Once they completed their plays, dramatists were expected to read the finished products to the acting companies–the companies’ sharers, that is. The readings apparently often took place in London’s taverns. Several documents in the Henslowe archives attest to the procedure. In December 1598 Henslowe lent the Lord Admiral’s money to pay Drayton, Dekker and Chettle for a completed new play, “The Famous Wars of Henry the First.” In addition, he lent five shillings “at that tyme unto the company for to spend at the readynge of that boocke at the sonne in new fyshstreate.” The Sun was a well-known tavern. Another entry in the Diary reflects a similar transaction. Henslowe records in May 1602 that he has “Layd owt for the companye when they [i.e. Munday and Dekker] read the playe of Jeffa for wine at the tavern.”
The formal purpose of these readings was to gain the companies’ approval for the now finished plays. In November 1599 Robert Shaw, a Lord Admiral’s sharer, writes to Henslowe about a play “The Second Part of Henry Richmond,” i.e. Henry, Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII, by Robert Wilson and an unknown co-author. Shaw reports that “we have heard their booke and lyke yt.” He asks Henslowe to pay Wilson eight pounds for the play, which, the Diary shows, Henslowe did. Lastly, Daborne writes to Henslowe in May 1613 saying that he is “unwilling to read” a play he is writing “to ye [the] generall company till all be finisht.” In this case the company was Lady Elizabeth’s.
We may readily imagine that the companies’ approval of the finished plays may sometimes have been contingent upon revisions specified by the companies. Such revisions at this point would have been of a practical nature. Enlarge the role of the character to be played by one of the sharers, cut a boring speech, add a comical scene at some specified point, and so forth. Absent a demand for any such revisions, the playwright’s role was now largely done. He was expected, several references show, to turn in a fair copy of the manuscript. Conceivably, he was expected to be present for rehearsals and to make further revisions if rehearsal revealed such revisions to be necessary. But for reasons I will say below, I suspect that any such further role was limited.
From Script to Performance
Once the script was turned over by the author to the acting company, the company had to realize the script as a performed play. The process the acting companies used to achieve that objective is not documented by the same kind of direct evidence that we have seen thus far. Stern does assemble an impressive amount of material. But most of this material comes from plays in which the play’s characters put on a play, that is, a play within the play. Multiple considerations restrict the utility of this material as evidence for the process in the professional theater.
Few of the plays within plays, to begin, are put on by characters who are professional actors. And those few plays within plays that are performed by professional actors involve relatively little rehearsal or discussion by the actors concerning how to prepare the plays for performance. Most plays within plays are put on by characters who are amateur actors. And many of their amateur efforts are meant to be comic. So the processes the playwrights sketch concerning preparation for performance do not necessarily represent the process professional actors would use.
Most “plays” within plays consist, moreover, only of single scenes. They involve only a small number of actors, and interaction between those actors is direct and straightforward. Such scenes standing alone in real professional performances would have required relatively little rehearsal. The actors needed only to block their action and figure out how to coordinate their individual actions and their interaction. But real plays in whole are much more complex. The actors must, for example, hint in their actions and interactions at motives that only later will be revealed. Many scenes are not so straightforward; they require the actors to interact in ways that interpret for the audience unspoken meanings. And some scenes involve many actors, complex blocking, and several subsets of actors, the actors in each subset interacting with each other at the same time as actors in the other subsets. A whole play thus probably required considerably more rehearsal than simple single scenes.
More broadly still we may reasonably doubt that playwrights would accurately represent the entire process of bringing a professional performance to the stage. Suppose that the process involved extensive working out of technical details, that difficult scenes and parts of scenes required repeated iterations in rehearsal, with only minor variations in each iteration. Such material represented on the stage would have made a very boring play.
Let me use an example I know well. TV shows and movies about lawyers generally show two parts of the trial process. They show the lawyer’s initial retention meeting with the client. And before you know it they show the trial itself. Stuff happens between those two events, of course, but it usually has little to do with the actual process of preparing for trial. The reasons for that choice by script writers are easy to understand. The real process of preparing for trial involves many tasks which to an observer would seem quite uninteresting. Lawyers spend weeks reviewing documents, tediously interviewing and re-interviewing witnesses, researching legal issues, drafting pre-trial motions and supporting memoranda, reading transcripts, and just plain staring at the wall while they think about how to present the case. Not a very good movie, I’m afraid.
All these considerations suggest an answer to our problem. When Elizabethan plays present plays within the plays, the events they represent as preparation for the performances probably did occur when a real, professional acting company prepared to perform a play. Those events were not, however, the only steps in the preparation process that a real, professional company undertook. Thus the Elizabethan plays offer a framework for further analysis. We can build upon the events that they do represent, and try to figure out what else might have happened.