[Selimus, 1863–1869]
Queen. A sweet children, when I am at rest my nightly
dreames are dreadful. Me thinks as I lie in my
bed, I see the league broken which was sworne at
the death of your kingly father, tis this my
children and many other causes of like importance,
that makes your aged mother to lament as she doth.
[The True Tragedy of King Richard III, 802-807]
Essentially the actors were provided with methods for making emotion explicit. In the first three illustrations the characters name their emotions outright, in the last the Queen describes it. Descriptions of external manifestations of grief, such as “strained sighs,” and apostrophe, either to another (“O father dear”) or to oneself (“Aga, thy griefe”) or to abstract properties (“Ah wofull sight”), or to divinity (“Ah heavens, Ah death”) are common. The later plays were subtler in the depiction of emotion. In Selimus, the similarity of his state to that of Priam conveys the overwhelming grief of Aga. In The True Tragedy, the Queen expresses the grief of the moment through the terror of a dream. By utilizing these various methods for years, the actor had become familiar with openly rendering the character’s emotion. Furthermore, the quality of the emotion was not highly differentiated. In force and depth, the grief for the loss of a loved or revered one, in each of the instances cited, is fundamentally the same.
One major development in the acting conditions must be noted. In the plays of the 1560’s and 1570’s the verse was regular and conventional. The galloping fourteener left little opportunity for nuance. The rhythm and accent of the verse in Cambises, for example, intruded upon the character. It erected a barrier to the immediate impact of emotion upon the auditor. The actor who rendered such verse was encouraged in the conventional expression of emotion and the reliance upon rhythmic sweep for his success.