Shakespeare on Theatre E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A unique collection of Shakespeare's every reflection on the theatre, offering fascinating insights into the man, his work, and the world of the Jacobean stage. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces – including 'All the world's a stage,' Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals – along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's informed commentary takes us through the entire process of a play's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the 'tiring-house' and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences. 'Refreshing... a lucid and fascinating overview' - Times Literary Supplement 'This remarkable little book... incredibly well-informed... nothing, it seems, is left out' - ReviewsGate.com 'This book is more than a collection of extended quotations. Somogyi's detailed, linking analysis and commentary turns it into quite an original book about Shakespeare's words, working method and contemporary context' - The Stage 'Shakespeare on Theatre gives [de Somogyi] the opportunity to teach us about Shakespeare's experience of drama itself, and his thoughts about it, a major implicit subject in the plays, and to bring together many scattered references. He does this with real passion for the plays as both text and performance… He brilliantly links passages from the plays with commentary and quotes wonderful passages (quite unknown to me before) from other Jacobean writers. De Somogyi's lexical relish and delightfully original wit are obvious throughout; he makes those startling, even absurd, but always apt comparisons to modern life and to the cinema that are often to be enjoyed in his introductions to the Shakespeare Folio editions.'- Dr Jan Piggott FSA, former Head of English and Keeper of Archives at Dulwich College

Leseprobe

Shakespeareon Theatre

edited by

Nick de Somogyi

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Prologues and Inductions

1. Auditions, Casting, and Parts

2. Learning Lines and Rehearsing Roles

3. Props and Costumes, Notes and Rewrites

  Interlude: A ‘Finished’ Script

4. Theatres and Scenery

5. Fluffs, Prompts, Cues, and Snags

6. Audiences, Critics, and Tours

Epilogues and Afterlives

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Epigraph Sources

Index of Works Cited

in memoriam

GEOFFREY BURNSTONE

(1925–2009)

The world’s a Theatre: the earth a stage,

Plac’d in the midst, where both the prince and page,

Both rich and poor, fool, wise man, base and high,

All act their parts in life’s short Tragedy.

Our life’s a tragedy: those secret rooms

Wherein we tire us are our mothers’ wombs.

The music ush’ring in the play is mirth

To see a man-child brought upon the earth.

That fainting gasp of breath which first we vent

Is a Dumb Show; presents the argument.

Our new-born cries, that new-born griefs bewray,

Are the sad Prologue of th’ensuing play.

False hopes, true fears, vain joys, and fierce distracts

Are like the music that divides the Acts.

Time holds the glass, and when the hour’s outrun,

Death strikes the Epilogue, and the Play is done.

Francis Quarles, ‘On the Lifeand Death of a Man’ (c. 1630)

Introduction

1 ACTOR. Gods of the theater, smile on us.

2 ACTOR. You who sit up there, stern in judgment, Smile on us.

1 ACTOR. You who look down on actors—

BOTH. And who doesn’t?

Stephen Sondheim (1974)

Whatever else he was or wasn’t – and bookshelves groan with contending theories – William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was a working man of the theatre to his core. If, to quote the maxim he perfected, ‘All the world’s a stage… And one man in his time plays many parts’, then the world of the theatre in which he lived and worked supplied him with a lifetime of roles. The stage-struck boy, watching in wonder the outlandish spectacle of touring productions. The young father drawn to the amateur dramatics of local maygames and revels. Then, talent-spotted by a later touring troupe, the industrious jobbing actor, hitching his fortunes to the grinding wagon of provincial rep, and learning the tricks of this gradually lucrative trade. Next, in step with his growing confidence as an actor, his precociously impressive skills as a textual fixer for the increasingly creaky melodramas of the repertoire – an improviser of verse and plot no less impressive than the showier repartee of the company Clown. In time, of course, the Londoner, and – after sharing the modern duties of dramaturg, prompter, and ASM – another new title to go with his burgeoning success as a junior co-author: ‘upstart’. Despite being disparaged by the Oxbridge élite in 1592 as a provincial jack of all trades, ‘as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best’ of them, Shakespeare’s parts proliferated: bestselling love-poet (1593); founder-member, with the actor Richard Burbage and the clown Will Kemp, of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594); published – and publicized – playwright (1598); shareholder and artistic director at the Globe theatre (1599); ‘the best and chiefest of our modern writers’ (1601); principal dramatist of the King’s Men, and celebrity box-office gold (1603); financial and artistic investor in the Blackfriars theatre (1609); senior co-author, mentor, and consultant (1613–14); and eventually, after a lifetime spent in a profession legally defined as little better than that of ‘rogues and vagabonds’, the part he may have cherished most, the one with which he described himself in his will (1616): ‘gentleman’. But when, in 1602, an officer at the College of Heralds expressed doubt over Shakespeare’s right to his coat of arms, the condescending term he used probably in fact best defines the man’s lifelong rank, profession, or occupation: ‘Shakespear ye Player’.

Shakespeare was a ‘player’ in nearly all the definitions available in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – ‘gambler’, ‘competitive contestant’, ‘professional (as opposed to gentleman)’, ‘financial speculator’, ‘sexually successful individual’, ‘respected, or influential person’ – but chiefly, of course, in the specifically theatrical sense that enabled all the others throughout his lifetime: ‘A person who acts a character on the stage; a dramatic performer, an actor.’ From the late 1580s to the early 1610s, Shakespeare’s life was regulated by the demands made on him as a ‘dramatic performer’. His calendar years were divided into theatrical seasons, themselves irregularly organized (by politics or plague) between London’s playhouses, its various aristocratic households, and the slog of provincial touring. The odd month or so was presumably snatched back home in Stratford, but his London weeks were determined by an exhausting schedule of all-but daily performance, whether for public profit at the theatre, or private reward at court. The diary of his London days was principally governed by the demands of the public theatres in which he worked – the Theater, the Curtain, the Rose, and the Globe – where, open to the skies, performances largely depended on daylight, the three hours or so of their typical duration therefore starting at around two o’clock in the afternoon. (The candle-light of the indoor Blackfriars theatre was later to extend the available playing time, for a richer clientele, into dark winter afternoons and evenings.)

The rival public theatres seem to have competed for their trade by presenting a different, often new, play every day (while regularly rotating performances of the staple favourites) – a schedule that must have dictated a punishing régime for its actors. With his afternoons devoted to performance, Shakespeare’s mornings must often have involved group rehearsals on the unattended stage – sorting out a new play’s blocking, for example, rehearsing its duels, dances, battles, and special effects, or else simply refreshing the collective memory of an earlier production required for its revival that afternoon. Days were long, and those evenings that were free from the demands of private performance at court or elsewhere would presumably have been as much taken up with the constant grind of learning lines – and in Shakespeare’s case writing and revising them – as the riotous boozing and wenching of popular imagination. Playing was – as it has always been – extremely hard work.

Modern playwrights have increasingly taken to donating (or selling) their working papers to the world’s great libraries, where future scholars may pore over the drafts, rewrites, notes, bills, invoices, and practical correspondence relating to the day-to-day business of making theatre. As it happens, the greatest precedent for such a bequest precisely dates from a few months after Shakespeare’s death, when the charitable foundation established at Dulwich by Burbage’s great rival, the actor Edward Alleyn, first began its work. To this day, the busy transactions of an Elizabethan theatre (the Rose), recorded in the so-called ‘Diary’ of its manager (Alleyn’s father-in-law) Philip Henslowe, together with a rich mass of manuscript correspondence, remains secure in the archives of Dulwich College. The nearest Shakespeare ever came to bequeathing the ‘dedicated words which writers use / Of their fair subject’ (Sonnet 82), however, was the deposit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library of a copy of the 1623 First Folio, the posthumously collected edition of his plays prepared by two of his ‘fellows’, John Heminge and Henry Condell.

In the absence, therefore, of any private, backstage commentary by the world’s foremost playwright – and unlike the other inaugural title in this series, Chekhov on Theatre – this anthology of Shakespeare on Theatre necessarily depends on the public, published nature of his surviving works. Those works, furthermore, seem almost perversely to have steered away from any direct depiction of the London theatre-land in which they were first written and performed. Unlike the many colleagues with whom he worked, collaborated, or quarrelled – Jonson, Marston, and Middleton spring immediately to mind – Shakespeare seems to have winced from dramatizing the daily business of his life too closely. At the same time, the am-dram tantrums of the ‘mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), the notably incompetent pageant that concludes Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595), and the troupes of strolling players that transform the stages of The Taming of the Shrew (1592) and Hamlet (1600–1), for example, cannot but reflect insights into his own profession. Necessarily oblique though such extended glimpses are, however, it does not take very long for a reader or performer of his plays to realize how often his characters ‘talk shop’ by incorporating the technical vocabulary of the stage – the nuts, bolts, and nitty-gritty of their actor–author’s craft. Whether in the relish with which Richard of Gloucester raids the props-basket, the impatience Othello barks at a premature prompt, or the anxious interpretation Bassanio places on an appreciative audience, Shakespeare drew repeated inspiration from the daily circumstances of his working life, almost as if unbidden to his mind.

That inspiration was further assisted by the deeply felt and widespread contemporary notion that each of our individual human lives comprises but a brief cameo appearance in (what Ralegh called) ‘this stage-play world’. Shakespeare’s variant of that phrase – ‘All the world’s a stage’ – has become a commonplace of modern quotation, but the premise it summarized was everywhere in the culture that gave rise to it. The theatrical sense of life, from the trumpeting of its ‘crying’ entrance to its inevitable exit – ‘curtains’, as we still say – profoundly influenced the way it was conducted, from the highest spectacle of monarchy to the daily squalid display of public execution. (The two extremes of this commonplace were to be shockingly conflated in 1649, when Charles I was beheaded outside the building originally designed as an indoor theatre for his father.) At a time when the complex hierarchy of ‘sumptuary law’ minutely regulated who was allowed to wear what, when, and why – and when theatre companies routinely spent more on lavish costumes for a new production than was paid to the authors for its script – the business of the stage, or scaffold, was the material of life.

Drawn from the thirty-six plays collected in the definitive First Folio, as well as the poems and the handful of further plays not included there, and supplemented by reference to the – sometimes dramatically – different wording of their Quarto texts, Shakespeare on Theatre seeks to identify, extract, and present the observations of a lifetime spent on the stage. In addition, since by its nature Shakespeare’s theatrical career throughout involved and required active collaboration, a range of material by his contemporaries has also been included. These supplementary extracts always engage directly with his own words and works, whether in deliberate reply, contemporary parallel, eye-witness observation, or later memory, or else from passages in works to which he is known to have contributed – most prominently the multi-authored Sir Thomas More (in which another troupe of strolling players perform for its title-hero).

The structure of Shakespeare on Theatre broadly follows the progress of a play’s ‘Jacobethan’ production. After a Prologue announcing the tactics by which, in the days before proscenium curtains or blackouts, his audiences were invited to exchange reality for fiction, there come three sections detailing the practical run-up to performance: from (the equivalents of) the audition-hall, via the rehearsal-room, to the costume-department. In keeping with the practical nature of the collection – and in illustration of the ways in which the print of surviving play-texts can sometimes distort or disguise the complicated processes by which they came about – we also include a ‘definitive’ text of Peter Quince’s Pyramus and Thisbe (the play-within-the-play featured in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The next three sections are concerned with the fate of a production from the moment its cast first tread the boards of their theatre – a theatre whose character, structure, and symbolism differed, often profoundly, from our own. But some theatrical experiences endure unchanged, whether in the shape of a fluffed line, a missed cue, or the love–hate relationship that exists between an actor and his audience. (‘His audience’ because in Shakespeare’s day all actors were male – hence the detailed instructions he supplies to the boy-actors playing his female leads.) The fact that Shakespeare and his fellows occasionally grovelled to their royal or aristocratic patrons in their courts, while frequently – and literally – looking down their noses at the groundlings in their public theatre-yards, perhaps represents another continuity for a profession that has always, in Francis Quarles’s phrase, been uniquely ‘Plac’d in the midst’. Quarles’s take on the theatre of our lives (which supplies the epigraph to this book) is one in a series of versions of that theme supplied here – as much as anything to demonstrate Shakespeare’s characteristic perfection of what was then already a cliché. The final section of Shakespeare on Theatre supplies an Epilogue suggesting the various ways in which a performance can live on in the mind after those inevitable final words, in theatre as in life, ‘You that way; we this way’.

Shakespeare seems to have been the first actor in England to be more or less directly described as a ‘Thespian’ (see below, here). The roles he actually learned and played on the various stages of his career include parts in satirical Comedies and classical Tragedies (according to the cast-lists Ben Jonson supplied for Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus), as well as the ‘kingly parts’ of History plays. A later tradition associates him with ‘old man’ characters (perhaps because of his baldness), and it is increasingly accepted that he may also have débuted many of his own Choruses. The shape and span of that career, from bit-part spear-carrier to distinguished mentor, set him apart from most of his rivals. Educated at university or the Inns of Court, those gentleman-playwrights may have trumped his knowledge of Latin and Greek, but they lacked his hands-on experience of theatre’s daily graft. The material gathered in this book therefore ranges from an early tip about how to provoke onstage tears by using an onion-soaked handkerchief, to his grandest reflections on the relation of art to life. It is in part because Shakespeare knew what it was to feel his mouth go dry, and to sense that brief tremor in his limbs as he walked onstage, that the words he wrote have lasted so freshly and vividly into an age when performances are regularly ‘blue-screened’, ‘digitally enhanced’, or ‘phoned in’. The ‘message’ of Shakespeare’s plays will endlessly change, but their ‘medium’ will last for as long as human beings continue to tell each other stories on a stage.

All the extracts collected below have been modernized from their early modern spellings and punctuation, and follow the conventions established in the ongoing ‘Shakespeare Folios’ series (NHB, 2000—). Quotation from Shakespeare’s plays generally follows the 1623 Folio, though the wording from earlier Quarto editions is sometimes also selected. The years supplied for each extract refer to their respective play’s likeliest first performance, or in the case of poems and prose to their date of publication. The individual Section Introductions seek to explain and contextualize the material included in each, while additional explanations also preface many of the individual extracts. The alphabetical Glossary at the end of the book (here) is intended to explain the often difficult words and allusions used in the main text, where they are cued by a °preceding ‘degree’-symbol. Extracts by authors other than Shakespeare have been set in a different style of type, and have also been modernized, by the present editor, where necessary.

This book is based on an original idea by Nick Hern, and I remain deeply grateful to him, both for his continuing faith in me, and for his unparalleled editorial judgement. Profound thanks are also due to the patiently brilliant expertise of Matt Applewhite, Robin Booth, Jodi Gray, and Ian Higham at NHB, as also to the many other friends who have variously helped it on its way, chief among them Fiona Brannon, Dan Burnstone, Miles Croally, Georgina Difford, Calista Lucy, Jane Maud, Jan and Cas Piggott, Tim Underhill, Peter White, and Mary Wilmer.

Prologues and Inductions

Like hungry guests a sitting audience looks,

Plays are like suppers: poets are their cooks.

The founders you; the table is this place:

The carvers we; the Prologue is the grace.

Peter Motteux (1702)

A Prologue to a play is out of date,

A leisurely technique of masquerade.

So please regard me as a friendly shade,

Returning down the years to indicate,

More by my presence than by what I say,

The atmosphere and setting of this play.

Noël Coward (1951)

‘Open your ears!’ The first words of the Chorus to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two (1597) may not seem very subtle, but they are effective. Spoken by the complex figure of ‘Rumour’, his costume ‘painted full of tongues’, they demand a receptive silence from the chattering audience – ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads’ he calls them – now gathered in the open yard before him, and in the echo-chamber of the surrounding galleries. ‘Shut your mouths!’ is what he doesn’t say, but what he certainly means; ‘Open your ears!’ – to a theatre then essentially reliant for its scenery, atmosphere, and lighting on the power of the spoken word. These days on London’s South Bank, the National Theatre publicly flags its repertoire on an electronic billboard outside, ushers its audiences to their seats via a PA system counting down the minutes to curtain-up, and typically signals the outset of each production by dimming the house lights – thereby curtailing the mass perusal of an expensively printed programme, silencing small-talk, and directing all expectant eyes to the pitch-black stage before of them. Needless to say, none of these technical resources was available to the theatres in which Shakespeare worked, though the same practical requirements still held – ‘As happy prologues to the swelling act’ (, 1.3).

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!