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Thank you very much.
Tiffany Stern, University College.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about Shakespeare and the Stage.
And the way he features about the stage,
affects the way Shakespeare writes his plays.
Because Shakespeare was of course, an actor as well as a playwright.
So firstly,
I'm going to see how we can see some actors in the plays of Shakespeare.
I've shown you a picture here, so the man called William Kemp.
And he was an actor who played a fool.
We have this picture because William Kemp as well as being an actor,
was also rather famous Morris dancer.
And this was a book he wrote about the nine day Morris dance he made from
London to Northridge.
Well, he was an actor for Shakespeare's company a full player until about 1600.
At that time, he left the company seemingly in disrepute.
And angrily went off to dance the Morris over the Alps.
Here is Kemp featuring inside one of Shakespeare's texts.
This is a little bit from Romeo and Juliet.
And you can see that the stage heading, instead of saying enter Peter,
says enter Will Kemp.
And that either shows us a moment when Shakespeare is writing with Will Kemp in
his mind or at least when the prompter is deciding who to cast in that part.
When all of Shakespeare's fools from the time when Will Kemp
was there are extremely foolish, we have constable doll,
we have Dogberry bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream.
But then, as I say, Kemp leaves and the new fool is acquired for the company.
And we also have a picture of him.
This is Robert Arman.
And he's a very different kind of fool as you can see.
If you look at this picture, you can see that he has hanging on his belt,
two things.
One is the big sort of triangle in the front.
That's his purse, which is why thieves will called cutpurses.
On the left is his inkhorn.
That's a horn, which has an inkwell,
a quill pen, and a little knife to trim the pen.
If you went around with an inkhorn, you are broadcasting to everyone that
you might need to write in pen at any time that you were a literary person.
Now, from 1600 when Shakespeare's company acquires this fool,
suddenly all the fools in Shakespeare's plays become cerebral, wise,
actually more trenched into knowing than anyone else in the company.
So we get the Wise, Fool, and Lair, we get Feisty, we get Touchstone,
these wise fools.
And I'm simply showing you this so
that you can see that Shakespeare's plays are shaped to his acting company.
And that is really hardly surprising.
There are other ways in which we can spot things happening in the company even when
we don't know the actors.
I'll give you a little example.
He would have a moment in Cymbeline.
What happens here is the two boys have found what I think is a dead body,
in fact it isn't, but I won't go into that now.
They decide to sing a song to this person they've been looking after.
But then they change their minds they went to sing the song they will in fact say it.
So now our voices have got to the manage crack,
sing him to the ground as wants to our mother.
And the reply is I cannot sing, I'll weepe, and word it with thee;.
So one says the voices have to manage crack and the other one says I can't sing.
And the second one agrees.
Actually, why don't we just say our song instead?
What's happened here is a speedy revision because of voice breaking in the company.
These two boys were clearly originally supposed to sing the song.
We even have music for the song they were supposed to sing.
But at some point, a revision has had to take place to deal with
the fact that their voices are going.
So having looked at that, I'm liking to look more specifically at the way plays
were put together, and at how that affects the way that plays were written.
In particular, and this is something that has fascinated me for a long, long time.
I get to look at what text actors were given, and
how that affects the way the plays were written in the first place.
So what you'd like to learn plays from?
What they were given was something that looks a bit like this, and
I'll explain its features to you.
This is what's known as an actor's part.
It's called the part because it's just part of the play,
the actor doesn't have the whole play.
This is the part for Orlando and a Robert Greene play called Orlando Furioso.
What this part consists of is everything the actor is going to say as Orlando,
but nothing that will be said to or about him.
You can see he has a long queue, a long line, at the end of which are the last
one or two or three words is to listen out for before his next feat.
So he has an entire script of everything he is going to say but
are very much without context.
He doesn't have the arc of the narrative but he does have the arc of his
own character's progression, and this is what actors learned from.
So what the actor has, it is everything here is going to say in the play.
But nothing that will be said to or about him, cues aside.
And there were various other things he is not given.
He doesn't know within his dialog with one or several actors.
He doesn't know how long he has before his next cue.
Will he say something immediately cued and immediately say something again?
Or will he say something and 12 people will come on and do a dance and
kill one another before he gets to speak again?
It's not clear from this.
So he does not have much narrative sense, but
he has a great deal of sense of his own character.
So what happens when we think of plays in these terms?
Well, amongst other things,
we must remember that actors learned texts such as this by themselves at home.
They didn't learn them with the other actors present.
Here's an example which says, the player so beateth his part to himself at home.
That he gives it right gesture when he comes to the scaffold or stage.
I have another example of that, but I'll hop past that.
How did actors who had learned the separate parts so
far from the narrative work together to put on a production?
This picture helps explain.
This is actually a medieval picture of a medieval play about the Martyrdom of
Saint Apollonia.
And that Saint Apollonia in the middle, they're being murdered by having her teeth
pulled, which is why Saint Apollonia is now the patron saint of dentists.
Around her, our fellow actors, for
the person I'm interested in is this one the prompter.
The prompter holds a book and the baton and
indicates with his baton when the next actor should speak.
And as you can see, he's something rather like a modern conductor.
And when you think actually of an orchestra,
if you imagine you're playing the bassoon in the orchestra, you're not going to
be given the entire score of music that you're going to play in.
You're going to be given your bassoon part.
And that's a little bit the way early modern performances took place.
But what does this mean for Shakespeare?
I can just show you a few examples.
Here's Hamlet, a bit from Hamlet.
This is the entire cute part for Reynaldo.
I'm going to look not at his cues but at his words.
This is what the actual we'll see.
I will my Lord.
My Lord, I did intend it.
I, very well my Lord.
As gaming my Lord.
My Lord that would dishonor him.
But my good Lord.
I my Lord, I would know that etc.
The actor sees that he is to say My Lord repeatedly.
This gives him rhetorical information about how to play that little
stripped role.
He knows that he is obsequious.
He probably thinks he'd better say My Lord in an amusing way.
He knows that something happens in the single sentence where he doesn't say
My Lord, a place is in the consequence at friend also and gentleman.
That's when Polonius with whom he is talking, loses his place.
Reynaldo has to put him back in his place.
I think this tells him to be a bit annoyed.
He forgets to say My Lord.
He's bored with his interlocutor.
Anyway, this is a part that, as you can see,
helps to stage itself by rhetorical devices put in the part.
Let me show you something else an actor might look for,
looking again at an actor's part.
We have to imagine the exit, turning or quite possibly unscrewing what
was sometimes called his role, because it was handed to him or rolled up.
So much in the actor playing Olivia unscrolling this role.
You don't have to read any of the words at all,
to see that the text moves from pros to first halfway through this scene.
Now, what's happening in the play is that Olivia is talking to Viola and
Viola is dressed as a man.
And Olivia at this moment falls in love, in this scene falls in love with Viola.
And the actor playing Olivia will see it one that it'll be a man player.
He will see it once that his method of speaking changes very
significantly halfway through the scene.
And this is of course, at the moment when he falls in love.
That sounds a little reductive but
you could clearly fall in love with a gesture because we have various
stage directions from the time saying he falls in love as a thing you can do.
So the actor will see that what he would call this is a change of passions.
Artists would divide their hearts into passions and look for
clues to see that their passions were changing.
Acting at the time was sometimes called playing,
but was sometimes called passionating.
Again, I think I'll hop over this one, and let's go straight to this one.
This is a moment when an actor would read this text in one way, but
when we see it in context, we'll see it in a different way.
Here's the actor playing Solanio.
Solanio is listening out for a queue of have my bond.
And when he is have my bond he's going to say it is the most impenetrable curre that
ever kept with men.
A curre is a dog, he is going to say something insulting.
So it's listening out for have my bond.
And now let me show you the bit of Merchant of Venice in which this occurs.
And I'll read this out to you, but imagine your Solanio you listening out for
have my bond.
Jew, that's Shylock.
I will have my bond.
It's the key, it is the most impenetrable.
I will not hear these speak.
I will have my bond.
It is the most important and therefore speak no more.
I will not be made a soft and delight fool to shake the head for
land and cited and deal to Christian intercessors.
Follow not, I'll have no speaking, I will have my bond.
It is the most impenetrable care that ever kept with men.
And as you can see, this text that we might read in a linear fashion actually
anticipates and in fact demands these early interruptions.
And again, we might think of a musical analogy where the music sometimes
demands that you go back to the beginning and play through again.
So this I go to suggest is Shakespeare scripting for actors.
And I'm playing to their strengths obviously,
the actor playing the true Shylock will know that he speaks his cue many times.
The actor playing Solanio, may or may not have that information,
but the actors can play games with one another using devices such as this.
And these are all ways in which plays that are not very collectively rehearsed.
Actors tend to have one collective rehearsal before performance.
These are all ways in which plays can stage themselves although they are not
very collectively rehearsed.
Sticking with the Merchant of Venice.
Shylock repeatedly gives out early cues.
Here's an example of ill lucke, ill lucke, is it true, is it true.
Fourscore ducats, etc.
What's going to happen as a result of this?
Is that actors,
the people to whom Shylock is speaking will be continually interrupting him.
And Shylock does repeatedly say that no one will listen to him that no one hears
him through.
And the text stage, stages itself such that will indeed happen.
This is my last slide.
I've shown you Shakespeare writing for actors receiving that kind of text.
As I say he was a theater man and theater was the element in which he thought.
So here he is playing a little game with this whole idea of cues and parts.
This is Beatrice saying and Much Ado speak count tis your Qu.
If you're Qu, you might want to speak but it's what we would call a meta dramatic or
a meta theatrical joke.
And here he is in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
where he has actors putting on plays from part.
At first he has some rehearsing and being so poor and in their rehearsal,
that they cannot in fact tell the difference between the part the lines that
he speak and the cue the lines that listen for.
Peter Quince, who's there prompter says,
you speak all your parts at once cues and all.
Well, here in the performance, the actors have finally learned the difference
between cues and parts and they're delighted by it.
Wicked walls for whom I see no bliss, cursed be thy stones for
thus deceiving me.
The wall me thinks being sensible should curse again.
No, in truth sir he should not deceiving me is Thisbies cue.
She is to enter, and I am to spy her through the wall.
So these are amateur actors proud at finally understanding the nature
of cued parts.
And that takes me back again to specific actors in Shakespeare's company.
I get to end on an epitaph for man called Richard Burbage.
Richard Burbage was Shakespeare's lead actor, the first player, the first
fellow the first Hamlet, and this is an epitaph written when Richard Burbage died.
I think it's one of the shortest epitaphs ever.
Here it is.
Exit Burbage.
But what I like about it is it isn't just an exit,
it's a queue of excellence as you can see from the long line before it.
This is Burbage's final ever exit as he goes off into oblivion.
But this does tell us that even poets that people at the time were very
familiar with the construction and the look of the cued part.
And as I say Shakespeare in particular, wrote to and about those things,
because they were also the very ways in which he himself had learned this texts.
Thank you >> [APPLAUSE]