by Shakespeare
Words were not the only theatrical reality. There was much music. The little group of musicians in the balcony, no more than six or seven, would have included a trumpeter and a drummer, as well as players of horns, recorders, “hoboyes” or “hautboys” and lutes. There are also reports of actors playing instruments upon the stage itself. Alleyn was a lutanist, for example, and on his death Augustine Phillips bequeathed a bass viol, bandore, cittern and lute. The players certainly performed songs and ballads on stage, and they were chosen in part for the quality of their voices. Certain plays must have resembled “musicals” rather than dramas. Music was associated on the stage with sleep and healing, with love and death. It was employed as a prelude to supernatural visitations. And of course it accompanied the numerous dances of Shakespearian drama. In the combination of music and movement we may glimpse the harmony of the spheres.
Many of the lyrics of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays were written by the dramatist himself, and there is evidence in his later life of collaboration with such skilled musicians as Thomas Morley and Robert Johnson. Morley had been his neighbour in Bishopsgate, and was also part of the circle around the Countess of Pembroke; so there were many opportunities for their meeting. It was Morley who wrote the musical setting for one of Shakespeare’s most famous songs, “It was a lover and his lass.” Robert Johnson was related, as we have seen, to Emilia Lanier, who through her influence had him indentured to Sir George Carey; he collaborated extensively with Shakespeare in the music of the late plays. Johnson is largely remembered for two songs from The Tempest, “Full fathom five” and “Where the bee sucks,” but at the time he played a not inconsiderable role in the staging and effects of dramas such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. It is significant that when Shakespeare does import songs from other sources, however, he generally chooses the popular ballad material of sixteenth-century England. These were the ballads he had heard in childhood.
From the references in his drama it is clear that Shakespeare had a technical knowledge of music and of musical terms. This was almost a commonplace skill in the period, where music-making was an indispensable aspect of social life; sight-reading of music was a familiar accomplishment. All the evidence suggests that Shakespeare possessed an acute and sensitive ear. He was a hater of discord in all its forms, even though his plays thrive upon a kind of harmonious discord. He would in any case have been required to sing, and perhaps also to play an instrument, upon the stage. His characters frequently burst into song, among them such unlikely vocalists as Hamlet and Iago, and there are endless references in his plays to the power and sweetness of music. The songs of Ophelia and of Desdemona are employed to touch the scenes of tragedy with eternal harmonies. The music of The Winter’s Tale and of The Tempest is an important part of their meaning. It can be argued, in fact, that Shakespeare was the first English dramatist to make song an integral part of the drama, apart from the anonymous chants of the medieval Mysteries, and can thus be seen as the begetter of the musical theatre. In that, as in so many other matters, he was a divining rod for the nation’s genius. It is worth remarking that he was the contemporary of two of the greatest composers in the history of English music, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. It was an epoch of profound musical accomplishment. It has been said that England was once “a nest of singing birds,” and it was a matter of particular comment among foreign visitors that music was closely woven within London stage performances.
Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, the “outdoor” playhouses were being replaced by “indoor” theatres. In those quieter surroundings, there was music between the recently introduced “acts”-in fact acts may have been devised solely for the purpose of affording musical accompaniments – and there was often a musical performance before the play actually began. Conditions at the Globe, in the open air and in front of a larger and more restive audience, were not conducive to such refined entertainment.
The stage itself was full of noises. Plays were acccompanied by the simulated sound of horses’ hooves and of birdsong, of bells and of cannons. Voices off-stage amplified battle scenes with cries of “Kill, kill, kill,” loud shouts, shrieks and general clamour. There were fireworks available, for lightning, and smoke was used to imitate fog or mist. When the directions called for “thunder” a sheet of metal was shaken vigorously, and squibs were let off, behind the scene. The sound of pebbles in a drum could counterfeit the sea, and a piece of canvas tied to a wheel could mimic the wind. The sound of dried peas upon a metal sheet would substitute for rain.
Lighting was another source of stage-effects. Torches or tapers were used to signify night. There were certain scenes where supernumeraries would come upon the stage carrying candles as an indication of a night-time banquet or meeting. On occasions lights were placed behind bottles of coloured water to provide sinister or supernatural illumination. In the late sixteenth century the stage was the centre of public enchantment.
CHAPTER 63
Why There You Toucht
the Life of Our Designe
The repertoire of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe was extensive and various. Quite apart from Shakespeare’s plays they seem to have owned approximately one hundred other dramas ranging from Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose to Stuhlweissenburg, from The London Prodigal to The Fair Maid of Bristol. In all of these plays it is likely that Shakespeare played his part. It is not clear how long it required to stage a revival, but it took between two and three weeks to prepare a new play. Since on average fifteen new plays were performed each year, the schedule of business was extremely tight. The records of the Globe have not survived but related material from the Rose suggests that the players there gave 150 performances of thirty separate plays during one winter season. In any week a different play was performed each afternoon. Nothing can better capture the vitality and excitement of the new medium. The constant demand was for novelty.
There was a tested procedure for the production of these new plays. The author or authors, as we have noted, would approach the playhouse with a skeleton narrative for a new play. On the basis of this scenario the playhouse might commission the drama, with a series of part payments followed by the remainder when a satisfactory manuscript or “book-of-the-play” was delivered. At the time of its final delivery the players met in order to listen to the playwright reading out the entire text. There is a note in Philip Henslowe’s diary, in May 1602, for two shillings “layd owt for the companye when they read the playe of Jeffa for wine at the tavern.” It may have been at this juncture, or slightly later, that the “book-keeper” prepared a “plot” or outline of the action in which the names of the actors, the stage-props required, and the requisite stage-noises, were written down. But by far the most important function of the “plot” was to list the sequence of entries, and thus the number of scenes. It was a way of adjusting the play, in other words, to the available resources and numbers of the company. One task, for example, was carefully to allot the roles to individual actors so that “doubling” (one actor taking two parts) became easily achieved. The player, however skilled, could not be in two places on the same stage. The plot was divided into individual scenes by the simple expedient of a line ruled across the various columns, and each scene began with the direction “Enter.” This was also placed on pasteboard and hung in the tiring-house behind the stage as an aide-memoire to players.
A member of the company, perhaps the book-keeper himself, also copied down the individual actor’s parts on a “scroll” or long strips of paper. It was this that the player carried about with him and memorised. One of those given to Edward Alleyn, for the part of Orlando in Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, has survived. It is made up of fourteen half-sheets of paper pasted together so that it forms a continuous roll some 17 feet in length and 6 inches in width. The speeches are given “cues” in the last words of the previous speaker, and there are occasional directions.
The author’s original manuscript became the “play-book,” known als
o as the “Book.” It was used to adapt the manuscript for theatrical performance, but such was the speed and professionalism of the theatrical company that in practice little was done. In certain circumstances stage-action was simplified and speeches shortened. But these were rare interventions. The more usual notes were simply concerned with the traffic of the stage. The author’s list of characters, for example, was substituted by the names of individual actors. The stage-properties, and the “noises off,” were incorporated. The author’s own stage-directions were occasionally revised; entrances, for example, were marked earlier so that the actor had more time to cross the stage. Other stage-directions by the author were left, although they must often have been ignored. His vision was no longer important. It had become a collective reality.
It seems likely that the “book-keeper” also superintended the rehearsals of the play, with prompt-copy in hand, and also acted as prompter during the performance itself. The prompter did not perform his modern task of whispering lines to an actor who was “out”; his role was to co-ordinate entrances and expedite the use of properties and “noises off.” There is a reference in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour to a choleric gentleman who “would swear like an Elephant, and stamp and stare (God blesse us) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors misse their entrance.” We may only conclude that the book-keeper was sometimes also the prompter, and sometimes not. The player himself, however, was assisted neither by prompter nor by bookkeeper. Once he was on the stage he relied upon his own resources and his own professionalism, as well as the support of the rest of the players, who no doubt covered any lapse of memory or mistake in timing.
Before any play could be performed, the finished text had to be despatched to the Master of the Revels in Clerkenwell for possible alteration and censorship. For a fee, which rose steadily through the years from 7 shillings to £1, the Master licensed each drama for public performance. With his signature appended to the manuscript it became the “allowed” book, available for performance throughout England. It was a most important document indeed and one that in ordinary circumstances the company would keep within its possession.
Obvious allusions to current events were of course examined very carefully by the Master of the Revels. Any challenge to the established authorities, overt or implied, was taken out. As the authors and actors of The Isle of Dogs discovered, there were also civil penalties for public disrespect. That is why the deposition scene of the monarch in Richard II was removed during Elizabeth’s lifetime. To the book of Sir Thomas More the Master of the Revels has added: “Leave out the insurrection wholy amp; the cause thereoff”; the caution was necessary in a period when the threat of civic violence in London was strong. Blasphemy was of course forbidden. One manuscript is marked by the command to remove “Oathes, prophaness amp; publick Ribaldry.” 1 The evidence, however, suggests that relations between the theatrical companies and the Revels Office were generally good. They were, in a sense, in the same business.
Assuming that all the formalities and the stage-mechanics had been satisfactorily completed, a play could be performed upon the stage within a few weeks of its being handed to the company. There was a premium on speed and professional competency. The rehearsals of new plays, and of revivals, occurred in the morning. There was no director in the contemporary sense but, as has been suggested, the book-keeper may have played that role in many productions. There is the strong probability that Shakespeare himself performed that duty when his own plays were in rehearsal. It would be the natural thing to do. An excellent dancer such as Will Kempe was responsible for the choreography, and a musician such as Augustine Phillips arranged the music.
A German traveller noted, on a visit to London in 1606, that the players were “daily instructed, as it were in a school, so that even the most eminent actors have to allow themselves to be taught their places by the dramatists.”2 This may have been a misunderstanding, so common in foreign reports of sixteenth-century London, since it is unlikely that an eminent actor would have endured direction from a young or minor playwright. But it would have been different with Shakespeare. Evidence to that effect comes in Richard Flecknoe’s Short Discourse of the English Stage, published in 1664, in which he describes how in the time of Shakespeare and Jonson “it was the happiness of the Actors of those Times to have such Poets as these to instruct them, and write for them; and no less of those Poets to have such docile and excellent Actors to Act their Playes as a Field and Burbidge.”3 They were not directed; they were “instructed.”
The actors had the “scrolls” of their own lines, but no complete script. They memorised or part-memorised their words before beginning the rehearsal itself. It can be inferred that approximately thirteen principal actors and boys were gathered together on this occasion. The smaller roles need not have been rehearsed. At this stage jokes were added or taken out, difficulties of action overcome, and obscurities of plot or dialogue clarified. At this point, too, the problems attendant on “doubling” were resolved. This was often done unobtrusively, but there were occasions when the Elizabethan players revelled in the artificiality of the procedure. Doubling was an obvious excuse for comedy as well as mystery. It also provided the actor with an opportunity to display his virtuosity and versatility, and it has been calculated that a player needed the time of just twenty-seven lines to change roles. In certain plays Shakespeare will allow precisely that amount of time for the transformation. There were occasions, too, when the audience revelled in “doubling.” When an actor dies on stage as one character, but then re-emerges as another living – this must often have been the cue for shouts of approval.
There is every reason to believe that actors and writers in rehearsal behaved very differently from their modern counterparts, who seem to be held in thrall to their director. In contrast the Elizabethan actor suggested lines, or ways of delivering lines, and may even have helped to invent new scenes to assist the progress of the plot. In the “epistle” to a publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher it is announced that “when these Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the Stage, the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour’s consent) as occasion led them.”4 The plays of Shakespeare were not treated very differently. The play is not a piece of writing, but a collaborative event; it is never finished, in other words, but subject to a continuous and inevitable process of change. There was in the sixteenth century a well-understood set of stage conventions, however, which helped the process of rehearsal; there were principles of movement and gesture that the good actor would have known instinctively. It is interesting, for example, that exits are rarely mentioned in stage texts; it was assumed that competent performers would know exactly when to leave the stage.
A general “run” of a new play was between four to six weeks, played at intervals, but of course there were always revivals and reworkings whenever the occasion required them. The general business of the day would include rehearsals in the morning, playing in the afternoon, and the learning of innumerable lines in the evening. In the case of Shakespeare this was complemented by the necessity of writing plays in relatively quick succession. He was continually, and exhaustingly, occupied. J. M. W. Turner once said that the secret of genius was “hard work,” a sentiment with which Shakespeare would have agreed.
CHAPTER 64
See How the Giddy Multitude
Doe Point
Everyone knew when the playhouse was open. A flag was flown from the roof, announcing the news, and a trumpet was blown to alert those in the vicinity. Playbills advertising the forthcoming entertainment had already been pasted onto walls and posts, as well as the doors of the Globe itself. These “bills” gave the time and place, title and company, as well as sensationalist details to attract the public- “the pittiefull murther … the extreame crueltie … the most deserved death” and so on. The play itself began with three “flourishes” from the small orchestra, designed in part to still the ever restless audience. Then there came upon t
he stage the “prologue,” attired in a long black velvet cloak, false beard and a wreath of bay-leaves. It was he who introduced the play and pleaded for the audience’s attention.
At the end of the play, after the epilogue had been concluded, the next and forthcoming drama was announced to the audience. There then followed the prayers for the monarch, when all the actors knelt upon the stage. And then there came the jig. Its name suggests a merry folk dance, but its provenance goes wider. The stage jig was a comic afterpiece accompanied by dancing, lasting for approximately twenty minutes, in which some or all of the players joined. Its principal exponents were of course the comedians in the company who, like Will Kempe, gained a reputation for their extempore dancing; they turned like a “gig,” or top, and sang ribald or personal songs.
The jigs often included folk dances and ballads as well as what are euphemistically termed “figure dances” by the comedians and boys. They were characterised and criticised for their bawdiness, described variously as “a nasty bawdy Iigge” and “obscaene and light Iigges.”1
Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage (the auspices are rarely favourable), and the couples are in a sense unconsummated; that consummation may have been depicted in the jig. And it was a jig in which Shakespeare himself would have joined. In many instances it seems to have been the most popular part of the afternoon’s entertainment, “called for” by the impatient audience at the end of the play. The crowd could also demand the performance of a favourite jig such as “master Kemps Newe jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman” or “a ballad of Cuttinge George and his hostis.”2