Renaissance Drama in Action

Martin White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134917808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Renaissance Drama in Action is a fascinating exploration of Renaissance theatre practice and staging. Covering questions of contemporary playhouse design, verse and language, staging and rehearsal practices, and acting styles, Martin White relates the characteristics of Renaissance theatre to the issues involved in staging the plays today.
This refreshingly accessible volume:
* examines the history of the plays on the English stage from the seventeenth century to the present day
* explores questions arising from reconstructions, with particular reference to the new Globe Theatre
* includes interviews with, and draws on the work and experience of modern theatre practitioners including Harriet Walter, Matthew Warchus, Trevor Nunn, Stephen Jeffreys, Adrian Noble and Helen Mirren
* includes discussions of familiar plays such as The Duchess of Malfi and 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, as well as many lesser known play-texts
Renaissance Drama in Action offers undergraduates and A-level students an invaluable guide to the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and its relationship to contemporary theatre and staging.

1
‘COMEDIES ARE WRIT TO BE SPOKEN, NOT READ’¹

Approaching the play

…a Play read, hath not half the pleasure of a play Acted: for chough it have the pleasure of ingenious Speeches, yet it wants the pleasure of Gracefull action.

Richard Baker, Theatrum Redivivum, 1662

Anyone who has read an Elizabethan, Jacobean or Caroline play knows how difficult a task it can be. For anyone preparing the play for performance the challenge is even more taxing since lines over which the eye can move swiftly and easily can present significant and time-consuming difficulties in rehearsal. When lines have to be the spoken expression of an individual character and filled out with action and interaction, each moment of the dialogue and the associated action has to be fully explored and understood: approximations and generalisations are, as Stanislavsky said, ‘the enemy of art’.²

It is precisely this exhaustive analysis that explains why working on a play-text practically (in rehearsal, onstage, or in a class/workshop) invariably teaches one very different things from reading alone, and why the conclusions of critics that are based on textual study alone can often seem wide of the mark, even downright mistaken, to those who have performed the same play. Michael Billington recounts an exchange between the critic John Wain and the actor Alan Howard:

John Wain remarked that the wooing scene in Henry V was simply a joky footnote to the play. Alan Howard, who by then had played the king countless times, picked him up on that and plotted the four or five shifts of movement within the scene. The actor, through practice, has simply spotted things the critic missed.³

In this chapter I shall try to outline what I see as some of the problems a student—or performer—might encounter (or possibly overlook) when working on an Elizabethan or Jacobean play, and guided by the experience of theatre artists, my observation of performances and my own practical experience, try to suggest ways in which these hurdles might be approached.

Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists wrote in what is in many ways to us a foreign language and any attempt to minimise or avoid the difficulties that result from this is misleading. All the actors and directors to whom I spoke or whose views I read during the course of writing this book acknowledged the challenges posed by the language. The director Sam Mendes, for example, describes the first read-through for his production of The Alchemist as ‘like trying to read a text in Swahili’, and David Troughton (preparing to play Fitzdottrel in The Devil Is an Ass) likened speaking Jonson’s words to ‘chewing beef stock cubes’.⁴ Jonson may present particular problems, but they are not unique ones, and in my own experience as a director and teacher I know that many students find understanding the words and forms of language a real stumbling-block to their enjoyment of the plays. In fact, the language is often more problematic than it might at first sight appear; the bonus is that careful study—rather than being some inward-looking ‘academic exercise’ with little bearing on performance—can lead to the pleasure of discovering exciting and frequently unforeseen possibilities of interpretation and staging.

Even the audiences at the original playhouses undoubtedly found much of what they heard unusual or complex as the playwrights used old words in new and surprising contexts, invented their own words, recovered some from their classical studies and borrowed others from contemporary languages. The demand for new words was considerable. In his Art of Reason (1573) Ralph Lever claimed that ‘there are more things than there are words to express things by’, and throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods the English language faced the challenge of expressing and describing the flood of technological, geographical and scientific discoveries. The development of a vernacular language became a matter of national pride, and writers strove to demonstrate the superiority of English; as Samuel Daniel wrote in his poem Musophilus (1599):

Or should we careless come behind the rest

In power of words, that go before in worth,

Whenas our accents, equal to the best, Is able greater wonders to bring forth.

(II. 951-4)

The playwright Thomas Heywood, in his Apology for Actors (1612), made confident claims for the role played by the theatre in refining the language:

our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaufry of many, but perfect in none, is now by this secondary means of playing continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it; so that in process, from the rude and unpolished tongue it is grown to a most perfect and composed language, and many excellent works and elaborate poems writ in the same, that many nations grow inamoured of our tongue, before despised.

(1841:52)

Certainly the language of Heywood and his contemporaries was visibly and audibly less rooted in the inflections and conventions of Middle English than that of their grandparents, even of their parents. Indeed, Elizabethan and Jacobean language soon became as different from the English spoken in the early 1500s as it is from the English we speak today.

It may seem unnecessary to make the point, but it is important that any study of the language of these plays is aware of it as spoken language. As Hamlet says to Polonius, the court will ‘hear a play tomorrow’ (2.2.530), and G.K. Hunter’s vivid image of the playhouse as a ‘rhetorical gymnasium’,⁵ where language flexed its muscles, is an apt one. Although levels of literacy improved markedly during the period, the transition from an oral culture to one dominated by the written word was still far from complete: despite the fact that London had a substantially higher literacy rate than the rest of the country, only about a third of the capital’s adult males—and presumably even fewer of its female population—could read or write. Consequently, although plays were published, some (especially following the issue of Ben Jonson’s Works in 1616) being prepared and adapted specifically for a reader, plays were generally viewed by their creators as scripts for theatrical production, to be heard and seen rather than read. The author of the Character of ‘An Excellent Actor’ (probably John Webster) underlined the importance of the spoken word:

Sit in a full Theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the Actor is the centre [emphasis added].⁶

This strikes me as a perfect image of the Elizabethan and Jacobean play-house: the actor—the focal point of any performance in any period—at the centre of a circle of listeners. Consequently, playwrights and audiences alike were alert to the skill actors displayed (or did not) in delivering their lines to the best advantage. In the Preface to his tragi-comedy The Devil’s Law Case (published 1623), Webster wrote of his debt to the actors:

A great part of the grace of this (I confess) lay in action; yet can no action ever be gracious, where the decency of language, and ingenious structure of the scene, arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.

(14-17)

John Orrell has argued that ‘the Globe was an acoustical auditorium, intended to serve the word and the ear more fully than the image and the eye’ (Orrell 1983:140). Although this deliberately and provocatively understates the impact of the playhouse’s decoration and the importance of visual stage languages (such as an individual actor’s posture and gesture, stage groupings, costume, various elements of the permanent stage structure, portable scenic elements), Professor Orrell is right to stress the centrality of spoken language, and the recreation of the Globe at the International Shakespeare Centre on the South Bank of the Thames (despite flight paths and river traffic), a project in which Orrell has played a significant role, allows us to get at least some sense of the original playhouse’s acoustics.⁷ The work done so far has produced predominantly favourable responses to this aspect of the reconstruction (though on rainy days, Globe 3’s Artistic Director Mark Rylance has observed, the actors need to project with much greater force). But what performances there cannot demonstrate (except, perhaps, at occasional ‘authentic’ presentations) is the difference in the actual sound made by the voices of Elizabethan actors and their modern counterparts. Peter Hall, for example, who describes Elizabethan pronunciation as ‘like Belfast crossed with Devon’, notes that:

the resonance and assonance of Shakespeare’s text were richer and more complex than the clipped grey sounds of modern English. When I am preparing a Shakespeare play, I still mutter the text to myself in Elizabethan. It reveals the shapes and colours. It always makes the words wittier.

(1993:76)

Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company currently perform Shakespeare’s plays in often broad, generally northern, accents, and so strictly speaking do not reproduce ‘Elizabethan’ English. Nevertheless, they have challenged the notion that there is a particular ‘voice’ for classic plays (still often characterised, unfairly and quite wrongly, as an ‘RSC voice) and restored much of the original linguistic and vocal energy to performances of the plays, especially as their vocal approach is matched by elements of theatre practice that are in tune with the original expectations and resources of Elizabethan and Jacobean production teams (Holland 1994 and 1995). Writing of Northern Broadsides’ production of Romeo and Juliet, for example, directed by Tim Supple, and staged in a disused viaduct beneath an old Halifax mill, Robert Butler commented:

Northern Broadsides have a vigorous aesthetic, a way of doing Shakespeare that is revelatory. Direction and design are kept to a minimum. There are very few lighting cues. The audience sit on two sides facing one another. The actors wear modern dress, but not the sort of stereotypical clothes that prejudge character. Quick and unsentimental, they never slow up the verse with naturalistic acting, which would duplicate emotions that are self-evident. They trust the text, carry us along with the rhythm of the verse, and, by making the arguments really matter, they transport us effortlessly from the gloom of the viaduct to the heat of Verona…this production restores the thrill of narrative: the rapid, jostling succession of events that throws up its own surprises. Shakespeare’s promised ‘two hours’ traffic’ here comes in at a miraculous 2 hours 10 minutes.

(Independent on Sunday, 13 October 1996, p. 12).

When we speak (and sometimes when we read) a text, a number of obstacles stand in our way. We may initially be floored by syntactical complexity.

Pray you,

Since doubting things go ill often hurts more

Than to be sure they do—for certainties

Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing,

The remedy then born—discover to me

What both you spur and stop.

(Cymbeline, 1.6.95–9)

Changes in pronunciation often make puns (such as ‘Do you smell a fault’, which would to its original audience have been indistinguishable from ‘Do you smell a fart’—and so made more sense of the line (King Lear, 1.1.13)) and rhymes (such as in ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind/Thou art not so unkind…’ (As You Like It, 2.7.174–5)) seem laboured (or even, as in the King Lear example, disappear). Despite the gradual acceptance in the period of standard grammatical practices, different conventions of word order produce for us easily misunderstood sentences, such as in the following speech from Ford’s The Broken Heart (1633):

Orgilus,

Take heed thou hast not, under our integrity,

Shrouded unlawful plots; our mortal eyes

Pierce not the secrets of your heart, the gods

Are only privy to them.

(3.1.8–12)

Speaking these lines aloud reveals the particular difficulty of making the word only apply to the gods rather than sounding as if it is defining privy. To many in Ford’s audience, the Latinate sentence structure would no doubt have been familiar (and appropriate to the play’s classical setting), but the modern actor will not find it so straightforward.

For performers and audiences, however, who unlike readers do not have access to footnotes, the most obvious—and most regularly encountered—problems concern vocabulary. It has been estimated that over 10,000 new words were introduced between 1550 and 1650, of which Shakespeare’s share has been reckoned to be anything from 600 to 2,000 (including many words in common use today, such as gloomy, radiant, leapfrog, frugal, accommodation, admirable, educate, generous and tranquil). John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, first performed at Paul’s playhouse in 1599, which contains on average a new word every fourteen lines, may be an extreme case of word-coining (and one much pilloried by Jonson) but it derives from a generally shared impulse among contemporary writers. There was no English dictionary until 1604 (Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall) and so it is not always easy to assess to what extent an audience member actually registered that a word was new, as opposed simply to being unknown to him or her individually. Many of Marston’s words—such as belkt, firking, gerne, houts, loofe, neakes, pantable, pere-gal, sliftred, spangs, surquedries, tyer, wimble—must surely have struck the audience as unusual, but just in case they didn’t, Marston has a character in the play,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read’: approaching the play
• 2 ‘The life of these things consists in action’: staging the play
• 3 ‘Speeches well pronounced, with action lively framed’: performing the play
• 4 Palaces of pleasure: outdoor playing spaces and theatre practice
• 5 Chambers of demonstrations: indoor playing spaces and theatre practice
• 6 ‘Poison in jest’: some comic (ir)resolutions
• 7 ‘A good play gone wrong’: Renaissance drama in action 1642–1997
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index