Manuscripts, Printing, and Publishing: Encyclopedia Entries
Act and scene division
The basic unit of dramatic construction throughout Shakespeare's career was the scene, which by definition starts and ends with nobody on the stage. Clearing the stage is such an emphatic dramatic break that there was no need for further indication in a play manuscript, and scene divisions are unmarked in all Shakespeare printings before 1623. (They are marked with a horizontal line in surviving playhouse plots, whose precise purpose is unknown.) Within a scene, the action almost always takes place in one location and in real time. An exception is the transition from 1.4 (a street scene) to 1.5 (the Capulet feast) in Romeo and Juliet, in which the maskers "march about the stage" but do not leave it. Editors impose a scene break here to preserve the one-scene-one-place principle. Occasionally Shakespeare compresses time in a scene: Hamlet's first meeting with the ghost, the continuous action of scenes 1.4 and 1.5, starts around midnight and ends around dawn, and Jachimo gets back into his trunk 3 hours after he crept out of in Cymbeline 2.2. The so-called Law of Re-Entry prohibited a character from entering at the start of a scene after leaving the stage at the end of the previous one. To avoid this, a character may exit without motivation (as John of Gaunt does near the end of the first scene of Richard II) in order to be available at the start of the next scene. As with other 'laws', Shakespeare occasionally broke this one: York and Salisbury walk off and straight back on in 3 Henry VI 2.2-2.3.
In outdoor performance the scenes followed one upon another continuously, but indoors the performance was further divided into 5 acts (usually of 2-6 scenes) marked by 4 short musical intervals while the candles were attended to. Across an act interval, re-entry was allowed. In 1608 Shakespeare's company occupied the indoor Blackfriars theater and regularized their practices by adopting at the Globe the habits of the indoor theaters. From this date, the King's men (and other players who imitated them) divided their performances into acts at their indoor and outdoor venues, with interval music played by musicians on show in the stage balcony
Further Reading
Jones, Emrys. Scenic Form in Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971; Smith, Irwin. "Their Exits and Reentrances." Shakespeare Quarterly 18 (1967): 7-16; Taylor, Gary. "The Structure of Performance: Act-intervals in the London Theatres, 1576-1642." In Gary Taylor and John Jowett, eds. Shakespeare Reshaped 1606-1623. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, pp. 3-50
Gabriel Egan
Assembled texts
A theory proposed independently by John Dover Wilson and R. Crompton Rhodes in the 1920s to account for certain early Shakespeare printings starting each scene with a massed entry direction for all the scene's characters with few or no interior stage directions within the scene. Without the dramatists' text, a play could be reconstructed by rejoining the individual speeches in the actors' parts--physically with glue, or by transcription--in their spoken order. Glueing would destroy stage directions at the top and bottom of each speech, and in any case the parts contained only those directions applying to an individual, so the scene-opening directions were taken from the playhouse plot if it were available. Initially applied to the Folio versions of The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and The Comedy of Errors, Wilson later added the 1600 quarto of The Merchant of Venice to the class of texts supposedly assembled this way. E. K. Chambers offered the alternative explanation, now widely accepted, that a scribe might mass stage directions at the beginning of a scene in imitation of classical drama.
Gabriel Egan
Cancel
When a gross error is made during printing, the easiest correction might be cancellation of part of the text (making a cancellandum or cancelland) and insertion of a new leaf holding the correct matter (the cancellans or cancel). These might co-exist in a single copy, but need not. Certain copies of the 1623 Folio have a duplicate ending to Romeo and Juliet crossed out (cancelland) and in others this leaf is a cancel in which the prologue to Troilus and Cressida stands in place of the crossed-out matter.
Gabriel Egan
Capitalization
Until recently initial capital letters were used in print not only for proper nouns but also to indicate respect for an idea or principle--still occasionally seen: ". . . we favor Democracy in our University"--and to show rhetorical emphasis. In Shakespeare's time printshop workers were expected to impose their own sense of order on the material, and since what we know of Shakespeare's habits indicates no artistic use capitals, the capitalization in his early printings should not be thought authorially or theatrically significant. The same is essentially true for spelling and punctuation.
Gabriel Egan
Catchword
One side of a printed sheet, a forme, usually contains more than one page of type, brought together in the act of imposition, and to keep track of the page order the first word of what should be the next page (when the sheets are folded), called the catchword or direction, is repeated at the bottom of each page. In manuscripts, by contrast, the catchwords help maintain the correct order in binding.
Gabriel Egan
Colophon
Until well into the twentieth century, a printer might identify himself, the publisher, the date--and in early printings the location of the bookseller's shop, the author, and the title too--at the end of a book in a finishing stroke called a colophon. Over time, colophon information increasingly passed to the title-page and in several early Shakespeare printings, including 2 Henry VI (1594) and the 1623 Folio, the same information is in both. Strictly speaking this information is called the imprint no matter where it appears, but most scholars confine that term to the title-page version only.
Gabriel Egan
Device
A picture, a design, or an ornament used by a printer or publisher to identify his work. Some devices alluded to the man's name, others to the sign over his place of work, and although they passed from between businesses, devices were also custom made. Progressive, irreversible deterioration in a distinctive device used in several books can help to determine the order in which they were printed, and so assist dating.
Gabriel Egan
Dramatis personae
Latin for 'the persons of the play', meaning a list of the characters. Although others' plays had them, no printed Shakespeare play had one until the 1623 Folio characters lists for The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, 2 Henry IV, Timon of Athens, and Othello. The lists are at the ends of the plays and their primary purpose seems to be to fill otherwise blank space arising from the difficulty of exactly fitting the play into the room allocated to it. However, there may have been an intention, soon abandoned, to include such a list for every play in the Folio, since three out of the first four plays have them. The manuscript origin of these lists is uncertain, but the one for Measure for Measure cannot have been written by someone simply reading the script as we have it, for it gives the duke a name, Vincentio, that appears nowhere else. A list detailing characters' relationships and 'types' would be useful in casting a play and might have provided a wrapper in which were stored the actors' parts, whence the Folio character lists. All the lists call the characters "actors", in the sense of those who perform deeds. Although our modern theatrical sense of 'actors' was current and used by Shakespeare--indeed it is used in the Folio's list of Chamberlain's/King's men--the more common word for them was 'players'.
The Folio character lists are roughly ordered by social class and gender and, with one exception, specify between 13 and 21 individuated persons. The list for 2 Henry IV is exceptional in naming 41 persons in three columns with lavish use of braces to group the king's party, his opponents, the country folk, and the "Irregular Humorists" including Falstaff. This seems intended to clarify affiliations rather than social status or size of part: Falstaff is below Travers and Coleville. The first edition to provide dramatis personae for all the plays was Nicholas Rowe's (1709), which moved them to the front and scrupulously listed the men in order of social rank, then the women. Modern editors agonize over the assumptions about class and gender that inhabit any such list and experiment with listing characters by their importance in the story. Short of going alphabetically the problem is insoluble since the plays themselves are more concerned with the rich than the poor and with men than women.
Gabriel Egan
Entrances and exits
The commonest stage directions are Enter and Exit (plural Exeunt), instructing an actor to go out onto the playing space or to leave it. Most entrances and exits were made via one of the two stage doors that flanked a larger central opening reserved for ceremonial and symbolic comings and goings. Alternatively, an actor might enter and exit through the trap in the floor of the stage or the one in the heavens over it, or by appearing in and leaving the stage balcony. Scripts do not tell the actor which of the two doors to use, and there was probably a rule as simple as the 'one-door-in, one-door-out' traffic flow of modern restaurant kitchens. Enter and Exit (italicized and set off from the dialogue) occupy a single point in the writing, but take time to perform: at least two lines for minor characters loitering near the doors and four for major characters. In early printings a stage direction could be moved by a compositor needing to make space for dialogue. In imitation of classical usage, a scribe might move all a scene's entrance directions into the opening line, although this phenomenon is alternatively explained by the assembled texts theory.
Further Reading
Ichikawa, Mariko. Shakespearean Entrances. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002
Gabriel Egan
Imprint
The written statement (and decoration) indicating the date and the printer, and/or publisher, and/or bookseller appearing usually at the front or back of a book. The standard formula is 'Printed by W [the printer] for X [the publisher] and to be sold by Y [the bookseller] at Z [location of Y's bookshop]'. A single stationer could fulfil more than one of these roles at once. The printer's name might be omitted, in which case the imprint would read 'Printed for X', and if the publisher was omitted ('Printed by W and to be sold . . .') it was the same as the printer.
Gabriel Egan
Interpolations
Words inserted into a play by someone other than the author. In the original Latin sense, to interpolate was to 'polish' the work by inserting matter, but the term is generally now confined to spurious and degrading insertions. In a printed play the possible sources of interpolation are actors' additions during performance (somehow getting into a written version), actors inserting extraneous material to pad out reported texts, dramatists expanding upon others' plays with additions, scribes adding words when copying scripts, and compositors adding words when typesetting texts'. Until recently all interpolations were deprecated, but as a collaborative theater practitioner Shakespeare presumably accepted, even welcomed, his fellow actors' contributions. Where the copy for a particular printing survives (as with several Shakespeare Folio plays printed from quartos) it is possible to detect accidental interpolations, deletions, and substitutions during typesetting and so determine a compositor's general level of accuracy. Hecate's song-and-dance routines in Macbeth and the incomprehensible discussion of Austro-Hungarian politics in Measure for Measure are famous interpolations by Thomas Middleton for revivals of Shakespeare's plays in the 1610s and 1620s. Hamlet's dying "O, o, o, o" were once routinely denounced as the interpolations of an over-zealous actor.
Gabriel Egan
Memorial reconstruction, see Reported text
Mislineation
The reproduction in manuscript or print of lines of verse as though they were prose or prose as though it were verse. In most verse writing, line-endings are determined by the poet and each line contains an artistically-chosen number of feet or syllables, and these should be respected in printing or copying. In prose, however, a printer or copyist should put on each line as many words as fill the 'measure' (the space between the left and right margin) before starting a new line. Thus a block of verse writing has a distinctively ragged right hand edge, whereas for prose the edge is straight. In modern verse writing, the first letter of each line is also capitalized, but Shakespeare, like other writers of the period, seems not to have followed this practice. It is possible for someone insensitive to metre to mistake verse for prose and thus to misline it when transcribing or printing. Mislining prose as verse is less common an accident. In early printing, a compositor setting pages out of page-number sequence (that is, setting by formes not seriatim) might find himself compelled to compress or expand matter near the bottom of a page in order to meet a predetermined page break, and to achieve this deliberate mislineation was a useful expedient.
Gabriel Egan
Misprints
Errors made during printing rather than (although often hard to tell from) errors in transcription. Compositors were expected to improve the punctuation and styling (such as use of initial capital letters) as they worked, and to adjust spellings and apply contractions or expansions of words in order to make type fit tightly into the press. Accidental alterations that changed meaning were considered misprints to be corrected immediately if noticed during printing, or later in a list of errata. Misprints that produce good sense--as when a letter is inserted upside down so that 'lonely' becomes 'louely' (lovely)--are hard to detect.
Gabriel Egan
Prefatory material
Before the main text of an early printed book there are preliminary leaves ('prelims') containing such things as the title-page, a dedication, prefaces by the author, printer, publisher, or someone else, and a table of contents. Any or all of these might loosely be called prefatory matter. Normally, a play prologue does not count amongst the prefatory matter, being part of the matter spoken in performance. Most early printed plays, including Shakespeare's, had no prefatory matter beyond the title-page, but the poetry was presented differently. Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece (1594) had a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton, signed by Shakespeare, and an 'argument' summarizing the action, and Sonnets (1609) had a puzzling dedication to an as-yet unidentified "Mr W.H.". An exception amongst the plays is the prefatory epistle to the reader in the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, whose phrasing apologizes for, and yet makes a virtue of, the play's never having been performed. After Shakespeare's death, prefatory matter to his plays referred to his marketability in the 1622 quarto of Othello, and, at 9 pages' length, his life and achievements in the 1623 Folio.
Gabriel Egan
Reported text
Because actors memorize and speak aloud the words of their play, it is possible for them or the audience to reproduce the script without using the dramatists' written version. In the Spanish theater of Shakespeare's time, the memorión (memory man) Luis Remirez could produce an accurate script after hearing a play three times, and Thomas Heywood complained that shorthand stenographers pirated plays in the London theaters. If the full script were unavailable to actors who had learnt their parts, they could recite their speeches in turn before a scribe, so producing a memorial reconstruction. Such a reported text would reflect what was actually performed, not what the script instructed.
W. W. Greg and A. W. Pollard supposed that renegade minor actors produced memorial reconstructions of plays in which they had performed in order to satisfy the demand for pirated texts of Shakespeare. These Pollard labelled the 'bad' quartos (shorter, and markedly inferior poetically and dramatically) in distinction from the good quartos authorized by the playing company. Thus the 1623 Folio's prefatory material complained that readers had been "abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies" of the plays. The memorial reconstruction theory became popular when Greg showed that the 'bad' quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) becomes like the good Folio version whenever the Host enters, and falls off when he exits. If the actor playing Host made it, he naturally recalled most accurately the scenes in which he was present and only paraphrased the rest.
Further ground was gained when Peter Alexander showed that The Contention of York and Lancaster (1594) was derived from a memorial reconstruction by actors of the play better represented by the Folio's 2 Henry VI. The proof was York's bungled account of his ancestry: in the 'bad' quarto he says that Edmund of Langley (Duke of York) was the second son of Edward III. Were this true, the rest of his argument, claiming the throne via the third son Lionel Duke of Clarence, is entirely pointless. The objection is not historical inaccuracy (the plays are full of it) but that York's speech makes no sense on its own terms, and hence could not represent an authorial version but must be an actor's garbling. Similar nonsense proved Richard Duke of York (1595) to be a memorial reconstruction of the play printed as the Folio's 3 Henry VI. By the mid-twentieth century, the 'bad' quartos Romeo and Juliet (1597), Richard III (1597), Henry V (1600), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and Pericles (1609) were routinely described as memorial reconstructions, albeit without the meticulous arguments made for The Merry Wives of Windsor and 2, 3 Henry VI.
The tide began to turn in the 1970s when stage-centered scholars began to defend the 'bad' quartos' departures from the good texts as artistic alterations made to generate patterns of contrast in scenes and streamlining the casting. Previous critics concerned only with poetic quality were said to have overlooked these dramatic improvements. Less subjectively, the phrasing of stage directions in The Contention of York and Lancaster is suspiciously close to the phrasing of stage directions in Folio 2 Henry 6, and yet actors do not commit such words to memory. Thus, comparing "Enter at one door the Armourer . . . drinking to him" (Q 1594) and "Enter at one Doore the Armorer . . . drinking to him" (F 1623), a transcriptional rather than a memorial link seems likeliest. However, if Q was intermittently used as printer's copy for F, the stage direction similarity could be explained without rejecting the memorial reconstruction hypothesis. About these details the debate is ongoing, but even those who are most sceptical of memorial reconstruction accept it as the explanation for the quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor matching the Folio only when the Host is on stage. In other cases the hypothesis had been positively disproven. John Jowett established with certainty that the 'bad' quarto of Shakespeare's Richard III could not have been made by memorial reconstruction because it follows the precise wording of stage directions and unremarkable (and virtually impossible to remember) variations in the spelling of speech prefixes.
Further Reading
Irace, Kathleen O. Reforming the 'Bad' Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 1994; Jowett, John. "'Derby', 'Stanley', and Memorial Reconstruction in Quarto Richard III." Notes and Queries 245 (2000): 75-9; Maguire, Laurie E. Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The 'Bad' Quartos and Their Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Pollard, A. W. Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920
Gabriel Egan
Running title
Also known as the running head, or headline, the line of type at the top of each page of a printed book, set apart from the body text and providing information (such as the book or chapter title) that applies to one or more pages. The running title of a left-hand page (called the verso) could differ from that of a right-hand page (the recto), and hence long play titles could be accommodated across the whole of an opening, as in "The comicall Historie of" (on verso) and "the Merchant of Venice" (on recto) in the quarto of 1600.
Gabriel Egan
Scenery in the Elizabethan Theater
Little or no scenery was used in the theaters of Shakespeare's time. Many scenes are left unlocalized (that is, they happen in no particular place and the audience are not supposed to wonder about it) and the rest are given a setting by characters' dialog in the opening lines of the scene. A typical example is Northumberland's "I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire. | These high wild hills and rough uneven ways | Draws out our miles and makes them wearisome" (Richard II 2.3.3-5), which establishes with characteristic Shakespearian economy an outdoor location in the West Midlands of England, giving a flavor of the landscape and its effect on the characters in it. To judge from an inventory of the rival Admiral's men company such things as trees, wells, tombs, rainbows, and moss banks could be brought onto the early-modern stage, but whether in each case this was a three-dimensional object that we would recognize as scenery, as opposed to say a painted back-cloth, is uncertain.
Further Reading
Beckerman, Bernard. Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609. New York: Macmillan, 1962; Foakes, R. A. and R. T. Rickert, eds. Henslowe's Diary, Edited with Supplementary Material, Introduction and Notes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961
Gabriel Egan
Shorthand
There were at least three sophisticated systems of shorthand available in Shakespeare's time, described by their inventors in books on the subject: Timothy Bright's Characterie (1588), Peter Bales's Arte of Brachygraphie (1590), and John Willis's Stenographie (1602). Shorthand note-takers frequented the theaters: in the printed prologue to his Play of Queen Elizabeth, also known as If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Thomas Heywood complained that "some by Stenography drew | The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew:)". Thus shorthand is one of the means by which copy for an unauthorized (pirated) printing of a play might be made, the other being memorial reconstruction by the actors. Both means generate a reported text based on what actually got said in the playhouse rather than what the dramatist(s) wrote in the script. At various times scholars have argued that first quartos of Shakespeare's Henry V, Hamlet, and King Lear were produced by shorthand stenography, generally by showing that differences between the Folio and quarto versions of a certain word or phrase could arise by the kind of errors that were peculiarly easy to make in one of the three systems.
Gabriel Egan
Speech prefix
The speaker's name (often in abbreviated form) given before each speech in a script. The earliest printed plays put speech prefixes in the left or right margin (alongside the first line of the speech) or centered in an otherwise empty line before the speech. By Shakespeare's time the convention was to set the speech prefix in an italic typeface to the left of the first line of a speech and indented slightly from the left margin. The sharing of the same space as the first line, and the indenting of this line, necessitated the use of abbreviations for all but the shortest names. This generated ambiguity, so that in the first scene of the Folio text of King Lear the speech prefix "Cor." may indicate Cornwall or Cordelia. For this reason, all reputable modern editions spell out a speech-prefix name in full, giving it a line of its own if the ensuing speech begins with a full line of verse; only if the first line is metrically incomplete verse or prose does the speech prefix share its space.
Alexander Pope thought Shakespeare's characters so individuated that if all the speech prefixes were omitted "one might have apply'd them with certainty to every speaker". Unlike readers, playgoers are ignorant of speech-prefix names. In a performance of Hamlet no-one utters the speech-prefix name 'Claudius' and hence he is just 'the king' in anonymity. This page/stage difference presents editors with problems: when (if ever) does Richard II cease to be king, and when should Bullingbrook's speech prefix change to "KING HENRY"? Retaining Richard's royal speech prefixes to the end suggests a certainty about his status that is not maintained in performance.
Further Reading
Williams, George Walton, ed. Shakespeare's Speech-headings: Speaking the Speech in Shakespeare's Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997
Gabriel Egan
Stage doors
The 1596 drawing of The Swan (our only inside view of a theater) shows two lateral doors in the back wall, leading onto the stage, but most theater historians think there was a larger central opening too. In plays of the period, the commonest indication that more that one door is needed is a stage direction of the kind "Enter a FAIRY at one door and ROBIN GOODFELLOW [PUCK] at another" (A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.0). Usually a stage door is simply the means to get on or off the stage. (Thus the fairies meet in a forest and the doors are mentioned only to show that they come from opposite directions.) However, the doors could feature in the action, as when Aumerle's parent are locked out during his appeal for royal forgiveness in Richard II 5.3. The central opening was reserved for ceremonial and symbolic use, and 'discoveries' such as the revealing of Miranda and Ferdinand playing chess at the end of The Tempest. If no central opening were available (say, on tour), a stage door could be used for 'discovery'.
Further Reading
Gurr, Andrew and Mariko Ichikawa. Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000
Gabriel Egan
Stage furniture
An inventory of "all the properties" of the Admiral's Men dated 1598 contains no more than two dozen pieces of furniture, so it seems that not much was used. The most important item routinely employed was a monarch's throne, which might be brought out as needed, or else (if it was especially elaborate, perhaps set on a dais) discovered, or left against the back wall of the stage and ignored in scenes not using it. Stools might simply have been left around the stage, and tables were routinely carried on as needed ("A table prepar'd" Hamlet 5.2.224). Instead of furniture, the "box-tree" (Twelfth Night 2.5.15) and "pulpit" (Julius Caesar 3.2.10) could be played using the theater's stage-posts and balcony. For Desdemona's entrance "in her bed [asleep]" (Othello 5.2.0) we should probably imagine a curtained four-poster being thrust out from the central opening. A multi-use booth with a solid top could serve as such a bed, and also as a tent for battle-ground scenes, a tomb, as a general-purpose discovery space, and even to provide an 'above' in venues that lacked a stage balcony.
Further Reading
Beckerman, Bernard. Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609. New York: Macmillan, 1962
Gabriel Egan
Title pages
A title-page at or near the front of a book identifying the work, its originator, and something of the book's manufacture and sale was virtually universal in Shakespeare's time. Plays were as strongly associated with their performers as their writers (as Hollywood films are today), so dramatists' names were routinely omitted from title-pages when Shakespeare's began his career in the early 1590s. This changed around 1600, and by the time Shakespeare stopped writing most printed plays named their authors. As soon as professional theaters appeared in the 1570s, title-pages presented books as the means to recover the pleasure of performance, offering the script "As it hath beene publikely acted by" the playing company. (Earlier printed plays encouraged readers to make their own performances.) When dramatists' names began to appear on title-pages, they supplemented rather than displaced the play's association with its playing company. As well as adorning complete books, individual title-pages were displayed in booksellers and hung up as advertisements like modern 'flyers'. Title-pages of early Shakespeare plays indicate that the names they went by on the stage were unlike their familiar modern titles: 2 Henry VI is identified as The Contention of York and Lancaster and 3 Henry VI as Richard Duke of York on the title-pages of their first printings.
Further Reading
Egan, Gabriel. "'As it Was, Is, or Will be Played': Title-pages and the Theatre Industry to 1610." In Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds. From Performance to Print in Early Shakespeare's England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 92-110; Farmer, Alan B. and Zachary Lesser. "Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512-1660." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77-165; Stern, Tiffany. "'On Each Wall and Corner Poast': Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London." English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 57-89
Gabriel Egan
Variant
A lexical difference between two written versions of a work. About half of Shakespeare's plays exist in multiple early printings and in every case these differ in hundreds of small details. Differences of spelling do not count as variants (spelling was not standardized), nor do differences of punctuation unless they alter meaning. Of the other variants, some are merely substitutions of roughly-equal words ('between' and 'betwixt' are 'indifferent' variants), others are clear misprints producing nonsense or obviously inferior words, and others amount to whole lines and scenes absent or rephrased in one of the two printings
Gabriel Egan
____________________________
doubling
With 12-18 actors in a typical early-modern playing company and over 20 characters in a typical play, it was necessary for most actors to play several characters, which is known as doubling. The main characters, played by the senior actors, were not usually doubled, but the rest were allocated to give each actor roughly the same number of lines. Rules were needed to avoid confusing the audience: no-one should try to play two characters in a single scene, and ideally doubling across adjacent scenes was avoided. At need, a company could commission new material to be added to the end of a scene to cover the time while one or more actors left the stage and changed appearance to double in the next scene. For this reason scripts for small touring companies might, contrary to the expectation of early-twentieth century theatre historians, be longer than those written for larger companies. It is likely that if a dramatist submitted a script offering too few opportunities for doubling, the company would routinely alter the script in rehearsal rather than hire extra actors.
None of the first-performance doubling of characters in Shakespeare's plays is known for certain, although modern editions usually attempt to discover the minimum casting requirement by applying plausible arbitrary rules for doubling, such as 'exit with others requires at least two others' and 'it takes at least 1 minute (about 20 spoken lines) to change costume'. Doubling Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear makes sense of Lear's "And my poor fool is hanged" (5.3.281), but could not have happened in Shakespeare's time: only boys played women and the specialist clown doubtless played the Fool. Evidence from non-Shakespearian plays suggests the doubling of highly unalike characters rather than of characters with something in common, which allowed actors to show off their skills. Just as one actor can play several characters, a single character can in theory be played by several actors, which is known as dodging. Occasionally an early-modern play manuscript names multiple actors for one character, but the evidence is ambiguous and might simply indicate casting changes in revivals; dodging does not seem to have been usual practice. Evidence from the eighteenth-century theatre shows virtuoso doubling of unalike characters, and in 1853 Samuel Phelps prosecuted his rivaly with Charles Kean by showing off as King Henry and Shallow in a production of 2 Henry 4. In 1865 Ellen Terry seemed to go beyond the logical limit of doubling by playing Viola and Sebastian in a production of Twelfth Night at the Olympic Theatre London.
Further Reading
King, T. J. Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Sprague, Arthur Colby. The Doubling of Parts in Shakespeare's Plays. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1966; Thompson, Ann and Neil Tayor. "'Your Sum of Parts': Doubling in Hamlet." In Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie, eds. Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare's Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 111-26
Gabriel Egan
Performance Criticism
Meaning simply the application of literary criticism to performances of Shakespeare, performance criticism is practised almost exclusively by critics who think that only in performance are the meanings of the plays fully realized. Performance criticism is founded on the idea that because they were written as scripts for actors, the plays are essentially incomplete, or 'open', in meaning until the performers finish, or 'close', the text by acting it. Between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare's plays were most often performed in heavily adapted versions with changes we might think laughable, such as providing a sister for Miranda (in John Dryden's adaptation of The Tempest), and having Edgar and Cordelia marry (in Nahum Tate's adaptation of King Lear). Under these circumstances, the published texts might seem to be the preservers of Shakespeare's original meanings that the theatre was perverting. For Shakespearian Charles Lamb (1775-1834), even if the script survived unmolested in the theatre the experience of hearing real people speak the words aloud rather than imagining them being spoken (while reading the play for oneself) necessarily reduced the play to "a controversy of elocution" in which "every character . . . must play the orator" rather than engage directly with the mind of the reader.[1] Long after the theatres returned to the original versions, the prejudice against performance persisted. Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946) worked to develop a theatrical criticism that would help the staging of plays and also advance understanding of their meanings, and his Prefaces to Shakespeare included matter not previously considered the province of scholarship such as costume, music, and the cutting of lines. In Elizabethan Stage Conditions Muriel Bradbrook (1909-1993) argued for the need to understand the playing practices of Shakespeare's time as a prerequisite for criticism.
From the 1950s, the stage-centered Shakespeare gained ground, promoted by the new British university departments in Bristol and Birmingham that studied drama as a subject in its own right, and it rapidly spread to other centres. Under the influence of Allardyce Nicoll and John Russell Brown especially, the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon treated what happened on the theatre stage as every bit as important as what appears in the text, and research degrees in performance studies were awarded for the first time. The annual book Shakespeare Survey, sponsored by the Institute, published reviews of performances from its first volume (1948) and the first article in the first issue of its American rival Shakespeare Quarterly (1950) was on performances in Ashland, Oregon. There had long been a tradition of witty and ascerbic theatre reviewing, the best of it compiled chronologically in Stanley Wells's Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism, but the new post-war approach aimed for considerably more academic rigour and, from the 1980s, theoretical sophistication. Adapting the Saussurian notion of a 'sign' from linguistics in the 1980s, Patrice Pavis and Keir Elam attempted to find the 'units' of performed meaning in order to put them into a quasi-structuralist analysis. The results were insufficiently formal to gain credence from the remaining Saussurian linguists--most linguists abandoned structuralism for transformational-generative grammar in the 1950s--and yet far too formal for most Shakespearians.
Much more successfully, W. B. Worthen adapted insights from textual criticism to the study of the relationship of script to performance. Editors and textual theorists have long wrestled with the problem that we have only imperfect and differing early printings of Shakespeare, from which we try to distinguish 'versions'. Just as an edited text can only ever approximate to the immaterial intellectual work that it seeks to embody, so performances only ever approximate to their scripts, and it is the task of performance criticism to account for the differences while recognizing that text and performance inhabit discursive domains that only partially overlap. For Worthen, the script 'produces' the performance but does not originate it: the performed event draws its 'authority' from many other discourses, including modern politics and culture. Strangely, this is not so far from Lamb's view, which was not simply anti-theatrical: "I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted".[2] Working along the same lines as Worthen, Barbara Hodgdon's approach has borrowed the idea of 'cultural capital' from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to show that recent performances on stage and screen owe little to the originating author and much to modern institutions of culture and power.
The British tradition of performance criticism has always been less theoretical and more inclined to describe than the American tradition exemplified by Worthen and Hodgdon. Edited first by Philip Brockbank and later by Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood, the Players of Shakespeare book series published actors' accounts of their work in creating Shakespeare characters on stage. From the same publisher, Cambridge University Press, the Shakespeare in Production series offers full texts of each play with footnotes that describe how various productions interpreted each moment, rather as the Variorum Shakespeare attempts to capture how critics have commented upon each moment. The raw materials for performance criticism are especially suited to online initiatives that make available to a wider public materials that were formerly accessible only within theatre archives. Christie Carson's Designing Shakespeare is an comprehensive visual archive of British theatre design work since 1960, freely available over the Internet. For the period before photography, a key resource for recovering what directors and designers chose to do is the company promptbook, a copy of the script surrounded by handwritten annotations indicating such things as lighting and sound cues and the arrangements of figures and scenery on the stage, and giving reminders about business. Most promptbooks remain in theatre archives, although expensive subscription products such as Gale Cengage Learning's The Shakespeare Collection make reproductions of these available to scholars in research libraries. As the online availability of the raw materials widens and the prices fall, performance criticism is likely to become a more commonly taught and examined discipline.
Further Reading
Chambers, E. K. and Greg W W. "Dramatic Records from the Patent Rolls: Company Licenses." In Malone Society Collections 1.3. London: Malone Society, 1910 (for 1909), pp. 260-83; Brown, John Russell. "Theater Research and the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries." Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 451-61; Egan, Gabriel. "The Closure of the Theatres." In Rory Loughnane, Andrew J. Power and Peter Sillitoe, eds. Yearbook of English Studies. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014 44, pp. 103-19; Gale/Cengage Learning/Arden Shakespeare. 'The Shakespeare Collection': A Online, Subscription-only, Digital Archive of Texts, Criticism, Promptbooks, and Diaries, 2007; Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1927, vol. 1: Introduction, Love's Labour's Lost, Julius Caesar, King Lear; Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930, vol. 2: Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline; Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1937, vol. 3: Hamlet; Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1945, vol. 4: Othello; Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1947, vol. 5: Coriolanus; Holland, Peter, ed. Shakespeare, Memory and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Lamb, Charles. Dramatic Essays. Ed. and introd. Brander Matthews. London: Chatto and Windus, 1891; Wells, Stanley, ed. Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997
Gabriel Egan
Textual Criticism
Before 'higher' literary criticism can explore what a text means, textual criticism must establish what the text is by removing errors introduced in transmission by manuscript copying and printing. No Shakespeare work survives in his own handwriting except three pages he seemingly contributed to the play Sir Thomas More. Otherwise we have only the early printings published in his lifetime and shortly thereafter. Where a play exists in multiple early printings, as with the Hamlet quartos Q1 (1603) and Q2 (1604-5) and the Folio text (F, 1623), the textual critic (usually an editor) treats these as 'witnesses' to the correct text as Shakespeare wrote it. Early printings may differ by whole scenes and speeches being present or absent in each witness, or by smaller verbal variants, such as Hamlet's complaint (at I.ii.129) about his "too much grieu'd and sallied flesh" (Q1), or "too too sallied flesh" (Q2), or "too too solid Flesh" (F). Assuming Shakespeare did not simply change his mind and rewrite the line, the textual critic seeks to explain how corruption during transmission produced the variants and either chooses one as the correct reading or else emends (rewrites) the line to give the correct reading.
When printers reprinted a work by taking an existing book as their copy and setting type from it, they almost invariably added fresh errors. Unless they also consulted a manuscript with an independent connection to the writer, the derivative reprint has less authority than the book it reprints even though printers usually tried to correct mistakes in their copy as they worked. A second edition was commonly just such a derivative reprint of the first, and the third a reprint of the second, so that errors accumulated. By observing how one edition picks up the errors (or other insignificant features) of another, textual critics arrange editions in a quasi-genealogical line of descent and declare the one at the head of the line to be the most authoritative because least corrupt. The German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) refined this genealogical approach and popularized the making of pictorial stemmata (singular: stemma) to show the 'family-tree' relationships between texts, which remains common in Shakespearian texual criticism even though it was developed not for printings that followed shortly after composition (as with Shakespeare) but for manuscripts made long after composition. Shakespearian stemmata are complicated by the printers' habit of annotating an existing printed book by comparison with an authoritative manuscript before using it as copy for a reprint, which injects new authority into the genetic line of the otherwise derivative reprint. The New Bibliography of the early twentieth century was essentially the attempt to apply to Shakespeare's works the principles of textual criticism that arose from analysis of biblical, classical, and medieval manuscripts, adjusted in the light of knowledge about the mechanics of printing and of the textual practices of the theatres.
Textual criticism rests on assumptions that Shakespearians no longer universally accept, such as the writer having a singular conception of the work that by diligent investigation we may recover. If Shakespeare himself changed "sallied flesh" to "solid flesh" for a revival of the play we have to give credence to both readings or else arbitrarily declare that second thoughts are inherently better or worse than first thoughts. Even for the first performance, the words standing in Shakespeare's foul papers or fair copy when he finished writing might be different from the words finally accepted into the promptbook after company rehearsal had polished them, and as an actor-sharer Shakespeare presumably took part in this polishing. Many early printings do not line up into straightforward genealogical trees and if each printing derives from a distinct (now lost) manuscript possessing independent authority (say, Q2 from foul papers and F from the promptbook) then there may be no singular, authorial ideal to recover. Even possession of the authorial manuscript would not solve all the problems of authorial intention. In his contribution to Sir Thomas More Shakespeare wrote the nonsense word "momtanish" where he presumably meant 'montanish' (in modern spelling, 'mountainish'). As John Jowett observes (Munday, Anthony, Henry Chettle, Edmund Tilney, Hand C, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and William Shakespeare. Sir Thomas More. Ed. John Jowett. London: Methuen, 2011), the writing hand here seems unfaithful to the wish of the composing mind. Being concerned more with physical records than insubstantial ideas, textual criticism is ill equipped for such cases.
Further Reading
Honigmann, E. A. J. The Stability of Shakespeare's Text. London: Edward Arnold, 1965; Jowett, John. Shakespeare and Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; Munday, Anthony, Henry Chettle, Edmund Tilney, Hand C, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and William Shakespeare. Sir Thomas More. Ed. John Jowett. London: Methuen, 2011
Gabriel Egan
Stage Decoration
The theatres of 1576-1642 were highly decorated inside. Early-twentieth century theatre historians wrongly supposed that the open-air amphitheatres were made of rough, unpainted bare wooden boards, which error is reflected in the replica Folger Theatre (Washington DC) and in the replica Globe of Laurence Olivier's film of Henry V (1944). In fact the wood and plaster were lavishly painted to resemble precious materials (such as marble) around the stage and throughout the auditorium. Anti-theatricalists such as Philip Stubbs were not exaggerating about the opulence, even gaudiness, of the theatres. Scattered evidence suggests that for a tragedy the stage was adorned with black cloth; no clear convention for comedy is apparent. A painted hanging of the kind commonly used for interior decoration could be attached to the frons scenae for eavesdropping characters to hide behind.
The interior decoration of the pre-Civil War playhouses was probably organized symbolically and iconographically. At the open-air playhouses the underside of the stage cover was known as the heavens and was likely painted with clouds and astronomical bodies. The frons scenae at the Fortune playhouse, based on the Globe, had pilasters attached to its surface and if the Globe had them too they were likely carved as classical figures in keeping with the Hercules motif of the playhouse sign. After the Restoration no outdoor theatres were built, and the indoor ones extended further the tradition of luxurious interior decoration.
Further Reading
Mulryne, J. R. and Margaret Shewring, eds. Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
Gabriel Egan
[1] Charles Lamb, Dramatic Essays, ed. Brander Matthews (London: Chatto and Windus, 1891), 169
[2] Lamb, Dramatic Essays, 172.