Rehearsal and Acting Practice Notes

Rehearsal and Acting Practice

Live stage performance is ephemeral; historical understanding relies on other media.
Before electronic recording, information is further removed from the live event.
Artifacts from other media provide rudimentary clues but rarely hard evidence.
Limited information exists about performance and rehearsal in Shakespeare's time, leading to speculation.
Significant differences existed between the theater of Shakespeare's day and modern theater.
Practice-as-research can illuminate these differences.
Goal: To challenge assumptions that modern theater is similar to Shakespeare's time.
Insisting on similarities limits understanding of different approaches to theatrical performance.

Rehearsal

Tiffany Stern's research suggests rehearsal quantities in Shakespeare's time were similar to amateur approaches in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Craftsmen-players had only a partial, single group rehearsal before performance.
Stern suggests a single group rehearsal before the first performance was the professional norm.
Repertory schedule significantly determined rehearsal quantities.
Henslowe's diary indicates public theaters performed six different plays per week, with a new play every two weeks.
Actors needed to keep 30-40 plays in their heads at a time.
Actors learned or relearned their parts in the morning, rehearsed until midday, and performed in the afternoon.
Performance was not a "production" in the modern sense due to limited preparation and consistency.
The Master of the Revels ensured actors performed parts as approved by the Crown's censor.
Actors might receive parts before censorship and have to relearn altered content.
Plays sometimes received an audition-like hearing before the Master of the Revels for Court performance.
A playwright typically read the play to the company's sharers (financial partners) upon purchase, ceding all rights.
An additional reading by the playwright might occur for other company members.
Actors would memorize their parts and determine their interpretations.
Limited group rehearsal meant actors didn't know others' choices in advance, requiring flexibility.
The single group rehearsal focused on fights, dances, songs, and special effects.
Special effects included Jupiter’s thunderbolt in Cymbeline (TLN 3126–8), or the sudden disappear- ance of the banquet in The Tempest (TLN 1583–5).
Attention was given to movable stage augmentations like beds, thrones, or mansions.
Grouped entrances and exits required preparatory attention.
Logistical challenges arose from actors entering and exiting from the same place.
Advance planning was needed for using the trap in the stage floor and the trap in the heavens.
Botching an entrance from the heavens could be fatal.

Acting Practice

Limited direct evidence exists about acting style from the 1590s onwards.
Little practice-as-research has focused on acting style.
"Personating" is a crucial aspect of performance from Shakespeare's day that remains unexplored.
Sir Thomas Overbury (1615) said Richard Burbage's personations seemed truly done before the audience.
"Truly done" implies a "real" quality to Burbage's playing, but its interpretation is complex from a later-modern perspective.
The "real" in dramatic representation is only real as a fictive event with effects on participants and witnesses.
Notions of the "real" in representation change over time, with earlier versions later appearing stylized or affected.
Examples: Daniel Day-Lewis (considered actual today), Laurence Olivier (yesterday's more actual performer), David Garrick (with his fright wig).
Techniques of Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg create a sense of the actual for today's audiences but may not be relevant for all time.
The idea of an actor feeling the emotions onstage may be a modern approach.
Cary Mazer suggests feeling emotions onstage comes from Stanislavskian techniques.
Tiffany Stern argues that actors feeling actual emotion onstage is as old as western theater.
Stern cites classical Greek and Roman theater, as well as early modern sources.
Stern uses Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier as examples of felt versus suggested emotion.
Olivier ridiculed Hoffman's method acting but may have used similar techniques.
Ex: Olivier thought of "all of the foxes in the world in traps" for Shylock's wail in The Merchant of Venice (TLN 2320), a method “substitution”.
Early modern notions of subjectivity were different from today's.
Evidence suggests malleable distinctions between actor and character.
Reports exist of actors dropping character or attentiveness when finished with their lines.
Maintaining a sense of character was likely the norm.
Lukas Erne (2003) argues that Shakespeare's plays were too long to perform in the allotted time and were intended only for print, based on Alfred Hart (1942).
Hart estimated the pace of play by reading the plays aloud.
Plays were allotted two to three hours, and the definition of an hour in Shakespeare's day was different.
Shakespeare's actors may have learned and played more text than anticipated.
Playing full texts of Shakespeare's plays would have been reasonably easy if playing paces were slightly faster than today.

Looking Backward, Playing Forward

Understanding early modern performance through later-modern practice has been ongoing for over a hundred years.
William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society used quarto versions of texts and attempted replicas of Elizabethan theatrical structures.
Poel's efforts inspired theatrical practitioners like B. Iden Payne, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Peter Hall, and John Barton.
Sir Tyrone Guthrie's thrust stages, inspired by a performance of Hamlet at Elsinore, changed understandings of spatial relationships.
Guthrie's influence and the popularity of Shakespeare's Globe led to the Royal Shakespeare Company abandoning proscenium stages.
Comparison: Barbican (proscenium-arch, 1,150 patrons at greater remove from action) versus Shakespeare's Globe (1,700 patrons, all within forty feet of the stage).
In Shakespeare's day, a smaller space would have held 2,500-3,000 people within thirty feet of the stage.
Poel's influence led subsequent practitioners to exploit early texts. Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenburg, and Kristin Linklater developed vocal and textual approaches.
Neil Freeman (1994) and Patrick Tucker (2002) used First Folio texts to guide actors.

Performance; Practice as Research

"Original practices" movement seeks to perform Shakespeare as Shakespeare did.
Offers insights into live performance, performer-audience relationships, and early modern theater.
Scholars must be clear about the inquiry's nature and limits.
With present-day theaters and actors, only present-day theater is possible.
"Original practices" cannot recreate practices from the early modern period.
The movement should be called "historically informed performance" (HIP), as in "early music".
HIP may make the work more proximate to Shakespeare's own, useful in describing the distance between Shakespeare’s theater and our own.
HIP can point to areas of likely difference between Shakespeare’s own practices and those more common today.
HIP is about entertaining audiences and disrupting familiarity.
Practices address differences in preparation and production elements.
Elements include amounts of rehearsal; playing in shared light; use of actors’ parts; reconstructions of playing spaces; preparation without a director; use of early modern texts; reconstructed costuming; single-gendered casts; and “original pronunciation.”
These seek to reengage with practices lost after the English Interregnum (1642).
Gurr and Ichikawa: "The long‐developing traditions of Shakespearean playing was broken in 1642”.

Amounts of Rehearsal

Preparation significantly influences theatrical events.
Standard productions involve extensive group rehearsal.
Actors begin without fully memorized lines, learning them during rehearsal.
Directors impose a vision, set movement patterns, and work on individual scenes.
The rehearsal process includes pacing, runs, costume and technical rehearsals, and preview performances.
Observation of companies working according to early modern rehearsal quantities shows none of these stages pertain.
In a single group rehearsal, companies work on songs, dances, and fights, and cue-to-cue.
Actors lack time to develop scenes, deepen moments, or fully learn lines.
Memorization is almost certainly incomplete.
The first off-book rehearsal is rough.
Actors control movement and choices without a director or rehearsal opportunity.
Performance is filled with discoveries shared with the audience.
This creates immediacy and spontaneity unmatched in conventional performance.
Differences brought about by later-modern rehearsal processes versus HIP impact the nature of the performance significantly.
Performances on Shakespeare’s stages were entirely different from performances on mainstream stages today.
Expectations of similarity in acting style and polish are unrealistic.

Playing in Common Light

Early modern stage used shared light, unlike the separation between actor and audience in later-modern productions.
Performances took place in the open air and under direct sunlight.
Avoiding controlling lighting changes relationships between actors and audience.
Companies interact more with audiences, and audiences react more fully.
Actors can see audience members' reactions clearly.
Relationships develop in common lighting that cannot develop otherwise.
Audiences' ability to see one another makes the performance a shared event.

Use of Actors’ Parts, and Matters of Memorization and Prompting

Actors learn subtextual clues from entirety as well gaining understanding of actors in rehearsal.
Plays of Anton Chekhov have subtext informative to audience during narrative.
Shakespeare's used lines directly instead of subtext.
Shakespeare wrote moments actors had to learn their part.
Palfrey and Stern (2007, 16), medieval actors’ parts contained the actors’ lines but not their cues.
Suggesting that this an alternative that the prompter would indicate which actor to speak.
The questions of the role of the prompter is linked to acting parts, and the amount of group rehearsal in the early modern theatre.
Gurr and Ichikawa claim: “As we have seen, there was no regular prompter”.
Stating that since the oak provided entry point of Frons scene made it hard for people behind to hear what was being said.
Claiming that actors might get help from actors if needed, where as the staff book keeper helped the actor.
The Frons argument of not being able to hear, ignores the realities of actors who do not rehearse.
The actors do not have the the time repetition of later modern actors.
There for requires a prompter.
If acoustics where bad for someone behind then a prompter had to be in front.
Which requires the prompter to see and hear what is going on, and assist with with missed cues or actions.
Clear form the nature of prep and performance, that a prompter was need.
That today actors know their lines well is due to how production is put together.
They do not obtain that condition till later in rehearsals compared to early modern times.
That with the prompter actor would us a platt (plot) to see what scenes and props would be used.

Performances in Reconstructed and Extant Early Modern Playing Places

Theatres of the early modern were different than later.
Oak timbers were used with lime and rough cast for walls.
A large oaken stage serves as a sounding board.
Early modern theatres intimacy could not have been matched by larger modern spaces.
Having some 2500+ people , the forty foot distance would allow a far more connected scene for the audiences.
In the park setting the suspended performance would depend on rain and weather unlike in a fully enclosed theartre.
With Van Buchells drawing helped showcase the theatre like nature from De Witt, which shows theatre as a performing stage.
With one actor on stage sitting and another one standing, like that of a drawn play.
By there standing and positioning allowed better visuals.

Preparation and Performance without the Influence of a Director

Directors have been more recent, while having a show without out a show can be viewed as similar to those domaint to day.
Showing that early modern would have demonstarated more fluid, rather than fixed for the staging
Without the directors, designers, the performance would create a continous scene to action,
That the verse and prose with actors, without directions that the actors would talk faster, unlike that of a regular setting.
Modern plays can achieve 1000 lines per hour, those that eschew pausing and scene changes can reach 1200 lines/hour.
Actors are more likely to learn lines from them selves rather then having a direction.

The Use of Early Modern Versions of Texts

Later modern texts undergo signifiant changes that can be closer to what was intended originally.
Due to irregularities in early texts, actors will find and find opportunity for interpretation with emphasis.

Reconstructed Early Modern Costuming

Director Mark Rylance , Van Kampen, Dean triumvirate that focused of early costumers.

Employment of Single-Gendered Casts

Those of different genders might create gender tension for the time.
The telling of plays with those of certain gender can change the tone of the story (Ex: Taming of the Shrew).

So-Called "Original Pronunciation"

That the original way things where said relied on studies, with dialects and communities holding such information.
Ben Champion and linguistic David Crystal , showed performances that resembled little to what can be heard in the Royal Shakespeare Stages.
The joke that actors say would be lost and and may come across better in Shakespeare.
With is know about the stage is more then what is speculated, can show the differences that the work does in fact have.