from
Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution
By Paul Friedland
(Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 17 - 19)
Throughout the early modern period, in France as in much of Europe, theatrical actors constituted something of a people apart. Despite the monarchy's official patronage of the theater, the Catholic Church and a good portion of the public tended to regard actors, whether on or off the stage, as pariahs. Repeated official decrees declaring that the actor was not infâme seemed to do little to combat religious and popular hostitility toward actors, a hostility that did not necessarily have an effect on theater attendance; it was apparently possible to attend plays and thoroughly enjoy the actors' performances while at the same time despising the actors for their profession.
...Despite the fact that ...opponents of the theater had a tendency to stress that their condemnation...was primarily due to the immoral content of the passions presented on the stage, one cannot help noticing that the very act of theatrical re-presentation seemed troubling to them, regrardless of its content.
...Underlying much of the hostility to the theatre...lay a ... deep-seated conviction that there was something inherently debased about the act of conjuring real passions within one's own flesh for the sole purpose of amusing a paying audience. As far as [Bishop Jacques-Benigne] Bossuet was concerned , there was little that separated the actions of a prostitute and those of an actress who gave over her body to physical passions that were not properly her own...
Something of the logic that underlay the marking of the actor as profane can be seen in the particular sensitivity of the church with respect to theater around Passion Week and Christmas. Actors, who so adeptly summoned passions at will and just as easily made them disappear the moment they walked off the stage, were so troubling to the church because they seemed to put into doubt the reality of Christ's Passion on the cross. As Bossuet argued in his sermon "On the Passion of Jesus Christ," the profundity of Christ's Passion lay in his choosing to feel it, for as the son of God he could have chosen to feel absolutely nothing. And here the similarities between Christ on the cross and the actor on the stage must have seemed painfully apparent...
...here was Christ at a moment that he knew would come to pass, and he chose to allow his body to feel every last passion that the events demanded. For Bossuet, the parallel with actors on the stage must have been all too clear; they too chose to feel all the passions within their bodies; they too knew the script in advance. If the actor's performance could be said to bear a resemblance to Christ's Passion, the the danger, of course, was that Jesus himself might, by corollary, be taken for an actor.
Comments
I think they made a musical of it. I can’t remember if it was called Fiddler on the Roof or Westside Story.
Guys and Dolls for sure. I think I saw the poster for it outside a theatre. Some doll standing out in a cobblestone street on tap of a pile of furniture with the bodice of her dress torn open and a bit of herself hanging out.
Now if I can get my thoughts past that inspiring pose that she struck, I might be able to remember what it was that she was holding aloft: an apron, a veil, a bed sheet, flag … but if the plot had something to do with the Church, she did not look like any kind of nun I can remember. Well maybe that look on her face was a little like Sister Nagurski’s. When she was not around, some of the braver boys referred to her as Bronko—a term of endearment, I am sure. Anyway.