Shakespeare (58 page)

A member of the company, perhaps the book-keeper himself, also copied down the individual actor’s parts on a “scroll” or long strips of paper. It was this that the player carried about with him and memorised. One of those given to Edward Alleyn, for the part of Orlando in Robert Greene’s
Orlando Furioso
, has survived. It is made up of fourteen half-sheets of paper pasted together so that it forms a continuous roll some 17 feet in length and 6 inches in width. The speeches are given “cues” in the last words of the previous speaker, and there are occasional directions.

The author’s original manuscript became the “play-book,” known also as the “Book.” It was used to adapt the manuscript for theatrical performance, but such was the speed and professionalism of the theatrical company that in practice little was done. In certain circumstances stage-action was simplified and speeches shortened. But these were rare interventions. The more usual notes were simply concerned with the traffic of the stage. The author’s list of characters, for example, was substituted by the names of individual actors. The stage-properties, and the “noises off,” were incorporated. The author’s own stage-directions were occasionally revised; entrances, for example, were marked earlier so that the actor had more time to cross the stage. Other stage-directions by the author were left, although they must often have been ignored. His vision was no longer important. It had become a collective reality.

It seems likely that the “book-keeper” also superintended the rehearsals of the play, with prompt-copy in hand, and also acted as prompter during the
performance itself. The prompter did not perform his modern task of whispering lines to an actor who was “out”; his role was to co-ordinate entrances and expedite the use of properties and “noises off.” There is a reference in Ben Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour
to a choleric gentleman who “would swear like an Elephant, and stamp and stare (God blesse us) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors misse their entrance.” We may only conclude that the book-keeper was sometimes also the prompter, and sometimes not. The player himself, however, was assisted neither by prompter nor by bookkeeper. Once he was on the stage he relied upon his own resources and his own professionalism, as well as the support of the rest of the players, who no doubt covered any lapse of memory or mistake in timing.

Before any play could be performed, the finished text had to be despatched to the Master of the Revels in Clerkenwell for possible alteration and censorship. For a fee, which rose steadily through the years from 7 shillings to £1, the Master licensed each drama for public performance. With his signature appended to the manuscript it became the “allowed” book, available for performance throughout England. It was a most important document indeed and one that in ordinary circumstances the company would keep within its possession.

Obvious allusions to current events were of course examined very carefully by the Master of the Revels. Any challenge to the established authorities, overt or implied, was taken out. As the authors and actors of
The Isle of Dogs
discovered, there were also civil penalties for public disrespect. That is why the deposition scene of the monarch in
Richard II
was removed during Elizabeth’s lifetime. To the book of
Sir Thomas More
the Master of the Revels has added: “Leave out the insurrection wholy & the cause thereoff”; the caution was necessary in a period when the threat of civic violence in London was strong. Blasphemy was of course forbidden. One manuscript is marked by the command to remove “Oathes, prophaness & publick Ribaldry.”
¹
The evidence, however, suggests that relations between the theatrical companies and the Revels Office were generally good. They were, in a sense, in the same business.

Assuming that all the formalities and the stage-mechanics had been satisfactorily completed, a play could be performed upon the stage within a few weeks of its being handed to the company. There was a premium on speed and professional competency. The rehearsals of new plays, and of revivals,
occurred in the morning. There was no director in the contemporary sense but, as has been suggested, the book-keeper may have played that role in many productions. There is the strong probability that Shakespeare himself performed that duty when his own plays were in rehearsal. It would be the natural thing to do. An excellent dancer such as Will Kempe was responsible for the choreography, and a musician such as Augustine Phillips arranged the music.

A German traveller noted, on a visit to London in 1606, that the players were “daily instructed, as it were in a school, so that even the most eminent actors have to allow themselves to be taught their places by the dramatists.”
²
This may have been a misunderstanding, so common in foreign reports of sixteenth-century London, since it is unlikely that an eminent actor would have endured direction from a young or minor playwright. But it would have been different with Shakespeare. Evidence to that effect comes in Richard Flecknoe’s
Short Discourse of the English Stage
, published in 1664, in which he describes how in the time of Shakespeare and Jonson “it was the happiness of the Actors of those Times to have such Poets as these to instruct them, and write for them; and no less of those Poets to have such docile and excellent Actors to Act their Playes as a
Field
and
Burbidge
.”
³
They were not directed; they were “instructed.”

The actors had the “scrolls” of their own lines, but no complete script. They memorised or part-memorised their words before beginning the rehearsal itself. It can be inferred that approximately thirteen principal actors and boys were gathered together on this occasion. The smaller roles need not have been rehearsed. At this stage jokes were added or taken out, difficulties of action overcome, and obscurities of plot or dialogue clarified. At this point, too, the problems attendant on “doubling” were resolved. This was often done unobtrusively, but there were occasions when the Elizabethan players revelled in the artificiality of the procedure. Doubling was an obvious excuse for comedy as well as mystery. It also provided the actor with an opportunity to display his virtuosity and versatility, and it has been calculated that a player needed the time of just twenty-seven lines to change roles. In certain plays Shakespeare will allow precisely that amount of time for the transformation. There were occasions, too, when the audience revelled in “doubling.” When an actor dies on stage as one character, but then re-emerges as another living—this must often have been the cue for shouts of approval.

There is every reason to believe that actors and writers in rehearsal behaved
very differently from their modern counterparts, who seem to be held in thrall to their director. In contrast the Elizabethan actor suggested lines, or ways of delivering lines, and may even have helped to invent new scenes to assist the progress of the plot. In the “epistle” to a publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher it is announced that “when these
Comedies
and
Tragedies
were presented on the Stage, the
Actours
omitted some
Scenes
and Passages (with the
Authour’s
consent) as occasion led them.”
⁴
The plays of Shakespeare were not treated very differently. The play is not a piece of writing, but a collaborative event; it is never finished, in other words, but subject to a continuous and inevitable process of change. There was in the sixteenth century a well-understood set of stage conventions, however, which helped the process of rehearsal; there were principles of movement and gesture that the good actor would have known instinctively. It is interesting, for example, that exits are rarely mentioned in stage texts; it was assumed that competent performers would know exactly when to leave the stage.

A general “run” of a new play was between four to six weeks, played at intervals, but of course there were always revivals and reworkings whenever the occasion required them. The general business of the day would include rehearsals in the morning, playing in the afternoon, and the learning of innumerable lines in the evening. In the case of Shakespeare this was complemented by the necessity of writing plays in relatively quick succession. He was continually, and exhaustingly, occupied. J. M. W. Turner once said that the secret of genius was “hard work,” a sentiment with which Shakespeare would have agreed.

E
veryone knew
when the playhouse was open. A flag was flown from the roof, announcing the news, and a trumpet was blown to alert those in the vicinity. Playbills advertising the forthcoming entertainment had already been pasted onto walls and posts, as well as the doors of the Globe itself. These “bills” gave the time and place, title and company, as well as sensationalist details to attract the public— “the pittiefull murther … the extreame crueltie … the most deserved death” and so on. The play itself began with three “flourishes” from the small orchestra, designed in part to still the ever restless audience. Then there came upon the stage the “prologue,” attired in a long black velvet cloak, false beard and a wreath of bay-leaves. It was he who introduced the play and pleaded for the audience’s attention.

At the end of the play, after the epilogue had been concluded, the next and forthcoming drama was announced to the audience. There then followed the prayers for the monarch, when all the actors knelt upon the stage. And then there came the jig. Its name suggests a merry folk dance, but its provenance goes wider. The stage jig was a comic afterpiece accompanied by dancing, lasting for approximately twenty minutes, in which some or all of the players joined. Its principal exponents were of course the comedians in the company who, like Will Kempe, gained a reputation for their extempore dancing; they turned like a “gig,” or top, and sang ribald or personal songs.

The jigs often included folk dances and ballads as well as what are euphemistically termed “figure dances” by the comedians and boys. They were characterised and criticised for their bawdiness, described variously as “a nasty bawdy Iigge” and “obscaene and light Iigges.”
¹

Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage (the auspices are rarely favourable), and the couples are in a sense unconsummated; that consummation may have been depicted in the jig. And it was a jig in which Shakespeare himself would have joined. In many instances it seems to have been the most popular part of the afternoon’s entertainment, “called for” by the impatient audience at the end of the play. The crowd could also demand the performance of a favourite jig such as “master Kemps Newe jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman” or “a ballad of Cuttinge George and his hostis.”
²

It is not at all clear when, or even whether, the performance of jigs was discontinued at the Globe. It is sometimes conjectured that Will Kempe’s departure from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 was the signal for their demise. When a playgoer, Thomas Platter, refers to a jig at the end of a performance of
Julius Caesar
at the Globe in that year he was apparently chronicling one of its last appearances. But at the close of
Twelfth Night
, written and performed in 1601, a clown is left on stage with a song. Where there is a song, there is a dance. There is in fact no real evidence to suggest that the jig came to a sudden or inglorious end in the Bankside theatre. Why remove one of the most popular entertainments that the theatre could provide? Ben Jonson may have complained about the jig but Jonson was not an enthusiast for populist theatre in any of its forms. It certainly flourished in the theatres of the northern London suburbs for many years. It seems unlikely that the “southern” theatres, catering for a similar audience, would discontinue the practice. The jig served a great purpose, not unlike that of the satyr plays which were performed at the end of the dramatic trilogies in fifth-century BC Athens. It was part of the dramatic celebration. It may seem inappropriate after the last scenes of
King Lear
or
Othello
, but there is somehow a dramatic rightness about ending any play with a song and a dance. It suggests that the drama is an aspect of human joy. The original meaning of
“mimesis,”
the word for mimicry or imitation, is “expression in dance.” It is perhaps the oldest form of human activity or human game.

The experience of the play has in fact been described as that of a ritual, in which the stage represents a heightened reality not unlike the gestures and movements of a Catholic priest at the altar. It is almost commonplace to suggest
that the Elizabethan drama, emerging to full life after the reformation of religion under the Anglican supremacy of Henry and Elizabeth, served as a substitute for the rituals of the old English faith. It fulfilled the audience’s appetite for significant action and iconic form. The Globe announced itself to be a cosmos in miniature, like the operations of the Mass. It is well known that ecclesiastical vestments were sold to the players, when their sacred-ness fell out of use, and that Puritan moralists denounced Roman Catholicism as “Mimic superstition.”
³
A company of Catholic travelling players performed
King Lear
in the households of Yorkshire recusants. Shakespearian tragedy, in particular, has some deep affinity with the experience of Catholic worship and the sacrifice of the Mass. Simon Callow, the English actor, has suggested in a modern context that “Catholicism (and its English variant) is another great manufactory of actors …”
⁴
So there is a connection. But the historical argument can be taken too far. The stage may have been inclined to ritual but, throughout the period of Shakespeare’s career, it also became an arena for the presentation of human character and of individual striving.