Comédien–Actor–Paradoxe: The Anglo-French Sources of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien

The ideas at the heart of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien have extraordinary conceptual reach. It is my contention that they owe this reach, in part, to the work’s sources. Although some research has been done into the origins of the Paradoxe, it is dwarfed by the quantity of writing that deals with the work’s reception or its broader implications. After all, the Paradoxe, an open-ended dialogue between two voices named “Premier” and “Second” that Diderot wrote and rewrote for almost a decade, invites such treatment. Specifically, the thoughts of this text extend themselves in two ways: first, beyond the figure of the actor, comparing the performer to the author or the statesman, so that it is now almost as common to find writing about the sociopolitical dimensions of the Paradoxe as it is to see it discussed as acting theory.1

Diderot's ideas, however, also possess a second kind of scope, one that is now harder to appreciate in a world where theories of performance, be they Brecht's or Stanislavski's, are used by companies and critics throughout the world, but that soon becomes clear when we look at the work's predecessors. Diderot's Paradoxe is remarkable as a piece of eighteenth-century writing about acting that aims to give an authoritative account of both the importance of a nation's own theatrical culture and those qualities common to great actors that transcend localization-to speak, in other words, as clearly about the mental processes of David Garrick at Drury Lane as it does about those of La Clairon (Claire Josèphe Hippolyte de La Tude) at the Comédie-Française. This is different from the comparisons between the English and French stages that predate the Paradoxe, one of which constitutes the work's starting point.
Premier begins the dialogue by being coaxed into naming the flaws of Antoine-Fabio Sticotti's Garrick, ou, les acteurs anglois, first published in 1769, and dismantled by Diderot for the Correspondance littéraire in his "Observations sur Garrick . . ." (1770), a short piece that would grow through the 1770s into the full Paradoxe. What Diderot soon shows with Sticotti's text is that its way of comparing English and French acting is inadequate, since it has failed to find a language for describing the actor's craft that James Harriman-Smith is the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholar at Cambridge University, where he is writing a thesis, under the supervision of Fred Parker, on Shakespeare and acting in the long eighteenth century.
takes into account the differences between the two countries' theatrical cultures. As Premier puts it, Sticotti was blind to the fact that "the technical terms of the stage are so broad and so vague that men of judgment, and of diametrically opposite views, yet find in them the light of conviction." 2 The new ideas of the Paradoxe-that the best actors have "no sensibility" and that they perform according to a modèle idéal of their role-are announced soon after this passage and represent not only a departure from the idea that the best actors are the most feeling, but also a higher order approach to the question of how a performer performs, one that avoids the errors of Sticotti. Thinking in terms of emotional constitution and the reflexivity it permits reveals to the reader that while Garrick and Clairon do not act in the same way or in the same context, they nevertheless both possess the marks of the "great performer": namely, rigorous self-control and the ability to form and act out a fantôme of their part. Such thinking gives the Paradoxe part of its grand scope-its ability to make repeated and unstrained references to both Clairon and Garrick throughout the dialogue-for both the English actor and the French actress possess what Diderot claims as the "qualities above all necessary to an actor": to have inside oneself "an unmoved and disinterested onlooker" and to possess "penetration and no sensibility." 3 The originality of Diderot's arguments has been the subject of some debate. A 2009 article by Michael Shortland describes, for example, the shortcomings of eighteenthcentury acting theory in dealing with new developments in performance style, resulting ultimately in what he calls "Diderot's break with the recent past, that is, specifically with 'Sir' John Hill's text and those written within the same framework." 4 Against this comment, we might set Sabine Chaouche's argument, in her La philosophie de l'acteur (2007), that there is no originality in Diderot's "modèle imaginaire," as French theoreticians had been urging the actor to imagine his character with a cool head since the 1740s. 5 Both arguments have merit: Chaouche is right to connect Diderot with his predecessors, if wrong to do so exclusively within a French context. Shortland, on the other hand, correctly identifies that the framework for discussing actors was present in England as well as France, but, by describing a "break" between Diderot and Hill, simplifies what is, in fact, a complex relationship.
Research conducted by Jacques Chouillet in the 1970s shows that the work of the exactor and botanist John Hill was connected to the Paradoxe through a remarkable chain of Anglo-French transmission, starting with a work by Pierre Rémond de Sainte-Albine called Le comédien, which was published in 1747 and translated by Hill into English as The Actor in 1750. 6 Hill then reworked the text five years later and republished it under the same title. This 1755 version of The Actor was translated by Sticotti as Garrick, ou, les acteurs anglois so that Diderot's Paradoxe, by responding to Sticotti, appears to construct its remarkably wide-ranging ideas as a wholesale rejection of commonplaces passed between England and France for thirty years. While it is certainly true that Diderot brought much that was new to thinking about performance, the importance of Sticotti should not be underestimated, since his work presented Diderot not with commonplaces, but a provocative translation of a fusion between Hill's thinking and Sainte-Albine's.
It is the contention of this article that the passage of French ideas about acting through England on their way to Diderot was an important contributing factor to the genesis of the Paradoxe, and particularly to the scope of the work. To demonstrate this, it will first be necessary to show that Diderot was responding to Sticotti with greater precision than the rapid dismissal at the opening of the Paradoxe would have us believe. After this, three important changes made by Hill and relayed to Diderot through Sticotti will be studied: first, a change in the way the topic of an actor's "sensibility" is approached; second, Hill's proposal of a "general sensibility"; and third, a shift in the understanding of the relation between actor and author. The first two of these points connect with the way in which, by building a new language for describing the actor's craft, Diderot was able to theorize at a level above national boundaries. The third innovation of Hill, regarding the author, anticipates and illuminates the Paradoxe's conceptual capacity to reach beyond the figure of the actor, as well as beyond its immediate cultural context.

Diderot and His Sources
How closely was Diderot reading Sticotti? There are, after all, sufficient parallels between many of the ideas in the Paradoxe and other texts by Diderot from the last decades of his life to make it plausible that no more than a cursory reading of Garrick, ou, les acteurs anglois was necessary to set things in motion. The neveu de Rameau has a critique of Clairon's "artificial" style, as well as a brief passage connecting pantomime onstage and in society. 7 The Rêve de d'Alembert describes a state analogous to that of the performing actor wrapped in the colossus of his or her conception, and even points out that keeping one's self-possession is the mark of "a great king, statesman, politician, artist and especially a great actor." 8 In spite of these connections and others between the Paradoxe and Diderot's writing, there is nevertheless strong evidence for a careful reading of Sticotti's work as well, one that would be sensitive to the kind of tensions that the preceding Anglo-French transmission had encoded within it. This evidence is clearest with regard to love.
Love appears again and again in the Paradoxe. When Diderot began the process of expanding his "Observations sur Garrick . . .," he replaced, for example, the assertion that the best actor is "one who is cold, who is self-possessed, who is master of his face, voice, actions and movements" (my translation) with a passage in which Premier sketches a particular version of a scene from Molière's Le dépit amoureux. 9 In this version, we read not only the lines from the play, but also a whispered dialogue carried on between the two actors playing the lovers Eraste and Lucile. These actors are married and their relationship is so different from that of Molière'scharacters that, in order for this scene to work, both actors must have such total control over themselves that all their mutual animosity does not disturb the performance: Eraste: no, no, madam, do not think that I have come to speak to you again of my passion . . . Lucile: I advise you to. Eraste: . . . it is all over . . . Lucile: I hope so. Eraste: . . . I am resolved to cure myself. I know how little share I have in your heart. Lucile: More than you deserve. . . . Eraste: But no matter, since your hatred repulses a heart which love brings back to you, this is the last time you shall ever be troubled by the man you so much despise. Lucile: You might have made the favor complete, sir, and spared me also this last trouble. Eraste: Sweetheart, you are insolent, and you shall live to repent this. 10 A little after this, Premier tells us of how the furious actress gets back at her husband by organizing a date with her lover, another actor, while she and he perform a scene from later in the same play. Both episodes are prefaced with an insistence on how much the audience, ignorant of the actors' own intrigues, enjoys this performance of Molière's text. The actors, we are told, "surpassed themselves," while "continual bursts of applause from pit and boxes" interrupted the scene ten times. 11 As Pierre Frantz has argued, this passage is part of a larger interest in the role of the audience, since here it is the warm credulity of the spectators that is as much the subject of observation as the cool feelings of the actors. 12 Yet, this does not explain why Diderot continues to return to love elsewhere in the Paradoxe, this time describing the opposite situation to that exemplified by those playing Eraste and Lucile: "An actor has a passion for an actress; they come together by chance in a stage scene of jealousy. If the actor is poor the scene will be improved; if he is a great player it will lose out." 13 This amounts to a paraphrase of the central thesis of the Paradoxe: that a great actor would be unable to undertake his usual excision of all personal feeling when performing such a scene with his beloved and so the spectacle would suffer; meanwhile, the actor who relies upon emotion will benefit from his personal feelings to create a better show than usual. More than another example of the reiterative tendency of Diderot's dialogue, however, these examples based on love respond to a specific topos of acting theory, which goes back at least as far as Sainte-Albine, and, crucially, is rendered by Sticotti in terms that both take into account and accentuate Hill's infusion of his thought into the topic.
Sainte-Albine produced in 1747 what Daniel Larlham has called "the first practicaltheoretical treatise in the French language devoted entirely to the art of the theatrical performer." 14 The fourth chapter of the work informs us that "persons born to love should solely have the privilege of performing the roles of lovers" (my translation). 15 Love, in Sainte-Albine's view, is distinct from other emotions performed on the stage, since it is impossible to act it "without being sensitive to its moments of weakness." 16 When someone who knows love performs love, it adds beauties to the physiognomy and corrects its faults, 17 but anyone who tries the part of a lover without such sensitivity to love's effects will not achieve this and so fail, producing nothing more than the "cold simpering" of a prostitute. 18 Love is then a key example for Sainte-Albine in a work that, to quote Allison Grear, "represents the apogee of . . . emotionally-based theory of acting in its sustained and nearly exclusive emphasis on the role of feeling in acting." 19 Given this, it is hardly surprising that Diderot would illustrate the cold self-control of the great actor with anecdotes and thoughts about love onstage: the philosophe is showing his ability to challenge the established thinking at what should be its strongest point. Patrick Tort has shown, however, that Diderot did not know the arguments of Sainte-Albine firsthand, and so must have instead received this target from Sticotti after its transmission via England. 20 In his 1750 edition of The Actor, Hill translated chapter 4 of Le comédien faithfully under the title "Players who are naturally amorous, are the only ones who should perform the parts of lovers upon the stage." 21 Hill's only change is to add the example of Susannah Cibber as Juliet, for whom "all that tenderness Shakespeare has put into the mouth of this favourite character" offers an exceptional opportunity for the expression of her natural disposition to love. 22 Following this, there are no major changes to the treatment of lovers onstage in the 1755 text of The Actor. Hill does, however, add the reflection that "husband and wife have seldom been observed to play the lovers well upon the stage." 23 Of course, this mention of a married couple performing lovers badly immediately brings Diderot's example of Eraste and Lucile to mind. It suggests that he may have taken from Hill (via Sticotti) the idea of offstage marital disharmony and turned it to his own ends with a differently pointed anecdote. As for Hill, both the additions of 1750 and 1755 are the result of this author's intense efforts to keep his book up to date: Cibber was in her prime in 1750, while the mention of married couples on the stage may glance either at her own unhappy marriage to Theophilus Cibber or at other actor-couples, such as Sarah and Henry Ward. Similarly, Hill's praise here of Shakespeare and elsewhere his increasing focus on Garrick (to the detriment of John Milton and James Quin) also reflect shifts in the theatrical firmament of the mid-eighteenth century in England.
When Sticotti put Hill's 1755 text into French, he clearly struggled with its extensive examples from the London stage. Although the core thought of the chapter on lovers is translated (as "On the disposition to love" [my translation]), including the example of a married couple that Diderot reverses, Sticotti cuts out any mention of Cibber. 24 This cut is part of a wider trend that has the effect of exaggerating Garrick's prominence even further, as is aptly shown in the metonymic implications of Sticotti's new title for his translation, Garrick, ou, les acteurs anglois. As well as removing Cibber, a footnote attempts a contrast between Englishwomen who are "miracles in conjugal love" and Frenchwomen who are "prodigies in little love affairs." 25 It is the kind of note that Diderot may well have had in mind when criticizing Sticotti's blindness to the national context of an actor's work, and the need for theory that thought about the relation between performance and situation in a more sophisticated manner. Similarly, Sticotti's last addition to this transmitted topos of the lovers-a couplet from Boileau's Art Poétique-hints at the potential scope for reaching beyond the figure of the actor that Diderot will exploit: the actor should be, for Sticotti, like Boileau and realize: "But well these Raptures if you'll make us see, / You must know Love, as well as Poetry. reiterate the central thesis of the Paradoxe in terms of onstage lovers, Diderot attacks the emotionally based theories of acting at what, since Sainte-Albine, was supposed to be their strongest point and twists it to his own ends. The Paradoxe even reverses the example of the unhappy married couple that Hill institutes in 1755 and Sticotti relays. On top of this, the changes that Sticotti makes to Hill all seem rich with a potential that Diderot exploits: cross-cultural comparison leads to the need for a way of understanding the actor that does not hide behind vague language for its parallels between Drury Lane and the Comédie-Française, and the quotation from Boileau points to a way of reaching through and beyond the figure of the actor to that of the poet. The passage of Sainte-Albine's ideas through England and then through Sticotti did more, however, than complicate the topos of the lovers, for Hill's translation and adaptation of the French original also questioned the concept on which the discussion of love was based-sensibility itself. Diderot, as he wrote the Paradoxe, was just as sensitive to this as well.

Sensibility Regulated, General and Absent
Joseph Roach has shown that when Hill translated Sainte-Albine he was forced to deal with a confusion in the French text between sensibilité and sentiment. 27 The former is defined at the opening of a section on an actor's interior gifts as "in actors the facility of making all the diverse passions to which man is susceptible succeed one another in their souls." 28 However, this opening chapter is titled as concerning "What sentiment is." The problem is that while sensibilité is clearly defined as how something is felt, sentiment can be taken to mean either what is felt (as in "avoir le sentiment que . . .") or how it is felt (as in "perdre le sentiment"). This leads to such ambiguous sentences as when Sainte-Albine writes of the strictness with which we judge how the tragic actor is able to "show in each of his positions the type and degree of the sentiment that he must make appear to us." 29 Hill's response to this problem is symptomatic of his approach to Sainte-Albine as a whole. In a move that draws on his own scientific knowledge and a larger desire for clarity in what he calls the "science" of acting, Hill replaces all instances of sentiment with sensibility. According to Roach, this change of terms fits with medical thought of the time, since Haller in England and Fouquet in France had both used sensibility (or sensibilité) to define the innate process by which matter registers impressions. 30 Further, this harmonization makes Sainte-Albine's implicit assumption of sensibilité as something innate, explicit. One simple consequence of this alteration is that neither Sticotti nor Diderot use the word sentiment as ambiguously as Sainte-Albine, and instead lay out their ideas with regard to sensibilité only.
Hill's clearer emphasis on sensibility as an innate process has broader consequences also. These become visible in the 1755 version of The Actor where, still under the aegis of scientific precision, he pushes beyond Sainte-Albine's ideas with a much enlarged 27 Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: studies in the science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 100-101. 28 Sainte-Albine, Le comédien: "dans les comédiens la facilité de faire succéder dans leur âme les diverses passions, dont l'homme est susceptible" (32). 29 Ibid., "montrer dans chacune de ses positions l'espèce & le degré de sentiment, qu'il doit nous faire paraître" (38). 30 Roach, The Player's Passion, 97. chapter on sensibility. Although his source had, for example, already emphasized the importance of esprit (translated by Hill as understanding) to the player as a way of regulating excessive sensibilité, Hill adds both the idea that one might train one's sensibility through the reading of Milton, exercising one's constitution into emotional suppleness, and that the best actors would ultimately achieve a kind of scientific detachment from themselves when performing, even though they remain "affected [by the] words of [the] author": Here is the great perfection of the science: we would have [the actor], while he feels all this, yet command his passions, so that they do not disturb his utterance; and yet we would not have that expression he keeps for himself take away the pain of it from us; we would have his manner of pronouncing the words take all that effect upon us, which the passage has on the most sensible reader; but we would not have it take that effect on himself. 31 Hill's emphasis on acting as a science and the strict separation possible between innate sensibility and mental control of it leads here to a passage that appears to anticipate Diderot's own ideas about the great actor's coldness and self-control. Careful reading shows, however, that what Hill instead offers is a middle position between Sainte-Albine and Diderot-that of, to use his own words, "regulated" sensibility. 32 The actor still "feels all this," yet-and this is what Hill calls "the great perfection of the science"-the innate, bodily feeling of these emotions is kept separate from the actor's understanding, allowing the actor to manage the projection of his feelings into the audience. In Diderot's model, there is no feeling in the performer onstage, just the careful execution of his or her modèle ideal for the role.
Between Hill and Diderot there is Sticotti's text, which mangles Hill's thoughts on "the perfection of the science" in an extremely provocative manner: "The perfection of the art demands that the actor speak clearly and at the same time persuade us that he is deeply penetrated by what he says; we want above all that, in the development of his well-ordered sensibility, ours loses nothing. Weak articulation is, however, permitted in the actor when extreme pain disturbs his speech: in such cases, this is a great beauty." 33 The second sentence of this passage is anathema to Hill's science. The idea that bursts of uncontrolled emotion might make articulation more moving even if they render it incomprehensible has no place here. Sticotti's insertion ends up creating a visible tension in the text-a tension between the importance of controlling feeling and the potential for a particularly strong emotion to overwhelm the speaker. While this tension is implicit in Hill and Sainte-Albine, both of whom carefully order their argument so that this question never arises directly, Sticotti's phrasing here seems almost to invite Diderot's criticism. In response to the inconsistency that the actor should both control emotion and receive applause for letting it overwhelm him, what other option is there than to suggest that feeling does not offer an adequate basis for discussing the actor's performance? Sticotti's unwieldy Anglo-French presentation of Hill's model calls out for the new approach of the Paradoxe. 31 Hill, The Actor (1755), 54-55. 32 Ibid., 79. 33 Sticotti, Garrick: "La perfection de l'art veut que l'acteur s'énonce distinctement, & nous persuade à la fois qu'il est bien pénétrée de ce qu'il dit; nous voulons surtout qu'au développement de sa sensibilité bien réglée, la nôtre ne perde rien. On permet cependant à l'acteur une faible articulation des mots, lorsqu'une extrême douleur intercepte sa voix, c'est alors une grande beauté" (68; emphasis added).
Regulated sensibility is not, however, the only departure from Sainte-Albine in the 1755 version of The Actor. Building on Le comédien's call for comic actors to be able to perform a wide range of emotions, Hill also proposes the idea of a general sensibility-something that again appears to anticipate certain features of the expansive way that Diderot sees the great actor's craft: any particular turn of mind, far from qualifying a person for playing, is rather a disadvantage. . . . This ductility of mind . . . is the only true, as it is the only general sensibility. It were best that the heart of the player had no reigning passion of its own with this ready sensibility of all. Then he would receive them all as the writer offered them, in an easy and unconstrained fashion. He would be the body, the author for the time the soul. And thus he would represent all well, because he would first feel all properly. Few enjoy this sensibility perfect; all are excellent, very nearly in proportion to the degree in which they enjoy it; and it is like the understanding, one of these qualifications the player must have from nature; for art will never give it. 34 This description of general sensibility is tied to Hill's efforts to keep his acting treatise up to date. It appears, in 1755, to explain a criticism first made of Garrick and Barry in 1750: namely, that "whether we see Mr Garrick in Richard or in Osmyn, still [we see] Mr Garrick," with the same being true for Barry in Othello. 35 Simply put, Garrick and Barry lack general sensibility and thus will always retain a little of their own self visible when performing another character's emotional responses.
Sticotti's version of this passage makes several striking changes. In place of Hill's advice that "any particular turn of mind, far from qualifying a person for playing, is rather a disadvantage," 36 Sticotti has the reformulation: "We feel that the proper character of a great actor is to have none [aucun]." 37 As well as contracting Hill's argument, the construction using aucun also brings to mind one of the key phrases of the Paradoxe, Second's "[a]great actor's soul . . . affects no [aucune] single determined form, and, capable of assuming all, keeps none [aucune]." 38 This similarity is noted by the 1975 editors of Diderot's OEuvres, but only with regard to Sticotti and Diderot. It also, however, depends both on Hill's modification of Sainte-Albine's ideas about actors' suitability for parts and the processes of translation back from Hill into French, where Sticotti, seeking a striking articulation of general sensibility, anticipates Diderot's own penchant for a negative formulation. Such negative formulations contribute to the conceptual reach of the Paradoxe, for, more than anything positive, it is above all the absence of strong sensibility that great actors, statesmen, authors, and others are shown to have in common.
Sticotti makes one other significant change to Hill's 1755 description of general sensibility. Having translated the criticism that "Garrick would easily take the prize for perfect sensibility, if he put a little less vivacity into his action," 39 Sticotti then caps 34 Hill, The Actor (1755), 61. 35 Ibid., 60. 36 Ibid., 61. 37 Sticotti, Garrick: "On sent que le caractère propre du grand acteur est de n'en avoir aucun" (71). 38 Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, 61: "L'âme d'un grand comédien . . . n'affecte aucune forme déterminée, et . . . également susceptible de toutes, n'en conserve aucune" (93). 39 Sticotti, Garrick: "Garrick emporterait aisément le prix de la parfaite sensibilité, s'il répandait quelquefois un peu moins de vivacité dans son action" (70). his description of the grand acteur by informing us that "[i]f the actor had no passion particular to the performer [then] he would reach that degree of perfection Garrick has arrived at in so many different roles." 40 The juxtaposition of these contradictory assessments of Garrick is important in the same way that Sticotti's inopportune mention of the potential benefits of excessively emotional articulation was: it focuses the issue to a single point-in this case, Garrick. It is, of course, with his friend Garrick as an example that Diderot elaborates many of his ideas in the Paradoxe, so much so that Marian Hobson has argued that it is "round the figure of Garrick that the recognition that the art object is imaginary crystallises," 41 while Anthony Strugnell has also named the actor himself as another "English source" for the Paradoxe. 42 Further, Diderot's pairing of Garrick and Clairon builds on Sticotti's focus to allow for a demonstration of the international reach of his model for the art of performance. What Diderot takes from Sticotti's version of Hill's ideas about sensibility-the problems of separating feeling out from thought, the possibility of understanding general sensibility in a negative way-is deeply connected to Garrick, while the addition of Clairon as an example exploits the potential unrealized by Sticotti for the elaboration of Hill's ideas into a conceptually rigorous and more international approach.

The Ouvrage of Author and Actor
The scope of the Paradoxe lies not just in its ability to describe aspects common to performance in different countries; it also appears in its capacity to reach through the figure of the performer to other professions. For the most part, these wider, sociopolitical implications of the Paradoxe are the result of far more than the tensions caused by the Anglo-French provenance of those ideas found in Sticotti. nevertheless, those connections that Diderot draws between actor and author can be better understood with reference to the thinking of Sainte-Albine, Hill, and Sticotti. One way, for instance, in which Diderot parallels performer and poet is the language used to describe each of them. Just as Clairon, in performance, "repeats her efforts without emotion," so too does the playwright Sedaine stay "reserved and still" as an overexcited Diderot recounts the success of Le philosophe sans le savoir. 43 In addition to this, both actor and author are described as producing "ouvrages." Premier describes Madame Riccoboni as the author of "a great number of charming works," 44 and elsewhere mentions how his literary friends have occasionally "deigned to consult me as to their work [ouvrages]." 45 As for the actor, the word ouvrage occurs during one of the most explicit parallels between the performer's craft and other artistic disciplines: They are a sort of inspiration. They come when the man of genius is hovering between nature and his sketch of it, and keeping a watchful eye on both. The beauty of inspiration, the chance hits of which his work [ouvrage] is full, and of which the sudden appearance startles himself, have an importance, a sureness very different from that belonging to the first fling. Cool reflection must bring the fury of enthusiasm to its bearings. 46 In his next speech, Premier uses ouvrage again to describe how performers "dart on everything which strikes their imagination; they make, as it were, a collection of such things. And from these collections, made all unconsciously, issue the grandest achievements of their work [ouvrages]." 47 The word is useful because it puts a name to the actor's performance that allows it to be connected to more permanent artistic productions. In addition, an ouvrage, as a distinct object, stands slightly separate from its creator, a necessary thing for a model in which the performing actor is presented as reflexive, "hovering between nature and his sketch of it." This conception of the double performer is a more sophisticated version of Hill's separation between innate sensibility and the understanding's direction of it. What can be added now is that the idea that both actor and author are producers of an ouvrage is something that Sticotti brings out of a particular set of tensions in his English source.
Throughout both versions of The Actor, Hill maintains a conflicting attitude over the relationship between actor and author. While Sainte-Albine had permitted the actor to make changes to his author's text with the aim of removing those parts that "slow down the scenes and cool the spectator," 48 Hill informs us in 1750 that he will not be using the same editions of plays as those used in Drury Lane, preferring "passages from plays . . . as the author gives them, not as the blockhead prompter may have lop'd them." 49 By 1755, he ignores what was still the common stage practice of the time by removing any suggestion that the actor might alter the text. While doing this, however, Hill also argues for the possibility of particular affinities between actors and authors in many of the examples he uses in 1750, and updates in 1755. In 1750, as regards Milton and Quin, "their turn of soul seems much the same"; 50 and in 1755, keeping pace with cultural developments, it is Garrick's affinity to Shakespeare that receives most attention, particularly concerning King Lear, where "there never was enough [fire] till this great player gave life to the character." 51 On top of this, Hill pushes the question of affinity so far as to suggest that Shakespeare may well himself have been a skilled performer, arguing in 1755 that although "they say Shakespeare acted ill," it was more likely that "a debauched taste in the age" condemned him for speaking in a way that Hill would have approved. 52 The workmanlike opening of Hill's 1755 chapter on sensibility reveals many of these conflicting attitudes: "Of the general requisites it is most natural to treat first, as they lead to the others; and of these the two capital are understanding and sensibility. The business of a dramatic writer is to excite the passions, and that of the player is to represent in the most forcible manner what the other has written." 53 There is something of a hierarchy here in that there is a clear division of tasks between the writer who lays out the material for exciting the passions and the player who must "represent . . . what the other has written." This recalls the way that Hill writes about "general sensibility" also, as a situation where the actor "would be the body, the author for the time the soul." That said, there is also a measure of mutual dependency, especially in the implication that the player can give the "most forcible" version of what was written to "excite the passions." This sentence is translated by Sticotti as follows: "It is proper to speak first of general qualities, since they lead to the others. A performance is a sublime tableau, the work [ouvrage] of two great artists: the poet and the actor. Their principal goal is to excite the passions." 54 The crucial alteration here is the move away from Hill's vaguely hierarchical division of tasks toward the suggestion that both poet and actor are creators of an ouvrage. This is not yet quite the argument of the Paradoxe. For now, poet and actor contribute, as equal "great artists," to the same object, and it is left to Diderot to argue that the actor creates an ouvrage of his or her own when he or she perform. Still, Sticotti's use of the same word as Diderot, one capable of paralleling the efforts of poet and actor, is striking indeed. Although it took the complex articulation of the Paradoxe to truly reach through the actor to an understanding of other professions and crafts, Sticotti's translation of Hill hits on one important piece of vocabulary for achieving such scope. Even Hill's own texts of the 1750s might also be said to have begun this movement, since his expression of affinities between Garrick and Shakespeare or Quin and Milton already imply a deeper concern for the creative process than Sainte-Albine's pragmatic concern for a text that should be cut by the actor to remain interesting.
One last point on authorship and performance. From Sainte-Albine to Hill, the attitude toward an author's text hardens to the point that the Englishman cannot countenance quoting speeches according to the versions pronounced in performance. Like so much that Hill brings to the thinking of Le comédien, this emphasis on a sacrosanct text is likely due to his awareness of contemporary cultural trends in the London literary scene. Garrick produced a new version of Macbeth in 1744 to replace Davenant's adaptation from 1664, and its performance was (albeit misleadingly) advertised as presenting the text "as Shakespeare  published in 1747, and many of the clergyman's footnotes take aim at all the "players' trash" that has crept into the text of the plays. 56 There is admittedly no direct translation of Hill's attitude in Diderot's Paradoxe, but it does lead to at least one speculative observation. It is noteworthy that the scene in the Paradoxe between Eraste and Lucile features two actors who make absolutely no changes to the text, and this moment is indeed all the better for the way their animosity operates around Molière's writing. If, then, we think of Diderot's efforts to conceive of the actor as a creator of an ouvrage, it would seem that one consequence of his method is a similar emphasis to Hill's on the stability of what is performed. Calling an author's text his ouvrage bestows a kind of immutability on it, as evidenced by the unadulterated version of Le dépit amoureux cited by Premier. With regard to the player's ouvrages, one might point to Diderot's allusions to sculpture or a "great basket work figure" to describe the modèle idéal, all of which have similar intimations of an object's firmness. 57 If the performer's craft is to be compared to that of the painter's or writer's, it seems that an implication of solidity creeps in. This does not come from Hill himself, but understanding his attitude illuminates this potential in Diderot's description of performance as ouvrage-a term that, as already shown, Sticotti stumbles into and Diderot exploits to the full for its ability to reach through and beyond the figure of the actor. In this way, the performer in the Paradoxe becomes not just a subsidiary doomed to "represent what the author wrote," but rather a model for understanding the kind of skilled observation, selfcontrol, and lack of emotion that enabled the great author to write in the first place.

Conclusion
The themes of authorship and sensibility, traced from Saint-Albine's Le comédien to Diderot's Paradoxe, evolve considerably in a process that depends in part on their passage back and forth across the English Channel. It is in Hill's reworking of Sainte-Albine that new scientific thinking about sensibility is applied to the stage, and a preoccupation with the author's textual and constitutional connection to the actor first surfaces. It is all too easy to underestimate the significance of such transmission and ignore the value of these texts. A compelling philosophical context for Diderot's writing on the theatre can be (and indeed has been) made from exclusively French material. 58 With regard to more practical concerns, recent research into the conditions of performance and rehearsal in France and England now gives a sense of how much all the writers discussed here, for whatever reason, have left out of their works. 59 Nowhere do we find mention of the prompter's place, for instance; while surviving parts, both in French and English, give ample proof that the author's text was far more sacred to Hill than it was to Garrick or Lekain. 60 Yet, the study of Sainte-Albine, Hill, Sticotti, and Diderot as a group offers a useful reminder to those who delve deep into the philosophical and practical traditions of specific countries' stages. The connections between these works tell of how alive the culture of each country was to its neighbour's, and it is such an attention, coupled with an entire range of other phenomena of translation and transmission, that underwrites the scope and potential of all these writers, particularly Diderot. What should appear in this analysis, therefore, is something of the breadth of this topic, the capacity for writing about performance in this period to cross both political and aesthetic borders, to write of actors in a way that also entails writing of feeling, authority, and the processes of artistic creation. In the light of all that has been argued here, it is thus completely proper for Diderot, in a letter to Madame Riccoboni on the techniques with which realistic conversation might be produced onstage, to turn for his examples to neither a dramatist nor a Frenchman, invoking instead the novels of Samuel Richardson: "See how many rests, points, interruptions, broken speeches there are in Pamela, in Clarissa, in Grandison. Accuse that man, if you dare. Doesn't passion require many of these things?" 61