How do I get to Blackfriars theatre? Practice, practice!

[nineweaving]

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

Comments

[steepholm]

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."

I think this may not be far from the truth. I've seen a sheet of the various "gestures" that indicated various moods and intentions, and there was a fairly standard set of sartorial conventions, too. (No need for Hamlet to open his mouth to announce himself as a melancholic: his black clothes do it for him.) All this makes sense when you think of the open air, nuts cracking like small arms fire to right and left, etc. What's a groundling at the back to make of it all without these stylized helps? Throw in short rehearsal times as well, and your patterned blocking seems almost inevitable.

[nineweaving]

Modern editors have helpfully changed Enter the Queen or The Braggart or Will Kemp to their characters' names; but surely an early modern audience, without programs, would rely on old conventions and a company with well-known roles to sort the plot?

Of course, things changed very rapidly--as fast as pop music in our time--going in Shakespeare's span from innyards and dumbshows to masquing and scenery.

Nine

[steepholm]

Truly, from Love me Do to A Day in the Life is no small step.

[nineweaving]

Things moved fast in those worlds!

Nine

[poliphilo]

Fascinating.

It always amazes when actors- Rylance and Jacobi for instance- come out as Oxfordians. It's as if they don't understand their own craft.

[nineweaving]

Or they disconnect. They make Shakespeare an alien, an immortal, a creature unimaginably gifted and gilded and privileged: so Not One of Us. "Oxford" is a name for that fantasy.

I think Jacobi may have class issues, having risen (like Shakespeare) from provincial origins to theatrical godhood.

Rylance is just bonkers.

Nine

[nightspore]

Tribble's remarkable book Cognition in the Globe (2011) has really good, subtle accounts of blocking, making good use of Stern (and others).

[nineweaving]

Wow, that book sounds fascinating! Thank you so much for the recommendation.

Nine

[oracne]

Fascinating!

[nineweaving]

Truly. And so much more useful than yet another projected fantasy about Shakespeare's life and psyche. I want to know how he and the other players might have worked.

Nine

[nineweaving]

Wow. Were they Shakespeare? Was your director experimenting with historical techniques? So cool.

Nine

[nineweaving]

Awesome. How did the productions turn out?

(Glad this got through.)

Nine