Grad School: Shakespeare's Theatre

My New Year’s Resolution should clearly be to be a better blogger. After all, so many exciting things were happening during my first semester of graduate school, and I did not find time to talk about any of them. The semester lasted three months, and each month was taken up with a different project. In my mind and memory, the semester had three distinct parts.


My first month was absorbed in a class called Shakespeare’s Theatre, guest taught by visiting professor Roslyn Knutson. Knutson is intelligent, unbelievably well-versed in the subject matter, and just delightful to be around. The class was a lot of work - it was a three-credit course squeezed into a month of time. We studied the playhouse world and the economics and realities of making theatre in England at the time of Shakespeare (1583-1616). We met three times a week, read an average of five plays a week, and countless pages of scholarship. It was intense. During the month of September I was in the library every night until midnight.

But it was worth it. What a way to start off a graduate school career! I learned a lot about current scholarly arguments when it comes to play printing and touring. I re-read favorite contemporary plays like The Spanish Tragedy and Edward II. And I was introduced to such gems as Mucedorus, A King and No King, and A Larum for London.

What I found most fascinating was watching scholars try to grapple with the realities of playhouse requirements versus what they thought an actor was capable of or not capable of. There are many questions regarding how playmaking worked in this era, but we know for a fact, thanks to Henslowe’s Diary, that actors were constantly putting on new scripts for audiences. If a play was performed six times, it was a hit. Most plays only got one or two performances. We have no way to tell how well the actors were memorized, or what their characterizations were like. Did they play a wide range of roles? Or did they play the same type of role in much the same manner in every play? 


As a performer, reading scholars downplay and disbelieve the abilities of actors is painful and head-shake inducing. Many arguments from these scholars would go along these lines “The evidence points to _______ as a possibility, but there is no way the actors could have ___________, so they must have ________.” Some arguments also went along the lines of, “Modern actors are incapable of __________, so the early modern actors were far more talented.”

The thoughts about this all lead to a pipe dream project. When my theatre company is more established and we have a group of regular actors, an ensemble that knows each other well, I would like to put on a mock early modern season for, say, a month. Follow a sample schedule in Henslowe’s Diary for how often a play was repeated, and how often a new play was performed, and fill the schedule with extant plays.

Granted some concessions would have to be made. The early modern actors were able to spend a majority of their time in a playhouse. Every actor in DC has to pursue work other than stage in order to pay the bills. So actors would have to get their scripts well in advance in order to have time to memorize.

Despite the differences, I think it would be a worthy experiment. It would certainly test the actor’s memory. Would we be able to learn the lines for 20-some plays and keep them in our heads? Would the actors be able to create dynamic characters? Would actors fall into patterns? Tricks? A similar style for each play? Also -- how would the text change in performance? How accurate would each actor’s line speaking be? That might tell us a lot about genesis of different textual editions.

I don’t know what all the answers would be, but I have no doubt that we would find some actors more capable than others. I’m sure the same thing was true in the early modern era. Richard Burbage’s memorization skills must have been impressive.

My first substantial graduate school assignment was for this class. A ten-minute oral presentation on a topic of my choosing. In a class one-month in length, there is not time to write a twenty-page paper. Still that oral presentation date came up quickly, and for a while I had no idea what topic to choose. But one day I was flipping through my Norton and I read the headnote to Titus Andronicus, written by Katherine Maus. She wrote, “Even by the standards of Shakespeare's contemporaries, however, Titus Andronicus is an extravagantly bloody play.” Given the plays I had been reading, I couldn’t help but question the veracity of such a statement. So there I had my topic. Ten minutes on violence and death in early modern plays. If you know me, you will not be surprised that I was attracted to this topic.

I found that most tragedies tended to have 6-8 deaths. Titus Andronicus has thirteen (not counting the fly), nine of which happen onstage. In the time I had to research the only play I read that beat it was A Larum for London, which also has thirteen deaths, but all of them occur onstage.

But I also surmised that one could judge bloodiness by the type of acts that were performed, not just body count. Some favorite stage directions from the era:

“he dashes out the Child's brains.” -- Alphonsus of Germany
“flays him with false skin” -- Cambyses
“wounds gaping... holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding bosom.” -- The Devil’s Charter
In Selimus, after removing the eyes of Aga, the title character orders his hands cut off, and then “Opens his bosome and puts them in.” When Aga returns blind and mutilated to his king Bajazet, he says “Witnesse the present that he sends to thee, / Open my bosome, there you shall it see.” The stage direction tells us “Mustaffa opens his bosome and takes out his hands.”

I would not try to ever deny the bloodiness of Titus Andronicus. But I did find that there isn’t a single act of violence in Titus that you can’t find elsewhere in the early modern canon.