Notes on "Back by Popular Demand"

The absence of the choruses from the quarto makes that text fundamentally different from the folio, and where critics like to point to the ambiguity of national politics and militarism that Henry V implies, the textual justification for those implications are found only in the folio text. The only reference to a contemporary event in the canon, the comparison to Essex's expedition, and the reminder that all of Henry's gains will be lost by his successor are both absent from the quarto text (315).

Despite the assumption that the folio text of Henry V is set from the "acting edition" of the play, there is no evidence to support this, and while we will never know what was actually acted on the London stages, it is quite probable that the quarto text actually represents a closer approximation to performance than the folio (316).

Greg's theory of memorially reconstructed texts does not adequately account for the gaps between the quarto and folio text: whole scenes and sense-changing speeches are completely left out, and the theory of an actor with a bad memory creating a transcription cannot account for the absence of such crucial material (317).

Wells and Taylor argue that the quarto of Henry V represents a memorial construction of a previously performed text cut for touring, and argue that the reduction in the quarto removes thirteen speaking parts (321 - 322). King, of course, disagrees.

Taylor himself admits problems with his theory: cast reduction cannot have been the motivation for the removal of the first scene, which casts a cynical eye on the military affair as the English Court tries to invent reasons to invade France, or of the Jamy/MacMorris scene, or of the substitution of Clarence for Bedford, or of some of the cuts in the Harfleur scene (322).

"No single hypothesis is likely to be able to explain all the instances of textual divergence; and... it is better to admit this in advance than be forced to introduce exceptions that shake the primary hypothesis at its roots" (322 - 323).

English monarchs were always interested in controlling the narrative of history, and Elizabeth was no exception. The printing of Q Henry V, coming as it did on the heels of the Essex rebellion, The LC's Men's involvement in the presentation of Henry IV the night before, and in the face of a 1 June 1599 Bishop's Order prohibiting the printing of histories, was likely to be censored if the LC's men did not censor the text themselves; removing the choruses and other controversial scenes turns the play into an unproblematic celebration of a popular monarch, whom audiences would  have likely instinctively linked with Elizabeth (325 - 330).

Summary

Theatrical considerations may not be the only ones that lead to the abridgment of a text, whether for print, performance, or both. Patterson succinctly demonstrates how the quarto version of Henry V could represent an edition of the text made for political expediency, and creates an implicit warning about trying to understand the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries outside of the political and professional context of the late 16th/early 17th century professional London playhouses.

Citation

Patterson, Annabel. "Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V." Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 313 - 346. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my citations.

Notes on "The Mechanics of Culture"

Speaking of Shakespeare's originals, Kastan writes "no manuscripts survive to compare with and correct the printed editions, and an appeal to their existence can be no more than hypothetical and in fact seems disturbingly circular." A manuscript is imagined based on perceived defects in a printed text (other than purely typographical ones), but while the manuscript does not materially exist (as best as we now know), neither do the defects (147).

No "foul papers" from any author of the period survive, and Paul Werstine argues that the existence of these foul papers is a product of the desire of editors to possess Shakespeare's plays in some unmediated form. The good quartos derive their goodness from their proximity to a collection of papers that does not exist (147).

"Plays always register multiple intentions, often conflicting intentions, as actors, annotators, revisers, collaborators, scribes, compositors, printers, and proofreaders, in addition to the playright, all have a hand in shaping the play-text: but editions of plays tend to idealize the activity of authorship" (147).

The aim of eclectic editing, which seeks to recover authorial intentions by a collation and analysis of a play that he never actually wrote, isolates Shakespeare from the immediate historical context of the professional playhouses of Tudor-Stuart London (148).

"To recognize that authorial intentions not only operate alongside of but in fact demand nonauthorial intentions for their realization is to restore the text to its full historicity" (149).

Even facsimiles represent idealized forms of the printed text; given the printshop practice of binding both corrected and uncorrected sheets into books, it is extremely unlikely that any two copies of a single book would have been identical, but the creation of a facsimile shrouds that variation. It also shrouds the materiality of the printed form itself, occluding the quality of the paper, the ink, and other physical characteristics of the printed book (150).

"If edited versions, then, usually idealize the activity of authorship, facsimile versions work to idealize the printed text" (150).

"In reality there is no other way to engage the play [than in edited form], for from its very first appearance as text it has been edited, mediated by agents other than the author, and intended for the convenience of its readers" (151).

"The text is always constructed, and its making and remaking are not evidence of its contamination but are the enabling conditions of its being. This is not to say that it makes no difference in what form the play appears, only that no specific form of the play represents (what can only be a fantasy of) the true original" (151).

Summary


Kastan's argument seems to run along the lines of you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so why worry about it? If the idea of recovering authorial intentions beyond the materiality of the printed texts we have is based more on wishful thinking than on fact, so is the idea of the purity of the material object. Far from encouraging an attitude of "can't win, don't try," Kastan seems to advocate the creation of text of the most utility to the intended audience, with the caution that we remember the ephemerality of the materials with which we work.

Citation


Kastan, David Scott. "The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today." Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. . 144 - 151. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my citations.

Notes on "Casting Shakespeare's Plays" - Chapter 4

Q1 of 2 Henry 6 has fewer spoken lines than appear in F, but does not require fewer actors, which contradicts the theory that Q1 is printed from a version cut for touring (for size requirements) (78).

The quarto of 3 Henry 6, like the quarto of 2 Henry 6, is shorter than its appearance in F, but does not require significantly fewer actors to play, and therefore should not be thought of as a version cut for touring (79).

"The casting requirements for F (Richard III) are almost the same as for Q1" (80). The idea of plays cut down so they could more easily tour is one of the center pieces of the new bibliographic concept of these pirated bad quartos, and while Gurr has presented some very good evidence to counter those theories, King sure is helping.

King takes the F stage direction from Midsummer "They sleepe all the Act" to mean the lovers sleep through an onstage musical interlude, but I think it is rather a sign to indicate that they remain on stage, even though they don't say anything. A signal to a reader, or perhaps even an actor, that they are not to go anywhere when they've run out of lines (84).

The quarto text of Henry V also requires a similar number of actors as the Folio text; 20 men and 4 boys in Q, 23 men and 5 boys in F. Even though F contains about twice as many spoken lines as Q, it is therefore unlikely, as Greg suggests, that Q is an adaptation for touring. Taylor's proposition that Q is a reduced cast version (for nine or ten men and two boys) is also inaccurate in light of this evidence (87).

King notes, of Troilus and Cressida, that "the fourteen men required in fifteen principal parts are significantly more than the average of ten men required in principal parts parts for other Shakespeare plays, and this lends support to the argument that the play was written for private performance" (89). But what about the 20 men and 4 boys that the shorter Q of Henry V requires? Why not commentary on that?

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

Notes on "Casting Shakespeare's Plays" - Chapter 3

"Two manuscript playbooks and thirteen early printed texts identify the men and boys who act the principal roles in each play. Seven of these plays were first performed by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, between 1619 and 1631, and eight were first acted by other London companies between 1625 and 1636" (50).

From the extant playbooks (manuscript and print) of the period, in no instance do all of the company sharers perform in the same play, and hired men, who were paid a weekly wage, play some lesser principal parts, and almost all of the smaller ones (50).

The manuscript to Arthur Wilson's The Swisser is carefully prepared, but shows no signs of playhouse use, which may indicate that it was prepared for the press (60). While there seems to have not been much of a standard practice in what sort of text was sent from the playhouse to the printshop, William Proctor Williams has asserted that the printshop would have insisted on fair copy for the very good reason that printshops were in the business of printing books, not of deciphering foul papers. That said, it is also possible that the manuscript was simply prepared as a manuscript book; the printshop was not the destination of all fair copy.

The briefest time allowed for a change occurs in The Duchess of Malfi, when only 246 lines pass between the exit of a Madam in 4.2 and the entrance of Delio in 5.1; both roles were played by Underwood (77).

Notes on "Casting Shakespeare's Plays" - Chapter 2

The principal adult and boy players in The Battle of Alcazar (which is the only early modern play for which both a plot and a printed text is extant) speak 98% of the lines, which is consistent with with the distribution of lines in extant prompt-books from pre-Restoration London that identify the names of the players in principal parts (27).

Of interest to me, in the plot of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, "four boys plays seven principal female roles" and while several of the adult principal roles are doubled "each actor who doubles in principle [sic] parts is off-stage for an interval of at least one full scene between roles" (29).

While the plot of The Battle of Alcazar is the only extant plot for which the text of the play itself is also extant, the plot is incomplete, and there is at least one instance where the plot differs from the printed play: a 35 line scene between Abdelmelec and Zareo is cut from the version of the play upon which the plot is based (31).

In assembling tables of parts, where one character is given multiple names, King separates them with a hyphen as opposed to giving the different character names their only row in the table (33). This is slightly different from my previous practice, but seems more logical. I'm only writing it down so I remember to implement it the next time I run into this situation.

Adult actors playing larger principal roles usually do not double, but lesser principals regularly double in one or two "minor roles" (33).

The book-keeper has added the note "Enter mr Goughe" in the left margin of one of the pages of The Second Maiden's Tragedy, which King says is "probably as a reminder that this new entrance for Memphonius should be added to the plot and that his new lines should be added to Goughe's part" (35). Again, while I agree with him, King's implication is that this is the only, or perhaps even the primary, reason for so doing, and all evidence I have seen suggests this is not the case.

In his edition of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, Howard-Hill observes that there are too many "inconsistencies, obscurities, and errors," and that "the manuscript did not give a prompter all the information he would have required to guide performances" (35 - 38). King seems to accept this without comment, but the suggestion that a book would be used to guide performances would seem to imply that a prompt-book is used in guiding the performance.

The manuscript allowed-book of The Honest Man's Fortune was probably based on a prompt book, and contains a scene (5.3) not printed with the play in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (1647) (40).

Assigning the greatest proportion of lines to principal players allows them to rehearse their parts independent of supernumeraries for as long as possible (48). This makes a huge deal of sense in light of Stern's argument that most of the time an early modern player spent in rehearsal would have either been on their own with the part, or in the presence of an instructor.

Summary

Evidence of who played which roles in the early modern London playhouses suggest that a single male sharer in the company tended to play the largest roles in a given play, with the other principal roles being distributed largely among company members. Principal players might have doubled with smaller roles (roles with less than 25 speaking lines), and hired men taking on other non-principal roles, and perhaps (along with playhouse staff) filling supernumerary roles as necessary.

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.

Notes on "The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks"

Blayney challenges Farmer and Lesser's "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited" in this article; he perceives Farmer and Lesser's impetus being a case of simple overstatement of what Blayney himself wrote in "The Publication of Playbooks," but still feels that Farmer and Lesser's argument does not hold up "historically, logically, and mathematically" (33).

For the purposes of this article, and answering Farmer and Lesser's charge, Blayney has shifted his metric from play texts to play books, and notes that so considered "the most immediately pertinent difference is that although 40.8 percent of plays were reprinted within twenty-five years, the figure for playbooks is only 32.4 percent" (34).

A printer was more often than not simply hired by a publisher; cases in which the printer was a partner in the process should be regarded as exceptional (36).

Farmer and Lesser are correct in setting aside official publications, "advertisements, blank forms, privately printed petitions, and the like" not because they were commonly printed, but because they were never intended to be sold to the general public vis-a-vie booksellers (36).

Farmer and Lesser should not have been so quick to discount books printed for the secret, Catholic presses because it would be "unhistorical" to presume that those books were printed to be given away en masse to prospective converts: they were printed to be sold to the faithful (36).

Blayney's original figures for the ratio of printed playbooks to other books do not drastically differ from Farmer and Lesser's (37).

While Farmer and Lesser make the claim that they will demonstrate that playbooks were far more popular than Blayney describes, they instead arrive at the conclusion that "playbooks were hardly marginal" (37).

Patented books, in general, were subject to the sam restrictions of the Stationer's Company as other books; only royal proclamations were exempt from the limit of 1000-1500 copies per edition (38).

While it may be true that monopolies eliminated competition for some classes of books, Farmer and Lesser's claim is an exaggeration: indeed, the power these monopolies exerted was an exaggeration in the late sixteenth century as well (38 - 39).

"The only class patents that really prevented anyone from publishing new books they might have wanted to publish were those for musical part-books and for almanacs" (39).

By considering books published for the captive audiences of churches, students, and lawyers, Farmer and Lesser ignore the possibility that these books could have been purchased by anyone should they wish to have their own private copy to study from or use during a church service (39).

"Market share in the real world is not always greatly affected by what publishers (sometimes wrongly) think will sell, and is not determined at all by what academics subsequently chose to study. What counts is what the customers actually buy" (40). Amen.

To the claim that more than twice the percentage of playbooks was reprinted than the percentage of sermons, Blayney says that Farmer and Lesser "ignore an elementary arithmetical truism that completely vitiates their main conclusion. Simply put, a small percentage of a large number can be much bigger than a large percentage of a small number." 32.5% of 345 playbooks means that 112 playbooks were printed in a second-plus edition, whereas 17.5% of 1328 sermons means that 232 sermon-books were given second-plus editions (43).

The fallacy of Farmer and Lesser's argument is built on comparing percentages without regard to the actual values they represent. When examining real numbers of printed plays verses sermons, as either books or texts, sermons consistently outsell plays by a wide margin (44).

"Of the 151 known publishers [of playbooks], eighty-four (55.6 percent) died before seeing a single reprint" (46).

"Unless we recognize and accept just how massively important godly books were to early modern readers, we will never fully understand the background of the dramatic literature we now value so much more than they did" (47).

Summary


Blayney pretty damningly refutes some key points of Farmer and Lesser's article.

Citation


Blayney, Peter W. M. "The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 56, No. 1. Spring 2005. p 33 - 50.