Shakespeare on Theatre E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: ... On Theatre
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 307

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A unique collection of Shakespeare's every reflection on the theatre, offering fascinating insights into the man, his work, and the world of the Jacobean stage. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces – including 'All the world's a stage,' Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals – along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's informed commentary takes us through the entire process of a play's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the 'tiring-house' and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences.

Leseprobe

Shakespeareon Theatre

edited by

Nick de Somogyi

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Prologues and Inductions

1. Auditions, Casting, and Parts

2. Learning Lines and Rehearsing Roles

3. Props and Costumes, Notes and Rewrites

  Interlude: A ‘Finished’ Script

4. Theatres and Scenery

5. Fluffs, Prompts, Cues, and Snags

6. Audiences, Critics, and Tours

Epilogues and Afterlives

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Epigraph Sources

Index of Works Cited

in memoriam

GEOFFREY BURNSTONE

(1925–2009)

The world’s a Theatre: the earth a stage,

Plac’d in the midst, where both the prince and page,

Both rich and poor, fool, wise man, base and high,

All act their parts in life’s short Tragedy.

Our life’s a tragedy: those secret rooms

Wherein we tire us are our mothers’ wombs.

The music ush’ring in the play is mirth

To see a man-child brought upon the earth.

That fainting gasp of breath which first we vent

Is a Dumb Show; presents the argument.

Our new-born cries, that new-born griefs bewray,

Are the sad Prologue of th’ensuing play.

False hopes, true fears, vain joys, and fierce distracts

Are like the music that divides the Acts.

Time holds the glass, and when the hour’s outrun,

Death strikes the Epilogue, and the Play is done.

Francis Quarles, ‘On the Lifeand Death of a Man’ (c. 1630)

Introduction

1 ACTOR. Gods of the theater, smile on us.

2 ACTOR. You who sit up there, stern in judgment, Smile on us.

1 ACTOR. You who look down on actors—

BOTH. And who doesn’t?

Stephen Sondheim (1974)

Whatever else he was or wasn’t – and bookshelves groan with contending theories – William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was a working man of the theatre to his core. If, to quote the maxim he perfected, ‘All the world’s a stage… And one man in his time plays many parts’, then the world of the theatre in which he lived and worked supplied him with a lifetime of roles. The stage-struck boy, watching in wonder the outlandish spectacle of touring productions. The young father drawn to the amateur dramatics of local maygames and revels. Then, talent-spotted by a later touring troupe, the industrious jobbing actor, hitching his fortunes to the grinding wagon of provincial rep, and learning the tricks of this gradually lucrative trade. Next, in step with his growing confidence as an actor, his precociously impressive skills as a textual fixer for the increasingly creaky melodramas of the repertoire – an improviser of verse and plot no less impressive than the showier repartee of the company Clown. In time, of course, the Londoner, and – after sharing the modern duties of dramaturg, prompter, and ASM – another new title to go with his burgeoning success as a junior co-author: ‘upstart’. Despite being disparaged by the Oxbridge élite in 1592 as a provincial jack of all trades, ‘as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best’ of them, Shakespeare’s parts proliferated: bestselling love-poet (1593); founder-member, with the actor Richard Burbage and the clown Will Kemp, of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594); published – and publicized – playwright (1598); shareholder and artistic director at the Globe theatre (1599); ‘the best and chiefest of our modern writers’ (1601); principal dramatist of the King’s Men, and celebrity box-office gold (1603); financial and artistic investor in the Blackfriars theatre (1609); senior co-author, mentor, and consultant (1613–14); and eventually, after a lifetime spent in a profession legally defined as little better than that of ‘rogues and vagabonds’, the part he may have cherished most, the one with which he described himself in his will (1616): ‘gentleman’. But when, in 1602, an officer at the College of Heralds expressed doubt over Shakespeare’s right to his coat of arms, the condescending term he used probably in fact best defines the man’s lifelong rank, profession, or occupation: ‘Shakespear ye Player’.

Shakespeare was a ‘player’ in nearly all the definitions available in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – ‘gambler’, ‘competitive contestant’, ‘professional (as opposed to gentleman)’, ‘financial speculator’, ‘sexually successful individual’, ‘respected, or influential person’ – but chiefly, of course, in the specifically theatrical sense that enabled all the others throughout his lifetime: ‘A person who acts a character on the stage; a dramatic performer, an actor.’ From the late 1580s to the early 1610s, Shakespeare’s life was regulated by the demands made on him as a ‘dramatic performer’. His calendar years were divided into theatrical seasons, themselves irregularly organized (by politics or plague) between London’s playhouses, its various aristocratic households, and the slog of provincial touring. The odd month or so was presumably snatched back home in Stratford, but his London weeks were determined by an exhausting schedule of all-but daily performance, whether for public profit at the theatre, or private reward at court. The diary of his London days was principally governed by the demands of the public theatres in which he worked – the Theater, the Curtain, the Rose, and the Globe – where, open to the skies, performances largely depended on daylight, the three hours or so of their typical duration therefore starting at around two o’clock in the afternoon. (The candle-light of the indoor Blackfriars theatre was later to extend the available playing time, for a richer clientele, into dark winter afternoons and evenings.)

The rival public theatres seem to have competed for their trade by presenting a different, often new, play every day (while regularly rotating performances of the staple favourites) – a schedule that must have dictated a punishing régime for its actors. With his afternoons devoted to performance, Shakespeare’s mornings must often have involved group rehearsals on the unattended stage – sorting out a new play’s blocking, for example, rehearsing its duels, dances, battles, and special effects, or else simply refreshing the collective memory of an earlier production required for its revival that afternoon. Days were long, and those evenings that were free from the demands of private performance at court or elsewhere would presumably have been as much taken up with the constant grind of learning lines – and in Shakespeare’s case writing and revising them – as the riotous boozing and wenching of popular imagination. Playing was – as it has always been – extremely hard work.

Modern playwrights have increasingly taken to donating (or selling) their working papers to the world’s great libraries, where future scholars may pore over the drafts, rewrites, notes, bills, invoices, and practical correspondence relating to the day-to-day business of making theatre. As it happens, the greatest precedent for such a bequest precisely dates from a few months after Shakespeare’s death, when the charitable foundation established at Dulwich by Burbage’s great rival, the actor Edward Alleyn, first began its work. To this day, the busy transactions of an Elizabethan theatre (the Rose), recorded in the so-called ‘Diary’ of its manager (Alleyn’s father-in-law) Philip Henslowe, together with a rich mass of manuscript correspondence, remains secure in the archives of Dulwich College. The nearest Shakespeare ever came to bequeathing the ‘dedicated words which writers use / Of their fair subject’ (Sonnet 82), however, was the deposit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library of a copy of the 1623 First Folio, the posthumously collected edition of his plays prepared by two of his ‘fellows’, John Heminge and Henry Condell.

In the absence, therefore, of any private, backstage commentary by the world’s foremost playwright – and unlike the other inaugural title in this series, Chekhov on Theatre – this anthology of Shakespeare on Theatre necessarily depends on the public, published nature of his surviving works. Those works, furthermore, seem almost perversely to have steered away from any direct depiction of the London theatre-land in which they were first written and performed. Unlike the many colleagues with whom he worked, collaborated, or quarrelled – Jonson, Marston, and Middleton spring immediately to mind – Shakespeare seems to have winced from dramatizing the daily business of his life too closely. At the same time, the am-dram tantrums of the ‘mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), the notably incompetent pageant that concludes Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595), and the troupes of strolling players that transform the stages of The Taming of the Shrew (1592) and Hamlet (1600–1), for example, cannot but reflect insights into his own profession. Necessarily oblique though such extended glimpses are, however, it does not take very long for a reader or performer of his plays to realize how often his characters ‘talk shop’ by incorporating the technical vocabulary of the stage – the nuts, bolts, and nitty-gritty of their actor–author’s craft. Whether in the relish with which Richard of Gloucester raids the props-basket, the impatience Othello barks at a premature prompt, or the anxious interpretation Bassanio places on an appreciative audience, Shakespeare drew repeated inspiration from the daily circumstances of his working life, almost as if unbidden to his mind.

That inspiration was further assisted by the deeply felt and widespread contemporary notion that each of our individual human lives comprises but a brief cameo appearance in (what Ralegh called) ‘this stage-play world’. Shakespeare’s variant of that phrase – ‘All the world’s a stage’ – has become a commonplace of modern quotation, but the premise it summarized was everywhere in the culture that gave rise to it. The theatrical sense of life, from the trumpeting of its ‘crying’ entrance to its inevitable exit – ‘curtains’, as we still say – profoundly influenced the way it was conducted, from the highest spectacle of monarchy to the daily squalid display of public execution. (The two extremes of this commonplace were to be shockingly conflated in 1649, when Charles I was beheaded outside the building originally designed as an indoor theatre for his father.) At a time when the complex hierarchy of ‘sumptuary law’ minutely regulated who was allowed to wear what, when, and why – and when theatre companies routinely spent more on lavish costumes for a new production than was paid to the authors for its script – the business of the stage, or scaffold, was the material of life.

Drawn from the thirty-six plays collected in the definitive First Folio, as well as the poems and the handful of further plays not included there, and supplemented by reference to the – sometimes dramatically – different wording of their Quarto texts, Shakespeare on Theatre seeks to identify, extract, and present the observations of a lifetime spent on the stage. In addition, since by its nature Shakespeare’s theatrical career throughout involved and required active collaboration, a range of material by his contemporaries has also been included. These supplementary extracts always engage directly with his own words and works, whether in deliberate reply, contemporary parallel, eye-witness observation, or later memory, or else from passages in works to which he is known to have contributed – most prominently the multi-authored Sir Thomas More (in which another troupe of strolling players perform for its title-hero).

The structure of Shakespeare on Theatre broadly follows the progress of a play’s ‘Jacobethan’ production. After a Prologue announcing the tactics by which, in the days before proscenium curtains or blackouts, his audiences were invited to exchange reality for fiction, there come three sections detailing the practical run-up to performance: from (the equivalents of) the audition-hall, via the rehearsal-room, to the costume-department. In keeping with the practical nature of the collection – and in illustration of the ways in which the print of surviving play-texts can sometimes distort or disguise the complicated processes by which they came about – we also include a ‘definitive’ text of Peter Quince’s Pyramus and Thisbe (the play-within-the-play featured in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The next three sections are concerned with the fate of a production from the moment its cast first tread the boards of their theatre – a theatre whose character, structure, and symbolism differed, often profoundly, from our own. But some theatrical experiences endure unchanged, whether in the shape of a fluffed line, a missed cue, or the love–hate relationship that exists between an actor and his audience. (‘His audience’ because in Shakespeare’s day all actors were male – hence the detailed instructions he supplies to the boy-actors playing his female leads.) The fact that Shakespeare and his fellows occasionally grovelled to their royal or aristocratic patrons in their courts, while frequently – and literally – looking down their noses at the groundlings in their public theatre-yards, perhaps represents another continuity for a profession that has always, in Francis Quarles’s phrase, been uniquely ‘Plac’d in the midst’. Quarles’s take on the theatre of our lives (which supplies the epigraph to this book) is one in a series of versions of that theme supplied here – as much as anything to demonstrate Shakespeare’s characteristic perfection of what was then already a cliché. The final section of Shakespeare on Theatre supplies an Epilogue suggesting the various ways in which a performance can live on in the mind after those inevitable final words, in theatre as in life, ‘You that way; we this way’.

Shakespeare seems to have been the first actor in England to be more or less directly described as a ‘Thespian’ (see below, here). The roles he actually learned and played on the various stages of his career include parts in satirical Comedies and classical Tragedies (according to the cast-lists Ben Jonson supplied for Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus), as well as the ‘kingly parts’ of History plays. A later tradition associates him with ‘old man’ characters (perhaps because of his baldness), and it is increasingly accepted that he may also have débuted many of his own Choruses. The shape and span of that career, from bit-part spear-carrier to distinguished mentor, set him apart from most of his rivals. Educated at university or the Inns of Court, those gentleman-playwrights may have trumped his knowledge of Latin and Greek, but they lacked his hands-on experience of theatre’s daily graft. The material gathered in this book therefore ranges from an early tip about how to provoke onstage tears by using an onion-soaked handkerchief, to his grandest reflections on the relation of art to life. It is in part because Shakespeare knew what it was to feel his mouth go dry, and to sense that brief tremor in his limbs as he walked onstage, that the words he wrote have lasted so freshly and vividly into an age when performances are regularly ‘blue-screened’, ‘digitally enhanced’, or ‘phoned in’. The ‘message’ of Shakespeare’s plays will endlessly change, but their ‘medium’ will last for as long as human beings continue to tell each other stories on a stage.

All the extracts collected below have been modernized from their early modern spellings and punctuation, and follow the conventions established in the ongoing ‘Shakespeare Folios’ series (NHB, 2000—). Quotation from Shakespeare’s plays generally follows the 1623 Folio, though the wording from earlier Quarto editions is sometimes also selected. The years supplied for each extract refer to their respective play’s likeliest first performance, or in the case of poems and prose to their date of publication. The individual Section Introductions seek to explain and contextualize the material included in each, while additional explanations also preface many of the individual extracts. The alphabetical Glossary at the end of the book (here) is intended to explain the often difficult words and allusions used in the main text, where they are cued by a °preceding ‘degree’-symbol. Extracts by authors other than Shakespeare have been set in a different style of type, and have also been modernized, by the present editor, where necessary.

This book is based on an original idea by Nick Hern, and I remain deeply grateful to him, both for his continuing faith in me, and for his unparalleled editorial judgement. Profound thanks are also due to the patiently brilliant expertise of Matt Applewhite, Robin Booth, Jodi Gray, and Ian Higham at NHB, as also to the many other friends who have variously helped it on its way, chief among them Fiona Brannon, Dan Burnstone, Miles Croally, Georgina Difford, Calista Lucy, Jane Maud, Jan and Cas Piggott, Tim Underhill, Peter White, and Mary Wilmer.

Prologues and Inductions

Like hungry guests a sitting audience looks,

Plays are like suppers: poets are their cooks.

The founders you; the table is this place:

The carvers we; the Prologue is the grace.

Peter Motteux (1702)

A Prologue to a play is out of date,

A leisurely technique of masquerade.

So please regard me as a friendly shade,

Returning down the years to indicate,

More by my presence than by what I say,

The atmosphere and setting of this play.

Noël Coward (1951)

‘Open your ears!’ The first words of the Chorus to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two (1597) may not seem very subtle, but they are effective. Spoken by the complex figure of ‘Rumour’, his costume ‘painted full of tongues’, they demand a receptive silence from the chattering audience – ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads’ he calls them – now gathered in the open yard before him, and in the echo-chamber of the surrounding galleries. ‘Shut your mouths!’ is what he doesn’t say, but what he certainly means; ‘Open your ears!’ – to a theatre then essentially reliant for its scenery, atmosphere, and lighting on the power of the spoken word. These days on London’s South Bank, the National Theatre publicly flags its repertoire on an electronic billboard outside, ushers its audiences to their seats via a PA system counting down the minutes to curtain-up, and typically signals the outset of each production by dimming the house lights – thereby curtailing the mass perusal of an expensively printed programme, silencing small-talk, and directing all expectant eyes to the pitch-black stage before of them.* Needless to say, none of these technical resources was available to the theatres in which Shakespeare worked, though the same practical requirements still held – ‘As happy prologues to the swelling act’ (Macbeth, 1.3).

Four centuries ago, flyers for forthcoming attractions at the public playhouses would be commissioned from a local printer, and posted about town a day or so in advance. Flags – bearing the theatre’s emblem (or logo) – would be run up the flag-poles to announce an afternoon’s playing. As the audience gathered, a trumpeter would sound a flourish for the ten-minute call, then a second blast to hurry lingerers along, before a third ‘sounding’ announced the imminent performance itself. It was natural light that largely determined the running-time of plays (whether in the early inn-yards or the open-air theatres later modelled on them); and even when it didn’t – for those productions performed indoors in the great halls of aristocratic households, or in the commercial private theatres – mere candlepower alone simply couldn’t stretch to a modern ‘blackout’. And so, in both cases, some sort of music had always supplied the obvious means by which to silence a seated audience’s social chatter, and summon their attention to the stage (much as a modern musical settles an audience by the striking up of its ‘overture’ by the band).

Indoor performances had long begun with an elaborately mimed sequence of action, to musical accompaniment, that would summarize the plot or symbolic moral of the play (or section of the play) it introduced, as well as setting the appropriate mood. The early Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc (1560) typically prefaced each of its acts with just such a ‘Dumb Show’ – choreographed to a series of suitably different instruments (violins, cornets, flutes, woodwind ‘hautboys’, and drums), each of which was attuned to the themes they introduced (discord, royalty, mourning, ghostliness, and war). By the time Shakespeare started out in the theatre, in the late 1580s, such a convention had begun to feel old-fashioned – though the format remained vivid in his imagination. It is something of a black joke, for example, that the garden-scene in Henry VI, Part One (1592), in which the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions pluck the white and red flowers as their respective emblems, is cued by Plantagenet’s command, ‘Since you are tongue-tied and so loath to speak, / In dumb significants proclaim your thoughts’ (2.4): curtain-up on the catastrophic civil war known as the Wars of the Roses. The most famous example of this antiquated device remains the detailed Dumb Show prefacing Prince Hamlet’s court production of The Murder of Gonzago at Elsinore (see below, here) – though that elaborately mimed play-within-the-play-within-the-play might just as well have served, to an earlier theatrical generation, as a scene-setter for Hamlet itself.

As things turn out there (and aptly for a play so endlessly preoccupied with delay), the Dumb Show to The Murder of Gonzago, unlike those in Gorboduc, is succeeded, not by any action, but by the entrance of the figure that had superseded it in the public theatres: the Prologue. Some sense of that early theatrical transition, from Dumb Show to Prologue, survives into the ‘war of looks’ Shakespeare describes between the amorous goddess Venus and Adonis, the reluctant object of her desires, in his 1593 poem of that name. Studiedly avoiding her penetrating gaze, and in a pantomime of evasion, we read that ‘all this dumb play had his acts made plain / With tears which chorus-like her eyes did rain’: the protracted Dumb Show of his rejection prompts the more dramatic effect of her tearful Chorus.

It has been estimated that around half the plays written in the period feature a Prologue, Chorus, or Epilogue (a Classical device already venerable by the time Shakespeare began his career) – though it may well be that many more such speeches were written and performed than have survived attached to their plays. Sometimes these figures were allegorical – Ate (the goddess of discord) in Locrine (c. 1590), for example, or Shakespeare’s own Rumour. Otherwise, convention seems to have dictated that, cued by the third and final trumpet blast in the open-air playhouses, the role of Chorus was played in a voluminous black cloak and a laurel crown – a suitably ‘poetic’ surrogate figure for the author himself. Or perhaps not so surrogate if we accept that, like Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare performed his own Prologues. The disastrous mispunctuation Quince makes of his own words, transforming fawning servility into arrogant indifference (see here), in fact emphasizes the strange mixture of both typically found in the form – as well as the ‘quaking’ nerves associated with performing it. On the professional stage of the day, a shakily received première could act like a latter-day New York Times review and ‘sink’ an entire production – a nautical metaphor entirely appropriate to London’s Bankside theatres.

Shakespeare’s use of the device was always experimental. After crafting the Prologue and Act Two Chorus to Romeo and Juliet (1594) in the ostentatious form of a sonnet, for example, he seems to have abandoned the framework he envisaged, allowing the mounting tension of the play’s action to speak for itself. (It is probably by sheer accident that the second-act Chorus has come down to us at all.) And when he revived and fulfilled that scheme as part of the framework of the six Choruses that punctuate Henry V (1599), the effect was to place the heroic action it staged within a sustained set of broadly ironic ‘inverted commas’, repeatedly and strangely intrusively negotiating the transition from the real to the fictional, from life to art, that is the Prologue’s central duty.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare had also brilliantly experimented with a third form of that transition, the device known as the ‘Induction’. A sort of theatrical trompe l’oeil, the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew (1592) introduces the entire play as an entertainment staged for a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, who is fooled into thinking himself a lord on waking from a night on the town. What is probably an early version of the same play, The Taming of a Shrew, elaborates this preamble into a thoroughgoing framework, with Sly at last waking from ‘the best dream that ever I had in my life’. Enigmatically, whether by design or accident, no such closure is supplied in the otherwise more authoritative Folio text: as Chuang-Tzu’s emperor asked one morning, ‘Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am now a man?’ The open-ended dream of the drunken tinker, where lords pretend to be players, and players lords, continues to define the theatrical world Shakespeare helped create.

So to ask a question that Shakespeare himself must so often have pondered, where on earth – or in ‘the brightest heaven’ – to begin?

‘The first and happiest hearers of the town’

These two Prologues, first spoken fourteen years apart, and each introducing a new Shakespeare play, were in all likelihood the first and last examples of the form ever heard at the first Globe theatre, which had opened for business in May 1599, and burned to the ground in June 1613. For all the dazzling effect this sumptuous new ‘wooden O’ must first have presented, the Chorus to Henry V almost grovels for approval in a tone of mock-modesty that simultaneously promotes its audience into ‘gentles all’, and deprecates even this brand-new playhouse as a mere ‘scaffold’ (for public executions) or ‘cockpit’ (for animal-baiting) – instead co-opting their ‘imaginary puissance’ to the perfection of illusion they will shortly combine to create.

The Prologue to Henry V (1599):

CHORUS. O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

°Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,

Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire

Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,

The °flat unraisèd spirits that have dar’d

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object: can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very °casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O, pardon! since a crookèd figure may

°Attest in little place a million;

And let us, °ciphers to this great account,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies,

Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide one man,

And make imaginary puissance.

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth;

For ’tis your thoughts that now must °deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,

Turning th’accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,

Admit me Chorus to this history;

Who Prologue-like your humble patience pray,

Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Fletcher’s Chorus to Henry VIII, the first in a trio of plays he co-wrote with Shakespeare in the early 1610s, urges the same blend of flattery and friendship upon its ‘gentle hearers’ – though tastes had changed among the ‘first and happiest hearers of the town’ at the Globe: no clowns or battle-scenes here – no ‘fool and fight’ (of the sort Henry V had supplied). By an irony of history, the ‘wooden O’ forever associated with ‘a muse of fire’ was destroyed ‘in two short hours’ during a performance of Henry VIII, when a stray spark ignited its thatched roof (see here).

John Fletcher, The Prologue to Henry VIII (1613):

CHORUS. I come no more to make you laugh: things now

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high and working, full of state and woe,

Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,

We now present. Those that can pity here

May, if they think it well, let fall a tear;

The subject will deserve it. Such as give

Their money out of hope they may believe

May here find truth, too. Those that come to see

Only a show or two, and so agree

The play may pass, if they be still and willing,

I’ll undertake may see away their shilling

Richly in two short hours. Only they

That come to hear a merry bawdy play,

A °noise of targets, or to see a fellow

In a long °motley coat guarded with yellow,

Will be deceiv’d. For, gentle hearers, know

To rank our chosen truth with such a show

As fool and fight is, beside forfeiting

Our own brains and the opinion that we bring

To make that only true we now °intend,

Will leave us never an understanding friend.

Therefore, for goodness’ sake, and as you are known

The first and happiest hearers of the town,

Be sad, as we would make ye; think ye see

The very persons of our noble story

As they were living; think you see them great,

And follow’d with the general throng and sweat

Of thousand friends; then, in a moment, see

How soon this mightiness meets misery:

And, if you can be merry then, I’ll say

A man may weep upon his wedding-day.

‘Two hours’ traffic’

Shakespeare wrote the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet (1594) as a sonnet, swankily flexing his literary muscles as the principal dramatist of the newly founded Lord Chamberlain’s Men – one of the two main theatrical ‘households’ of the day. The promised ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’ – echoed in Fletcher’s ‘two short hours’ – has been much debated, given the length of many published plays of the time. Whether this reflects a greater rate of delivery on the early modern stage, a piece of conventional rhetoric (like the ‘hour-glass’ mentioned by Henry V ’s Chorus), or else (perhaps most likely) that a play’s published text routinely supplied more than was ever acted, remains unknown.

The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet (1594):

CHORUS. Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life,

Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.

The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which °but their children’s end nought could remove,

Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage:

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

First-night nerves

Choruses were often written for a specific time and place of performance: a play’s court production, for example; or its première on the public stage; or on the occasion of its later revival; or even in honour of a particular actor’s début in a part. They were also therefore among the last pieces of a play’s text to be learned, which is perhaps why Shakespeare so often associates the form with ‘faintly’ spoken hesitation – arguably compounded by his first-hand experience of the ‘butterflies’ associated with the role. Hence Benvolio’s reference below to a ‘without-book Prologue’.

Gathered in their costume and masks outside the Capulet ball they are about to gatecrash, Romeo asks his fellow Montagues whether they should deliver the customary oration to their hosts. Benvolio dismisses the idea: such niceties are as antiquated, he says, as the allegorical prologues to old plays – in this case the blindfold figure of Cupid, the boy-god of love, wielding a fearsome-looking bow and arrow, and fumbling over his hastily learned (or half-learned) words. (Interestingly, it is the same figure of Cupid who presents the masque in Timon of Athens, the play Shakespeare co-wrote with Thomas Middleton ten years later.) Let them judge (‘measure’) us instead, says Benvolio, by the quality of our dancing (‘measure’).

Romeo and Juliet (1594), 1.4:

ROMEO. What, shall this speech be spoke for our excuse?

Or shall we on, without apology?

BENVOLIO. The date is out of such prolixity:

We’ll have no Cupid, hoodwink’d with a scarf,

Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of °lath,

Scaring the ladies like a °crowkeeper;

Nor no without-book Prologue faintly spoke

After the prompter, for our entrance.

But let them measure us by what they will,

We’ll measure them a measure and be gone.

‘Certain it is,’ wrote Francis Bacon in his treatise on the Advancement of Learning (1605), ‘that words, as the Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgement.’ Whether or not a reference to Benvolio’s Cupid, the same boomerang effect is much in evidence in another of Shakespeare’s imagined Prologues, this time the nervous recitation by Peter Quince of his own Prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe (the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Unsurprisingly (since the author is delivering his own lines), the speaker is here word-perfect; unfortunately, he is so intent on remembering them, and so stricken by nerves, that the sense of their punctuation (‘points’) entirely escapes him, and the random pauses and stresses he makes has the devastating effect of reversing its entire meaning. (For the speech as Quince intended it, see below, here.)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), 5.1:

PROLOGUE. ‘If we offend, it is with our good will.

That you should think. We come not to offend

But with good will. To show our simple skill,

That is the true beginning of our end.

Consider then: we come but in despite.

We do not come as minding to content you —

Our true intent is. All for your delight

We are not here: that you should here repent you,

The actors are at hand. And by their show

You shall know all that you are like to know.’

THESEUS. This fellow doth not stand upon points!

LYSANDER. He hath rid his Prologue like a rough colt: he knows not the stop. A good moral, my lord — it is not enough to speak, but to speak true.

HIPPOLYTA. Indeed, he hath played on this Prologue like a child on a recorder — a sound, but not in government.

THESEUS. His speech was like a tangled chain — nothing impaired, but all disordered.

First-night protection

Audiences are always the ultimate judge of a play’s quality, but sometimes the Chorus’s traditional ‘black velvet cloak and bay garland’ required firmer protection. Ben Jonson dressed the Prologue to his Poetaster (below) in armour, proof against the attacks for slander his satire on literary London might provoke – disingenuously, since his play, nominally set in Ancient Rome, contains vicious personal assaults on three fellow dramatists (as part of the so-called War of the Theatres). Shakespeare’s Chorus to Troilus and Cressida, which follows, has sometimes been considered a minor salvo in the same spat. Though likewise arriving ‘arm’d’ on stage, his Prologue insists on the dramatic propriety of his costume (‘In like conditions as our argument’) over the potentially self-serving nature of Jonson’s style (‘but not in confidence / Of author’s pen’).

from Ben Jonson, The Induction to Poetaster (1601):

The third sounding.

Enter Prologue in armour.

PROLOGUE. If any °muse why I salute the stage

An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a dangerous age,

Wherein who writes had need present his scenes

Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means

Of base detractors and illiterate apes,

That °fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes.

’Gainst these have we put on this forc’d defence,

Whereof the allegory and hid sense

Is that a well-erected confidence

Can fright their pride, and laugh their folly hence.

from The Prologue to Troilus and Cressida (1601–2):

CHORUS. Now expectation, tickling skittish spirits

On one and other side, Trojan and Greek,

Sets all on hazard: and hither am I come

A Prologue arm’d, but not in confidence

Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited

In like conditions as our argument,

To tell you, fair beholders, that our play

Leaps o’er the °vaunt and firstlings of those broils,

Beginning in the middle, starting thence away

To what may be digested in a play.

Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are:

Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war.

‘Think this his barque…’

Perhaps because theatrical architecture held so much technology in common with the Thames-side shipping industry – wooden decking, trap-doors, ropes, ladders, winches, flags, gilding, paintwork, and canvas – the analogy of Chorus to a sort of tug-boat of the imagination must have seemed irresistible. ‘In your imagination hold / This stage a ship,’ instructs the medieval poet Gower, the Chorus to Pericles (one of the riverside Globe’s greatest successes), ‘upon whose deck / The sea-toss’d Pericles appears to speak.’

from The Fifth and Sixth Choruses of Pericles (1608):

GOWER. Thus time we waste and long leagues make short,

°Sail seas in cockles, have and wish but for’t,

Making to take our imagination

From °bourn to bourn, region to region.

By you being pardon’d, we commit no crime

To use one language in each several clime

Where our scenes seems to live. I do beseech you

To learn of me, who stand i’ th’ gaps to teach you

The stages of our story. Pericles

Is now again thwarting the wayward seas […]

So with his steerage shall your thoughts grow on —

To fetch his daughter home, who first is gone.

Like motes and shadows see them move awhile:

Your ears unto your eyes I’ll reconcile. […]

In your supposing once more put your sight:

Of heavy Pericles, think this his barque,

Where what is done in action — more if might —