Performing Shakespeare

Preparation, Rehearsal, Performance

Oliver Ford Davies

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788502030
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Actuación y audiciones

An authoritative, hands-on guide through the practical challenges involved in performing Shakespeare.

Drawing on a lifetime's experience of playing Shakespearean roles, Oliver Ford Davies offers practical advice to actors, directors and drama students on a wide variety of scenes, characters, speeches and individual lines from almost every one of the plays.

The three core sections of Performing Shakespeare take us through the whole process of Preparation, Rehearsal and Performance, preceded by discussions of the Elizabethan actor and Shakespeare's language.

Also included are revealing interviews with other notable Shakespearean actors including Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Harriet Walter, Simon Russell Beale and Juliet Stevenson.

'an invaluable guide to those who act and to all those who wish to gain deeper insights into the performance of Shakespeare's plays' - Stanley Wells from his Foreword

'terrific... should be read by anyone who wants to understand more about the Bard, his players, his times and today's interpretations of his stupendous creations... a great book for anyone who loves the theatre' - Observer

'it is hard to offer enough praise to this book... a tremendous knowledge of the canon... the writing is always practical and never dry or dull... might become definitive guidance for many who wish to follow in the author's footsteps' - British Theatre Guide

1

THE ELIZABETHAN ACTOR

An actor’s art can die, and live to act a second part.

1623 folio

Why bother with what actors did four hundred years ago? If you feel this strongly, skip this chapter, but I think you will be missing a valuable source of help. Shakespeare was an acting member of a permanent company – unlike, say, Congreve, Wilde or Stoppard – and wrote for a particular theatre, audience and group of actors. Hard evidence is scanty, but there are signs that he tailored his plays to suit his chosen stages and company of actors. To have some knowledge of the Elizabethan stage must be a help in understanding how to interpret and perform the plays.

THE ROOTS OF ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

The tradition of acting in plays went back many centuries, and by the sixteenth century took several forms. There were various kinds of religious plays – morality plays, saint plays and biblical plays – promoted by towns and parishes and performed by local amateurs, sometimes supplemented by travelling actors we might call semi-professional. The most ambitious of these were the mystery cycles, presented by the great civic authorities, often with elaborate stage effects. But Catholic doctrine was inevitably an integral part of these scripts, and so they increasingly fell foul of both the state and local Protestant authorities. The last York cycle was performed in 1575, the Coventry cycle in 1579, and in 1581 the government prohibited them altogether. The morality tradition lived on, however, and can be seen in Marlowe’s Good and Bad Angels in Dr Faustus, and in Shakespeare’s Father and Son who flank Henry VI after the Battle of Towton.

There was a strong tradition of touring players, entertainers and minstrels – would-be professionals who could turn their hands to other things when times were hard. Civic authorities also funded plays and entertainments, either based on local figures such as Robin Hood or to celebrate the various Christian festivities. Schools and universities were active in promoting drama, because public speaking and the art of rhetoric were fundamental to Tudor education. There was a tradition of boy choristers performing at court and in aristocratic households, often in large-cast plays with music that had religious or political agendas. In 1576 the Chapel Children moved to a theatre in Blackfriars and were the predecessors of Hamlet’s ‘eyrie of children, little eyases’, strong competition for the adult companies. Finally there were acting companies attached to the court and aristocratic households. Encouraged by Henrys VII and VIII a new theatrical tradition emerged after 1500, rooted in the emerging tide of humanism. These ‘interludes’ were classically inspired allegories like John Skelton’s Magnificence (1515–18) or romantic comedies such as Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1530?). They contained characters, themes, and an emphasis on internal moral struggle that greatly influenced Elizabethan playwrights. These early Tudor household players were at first part-timers, with other household and musical duties. Gradually they formed more independent groups, touring a great deal, but always under the umbrella of aristocratic patronage. This patronage enabled them to travel unhindered by the Elizabethan proclamations against wandering vagabonds, as well as giving them some protection at court and in government; in return their patron gained both prestige and entertainment at his various feasts and gatherings. In the 1570s and 1580s there were about a dozen such troupes. By 1594, as a result of amalgamations, the main permanent troupes were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men based at the Theatre in Shoreditch, the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Rose in Southwark, and the Queen’s Men formed in 1583 to tour and make court appearances.¹

Shakespeare therefore could have become hooked on theatre from many different sources. He would have studied rhetoric and acted in plays at the King’s New School in Stratford. He would have seen the many touring companies which his father, as town bailiff in 1569, had to license as well as attending the first performance. He could have seen the entertainments at the Queen’s visit to nearby Kenilworth in 1575, and he might even have seen the last Coventry mystery cycle when he was fifteen. If he was the ‘William Shakeshafte’, who was working in 1581 as a tutor in Lancashire, he would have come into contact with Lord Strange’s acting company when they toured there, and that might have given him the patronage that took him to London some time after 1585 (when his last, twin children were born) and propelled him into acting and writing at both the Theatre and the Rose by 1590. There is some speculation that he may have joined the Queen’s Men when they visited Stratford in 1587, shortly after the murder of one of their players, William Knell. His acting skills could therefore have been honed at school, in local festivities, and through a connection with one of the touring companies. All this is conjecture . . . but at the same time, Shakespeare’s extraordinary theatrical talent must have been nurtured somewhere.

THE ACTORS

We have the names of nearly a thousand actors between 1560 and 1640. Where did they all come from? Some were entertainers – minstrels, jugglers, tumblers like Richard Tarlton – or comedians and dancers of jigs, like Will Kemp who played Dogberry and was probably the first Falstaff. Some actors were tradesmen, from goldsmiths to butchers, who abandoned the professions their fathers had carved out for them. Theatrical dynasties were already being established. Richard Burbage (1568–1619), Shakespeare’s star actor, followed his father on to the stage and was acclaimed by the age of sixteen. The female parts were played by boys, who were usually apprenticed from the age of ten upwards to an individual player and maintained by him. John Heminges apprenticed ten such through his long career. In their late teens, when they could no longer speak in a convincingly high register, they might graduate to male parts (see here). Then there must have been those who simply hung around the theatres doing odd jobs, hoping to worm their way into playing. If Shakespeare arrived from Stratford with no professional experience he may have been among those hopefuls (one tradition has him holding horses for visiting gentry).²

We have no record of how actors were auditioned or assessed. Some bought a share in a company: in the 1590s £50 seems to have been the going rate, and this is what Shakespeare paid in 1594 when he passed from Lord Strange’s company into the newly re-formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. We don’t know how he raised such a large sum (many thousands in modern terms). It may have been through an aristocratic patron like the Earl of Southampton, but it more likely reflects the success of his early plays and of his poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. By 1594, when he was thirty, he had already written the three Henry VIs, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and possibly The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost. The eight ‘sharers’ of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (all of whom were actors in the company) provided capital which helped buy plays, costumes and other equipment, and pay the rent. In return they took a cut of box-office takings. They needed to hire staff as musicians, stage-keepers, book-keepers, property makers, etc., and also as performers. Shakespeare’s plays needed between twelve and sixteen actors, so the eight sharers and perhaps three boys would need to hire several men to make up the cast, probably doubling and trebling the smaller parts. Hired men were usually paid ten shillings a week in London and five shillings on tour. The stage may have been an exclusively male world, but not the theatre at large. Women were engaged in making costumes, hats and properties, and as dressers, hairdressers, doorkeepers, ticket-sellers, vendors of food, drink and tobacco – and most important for profligate actors, as pawn-brokers.³ It is also possible that they wrote, or co-wrote, plays under male pseudonyms.

The Chamberlain’s Men thought of themselves as a ‘brotherhood’, and remained very loyal to their company. They intermarried, lent one another money, and certainly while Shakespeare and Burbage were alive there seems to have been little internal discord. Burbage was acknowledged their star and played Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Lear and other leads until his death in 1619. Will Kemp was their first star comic, and after he left the company in 1599 Robert Armin probably played Feste and the other professional fools. We know the names of almost all the other actors, but we have no reliable guide to what they played. Contemporary accounts almost never single out individual actors, so although a tradition has grown up that Shakespeare had no great talent as a performer, there is little evidence either way. He may have been the great Claudius or Iago of his day, or he may have played a line of parts that included, for example, Benvolio, Grumio, Gaunt, Polonius and Duncan.⁴ It’s possible that he retired as an actor sometime after 1603, certainly by 1611, but it’s significant that he remained an actor into his 40s, when other playwrights like Ben Jonson and Anthony Munday gave up performing as soon as they could. Perhaps the success of Hamlet was partly due to the author keeping an eye on everything on stage as the Ghost, Polonius or the Gravedigger – or possibly all three?

THE THEATRES

The Red Lion (1567) in Stepney is the first recorded London theatre, though it was almost certainly a converted inn and survived for only a few months. James Burbage, Richard’s father, constructed the first purpose-built theatre in 1576, called simply the Theatre, and it was here in Shoreditch that many of Shakespeare’s early plays, like Romeo and Juliet, were first seen. His very first plays, like 1 Henry VI, were probably presented at the Rose, built by Philip Henslowe in Southwark in 1587. All these theatres were built in the ‘liberties’ outside the City boundaries, because rents were cheaper and there was no interference from mayoral regulations or city neighbours.

In 1596 Burbage converted part of the old Blackfriars monastery into a small indoor theatre for the Chamberlain’s Men when their lease on the Theatre ran out in 1597. Unfortunately a local petition about traffic, noise and undesirables caused the privy council to forbid its adult use, and it reverted to a more amenable boys’ company. After a difficult two years hiring other venues the company took the timbers from the Theatre – much to the landlord’s fury – across the river, and used them to build the Globe close to the Rose in Southwark. It’s intriguing to think that if Burbage’s original Blackfriars scheme had succeeded, the Globe might never have been built, and all Shakespeare’s mature work would have been first presented in an intimate indoor theatre (66 by 46 feet, with a 30-foot-wide end-on stage), and might have taken a somewhat different form.⁵

The Globe opened in 1599 and was, however, a great success. Using knowledge gained at the Theatre and the Rose, the company devised an extremely flexible space. The outer walls were probably hexagonal, about 100 feet in diameter and 36 feet high. The inner walls afforded a depth of 12 feet for three levels of tiered benches topped by a thatched roof (the cause of the 1613 fire). The stage jutted out into the central yard, where the groundlings could partly surround it. If it was similar to the smaller Fortune, built the following year, it had a stage 43 feet wide by 27 ½ feet deep and about 5 feet high. This stage was large enough for leading players to stand centre, and commentators (clowns or characters like Iago) to prowl the edges making quips and asides to the audience. Recent discoveries from the foundations of the Rose suggest that its stage was not a simple rectangle, but tapered from 36 feet to 26 feet at the front and was only 15 feet deep. The problems of how to keep actors apart and how to make one scene flow into another were solved with great ingenuity. At the back of the stage was a central ‘discovery space’ where, behind a curtain, characters could be revealed – Polonius eavesdropping perhaps, or Miranda and Ferdinand playing chess. On either side were doors, enabling characters to enter and exit ‘severally’. Behind was the dressing room, or ‘tiring house’. Above on a second level was a gallery, divided into sections, which could serve for Juliet’s balcony and characters ‘aloft’, probably housed the musicians (viol, lute, oboe and trumpets), and provided some special seating for ‘lords’ at a shilling a time (suggesting that the actors may have been conscious that they were playing to some extent in the round). Above that was a window, known as the ‘top’, from which Brabantio might look out or Prospero spy ‘invisible’. At the back of this highest level was a room where storm and other effects could be created (cannon-balls rolling round a trough to create thunder).

A canopy covered part of the acting area, with the painted ‘Heavens’ on its underside, which were ‘hung with black’ for tragedy. This canopy was probably supported by two pillars, their existence, position and width still a matter of much dispute, which could serve as trees or places to hide. In the stage floor was a trap, which could have provided a prison for Barnardine or a grave for Ophelia. There was cellarage below the stage for Hamlet’s ‘old mole’ to make his groans. Various large props – beds, thrones, tables – could be pushed on by attendants, but essentially word and action rather than scenery conveyed a sense of place. Shakespeare was writing specifically for this space, which imposed itself on both the writing and the performance of the plays. His stage directions make it clear that the scene was both the prescribed location and the Globe. The audience were never in any doubt that they were in a theatre.

The company shareholders became the owners (‘householders’) of the Globe. English actors had never owned their own building before, and sadly never would again on the same principles of commonwealth. It was probably the most cooperative and democratic organisation of its time. Decisions about repertoire, casting and finance were taken collectively by the sharers – something modern actors might ponder on. When James I came to the throne in 1603, he decided to take all the companies under royal patronage. The Chamberlain’s became the King’s Men, the Admiral’s Prince Henry’s Men and the recently established Worcester’s the Queen’s Men. The number of productions presented at court greatly increased, as did royal payments. The sharers in the King’s Men became Grooms of the Chamber, a sharp rise in social rank, though it could involve standing around at court to swell the numbers when foreign ambassadors needed impressing. Shakespeare’s company was now recognised both at home and abroad as the finest in the land.

In 1608 the company finally got hold of the Blackfriars Theatre (the boys’ company had put on a politically contentious play that had offended James I). And from the following year the King’s Men began to perform at the Blackfriars in winter and the Globe in summer, thereby extending their season and becoming less dependent on touring. Blackfriars only seated 600, against the Globe’s 2–3,000, but its price range was sixpence to two shillings and sixpence, while most of the Globe’s audience only paid one penny standing and up to sixpence seated (at a time when an artisan might earn a shilling a week and a schoolmaster eight shillings). Blackfriars therefore had a potentially bigger take (in 1612 it took £1,000 more a season than the Globe); it was not dependent on the weather; and the acting could be subtler, so that it gradually became the company’s preferred venue. Shakespeare’s final plays were probably written for this smaller stage. High society certainly approved, as the prices made the venue more exclusive, women felt safer, and, unlike the Globe, the more you paid, the closer you were to the stage. In the 1630s Queen Henrietta Maria paid four private visits – pace the film Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth wouldn’t have been seen dead in a common playhouse.⁶

By 1610 Shakespeare was a rich man. His share of the rents and box office of the two theatres must have yielded him over £150 p.a. With payment for the two plays a year, which he wrote on average for the company, and rents and tithes round Stratford worth £80, his total income was not far short of £300 p.a. This was not wealth to compare with an aristocrat at £3,000 p.a., or even Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), star of the Admiral’s Men and shrewd property investor, who eventually bought the manor of Dulwich for £10,000. But in modern terms it certainly put Shakespeare’s income into six figures.

REPERTOIRE, CASTING AND TOURING

In the 1590s a company might put on thirty to forty plays in a season (late summer till spring, with a six-week break during Lent), of which ove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Dedication
• FOREWORD by Stanley Wells
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE ELIZABETHAN ACTOR
• 2 SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE
• 3 PREPARATION
• 4 REHEARSAL
• 5 PERFORMANCE
• APPENDIXES
• NOTES ON SOURCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• About the Author
• Copyright