Acting from Shakespeare's First Folio

Theory, Text and Performance

Don Weingust

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415979160
• eBook ISBN: 9781135864095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Acting from Shakespeare's First Folio examines a series of techniques for reading and performing Shakespeare's plays that are based on the texts of the first 'complete' volume of Shakespeare's works: the First Folio of 1623.

Do extra syllables in a line suggest how it might be played? Can Folio commas reveal character? Don Weingust places this work on Folio performance possibility within current understandings about Shakespearean text, describing ways in which these challenging theories about acting often align quite nicely with the work of the theories' critics.

As part of this study, Weingust looks at the work of Patrick Tucker and his London-based Original Shakespeare Company, who have sought to discover the opportunities in using First Folio texts, acting techniques, and what they consider to be original Shakespearean performance methodologies. Weingust argues that their experimental performances at the Globe on Bankside have revealed enhanced possibilities not only for performing Shakespeare, but for theatrical practice in general.

1 First Folio acting techniques

Richard Flatter, Neil Freeman and Patrick Tucker

Introduction

In the 1880s, rediscovery and publication of the Swan Theatre drawing sparked interest in the theatrical conditions of Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeareans began to consider that inquiries into the playhouse architecture of the period might lead to new understandings about Shakespeare’s plays and their possibilities in the theatre.

In the 1980s, theories of Shakespearean revision suggested that the early quarto and folio versions of Shakespeare’s plays were possibly more than just imperfect renderings of one another requiring conflation and correction. Textual critics began to read these originally printed documents as distinct wholes, worthy of greater specific individual attention. The movement to “unedit” Shakespearean texts was underway.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Bernard Beckerman, J. L. Styan and John Russell Brown, among others, reminded us that the practice of theatre in Shakespeare’s day was quite different from that of our own. Speculations about performance took centerstage in this study, as most stage-centered critics and other Shakespeareans gave much less attention to questions of production preparation. With Tiffany Stern’s landmark study, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan,¹ inspired in part by the work of her uncle, the theatrical practitioner Patrick Tucker, scholars of Shakespearean drama and performance could no longer assume that preparations for original Shakespearean theatrical productions – and the performances these preparations produced – were like those of the post-Saxe-Meiningen, directed and lengthily rehearsed western theatrical practices of the twentieth century.

These moments of attention to Shakespearean architecture, text and practice were focused by the work of Patrick Tucker and his Original Shakespeare Company, when they gave each of three annual “experimental slot” performances at the recently constructed Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s Bankside. For the first time in nearly 400 years, a company of players came together in a space approximating an original Shakespearean theatre, using a text approximating original Shakespearean texts, and particularly notably, employing performance preparation methods approximating those of Shakespeare’s own company.

The term “approximating” in the previous paragraph not only serves to express notions of approach to, or closeness and affinity with, earlier space, text and practice. It stands also as a cipher for the unrecoverable distances between any such early modern constructs and their later modern cognates. Whatever we may desire, the new Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, modern readings of old texts and attempts to recapture earlier performance preparatory practices are inalienably efforts of the present. Where these efforts stand to have the greatest value to scholars and theatrical practitioners is not in the ways they may feed cultural or would-be-historical tourism industries or the nostalgic desires of antiquarians, but in the ways our encounters with these places, texts and practices may reveal opportunities for discovering (perhaps in some instances, rediscovering) and understanding the boundaries of theatrical practice and the possibilities for the performance and reading of Shakespeare today. Toward these ends, the current study seeks to engage three topics that grow out of the attempt, championed most visibly by Neil Freeman and Patrick Tucker, to suggest a series of techniques for acting Shakespeare based in the texts and orthography of the first comprehensive collection of Shakespeare’s works.

The first of these topics (and the primary work of the present chapter) is a rudimentary explication of these reading and acting techniques, with a particular emphasis on their origins in the mid twentieth-century work of Richard Flatter. This investigation centers on Flatter’s study entitled Shakespeare’s Producing Hand,² together with the contemporary reception it gained, arriving as it did at the height of the New Bibliography movement. Flatter introduced a way of looking at old texts that focused on those rhetorical, even elocutionary, sensibilities preserved in them from the era of their origins.³ Such a way of reading was in direct conflict with the New Bibliographic emphasis on “correcting” imperfections in these old texts, in ways that couldn’t help but reflect modern grammatical and syntactical approaches to printing literature. The occasion of Flatter’s writing and its reception marked a critical moment for twentieth-century conceptions of and approaches to the reading of Shakespeare. In the slightly more open textual climate of the late twentieth century, Freeman and Tucker developed Flatter’s ways of reading into an approach for acting that, while making challenging and potentially troublesome claims for Shakespearean authority, brings to the fore the rhetorical and elocutionary textual sensibilities of an age antecedent to our own.

The second area of inquiry considers these techniques for reading and acting Shakespeare in context with the textual and editorial theory and practices of the mid and late twentieth century. Some of what Flatter had pointed to during the peak of New Bibliographic progress would lay fallow until theories of Shakespearean revision re-opened examination of the early printed texts. The tensions between competing approaches to reading texts resulted in competing figurations of Shakespearean authority. The second chapter places the findings of Flatter and the techniques of Freeman and Tucker within this discourse of textual instability, openness, and Shakespearean authority.

The third area of inquiry focuses on the work of Patrick Tucker and his Original Shakespeare Company, who, using these techniques, “unedited” Shakespearean texts, and what they understand to be preparation practices like those employed by Shakespeare and his players, gave three full-length, experimental performances at the attempted reconstruction of Shakespeare’s original Globe Theatre on London’s Bankside. The Original Shakespeare Company’s performances at the Shakespeare’s Globe not only help to focus our inquiries into Shakespearean place, text and practices, but also help to foreground consideration of the mission of the International Shakespeare’s Globe Center and provide counterpoint to the means of production otherwise practiced in this remarkable new performance space. The results of the work of Flatter, Freeman and Tucker, and the scholars, critics and practitioners their work engages, cannot help but suggest reconsideration of the ways Shakespeare is read and played today.

Modern editions and First Folio texts

The texts from which most Shakespearean actors now work have been created for a modern, often academic, reading public. Accordingly, these texts are printed in modern typeface; either a result of inherited practice or specific editorial rationale,⁴ spellings are updated to modern equivalences of the originals; punctuation is altered to reflect modern grammatical norms; and lineation and metrical variation are often regularized where an editor believes that such regularization may have been the author’s original intention, antecedent to his will being corrupted by supposedly unwelcome collaborative efforts of inter alia, actors, scribes, and persons of the printing house.

These assumptions and practices result in modern edited texts of Shakespeare that tend to vary greatly from the primary “control” or “copy” texts to which they owe their existence. One such modern edition, The Riverside Shakespeare, claims to avoid “unnecessary emendation,” and warns that

an editor who feels, as Dr. Johnson did, that punctuation is entirely in his power, and who ignores the punctuation of the copy-text, does so at the risk of continual damage to the movement and frequently to the meaning of the lines, either verse or prose.⁵

In accord with this respect for the early texts, the Riverside attempts “to preserve a selection of Elizabethan spelling forms that reflect, or may reflect, a distinctive contemporary pronunciation.” Despite such editorial sensitivities, The Riverside Shakespeare exhibits alterations from control texts that may number some 2,000–3,000 per play.⁶

Are the many changes made in creating modern editions simply transparent or immaterial alterations of the original texts, mere translations of early modern practice into those reflective of the modern age? Those engaged in the scientifically intended textual investigations of New Bibliography, the dominant textual practice of the early and mid twentieth century, would argue in the affirmative. But with New Bibliography’s failure to accomplish its objective of discovering a true and authoritative Shakespearean original behind the originally printed texts, we are left with questions about how to navigate between the originally printed texts and their modern “corrected” interpretations. Of what specific values are the old versus the new texts, and to what uses can they be put?

While it need not be detailed here how the exercise of editorial prerogative results in gains for the modern reader, it is difficult to imagine that in the process something else is not also lost. If modern actors of Shakespeare, very particular kinds of readers, pursue their craft with only modern edited editions in hand, does it not follow that their performances are likely to be subject to similar gains and losses?

The so-called “First Folio” of Shakespeare (often referred to as the “Folio” or simply, “F1”) was put together by two fellow sharers, or partners, in the playwright’s acting company, in a project completed seven years after Shakespeare’s death.⁷ Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio (“F1 acting” or “F1 technique” or “techniques,” as I shall refer to them) describes a series of interpretive and acting techniques, as championed in particular by British-born Shakespeareans Neil Freeman and Patrick Tucker, based in the textual and orthographic specifics of this first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works.

The first argument suggesting the Folio’s superiority in representing what Shakespeare wrote may be found in an introduction to it entitled “To the great Variety of Readers.” In this passage, the two King’s Men members who had organized the volume, John Heminge and Henry Condell, allege to the Folio’s readership (and those contemplating purchasing the text) that “where (before) you were abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors,” those plays are “now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes,” together with those not previously published: “all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them” (emphases added). This rhetorical maneuver of authorization serves to set the Folio apart from the single play “quarto” editions of nearly half the plays already then published.

Freeman and Tucker may be accused of taking Heminge’s and Condell’s claims to absolute authority rather more at face value than would many modern editors or bibliographers. Given the amount of textual theoretical discourse disrupting notions that the Folio provides unmediated access to Shakespearean intent, it would not be terribly difficult for one engaging the topic of F1 acting to make the work of Freeman and Tucker appear as a patchwork of critical naivete. I will address below some of the problems scholarship poses for F1 acting, particularly with regard to questions of Shakespearean authority, but to focus solely or even primarily on the contemporary theoretical and historical difficulties that can be found with the work of Freeman and Tucker would be to ignore what is increasingly a significant contribution not only to the pedagogy and practice of performing the most produced and challenging of English-language playwrights, but also to the critical movement of “unediting” early texts. In the wake of the dissolution of the New Bibliography, textual criticism is in a state of flux, and the work of Freeman and Tucker engages with the changing Shakespearean textual paradigms in some challenging ways.

According to the premises of F1 acting, the long editorial history of Shakespeare’s works has rendered most modern editions devoid of significant elements of the interpretive, particularly actorial, potential of the first texts: F1 acting advocates suggest that the specific orthography of the Folio provides the technical apparatus for cutting through the layers of editorial “improvement,” allowing performers to develop coherent, interesting performance choices that some would claim are more faithful to a sense of either authorial intention or at least the rhetorical milieu from which the works originate. The Folio orthography becomes a simple alternative means of textual study, one well suited to the temporal demands of theatrical production. Folio-based techniques provide actors not only technical assistance, but also a less tangible, though no less important, moral authority bound up with the supposed intentionality of the playwright. While any number of groups have claimed a demographic affinity with Shakespeare and concomitant privilege in interpreting his works, actors may reasonably feel their own strong sense of connection.⁸ Despite being called upon to provide a voice for Shakespeare’s texts, actors largely have been excluded, or have chosen to absent themselves, from the learned debates surrounding the texts’ interpretation. The techniques espoused by Tucker and Freeman place actors at the very center of the critical/interpretive debate over text, make Shakespeare’s texts (frozen in a version of the language 400 years earlier than their own) readily known territory for them, and give them license to claim this territory in the face of an often intimidating critical establishment having far greater scholarly knowledge than they about the works they enact. Using F1 acting’s simple body of techniques, the quest for Shakespearean authority that actors may fear rests at the end of an arduous critical study now appears to become immanent and apparent in the text.

Despite elixir-like claims and a seeming disregard for the large body of scholarship that problematizes the textual and orthographical underpinnings of F1 techniques,⁹ in practice, these methods do seem to produce positive results, both with professional and student actors. Actors employing these techniques seem able to create readings of the text that are intelligible and coherent while finding great specificity, variety and theatricality, seemingly to a greater extent than prior to, or without, employing these techniques.¹⁰ One of F1 tec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 First Folio acting techniques
• 2 First Folio techniques and the death of the bibliographer
• 3 First Folio techniques in performance: The Original Shakespeare Company and the International Shakespeare’s Globe Center
• Works cited