Sheridan, Thomas. A Course of Lectures on Elocution.
Sheridan’s influential Course of Lectures was a seminal text in the eighteenth-century elocution movement and remained a recommended text for scholars of delivery well into the nineteenth century. Sheridan, an actor and theatre manager turned elocutionist, gave a series of lectures between 1756 and 1762 declaring the study of oral delivery a moral imperative, necessary for achieving interpersonal understanding and human sympathy. He frames his Lectures as a response to Locke’s “Essay on Human Understanding,” which he sees as flawed, due to Locke’s lack of any “practical plan” (8) for benefiting mankind in light of his discoveries. Sheridan agrees with Locke’s claim that errors in thinking and communication result from an “abuse of words,” but, unlike Locke, he thinks that such errors can be corrected by instruction in a “uniform…use of words.” Yet the uniform use of words in writing, Sheridan claims, is not enough, since writing leaves emotion, or “the passions,” in the dark. Good oral reading, then, communicates “not only all the ideas which pass in the mind, but also its operations, affections, and passions” with the use of due “force of emphasis, properly varied tones, just cadences and pauses…suitable gesture, and expressive looks” (5). Sheridan thus divides his work into chapters on articulation, pronunciation, accent, emphasis, pauses and stops, tones, and gesture. He promotes his lectures as instructions on how to make both the semantic and emotional content of an utterance legible to an audience in order to facilitate human sympathy.
Of all of Sheridan’s chapters, his writing on “tones and gesture” is most interesting to me. He associates words with reason and associates tones and gesture—or the modulating sounds of speech—with emotion. In a passage seemingly reminiscent of Rousseauian theories of onomatopoeia as the origin of language, Sheridan compares the tones of speech to the cries of animals. Only humans, however, are sensitive to the tones of all species and men, and only humans are bestowed with the “organs of speech,” allowing us to both feel and understand. While he includes very little instruction on how to express emotion though oral delivery, Sheridan argues that a standardized bodily grammar of emotion expression is the key to sympathy. He thinks that the uniform expression of language will allow for complete comprehension of another’s mind. Learning how to speak, for Sheridan, is also learning how to feel and decipher others’ feelings.