ONE OF THE HOT DEBATES among scholars concerns whether Shakespeare wrote his plays principally conceiving them to be literature or principally for the purpose of performance. It surely is no secret that although I count the first group among my good friends, I fall into the latter school. And if we think of Shakespeare’s plays as written principally for performance, I would add, we will understand them much better as literature. The plays’ shapes, their warps and their woofs, arise because they were written with performance in mind.
Not just any performance, either. A particular one. A new play’s success upon its first performance, we may infer from Henslowe’s Diary, often determined its future survival. That fact will come as no surprise to playwrights of our own era. So we may reasonably believe that from the time a play was first conceived, the playwright and the acting company were aiming for a successful first performance. If we can figure out the process by which plays were conceived and brought to first performances, we will much better understand the plays themselves. We will know the imperatives under which our Elizabethan playwrights operated.
In several books (Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, Documents of Performance and, together with Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts) Tiffany Stern has reviewed an impressive array of Elizabethan documents concerning this problem. I won’t attempt to redo Stern’s work. I’ll just recommend her books. But I do want to build upon the evidence that Stern assembles. With respect to creation of the script, I believe that we can figure out some important new particulars. With respect to preparation for performance, I believe that the surviving documentary evidence gives us an incomplete picture. We need to find a reasonable basis upon which to fill in that picture. I’ll say why I think so, how we might find the additional information, and, starting with Stern’s documents themselves, show what new conclusions might be drawn.
From Conception to Script
The process by which a play was first conceived and then realized as a fully developed play script is discussed not only by Stern in Parts, but also by Neil Carson in A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary and Gerald E. Bentley in The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time. But here I want to look at original documents, and draw reasonable inferences from them. Although the documents are sometimes difficult to interpret, we may rely upon them completely. They were generated as part of the actual process itself.
Ideas for new plays in the Elizabethan era were for the most part generated, the documents show, by the playwrights themselves. The playwrights then sold their ideas to the acting companies in a process which resembles the way Hollywood screenwriters today, usually with additional sponsors, pitch their ideas to the studios. They met with some or all of a company’s sharers. In the meetings they provided either a synopsis or some scenes, or perhaps both, from a play they proposed to write. In a well-known example, Henslowe records in December 1597 a one pound loan to Ben Jonson, presumably in earnest of delivery, “upon a boocke wch he showed the plotte unto the company wch he promysed to dd [deliver] unto the company.” That is, Jonson persuaded the Lord Admiral’s Company to commission him to write the play based on a “plot,” or synopsis, which he had prepared for them.
More examples may be found in Henslowe’s records. In April 1601, Lord Admiral’s sharer Samuel Rowley wrote a note to Henslowe asking him to send two pounds to John Day, William Haughton and Wentworth Smith in earnest of a play to be called “The Conquest of the West Indies.” He observes in the note: “I have harde [heard] fyve shetes” of the play, “& I dow not doute but it wyll be a verye good playe.” And in May 1613 playwright Robert Daborne himself wrote to Henslowe suggesting that Henslowe “appoynt any howr” for him to read from a proposed new play “to mr Allin,” presumably Richard Allen, a sharer in a company closely supervised by Henslowe, the Lady Elizabeth’s.
We may readily imagine that in these meetings the sharers suggested how the proposed plays might be shaped to accommodate the needs of the acting companies. That such dialogues occurred is suggested by a note written around June 1613 by Lady Elizabeth’s sharer Nathan Field. Field writes: “Mr Dawborne and I have spent a great deale of time in conference about this plott, wch will make as beneficiall a play as hath come these seaven yeares.” Field could have meant that he was writing the play together with Daborne. But he probably did not. He refers later in the note to the possibility that Daborne will sell the play instead to another acting company. Thus the time Field spent conferring with Daborne about the plot probably was spent discussing how the play might be developed.
We may also reasonably conjecture that the acting companies themselves generated ideas for new plays, and commissioned playwrights to write them. In my Alcazar article in RES I argue, for example, that the Lord Admiral’s Company themselves conceived the second and third parts of “The Civil Wars in France” as a prequel and a sequel for a revival of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris. I also argue that a half year later they similarly conceived “Troilus and Cressida” and “Orestes Furies,” alternately titled “Agamemnon,” as a prequel and sequel to a revival of another play already in their repertory, “Troy.” In these cases they commissioned first Dekker and Drayton, then Dekker and Chettle, to write the prequels and sequels.
Roslyn Knutson shows, in addition, in The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, that in some years specific play types, such as citizen comedies or revenge tragedies, were fashionable among the acting companies, and that the companies mimicked each other’s successes. Those propensities probably did not arise through a merely random process of playwrights proposing plays. The acting companies presumably were seeking plays in the specified categories. Some support for these conjectures may be found in a May 1613 note written by Daborne to Henslowe. Daborne offers to dramatize “any other book of yrs [yours]” if Henslowe would “let me have perusall” of it.
Once they completed their plays, dramatists were expected to read the finished products to the acting companies–the companies’ sharers, that is. The readings apparently often took place in London’s taverns. Several documents in the Henslowe archives attest to the procedure. In December 1598 Henslowe lent the Lord Admiral’s money to pay Drayton, Dekker and Chettle for a completed new play, “The Famous Wars of Henry the First.” In addition, he lent five shillings “at that tyme unto the company for to spend at the readynge of that boocke at the sonne in new fyshstreate.” The Sun was a well-known tavern. Another entry in the Diary reflects a similar transaction. Henslowe records in May 1602 that he has “Layd owt for the companye when they [i.e. Munday and Dekker] read the playe of Jeffa for wine at the tavern.”
The formal purpose of these readings was to gain the companies’ approval for the now finished plays. In November 1599 Robert Shaw, a Lord Admiral’s sharer, writes to Henslowe about a play “The Second Part of Henry Richmond,” i.e. Henry, Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII, by Robert Wilson and an unknown co-author. Shaw reports that “we have heard their booke and lyke yt.” He asks Henslowe to pay Wilson eight pounds for the play, which, the Diary shows, Henslowe did. Lastly, Daborne writes to Henslowe in May 1613 saying that he is “unwilling to read” a play he is writing “to ye [the] generall company till all be finisht.” In this case the company was Lady Elizabeth’s.
We may readily imagine that the companies’ approval of the finished plays may sometimes have been contingent upon revisions specified by the companies. Such revisions at this point would have been of a practical nature. Enlarge the role of the character to be played by one of the sharers, cut a boring speech, add a comical scene at some specified point, and so forth. Absent a demand for any such revisions, the playwright’s role was now largely done. He was expected, several references show, to turn in a fair copy of the manuscript. Conceivably, he was expected to be present for rehearsals and to make further revisions if rehearsal revealed such revisions to be necessary. But for reasons I will say below, I suspect that any such further role was limited.
From Script to Performance
Once the script was turned over by the author to the acting company, the company had to realize the script as a performed play. The process the acting companies used to achieve that objective is not documented by the same kind of direct evidence that we have seen thus far. Stern does assemble an impressive amount of material. But most of this material comes from plays in which the play’s characters put on a play, that is, a play within the play. Multiple considerations restrict the utility of this material as evidence for the process in the professional theater.
Few of the plays within plays, to begin, are put on by characters who are professional actors. And those few plays within plays that are performed by professional actors involve relatively little rehearsal or discussion by the actors concerning how to prepare the plays for performance. Most plays within plays are put on by characters who are amateur actors. And many of their amateur efforts are meant to be comic. So the processes the playwrights sketch concerning preparation for performance do not necessarily represent the process professional actors would use.
Most “plays” within plays consist, moreover, only of single scenes. They involve only a small number of actors, and interaction between those actors is direct and straightforward. Such scenes standing alone in real professional performances would have required relatively little rehearsal. The actors needed only to block their action and figure out how to coordinate their individual actions and their interaction. But real plays in whole are much more complex. The actors must, for example, hint in their actions and interactions at motives that only later will be revealed. Many scenes are not so straightforward; they require the actors to interact in ways that interpret for the audience unspoken meanings. And some scenes involve many actors, complex blocking, and several subsets of actors, the actors in each subset interacting with each other at the same time as actors in the other subsets. A whole play thus probably required considerably more rehearsal than simple single scenes.
More broadly still we may reasonably doubt that playwrights would accurately represent the entire process of bringing a professional performance to the stage. Suppose that the process involved extensive working out of technical details, that difficult scenes and parts of scenes required repeated iterations in rehearsal, with only minor variations in each iteration. Such material represented on the stage would have made a very boring play.
Let me use an example I know well. TV shows and movies about lawyers generally show two parts of the trial process. They show the lawyer’s initial retention meeting with the client. And before you know it they show the trial itself. Stuff happens between those two events, of course, but it usually has little to do with the actual process of preparing for trial. The reasons for that choice by script writers are easy to understand. The real process of preparing for trial involves many tasks which to an observer would seem quite uninteresting. Lawyers spend weeks reviewing documents, tediously interviewing and re-interviewing witnesses, researching legal issues, drafting pre-trial motions and supporting memoranda, reading transcripts, and just plain staring at the wall while they think about how to present the case. Not a very good movie, I’m afraid.
All these considerations suggest an answer to our problem. When Elizabethan plays present plays within the plays, the events they represent as preparation for the performances probably did occur when a real, professional acting company prepared to perform a play. Those events were not, however, the only steps in the preparation process that a real, professional company undertook. Thus the Elizabethan plays offer a framework for further analysis. We can build upon the events that they do represent, and try to figure out what else might have happened.
But how? Theater practices in most theaters today would shed little light. The conditions are just too different. Elizabethan professional theater conditions are, however, closely approximated today in one setting. Each year from January through March the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, puts on a “Renaissance Season.” As in all ASC seasons, plays in the Renaissance Season are performed by experienced, professional actors who are very familiar with Elizabethan language, customs, texts and plays. In addition, the actors know each other well, as an Elizabethan acting company’s actors did, because the ensemble is fairly stable over the seasons and years. The actors perform on a replica Elizabethan stage, the Blackfriars Theater, surrounded on three sides by audience members, and even “gallants” on the stage itself. And in each season the company puts on a rotating series of different plays, usually five of them, so the actors perform a different play each night.
In the Renaissance Season, Elizabethan conditions are approximated even more closely. As in Elizabethan times, the actors figure out how to put on the plays by themselves; they have no director. And they put the plays on at a very rapid clip. In less than three full months they mount five plays, each introduced in turn and entering the rotation, all five in the rotation by about the middle of the season. New plays are rehearsed in the day, as the prior plays are performed at night. This pace roughly equals the pace at which the Lord Admiral’s Company introduced plays, as we can tell from Henslowe’s Diary. Lastly, the plays at the end of the sequence are ones with which the actors are not already familiar. They start with Shakespeare plays, which of course they already know and in which they almost all have performed before. But then they turn to Elizabethan period plays with which they are not already familiar. In those cases they are in much the same position as an Elizabethan acting company with a new script, just delivered by the playwright.
There are some differences of course, but I don’t think that those are consequential. The play’s author probably was available to the Elizabethan acting company, as he obviously is not here. Stern cites references which seem to say that writers of plays might tutor actors regarding their performances. None of those references shows, however, that professional playwrights instructed professional actors regarding how to perform their roles. Certainly, playwrights wrote the words which actors “parroted,” in the condescending term used by some of the writers Stern cites. But whether those writers cared to admit it or not, good acting requires formidable skills by the actors themselves. Most playwrights probably did not possess those skills. There are many surviving complaints by playwrights, moreover, that professional acting companies have made a hash of their plays, complaints which suggest that the playwrights did not help the actors prepare for performance. My own limited experience in play writing, and what I have heard from real playwrights, suggests that actors want to know from the authors only their characters’ backgrounds and motivations. They aren’t much interested in the author’s opinions about how to act the roles. An Elizabethan author could mend the play if the actors wanted, as he cannot here, but the ASC actors can and do make many minor cuts on their own when they believe that the material doesn’t advance the purpose.
It’s also possible that audiences today expect more polished first performances than did Elizabethan audiences. I doubt the existence of any such difference, however. Many records show that first performances of new plays were a big deal in Elizabethan theaters. Both for the actors and for the audiences. Good evidence tells us that acting companies charged twice the normal basic admissions price at first performances of new plays. Henslowe recorded for several years his daily receipts from additional fees to enter the galleries of his Rose theater. His receipts are almost invariably higher for first performances of new plays. Thus, the evidence seems to say, more people attended, and were willing to pay extra as well, on those occasions. Presumably, they expected to see polished performances.
I attended the rehearsals for the third play of the 2016 Renaissance Season, Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Women is a sophisticated and complex, rather extravagantly decadent, Jacobean play. But it is a play with which the actors had almost no prior familiarity. They would have to figure it out, and under difficult conditions. They had eight days in which to prepare for the opening night performance on January 28. On most of those days they were also performing either Tempest or Measure for Measure. Those conditions to a large extent determined how the actors approached their problem. As Elizabethan acting companies were responding to the same practical necessities, the actors’ responses here should give us considerable insight into how the Elizabethan companies might have responded.
The documents Stern examines show that Elizabethan actors studied their individual parts by themselves, on their own time. So did the actors at the ASC. Their parts had been assigned, and a doubling chart prepared. They arrived at the initial read-through at various stages of preparation. Some already knew their lines fairly well, and had thought out their vocal inflections. Others went through that process as preparation for the performance progressed. But memorization and vocal inflection were almost entirely the actors’ own individual responsibilities. Very little ensemble time was spent on the process, and then only if the other actors thought a different inflection might represent a better reading.
The actors first assembled as a group to work on the play at the initial read-through. This was the last time they took on the whole play in sequence until the “stumble-through” more than a week later. At the read-through the actors read the play, each reading his or her part(s). They paused briefly to note and discuss potential staging problems. After the read-through they held an initial conference that included the stage, costume and properties managers. They discussed staging problems more thoroughly, properties, costumes, pre-show music, songs called for by the play, possible cuts, and optimal allocation of the available rehearsal time. No similar read-throughs and conferences are reflected in Elizabethan documents, but practical considerations suggest that they occurred. The read-through, unlike the author’s reading to the company, allowed the actors themselves to think in practical terms about staging the play. Conferences were necessary for the same reasons they were necessary here.
Elizabethan documents also do not seem to reflect the next part of the process, but, again, similar events surely took place. The actors rehearsed individual scenes plus, in separate sessions, the dances, fights and songs. Relatively little time was spent on simple scenes, in which only a few actors interacted directly with each other. More time was spent on difficult segments of otherwise simple scenes, such as when a single conversation between two characters produces a dynamic change in their relationship. And far more time was spent on complex scenes, ones which involved the whole cast and multiple, sometime simultaneous, sets of interactions. Altogether the process of rehearsing individual scenes, fights, dances and songs, took up the great bulk of the preparation time available to the ensemble.
Each actor brought to the initial scene rehearsals his ideas about the body language and specific gestures he or she might use. Those ideas were largely sufficient for soliloquies and merely informational speeches, although even in those cases the actors’ individual ideas evolved as rehearsals progressed. But where dialogue was involved, the actors had to figure out how to coordinate their physical action and make the interaction work as a cohesive whole. If, for example, one character is upset by something another says, her actor turns her back. If the speaker seeks to change her mind he must step to her and gently touch her shoulder. When only some of the characters participated in a dialogue, while others also remained on stage, the actors had to decide where and how the non-participants would occupy their time.
The actors also had to figure out many problems concerning stage management. To keep the action dynamic, the actors rarely stood in the same place the whole scene. They had to figure out how to change positions on the stage and to coordinate those changes with each other. When more than a few actors will be on stage at once they had to coordinate multiple changes of position. They had to decide how to get the stage furniture onto and off the stage, and how to use those properties in a dynamic fashion. The actors also worked hard to ensure that the action could be understood and seen by the prospective audience. As Middleton’s text later indicates, for example, the Duke has accidentally been poisoned by his own wife, who had intended to poison the Duke’s brother, the Cardinal. Middleton’s spoken text at the moment, however, provides only hints of the wife’s action and intention. And no relevant stage directions exist. So the actors spent significant time devising a pantomime scheme to make the action clear. The actors’ efforts to achieve clarity even extended to such small details as arranging the action so that shorter actors would be closer to the audience than taller ones.
Altogether, attending to these tasks involved making decisions about hundreds of fine details. For many segments of scenes the actors discussed and tried out multiple iterations, each iteration varying to some degree, in order to address difficulties in the prior iteration. Most scenes were rehearsed in whole in this process four or five times.
Two scenes in Middleton’s play are exceedingly complex, a banquet scene at the play’s climax and the final, fatal masque catastrophe. Both require the entire cast on stage, involve the intermixing of several plot lines at once, and several simultaneous sets of interactions among varying subgroups of characters. The actors often are cued by lines not actually spoken to them, setting off sequences only tangentially related to the prior sequences. Both scenes are difficult to comprehend by a reader of the script, but the actors had to make them clear to the audience. Rehearsals of these two scenes required a substantial part of the total rehearsal time, with the actors repeatedly discussing and trying out different variations.
Separate rehearsal sessions were devoted to the music, dances and fights. In each case one of the actors who had special expertise took the lead in the orchestration or choreography. For the dances and the fights, the actors first practiced in stop motion, then in slow motion, and gradually came up to full speed. By the time of the first public performance, each of these supplemental elements had become a skillful entertainment. The comic dance was very funny. The featured swordfight was wholly compelling. As the rehearsals progressed the actors periodically met in dedicated conferences to discuss problems related to presentation of the play as a whole, such as continuity, costume adjustments, possible cuts of text that was turning out to be superfluous, and optimal reallocation of the remaining rehearsal time.
The material Stern examines suggests that Elizabethan play rehearsals consisted of, say, one or two run-throughs of the entire plays. After watching the entire process of preparing Women Beware Women at the ASC, I have to believe that such a schedule would have been essentially impossible in a real, professional theater. Never mind that it would inefficiently devote equal time to easy scenes and difficult ones. Without similar repeated attempts, discussions and iterations of difficult sequences and scenes, Elizabethan actors would have presented first performances that seemed ridiculously ill-prepared. The rude mechanicals’ performance in Midsummer Night’s Dream would not have seemed all that comical in comparison.
The one or two complete run-throughs reflected in Elizabethan materials were in fact also executed by the ASC actors. First, they ran a “stumble-through.” That was the first time they rehearsed the entire play from end to end. The next day they performed a full dress rehearsal. After both events, they made further adjustments based on what they had learned from the full performance process. The next day was a “preview night,” in which the actors performed for an audience that was not required to pay. We can be fairly certain, though, that no similar event occurred in the Elizabethan theater.
Conclusion
On opening night the ASC audience was presented a polished, engaging and thoroughly convincing performance of Middleton’s play. The performance was straightforward Middleton. It lacked the gratuitous flourishes that a proscenium arch theater director might have glued on. Scenes which Middleton intended to be comic were indeed funny, but the actors passed up many opportunities to turn Middleton’s Jacobean tragic extravagance into hyperbolic parody. What we saw was as close as we are likely ever to come to seeing the performance seen by Middleton’s own audience on the day of the play’s original first performance. And the audience loved it. The audience here, that is, although the performance this night made me think that Middleton’s audience must have too.
What impressed me most about the whole process was the dedicated professionalism shown throughout by the actors. There was no bickering; there were no temper tantrums nor ego trips. Each actor naturally came to the rehearsals with ideas of his or her own which emphasized the role of that actor’s character. The resulting differences were, however, worked out in a spirit of cooperation. Ego was subordinated to consensus. The actors focused instead on the business of putting on an entertainment worthy of their spectators’ time.
Watching the actors, it occurred to me that this also was how a successful Elizabethan acting company must have operated. They not only had to perform and to rehearse upcoming performances, but also to attend to the company’s business affairs, hiring and paying employees, dealing with the authorities, and marketing their product. They also had to acquire new plays, a process which, as we have seen, required considerable attention on their parts. They could not have done all that in the time available to them unless they cooperated with each other with the same professionalism that was shown by the actors here.