Wanting a second opinion on the way touring companies worked in the 16th and 17th centuries, I decided to turn to Andrew Gurr's The Shakespearean Playing Companies for his analysis of evidence. Basically everything Gurr says in this chapter contradicts Stern, but as Gurr's arguments do not conform to the existing evidence of the extant Merry Devil text, I'm not sure how much weight I should give him.
Throughout the 16th century touring companies were an almost regular feature of life outside of London, and while most of these companies have left little record of their existence, the records themselves are incomplete, and so there are very likely more than we are aware of today. The city of Leicester was visited by more than 50 different companies in the period, and touring was standard practice for all companies during the Tudor period. It wasn't until just before Elizabeth's death in 1603 that London playing began to dictate the standards of theatrical practice (36).
Puritan disapproval of playing was likely stronger and quicker to manifest outside of London, where the court had less direct control over government. Few mayors would have lamented the closure of the public playhouses in 1642 (38).
From 1559 on, plays had to be either licensed by the mayor, or had to be seen before a council of the mayor an alderman of the city before the players would be licensed to perform (39).
The London companies all began as touring companies, and the tradition continued even when the King's Men received their supreme privilege under James. Some share holder-players seem to have preferred a life on the road to a more stable one in London (40). Gurr seems surprised by this, but it doesn't seem odd to me at all. Now, as then, there are some people who prefer the bustle of life on the road, and there are some people who prefer the stability of life in the same town. Some people like waking up in a different place every morning, and some prefer waking up in their own beds.
It is traditionally presumed that London players would look to touring as a source of revenue when the London playhouses were closed due to plague deaths, but local authorities were often suspicious that player might bring the plague with them, and were thus hesitant to let them play (40). The King's Men, in particular, didn't need to tour during plague closures because James (and later Charles) both paid them a subsidy during plague closures; despite not needing to travel, they continued to do so regularly (44). It is also noteworthy that there is little correlation between plague closures in London and increased touring activity in the extant records; rather, all available evidence indicates that touring remained constant through times when public playing was allowed in London and times when the playhouses were closed (53).
Most assume that travel was a strenuous activity and forced playing companies to economize their resources, cutting back on the number of players in their troup, and cutting their playbooks for touring: Gurr believes this is not the case (40). This, despite evidence he cites from Donald Lupton's 1632 London and the Countrey Carbonadoed, wherein Luptun cites a lack of funding, costumes, audience, and new play books as a reason why companies go on tour (40 - 41). Gurr feels the situation "cannot have been so simple" (41).
Gurr offers that, while a permanently mobile company might go to the trouble of trimming down on its playbooks and other resources, he does not think that a London based company would have done so (41 - 42). In particular, Gurr rejects the idea that the "bad quartos" are derived from touring scripts (42).
cf Werstine, Paul. "Narratives about Printed Shakespearen Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol 41. 1990. 65 - 86.
cf Irace, Kathleen M. "Reconstruction and Adaptation in Q Henry V." Shakespeare Bulletin. Vol 44. 1991. 228 - 253.
cf Bradley, David. From Text to Performance in Elizabethan Theatre. p 58 - 74.
cf King, TJ. Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and their Roles, 1590 - 1642. Cambridge. 1992. p 73.
cf Murray, JT. English Dramatic Companies, 1558 - 1642. Vol 2. London. 1910. p 330.
Bradley argues that the "bad quarto" text show no signs of cutting with the focus of reducing the size of the cast in mind (42). I don't have a problem conceding this one. There were fewer sharers in the Chamberlain's/King's Men than would have been able to perform the cut Merry Devil.
Bradley also argues that the company would have had to re-license the playbook after cutting it in order to perform it on tour, as the Master of Revels signed each playbook (42). Yet Gurr ignores some of his own evidence in supporting Bradley's claim: he cites Tilney's patent (qtd in Murray) referring to Tilney's signature at the end of the playbook (42). It is completely conceivable that they may have simply got the entire play authorized, and re-cut it (for whatever reason, it wouldn't matter because, as long as they were adding no new material, it had all been approved) keeping the last page (with the signature) intact. That could very well explain the reference on the last page to the scene that never happens in Merry Devil.
Gurr also notes that there was often little regulation on how far into the night a play may be performed outside of London, and that local authorities did not restrict the time available for plays, and thus there was no reason to cut plays for length (43). I find Gurr's claim dubious because in some cases, as with Merry Devil, the script clearly was cut, with length being a key factor. It makes sense that a company would cut scenes for travel that required the use of an above, or some other technology they couldn't bring with them (like a canon), but they also may have found cutting for length to be more profitable. Whatever the reason, Merry Devil was clearly cut.
Part of the compensation that touring would bring would come in the form of reduced expense at buying new plays (48). Although, as Henslowe's Diary records, the amount spent on a purchasing a new playbook was relatively small, and thus they weren't saving much.
By 1604 Augustine Philips had a house on Mortlake, which was not far fom Richmond Palace, and Chamber accounts in December 1604 record a payment covering the cost of the King's Men's travel from Mortlake to Wilton. Gurr surmises that, during the plague closure, the players might have used this house as an impromptu performance space outside of London (54).
Analysis
Gurr provides some interesting evidence, and I fully appreciate his willingness to contest conventional wisdom; conventional wisdom is the kind most oft proved wrong. Still, by my reckoning, his argument is that the "bad" quartos were not cut, or rather that there is no evidence that they were, and that is at odds with the 1100 line Merry Devil. If it wasn't cut, why is it so short. If it wasn't cut for touring, why was it cut? There are gaps in the evidence, and we simply don't have the whole picture.
Citation
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Playing Companies. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1996,
Showing posts with label Henslowe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henslowe. Show all posts
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Notes on The Disintegration of Shakespeare
From the work of Stanley Wells, I now turn the clock back to E. K. Chambers' 12 May 1924 lecture "The Disintegration of Shakespeare." I am, of course, reading a printed copy of the lecture he read, but without much indication who he read this to, who published the lecture, when they published it, where it was published, or any of the like information that would be useful in tracking it down as a source. All I can really offer is that Mary Baldwin College owns a copy.
Chambers, you may or may not know, is the man behind The Elizabethan Stage, which is an excellent go to source for just about anything related to... well... the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. Fancy that.
The tradition of ascribing the works of Shakespeare to someone other than Shakespeare can be traced back to Edward Ravenscroft, who printed a post-Restoration adaptation of Titus Andronicus in 1687. He claimed that he had heard from "some anciently conversant with the stage" that Shakespeare had adapted the play from a pre-existing one (3).
If one looks hard enough at statistics and individual stylistic elements, a great number of potential originators, emenders, and contributors, or separate authors can be named as having either a partial or complete hand in the works of Shakespeare. The ascriptions of these stylistic markers have not, however, been consistent among scholars, who can rarely do better than make weak arguments for non-Stratfordian ascriptions of authorship (3-7).
Proponents of multiple authors, emenders, etc have had a tendency to defend themselves as being the preserves of Shakespeare rather than detractors. They tend to ascribe the "chaff" to authors whom they perceive as being of a lesser stature, and thus the choicest bits that remain of the plays are ascribed to Shakespeare. These scholars, however, display their own biases towards material, and seem to forget that the cannon of Shakespeare can only be determined by the extant body of work ascribed to him. There is no other concrete basis for determining which works belong to Shakespeare and which do not. (7-8). I can't help but think of something Roslyn Knutson said to me in an email: "did you ever notice how Shakespeare is never found to have made a worse revision."
"I come to accept Shakespeare, not to praise him" (8).
Taken as a whole, the canon of Shakespeare's work reveals an author who was open to experimentation and even imitation. If some of Shakespeare's lines feel like Marlowe's or Greene's, it could very plausibly be because Shakespeare experimented with writing in their styles as part of his own development as a writer. Likewise, we need neither pretend that these experiments were always pleasing, nor that Shakespeare wrote every line at the height of his own creative genius (8 - 9).
While some will dismiss certain lays or passages from Shakespeare's canon based on metrical or stylistic variation that does not conform to a projected development curve, these scholars ignore the fact that the development of one in their craft very rarely can be plotted along a perfectly smooth growth curve. General trends in improvement can still be seen across the plays, but specific variations from those trends do not invalidate the overall progression of the man's mastery of his craft, and those lines/passages/plays should not be dismissed as being "inauthentic" simply because they do not conform to an ideal statistical regularity (9 - 10).
It is likewise impossible to ascribe certain uses of words within Shakespeare's works to other authors because we cannot clearly establish a clear vocabulary for other authors. Even if it were possible to do so, it is just as plausible that Shakespeare borrowed words he heard frequently and incorporated into his own work as it is that someone else added them after being brought in to do a "punch-up" of Shakespeare's scripts (11 - 12). Let us not forget that Shakespeare was primarily an actor in a company that operated on a repertory system that would put most modern theatres to shame. He came into contact with the works, and the words of other writers on a daily basis, and needed to have a clever ear for their meanings and pronunciations in order to function in his primary trade. Most of the plays of the period are now lost, and thus it is impossible to say exactly where Shakespeare's expansive vocabulary comes from, but it is possible, probable even, that his regular contact with the work of the most active poets of his generation contributed to his own work.
The Folio cannot be considered a complete record of which plays were written by Shakespeare because, for whatever reason, Heminges and Condell omitted at least nine plays from the Folio that had been previously published under the name (or initials) of Shakespeare (13 - 14).
Pollard proposes that the Thomas Moore manuscript was submitted to the Master of the Revels as it is, but this is unlikely because it exists in a sloppy state. If the Master of the Revels had to concern himself with deciphering foul papers and piecing together how a playwright may have intended a scene to read, he would have never been able to make it through the quantity of plays that would have had to pass through his office (16 - 17). I am once aain reminded of William Proctor Williams' assessment that printers would have insisted on fair copy for type setting because they were in the business of printing books and not of attempting to decipher foul papers. The Revels office would have been interested in its own administrative efficiency over the inconvenience to playing companies of having to have fair copy prepared. Just as printing hourses today insist on "manuscript" submissions in particular file formats for ease of their own house practices.
Henslowe's diary chronicles a process of revision that seems to favor the addition of new material to established plays rather than of re-writing old scenes of new ones. This trend seems to be confirmed by Sir Henry Herbert's notes (19 - 20).
Analysis
Chambers takes a fairly conservative position at the dawn of the era of seeing the canon of Shakespeare's works as being the products of a process that may have included revision and multiple authors. I take for granted that a play text is a living document because, whether intentional or not, and whether subtly or not, the play text is almost always altered in performance. Whether the extant copies of the plays we have derive from deliberate or accidental emendations in performance, the original text as penned by the playwright, or a text later penned by the playwright (or another playwright) that take these changes into account is unknown. Chambers argues that we ought, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, regard the plays we know as Shakespeare's as having been written by Shakespeare, and I agree with him in principle, but I cannot ignore my knowledge of modern theatrical practice.
Still, it is worth considering his calculations from Henslowe's diary. It comes as perfectly logical that the records of most play revision indicate older plays being updated with new scenes. "Newly revised and expanded" can be a money-making tag on any written work. It is perhaps worth considering that, if Shakespeare did revise his plays, it may have been toward this end, which is supported by the evidence of the addition of the fly scene in Titus Andronicus.
Where this all comes to bear on Merry Devil: the play seems to have undergone little alteration across its six quartos. If the extant copy was cut, for whatever reason, why not include some of those scenes that were cut? Unless they were lost. Why not add new scenes, or have the old ones re-written? The answer can only be that the play, even without the additional scenes described in The Life and Death of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, sold well enough without needing to pay for further work to be done on it. If plays were revived in performance when they were re-printed, this may indicate that the published text of Merry Devil could stand alone in performance on the stage of the Globe.
Chambers, you may or may not know, is the man behind The Elizabethan Stage, which is an excellent go to source for just about anything related to... well... the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. Fancy that.
The tradition of ascribing the works of Shakespeare to someone other than Shakespeare can be traced back to Edward Ravenscroft, who printed a post-Restoration adaptation of Titus Andronicus in 1687. He claimed that he had heard from "some anciently conversant with the stage" that Shakespeare had adapted the play from a pre-existing one (3).
If one looks hard enough at statistics and individual stylistic elements, a great number of potential originators, emenders, and contributors, or separate authors can be named as having either a partial or complete hand in the works of Shakespeare. The ascriptions of these stylistic markers have not, however, been consistent among scholars, who can rarely do better than make weak arguments for non-Stratfordian ascriptions of authorship (3-7).
Proponents of multiple authors, emenders, etc have had a tendency to defend themselves as being the preserves of Shakespeare rather than detractors. They tend to ascribe the "chaff" to authors whom they perceive as being of a lesser stature, and thus the choicest bits that remain of the plays are ascribed to Shakespeare. These scholars, however, display their own biases towards material, and seem to forget that the cannon of Shakespeare can only be determined by the extant body of work ascribed to him. There is no other concrete basis for determining which works belong to Shakespeare and which do not. (7-8). I can't help but think of something Roslyn Knutson said to me in an email: "did you ever notice how Shakespeare is never found to have made a worse revision."
"I come to accept Shakespeare, not to praise him" (8).
Taken as a whole, the canon of Shakespeare's work reveals an author who was open to experimentation and even imitation. If some of Shakespeare's lines feel like Marlowe's or Greene's, it could very plausibly be because Shakespeare experimented with writing in their styles as part of his own development as a writer. Likewise, we need neither pretend that these experiments were always pleasing, nor that Shakespeare wrote every line at the height of his own creative genius (8 - 9).
While some will dismiss certain lays or passages from Shakespeare's canon based on metrical or stylistic variation that does not conform to a projected development curve, these scholars ignore the fact that the development of one in their craft very rarely can be plotted along a perfectly smooth growth curve. General trends in improvement can still be seen across the plays, but specific variations from those trends do not invalidate the overall progression of the man's mastery of his craft, and those lines/passages/plays should not be dismissed as being "inauthentic" simply because they do not conform to an ideal statistical regularity (9 - 10).
It is likewise impossible to ascribe certain uses of words within Shakespeare's works to other authors because we cannot clearly establish a clear vocabulary for other authors. Even if it were possible to do so, it is just as plausible that Shakespeare borrowed words he heard frequently and incorporated into his own work as it is that someone else added them after being brought in to do a "punch-up" of Shakespeare's scripts (11 - 12). Let us not forget that Shakespeare was primarily an actor in a company that operated on a repertory system that would put most modern theatres to shame. He came into contact with the works, and the words of other writers on a daily basis, and needed to have a clever ear for their meanings and pronunciations in order to function in his primary trade. Most of the plays of the period are now lost, and thus it is impossible to say exactly where Shakespeare's expansive vocabulary comes from, but it is possible, probable even, that his regular contact with the work of the most active poets of his generation contributed to his own work.
The Folio cannot be considered a complete record of which plays were written by Shakespeare because, for whatever reason, Heminges and Condell omitted at least nine plays from the Folio that had been previously published under the name (or initials) of Shakespeare (13 - 14).
Pollard proposes that the Thomas Moore manuscript was submitted to the Master of the Revels as it is, but this is unlikely because it exists in a sloppy state. If the Master of the Revels had to concern himself with deciphering foul papers and piecing together how a playwright may have intended a scene to read, he would have never been able to make it through the quantity of plays that would have had to pass through his office (16 - 17). I am once aain reminded of William Proctor Williams' assessment that printers would have insisted on fair copy for type setting because they were in the business of printing books and not of attempting to decipher foul papers. The Revels office would have been interested in its own administrative efficiency over the inconvenience to playing companies of having to have fair copy prepared. Just as printing hourses today insist on "manuscript" submissions in particular file formats for ease of their own house practices.
Henslowe's diary chronicles a process of revision that seems to favor the addition of new material to established plays rather than of re-writing old scenes of new ones. This trend seems to be confirmed by Sir Henry Herbert's notes (19 - 20).
Analysis
Chambers takes a fairly conservative position at the dawn of the era of seeing the canon of Shakespeare's works as being the products of a process that may have included revision and multiple authors. I take for granted that a play text is a living document because, whether intentional or not, and whether subtly or not, the play text is almost always altered in performance. Whether the extant copies of the plays we have derive from deliberate or accidental emendations in performance, the original text as penned by the playwright, or a text later penned by the playwright (or another playwright) that take these changes into account is unknown. Chambers argues that we ought, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, regard the plays we know as Shakespeare's as having been written by Shakespeare, and I agree with him in principle, but I cannot ignore my knowledge of modern theatrical practice.
Still, it is worth considering his calculations from Henslowe's diary. It comes as perfectly logical that the records of most play revision indicate older plays being updated with new scenes. "Newly revised and expanded" can be a money-making tag on any written work. It is perhaps worth considering that, if Shakespeare did revise his plays, it may have been toward this end, which is supported by the evidence of the addition of the fly scene in Titus Andronicus.
Where this all comes to bear on Merry Devil: the play seems to have undergone little alteration across its six quartos. If the extant copy was cut, for whatever reason, why not include some of those scenes that were cut? Unless they were lost. Why not add new scenes, or have the old ones re-written? The answer can only be that the play, even without the additional scenes described in The Life and Death of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, sold well enough without needing to pay for further work to be done on it. If plays were revived in performance when they were re-printed, this may indicate that the published text of Merry Devil could stand alone in performance on the stage of the Globe.
Friday, February 5, 2010
On whose authority?
We don't know who wrote The Merry Devil, as I've previously pointed out, which raises the question, on whose authority do we authorize a text? This same question, of course, can be turned to the plays of William Shakespeare himself. The theatricians of Renaissance London didn't know or care about our post-enlightenment concept of the author, that solitary genius motivated by the divine spark to create "art." They cared about putting on a good show, defined as one which would make money.
If Mr. Henslowe buys a play and decides it needs some fixing, great. He'll probably hire someone to do it. He did it with Dr. Faustus, afterall (and documented the transaction), and there's no reason to think that the Chamberlain's/King's Men didn't do exactly the same thing. Remember, Shakespeare produced about two plays a year, and the playhouses (when not closed due to plague) liked to perform 6 days a week. They performed many more plays than Shakespeare could have possibly written. Merry Devil was one of them.
So here's the thing; if one of the reasons that Shakespeare's plays are so good (as Gary Taylor would argue) is that they were the product of the best playwright working with the best players; in other words, if the company revised Shakespeare's plays while performing them (as is not uncommonly done today), they would have most assuredly done so with another playwright. Like whomever wrote Merry Devil.
So when this play is finally published in quarto format in 1608, how did they "authorize" it? In other words, how did they establish it as a piece of work worth paying money to own? Dr. Menzer directed me to look at the title page, so lets see what that says....
I'm finding that there are two primary types of editions of a text that I'm likely to work with: documentary editions, which seek to re-create the specific instance of a specific text (like the first quarto, completely disregarding anything that might have happened in the five subsequent quartos). That type of edition is authorized by the fact that it is a preservation of the way the text once looked, no more no less.
The critical edition is the one we're more familiar with. That's the kind where, in an ideal world, an editor has examined all possible editions of a text and based on sound logical judgment creates an accessible version replete with foot and end notes for the modern reader. The authority of this type of text derives from it's having compared and contrasted several different printings.
When I started this project, I was aiming towards the latter edition, and to some degree, that's still the trajectory that I'm following, but creating a text for performance is a little bit different than a text for study. To be sure, the performance text usually derives from the critical text (at least in my productions), which requires an appeal to another sort of authority: my experience as a director.
Here's the rub: I trust myself more as a director than I do as a scholar. My performance text of this play will therefore speak with more authority to me than my critical text will. That just gives me more of an incentive to make sure that I've looked at as many editions of this text as possible, and that my judgment in making emendations is very, very sound.
That said, I've just finished going over my transcription of Q1 with a fine tooth comb, and notating it liberally where something even seemed a little bit odd to me. Next, I'll be moving on to a line by line comparison between my Q1 transcription and, you guessed it, the second quarto (Q2) of 1612. I read somewhere that Q2 and Q3 were little more than reprints of Q1; if so, that may be even more reason to go over them with a fine tooth comb as well: what better way to make sure I have missed, or misinterpreted, anything from my Q1 transcription?
If Mr. Henslowe buys a play and decides it needs some fixing, great. He'll probably hire someone to do it. He did it with Dr. Faustus, afterall (and documented the transaction), and there's no reason to think that the Chamberlain's/King's Men didn't do exactly the same thing. Remember, Shakespeare produced about two plays a year, and the playhouses (when not closed due to plague) liked to perform 6 days a week. They performed many more plays than Shakespeare could have possibly written. Merry Devil was one of them.
So here's the thing; if one of the reasons that Shakespeare's plays are so good (as Gary Taylor would argue) is that they were the product of the best playwright working with the best players; in other words, if the company revised Shakespeare's plays while performing them (as is not uncommonly done today), they would have most assuredly done so with another playwright. Like whomever wrote Merry Devil.
So when this play is finally published in quarto format in 1608, how did they "authorize" it? In other words, how did they establish it as a piece of work worth paying money to own? Dr. Menzer directed me to look at the title page, so lets see what that says....
The line I want to draw your attention to is the one that reads "As it hath been sundry times acted, by his Majesties Servants, at the Globe, on the bank-side." The authority this play is claiming is not that it was written by a specific individual, but first that it was performed "sundry times" (and plays that suck don't get sundry performances), second that it was performed by the servants of the king, and third that it was performed in their large, public theatre. In other words, both the audience and the king are implicitly referenced as the authorizing authorities for this publication.
I'm finding that there are two primary types of editions of a text that I'm likely to work with: documentary editions, which seek to re-create the specific instance of a specific text (like the first quarto, completely disregarding anything that might have happened in the five subsequent quartos). That type of edition is authorized by the fact that it is a preservation of the way the text once looked, no more no less.
The critical edition is the one we're more familiar with. That's the kind where, in an ideal world, an editor has examined all possible editions of a text and based on sound logical judgment creates an accessible version replete with foot and end notes for the modern reader. The authority of this type of text derives from it's having compared and contrasted several different printings.
When I started this project, I was aiming towards the latter edition, and to some degree, that's still the trajectory that I'm following, but creating a text for performance is a little bit different than a text for study. To be sure, the performance text usually derives from the critical text (at least in my productions), which requires an appeal to another sort of authority: my experience as a director.
Here's the rub: I trust myself more as a director than I do as a scholar. My performance text of this play will therefore speak with more authority to me than my critical text will. That just gives me more of an incentive to make sure that I've looked at as many editions of this text as possible, and that my judgment in making emendations is very, very sound.
That said, I've just finished going over my transcription of Q1 with a fine tooth comb, and notating it liberally where something even seemed a little bit odd to me. Next, I'll be moving on to a line by line comparison between my Q1 transcription and, you guessed it, the second quarto (Q2) of 1612. I read somewhere that Q2 and Q3 were little more than reprints of Q1; if so, that may be even more reason to go over them with a fine tooth comb as well: what better way to make sure I have missed, or misinterpreted, anything from my Q1 transcription?
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