How to Act in a Period Piece: Posture, Manners, and Language

You’ve been cast in a play written two hundred years ago, or a series set in 1890. At the first read-through, everyone sounds a little like a tour guide in a stately home. The vowels go up a class. The spines go stiff. Somebody bows like a waiter.

Period work makes good actors nervous because it seems to ask for a second skill on top of acting: being “from back then”. So people put on a manner, a voice, and a posture, and the person underneath disappears. The audience sees costume and good diction, and nobody they care about.

The short version: you’re not playing “the past”, you’re playing a person for whom all of this was normal. Research the rules your character takes for granted, get your body into the clothes (or something close) as early as you can, play every bow and courtesy as something you’re doing to another person, and treat formal language as a fast, clear thought rather than a recital. Then learn the lines with the movement, not separately from it.

Start with what your character takes for granted

Nobody in 1847 thought their manners were quaint. They were just the rules, and breaking them meant something. Your research job is to find those rules for your character’s year, country, and class, so you can follow them without thinking and notice when the script has someone break one.

Etiquette books of the period are the best place to start, because they were written for people who needed to get it right. Project Gutenberg has many. Take True Politeness: A Hand-book of Etiquette for Ladies, published in New York in 1847. It says that on a first introduction, a lady makes “a slight but gracious inclination of the head and body”, and that “It is ill-bred to shake hands.” On later meetings she may offer her hand to a lady, but never to a gentleman unless they’re very close.

Read that and the modern handshake, the most automatic thing an actor does when meeting a scene partner, becomes a mistake for a lady in that world. Worse, it becomes a choice the audience reads. That’s the kind of detail you’re hunting for: the small, ordinary behaviors that your body will do on autopilot unless you replace them.

A few places to look, depending on the play:

• Etiquette and conduct books from the right decade, which tell you who greets whom first, what to do with gloves, hats, and hands, and what counts as rude.
• Portraits and paintings of people of your character’s class, which show how they stood, sat, and held their hands, at least when they were posing.
• Letters and diaries, which show how people of the time actually talked to people they loved and disliked.
• A practical guide to the style, if your play has one. For Restoration comedy, Suzanne Ramczyk’s Delicious Dissembling covers period manners and movement, with illustrations of bows, curtsies, the “language” of the fan, and snuff taking.

Keep notes in your script, next to the moments they affect. A rule you read once and never connect to a scene won’t make it to opening night.

Get into the clothes, or something like them, early

Period clothes change how you stand, breathe, sit, and turn. If you meet them for the first time at the dress rehearsal, you spend your opening week fighting them instead of using them.

Designer Katrina Lindsay knew this. For the 2008 Broadway revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, she told TDF that the team gathered rehearsal costumes even when they weren’t quite the right shape, “just to get used to having corsets on.” Her reason: your body has to get used to the corsets and the width of the panniers, the hoops that hold the skirts out.

Some film actors do the same. Talking about Nosferatu with Natalie Portman in Interview, Lily-Rose Depp said she worked with a movement coach and “rehearsed the movement with the corset on.” Portman’s reply is worth remembering: it affects your breathing, which she called “so important to acting.”

Miami University’s theater department production of Pride and Prejudice took the gradual route. The campus paper reported that the directors added costume pieces each week, and that the costume director brought in shoes about a week before tech to check they would work. One actor said the costume makes you want to stand up straight.

If your production hasn’t got rehearsal pieces yet, make your own. A long, full skirt teaches you to manage stairs and turns. Shoes with the right heel height change your walk. A stiff jacket you can’t slouch in, a cane, a hat you have to take off indoors, or gloves you have to remove before you eat all give your hands real jobs. Wear them for every run, not just the “big” scenes.

Play manners as actions, not decoration

A bow done correctly but with no intention is just choreography. In the period, every courtesy did something to the other person: it honored them, kept them at arm’s length, put them in their place, or flirted. That’s what makes manners playable.

The same 1847 handbook shows how much meaning was packed into small gestures. It says “The superior in rank and station should first salute the inferior,” so who greets whom first shows who outranks whom. And if a lady wants to be rid of someone’s company, it recommends “a cold bow in the street” rather than cutting them dead. A cold bow is a whole scene in one movement.

So for every bit of etiquette in your blocking, ask the acting question: what am I trying to do to this person with it? A deep bow to someone you despise and a deep bow to someone you adore should look like the same bow and feel completely different. If you can’t tell the difference from the house, the manner has become wallpaper.

One more useful rule from the same book: “To curtsy is not gracefully consistent with locomotion.” In other words, in the street a lady bowed on the move rather than stopping to curtsy. Look for the same instinct in your scenes: courtesies folded into walking and talking. When your courtesies stop the scene, they’re probably too big.

Make the language sound like a thought

Old dialogue tempts actors to slow down and admire it. That’s the fastest way to make it sound recited. Characters in period plays aren’t speaking beautifully on purpose. They talk the way everyone they know talks, and they’re usually in a hurry to win the argument.

Here’s Sir Peter and Lady Teazle mid-quarrel in Act II of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), from the public-domain Standard Ebooks text:

SIR PETER. Old enough!—ay, there it is. Well, well, Lady Teazle, though my life may be made unhappy by your temper, I’ll not be ruined by your extravagance!

LADY TEAZLE. My extravagance! I’m sure I’m not more extravagant than a woman of fashion ought to be.

SIR PETER. No, no, madam, you shall throw away no more sums on such unmeaning luxury. ’Slife! to spend as much to furnish your dressing-room with flowers in winter as would suffice to turn the Pantheon into a greenhouse, and give a fête champêtre at Christmas.

LADY TEAZLE. And am I to blame, Sir Peter, because flowers are dear in cold weather? You should find fault with the climate, and not with me.

Sir Peter’s long speech is one thought: you waste money on flowers in winter. Everything after the oath builds that thought into a bigger and bigger picture, and the punch is the last phrase, a garden party at Christmas. If you slow down and stress every word, the build collapses. If you drive through to the end, it gets the laugh. Lady Teazle doesn’t need a posh voice either. She needs to enjoy blaming the weather.

Look up every word you don’t fully understand before you learn it. Here, that means ’Slife (an oath), the Pantheon (a grand London assembly hall of the day), and a fête champêtre (an outdoor party). If you only half know what a word means, you’ll say it as sound, and the audience will hear the gap.

Long sentences: carry the thought to the end

Formal prose often saves the point for the end of the sentence. Find the word the whole sentence is building toward, and keep the energy up until you land it. Breathe where the thought turns, not wherever you run out. Mark those breaths in your script during table work, then test them standing up in your rehearsal shoes and costume pieces, where they may move.

Learn the lines with the movement

Period plays punish the actor who memorizes in a chair and adds the body later. You’ll go up the first time you try to curtsy, cross, and speak at once. There’s research on your side here: the psychologists Helga and Tony Noice found, as ScienceDaily reported, that lines actors learned while making an appropriate motion, such as walking across a stage, were remembered better than lines learned with no action. They also found that actors learn lines readily by focusing on what the words mean, not on the words themselves.

So learn the lines on your feet, in your rehearsal shoes, doing the blocking and the courtesies as you say them. Our guide to memorizing blocking has a simple way to tie each move to the line it belongs to.

Period scripts also have a word-perfect problem. Old contractions like “’tis” and “’twas”, inverted word order, and words like “ay” and “madam” are all easy to “fix” into modern English without noticing. Offbook helps with this. Upload your script, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other part, then Offbook listens and plays the next cue when you finish your line. Set line detection to Strict and it holds you close to the script, which makes a modernized phrase easier to catch.

You can also turn a speech into first-letter cues with our free line memorizer, which is a good check on whether you know the old wording or just the gist. If the play is verse, our guide to memorizing Shakespeare covers how to use the meter as a memory aid.

A first week of period rehearsal at home

Here’s a simple plan for your first week with the part, well before you need to be off book, alongside whatever the director is doing in the room:

• Day 1: Look up every unfamiliar word and reference in your scenes, and write a plain modern paraphrase of each long speech in the margin.
• Day 2: Read an etiquette book or two from your play’s period, and note every rule that touches your scenes: greetings, gloves, hats, seating, who leaves a room first.
• Day 3: Put on your rehearsal shoes and costume pieces, and walk your blocking while reading from the script, trying each courtesy as an action on your scene partner.
• Day 4: Mark breaths and the word each long sentence builds to, then run the speeches on your feet at full speed.
• Day 5: Run your scenes against cues, from a castmate, a recording, or an app, in costume pieces, with the script hidden.
• Day 6: Run the whole part once without stopping, then fix only the lines where you modernized the wording.
• Day 7: Rest, then do one easy, full-speed run in the evening.

Watch for the modern habits that give you away

A period performance rarely falls apart over a wrong bow. It falls apart when ordinary modern habits leak through. Run a scene, then check yourself for these:

• Hands in pockets, folded arms, or touching your face when you’re thinking.
• A modern slouch when you sit, or dropping into a chair without using your hands or checking the skirt or coattails behind you.
• Rising inflection at the end of statements, and filler sounds between phrases.
• Casual touch with characters your character would never touch, like a hand on the arm of a near-stranger.
• Playing the period instead of the person: a “posh” voice, a fixed half-smile, and stiffness that doesn’t change when the character is angry, frightened, or in love.

The last one is the big one. The clothes and the rules are the shape of your character’s world. Inside them, people still want things, lose their tempers, and fall for the wrong person. If you want more ways into a character’s body, try our guide to Michael Chekhov’s imaginary body, and browse plays and monologues for period material to practice on.

Questions actors ask

How do you act in a period drama?

Play a real person for whom the period’s rules are normal. Research the manners and customs of your character’s year and class, rehearse in period shoes and costume pieces early, use every courtesy as an action on another character, and speak the formal language as clear, fast thought rather than something beautiful to admire.

How do actors learn to move in period costume?

By wearing it, or something close to it, for weeks before the show. Some productions provide rehearsal corsets, skirts, and shoes, and some bring in a movement coach. If yours doesn’t, use a long skirt, heeled shoes, a stiff jacket, or gloves, and wear them for every run.

How do I make old-fashioned dialogue sound natural?

Understand every word, paraphrase each speech in modern English, and find what the line is trying to win. Then say it at the speed of thought, building to the word the sentence is about. Don’t put on a special voice. Your character thinks this is ordinary speech.

Do I need an accent for a period piece?

Only if the director asks for one, so ask at the first rehearsal rather than guessing. If you do need a dialect, start early and learn it the way coaches teach it; our guide to learning an accent for acting walks through the process.