ABSTRACT
The problem of suiting the action to the word is no more than another aspect of that which faces the actor in speaking the score. When the modern actor is asked to take notice of accounts of ‘rhetorical action’ written by men such as John Bulwer and Abraham Fraunce, he may well hesitate and ask what can rhetoricians possibly have to tell us about the acting of stage-players in any age. Bulwer and the other practitioners of rhetorical delivery subscribed wholeheartedly to the assertion of Thomas Wright that ‘the fountain and origin of all external actions’ must be ‘the passion which is in our breast’. For Bulwer, gesture was not an external convention imposed from without; it was really nothing more or less than a satisfying of the need to express adequately something felt within.
