How do I get to Blackfriars theatre? Practice, practice!
Has anyone else read Tiffany Stern's Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Clarendon Press, 2000)? Fascinating. And fairly radically different from the theatre practices we know.
First the author would audition the play to a small group of the sharers: give a sketch of the scenario, read a few scenes. If they approved, he'd go on to finish the play. Then-customarily, not always-the poet would give a reading of the book to the inner company, by preference at a tavern. (Hirelings weren't in on this; they'd have to clue themselves in. "There's this nurse...")
Shortly after that, each player would get a copy of his part and his part only, with his cues. (Not only did this spare the scrivener-it prevented the actors from flogging the script to a rival company or a printer.) There was nothing else on the page, no names, no numbered acts and scenes. Just his lines and one to three catchwords. He wouldn't know how many others were in a scene with him, or to whom he was speaking, or when in the play. No wonder poor Flute speaks all his part at once, cues and all. The text itself was meant to clue him in on how it should be played, by its changes from prose to verse, or smooth to broken rhetoric, or you to thou. There was an art to reading such pieces; and a highly specialized art to writing them.
Then they'd all go to their rooms (or an inn with a fire or a field somewhere they could shout) and study. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with a teacher: for lesser actors, greater actors; for the principals, maybe the poet himself. ("Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue...") Ben Jonson was renowned as a magnificent, relentless practice teacher. Boys worked with their masters, perhaps Desdemona with Othello, the Lady with Macbeth. Ben's children with Ben. Things that really had to be practiced together, they did: part-songs, dances, swordfights, slapstick. I should think they'd all start piecing the jigsaw together-wait, you kill me?
And then? They had one full rehearsal-if they were lucky-and went on.
You remember that fiction that companies of players were only perfecting their art for the delectation of the Queen or King? Well, it wasn't quite fiction. A first night at the Globe was a tryout. If the play flopped for that first audience, it went in the trash. If it played, the company would note what worked, what needed punching up or cutting down, where the laughs were, where it dragged. And the poet would revise.
Heaven knows what they did about blocking. Perhaps they'd all learned patterns, like the figures in a dance, and as they went on, the prompter whispered, "Six."
Not much room in there for a Man of Mystery.
Nine