My friends over at nosweatshakespeare and I are trading posts today. Read Warren's truly fantastic look at the life of a Shakespearean actor back when these plays were hot off the quill, then head over there to read my nonsensical ramblings about OTHELLO. Personally, I love this post, as it bears a great deal of importance for an upcoming novel of mine. So please give a warm Verona welcome to Warren King:
Performing Shakespeare in Elizabethan Times
In his book The Empty Space, the English theatre director, Peter Brook suggests that if professional musicians were to perform to the same standard as professional actors, they would be booed off the stage. It’s not uncommon, he says, for actors with little training and experience to perform on the stage, whereas musicians undergo years of training and learning about their craft. We don’t expect that kind of expertise, accuracy and precision from actors, although we can be drawn in by them and have a satisfactory theatrical experience as they give a naturalistic performance, interpreting their characters and exploiting the language for the meaning they wish to bring out.
Modern actors are given a part to play, they’re provided with a printed copy of the text, they get to know the play as a whole, and the parts of the other actors; they have substantial rehearsal periods and they are encouraged to interpret their role. Their performance is supported by a team of designers, voice trainers, directors and all the other off-stage personnel that modern performances require. It was very different for Shakespeare and Elizabethan actors.
The Elizabethan theatre was big business and those actors fortunate enough to be employed by the most popular London theatres became rich. They worked very hard though. There were usually six performances every week and the actors would perform in all of them, week after week, learning their parts and going on to the stage with minimal rehearsal time, sometimes none at all. Each actor would often have to perform more than one part playing, for example, Banquo in Macbeth and then Macduff later. He may also play some character like the doctor, and a serving man as well.
None of that could be done in our theatres today. So how was it done in Shakespeare’s time? Perhaps the greatest skill required of an actor was to learn his lines quickly. Most of his training involved that, and mastering stock movements and positions, which were used by all the characters, so unless there were special circumstances he knew exactly how to move and where to stand without being instructed every time. He was given strips containing his lines, cut out of a fair copy of the text, sometimes with one or two-word cues and he had to set about learning them, sometimes two or three roles in a play and another handful of roles in the play he had to perform the next day.
The authors also worked very fast, which we can see by glancing at the long lists of surviving plays by Elizabethan playwrights. Their actual scripts were known as ‘foul papers’ and they sold them to the theatre owners who had two ‘fair copies’ made by scribes. One was cut into strips for the actors and the other was given to the ‘book-holder,’ who was the Elizabethan equivalent of the modern director. He was a combination of stage manager and director. His fair copy was also known as the ‘prompt book.’ And he would annotate it with rough stage directions and special movements that he may want to use. He would sometimes come on to the stage before the performance and deliver a prologue such as the one in Romeo and Juliet. He would sit somewhere where the actors could hear him and prompt them if they forgot their lines, and he would also tell actors where to stand if they didn’t know. The plays were never printed because there was the danger that another theatre company would steal a play and perform it. So there was only that one carefully guarded copy. The foul papers and the fair copies were all the property of the theatre. That is why we have very few fair copies today, and very few foul papers have survived – certainly none of Shakespeare’s
The actor’s job was to deliver the lines: the language was the main interest. If we consider the language of one of Shakespeare’s plays it’s evident that all the meaning and emotions are contained there, as well as the descriptions of the settings. The actor had to speak the lines clearly and loudly and the audience would do the rest. The movements were all conventions and the audience knew them too. The words ‘audience’ and ‘auditorium’ refer to hearing: seeing was not as important. The theatre-goers with the best view, the goundlings, paid the least: the most expensive seats were actually at the back of the stage behind the actors, where those wealthy patrons could not see as well as the groundlings but they had the best access to the sound.
So there was no such thing as ‘acting’ in the sense that we understand it today. The actors were called ‘players,’ which indicates that they were the operators of the play. We have some insight into what it was like in Hamlet, where Hamlet instructs the visiting players to play it straight, without trying to interpret the words with individual gestures and egocentric attention seeking. Audiences were more sophisticated in the reception of plays than we are today. That may sound strange, given the four centuries of development between then and now, but they were in tune with such things as multiple meanings in poetry, puns, in-jokes, satire and so on. They were listening for all those things and didn’t need the distraction of the antics of actors. The language of Elizabethan plays is rich, and packed with conventions that we are not even aware of but that Elizabethan audiences expected when they attended a play. Shakespeare knew that and that’s one of the reasons that his plays were particularly popular and why he made so much money out of his craft. During the period in which he was working the population of London was about twenty thousand and there were twenty-two theatres, all packed every day. London had none of the innumerable other spectator events that we enjoy today (apart from bear baiting, which was also very popular), and many of London’s inhabitants attended the theatre several times a week. Playwrights and players were among the hardest-working people in London.
Shakespeare gives us a picture of a rehearsal for a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The rustics are gathered in a clearing in the wood. It is something of a spoof, where Shakespeare is sending the process up. But certain things are clear. Peter Quince is the book-holder. He’s dealing with a group of inexperienced amateurs and he spends most of the time trying to curb the egotism of Bottom, who wants to play all the parts and act them out in an inappropriate dramatic way. Quince is concerned throughout with the language, how the text will be written, and that it should be spoken clearly. Flute has difficulty in speaking his lines and Quince lectures him about it.
If we could go back in time and attend a performance of, shall we say, King Lear, we would be disappointed because we would think the acting is terrible, and there would be very little of what we expect today. If an Elizabethan theatre enthusiast were to attend a modern performance he would not make much of it. Although the actors would be speaking in Elizabethan English he would not be able to make head or tail of it as the actors strove to interpret it for the audience. And he would be distracted by all the action and the theatrical devices without which we would find the production inadequate.
By Warren King, Nosweatshakespeare.com
