One response to Ryan Paul’s worry about what actors learn:   Acting teachers who work with Tina Packer of Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox MA, make use of Tillyard and the idea of “great chain of being” not simply as ciphers of historical truth but as frames for an acting exercise.  Something like this:  You stand in open space, and try to imagine yourself—within your limbs, muscles, breath, and mind—moving from being an angel or spirit downward to the states of being human, lion, horse, dog, snake, fish, vegetable, stone.  And they you imagine yourself back up again.  It’s a slow process, done rightly, you keep still or you move as seems right, with a strong sense of surprise in the connections and shifts between different phases, things felt deep inside your nerves.  Or at least that’s what I remember from doing this exercise in the 90s, when I studied with S & Co.  And you’re in a room full of other actors doing the same thing, so what you observe of them becomes part of the lesson too.   It’s very remarkable preparation for performing moments in the plays when characters give themselves over suddenly, often unexpectedly, to other, not entirely human states of being.  

best,

Ken