Elizabethan documents also do not seem to reflect the next part of the process, but, again, similar events surely took place. The actors rehearsed individual scenes plus, in separate sessions, the dances, fights and songs. Relatively little time was spent on simple scenes, in which only a few actors interacted directly with each other. More time was spent on difficult segments of otherwise simple scenes, such as when a single conversation between two characters produces a dynamic change in their relationship. And far more time was spent on complex scenes, ones which involved the whole cast and multiple, sometime simultaneous, sets of interactions. Altogether the process of rehearsing individual scenes, fights, dances and songs, took up the great bulk of the preparation time available to the ensemble.

Each actor brought to the initial scene rehearsals his ideas about the body language and specific gestures he or she might use. Those ideas were largely sufficient for soliloquies and merely informational speeches, although even in those cases the actors’ individual ideas evolved as rehearsals progressed. But where dialogue was involved, the actors had to figure out how to coordinate their physical action and make the interaction work as a cohesive whole. If, for example, one character is upset by something another says, her actor turns her back. If the speaker seeks to change her mind he must step to her and gently touch her shoulder. When only some of the characters participated in a dialogue, while others also remained on stage, the actors had to decide where and how the non-participants would occupy their time.

The actors also had to figure out many problems concerning stage management. To keep the action dynamic, the actors rarely stood in the same place the whole scene. They had to figure out how to change positions on the stage and to coordinate those changes with each other. When more than a few actors will be on stage at once they had to coordinate multiple changes of position. They had to decide how to get the stage furniture onto and off the stage, and how to use those properties in a dynamic fashion. The actors also worked hard to ensure that the action could be understood and seen by the prospective audience. As Middleton’s text later indicates, for example, the Duke has accidentally been poisoned by his own wife, who had intended to poison the Duke’s brother, the Cardinal. Middleton’s spoken text at the moment, however, provides only hints of the wife’s action and intention. And no relevant stage directions exist. So the actors spent significant time devising a pantomime scheme to make the action clear. The actors’ efforts to achieve clarity even extended to such small details as arranging the action so that shorter actors would be closer to the audience than taller ones.

Altogether, attending to these tasks involved making decisions about hundreds of fine details. For many segments of scenes the actors discussed and tried out multiple iterations, each iteration varying to some degree, in order to address difficulties in the prior iteration. Most scenes were rehearsed in whole in this process four or five times.

Two scenes in Middleton’s play are exceedingly complex, a banquet scene at the play’s climax and the final, fatal masque catastrophe. Both require the entire cast on stage, involve the intermixing of several plot lines at once, and several simultaneous sets of interactions among varying subgroups of characters. The actors often are cued by lines not actually spoken to them, setting off sequences only tangentially related to the prior sequences. Both scenes are difficult to comprehend by a reader of the script, but the actors had to make them clear to the audience. Rehearsals of these two scenes required a substantial part of the total rehearsal time, with the actors repeatedly discussing and trying out different variations.

Separate rehearsal sessions were devoted to the music, dances and fights. In each case one of the actors who had special expertise took the lead in the orchestration or choreography. For the dances and the fights, the actors first practiced in stop motion, then in slow motion, and gradually came up to full speed. By the time of the first public performance, each of these supplemental elements had become a skillful entertainment. The comic dance was very funny. The featured swordfight was wholly compelling. As the rehearsals progressed the actors periodically met in dedicated conferences to discuss problems related to presentation of the play as a whole, such as continuity, costume adjustments, possible cuts of text that was turning out to be superfluous, and optimal reallocation of the remaining rehearsal time.

The material Stern examines suggests that Elizabethan play rehearsals consisted of, say, one or two run-throughs of the entire plays. After watching the entire process of preparing Women Beware Women at the ASC, I have to believe that such a schedule would have been essentially impossible in a real, professional theater. Never mind that it would inefficiently devote equal time to easy scenes and difficult ones. Without similar repeated attempts, discussions and iterations of difficult sequences and scenes, Elizabethan actors would have presented first performances that seemed ridiculously ill-prepared. The rude mechanicals’ performance in Midsummer Night’s Dream would not have seemed all that comical in comparison.

The one or two complete run-throughs reflected in Elizabethan materials were in fact also executed by the ASC actors. First, they ran a “stumble-through.” That was the first time they rehearsed the entire play from end to end. The next day they performed a full dress rehearsal. After both events, they made further adjustments based on what they had learned from the full performance process. The next day was a “preview night,” in which the actors performed for an audience that was not required to pay. We can be fairly certain, though, that no similar event occurred in the Elizabethan theater.

 

Conclusion

On opening night the ASC audience was presented a polished, engaging and thoroughly convincing performance of Middleton’s play. The performance was straightforward Middleton. It lacked the gratuitous flourishes that a proscenium arch theater director might have glued on. Scenes which Middleton intended to be comic were indeed funny, but the actors passed up many opportunities to turn Middleton’s Jacobean tragic extravagance into hyperbolic parody. What we saw was as close as we are likely ever to come to seeing the performance seen by Middleton’s own audience on the day of the play’s original first performance. And the audience loved it. The audience here, that is, although the performance this night made me think that Middleton’s audience must have too.

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