la educación corporal

Despite its rigors, however, Chironomia was remarkably influential among later authors of Victorian gesture manuals. It is the model for several volumes published in the United States in subsequent decades. Dr. Jonathan Barber went so far as to construct a bamboo replica of Austin’s sphere, which he used to teach students at Harvard and recommended in his 1831 Practical Treatise on Gesture. The average American orator, it seems, presented the opposite problem to his British counterpart. As A. M. Bacon avers in his Manual of Gesture of 1875, the native public speaker is grievously in need of the prince’s counsel to the players in Act III, Scene ii of Hamlet: “In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”7 Drawing explicitly on Austin’s system, Bacon merely simplifies it somewhat and updates the attire of his illustrative figures, so that they appear less flamboyantly dressed, sober-suited, and stately. (Also, sporting a modish variety of facial hair.)