385 pages
Published 2023
Read from June 6 to June 12
Rating: 3 out of 5
Around the time that I read Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare, I learned that this book was in the pipeline, soon to be published. I was tempted to preorder it and turn it into a loose Ackroyd-on-acting double bill. Instead, I got it used as a housewarming gift to myself a couple months ago, and haven’t gotten around to it until now.
It’s a typical Ackroydian history, rambling through its subject with an eye for illustrative anecdote but rarely, if ever, scratching beneath the surface. One is reminded of his Albion, in which he posits that the English “taste” is for surface ornamentation at the expense of internal complexity, which seems to describe his popular histories quite well.
Admittedly, the breadth of The English Actor’s subject doesn’t leave room for much depth. Not even halfway through, it abandons any pretense at historical overview to become a string of pocket biographies. Early actors so famous that even I have heard of them — Edward Alleyne, Nell Gwyn, Edmund Kean — scarcely get a page or two to themselves, leaving more than half the book to detail the twentieth century. I’m more drawn to the “medieval” part of the subtitle than to the “modern”; I’d rather get a chapter or two expanding on Ackroyd’s brief mentions of Anglo-Saxon bards and medieval liturgical plays, instead of chapter after chapter listing out the major roles of near-contemporary actors. I’m sure there’s some sort of stage equivalent of IMDb I could turn to if I ever needed more of that.
My personal tastes in subject matter aside, I don’t think this was Ackroyd’s best effort. It’s missing the brio he brings to his better work. In places, the text feels rushed; he repeats anecdotes and quotations as if no one got around to editing out the placeholders.
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