The phrase started being used in the theatre in the 1920s. One thought is that the tradition came from a writing by Robert Wilson Lynd called "A Defence of Superstition." This was published in the October 1, 1921 edition of the New Statesmen. He said that the most superstitious people were those who bet on horse racing and it was bad luck to wish them good luck, so instead people should say something like, "May you break you leg!" Lynd did not give a source for this. In the same article, Lynd said that theatre people were the second most superstitious. It is thought that theatre people may have adopted the idea from this article or that Lynd got the idea from theatre people and put it in the article. The order is not certain.
Another theory is that the phrase "break a leg" comes from wishing somebody the chance to perform. This comes from when those who got to perform were the people who were paid and the people who didn't perform were not paid. It can also come from wishing that people might have to go out for a curtain call at the end of the show. In either theory, it means that the actor passed the "leg line" or passed the curtains in the wings known as "legs." Thus, the actor broke a leg, as the leg-line was crossed.
While those two theories are probably the ones that make the most sense, there are others such as when bowing, that would mean "breaking a leg" because the knees bent, so it was wishing an actor have a good performance so that multiple bows or curtsies be given. Then, there are the theories that the phrase came from the Greek practices of stomping in which if a person stomped too hard in appreciation of a performance, a person might break his or her leg. There's the theory that it could also mean breaking the leg of a chair from Elizabethan times when audiences would bang chairs on the ground in appreciation.
There are also theories that the phrase comes from translations of different languages and that they somehow made it into the English speaking world. No matter how the phrase came about, it has stayed as one of theatre's traditions to tell an actor "break a leg" in order to mean good luck.
If you enjoy my content, please consider becoming one one of my patrons through Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/TheatreGeek where I will be sharing more in-depth content, answering your questions, sharing which types of software I use and how to find them, and more. By becoming my patron, you allow me to create more content about theatre and more theatrical content.
Your own or someone else's? An actor's? An audience members? To cause emotion so great their leg breaks?
ReplyDelete