The English Actor charts the uniquely English approach to stagecraft. In thirty chapters, Peter Ackroyd describes, with superb narrative skill, the genesis of acting - deriving from the Church tradition of Mystery Plays - through the flourishing of the craft in the Renaissance to modern methods that followed the advent of film and television. The biographies of the most notable and celebrated actors are also explored, right up to the present day. In this book, Ackroyd gives us an original and superbly entertaining appraisal of how actors have acted - and how audiences have responded - since the medieval period, and what we mean by the 'magic of the stage'.