Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (18 page)

Act 5

Enjoy the Play

Scene 1

A London printers, 1622

H
ere’s a question: how do you direct a company of actors if you’re dead?

As I touched on earlier, if you’re like Shakespeare, you’ll leave clues in your writing, a
Da Vinci Code
-like treasure map telling your actors what to do when.

The theatre company Shakespeare worked with, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later called The King’s Men) had been together since 1594; and it was
men
– women weren’t allowed to act on stage, so young boy-actors played all the female parts. That company of players carried on working together, apart from a few changes of actors, for most of Shakespeare’s writing career, and would have performed over a hundred plays together.

This group would have known each other incredibly well, and understood how each other worked intimately. As would Shakespeare: when he wrote his plays, he wrote them knowing
his
actors would be performing them, so he wrote for
them
as much as he did for his audience.

A writer watching
[his own work]
wants to see the actors relishing the language
.

Harold Pinter,
Working With Pinter
, 2007

This flexibility in his writing is clear from the way Shakespeare’s clown character changed over the course of his writing. William Kemp was the clown with The Chamberlain’s Men – and so Shakespeare’s main clown – from 1594 to 1599, and was the first to play Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
. Robert Armin took over from Kemp as the company’s clown in 1599, and was the first Feste in
Twelfth Night
.

It seems that Kemp was a gifted comic, and Armin much more of a singer, so following the change in cast, the clown character in the plays noticeably shifted from a wordy slapstick-clown to the more solemn, singing, melancholic-clown: the writer following the actor’s individual personality.

Scene 2

A graveyard

H
ad Shakespeare been interested in fame beyond death, he might have done something to make sure his plays survived him. Ben Jonson oversaw the printing of his own collected works in 1616, but Shakespeare did nothing to help his own writing live on.

Fortunately, as we saw in Act 1, his actors saw fit to preserve the works, and thank goodness they did. Thanks, not just because we now have the plays, but because, with the arrival of the Puritans’ rule of the land soon after Shakespeare died, there is now a 40-year hole in theatre history.

Working back from the 20th century, we have actors who’ve worked with actors who’ve worked with actors and so on, right back to the Restoration period, in 1660. Acting techniques passed on and on.

Before 1660? Nothing. Almost all the acting traditions from Shakespeare’s time are lost. There are tales of actors from 1660 who could remember contemporaries of Shakespeare, but the lessons that were passed down from actor to actor in Shakespeare’s time were lost when Civil War broke out in 1642. England became a Commonwealth and the Puritan Parliament, desperate to maintain control of the
people, issued an ordinance suppressing all stage plays: theatre, the use of fine clothes and ‘flippant’ behaviour – all obviously great sins in the eyes of the Puritans – were banned. Soon afterwards, the Globe was torn down.

The Puritans followed up that little
coup de grace
with an order in 1647 stating that
all
theatres were to be destroyed, all actors to be arrested and flogged, and anyone caught trying to see a play to be fined. The art, the style and the techniques that Shakespeare wrote for and, likewise, the writing that his actors acted, were being forgotten, and were nearly lost forever.

Nearly. A few years before theatre – and Christmas – was banned, two of Shakespeare’s lead actors thought it might be time to remember their old dead chum Will in style. So what if
he
never showed any interest in having his plays printed up …

Plus, it might make a few quid.

The First Folio of 1623 … Using the clues that Shakespeare wrote into the First Folio, it’s possible to work out, or at least get an idea of, how Shakespeare’s company worked. The Folio is the closest thing we have to Shakespeare. Although it was printed seven years after his death, it was edited by Henry Condell and John Hemmings, two of his lead actors who would have worked very closely with him. If anyone would know how his plays should be printed, it would be the people who had acted in them.

I know actors who swear by it, and I know actors who don’t know what it is. The First Folio is a number of things, and at first glance it can seem rather daunting.

It’s not like any book you’ll be used to. It’s big, it’s heavy, and the page numbering is all over the place. There are online versions of the Folio text that are slightly more user-friendly, but then there are still the unusual spellings and typeface to deal with.

Why bother using it, then, when I have very handy, port able, modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays scattered around my house?

The Folio edition of the plays, while far from perfect, is the closest thing we have to the plays as Shakespeare intended, and if anyone questions its worth, I always come back to this basic argument: Shakespeare wrote his plays for his actors, and this is the only version of the plays they had a hand in.

Folio, The First …

There were about 1,000 copies printed of the First Folio of 1623, and about 229 of those survive today, having somehow lived through the regime of the Puritans, the Great Fire of London (to which it is thought many copies of plays, manuscripts, etc., were lost) and three more centuries of life. Copies have been found dusty on shelves of libraries, and mouldy in attics in northern England. Seventy-nine copies live in the Folger Library in Washington. Copies rarely come up for sale, and when they do, they sell for millions.

The First Folio had four reprints in the 17th century:

It’s a rare and very valuable book. Go on, go and check those bookshelves and attics …

Scene 3

Backstage at Shakespeare’s Globe, 1599

A
play would rarely be found all in one place before the First Folio was printed. The actors would have their parts written out on separate rolls of paper (scrolls), with the three cue words of whoever was speaking before them written above their speeches. Due to the frequency of new plays and the short rehearsal time, they probably didn’t have much time to find out what was going to happen next, how the play ended, or who was playing which part …

There was a
platt
(a piece of paper with a hole in the middle, through which it was nailed up backstage) which detailed the order of the scenes, the fights and dances, the exits and entrances that took place, and all the doubling up of parts that the boy-actors would take care of, all switching hats and costumes as fast as possible.

The scripts were handed out this way because it would be time-consuming and costly to write out the entire play for every actor. Also, by making sure that entire copies of the plays were scarce, the theatre company limited the chances of rival companies stealing their brand-new product.

The actors’ cue-scripts were copied from the
prompt-copy of the play, held by Edward Knight, the Book-keeper of the company, who would have ensured that any cuts or changes made by the acting company or the Master of the Revels would be copied down and followed. Some say the actors copied out their own parts, which would undoubtedly help them to learn their parts quickly.

So the scripts – what we now know as literary texts – really were solely and simply the tools of actors. The complete prompt-copies or, if they couldn’t be found, the actors’ cue-scripts were what Condell and Hemmings used to put the First Folio together.

They obviously couldn’t ask Shakespeare how he would want the plays presented, so it’s likely they printed the plays as
they
would want to use them. Note I say
use
not
read
. They were the equivalent of plumbers organising a tool-box. A plumber’s tool box would not be for looking at, it would be for using.
This is a book of how to act William Shakespeare’s plays
, is what they’d have been thinking.

There are a number of clues in the Folio that show an actor where, for instance, they should stand on the stage. Whether they should speak quickly or slowly. Which words they should carefully stress because those particular words are crucial to the story-telling (as an Elizabethan actor wouldn’t have been able to read the whole play, how would he know otherwise?). I’ll go through some of these clues shortly.

Now the reason I suggest you go to the First Folio when looking at a speech or scene or a play of Shakespeare’s is because a lot of the modern editions have edited these clues out. Modern editors, over the years, forgetting these are actor’s tools and thinking of the plays only as literary works, have tried to neaten the texts up a bit.

When preparing a Shakespeare play for publication, modern editors will go back to the Folio and the Quarto versions, and decide which punctuation is right, and which is wrong. They’ll add exclamation marks to try to make a character’s intention clearer. They’ll remove the capitalisations of words in the middle of a sentence – because that’s not how we write now, or because it appears to be random and without meaning.

All of which is completely understandable: the written language hadn’t begun to standardise in Shakespeare’s time, and it would be easy to mistake these clues for errors. And certainly we know that the Folio typesetters introduced many errors when the First Folio was being printed. There were five ‘Hands’ involved – five different compositors – evidently of varying intellects and each with their own idiosyncratic way of spelling, so despite being as close as we can get to Shakespeare, the Folio is by no means flawless.

But modern editors are not actors, and they will remove or replace words, add full stops in the middle of thoughts,
or change prose to verse (Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech in
Romeo and Juliet
is a good example of that) because the text as it stands doesn’t seem to make sense.

The thing is, sometimes a particularly odd turn of phrase won’t make any sense at all unless it’s spoken on stage in front of an audience, no matter how much editing work is put into it.

Modern editors – and modern productions, for that matter – are also prone to cutting, and before removing something from a Shakespeare play, it’s worth going to fairly extreme lengths to find out why it was there in the first place.