The actors had the “scrolls” of their own lines, but no complete script. They memorised or part-memorised their words before beginning the rehearsal itself. It can be inferred that approximately thirteen principal actors and boys were gathered together on this occasion. The smaller roles need not have been rehearsed. At this stage jokes were added or taken out, difficulties of action overcome, and obscurities of plot or dialogue clarified. At this point, too, the problems attendant on “doubling” were resolved. This was often done unobtrusively, but there were occasions when the Elizabethan players revelled in the artificiality of the procedure. Doubling was an obvious excuse for comedy as well as mystery. It also provided the actor with an opportunity to display his virtuosity and versatility, and it has been calculated that a player needed the time of just twenty-seven lines to change roles. In certain plays Shakespeare will allow precisely that amount of time for the transformation. There were occasions, too, when the audience revelled in “doubling.” When an actor dies on stage as one character, but then re-emerges as another living — this must often have been the cue for shouts of approval.
There is every reason to believe that actors and writers in rehearsal behaved very differently from their modern counterparts, who seem to be held in thrall to their director. In contrast the Elizabethan actor suggested lines, or ways of delivering lines, and may even have helped to invent new scenes to assist the progress of the plot. In the “epistle” to a publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher it is announced that “when these Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the Stage, the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour’s consent) as occasion led them.”4 The plays of Shakespeare were not treated very differently. The play is not a piece of writing, but a collaborative event; it is never finished, in other words, but subject to a continuous and inevitable process of change. There was in the sixteenth century a well-understood set of stage conventions, however, which helped the process of rehearsal; there were principles of movement and gesture that the good actor would have known instinctively. It is interesting, for example, that exits are rarely mentioned in stage texts; it was assumed that competent performers would know exactly when to leave the stage.
A general “run” of a new play was between four to six weeks, played at intervals, but of course there were always revivals and reworkings whenever the occasion required them. The general business of the day would include rehearsals in the morning, playing in the afternoon, and the learning of innumerable lines in the evening. In the case of Shakespeare this was complemented by the necessity of writing plays in relatively quick succession. He was continually, and exhaustingly, occupied. J. M. W. Turner once said that the secret of genius was “hard work,” a sentiment with which Shakespeare would have agreed.
CHAPTER 64
See How the Giddy Multitude
Doe Point
Everyone knew when the playhouse was open. A flag was flown from the roof, announcing the news, and a trumpet was blown to alert those in the vicinity. Playbills advertising the forthcoming entertainment had already been pasted onto walls and posts, as well as the doors of the Globe itself. These “bills” gave the time and place, title and company, as well as sensationalist details to attract the public— “the pittiefull murther … the extreame crueltie … the most deserved death” and so on. The play itself began with three “flourishes” from the small orchestra, designed in part to still the ever restless audience. Then there came upon the stage the “prologue,” attired in a long black velvet cloak, false beard and a wreath of bay-leaves. It was he who introduced the play and pleaded for the audience’s attention.
At the end of the play, after the epilogue had been concluded, the next and forthcoming drama was announced to the audience. There then followed the prayers for the monarch, when all the actors knelt upon the stage. And then there came the jig. Its name suggests a merry folk dance, but its provenance goes wider. The stage jig was a comic afterpiece accompanied by dancing, lasting for approximately twenty minutes, in which some or all of the players joined. Its principal exponents were of course the comedians in the company who, like Will Kempe, gained a reputation for their extempore dancing; they turned like a “gig,” or top, and sang ribald or personal songs.
The jigs often included folk dances and ballads as well as what are euphemistically termed “figure dances” by the comedians and boys. They were characterised and criticised for their bawdiness, described variously as “a nasty bawdy Iigge” and “obscaene and light Iigges.”1
Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage (the auspices are rarely favourable), and the couples are in a sense unconsummated; that consummation may have been depicted in the jig. And it was a jig in which Shakespeare himself would have joined. In many instances it seems to have been the most popular part of the afternoon’s entertainment, “called for” by the impatient audience at the end of the play. The crowd could also demand the performance of a favourite jig such as “master Kemps Newe jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman” or “a ballad of Cuttinge George and his hostis.”2
It is not at all clear when, or even whether, the performance of jigs was discontinued at the Globe. It is sometimes conjectured that Will Kempe’s departure from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 was the signal for their demise. When a playgoer, Thomas Platter, refers to a jig at the end of a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe in that year he was apparently chronicling one of its last appearances. But at the close of Twelfth Night, written and performed in 1601, a clown is left on stage with a song. Where there is a song, there is a dance. There is in fact no real evidence to suggest that the jig came to a sudden or inglorious end in the Bankside theatre. Why remove one of the most popular entertainments that the theatre could provide? Ben Jonson may have complained about the jig but Jonson was not an enthusiast for populist theatre in any of its forms. It certainly flourished in the theatres of the northern London suburbs for many years. It seems unlikely that the “southern” theatres, catering for a similar audience, would discontinue the practice. The jig served a great purpose, not unlike that of the satyr plays which were performed at the end of the dramatic trilogies in fifth-century BC Athens. It was part of the dramatic celebration. It may seem inappropriate after the last scenes of King Lear or Othello, but there is somehow a dramatic rightness about ending any play with a song and a dance. It suggests that the drama is an aspect of human joy. The original meaning of “mimesis,” the word for mimicry or imitation, is “expression in dance.” It is perhaps the oldest form of human activity or human game.