The Player's Passion reinterprets theories of acting in light of the history of science, examining acting styles from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and measuring them against prevailing conceptions of the human body. The author explores how dominant theories of emotion, from the Galenic humor to the Pavlovian reflex, have shaped the critic's changing standards of the natural order of life and the actor's physical embodiment of it.

The Player's Passion has become a classic among theater historians and students of acting, and received the prestigious Barnard Hewitt Award for outstanding research in theater history. A wider audience will appreciate the book for its consideration of how far an idea can spread from its original discipline into the broader currents of intellectual history and popular comprehension.