlike in the literary theater or the opera, where the audience concentrated on a playwright's speeches or on individual arias, the spectator's interest in the commedia attached itself to the improvised and expressive accomplishments of the entire ensemble. Literary concepts and spectacular scenic displays were uncommon in commedia dell'arte, and this encouraged attention to the art of acting.
During the 17th century, when the plays of such dramatists as William Shakespeare and Molière were popular in England and France, theater integrated great dramatic literature with the excitement of professional acting. But once again the playwright's art overshadowed the performer. It was difficult to untangle artistically the words of the dramatist from the skill of the actor speaking them. Only the historical separation of these first productions from their restagings a generation later allowed audiences to fully appreciate the actor's art, independent of the original dialogues. Beginning in the late 17th century, theatergoers in England learned to distinguish the treatment of Hamlet by actor-manager Thomas Betterton from other productions of Shakespeare's play. Different stagings of classical or familiar plays sharpened spectators' critical facilities. In addition, theater halls designed with a concern for good acoustics permitted performers to be heard differently and allowed for more subtle, natural inflections. Sophisticated systems of indoor stage lighting displayed the faces and hands of individual actors, so that the visual details of a performance could be more easily perceived and critiqued. Among the first modern actors on the British stage in the 18th century were Charles Macklin and his student David Garrick.
truthfully awaken benefit decorative facial feature index potters roots societies stock success download morpheus