Introduction.

Tribble, Evelyn

Skill is easy to recognize but difficult to describe. Describing the skilled body in motion confronts writers with the difficulties of "languaging experience," in the phrase of phenomenologist and dance theorist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. (1) Richard Lanham's breathless and enthralled attempt to describe the tumbling of an Italian gymnast who performed before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth reflects the search for words to capture kinesis:

   Now was thear shewed before her Highness by an Italian, such feats
   of agilitie, in goinges, turninges, tumblinges, castings, hops,
   jumps, leaps, skips, springs, gambaud, soomersauts, caprettiez and
   flights; forward, backward sydewize, downward, upward, and with
   sundry windings, gyrings, and circumflexisions; also lightly and
   with such easiness, as by me in feaw words it iz not expressible by
   pen or speech, I tell you plain. I bleast me by my faith to behold
   him, and began to doout whither a waz a man or a spirite, and I
   ween had doubted me till this time, had it not been that anon I
   bethought me of men that can reason and talk with too tongs, and
   with two parsons at onez, sing like burds, curteiz of behaviour, of
   body strong, and in joints so nymble withal, that their bonez seem
   as lythie and plyaunt as syneuz. They dwel in a happy Hand (az the
   Book tearmz it), four months sayling Southward beyond Ethiop.... As
   for thiz fellow, I cannot tell what to make of him, save that I may
   gesse hiz bak be mettalld like a lamprey, that haz no bone, but a
   lyne like a lute-spring. (2)

Part of Lanham's difficulty in describing what is "not expressible by pen or speech" is probably familiar to anyone attempting to describe physical skill in words, but the categories in which he searches are different from ours. The accomplishments of the gymnast lead the writer down a rhetorical rabbit hole--so adept is the "tumbler" that Lanham wonders whether he is more like a demon, a preternatural being such as those who are described in fantastic travelers' tales, or some strange fusion of man, animal, and instrument, with a spine like a lamprey or a lutestring. This search for analogy, language, and experience to describe the evanescent, time-pressured, and seemingly superhuman abilities of the Italian's "feats of agilitie" is a small glimpse into the complexities attendant upon describing the skilled body, as well as the historical contingencies of the categories through which skill is imagined.

Perhaps it is for this reason that skill is seldom discussed as an independent category of analysis in studies of Shakespeare's theater, whether historical or contemporary. Theater is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theater find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the interstices of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning, or even so seemingly simple an act as walking or the movements of a hand. Such skills are often seen as mere physical displays, and theater historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been corrupted by actors. But reconstructing the ecologies of skill of the early modern period is a crucial step in understanding the kinetic intelligence of the early modern player.

Early modern actors inhabited a culture that placed enormous weight upon the way that bodies were managed--gesture, bearing, acts of deference or of domination were immensely important in negotiating everyday life. If command over one's body was important in the culture at large, it was even more urgent for the actor, who had to master a range of postures and bearings before an audience acutely aware of the social nuances of movement and gesture.

Early modern England inherited a variety of skill discourses: skill and the body can be seen as the confluence of numerous, often incompatible, issues that are derived from classical antiquity and the Christian tradition--for example, the Greek admiration for athleticism and the masculine body; the Roman warrior and gladiatorial tradition; the Augustinian suspicion of the flesh and hostility towards brutal sport; the humanist attitude towards the body and the role of physical exercise in education; medical discourses such as Galen's De Sanitate Tuenda, and prescriptive treatises such as conduct books and oratorical manuals. These come together, collide, and jostle within existing skill traditions with their own relationships to status and expertise. The result is a wide range of vocabularies of skill that are at once tantalizingly precise and maddeningly vague: Roger Ascham describes skilled action as the art of "comeliness"; Thomas Hoby uses the term "lightsomeness" to capture the ready and adept stance of the skilled swordsman or thrower; Hamlet asks the First Player for a "taste" of his "quality," and the "Excellent Actor" is said to add "grace" to the poet's labors. (3)

How such comeliness or lightsomeness or grace were actually perceived and experienced is less clear. As Richard Preiss vividly describes in this issue, we know through a few scattered references that actors in Shakespeare's time performed set pieces for a wager in what was apparently a kind of quasi-pugilistic contest of acting skill. Bets were laid upon the outcome, which implies there must have been at least a rough, if contested, sense of what counted as skilled acting. (4) Donald Hedrick and Preiss have noted that such contests more closely resemble today's sporting matches than contemporary theater. (5) Imagine for a moment such a contest being broadcast, presented by commentators such as those who work the Olympic games and whose job it is to educate the audience in the nuances of the sport, to train their eyes and ears so that they can distinguish excellent from run-of-the-mill performances, to capture in words the criteria by which, say, synchronized diving is assessed by expert judges. Commentators on sport guide our attention to the tiniest of movements--the boxer has dropped his hands, the fielder has shifted to the left, the diver has bent his legs. Even in the absence of commentators, anyone who has witnessed a high-stakes sporting match among a knowledgeable group of fans has experienced the skilled viewing of the spectators--the sense of collective expertise in applauding a skilled catch or bemoaning a botched pass. Such expert forms of spectatorship constitute a form of "skilled viewing," as Christina Grasseni has described it, through which one develops an "eye for" expert performance. (6)

Skill, then, is always relational: it cuts across categories of physiology, mind, technology, material culture, national identity, and status. Skill can best be understood within a framework of "cognitive ecology," which John Sutton and I have defined elsewhere as a distributed but interconnected system or assemblage of social, material, and internal resources and mechanisms which work together in mutually dependent, context-sensitive ways to enact some shared, flexible practice or activity. (7) A full account of skill ecologies requires attention both to individual training and to the wider cultural contexts within which such skills flourish. Such a framework includes the training and the plasticity of the nervous system with habituation and practice; the question of how "experience gets under the skin"; the role of attention, memory, and perception in the training of the body; the extension of the body through a range of instruments and objects, such as tools, artifacts, and instructional and how-to manuals; and social structures and practices, including apprenticeship, skill-building and enculturation. Moreover, skilled practices are inseparable from expert viewing, which is built through the reciprocal and recursive relationships among skill-building, display, competition, and evaluation. Early modern and contemporary actors inhabit distinct ecologies of skill, in which we can detect some areas of commonality and others of marked difference, as would be expected, given the markedly variable regimes of training, material cultural, enculturation, and audience perceptions and response. As Greg Downey suggests, "Culturally distinct forms of physical education shape distinctive bodies in a literal sense, forging muscles, crafting tendons, assembling sensory systems, and generating physical capabilities." (8)

We might gain a sense of such areas of overlap and of disparity from accounts of the expected skill-sets of the early modern player. As Lois Potter notes in her essay, at least one contemporary treatise attempts just such a reckoning. In the commonplace compilation The Rich Cabinet of Invention, the (probable) author Thomas Gainsford enumerates the skills of the early modern player:

   Player hath many times, many excellent qualities: as dancing,
   actiuitie, musicke, song, elloqution, abilitie of body, memory,
   vigilancy, skill of weapon, pregnancy of wit, and such like: in all
   which hee resembleth an excellent spring of water, which growes the
   more sweeter, and the more plentifull by the often drawing out of
   it: so are all these the more perfect and plausible by the often
   practice. (9)

To a modern eye, this list might well seem like an indiscriminate mix of properly dramatic skills with specialized physical or athletic abilities. Some of these "excellent qualities," seem closely to resemble the skills that modern actors might be expected to possess, while others clearly mark differences between early modern and contemporary ecologies of skill.

Skills such as "dancing," "activity" (generally associated with agility and so-called "feats of activity," such as those performed by Lanham's Italian tumbler) and "skill of weapon" appear today more like specialized abilities rather than as essential to the art of acting. Theater historians often dismiss such displays as concessions to groundlings or the patrons of the supposedly down-market venues like the Red Bull. But the bodily practices such as gesture, dance, and swordplay were crucial forms of kinetic intelligence honed by the early modern player within particular cognitive ecologies of skilled practice. Fencing treatises emphasized that the art molded the body and mind: training taught a man "how to mannage and vse his body, his hand, and his foote." (10) Similarly authors of dance treatises insisted upon the mindfulness of their practice. Just as verbal recall was meant to be active and spontaneous, not mere rote repetition, so physical memory for intricate dances required expert "on-line" intelligence and constant attentiveness to unfolding demands of performance. The kinetic intelligence demanded by dance was closely related to the qualities of "grace" and ease that marked elite performance in the early modern period.

The player is above all an expert in movement. "By a full and significant action of the body," writes Webster in "The Character of an Excellent Actor," "he charms our attention" (91). Webster is apparently replying here to the portrait of "The Common Player," which derides the inferior actor's appetite for applause and the ploys to which he resorts to gain it: "When he doth hold conference upon the stage and should look directly in his fellow's face, he turns about his voice into the assembly for applause sake, like a trumpeter in the fields that shifts place to get an echo." (11) In contrast to such appeals for attention, the Excellent Actor is able to draw the audience to him: "sit in a full Theatre, and you will thinke you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the Actor is the Center" (92). The ability to produce "significant" movement through the managed body is akin to magic, a reminder that the secret of both the actor and the conjurer is to manage and direct attention. Here perhaps Gainsford's reference to qualities such as "vigilancy" and "pregnancy of wit" come into play. These might be described as the "skills behind the skills," abilities that are not directly visible but underpin the apparently effortless performance of the skilled player. "Vigilancy," for exam pie, might be thought of as akin to "dual-task monitoring," the ability of skilled professionals to command metacognition that allows them both to perform fluidly while still monitoring and adjusting their performances in real time. (12)

For contemporary actors, skills such as fencing and dancing, however desirable, would more likely be seen as useful adjuncts or marketable abilities rather than essential to the art of acting. Even skills that seem more closely aligned to modern playing conditions, such as "memory" and "elocution," might well be seen in different ways today. Actors notoriously dislike being asked "how they remember all those lines," which seems to reduce the art of acting to mere memorization, the term "mere" revealing the historical trajectory by which the faculty of memory, so closely linked to ethics and intelligence in the early modern period, becomes perceived in our own times as a mindless rote recall. Elocution or the art of "accent," as it was often described in the early modern period, is recognizably part of the actor's tool-kit today, although explicit preoccupation with elocution is now often marked as inauthentic and formalistic.

The Essays

The essays gathered here address skill and skilled viewing across a range of domains and time periods, from on-stage skills evidenced in the first performances (Preiss, Potter, and Bishop) to shifts in vocabularies of skill from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century (Menzer and Cornford), to the use of new technologies in gaming and new ways of imagining theatrical skill in the digital age and emerging modes of audience skill in reconstructed playhouses (Bloom and Woods). Taken together, they explore diverse ecologies of skill.

In their essays on early modern performance practices, Lois Potter, Richard Preiss, and Tom Bishop redirect our attention to the range of skilled practices on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. All three essays point to a capacious understanding of skill that encompasses not just the "taste of your quality" provided by the First Player in Hamlet, but also include the skilled practices of boy actors imitating the physical labor of basket making and mending, the physical dexterities of the clown, and the agonistic "trials of wit" conducted as much through pamphlet wars in print as on stage. Indeed, Preiss goes so far as to suggest that " 'plays' must have been not organic, imaginative experiences so much as conglomerations of display, their advantage over other entertainments ... the direct suffrage they afforded" the viewer.

In these essays, we hear the rhythm of running or walking feet, and the enmeshment of song, bodily rhythm, and craft, thus underscoring both the links among acting, materiality, mimetic skill building, and rhythm described by Cornford, as well as the induction of spectators into the rhythm of performance described by Woods. Lois Potter notes that one of the 'hidden' skills of early modern players was timing, the ability to coordinate disparate actions, a skill that was perhaps honed through musical training. Tom Bishop directs our attention to the foot--the skilled footwork of the jig, the running pace of the comic servant, the pulling off and putting on of boots--as a way of thinking about the kinds of knowledge we glean from the feet: "a kind of minimal functional anatomy of what we might call 'knowing the world' that involves three cardinal elements--eyes, brains, and feet. Eyes to sense, brains to reason, feet to get about." This link between walking and knowing is a reminder of the embodied nature of knowledge, as articulated by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, whom Cornford also cites: "Walking along ... is not the behavioural output of a mind encased within a pedestrian body. It is rather, in itself, a way of thinking and knowing." (13) In contrast, the "trial of wit" that Richard Preiss examines threatens to divorce skill entirely from embodied knowledge and performance by erasing contingency: "the safety of print, however, lets Taylor and Fennor not only acquit themselves in the best possible light--here there are no stunned silences, no forgotten lines, no spectators to interfere--but retroactively construct an idealized challenge that merges text with performance, in which remote correspondence actually substitutes for face-to-face confrontation."

Both Menzer and Cornford point to a certain embarrassment in talking about skill within the context of contemporary acting. The actors and directors Cornford discuss would perhaps grant that Gainsford's skills might be useful tools, but they would in no way comprise the essence of acting, which is seen to be "exhibiting an inner life." Menzer identifies a pervasive rhetoric of interiority that shapes how actors are trained, how they describe what they do, and, in turn, how reviewers assess their performances. The tripartite influences of Freud, Stanislavsky, and Bradley contribute to an environment that prizes subtlety; actors who can convey the "inner life of the human spirit" with the least apparent effort are given the greatest accolades. The perfect pause, the moment of silence and hesitation, attracts praise, not, as in previous centuries, perfect pronunciation or adept bearing of the body. Skill must be concealed or implicit rather than displayed in some unseemly, overly external or demonstrative fashion.

Menzer suggests such vocabularies inevitably mystify the art of action, making it in fact difficult to speak of skill, at least in any way that suggests that skill might be acquired through practice. Cornford's contribution strongly supports this conclusion through his analysis of Actors Speaking, which privileges the tacit over the explicit and indeed strongly suggests that it is only by remaining tacit, outside the realm of declarative knowledge, that skill can be truly itself. Writers such as Michael Polanyi participate in the devaluation of "thinking" and the intellect in describing the art of acting, the sense that if a skill can be captured in words, it is inevitably lost. It is apparent that shifts in vocabularies of skill are not simply terminological variations, but can make certain ways of thinking and being in the world invisible.

In contrast with such mystifications, Cornford suggests that we rethink the materiality of acting, its connection to rhythm and labor, and to rediscover imitation as a creative act: "the process of imitation serves to train the relationship between action and perception upon which skill depends." Using the work of the anthropologist Ingold, Cornford suggests refocusing our attention to "the forces and flows of material" that bring theater into being, that we redirect our attention to what theater making does rather than how it is described.

In a very different context, Gina Bloom points to ways of inducting novices into the world of Shakespearean theater through gaming, itself an embodied skill. In contrast to games that invite an only notionally embodied form of relationship with the theatrical world--pointing, clicking, copying, and pasting in an attenuated and anorexic simulacrum of theater making--full-body technologies fostered by mirroring technology such as Kinect offer a more fully realized form of engagement. Bloom reminds us that animation and movement of the game player reveal what "games do for the Shakespearean theater that it cannot do for itself." New forms of knowledge and ways of thinking about skills and competencies are a result of new ways of seeing theater making. Similarly, Woods examines how emerging models of audience-performer interactivity, as well as new ways of imagining and occupying theatrical space, help to reshape theatrical knowledge and audience skill. Both Bloom and Woods challenge the model of Shakespeare as high art to be consumed respectfully, showing instead that changing haptic and embodied modes of interaction with Shakespearean theater results in new ways of enskilling audiences.

Taken together, then, these essays demonstrate both the diversity of skill ecologies across historical periods and the potential robustness of skill as a category for analyzing Shakespearean theater.

Notes

(1.) Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 470.

(2.) Richard Lan[e]ham, A Letter: whearin, part of the entertainment untoo the Queenz Maiesty, at Killingwoorth Castl, in warwik Sheer, in this soomerz Progress. 1575, iz signified (London, [1580]), Dlv-D2r.

(3.) Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, ed. Peter Medine (Tempe: ACMRS, 2002), 125; Thomas Hoby, The Boke of the Courtier (London, 1561), C2r; William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.455; John Webster, "The Character of An Excellent Actor," in Elizabethan Jacobean Drama: The Theatre in its Time, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (London: A. C. Black, 1988), 91.

(4.) Murray Bromberg, "Theatrical Wagers: a Sidelight on the Elizabethan Drama," Notes and Queries (1951): 533-35.

(5.) See Donald Hedrick, "Real Entertainment: Sportification, Coercion, and Carceral Theater," in Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, ed. Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 50-56. In this forum Preiss disputes Hedrick's claim that plays became "sportified," arguing that "sport was already their default framework."

(6.) See Christina Grasseni, "Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics," Social Anthropology 12, no. 1 (2004): 41-55.

(7.) This definition is developed more fully in my chapter on "Skill" in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 173-88.

(8.) Greg Downey, "Educating the Eyes: Biocultural Anthropology and Physical Education," Anthropology in Action 12, no. 2 (2005): 56-71, 58.

(9.) [Thomas Gainsford], The Rich Cabinet furnished with varietie of excellent descriptions (London: I. B. for Roger Jackson, 1616), 117v.

(10.) Vincentio Saviolo, Vincento Saviolo: His Practice (London, 1595), C3r.

(11.) John Stephens, Satiricall Essayes, Characters, and Others (London: 1615), in Elizabethan Jacobean Drama, 95-97.

(12.) On dual-task monitoring, see Beilock, et. al., "Expertise, Attention, and Memory in Sensorimotor Skill Execution: Impact of Novel Task Constraints on Dual-Task Performance and Episodic Memory," The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A 55.4 (2002): 1211-40.

(13.) Tim Ingold, "Footprints through the Weather World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing," JRA1 (2010): S121-S139, S136.