9. The Education of George Whitefield

“I would give a hundred guineas if I could say ‘Oh’ like Mr. Whitefield.”¹ So said David Garrick, London’s greatest actor in the mid-1700s. He wasn’t the only one raving about George’s powerful delivery. Regarding Whitefield’s preaching style, Ben Franklin himself wrote that “every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed that without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse, a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music.”²

Where did George learn to speak like that? Though he was certainly practicing on his own from an early age, his formal training would have begun at age twelve at St. Mary de Crypt grammar school in Gloucester. Working-class children generally learned trades and entered apprenticeships, as Ben Franklin had done. Upper-class children often had private tutors. But for those families in between, those who hoped to send children to college but lacked the resources for private instruction, the “grammar school” was generally the best option. This was the course of study Ben Franklin had started and stopped when it became clear that his family couldn’t afford college. The grammar school was a pathway toward college that involved several years of learning Latin, Greek, the classics, and some mathematics. Most likely, the curriculum would have included a thorough study of Cicero’s writing on rhetoric and oratory. In his memoirs, George mentioned that he had “good elocution and memory” and that he was sometimes asked to give speeches to the student body.³

The most famous of the ancient Roman orators, Cicero had divided speech making into five parts: inventio, developing arguments; dispositio, arranging the arguments; elocutio, choosing techniques of wording; memoria, memorizing the speech; and actio, using voice and gesture.

“The orator takes all those things that are commonly thought to be evil and troubling and frightening, and with his words makes them even more so,” Cicero wrote. “And whatever seems desirable and valuable in ordinary life, he amplifies and embellishes by speaking about it.”⁴

This serves as an apt description of Whitefield’s preaching, as he extolled the virtues of faith and repentance and warned against the sin that would keep someone from responding to God.

Cicero hailed the orator “who speaks distinctly, explicitly, copiously, and luminously, both as to matter and words; who produces in his language a sort of rhythm and harmony; who speaks, as I call it, gracefully. Those also who treat their subject as the importance of things and persons requires, are to be commended for that peculiar kind of merit, which I term aptitude and congruity.”⁵ Rhetoric was a whole-person discipline, not just a matter of slick speech. A good speaker needed something to say, as well as the mental capacity to organize ideas and communicate them in ways that would connect with the audience.

George learned these lessons well, but apparently he also developed a love of acting. And why not? He had already been reading plays (surprisingly, many plays of the time found more of an audience in print than on stage), and it’s likely that he saw some theatrical productions in the large meeting room at his mother’s inn. Bristol’s community theater didn’t start up until about 1740, but there were various traveling troupes (“strollers”) that might bring their shows around.

At school, George’s elocution and memory would enable him to learn parts and recite them clearly. As he got more involved in theater at school, he would sometimes cut other classes for several days in order to learn his role. Obviously, acting was more important to him than the rest of his studies. A teacher at the school recognized George’s ability and interest, as well as his effect on his classmates, and wrote some new plays for them to perform.

A few years earlier George had been bullied by his peers, but now he was respected and admired, at the head of his class in oratory and drama. Whitefield’s own report of his childhood reveals some confusion about what kind of person he wanted to be, yet for a few years at St. Mary’s grammar school, he put things together. He could speak well. He could act well. When he was on stage, people liked him. Though his attitude toward theater drastically changed in the following years, he never lost this sense of fulfillment. He loved being in front of people.

Acting Lessons

Whitefield doesn’t record much about the lessons he learned at St. Mary’s. Cicero would have been in the curriculum, and possibly Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, but some theater instructors of that time were trying to find new approaches to acting, going beyond the Latin classics to find techniques that would bring life to the stage.

In 1710, Charles Gildon published The Rules of Oratory Applied to Acting, in which he suggested that the actor stand in front of a mirror and try to experience the emotion of his character. The mirror would show him how those feelings looked. “You must lift or cast down your eyes according [to] the nature of things you speak of. Thus if [you are speaking] of Heaven, your eyes naturally are lifted up; if of Earth or Hell or anything terrestrial, they are naturally cast down.”⁶

Gesture was widely studied and catalogued. Certain feelings called for certain movements. Increasingly, acting teachers were going back to Aristotle’s writings on the arts, focusing on the “passions” he listed: anger, calm, friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, shame, favor, pity, envy. There were different lists of these passions, usually including six to ten. Each of these human emotions had a particular look and feel to it, which the successful actor would attempt to master.

One of the leading theorists of acting in the 1700s, Aaron Hill, put out a newsletter called The Prompter. The first thing you should do as an actor, he said, is:

To consider the nature of the thing of which you are to speak and fix a very deep impression of it in your own mind before you can be as thoroughly touched with it yourself, or able by an agreeable sympathy to convey the same passion to another. Let a man, for instance, recollect some idea of sorrow; his eye will, in a moment, catch the dimness of melancholy; his muscles will relax into languor and his whole body sympathetically unbend itself into a remiss and inanimate lassitude.⁷

As early as 1724, Hill was writing about “acting the passions.”

It’s possible that George’s teacher in Gloucester, who was enterprising enough to write his own plays for the class, was familiar with Charles Gildon’s 1710 book, and he might have kept in touch with Hill’s ideas, too, passing them on to his students.

In any case, we see the results of George’s training in his lifetime of ministry. You would expect oratory. Any successful speaker would certainly apply the Ciceronian values of preparation and style. There were plenty of preachers doing that, from the Wesley brothers in England to Gilbert Tennent and Jonathan Edwards in America. But George Whitefield brought something very different to the pulpit. It was clearly his theater training that taught him to embody the passions.

We can read reports from two continents about Whitefield’s emotional displays. One listener remarked on his “unreserved use of tears,” saying that the preacher was “frequently so overcome, that, for a few seconds, you would suspect he never could recover.” Whitefield refused to apologize for the waterworks. “You blame me for weeping, but how can I help it when you will not weep for yourselves, though your immortal souls are on the verge of destruction?”⁸

In the dramatic action of his sermons, he sometimes interrupted himself. “Once, when preaching on eternity, he suddenly stopped his message, looked around, and exclaimed, ‘Hark! Methinks I hear [the saints] chanting their everlasting hallelujahs, and spending an eternal day in echoing forth triumphant songs of joy. And do you not long, my brethren, to join this heavenly choir?’ ”⁹

Whitefield’s storytelling skills were much in evidence, and he knew how to find the passions in any scene. “Once, when he described a storm at sea, his description was so vivid that a sailor in the audience actually cried out, ‘To the lifeboats! To the lifeboats!’ ”¹⁰

Eyewitnesses (and ear witnesses) described his gestures and gyrations, his thundering tone, and the characters he assumed while telling those stories. He was not just speaking. He was acting, in an Aaron Hill sense. He was experiencing the passions of his subject and conveying them to his audience. That’s what made him special. Some of his antics might have lost him a few points in Ciceronian oratory, but they gained him a vast following. His style engaged people enough so that they heard the message of God’s redemption.

Critics, then and now, have assumed that Whitefield’s dramatic delivery was phony, put on, or manipulative. In so doing, they reveal an ignorance of the craft of acting. Whitefield himself addressed this in a story he told about an actor conversing with the Anglican archbishop. “We actors on the stage speak of things imaginary as if they were real, and you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary.”¹¹ Remember that Whitefield had a running battle with the established church. Using this actor’s words as an indictment of the insipid triviality too often heard from Anglican clergy, George renewed his own commitment: “I will not be a velvet-mouthed preacher.”¹²

By that time, Whitefield was no friend of the theater either. He lambasted play going as a worthless diversion. Yet he himself used his acting skills, forged back in that grammar school, to create a new kind of ministry. He would speak of things that were alarmingly real, and he would use a full range of theatrical expression to focus attention on those realities.

Historian Harry S. Stout has explored this subject well. “At an early age . . .,” he writes, “Whitefield managed to fuse a public amalgam of preaching and acting that held audiences spell-bound. . . . At heart, Whitefield became an actor-preacher, as opposed to a scholar-preacher.”¹³

Changing His Mind

George changed his mind about theater after he got to Oxford. It was part of his spiritual development to focus fully on God and cast aside such worldly diversions as play reading and card playing. And of course attending plays or acting in them was out of the question. That might seem to modern readers like an overly strict taboo, but at the time it was a clear choice, and Whitefield never wavered.

It wasn’t just the idea that play reading (or play going) was an unproductive activity for the serious believer. The theater world existed on the opposite side of a great divide. It was a world of bawdy humor and drunkenness, loose morals and raw sexuality. Playwrights questioned authority and challenged accepted ideas about God. Plays often mocked religion.

The first psalm offers a blessing to “the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night” (Psalms 1:1–2 KJV). As an Oxford student newly convicted by God, that’s the man George Whitefield wanted to be. It meant giving up theater.

One curious detail of his scholastic acting experience is related in his memoirs tersely, somewhat painfully. As he acted various roles in the plays written by his teacher, he sometimes had to dress in girls’ clothes, as was common. Only in 1660 were women first allowed to perform on London stages, and so there was a long-standing tradition of boys in female roles. In an all-boys school, it would be a matter of necessity. Somebody would have to play Juliet. In fact, it might have been an indication of George’s acting ability that he could play a girl’s role well. Still, he commented, “The remembrance of this has often covered me with confusion of face, and I hope will do so, even to the end of my life.”¹⁴

He wrote that more than a decade later, in 1739, as an ordained minister sailing to Philadelphia for the first time. And in a further addition, he felt compelled to repudiate his theatrical training even more, noting that “this way of training up youth has a natural tendency to debauch the mind, to raise ill passions, and to stuff the memory with things as contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as light to darkness, Heaven to Hell.” But even then a bit of ambivalence enters in. While he “had to repent of . . . my education in general,” he still had to thank his teacher for taking great pains to help him to “speak and write correctly.”¹⁵

Ships at Sea

About the time that George Whitefield was starting his studies at St. Mary de Crypt grammar school, Ben Franklin was on a ship from London to Philadelphia. He filled the three-month voyage by observing the ocean, conducting some scientific experiments, planning how he would live the rest of his life, and keeping a journal. After about two months at sea, his ship came alongside another ship, which was traveling from Dublin to New York. “There is really something strangely cheering to the spirits,” Ben journaled, “in the meeting of a ship at sea containing a society of creatures of the same species and in the same circumstances with ourselves, after we had been long separated and excommunicated as it were from the rest of mankind.” They had been feeling a bit like the passengers on Noah’s ark, he said, as if they were alone in the world—but then this other ship appeared. “My heart fluttered in my breast with joy when I saw so many human countenances, and I could scarce refrain from that kind of laughter which proceeds from some kind of inward pleasure.”¹⁶ The two vessels sailed together for a while, and the two captains even met for dinner.

It’s a delightful account, but also an appropriate image for us as we consider two lives. George Whitefield and Ben Franklin were making very different voyages through life, but their paths would cross in 1739 and at many points thereafter. They would “sail together” for a time and then move on to their own destinations. Was there a certain “joy” they found in each other? Did they recognize that they were of the same “species”? Perhaps each of them sensed that he was not quite as alone as he feared.

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