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Shakespeare's Profession: What the Playwright Saw
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Peter Thomson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In contemporary theatre, it is not uncommon that the writer will detail in the script every aspect of the performance: Samuel Beckett, for example, remained adamant that his plays could be performed only in the manner specified by him. Shakespeare's situation would have been very different. In this extract from chapter 4 of his book Shakespeare's Professional Career (available through Fathom), Peter Thomson looks at the unenviable lot of the playwright in Elizabethan England. |
 o be successful, a professional playwright needed to observe fashion. Only the outstandingly successful or outrageously arrogant, like Marlowe or Jonson, would presume to challenge or lead that fashion. It was to the journeyman-writer that 'normal practices' applied. Such a journeyman would begin his campaign for performance by proposing a story to a company of players or to a single leading member of such a company. If the story seemed promising, he might be asked to furnish the company with a plot. It is presumably to this practice that Meres refers in Palladis Tamia when he calls Anthony Munday 'our best plotter'. There is, of course, a genuine skill in the effective division of a story into appropriately dramatisable episodes, however short of high art that skill may be. Armed with his 'plot', the playwright could then return to the players for further discussion. He would be carrying something not unlike the prose 'argument' with which Shakespeare prefaced The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. If the decision then taken is that the plot merits expansion into a play, detailed plans for its writing can be undertaken, perhaps with the sweetener of £2 as a down-payment. With new plays at such a premium, speed of completion is a recommendation for future employment, and joint-authorship is a useful aid to rapidity of composition. Richard Dutton has alertly compared the playwrights' syndicates of the Elizabethan theatre to Hollywood's 'writing factories' of the 1930s and 1940s (R. Dutton, William Shakespeare, 1989, pp. 27-28). Our modern squeamishness about collaboration is anachronistic. Shakespeare's evident reluctance to collaborate might just as well be used as proof that he was unusually unpopular among fellow-writers as in support of his greater artistic integrity. The more important point is that he was uniquely secure among late Elizabethan playwrights in his status as a member of the 'board of directors' of London's most successful theatre company. Sole composition has many advantages over collaboration, but speed is not one of them. For a man like Thomas Dekker, dependent on his income from writing to support an inclination to spend money prodigally, collaboration was a necessity. Carol Rutter emphasises the point with a nice contrast of two playwrights at work for Henslowe in the summer of 1598:
Chapman at thirty-eight years of age was something of a donkey, content to plod along, solitary, while the young veteran Thomas Dekker (only twenty-six) was the stable's sociable farmyard cock, perpetually scratching around for more work. The same month Chapman was working on a single play, and finding it difficult to produce even a title for it, Dekker was involved in six plays, all of them collaborations (C. Rutter (ed.), Documents of the Rose, 1984, p. 141).
But this suggests too readily, perhaps, that such frenzy was a source of delight to Dekker. The stresses of professional writing were, in fact, considerable, and Dekker was quite as much the victim as the beneficiary of market forces. |
Plotting consistency
Let us, for convenience, assume that the task of filling out an accepted plot has been divided five ways, with each of five writers undertaking to combine a sequence of episodes into a single Act. The syndicate must, presumably, meet at least once during composition in order to avoid damaging repetitions, resurrections from the dead or other inconsistencies, and once at the end to read over the finished product and make the necessary emendations. The manuscript, written in five different hands and dotted with corrections, is then delivered to the players, who demonstrate their satisfaction by paying a further £4 or £5 for appropriate division among the authors. The manuscript is now the possession of the acting company. If they are lucky, each author will have written in a legible hand and the manuscript will not be too defaced by late corrections, but such good luck is hard to credit. The players must anyway deliver the precious pages to a scribe, paying him to make a fair copy. In doing so, the scribe may correct some errors in the original whilst, almost inevitably, making new ones of his own. I have not tried to work out how long it would take to complete a fair hand-written copy of Hamlet, but the task would not have been a light one. And, of course, one copy is not enough. What, after all, is the fate of the fair copy? It has to be chopped up so that it can reach each of the actors in the form of a complete 'part'. This part, pasted together and presented to him in the form of a scroll, is then adorned with the minimum necessary cues and stage directions. Before this can happen, then, a second fair copy will need to be made, presumably using the first as a master with reference made to the authors' original manuscript only rarely, if at all. Again, more errors are bound to creep in, more unintentional emendations to be made. Now, with all the necessary payments made, the company possesses three copies: the first is the 'foul papers' of the original conglomerate manuscript, the second has been chopped into pieces and turned into a collection of various-sized scrolls, and the third can be marked up as the promptbook. |
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| Customs die hard. In this drawing from 1891, the actor has a stick in one hand and his rolled-up part in the other. | |
If we follow the career of the second copy, we get close to the heart of playhouse pragmatism. To 'possess' a part in the Elizabethan theatre could mean, literally, to possess the scroll on which that part was written. To lose a part--by dropping it in the street or leaving it in a tavern--might threaten a whole performance. The storing of parts, once memorised by the actor, may have been an important playhouse task. How else, without frequent additional payments to a scribe, could new actors replace old ones? and how else could the danger of an actor's defection to a rival company, with all his parts in his possession, be avoided? We have nothing but surmise on which to base an assessment of exactly how many fair copies of a play were held by the company which owned it, but one 'part' survives. It was Edward Alleyn's in Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso (1591). Opened out, the part is about seventeen feet long (it was, Alleyn being Alleyn, much the biggest in the play). No scene divisions are marked and the cues are minimal, three words, two words, sometimes only one. There are scattered stage directions, the short ones in Latin and a few longer ones in English. The text also carries alterations in Alleyn's hand. There is no reason to assume that Greene had colluded in these alterations. There were, I have no doubt, occasions of hurt pride when the parts in a new play were first distributed. Everyone could tell the size of the part by the size of the scroll. Shakespeare exploits the humour of these occasions in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Peter Quince gives out parts to the mechanicals; substantial scrolls for Bottom and Flute, smaller ones for Starveling and Snout, none at all for Snug, who 'may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring' (I.ii.71-2). Later, during the interrupted rehearsal, Flute excites the laughter of the cognoscenti in the audience by his inability to cope with the conventional lay-out of a part on the scroll. Quince is a little impatient: 'you must not speak that yet; that you answer to Pyramus: you speak all your part at once, cues and all' (III,i.103-6). Incidentally, either the compositor or the playhouse scribe seems to have omitted something from Shakespeare's original text. The Flute of the received version has no cues to speak. Such are the hazards of the transmission of a script from Elizabethan playwright to Jacobean printer. |
Actors and acting
A deal of archaising sentimentality has entered into the assumptions of literary scholars about the beauty of the original performances of Shakespeare's plays. The antics of Quince's company, though risibly exaggerated, represent something closer to reality. At the point where his individual creativity entered the public domain of playhouse practice, an Elizabethan dramatist had to accept the fact that, whilst each actor might (or might not) know his part, he was in no position to know the play. For those neo-Stanislavskians whose practice dominates the twentieth-century English stage, those for whom a text, however accomplished, serves primarily as the pretext for a histrionic revelation of the subtext, Elizabethan precedent sounds a salutary warning. Carol Rutter offers as exemplary of the pressure under which the Admiral's Men worked at the Rose a ten-week period in 1595 when they gave fifty-seven performances of twenty different plays, four of them new (ibid., p. 91). For an actor like Snug, 'slow of study', such demands would be unsatisfiable, and even the most able must have had difficulty in avoiding the confusion of today's words with those they spoke yesterday and the entirely different ones they would have to speak tomorrow. That is not the particular dilemma of the eight boys who bustle out for the Induction to Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1590/1600), each carrying his part. 'Faith, we can say our parts', says the boy who is to play the important role of Piero, 'but we are ignorant in what mold we must cast our actors.' For adult players, it may have been easier to fashion a character out of memorised words than it was for these boys, but Marston is clearly indicating how an Elizabethan playwright's hopes could be disappointed in performance. The concept of 'character', developed in the nineteenth century, would not have been understood by the Elizabethan actor or his audience. If we are to believe that Shakespeare grasped it intuitively, before there was any available linguistic formulation, we must also recognise that his intuitions would not often have been realised in the playhouse. The primary task of an Elizabethan actor was to deliver a story and to retain the attention of the audience by delivering it effectively. It was less often the playwright whose name attracted audiences (playbills seem not to have mentioned it), than the reputation of the actors, who had bought the plays as commodities and laboured to turn them into profitable merchandise. If the actors failed, the playwright would retain his initial payment but lose the bonus of the takings from a 'benefit' performance, granted to the author at the play's second or third presentation. |
Work or play?
For a playwright like Ben Jonson, it was probably galling to see his play transformed into a number of various-sized scrolls, and the fair copy (as well, probably, as the foul papers) in the possession of the company that had bought the play. There was nothing to stop him 'cheating' by paying a scribe to make a copy for his own keeping, though the actors would not have been pleased. There was almost certainly a clause against it in any signed agreement. But Jonson was able to provide the printers with good copy for the production of the unprecedented folio edition of his Works in 1616. The volume was met with admiration by some and with sneers by others. One epigram, addressed 'To Mr Ben Jonson demanding the reason why he called his plays works', enquired:
Pray tell me, Ben, where doth the mystery lurk,
What others call a play, you call a work?
Four years earlier, the bibliophile Sir Thomas Bodley had grouped plays with almanacs and proclamations among 'idle books and riff-raffs'. Reproaching the keeper of his library for cataloguing them, Bodley conceded that 'Haply some plays may be worth the keeping: but hardly one in forty' (quoted in G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1971, p. 52). Jonson's handsome volume contributed to the gradual rise in the respect for plays as literature, but it should be remembered that Bodley's love of books was exceptional in the England of Elizabeth I and James I. The inventory of Sir Henry Unton's house at Wadley draws attention to the 'many books of divers sorts' in his study, but the actual number given is only 220(see R. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth, 1977, p. 100). Unton was a cultured diplomat whose library was of sufficient size to draw comment: we do not know whether it included any plays. There is, in fact, no way of determining who bought the plays that the London printers and provincial chapmen sold. New books were customarily brought out during the legal terms, when London was buzzing with lawyers and their litigious clients. Such people would certainly have figured among the playhouse audiences, and there was no shortage of unscrupulous printers eager to cash in on theatrical popularity. Plays sold best when the acting companies would least have wished them to be available, at the height of their on-stage success. The provenance of the copy from which some of these hastily printed quarto editions were printed was highly suspect. Like Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood was drawn into publication chiefly by the urge to provide accurate alternatives to stolen and butchered texts of his plays, as he is at pains to explain in the prologue to If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605):
...some by Stenography drew
The plot: put it to print: (scarce one word trew:)
And in that lamenesse it hath limp't so long,
The Author now to vindicate that wrong
Hath tooke the paines, upright upon its feete
To teache it walke...
But, again like Shakespeare, Heywood was an active member of a company of players and was, therefore, professionally reluctant to publish his plays. He knew that other playwrights were less scrupulous and protested, in an address to the reader prefacing the published text of The Rape of Lucrece (1608), against what he considers the dishonest practice of those who sell their labours twice, 'first to the stage, and after to the press'. In this respect, Heywood and Shakespeare exhibit a purism that many other playwrights could not afford and a few, Ben Jonson among them, might have taken issue with. The relationship of plays to books was still far from clear. After all, nobody chopped books into pieces to stick them higgledy-piggledy together again. |
The last indignity for a sensitive playwright with high poetic ideals might have been to see his play, which had begun as a plot, reduced to a plot again at its first performance. The allusion here is to a straightforward playhouse custom. As an aide mémoire to busy actors, the company's book-keeper would write out a synopsis or 'plot' of the play and hang it on a wall backstage in the tiring-house. A surviving example is written on foolscap, divided into two columns, with marginal notes on properties and sound-effects. The names of the actors and the characters they are to impersonate are then listed against the episodes in which they are to be involved. The precaution is sensible enough. It is recorded of the eighteenth-century actor, John Palmer, on the occasion of his being entrusted with the title role in William Hayley's new tragedy, Lord Russel (1784), that he
had done with Lord Russel, as he did with many other characters, that is, totally neglected to study the words of the part; and in this dilemma he bethought himself of an expedient, which answered astonishingly, and, indeed, by the audience was never suspected. As much of Lord Russel was unlearned on the night of its performance, he thought it was better to speak from some character that he did know, than one that he did not; whenever, therefore, he felt himself at a loss, he dexterously introduced some passages from the Earl of Essex, which he contrived to fit into the cues received by Lord Russel; and thus, really giving some parts, and masking others, he gained another day to perfect himself in the character. It will be remembered that to his audience this play was completely new; while the dialogue was in progress, and not seemingly irrelevant, there were no means of detection.(J. Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, vol. 1, 1825, p. 193.)
Whilst the anecdote smacks of familiar theatrical exaggeration, it contains a germ of truth. Palmer was a competent actor, sometimes required by circumstance to take on more than he could handle. What is here recorded as intentional confusion of the audience might have begun with the accidental confusion of the actor. Such disorientation would have been all too possible among Elizabethan actors, whose task was to keep separate in their heads the lines and actions of one play from the broadly similar ones of another. Lord Letoy, in Brome's The Antipodes (1636), speaks fondly but realistically of his household players:
...Well sir, my actors
Are all in readiness, and, I think, all perfect
But one, that never will be perfect in a thing
He studies: yet he makes such shifts extempore,
(Knowing the purpose what he is to speak to)
That he moves mirth in me 'bove all the rest.
For I am none of those poetic furies,
That threats the actor's life, in a whole play,
That adds a syllable or takes away.
If he can fribble through, and move delight
In others, I am pleas'd. (II.i.14-24)
Not all authors were as complacent as Letoy, but they would have needed to accustom themselves to the 'fribbling' of actors. Letoy's favourite may not know his part, but he knows 'the purpose what he is to speak to' and will not, therefore, disrupt the flow of the story. He can check his entrance on the hanging 'plot' and will know to leave the stage when his 'purpose' is fulfilled. His on-stage conduct is no longer within the control of the playwright. |
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