This chapter is organized around Diderot, who gave much attention to the craft of acting, and remains the best-known eighteenth-century theorist of acting. In two essays of the 1750s, Diderot conjured up a vision of twentieth-century naturalism, echoing Saint-Albine’s fashionable emphasis on feeling, while in his later Paradox on the Actor he argued that the best actors reproduce emotion on stage through cold analysis. Diderot invoked numerous contemporary actors, and this chapter establishes how the point of view of these actors differed profoundly from that attributed to them by Diderot. Antoine-François Riccoboni: who emphasized core technique for the benefit of amateurs. Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni: patronizingly dismissed by Diderot, who went on to adopt her arguments. Marie-Madeleine Jodin: a rebellious protégée who rejected his advice. Michel ‘Kelly’ Sticotti: a jobbing actor whose ideas had a complex genesis. Hyppolite Clairon: a remarkable actress and teacher whose published account of the acting process offers a more subtle analysis than Diderot. François-Joseph Talma: an articulate actor who challenged Diderot’s attack on Sticotti. Coda: theatre and oratory: two modes that remained closely related, despite claims that theatre somehow ‘liberated’ itself from oratory.

Can you teach someone to be an actor? Paradoxically, the French cultural context while constraining the remit of the actor allowed acting to emerge as an autonomous science. The conservatoire training model that flourished in France in the nineteenth century was vigorously resisted by the nineteenth-century English actor-manager. Training or talent: the classical debate: Cicero and Quintilian resisted Aristotle’s claim that acting was merely ‘natural’. Early modern apprenticeship in the science of acting: our best evidence comes from Paris in the Shakespearean era, where Hardy’s classical dramaturgy demanded new skills. Multiple skills served the craft of acting. Early modern schooling: the example of Marston’s boy actors: how boys with a rhetorical education challenged the older generation of professionals. Hamlet: fencing as a foundation for acting: Hamlet learns to ‘act’ by learning to fence, and I trace the enduring place of fencing in actor training, distinguishing Italian and English methods. The pedagogy of Charles Macklin: a case study in how eighteenth-century acting was taught. The birth of the conservatoire: first championed by Lekain and his contemporaries.