It was long held – and one still hears the claim – that Shakespeare’s audience went to ‘hear’ rather than ‘see’ a play. Rhetorical virtuosity was the draw, and it was performed on a relatively bare stage. Shakespeare’s use of the phrase ‘hear a play’ in The Taming of the Shrew (Ind.1.92; Ind.2.129) and in Hamlet (3.2.41) is often cited to support this privileging of the ear over the eye, the word over the image. In Andrew Gurr’s words, ‘A poet wants listeners, not spectators, merely viewing the scene without the thought that listening entails’; Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he maintains, therefore ‘rated hearing far above seeing as the vital sense for the playgoer’.¹ Material support for this argument has been found in the design of early modern London’s amphitheatres: the Globe, according to John Orrell, was ‘an acoustical auditorium, intended to serve the word and the ear more fully than the image and the eye’.² Bruce Smith similarly describes London’s amphitheatres as ‘instruments for producing, shaping, and propagating sound’.³ The Globe’s ‘wooden O’, he argues, was engineered as a gigantic, polygonal, reverberating ‘sounding board’ to produce ‘a harmonically rich amplification of the voices of actors’.⁴

Recent scholarship has begun to contest this account by excavating previously neglected evidence of early modern stage spectacle, aided by archaeological finds on the sites of early theatres and digital data-mining techniques. Tangible evidence of the visual attractions that enticed early modern spectators to ‘see a play’ has surfaced in the Museum of London’s archaeological finds, which include remnants of the ‘glistering apparel’ (Tempest, 4.1.193, s.d.) worn onstage.⁵ A quantitative analysis of the Literature Online Database (LION) conducted by Gabriel Egan in 2001 yielded the surprising discovery that the phrase ‘hear a play’ was in fact rather anomalous, appearing only eight times during the period covered (1470–1700), in contrast to ninety-seven instances of the phrase ‘see a play’. Egan concludes that ‘plays were much more commonly thought of as visual rather than aural experiences in the literary and dramatic writing of the period’.⁶

In casting playgoing as a contest between the ears and eyes, or the verbal and the visual, these seemingly disparate approaches both confine theatrical experience to a curiously disembodied floating head, thereby occluding the kinetic experience of playgoing, which in the broad daylight of the open-air amphitheatres was and is one of going – a dynamic, interactive experience of bodies-in-motion. Indeed, the term ‘going’ in the early modern period often referred specifically to walking, that is, to movement or travel ‘on foot (as opposed to any other means of locomotion)’ (OED; ‘go, v. ’, 1.a.). For bystanders in the amphitheatre yard, proprioception, the continual awareness of where one is and how one’s body is feeling and moving during the two (or three) hours’ traffic of a play, commenced – as Hamlet’s coinage of the term ‘groundlings’ (3.2.10) suggests – on the ground, in the feet and legs.⁷ This awareness has largely been lost to modern playgoers, who have grown accustomed to fixed seating and darkened auditoria, which work to immobilise the body and conceal proprio- and alloceptive awareness of offstage movement.⁸

Theatre history’s focus on the eye–ear matrix likewise tends to minimise the dynamic, kinetic dimension of early modern actors’ bodies-in-motion onstage. The lens through which it has analysed the sights and sounds produced by early modern actors’ bodies often seems quasi-cinematic in its focus on talking heads and posing hands, which hover magically above invisible feet and legs. The influence of the cinematic gaze, of art-historical approaches to pictorial iconography, and of John Bulwer’s frequently reproduced ‘chirograms’ or tables of hand gestures,⁹ has produced a curiously static view of so-called stage pictures, approached as a frozen series of stills.¹⁰ To be sure, historical studies of theatrical gesture have introduced a modicum of movement into this picture; yet, in focusing on facial expressions and hand gestures, they tend to ignore movement propelled by the feet and legs and to treat gesture as solely a visual idiom, a form of ‘silent eloquence’, contrasting it with the vocal idiom or verbal eloquence of verse drama.¹¹ At the other extreme of the eye–ear matrix, attempts to reconstruct the soundscape of the Globe and what it meant to ‘hear a play’ likewise focus on sounds and sound effects produced by the head and hands, ignoring those produced by the rhythmic pacing of actors’ feet in contact with the stage.¹²

This hegemony of the head and hands within the discipline of theatre history is hardly surprising, given their broader privileging over the feet in Western culture since classical antiquity. Within this hierarchical paradigm, as analysed by Tim Ingold in his evocatively titled essay ‘Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet’, the primary purpose of bipedal locomotion is to liberate human hands to become agents and instruments of the head and intellect; the subordinated feet merely ‘undergird and propel the body within the natural world’ so that ‘the hands are free to deliver the intelligent designs or conceptions of the mind upon it’.¹³ As Ingold demonstrates, this triumph of the head and hands over the heels was reinforced with the onset of modernity by everything from Darwinian science to modes of transportation, habits of posture and gesture, the architecture of the built environment, and even changing technologies of footwear. Now ‘deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies’, he contends, this paradigm has also shaped ‘mainstream thinking in the [academic] disciplines’.¹⁴ Its influence may be seen not only in theatre history, as noted above, but also in the study of material culture, which, in seeking to put us in touch with the past, nonetheless defines this touch in manual terms by focusing on the artisanal skill manifested in the crafted object.

How, then, might theatre history’s grounding, disciplinary methods be reconceived from the perspective of the feet? What might this perspective have to teach us about artifacts of early modern material and theatrical ‘culture on the ground’, such as the numerous shoes and shoe fragments unearthed in the Museum of London’s excavations of early theatres, whose significance is likely to be overlooked by proponents of the floating-head model of playgoing? Situated at the point of contact between the actor’s body and the stage, shoes continually call to mind, with each strut, step, stride, or stomp of the actor across the boards, the material substrate upon which theatre is grounded. What are we to make of these shoes, which have stepped out of Shakespeare’s world and into ours, as if to remind us of the forgotten feet that ‘trod the boards’ of the stage and stood for hours in attendance?¹⁵ What might they tell us about the meanings in motion that transpired between early modern players and playgoers from head to toe – or rather, from the ground up? How might they help us to understand the experience of playgoing from the perspective of the feet?

This is, of course, precisely the vantage from which the majority of playgoers and especially the ‘groundlings’ would have witnessed the stage-traffic of plays unfold on the raised platform of the elevated thrust stage, which lifted the feet of actors to eye and ear level, thereby foregrounding the display of footwork and foot-skills. In so doing, the architecture of the stage not only highlighted the visual effects and amplified the sounds of movement propelled by the feet but also augmented their visceral impact, sensed in the bodies of players and playgoers. Recent studies of what has been termed ‘kinetic Shakespeare’ have begun to consider the movements of actors from the waist down, focusing on specialised foot-skills and/or highly formalised stage choreography, such as swordplay and dance, which are studied through the lens of kinesics (i.e. the study of nonverbal communication through gesture) and/or of extended cognition.¹⁶ Thus, for example, Evelyn Tribble’s recent study of Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (2017) extends the range of theatrical gesture to include stage choreography (such as fencing); yet, the theoretical framework of extended cognition nonetheless retains the head–hand matrix as its primary analytical lens: hand technics (‘skill of weapon’) or what you ‘hold in your hand’ are thus in the end still considered to be what ‘really matters’.¹⁷

As we shall see, early modern playwrights and defenders of the stage emphasised fully embodied motion and action as defining features of theatre, introducing the terms ‘acting’ and ‘actor’ as more active, agential alternatives to ‘playing’ and ‘player’ (thereby rebutting anti-theatrical attacks associating ‘play’ with idleness) and defending their ‘art’ as grounded in ‘motion’.¹⁸ Thus, for example, John Marston cautions the reader of The Fawne to ‘Remember, the life of these things [i.e. plays] consists in action’,¹⁹ and Richard Baker’s 1634 rebuttal of an anti-theatrical treatise by William Prynne (published the year before) maintains: ‘Gracefulness of action, is the greatest pleasure of a Play’.²⁰ In so doing, they demonstrated their knowledge of the classical rhetorical theory of action and gesture, while simultaneously drawing on emerging theories of ‘motion’ developing on the Continent in the field of visual aesthetics. In what follows, I therefore want to consider not only the kinetic materiality of playing and playgoing but also their aesthetic dimensions, recognising that movement in theatre is a matter of not only kinesics but also kinesthesis (i.e. how we perceive motion or bodily movement multi-sensorially), and indeed, of what I will term kin-aesthetics, defined here as the aesthetic significance attributed to motion and action in theatre and its sister arts.

It has often been observed that actio (gesture) and pronuntiatio (elocution) formed the two crucial components of the classical theory of rhetorical delivery (see OED, ‘action, n.’ 19.a.).²¹ Yet, it is less often noted that the scope of ‘gesture’ (gestus) covered a far broader range of bodily movement (motus corporis) than we associate with it today and was certainly not restricted to facial expressions or hand gestures. Rather, it encompassed everything from bodily posture, carriage, deportment, grace, attitude, and countenance, to the body’s positioning, motion, and movement through space (OED, ‘gesture, n.’ 1.a., 1.b., 2.a., 3.a.). Effective use of gesture required orators and actors alike to gesture ‘with their hands, with their eies, with their shoulders, and with their feet’, rendering the entire body a vehicle of eloquence.²² Quintilian, who among classical rhetoricians offers the fullest account of actio, insists on the ‘extraordinarily powerful effect’ conveyed by the entire body working to produce ‘physical eloquence’ from head to toe [XI.3.1–2].²³ ‘All emotional appeals will inevitably fall flat’, he says, ‘unless they are given the fire that voice, look, and the whole carriage of the body can give them’, adding, ‘A proof of this is given by actors in the theatre’ [XI.3.2, 4]. His discussion of gesture thus covers the entire body, beginning with the head and systematically working its way down to the feet.

Like Cicero before him, however, Quintilian is quick to distinguish the more refined gestures and movements of the orator from those of the actor, a distinction that becomes particularly important when he discusses gestures of the feet. The dictates of decorum that governed oratorical declamation allowed only the most minimal and carefully controlled of foot-movements: ‘A step forward is quite in order’, he says, ‘so long as it is opportune, short, and well controlled. So is a certain amount of walking up and down’, but ‘only on rare occasions and not for long’.²⁴ The orator is permitted little more in the way of footwork than ‘Stamping the foot’, which Quintilian allows ‘can be opportune on occasion’, but only ‘at the beginning or end of a passage of aggressive argument’.²⁵ Excessive stomping or stamping of the feet, as well as ‘running up and down’, jumping, hopping, standing ‘on tiptoe’, ‘Holding the feet too far apart’, ‘rapidly and frequently rocking to and fro’, and so forth, he insists, are ‘Gesture[s] of comedy rather than of oratory’.²⁶ Such brisk, expressive foot-movements ought to be shunned, he cautions, not only by orators, but also by ‘more serious actors [histrionibus … gravioribus] ’.²⁷ Classical rhetoricians repeatedly stress the importance of decorum in gesture, which is accomplished by matching appropriate action to speech and speech to action, and by avoiding histrionic excess.

By adopting the vocabulary of classical rhetoric, early modern players and playwrights sought to appropriate its prestige, while developing a canon of decorum appropriate to their own craft. In Hamlet, the studious Dane demonstrates his familiarity with rhetorical theory in his attempt to ‘reform’ the practice of playing, when he advises the players to speak ‘trippingly on the tongue’ (3.2.2) and to show ‘discretion’ (15) by ‘Suit[ing] the action to the word, the word to the action’ (16–17). His metaphorical use of the adverb ‘trippingly’ – a Shakespearean neologism, according to the OED – compares the graceful dancing of the actor’s tongue around his mouth to the nimble tripping of his feet about the stage, suggesting that ‘discretion’ in delivery, for the actor as for the orator, must be manifest from head to toe. Following Quintilian, he cautions actors to be decorous of foot as well as of voice, advising them not to ‘o’erstep … the modesty of nature’ (17–18; my emphasis) by strutting or bellowing onstage. Unskilled actors, he claims, have neither ‘th’ accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man’ (ll. 28–9; my emphasis).

Hamlet’s attention to the ‘gait’ of the actor as a crucial skill of theatrical embodiment echoes metatheatrical comments throughout the Shakespearean canon suggesting that dramatic character was built from the ground up, requiring mastery of particular ‘manner[s] of gait’ (as well as of stance, posture, and carriage, etc.), which enabled and supported myriad forms of theatrical embodiment differentiated in accordance with gender, status, age, and nationality, and recognisable at a distance. Satirical references to ‘stalking-stamping Player[s]’ during the period, even when taken with a grain of salt, suggest that actors did not simply stand and deliver orations onstage, and that the bounds of decorum governing theatrical footwork were of necessity far more flexible than those that confined the orator.²⁸ Even ‘more serious’ and tragic actors were at times obliged, pace Quintilian, to ‘o’erstep’ the short, measured strides prescribed for the orator, as Hamlet’s leap into Ophelia’s grave so memorably demonstrates.²⁹

A survey of Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions reveals that, in practice as in theory, the actor’s craft required an ability to ‘trip about the stage’ whilst speaking ‘trippingly on the tongue’.³⁰ The notoriously scarce stage directions in early modern play-texts provide a surprisingly fertile source of information about actors’ footwork and foot-skills, incorporating a diverse lexicon of expressive foot-movements, which ran from the heavy, loud, and audacious to the ‘soft’, stealthy, and deliberate (as in ‘soldiers in a soft march, without noise’, or ‘Pass softly over the stage’ [216]). Onstage dancing was of course extremely popular during the period: there are almost 350 examples of stage directions to ‘dance’ (142), some of which indicate a particular manner of dancing (such as ‘dance expressing a fight’ or ‘Dances looking on his Feete’ [65]),³¹ while others specify the technical name of the dance, including both foreign imports and native forms. Such inset dances enabled players to utilise the distinctive, rhythmic resonances of particular dances to varied dramatic effects, which are sometimes specified by instructions in stage directions as to the particular tone and rhythm desired, as in ‘a soft dance to the solemn measure’ (206). Stage directions likewise reveal playwrights’ keen awareness of the importance of dramatic pacing and the need to vary it through forms of footwork that were by no means limited to dance. Excitement and suspense were generated through changes of rhythm and tempo effected by abrupt movement, sudden stops, and punctuating pauses (as in ‘Offers to go out, and suddenly draws back’, ‘suddenly rush in’, ‘make show of coming forward and sodainly depart’, ‘sodenly slippe away’ [221], ‘runne all at Piero, and on a sudden stop’ [218], ‘fight a while and pause’ [160]).

Contemporary accounts of audience behaviour suggest that fully embodied movement and expressive footwork were not confined to the stage alone, but were important aspects of playgoers’ expressive repertoire as well. In the public amphitheatres, crowds of as many as 800 bystanders gathered around the stage, supported for two to three hours by only their feet and legs.³² Bodies jostled against other bodies in constant motion, responding physically to one another and to the action of the play, and moving about to get a better view or hearing, buy food or drink, or attend to other bodily needs. This was true of not only the groundlings but also those in the galleries of both the public and private indoor theatres. Thomas Dekker, in his epilogue to Satiromastix (performed in 1601 at the Globe), thus addresses ‘all you Gentle-folkes (that walke i’ th’ Galleries)’.³³ Tiffany Stern argues persuasively that early modern playgoers ‘had freedom of movement in the galleries as well as in the yard’, although she analyses such movement solely as an expedient to remedy obstructed sightlines, rather than as an expressive vehicle through which playgoers responded to onstage action.³⁴ The mobility of playgoers in her view enabled stasis onstage (‘these were theatres in which the actors were able to hold their positions comfortably onstage for as long as they liked … because the audience could move around to see them’), rather than complementing it or, indeed, being a constituent aspect of theatrical experience as a phenomenological event.³⁵ Yet, the expressive repertoire of early modern playgoing – in contrast to the floating-head model of reception, which confines audience response to the head and hands (we watch, we listen, we clap) – manifestly included motions and emotions conveyed through the feet: early modern playgoers are described ‘stamping’ their feet, standing on tiptoe, and even skipping and dancing in response to the action onstage.³⁶ Henry Fitzgeffrey’s ‘Play-house Observation’ of theatregoers at Blackfriars playhouse in his Satyres (1617) describes a dancing dandy who ‘Ushers in [to the playhouse], with a Coranto grace’, observing ‘Yet marke! No sooner shall the Cornets blow, / But ye shall have him skipping too and fro’.³⁷

The power of actors’ bodies-in-motion to move playgoers was grounded in the strong connection between motion and emotion posited by humoral psychology, in which the internal and external movements of the body were inextricably linked.³⁸ Different emotional temperaments, produced by the internal movements of bodily humours, were associated with corresponding tempos and rhythms of external bodily movements through space. Thus, for example, terror summoned heat from the ‘nether parts’ of the body, resulting in a ‘shivering’ or knocking of the knees together.³⁹ In a chapter on the ‘Discovery of passions in gesture’, Thomas Wright posits that each humoral temperament corresponds to a different gait or ‘manner of going’: ‘grave men’ walk with a ‘slow pase’, ‘proud’ men ‘walke majestically … with a slow and stately motion’, and so forth.⁴⁰ So, too, were particular manners of going onstage associated with different emotional states and temperaments. Stage directions instructed actors to ‘walk passionately’, ‘fearfully’, ‘sadly’, ‘fantastically’, ‘discontentedly’ (245), to stamp their feet in anger (e.g. ‘She reads the letter, frowns and stamps’, ‘they stamp and storm’, ‘stamps and goes out vexed’ [213]),⁴¹ to quake and tremble in fear (e.g. ‘Divers Senators passe by, quaking and trembling’),⁴² and to leap, ‘caper / And frisk ’ith ayre for joy’.⁴³

The grounding of emotion in bodily motion rendered theatre a potent instrument in the view of both its opponents and defenders. In the fifth ‘action’ of Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), Stephen Gosson describes ‘What force there is in the gestures of Players’, arguing that players’ gestures incite excessive passion in those who witness them.⁴⁴ He illustrates his argument with an anecdote from Xenophon describing a theatrical performance featuring ‘Bacchus dauncing’ before Ariadne. In his ‘daunce [expressing] the passions of love’, Bacchus has a powerful effect on Ariadne, who ‘shew[s] by her gesture’ that her desire has been enflamed, and on the playgoers watching the scene, who are likewise ‘set on fire’, in thrall to the frenzied, rhythmic motion of Bacchus’s feet; this stirs their blood and enflames their passion, in turn setting their feet and bodies into motion: ‘when Bacchus rose up … the beholders rose up, every man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to hover over the p[l]aye … when [Bacchus and Ariadne] departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire … post[ing] home’ to bed themselves.⁴⁵ The kinetic ‘force’ of players’ gestures and its effect on playgoers is at once centripetal and centrifugal, drawing playgoers into the spectacle of motion onstage, and then with equal force thrusting them outward again to replay these motions in their goings-on in the world. In Gosson’s view, theatre is unable to contain within its walls the carnal exertions it enacts and incites. Elsewhere, he maintains that ‘in publike Theatres, when any notable shew passeth over the stage’, even ‘the people [in the galleries] arise in their seates, & stand upright with delight and eagernesse to view it well’.⁴⁶ The embodied movement of playgoers is cast not only as an expedient to enhance sightlines (‘view[ing] it well’) but is also a vehicle through which to express ‘delight and eagerness’ in response to onstage action.

Defenders of the stage countered the arguments of anti-theatricalists regarding the vicious, kinetic force and sensory impact of fully embodied gesture by re-framing them in virtuous terms drawn from classical rhetorical theory and the discourse of visual aesthetics. Thomas Heywood, in his Apology for Actors (1612), draws on the authority and prestige of classical rhetorical theory, citing the Rhetorica ad Herennium (attributed to Cicero) to argue for the centrality of action to the actor’s art: ‘Tully, in his booke, ad Caium Herennium’, he argues, ‘requires five things in an Orator, Invention, Disposition, Eloquution, Memory, and Pronuntiation; yet all are imperfect without the sixt, which is Action’, whose expressive repertoire comprises ‘motion of the head, the hand, the body. … And this is the action behoovefull in any that professe this quality [of acting]’ (C4r). In asserting that the ‘quality’ of ‘Actors and Acting’ (not players and playing) relies on the forcefulness of fully embodied gesture, Heywood also foregrounds the efficacy of (e)motions propelled through the feet.⁴⁷ His defence thus fittingly begins with what he terms the ‘buskend Muse’ (or ‘Cothurnate Muse’) of tragedy, Melpomene, appearing to him in a dream, ‘inraged’ because her buskins or cothurni (thick-soled boots worn by tragic actors in classical Greek drama) have been ‘utterly despoiled’ of their ‘wonted Jewels and ornaments’ by the ‘invenom’d Inke’ of anti-theatricalists (B1v). The garter buckled around her buskins bears the motto: ‘Behold my Tragicke Buskin rent and torne, / Which Kings and Emperors in their tymes have worne’ (B2r). Yet, this silent motto does not suffice to express her rage, so she commences ‘pacing with a majesticke gate & rowsing up her fresh spirites with a lively and queint action’ (B2v). Following Melpomene’s performative demonstration of fully embodied gesture, the muse makes a grand exit (‘in rage shee left the place’), whereupon Heywood, awakening, proceeds to extoll the distinctive efficacy of theatre to depict ‘lively’ action and (e)motion as superior to that of either poetry or painting, while again focalising footwork:

Even ‘lively portraiture’ is unable to ‘shew action, passion, motion’ in a manner that will ‘move the spirits of the beholder’ as effectively as the ‘lively and well spirited action’ of actors who ‘trample’ foes onstage. To be fully effective, gesture must be both ‘lively’ and fully embodied; for this reason, Heywood exhorts the actor not to stand still when delivering his lines ‘like a livelesse Image’ or a ‘stiffe starcht man’ (C4r). Theatre alone is able to bring the ‘speaking picture’ of poetry and the ‘dumb oratory’ of painting to life, and in so doing, to move playgoers to virtuous action (B3v).

In contrasting theatre’s use of ‘action’ and ‘motion’ with that of poetry and painting, respectively, Heywood’s defence demonstrates familiarity with not only classical rhetorical theory but also the distinction between ‘lively’ and ‘liveless Images’ in the discourse of visual aesthetics, which had slowly made its way from Italy to England at the end of the sixteenth century, when the first Italian painting treatise was translated into English. Richard Haydocke’s 1598 Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge, a translation of Milanese painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s 1584 Trattato dell’ Arte de la Pittura, Scultura, et Architettura, makes the very same claim for painting that Heywood would later make for theatre, namely, that ‘the greatest grace and life that a picture can have, is, that it expresse Motion’ (1:17).⁴⁸ Lomazzo’s treatise is significant for its detailed and extensive analysis of fully embodied, emotive gestures in painting, defined as the ‘significant expressing of the inward affections of the minde, by an outward and bodily Demonstration’ (2:4), which Panofsky argues went ‘far beyond’ that of art theory up to his time.⁴⁹ Lomazzo’s description of the outward bodily demonstration of inward affections (or ‘How the Bodie is Altered by the Passions of the Minde’ [2:10]) is far more detailed than those found in treatises on the humours and passions, because he is primarily interested in the visual depiction of motion in painting.

Within a theatrical context, Lomazzo’s treatise is significant for not only its detailed treatment of the representation of emotive gestures but also its analysis of their performative force: ‘these motions’, he maintains, ‘thus lively imitating nature in pictures, breed’ not only ‘an eie-pleasing contentment, but do also performe the selfe same effects which the natural doe’ (2:1).⁵⁰ Drawing on rhetorical theory, he maintains that the force of gesture must be captured from head to toe. In a discussion of ‘the vertue and efficacie of Motion’ in art, he claims that by capturing motion and emotion, an ‘immoveable and senselesse picture seemeth as it were to moove, daunce, runne, call, strike with the hande, and moove his whole body forwards, backwards, on the right hand, and on the left’ (1:4).⁵¹ The ambiguity of Haydocke’s ‘moove his whole body’ – a translation of Lomazzo’s equally ambiguous ‘muova tutta la vita’, which may refer to the embodied motion or liveliness of the painting itself, its painted subject, or its beholder – rhetorically enacts the claim that ‘these motions, thus lively imitating nature in pictures’, produce not only ‘an eie-pleasing contentment, but do also performe the selfe same effects which the natural doe’ (2.1; my emphasis). That is, in capturing expressive motion from head to toe, the painting is brought to life; it seems to move and produces like motion and emotion in its beholder. Like ‘the actions of stage-plaiers’, it ‘move[s] the beholders to the selfe same passion of mirth or sorrow. … For as he which laugheth, mourneth, or is otherwise affected, doth naturally moove the beholders to the selfe same passion of mirth or sorrow’; Lomazzo argues, ‘So a picture artificially expressing the true naturall motions, will (surely) procure laughter when it laugheth, pensiveness when it is grieved &c.’ (2:1).⁵² The painting has become an actor: it laughs, grieves, and moves its whole body, moving its beholders to do the same.

For this reason, the skilled painter must become a ‘cunning Motist’ by observing how different bodies express emotion in and through fully embodied motion (2:13). Haydocke’s invented term, ‘Motist’, a translation of Lomazzo’s motista, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a person skilled in depicting or describing movement’. Yet, as we have seen, the ‘cunning Motist’ not only skilfully depicts movement or gesture but is also able to wield its performative ‘efficacie’. It is perhaps for this reason that Lomazzo advises the painter, as Cicero and Quintilian had advised the orator, to observe ‘the actions of stage-plaiers’ (2:3), for they too are cunning motists, as Lomazzo maintains elsewhere in his treatise; he describes actors ‘throw[ing] abroad their armes’ and ‘their legges now up, now downe’ (2:56). It has been argued that Lomazzo’s interest in theatrical gesture may reflect his familiarity with the virtuosic commedia dell’arte actor Simone da Bologna (the Gelosi company’s zanni), as both belonged to the same burlesque Academy of the Blenio Valley.⁵³ Whatever its source, Lomazzo’s interest in theatrical gesture as an exemplification of the performative force of motion in painting helped shape the developing discourse of visual aesthetics in England and, in turn, claims regarding the efficacy of ‘motion’ made by Heywood and his theatrical contemporaries.

The influence of Lomazzo’s 1584 treatise and Haydocke’s 1598 translation in England may be found in Nicholas Hilliard’s Arte of Limning (c. 1598–1602), which was written at Haydocke’s urging and opens with a reference to Lomazzo, explaining that of the ‘arte of paintinge I will saye littel In so much as Paulo Lomatzo [& others hath excellently & learnedly spok]en therof, as is well knowen to the learned & better sorte [who are conversant with those] auhtors [sic]’.⁵⁴ Hilliard’s claim, that ‘the learned & better sorte’ in England were conversant with Lomazzo, reflects what F. J. Levy has described as ‘a remarkable change in taste [that] occurred in England’ during the last years of the sixteenth century and first two decades of the seventeenth, such that ‘some knowledge of art became necessary to preserve the appearance of gentility’ or, indeed, ‘to suggest the appearance of gentility in the first place’.⁵⁵ Henry Peacham, who functioned as a kind of ‘mediator of taste’ during this period, likewise mentions Lomazzo in his chapters on ‘expressing passion in the countenance’ and rendering ‘the whole bodie’ in his treatise on ‘Drawing and Limming’ in The Gentlemen’s Exercise (1612), where he suggests that Lomazzo’s treatise is for more advanced students: ‘I would have you to buy [it], after you are well entred’.⁵⁶ Heywood, who had been a contemporary of Peacham’s at Cambridge, was clearly familiar with and an admirer of his work, as he writes a commendatory poem for the latter’s book of emblems, Minerva Britanna, published in 1612, the same year that Heywood’s Apology for Actors came to print.⁵⁷

The influence of Lomazzo’s treatise on the developing discourse of theatrical gesture in England may also be found in Inigo Jones’s ‘sketchbook’, which quotes Lomazzo, whose 1584 treatise Jones owned and annotated heavily, paying special attention to Lomazzo’s analysis of motion, including motions of the legs and feet.⁵⁸ Sir Henry Wotton’s discussion of painting in his 1624 treatise on architecture likewise suggests familiarity with Lomazzo in its discussion of emotive gesture in art, which follows Lomazzo in comparing the performative efficacy of painting to acting: ‘Affection’, he says, ‘is the Lively Representment, of any passion whatsoever, as if the Figures stood not upon a Cloth or Boorde, but as if they were acting upon a Stage’.⁵⁹ The ‘Boorde’ of the two-dimensional painting is here transformed into the three-dimensional boards of the ‘Stage’, upon which the painted figures not only stand but also act. John Bulwer’s oft-cited treatise on hand gestures demonstrates familiarity with Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo, as he employs Haydocke’s phrase ‘cunning motist’ no fewer than three times. ‘The Art [of gesture] ’, he says, ‘was first formed by Rhetoricians; afterwards amplified by Poets and cunning Motists, skilfull in the pourtraicture of mute poesie: but most strangely inlarged by Actors, the ingenious counterfeiters of mens manners’.⁶⁰ If actors are the most ‘ingenious’ and ‘cunning Motists’, they are nonetheless prone, Bulwer suggests, to ‘strangely’ enlarging the bounds of gestural decorum beyond what is prescribed by ‘Rhetoricians’ through their use of fully embodied motion and gesture.

Although Shakespeare never uses the term ‘Motist’, and we do not know with certainty whether he read Haydocke’s treatise,⁶¹ in The Winter’s Tale and elsewhere, he demonstrates the power of the actor to bring ‘a livelesse Image’ to life through fully embodied motion. The boy-actor playing Hermione is discovered ‘like a Statue’ when Paulina draws the curtain in the final scene (5.3). The ‘statue’ is initially described as a ‘dead likeness … as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death’ (15, 19–20). The ‘likeness’, although ‘lively mocked’ or accurate, nonetheless initially fails to convey the liveliness of motion. The accuracy of the rendering is conveyed through ‘posture’ (23), stance, or bearing: it ‘coldly stands’ (36) frozen and inert. In consequence, so too do the bystanders onstage, who are transfixed ‘like stone’ (42) around it. We are told that it is ‘but newly fixed’ (47), a reference to its colour but also a metatheatrical reminder of the actor’s recent adoption of the static posture or pose, which can be maintained for only so long. If the painter or sculptor’s challenge is to capture motion, the actor’s challenge in this scene is initially the opposite: to maintain stillness. Gradually, by inklings of breath and tiny flickers of motion, the statue is brought to life, as Paulina commands, ‘Be stone no more. Approach’ (99). Although she addresses the ‘statue’, her words might equally apply to the bystanders both onstage and off, for its motion prompts reciprocal (e)motion in them. Significantly, Hermione’s transformation from a ‘liveless Image’ is signalled by motion ‘stirred’ or propelled by the actor’s feet: as she steps down from the podium, out of the framed discovery space and onto the boards of the stage, the motionless bodies around her are themselves moved to step forward and embrace her. In Shakespeare’s staging of the paragone between the sister arts, as in Heywood’s defence, it is the actor, not the sculptor or painter, who is the most ‘cunning Motist’, able to ‘make the statue move indeed’ (88), that is, to move itself and, in so doing, move those in attendance.