ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
Making Shakespeare
Making Shakespeare offers a lively introduction to the major
issues of stage and printing history, whilst also raising
questions about what a ‘Shakespeare play’ actually is.
Tiffany Stern reveals how London, the theatre, the actors
and the way in which the plays were written and printed all
affect the ‘Shakespeare’ that we now read. Concentrating on the
instability and fluidity of Shakespeare’s texts, her book
discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first
composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and
identifies traces of the production system in the plays that we
read. She argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have
come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts
from which they emerged, being shaped by, for example, the
way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and
music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by
the playhouses and printers.
Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and
perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to
issues of stage and page. A refreshingly clear, accessible read,
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this book will allow even those with no expert knowledge to
begin to contextualise Shakespeare’s plays for themselves, in
ways both old and new.
Tiffany Stern is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University.
Her previous publications include Rehearsal from Shakespeare
to Sheridan (2000) and, with Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in
Parts (2005). She has edited King Leir, is editing Sheridan’s
Rivals, and is particularly interested in the way theatrical
performance impacts on the writing and revision of plays.
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ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
It is more than twenty years since the New Accents series
helped to establish ‘theory’ as a fundamental and continuing
feature of the study of literature at the undergraduate level.
Since then, the need for short, powerful ‘cutting edge’ accounts
of and comments on new developments has increased sharply.
In the case of Shakespeare, books with this sort of focus have
not been readily available. Accents on Shakespeare aims to
supply them.
Accents on Shakespeare volumes will either ‘apply’
theory, or broaden and adapt it in order to connect with concrete
teaching concerns. In the process, they will also reflect and
engage with the major developments in Shakespeare studies of
the last ten years.
The series will lead as well as follow. In pursuit of this goal
it will be a two-tiered series. In addition to affordable,
‘adoptable’ titles aimed at modular undergraduate courses, it
will include a number of research-based books. Spirited and
committed, these second-tier volumes advocate radical change
rather than stolidly reinforcing the status quo.
IN THE SAME SERIES
Shakespeare and Appropriation
Edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer
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Shakespeare Without Women
Dympna Callaghan
Philosophical Shakespeares
Edited by John J. Joughin
Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium
Edited by Hugh Grady
Marxist Shakespeares
Edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow
Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis
Philip Armstrong
Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of
Modernity
Edited by Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie
Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage
Sarah Werner
Shame in Shakespeare
Ewan Fernie
The Sound of Shakespeare
Wes Folkerth
Shakespeare in the Present
Terence Hawkes
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Making Shakespeare
From stage to page
TIFFANY STERN
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First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2004 Tiffany Stern
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stern, Tiffany.
Making Shakespeare : the pressures of stage to page / Tiffany Stern.
p. cm. – (Accents on Shakespeare) Includes bibliographical references and
index.
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism, Textual. 2. Shakespeare, William,
1564–1616 – Stage history. 3. Transmission of texts – England – History. 4.
Drama – Editing – History. I. Title. II. Series.
PR3071.S67 2004
822.3’3–dc22
2003017129
ISBN 0-203-62548-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-34537-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–31965–X (pb)
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ISBN 0–415–31964–1 (hb)
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To my brother Jonty
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Contents
List of illustrations
General editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
Textual note
1
Prologue
2
Text, Playhouse and London
3
Additions, Emendations and Revisions
4
Rehearsal, Performance and Plays
5
Props, Music and Stage Directions
6
Prologues, Songs and Actors’ Parts
7
From Stage to Printing House
8
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography and further reading
Index
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Illustrations
2.1 Claus Jan Visscher, Long View of London (1616)
2.2 Swan Theatre, by Johannes de Witt, as copied by Aernout
van Buchel, c. 1596
2.3 Illustration from the title page to Francis Kirkman’s The
Wits, or, Sport upon Sport (1673)
4.1 Illustration from the title page to William Kempe’s Kemp’s
Nine Daies Wonder (1600)
4.2 Illustration from the title page to Robert Armin’s The
History of the Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609)
5.1 Illustration from the title page to Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy (1615)
5.2 Illustration from the title page to Christopher Marlowe’s
The Tragicall History of the life and Death of Doctor
Faustus (1631)
5.3 Woodcut illustration accompanying ballad of The
Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus (c.
1655–65)
5.4 Henry Peacham (?), drawing from William Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus (? 1595)
7.1 Reproduction of the layout of Moxon’s lower type case
Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683)
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General Editor’s Preface
In our time, the field of literary studies has rarely been a
settled, tranquil place. Indeed, for over two decades, the clash
of opposed theories, prejudices and points of view has made it
more of a battlefield. Echoing across its most beleaguered
terrain, the student’s weary complaint ‘Why can’t I just pick up
Shakespeare’s plays and read them?’ seems to demand a
sympathetic response.
Nevertheless, we know that modern spectacles will always
impose their own particular characteristics on the vision of
those who unthinkingly don them. This must mean, at the very
least, that an apparently simple confrontation with, or pious
contemplation of, the text of a four-hundred-year-old play can
scarcely supply the grounding for an adequate response to its
complex demands. For this reason, a transfer of emphasis from
‘text’ towards ‘context’ has increasingly been the concern of
critics and scholars since the Second World War: a tendency
that has perhaps reached its climax in more recent movements
such as ‘New Historicism’ or ‘Cultural Materialism’.
A consideration of the conditions – social, political, or
economic – within which the play came to exist, from which it
derives and to which it speaks will certainly make legitimate
demands on the attention of any well-prepared student
nowadays. Of course, the serious pursuit of those interests will
also inevitably start to undermine ancient and inherited
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prejudices, such as the supposed distinction between
‘foreground’ and ‘background’ in literary studies. And even the
slightest awareness of the pressures of gender or of race, or the
most cursory glance at the role played by that strange creature
‘Shakespeare’ in our cultural politics, will reinforce a similar
turn towards questions that sometimes appear scandalously
‘non-literary’. It seems clear that very different and unsettling
notions of the ways in which literature might be addressed can
hardly be avoided. The worrying truth is that nobody can just
pick up Shakespeare’s plays and read them. Perhaps – even
more worrying – they never could.
The aim of Accents on Shakespeare is to encourage students
and teachers to explore the implications of this situation by
means of an engagement with the major developments in
Shakespeare studies over recent years. It will offer a continuing
and challenging reflection on those ideas through a series of
multi- and single-author books which will also supply the basis
for adapting or augmenting them in the light of changing
concerns.
Accents on Shakespeare also intends to lead as well as
follow. In pursuit of this goal, the series will operate on more
than one level. In addition to titles aimed at modular
undergraduate courses, it will include a number of books
embodying polemical, strongly argued cases aimed at
expanding the horizons of a specific aspect of the subject and at
challenging the preconceptions on which it is based. These
volumes will not be learned ‘monographs’ in any traditional
sense. They will, it is hoped, offer a platform for the work of
the liveliest younger scholars and teachers at their most
outspoken and provocative. Committed and contentious, they
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will be reporting from the forefront of current critical activity
and will have something new to say. The fact that each book in
the series promises a Shakespeare inflected in terms of a
specific urgency should ensure that, in the present as in the
recent past, the accent will be on change.
Terence Hawkes
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Acknowledgements
Making Shakespeare started life as a series of lectures given to
the English Faculty at Oxford. I am indebted to the students
who attended those lectures – particularly Pascale Aebischer,
Paige Newmark and Pierre Hecker – whose probing questions
have become part of what this book is about. To Merton
College, Oxford, I am deeply grateful for the Junior Research
Fellowship that enabled me to embark on this project; Clare
Hall, Cambridge, kindly provided the Visiting Fellowship that
enabled me to complete it. Most of all I thank my current
institution, Oxford Brookes University, which generously
granted me leave to write up.
I have benefited enormously from the assistance of Gareth
Mann and Tracey Sowerby, who took time out from their own
work to read mine; their intelligence and historical acumen
rescued me from countless errors. Ralph Hanna, an astute and
sagacious friend – as well as an excellent drinking companion –
gave thoroughly helpful criticism and asked the questions that
needed to be asked. I cannot do enough justice to Gordon
McMullan, David Scott Kastan and Andrew Gurr who read
chapters sent to them at short notice; their help, criticism, and
attentive reading has improved the book in countless ways; its
errors are, of course, my own. Last, but by no means least,
Terence Hawkes has been a tremendously supportive and
encouraging general editor, and a wise, diligent and thoughtful
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reader.
The staffs of the Cambridge University Library, the British
Library, the Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare
Library have all been extremely helpful; the assistance I have
received from the staff at the Bodleian, who have put up
uncomplainingly with my daily demands, has been invaluable.
The following libraries and people allowed me to reproduce
images from their collections: Guildhall Library, Corporation
of London (2.1); Library of the Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht (2.2);
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (2.3; 5.1); the
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (4.1); the Huntington
Library, San Marino, California (4.2; 5.2); the British Library
(5.3); the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster,
Wiltshire (5.4); David Bolton (7.1).
The work and friendship of colleagues across the globe has
informed this book in numerous ways. Peter Holland has, from
the first, been an inspiration; Alan Dessen does not know how
important his email, sent to me in Poland, really was – he
deserves very special thanks for his encouragement and great
help then and now. The Shakespeare Association of America,
the International Shakespeare Association, a Huntington
Library conference on Redefining Theatre History, and the
Bodleian Library have provided the most wonderful intellectual
environments in which to test out some of the ideas put forward
here. My thanks for comments, conversation and
companionship from John Astington, Mark Bland, Al
Braunmuller, Doug Brooks, David Carnegie, Jean Chothia,
Tony Dawson, Gabriel Egan, Jay Halio, Jonathan Hope, Bill
Ingram, William Long, Scott McMillin, Laurie Maguire,
Randall Martin, Stephen Orgel, Simon Palfrey, Eric Rasmussen,
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Michael Warren. I am also grateful to an insightful letter sent
me from an anonymous member of the SAA; portions of this
book are responses to points it made.
People whose company was important during the time when
Making Shakespeare was being completed include Kate
Bennett, James Cannon, Ivona Dragun, Sam (John-in-London)
Eidinow, Elspeth Findlay, Kerensa Heffron, Wojtek Jajdelski,
Justyna Lesniewska, Richard McCabe, Bryan Magee, Arkady
Ostrovsky, Vlatko Vedral, Marcin Walecki, all my colleagues
at Oxford Brookes – but in particular Michelle O’Callaghan,
Steve Matthews and Anna Richards, and all my colleagues at
the Jagiellonian University, Kraków – in particular Marta
Gibinska and Zygmunt Mazur. I am indebted to Joy Moore for
numerous kindnesses here and in Canada. Rebecca Hewitt’s
friendship has cheered and enriched the last few years; the love
of Artur Ekert, who put up with me – and put me up – while in
Cambridge has shaped them. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to
my uncle Patrick Tucker who first stimulated my interest in
Shakespeare and the theatre and to my parents Geoffrey and
Elisabeth Stern who nurtured and encouraged that interest – and
me. My brother Jonty (Jonathon) Stern’s warmth, kindness and
thoughtfulness deserve more than I can say or give. To him this
book is affectionately dedicated.
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Textual Note
As this book focuses on texts, it is important to present
Shakespeare passages in the form in which they were first
printed. For that reason, quotations are given as they appear in
quarto (Q) or folio (F). Quarto texts were consulted using
Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto: A Facsimile Edition of Copies
Primarily from the Henry E. Huntington Library ed. Michael J.
B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1981); they are referred to by
page signature. Folio texts were consulted using the Norton
Facsimile of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies (The First Folio), prepared by Charlton Hinman
(New York: Norton, 1968); they are referred to using the
through-line-numbers (TLN) of that edition. A modern actscene-line reference is also supplied, taken from the The
Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., second
edn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Speechprefixes have, to avoid confusion, been regularised except in
instances when they are themselves the subject of examination.
Similarly, ‘i’ and ‘j’ and ‘u’ and ‘v’ have been regularised in
quotations, except, again, when the use of either is under
discussion.
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1
Prologue
It is a truism to say that a play printed on the page is not the
same as a play in performance. What is less often considered is
that one version of a play in performance is different from
others. Shakespeare’s plays were written and rewritten
throughout their production, taking markedly different forms on
their first day, on subsequent days, for court and for revivals.
Censorship, changes in playhouse personnel, audience reactions
all took their toll, and their shadows can be seen through the
texts that have come down to us, as this book will illustrate. But
plays were also shaped by other circumstances: they were
written primarily for London performance in certain buildings
whose size and construction also informs the content of the
texts. Subsequently printed in a variety of forms and marketed
to different readers, plays were then moulded to and by the
books in which they were published. Making Shakespeare is
about the playtexts we have, and the way they relate to events in
the theatre and printing houses of the past. It explores the
distance between the texts that have survived, what the author
wrote, what the reviser rewrote, what was initially performed,
what was subsequently performed and what was first printed.
The contents of Shakespeare’s plays may have been in their
nature ‘fluid’, as is often said; but this is also a book about the
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‘fluidity’ of the material conditions of production.
Recent scholarship, which has stressed the importance of
the multiple contexts that brought about Shakespeare’s work,
attempts to ‘situate’ plays inside the culture that helped
generate them. This book concentrates on the contexts that
directly impacted on the nature of the playtext in the playhouse
and the printing house, examining the full process of production
undergone by a text to bring it from what Shakespeare wrote to
what was published in quarto and folio. Making Shakespeare is
thus a ‘stage-to-page’ book with a difference. It shows
everything that goes into making a play – but it also shows how
the versions of plays we have are only written testaments to
moments in the life of an unstable text. It introduces the major
issues of stage history and printing history, whilst raising
questions about what a ‘Shakespeare play’ actually is.
Concerned as it is with situation and circumstance, Making
Shakespeare considers plays not one by one, but context by
context. No prior knowledge is assumed; instead, the chapters
describe how London, the theatre, the actors, the way plays
were written and printed, affect the ‘Shakespeare’ that we now
read. The book straddles performance and bibliographical
issues; it shows what happened to a manuscript between its first
composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and how
leftovers of the production system have worked their way into
the plays that we read. It argues that the way actors received
and responded to their lines, the props and music anticipated
and used in the theatre, and the continual revision and
remodelling of plays by the playhouses and printing houses
have formed the versions of Shakespeare that have come down
to us. Included in the book is a discussion of the knotty question
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of revision (who did it? when did it happen? and what can be
learned from notions of a revising author?) and a look at ‘new’
bibliographical issues, such as the way books were typeset and
what effect this has on the text. Each chapter explores a
different practical context for shape-shifting Shakespeare; each
is illustrated verbally and, sometimes, with pictures. The book
aims not to give a dictatorial series of ‘readings’; rather, it
builds up a familiarity with particular passages and references,
while providing the background material and tools to allow
readers to contextualise Shakespeare’s plays – in old and new
ways – for themselves.
The opening chapter, ‘Text, Playhouse and London’, is
concerned with buildings – both the buildings of early modern
London and, more locally, the buildings in which Shakespeare’s
plays were enacted. The structure of the early modern theatres
and the layout of early modern London itself became a feature
of Shakespeare’s writing, and this chapter illustrates how these
and other contingent factors have formed Shakespeare’s plays
and are manifested in them. The history of the establishment of
the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars is discussed in terms of
the plays written for those buildings; London life, playhouses,
bear-baiting pits, theatrical audiences, theatrical flags and
theatrical candles are shown to have impacts on the writing as
well as the performance of Shakespeare.
The next chapter, ‘Additions, Emendations and Revisions’,
explains what happens to Shakespeare’s plays over time and
how that is manifested in quarto and folio. It looks at plays
revised during the process of writing, and plays revised after
performance in the light of censorship, or criticism – or simply
in order to maintain their currency. It shows, too, how signs of
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revision can be found, even in plays that exist only in one form.
The playhouse of the time demanded a flexible and fluid text;
just how unfixed that text was, and how receptive to change, is
examined in this chapter.
What does it mean to share a number of productions
amongst the same small group of people? The fourth chapter,
‘Rehearsal, Performance and Plays’ puts Shakespeare’s works
in the context of the people who acted in them. It looks at
members of the playing company – clowns, tragedians, ‘boys’
and a series of other typecast actors – and it examines the way
the writing reflects these people or types. It also asks how
theatrical companies dealt with the quantity of texts that had to
be learned and relearned. The process of putting together a
performance is discussed, with a look at actors’ preparation
from the moment when separate scripts (‘parts’) are received,
through individual ‘study’, to brief collective rehearsal. How
are the players and the way they perform reflected in the plays
themselves?
Chapter 5, ‘Props, Music and Stage Directions’, investigates
the practical stage. It compares verbal props and physical props,
showing how actual props functioned symbolically rather than
realistically. Colour, music, stage-hangings and words joined
together to make statements to the audience – but how were
those statements perceived? And how were the plays designed
to accommodate the artefacts of the early modern theatre?
Shakespeare was an actor writing for actors: he wrote
anticipating the way his texts would be disseminated and
learned. Chapter 6, ‘Prologues, Songs and Actors’ Parts’,
explores the life of different fragments of the play, arguing that
the theatre was, in many ways, more interested in ‘parts’ of the
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work than in the whole. By paring Shakespeare’s plays back
down into the separate pieces of paper that made them up, this
chapter shows how the printed versions relate to theatrical
manuscripts, and examines the implications of this relationship.
Looking at the corrections, improvements and errors that
arise from the way texts were readied for performance and for
the printing house, Chapter 7, ‘From Stage to Printing House’,
shows how, even by the time of publication, the plays of
Shakespeare were distinctly different from what their ‘author’
had written.
The stage-to-page trajectory of this book, an approach
currently without its own defining ‘ism’, is a particular
example of a more general trend in recent modern criticism. As
part of its aim to ‘restore Shakespeare’s artistry to the earliest
conditions of its realization and intelligibility’, that criticism
initially aligned itself with two particularly strong movements
from the 1980s.1 It took its interest in the importance of context
from new historicism, and its interest in textual indeterminacy
and instability from the post-modern project to ‘decentre’ the
text and query the nature of ‘authorship’. The next step was to
start considering the various factors involved in the
construction of a Shakespeare text, and to question the authority
residing in the plays themselves. Studies mostly concentrating
on King Lear – the test-case for revision – had already begun to
point out that Shakespeare’s plays were regularly altered and
adapted by a number of different agents. Principal amongst the
1980s work was Peter Blayney’s The Texts of ‘King Lear’ and
Their Origins: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto, which
explained the printing house background to the two variant
texts of Lear. That was swiftly followed by a fascinating
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collection of essays arguing that the quarto and folio versions
of Lear constituted two slightly different plays: The Division of
the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’
edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. The later exciting
and notorious Complete Works of Shakespeare , edited by
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, responded to issues arising out
of the new interest in textual instability by printing Lear
separately in two versions and – more controversially –
renaming Falstaff ‘Oldcastle’ in 1 Henry IV, Imogen ‘Innogen’
i n Cymbeline, and retitling Henry VIII ‘All Is True’ in an
attempt to present ‘Shakespeare’ not as written by the author
b u t as performed in the theatre.2 Arising from this was a
renewed interest in collaboration: had we been too certain not
just in the stability of texts, but in the stability of authorship
itself?3 Questions were asked not only about how ‘fixed’ any
printed text was, but what constituted a text at all.4
‘Context’ and ‘indeterminacy’ were themselves inflected by
various other concerns radically different in their nature. One
was theatre history, a subject that has been of continual interest
to Shakespeareans and that, unlike most other approaches to
Shakespeare, has never been outdated or replaced – though it
has also been slow to accept new interpretative methodologies.
It came to greater prominence than ever during the 1990s with
the growth of general concern in the material conditions that
shaped the playhouse, traceable to a combination of practical
events and technological advances. The discovery of the Rose
theatre site, the building of the new Globe in London and the
new Blackfriars in Virginia have returned attention to early
modern playhouses as buildings: just how did the original
places of performance impact on the texts performed in them?5
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At the same time, new historical material was and is being
made available in huge quantities allowing criticism with an
empirical base to flourish. REED (Records of Early English
Drama) has since 1979 been publishing manuscript county
records illustrating habits of performance outside London;
internet sites are beginning to make rare books – and so bookbased scholarship – accessible to universities situated miles
away from rare-book libraries.6
As a movement, however, the stage-to-page field,
combining theatre history and book history, reaching towards a
‘Shakespeare’ defined by multiple contexts rather than
authorial intention, has only lately been theoretically situated.
A series of notable recent books have begun the process.
Principal among them are two collections of essays: A New
History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David
Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997);
a n d A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Both attempt to recover specific
historical contexts and actions in playhouse and printing house
that produce meaning(s) in the light of questions about textual
and authorial instability.7
Making Shakespeare is part of a critical movement that, in
the same spirit, concentrates not on ‘Shakespeare’ the
individual author but on the collaborative, multilayered,
material, historical world that fashioned the Shakespeare canon.
The book provides both a summary of stage and textual history
and an alternative way of understanding the dissemination of
theatrical manuscripts. It inherits a tradition that perhaps once
saw the study of ‘literature’ and the study of ‘history’ as
separable if not separate activities. By redefining ideas of
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textual and authorial instability in a rooted, historical context, it
aims to create a newly vibrant meeting point between the two.
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2
Text, Playhouse and London
Potential spectators going from London to the Globe theatre on
the Bankside could cross the Thames in two ways. There were
ferry-boats plying the river, the watermen shouting out their
route: ‘Westward Ho!’ from which the Dekker and Webster
play got its name, or ‘Eastward Ho!’ from which the Chapman,
Jonson and Marston play took its title. These could be hailed to
cross the river, and functioned much like taxis now. Whenever
theatres were forcibly closed, watermen feared for their jobs
and made vigorous complaints: ‘wee yor saide poore watermen
have had muche helpe and reliefe for us oure poore wives and
Children by meanes of the resorte of suche people as come unto
the . . . playe howse’.1 For the audience, the raucous cries of the
ferrymen were part of the preliminary entertainment on the way
to the theatre; the play-titles show how the ferryman’s language
also became part of theatrical discourse. The alternative way
over the Thames was via London Bridge, a street over the
water, filled with shops and houses, merchants and
moneylenders. A toll was charged to enter London Bridge on
horseback, however, and it was also necessary to pay a
waterman to row over the river – so that in general only people
with spare cash and the intention of spending it would cross the
Thames to experience the pleasures of the Bankside. At the
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Southbank exit from London Bridge, visible both to those on
the bridge and to those on the river itself, was a gatehouse.
Impaled above the gatehouse were the heads of traitors (see
Plate 2.1): a grim reminder for Londoners entering into the bad
suburbs (the ‘liberties’) – where ‘the licentious, dangerous,
unclean, or polluted’ were located – that transgression would
have the direst results.2
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Plate 2.1 Claus Jan Visscher, Long View of London (1616).
Reproduced by permission of Guildhall Library, Corporation of
London.
The heads over the gatehouse prompted a number of fairly
predictable jokes. When Catesby in Richard III bandies words
with Hastings, he says: ‘The Princes both make high account of
you’, adding in an aside, ‘For they account his Head upon the
Bridge’ (TLN 1869–70, 3.2.69–70). 3 But the heads also form
part of a network of less straightforward references. They were
black in appearance, having been parboiled and, often, coated in
tar to prevent erosion. Of the Bishop of Rochester, executed on
22 June 1535, it is recorded that his miraculous head, after
‘parboiling in hot water . . . grew daily fresher and fresher’.4 In
the theatres, just down the road, ‘black’ characters were created
when the actor either masked his face with a black vizard or
‘pitched’ it by artificially colouring it with a burnt cork; the
same processes were used to make ‘devils’, also black.5 A
blackened actor, irrespective of character, had an immediate
resemblance not just to a stage devil but also to the condemned
traitors the audience would probably have seen on its way to the
theatre. To many of Shakespeare’s audience watching Othello
for the first time, the hero has a doomed aspect: he is a traitor
even before he has opened his mouth.
Places and environments have always been infused with
meaning, and early modern London was filled with buildings
and details that were strongly part of the routine both of
Shakespeare and of his London-based audience. Even the ways
by which Londoners approached the playhouses might, as
shown, have an affect on what they understood from the plays
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they saw there; the very bustle of London, its noises and
imagery, were part of the plays put on. Consideration of just a
couple of important London landmarks that characterised the
approach to the Globe and the Blackfriars theatre usefully
shows how place was part of thought, and highlights the
question raised by this chapter: how did the playhouses – as
places – impact on the works performed in them?
If the bridge approach to the Globe may have promoted,
sanctioned or simply become an element of early modern
racism, so the Ludgate approach to the Blackfriars playhouse
was part of the way early modern Londoners thought about – or
knew about – the history of their city. For Ludgate, one of the
entrances into the walled city of London, was famously
decorated with ‘with images of Lud and other Kinges’.
Spectators attending Blackfriars, where Shakespeare’s company
performed from 1609, would have been familiar with Ludgate’s
famous decorations, as the gate was directly up the road from
the theatre. They would have known, too, that the gate was not
just a triumphant record of English kingship and its (semispurious) links to ancient Rome; it was also a prison. As the
antiquarian John Stow recorded, Ludgate was, in 1586, fully
refurbished:
the same gate being sore decayed was clean taken down,
the prisoners in the meane time remayning in the large
Southeast quadrant to the same Gate adjoyning, and the
same yeare, the whole gate was newly and beautifully
builded with the images of Lud, & others, as afore, on the
East side, and the picture of her Majestie, Queene
Elizabeth on the West side.6
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On Ludgate, then, Queen Elizabeth completed a line of
king-ship extending from the mythical king Lud; in being
carefully placed to one side of Ludgate the Queen created her
own historical context. But the gate also had another
memorable image, so memorable as to define it in some way.
This was, as the poet Henry Vaughan attests, a picture of the
ancient king Cymbeline. When lust is high, writes Vaughan,
‘itchy blood’ hunts for a mate ‘From the Tower-wharf to
Cymbeline and Lud’.7 ‘Cymbeline and Lud’ was an alternative
way of saying ‘Ludgate’.
Any writer of plays for the Blackfriars playhouse would
have known the pictorial image of Cymbeline on Ludgate – as
would his audience. Familiar, too, would have been
Cymbeline’s context as one of a line of early monarchs,
concluded by Elizabeth and fronting both an entry and a gaol. It
is telling, then, that Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline runs through
the history of some of the prominent early London kings who
embellished the gate: Mulmutius who ‘made our lawes / Who
was the first of Britaine, which did put / His browes within a
golden Crowne, and call’d / Himselfe a King’ (TLN 1436–9,
3.1.58–61); Cassibellaunus who ‘Made Luds-Towne with
rejoycing-Fires bright, / And Britaines strut with Courage’
(TLN 1411–12, 3.1.32–3). It is also telling that prisons and
prison images run through Cymbeline; that Imogen is the
Queen’s prisoner (TLN 86, 1.1.72); that the Welsh cave of
Arviragus and Guidarius is likened to ‘A Cell of Ignorance: . . .
A Prison’ (TLN 1589–90, 3.3.33–4). At a pivotal point in the
play Posthumus is thrown in jail because he has been mistaken
for a Roman soldier. The play, of course, is not in any sense
about Ludgate, though the repeated references to King Lud and
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to gates in general in it are significant: Guidarius and Arverigus
stoop to go through the ‘gate’ of their cave (whereas ‘The Gates
of Monarches / Are Arch’d so high, that Giants may jet through
/ And keepe their impious Turbonds on’, TLN 1558–60, 3.3.4–
6); Cloten threatens the king’s true sons with ‘Ile . . . on the
Gates of Luds-Towne set your heads’ (TLN 2378, 4.2.99–100).
More, the play is, on a minor level, a function of having been
performed near Ludgate; it seems to anticipate mental
associations that will join monarchs of the past to a monarch of
the recent present, and perhaps suggest that, at least
historically, ‘Britain’ has been – like Hamlet’s Denmark – a
prison as well as a place of triumph.
Shakespeare’s plays were, of course, performed in the
provinces as well as in London, and the London-based
associations work only on a London-based audience: that,
presumably, is another reason why the plays do not overuse
London analogies. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s surroundings,
Shakespeare’s London, clearly affected what the playwright
wrote, as well as what the audience saw and the associations
they might draw from it. Similarly, the theatres of early modern
London are not simply referred to in Shakespeare’s works; they
are part of their fabric. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be
performed in certain types of building and those buildings –
their dimensions, their construction, and their milieu – imposed
a variety of understanding on the audiences who attended them.
Moreover, as permanent theatre buildings were themselves a
relatively new idea, Shakespeare, in the process of writing, was
not only using but creating a new kind of dramatic text fitted
for this new kind of environment.
The first ever permanent theatre in London was probably
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the Red Lion, about which very little is known other than that it
was erected by John Brayne around 1567 and that it did not
exist very long. The next purpose-built theatre in London, put
up in 1576 was, by contrast, a great and immediate success. As
a result, it was condemned by Puritan preachers: ‘It is an
evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so riche that
they can build suche houses.’8 It too, was built by John Brayne,
this time together with his brother-in-law, James Burbage, who
had been a strolling player for the Earl of Leicester’s Men. It
was erected on a rented field in Halliwell, one of the suburbs or
‘liberties’ of London, which were less subject to London
jurisdictions than the City itself, and was called ‘the Theatre’, a
name that seems to have been borrowed from classical texts.
From classical texts, too, must have come the inspiration for
the Theatre’s round shape. In other respects, as well, the
Theatre was entirely a local Tudor building: it was made from
wood, and had sides of irregular length and a thatched roof.
When Shakespeare became attached to the company
performing at the Theatre is unclear. He is known to have been
a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, who performed at the
Theatre from 1594 to 1596, and a shareholder in the company
from 1599. The first plays Shakespeare wrote, then, were
intended for performance in the Theatre: Love’s Labour’s Lost ,
Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,
King John, The Merchant of Venice , 1, 2 and 3 Henry VI, 1 and
2 Henry IV and Much Ado About Nothing.
The Theatre was a great success, not only because good
young authors were writing for it but also because good young
actors were performing in it. Most notable amongst the up-andcoming players was James Burbage’s son, Richard Burbage. He
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would become not only one of London’s most famous actors
but also the player for whom many of Shakespeare’s major
roles were written. Disaster struck the popular playhouse in
1597, however. The Brayne family and the Burbage family had,
for some time, been furiously quarrelling over finances. On one
occasion James Burbage leant out of his window to shout
‘whore’ and ‘murdering knave’ at Brayne’s wife and her friend
Robert Miles; afterwards Richard Burbage beat Miles with a
broom-staff and threatened Nicholas Bishop, appointed to
collect money for Mrs Brayne, by ‘scornfully and disdainfullye
playing with this deponents nose’.9 At the same time, the
theatre itself was increasingly threatened by local ill-feeling.
Not only was the subject matter of its plays thought
questionable but the very place itself was said to breed
unwholesomeness.
I am persuaded that Satan hath not a more speedie way &
fitter schoole to worke and teach his desire to bring men
and women into his snare of concupiscense and filthie
lustes of wicked whoredome, than those places and plaies,
and Theatres are: And therefore it is necessarie that those
places and Plaiers shoulde bee forbidden and dissolved and
put downe by author-itie, as the Brothell houses and
Stewes are.10
Then the last blow struck. Giles Alleyn, who had rented to
James Burbage the field on which the Theatre had been built,
declined to renew the lease on the land. He went so far as to
refuse even to let the actors enter the field to collect their
wooden theatre, as, technically, he owned the buildings erected
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on his site; in reclaiming his field, he thus also acquired the
Theatre for his own use.
What must it have been like for the Chamberlain’s Men to
see the building they had constructed rendered inaccessible
because it was trapped on a piece of land that belonged to
someone else? Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor
seems to relate memories of the physical loss to general
emotional outrage. In that play Ford compares misdirected love
(to someone he in fact should ‘own’ – his wife) to ‘A fair
house, built on another mans ground, so that I have lost my
edifice, by mistaking the place, where I erected it’ (TLN 975–7,
2.2.215–17).
Eventually the actors, probably including Shakespeare,
certainly including the brothers Richard and Cuthbert Burbage,
went into Alleyn’s field by night on 28 December 1598. With
the help of the master-builder Peter Streete, they dismantled the
Theatre and, as the legal documents put it, carried ‘all the wood
and timber therof unto the Banckside in the parishe of St.
Marye Overyes, and there erected a newe playehowse with the
sayd timber and woode’.11 St Mary Overies was to become an
actors’ church; it still stands, though it is now known as
Southwark Cathedral. In its choir are gravestones for
Shakespeare’s brother Edmund, also an actor, and the
playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. In one wall is
the tomb of the medieval poet John Gower, whom Shakespeare
fictionalised as the narrator in his play Pericles. St Mary
Overies (called ‘overies’ because it was over the river) and its
Bankside parish were, like London Bridge and Ludgate, part of
the complex fabric out of which Shakespeare’s plays were
woven.
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Being on the South Bank of the Thames, the parish of St
Mary Overies was situated in what was then Surrey, not
London. So the players had changed more than just the
environment of their playhouse; they had changed its milieu.
But why did the players cross the Thames for their new
venture? There was the pull of the relaxed laws offered by
being in a ‘liberty’ of course, but London was surrounded by
‘liberties’. Perhaps the Rose theatre, already flourishing on the
Bankside, was seen to offer a ready-made audience primed to
like plays, and willing to be diverted to a new and more
glamorous playhouse. In addition, the particularly weak
government of Surrey – and of Southwark in particular – would
have been of huge appeal. Southwark was an administrative
mess: nominally it came under the auspices of the Justices of
Surrey, but in effect it was governed by one of three manors
which made up the borough. The area which included Bankside
was the Clink Liberty, named after the prison, which was under
the authority of the bishop of Winchester. Winchester not only
sanctioned but also took rent from the many prostitutes who
clustered around his land and were popularly known as
Winchester ‘geese’. In this new, glamorous, seedy and fairly
lawless environment, the company for which Shakespeare wrote
could feel less restrained in their choice of play topic than when
they were north of the London wall.
Part of making a clean break with the past involved
changing the playhouse’s name. The new building would no
longer be called the Theatre; it was retitled the Globe. The
symbolism implies that people were expected to know the
history of the playhouse and its previous name. ‘The Theatre’
became ‘the Globe’, the stage became the world. As Duke
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Senior put it in As You Like It , thought to be the first
Shakespeare play performed at the new Globe:
This wide and universall Theater
Presents more wofull Pageants then the Sceane
Wherein we play in.
(TLN 1115–17, 2.7.137–9)
Drawing out the analogy, the Duke also calls attention to the
fact that, more locally, the Globe really is the Theatre. He toys
with the fact and with the fiction of his environment – he is
indeed speaking from a theatre in which tragedies as well as
comedies are performed – but Jaques replies in a way that
highlights, again, both the conceit (the world is like a theatre)
and the move from Theatre to Globe:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women, meerely Players;
They have their Exits and their Entrances,
And one man in his time playes many parts.
(TLN 1118–21, 2.7.139–42
The Globe was a living metaphor, and the performances written
for it, unsurprisingly, are often ‘metatheatrical’ – they draw
frequent attention to their own theatrical natures and their
consequent unreality.
To bridge the time between being denied access to the
Theatre in 1597, pulling it down in 1598–99 and constructing
the Globe theatre out of its remains in 1599, the Chamberlain’s
Men performed at the other round theatre that had been
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constructed in the liberty of Halliwell: the Curtain.
Shakespearean plays that may have first been performed at the
Curtain are those of 1598–99 and seem to have included Henry
V, so that the prologue’s famous diffidence about the
inadequacies of ‘this unworthy Scaffold . . . this Cock-pit . . .
this Woodden O’ (TLN 11–14) are probably references to the
Curtain, not the Globe as is so often thought.12 If Henry V is
indeed a Curtain play, written just as the Globe was being
readied for performance, the prologue’s ‘apology’ has an
aggressive dimension. Rather than displaying a modest
humility for the inability of the stage in general to depict
realism, the prologue seems designed to undermine the Curtain
theatre, the suggestion being that the Globe’s better-appointed
‘O’ will be an improvement. The much later Globe/Blackfriars
prologue to Henry VIII is, by contrast, pointedly unapologetic
for its surroundings. Instead, it forcefully puts the onus on the
audience not to resent the staging but to use their imaginations
and ‘for Goodnesse sake . . . Thinke ye see / The very Persons
of our Noble Story, / As they were Living’ (TLN 24–8). It is
always important to have a sense of which plays were intended
for which theatres; the very buildings can inflect the way the
text may be understood.
Before long, almost all the public theatres were situated on
the South Bank (the ‘Bankside’) of the Thames in the county of
Surrey. They were the Rose, the Hope, the Swan (all round
theatres), and they came to be part of the essence of the South
Bank – just as the South Bank, its buildings and its mentality,
became a feature of the plays put on in its environs.
None of the South Bank playhouses was subject to London
rules. Liberating as the lack of regulations was, however, the
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fact that the theatres were over the river and away from London
itself raised practical problems. Advertising across the water
was difficult, yet it was necessary that Londoners should know
when a performance was to be expected. A number of solutions
were devised. At one stage, the players sent posses across the
Thames with drums and trumpets, shouting out the name of that
day’s play; later, they covered London with advertisements
(‘bills’), filling the city with printed mementoes of the theatre
it had so pointedly rejected. An alternative system of visual
imagery also came into being, able to market to the literate and
illiterate alike; the theatres’ appeal was broad and extended
over different classes. When a play was to be performed, the
Surrey playhouses flew flags from their rooftops to herald the
fact. In that way, the buildings themselves could advertise
across the water. ‘Each Play-house’, as William Parkes
explained, ‘advanceth his flagge in the aire, whither quickly at
the waving thereof, are summoned whole troopes of men,
women and children.’13 The flags bore signs linked to the name
of the theatre: a Swan for the Swan, probably a symbol of the
Thames (see the picture of the Swan playhouse, Plate 2.2, p.
23), a rose for the Rose, a symbol of the rose-gardens the
theatre replaced. Juliet’s observation in Romeo and Juliet that
‘that which we call a Rose, / By any other word [Q1 name]
would smell as sweete’ (TLN 837–8, 2.2.43–4) may also be a
cruel joke about the Rose playhouse, said to be distinctly
malodorous.14 There was a ‘picture of Dame Fortune / Before
the Fortune Play-house’ until it burnt down; on rebuilding it
was renamed the Phoenix, after the mythical bird that is
resurrected from the ashes of its grave. A phoenix, presumably,
became the theatre’s symbol. 15 Visual signs with symbolic
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import were part of the world of the theatre.
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Plate 2.2 Swan Theatre, by Johannes de Witt, as copied by
Aernout van Buchel, c. 1596. Reproduced by permission of the
Library of the Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht.
The picture on the flag of the Globe was not described until
the seventeenth century, though there are enough references to
it in the literature of Shakespeare’s time for us to guess what it
must have been: a god carrying the Globe on his back – either
Atlas who, according to the Greek myth, was condemned to
hold the world on his shoulders for ever, or Hercules who bore
the world briefly as one of his twelve labours. So an elegy for
the Globe’s lead actor, Richard Burbage, maintains that the
Globe should shut down now that its best actor is dead:
Hence forth your waving flagg, no more hang out
Play now no more att all, when round aboute
Wee looke and miss the Atlas of your spheare.16
That the Globe’s sign was further embellished with the words
Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem (‘The whole world plays the
player’), is a pleasing idea, though an unlikely one: the motto
hung above the Drury Lane theatre in the early seventeenth
century and the story that it came from the Globe dates from
about then.17 References to the Globe’s pictorial sign, on the
other hand, are not just present but used metatheatrically in
several Shakespeare plays. Hamlet on a number of occasions
makes references to Hercules, creating moments that are both
inside the fiction of the play Hamlet and outside it. When the
Prince hears that the boy players are so popular that they are
taking audiences away from the adult ‘tragedians of the city’,
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he exclaims ‘Do the Boyes carry it away?’ ‘I’ [ay] replies
Rosencrantz, ‘that they do my Lord. Hercules & his load too.’
Suddenly Hamlet has moved from the troubles of Elsinore to
the troubles besetting the Globe theatre: boy players have
become fashionable and the adult players are losing audiences
to them (TLN 1408–9, 2.2.360–1).
The good reputation of the youthful actors in 1601 –
seemingly the date of this passage – will have been particularly
galling to the Burbages, for the boys were performing in the
Blackfriars Playhouse, a theatre that the Burbages owned but
could not use.18 Ever impetuous, James Burbage had acquired
parts of the old Blackfriars monastery in 1596 and had
converted them into a rectangular indoor theatre before finding
that residents in the area would not countenance professional
performances there (indeed, they went so far as to get an
injunction to stop the theatre being used by adult players).19
Burbage presumably had not anticipated this trouble:
Blackfriars was in a precinct of London that was technically a
‘liberty’ though within the City walls. As it was, unable to
mount productions in Blackfriars himself, he had been obliged
to lease his theatre to a boy choir. Infuriatingly, the children
had been able to perform plays at Blackfriars as they were not
considered professional players: they were said to be putting on
productions as part of their education, even though they charged
money for performances. When the adult professionals started
losing their own audience to a theatre they had let the boys
have, they must have been filled with the anger of the
powerless. In the following passage, Hamlet wonders why the
talented tragedians have had to leave the city and perform in the
country as ‘travelling players’:
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Hamlet what Players are they?
Rosincrantz Even those you were wont to take delight in the
Tragedians of the City.
Hamlet How chances it they travaile? their residence both in
reputation and profit was better both wayes.
Rosincrantz I thinke their Inhibition comes by the meanes of
the late Innovation?
Hamlet Doe they hold the same estimation they did when I was
in the City? Are they so follow’d?
Rosincrantz No indeed, they are not.
Hamlet How comes it? doe they grow rusty?
Rosincrantz Nay, their indeavour keepes in the wonted pace;
But there is Sir an ayrie of Children, little Yases, that crye
out on the top of question; and are most tyrannically clap’t
for’t: these are now the fashion, and so be-ratled the
common Stages (so they call them) that many wearing
Rapiers, are affraide of Goose-quils, and dare scarse come
thither.
(TLN 1371–91, 2.2.326–44)
‘Little eyases’ are young hawks – the boy players are birds of
prey consuming the scavenged remains of others’ business.
Hardly surprisingly, the boy players, situated within the
walls of London, often put on plays about life inside London;
theatres outside the walls, meanwhile, often performed what
have come to be known as ‘history plays’, plays based around
the kings of England. Playhouses outside London had, after all,
London itself as their backdrop: Surrey theatres looked across
the river to the Tower and St Paul’s. The fiction of the English
history plays will thus have felt different from the fiction of
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other plays that might also loosely be called historical, like
‘Roman’ plays: the ‘history’ plays performed in those theatres
were flanked by the flurry of the London they were concerned
with yet slightly removed from. References like ‘Here is the
Indictment of the good Lord Hastings, / Which . . . may be to
day read o’re in Paules’ ( Richard III, TLN 2199–201, 3.6.1–3),
or ‘this is the way / To Julius Caesars ill-erected Tower’
(Richard II, TLN 2261–2, 5.1.1–2 – the Tower of London was,
at the time, thought to have been built by Julius Caesar) were,
for as long as they were performed in the London liberties,
‘situated’. London was, literally, the theatres’ backdrop, and it
was part of the plays’ context.
Other dubious professions not approved of in London also
operated freely in Surrey. Bear-baiting took place in buildings
similar to the theatres – indeed, one theatre, the Hope, doubled
as a bear-baiting pit. These amphitheatres were the nearest
rivals to the playhouses, for both charged the same entrance fee,
both put on shows that lasted for about two hours, both started
at the same time and held roughly equivalent audiences. Often
playhouses and bear-baiting rings are discussed in the same
breath, as when Lambarde describes the prices of various
entertainments: ‘such as goe to Parisgardein, the Bell Savage,
or Theatre, to beholde Beare baiting, Enterludes, or Fence play .
. . first pay one pennie at the gate’.20 Yet the sport and the
drama were, in many ways, rivals – competing for roughly the
same audience at the same time of day. Plays had to offer an
entertainment at least as compelling as the visceral, bloody,
brutal sport of killing or maiming bears, dogs and bulls. This
rivalry may even be behind some of the visual cruelty of
Shakespearean and other drama of the time. Plays are often
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surprisingly bloody – given that so much else is left to the
poetry. There is the heavy, dark sticky blood that pervades
Macbeth and cannot be washed off Lady Macbeth’s hands, that
fills the wounds of dead Henry VI until they ‘Open their
congeal’d mouthes, and bleed afresh’ as Richard approaches
(Richard III, TLN 232–3, 1.2.56). There is the sparkling and
oddly erotically charged blood of Julius Caesar: the wound
which Portia voluntarily makes in her thigh as a proof of her
constancy to Brutus, and the gashes in the body of Caesar that
‘ope their Ruby lips’ (TLN 1488, 3.1.260) but cannot speak, so
that Antony dearly wishes that he could ‘put a Tongue / In
every Wound of Caesar’ (TLN 1765–6, 3.2.228–9).21
Bears in the bear-baiting pits were chained to a stake before
being attacked by dogs: sometimes they had been blinded first;
sometimes they were provoked to frenzy by having pepper
blown into their noses. The idea was to release the dogs to
worry at the chained bears who would then lash out, attacking
and killing where they could. It is usual to find a Shakespearean
tragic hero comparing himself to a baited bear and drawing up
equivalencies. One early example is in the Theatre play of 2
Henry VI, when the army of Richard, Duke of York, is
compared to bears and Richard to the man in charge of the
bears or ‘bear-ward’:
Clifford Are these thy Beares? Wee’l bate thy Bears to death,
And manacle the Ber[w]ard in their Chaines,
If thou dar’st bring them to the bayting place.
Richard Oft have I seene a hot ore-weening Curre,
Run backe and bite, because he was with-held,
Who being suffer’d with the Beares fell paw,
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Hath clapt his taile, betweene his legges and cride,
And such a peece of service will you do,
If you oppose your selves to match Lord Warwicke.
(2 Henry VI, TLN 346–55, 5.1.148–56)
The comparison of stage-world and bear-pit can be found in
unexpected places. It is little surprise to find Macbeth
confronting his last fight with ‘They have tied me to a stake, I
cannot flye, / But Beare-like I must fight the course’ ( Macbeth,
TLN 2396–7, 5.7.11–12), but perhaps more striking to find
Olivia in the comedy Twelfth Night accusing the ‘man’
(actually a woman) she loves of having ‘set mine Honor at the
stake, / And baited it with all th’unmuzled thoughts / That
tyrannous heart can think’ ( Twelfth Night, TLN 1331–3,
3.1.118–20). Perhaps because of the tension between bearbaiting ring and theatre, the only two actual creatures brought
on stage in Shakespearean plays are a bear and a dog (Winter’s
Tale, Two Gentlemen of Verona and, perhaps, Midsummer
Night’s Dream ), as though the Shakespearean playhouses
attempted to counter the bear-baiting pit by, in a sophisticated
way, being it.
Bear-baiting was also advertised with flags: early ‘long
views’ of London sometimes show playhouses and bear-baiting
houses with their flags up. So the South Bank waved its
coloured flags indicating violence, sex and the theatre, all of
which came to be associated, and the last of which might offer a
ritualised, philosophical version of the former two. Bored
Londoners could look across the Thames to the dangerous,
seedy, exciting, liberated Surrey side; some would be tempted
across to enjoy one pleasure or another, perhaps not minding
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too much which, as contemporary poems makes clear:
Speake Gentleman, what shall we do to day?
Drinke some brave health upon the Dutch carouse?
Or shall we to the Globe and see a Play?
Or visit Shorditch, for a bawdie house?22
In the mind of the Londoner, then, theatregoing was imbued
with the glamour of sin that it picked up from its surroundings,
and then dealt with in its plays.
Why might a spectator, given the choice, go to the theatre
rather than engage in some of the many other Bankside
pleasures? There are any number of reasons, of course, quite
apart from the interest in being told a story, but one important
pull of the theatre was its use of language. First, plays provided
a source of jests and anecdotes; they supplied the quips and
one-liners that could be used to spice up conversation later: ‘So
there be among them that will get jestes by heart, that have
gathred a Common-place booke out of Plaies, that will not let a
merriment slip, but they will trusse it up for their owne
provision, to serve their expence at some other time.’23 Indeed,
the very language of flirtation could be picked up from the
theatre; a lawyer’s clerk is described as someone who dare only
‘attempt a mistresse’ with ‘Jests, or speeches stolne from
Playes’.24 For those who could not read, the theatre was one of
the few places that would offer the carefully honed and crafted
language of love; already by 1598 Marston is horrified by
‘Luscus’ who learns phrases of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
off by heart:
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Luscus what’s playd to day? faith now I know
I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow
Naught but pure Juliat and Romio.
Luscus, as Marston goes on to explain:
[Hath] made a common-place booke out of plaies,
And speakes in print, at least what ere he sayes
Is warranted by Curtaine plaudit[e]s,
If ere you heard him courting Lesbias eyes;
Say (Curteous Sir) speakes he not movingly
From out some new pathetique Tragedie?
He writes, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not,
And all from out his huge long scraped stock
Of well penn’d playes.25
But people of the time acquired more than just jokes and
speeches from the theatre. They enriched their vocabularies
with the new terms that the plays freely presented to them.
‘English’ was in a state of development, swelling with foreign
phrases brought from overseas by merchants. It was being
forcibly enlarged, too, by humanists trying to make the tongue
capable of producing the ‘copiousness’ they so admired in
Latin.26 Shakespeare was, like Jonson, a minter of new words
and bold in his acquisition of others: new words were crowdpullers (estimates as to how many words Shakespeare really
created vary; he is certainly the first writer on record to use
various compounds such as ‘bloodstained’ and ‘watchdog’ as
well as to turn nouns such as ‘gossip’ into verbs). The
playhouse introduced new terms into common parlance.
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Richard Tarlton, the Theatre’s most famous clown, notoriously
brought the word ‘prepuse’ (foreskin) ‘into the Theater with
great applause’.27 A Tarltonian catchphrase was ‘without all the
paraquestions’.28 Shakespeare’s clowns similarly have a
fascination with the word: Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost
juggles with the term ‘remuneration’, while in the same play
Don Adriano de Armado (described by King Ferdinand as ‘One,
who the musicke of his owne vaine tongue, / Doth ravish like
inchanting harmonie’, TLN 177–8, 1.1.166–7) calls his boy a
‘tender Juvenal’ because the phrase is ‘a congruent apathaton,
appertaining to thy young daies, which we may nominate
tender’ (TLN 324–6, 1.2.13–15). Osric in Hamlet interposes
‘palpable’ into a sentence; Polonius relishes the word ‘mobled’.
Arguing against the closure of all theatres in the 1640s, actors
wrote that it was on the stage that ‘the most exact and natural
eloquence of our English language [is] expressed and daily
amplified’.29 When the theatres were indeed closed, it was
feared that the language would suffer as a result:
The Stage . . . having much conferd and contributed to the
inrichment of [language], it being the Mint that daily
coyns new words, which are presently received and
admitted as currant, . . . the plucking downe of which will
I feare, not only retard the perfectioning of our Language
towards which it was advancing amain, but even quite
hinder and recoyle it, and make it return to its former
Barbarisme.30
If Shakespeare’s vocabulary is rich, that is partly because
‘words’ were what his audience were paying for.
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Fixed theatres, though a relatively new concept, were
constructed using a symbolic architecture familiar to anyone of
the early modern period. That architecture can be seen in the
depiction in Plate 2.2 of the interior of the Swan theatre. The
drawing itself, a copy made in Holland by the Dutchman
Aernout van Buchel of a picture drawn by his friend Johannes
de Witt when in London, is unlikely to be entirely accurate, but
does usefully illustrate some of the essential elements about the
way stages were housed within theatres.31 It is the only
contemporary picture of the inside of an English round theatre
that has been found.
Though the theatre is itself circular, its stage is rectangular
and protrudes or thrusts out into the middle of the auditorium.
The stage is also elevated or, as Thomas Platter, visiting
London from Germany in 1599, put it, ‘they play on a raised
platform, so that everyone has a good view’.32 A raised, thrust
stage had the further advantage of providing plenty of room
underneath to keep props and, if necessary, actors waiting for
an entrance from below.
Over the top of the stage there is a thatched covering
supported by pillars; such a covering, and the pillars
themselves, are features of the plays written by Shakespeare.
So, while structurally necessary, pillars also provide useful
‘trees’ on which Orlando in As You Like It can hang his love
poems, as well as hiding places behind which Claudius and
Polonius can watch the Prince in Hamlet (with the additional
advantage that the audience can see both the observer and the
observed). They might also have been used as ways of
separating the stage into two (perhaps representing Troy and
Greece in Troilus and Cressida, or Egypt and Rome in Antony
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and Cleopatra). The covering supported by the pillars also
served a practical purpose: it kept the rain or sun off the actors
and their fine clothes. But the underside of this covering was, as
contemporary references make clear, painted with images of
stars, clouds and zodiacal signs. Most theatres, the Globe
amongst them, seem to have had such an awning over their
stages at least after about 1600. Unsurprisingly, this internal
roof decorated with star images was called ‘heaven’, or ‘the
heavens’, while the area below the stage was ‘hell’. In an
epitaph for the actor Richard Burbage, the playwright Ben
Jonson wonders ‘What need hee stand at the judgement throne /
Who hath a heaven and a hell of his owne?’33 Naturally this all
relates to the stage/world analogy so carefully spelt out by the
company that owned the Theatre/Globe. In the middle of this
metaphorical sandwich, where the actors performed their play,
was ‘the world’: if players had their own heaven and hell, they
had their own living-space too.
So actors performed in a play-world that was different from
the larger ‘real’ world that surrounded the stage, but that was
intended to be a reflection of it. Similar heaven/hell distinctions
were frequently made in other buildings of the time. Old
churches, even now, often still have roofs painted with stars and
angels: the heavens. Below, obviously, is the grave where the
people are buried; it is also, traditionally, the location of
purgatory and hell. Between heaven and hell in church and
theatre alike lies the world of the living. Unlike the church’s
heaven, however, the heaven of the theatre did not extend out
over the spectators: even references in plays that seem to be
dealing with universal truths are, in a different sense, appealing
more strongly to the fiction of the theatre. When Hamlet,
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occupant of ‘this distracted Globe’ (TLN 782, 1.5.97), gestures
towards ‘this brave o’rehanging firmament, this majestical
roof’ (TLN 1347–8, 2.2.299–301), he is, on one level, talking in
universal terms, but also, in a fashion typical of him,
undercutting what he says; when he goes on to observe that
heaven is ‘fretted with golden fire’, he draws attention to the
glory not of the actual sky but of the underside of the stage
roof, a fretted structure described by the poet Thomas
Middleton as ‘naylde up with many a Starre’.34
The locations of heaven and hell within the theatre also
have a practical effect on the way, for instance, members of the
audience ‘read’ an actor’s place of entrance and exit. To enter
from or exit into heaven has supernatural connotations. In
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline Posthumus is on the point of
despairing in prison when Jupiter descends from heaven on the
back of an eagle. The hope Jupiter offers, and the riddling
prophecy he gives, mark a turning point in the play, as does
Juno’s heavenly entrance to bless the marriage of Ferdinand
and Miranda in The Tempest.
To enter from, or exit into, hell, on the other hand, clearly
indicates evil, death – or both. A voice or a sound coming from
hell is ominous, and plays stress the location of a sound if it
comes from under the stage. In Antony and Cleopatra, the eerie
whining of the hautboy (an earlier version of the oboe) from
beneath the ground marks the beginning of Antony’s final
downfall.
Musicke of the Hoboyes is under the Stage.
2 Sold. Peace, what noise?
1 Sold. List list.
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2 Sold. Hearke.
1 Sold. Musicke i’th’Ayre.
3 Sold. Under the earth.
4 Sold. It signes well, do’s it not?
3 Sold. No.
1 Sold. Peace I say: What should this meane?
2 Sold. ’Tis the God Hercules, whom Anthony loved, Now
leaves him.
(TLN 2482–92, 4.3.12–17)
There is a metatheatrical reference in this passage, too, to the
sign of the Globe, Hercules, which was also Antony’s sign: the
theatre itself is giving up on its hero.
The trap-door in the centre of the stage was the entrance
from hell. Indeed, the Rose playhouse’s Elizabethan prop
inventory, transcribed in the eighteenth century, seems to have
included ‘j Hell mought’ (one hellmouth) with which to cover
the trap; perhaps, like a German hellmouth described in 1594, it
resembled ‘the broad wide mouth of an huge Dragon’.35 Even
when not as obviously the lipped and toothed mouth of hell as
this, the stage trap-door retained hellish or bad associations: it
is the bloody hole in which Lavinia is raped in Titus
Andronicus, the grave in Hamlet, the place from which the
apparitions in Macbeth come and go.36 So whenever the hole
gaped open on the stage, the audience knew that something evil
or with deathlike connotations was happening, or about to
happen. The trap presumably came to represent a cumulative
evil. Much in the theatre, props particularly, worked in this
way, borrowing their natures partly from the collective
character they had built up through use in many plays.
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The trap, naturally, also doubled as the grave when
characters needed to be buried on stage. So the ghost of
Hamlet’s father, who has clearly come up from the grave, has,
by association, also come up from ‘hell’. Almost certainly he
enters the stage from the trap. Hamlet asks the ghost to tell
‘why the Sepulcher / . . . Hath op’d his ponderous and Marble
jawes, / To cast thee up againe?’ (TLN 633–6, 1.4.48–51). The
ghost exits to hell or at least clearly resides there, for his voice
is heard emanating, as Hamlet is careful to point out, from ‘the
cellarage’ under the stage. Hamlet calls the ghost ‘old Mole’
(TLN 859, 1.5.162) signifying that he burrows in the blackness
under the ground. In terms of the metaphorical stage, therefore,
the ghost in Hamlet is evil: the audience watching the play and
hearing Hamlet wonder whether he is to meet ‘a Spirit of
health, or Goblin damn’d’ (TLN 624, 1.4.40) may have felt that
they knew the answer. The theatrical structure could impose a
layer of simplicity on to the plays that modern readers, seeking
for complex meanings in printed, footnoted editions, can miss.
The fact of the audience itself, its very presence, was also,
selectively, part of the play. In the indoor and outdoor theatres
of the time, spectators and actors clearly saw each other and
borrowed reactions from one another. Watching plays today is
thus a very different experience from watching plays in the
early modern theatre. Audiences nowadays sit in the dark,
unable to see the reactions of other spectators; a modern
audience is a collection of solitary beings, not a crowd with
crowd-responses. As trained and responsible spectators,
moreover, we tend to sit quietly and keep ourselves to
ourselves: we do not physically or vocally take part in the
action, so that the separation of actor from audience is
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complete. But Shakespeare’s original audience was as well-lit
as the actors, as visible and, sometimes, as talkative. This was
an audience constantly in need of taming. It might throw stones
or even lathes. It often threw fruit, which was available for sale
throughout performances. One poem asks the spectators of a
play performed at the Red Bull playhouse to ‘forbeare / Your
wonted custome, banding Tyle, or Peare, / Against our
curtaines, to allure us forth’, and jest books relate amusing
retorts made by actors under bombardment:
in the Play Tarltons part was to travel, who kneeling down
to aske his father blessing, [a] fellow threw an Apple at
him, which hit him on the cheek. Tarlton taking up the
Apple, made this jest.
Gentleman, this fellow, with this face of Mapple,
Instead of a pipin, hath throwne me an Apple,
But as for an Apple, he hath cast a Crab,
So instead of an honest woman, God hath sent him a drab.
The people laughed heartily . . .37
Actors were expected to respond to events outside the texts,
and seem to have had a body of known jokes with which to do
so. These playhouse jests were features of one-off
performances, and were not consistently attached to any
particular play; they seldom ended up in print. Thus the play on
paper often does not record the play performed. A hint of what
some of the standard jokes might have been is provided in a
muddled and probably ‘memorial’ text of Hamlet from 1603
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(memorial texts themselves will be discussed in the next
chapter). Speaking of clowns, Hamlet rails against the jesters so
feeble as to have only one set of jokes to bring in to each play –
jests so predictable that the audience can anticipate them all in
advance:
you have some . . . that keepes one sute
Of jeasts, as a man is knowne by one sute of
Apparell, and Gentlmen quotes his jeasts downe
In their tables, before they come to the play, as thus:
Cannot you stay till I eate my porridge? and, you owe me
A quarters wages: and, my coate wants a cullison:
And your beere is sowre . . .
(Q1 F2a–b)
Confronted by such an active audience, plays kept their
appeal as wide as possible: there were spectators who would
‘damn’ levity, and spectators who would ‘damn’ seriousness,
indeed audiences seem to have clapped and hissed their way
through performances, necessitating frequent alterations and
revisions of plays – a point that will be returned to. John Davies
writes a poem to playwrights whose trade he describes as being
‘full of toile’: ‘It’s easie to cry Hisse; but, tis not so / To silence
it, and Claps of hands to raise.’38
The cheapest places at the Globe theatre were in the open
air of the yard surrounding the stage. They were for standing
audience only, and the people who gathered there were
collectively known as ‘penny stinkards’, ‘garlick breaths’ and,
punningly, ‘understanders’ – understanders, because they stood
under the stage. Whenever a Shakespearean play insults the
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brutal nature of a lower-class crowd it seems to be turning its
criticism towards this element of the audience, partly
contemptuously, and partly to provoke a response. Antagonism
was one of the ways a playhouse ensured involvement, and
mutual insults were part of the theatre’s stock-in-trade: ‘What’s
the matter you dissentious rogues’ says Caius Martius (later
Coriolanus) at the start of Coriolanus, ‘That rubbing the poore
Itch of your Opinion, / Make your selves Scabs’ (TLN 174–5,
1.1.165–6). He is taunting a crowd who are rebelling because
they are starving as a result of corn shortages. As Britain had
itself suffered corn shortages just the year before the play was
performed (in an earlier famine in 1598, Shakespeare had
himself been accused of hoarding malt at his Stratford home),
the sentiment was incendiary. 39 Often Shakespeare utilises the
spectators so that they become, unwittingly, part-actors in the
plays they are observing. They can then supply the massed
army that the Henry V prologue could not come up with. When
Henry ends his ‘Once more unto the Breach, / Deare friends’
speech with a three-part expression designed to elicit applause,
he urges the audience to cry out and swell the multitude: ‘Cry,
God for Harry, England, and S[aint]. George’ (TLN 1117,
3.1.1–34). In King John, the monarch tries to persuade the
people of Angiers that he is their rightful king:
Doth not the Crowne of England, proove the King?
And if not that, I bring you Witnesses
Twice fifteene thousand hearts of Englands breed.
(TLN 580–2, 2.1.273–5
Here the spectators are again goaded by the speech to cheer,
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though, even if they do not, they have still been dragged into
the fiction of the theatre, becoming by implication not only
observers but part of what they are watching. This drama
changes spectators into participants.
It was often said, at the time, that plays were written in
layered form, each layer to appeal to a different class of
spectator located broadly in different parts of the playhouse:
bawdy jokes and rustic clowns for the stinkards standing in the
pit, high poetry for the gentlefolk. Joseph Hall writes of the
upper echelons (literally) of the audience, the ‘gazing
scaffolders’ (the scaffold was the structure in which the sitting
audience were placed) who particularly enjoy iambic verse, and
of the ‘dead stroke’ or ‘low’ audience who are really interested
only in clowning:
if [the poet] can with terms Italianate,
Big-sounding sentences, and words of state,
Faire patch me up his pure Iambick verse,
He ravishes the gazing Scaffolders: . . .
Now, least such frightfull showes of Fortunes fall,
And bloody Tyrants rage, should chance appal
The dead stroke audience, mids the silent rout
Comes leaping in a selfe-misformed lout,
And laughes, and grins, and frames his Mimik face,
And justles straight into the Princes place . . .40
All this would partly, but not wholly, change when another
theatrical move was made by what were now called the King’s
Men. This was when, now under royal patronage, the company
finally gained the right, in 1609, to perform in their Blackfriars
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theatre in London. They continued to play in the Globe theatre
in the summer months – indeed, the Globe, having burnt down
in 1613, was rebuilt even more finely – but from 1609 onwards
Shakespeare’s plays seem to have been written with the indoors
Blackfriars theatre in mind. What works within a small
artificially lit theatre can, after all, be adapted to work outdoors
on a large naturally lit stage; the reverse is not necessarily the
case.
The Blackfriars was in a rectilinear room, but it seems to
have retained the properties of a round theatre. Its galleries
were curved, so that from the auditorium it looked at least
semicircular; it had a heaven and a hell, and a thrust stage
surrounded by audience on all sides. One fanciful picture from
the 1670s (Plate 2.3) depicts an indoor stage of the 1630s or
1640s (datable by the hats of the audience); the picture is not
theatre-specific but can be taken as a rough guide to what
indoor theatres in general were like.
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Plate 2.3 Illustration from the title page to Francis Kirkman’s
The Wits, or, Sport upon Sport (1673). Reproduced by
permission of University of Cambridge Library.
Here is a playhouse lit by candles depending from
chandeliers and surrounding the stage as footlights. A
contemporary poem named the Blackfriars theatre ‘the Torchy
Fryers’ and a wealth of artificial light was a Blackfriars
feature.41 Lighting immediately had huge effects not just on the
look but also on the structure of plays. In the indoor Blackfriars
theatre, provision had to be made for the regular trimming and
replacing of candles: fire inside a timber-framed London would
put the whole city at risk. Any play put on at the Blackfriars,
therefore, had to have regular breaks on a roughly half-hourly
basis during which candles could be tended. In what seems to
be a direct response to this, any Shakespeare play written to be
performed at the Blackfriars – that is to say, written after 1609
or, like Measure for Measure , revised for performance in the
Blackfriars – is divided into five acts: five acts mean four actbreaks for candle-trimming. On the other hand, plays written
before 1609, to be performed at the Globe only, simply have
scene-breaks, and would have been enacted straight through
without pause. But, of course, the five-act structure is classical
(the plays of Seneca and Terence were divided this way).
Sometimes it is thought that Shakespeare in his later years
suddenly developed an interest in form. Actually, it seems more
likely that Shakespeare changed his manner of writing to
conform to a new playhouse, though the result would have been
the same – writing to a five-act structure affects the way a play
develops its story.
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The auditorium of the Blackfriars was much smaller than
that of the Globe. The Blackfriars’ indoor stage was, similarly,
narrower and shallower than the Globe’s outdoor one: candles
were expensive, and the larger the acting-area, the more
lighting would have been required. As, in addition, the audience
at Blackfriars could pay to sit on the stage itself, the kinds of
texts that could be performed in the new playhouse were
automatically limited.42
Fighting armies with long halberds could not be
countenanced, for the weapons might well damage spectators
huddled around or on the stage. So plays with major battles
were not written for the Blackfriars theatre. Moreover,
spectators, who were charged more for performances at
Blackfriars than at the Globe, tended to be from the richer
classes, which itself put constraints on the plays produced.
Court fashion became of enormous importance; sumptuous
dances, known as masques, which were then very much in
vogue in court circles, become regular features of later
Shakespearean works. There is a dream-masque in Henry VIII
very peripheral to the action, and a masque also in The Tempest.
Music in general was a private-theatre staple, and it took a
very different form from the basic, brash music that belonged
to public theatres such as the Globe. Outdoor theatres needed
instruments that were loud and martial if they were to be heard,
like drums and trumpets or cannon. All Shakespeare’s major
tragedies, and most of his so-called ‘history plays’ with their
battles and marches, were written for the Globe. Such music
would, however, have been deafening in the enclosed space of
the Blackfriars with its subtle acoustic. Instead, flutes, lutes and
‘broken consorts’ were chosen, with, in addition, the
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accompaniment of the odd boy singer to bolster the theatre’s
already established reputation for high-quality choral music.
Music would be played in the four act breaks: ‘the encurtain’d
musique sounds’, wrote Brathwait, ‘to give Enter-breath to the
Actors, and more grace to their Action’.43 Music would also
stop the audience from getting restless during act breaks. The
plays written after the Shakespeare company acquired the
Blackfriars theatre include those often called Shakespeare’s
‘late plays’ or his ‘romances’: Pericles, Cymbeline, The
Tempest, The Winter’s Tale . Each of these has a dark side, but
each is wistful, romantic, yearning, hence the term ‘romance’.
These are static plays – presumably because the Blackfriars
stage was smaller than the stage of the Globe – so they tend
towards the aesthetic of fixed things, painting, sculpture, stately
dance, tableaux, the conscious art of the theatre. Written to be
played by candlelight, broken into separable units and tied over
with sweet music, they have a dreamy quality that can be traced
directly to the practical necessities offered by the new theatre.
Sometimes, particularly over the Christmas season, plays
were performed at court. That may be hinted at in some texts
too. The single version of Macbeth that survives shows signs
that it may be a version of the play specially prepared for oneoff performance. The play includes a scene in which Macbeth
visits the witches to ask whether Banquo’s sons will indeed
inherit the crown. In answer, he is shown a procession of ‘eight
Kings, and Banquo last, with a glasse in his hand’ (TLN 1658,
4.1.112–13). In the looking-glass Macbeth sees a line of kings
that seems to ‘stretch out to’th’cracke of Doome’ (TLN 1664,
4.1.117). But the fact that Banquo heads a succession of kings
has already been made by the procession, provoking a question
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as to why the mirror is needed. The answer may be that this
version of Macbeth is to be played before King James, a direct
lineal descendant from Banquo. Other aspects of the play – its
many witch scenes (James had written a tract on witches,
Demonology, in 1597) – suggest that Macbeth may have been
reworked for royal performance. Then, in the glass as Banquo
passes by, the King sees himself reflected at the end of the line
of kings, just as he hears the prediction that his blood-line will
rule for ever.
So Shakespeare’s London, its buildings, its court, its
playhouses, becomes a feature of Shakespeare’s texts and of the
mentality of Shakespeare’s audience. The plays of Shakespeare
are thus a product of Shakespeare’s environment both
specifically and more generally; to have a sense of the early
modern London stage is not just to understand the plays in situ
– in the place for which they were written – but also to
understand the way place imposed itself on the writing as well
as the performance of Shakespeare.
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3
Additions, Emendations and
Revisions
One way a playwright could cancel what he had just written in
manuscript was to cross it out, scribbling over the rejected
words or phrases. Heminges and Condell, the two actors who
gathered together Shakespeare’s plays and published them in
the 1623 folio, declare that Shakespeare seldom erased any
fragment of text in this fashion: ‘His mind and hand went
together: And what he thought he uttered with that easiness,
that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers’
(A3a). Shakespeare, his friends claim, was so effortlessly
creative that he hardly ever stumbled, even over a phrase.
It has been convincingly argued that Heminges and Condell
were giving Shakespeare little more than formulaic praise.1
Commendation of a similar kind is lavished on the works of the
now nearly forgotten playwright Thomas Randolph, whose very
childhood chatter was publishable – he had ‘lisp’d Wit worthy
th’Presse’. His natural ease in writing is compared with the
scrawlings of lesser playwrights whose pages look like crossed
account books; who
. . . blot
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A quire of Paper to contrive a Plot,
And ere they name it, cross it, till it look
Raced with wounds like an old mercers Book.2
Indeed, Ben Jonson, who countered the praise that
Shakespeare never blotted out a line with the bitter retort
‘would he had blotted a thousand’, pointed out that easy
composition sometimes means writing before thinking:
Shakespeare ‘flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was
necessary he should be stop’d . . . His wit was in his owne
power; would the rule of it had beene so too.’3 Jonson’s
resentment will have been fuelled by the fact that his own
careful and long-pondered plays were frequently criticised for a
laboured lack of spontaneity:
. . . thy Witt
As long upon a Comoedie did sit
As Elephants bring forth; and . . . thy blotts
And mendings tooke more time then Fortune plots.4
This chapter explores the way Shakespeare wrote, rewrote and
revised his plays. Did Shakespeare in fact blot his copybook?
What other kinds of changes might a composing author make
and where can they be found? In showing that plays were
regularly and frequently altered by a number of people, the
chapter raises some larger questions – how ‘fixed’ is any
playtext – and what, exactly, is ‘the author’ and ‘the play’?
The one piece of continuous handwriting that is thought to
be Shakespeare’s is actually full of crossed words, rewriting
and overwriting. It forms a section of a manuscript play, The
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Booke [i.e. playscript] of Sir Thomas Moore, which is written,
in all, by six people, none of whose names are provided. Their
individual ‘hands’ are commonly designated as belonging to
playwrights A, B, C, D, E and S. ‘Hand S’ in Thomas Moore is
thought to be that of Anthony Munday, author of numerous
plays including The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon
(1601), and John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1594). He was
famous for his ability to come up with good plots, but his play
Thomas Moore was rejected by the public censor, the Master of
the Revels, for being seditious. That rejected play was then
returned and, at some later point, was revised by five people,
most of whom made their emendations on to the rejected
manuscript, some of whom wrote revisions on to separate
pieces of paper that were then pasted into the playtext. Why
five people worked on the text is unclear; how they divided
their labours between them is also unknown. Even the date at
which the five performed their work is hard to determine. It is,
moreover, suspected that the play was never performed and that
what survives is a revised but subsequently re-rejected
manuscript. The five revisers are thought to be: ‘Hand A’
(Henry Chettle), ‘Hand B’ (Thomas Heywood?), ‘Hand C’ (a
professional scribe or prompter), ‘Hand E’ (Thomas Dekker).
‘Hand D’ is usually identified as Shakespeare’s because of the
appearance as well as the quality of its writing.5
Playwright D does not contribute much to Thomas Moore.
He writes one crowd scene into the manuscript playtext, and
provides one soliloquy which is written by Hand C on to a
separate piece of paper and later pasted into the playbook;
inconsistencies between these passages and the rest of the text
show that D has written in isolation, without access to the full
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copy of the play for which his inserts are intended. D thus
shows how little knowledge a collaborator needed to write his
text, and this makes him important in the history of coauthorship, whoever he is. Here is a transcription of part of D’s
crowd scene as it appears on the manuscript page. It is heavily
abbreviated, and, for ease of reference, the abbreviations have
been spelled out in italics. C has later revised over the text and
has changed some of D’s speech-prefixes: C’s alterations are
reproduced in bold. In this section, the English crowd are crying
out against admitting foreigners into the country, flooding
England with their babies and their alien food. At this point in
history, ‘foreign food’ seems to be defined particularly as root
vegetables: the writer (from here on, for the sake of
convenience, ‘Shakespeare’) may want to emphasise that true
Englishmen eat meat rather than vegetables. At the same time
he points out that food which is disturbingly foreign to one
period is native to another:
Linc they bring in straing rootes, which is merely to the
vndoing of poore prentizes, for whates a watrie a sorry
parsnyp to a good hart
oth william trash trash,: they breed sore eyes and tis enough to
infect the Cytty with the palsey
Lin nay yt has infected yt with the palsey, for theise basterdes
of dung as you knowe they growe in Dung haue infected vs,
and yt is our infeccion will make the cytty shake which
partly Coms through the eating of parsnips
o Clown. betts trewe and pumpions together
...
Enter the L maier Surrey
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Shrewsbury
Sher Maior hold in the kinges name hold
Surrey frendes masters Countrymen . . .6
[Modernised transcript:
Lincoln They bring in strange roots, which is merely to the
undoing of poor [ap]prentices, for what’s a watery a sorry
parsnip to a good heart?
Oth William Trash! Trash! They breed sore eyes, and ’tis
enough to infect the city with the palsy.
Lincoln Nay, it has infected it with the palsy, for these bastards
of dung (as you know, they grow in dung) have infected us,
and it is our infection will make the city shake – which
partly comes through the eating of parsnips.
o Clown. Betts True, and pumpions [pumpkins] together
...
Enter the Lord Mayor, Surrey,
Shrewsbury
Sher Mayor Hold! In the king’s name, hold!
Surrey Friends, masters, countrymen . . .]
Authorial revisions in Thomas Moore are made by the very
procedure Heminges and Condell had so specifically denied: by
crossing out erroneous words and phrases and rewriting them.
Revisions are made throughout the dialogue; changes to the
designation of character on the left were made later by C when
trying to sort out who speaks what (the layout of the manuscript
suggests that Shakespeare wrote the dialogue first, and added
the names of the speakers afterwards). This kind of revision,
made hastily in the process of writing a draft text, is called
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currente calamo (literally ‘with a running pen’). When
Lincoln’s speech is changed from ‘what’s a watery parsnip to a
good heart?’ to ‘What’s a sorry parsnip to a good heart?’
Shakespeare is shown making a false start and correcting it,
currente calamo. The revision alters the direction of the
sentence. Where ‘watery’ would have made ‘parsnip’ the
subject of criticism, ‘sorry’ – hardly an outrageous slur on the
vegetable – throws criticism back on to its speaker, now made,
himself, to seem rather ridiculous. It allows (or inspires), too,
the joke in the next line: ‘sorry’ parsnips are indeed so because
they breed ‘sore eyes’. Shakespeare, like most writers, revised
during the process of writing itself.
The Thomas Moore fragment also shows another feature
that relates to notions of the revising author – the use or reuse
(depending on dating) of a verbal formula employed elsewhere.
Surrey’s opening speech to the crowd, ‘friends, masters,
countrymen’ is highly reminiscent of Antony’s ‘Friends,
Romans, Countrymen’ (TLN 1618, 3.2.73) in Julius Caesar,
just as Hamlet’s ‘words, words, words’ in Hamlet (TLN 1230,
2.2.192) is matched by Troilus’ ‘Words, words, meere words,
no matter from the heart’ in Troilus and Cressida (TLN 3322–
3, 5.3.108). Even in the heat of creation – or perhaps because of
it – Shakespeare seems to have remembered and returned to
phrases that had worked in the past. He was a reuser and a
reviser, a point hardly worth making except that Heminges and
Condell had said he was not.
There were ways other than blotting that playwrights could
employ when working on what were called ‘foul papers’ –
‘foul’, because, as the very word suggests, it was in the nature
of draft manuscripts to be messily blotched in appearance. If a
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writer were slightly undecided about a passage he had just
completed, he could highlight it to be moved, or perhaps
deleted later. The conventional way of doing this was to
inscribe a vertical line along the side of the questionable
section, singling it out without actually damaging the substance
of the text, which might, perhaps, prove useful in another place
or at another time.
Such passages, marked as debatable, but not physically
crossed through, sometimes work their way into printed texts
by mistake, for the compositors (typesetters) in the printing
house did not always notice that a passage that had not been
struck through had nevertheless been rejected.
Some printed Shakespearean texts show evidence that
sections marked for excision have been mistakenly published.
One occurs in Love’s Labour’s Lost . In that play, the King of
Navarre and his young companions have sworn to live pure
lives dedicated only to academic study; they also swear to forgo
the company of women. When the Princess of France arrives in
Navarre with her ladies, however, the King and all his followers
are immediately smitten: each man falls in love, starts a
flirtation and is, therefore, forsworn. Berowne, the most
outspoken of the King’s friends, takes it upon himself to defend
and excuse what has happened. The men should embrace the
company of women, he maintains, for studying women is
simply a variety of scholarly pursuit. As he puts it:
From womens eyes this doctrine I derive,
They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
(Q F2b, TLN 1652–4, 4.3.298–300)
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And as he puts it a few sentences later:
From womens eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparcle still the right promethean fier,
They are the Bookes, the Artes, the Achademes,
That shew, containe, and nourish all the worlde.
Els none at all in ought proves excellent.
(Q F3a, TLN 1701–5, 4.3.347–51)
Obviously only one version of this passage is supposed to have
been retained but, as it is, both have worked their way into
Shakespeare’s printed text. In fact, the whole second half of
Berowne’s speech revisits the themes of the first half. What are
editors to do with a text like this? Which of the passages should
be kept and which rejected? What did Shakespeare intend? The
answer is impossible to determine, and editors of Love’s
Labour’s Lost always leave both of the above passages in the
text and give Berowne his long, repetitive speech in full.7
This example is illustrative of the way Shakespeare
sometimes wrote. It shows that he was capable of having
second thoughts which he might mark for reconsideration rather
than expunge. More significantly, it gives a brief glimpse of
Shakespeare at a crux in the creation of his play. As it seems, he
sometimes had an idea or a verbal image before determining
what its final context should be. This is particularly clear in
Romeo and Juliet, where Shakespeare appears to have settled on
a passage to be spoken before deciding its speaker. At the end
of 2.2 in the two surviving ‘good’ texts of Romeo and Juliet,
Romeo realises that dawn is breaking.
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Romeo The grey eyde morne smiles on the frowning night,
Checkring the Easterne Clouds with streaks of light,
And darkness fleckted like a drunkard reeles,
From forth daies pathway, made by Tytans wheels.
Hence will I to my ghostly Friers close cell,
His helpe to crave, and my deare hap to tell.
Exit.
Enter Frier al one with a basket
Friar The grey-eyed morne smiles on the frowning night.
Checking the Easterne clowdes with streaks of light:
And fleckeld darkness like a drunkard reeles,
From forth daies path, and Titans burning wheeles.
(Q2 D4b; TLN 999–1009, 2.2–3.1.1–4)
Notice the slight variations in the passages spoken by Romeo
and spoken by the Friar; ‘darkness fleckted’, becomes ‘fleckeld
darkness’, ‘daies pathway, made by Tytans wheels’, becomes
‘daies path, and Titans burning wheeles’. So the repeated
segment is authorial: it is not the result of eye-skip or some
other mistake in the printing house. As it seems, the substance
of this passage was important to Shakespeare – but it did not
matter who said it. When addressing ‘characterisation’, such
examples should be borne in mind, for in this instance
Shakespeare’s characters are tools for a fragment of verse about
the arrival of morning. Modern editors, looking at this repeated
text in Romeo and Juliet, do not let it stand as they did
Berowne’s twice-spoken fragment in Love’s Labour’s Lost .
Perhaps because the repetition is consecutive, or perhaps
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because the repetition is divided between two people, editors
tend to print one version and not print the other, their choice –
giving the passage to the Friar or giving it to Romeo – being
random (though the fact that in the third surviving ‘bad’ text
only the Friar speaks the speech should be borne in mind).8
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar may both
contain another variety of internal, local revision that has crept
into the established texts. The passages marked for deletion are
not repetitions, however, but alternatives. A Midsummer Night’s
Dream seems to have two endings one after another – a fairy
masque (probably for private performance) and an epilogue
spoken by Puck (probably for public performance). In Julius
Caesar, the alternative passages relate to the character – and
characterisation – of one of the play’s protagonists. At the start
of 4.3, Brutus already knows that Portia is dead; a few
sentences later he discovers it to his surprise. On each occasion
he has a markedly different response to the news. In the first
instance he manfully faces up to sorrow, as Macduff does in
Macbeth when he hears of the death of his wife and children.
For the audience, this is the first time that we learn that
Brutus . . . Portia is dead.
Cassio Ha? Portia?
Brutus She is dead.
Cassio How scap’d I killing, when I crost you so?
O insupportable, and touching losse!
Uppon what sickness?
Brutus Impatient of my absence,
And greefe, that yong Octavius with Mark Antony
Have made themselves so strong: For with her death
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That tydings came. With this she fell distract,
And (her Attendants absent) swallow’d fire.
Cassio And dy’d so?
Brutus Even so.
(TLN 2134–46, 4.3.147–57)
Later in the scene, Messala enters.
Messala Had you your Letters from your wife, my lord?
Brutus No Messala.
Messala Nor nothing in your Letters writ of her?
Brutus Nothing, Messala.
Messala That me thinkes is strange.
Brutus Why aske you?
Heare you ought of her, in yours?
Messala No my Lord.
Brutus Now as you are a Roman tell me true.
Messala Then like a Roman, beare the truth I tell,
For certaine she is dead, and by strange manner.
Brutus Why farewell Portia: We must die Messala:
With meditating that she must dye once,
I have the patience to endure it now.
(TLN 2175–88, 4.3.181–92)
This second version of the news takes a Brutus too weighed
down with sorrow and guilt to feel the additional blow. If he is
Macduff in version one, in version two he is like Macbeth, who
responds to the death of his wife with ‘She should have dy’de
heereafter; / There would have beene a time for such a word’
(TLN 2238–9, 5.5.17–18). Shakespeare seems to be hesitating
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over a point of characterisation here. Should he make Brutus
sympathetic, or stoical and detached? Macduff or Macbeth? 9 It
is possible, of course, that he wants to keep both options open
and that the repetition of the same matter in a different form is
deliberate. Editors always print both passages, and actors often
act them; but Shakespeare’s habit of laying out alternative
passages one after the other on the same manuscript has already
been illustrated. He had a tendency to redraft while composing;
indeed, flowing effortlessly from one version to another is a
product of that comfortable ease and fluency in writing so
criticised by Jonson.
Shakespeare’s recycling of phrases across plays, combined
with what looks like a tendency to think and write in separate
‘passages’ without necessarily too much preimposed structure,
suggests an author who writes in blocks. Probably, like his
Hamlet, Shakespeare had a ‘commonplace’ or ‘table’ book in
which he stored observations and ideas for future use, some
composed by himself, some gathered from the writings of
others. Hamlet says the ‘Tables’ of his memory contain ‘triviall
fond Records’ and ‘sawes of [sententious sayings from]
Bookes’. He adds an observation to his own commonplace book
summarising what he has newly discovered about his
stepfather. ‘My Tables’, says Hamlet, ‘my Tables; meet it is I
set it downe, / That one may smile, and smile and be a Villaine’
(TLN 792–3, 1.5.106–7). ‘One may smile and smile – and be a
villain’ is the memorable phrase Hamlet has created to be noted
for rereading and, perhaps, reuse in the future. In this play full
of injunctions to ‘remember’ what has happened, the tome full
of insults that Hamlet so earnestly pores over when talking to
Polonius may well be his own table book.
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A culture that works with commonplace books has a habit
of thinking in snippets, in pieces of removable text. Playwrights
in particular had a reputation for working from fragments,
which is why they were often known, critically, as
‘playpatchers’.10 So it is no surprise to find suggestions that
Shakespeare, as well as writing spontaneously, also worked
from separate pre-written pieces of text. Nor, given that
commonplace books were equally used for storing the ideas of
others, is it surprising to find that he gathered passages from
the books he read for use in his plays. Sections i n Antony and
Cleopatra closely adhere to Thomas North’s translation of
Plutarch (1579) and seem to do all they can to recall that text.
In particular, Shakespeare picks up not just what North says,
but the rhythms and vocabulary in which he says it. A famous
example is the depiction of Cleopatra’s barge, which North
describes in these words:
She [Cleopatra] disdained to set forward otherwise, but to
take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the pope whereof
was of gold, the sailes of purple, and the owers of silver,
which kept stroke in rowing after the sounde of the
musicke of flutes, howboyes, citherns, viols, and such
other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And
now for the person of her selfe: she was layed under a
pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired
like the goddesses Venus, commonly drawen in picture:
and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretie faire boyes
apparelled as painters doe set forth god Cupide, with little
fannes in their hands, with the which they fanned wind
upon her. Her ladies and gentlwomen also, the fairest of
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them were apparelled like the nymphes Nereides (which
are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some
stearing the helme, others tending the tackle and ropes of
the barge, out of the which there came a wonderfull
passing sweete savor of perfumes, that perfumed the
wharfes side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of
people. Some of them followed the barge all alongest the
rivers side: others also ranne out of the citie to see her
comming in. So that in thend, there ranne such multitudes
of people one after an other to see her, that Antonius was
left post alone in the market place, in his Imperiall seate to
geve audience.11
Transmuting this passage into blank verse, Shakespeare added
to it a series of linked themes whilst nevertheless keeping much
of North’s original language.
The Barge she sat in, like a burnisht Throne
Burnt on the water: the Poope was beaten Gold,
Purple the Sailes: and so perfumed that
The Windes were Love-sicke.
With them the Owers were Silver,
Which to the tune of Flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beate, to follow faster;
As amorous of their strokes. For her owne person,
It beggerd all discription, she did lye
In her Pavillion, cloth of Gold, of Tissue,
O’re-picturing that Venus, where we see
The fancie out-worke Nature. On each side her,
Stood pretty Dimpled Boyes, like smiling Cupids,
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With divers coulour’d Fannes whose winde did seeme,
To glove the delicate cheekes which they did coole,
And what they undid did. . . .
Her Gentlewoman, like the Nereides,
So many Mer-maides tended her i’th’ eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the Helme
A seeming Mer-maide steeres: The Silken Tackle,
Swell with the touches of those Flower-soft hands,
That yarely frame the office. From the Barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent Wharfes. The Citty cast
Her people out upon her: and Anthony
Enthron’d i’th’ Market-place, did sit alone,
Whisling to’th’ ayre: which but for vacancie,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopater too,
And made a gap in Nature.
(TLN 902–31, 2.2.191–218)
The lovesick winds, the amorous water, the touches of the
flower-soft hands are all Shakespeare’s, flooding the passage
with a sensuality lacking in North. He has added, too, a
lyricism, taking repeated sounds, already a feature of North’s
writing, and playing on them so that they become a theme in
themselves: the effect is a wealth, an extravagance of sound and
image. What Shakespeare does is in no sense plagiarism, a term
that did not exist at the time; it is imitatio (‘imitation’), a
variation on a pleasing theme and a homage to a writer greatly
respected. North’s Plutarch is said to have been the first
English translation as famous for its translator as for its
original writer (it was known as ‘North’s Plutarch’, rather than
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just ‘Plutarch’, even at the time). North, of course, was
imitating Plutarch; Shakespeare was imitating North in a line of
homage and inheritance.
Homages of this kind, combined with other borrowings –
jokes that were around in London at the time, for instance –
make up part of what Shakespeare does and expects the
audience to recognise. The playwright Ben Jonson went a step
further. He not only carefully edited his own plays for
publication, excising the contributions of other playwrights
(‘this Booke . . . is not the same with that which was acted on
the publike Stage, wherein a second Pen had good share: in
place of which I have . . . put . . . mine own’); he also chose,
sometimes, to print quotation marks around what he decided
were the best or most memorable bits in his plays, singling key
thoughts from the rest and, by so doing, highlighting them for
removal into commonplace books.12 In this way he broke his
works back down into the separate fragments that had,
presumably, made them up in the first place. 13 The urge to
reduce texts to moments, to phrases or sententia was strong at
the time; plays had the fragment firmly structured within them.
Throughout Shakespeare’s canon there are revisions more
wide-reaching and significant than discussed so far. These are
revisions made over full and complete working plays,
emendations made to works that have often already been
performed. They relate to the policy of frequent adaptation that
existed in the theatre of the time. London was too tiny to
provide the audience for a ‘run’ of a single play, and even the
same play could not be performed, unchanged, too many times.
Title pages often claim to be, like the 1598 quarto of Love’s
Labour’s Lost, ‘newly corrected and amended’ or, like the 1599
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(quarto 2) of Romeo and Juliet, ‘newly corrected, augmented,
and amended’ showing not just that plays changed regularly but
that alteration was a prized quality. Even when plays
themselves are not in reality altered, the claim that ‘correction’
has taken place continues to be made. Revisions to a text were
seen to be a selling-point; an indication that in the playhouse a
play was expected to be changed if it were to remain current.
Textual differences between two versions of the same play are
of crucial importance, so what is meant by the words that often
describe two different states of the text, ‘quarto’ and ‘folio’
should be explained. When two or more good texts of a
Shakespeare play survive, at least one is going to be quarto and
the other folio, so it is necessary to be absolutely clear what
each implies, both in general and with respect to Shakespeare.
The terms ‘quarto’ and ‘folio’ simply denote the size of a
book, and can be used to describe any published text. Paper
could be printed on, folded and cut to produce books of various
dimensions: if a sheet of paper were folded into quarters, it
made a ‘quarto’; folded into eight, it made an ‘octavo’; into
twelve it made a ‘duodecimo’. Plays were usually printed in
cheap, accessible quartos, and the only plays by Shakespeare
published during his lifetime came out in this format (with the
exception
of Richard Duke of York , a ‘bad’ octavo).
Shakespeare does not himself appear to have been responsible
for selling any of his texts to publisher or printer, nor does he
seem to have seen or made improvements to quartos before
they were sent to booksellers. (Printing, publishing and
bookselling were not then necessarily the separate trades they
are today.)
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Critics and editors divide extant quartos of Shakespeare’s
texts into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, though this process has of late come
into disrepute.14 Nevertheless, as the words are much used, and
the concepts behind the words have not yet been fully reformed,
it is important to describe what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are used to
imply. A ‘good’ quarto is any quarto containing a text that
seems to be in some way authoritative, though ‘authority’ itself
can mean a variety of different things. An authoritative text
may originate in a Shakespearean rough draft (‘foul papers’); in
a scribe’s neat copy of a Shakespearean draft; or in a playhouse
manuscript used for prompting. So though a ‘good’ quarto is in
some form traceable back to an authoritative Shakespearean
text, as written or acted, it can have various different lineages.
A ‘bad’ quarto, on the other hand, is a quarto that contains a
text so muddled and confused that it is judged not to have its
basis in a straightforward authorial text (though it is not always
apparent where a ‘bad’ quarto does come from). It is often said
that ‘bad’ quartos consist of texts that were partially memorised
and then semi-created by whoever supplied the manuscript to
the printer. Sometimes a bad quarto is thought to be traceable to
a particular actor who gave his ‘part’ to the printer and then
remembered and rehashed as much of the rest of the play as
possible. An alternative explanation is that a member of the
audience who was skilled in stenography (a variety of
shorthand) copied down as much of the play as he could and
then made up the rest and gave it to the printer. Heywood
claimed of his play Queen Elizabeth that ‘some by Stenography
drew / The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew:)’.15
Perhaps a playwright, or a would-be playwright, produced the
texts from a mixture of memory and invention. At the
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beginning of Shakespeare’s folio Heminges and Condell claim
that earlier quartos (they make no distinction between good and
bad) were ‘stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and
deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors’.
Quartos, good and bad, were printed because publishers
were prepared to gamble on their success. Legal fees of one
kind or another meant that a printer/publisher would gain little
money from issuing playtexts only once, but would profit
considerably from reprints.16 So it was that popular stage plays
– the kind that might be assumed to lead swiftly to reprinting –
were sought after. Why ‘bad’ quartos were printed as well as
good is not entirely clear, but seems to relate to the way
copyright worked at the time. Playwrights had no legal right
over what they had written and textual ownership was, instead,
accorded to whoever paid the stationers’ guild a sum of money
for the work in question. As soon as a play was acquired, it
could be ‘entered’ (registered), sold and printed irrespective of
its quality or of the feelings of its writer. Indeed, one of the
reasons why ‘authors’ were so little thought of, and were often
not named on quarto title-pages, is that they had no clear legal
hold over their own creations.
A folio was the largest kind of book that could be published.
To print it, sheets of paper were folded only once, and the result
was a tome as expensive as it was imposing. The folio size was
usual for bibles or the complete works of reputed classical
writers. Thus, to have his works published in folio was a
comment on Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation. In 1616 Ben
Jonson had been the first playwright who had dared publish his
collected English plays and poems in folio, calling them The
Workes of Benjamin Jonson, and, by so doing, implying that
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they were of equal status with the writings of classical authors.
Many people found Jonson’s attitude presumptuous in the
extreme. In particular, they criticised his choice of the majestic
term ‘works’ for what were in fact largely ‘plays’ (plays being,
at the time, considered ‘riffe raffes’ and ‘baggage bookes’).17
To M. Ben Johnson demanding the reason, why he call’d
his playes works.
Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mistery lurke,
What others call a play, you call a worke.
Thus answer’d by a friend in M. Johnson defence.
The authors friend thus for the author sayes,
Bens plais are works, when others works are plais.18
The collection of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623
after his death was in folio, following the example set by
Jonson. Shakespeare’s folio was, however, printed without
recourse to the dangerous term ‘works’ or the demeaning term
‘plays’; instead it was called, cumbersomely, Mr. William
Shakespeares Comedies, histories & tragedies. That its contents
are then divided into comedies, histories and tragedies is
probably a necessity brought about by the title. Having
Shakespeare’s plays published in folio at all was nevertheless
thought to be outrageous as the furious anti-theatricalist
William Prynne makes clear. ‘Some Play-books’, he fumes,
‘are growne from Quarto into Folio; which yet beare so good a
price and sale, that I cannot but with griefe relate it, they are
now new-printed in farre better paper than most Octavo or
Quarto Bibles’, adding in the margin, ‘Shackspeers Plaies are
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printed in the best Crowne paper, far better than most Bibles’. 19
Shakespeare’s folio was, however it dressed itself, potentially
offensive simply as a book.
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, histories & tragedies
came out seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and contains
thirty-six plays. All of these are by, or largely by, Shakespeare;
other plays thought nowadays to be at least partially
Shakespeare’s but which are absent from the folio are Pericles,
Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III. Although all texts in the
folio are ‘good’, it is hard to know what relationship they have
with their dead author. Some appear to have come from foul
papers, others from ‘fair copies’ of foul papers, others still
from scribal manuscripts. Some may have come from
prompters’ books; some are set from already extant quartos
which have themselves, to complicate matters further, been
used as prompters’ books – Romeo and Juliet is one such
example. Folio plays set from quarto are Love’s Labour’s Lost ,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream , 1 Henry IV, The Merchant of
Venice, Much Ado About Nothing. As only quartos and the folio
survive – the few pages of Thomas Moore, perhaps, aside – the
question as to what kind of text lies ‘behind’ a printed text
cannot always be resolved.
Some texts survive only in folio and were never printed in
quarto: 1 Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona , King John, Julius
Caesar, As You Like It , Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Measure for
Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well , Antony and Cleopatra,
Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale ,
The Tempest , Henry VIII. Editing these texts is simple as there
is no alternative text to muddle what is preserved; at the same
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time, as will be shown, these single plays often have internal
indications that they once existed in variant, lost versions.
Other plays survive in more than one ‘good’ text: a quarto
‘good’ text and a folio ‘good’ text. And, often, these two ‘good’
texts are significantly different from each other, because they
have different lineages and were written at different times.
Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Othello, 2 and 3 Henry VI,
Richard III, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V all have
two substantively different ‘good’ forms. Hamlet and Romeo
and Juliet have two substantively different ‘good’ forms and
each has a ‘bad’ form as well. Some other texts, while
displaying minor differences between quarto and folio, are not
significantly different. There is, for instance, one scene added
to the folio text of Titus Andronicus that is not in the quarto: the
‘fly-killing scene’. For the rest, the two texts are largely (but
not entirely) the same. Other texts that display minor
differences between quarto and folio are Richard II and 2 Henry
IV.
From about the turn of the last century up until the 1980s,
editors confronted with two good-but-variant texts tended to
argue that there had, presumably, been one perfect
Shakespearean archetypal text that had been ‘lost’. It was then
suggested that the lost, perfect text could be recovered by
conflating the remaining good texts together. Conflated editions
of necessity provide the longest possible playtexts with the
least possible ‘authority’ (a good quarto text, or a good folio
text, may well have been performed in the playhouse; a
combination of the two never was). Only in the 1980s did a
group of scholars seriously reconsider the possibility that, when
there is a good text from, say, 1604, and another good text from
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1623, and both are different, what has probably happened is that
the play has been revised over time. Comparing two texts,
rather than welding them together, reveals something about the
ways Shakespeare – or Shakespeare’s theatre – emended
playscripts.
Accounts show that it was normal to revise a play after it
had already been performed. A simple example of postperformance Shakespearean revision emerges from Ben Jonson.
I n Timber; or Discoveries, Jonson picks up on a grammatical
irregularity in Shakespeare’s writing of Julius Caesar.
Many times [Shakespeare] fell into those things, could not
escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar,
one speaking to him; Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee
replyed: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and
such like; which were ridiculous.20
So amused and infuriated was Jonson that he continued to harp
on the one infelicitous phrase ‘Caesar did never wrong, but with
just cause’ for the rest of his life: ‘Cry you mercy’ says his
Prologue to The Staple of News (1640), ‘you never did wrong,
but with / just cause.’21 But the single surviving text of Julius
Caesar contains no such observation. The text as it now stands
reads, ‘Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause / Will
he be satisfied’ (TLN 1254–5, 3.1.48). Jonson, it would seem,
made the criticism, and the text was changed – by Shakespeare
or someone else – as a result.
Another post-performance revision was made to 1 Henry IV.
The character now known as Sir John Falstaff started life under
the name of Sir John Oldcastle. But the Cobham family,
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descendants of the real Oldcastle, were offended by
Shakespeare’s scurrilous treatment of their ancestor, a famous
Lollard martyr. Some time after the first performance of the
play but before its publication, Oldcastle’s memory was
‘relieved’ when the name of the fat rogue was altered to
‘Falstaff’ – although the change only effectively wronged a
different family: ‘Now as I am glad that Sir John Oldcastle is
put out, so I am sorry that Sir John Fastolfe is put in, to relieve
his memory in this base service, to be the anvil for every dull
wit to strike upon.’22 The surviving text of 1 Henry IV retains
leftovers of the earlier name of Oldcastle that no longer make
sense, including Prince Harry’s jocular address to Falstaff as
‘my old Lad of the Castle’ (TLN 148, 1.2.41–2). Some lines of
the play seem to be metrically disturbed for the absence of the
name’s extra syllable, like ‘Away good Ned, Falstaffe sweates
to death’ (TLN 844–5, 2.2.108). 23 The revisions in 1 Henry IV
may not have been absolute, however: the descendant of a noble
family was insulted no matter which name was used, and it is
possible that the company varied ‘Falstaff’ and ‘Oldcastle’
according to circumstance – late identification of ‘fat John’
with Oldcastle at least raises the possibility that the play was
still sometimes performed using the old titles: ‘I’me a fat man .
. . I doe not live by the sweat of my brows, but am almost dead
with sweating, I eate much, but can talke little; Sir John Oldcastle was my great grand-fathers fathers Uncle . . .’24 If the
playhouse did retain the name ‘Oldcastle’ – or continue to hint
at it – that may be because the revision itself was made
unwillingly. But just because a writer does not want to alter his
text does not make the changes invalid, though it does raise
questions about what it means to be ‘authorial’ and how to
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define ‘authorship’ – especially as it is also possible that the
person who changed the names in the text was not Shakespeare.
Playwrights for the early modern theatre can be shown
undertaking unwilling revision as well as willing revision – the
one sometimes leading to the other.
Henry V, too, seems to have been speedily adapted in the
light of the Earl of Essex’s failure to subdue the Irish rebels. In
the folio version of the play there is a chorus that declares that
Henry V’s successful return from the Battle of Agincourt will
be greeted with the same rapture that would be accorded Essex
were he ‘As in good time he may, from Ireland comming, /
Bringing Rebellion broached on his Sword’ (TLN 2881–2, 5. 1.
29–34). This passage must have been composed between March
and June 1599, a date that can be judged with some accuracy as
the fact that Essex’s journey was going to be a failure was
obvious by July. 25 A later version of Shakespeare’s Henry V
(though published much earlier in a quarto of 1600) already
lacks this Essex-promoting chorus; the text seems to have been
almost immediately rewritten to take away the embarrassingly
wrong prediction. Had Essex been successful, indeed, the text
would still have needed to be changed simply to recognise the
fact. Shakespeare’s plays were a product of the time in which
they were written and fully reflected its impermanencies.
When the Earl of Essex later tried to institute a coup in
1601 designed to replace Queen Elizabeth’s counsellors with
his own friends, that event also took its toll on a Shakespeare
play. The Earl paid the Chamberlain’s Men forty shillings to
perform Richard II the day before his uprising. Presumably he
chose to use the play because it presented an England weakened
by bad leadership (‘That England, that was wont to conquer
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others, / Hath made a shamefull conquest of it selfe’, TLN 706–
7, 2.1.65–6). The rebellion itself was, however, as unsuccessful
as the Irish wars: the followers of Essex were arrested (they
included Shakespeare’s patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton); Essex was later executed. Under interrogation,
the Chamberlain’s Men claimed ignorance as to their own
importance in the uprising. Yet as a shareholder (‘sharer’) in
the Chamberlain’s Men since 1599, Shakespeare must have
sanctioned the resurrection of Richard II under circumstances
that would have manipulated the audience’s understanding of
the play. If the plays were written to include changeable
passages, they were also performed in situations that altered
their meaning.
Richard II offers an example of post-performance revision
that affects the printed text but may not have affected the
playing text (the play was probably not performed again after
its dangerous use in 1601). The folio and quarto versions of the
text are relatively similar save for a single episode. In none of
the first three quartos (one of 1597, two of 1598) is the
‘deposition’ scene of 4.1 published. This is the part of the play
in which the King is made to hand his crown to Bolingbroke
and renounce his kingship. It was probably because of Essex’s
uprising that the scene was subsequently excised from the text,
remaining absent until the fourth quarto of 1608 which has, its
title page boasts, ‘new additions of the Parliament Scene, and
the deposing of King Richard’. But though printings of Richard
II reveal the loss and recovery of the scene, the alterations
made to Julius Caesar, 1 Henry IV and even Henry V would
probably not have been noticeable without external information
alerting us to them. This has important ramifications, for it
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suggests that there were probably alternative versions of
passages in Shakespeare plays that have been lost to time and
that we do not know about.
Some plays that exist only in one form contain within their
single texts hints of other sections that do not survive. The one
folio edition of Winter’s Tale includes, at the start of 4.1, a
passage to be spoken by an actor playing Time. In it, Time
enjoins the audience to ‘Remember well I mentioned a sonne
o’th’Kings, which Florizell / I now name to you . . .’ ( Winter’s
Tale, TLN 1600–02, 4.1.21–2), but Time has not appeared
before in the text in which this passage stands, and the audience
is thus in no position to remember well or badly what he has
said. Perhaps Time once had a larger role, like that of Gower in
Pericles; possibly Time spoke a now-lost prologue. Meanwhile,
Measure for Measure and Twelfth Night both have stories that
take place in northern Europe, the first in Vienna, the second in
Illyria (roughly situated between Albania and Greece). Yet all
the characters have markedly Italian names, the protagonists of
Measure for Measure including Isabella, Claudio, Lucio,
Angelo and Mariana, those of Twelfth Night including Viola,
Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian. It is possible, of course, that
Shakespeare thought that everywhere abroad was a version of
Italy. But, as he has a sense of Jewish and Roman names, it is
equally possible that, at some point in the life of the two texts,
either country or set of characters has been altered.
One reason why a play written before 1606 but performed
after that date would have to be significantly revised was the
1606 ‘Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players’ which stated
That if at any tyme . . . any person or persons doe or shall
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in any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame, or Pageant
jeastingly or prophanely speake or use the holy Name of
God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the
Trinitie, which are not to be spoken but with feare and
reverence, shall forfeite for everie Offence by hym or them
committed Tenne Pounds.26
This act effectively outlawed all blasphemy on the stage, and
much revision took place as a result of it: all swearing had to go
from any pre-1606 play that was to be acted again. The law,
however, did not extend to the publishing of texts; ‘swearing’
texts could be read but not seen. A simple example is offered by
King John, for which only the folio version survives. The
printed play itself, which seems to have been written in roughly
1595, is surprisingly free from swearing, and includes some
awkward verse lines that are a beat or a couple of beats too long
or too short. A couplet such as Philip the Bastard’s ‘O old sir
Robert Father, on my knee / I give heaven thankes I was not
like to thee’ (TLN 90–1, 1.1.82–3) would obviously read better
if the two-syllable ‘heaven’ yielded to a one-syllable word such
as ‘God’. ‘Heaven’ indeed seems to stand in for ‘God’ in much
of the King John. This is a revised play, though it appears to be
hamfistedly emended, perhaps by a prompter. Its swearwords
have simply been replaced at the expense of the verse. Other
texts in which swearing has been more or less competently
removed are the folio texts of Titus Andronicus , Richard III,
Merry Wives of Windsor, 1 Henry IV and Twelfth Night.
Simply crossing out offending words would damage the
verse of a text, as the above example illustrates; revision of this
kind is unlikely to be authorial. Other plays show signs of
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having been returned to the author (or at least, to an author) for
alteration. Othello offers an example. It exists in quarto (1622)
and folio, the quarto being a ‘swearing’ text, the folio largely
‘non-swearing’ (the quarto text dates from before 1606 despite
its late date of publication). In its two manifestations, the play
begins like this:
(swearing pre-1606 text)
Rodrigo Tush, never tell me, I take it much unkindly
That you Iago, who has had my purse,
As if the strings were thine, should’st know of this.
Iago S’blood, but you will not heare me . . .
(Q B1a, 1.1.1–4)
(non-swearing post-1606 text)
Rodrigo Never tell me, I take it much unkindly
That thou (Iago) who hast had my purse,
As if ye strings were thine, should’st know of this.
Iago But you’l not heare me:
(TLN 3–5, 1.1.1–4)
It is touching to find that, together with taking out ‘S’blood’, a
corruption of the blasphemous expletive ‘God’s blood’, the
revising author has carefully removed even the surely
innocuous exclamation of contempt, ‘tush’. Other slight
changes have also been made. Rodrigo’s formal ‘you’ in the
‘swearing text’ has been replaced by the familiar ‘thou’ in the
non-swearing text. Perhaps the close relationship between the
two men had to be manifested by modes of address once the
casual familiarity implied by the nonchalant swearing had been
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removed. Entire lines are rewritten in slightly different form;
while altering the text to remove the blasphemy, other local
revisions were made:
(swearing pre-1606 text)
Iago It were not for your quiet, nor your good, nor for my
manhood, honesty, or wisedome, To let you know my
thoughts[.]
Othello Zouns.
(Q G3b, 3.3.152–4)
(non-swearing post 1606 text)
Iago It were not for your quiet, nor your good,
Nor for my Manhood, Honesty, and Wisedome,
To let you know my thoughts.
Othello What dost thou meane?
(TLN 1764–7, 3.3.152–4)
‘Zouns’ or ‘zounds’ is a corruption of ‘by God’s wounds’, and a
blasphemous swearword. What in the first text is Othello’s
furious exclamation becomes, in the second, a question, a
demand for more information. Othello has won back some
articulacy in the folio; his descent into jealous madness is
slower than it is in the quarto and more paced. In the folio, too,
Othello concludes the five-beat (‘iambic’) verse line started by
Iago: ‘To let you know my thoughts. What dost thou mean?’
The regularity of the verse completion again implies that he has
not yet lost control as he has in the quarto, though it may also
illustrate to what extent he is under Iago’s sway: Othello
completes Iago’s lines. So alteration, whatever necessity
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brought it about, will often subtly (and sometimes less than
subtly) change the tone of the play itself.
Other, additional, revisions have been made to Othello,
revisions that suggest a Shakespeare who cannot leave his text
alone once he has the chance to rework it (that ‘Shakespeare’ is
the reviser is an assumption based on the quality of the
revision). On one level simple substitution has taken place.
There was, for instance, no legal or textual necessity to change
the quarto’s iambic ‘And swiftly come to Desdemona’s armes’
(Q D4a, 2.1.80), to the folio’s more torrid iambic ‘Make loves
quicke pants in Desdemonaes Armes’ (TLN 844, 2.1.80), but
that is the alteration. Perhaps, looking at the play again,
Shakespeare decided to intensify the sexuality of the couple’s
love.
In addition, substantial passages appear in one text of
Othello and not the other. They often work round certain
themes, as though Shakespeare had a new connected series of
ideas that he wove into the text. In the folio there are several
passages that are absent from the quarto that suggest Othello
used magic to win Desdemona’s love. The characters that
surround Othello in folio are, as a result, more implicitly racist
than their counterparts in the quarto; the folio hero is more
isolated. Shakespeare fiddled with his texts as he revised them,
but, given the chance, he also could alter fundamental elements
of the story – this is equally clear in Hamlet and Lear, in which
‘good’ texts differ so exceptionally as to constitute rather
different plays.
Hamlet exists in three texts, two quartos and the folio. Of
the quartos, one, the first, published in 1603, is designated ‘bad’
and is approximately 2150 lines long. The second, published in
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1604/5, is designated ‘good’ and is considerably longer,
extending to some 3600 lines. The folio text, also ‘good’, but
manifestly later in composition than the good quarto, is 3500
lines long. The ‘bad’ quarto truly is a garbled form of the play.
Rhyming couplets are half-remembered: what in good quarto
and folio is Claudius’ despairing ‘My words flye up, my
thoughts remain below, / Words without thoughts, never to
Heaven go’ (TLN 2372–3, 3.3.97–8) is, in the bad quarto, ‘My
wordes fly up, my sinnes remaine below. / No King on earth is
safe, if Gods his foe’ (Q1 G1a). Indeed, God has, throughout the
bad quarto, a much less ambiguous presence than in either of
the good texts. The ‘To be or not to be’ speech is rendered
To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returnd,
The undiscovered country, at whoes sight
The happy smile, and accursed damn’d.
But for this, the joyfull hope of this,
Whol’d beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poore?
(Q1 D4b)
This speech certainly contains echoes of Hamlet’s reflection on
death as an undiscovered country, but the undiscovered country
is unambiguously ‘heaven’ and is a place to which Hamlet has
the ‘joyfull hope’ of going. While in the ‘good’ texts the speech
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is impelled by Hamlet’s fears about an unknowable afterlife,
here in the bad text Hamlet has such a comfortable certainty of
going to Heaven that it is unclear what he is worried about.
How ‘bad’ this text actually is, is another question. Though the
1603 quarto represents the play in a different state from either
quarto or folio (‘Polonius’ is here called ‘Corambis’;
‘Reynaldo’ is called ‘Montano’), it is not obviously a text that
dates either from earlier or from later than the two good texts.27
It lies somewhere in between the two; a bad version of a third
state of Hamlet.
In the story told by the ‘bad’ quarto, Gertrude, learning
from Hamlet that Claudius is a murderer, changes allegiance
from her new husband to her son. Her character may echo the
equivalent part of the Queen in the lost play of Hamlet (often
called the ‘Ur’-Hamlet), perhaps by Kyd, from which
Shakespeare took his story. Maybe whoever constructed the
quarto added elements remembered from Kyd’s play to flesh
out the text. On the other hand, the moral dubiety of Gertrude in
the two good versions of Hamlet could be seen as a textual
alteration made by Shakespeare to something he had written.
Just as Shakespeare added a layer of complexity to Othello, so
his decision to complicate the role of Gertrude may have been
carefully made; perhaps he wanted Hamlet to confront – but
also to have inherited – two strands of ‘villainy’.
So, as well as being a muddle, the bad quarto of 1603 is also
a trace of a lost version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is no
surprise: most plays, as has been shown, were somewhat ‘fluid’.
Other versions of Hamlet, entirely lost, are suggested by
references and epitaphs. ‘Ther are, as Hamlet saies,’ writes
Robert Armin, a performer of Fools for the Chamberlain’s men,
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‘things called whips in store’, a phrase that is absent from any
of the three extant texts of Hamlet.28 The line may be a
misremembered version of 2 Henry VI’s ‘My Masters of Saint
Albones, / Have you not Beadles in your Towne, / And Things
call’d Whippes?’ (TLN 882–4, 2.1.133–4) as is sometimes
suggested, or it may relate to Hamlet’s ‘Whips and Scornes of
time’ (TLN 1724, 3.1.68). But given that it is written by an
actor who had played in Shakespeare’s Hamlet since its
inception, the phrase might be from a version of Hamlet for
which there is no other record. Richard Burbage, the actor, is
particularly remembered for the way he ‘but scant of breath’
cried out ‘Revenge for his dear father’s death’, an exclamation
not present in any of Shakespeare’s surviving Hamlets.29
Similarly, in a jest-book written by Richard Chamberlain in the
1630s, a section on ‘Sundry mistakes spoken publickly upon the
Stage’ tells how an actor in Richard III reversed the names of
Buckingham and Banister and said ‘My Liege, the Duke of
Bannister is tane, / And Buckingham is come for his reward’.30
But in Shakespeare’s play there is no character Banister, and
there the words are ‘My Liege, the Duke of Buckingham is
taken, / That is the best newes’ (TLN 3339–40, 4.4.531–2).
True, the words may be from another popular play about
Richard III, now lost – but they may equally be a testament to a
different version of Shakespeare’s text from either of the two
that have survived.
Between the good Hamlet (1604) and the folio Hamlet,
large-scale revision has taken place. The folio text includes
about eighty lines that are not in the ‘good’ 1604 quarto, but it
also omits about 230 lines that are. Was Shakespeare trying to
create new audience interest in a tired play, or was he, once
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again, a victim of the practical demands of the censor? Perhaps
both. ‘Danish’ jokes – the fact, for instance, that Danes are
called drunkards and swine by other nations – are consistently
revised out of Hamlet. Here is one of the passages later cut:
This heavy headed reveale east and west
Makes us tradust, and taxed of other nations,
They clip us drunkards, and with Swinish phrase
Soyle our addition.
(Q2 D1a, 1.4.19–22)
This and similar observations seem to have been excised when
King James came to the throne with a Danish wife in 1603. Has
the play been altered so as not to offend royal sensibilities?
As with the emendations in Othello, the process of subtly
but consistently changing Hamlet alters the nature of its hero.
In the earlier good quarto, Hamlet seems to be closer to his
revenge-play archetype. Important passages cut by the time of
the later, folio text include the much-quoted section where
Hamlet would, he says, trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
‘my two Schoolefellowes . . . as I will Adders fanged’, and
acidly declares that ‘tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist
with his owne petar’ (Q2 K3b, 3.4.202–7) – that is to say, that it
is amusing to blow up the engineer with his own bomb. Without
this malicious side, the later Hamlet is less vindictive, less of a
standard ‘revenger’.31
King Lear was once believed to exist in ‘two relatively
corrupted texts of a pure (but now lost) original’. These days it
is thought instead to represent ‘two relatively reliable texts of
two different versions of the play’. 32 The two versions are the
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‘good’ (but earlier thought ‘bad’) quarto of 1608, and the folio
of 1623. There is also a second quarto of 1619 which is a reprint
of the first quarto. The folio text, however, is thought to have
been set from an annotated copy of quarto 2.33 The Lear text is
very different in the two versions and, because of this, Lear was
made by critics the crucial example of undoubted authorial
revision. Consideration of it set off the whole ‘revision’
controversy in the 1980s. Important essays showed changes to
almost every character between quarto and folio. Michael
Warren argued that the folio diminished the quarto role of Kent,
Thomas Clayton that folio Lear was more dramatic in its final
acts than the quarto, Beth Goldring that Cordelia was stronger
in folio than quarto, John Kerrigan that the Fool was
dramatically superior in folio.34 John Jones argued that the
quarto text represented a version of Lear filled with ‘late play’
devices – music, tears – and that the folio’s was a harsher
telling of the tale; Ioppolo that Cordelia was more powerful in
the quarto.35 But revision in Lear is actually unlike revision in
any other play, a fact that is not taken sufficiently into account.
In the case of almost all the plays discussed so far, one text
relates to another. One is earlier, or one is later, with passages
or sections reworked over time. In Lear, however, the two texts
constitute two entirely different versions of the play, neither
necessarily worse nor better than the other but both so minutely
yet consistently varied that it is unlikely the same company
performed them. One powerful example will serve: the death of
Lear.
(Quarto text)
Duke. all friends shall tast the wages of their vertue, and al foes
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the cup of their deservings, O see, see.
Lear. And my poore foole is hangd, no no life, why should a
dog, a horse, a rat [have] life and thou no breath at all, O
thou wilt come no more, never, never, never, pray you undo
this button, thanke you sir, O, o, o, o.
Edg. He faints my Lord, my Lord.
Lear. Breake hart, I prethe breake
Edg. Look up my Lord.
Kent. Vex not his ghost, O let him passe,
He hates him that would upon the wracke,
Of this tough world stretch him out longer.
Edg. O he is gone indeed.
(Q1 L4a, 5.3.303–16)
(Folio text)
Alb. . . . All Friends shall
Taste the wager of their vertue, and all Foes
The cup of their deservings. O see, see.
Lear. And my poore Foole is hang’d: no, no, no life?
Why should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this Button. Thanke you Sir,
Do you see this? Looke on her? Looke her lips,
Looke there, looke there. He dies.
Edg. He faints, my Lord, my Lord.
Kent. Breake heart, I prythee breake.
Edg. Look up my Lord.
Kent. Vex not his ghost, O let him passe, he hates him,
That would upon the wracke of this tough world
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Stretch him out longer.
Edg. He is gon indeed.
(TLN 3274–3290, 5.3.303–16)
As will be seen, the alterations here are not simply additions to
the passage. The same words are given to different characters,
and Lear dies at a different time. So in the first passage Lear
expires just after begging his own heart to break, ‘I prethe,
break’. Edgar does not realise that the King’s struggle is over
(‘Look up my Lord’); Kent does (‘Vex not his ghost . . .’).
Lear’s final wish in the quarto has been to die, so that he is
almost responsible for his death; the last word of the man who
shattered the unity of his family and kingdom is ‘break’. But in
the second passage, Lear, in an addition, looks at the lips of
Cordelia. Perhaps he dies in hope, thinking that his daughter is
still breathing; perhaps he dies in anguish seeing that she is not.
Either way, as the stage direction indicates, his death must
occur at the end of the speech. Again, Edgar does not realise
and tries to rouse the dead king (‘my lord!’) but now Kent, who
understands all, wills his own heart to ‘break I prithee . . .’. As a
result, in the folio the hearty Kent wills death upon himself,
begging his own heart to break – but it does not, just as nothing
Kent has wanted or hoped for has worked in this play. When, a
few lines later he relates that he has a journey to go on – and
that his master has called him – his meaning is only too clear.
Revision to a text did not stop with the death of the author.
Plays that were, as has been shown, regularly reshaped during
an author’s life were, for the same reasons, regularly reshaped
after his death. That means that by the time texts were gathered
for Shakespeare’s 1623 folio they may include developments
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instituted after 1616 (the date of Shakespeare’s death). In
several cases what has survived into the folio actually appears
to be a later adaptation of the play made by another writer. So
Macbeth has two stage directions, ‘sing within. Come away,
come away, &c.’ and ‘Musicke and a Song. Blacke Spirits, &c’
(TLN 1466, 1572, 3.5.34.0, 4.1.44), both of which are crossreferences to songs in scenes from Thomas Middleton’s play
The Witch. Macbeth, which is considerably shorter than any
other Shakespearean tragedy, seems to be a cut-down version of
a lost, longer text; its reviser may well be Middleton, who was
himself a playwright for the King’s Men. May ‘Middleton’
have added other passages to Macbeth? It is quite possible that
the trochaictetrameter ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’, a form
of verse not used elsewhere by Shakespeare, may also be a
reviser’s interpolation.36
What quartos and folio seem to offer are fixed moments in
the fluid life of a text, some more ‘authorial’ than others,
though perhaps it is wrong to use the sense of an ‘author’ as a
way of deciding what constitutes a good or bad text. Certainly
‘Shakespeare’ appears to have accepted revision even if
unwillingly, and emerges as a writer capable of changing his
mind in ways that alter characters and affect plots. He seems
prepared to accept passages into his plays that censorship,
circumstance or current events are responsible for. He also
appears to have chosen to erase lines that have subsequently
been designated ‘immortal’. Revision, invisible to the reader of
edited texts, and alien to anyone who wants to think that
Shakespeare wrote with the permanence his lines are now
accorded, is a basic feature of the early modern repertoire.
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4
Rehearsal, Performance and Plays
Though ‘Shakespeare’s’ London was the largest city in the
country, it was only a mile or so square: the entirety of early
modern London would fit into Hyde Park now. As the city was
so small, the potential audience for any theatre was also small –
there were not enough people to supply a daily audience for the
same play if it were repeated too frequently. So throughout
Shakespeare’s lifetime theatres put on different plays every
day: there were no ‘play runs’. Every acting week, then,
consisted of a variety of new and old plays interspersed, an ‘old
play’ being a play that the company had acted before. An
unpopular new play, a play that was ‘damned’ or ‘hissed’ after
first performance, would not be performed again. A reasonably
popular play could expect up to twelve performances in all
spread over two years; an extremely popular play might become
‘stock’ and be performed on a regular basis for a number of
years.
What does it mean to share a large number of plays amongst
the same small number of people? This chapter explores the
way a theatrical company dealt with the quantity of texts they
had to learn and relearn. It considers the designation of certain
roles within playing companies, and how Shakespeare’s plays
reflect this. The process of putting a play on is discussed, with a
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look at actors’ preparation from the moment when separate
scripts (‘parts’) were received, through to brief collective
rehearsal. Are Shakespeare’s texts a product of the way they
were disseminated and learned? How is the playhouse context
reflected in the texts of the plays themselves?
Here are some concrete examples of a regular weekly
playing schedule for an acting company performing at the Rose
playhouse in the 1590s, taken from the Diaries of the theatrical
entrepreneur Philip Henslowe.1 The Admiral’s Men (the
company that played at Henslowe’s Rose theatre) performed six
days a week during 1594/95, and offered thirty-eight plays in
all, of which twenty-one were new. Few of those new plays
remained in the repertory for more than a year. In January of
the next year, 1595/96, the Admiral’s Men played on every day
except Sunday and presented fourteen different plays. Of these,
six were only ever given one performance – and that is for
January alone.
To put this in context, consider one week of that January
(between the 18th and 25th) from the perspective of Edward
Alleyn, the main actor of the Admiral’s men. The plays were
The Jew of Malta, The Famous Victories of Henry V, Barnado
and Phiameta, Chinon of England, Seven Days of the Week part
2 and Pythagorus. Alleyn would, probably, have had to play
Barabas one day, Henry V the next, Barnardo the day after,
followed by Chinon, whichever character starred in the lost
Seven Days, and Pythagoras. So he had no opportunity for the
kind of reflective rehearsal that we have today, or for delving
into the problems of motivation in the manner of a modern
actor: he would have had little time to do more than learn or
relearn his lines. Yet parts written for performers acting inside
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this system are often dense, complicated and richly obscure.
Why – and how – were texts written in so complex a fashion
when they were going to be treated in what appears to be such a
cavalier manner?
The answer, of course, is that they were not regarded
cavalierly. Preparation for performance was thorough, though
very different from the way plays are made ready now. Actors’
texts of the period reflect and are a testament to the kind of
work involved.
The early modern theatre had a system of typecasting in the
original sense of the word: it cast along the lines of personality
‘type’, so that fat jolly men had fat jolly parts, and lean
melancholic men played lean melancholic types. This is
broader than modern typecasting: a lean melancholic man
could, for instance, be a villain or a hero – his parts were not
always the same, but his real-life character type always shaped
them. As players seem to have been cast in similar kinds of role
during a theatrical season, and were generally cast in parts that
matched their actual personalities, there was less need for any
actor to work on issues of characterisation: kingly types would
usually be kings, ‘braggarts’ (proud, boasting types) would play
braggarts, and the clown would be the clown. This helped actors
perform different parts on a daily basis, while also making
those parts ‘make sense’ not just to the actors playing them but
also to the watching audience.
‘Types’ had names and characteristics – king, braggart,
fool, old man – and each probably had a regular set of clothes
as well as a verbal designation. Given that actors played to type,
it is clear that plays written for a particular set of players must
also have been designed for a limited number of types. In
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Hamlet, the Prince refers to the way plays are constructed out of
set characters. When he meets the players, he knows what parts
they can offer before he learns their specific repertory, both
because he knows the company and because he knows theatre.
He says:
He that playes the King shall be welcome; his Majesty
shall have Tribute of mee: the adventurous Knight shal use
his Foyle and Target: the Lover shall not sigh gratis, the
humorous man shall end his part in peace: the Clowne
shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a’th’ sere:
and the Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke
Verse shall halt for’t.
(TLN 366–72, 2.2.319–25)
Hamlet sees the players – and their plays – as a distillation of
the range of parts the company seems to offer.
Bearing character types in mind when looking at the plays
of Shakespeare can be very instructive. A speech-prefix or stage
direction in an early printed playtext often varies between using
a character’s name (for instance, ‘Lancelot’), and a character’s
generic type (for instance, ‘Clown’). What this suggests is that
Shakespeare did not always create fictional characters with
personal names. Instead, he may have started by writing a play
for, say, King, Queen, Bastard, Fool, Braggart, Clown, Old
Lady, Friar, Nurse, adding individual names later. There follow
some examples of generic names from speech-prefixes and
stage directions of early texts (their modern designation – what
is found in edited texts – is given in parentheses afterwards):
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Enter Clowne (Lancelot) and Jessica, folio, Merchant of
Venice, 3.5.0
Enter two Clownes (Gravediggers), Q2 (1604/5), M1b,
Hamlet, 5.1.0
Enter Bastard (Philip) with Austria’s (Richard’s) head,
folio, King John, 3.2.0
Enter a Bragart Gentleman (Osric), Q1 (1603), I2a, Hamlet,
5.2.80.1
Enter Braggart and his Boy (Don Adriano; Moth), Q (1598),
C3b, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 3.1.0
Enter Lady of the house and Nurse (Lady Capulet, Nurse),
Q2 (1599), K1b Romeo and Juliet, 4.4.0
And here is a section of dialogue exactly reproduced from the
folio text of King Lear, showing that the speech-prefix ‘bastard’
is used for Edmund, even though within the text itself he is
addressed by his name:
Edg. How now Brother Edmond, what serious contemplation are
you in?
Bast. I am thinking Brother of a prediction I read this other day,
what should follow these Eclipses.
(TLN 467–70, 1.2.138–41)
Some of these generic names are familiar. Most, however, are
not. This is because modern editors usually ‘discover’ a
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character’s name, and use it in speech-prefixes, opting to ignore
the other, ‘generic’, name. A present-day reader, trained up on
novels, is naturally interested in the individual. But in some
plays only ‘types’ are provided for characters, and then modern
editors have to use those generic types for titles. So even in
modern edited texts the nurse in Romeo and Juliet is known
only as ‘Nurse’, and the Fool in King Lear is ‘Fool’. Macbeth in
the play of that name has a title of his own, but his wife has
only his name feminised – ‘Lady’ Macbeth (compare other
tragic wives who do have names of their own, such as
Desdemona in Othello, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale , and
others who do not, such as the bad Queen in Cymbeline).
Characters who are generally identified by their generic type in
the speech-prefixes of early editions, but who are actually
addressed by name in the text, have their names extracted by
modern editors. One example is the Bastard in King Lear, to
whom editors always give the name Edmund (confusingly, the
Bastard in King John, who also has a name, is usually called
Bastard by them). The fool in Measure for Measure is called
‘Clowne’ in speech-headings of the Folio, but Pompey (his
‘name’) in modern editions. Similarly, modern editions of
Measure for Measure prefer Thomas and Peter to ‘2 Friars’.
A different kind of example is offered by Hamlet. In the
quartos and folio of that play, the King and Queen are called
just that – King, Queen – despite the fact that the Queen is
referred to as Gertrude in the text. So the second quarto
(1604/5) provides the following exchange:
King How is it that the clowdes still hang on you.
Hamlet No so much my Lord, I am too much in the sonne.
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Queen Good Hamlet cast thy nighted colour off . . .
(Q2 B4b; 1.2.66–8)
A modern edition individualises the King and Queen in literary,
novelistic fashion, giving the Queen her name of ‘Gertrude’ and
the King his name ‘Claudius’. In fact, though Gertrude is called
by her name in the play, the name Claudius is never used in any
of the texts of Hamlet itself: it is a redundant or ‘dead’ name, a
name that exists only in a speech-prefix. An audience in
Shakespeare’s day, and indeed now, never learns that Claudius
is the king’s name. Another ‘dead’ name is that of the prince in
Romeo and Juliet, who is, it would seem, called ‘Prince
Eskales’, but, again, only in the speech-prefix. To the audience,
would those characters be individualised – or would one be
‘king’ and one ‘prince’? In opting to flesh out characters in this
distinctive way wherever possible, modern editors lose what
they do not want to recognise: the mass-produced qualities of
many of Shakespeare’s characters; the way one king is often
like another, because frequently he is written for the same
actor.
Knowing the way Shakespeare wrote can help explain why
it is that some characters seem to exist in more than one play:
there are across-play types traceable to actors’ personalities.
This is particularly easy to see in the case of the clown. The
Chamberlain’s Men, had, in the early days, a clown by the name
of William Kempe, who performed light, humorous roles. He
was also a noted morris dancer, and in 1600 famously danced a
nine-day trip from London to Norwich (he wrote about it in
Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder , 1600). The parts Shakespeare
appears to have written for Kempe reflect his nature, which is
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probably why ‘Fools’ and ‘Clowns’ in Shakespeare’s early
plays share certain qualities: they are ridiculous and slowwitted. Dogberry in Much Ado, Launce in Two Gentlemen of
Verona, Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and
Constable Dull in Love’s Labour’s Lost seem to have been
Kempe characters, and can be compared to stories told of
Kempe himself:
Will[iam] Kempe by a mischance was with a sword run
quite through the leg, a Country Gentleman comming to
visit him, asked him how he came by that mischance, he
told him, and withal, troth saith he, I received this hurt just
eight weekes since, and I have laine of it this quarter of a
yeare, and never stirr’d out of my Chamber.2
Kempe eventually left the company for which Shakespeare
was writing, perhaps under a cloud – it has been suggested that
Hamlet’s exceptions to clowns who ‘speake . . . more then is set
downe for them’ (TLN 1887–8, 3.2.39–40) is a reference to
Kempe and his habit of extemporisation. For whatever reason,
Kempe set off in 1599 first to dance his morris to Norwich (see
Plate 4.1), then to dance over the Alps to Rome.3
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Plate 4.1 Illustration from the title page to William Kempe’s
Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600). Reproduced by permission
of the Bodleian Library.
A new Fool was acquired for the Chamberlain’s Men to fill
the gap left by Kempe. His name was Robert Armin, and his
character was markedly different from that of his predecessor.
He was lean, intelligent, articulate, played the lute and sang,
and from the point at which the company acquired him the
‘fool’ parts in Shakespeare plays change their nature.
Professionally Armin what was known as an ‘artificial’ or
‘wise’ fool, a different variety from ‘natural’ (meaning ‘born’)
fools. While natural fools were stupid by nature, ‘artificial’
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fools were foolish by design and through study. Armin, the
Globe’s new ‘wise’ fool, wrote a book on the nature of fooling
called Foole Upon Foole (1600), which he later revised as A
Nest of Ninnies (1608); it commends the artificial over the
natural fool because
Naturall Fooles, are prone to selfe conceipt:
Fooles artificiall, with their wits lay wayte
To make themselves Fooles, liking the disguise,
To feede their owne mindes, and the gazers eyes.4
No one would accuse Armin of really being a fool as they had
Kempe:
To honest-gamesome Robin Armin,
That tickles the spleene like an harmeles vermin.
Armine, what shall I say of thee, but this,
Thou art a foole and knave? Both? Fie, I misse;
And wrong thee much, sith thou in deede art neither,
Although in shew, thou playest both together.5
Armin was also a poet and a playwright. So the profusion of
‘wise’ fools in the plays of Shakespeare after 1600 – the Fool in
Lear, Touchstone in As You Like It , Feste in Twelfth Night,
Lavache in All’s Well that Ends Well – seem to be a reflection
of a playhouse change. That said, Armin did also inherit the
parts of Kempe that were still in repertory: he has, he tells his
readers, been ‘writ downe for an Asse’ in his time, indicating
that he succeeded Kempe as Dogberry in Much Ado About
Nothing.6
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One picture of Armin survives at the front of the printed
text of his play The Two Maids of Moreclack depicting the
clown in character, and bearing about him props that comment
both on John of the Hospital (the role he played) and on the
man (Plate 4.2). Hanging from Armin’s belt in the picture is a
long black object: an inkhorn. The inkhorn’s visible presence
indicated someone who was in constant need of writing
materials (a strong statement in an age in which many people
were illiterate); it signified that its wearer was erudite – or
pretentious.
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Plate 4.2 Illustration from the title page to Robert Armin’s The
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History of the Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609). Reproduced
by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California (RB 56220).
Unsurprisingly, roles written for ‘women’, played by boys,
were altered more frequently than any other roles. Boys change,
they go through growth spurts, their voices break, they finally
cease to be able to be ‘women’ any more and have to start
playing male roles (Henry Glapthorne writes a poem to ‘Ezekiel
Fen at his first Acting a Mans Part’.) 7 ‘What, my yong Lady
and Mistris?’ says Hamlet jestingly to the boy player, ‘Byr lady
your Ladiship is neerer Heaven then when I saw you last, by the
altitude of a Choppine’ (a ‘chopine’ was a shoe with a
monstrously high cork heel). He adds the hope that ‘her’ voice
has not yet broken: ‘Pray God your voice like a peece of
uncurrant Gold be not crack’d within the ring’ ( Hamlet, TLN
1402–4, 2.2.424–7). Perhaps a growth spurt explains the muddle
in As You Like It where Celia is described as being ‘the taller’
woman (TLN 440, 1.2.262), though later it is Rosalind who
calls herself ‘More then common tall’ (TLN 580, 1.3.111).
Sometimes voice-breaks seem to be hastily accommodated in
texts, as when, in Cymbeline, Arviragus and Guiderius are about
to sing a song but Guidarius suddenly decides he will instead
‘weepe, and word it with thee’ (TLN 2553, 4.2.240). Twelfth
Night, too, which only exists in one text, seems also to bear the
leftovers of a voice-revision. Viola, when first met stranded on
the Illyrian shore, is unsure what to do. She eventually settles
on dressing as a boy and going to join Orsino’s court. She is
sure she will be accepted by the Duke ‘for I can sing, And
speake to him in many sorts of Musicke, / That will allow me
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very worth his service’ (TLN 109–11, 1.2.57–9). At this point,
the role of Viola is written for a singing heroine, which works
well with the structure of the narrative. Orsino indulges in
music-fed love-melancholy; Viola will, over the course of the
play, sing him into real love. But whether because the boy
playing Viola lost his voice or was replaced with a worse singer
(or whether the company wished their new Fool, Armin, to sing
the songs instead), Viola’s songs are given to Feste. Here is a
passage in which Viola (dressed as a boy, Cesario), is asked to
sing:
Duke Give me some Musick; Now good morrow frends.
Now good Cesario, but that peece of song,
That old and Anticke song we heard last night;
Me thought is did releeve my passion much,
More then light ayres, and recollected termes
Of these most briske and giddy-paced times.
Come, but one verse.
Curio He is not heere (so please your Lordshippe) that should
sing it?
Duke Who was it?
Curio Feste the Jester my Lord, a foole that the Ladie Oliviaes
Father tooke much delight in. He is about the house.
(TLN 885–96, 2.4.1–13)
Basic revision seems, here, to have removed Viola’s songs and
given them to Feste, necessitating Feste’s unlikely presence in
the house of Orsino for this scene. The song that Feste sings,
‘Come away, come away death’, would have made Viola, had
she sung it, subject to the same moody melancholy as Orsino
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and so could have linked the two through the medium of music.
In the mouth of Feste the song is an ironic commentary on what
is going on. Of course, the song Viola sung might have been
different from Feste’s, for plays were reshaped to accommodate
company changes, and the nature of the change will have
dictated the variety of the rewriting.
We can trace through the plays one particular singing boy in
the Chamberlain’s Men, although it is unclear who he was.
Shakespeare’s tragedies alter to follow the singing skills of, it
would seem, one especially talented young man. Of the two
versions of Othello, one, the quarto, is without music, the other,
the folio, contains a song – the ‘willow song’ – for Desdemona
to sing. Though it is hard to date the writing of the two Othello
texts, the difference probably relates to the fact that major
Shakespearean heroines sing between 1601 and 1604, and that
they then all stop until 1609 (when the company moved to the
Blackfriars theatre and there was a general increase in the
music used for plays).8 Ophelia and the musical Desdemona, it
seems, are part of a general proliferation of singing women
traceable to an accomplished singing boy. But the ‘willow
song’, present or absent, makes a fundamental difference to the
play. Its pathos but also its homeliness counterbalance the
chaos of the drama with a wistful gesture towards folk song and
country values; the symbolism of a willow song, a formula
traditionally used to describe the sorrowings of a rejected or
dejected lover, also sounds an ominous warning to the audience.
Spectators in the early modern theatre regularly saw the
same actors perform in a host of different plays.
Unsurprisingly, particular performers soon came to be
recognised as celebrities. John Manningham, writing in 1602,
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tells an anecdote about a star-struck woman who ‘grew . . . far
in liking’ with Richard Burbage. She was particularly taken by
Burbage’s portrayal of Shakespeare’s Richard III – so taken, in
fact, that she requested Burbage to ‘come that night unto her by
the name of Richard the Third’. As it was, the story goes,
Shakespeare ‘overhearing their conclusion’ turned up slightly
earlier at the woman’s house, and was ‘at his game’ by the time
Burbage arrived. ‘Message being brought that Richard the Third
was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that
William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.’ 9 Young
gallants started to imitate Burbage’s Richard III, and the
various traits with which he glamorised the tyrant king. As one
contemporary poem had it: ‘Gallants, like Richard the usurper,
swager, / That had his hand continuall on his dagger.’ Years
later, during the civil war, frightened politicians were still
described as being ‘in such a perpetuall bodily feare of their
owne shadowes . . . that like cruell Richard, their hands are
always upon their Dagers’.10 Another poem tells how a tavernkeeper recounting the historical story of what happened in the
battle of Bosworth Field, ‘when he would have said, King
Richard dy’d, / And call’d a Horse, a Horse, he Burbage
cry’d’.11 Other parts that Burbage played include Hamlet,
Othello, and Lear in the plays of those names, and Heironymo
in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. On Burbage’s death, what is
particularly bemoaned is that the parts he played have expired
with him – at that time, parts were so closely associated with
the actors who ‘owned’ them that it was not necessarily thought
possible to put on plays once their performers had died:
No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe
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Kind Leer, the greved Moore, and more beside,
That lived in him; have now for ever dy’de.12
In fact Burbage’s parts were inherited by two members of the
company, John Lowen and Joseph Taylor, whose performances
were themselves said to have been inherited by the great
Restoration actor Thomas Betterton: ‘Burbage’ was thus
thought to have lived on through preservation of his acting
techniques. As this illustrates, Burbage’s performances were,
and continued to be, famous for the man as much as for the
plays. Shakespeare had to write bearing ‘Burbage’ in mind.
An audience, having come to watch a particular performer
as much as a play, could not automatically be relied on to see a
story through to its conclusion. The playwright Glapthorne, in
his Ladies Privilege (1640), refers to spectators who make the
author ‘end his Play before his Plot be done’: the onlookers had
a disturbing tendency to go away before the play was fully
over.13 In the eighteenth century the audience would sometimes
leave the theatre when the lead actor in a tragedy ‘died’, even
though the play itself was not finished; it is certainly possible
that playwrights of the early modern period feared the same and
that this is why almost all major actors’ tragic deaths are
grouped together in the last act, a feature of what have come to
be called ‘revenge tragedies’ such as Hamlet or John Webster’s
Duchess of Malfi.14
It is often useful to see what parallels in character type can
be drawn between one play and another, particularly when
looking at plays written closely together. Shakespeare is writing
for the same performers. Is he exploring different aspects of the
same character type over time? The same variety of feisty
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heroine is, after all, presented in Kate (Taming of the Shrew )
and Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing); the same kind of
compellingly destructive villain in Iago (Othello), Edmund
(King Lear) and Iachimo (Cymbeline); the same plump rogue in
Falstaff (1 and 2 Henry IV, Merry Wives of Windsor ) and Sir
Toby Belch (Twelfth Night); the same well-meaning but
misdirected old man in Polonius (Hamlet), Menenius
(Coriolanus) and Gloucester (Lear). Rather than looking at
these separate characters inside their separate texts it can be
telling to see them in terms of a continuum carrying over from
one text into another.
The fact that actors played to character-type affects more
than speech-prefixes. When an actor stepped on to the stage he
may have done so replete with all the other, similar, characters
he had played on that stage. Just as areas of the stage, like the
trap, had a composite nature built out of its use in many plays,
so actors may have had a series of composite character types
built up over years of performance which affected every play
they were in by every author. Indeed, sometimes Shakespeare
writes passages in which an actor pointedly links himself from
within one play with some of the parts that he has played in
other plays. The Fool in Lear sings a snatch of the song ‘The
rain it raineth every day’:
He that has and a little-tyne wit,
With heigh-ho, the Winde and the Raine,
Must make content with his Fortunes fit,
Though the Raine it raineth every day.
(TLN 1729–32, 3.2.74–6)
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That same song, with different words, is the epilogue to Twelfth
Night, presumably sung by the same performer, Robert Armin,
Shakespeare’s wise-fool actor:
When that I was and a little tine boy,
with hey, ho, the winde and the raine:
A foolish thing was but a toy,
for the raine it raineth every day . . .
(TLN 2560–3, 5.1.389–92)
‘The rain it raineth’ is Armin’s across-play song, and it is
possible that, on occasion, it was sung also in other company
plays. In making one play gesture towards another, Shakespeare
upsets the difference between one separate text and another.
Here, indeed, Shakespeare muddies the distinction between a
tragical history set in England (Lear) and a fictional comedy set
in Illyria (Twelfth Night). Why so? Partly, perhaps, because he
is creating out of the wise fool type an ‘everyman’ character
who can make universal comments that are not play-specific or
specific only for a particular variety of fictional world. ‘The
rain it raineth’, a melancholy song about the humdrum
sameness of life in a raining world, is one of them. The song
also breaks down the boundaries that separate play from play,
reminding the audience that it is watching a character it has
seen before: one that can die or disappear in one play, and live
again in another. On one level this lessens the tragedy of
tragedy and the comedy of comedy by disturbing the
completeness of the play world; on another it extends the
stories into the world of the audience, setting up a series of
questions about the relationship between reality and fiction.
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Another example of one play gesturing towards another can
be found in Hamlet, which contains several references to Julius
Caesar (both were originally performed at about the same time,
between 1600 and 1601). Possibly these references can be
traced to the fact that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet just after – or
perhaps while – writing Julius Caesar in around 1599. But the
references may serve another purpose too. One particular
account of Julius Caesar occurs only in the earlier ‘good’
quarto of Hamlet (published 1604/5). By the time of the folio
(1623), a later text, it has been removed. The passage in
question is spoken by Horatio standing on the battlements
having just seen the ghost of Hamlet’s father for the first time.
It is then that he starts, for no particular reason, to relate in
lurid detail what happened in Rome before Caesar’s murder:
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets . . .
(Q2 B2b, 1.1.113–16)
This can be read as a promise of ghoulish pleasures in the other
play if the same audience chooses to come back to the theatre.
In other words, it might be an advertisement. That, at any rate,
would explain the loss of the passage from the later folio text:
by the time that the later version of Hamlet was in performance,
Julius Caesar had dropped out of the repertory and was no
longer relevant. Another possible advertisement for Julius
Caesar, perhaps good enough as a joke in its own right to be
kept as part of the body of the play, occurs in a dialogue
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between Polonius and Hamlet. It is both in second quarto and in
folio. Polonius recalls that he once acted at university and,
when asked who he performed, replies ‘I did enact Julius
Caesar. I was killed i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed me.’ Hamlet
replies in one of his characteristic puns ‘It was a bruite part of
him, to kill so Capitall a Calfe there’ (TLN 1960–1, 3.2.102–6).
Again, the exchange is unnecessary to the plot, and seems
rather to relate to the fact that the actors now playing Polonius
and Hamlet also perform Julius Caesar and Brutus in the other
production. One fiction refers to another fiction. There is also
there, perhaps, an aside to the audience who are shrewd enough
to pick up on it: Brutus, played by the Hamlet character, killed
Caesar, played by the Polonius character; Hamlet will in due
time also kill Polonius. Here, too, is further information about
character ‘types’. The connection between Brutus and Hamlet,
if both were indeed played by the same actor, is intriguing: both
despite their careful reflection are led to perform actions they
largely regret. As for Caesar and Polonius, does the link imply
that Caesar, continually presented in the play as physically
weak – infertile, epileptic and a bad swimmer – was also played
by a performer famous for his presentation of fatuous and
slightly ridiculous old men?
The epilogue to 2 Henry IV is a third text that refers beyond
itself, promising yet another play with Falstaff in it and
apologising for Falstaff’s earlier designation ‘Oldcastle’
(discussed in Chapter 3). This epilogue not only recalls the
history surrounding the name-change in 1 Henry IV, it is also
carefully subversive: in naming ‘Oldcastle’, it usefully reminds
the audience that Falstaff and Oldcastle are one and the same,
and so prevents the Oldcastle designation from being forgotten.
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One word more, I beseech you: if you be not too much
cloid with Fat Meate, our humble Author will continue the
Story (with Sir John in it) and make you merry, with faire
Katherine of France: where (for any thing I know)
Falstaffe shall dye of a sweat, unlesse already he be kill’d
with your hard Opinions: For Old-Castle dyed a Martyr,
and this is not the man.
(TLN 3344–8, epilogue)
Plays were rather less individuated than they seem now in
separately bound and edited editions, and it is useful to think of
texts not so rigidly as separate entities but as part of a series
containing all the other plays performed by the same actors.
Typecasting limited the amount of preparation necessary
before performance – and, in a system where different plays
were put on each day, every way of reducing preliminary work
had to be used. Rehearsal, in particular, was organised around
the principle of a little time and a large number of plays. So the
way actors came into contact with new plays, and the amount of
information they were given to learn, needs to be explored to
show how rehearsal practice shaped the texts of Shakespeare.
When an author had completed his new play he would read
it to the actors. Actors thus had a chance to hear the story of the
play and to decide whether they liked the text and the writing.
But only actors who had a financial interest in the acting
company attended such a reading.15 Those actors were called
‘sharers’ because they held shares in the company’s wealth and
received a regular portion of the theatre’s daily revenue. Lesser
actors may never have heard in full the text of the play in which
they were to perform. Thomas Killigrew, for instance, who was
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a child in the 1620s, recalls being outside the Red Bull theatre
‘when the man cried to the boys, “Who will go and be a divell,
and he shall see the play for nothing?”’.16 He joined the throng
and went on stage to perform that same day – he knew no more
of the play he was in than his walk-on role.
After the reading, the actors would be given their separate
parts to take home and learn. These parts consisted of their own
lines only: actors were never given the full text of a play to
study, they simply received their personal speeches. They knew
when to speak, however, because they were also given the last
few words of the speech that preceded their own to listen out
for. They would wait until they heard these last few words –
called ‘cues’ – and then say the relevant passage that they had
learned followed it. An actors’ part of the time (that of
‘Orlando’ in Greene’s Orlando Furioso), shows the full text the
actor is to speak, and the number of words that made up the
cue-lines. Note, in the fragment provided, how the number of
cue-words given is varied when cues are similar; note too the
stage direction giving the actor additional information on the
right-hand side (that he is to beat A[rgulius]).
I pray the tell me one thing, dost thou not
knowe, wherfore I cald the
_______________________________________
why knowest thou not, nay nothing thou
mayst be gonne, stay, stay villayne I tell
the Angelica is dead, nay she is in deed
_______________________________________
but my Angelica is dead.
_______________________________________
and canst thou not weepe he beates. A.
_______________________________________
neither
lord
my lord
Lord 17
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The whole process of distributing and receiving separate
parts can be seen in convoluted form in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. First Quince, who is the reviser if not the author of the
mechanicals’ play Pyramus and Thisbe, tells the actors what
characters they are to play and a tiny bit about their roles:
Quince You Nicke Bottome are set downe for Pyramus.
Bottom What is Pyramus, a lover, or a tyrant?
Quince A Lover that kills himselfe most gallantly for love.
(TLN 289–92, 1.2.21–4)
Then Quince hands each actor what he calls their ‘scrip’ or
‘scroll’, the rolled-up sheet of paper on which their individual
part is written. All performers are sent away to memorise their
parts: when they next meet together, the parts must already be
fully learned. Learning happened in isolation from the rest of
the text.
Quince . . . But masters here are your parts, and I am to intreat
you, request you, and desire you, to con them by too
morrow night . . .
(TLN 359–61, 1.2.99–101)
So it was in the professional theatre. An actor, having received
the roll of paper on which his separate part was written, learned
his lines separately. Minor actors did not necessarily know
details of the story in which they were performing until they
entered on to the stage itself. Edmund Gayton, one of the
followers of the playwright Ben Jonson (a member of what
came to be called the ‘school of Ben’), tells an anecdote about a
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university production that illustrates very plainly the effect this
can have. He recalls how two separate actors had both
independently learned the parts of ghosts. Neither, however,
was prepared to see the other on the stage.
Two Scholars there were . . . whose parts were two Ghosts
or Apparitions . . . These two at the Repetitions [individual
rehearsals] spoke their lines very confidently, insomuch,
that the Judges thought they would be very good Ghosts;
but when the tryall night came that the Play was to be
presented to some few friends . . ., and . . . these two
Scholars were put . . . into white long robes . . . just as they
put their heads through the hangings of the Scene . . . they .
. . were so horribly frighted at one another’s ghastly lookes
that no force of those behind them, could get them to
advance a foot forward toward the stage, or speak a word
of their Parts.18
The two actors had completely established their roles away
from the rest of the play, and without necessarily being very
clear about the story told by the text in full. Testimony that this
was true also of London players comes from the opening of
Marston’s Antonio and Mellida. In the Induction to that play,
the actors enter still holding their parts. They are about to
perform, but they claim not to know what parts the others are
playing:
Galeatzo Come sirs, come: the musique will sounde straight for
entrance.
Are yee readie, are yee perfect?
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Piero Faith, we can say our parts: but wee are ignorant in what
mould we must cast our Actors.
Albert Whome doe you personate?
Piero Piero, Duke of Venice . . . whome act you?
Albert The necessitie of the play forceth me to act two parts . . .
Galeatzo Wel, and what doest thou play?
(Antonio and Mellida, 1602, Induction)19
Antonio and Mellida is, of course, exaggerated, but a parody
works only if it has a core of truth in it. As it seems, not only
did actors play to character type; they also played without
access to the full text of the play and with only hesitant
knowledge of the story of that play.
In the professional theatre, there were usually ‘instructors’
to help actors through their isolated learning-process.
Instructors were, in the case of lesser actors, superior actors,
and in the case of superior actors, the author – or nobody. 20 But
what precisely was established during instruction was what the
actor would have to say and do, not what other characters would
say and do. Neither actor nor instructor generally had access to
the full play, for the prompter kept it locked away – full plays
were the playhouse’s most treasured possessions. They did,
however, occasionally have ‘parts’ written that were for more
than one player – two-player parts for the eighteenth century
survive in the Folger Shakespeare Library, and evidence from
the plays of Shakespeare show that a boy player and his master
often have dialogue strictly with one another, meaning that they
can rehearse whole scenes with each other away from the rest of
the company. 21 Trying to sort out how to perform their ‘part’
well, actors in Shakespeare’s day were not primarily concerned
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with the story they were telling. Instead they were looking
inwards at their parts, determining what the emotions required
by their roles were, and how best to manifest them using
gesture and pronunciation.
Which ‘passion’ was being exhibited, and at what moment,
was easily identifiable in a part and so was seen to be one of the
most important aspects of acting; a term often used to describe
the art of acting at the time was ‘passionating’. When Hamlet
decides to test one of the players’ skills he demands ‘a
passionate speech’ in order to give the court ‘a tast of your
quality’ ( Hamlet TLN 1476–7, 2.2.431–2). ‘Passion’ was not
the vague word then that it is now. ‘The passions’ were the
emotional extremes. Passions featured in Shakespeare plays
include joy and grief – Kent’s heart ‘twixt two extremes of
passion, joy and greefe, / Burst smilingly’ ( King Lear TLN
3161–2, 5.3.198–200); love – Orsino suffers from ‘the passion
of my love’ ( Twelfth Night TLN 274, 1.4.24); fear – Joan La
Pucelle [Joan of Arc] believes ‘of all base passions, Feare is
most accurst’ ( I Henry VI TLN 2420, 5.2.18). The passions and
other emotions (arguments raged as to whether there were
seven or more identifiable passions) had fairly regular
significations, so the actor had only to recognise which emotion
was indicated in a text to know how to display it
appropriately.22 Falstaff in 1 Henry IV makes fun of this
process when, preparing to play-act the part of Henry IV in a
game with Hal, he asks for ‘a Cup of Sacke to make mine eyes
looke redde, that it may be thought I have wept, for I must
speake in passion, and I will doe it in King Cambyses vaine’
(TLN 1341–4, 2.4.383–7). When Hamlet gives advice to the
players, he gives particular attention to the best (and worst)
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ways to exhibit the passions:
in the verie Torrent, Tempest, and (as I may say) the
Whirlewinde of Passion, you must acquire and beget a
Temperance that may give it Smoothnesse. O it offends
mee to the Soule, to see a robustious Pery-wig-pated
Fellow, teare a Passion to tatters.
(TLN 1853–8, 3.2.5–10)
Visible transitions from one major passion to another within
a speech were highly thought of – and so were written into
texts. In Shakespeare’s plays they may occur when prose gives
way to verse, when simple language gives way to complex
language or when long, singing lines give way to short, staccato
sentences. These are some of the features that an actor would
identify in his part as he worked together with his instructor. A
change of passions is clearly indicated in Leontes’ part ( The
Winter’s Tale) for 1.2. The text is presented as the actor playing
Leontes will have received it, though possibly with a ‘cue’
longer than the actor could have hoped for.
Why, that was when
Three crabbed Moneths had sowr’d themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white Hand:
And clap thyselfe my Love; then didst thou utter,
I am yours for ever.
______________________________________ while a friend.
Too hot, too hot:
To mingle friendship farre, is mingling bloods.
I have Tremor Cordis on me: my heart daunces,
But not for joy; not joy.
(TLN 172–84, 1.2.101–11)
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Leontes conceives a sudden and irrational jealousy. His
emotions, his ‘passions’, change here as jealous anger
overwhelms him. The text reveals the altered emotion, the
contained jealousy manifesting itself in Leontes’s second
speech, where the obsessional repetition of words and phrases
‘too hot, too hot’, ‘mingle . . . mingling’, ‘not . . . joy, not joy’
tell the player to work himself into a stammering rage. In texts
of the time, one passion often yields to another with enormous
rapidity, partly because passions were thought to overtake the
intellect by their speed and violence, and partly because skill in
showing a quick ‘transition’ of passions was highly valued. In
Richard III, the Second Murderer, preparing to kill Clarence, is
struck by a sudden fit of conscience: what he calls a ‘passionate
humour’. He apologises: ‘I hope this passionate humour of
mine will change, / It was wont to hold me but while one tels
twenty.’ Twenty seconds, then, for a significantly changing
passion. In fact, the change of mind comes more quickly than
that:
1 Mur. How do’st thou feele thy selfe now?
2 Mur. Some certaine dregges of conscience are yet within mee.
1 Mur. Remember our Reward, when the deed’s done.
2 Mur. Come, he dies: I had forgot the Reward.
(TLN 954–60, 1.4.120–6)
Or, as the second murderer will have received the passage:
______________________________________ thy selfe now?
Some certaine dregges of conscience are yet within mee.
____________________________________ the deed’s done.
Come, he dies: I had forgot the Reward.
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Reading a part in terms of passions goes some way towards
explaining the high emotional charge of plays at the time, and
the speed with which one strong emotion surrenders to another:
Othello’s and Leontes’ sudden jealousy ( Othello, Winter’s
Tale); Lear’s sudden rage and sudden madness (King Lear);
Olivia’s and Romeo’s sudden love ( Twelfth Night, Romeo and
Juliet). ‘Unlikely’ transitions are not unusual in such a system.
Oliver’s sudden alteration from bad to good man (As You Like
It), Orsino’s ‘love’ for Viola on learning that she is not a boy
Cesario (Twelfth Night) are written in a system that allows for –
and indeed encourages – violent transitions.
So an actor would need to break his speeches down into
passions that could then be exhibited using gestures and tones, a
process that observers watched for as Thomas Wright explains
in his The Passions of the mind in General: ‘passion . . . by
gestures passeth into our eyes, and by sounds into our ears’.23
Pronunciation was matched by weighty, telling gestures that
were a physical way of illustrating the passions. Othello in his
rage bites his lower lip (‘Alas, why gnaw you so your netherlip’, TLN 3290, 5.2.43); as does Wolsey in Henry VIII:
. . . He bites his lip, and starts,
Stops on a sodaine, lookes upon the ground,
Then layes his finger on his Temple: straight
Springs out into fast gate, then stops againe,
Strikes his brest hard, and anon, he casts
His eye against the Moone: in most strange Postures
We have seene him set himselfe.
(TLN 1974–80, 3.2.113–19)
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That there were conventions for exhibiting certain emotions
can be seen from the texts that try to define them. The ‘country
man’ who wrote The Cyprian Conqueror (c. 1633) gives a
preface explaining the requisite gestures for his play: ‘in a
sorrowful parte, ye head must hang downe; in a proud, ye head
must bee lofty; in an amorous, closed eies, hanging downe
lookes, & crossed armes, in a hastie, fuming, & scratching ye
head &c’.24 Moth, in Love’s Labour’s Lost , describes to Don
Andriano di Armado how to bear himself when he is in love.
The crossed arms of the quotation above must have been
important, for Armado should have his ‘armes crost on your
thinbellie doublet, like a Rabbet on a spit’ (TLN 787–8, 3.1.18–
19). Ophelia, describing the moment when Hamlet came into
her room and affrighted her, depicts Hamlet in a state of
dishevelment that seems to her like the traditional dress of a
distracted lover: ‘his doublet all unbrac’d, / No hat upon his
head, his stockings foul’d, / Ungartred, and downe gived to his
Anckle’ (TLN 974–6, 2.1.75–7). It is Hamlet’s appearance that
seems to have misled both Ophelia and Polonius as to the root
cause of his madness. The Prince has given out the wrong visual
signals: he has wordlessly deceived Ophelia.
‘Correct’ action and gestures continued to be taught for the
next two centuries, though it is never easy to sort out exactly
what was involved, for the ‘rules’ get muddled in with the
‘conventions’. Some of the gestures simply mimicked social
behaviour; others were contrived and required an audience
capable of reading them. The two are separated in a couple of
linked books written in 1644 by John Bulwer: Chirologia,
which shows the ‘Natural’ (instinctive) language of the hand,
a nd Chironomia, which shows the ‘Art’ or rules that govern
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‘Manuall Rhetorique’. Both books were designed to teach deaf
people a way of communicating. Chirologia is thought to be an
exaggerated depiction of socially recognisable hand-gestures
such as might also have been used on the stage and shows how
words and concepts – anger, love, friendship – had physical
manifestations. The playwright Heywood shows the importance
of gesture as an element of communication when he writes that
the actor should ‘fit his phrases to his action, and his action to
his phrase, and his pronuntiation to them both’; Hamlet
similarly recommended ‘Sute the Action to the Word, / the
Word to the Action’ (TLN 1865–6, 3.2.17–18). 25 In the theatre
in particular, large gestures will have been very important, for
corrective spectacles for short sight did not exist and subtle
inflections of the face would not have been visible to most of
the audience. How important hand-movements were is
illustrated by a passage in Titus Andronicus in which Titus
explains the difficulty he has in fully expressing his feelings. It
occurs at a point in the play when Titus has rashly cut off his
hand, and is therefore unable to emphasise his words with the
requisite gestures: ‘how can I grace my talke’, he laments,
‘Wanting a hand to give it action’ (TLN 2301–2, 5.2.17–18).
Pronunciation, too, was very important, and actors spent
much preparation time establishing the correct ‘emphasis’ in a
sentence. A famous elegy on Burbage relates the way the great
actor died: he lost the art of speaking first so that death could
not to be charmed away from his purposes by speech in which
‘not a word did fall, / Without just weight, to ballast itt with
all’.26 There were, in addition, clear and important vocal
differences in the way verse and prose were spoken. Nowadays
at the theatre it is often hard to tell whether an actor performing
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a Shakespearean text is speaking verse or prose. But
Shakespeare often wrote parts that switched from one to the
other, because a different vocal register was used for each. Low
language had one ‘tone’, high language another. Heightened
language needed heightened enunciation. The beat of a verse
was often punched out in none-too-subtle a fashion (speaking
verse too brutally in declamatory fashion was called ‘ranting’;
verse written too brutally was ‘fustian’ or ‘bombast’). Modernday Russians speaking verse do so in a rhythmical, cadenced
manner that brings it somewhat nearer to music, and this is
probably much closer to the Shakespearean manner of versespeaking, for verse was often linked to music. Some telling
Shakespearean verse–prose transitions will feature in the next
chapter.
The ‘instruction’ an actor received on his separate part did
not involve discussing character or motive – indeed it often did
not involve asking the actor to think at all. It was a system
merely in place to help the actor establish what the emotions –
the ‘passions’ – were in his part, and how best to show them,
tonally and with action. Sometimes, therefore, the process of
instruction was completely dictatorial. One university play
from the time shows Richard Burbage ‘instructing’ a student
for the part of Heironymo in The Spanish Tragedy: ‘I thinke
your voice would serve for Hieronimo: observe how I act it’, he
says, ‘and then imitate me’ ( Return from Parnassus (1606),
4.3).27 Instruction often took this form: a superior actor or the
playwright recited the part to the actor concerned in the way it
should be spoken. The actor was then learned that method – and
that was the rehearsal. And when Hamlet instructs the actors, he
does it in just this way. He has composed an extra speech of
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‘some dosen or sixteene lines’ (TLN 1581, 2.2.541–2) to be
added into their play The Murder of Gonzago, and, as it
appears, he then goes on to teach the actor exactly, syllable-forsyllable, how to say it – through imitation. ‘Speake the Speech’,
he cautions, ‘. . . as I pronounc’d it to you’ (TLN 1849–50,
3.2.1–2). Actors were not free to act as they wished; they were
free only to act as the text wished them to – with help from
overseers who could aid in interpreting a text’s demands.
A ‘part’, once learned, was supposedly fixed. When an actor
became too old to perform his part, he handed it on to his
successor in a very literal way. He gave that successor the
written ‘part’ on which the text was inscribed, and he taught
him the ‘correct’ way of speaking and acting it – the emphases
and the gestures. The new actor would then be rated by his
ability to mimic the old one: anything he altered was likely to
be frowned on. Japanese Noh plays are still passed on in a
similar fashion, each performance an echo of earlier
performances. In Britain, parts continued to be handed down
from one actor to another in this way, with mannerisms learned
and reproduced for the next two hundred years. John Downes, a
Restoration prompter, claimed that his players had directly
inherited Shakespeare’s ‘action’, and traced the performance of
certain roles back through Betterton to Davenant to Lowen to
Shakespeare himself.28 Those same performances were handed
on again, broadly in the same form, for the next hundred years,
acquiring local additions on the way – Powell in the 1690s
mimicked Betterton’s Falstaff so closely that he included in it
Betterton’s ‘acute pains of gout’ and the characteristic wince
they occasioned.29 Originality was far from being the goal of
any production of the time: each one strove to imitate the first
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(‘real’) production of the play.
Actors’ separate texts contain all the information necessary
for that actor to perform his ‘part’ well. These include, together
with ‘passions’ and humours, whatever personality traits are
features of the character. Such traits are often easy to pick up
when examining a text that contains only a single actor’s lines
with cues, but easy to miss when looking at the whole play as a
unity. Probably personality traits related to the real character of
the actor who was to perform the part in question; possibly
some of them were, indeed, added by the actor concerned.
Hamlet in quarto 2 (1604/5) and folio (1623) has a particular
verbal tick that no performer other than, significantly, the
Ghost possesses – he repeats himself a lot. ‘O God, O God! /
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seemes to me all the
uses of this world?’ (TLN 315–17, 1.2.132–3); ‘Thrift thrift
Horatio’ (TLN 368, 1.2.180), ‘What do you read my Lord?’
‘Words, words, words’ (TLN 1230, 2.2.192); ‘You cannot Sir
take from me any thing, that I will more willingly part withal,
except my life, my life’ (TLN 1258–60, 2.2.216–17) (Q2 F1b:
‘except my life, except my life, except my life’).
This tells the player something about the way Hamlet
thinks. Repetition suggests a combination of nerves and
obsessiveness; it shows a man thinking faster than he can speak
and stammering to get out his sense. Against such verbal
awkwardness, Hamlet also uses certain fragile, sensitive,
emotional words repeatedly, which is one of the features that
gives him a spiritual edge, for all his self-obsession and murky
sexuality. One Hamlet word is ‘soft!’ used as an exclamation
meaning ‘look there’. ‘But soft, behold: Loe, where it comes
againe’ (TLN 126, 1.1.126); ‘But soft, me thinkes I sent the
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Mornings Ayre’ (TLN 743, 1.5.58); ‘Soft you now, / The faire
Ophelia’ (TLN 1741–2, 3.1.87–8); ‘Soft now, to my Mother’
(TLN 2263, 3.2.392). Another very Hamlet characteristic is to
substitute the word ‘soul’ for ‘mind’: ‘Since my deere Soule
was Mistris of my choyse’ (TLN 1914, 3.2.63); ‘it offends mee
to the Soule’ (TLN 1856, 3.2.8); ‘My soule is full of discord
and dismay’ (TLN 2629, 4.1.45). The obsession with the ‘soul’
as against the mind may show a man applying religious
terminology to his own thought-process: perhaps he has
elevated his own thinking into a religion. Or perhaps the point
is that he has rationalised away his religion, turning instead to
the classical idea that the soul, anima, is the seat of judgement.
Either way, these repeated words are acting clues inside texts
that, carefully read, can offer clear direction to the actor. One
role in Hamlet in particular shows how an obsession with a
couple of words – in this case, ‘my lord’ – is made absolutely
obvious when looking at the play in parts, but is not necessarily
visible when looking at the full text. It is the entire part for
Reynaldo, and to the actor it would have looked something like
this:
_________________________________
these
notes
Reynoldo.
I will my Lord.
_________________________________ Of his behaviour.
My Lord, I did intend it.
_________________________________
marke
this
Reynoldo?
I, very well my Lord.
_________________________________ youth and liberty.
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As gaming my Lord.
_________________________________ goe so farre.
My Lord that would dishonour him.
_________________________________
of
generall
assault.
But my good Lord.
_________________________________ you doe this?
I my Lord, I would know that.
_________________________________ man and Country.
Very good my Lord.
_________________________________ did I leave?
At closes in the consequence:
At friend, or so, and Gentleman.
_________________________________ have you not?
My Lord I have.
_________________________________ fare you well.
Good my Lord.
_________________________________ in your selfe.
I shall my Lord.
_________________________________ plye his Musicke.
Well, my Lord.
Exit.
(TLN 860–969, 2.1)
This in some way ‘advises’ the actor, for Reynaldo’s
obsequious deference to Polonius is undercut by the repetition.
Plays look different when seen in ‘part’ terms, a point that will
be returned to in Chapter 5.
So the learning of parts, what was called ‘study’, was a
solitary business, and happened alone or in the company of an
instructor. Shakespeare wrote jokes around the fact that actors
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knew well only their studied parts, not the full text. Gibing at
Petruchio and accusing him of play-acting, Kate in Taming of
the Shrew asks him ‘Where did you study all this goodly
speech?’ (TLN 1141, 2.1.262) as her way of suggesting she does
not believe or recognise what he says. Viola, in Twelfth Night,
has ‘studied’ a speech of love that Orsino taught her. When she
is asked a question for which she has learned no response she
does not know how to reply – ‘I can say little more then I have
studied, & that question’s out of my part’ (TLN 472–3,
1.5.178–9).
How, then, were all these separately prepared actors
gathered together in such a way that, in the end, a play actually
worked on the stage? A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives
something of an idea. There was, usually, a full rehearsal of
some kind before performance, which all actors were supposed
to attend. This would smooth over problems with complicated
stage-action (fights, dances, slapstick), and make sure each
actor had a sense of the broad outline of the story. If, however,
the rehearsal could not go ahead or was called off, performance
could follow anyway: group rehearsal was one of the less
important elements in the preparation of a play. So in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream the actors’ bitty rehearsal is stopped
part way through because Bottom has – literally – become an
ass. Most of the mechanicals’ play has not been rehearsed, but
that does not prevent them from putting on their show. Bottom,
transmuted back into himself again just in time to go on stage,
draws attention to what he considers the most important aspect
to precede performance. He reminds his fellow actors to gather
up their costumes and take a last look over their separate parts
to be sure that they know them: ‘Get your apparell together,
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good strings to your beards, new ribbands to your pumps, meete
presently at the Palace, every man looke ore his part: for the
short and the long is, our play is preferred’ (TLN 1780–3,
4.2.35–9). The unit of play that concerned the actor – even the
moment before performance – was his separate part, not the full
text.
With plays prepared in this fashion, the prompter, or
‘bookkeeper’ as he was sometimes called, was very important.
He was responsible for more than simply setting on the right
track an actor who had missed his cue – though he was of
course in charge of that. Romeo refers to the occasions (‘out of
such prolixity’) when the entirety of the prologue was ‘faintly
spoke / After the Prompter’ Romeo and Juliet (Q1 only, C1a).
But, much more importantly, the prompter also managed the
entrances and exits, arranged the basic blocking on the stage,
and saw to it that the timing was right during performance,
rather like a modern musical ‘conductor’. Medieval pictures of
prompters show how sometimes performances really were
‘conducted’, the prompters clutching batons in their hands to
indicate which actor is to speak. Renaissance prompters still
performed a similar task, though by then they had retreated
behind stage, and were no longer visible to the audience.30 They
did, however, continue to control timing (‘Were it my Cue to
fight’, says Othello, ‘I should have known it / Without a
prompter’, TLN 302–3, 1.2.83–4); ‘What would he [the player]
doe,’ asks Hamlet, ‘Had he the Motive and the Cue for passion /
That I have?’ (TLN 1601–3, 2.2.561–2) (Q2 H4b ‘and that for
passion’).
But the major difference between performances now and
then was that in Shakespeare’s time plays had no director.
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Modern rehearsal, conversely, takes the form it does largely
because the director is in charge of productions. This
figurehead, who came to be a regular part of production at the
turn of the nineteenth century, is now considered artistically in
charge of the play he or she puts on: theatre critics refer to
Peter
Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (rather than
Shakespeare’s); cinema critics write of another new Steven
Spielberg film (rather than naming the author). But in the days
before the director, no single person was exactly artistically in
charge of a play, and a play therefore spoke for itself. It was not
overlaid with a concept, it was its concept – which is why clues
to its performance are wrapped inside the parts themselves.
Receiving texts and performing them in the manner
described meant that actors performed without ever really
losing their sense of ‘part’. There are, for instance, indications
that actors in performance often did not maintain their fictional
character while another actor was on the stage. Burbage was
congratulated for continuing to hold his role on the stage even
when he was not saying anything (Flecknoe praises him for
‘never falling in his Part when he had done speaking; but with
his looks and gesture, maintaining it still’).31 Big-headed actors
might even self-consciously direct their performances away
from the players they were with, rather than towards them ‘for
applause-sake’, like the player described by John Stephens who
‘When he doth hold conference upon the stage; and should look
directly in his fellows face . . . turnes about his voice into the
assembly.’32
Sometimes it seems that a line or so was simply added by
the actor into his part even if it did not always make sense in
the fuller context of the play. One particular example occurs
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when Hamlet dies. In the good second quarto text of 1604/5,
Hamlet’s death ends with the silence he has foretold, ‘the rest is
silence’ (O1b), so that there follows the silence of death and
eternal nothingness begins. In the 1623 folio’s later good text,
Hamlet’s death is like this: ‘the rest is silence, OOOO. Dyes’
(TLN 3847, 5.2.358). Could it be that Burbage, playing Hamlet,
wanted a more glamorous death-scene than the one the text
gave him? As it appears, Burbage has frustrated the wishes of
the author for a reflective, silent death, by imposing on to his
part a noisily vocal death-rattle, though it ruins the tenor of the
last lines. It has further been suggested that Burbage added
revenge-play motifs to Shakespeare’s subtle Hamlet, perhaps
trying to bring it more in line with other revenge plays, or to
give back to it some of the best moments from the lost
‘Ur’-Hamlet. One other line thought perhaps to be an actor’s
interpolation is the free-standing ‘Oh Vengeance’ that is added
to the middle of one of Hamlet’s blank-verse set pieces in folio
and is not present in either of the earlier quartos.33
Remorseless, Treacherous, Letcherous, kindles villaine!
Oh Vengeance!
Who? What as Asse am I? I sure, this is most brave,
That I, the Sonne of the Deere murthered,
Prompted to my revenge by Heaven, and Hell,
Must (like a Whore) unpacke my heart with words . . .
(TLN 621–7, 2.2.580–5)
Shakespeare’s actors by their personalities, their acting
quirks, and also by the way they received and responded to their
texts, are all features of the way the plays were written in the
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first place – and are responsible for some of the ways plays
were subsequently changed.
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5
Props, Music and Stage
Directions
The two guards at the opening of Hamlet are surrounded by
darkness so intense that they cannot see each other, as the
nervous dialogue they exchange reveals.
Bernardo Who’s there?
Francisco Nay answer me: Stand & unfold your selfe.
Barnardo Long live the King.
Francisco Barnardo?
Barnardo He.
Francisco You come most carefully upon your houre.
Barnardo ’Tis now strook twelve, get thee to bed Francisco.
Francisco For this releefe much thankes: ’Tis bitter cold,
And I am sicke at heart.
(TLN 4–13, 1.1.1–9)
That last line gives a context to the kind of darkness the play is
dealing with. The reference to the lack of light and the cold set
the scene ‘realistically’, but the indefinable grief that strikes
Francisco describes the inside of the Hamlet world. Hamlet,
later, will declare in similar vein that ‘all’s ill about my heart’
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(Q2 N3b, F reads ‘all heere a-bout my heart’ TLN 3661,
5.2.212–13) – again, something is wrong, but the wrong is
unattached to any direct cause, just as ‘something’, again not
quite definable, ‘is rotten in the State of Denmarke’ (TLN 678,
1.4.90). Hamlet is full of vagaries, ambiguous senses of wrong
that are so far from having identifiable cause that they cannot
even be properly articulated: in a sense, everything is ‘dark’ in
Hamlet. So the kind of night the play opens on is a night of the
soul, a metaphorical night, though it is also a fictional night:
the clock in the passage above has just struck twelve. Perhaps
because this variety of night is more than just scene-setting, the
act ors articulate it to the audience (verbally) rather than
manifest it physically with the use of torches, lamps or other
‘night-time’ props. It may, indeed, be important for the story
that the stage should be without the comfort of torchlight at this
point, for the kind of darkness that stops Bernardo seeing
Francisco needs to be impenetrable. The themes of this chapter
are the nature and uses of verbal props and, in contradistinction,
physical props.
As ‘scenery’ was not used on the early modern stage, verbal
descriptions that explain where a character is are very
important. They are not, however, trustworthy, and, when a
place is envisioned only verbally, the depiction given is not
always supposed to be understood in a straightforward fashion.
So when Gonzalo and his dishonest companions look at the
island of The Tempest , each perceives a different place.
Gonzalo sees a rich, fertile land of delicate air, and abundant
foliage; Antonio and Sebastian see a barren desert, with only a
few strands of greying grass:
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Gonzalo How lush and lusty the grass looks? How green?
Antonio The ground indeed is tawny.
Sebastian With an eye of greene in’t.
Antonio He misses not much.
Sebastian No: he doth but mistake the truth totally.
(TLN 727–30, 2.1.53–8)
Neither observation tells the audience what the place is
really like; but then the island is ‘magic’, and can, like Ariel,
take any form it pleases. The characters are in fact describing
their inner emotions rather than the world they see. The absence
of stage furniture in the early modern playhouse meant that
plays were not situated and could dictate and redictate
perceptions to the audience. The island in The Tempest is of the
mind, and collapses, as the play-world collapses, when the story
comes to an end: ‘These our actors . . . Are melted into Ayre . . .
like the baselesse fabricke of this vision’ (TLN 1819–22,
4.1.148–51). The absence of realistic scenery is, therefore,
important.
The same is true of Macbeth. In creating an oppressive
stage castle for Macbeth to live in, a set designer can obscure
the play’s ambivalence. The castle is, like the island of The
Tempest, a manifestation of the characters who look at it.
Duncan and Banquo, two of the heroes of Macbeth, have a
conversation about Macbeth’s habitat. They say
King Duncan This Castle hath a pleasant seat,
The ayre nimbly and sweetly recommends it selfe
Unto our gentle sences.
Banquos Guest of Summer,
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The Temple-haunting [M]arlet does approve,
By his loved Mansonry, that the Heavens breath
Smells wooingly here: no Jutty frieze,
Buttrice, nor Coigne of Vantage, but this Bird
Hath made his pendant Bed, and procreant Cradle . . .
(TLN 434–42, 1.6.1–8)
Descriptions spoken by characters onstage should not be
assumed to take the place of scenery, or to be about
environments that are often designedly unclear and carefully
uncharacterised. Even what the audience can see is sometimes
reinterpreted by the characters on stage. After the Ghost in
Hamlet has walked off the stage in full view of the audience
(his stage direction in folio is ‘Exit the Ghost’, TLN 66)
Marcellus describes how he ‘faded on the crowing of the
Cocke’ (TLN 156, 1.1.157). Similarly, when the king in King
John regrets commanding Hubert to kill the young Prince
Arthur, he blames Hubert’s ugly face (his ‘abhorred aspect’),
for inspiring murderous thoughts. But Hubert explains that he
has not carried out the King’s instructions and that Arthur still
lives. Overjoyed, John apologises:
King John Doth Arthur live? O hast thee to the Peeres,
Throw this report on their incensed rage,
And make them tame to their obedience.
Forgive the Comment that my passion made
Upon thy feature, for my rage was blinde,
And foule immaginarie eyes of blood
Presented thee more hideous then thou art.
(TLN 1986–91, 4.2.260–6)
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The audience, who will have had a full view of Hubert
throughout, might well have felt that the true changeable
hideousness was in the mind of King John himself.
As words do so much to complicate appearances, actual
straightforward physical props are used carefully. Their heavy
realism is countered by the fact that they are generally used
neither imaginatively nor realistically, but symbolically.
Plays, though staged with a minimum of bulky scenery,
were lavishly produced with rich clothing and, contrary to what
is often thought, many and varied props. But visual signs –
clothes, props – were ‘read’ symbolically rather than, as now,
naturalistically. They were in many ways the physical versions
of metonyms (‘metonymy’ is the action of substituting for a
word denoting an object, a word or phrase denoting a property
of the object or something associated with it): just as the word
‘crown’ or ‘throne’ can represent kingship, so, similarly, a
stage crown or stage throne could represent kingship,
abnegating the necessity of (what could not be staged) a rich
palace. Often stage directions show which single, relevant items
were brought on stage to symbolise place, person or event.
Directions, for instance, that tell the actor to ‘enter, as at night’
are explained with the addition ‘with torches’ or ‘softly’. 1 This
was used for a darkness that was less complicated than that in
the opening of Hamlet. The torch shows that, otherwise, without
the torch, the player would be unable to see: at the time there
was no changeable lighting on the stage. But, naturally, the
physical torch, already in itself a symbol, easily takes on a
symbolic role in the plays that use it. When King Claudius
guiltily starts up in the middle of the Hamlet play-scene
demanding ‘Give me some Light. Away’ (TLN 2140, 3.2.269),
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he is stating a practical need and making a symbolic point.
Claudius needs torches to light him as he leaves the room, a
reminder that the play is set at night in an ill-lit castle, full of
hidden things; he is also seeing to it that the actors of The
Murder of Gonzago are deprived of their light, which means
that they cannot continue with their performance: now no one
can see what happens next in a play that promises to
incriminate Claudius. But the need for light is also part of the
theme of darkness on which the play opened: Claudius’ inner
darkness (‘Oh bosome, blacke as death!’, TLN 2343, 3.3.67) is
highlighted in his yearning, when confronted with his guilt, for
illumination.
Torch-play is also used for its semi-symbolic potential in
Macbeth, where Banquo’s murder is preceded by the
extinguishing of the torch: ‘Who did strike out the Light?’
(TLN 1246, 3.3.19). Again, this is a practical prop that also
makes a symbolic point. Literally, the light is extinguished; in
story terms, putting out the light was ‘not the way’ for the
darkness allows Banquo’s son Fleance to escape. Symbolically,
Banquo’s life is ended and darkness possesses the Macbeth
world – for a while. Othello spells out the connection when he
extinguishes the candle in Desdemona’s room prior to killing
her: ‘put out the Light,’ he tells himself, ‘and then put out the
Light’ (TLN 3246, 5.2.7). The verbal metaphor is met by the
brutal physicality of the action; in Othello, a play obsessed with
white and black, with light and darkness, Othello has let his
dark triumph. Symbol and metaphor, verbal and physical prop,
merge.
The same to-and-fro between words and stage furniture
occurs in Antony and Cleopatra. The language of the play
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strongly associates the two protagonists with the props that will
finally kill them. So Cleopatra reveals that the infatuated
Antony has a pet name for her: ‘Hee’s speaking now, / Or
murmuring, where’s my Serpent of old Nyle, / (For so he cals
me)’ (TLN 553, 1.5.24–6). Cleopatra’s connection with a snake
may be suggestive of the fall of Eve (the Egyptian queen will
bring about Antony’s destruction); or it may be phallic,
implying that Cleopatra has already ‘unmanned’ Antony. Only
at the end of the play, however, comes the irony: Cleopatra dies
with a ‘Poore venomous Foole’ (TLN 3557, 5.2.305), an asp, at
her breast; she has, the play visually suggests, died because of
what she is. Antony in the same play is strongly linked to his
sword, another phallic symbol. The sword is what he trusts to
and swears by:
Antony Now by [my] Sword.
Cleopatra And Target.
(TLN 399–400, 1.3.82)
Tellingly, Cleopatra recalls the time when she took the sword
from Antony and, in exchange, dressed him in her clothes: ‘I
drunke him to his bed: / Then put my Tires and Mantles on him,
whilst / I wore his Sword Phillippan’ (TLN 1049–51, 2.5.21–3).
The sword, that has symbolised the strength (and weakness) of
Antony, is finally what the hero learns from the pointedly
named ‘Eros’ to plunge into his own body. Antony’s death too
was foretold in what he lived by if he had but known it.
Illustrated title pages to plays and ballads show some of the
other signs that may have been used on stage. Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy in its 1615 edition is embellished with a woodcut
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illustrating moments from the play (Plate 5.1). Examining the
title page with the eyes of an early modern theatre spectator
(the person most likely to choose to buy The Spanish Tragedy),
it is possible to gather information conveyed by the
construction of the image. The picture, of course, may not itself
describe the actual staging of the play, nevertheless, it uses a
set of symbols anticipating that they will be understood.
Plate 5.1 Illustration from the title page to Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy (1615). Reproduced by permission of
University of Cambridge Library.
In the woodcut, Heironymo holds a lighted torch (signifying
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that it is night) while the boots of the hanged Horatio are
spurred (signifying that he has been riding). The bower or
arbour in which Horatio is hanging, meanwhile, is symbolic in
itself: it is a lattice-work arch but its leafy coverage shows it to
represent a tree. Hieronymo in the play talks of ‘the tree’ he
planted (‘I set it of a kernel . . . Till at the length / It grew a
gallows and did bear our son’).2 This leafy arch is probably
reminiscent of a theatrical prop – there is no other reason for
the artist to envisage a representative rather than a realistic tree.
Pictures could, at the very least, be understood
‘emblematically’ as a collection of symbols revealing time,
place and activities passed; props in plays had a similar
function.
More clues as to the type and nature of playhouse props can
be seen in the inventory that Henslowe kept for the Rose
theatre. The actual manuscript of this inventory is now lost, but
an eighteenth-century transcription of it was printed by the
theatre historian and editor Edmund Malone. Here is an extract,
illustrating the props that a theatre of the 1590s used in
production.
The Enventary tacken of all the properties for my Lord
Admeralles men, the 10 of Marche 1598:
Item, j rock, j cage, j tombe, j Hell mought.
Item, j tomb of Guido, j tomb of Dido, j bedsteade.
Item, viij lances, j payer of stayers for Fayeton.
Item, ij stepells, & j chime of belles, & j beacon.
Item, j hecfor for the playe of Faeton, the limes dead.
Item, j globe, & j golden sceptre; iij clobes.
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Item, ij marchepanes and the sittie of Rome.
Item, j gowlden flece; ij rackets; j baye tree.
Item, j wooden hatchet; j lether hatchete.
Item, j wooden canepie; owld Mahemetes head.
Item j lyone skin; j beares skyne; & faetones lymes, &
Faeton charete; & Argosse heade.
Item, Nepun forcke & garland.
Item, j crosers stafe; Kentes woden leage.3
The list raises as many questions as it answers. What was ‘the
city of Rome’? Was it, perhaps, a curtain for the back of the
stage, the frons scenae, with a picture on it? Is this, then, one of
the ways that plays indicated ‘place’? Certainly the hangings
were often pictorial, for John Taylor, a Thames sculler who
frequented all the southbank theatres and was also a poet (so
called Taylor ‘the water poet’) describes a tragic scene in which
the stage is ‘all hang’d with the sad death of Kings, / From
whose bewailing story sorrow springs’; Shirley, the playwright,
describes a semi-empty theatre in which ‘The benches then /
Were all the grave spectators, but that here / Some cruell
Gentlemen in your hangings were’.4 When a tragedy was to be
performed plain black hangings were sometimes substituted. In
the anonymous play A Warning for Fair Women of 1599,
personifications of Tragedy, Comedy and History contest for
superiority, until History observes: ‘Look, Comedy, I mark’d it
not till now, / The stage is hung with blacke, and I perceive /
The auditors prepar’d for tragedie’; ‘Hang all your house with
black’, goes an elegy for Burbage, ‘May nought but Tragedyes
afflict your sceane’.5 Even before a play started, and before any
actor spoke, then, the tragic theme could already have been
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visually symbolised, undercutting any moments of comedy with
its dark unspoken symbolism. Hamlet, a walking tragedy in his
own person, never casts off his black suit of mourning. Colour
could ‘speak’ though its specific language can be remote from
us.
Other features on Henslowe’s list are equally suggestive.
Why is there more than one tomb – was each tomb separately
inscribed, and was this normal? Could the dead-limbed heifer
or the golden fleece be used in any other productions? How big
was the steeple and did it contain the bells – or was it simply a
representation of a steeple, like the tree in the woodcut for The
Spanish Tragedy? An item referred to amongst Henlowe’s
clothing inventories is one ‘cloak for to make you invisible’:
again, this must have been a cloak that the audience could
‘understand’. Perhaps it had shut eyes on it: in quarto 2 Henry
IV the character representing Rumour enters ‘painted full of
Tongues’ (A2b), presumably wearing a cloak decorated with
tongue images. The Globe will have had a similar list of props –
indeed one or two of its regular props can be determined by
careful reading of the plays. The company had, for instance, a
lion’s skin. It crops up on the shoulders of Austria in King John
(‘Thou weare a Lyons hide, doff it for shame, / And hang a
Calves skin on those recreant limbs’, TLN, 1054–5, 3.1.131),
and on the back of Snug in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s playwithin-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe (‘halfe his face must be
seene through the Lyons necke, and he himselfe must speake
through, saying thus . . .’, TLN 847–9, 3.1.36–7). They also had
a throne, of course, and a tomb, a bed, books, weapons and
some way of indicating the interior of a court-house.
Plate 5.2, also from the title page to a play, suggests the way
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a ‘study’ might have been symbolised, showing how a few
items of stage furniture could have sufficed to construct an
academic magician’s room. The woodcut features an armillary
sphere (the metal-worked sphere that hangs on the wall, for
telling the stars), and a shelf-full of books (note the fact that
books were, in the early modern period, shelved with the spine
to the wall and the leaves outward, probably a leftover from the
days when books were chained to a wall by their spines). The
title page image is matched by one to the prose history The
famous historie of fryer Bacon, published in 1627 by Francis
Grove, and later, in 1630, used for the play Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay. That woodcut also includes the sphere and the
shelf of books; indeed, the two illustrations may consciously
recall one another – each story concerns an academic who is
also a conjurer or magician – but the fact that a study in
Wittenberg (Dr Faustus), and Brasenose College, Oxford (Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay), are depicted so similarly also points
towards a consensus as to what a stylised ‘study’ should
contain.
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Plate 5.2 Illustration from the title page to Christopher
Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the life and Death of
Doctor Faustus (1631). Reproduced by permission of The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California (RB 62484).
Even the way hair was arranged was visually telling. One
stage direction in the ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet (1603) requires
Ophelia, on her first mad entrance, to come in ‘playing on a
Lute, and her haire downe singing’ (Q1 G4b). The folio at the
same point has: ‘enter Ophelia distracted’ (TLN 2766).
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Distraction, as this suggests, was represented in the unbound
hair. Extreme grief verging on the edge of madness, and
madness itself, stemming from grief, was symbolised by letting
the hair hang down – sane women kept their hair bound and
ordered.6 So, in Troilus and Cressida, mad Cassandra enters
‘with her hair about her ears’ (TLN 1082, 2.2.100.0); in Richard
III, the grief-stricken Queen enters also ‘with her hair about her
ears’ (TLN 1306, 2.2.33.0). A character’s tresses are loosened
as a way of giving sorrow a physical and, in stage terms,
visually powerful manifestation. Constance in King John
deliberately chooses to free her hair to demonstrate the grief
she feels at losing her son Arthur. King Philip, seeing
Constance, is horrified into thinking that his mother has
actually gone mad with sorrow. But Constance inveighs against
the very appearance she has given herself: she has used the
convention of the loose hair to force Philip to listen to her, if
only to make her put up her hair again:
Constance I am not mad: this haire I teare is mine,
My name is Constance, I was Geffreyes wife,
Yong Arthur is my sonne, and he is lost: . . .
Philip Binde up those tresses . . .
Binde up your haires.
Constance Yes that I will: and wherefore will I do it?
I tore them from their bonds, and cride aloud,
O, that these hands could so redeeme my sonne,
As they have given these hayres their libertie:
But now I envie at their libertie,
And will againe commit them to their bonds,
Because my poore childe is a prisoner.
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(TLN 1429–60, 3.4.45–75)
Unable to work her will through feigned madness, Constance
shackles her hair once more, to illustrate her son’s
imprisonment.
Plate 5.3 accompanies a ballad printed in 1654 telling the
tale of Titus Andronicus . Again, it is a woodcut that either
reflects the staging of the play, or shows conventions consonant
with it, for it links itself carefully with the theatres of the 1640s
and before. Published during the interregnum when all
playhouses had been forcibly closed, to the top right of the
ballad’s woodcut is a section that shows where the play Titus
was acted: a round theatre with its flag up. The theatre may be
specific – is it, perhaps, the Globe? – although it is more likely
to be an all-purpose representation of a playhouse of the past.
Either way, the picture accompanying the ballad, as well as the
story told in it, is linked with staged productions of Titus
Andronicus.
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Plate 5.3 Woodcut illustration accompanying ballad of The
Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus (c. 1655–
65). Reproduced by permission of The British Library.
In the top centre of the woodcut is the raped Lavinia with
her symbolically unbound hair a sign of her grief. She is writing
the names of her accusers in the sand: writing, because at this
point in the play/ballad her tongue has been cut out and her
hands lopped off (unlike her counterpart in the play, however,
this Lavinia holds the stick in her stumps rather than her
mouth). At the bottom centre of the picture the two welldressed rapists are in the process of having their throats cut.
They had come to visit Titus in disguise, claiming that they
were Rape and Murder, but the picture shows that they arrived
wearing the spurred boots that link them to the time when,
earlier (top left), they went out hunting and caught Lavinia,
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whom they raped, and Bassianus, her husband, whom they
killed. The woodcut suggests that the boys, when enacting Rape
and Murder, look as they did when performing those crimes:
they are ‘rape’ and ‘murder’, then, and, indeed, are killed for
their actions in the same clothes, a satisfying irony. Does this
relate to costuming in the staged production of Titus
Andronicus? To the far left of the picture is Aaron the Moor
buried ‘brest-deep’ in earth as the play gives out will be his
punishment:
Set him brest deepe in earth, and famish him:
There let him stand, and rave, and cry for foode:
If any one releeves, or pitties him,
For the offence, he dyes. This is our doome:
Some stay, to see him fast’ned in the earth.
(TLN 2683–7, 5.3.179–83)
At the end of the play there is a general exit, except,
presumably, for Aaron, ‘fastened in the earth’. In the picture he
makes lamentation with his hands, the rest of his body being
underground. Perhaps, again, this hints at the staging of Titus
Andronicus – ‘burial in sand’, almost certainly consisted of
standing in the trap on the stage: the trap that was the gate of
the stage’s ‘hell’. Seeing Aaron in the trap is to see the
character already in Hell, a comment to the audience about the
state of Aaron’s soul and his fate. On the bottom right of the
picture, set apart in a box, Tamora and Saturninus prepare to eat
the meal Titus has cooked them, consisting of a pie made from
Tamora’s sons, the rapists. Saturninus in this picture wears a
crown, yet in the play he is a Roman emperor, not a king.
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Almost certainly, however, the same clothes often furnished
both in the playhouse, for, again, the symbol is what is
important: indeed, if ‘emperor’ did not resemble ‘king’ the
audience might have had no way of interpreting Roman clothes
in hierarchical terms. This is clear from the other, far more
famous, Titus Andronicus drawing from the time (Plate 5.4).
Plate 5.4
Henry Peacham (?), drawing from William
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (? 1595). Reproduced by
permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Wiltshire.
The drawing, seemingly penned by Henry Peacham the
draughtsman, is dated 1595 (though the date and ascription may
be the work of the Victorian forger John Payne Collier). The
picture itself is genuine however, and seems to depict a medley
of moments in the play all of which may relate to a production.
Tamora, queen of the Goths, here wears a crown symbolising
her status, which is also signalled by her sophisticated dress.
That dress, however, appears to be Elizabethan. To the left of
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the drawing are two soldiers symbolised as such by their
halberds; again, they are Elizabethan in appearance. Aaron the
Moor is obvious by his colour: his dress is ambiguous, and may
be all-purpose ‘ethnic’. Only Titus in the centre makes a halfhearted show of being Roman by wearing a toga slung over one
shoulder; the sword at his side is worn in Elizabethan fashion.
He, perhaps, is also the only symbol that the play is set in Rome
at all. Who or what symbolised ‘Rome’ in Julius Caesar? A
decorated curtain? Certainly not Caesar himself, who appears to
have been dressed as an Elizabethan would-be monarch,
wearing a ‘doublet’ and hoping for a ‘crown’: ‘when he
perceiv’d the common Heard was glad he refus’d the Crowne,
he pluckt me ope his Doublet, and offer’d them his Throat to
cut’ (TLN 367–70, 1.2.263–6). It is rare even in paintings of the
period to find ‘classical’ costume actually represented: most
‘history’ was depicted as happening in modern-day Elizabethan
or Jacobean dress. Cleopatra, feeling faint in Antony and
Cleopatra, asks Charmian to loosen the strings of her bodice –
‘cut my lace, Charmian’ (TLN 386, 1.3.71). This, and other
similar examples also show to what extent one play was staged
like another – a further aspect of the across-play continuum
described in the last chapter.
Clothes were read symbolically: they were, in many ways,
simply other versions of ‘props’. If a character wore a blue coat
and a flat cap, he looked like (and therefore was) an apprentice
– unless the text told a different story. Similarly, if he wore
rags he was a beggar. So clothes could denote the character but,
more than that, character could denote place. Alan Dessen has
suggested that
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At the Globe or Fortune or Blackfriars, place was signalled
primarily by means of costume. For example . . . a forester
or woodsman would signal a forest; a host or vintner, an
inn; figures in nautical costume, a ship. In such an onstage
vocabulary, distinctive properties or costumes serve as
visual clues: . . . the forester’s green garments or weapons;
the vintner’s apron or handheld glasses.7
Clothes, then, are another kind of visual prop and in the same
way have both a straightforward representation and, often, a
symbolic subtext.
Though clothes are not generally described, sometimes it is
possible to work out how they may have been used to enhance
the action of certain plays. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet wears her
‘best Robes’ (TLN 2405, 4.1.110) when she takes Friar
Laurence’s potion, but these, presumably, are also the clothes
she married in and perhaps, too, the clothes she wore for the
Capulets’ masked ball. Dying in her wedding-clothes on a stage
tomb (situated, presumably, in the same place as the wedding
bed in the marriage scene), Juliet links sex and death – the
connection between the two running through and under the text
of the whole play: ‘Do thou but close our hands with holy
words’ says Romeo to the Friar, ‘Then Love-devouring death do
what he dare’ (TLN 1398–9, 2.6.6–7). Those themes are
revisited in Othello: in that play Desdemona pointedly asks that
her wedding sheets be laid out on the bed in which she will later
be killed. Othello, moreover, has a repeated visual theme of
disturbed sleep that will culminate in the final bedchamber
death scene; the play continually stages muddled and
vulnerable characters raised in their nightgowns and
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misunderstanding what is going on around them. Brabantio,
woken in the night by Iago and Rodrigo, appears in the first
scene ‘in his night gowne’ according to the 1622 quarto (B3a);
Othello and then Desdemona are roused from sleep in 2.3 by
Cassio’s drunken brawling – as the text suggests, they are in
their night clothes and have been disturbed from consummating
their marriage: ‘All’s well, Sweeting: / Come away to bed’
(TLN 1376–7, 2.3.251–2). Later, an intimate scene has
Desdemona prepare for bed helped by Emilia (‘Give me my
nightly wearing’, TLN 2985, 4.3.16); she dies in her night
clothes in bed, shortly followed by Emilia who has herself been
roused from slumber by the sounds of the killing. Montano,
Gratiano and Iago rising in the night when they hear what
Othello has done may, indeed, all be in their night clothes; Iago
has, like Macbeth, ‘murther’d Sleepe’ ( Macbeth TLN 699,
2.2.39).
Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is obviously dressed in
special clothes that identify him as a Jew. He makes this plain
when he rails against the Christians who ‘spit upon my Jewish
gaberdine’ (TLN 440, 1.3.112). Presumably he wore the dark
red dress and yellow cap traditionally associated with Jews: at
any rate, he wore a stage costume that visually separated him
from non-Jews. This raises questions about the important court
case at the end of the play. When Portia, disguised as a learned
doctor, enters the court and asks ‘Which is the Merchant here,
and which the Jew?’ she cannot actually be requesting
information, as she can tell who is whom by looking – in
addition to the Jewish gabardine, Shylock probably had a
proboscis or ‘visage (or vizard) like the artificiall Jewe of
Maltaes nose’.8 Portia, however, raises one of the primary
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questions of the play: who is the buyer precisely, and who the
seller? Who is being truly ‘Jewish’ (at that time ‘jew’ was a
name of opprobrium for a grasping person who drove a hard
bargain)? Both merchant and Jew emerge badly from the play
that had as its title in the Stationers’ Register (a book in which
ownership of texts was recorded) ‘The Marchaunt of Venyce or
otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce’; the shared financial
concerns, the misplaced love, even the reliance on Portia,
consistently link merchant and Jew throughout the play.
Perhaps, the text may suggest, the two are not as different as we
would like to think.9
Having an audience trained to ‘read’ clothes in a very literal
way also allows the playwright to play games with people’s
expectations. When a boy plays a girl, the audience may
‘understand’ that he is a girl. But suppose he dresses as a girl
who then disguises herself as a boy, as does Viola in Twelfth
Night, Rosalind in As You Like It , Julia in Two Gentlemen of
Verona, Jessica, Portia and Nerissa in Merchant of Venice . The
spectators then recognise that they are seeing a girl dressed as a
boy, although what they are actually seeing is a boy dressed as
a boy. No doubt one reason why girls are so frequently dressed
as boys in Shakespearean dramas is that it is easier for a boy to
play a boy than a girl. But, from the audience’s point of view,
the confusion has interesting gendered ramifications. Sebastian,
Viola’s twin brother, is described in Twelfth Night as being a
boy who looks exactly like Viola: Viola being a ‘girl’ dressed
as a boy. But given the similarity of appearance, it may have
been hard for the spectators to know when they were seeing
Viola and when Sebastian; when what they were watching was
to be understood as a real boy and when it was not: they would
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have had the same genuine difficulty as the characters in the
play who also cannot tell the difference.
Then again, there were more subtle games that a playwright
could introduce. Doubling was common in the theatre of the
time – ‘Albert’ in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida explains to
his fellow actors, ‘The necessitie of the play forceth me to act
two parts’ – and there was a convention that if a character
changed clothes then he was someone else, though often
someone else of similar rank and position.10 It is fairly likely,
for instance, that the actor who was Brabantio, Desdemona’s
father in the first act of Othello, also played Gratiano,
Brabantio’s brother, in the last act. If that were the case, then he
had the poignant task of announcing his own death: ‘Poore
Desdemon: / I am glad thy Father’s dead, / Thy Match was
mortall to him: and pure greefe / Shore his old thred in twaine’
(TLN 3492–5, 5.2.204–6). How, then, of characters who stay
themselves, but change clothes? Usually they articulate that
fact so the audience knows what is going on. Kent in Lear
decides to shave off his beard and change his voice so that he
can continue to serve the king who has banished him:
If but as [well] I other accents borrow,
That can my speech defuse, my good intent
May carry through it selfe to that full issue
For which I raiz’d my likenesse.
(TLN 531–4, 1.4.1–4)
But sometimes the playwright chooses that an actor, though
dressed differently, will continue to represent the same person –
and does not ‘tell’ the audience. At the beginning of As You
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Like It Oliver was an evil man with an irrational hatred of his
good brother Orlando. In the fourth act, Oliver enters the play
in new clothing and ‘reformed’, having been rescued from the
mouth of a hungry lion by his kind brother’s aid. He does not,
however, immediately reveal who he is, with the result that the
audience learns Oliver’s identity at the same time as the
characters in the play:
Celia O I have heard him speake of that same brother,
And he did render him the most unnaturall
That liv’d amongst men.
Oliver And well he might so doe,
For well I know he was unnaturall.
Rosalind But to Orlando: did he leave him there
Food to the suck’d and hungry Lyonnesse?
Oliver Twice did he turne his backe, and purpos’d so:
But kindnesse, nobler ever then revenge,
And Nature stronger then his just occasion,
Made him give battell to the Lyonnesse:
Who quickly fell before him, in which hurtling
From miserable slumber I awaked.
Celia Are you his brother?
Rosalind Was’t you he rescu’d?
Celia Was’t you that did so oft contrive to kill him?
Oliver ’Twas I: but ’tis not I: I doe not shame
To tell you what I was, since my conversion
So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.
(TLN 2272–90, 4.3.121–37)
The spectators fool themselves beyond the remit of the text:
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they both actually see that the actor is Oliver, and, presumably,
take it that he is someone else: a good man. In fact Oliver’s
changed clothes are here a sign of a changed personality.
Whereas he was before ‘bad’, he is now ‘good’ (’Twas I, but
’tis not I’): he is, therefore, someone else as he says, and this is
illustrated by his altered dress and appearance.
Music also was used symbolically; the idea of
‘atmospheric’ music had not yet come about. So, for instance,
no Shakespearean ghost’s entrance is flagged by sinister music
– or by music of any kind – as would happen in a modern film.
The ghost of Hamlet’s father, the ghosts of Banquo and of
Caesar, all enter and depart without musical accompaniment.
Nevertheless, music is important to the meaning of various
moments in Shakespeare’s plays, for the kind of music and the
type of instruments played made certain symbolic statements
out to the audience. Hautboys, the ancestors of the oboe, with
their reedy, nasal sound, were taken to symbolise the fact that
something bad was about to happen, like the oboes under the
stage when Antony’s god Hercules leaves him in Antony and
Cleopatra. They are present too in Macbeth sounding out a
warning note when Duncan arrives at Dunsinane; present when
the witch’s cauldron sinks; and behind the players’ dumb-show
in Hamlet.11
Conversely, music in Twelfth Night and Troilus and
Cressida is rich and self-indulgent. There, characters use music
rather than respond to its dictates: Orsino elects to suffer lovemelancholy and forces the music to back him up, as did
Cleopatra, who demanded music because it was the ‘moody
foode of us that trade in love’ ( Antony and Cleopatra TLN
1025–6, 2.5.1). Twelfth Night begins before its words do: it
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starts with Orsino’s ‘food of Love’, music; ending on the
Clown’s song ‘for the raine it raineth every day’. The play,
however, ‘teaches’ Orsino, through the medium of pointedly
ironic songs, to turn his attentions away from the world of
emotional indulgence and to concentrate on the world of real
emotions instead. Helen in Troilus and Cressida similarly gluts
herself with songs about what she calls love but is in fact sex:
‘Let thy song be love: this love will undoe us al. / Oh Cupid,
Cupid, Cupid.’ The song that follows is
Love, love, no thing but love, still more:
For O loves Bow,
Shootes Bucke and Doe:
The Shaft confounds not that it wounds,
But tickles still the sore:
These Lovers cry, oh ho they dye;
Yet that which seemes the wound to kill,
Doth turne oh ho, to ha ha he:
So dying love lives still,
O ho a while, but ha ha ha,
O ho grones out for ha ha ha – hey ho.
(TLN 1588–98, 3.1.114–26)
The decadent impropriety of the song is on one level simply
amusing, but it also illustrates a Helen who is indulgent, coarse
and bored. That the song is about dying for love – dying, here,
meaning to have an orgasm – is pointedly ironic: the sore, the
wound, the killing, and the groans are sexual in the song, but
are also reminders of the Trojan war in which Helen has no
interest, and that is being waged for her.
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Music at the time was understood to relate to ideas about
divine order, and so could be read two ways by the audience: as
a comment on the state of divine harmony or disharmony in the
play-world; and as a rhetoric of the emotion. The old
Pythagorean concept of the universe had held it that the planets
were fixed in their place by harmonic law, sometimes called the
music of the spheres, or ‘musica mundana’. This dictated to or
was reflected by ‘musica humana’, the music of men.12 When
men’s nature was in tune with celestial music, all was well; but
out of tune with their universe, and all was ill. Themes of
musical order or disorder run through many Shakespearean
plays. ‘Take but Degree away, un-tune that string,’ warns
Ulysses in Troilus, ‘And hearke what Discord followes’ (TLN
568–9, 1.3.109–10). When music is illused in Shakespeare, or
when, more sinisterly, it goes wrong, the bad music often
reflects or suggests divine disorder in the larger world. The
young instrumentalist who has fallen asleep in Julius Caesar
wakes up from a bad dream and says what in the story of the
play is a fact – but to the audience is prophetic: ‘The strings my
Lord, are false’ (TLN 2305, 4.3.291). Kate in Taming of the
Shrew breaks a lute over the head of her tutor with ‘Frets call
you these?’ (TLN 1020, 2.1.152). The broken or mutilated
instruments seem to be employed at times when ‘harmony’ has
been in some way shattered.
Music can make one set of statements to characters in the
play, and another to the watching audience. It does so in Antony
and Cleopatra, when the boozy Antony and Caesar make an
uncertain and over-drunken peace. Portentously they sing a
drinking-song that begins ‘Come thou Monarch of the Vine, /
Plumpie Bacchus, with pinke eyn’ (TLN 1466–7, 2.7.113–14).
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To the watching audience this was almost a blasphemous
parody of ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, a Whit Sunday hymn. The
transmutation of a hymn meant for the holy spirit to one
intended for the ears of the god of drunkenness and immoral
revelry would have been an ominous indication that the concord
represented by the song had a corrupt foundation – and that
tragedy would follow.13
When Pericles is finally reunited with his daughter Marina
and his world resolves itself, he hears the divine music of the
spheres. The text, however, does not indicate that actual music
should be played, so it seems that the heavenly bounty is for
Pericles only:
Pericles I embrace you, give me my robes.
I am wilde in my beholding, O heavens blesse my girle,
But harke what Musicke tell, Hellicanus my Marina,
Tell him ore point by point, for yet he seemes to doat.
How, sure you are my daughter; but what musicke?
Helicanus My Lord I heare none.
Pericles None, the Musicke of the Spheres, list my Marina.
Lysimachus It is not good to crosse him, give him way.
Pericles Rarest sounds, do ye not heare?
Lysimachus Musicke my Lord? I heare.
Pericles Most heavenly Musicke.
It nips me unto listning, and thicke slumber
Hangs upon mine eyes, let me rest.
(Q I1b, 5.1.221–35)
Music had, earlier on in the play, awakened Pericles’ wife
Thaisa, thought dead, though that music could be heard by all
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(‘The Violl once more,’ demands Cerymon, ‘The Musicke there
. . . give her ayre’, Q E4a, 3.2.90). The redemptive power of
music, music showing harmony both earthly and heavenly, is a
theme in this play; and the bounty of the harmony extends out
to the watchers with the happy ending: ‘New joy’ says Gower to
the audience in the last line, ‘wait on you’ (Q I3b, 5.3.102).
Thaisa’s awakening recalls an important textual moment in
King Lear where Lear, according to the quarto, returns to
sanity, partly through being allowed to sleep, partly through
being played curative music. So Cordelia prays that Lear’s own
music be set on the right course, that his strings be retuned:
O you kind Gods cure this great breach in his abused
nature,
The untund and hurrying senses, O wind up
Of this child changed father . . .
(Q K1b, 4.7, not in Riverside)
In answer, as it were, the Doctor rouses Lear to the sound of
gentle music; and the old man wakes up weeping and sane.
Doctor Please you draw neere, louder the musicke there [.]
Cordelia O my deer father, restoration hang thy medicine on
my lips
And let this kis repaire those violent harms that my two
sisters
Have in thy reverence made.
(Q K2a, 4.7.24–8)
This is one of the passages significantly revised out of what is
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thought to be the later text (the folio text) of Lear. In the
harsher folio Tragedy of King Lear there is none of the saving
grace of music. Much of the verbal lyricism is gone in that
play, replaced by heavier, more muscular, brutal language; and
in the same way the tragedy is less relieved – there is less room
for hope. This second Lear is darker than the first, and in it
Cordelia’s prayer is not met with as unambiguous an answer,
and there is no doctor to help cure the muddled king:14
Cordelia O you kind Gods!
Cure this great breach in his abused Nature,
Th’untun’d and jarring senses, O winde up,
Of this childe-changed Father.
Gentleman So please your Majesty,
That we may wake the King, he hath slept long?
Cordelia Be govern’d by your knowledge, and proceede
I’th’sway of your owne will: is he array’d?
(TLN 2763–70, 4.7.13–19)
Another use of music is, of course, the songs themselves.
Here it is noticeable that Shakespeare frequently supplies words
for the songs that occur in his plays: many other playwrights do
not. The presence of the words to the songs shows that the
actual substance of the texts was important. Traditionally,
moreover, there had been few or no songs sung in tragedies, so
Shakespeare, in introducing the tragic song supplement, was
bringing something quite new to the theatre.15
Hamlet relies considerably on the use of the tragic song. In
the play one point continually illustrated by staging is that the
world has gone topsy-turvy and that everything keeps
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happening the wrong way round: there is ‘mirth in Funerall, and
. . . Dirge in Marriage’ (TLN 190, 1.2.12); the flowers that
should have decked Ophelia’s bridal bed are instead placed on
her grave. The music also mirrors – or helps create – this
upside-down world. Ophelia is buried without anyone singing a
requiem for her, because, as the ‘churlish’ priest holds, ‘Her
death was doubtful . . . We should profane the service of the
dead / To sing a requiem’ (TLN 3426–7, 5.1.227–37). And yet
Ophelia has had songs sung for her; songs that seem to amount
to a pagan requiem. Preparing Ophelia’s grave, the gravedigger
sings ‘In youth when I did love, did love’ (TLN 3251, 5.1.61), a
song about tiring of love and being ready for death that also
parodies the themes of Ophelia’s mad songs: sexuality and the
grave.
One particularly ironic use of music occurs at the end of the
play and contributes to the play’s bleak conclusion. As Hamlet
dies, Horatio says a blessing over him: ‘Goodnight, sweet
Prince, / and flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest’ (TLN 3850,
5.2.359–60). The audience, hearing this for the first time, would
have been primed for ethereal music like the ‘celestial music’
that Pericles hears. But the next line explains what actually then
happens. ‘Why’ exclaims the anguished Horatio, ‘do’s the
Drumme come hither?’ (TLN 3851, 5.2.361). The expectation
of singing angels yields to the harsh intrusion of a martial
drum: the Hamlet world is still disordered, confused and
essentially back-to-front in a way that the play has not been
able to solve. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the havoc
Hamlet has wrought. Denmark, powerful and confident at the
beginning of the play, has been reduced to a client of Norway
by the end, and largely as the result of Hamlet’s activities; one
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of the broader topsy-turvy Hamlet themes. But perhaps, also,
there is a suggestion that the intervention of Fortinbras is not
the happy conclusion to the play that is sometimes suggested,
but is as dark as all the other happenings. The Kenneth Branagh
film
of Hamlet concentrating on the cruelty and
singlemindedness of the Norwegian prince favoured this
interpretation.16
Colour, props, music, stage-hangings and words themselves
had layers of meaning, some of which made statements out into
the audience that were not to be understood by the characters in
the play, and some of which were proleptic, their full meaning
to be recognised only retrospectively. Denying a text its theatre
symbolism, confining it to the page, is to remove layers of
potential meaning from it. To read the text alone and take that
to be the play itself is to ignore the visual and aural
commentary that shaped it in the theatre.
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6
Prologues, Songs and Actors’
Parts
When you look at a folio or quarto version of a Shakespeare
play, or any other early modern play, the use of different
typefaces for certain bits of the playtext will be immediately
apparent. Specifically, it will be clear that parts of the text are
nearly always differentiated from the rest by being printed in
larger or different type. Those bits of a play are the prologues,
the epilogues, the songs and the letters; all four tend to be
visibly separated from the body of the text. In its original form,
the printed text does not look homogeneous, a feature that is
easily lost when looking at a modern, regularised edition.
Why did the playhouse give a different worth to different
bits of text? This chapter will look at how an assemblage of
textual pieces comes seen to be a solid dramatic work. It will
then pare some of Shakespeare productions back into the
discrete sheets of paper that made them up, showing how
printed plays relate to theatrical manuscripts.
It has already been shown that a published play reflects in
some form the state of the manuscript behind it. But why might
the playhouse manuscript have given special treatment to
prologues, epilogues, songs and letters? To answer the question
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it is necessary to see in what other ways those same sections of
text are printed differently from the text around them. Here are
some examples, transcribed to show the layout and typeface of
the passages in their various folio versions:
THE PROLOGUE.
I Come no more to make you laugh, Things now,
That beare a Weighty, and a Serious Brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of State and Woe:
Such Noble Scoenes, as draw the Eye to flow
We now present.
(Henry VIII TLN 2–6, prologue)
THE EPILOGUE.
Tis ten to one, this Play can never please
All that are heere: . . .
(Henry VIII TLN 3449–51, epilogue)
Duke. I prethee sing. Musicke
The Song.
Come away, come away death,
And in sad cypresse let me be laide . . .
(Twelfth Night TLN 939–41, 2.4.50–2)
Lad. What have we heere?
Clo. In that you have there.
exit
A Letter.
I have sent you a daughter-in-Law, shee hath recovered the
King, and undone me.
(All’s Well, TLN 1418–22, 3.2.17–19)
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As the above makes clear, in these instances ‘the prologue’,
‘the epilogue’, ‘the song’, ‘a letter’ have their own generic
headings, although what they are is quite obvious from the
context. The titles are removed by modern editors, but when
present they isolate sections of play as varieties of literature in
their own right; it is as though prologue, epilogue, song and
letter are not entirely part of the texts to which they are
attached.
A brief look at some songs in plays by Shakespeare and
other writers will reveal what must sometimes be happening in
the playhouse to account for the different type and the
seemingly unnecessary headings. The printed plays of James
Shirley will be found often to have moments like this from his
The Duke’s Mistress (1638):
Du. Musicke, the minuits
Are sad i’th absence of Ardelia,
And moove too slow, quicken their pace with Lutes,
And voices.
A Song.
Du. No more; we will be Musicke of our selves,
And spare your Arts . . .1
Here the heading of ‘a song’ is present, but the ditty itself,
music, words and all that ‘quickened the pace’, are absent. This
can be matched by similar examples in Shakespeare. In Julius
Caesar Lucius plays the troubled Brutus a song, but falls asleep
while performing it. The tune, says Brutus, was played for
‘slumber’, but ‘slumber’ has in turn murdered the player with
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the ‘leaden mace’ of sleep. This is, of course, a passage more
about the mind of Brutus than about sleep or the tune,
nevertheless the violence of the observation is movingly
flanked by the love Brutus obviously has for the boy singer.
Love, violence and despair combine, and the nature and words
of the ‘sleepy tune’, whatever they were, will have given a
further contrast as well as a context to this passage. And yet
here is the moment exactly as it looks in the one surviving folio
text of the play.
Luc. I have slept my Lord already.
Bru. It was well done and thou shalt sleepe againe:
I will not hold thee long. If I do live,
I will be good to thee.
Musicke, and a Song.
This is a sleepy Tune: O Murd’rous slumber!
Layest thou thy Leaden Mace upon my Boy,
That playes thee Musicke? Gentle knave good night:
I will not do thee so much wrong to wake thee:
If thou do’st nod, thou break’st thy Instrument,
Ile take it from thee, and (good Boy) good night.
(TLN 2273–85, 4.3.263–72)
The substance of the sleepy tune is lost, just as the words to the
song from Shirley’s Duke’s Mistress have disappeared.
Pericles, too, contains such a moment. Marina has been sent by
Lysimachus to try to rouse Pericles with her ‘sweet harmonie,
and other chosen attractions’. She starts with a song:
Lys. Come, let us leave her, and the Gods make her prosperous.
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The Song.
Lys. Marke[d] he your Musicke?
Mar. No nor lookt on us.
(Q H3b, 5.1.79–81)
Marina is Pericles’ long-lost daughter, but at this point in the
play neither she nor Pericles realise that. What was in her song?
Was it about relations or relationships? Was it about love or
loss or childhood? Did it send out obscure messages to the
audience? As Emilia puts it in Othello, ‘What did thy Song
boad Lady?’ (TLN 3545, 5.2.246). We cannot know, however,
for the song is gone.
The same is true of 1 Henry IV:
Hotsp. Peace, shee sings.
Heere the Lady sings a Welsh Song.
Hotsp. Come, Ile have your Song too.
(TLN 1789–91, 3.1.244–5)
Of course, the fact that the song in 1 Henry IV was in
Welsh, a language that most of the audience would not
understand, renders the value of the words that much less
relevant. Nevertheless, the fact of the loss is revealing, and can
be added to the one or maybe two lost songs in Love’s Labour’s
Lost. In that play the boy Moth enters on to the stage together
with Don Adriano his master. What then happens is unclear:
Song.
Bra. Warble childe, make passionate my sense of hearing.
Boy. Concolinel.
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Brag. Sweete Ayer . . .
(Q C3b and F 770–5, 3.1.1–4)
The scene certainly begins with a lost song – but the meaning of
Moth’s response to ‘warble child’ (‘Concolinel’), has long
puzzled commentators. It is quite possible, given the context of
the play, that that term, too, is the heading for a song (the Irish
‘Can cailin gheal’ – sing maiden fair – has been suggested, as
has the French ‘Quand Colinelle’ – ‘when Colinel’) and that
this scene contains two lost songs. Alternatively, ‘song’ and
‘concolinel’ are the same single lost song – we cannot know
because nothing besides the puzzling title remains.
Lost songs raise a number of issues. They show that
sometimes simply the title ‘song’ was supplied in the text,
while the ditty itself must have been written on a separate piece
of paper. This may explain the title ‘the song’ that heads so
many songs in Shakespeare texts, and may explain, too, why
those texts are in varied type: they looked ‘different’ from the
rest of the play because they were different in manuscript. A
number of early modern plays have their songs separately
printed, gathered either at the front or the back of the edition,
illustrating the separate nature of the songs from the playtext.
Often, it seems, songs were not written directly into the
playhouse ‘book’.2 But why might songs have been transcribed
aside from the playtext?
For actors, who had a different play to put on every evening,
there was very little time to learn scripts. Anything, therefore,
that could reduce the learning load was very useful. Bits of play
that could be written out on separate pieces of paper and read
on stage rather than learned in advance were always helpful.
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With songs there was the added advantage that a separate sheet
could provide the music as well as the words. So, it would
seem, the pieces of paper on which songs were written were
commonly kept outside plays as well as (and sometimes instead
of) in them.
Various textual issues arise from this. If the song in the
playhouse is kept separate from the rest of the play, then it can
easily be lost while the body of the dialogue survives (as
illustrated) or easily be taken away or moved from one
character to another. Consider how many of the examples of
revision already discussed happen around or in connection with
songs. The willow song is present in folio Othello and absent in
the quarto; Viola’s songs in Twelfth Night appear to have been
given to Feste; two songs are added to Macbeth out of
Middleton’s The Witch. Measure for Measure has been revised
for performance at the Blackfriars theatre (it is a play to which
act breaks have been added), and it has a song added between
Acts 3 and 4, ‘Take o take those lips away’. As Shakespeare
usually wrote his own words to songs in plays, the suggestion
is, in the latter two instances where the full song text is not
supplied, that someone else has revised the plays and made the
additions. A play is simply more flexible wherever songs are.
For the same reason, songs are less likely to be written by the
author than other bits of text: some of Shakespeare’s songs are
in fact common early modern songs. The willow song is one
such example; ‘o mistress mine’ (Twelfth Night) another.
A play thus has particular sections that are less ‘fixed’ and
less ‘authorial’ than other sections. The fact of the ‘lost’ songs
means that surviving songs should be looked at carefully. If the
words to a song have survived, that may mean that the text
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itself is of especial significance. As Shakespeare’s plays
generally do supply the words to songs, then the songs are
directly relevant to the body of the text (rather than being, like
the Welsh song, more important for sound than meaning). It is
significant, also, that many songs do seem in fact to have been
written especially for the play in which they appear.
As with songs, so letters, too, may also have been read on
stage by actors rather than being committed to memory. Even
in the nineteenth century, the player Edward Cape Everard
writes of opening a long letter to be read in the first scene of a
play and finding it ‘a mere blank!’. He continues, with some
pride for his foresight, ‘Luckily for me, I had always made it a
rule to study my Letters, as well as my character; it was well I
did.’3 There may be lost letters in the plays of Shakespeare, just
as there are lost songs; certainly not all letters received are read
aloud as we might expect.
As with songs and letters, so with prologues and epilogues.
They also tend to be printed in italics and given a heading; in
the layout of some early modern texts they follow on from one
another, although in performance one opens the play and the
other concludes it. Sometimes the same prologue is given to
more than one play, like the prologue that boasts about the
playwright’s ‘wonne grace’ in the theatre previously, which
opens both Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust (1633), and Dekker’s
Wonder of a Kingdom (1636).4 This suggests that stage
orations, too, were kept together on different pieces of paper
from the play itself. Moreover, many Shakespeare texts have
survived without prologue or epilogue, though they seem
originally to have had one or the other. Time in Winter’s Tale ,
it was suggested in Chapter 3, may refer to a lost prologue when
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he asks us to ‘remember well’ the son of the king he previously
mentioned – even though we have not heard of him in the text
as it stands. Falstaff describes kissing and embracing as being
‘ t h e prologue of our Comedy’, meaning, of course, the
preliminaries to the desired event; the comedy in which he
makes the observation, Merry Wives, now lacks a prologue
(TLN 1744–5, 3.5.75); in 2 Henry VI, which also has no
prologue, Gloucester describes his own death as simply ‘the
Prologue to their Play’ (TLN 1451, 3.1.151); ‘We are cast,’
observes Antonio in The Tempest , another play without a
prologue, ‘to performe an act / Whereof, what’s past is
Prologue’ (TLN 947, 2.1.252–3). Each play seems to think a
prologue normal to a production; each play nevertheless has no
prologue. On the other hand, a prologue thought to be by
Shakespeare survives in a commonplace book. It is not playspecific, and is not printed with any play: ‘As the diall hand
tells ore.’5 But then, plays that exist in more than one version
often include one text with and one text without prologue or
epilogue. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, appears in the folio
without the ‘star-crossed lovers’ prologue; Henry V in its ‘bad’
1600 quarto has neither prologue nor chorus; the Troilus
prologue is absent from the quarto and early printings of the
folio. Conversely, a prologue does survive for Shakespeare’s
Richard III, though it is not by Shakespeare and is never printed
with the text. It is a prologue by Heywood and is written for a
little boy who was in Queen Anne’s Men and played Richard III
at the Red Bull playhouse some time between 1605 and 1619:
‘If any wonder by what magick charme, / Richard the third is
shrunke up like his arme . . .’6 Prologues were not only quickly
lost, but were also quickly replaced as circumstance dictated.
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Like songs and, perhaps, letters, textual fluidity and change
can be expected around prologues and epilogues, and we might
suspect that Shakespeare plays that now have neither originally
had at least one. Prologues and epilogues were thought to be
disposable, as the textual history of the prologue to Troilus and
Cressida reveals. Troilus was first published in quarto in 1609;
that same quarto was twice produced, the second version
containing introductory material absent from the first (that
reissued quarto is, for this reason, described as 1609b). Neither
quarto version contains a prologue. When Troilus was first set
for printing in the folio it was similarly prepared for
publication without a prologue, and early sheets from the first
setting of the play show the text starting immediately on the
verso, the back, of the last page of Romeo and Juliet. But then
the publishers of the folio ran into difficulties securing rights to
print Troilus legally. They stopped typesetting Troilus after
they had already printed the first few pages of the play.
By the time the legal problems had been resolved, the space
after Romeo had been filled with a different play, Timon of
Athens. So Troilus was set again and placed after Henry VIII. It
was such a late inclusion that it has no page numbers and is not
mentioned in the ‘catalogue of the severall Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies contained in this Volume’ at the start
of the folio. Some sheets that had previously been printed for
the play, however, had been preserved and were bound into
folio texts with the tail end of Romeo on the recto, the front of
the page, as a crossed out or ‘cancelled’ sheet (a ‘cancellans’).
The newer sheets needed a layout equivalent to the old sheets if
all were to be used, so a piece of text was acquired to supply the
page no longer occupied by the end of Romeo: the prologue.
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This prologue, which had not featured in either 1609 quarto of
Troilus, would otherwise have been lost to history. In other
words, prologues and epilogues were not part of a unified text,
sharing the same rights and lasting qualities. They were
ephemeral and were not thought of as having the importance or
the permanence of the text of the play itself, though they often
had an alternative existence. Many prologues and epilogues are
separately preserved in books of poetry and jests.
Why? At first the separation of prologue and epilogue from
text seems surprising, for, unlike songs and letters, they were
not read on stage, but learned off by heart. In the ‘bad’ quarto
of Romeo and Juliet there is a reference to a prologue that is
‘faintly spoke / After the prompter’ (Q1 C1a), and two boys at
the start of Ben Jonson’s play Cynthia’s Revels quarrel because
each has learned the prologue and wants to say it.
The reason for the division of prologue or epilogue from
play seems to be that prologues and epilogues were not
permanent features of a production. Some of them are
specifically designed for court performance – if so, they are, of
course, to be spoken only on a single occasion. But, reading
public theatre prologues and epilogues of the period en masse,
it becomes obvious that all share the same themes. They are, for
instance, always unclear what the spectators will think of the
play. Will the audience, they all ask, ‘approve’ the performance
or ‘dismiss’ it? The prologue to Henry V requests the audience
‘Gently to heare, kindly to judge our Play’ (TLN 35); the
Troilus and Cressida prologue is bolder on the same question:
‘Like, or finde fault, do as your pleasures are’ (TLN 31); while
the prologue to Henry VIII hopes that ‘the play may passe’
(TLN 12), but also lists the types of spectators likely to dislike
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this kind of production. Epilogues, meanwhile, seem pointedly
to demand applause whilst fearing to be hissed, booed or
‘mewed at’. Prospero ends The Tempest with an epilogue in
which he expresses a fear that his project (to please the
audience) will fail unless everyone agrees to release him ‘from
my bands / With the helpe of your good hands’ (i.e. applaud the
play) (TLN 2331). At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,
Puck asks the audience not to ‘reprehend’ him but ‘Give me
your hands, if we be friends’ (TLN 2221, 5.1.429–37);
Rosalind, concluding As You Like It , hopes that ‘the play may
please’ (TLN 2791) and, again, suggests brashly that the
audience ‘for my kind offer, when I make curt’sie, bid me
farewell’ (TLN 2795–6). As prologues and epilogues for public
performance repeatedly show, then, they are for an audience
that is ‘judging’ the play and deciding whether or not to award
it approval.
When did the audience have the chance to show their
opinion of a play? They judged it on its first performance, an
occasion that cost more than any other performance and that
was often described as the ‘trial’ of the play itself. 7 Whatever
the reader of Shakespeare’s folio chooses to think, write
Heminges and Condell bluntly in their introduction to the book,
the plays ‘have had their triall alreadie’ (A3a). Hamlet
discusses a play that was disliked by an audience and therefore
did not survive beyond its first day. He recalls that the play was
good, but too sophisticated – like caviar – so that it appealed to
those few with fine taste, and was objectionable to the rest: ‘the
Play I remember pleas’d not the Million, ’twas Caviarie to the
Generall: but it was (as I receiv’d it and others, whose
judgement in such matters, cried in the top of mine) an
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excellent Play’ (TLN 1479–82, 2.2.434–9). A play recently
rejected by the audience (a ‘damned’ play) is referred to by the
epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The performer playing the epilogue
recounts how he was ‘lately heere in the end of a displeasing
Play, to pray your Patience for it, and to promise you a Better’
(TLN 3332–3). Other playwrights famously had their plays
damned on the first performance. They include Ben Jonson,
whose New Inn (1631) was censured by the ‘hundred fastidious
impertinents . . . present the first day’, John Fletcher, whose
Faithful Shepherdess (1609?) was ‘scornd’ by its first audience,
and Peter Hausted, whose Rival Friends (1632) was ‘Cryed
downe by Boyes, Faction, Envie, and confident Ignorance’,
though ‘approv’d by the judicious’.8
So the purpose of prologue and epilogue alike was to woo
the first-performance audience which was judging or
auditioning the play and to petition the spectators, begging
them to be indulgent rather than unkind. A play, having
survived its first day and been ‘passed’ by the audience, seems
to have shed its stage orations which could then float free of the
text, and so were easily lost before publication.9 First
performances of a play will, then, have been different from any
subsequent performance. They will, on the other hand, have
been similar to all other first performances, the presence of
prologue or epilogue in itself linking all new plays (whoever
they are by) with one another – particularly as the actors
playing prologues and epilogues usually wore the same black
cloak. In Heywood’s Four Prentices of London the Prologue
wears a ‘long blacke velvet cloake’; in Edward Phillips’s The
Mysteries of Love and Eloquence ‘Prologues’ are described as
‘set and starcht speeches to be gravely delivered . . . by the man
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in the long cloak with the coloured beard’.10 A picture of a
prologue is provided in a book by George Wilkins which tells a
tale closely connected to the story of the play Pericles.
Wilkins’s The Painful Adventure of Pericles (1608) has a
picture of Gower on the title page, wearing a cloak and holding
a staff, hinting at the way ‘Gower’ was staged. Laurel or ‘bay’
wreaths were also standard for prologues: ‘A Prologue in Verse
is as stale, as a black Velvet Cloake, and a Bay Garland’ says a
Beaumont and Fletcher prologue.11 But a cloak represents
scholarship and ‘bays’ an award for poetic creativity: prologues
are dressed like ‘authors’ but are played by actors. In other
words the playhouse takes over ‘authorship’ on the first
performance, which queries the ‘ownership’ of a play from first
performance onwards. Plays may even have been given in overlong form on their first day, so that the moments clapped or
hissed by members of the audience could be enlarged on or cut
– at any rate, some textual shortening between first and second
performance seems regularly to have taken place.12 A play in
performance was by no means textually fixed.
For the playhouse, then, ‘the play’ may have consisted of
one book containing the dialogue, some sheets of paper
containing the songs, some other sheets of paper containing
letters, and finally some sheets on which were written the
prologue and/or epilogue (fashion seems to have dictated
whether to have one, the other or both). This was not, however,
always the case. If Shakespeare, for instance, writes a song
while writing a play and transcribes the whole into his foul
papers, and if those foul papers then become the prompter’s
‘book’, the words of the song survive into the playtext. If, on
the other hand, he either writes the song later or simply requests
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that any old song, or a popular song from elsewhere, be
acquired, the song may not make its way into the prompter’s
book. There are other variations on these two options, of course
– but the point is that a play easily resolves into fragments that
have separate lives from the body of the text and only a hesitant
relationship to the play itself. What do we mean, then, when we
talk about ‘the text’, and about ‘textual unity’? The way actors
received and responded to their parts shows that the whole
notion of ‘the play’ as a single entity may itself be slightly
misguided.
Plays themselves were disseminated to actors in segmented
form, in ‘parts’, as Chapter 4 showed. The ‘part’ did not relate
strongly to the play in narrative terms, for the full story is not
clear from looking at a part. Each actor received what he was to
say and a cue; to him, the play will have consisted of his role
and the few words that led into it. Much theatrical by-play is
made of the idea of ‘cues’ and ‘parts’ within Shakespeare’s
plays. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Flute has difficulty
understanding how his ‘part’ of ‘Thisbe’ works. According to
Peter Quince, Flute muddles in his cues with his own lines and
speaks the whole lot.
Flute Most radiant Piramus, most Lilly white of hue,
Of colour like the red rose on triumphant bryer,
Most brisky Juvenall, and eke most lovely Jew,
As true as truest horse, that yet would never tyre,
Quince Ile meete thee Piramus, at Ninnies toombe.
Ninus toombe man: why, you must not speake that yet; that
you answere to Piramus: you speake all your part at once,
cues
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and all. Piramus enter, your cue is past; it is never tyre.
Flute O, as true as truest horse, that yet would never tyre:
Bottom If I were faire, Thisby I were onely thine.
(TLN 906–17, 3.1.93–104)
But the further joke is that the actual actor, playing Bottom
playing ‘Pyramus’, will have received a real cued part for this
same moment in the scene that must have looked something
like this:
____________________________________ never tyre:
If I were faire, Thisby, I were onely thine.
As the cue ‘never tyre’ repeatedly occurs in the above scene, it
could be that the real actor actually starts to speak three times,
for the very words with which Quince (the prompter) chides
Bottom for neglecting his cue (‘your cue is past; it is never
tyre’) give him a false cue. After Quince’s ‘never tyre’, both
Thisbe and Pyramus, who both now have ‘never tyre’ as their
next cue, may start speaking simultaneously. The whole section
is, of course, dedicated to making jokes about country
mechanicals who do not understand the theatre and cannot work
out the cueing system.
The term ‘part’ used for the script actors received (and still
used today to describe the role an actor plays) arises, of course,
from the fact that actors were not given the full text of the play
but only ‘part’ of it, the part with their lines and cues. Similarly
the term ‘role’, it has been suggested, originates in the roll of
paper on which the ‘part’ was written: your ‘part’ or ‘roll’ was
your bit of the play, consisting of your lines to be spoken and
your cues to be listened for. Terms such as ‘part’ or ‘parcell’,
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both used to describe the script in the form received, indicate
that the fragment was thought of as being just that, ‘part’ of
something larger.
Why did actors receive their texts, their ‘parts’, in this way?
There are several obvious reasons. One is that all parts had to
be written by a scribe (probably the prompter), and there would
not have been the time, or the paper, or the incentive to pen a
full version of the play for each separate actor. Moreover, the
more copies of a play in existence, the more likely it was that
one of them might end up in the hands of a printer. Not that that
was entirely a bad thing: printing a play was a good way of
advertising it and playhouses seem selectively to have released
their texts for publication, particularly over periods when they
could not perform – for instance, when the theatres were closed
because of plague. Plays were not generally released to the
printing houses until approximately two years after they
reached the stage, however.13 The fewer people with access to a
‘new’ play – a play never performed before – the more would
have to pay the theatre to hear the story.
As a result, it was as usual to come across a play in its
separate bits as to come across it as a whole: texts had a strong
part-based life. The ‘bad’ quartos may show the result of this.
Editors examining ‘bad’ texts believe they can sometimes tell if
an actor was responsible for stealing the text, for there often
seems to be one consistently ‘good’ part running through the
bad text, and lines can be seen to be relatively ‘more’ good
(when that actor is on stage) and ‘less’ good (when he is not).
The conclusion is that the actor contributed his part and his
memory to recreating the text. So in the ‘bad’ Quarto of Henry
V, the actors (or actor) who may have been responsible for
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pirating the text were, perhaps, the players of Gower and
Exeter.14
How would an actor in the theatre use his part? In
performance he would listen for his ‘cue’, and then say the
speech that he had learned would follow it. These cues,
however, were extremely short. As the example from A
Midsummer Night’s Dream showed, Pyramus had a two-word
cue, ‘Never tyre’. From the surviving 1590s professional part of
‘Orlando’ in Orlando Furioso, quoted in Chapter 4, it seems
that cues of one to three words were normal, and that it was
equally normal not to name the cue speaker. During the
Restoration, similarly, actors were given parts (or lengths, as
they were then called) with up to three cue words and without
the name of the cue speaker supplied (a 1662 part survives for
the character ‘Trico’ in a play called Ignoramus). During the
eighteenth century, as the many extant professional parts from
that period illustrate, cued parts continued to be presented in
the same way; even nineteenth- and twentieth-century parts
(then called ‘sides’) did not look much different. French and
German parts for the medieval and early modern period, of
which there are many, also show the use of exceptionally brief
cues: in France, cues do not seem to have extended beyond one
word.15 Hardly surprisingly, the fact of the cue becomes a
source for metatheatrical references: ‘your speech being ended,
now comes in my cue’ (Heywood, The Royal King and the
Loyal Subject); ‘Your qu. / . . . ’twill be spoken quickly /
Therefore watch it’ (Middleton and Rowley, A Fair Quarrel);
‘Speak count, tis your Qu’ (Shakespeare, Much Ado, TLN 704,
2.1.305).16
There follows a recreation of the opening of the ‘part’ for
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Olivia in Twelfth Night, 1.5. Slightly generous cues of three
words have been given.
_______________________________________ which is she?
Speake to me, I shall answer for her: your will.
__________________________________ least sinister usage.
Whence came you sir?
______________________________________ in my speech.
Are you a Comedian?
_______________________________________ of the house?
If I do not usurpe my selfe, I am.
(TLN 462–80, 1.5.167–87)
The first ‘cue’ is ‘which is she?’ (or, perhaps, ‘is she?’) after
which Olivia knows to reply ‘Speake to me, I shall answer for
her will’. The next cue is ‘sinister usage’ for which the response
is ‘Whence came you sir?’ As is obvious, the cues do not tell
the actor much about the story of the scene he is in, though they
may, like the ominous ‘sinister usage’ of the passage above,
help him define what emotions to exhibit. Actors largely had to
build their performances and sense of character out of the
words they themselves were given to speak and their cues; they
might not hear the context of their words until very late in the
preparation process, perhaps not until performance.
The fact of working with a short cue line of three or fewer
words meant that giving an actor ‘premature cues’ may, on
occasion, have been used purposefully in the action of the play.
Shylock’s part in Merchant of Venice seems to offer a useful
example of this, for it is one of Shylock’s characteristics to
become fixed on certain verbal formulae, his main figure of
speech being repetition. The cued-part effect of this, however,
seems to be that he is continually interrupted by the other
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characters.
Scene 3.3 in The Merchant of Venice is one in which
Solanio, Shylock and Antonio are on stage with Shylock. Read
in ‘full text’, Shylock rants, Antonio then interjects to demand
that Shylock hear him speak, Shylock refuses, and finally
Solanio chimes in to call Shylock an impenetrable cur. But, in
part form, the scene takes on a different momentum. Provided
below is the part for Solanio in that scene. If given a ‘long’ cue
of three words he is listening out for ‘have my bond’. If given
an even longer cue, he is listening for ‘I’ll have my bond’.
When he hears the cue, he is to respond, ‘It is the most
impenetrable curre / That ever kept with men’. His ‘part’ at this
stage in the action will have looked something like this:
____________________________ have my bond.
It is the most impenetrable curre
That ever kept with men.
Now here is Shylock’s speech:
Shylock Ile have my bond, [Solanio: It is the most impenetrable
curre . . .] speake not against my bond,
I have sworne an oath that I will have my bond: [It is the
most impenetrable curre . . .]
Thou call’sdt me dog before thou hadst a cause,
But since I am a dog, beware my phangs . . .
Ile have my bond, [It is the most impenetrable curre . . .] I
will not heare thee speake,
Ile have my bond, [It is the most impenetrable curre . . .]
and
therefore speake no more.
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Ile not be made a soft and dull ey’d foole,
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yeeld
To Christian intercessors: follow not,
Speaking, I will have my bond.
Solanio It is the most impenetrable curre
That ever kept with men.
(TLN 1690–1705, 3.3.4–19)
In ‘part’ terms, what seems to be happening is that Shylock,
while addressing himself to Antonio, repeatedly throws out
Solanio’s cue early. So Antonio makes two forlorn attempt at
interjection (‘I pray thee heare me speake’) and gives up, while
his indignant friend continually attempts to break Shylock’s
flow – but whenever he tries, he is told to be quiet. By the time
Solanio gets a chance to speak, he is truly angry. Antonio,
resigned, chivvies his friend: ‘Let him alone, / Ile follow him
no more with bootlesse prayers’. Is this scripted babble? Does
Solanio’s ‘impenetrable curre’ speech, which looks on paper to
happen only once, actually partially happen four additional
times? Were that the case, then the reference to curs might also
be important, enraging Shylock anew with the recollection that
Antonio before had been ready enough to label him ‘dog’;
hence, perhaps, his sudden change of direction: ‘Thou call’sdt
me dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog,
beware my phangs’ (my italics). Something of the same kind
seems to happen again when Shylock gives a complicated reply
to the Duke’s request for a ‘gentle answer’ (4.1):
You’l aske me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh, then to receive
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Three thousand Ducats? Ile not answer that:
But say it is my humor; Is it answered?
What if my house be troubled with a Rat,
And I be pleas’d to give ten thousand Ducates
To have it bain’d? What, are you answer’d yet? . . .
[I can] give no reason, nor I will not,
More then a lodg’d hate, and a certaine loathing
I beare Anthonio, that I follow thus
A loosing suite against him? Are you answered?
Bassanio This is no answer thou unfeeling man . . .
(TLN 1945–68, 4.1.40–63)
This is indeed more rhetoric than ‘answer’: from being asked to
answer a question, Shylock has talked himself into a position
where he is asking a question instead. The argument contains
three parts as though it has a kind of logic that it does not: each
part consists of a blustering question as to whether the answer
has now been supplied, but the reasons given – whim, humour –
are no answers to Bassanio, who is looking for something more
rational than blind hatred. Does Bassanio three times (or twice
depending on the length of the cue) point this out? ‘This is no
answer’ and ‘ This is no answer’? It is, similarly, possible that
Salarino (3.1) breaks in at each of Shylock’s ‘to his bond’ to
query why Shylock is so obsessed with his bargain:
Shylock There I have another bad match, a bankrout . . . who
dare scarce shew his head on the Ryalto . . . let him look to
his bond, he was wont to call me Usurer, let him looke to
his bond, he was wont to lend money for a Christian curtsie,
let him looke to his bond.
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Salarino Why I am sure if he forfaite, thou wilt not take his
flesh
...
(TLN 1260–4, 3.1.43–51)
One other, more general example is when Shylock is talking
to Tubal (3.1) about the loss of his daughter and his money. At
this stage he is overwrought, excitable and full of repetitions; as
an emotional pointer, the actor will have recognised the fact
and worked on it. But the effect seems to be, as ever, that
Shylock is throwing out premature cues so that he is continually
interrupted by his interlocutor. His part for this moment will
have been something like:
What, what, what, ill lucke, ill lucke.
______________________________________ from Tripolis.
I thanke God, I thanke God, is it true, is it true?
_________________________________ escaped the wracke.
I thanke thee good Tuball, good newes, good newes:
ha, ha, here in Genowa.
___________________________________ fourescore ducats.
Thou stick’st a dagger in me, I shall never see my gold
againe, fourescore ducats at a sitting, fourescore ducats.
__________________________________ choose but breake.
I am very glad of it, ile plague him, ile torture him,
I am glad of it.
(TLN 1311–28, 3.1.98–117)
Performed from parts, the interlocutor, Tubal, will, it appears,
spend most of this scene talking half over the friend whom he is
enraging with his mischievous ‘comfort’. So though a full text
is always linear, the spoken text underlying it could have been a
vibrant scripted confusion of interwoven voices – and all
because of the way actors received their parts.
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The part-based actor has scripted and in his possession
everything he says, but not everything that is said to or about
him. If something is said about him in a scene when he is not
even on stage, he may not know about it, just as, years later, the
famous Mrs Pritchard was accused of having performed Lady
Macbeth from her part without reading the tragedy through:
‘She no more thought of the play out of which her part was
taken, than a shoemaker thinks of the skin, out of which he is
making a pair of shoes.’17 Could this mean that the actor
playing Lear in King Lear does not know Regan’s startling
insight, ‘he hath ever but slenderly knowne himselfe’ (TLN
318–19, 1.1.293–4), and cannot, therefore, use that observation
as a character-note? True, major actors will have heard a
‘reading’ during which the story of the play as it then stood was
related to them. But the tale may well have gone through
several changes since that point, and, anyway, the reading will
have been some weeks before first performance, and between it
and the actual production there will have been performances of
many other plays. What can a term like ‘char-acterisation’
mean when looking at actors who learn only what their
character says?
Obviously performers responded in a particular way to texts
that obscured some basic features of the play – but revealed
others. This can be seen by returning to Olivia’s part in Twelfth
Night. Olivia’s cues are both telling and reticent: the (male)
actor playing Olivia who received this part would not
necessarily have understood exactly the conversation he was
having. He would, however, have understood the shift in
passions that he undergoes two-thirds of the way down the
scene. What happens is not simply that in the text the actor
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stops bantering; it is also that the actor stops speaking prose. At
this stage in the play Olivia is talking to Viola for the first time.
Viola is dressed as a boy, Cesario, and Olivia does not know his
or her real sex. In the following passage Olivia lifts her veil and
she and Viola (Cesario) see one another properly for the first
time.
______________________________________ see your face.
Have you any Commission from your Lord, to negotiate
with my face: you are now out of your Text: but we
will draw the Curtain, and shew you the picture.
Looke you sir, such a one I was this present: Ist not
well done?
________________________________________ God did all.
’Tis in graine sir, ’twill endure winde and weather.
_____________________________________ world no copie.
O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted: I will give out
divers scedules of my beautie. It shalbe Inventoried and
every particle and utensile labell’d to my will: As, Item
two lippes indifferent redde, Item two grey eyes, with
lids to them: Item, one necke, one chin, & so forth.
Were you sent hither to praise me?
________________________________ non-pareil of beautie.
How does he love me?
_______________________________________ sighes of fire.
Your Lord does know my mind, I cannot love him
Yet I suppose him vertuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainlesse youth;
In voyces well divulg’d, free, learn’d, and valiant,
And in dimension, and the shape of nature,
A gracious person; But yet I cannot love him:
He might have tooke his answer long ago.
___________________________________ not understand it.
Why, what would you?
____________________________________ should pittie me.
You might do much:
What is your Parentage?
___________________________________ am a Gentleman.
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Get you to your Lord:
I cannot love him: let him send no more,
Unlesse (perchance) you come to me againe,
To tell me how he takes it: Fare you well:
I thanke you for your paines: spend this for mee.
________________________________ Farwell fayre crueltie.
Exit [Viola]
(TLN 462–583, 1.5.230–88)
After the cue ‘non-pareil of beautie’ there is a line that may be
in verse: ‘how does he love me?’ from which, looked at in the
part, the next line spoken follows on in one long stream of
thought: ‘how does he love me? Your Lord does know my
mind, I cannot love him’. It is from ‘Your Lord does know’
onwards that Olivia speaks only verse. This prose/verse
alteration will have been visible to the actor even before he read
a word of the text; he will have seen it, thus, as a visual stage
direction, a sign that his conversation is changing its nature in
some way. What takes place in this scene, as the part manifests,
is that Olivia has fallen in love; could it be that the stage
direction about when to do so is embedded in the very layout of
the part? Is it possible that Olivia falls for Viola while denying
the possibility of ever loving Orsino? The suddenness with
which love overtakes Olivia is no surprise from the perspective
of the early modern stage. Thomas Killigrew’s The Princess
(1664), 2.2 contains the stage direction ‘Virgilius spyes Cicilia
and falls in Love with her’, similarly in a stage direction to
John Marston’s Insatiate Countess ‘Isabella falls in love’.18 If a
stage direction can tell the actor to fall in love, then ‘falling in
love’ must somehow have been visible – probably gestural – so
that the change-of-text in Olivia’s part may also tell the player
the ‘action’ to be performed. This is, of course, all conjectural,
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but it is certainly always important to be aware of changes of
tone and pace within specific actors’ parts as well as over whole
texts or scenes. Viola, for instance, in this scene has an entirely
different verse/prose pattern, seemingly using verse when
employing the ‘heightened language’ Orsino has taught her, and
prose when she is speaking for herself.
There are many illuminating prose/verse transitions in the
plays of Shakespeare when a major emotional change is
signified. In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice speaks only
prose until she hears her friends declare that Benedict loves her.
Having done nothing but throw prose insults at Benedict
hitherto, she now falls in love and starts speaking verse.
Looking at the full play, the ‘moment’ of changed emotion is
not particularly obvious: there is one scene in which Beatrice
insults Benedict in prose; later there is another in which she
listens to her friends talking of Benedict’s affection for her and
responds in poetry. But the actor playing Beatrice will have
received a part that collapsed the distance from one scene to
another, showing a sentence in argumentative prose followed by
a section in poetry:
Yea just so much as you may take upon a knives point,
and choake a daw withall: you have no stomacke signior,
fare you well.
____________________________________ some with traps.
What fire is in mine eares? can this be true?
(TLN 1076–199, 2.3.254–6; 3.1.107–8)
Again, the actor might have read the layout of the part as a way
of approaching the emotional activity within the part.
Before the time at which Shakespeare was writing, plays
had traditionally been composed in verse only. Indeed, the
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usual title by which the writer of a play was known while
Shakespeare was alive was ‘poet’; the word ‘playwright’ was
only introduced around or just after Shakespeare’s death (it is
first recorded in poetry in 1617).19 Sometimes Shakespeare
bows to this: Richard II is written entirely in verse. But, as with
so much else, Shakespeare was bold and experimental. He took
to using prose regularly, though traditionally it had been spoken
only by fools, clowns and low-down characters. In his earlier
plays the traditional distinctions are more likely still to pertain:
the prose is often casual and the verse is reserved for high
matter like love or reflection. Tragic heroes’ soliloquies, for
instance, are always in verse in the earlier plays, though a ‘low’
character such as Launcelot Gobbo in Merchant of Venice may
be given a soliloquy in prose. But, roughly the same time as the
company started to perform at the Globe playhouse,
Shakespeare starts varying verse and prose in a more complex
ways. These moments will have been clearer to an actor playing
from ‘parts’ than to a modern reader. For instance, the full text
of Hamlet (probably written in 1600) seems to be composed in
a medley of prose and verse.20 Divided into parts, however,
distinctions between the two in ‘good’ quarto and folio alike
start to make sense.
Hamlet begins his part speaking in verse. Then, after he has
seen the ghost, he determines (as he explains) to ‘put an
Anticke disposition on’ (TLN 868, 1.5.172). The next time he
speaks he acts the fool with Polonius (‘y’are a Fishmonger’,
TLN 1211, 2.2.174) and he talks in prose. Indeed, whenever he
is fooling, he seems to speak prose: in this way, the actor
himself, and all who perform with him, can see that he is ‘mad’.
When he is not fooling – generally in the soliloquies, where he
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reveals to the audience his rational side – he returns to verse.
The actor of Hamlet thus has a text in which his character never
loses the ability to address the audience (and close friends such
as Horatio) in ‘sane’ verse: Hamlet appears to be exactly what
he says he is, a sane man pretending to be mad. The verse–prose
crux comes in the burial scene. Hamlet, by this stage, has
learned on board ship that his uncle, Claudius, has planned to
have him put to death on his arrival in England. This is, in fact,
Hamlet’s first direct proof, outside the ghost’s testimony, that
Claudius truly has a murderous nature (the audience has heard
Claudius confess his guilt in soliloquy, but Hamlet has not).
Hamlet manages to escape the death that Claudius had planned
for him, jumping aboard a pirate ship, and imposing what was
to have been his fate on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He has
confronted death, rejected it and chosen to live, consciously
saving his own life by not going to England. Now Hamlet finds
himself back in Denmark and in a graveyard just as Ophelia,
whom he belatedly realises he loved, is buried. Having insisted
to the court of Denmark that he was mad, Hamlet now has to
prove that he is sane. From the entrance of Ophelia’s coffin, he
speaks only verse in public until the time he dies, though he
exchanges frivolous banter in prose with Osric. Ophelia,
conversely, speaks only rational verse until going mad: from
then until she dies she speaks prose. Actors, following hints in
their parts, might not be absolutely clear about the ‘story’ of the
play but were very cognisant of mood and mood-change.
Difficult as it is to contemplate, actors continued to create
spectacular and complex performances from knowledge of cued
parts – and not much concern with ‘meaning’ or the full play –
even last century: parts or ‘sides’ as they were often called,
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were used in repertory up until the 1950s. ‘I believe that
learning the part and each cue with a postcard over the page,
which I do relentlessly, is the most horrible drudgery’, said
Noel Coward. ‘I don’t worry about whether I’m getting at the
right meaning at this point. When I get up on the stage, the
words give me the meaning: you can’t know it better than the
words.’21
Within parts and along their length, the register or tone used
tells the actor about the kind of relationship he has with the
person he is addressing – and when that relationship changes.
He can observe whether he favours the familiar ‘thou’ form of
speaking, the more formal and distant ‘you’ form, or varies
between the two.22 Informal and formal modes of address can,
for instance, be seen to vary in frequency and use in the ‘part’
belonging to Lady Macbeth. Early in the play, Lady Macbeth
refers to Macbeth as ‘thee’; she does this both when alone on
her first entrance and when later joined by her husband. When
Macbeth seems unwilling to perform the murder she takes on a
tone of command: ‘when you durst do it, then you were a man’
(TLN, 528, 1.7.49) before switching back to the familiar ‘thee’
to wheedle him round. But there is an unalterable change in her
tone later on in the play. From 3.3 onwards Lady Macbeth loses
her power. As Macbeth’s guilt and bloodlust cuts him off from
conversation or understanding with anyone else, so Lady
Macbeth ceases to be privy to his thoughts or plans. She dare no
longer use the familiar shared ‘thee’ form to her husband, and
her part shows that her language becomes increasingly formal:
she calls Macbeth ‘you’, ‘sir’, ‘My Royall Lord’. This can be
illustrated by a quick comparison between the tone of one early
Lady Macbeth passage, and another from much later:
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Thy Letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present; and I feele now
The future in the instant.
(TLN 408–10, 1.5.56–8)
How now, my Lord, why doe you keepe alone?
(TLN 1161, 3.2.8)
Received in a part, the tonal change indicates to the actor of
Lady Macbeth a growing estrangement. Significantly, Macbeth
does not receive these same indications in his part. He
continues to call Lady Macbeth ‘thee’, ‘love’, ‘deare Wife’, and
‘dearest Chuck’ throughout. So the Macbeth actor does not
receive a part that acknowledges or indicates that there is
marital tension: he continues to act familiarity while she
becomes increasingly distant. In short, Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth do not share an understanding about the nature of their
relationship – and the parts create the acting that reveals this.
Other theatrically telling information can be found in parts
which sometimes contain information that may stand in for
stage directions to other actors. The Duke in Measure for
Measure asks a question which perhaps creates the appropriate
action with his ‘Doe you not smile at this, Lord Angelo?’ (TLN
2535, 5.1.163). Alternatively the gulf between what the Duke
says and the way Angelo actually looks is a hint to the
audience. Similarly Iago constructs a certain kind of response
in Othello:
Iago I see this hath a little dash’d your Spirits:
Othello Not a jot, not a jot.
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Iago Trust me, I feare it has.
(TLN 1835–7, 3.3.214–15)
Other kinds of detail actors would have been able to pick up
from parts even before learning them would have been whether
they were otiose or brief, curt or lyrical, full of questions or full
of answers – and they would have spotted immediately the
important moment at which any of their characteristics were
changed or modified.
Even revision itself seems often to have happened along
part lines, as is particularly apparent with the text of Hamlet.
The alterations made to Hamlet between the quarto and folio
text are mainly cuts, lines being taken, usually, from the middle
of long speeches. Commentators have been left bemused,
wondering why such minute passages were altered, and why
cuts had not been made over, for instance, a whole scene. But,
of course, cuts of this nature make absolute sense in playhouse
terms: extracting the middle of a speech leaves the cues intact
and so does not force more than one actor to relearn his part.
O throwe away the worser part of it,
And leave the purer with the other halfe,
Good night, but goe not to my Uncles bed,
Assume a virtue if you have it not,
That monster custome, who all sence doth eate
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this
That to the use of actions faire and good,
He likewise gives a frock or Livery
That aptly is put on refraine to night,
And that shall lend a kind of easines
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To the next abstinence, the next more easier:
For use almost ean change the stamp of nature,
And either the devil, or throwe him out
With wonderous potency: once more good night,
And when you are desirous to be blest,
Ile blessing beg of you, for this same Lord
I doe repent; but heaven hath pleasd it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minster,
I will bestowe him and will answere well
The death I have him; so againe good night
I must be cruell only to be kinde,
This bad beginnes, and worse remaines behind.
On word more good Lady.
(Q2, I4a-b; TLN 2540–55, 3.4.157–80)23
Indeed, in Hamlet, not all parts are revised, so many parts will
never have had to be returned to the prompter for rewriting.
Only eight parts are altered: Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius,
Horatio, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric (the five
most important characters and the three clowns). This revision,
then, happened not over the whole text but along the length of
some of the ‘strands’ in the play.
So in many ways the internal structure of a play can be seen
to divide not so much into acts and scenes, plots and sub-plots,
as into stage orations, songs, ‘parts’: the plays are constructed
from individual ‘bits’ that still keep some of their separate
integrity. ‘Parts’ explain a lot about acting technique at the
time, but also about writing technique. Shakespeare was an
actor and, in writing plays for other actors, seems to have
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included some of his instructions for performance in the partform itself.
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7
From Stage to Printing House
The one written fragment that survives in what is thought to be
Shakespeare’s hand, passages from the play of Sir Thomas
Moore, was discussed in Chapter 2. Here is another passage
from the ‘Shakespearean’ part of that same document,
repunctuated with stage directions added to show what the
writer seems to want to be staged. ‘Shrieve’ is a variant of the
word ‘sheriff’, ‘a’ is used for ‘he’:
Lincoln Peace, I say! Peace! Are you men of wisdom, or what
are you?
Surrey [aside] What you will have them, but not men of
wisdom.
[some] We’ll not hear my Lord of Surrey.
[others] No, no, no, no, no! Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury!
Moore [to the nobles and officers] Whiles they are o’er the
bank of their obedience,
Thus will they bear down all things.
Lincoln [to the prentices] Shrieve Moore speaks. Shall we hear
Shrieve Moore speak?
Doll Let’s hear him. A keeps a plentiful shrievaltry, and a made
my brother, Arthur Watchins, Sergeant Safe’s yeoman.
Let’s hear Shrieve Moore.
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All Shrieve Moore, Moore, Moore! Shrieve Moore!
The text as it is written, though, is much less clear.
Shakespeare – if this fragment is by him, and if it is
representative of his usual writing style – punctuated very
lightly indeed and almost at random.
Linc Peace I say peace ar you men of Wisdome ar or what ar
you
Surr But what you will haue them but not men of Wisdome
all weele not heare my L of Surrey, all no no no no no
Shrewsbury shr
moor whiles they ar ore the banck of their obedyenc
thus will they bere downe all thinges
Linc Shreiff moor speakes shall we heare shreef moor speake
Doll Lettes heare him a keepes a plentyfull shrevaltry, and a
made my Brother Arther watchin[s] Seriant Safes yeoman
letes heare
shreeve moore
all Shreiue moor moor more Shreue moore1
In the passage above, the original text has two commas (after
‘Surrey’ and ‘shrevaltry’) and no full stops at all. There are also
no question-marks. The two commas, though positioned
logically, are absent from other places where they might be
equally useful. The capitalisation is slightly more explicable; it
is used here for (some) proper names and (some) nouns (at the
time it was relatively normal practice to capitalise nouns). Even
then, however, the strategy that determined which particular
nouns should be singled out for capitalisation is obscure. So the
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first name ‘Arthur’ starts with a capital letter, but not the
surname ‘watchin’, the weighty term ‘Wisdom’ is capitalised
but not ‘obedyenc’, while ‘Brother’ and ‘Serjant’ are selected
for capitalisation when neither is particularly important. It
looks as though Shakespeare punctuated and capitalised more
or less according to whim.
Much the same has to be said of Shakespeare’s spelling
practices. The last line in the passage above is spoken by ‘all’
(this is what the massed crowd is meant to shout out) so its
quirks of spelling can hardly be supposed to suggest changes of
accent or pronunciation. Yet the spelling in that line is
spectacularly variable, for though it consists of only two words,
‘shrieve’ and ‘Moore’ (the crowd is shouting out for sheriff
Thomas Moore to come and speak to them), each word is
spelled in a variety of ways. ‘Shrieve’ is rendered ‘shreiue’ or
‘shreue’, while the sentence before adds another variant to the
word, ‘shreeve’, and the sentence before that presents two
more: ‘shreiff’ and ‘shreef’. As for what might be taken to be a
straightforward word, the name ‘Moore’, it has three variant
spellings simply within the one sentence spoken by ‘all’:
‘moor’, ‘more’ and ‘moore’. Spelling had no fixed rules at the
time, but ‘Shakespeare’ is particularly wayward in his choices.
The punctuation and capitalisation to be found in early
modern printed texts, then, are unlikely to be authorial in
origin. As will be shown, it was normal for the scribe who
might write a fair copy of the author’s rough draft to add
punctuation of his own, and for the compositors (typesetters) in
the printing house to impose their own punctuation on a text in
the process of setting the type. Some instances of textual
uncertainty in the printed plays of Shakespeare seem to relate to
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difficulties interpreting punctuation in the underlying
manuscripts. On occasion, two good texts are printed in which
the sense of the words is more or less the same, but a choice of
punctuation has altered the passage’s meaning.
Compare these two versions from 3.3 spoken by Iago in
Othello, one from the quarto (1622), one from the folio (1623).
Both texts are ‘good’, but both present their words in ways that
alter the meaning of the sentence:
Good name in man and woman’s deere my Lord;
I[t]s the immediate Jewell of our soules:
(Q G3b, 3.3.155–6)
That is to say, ‘good name’ is dear or ‘precious’ to man and
woman alike (‘good name in man and woman’s dear’), it is also
a jewel to our souls (Iago, who is speaking, probably means by
‘our’ himself and the addressee Cassio). Now follows the folio
(1623) version:
Good name in Man, & woman (deere my Lord)
Is the immediate Jewell of their Soules.
(TLN 1768–9, 3.3.155–6)
Here ‘dear’ is attached to ‘my lord’: Iago reminds his dear lord
(Cassio) how important a jewel is ‘good name’ to men and
women. Both passages work, but each conveys a slightly
different sense. That word ‘dear’ is poised between the two:
does it mean ‘costly’, as in passage one, or is it the chilling
blandishment of passage two, where, as a phoney term of
endearment for Cassio, it illustrates how Iago works his evil out
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of the language of love itself? Either way, the difference could
be as much the result of variant punctuation as of variant text.
A similar problem besets the good quarto of Hamlet and the
good folio version of that same play. The quarto (1604/5) has
the following passage:
What [a] peece of worke is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinit in faculties, in forme and mooving, how
expresse and admirable in action, how like an Angell in
apprehension, how like a God.
(Q2 F2a, 2.2.303–7)
The folio (1623) on the other hand, presents the passage like
this:
What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason?
how infinit in faculty? in forme and moving how expresse
and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel? in
apprehension, how like a God?
(TLN 1350–4, 2.2.303–7)
Passage two shows the commas towards the latter half of the
text shifted a half-sentence along; the result is, again, a
different meaning. Is man infinite in faculties and form and
moving? Is he like an angel in apprehension? Or is he infinite
in faculties, and express and admirable in form and moving? Is
he like a god in apprehension? What is a modern editor to do
faced with having to make a single text out of this? He or she
has to choose one meaning, and, as a result, has to reject
another – though the other might be the ‘true’ Shakespearean
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one. And, though textual notes to plays can easily point out
editorial emendations to words, it is difficult to highlight
altered commas, though the effect on meaning might be huge.
This chapter will explore what process plays went through
from their inception to their first, ‘foul paper’, drafts, through
scribal and actors’ copies, to the printing house where they are
turned into quartos and folios. The kinds of corrections,
improvements and errors that result from the way texts were
readied for ‘production’ as performance and printed text will be
explored: even by the time of publication, Shakespeare’s plays
were considerably distanced from what he had written.
What a playwright first composed were his rough drafts or
‘foul papers’. One or two of Shakespeare’s foul-paper habits
can be gleaned from looking at the Thomas Moore manuscript
and at published texts of his thought to have been printed
straight from draft. ‘Shakespeare’s’ handwriting is not easy to
read even by early modern standards, and his words are
sometimes completely obscured by over-writing. There may,
then, be errors in texts printed from Shakespeare’s manuscripts
that arise from misreadings of a difficult hand or from the fact
that a worker in the printing house, unable to decipher a word,
has substituted one of his own. After all, only concerned or
invited playwrights might visit the printing house to proofread
their texts, for plays belonged to the people who had paid for
them in the Stationer’s Register, not to their authors. In quartos
1 (1603) and 2 (1604/5) of Hamlet, the player’s speech contains
a reference to the ‘mobled queen’, a sentence that Polonius
particularly likes (Q2 F4a, 2.2.504). But the word ‘mobled’ has
no clear meaning. In the folio (1623) the word printed is
‘inobled’ (enobled) (TLN 1542), which at least makes some
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kind of sense (because the sentence remains obscure, some
editors keep the word ‘mobled’ and attempt to provide
meanings for it). Perhaps the letters ‘i’ and ‘n’ were written in a
crabbed fashion in some of the manuscripts underlying Hamlet,
a suggestion that becomes particularly important when
considering the name ‘Imogen’, which exists only in
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and the name ‘Innogen’ which exists
elsewhere. Is ‘Imogen’, as some editors believe, simply a
misreading of Innogen?2
The Thomas Moore text, as discussed in Chapter 3, places
the body of words to be spoken centre page, with the speechprefixes roughly crammed into a space on the left hand side.
Sometimes speech-prefixes do not quite match the start of the
speaker’s speech, indicating that, at any rate for a crowd scene,
Shakespeare wrote the text first and put in the speech-prefixes
later, creating a conversational babble, and then parcelling it
out to different speakers. Possibly this is the reason why some
characters are wrongly named in Shakespearean texts or are
given floating names. For instance, Pistoll’s wife in Henry V is
called ‘Nell’ in Act 2, and ‘Doll’ in Act 5. In Romeo and Juliet
there is some confusion between the Nurse’s ‘man’, who is
called Peter, and Romeo’s ‘man’, who is called at one stage
‘boy’, at another ‘Balthazar’, and at a third also ‘Peter’. Do
Romeo and the Nurse share a man of uncertain name? Does the
same actor double as Romeo’s man and the Nurse’s, the name
being immaterial? Has Shakespeare written a boy’s part under
the generic title of ‘boy’ and then later given the character a
couple of random names – leaving the tangled problem for the
prompter to sort out? Sometimes two different ‘good’ texts
allot the same lines to different speakers – again, maybe
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indicating a mind-change, or maybe indicating that
Shakespeare’s wobbly designations were not obvious. In the
first ‘good’ quarto of Lear (1608), Lear has this speech:
Doth any here know me? Why, this is not Lear, doth Lear
walke thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes, either his
notion, weaknes [sic], or his discernings are lethargie,
sleeping, or waking; ha? sure, tis no so, who is it that can
tell me who I am? Lears shadow? I would learne that . . .
(Q D1b, 1.4.226–32)
In the folio version Lear and the Fool have this dialogue:
Lear Do’s any heere know me?
This is not Lear:
Do’s Lear walke thus? Speake thus? Where are his eies?
Either his Notion weakens, his Discernings
Are Lethargied. Ha! Waking? ’Tis not so?
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Fool Lears shadow.
Lear Your name, faire Gentlewoman?
(TLN 740–5, 1.4.226–32)
A mind-change? Quite possibly. But the continuous text of the
quarto might equally indicate that Shakespeare had not
indicated whether one or two people were speaking in the
manuscript underlying the text. Either way makes a profound
difference to the sense of the passage. In the monologue Lear
querulously asks whether he is simply a shadow of the old Lear.
In the dialogue he questions who he is and is given as an
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external answer something he has not dared to confront: that he
is just the shadow of what he was.
Completed foul papers seem often – but not always – to
have been written out again in ‘fair’ copy, either by the author
himself or by a playhouse scribe. This neat or ‘fair copy’
became the playhouse ‘book’ (the version used by the
prompter) unless the foul papers themselves were used for the
‘book’ instead. If a scribe were responsible for the rewriting,
then he will have done more than simply copy the text: his job
was to make sense out of a confusing script, and that will have
included adding more punctuation, and, perhaps, supplying
obviously missing stage directions, such as exits.
One of the scribes who worked for the King’s Men was
called Ralph Crane. His writing habits can be learned by
looking at extant manuscripts that he penned (none,
unfortunately, is Shakespearean), and by examining printed
texts known to be set from his scripts. Crane-written plays are
easy to identify, even through printed texts, because they supply
what are known as ‘massed entrances’. That is to say that,
rather than include actors’ entrances at the point in the scene at
which they happened, he ‘massed’ or gathered all entrances at
the top of the scene. This he seems to have learned while he was
scribe to Ben Jonson, who liked to present his texts in ‘literary’
rather than playing form: ‘massed entrances’ work badly
theatrically, but give a text the same physical appearance as a
classical text published to be read rather than performed. It may
be that Crane was especially commissioned by the printing
house preparing the folio to rewrite messy or unreadable
playbooks neatly, treating them as he had treated Ben Jonson’s.
It may be that the Crane manuscripts reached the printing house
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by other means (perhaps ‘scribal copies’, made for friends or
patrons, were acquired for the publication of Shakespeare’s
folio). Folio texts with ‘massed entrances’ are Two Gentlemen,
Merry Wives and Winter’s Tale. So Merry Wives in folio (1623)
begins
Enter Justice Shallow, Slender, Sir Hugh Evans, Master
Page, Falstoffe, Bardolph, Nym, Pistoll, Anne Page,
Mistresse Ford, Mistresse Page, Simple.
(TLN 1–3)
The quarto (1602) to that same play, on the other hand, begins
with only the characters who are in fact to be on stage at the
opening of the play – ‘Enter Justice Shallow, Syr Hugh, Maister
Page, and Slender’. As ‘massed entrance’ texts are obviously
diffi-cult to act from, it is likely that Crane massed entrances
only when he was writing a copy to be read rather than
performed. But if the text behind Merry Wives in folio is a gift
or ‘presentation copy’ rather than a theatrical copy, might it
contain other consciously ‘literary’ features? How should we
think of such a text, with the hand of Crane lying so heavily
upon it? What else might the scribe have altered?
The completed scribal manuscript, if one were made for the
theatre, was then handed over to the prompter for further
additions and alterations. The prompter would add to the text
any missing entrances and exits and would often, additionally,
indicate when actors were to be gathered in the tiring-house
some lines in advance of their actual entrance. He did not
expect anyone else to have dealings with his book however, so
he wrote in a form he understood – he was under no obligation
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to have a system that an outsider could comprehend. Signs that
a printed text may originate with the prompter include ‘early’
(reminder) entrances, and moments when a real actor’s name is
used instead of the name of the character he is playing (the
prompter is more keen to know who is to be on stage at a
certain point, than to know his character’s stage-name).
Examples include the second quarto Romeo and Juliet’s ‘enter
Will Kempe’ (Q2 K3b) for the Nurse’s man Peter, that
character of the questionable name. The prompter would also, if
he could, be specific where the author is vague. Authors have a
tendency to favour the fiction of the story over the practicalities
of the playhouse; an author is likely to write ‘enter gentleman
on the walls of Rome’, while a prompter is more likely to write
‘enter above’. Indeed, clues of this nature help editors identify
the lost text that lies behind a printed one. Where an author may
give the vague ‘enter . . . others as many as can be’ ( Titus
Andronicus, Q A4a–b, 1.1 72, thought to have been set from
foul papers), a prompter is likely to specify the number of spare
people he can muster at this point in the acting. Specificity of
numbers is said to be another sign of a prompter’s book.3
Technically, the prompter was also supposed to remove
dubious bits of text such as swear words and overtly political
statements. And then he was supposed to hand this ‘corrected’
book (or another scribal copy of it) over to the authorities for
‘approval’. At that time no play could be performed without
being sanctioned first by the Master of the Revels, whose job
was to ensure that nothing too seditious or blasphemous was
played on the stage. So the Master of the Revels himself would
also make his own amendments to the text, censoring bits he
disapproved of, before returning the play to the theatre. The
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prompter would then either hand the ‘improved’ text back to
the scribe to be written into actors’ parts, or write the parts out
himself – perhaps a bit of both. That, technically, was what was
supposed to happen, though sometimes the order of events
became a little muddled. One Master of the Revels, Henry
Herbert (brother of the poet George Herbert), writes an angry
note to the prompter for the King’s Men in 1633, Edward
Knight, whom he criticises for not having sufficiently ‘purged’
the submitted book. Herbert suggests extra amendments to be
made to the text and to the parts that the prompter has rashly
already distributed amongst the actors: ‘Mr. Knight, In many
things you have saved mee labour; yet wher your judgment or
penn fayld you, I have made boulde to use mine. Purge ther
parts, as I have the booke . . .’4
To summarise: the playwright’s foul papers may have been
written up in fair copy by a scribe who would then also have
made ‘scribal’ alterations to the text; the neat text will have
been given to the prompter who would have made prompter’s
alterations as well as censoring the play – and possibly both;
that censored, scribal text will have been given to the Master of
the Revels for final censoring and corrections before the play
was returned to the playhouse and the actors’ parts were
created. In other words, even by the time actors received their
parts, the text could be far removed from what the author had
written. In the theatre, it was the authority of the practical men,
the punctuators and the censurers, that mattered. Any
Shakespeare text that can be traced to a prompter’s book has
already been repeatedly mediated by other hands.
A really successful play might survive longer than a year on
stage. If that were the case, however, it would undergo a
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number of changes during that process. It might be cut down to
be performed by the reduced, touring fragment of the company
that did the rounds most summers when plague – a plague, if
not the plague – caused London theatres to be closed. When
actors were forced to go on ‘peregrinations’, temporary London
players (‘hired men’) would be dropped, for strolling was a
time of meagre salary for the actors; only the permanent sharers
who had a financial stake in the company would perform
regularly over the summer. Plays would therefore have to be
reshaped. Minor characters might be abandoned or melded to
form more major characters; extra doubling of parts would
mean a change of entrances and exits; and, in general, travelling
plays, which were shown to a less sophisticated audience, were
kept shorter than non-travelling ones. One of the reasons why
there are sometimes good texts in variant forms could be that
one is for a travelling performance – this has been put forward
as a possible explanation for the two versions of King Lear.
Some ‘bad’ texts that are noticeably ‘simpler’ than their good
counterparts, such as quarto 1 (1603) of Hamlet, may, amongst
other forms of corruption, also preserve ‘travelling’ versions of
plays.5
Even a play not adapted for strolling would be altered as
topics of current interest changed: plays had a very short life in
their first form. Often they have removable fragments of local
gossip and in-jokes, as Chapter 2 showed. Themes of
‘equivocation’ which became modish at the time of the
Gunpowder Plot (1605), as did the word itself, work their way
into the porter’s jokes in Macbeth (‘Much Drinke may be said
to be an Equivocator’, TLN 773, 2.3.34). The first Gravedigger
in Hamlet sends the second off to fetch ‘a stoup of liquor’ from
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a very un-Danish-sounding man of the name of ‘Yaughan’ –
presumably the Welsh name ‘Ewan’ is intended (TLN 3250,
5.1.60). Yaughan is never mentioned again: the man was
perhaps a tavern-keeper operating in or near the Globe, and this
may be a local joke to the audience. Banks’s celebrated dancing
horse Marocco who could add numbers together and stamp out
the product, is mentioned in Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘how easie it
is to put yeres to the word three, and study three yeeres in two
words, the dancing horse will tell you’ (TLN 358–60, 1.2.51–4).
Jokes, of course, stale quickly, and the subjects of jokes do not
last. So a play would be regularly refreshed with the addition of
new and topical references; were it to prove really popular, then
it might also undergo a fuller revision between one season and
another.
There is one practical reason why specific texts reflecting a
particular point in time have survived. A discarded one-off text,
or some foul-papers left over after the fair copy is made, would
not necessarily be thrown away, for paper was expensive. They
would, more likely, be kept as reserves in case something
happened to the current theatrical book. Perhaps that is how
some foul papers ended up at printers’ shops for publication
years after they were written. Similarly, when a book needed to
be so thoroughly overhauled that it was written out again, the
first copy too might end up at the printing house.
In other words, most ‘good’ quarto texts printed in
Shakespeare’s lifetime were good-but-outdated forms of plays
– texts that someone had given up on in favour of a better,
neater, or more modern version. So it is that quartos might have
a lineage traceable either to foul papers or to the prompter’s
book, but relating either way to an earlier version of the play
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than that on stage at the time they were printed.
Once a text has been published, though, the playhouse might
be tempted to use it even if it were slightly outdated: a printed
text is neater and easier to read than a scribal copy, and also
easier to replace. So what seems to have happened is that
sometimes the playhouse would acquire the ‘good’ printed
quarto for its prompter’s book, but then supplement it in
manuscript with all the additions that had subsequently been
made to the play, plus prompt-markings. The printed text, with
manuscript additions, becomes the playhouse’s ‘book’. This
seems to be what has happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet,
for which there is one ‘bad’ quarto, one ‘good’ quarto and a
‘good’ folio text. The ‘good’ quarto seems to have been used as
a theatrical book on which manuscript additions were made,
and the resultant text, though lost, appears to be behind what is
printed in the folio. Folio Romeo and Juliet reproduces much of
the spelling and lineation of the quarto – always revealing in a
world in which there were no overall spelling rules – but
contains some additional segments of text not present in the
quarto.
Once a text, in whatever form, made it to the printing house,
it was prepared for publication. This meant that it was marked
out and the number of words that could be printed on each page
was calculated – a process called casting off (or counting) copy.
Copy had to be predetermined in this way, as books were
generally not printed in the order in which they are bound and
read (‘seriatim’) but were instead printed by ‘formes’. This
meant that the way the paper was to be folded would determine
which pages were printed in which order on the sheet. To make
a quarto, a sheet of paper would be folded twice after printing,
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which meant that pages 1, 4, 5, and 8 were all printed on the
‘outer’ forme (one side of the sheet), and pages 2, 3, 6, and 7
were printed on the inner forme (the other side of the sheet). To
make a folio a sheet of paper had to be folded only once, but the
way the 1623 folio was bound was that three sheets of paper
were folded in half and interleaved, creating a ‘quire’ of six
leaves (so twelve printed sides) – meaning that sheet one would
have pages 1 and 12 on the outer forme and 2 and 11 on the
inner forme; sheet two would have 3 and 10 on the outer forme
and 4 and 9 on the inner forme; sheet three would have 5 and 8
on the outer forme, and 6 and 7 on the inner forme. Instructions
for the binder were always printed on each sheet to indicate in
what order the book should be put together. A sign – generally a
letter – was put at the bottom of each quire, and the binder
would set groups of pages ‘A’ next to ‘B’ next to ‘C’. Another
binder’s help was the ‘catchword’ at the bottom of each page
which gave the first word of the next page. This, too, helped the
binder be sure that he was placing pages in the right order.
Pages were set out of reading order – partly so that more
than one compositor could work on a play at once and partly so
that (if necessary because of shortage of type) one forme could
be printed and the type distributed before the pages to appear on
the other side of the sheet were set. But this affected the
approach to the text. A compositor setting, say, pages 1 and 12
for one sheet, while the person next to him was composing, say,
pages 3 and 10, could not print either more or less of the
manuscript text than had been designated for each page. Hence
casting off copy (working out how many pages it would fill)
was a skilled business and any miscalculation simply had to be
dealt with. The 1623 folio has pages trying to compensate for
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too much or too little text in ways that sometimes change the
sense of the text itself. Peter Blayney explains that if the
compositor was still having difficulties with the layout of his
page after having added or removed space from around
headings and stage directions, he would start to alter the text
itself – as happened in the case of Much Ado About Nothing.
Comparison with the quarto text (1600) shows that, on the
overcrowded last folio (1623) page of the play, the sentence
‘heere comes the Prince and Claudio’, spoken just before a
stage direction for the entrance of those characters, has been
removed. In straitened circumstances, it would seem, the
compositor thought bits of the play itself disposable. Similarly,
where the quarto has ‘They swore that you were almost sick for
me’, ‘they swore that you were wel-nye dead for me’ (Q I4a),
the folio leaves out both instances of the word ‘that’ so that the
verse sentences will not spill over and use up the next line,
despite the fact that, as a result, the rhythm of the iambic
pentameter has been corrupted. Contractions are used
throughout the page, stage directions are crammed into the end
of lines of speech, even the ‘finis’ at the close of the play is in
the line where the catchword is supposed to be.6
Compositorial space problems may, too, have led to an
awkward moment in the folio text (there is no other) of Antony
and Cleopatra. A cramped page for 5.2 gives Proculeius two
consecutive speech-prefixes (each is headed ‘Pro’):
Cleo Pray you tell him,
I am his Fortunes Vassall, and I send him
The Greatnesse he has got. I hourely learne
A Doctrine of Obedience, and would gladly
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Looke him i’th’Face.
Pro This ile report (deere Lady)
Have comfort, for I know your plight is pittied
Of him that caus’d it.
Pro You see how easily she may be surpriz’d:
Guard her till Caesar come.
(TLN 3233–42, 5.2.27–36)
Proculeius addresses Cleopatra, the ‘deere Lady’, in the first
speech, in the second his attention is on the guard; his manner
of address between one speech and the other is also radically
different. A bit of text appears to have been left out. Is a stage
direction missing? Or – given that there is a half-line of verse
before the capture and a complete one after it – could a halfline speech (possibly spoken by Cleopatra) have been edited
away for space reasons?
In folio (1623) King Lear, the reverse appears to have
happened and the compositor seems to have added some verbal
padding to bulk out a section lacking sufficient words as
Blayney points out. On the page in question which covers 4.7,
various measures have been made to swell the text. Some
complete lines of verse are printed as two half-lines so that they
take up more room; gaps have been put above and below stage
directions. But in addition there is a telling verbal difference on
this page from the equivalent moment of play in the quarto
(1608). In quarto Lear says that he is
. . . a very foolish fond old man,
Fourescore and upward, and to deale plainly
I feare I am not in my perfect mind
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(Q K2b, 4.7.58–62)
A ‘score’ is ‘twenty’, so fourscore is eighty; fourscore and
upward is therefore eighty-plus-a-little. In the folio (1623),
however, Lear says he is (in broken verse)
. . . a very foolish fond old man,
Fourescore and upward,
Not an houre more, nor lesse:
And to deale plainely,
I feare I am not in my perfect mind.
(TLN 2824–18, 4.7.58–62)
How can Lear be neither an hour more nor less than an
undefined number, eighty-something? The phrase ‘not an hour
more nor less’ is senseless, and there is a strong suspicion that
it originates in the printing house as a text-enhancing device.7
The people responsible for picking up the pieces of type and
setting them were known as ‘compositors’. They had in front of
them two large trays or ‘cases’, the top one of which contained
the pieces of type for capital letters, and the bottom one of
which contained the type for small letters and for spaces. These
days, capitals are still sometimes called ‘upper-case letters’ and
small letters ‘lower-case letters’ because of the position they
once occupied in the compositors’ two type-cases. Holding a
‘composing’ stick that corresponded in width to the width of
the line of type to be set, a compositor would pick up the
requisite letters and spaces and fit them in, adding letters and
spaces until he had made a tightly fitting line of type. On top of
this he would set another line of type. When he had composed
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four or five lines of type, he would transfer them on to the
‘galley’, a wooden tray that would ultimately hold the full page
of type. He would continue in this way until the galley was full
and a whole page had been set. Naturally the very composing
process affects what is printed.
The compositor was the Renaissance version of a touchtypist: he could have a manuscript at his side and, whilst
keeping his eyes fixed on it, pick up the right pieces of type
without looking at what he was doing. He set type every day,
and had developed a ‘feel’ for the thickness of each letter and
the position of each compartment in his type-case. But just as a
good touch-typist still makes spelling errors, so a good
compositor might still, on occasion, pick a letter out of the
wrong section – usually the compartment next to the one he was
aiming at. Equally, he might, when breaking up a printed page,
‘distribute’ a piece of type into the wrong compartment –
usually, again, adjacent to the one intended. So there are
common compositors’ errors to look out for in Renaissance
texts, though to spot them requires a sense of the layout of the
compositors’ boxes. Figure 7.1 shows a compositor’s lower
case of type (there were, of course, further cases that
compositors used for italic type and for letters of different
sizes). Two letters are shown when both occupy a single piece
of type; ‘ ’ represents a ‘long s’; ‘en’ and ‘em’ are spaces the
width of a letter ‘n’ and a letter ‘m’ respectively; ‘k’ is absent
as it was placed amongst the capitals and numbers in the upper
case box.
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Figure 7.1 Based, with grateful thanks, on the picture of
Moxon’s lower type case from Joseph Moxon, Mechanick
Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), as supplied by
David
Bolton
on
his
website
http://members.aol.com/alembicprs/selcase.htm
One compositors’ error in the folio is in Richard II. Again,
as there is also a quarto for that play, it is possible to see what
the correct reading should be. The folio gives ‘White Beares
have arm’d their thin and hairelesse Scalps / Against thy
Majestie’ (TLN 1470–1, 3.2.112–13), as though a series of
polar bears have joined the uprising against Richard II. The
quarto provides the more reasonable ‘White beards have armed
their thin and hairless scalpes . . .’ (Q F2a), where ‘white
beards’ are ‘old men’. Probably the folio compositor’s hand has
slipped into the ‘e’ box, which is next to the ‘d’ box. Similarly,
Lear in quarto one is confronted by his daughters who ask the
need why he should travel with so many men. He answers ‘O
reason not the deed’. The folio has what makes more sense at
this point:
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Gonoril Heare me my Lord;
What need you five and twenty? Ten? Or five?
To follow in a house, where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
Regan What need one?
Lear O reason not the need . . .
(TLN 1559–64, 2.4.260–4)
Again, the ‘n’ box is next to the ‘d’ box, and, as both letters are
of a similar thickness, the compositor will not have ‘felt’ his
mistake.
Unlike a touch-typist, however, a compositor did not have
access to an infinite quantity of letters. Only when a full forme
had been printed could the type be ‘broken up’ and ‘distributed’
back into the compositors’ cases. In the meantime, the more
type a hard-working compositor set, the less he had to choose
from. As the compositor’s stock of type dwindled, so his
punctuation and spelling habits would change. Extra ‘e’s on the
ends of words might go; punctuation might become lighter. For
years people wondered at the logic of the questions in this
passage from the quarto (1600) of The Merchant of Venice.
[Jewe] if you deny it, let the danger light
upon your charter and your Citties freedome?
Youle aske me why I rather choose to have
a weight of carrion flesh, then to receave
three thousand ducats: Ile not aunswer that?
But say it is my humour, is it aunswerd?
What if my house be troubled with a Rat,
and I be pleasd to give ten thousand ducats
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to have it baind? what, are you answered yet?
Some men there are love not a gaping pigge?
Some that are mad if they behold a Cat?
...
Bass. This is not aunswer thou unfeeling man,
to excuse the currant of thy cruelty?
Jewe. I am not bound to please thee with my answers?
Bass. Doe all men kill the things they doe not love?
Jewe. Hates any man the thing he would not kill?
Bass. Every offence is not a hate at first?
Jewe. What wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?
(Q G3b, 4.1.38–70)
Shylock and Bassanio have gone question-mad: all their
questions are questioned back, all their statements are queried.
What has sent two strong characters into such a flurry of
uncertainty? Is the profusion of question marks here an acting
note? No, for most of these ‘questions’ are obviously in fact
statements. What has happened in this passage is that the
compositor has run low on full stops (periods). His problem is
that he has placed full-stops after speech-headings – but has not
had the quantity of type for punctuation that such stop-heavy
printing demands. Lacking the stops to sustain the passage of
dialogue, the compositor has opted to use the next mark of
punctuation along – the question mark. The punctuation here
has little to do with the manuscript play or the punctuation
desires of the printer, it simply reflects a printing house
deficiency. The same may be behind the King Lear quarto’s
choice of the term ‘Bastard’ as opposed to ‘Edmund’ in the
quarto speech-prefix and stage directions for that character.
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Often thought to be a weighted description of the nature of the
man, his ‘bastard’ birth somehow shaping the person that
Edmund is, the designation may equally reflect a printer’s
necessity. The capital italic ‘E’ is a letter much required in
printed playtexts for the words ‘Enter’ and ‘Exit’; in Lear,
which also has a character called ‘Edgar’, italic ‘E’ will have
been in great demand, and possibly the use of ‘Bastard’ was a
way of preserving it.
The compositor was encouraged to improve the punctuation
and spelling of the text in front of him. Compositors in William
Jaggard’s printing house (where Shakespeare’s folio was set)
specifically claimed, in 1622, that they would not be ‘so madly
disposed to tye themselves’ to the spelling errors in Ralphe
Brooke’s manuscript book; had they ‘given him leave to print
his owne English . . . hee would (they say) have made his
Reader, as good sport . . . as ever Tarleton did his Audience, in
a Clownes part’.8 Blindly following the manuscript in front of
you without thinking was hazardous, though it did happen. In
the quarto (and folio – set from quarto) text of Love’s Labour’s
Lost there is a section where each of Berowne’s speeches begins
with an ‘O’. Even at first glance these ‘O’s look extraordinary,
and it is difficult to explain why Shakespeare has opted for
rhetorical trickery of this kind. Is he giving the sophisticated
Berowne a reserve that will contrast with the chattiness of the
clown? The informality of the content of the dialogue strongly
argues against that reading. Here is the passage exactly as it
looks in the quarto, where Costard’s speech-prefix varies
between ‘Cost’ and ‘Clow’ (‘Clown’), and Berowne’s speechprefix remains fixed at ‘Ber’. The speech-prefixes are the clue
to what seems to have happened in the printing house.
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Enter Berowne.
Ber. O my good knave Costard, exceedingly well met.
Clow. Pray you sir, How much Carnation Ribbon may a man
buy for a remuneration?
Ber. O what is a remuneration?
Cost. Marie sir, halfepennie farthing.
Ber. O, why then threefarthing worth of Silke.
Cost. I thanke your worship, God be wy you.
Ber. O stay slave, I must employ thee.
As thou wilt win my favour, good my knave,
Do one thing for me that I shall intreate.
Clow. When would you have it done sir?
Ber. O this after-noone.
Clow. Well, I will do it sir: Fare you well.
Ber. O thou knowest not what it is.
Clow. I shall know sir when I have done it.
(Q D1a-b, 3.1.144–58)
It would seem that, in the manuscript behind this passage,
Berowne’s speech-prefix (here ‘Ber.’) has in fact been written
‘Bero’, but the compositor has misunderstood the ‘o’ as the
start of Berowne’s speeches. The compositor has been faithful
to the manuscript but without bringing his own logic to bear on
it.
Sometimes textual difficulties originate with the pieces of
type – or even the inking. For years many thought that
Ferdinand had a strange speech at the end of The Tempest . He
has been granted what above all things he desired – Miranda’s
hand in marriage – but after Prospero has shown him a
‘majestical vision’, he appears to say
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Let me live here ever,
So rare a wondred Father, and a wise
Makes this place Paradise.
(TLN 1785–7, 4.1.122–4)
How surprising, thought commentators, that Ferdinand wants to
stay on the island because of the wonders and wisdom of his
gruff father-in-law, rather than his lovely bride. But the word is
not in fact ‘wise’ but ‘wife’ with the integument on the ‘f’
broken off leaving the letter resembling a long ‘s’. ‘So rare a
wondred Father, and a wife / Makes this place Paradise.’
Another example occurs in Antony and Cleopatra where
Cleopatra appears to say that death ‘rids our dogs of languish’
(TLN 3249, 5.2.41). ‘Anguish’ would undoubtedly make more
obvious sense in this context, and what seems to have happened
is that a space (which was also a piece of type) has been
accidentally inked. Other instances do not seem to be
resolvable. If long ‘s’ and ‘f’ are confusable, how much more
confusable are the letters that were used reversibly, such as ‘u’
and ‘v’ and ‘i’ and ‘j’. So a word such as ‘loud’ in an uncertain
context could conceivably represent ‘loud’ or ‘lov’d’. Almost
always, the context identifies the word intended, but there is a
famous confusion resulting from i/j uncertainty in Othello. In
5.2 the folio has Othello, learning too late that the wife he
killed was innocent, compare himself to
. . . one, whose hand
(Like the base Iudean) threw a Pearle away
Richer then all his Tribe.
(TLN 3657–9, 5.2.346–8)
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In the quarto (1622) for that same passage he views himself as
one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearle away,
Richer then all his Tribe:
(Q2 N2a, 5.2.346–8)
I or J for the first letter? And for the second letter, a ‘u’ or an
‘n’ (is one set upside-down by the compositor by mistake?) Or
what? Indian or Judean? Or is the analogy a metaphorical one,
in which case might the ‘Judean’ refer not so much to the Jews
as to Judas, the cast-away pearl being Jesus? As no one yet has
suggested an unambiguous source for the story of the man who
threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe, there is no way to
answer that question. Editors must simply make their own
decision when preparing a text for this play.
When compositors did not copy blindly they imposed on the
text their own individual habits of spelling and punctuation.
This is very clear in the folio, which is set by up to eight
different compositors, called by modern commentators A, B, C,
D, E, F, G, H. Experts who study the folio’s printing history can
identify which page of which text was set by which compositor
by recognising the compositors’ spelling habits. For instance
‘B’ favours spelling the word ‘do’ ‘doe’, the word ‘here’ ‘here’,
and the word ‘dear’ ‘deare’. ‘A’ on the other hand, favours ‘do’,
‘heere’ and ‘deere’. 9 Compositor ‘E’ working on the folio was
probably apprentice to compositor ‘B’, as is suggested by the
fact that ‘E’ has the same spelling quirks as ‘B’, but makes a lot
more errors. ‘E’’s text has to be proofed and corrected (some of
his proofed pages are bound into surviving folio texts – paper
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was too expensive to waste); no other compositor’s texts seem
to have been proofed in this way. Interestingly, the Jaggard
printing house that was setting the folio at the time had a new
apprentice compositor whose name was John Leason: was he
‘E’?
So, the process of setting a play in the printing house puts
the original text at one further remove. In addition, the printed
texts themselves were prepared variously as quartos and folios
and had differing concerns for accuracy (remember that as part
of their sales pitch Heminges and Condell dismiss any
previously published Shakespeare plays as not just stolen but
‘maimed’). Quartos aimed at a readership of literate people
prepared to pay a ‘tester’ (sixpence) to read a play – the price of
an expensive seat at the Globe or a cheap seat at Blackfriars;
the imposing folio was available only to those with fifteen
shillings to a pound to spare.10 The folio has been carefully
designed so that it has coherence as a book. The first play, The
Tempest, begins with ‘a tempestuous noise of Thunder and
Lightening’, and the last play, Cymbeline, ends with ‘such a
Peace’. But in giving Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,
histories & tragedies its internal consistency and pleasing
form, how greatly have the plays been altered?
The division of the folio into tragedies, histories and
comedies, it was suggested in Chapter 3, placed plays in certain
categories: that categorisation may also have necessitated the
changing of play-titles to fit them into the system. During
Shakespeare’s lifetime, the play called in the folio Henry VIII
and situated amongst the history plays was, in at least one of its
manifestations, called All Is True, for that play was in
performance when the first Globe theatre burnt down and its
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topic and title appear in letters and gossip of the time.11
Quarto titles to plays published while Shakespeare was alive
presumably show the name of the play at that point in time. As
against the folio designations, the quarto of King Lear is M.
William Shak-speare: His True Chronicle Historie of the life
and death of King Lear and his three Daughters, suggesting that
Shakespeare called the play a ‘history’ rather than a ‘tragedy’,
while Richard III is, in quarto, not just a ‘tragedy’, but The
Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous
Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his
innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole
course of his detested life, and most deserved death. This title
probably reflects the playbills that were hung up on posts
around town to advertise the day’s performance, while the folio
displays the result of dividing plays into generic groups:
Richard III is historical, and must therefore be a history play.
But this is to muffle the tragic dimension of Richard III,
overshadowing what may have been deeper underlying
complications. ‘History’ is linear and goes on reaching forward
through time to touch the head of the present monarch;
‘tragedy’ usually comes to an end with the death of the
protagonist. By calling a play a ‘tragedy’ something permanent
and irrevocable about its ending is implied that is lost in calling
it a history. What else might folio logic have done to impose
order on to a series of disparate texts? In fact, in the folio the
designation for Richard III remains confused, for the play’s
actual title in the ‘Catalogue’ is ‘the Life and Death of Richard
the Third’ which is also its ‘running title’ (the title that is
placed along the top of each page). Calling the play ‘the life and
death’ has the effect of making the death of Richard an
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important feature of what the play is about (imagine what a
difference it would make if Lear were called ‘the life and death
of King Lear’, the tragic close of the story already within the
play as it opens). Does this title reflect what the play was called
in one of its later manifestations? The heading for Richard III
on its first page in the folio itself is, again, ‘The Tragedy’
(rather than history) ‘of Richard the Third: with the Landing of
Earle Richmond, and the Battell at Bosworth Field’. The final
scene, the battle, is singled out, but the fact that Richard dies
there is not the issue.
These variant titles – varied even within one text – provide
examples of the unfixed and changeable nature of every aspect
of a play from its name onwards. Early references show that
many of Shakespeare’s compositions swiftly became named
after their protagonists even if their original titles had been
m o r e adventurous: Twelfth Night was commonly called
Malvolio; indeed, Charles II’s second folio Shakespeare
survives, and in it the King has crossed out the heading Twelfth
Night and substituted Malvolio as an alternative title. All’s Well
that Ends Well was known to Robert Burton as ‘Benedicte and
Betteris’.12 And yet the choice of named character for a title
will itself dictate, slightly, the way the audience sees a play –
compare titles such as Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and
Juliet, both of which equally name two characters as
protagonists, with titles such as Othello (rather than Othello and
Desdemona) or Macbeth (rather than Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth). If the play changes its title to reflect audience
perception, as appears to be the case with Malvolio, then that
too is illuminating, indicating that what stood out from the
Twelfth Night comedy was its one tragic figure.
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From content to title texts were fashioned by concerns
brought about by the size and nature of the book in which they
were published, and the context that book was conceived to
have. The folio may have ‘Mr William Shakespeare’ as part of
its title; quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays, published,
some of them, before either Shakespeare or ‘authorship’ was
particularly prized, are often printed without any authorial
designation (Shakespeare is not named on any quarto title page
until Love’s Labour’s Lost of 1598). The mediation that shapes
the look and content of a book, however, does not stop in
Shakespeare’s time. A modern editor is generally concerned to
produce an edition that will fit into a series – and each series
has values of its own. Those values will determine the page size
and quality, typeface and binding of the book. A series will also
have certain demands – that spelling and punctuation should be
modernised, that notes should be provided etc. Finally, modern
editors have to deal with the printing house texts of
Shakespeare’s plays as we have them. Some texts are folio
only; others exist both in folio and quarto. Not all quartos offer
substantially different texts from the folio – but some do. When
there are good-but-variant quartos and folios, it is still common
policy for an editor to combine the two, which makes reading
sense – most people do not want to read what is roughly the
same play twice. It also ensures that the reader gets as much
‘Shakespeare’ as possible out of one reading. But it also
produces a superimposition of all available texts one upon the
other and is thus as far away as possible from what Shakespeare
wrote at any one time.
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8
Epilogue
The folio title of one of Shakespeare’s later plays, Cymbeline:
King of Britain, relates directly to recent historical events.
‘Britain’ was a new concept or, rather, an old concept revisited:
the word had come into prominence after the Scottish King
James came to the throne in 1603. Not only was it a weighted
term, then; even the notion of a greater unified country was one
that was open for exploration. Substituting ‘Britain’ where
‘England’ might more obviously be expected became a loaded
joke, aired by Shakespeare also in his play King Lear, a story
about a king who divides his united country into three distinct
pieces. In Lear, the other half of the phrase ‘fie, foh, and
fumme’, is completed not with ‘I smell the blood of an English
man’, as the fairytale dictates, but ‘I smell the blood of a
Brittish man’ (TLN 1967–8, 1.4.183–4). The fact of ‘Britain’
was a feature of Shakespeare’s life from 1603 onwards, and
Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly harp on it. Yet the ‘Britain’
jokes are not exactly about the history of the time in which
Shakespeare lived; rather, they are a product of it. Shakespeare
responded to the events surrounding him; to understand his
surroundings better is to understand better what he wrote.
Reading an old play in a modern edition, it is easy to lose
more than just a sense of history or a sense of theatre. The
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reader can lose – or never gather – the oddly contingent facts
about national and local life, circumstances of performance and
personnel that defined the plays during their early productions
and that fashioned the way they were written in the first place.
Shakespeare was constantly affected by the conditions under
which he wrote; if ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’, yet
he was from an age, and the timelessness of some of his
utterances must be balanced by the contemporary rootedness of
others.1
Given that any surviving play is at a remove from what
Shakespeare was creating – a text to be spoken on the stage, not
to be printed – the ‘Shakespeare’ that is bought in a modern
bookshop is very different from anything the playwright might
have anticipated. But as Making Shakespeare has argued, it is
not different simply because ‘performance’ would have
supplied a visual dimension absent on the printed page. The
very layout and building of the stage itself provided, for an
audience trained to look at playhouses in a particular way, a
manner of ‘reading’ the performance, in which place of
entrance and exit were part of what a play was saying, and
props and music had symbolic ramifications that cannot be
instantly interpreted now as they could in Shakespeare’s day.
Early modern London too has been shown to be part of the
plays written to be performed there, as have the particular
actors for whom roles were specifically composed. Players
worked their habits, their body-types and their performances in
other plays into every production they mounted. This book has
attempted to highlight and elucidate the extent to which place,
people and props – the physical and material context in which
plays were performed – were elements of the way a play was
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interpreted and of the statements it made.
The textual as well as physical production of plays has also
been considered, and they have been presented as assemblages
of different parts – prologues, epilogues, songs, letters, actors’
speeches – rather than as consistent, tightly unified ‘whole’
texts. Factors which Shakespeare embraced and which in turn
moulded his writing are shown to be not additional to the plays
but deeply embedded within them.
For these reasons, Shakespeare the man has not been
particularly addressed, not because he is not important but
because he is not all-important. ‘Decentring’ textual authority,
both by pointing out that it is not there, and by redistributing it
more broadly around the various people who put together a
published playtext, reopens, excitingly, questions about what
‘Shakespeare’ really can be said to be. For too long his plays
have been treated as sacrosanct and fixed in ways that patronise
the fluidity of his working pattern, and exclude the excitingly
collaborative nature of his writing. Seeing Shakespeare’s plays
in production in playhouse and printing house, raises new
questions about the construction – the making – of
‘Shakespeare’. Most important of all, it forces us to ask what
the study of that phenomenon ought to involve.
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Notes
Chapter 1
1
2
3
4
5
David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory , London and New York:
Routledge, 1999, 16.
Other important contributors to the revision movement include Steven
Urkowitz, John Kerrigan and Randall McLeod (who, as an illustration of textual
indeterminacy, sometimes writes under the name ‘Random Cloud’). E. A. J.
Honigmann’s The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text , London: Edward Arnold,
1965, considered Shakespeare as a reviser in ways that came to be of concern
in the 1980s – its title ‘stability’ rather than ‘instability’ had probably prevented
its coming to prominence previously. In the wake of these accounts other
important books were written: Grace Ioppolo wrote Revising Shakespeare,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; Thomas Clayton edited The
Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1992; and John Jones produced Shakespeare at
Work, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Brian Vickers shows to what extent co-authorship was usual in his Shakespeare
Co-author, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, combining a variety of
methodologies to determine the co-authorship of five Shakespeare plays. Other
recent and important contributions to the field include Jonathan Hope’s The
Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994; Gordon McMullan’s The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher,
Amherst, MA: Studies in Early Modern Culture, 1994; and Jeffrey Masten’s
Textual Intercourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
‘What Is a Text?’ was written by Stephen Orgel in Research Opportunities in
Renaissance Drama, 24, 1981, 3–6. The whole division of Shakespeare texts
into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ was questioned and redefined by Paul Werstine in
‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad”
Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41, 1990, 65–86, and by Laurie Maguire in
Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts ,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Andrew Gurr has written the most accessible and inspiring accounts of the early
modern theatre in general: The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 , 3rd edn,
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, and Playgoing in
Shakespeare’s London , 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996; other thought-provoking accounts are provided by Peter Thomson,
Shakespeare’s Theatre , 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 1992, and Arthur
Kin n e y, Shakespeare by Stages, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Tremendous
research added to the field of theatre history and helped redefine it – in
particular, the work on contemporary staging pictures by R. A. Foakes,
Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642, London: Scolar Press, 1985; on
playhouses by Herbert Berry, Shakespeare’s Playhouses , New York: AMS,
1987; on censorship by Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation
and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama, Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1991; on repertory by Roslyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s
Company, 1594–1613, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991; on the
developments that led to the playhouses by William Ingram, The Business of
Playing, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992; on stage directions by Alan
D e s s e n , Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary , Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995; and on companies by Scott McMillin and
Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays , Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
6 Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature on Line, ‘LION’, contains (virtually) all plays
and poems and many works of prose from the early modern period; Early
English Books Online, ‘EEBO’, contains (virtually) all early modern rare books.
The internet sites, for which a substantial subscription is required, are at
http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk and http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo.
7 Other recent and important stage-to-page books are Robert Weimann’s
Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000, which explores the duality between playing and writing; David Scott
Kastan’s Shakespeare After Theory , which contextualises Shakespeare’s plays
in the rich densities of the world in which they were created, and Douglas
Bro o k s’s From Playhouse to Printing House, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000, which examines the shifting relationship between
theatre and publisher. My own Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan ,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, investigates early modern theatrical rehearsal as
a way of exploring the revision of texts. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel are
preparing two collections of essays on Redefining Theatre History in the early
modern period, London: Palgrave, forthcoming; one will examine actors and
companies, theatre buildings and staging; the other considers evidence of
playtexts and concepts of authorship.
Chapter 2
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1 ‘Petition from the Watermen of the bankside to Lord Howard 1592’, in W. W.
Greg, Henslowe Papers, London: A. H. Bullen, 1907, 43.
2 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988, 22.
3 William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies – hereafter, The First Folio (1623). First Folio quotations are taken
throughout from the Norton Facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman, New
York: Norton, 1968, using the through-line-numbers (TLN) of that edition. For
more information, see the textual note, p. xiv.
4 G. B. Besant, London Bridge, London: Selwyn and Blount, 1927, 120.
5 For ways of blacking the face see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage,
1574–1642, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 199–200,
and W. J. Lawrence, ‘The Black-a-vised Stage Villain’, in Old Theatre Days
and Ways, London: G. G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1935, 124–9.
6 John Stow, Survey of London, 1598, 33.
7 Henry Vaughan, ‘A Rhapsodie: Occasionally written upon a meeting with some
of his friends at the Globe Taverne, in a Chamber painted over head with a
Cloudy Skie, and some few dispersed Starres . . .’, in The Works of Henry
Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 10–11.
8 William Harrison, Chronologie, 1588, I.liv, quoted in E. K. Chambers, The
Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, 2: 396.
9 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 392.
10 John Northbrooke, A Treastise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine plaies . . . are
Reproved . . ., 1579, 29b.
11 Quoted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 415.
12 For the dating of Henry V see William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 4.
13 William Parkes, The Curtaine-Drawer of the World, 1612, 47.
14 See Christine Eccles, The Rose Theatre, London: Nick Hern Books, 1990, 72.
15 Thomas Heywood, The English Traveller, 1633, I6a.
16 ‘A Funerall Elegye on ye Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbedg who
dyed on Saturday in Lent the 13 of March 1618’, quoted in Edwin Nungezer, A
Dictionary of Actors, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929, 75–6.
17 Tiffany Stern, ‘Was Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem Ever the Motto of the Globe
Theatre?’, Theatre Notebook, 51, 1997, 122–7.
18 Passages in the manuscript behind this folio, 1623, text of Hamlet are dated in
William Shakespeare, a Textual Companion , ed. Stanley Wells and Gary
Taylor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, 400.
19 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 508.
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20 William Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 1596, 233.
21 For an exploration of Shakespeare’s spectacular use of stage violence for its
entertainment value see R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence , Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
22 Samuel Rowlands, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine, 1600,
A7a.
23 Barnaby Rich, Faultes Faults, and nothing else but Faultes, 1606, 4b.
24 John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others, 1615, 276.
25 John Marston, Scourge of Villanie, 1598, H4a.
26 See Jonathan Hope, ‘Shakespeare’s “Natiue English”’, in A Companion to
Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan, London: Blackwell, 1999, 248.
27
Sir John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the
Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596, C2b.
28 Sir John Harington, Ulysses upon Ajax, 1596, D1a.
29 The Actors Remonstrance, or Complaint, 1643, 5.
30 Richard Flecknoe, Miscellania, 1653, 103–4.
31 The Swan drawing’s inaccuracy is discussed in R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of
the English Stage, London: Scolar Press, 1985, 52–5.
32 Peter Razzell, ed., The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early
Stuart England: Thomas Platter and Horatio Busino, London: Caliban Books,
1995, 26.
33 Ben Jonson, The Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947, 8: 439.
34 Thomas Middleton, The Blacke Booke, 1604, B1a.
35 Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diaries ed. R. A. Foakes, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002, 319; The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus . . .
Written by an English Gentleman student in Wittenberg . . ., 1594, E2b.
36 Jonathan Bate in his Arden edition of William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus ,
London and New York: Routledge, 1995, writes powerfully about the use of
the trap in his introduction to that play, 4–21.
37 John Tatham, The Fancies Theater, 1640, H3; Richard Tarlton, Tarltons Jeasts,
1638, B2a–b.
38 John Davies, Wits Bedlam, 1617, F7a.
39 For an account of the Midland Uprising of 1607/8 see William Shakespeare,
Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 34–7; for William
Shakespeare’s corn hoarding see Katherine Duncan Jones, Ungentle
Shakespeare, London: Arden, 2001, 121–2.
40 Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum 2, Liber 1, satire 3, 1598, in Poems of Joseph Hall,
ed. A. Davenport, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949, 14–15.
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41 Francis Lenton, The Young Gallants Whirligigg, 1629, 14.
42 The dimensions of the stage are discussed in Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 157;
and Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres ,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 29–32.
43 Richard Brathwait, Whimzies, 1631, 51–2.
Chapter 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
See E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘The Unblotted Papers’, in The Stability of
Shakespeare’s Text, London: Edward Arnold, 1965, 22–35.
Richard West, ‘To the pious Memory of my deare Brother in Law, Mr Thomas
Randolph’ in Thomas Randolph, Poems, 1640, B4b.
Jonson, Works, 8: 583.
‘To the Memory of Ben. Johnson’ in Jasper Mayne, Jonsonus Virbius, 1638,
30.
First identified as Shakespeare’s hand in a Notes and Queries article by Richard
Simpson in 1871, and now commonly accepted to be so. But see Paul Ramsey,
‘The Literary Evidence for Shakespeare as Hand D in the Manuscript Play Sir
Thomas More: A Re-re-consideration’, The Upstart Crow, 11, 1991, 131–55,
for a disputation of this designation.
Transcription is provided in Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion , 463–7;
modernised version is my own.
More on revision in Love’s Labour’s Lost can be found in John Kerrigan,
‘Shakespeare at Work: the Katharine–Rosaline Tangle in Love’s Labour’s Lost’ ,
Review of English Studies, NS 33, 1982, 134–6; ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost and
Shakespearean Revision’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 33, 1982, 337–9.
For more on this topic see Randall McLeod (Random Cloud), ‘The Marriage of
Good and Bad Quartos,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 33, 1982, 421–31.
Cassius also changes his character between these two sections, a point made by
Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991, 115.
See Thomas Dekker, Newes from Hell, 1606, in The Non Dramatic Works of
Thomas Dekker, 5 vols, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 1884, New York: Russell
and Russell, 1963, 2:146, who writes about ‘a Cobler of Poetrie called a playpatcher’. More on the playwright as playpatcher can be found in Tiffany Stern,
‘Repatching the Play’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds, Redefining the
Theatre, London: Palgrave, 2004, forthcoming.
Reproduced in William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, appendix A, 327–62.
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12 See Ben Jonson, Sejanus, in Jonson, Works, 4: 351.
13 See Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, 1605. More on this subject can be found in Mark
Bland, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, in TEXT, 11,
1998, 91–127.
14 The distinction is importantly redefined by Laurie Maguire in Shakespearean
Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts , Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996. For an argument against using ‘foul papers’ and
‘bad/good’ quartos as technical terms see Werstine, ‘Narratives about Printed
Shakespeare Texts’.
15 Thomas Heywood, Pleasant dialogues and dramma’s, 1637, 249.
16 Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott
Kastan, eds, A New History of Early English Drama, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997, 383–422.
17 These terms of opprobrium come from Thomas Bodley’s instructions to the
keeper of the Bodleian Library, reproduced in Sir Thomas Bodley, Letters of Sir
Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G.
W. Wheeler, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926, 219. He adds, ‘Happely some
plaies may be worthy the keeping: but hardly one in fortie’, 222.
18 Sir John Mennes, Wits Recreations, 1641, F4a.
19 William Prynne, Histriomastix, 1633, **6b.
20 Jonson, Works, 8: 584.
21 Jonson, Works, 6: 280.
22 Thomas Fuller, Worthies of England, 1662, 253.
23 For the suggestion that the line in question is not actually supposed to be verse
see Thomas A. Pendleton, ‘“This is not the man”: On calling Falstaff Falstaff’,
Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, NS 4, 1990, 59–71.
24 ‘The Glutton’s Speech’ in Ahasuerus, The Wandering Jew, 1640, F3b.
25 See Andrew Gurr’s introduction to his edition of Shakespeare’s Henry V,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 7.
26 Quoted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:338–9.
27 For the argument that the names were changed for Oxford performance see
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987, 74–5. The bad quarto names are used in a German play from the
eighteenth century, Der Bestrafte Brudermord , which seems to be descended
from an early modern version of Hamlet that made its way to Germany.
28 Robert Armin, A Nest of Ninnies, 1608, G3b.
29 ‘A Funerall Elegye on ye Death of . . . Richard Burbedg’, reproduced in
Nungezer, Dictionary, 74. The phrase featured, as early accounts make clear, in
the Ur-Hamlet: perhaps Burbage borrowed it from there.
30 Robert Chamberlain, A New Booke of mistakes. Or, Bulls with tales, and buls
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31
32
33
34
35
36
without tales (1640), 50.
For more on the way changes between the two good texts of Hamlet alter the
hero see John Jones, ‘Hamlet’, Shakespeare at Work , Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995.
Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1983, 4–5.
For the history of the Lear texts see Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion ,
509.
All in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds, The Division of the Kingdoms,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Ioppolo in Revising Shakespeare, 167.
Ioppolo in Revising Shakespeare, 50, includes a list of quartos by a variety of
playwrights which state on their title pages that they have been ‘corrected’,
‘amended’, ‘augmented’ without mention of the author’s name.
Chapter 4
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
See Henslowe’s Diary , ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
A Banquet of Jeasts, 1630, 57.
For more on the life of William Kempe and the characters he played see David
Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse ,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Armin, Nest of Ninnies, B2b.
John Davies, The Complete Works collected by Alexander B Grosart, 2 vols,
repr. New York: AMS Press, 1967, 2: 60.
Robert Armin, The Italian Taylor and his Boy, 1609, A3a.
Henry Glapthorne, Poems, 1639, 28.
F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1967, 79.
John Manningham, Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, ed. J.
Bruce, 1868, 39.
Rowlands, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine, A2a; Mercurius
Bellicus no. 5, 1648, 4.
Richard Corbet, Certain Elegant Poems, 1647, 12.
‘A Funerall Elegye on ye Death of . . . Richard Burbedg’, reproduced in
Nungezer, Dictionary, 74.
Henry Glapthorne, Ladies Priviledge, 1640, A3b.
V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, It’ll be Alright on the Night, London: Putnam, 1954,
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15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
43.
For more on the playwright’s ‘reading’ and the entire rehearsal process see
Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan , Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000, 59–61.
Samuel Pepys, The Diary, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols,
London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970–83, 3: 243–4.
Dulwich College MS I, Item 138. Reproduced as facsimile with transcript in W.
W. Greg, ed., Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses; Stage
Plots, Actors’ Parts, Prompt Books , 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931, 2,
and against the text of the 1594 quarto to Orlando Furioso in W. W. Greg’s
Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, Oxford: Malone Society, 1922.
Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote, 1654, 94–5.
John Marston, The Plays, ed. H. Harvey Wood, 3 vols, London: Oliver and
Boyd, 1934, 1: 5.
For more on instruction see Stern, Rehearsal, chapters 2 and 3 passim.
This proposition is put forward by Scott McMillin in his fascinating ‘The Sharer
and His Boy’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds, Redefining Theatre
History, London: Palgrave, 2004, forthcoming.
More on the early modern concept of passions can be found in Joseph R.
Roach’s The Player’s Passion, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the mind in Generall, 1604, 174.
BL Ms Sloane 3709, fol. 8r quoted in Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–
1642, 3rd, 1992, 100.
Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors, 1612, C4b.
‘A Funerall Elegye on ye Death of . . . Richard Burbedg’, reproduced in
Nungezer, Dictionary, 74.
The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman, London: Ivor Nicholson and
Watson Ltd, 1949, 341.
See John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. J. Milhous and R. D. Hume,
London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987, 51, 55.
Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols, Dublin, 1784, 1: 138.
For the position of the prompter in the early modern theatre see Tiffany Stern,
‘Behind the Arras: the Prompter’s Place in the Shakespearean Theatre’, Theatre
Notebook, 55, 2001, 110–18.
Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom . . . with a short Treatise of the English
Stage, 1664, G7a.
Stephens, Satyrical Essayes, 297.
This is an idea put forward by Harold Jenkins in his edition of Hamlet, London
and New York: Methuen, 1982, 62.
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Chapter 5
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
See Alan C. Dessen, ‘Elizabethan Darkness and Modern Lighting’, in
Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpretations, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy ed. Philip Edwards, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1977, 4th edn, l.63, 127.
Inventory reproduced from Greg, Henslowe Papers, 116.
John Taylor, The Water-Cormorant his complaint: Against a brood of LandCormorants, 1622, A4a; James Shirley, Poems, 1646, 147.
A Warning for Faire Women, 1599, A3a; ‘A Funerall Elegye on ye Death of . . .
Richard Burbedg’, reproduced in Nungezer, Dictionary, 74.
Discussed in more detail in Dessen’s Elizabethan Stage Conventions, 36.
Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s ‘Theatrical’ Vocabulary ,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 151.
William Rowley, A Search for Money, 1609, C2b.
W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4
vols, 1939–59, 172.
John Marston, Antonio and Mellida in The Plays, 1:5–7.
Sternfeld, Music, 223–4.
Sternfeld, Music, 205.
Sternfield, Music, 86. The resemblance is questioned by Peter J. Seng, The
Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical History , Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1967, 212, but his translation of the full ‘Veni
Creator’ lyric seems, in fact, to draw attention to the similarities he is trying to
disprove.
For more on the ‘late play’ qualities revised out of Lear see John Jones, ‘King
Lear: Romance into Tragedy’, in Shakespeare at Work , Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995.
See ‘Tradition of Vocal and Instrumental Music in Tragedy’ in Sternfield,
Music.
For other verbal themes that relate to the upside-down world, particularly for
the play’s use of hendiadys, see George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’,
PMLA, 96, 1981, 168–93, and Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language ,
London: Penguin Books, 2000, 100–2.
Chapter 6
1 James Shirley, The Duke’s Mistress, 1638, C1b.
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2 Other examples of ‘lost songs’ can be found in William Bowden, The English
Dramatic Lyric, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951, 87–94.
3 Edward Cape Everard, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Son of Thespis, Edinburgh,
1818, 49.
4 Quoted from Rowley, All’s Lost by Lust, A3b.
5 ‘to ye Q. by ye players 1598’, reproduced in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.
Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1997.
6 ‘A young witty Lad playing the part of Richard the third: at the Red bull: the
Author because hee was interessed [sic] in the Play to incourage him, wrote him
this Prologue and Epilogue’, in Thomas Heywood, Pleasant dialogues and
dramma’s, 247.
7 For inflated first performance entrance charges see Chambers, Elizabethan
Stage, 2: 532.
8 Jonson, Works, 6: 397. Beaumont and Fletcher, The Dramatic Works in the
Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers et al., 10 vols, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966, 3: 491; Peter Hausted’s The Rivall Friends,
1632, title page.
9 This argument, with reference to early modern plays in general, is given with
much more detail in Tiffany Stern, ‘A Small-beer Health to his Second Day’:
Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theatre’,
Studies in Philology, 2004, forthcoming.
10 Dramatic Works collected by Richard Herne Shepherd, 6 vols, London, 1874,
2: 165; Edward Phillips, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, 1658, A3a.
11 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Woman Hater, 1607, in Dramatic Works, 1: 157.
12 Andrew Gurr, ‘Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. The Globe’,
Shakespeare Survey, 52, 1999, 68–87.
13 Discussed in Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’ in John D.
Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 383–422 and Lukas Erne, Shakespeare
as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 87.
14 This is an argument put forward by G. I. Duthie, ‘The Quarto of Shakespeare’s
Henry V ’ in Papers, Mainly Shakespearian, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964,
106–30.
15 The fullest history of early modern parts to date is provided by Tiffany Stern,
Rehearsal, chapters 1 and 2. But see Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern,
Shakespeare in Parts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, forthcoming.
The parts of Poore (from a lost play), Polypragmaticus (from Robert Burton’s
L a t i n Philosophaster), Amurath (from Thomas Goffe’s The Tragedy of
Amurath), Antoninus (from the anonymous Antoninus Bassianus Caracalla),
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16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
four non-professional university parts from the 1620s in the Houghton Library,
Harvard, give longer cues and name the cue-speaker. They are typical of parts
for university production which offer more information than parts for
professional players.
Thomas Heywood, The Royall King, and the Loyall Subject, 1637, C1a.
See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979, 616; Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David
Garrick, 2 vols, 2nd edn, 1780, 1: 177n.
Thomas Killigrew’s The Princess, 1664, 21; Marston, The Plays, 3: 22.
John Davies, Wits Bedlam, 1617, F7a: ‘of all Glory, purchas’d by the small, / A
Play-wright, for his Praise, payes most of all!’
For the date of Hamlet see The Riverside Shakespeare, 1184.
BBC interview, quoted in Peter Hay, Theatrical Anecdotes, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987, 60–1.
Distinctions between ‘you’ and ‘thou’ are discussed in Hope, ‘Shakespeare’s
“Natiue English”’, 246–7. For the performance ramifications of ‘you’ and
‘thou’ and for clues to look for when performing from actors’ parts see Patrick
Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare , London and New York: Routledge,
2002, 207.
Other within-speech cuts occur at 1.2.60; 2.2.210; 2.2.393; 2.2.320; 3.2.205;
3.4.72; 3.4.73; 3.4.190; 4.1.39; 4.7.88; 4.7.99; 5.1.100. For more on the subject
of parts and revision in Hamlet see Stern, Rehearsal, 106–10.
Chapter 7
1 This text is reproduced from Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion , 463–67,
the modernised transcript is my own.
2 This belief led Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor to substitute the name ‘Innogen’
for ‘Imogen’ in their William Shakespeare, Complete Works, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986. The change is problematic, however, because the
manuscript speech-heading must have been at least ‘Im’ (or ‘In’) to differentiate
it from the name ‘Iachimo’. Moreover, the folio text of Cymbeline is set by at
least two compositors. How likely is it that both would continually misread the
speech-heading and the full name?
3 William Long, however, provides a useful caveat against concluding too much
from such textual characteristics. See his ‘Precious Few: the Surviving English
Manuscript Playbooks’, in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to
Shakespeare, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 414–33.
4 N. W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama , Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996, 183.
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5 See William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. George Ian Duthie and John Dover
Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961, 131; and Kathleen O.
Irace, ‘“Origins and Agents of Q1 Hamlet”, in Thomas Clayton, ed., The
Hamlet First Published, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992, 90–122
(100).
6 Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, Washington: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1991, 14.
7 These examples, and some others, are provided with more detail in Blayney,
The First Folio, 13–14.
8 Augustine Vincent, A Discoverie of Errours, 1622, π6b.
9 Blayney reproduces two pages of folio illustrating ‘A’ and ‘B’’s spelling habits
in First Folio, 10–11.
10 For entrance charges see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 531–4, 556. For the
price of a quarto see Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, 383–422; for the
price of a folio see Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, 82.
11 See, for instance, Sir Henry Wotton, Letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, 2 July 1613,
i n The Life and Letters, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1907, 2: 32–3. For a discussion of this letter as a critical reading of the
play Henry VIII see Gordon McMullan’s edition of William Shakespeare, Henry
VIII, London: Thomson, 2000, 59–62.
12 See John Munro, The Shakspere Allusion-Book , 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1932, 324–5.
Chapter 8
1
Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr. William
Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’ in the preliminary matter to The First
Folio (1623), A4b.
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Bibliography and Further Reading
Primary Sources
Actors Remonstrance, or Complaint, The, 1643.
‘Ahasuerus’, The Wandering Jew, 1640.
Armin, Robert, The Italian Taylor and his Boy, 1609.
Armin, Robert, A Nest of Ninnies, 1608.
Banquet of Jeasts, A, 1630.
Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and
Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers et al., 10 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966.
Bodley, Thomas, Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of
the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.
Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979.
Brathwait, Richard, Whimzies, 1631.
Chamberlain, Robert, A New Book of mistakes. Or, Bulls with tales, and buls
without tales, 1640.
Corbet, Richard, Certain Elegant Poems, 1647.
Davies, John, The Complete Works, collected by Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols, repr.
New York: AMS Press, 1967.
Davies, John, Wits Bedlam, 1617.
Davies, Thomas, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols, Dublin, 1784.
Davies, Thomas, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 2 vols, 2nd edn, 1780.
Dekker, Thomas, The Non Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 5 vols, ed.
Alexander B. Grosart, 1884, New York: Russell and Russell, 1963.
Downes, John, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. J. Milhous and R. D. Hume, London:
Society for Theatre Research, 1987.
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Index
Admiral’s Men 63, 97
advertising plays 15–16, 75, 157
Alleyn, Edward 63
Alleyn, Giles 12–13
apparel see costumes
Armin, Robert 67–69, 70, 74; Fool Upon Fool 68 Nest of Ninnies 57, 68 Two
Maids of Moreclack 69
audience 26–29, 45, 62, 73, 74, 107, 120–122
Bankside 7, 13–14, 20
Banks’s horse 146
Barnado and Phiameta 63
bear-baiting 18–20
Beaumont, Francis 122
Bell Savage playhouse 19
Betterton, Thomas 72, 85
binder 148
Bishop, Nicholas 12
Blackfriars playhouse 15, 71, 104, 117, 156; description of 29–30; history of
17–18; setting of 9–10
blasphemy 53–55, 144
Blayney, Peter 148–149
book see prompter’s book
boy companies 17–18
boy players 17–18, 70–71, 105–106, 119, 120, 141–142
Branagh, Kenneth 112
Brathwait, Richard 32
Brayne, John 11–12
Brayne family 12
‘Britain’ 11, 159
Brook, Peter 89
Brooke, Ralph 153
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brothels 12, 14 see also prostitutes
Buchel, Aernout van 22
Bulwer, John: Chirologia and Chironomia 83
Burbage, Cuthbert 13
Burbage, James 11–12, 16
Burbage, Richard 12–13; as actor 16, 24, 57, 72–73, 83–84, 89, 98
Burton, Robert 158
candles 30; as symbols 95
Cassibellaunus 10
catchwords 148
Chamberlain, Richard 57
Chamberlain’s Men 12–14, 51, 57, 67, 71 see also King’s Men
Chapman, George: Eastward Ho! 7
Chettle, Henry 36
Chinon of England 63
Clayton, Thomas 58
Clink prison 14
Collier, John Payne 102
commonplace books 20–21, 42–43, 45
compositors 38, 58, 150–156 see also printing house
Condell, Henry 34, 37, 38, 47, 121, 156
costumes 94, 101–107; and vizards 9
court performances 32–33, 120
Coward, Noel 133–134
Crane, Ralph 143–144
cues 77, 80, 85, 88, 123–136
cue-scripts see parts
Curtain playhouse 15, 21
Cymbeline 10
Cyprian Conqueror 82
Davenant, William 85
Davies, John 28
Dekker, Thomas 36; Westward Ho! 7; Wonder of a Kingdom 118
Dessen, Alan 104
Devereux, Robert 51
directors 88–89
Downes, John 85
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Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester 11
Essex, Earl of see Devereux, Robert
Elizabeth I 10, 51
entrance charges 18–19, 30, 121, 156
entrances 25, 88, 94, 144, 145; massed entrances 143
epilogues see prologues
Everard, Edward Cape 118
exits 25, 88, 144, 145
‘fair’ papers 142–143, 145, 146
Famous History of Friar Bacon 99
Famous Victories of Henry V 63
fence play 19
ferry-boats 7
first performances 121–122
flags see stage
Flecknoe, Richard 89
Fletcher, John 13, 122; Faithful Shepherdess 121
folio: described 47–49, 147–148; typeface 113–114 see also plays by name in
Shakespeare, William
formes 147–148
Fortune playhouse 16, 104
‘foul papers’ 141–143, 145, 146–147
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay see Greene, Robert
Gayton, Edmund 78
Glapthorne, Henry 70; Ladies Privilege 73
Globe playhouse 7, 9, 20, 67, 132, 146, 156; audience of 28–29; description of
14–17; plays for 30, 32; props in 98, 104; sign of 16–17, 25
Goldring, Beth 58
Gower, John 13
Greene, Robert: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 99–100; Orlando Furioso 77, 125
Grove, Francis 99
gunpowder plot 146
Hall, Joseph 29
Halliwell 11, 15
Hausted, Peter: Rival Friends 121
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‘heavens’ see stage
‘hell’ see stage
Heminges, John 34, 37, 38, 47, 121, 156
Henslowe, Philip 63, 97, 98
Herbert, Henry 145
Heywood, Thomas 36, 83, 119; Four Prentices of London 122; Queen Elizabeth
46; Royal King and Loyal Subject 125
hired men 145
Hope playhouse 18
Ignoramus 125
imitation 44
instruction see rehearsal
Ioppolo, Grace 59
Jaggard, William 153, 156
James IV 33, 159
Jones, John 59
Jonson, Ben 7, 21, 24, 35, 45, 78, 143; Cynthia’s Revels 120; New Inn, The 121;
Timber 49–50; Works of 47–48
Kempe, William 67–69; Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder 67
Kerrigan, John 58
Killigrew, Thomas 76; The Princess 131
King’s Men 29, 61, 143, 144 see also Chamberlain’s Men
Knight, Edward 145
Kyd, Thomas: Spanish Tragedy 72, 84, 96–97, 98; ‘Ur’-Hamlet 56–57, 90
Lambarde, William 19
letters see props
‘liberties’ 8, 11, 13, 17
London 7, 18, 45, 62, 145; gates of 10–11 see also Ludgate
London Bridge 7–8, 13
Lowen, John 72, 85
Ludgate 9–11, 13
Malone, Edmund 97
Manningham, John 72
Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus 99–100; Jew of Malta 63, 105
Marston, John 21; Antonio and Mellida 78–79, 106; Eastward Ho! 7; Insatiate
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Countess 131
masques 32, 40
Massinger, Philip 13
Master of the Revels 35, 144–145
Middleton, Thomas 25, 60–61; Faire Quarrel, A 125
Miles, Robert 12
Mulmutius, King, 10
Munday, Anthony: Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon 35; John a Kent and
John a Cumber 35
music 25, 32; songs 60–61, 70–71, 73–74, 107–112, 113–118
North, Thomas 43–44
Parkes, William 16
Paris Garden 19
parts 46, 63, 77–90, 123–136, 145
passion 79
Peacham, Henry 102
Phillips, Edward: The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence 122
Phoenix playhouse 16 see also Fortune playhouse
pillars see stage
plague 145
Platter, Thomas 22
playbills see advertising
play ‘runs’ 45, 62
Powell, George 85
printing house 40, 124, 147–158 see also compositors, binders
prisons 10–11
Pritchard, Hannah 129
prologues 113–114, 118–122
prompter 53, 79, 88, 124, 142, 144–145
prompter’s book 48, 79, 123, 143, 144–145, 147
props 26, 94–107; letters as 113–114, 118; songs as 113–118
prostitutes 14 see also brothels
Prynne, William 48
Puritans 11
Pythagorus 63
quartos 48–49; ‘bad’ 46–47; described 45–47, 147; ‘good’ 46, 146–147; typeface
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113 see also plays by name in Shakespeare, William
Queen Anne’s Men 119
racism 9
Randolph, Thomas 34
Red Bull 27, 76, 119
Red Lion 11
rehearsal 76–90; instruction 79–84, 87
Return from Parnassus 84
Rochester, Bishop of 9
Rose playhouse 13, 16, 25, 63, 97
Rowley, Samuel: All’s Lost by Lust 118
St Mary Overies 13
St Paul’s Cathedral 18
Seneca 30
Seven Days of the Week 63
Shakespeare, Edmund 13
Shakespeare, William: 12–13, 28, 34–35, 60, 72, 85; and Hand ‘D’ 36; mints new
words 21–22
All’s Well that Ends Well 48, 69, 114; title of 158
Antony and Cleopatra 24, 48; compositorial problems in 149, 155; music in 25,
108, 109; and North’s Plutarch 43–44; and props 95–96, 103; title of 158
As You Like It 24, 48, 69, 105; boys in 70; epilogue of 121; and Globe reference
14; and Oliver’s transformation 82, 106–107
Book of Sir Thomas More 35–38, 48, 137–139, 141
Comedy of Errors 48
Coriolanus 28, 48, 73
Cymbeline 25, 32, 48, 66, 73, 156; and boy singers 70; and early English kings
10; and ‘Innogen’ 141; title of 159
Edward III 48
Hamlet 26, 38, 49, 65, 67, 72, 73, 83, 98, 107, 108, 146; attitude to players
17–18, 64, 66, 70, 80, 84; ‘bad’ quarto 27, 55–57, 100; discusses damned
play 121; and exits 93; in folio 57–58, 140; ‘good’ quarto 57–58, 140; and
‘heavens’ 24–25; and
Julius Caesar 74–76; ‘lost’ phrases from 57; and minting words 22, 141; and
parts 85–87, 88, 132–133, 135–136; and props 91–92, 94–95, 100; revisions
in 57–58, 89–90, 135–136, 140; and songs 111–112; and ‘tables’ 42
1 Henry IV 12, 48, 52, 53, 116; Falstaff in 50, 73, 76, 80; Oldcastle in 50, 76
2 Henry IV 12, 49, 73, 76, 98, 121
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Henry V 28, 49, 52, 125, 141; prologue of 15, 119, 120; revision in 51
1 Henry VI 12, 48, 80
2 Henry VI 12, 19, 49, 57, 119
3 Henry VI 12, 49
Henry VIII 32, 48, 82, prologue of 15, 114, 120–121, title of 156
Julius Caesar 18, 19, 38, 48, 103, 107; advertisements for 74–76; music in 109,
115–116; revision in 40–42, 49–50, 52
King John 12, 28–29, 48, 53, 65; descriptions of characters in 66, 93–94; props
in 98, 100–101
King Lear 49, 55, 65, 68, 72, 80, 82, 106, 129; ‘Britain’ in 159; songs in 73–74;
textual difference in 58–60, 110–111, 142, 146, 149–150, 151–152, 153; title
of 156
Love’s Labour’s Lost 12, 22, 45, 48, 65, 67, 82–83, 146; author of 158; printing
errors in 153–154; variant passages in 38–40; song in 116–117
Macbeth 19, 20, 26, 41–42, 48, 65–66, 105, 146; court performance of 32–33;
lack of scenery in 93; music in 60–61, 107, 108, 117; and parts 129,
134–135; props in 95; title of 158
Measure for Measure 30, 48, 52, 66, 117, 135
Merchant of Venice 12, 48, 65, 67, 132; clothes in 105; and parts 126–129;
printing of 152–153
Merry Wives of Windsor 49, 53, 73, 118–119; and loss of Globe 13; and massed
headings 143–144
Midsummer Night’s Dream 12, 20, 48, 89, 98; epilogue of 40, 121; and parts
77–78, 123–124, 125; rehearsal in 77–78, 87–88, 123–124; variant endings
of 40
Much Ado About Nothing 12, 48, 67, 69, 73, 125; and parts 131–132; printing of
148
Othello 49, 57, 58, 66, 72, 73, 82, 88, 116, 135; blackness in 9, 95; doubling in
106; props in 95, 104–105; singing in 71, 117; swearing in 53–55; textual
variants in 53–55, 71, 139–140, 155; title of 158
Pericles 13, 32, 48, 52, 122; music in 109–110, 116,
Richard II 12, 49, 51–52, 132, 151
Richard III 9, 18, 19, 49, 53, 100; Burbage in 72; ‘lost’ phrases from 57;
prologue of 119; ‘transitions’ in 81; title of 156
Romeo and Juliet 12, 16, 21, 45, 48, 49, 65, 66, 82, 88, 144; clothes in 104;
position in folio 119–120; textual variants in 39–40, 141–142, 147; title 158
Sir Thomas Moore see Book of Sir Thomas Moore
Taming of the Shrew 48, 73, 87, 109
Tempest 25, 32, 48, 119, 156; epilogue of 121; lack of scenery in 92–93;
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printing errors in 154–155
Timon of Athens 48, 120
Titus Andronicus 26, 49, 53, 83, 101–103, 144
Troilus and Cressida 24, 38, 49, 100, 108–109, 119–120
Twelfth Night 20, 48, 52, 53, 69, 73, 80, 82; boys in 105–106; and parts 87,
125–126, 129–131; revision in 70–71; songs in 70–71, 74, 108, 114, 117,
118; title of 158
Two Gentlemen of Verona 20, 48, 67, 105, 143
Two Noble Kinsmen 48
Winter’s Tale 20, 32, 48, 66, 82, 143; and parts 80–81; revision in 52, 118
‘comedies’ 48, 156
‘history plays’ 18, 32, 48, 156–157
‘Roman’ plays 18
‘romances’ 32
tragedies 32, 48, 156
sharers 76, 145
Shirley, James 98; The Duke’s Mistress 115
songs see music
Southbank see Bankside
Southwark Cathedral see St Mary Overies
Southwark see Bankside
spectators see audience
Spielberg, Steven 89
stage: flags of 16, 20; ‘heavens’ of 24–25, 29; ‘hell’ of 24–26, 29, 102; pillars on
23–24; ‘thrust’ out 22–23; trap-door of 25–26, 73, 102
stationers’ register 105, 141
stenography 46
Stephens, John 89
stews see brothels
strolling players 11, 17–18, 145–146
stock plays 62
Stow, John 10
Streete, Peter 13
Swan theatre 16, 22
Surrey 13, 15–18, 20
‘tables’ see commonplace books
Tarlton, Richard 21, 27, 153
Taylor, John 97–98
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Taylor, Joseph 72
Terence 30
Thames 7, 15, 20
Theatre playhouse11–15, 19, 21
‘thrust’ stage see stage
Tower of London 18
traitors’ heads 8–9
trap-door see stage
traveling players see strolling players
‘trial’ see first performance
typecasting 63–76
Ur-Hamlet see Kyd, Thomas
Vaughan, Henry 10
vizards see costumes
Warren, Michael 58
Warning for Fair Women 98
watermen 7
Webster, John: Westward Ho! 7; Dutchess of Malfi 73
Wilkins, George: Painful Adventure of Pericles 122
Winchester, Bishop of 14
Witt, Johannes de 22
Wright, Thomas: Passions of the Mind in General 82
Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton 51
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