Notes on "Casting Shakespeare's Plays" - Chapter 1

Shakespeare's plays require a relatively constant number of principal actors: ten for male roles and ten for female roles. For a male role, this means a character that speaks at least 25 lines, and for a female at least 10 (1).

King's use of the term "principal" is based on Ben Jonson's identification of the principal plays of Shakespeare as a "principal comoedian" with the Chamberlain's Men when they performed Every Man in his Humour in 1598, and as a principal Tragoedian with the King's Men when they performed Sejanus in 1603, as well as from the front matter of the First Folio, which lists "the Principall Actors in all these Playes" (1).

"Not all actors in principal roles are sharers, nor do all the available sharers appear in each of the plays that the company performs" (4). Fascinating.

c.f. G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time. Princeton 1984.

Doubling was a common practice within the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men, and earlier scholarship on the casting procedures of their repertory tends to ignore this fact (4).

Roughly twenty plays printed between the 1530s and 1570s are 'offered for acting,' and are printed with cast lists that show the number of actors they require. Ulpian Fulwell's 1568 Like Will to Like is a moral interlude that describes how five actors 'may easily play' sixteen roles. John Pickering's 1567 Horestes contains a cast list demonstrating how six actors can play twenty seven characters. See also the 1570 Clyomon and Clamydes, which acknowledges that supernumerary roles, and even the excellence of costume, may be limited (4 - 5).

c.f. The Doubling of Parts in Shakespeare's Plays by Arthur Colby Sprague (london 1966). Sprague observes that 55 performances of Hamlet between 20 April 1730 and 30 April 1914 where Polonius doubles as the First Gravedigger (5).

Authors of the period prepared a plot of the play they wished to write describing how many actors would be necessary for given scenes, which they would submit to the company for approval (6).

"Some actors moved from one company to another just as acting companies moved from one playhouse to another" (7).

It seems a common practice that an author was advanced a sum of money on the acceptance of the plot, and was sometimes (based on Henslowe's records) given further advances based on stages of development. It is likely that only after such an initial payment was made would the author begin the work of writing the dialogue according to the approved plot. Before final payment for the script was made to the author, it seems the usual case for a company to insist on being given a fair copy of the play (7 - 9).

The text of the extant part of Orlando Furioso is written in secretary hand, and contains certain gaps where it seems as if the scribe was unable to decipher the writing for the player to insert later from the prompt book (10).

I don't know if I agree with King's contention that this was a playhouse scribe, for if it was, why would they presume the actor would be better able to read the book if they could not? Unless either the book or the copy the scribe was working from was not-quite fair copy. King cites the case of Machiavel and the Devil on page 9, where a scribe began making parts from rough copy before the play was finished.

John Higgens, in his 1585 Nomenclator defines the book-keeper as "he that telleth the players their part when they are out and have forgotten, the prompter or book-holder" (qtd on 10).

This calls into question Gurr's assertion that the use of the word "prompt book" is anachronistic, and also my own that the New Bibliographers were speaking of the duties of the prompter without necessarily having a clear understanding of what those duties were. If an allowed book had to be legible enough to use to be able to feed lines to actors, than a foul papers setting seems to not be appropriate to the task.

The promptbook for Fletcher and Massinger's Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619) does not list the names of actors for the largest principal roles, but does give them for lesser principal roles that double. In each of these cases, the actor is off stage for a complete scene to allow for the costume change (11).

"Most of the other actors' names added to the texts of the prompt books -- and the early texts of Shakespeare -- are those of hired men who played minor parts" (11).

Principal actors sometimes doubled with minor parts, but it was rare for a hireling to perform a principal role (11).

While a modern prompt book is a complete and detailed record of all technical requirements and cues for a production, the seventeenth century counterpart did not provide nearly as complete a technical record. The book-keeper would instead prepare a scene-by-scene plot breakdown, add names of actors to characters, and would then hang this document in the tiring house; when notes appear in prompt-books about technical requirements or actors names, it is probably because the book-keeper was taking notes at rehearsals for later inclusion in the plot (13).

I'm not sure I can accept the exclusivity of King's assertion. We use scene breakdowns and prop and costume lists all the time backstage in the modern theatre during performance, and while those are created from notes in the Stage Manager's book, the book itself is used as a guide during performance. If Higgens is correct in his contemporary description of how a prompter and book-holder used a book, there would have been someone reading along with the performance.

"An actor can learn a minor part of twenty-five lines or less with about an hour of study and rehearsal" (13).

According to Henslowe's Diary, the time elapsed between payment to the author (or authors) for The Conquest of the West Indies was about one month, which may be the time alloted to rehearsal. In another instance, for Madmen's Morris, the same period was about two weeks (14).

This does not mean that parts could not have been made from rough copy in advance in either case. It is a vague approximation, but that said, I know from my own experience that either time frame can be long enough to rehearse a complete play. 

In The plott of ffrederick & Basilea "ten leading actors of the company are identified in ten principal roles without doubling; four boys play four principal female roles without doubling. Two hired men play ten minor parts, and five playhouse attendants and gatherers play Lords, Guards, Confederates, and Soldiers" (15).

Based on the evidence King examines, it seems common practice for boys' parts to not be doubled, and for playhouse employees to play supernumerary characters (14 - 15).

"Shakespeare's earliest tragedy [Titus Andronicus] (1594) and a late romance [The Tempest] (1611) have the same basic plan for casting... this plan for casting Shakespeare's plays is derived from common theatrical practice at London playhouses of this period" (19).

Summary


Using playhouse documents from the period, it is possible to discern patterns and trends of patterns in the ways in which the plays of the period were cast. This will not only help us understand how the plays were performed, it can help us understand how the plays may have been cut or adapted, and what that might imply for company sizes at various times.

Citation


King, T. J. The Casting of Shakespeare's Plays: London actors and their roles, 1590 - 1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1992. Print.

Tickling Your Catastrophe

2 Henry IV's "I'll tickle your catastrophe" is one of the great Shakespearean insults, or is it? I don't know how I've been staring at this text for so long without making the connection, but Smug, in what I've dubbed scene 5, makes a remark about the wind 'O it tickles our catastrope.' And who is the source of the more well known "I'll tickle your catastrophe?" None other than the great Sir John Falstaff. That would be scanned.

One of the arguments I've been making is that some of the great clown characters of the King's Men come together in Merry Devil, and I've been casting Merry Devil's Sir John as an incarnation of Falstaff. But maybe that isn't so. Or maybe the roles these men played were more fluid than Tiffany Stern and other modern scholars have come to believe. We all know the story of William Kempe, the principle clown of the company, being replaced by Robert Armin, and thus the change in clown types in new plays, but Armin would have been expected to play Kempe's roles. Or would he? Is it possible that someone else better suited to those roles would have filled them in? Certainly Merry Devil requires a greater comic range than the reductive assignment of the company clown will allow. Just like a modern actor must be versatile in their range, so must an early modern one.

In any case, perhaps this is a pointer to Shakespeare's hand in Merry Devil. Or it could be a pointer to someone else's hand in 2 Henry IV. Or it could be that the tickling of catastrophes was such a common catch phrase that everyone was using it. 2 Henry IV was written between 1596 and 1599, a good 4 - 7 years prior to Merry Devil, so it is perhaps possible that we're seeing an actor re-inserting a favorite phrase, but even if this is the case, and Shakespeare is responsible for the invention of "tickle your catastrophe" we could be seeing Stern's culture of the commonplace book at work.

Three distinct possibilities emerge:

1. Shakespeare originated the line, and re-used it in Merry Devil.
2. Shakespeare originated the line, and someone else used it in Merry Devil.
3. Shakespeare did not originate the line.

Thus we must allow one of the following: either Shakespeare has contributed to the authorship of Merry Devil, or someone else contributed to the authorship of 2 Henry IV.  Pause and consider.

Lessons Learned from the Bibliographic Taxonomy of The Merry Devil of Edmonton

The types of books that an individual bookseller sold provides a context in which one can read a given text. Locating the printed text of a Shakespearean play in its original native environment, the bookstalls of St. Paul's Churchyard, will help the modern practitioner establish the context in which to perform the play. Arthur Johnson's specialization in comic plays such as The Merry Devil of Edmonton, for example, is complemented by the anti-Catholic pamphlets, apologies for the Church of England, psalters, and true crime books he also sold. While the materials available in Johnson's stall will not tell a modern practitioner how to read Merry Devil, they will provide the context necessary to help said practitioner understand how their early modern counterpart read the play.

Before locating the printed text of Shakespeare, one must necessarily define what qualifies as a Shakespearean text. Simple attribution to the hand of William Shakespeare cannot qualify as a standard of judgement, as the King's Men's pursuit of an injunction against the printing of their plays appears to be a direct response to Pavier's attempt to publish Shakespeare's works (Jowett 71). The Lord Chamberlain's edict established the King's Men as the only legitimate (in the legal sense) authors of a text that we might describe as “Shakespearean."

If every text that we ascribe to Shakespeare can only be properly authorized by the King's Men, the opposite is also true: every play authorized by the King's Men must be regarded as Shakespearean. While trying to locate the hand of Shakespeare in every text authorized by the King's Men would be futile, Shakespeare, as a sharer in the company, perhaps as the chief literary authority of the company, would necessarily authorize every text printed by the company. The ascription of a text to the hand of Shakespeare makes it no less Burbagean or Slyean if it was a product of the King's Men. The legal framework of the Stationer's Company, under injunction of the Lord Chamberlain, provided that only the King's Men could authorize the printing of their plays, but this could only be an extension of a system of production of play texts that recognized the text as the product of a company effort. In the eyes of crown law, The Merry Devil of Edmonton must be regarded every bit as “Shakespearean” as The Merry Wives of Windsor, both of which were printed for the book seller Arthur Johnson.

While an examination of The Merry Wives of Windsor no doubt would prove insightful, The Merry Devil of Edmonton has a more interesting and more traceable history in Johnson's shop. According to the Short Title Catalogue, Johnson had printed Merry Wives in 1602 and 1619. Whether he simply ordered too many copies in 1602 or Merry Wives experienced a resurgence in popularity seventeen years later, there is too much time between printings to determine with what Merry Wives might have shared shelf space. The four years between the first printing of Merry Devil in 1608 and the second printing in 1612 (revealed by their title pages), provides a more reasonable range for analysis. It is entirely possible that Johnson ordered printings to coincide with surges in popularity, but given Laurie Maguire's description of the printing process as “neither a rapid nor a simple operation” this is unlikely (445). Given that Johnson would order a third printing of Merry Devil in 1617, it is plausible he ordered stock to last for several years; certainly if Merry Devil did not sell with some regularity between 1608, 1612, and 1617, it is unlikely that Johnson would have ordered these subsequent printings at an apparently regular interval. To determine what other books Johnson's customers might have had to choose from at the same time the first quarto of Merry Devil was for sale, it is therefore necessary to examine a span of time that predates the printing of that quarto by several years.

For the purposes of this examination, I chose to look at the materials printed for Arthur Johnson between 1605 and 1611. This includes enough of a range to determine what older materials might have remained in Johnson's stacks as the first quarto of Merry Devil came into print, and would have included new works that came into print leading up to the second printing in 1612. A search of the Short Title Catalog yields 34 distinct records of materials either printed for or to be sold by Johnson within this range (see attached). Taken together, the materials Johnson had for sale help establish the context for the printed text of Merry Devil's first quarto, and for reading the play today.

Of the 34 books that Johnson had printed for his shop between 1605 and 1611, eight of them were anti-Catholic/pro-protestant treatises, seven were religious commentaries, six were comic plays, three were instruction manuals, sermons, and poetry collections, two were true crime pieces, and there was one psalter and one non-dramatic tragi-comedy. Even within this catalogue of titles, context is necessary for meaningful analysis. All of the plays Johnson sold were comedies, which is especially noteworthy given that he sold two non-dramatic true crime pieces; a genre that was represented in certain dramatic works of the time. While Johnson clearly did not have ambitions to specialize in plays, his specialization in the comic genre of play texts indicates that his customers of The Arraignment, Judgement, Confession, and Execution of Humfrey Stafford, Gentleman, and The Bloody Mother very likely had tastes that were both specific and different from his other customers. If this is true, the forensic bibliographer would do well to look more closely at Johnson's other play-texts as points of comparison without regard to the texts from other genres that he sold.

Just as Johnson's reluctance to carry true-crime play texts may indicate a separation of his customers, the bibliographic evidence might also suggest deliberate cross marketing between readers of religious materials and readers of comedies. Divided into the genres I have outlined, anti-Catholic treatises, religious commentaries, and comedies all account for similar percentages of Johnson's printing between 1605 and 1611. Among the comedies, two deal very directly with religious figures: The Jesuits Comedy and Merry Devil. A cross comparison of the religious texts Johnson sold with Merry Devil may therefore prove illuminating.

It comes as little surprise that religious material comprised more than half of the books that Johnson sold, but the anti-Catholic nature of the significant portion of those materials takes on special significance when sold next to The Merry Devil, wherein the poaching hedge-priest Sir John is one of the principle clowns. All religious figures in Merry Devil are duped in some way, and Chesson Nunnery itself becomes the tool of a parsimonious parent. Certainly the romantic comedy takes the fore, but especially in light of the anti-Catholic treatises that Johnson sold at about the same time, it is difficult not to read The Merry Devil as a satire of the Roman Catholic Church where the ineptitude of the clergy helps create the happy ending.

Perhaps as illuminating as the cross-genre marketing of comedies that satirize the Catholic church are the instances of texts that received multiple printings within the seven year period of this examination. Cupids Whirligig was printed in 1607, and then again in 1611, which parallels almost precisely the printing schedule between the first Merry Devil quarto in 1608 and the second in 1612. The other title Johnson had printed twice within this period was A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, a manual on “preserving, conserving, and candying;” first in 1608 and then again in 1611. While the multiple printings of Cupid's Whirligig will help to reinforce Johnson as a purveyor of comic plays, the success of A Closet for Ladies emphasizes the practical, domestically inclined nature of at least some of his customers. Since he did seek to specialize in this particular genre, it would be logical to infer that A Closet for Ladies was printed in service of his already existing clientele. Given that Merry Devil is a domestic comedy, one may need look no further than the text of the play for a picture of Johnson's customers, and its original audience.

It is noteworthy that of the six comedies Johnson had printed within this range of time, only Merry Devil was a King's Men play. The Phoenix and Michaelmas Term were both “acted by the Children of Paules” (a direct quote from both of their title pages), Cupids Whirligig by the Children of the Kings Majesties Revels (see title page), and The Jesuits Comedy was “acted at Lyons in France” (see title page). If Merry Wives was not also available during this time, Merry Devil would have been the only play Johnson sold that was performed by an adult company in London. Merry Devil and Merry Wives are structurally comparable in several ways; they're both romantic comedies, both domestic comedies, both present mystical figures in the resolution, and both feature an Epicurean Sir John. These similarities likely did not escape Johnson, and the fact that Merry Devil received more printings would suggest that either Johnson severely over-printed Merry Wives, or that in print if not on stage, Merry Devil was the more popular play. This may not affect a modern staging of the play, but it might help to inspire a modern staging of what has become a comparatively neglected work.

Perhaps the most consistent thread woven into theatrical performance throughout the history western theatre is that audiences like to see themselves on stage. A bibliography of Arthur Johnson's book shop, circa 1608, will help the modern director better understand the text of The Merry Devil of Edmonton. This is perhaps true of works surrounding any printing, but the popularity of Merry Devil provided for its multiple printings over the course of a decade. These printings provide benchmark dates from which the modern bibliographer can weigh the contents of Johnson's shop, and perhaps gain insight into the original readers of the text. If modern audiences enjoy seeing themselves on stage as much as the King's Men's did, valuable evidence of who these audiences were can be observed in the records of the books they may have purchased along with The Merry Devil.

Works Cited 

The Arraignment, Judgement, Confession, and Execution of Humfrey Stafford, Gentleman. London. E. Allde. 1607. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010.

A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen. London. F. Kingston. 1608. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010.

–. London. 1611. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010.

The Jesuits Comedy. London. E. Allde. 1607. Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 Oct. 2010.

Jowett, John. Shakespeare and Text. Oxford. Oxford UP. 2007.

Maguire, Laurie E. “The Craft of Printing (1600).” A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan. Blackwell. 1999.

The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Henry Ballard. London. 1608. Early English Books Online. Accessed 26 Sept. 2009.

--. Henry Ballard. London. 1612. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010.

Middleton, Thomas. Michaelmas Term. London. Thomas Purfoot and Edward Allde. 1608. Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 Oct. 2010.

–. The Phoenix. London. Edward Allde. 1607. Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 Oct. 2010.

Pantzer, Katherine. “Johnson, Arthur.” A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475 – 1640. First compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave. Vol. 3. London. The Bibliographical Society. 1991.

Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor. London. T[homas] C[reede]. 1602. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010.

–. The Merry Wives of Windsor. London. William Jaggard. 1619. Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 Oct 2010.

Sharpham, Edward. Cupids Whirligig. London. E. Allide. 1607. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010.

–. Cupids Whirligig. London. T. C[reede]. 1611. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 2010

T.B. The Bloody Mother. London. John Busbie. 1610. Early English Books Online. Accessed 14 Oct. 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....

 

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?

Exploiting Faustus

The American Shakespeare Center just opened Dr. Faustus as part of their Actor's Renaissance Season. When you're working on a play that features a wizard who has bought the service of a devil with his soul, comparisons to Faustus are inevitable. Especially when we know from Henslowe's Diary that Mr. Henslowe "Lent unto the company the 22 of November 1602 to pay unto William Bird and Samuel Rowle for their additions in Dr. Faustus the sum of" 4 pounds sterling. I can't imagine a shrewd businessman like Henslowe paying money for revisions to a play he wasn't planning on producing, You may recall that 22 November 1602 is about the time that it seems most likely that The Merry Devil was written.

Dr. Knutson is tantalized by the possibility of having Faustus up at one playhouse, and Merry Devil up at a competing playhouse across town, and quite frankly, so am I. It's hard to draw a modern analogy, especially because Merry Devil doesn't exactly parody or burlesque Faustus: they both feature necromancers who have sold their souls to various devils, but there the similarity ends. Faustus is a tragedy about the perils of sacrificing oneself for vanity, Merry Devil is a romantic comedy. Dr. Knutson calls it an exploitation, and when you look at the text of Merry Devil, it's pretty clear why.

Fabell's role in Merry Devil is actually quite limited. He works primarily through his agents to achieve his ends, which are really not his ends at all so much as the ends of his former student. The only time Fabell traffics with his spirit, Coreb, is in the induction, and while that establishes Fabells power, his sense of humor, and his craftiness, it does not tie directly to the main plot. It's a little bit like if you were to produce a romantic comedy when the Star Wars trilogy was re-released in 1997: the series was already well established and popular, featuring new materials, and you wanted to ride that wave, so you have a Darth Vader looking mystic knight with a garbage can like android show up and use "the power" to bring the featured couple together. Your movie's got nothing to do with Star Wars, would probably work fine without Simulacrum Vader, but the presence of the character will boost your ticket sales.

This train of thought ultimately will bear more fruit when the production is in rehearsal. It begs the question of how much Fabell's inner life parallels Faustus'. Surely they both care about their friends and students; Faustus wills his entire estate to his apprentice, after all. Fabell's time is up when the play begins, but he manages to trick and extort Coreb into giving him seven more years. Still, he's got to be feeling that time flying by every bit as much as Faustus is. Then again, maybe he's better than Faustus. Fabell has tricked the Devil once, after all, and there's no reason we should think he won't be able to do it again.

Almost makes me wonder if the King's Men (or Chamberlain's Men, depending on the exact date) didn't buy a script and then decide to jazz it up a bit. Not that it matters; we'll never be able to prove any of that. Still, the original production of Faustus happened in the early 1590s and was hugely popular, so The Merry Devil's author would, at least have been aware of the story, and even if the Globe production didn't parallel the Rose production, the shadows of Christopher Marlowe were certainly cast as much over Merry Devil, just as they're cast over Damn Yankees and Little Shop of Horrors.