During the eighteenth century, treatises on the science of elocution, gesture and naturalness abounded. This five-volume facsimile edition draws together a representative selection of the most difficult-to-access texts from throughout the period. The edition enables cultural historians to examine the place of stagecraft in the eighteenth-century imagination. What factors shaped the popular market for such writings? How did this burgeoning market affect the stage? In a culture of sympathy, what went into the construction of an identity where the gap between the bodily display of emotion and actual feeling was applauded? What was the relationship of these concepts to the rise of the sentimental novel?The arrangement of the texts enables readers to see eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century publications on acting as a crucial part of the period's cultural imagination. Most of the texts included have never been republished and the rarest are taken from the only surviving copy. New editorial material includes a general introduction, headnotes, endnotes and a consolidated index. This edition will appeal to scholars and students of Eighteenth-Century Studies, History of the Theatre, Cultural History and History of Print.