How Shakespeare rehearsed

And what that tells us about performance

The next Shakespeare Book Club is 16th June. Our next play is the glorious As You Like It.

My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect starts on 6th June. First, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings, but then Emma, and on to Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde.

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In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio accuses Hero of being unfaithful in the middle of their wedding ceremony. He and his men leave and we are left with Hero (passed out), her father Leonato (so angry he wishes his daughter dead), Beatrice (Hero’s closest friend), Benedict (“apparelled in wonder”), and the Friar. Well-played this is hugely dramatic; picked apart in a classroom, or fluffed by too-clever directors, it is apt to be drained of all its blood by people more interested in themes, and commentary about sexism, and so on. Before you can get to all of that (and it is important) you need to know the mechanics of how the scene works, which means thinking about how the play would have been rehearsed.

First I’ll outline some basics of how rehearsal worked in Shakespeare’s theatre (drawing on Tiffany Stern’s truly splendid book Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, which I cannot recommend highly enough), then I’ll look at a speech given by the Friar to point out just how much is going on in this scene.

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Rehearsal

Unlike modern theatre, there simply wasn’t very much rehearsal in the 1590s. Dozens of plays were kept in repertoire, many of them new; few were retained longer than twelve months. There wasn’t time to rehearse them all in the precious and delicate manner we are used to now. Actors focussed on learning and relearning multiple parts at a time. Maybe one new role every two weeks, plus another thirty in their head. Not all major parts, but still that was where most of the time would be spent.

The time between buying a play and putting it on varied between three and fifty-one days, averaging about twenty. These are fairly uncertain numbers (being based on one diary) but they give a good sense of the limited time available for rehearsals. Those twenty days would include several plays. Scholars disagree about these numbers, but the point is clear: you didn’t get several weeks of dedicated time to rehearsing and performing just one play. It was a busy, bustling job. A different play every day! Without mass tourism, that’s how theatres made their money.

Writers first sold a company the plot, then did a small private reading, then, when it was finished, read the play with the actors. Then the “parts” were handed out for learning. Actors did not receive a full script, as today, but just their lines and their cues. Those cues may be one or two words, and actors were given very little indication about who their speeches were directed towards. Lines were learned solo, not in a group. Stern says, “group preparation was a luxury, not a necessity.”

Learning parts, without the broader context, meant actors worked from their cues much more than they do today. Stern gives the example of Twelfth Night, I.v, when Olivia falls in love with Viola. Look at the cues, she says, and we can see the moment of the falling in love quite precisely. When Viola says “with sighs of fire”, Olivia’s next lines are verse, not prose; this is a huge shift in the scene, and in itself would be a significant cue to the actor that something momentous is happening. The same thing happens in Much Ado, when Beatrice realises Benedict loves her she says, “What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?” This is verse, and until now she has spoken prose. She doesn’t need the whole script to know this is momentous. Shakespeare cues her with the switch to metre.

The use of cues meant you could put on a play very quickly. (It is also where the importance of missing a cue comes from; today, actors know the whole scene and can often patch it up; back then, literally no-one on stage would know what to do! Hence the prompter.) The actors were told what to do (writers taught major actors, major actors taught minor actors), and although they sometimes extemporised, they did it. Cues also explain why some speeches repeat phrases.

I’ll have my bond; I will not hear thee speak:
I’ll have my bond; and therefore speak no more.
I'll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool,
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield
To Christian intercessors. Follow not;
I'll have no speaking: I will have my bond.

You see here how every time Shylock says “I’ll have my bond” he then says something the equivalent of “shut up”. The actor playing Salarino will have been “falsely cued” by that line and, not having known the play, will have tried to interject. You do not need to direct the actor to be cross: that will happen by the constant frustration of the false cue (Shylock actually uses the cue phrase earlier on as well.) The script directs the actors more than anything else. Read the rehearsal scene in III.i of Midsummer Night’s Dream and you’ll see the false cue “never tyre” making comic mayhem with Bottom.