Why There You Touched the Life of Our Designe
The repertoire of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe was extensive and various. Quite apart from Shakespeare’s plays they seemed to have owned about one hundred other dramas from London Prodigal and The Fair Maid of Bristol. In all of these plays, it is likely that Shakespeare played his part. Since an average of fifteen new plays were performed each year, the schedule of business was extremely tight. The records of the Globe have not survived but related material from the Rose suggests that the players there gave one hundred and fifty performances of thirty separate plays during one winter season. In any week a different play was performed each afternoon. Nothing can better capture the vitality and excitement of the new medium.
There was a tested procedure for the production of these new plays. The authors would approach the playhouse with a skeleton narrative for a new play. On this basis of this scenario, the playhouse might commission the drama, with a series of part payments followed by the finished product. At the time of its final delivery, the actors would have met in order to listen to the playwright reading out the entire text. It may have been at this juncture that the “book-keeper” prepare a “plot” or outline of the action in which the name of the actors, the props required and stage noises were needed. But by far the most important function of the “plot” was to first list the sequence of entries, and thus the available resources and numbers of the company. One task was to carefully allot the roles to individual actors so that “doubling” (one actor taking two parts_ became easily achieved. The player, however skilled, couldn’t be in two places on the same stage. The plot was divided into individual scenes by the simple expedient of a line ruled across the various columns, and each scene began with the direction “Enter”.
A member of the company 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 seventeen feet in length and six 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 on stage. The author’s own stage-directions were occasionally revised. His vision was no longer important and it had become a collective reality.
It seems likely that the “book-keeper” also superintended the rehearsals of the play and also acted as a prompter during the performance itself. The prompter did not perform his modern task of whispering lines to an actor who was “out”. We may only conclude that the book-keeper was sometimes also the prompter, and sometimes not. The player himself was assisted neither by prompter nor by book-keeper. Once he was on the stage he relied upon his own resources and his own professionalism 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 the Master of the Revels in Clerkenwell for possible alteration and censorship. For a fee, which rose steadily through the years from seven shillings to one pound, the Master licensed each drama for public performance. It was an important document 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. 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. Blasphemy was of course forbidden. One manuscript marked by the command to remove “Oathes, prophaness and publick Ribaldry.” Evidence 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 revivals, occurred in the morning. There was no director in the contemporary sense but the bookkeeper may have played that role in many productions. There is a strong possibility 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 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.” This may have been a misunderstanding, so common in foreign reports of sixteenth-century London since it’s unlikely that an eminent actor would have endured direction from a young or minor playwright. But it would have been with different with Shakespeare. They were not directed, they were “instructed”.
The actors had scrolls of their own lines, but no complete script. They memorised or partially 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. At this point, 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 and provided the actor with an opportunity to display his versatility. There were occasions when the audience also revelled in “doubling”. When an actor dies on stage as one character, but then emerges as another, acted as a 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 of their director. In contrast, the Elizabethan actor suggested lines, or ways of delivering lines, and may have even helped invent new scenes to assist in the progress the plot. 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. In the sixteenth century, a well understood set of stage conventions which helped the process of rehearsal; there were principles of movement and gesture that the good actor would have known instinctively. 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.
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