Sixth Annual Blackfriars Conference

During October I, and everyone else in the Mary Baldwin SAP (Shakespeare in Performance) program, was absorbed in preparations for the Sixth Annual Blackfriars Conference. The Blackfriars Conference is held every other year at the Blackfriars Playhouse, organized by staff at the American Shakespeare Center, and run with the help of SAP students. The Blackfriars Conference is a place where scholars and practitioners gather to “explore Shakespeare in the study and Shakespeare on the stage and to find ways that these two worlds -- sometimes in collision -- can collaborate.”

The Blackfriars Conference, or the attitude behind it, was a determining factor for me when picking a graduate school. The about quote is exactly the kind of work I am interested in, and I will be lucky enough to attend two conferences while I am a student.

The papers at the conference are mostly presented on stage in the Blackfriars Playhouse. Conference attendees are encouraged to use performance in their argument: papers that use actors are granted thirteen minutes; papers that don’t, ten. Half of the paper sessions are staffed with actors from the American Shakespeare Center and the other half with SAP students. I was fortunate to be one of those students and was able to participate in several papers.

Participating as an actor presents several challenges. You get the text 1-4 days before you have to perform it. There is virtually no rehearsal time other than a tightly scheduled 15 minute meeting with the scholar. As an actor, you want help the scholar get across their argument, you want to perform what the scholar is looking for. But some scholars are better than others at describing what they need. You have to work to translate what they tell you into performance. Also rewarding was the wide range of texts I was given to perform. There were pieces I was extremely familiar with and could perform off book, such as Silvia in the final scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but there were also pieces from plays I had never heard of, indeed, from plays no one had every heard of, such as William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven. Oh yeah, and then there was that scene from Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess where I had to deliver a long speech in Latin. (Well, it may have only been thirty seconds long, but it sure felt like an eternity!)

I cannot emphasize how quickly the week seemed to go by, and how rapidly I felt like I had to prepare each text. But that is also good practice for me. I am a super-preparer, so when I am put in situations where I’m not able to do the kind of text work I typically do, it helps me flex a different set of acting muscles.

But this wasn’t all. After the conference wrapped up for the day, attendees would have dinner, then attend an evening performance of the American Shakespeare Center, and then some would stick around for Late Night Plays at 11pm. I was in two of the late night plays. First on Wednesday night of the Conference was Meet Ben Jonson by Michael J. Hirrel. This was presented as a staged reading, but all of us in it, under the direction of Shannon Shultz, had workshopped the piece earlier in the semester. The play linked together the Wars of the Theatre plays through their descriptions of characters representing Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker.

The second play I was in was a performance of the first half of Michael Poston’s The King’s Tragedy, directed by Ben Ratkowski. The King’s Tragedy is a new play written in the style of an early modern drama. We had been rehearsing this for about a month, and I had a lot of fun playing the proud villain of the piece, Alonso, who murders his brother in order to become king. I had three soliloquies in the piece, which gave me my first extended opportunity to play with audience contact on the Blackfriars Stage. Like so much else, it went by all too quickly.

But we students had a lot more to do than just perform. SAP students also provided rides for scholars, airport pickups, hospitality, stage management and technical support, and more. Several of us, myself included, also helped live-blog the conference. Every paper session and keynote was posted about on the American Shakespeare Center’s Education Blog.

The keynote speakers for this years conference were George T. Wright, Stephen Booth, Scott Kaiser, and Tiffany Stern. I don’t think it’s possible to find a more intelligent, fascinating group of people. I was fortunate enough to assist Scott Kaiser, so not only did I get to watch him prep for his keynote, but I also got to trap him in my car for a 30 minute ride and pick his brain about new plays and playwrights.

Kaiser’s talk was absolutely the highlight for me. I was thrilled from the moment it was announced he would be coming, because I had owned his two books, Mastering Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Wordcraft, for years. Shakespeare Wordcraft is used as a text book for the SAP program, but as a director and actor I have found Mastering Shakespeare indispensable. While holding auditions for Richard III recently, I used something from Kaiser’s book at least three times. So it was a treat for me to meet this man in person.

In the book, Kaiser walks you through multiple techniques for analyzing and performing a Shakespeare text. His keynote, to my great delight, was him demonstrating the techniques he writes about. His keynote was very well attended, not only by conference attendees, but by SAP students, and the ASC actors.

It was wonderful to meet other practitioners as well, such as Beth Burns from Hidden Room Theatre, and Katherine Mayberry of Pigeon Creek Shakespeare. Though I didn’t get to meet her, I enjoyed the talk that Kristin Hall from the Atlanta Shakespeare Company gave. She discussed the company’s mission to perform the entire canon, and how they tacked on Double Falsehood for good measure. She noted that the actors didn’t give any credit to the theory that Shakespeare had a hand in Double Falsehood, and one way they said they could tell was that it was harder to memorize. A fascinating notion for attribution studies, and one that I think has weight. I had always thought that it was the iambic pentameter that made Shakespeare easy to memorize. After working on verse pieces not by Shakespeare, I have found that this isn’t completely true. I think part of Shakespeare’s genius is the ear he has for human speech, and the inherent logic of what he writes. This is not something you fully realize until you work on text by his contemporaries, and it is just one more education experience this program has given me.

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.

BLACKFRIARS CONFERENCE 2011 – PLENARY SESSION X

Cross-posted from the American Shakespeare Center's blog

Hello – Charlene V. Smith here, welcoming you to Saturday afternoon of the 2011 Blackfriars Conference. I’ll be liveblogging Paper Session X from 2:30pm to 3:45 pm. The session is moderated by Farah Karim-Cooper from the Globe Theatre, and the presenters were assisted by Mary Baldwin MFA actors A. J. Sclafani, Linden Kueck, and Angelina LaBarre.

Annalisa Castaldo, Widener University
“Here sit we down…”: The location of Andrea and Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy opens with the entrance of the Ghost of Andrea and the figure of Revenge, and presumably they both remain onstage for the entire play. Castaldo mentions a footnote in an essay by Barry Adams pointing out Scott MacMillian’s assertion that the characters would have appeared on the main platform of the Rose in full view of the audience.

Castaldo suggests that this set up is a ridiculous waste of two actors and stage space. Castaldo compares the play to Taming of A Shrew, where Sly, onstage for entire play, repeatedly interacts with the action. In contrast, Andrea and Revenge sit still, pretend that the actors cannot hear them, speak only to each other during breaks in the action. Andrea and Revenge act more like a modern audience than an early modern audience.

Other plays of the time suggest interaction form audience, so Castaldo wonders if an non-interacting Andrea and Revenge located onstage would have in fact been distracting to the audience. With that thought, Castaldo wonders how might the characters have moved around the stage? Where would they have been?

In the very first scene, Revenge says, “Here sit we down, to see the mystery.” In an indoor theatre, they could take gallant stools. But there is no evidence that the Rose had seating onstage. Would stools have been preset? Would the actors have carried them on with them? Castaldo thinks these options seems unlikely. These problems can be solved if the characters enter above.

Further evidence for this idea comes in 3.2, during Hieronimo’s famous “O Eyes, No Eyes” soliloquy. His speech is interrupted by a letter which falls from above. The letter comes from Bel-imperia, so it would make sense that Bel-imperia drops it from her balcony. However the stage direction from the printed text is ambiguous: “a letter falleth” suggesting instead a supernatural element. Castaldo argues that Revenge drops the letter, which he can do so from above.

Castaldo also points out the stage direction that appear between acts three and four, “enter Ghost.” The previous action upsets Andrea and Castaldo says the “enter” indicates that Andrea appears onstage and shouts up to the sleeping Revenge, who is still above.

Castaldo ends her presentation with a strong recommendation that the ASC produces The Spanish Tragedy, a statement that is met with enthusiastic applause from the audience (much of it, admittedly, mine).

Jeanne McCarthy, Georgia Gwinnett College
The Two Blackfriars Theatres: Discontinuity or Contiguity?

E.K. Chambers conjectured that both Blackfriars theatres were located in the same place in the monastery. Later scholars have imposed great difference between the two theatre on what McCarthy calls “slim evidence.” Scholars have come to view the first Blackfriars as inferior in location, size, and ambition, a failed attempt that was corrected with the second. McCarthy suggests this comes from a selective reading of the evidence.

Many scholars push first Blackfriars into northern end of the upper floor in the old buttery. This conclusion is based on misunderstandings of audience access, room size, and roof height. Documents from the period speak both of divided rooms and also one great room, suggesting a mutability of space. McCarthy points out evidence authorizing the removal of walls.

McCarthy argues that the desire of scholars to seek a permanent purposed built theatre in the Blackfriars is anachronistic. The documents are evident, instead, of a fluid, transformable sense of space.

Joe Falocco, Texas State University – San Marcos
“What’s in a Name?”: Defining an Appropriate Nomenclature for Elizabethan/Original Practices/Early Modern/Renaissance/ Shakespearean Staging

Since late 19th century, theatre practitioners have sought to emulate the staging conditions of Shakespeare’s playhouse. Falocco’s paper investigates what we should call this movement. Early incarnations were known as Elizabethan Revival. This causes problems, the chief of which is the name Elizabethan is historically inaccurate. Early Modern is more accurate, but few people outside of English departments know what that means. Falocco says that calling the movement Renaissance Staging would avoid these pitfalls, but unfortunately would cause tension with disgruntled medievalists.

The term Original Practices has gained some popularity recently, though there has not been complete agreement over what these practices are. This term has been associated strongly with Mark Rylance’s tenure at the Globe and the New American Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta. Theatre historians, however, have pointed out the Globe’s ahistorical use of the yard for entrances, exits, and processions. At the Shakespeare Tavern, the audience is seated in front and does not surround the playing space. Nor does the tavern consistently employ universal lighting.

Jim Warren, Artistic Director of the American Shakespeare Center, told Falocco that everyone used to refer to Shakespeare’s staging conditions. Falocco suggest Shakespearean Staging as a viable alternative to these other terms. However he admits that this terms shortchanges Shakespeare’s contemporaries and also causes confusion, as every production of Shakespeare play is in some sense Shakespearean staging. But, Falocco argues, the benefits of name recognition might outweigh these drawbacks.

Ann Jennalie Cook, Vanderbilt University and Sewanee School of Letters
Light and Heat in the Playhouses

Cook begins her presentation by noting that even in our original practices productions we don’t fully realize the influence of light and heat in the early modern period. The availability of light regulated activity in the early modern period. Torches and candles were expensive. Whatever happened at night involved spending money.

It was, additionally, really cold most of the time. The period was consistently colder than temperatures have been in the 20th century. Weather conditions caused permanent snow on Scottish hill tops and frequent storms brought rain and crop destruction. The Thames River froze solid at least eleven times during the 17th century.

1601 was the coldest summer in 2,000 years. The weather, like the light, had monetary implications. During the period, the price of fuel climbed steadily. Clothing was also expensive and shoes were a necessity, not a luxury.

Both factors of heat and light affected season attendance and governed activities in the playhouses. Cook wonders how often performances were curtailed or canceled due to weather? How many groundlings remained shivering until the end of the performance? To sit out of the rain and weather in an outdoor playhouse cost more money. Indoor playhouse likewise had a higher cost of admission.

Considering these elements will help us understand the plays better, Cook argues. Shakespeare’s text clearly makes references to weather, season, and time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place at a time of year where the light and weather allow for lovers to sleep on the ground, and for rude mechanicals to rehearse in the woods. “Sleeping in mine orchard,” as mentioned in Hamlet, was only possible for a limited period of the year. Looking at the season and the school schedule at Wittenberg, Cook suggests that Hamlet would have been at Elsinore when his father died. Cook states that the action of the plot of Hamlet begins in early September and “the days thereafter grow steadily colder.”

Nova Myhill, New College of Florida
“The Concourse of People on the Stage”: An Alternative Proposal for Onstage Seating at the Second Blackfriars

Ben Jonson’s prologue to The Devil is an Ass is concerned with the physical restraints the stage-sitters put on the actors. Thomas Dekker makes similar observations about the behavior of these audience members in his plays. The Blackfriars recreation we are currently sitting in allows for eighteen occupants of Lord’s Chairs in box like area, behind a half wall, and places twelve gallants stools on stage. This Blackfriars recreation follows scholarly opinion that assumes a small numer of spectators onstage. Andrew Gurr, for example, restricts the number to “as many as ten.”

Myhill asks what would happen if we stopped looking at Jonson and Dekker’s descriptions seen as satiric exaggerations. What if we maximize the possible number of onstage audience members rather than minimizing it? This thought brings up two areas of inquiry: how many stage-sitters were there, and where would they have been located.

Myhill tells about a strage law case in 1609 where a theatre employee was accused of receiving 30 shillings a week for the stools on the stage of the Blackfriars unknown to everyone else. Myhill states a cost of six pence per stool, extrapolating that according to the case, sixty people hired stools. Were there enough already onstage that sixty more would have been unnoticed?

One scholar has proposed that there were no boxes at the second Blackfriars, simply side seating, though an illustration from the time shows that there were. Myhill proposes that perhaps the boxes were located at the rear of the stage, allowing for more spectators on the stage itself.

Myhill ends by pointing out that the estimates of ten stage sitters, or even twenty to thirty, that scholars suggest can not produce the effects mentioned and bemoaned by Jonson and Dekker.

Lauren Shell, University of Virginia, Technical Direction MFA program
Lighting Effects in the Early Modern Private Playhouses

Shell states that we must realize that lighting design is not a modern concept. It began as early as the ancient greek and roman theatre, where plays called for torches brought onstage for certain moments. Here at the Blackfriars recreation we assume an even wash of light onstage and through out the house, but Shell argues that lighting effects were more nuanced that that and points out that text of the early modern plays we study suggest lighting effects.

Shell then discusses evidence of lighting effects in books and manuals from the 17th century. Some of these manuals provide instructions for how to achieve these effects. Shell then demonstrates her own models of possible early modern lighting machines.

First is a device whereby lit candles have covers over them. These covers are attached to ropes and can be lowered and raised, effectively dimming and increasing the level of lighting. Proof exists of such a device being used in court masques, so it seems probably that the same device could have been employed in private playhouses. Shell points out the difference between the stage directions “as if groping in the dark” and “a darkness comes over the place.” These directions are not the same. The first deals with perceived darkness; the second, actual darkness.

Shell then demonstrates how colored lighting would have been created by placing containers of colored liquid in front of candles, the forerunner to modern day gels. Shell then shows a device where candles are surrounded by microreflectors that could be swung open and closed, creating a sudden burst of light.

Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson first collaborated on The Queen’s Masque of Blackness. Jonson’s text contains verbose descriptions of stage effects, including lighting effects. Future masques that Jonson worked on do as well. These effects, when employed in the private playhouses, brought the sophistication of court to the common man. 

BLACKFRIARS CONFERENCE 2011 – GEORGE T. WRIGHT KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Cross-posted from the American Shakespeare Center's blog

Greetings! I’m Charlene V. Smith and it’s 10:30 am on Day 2 of the 2011 Blackfriars Conference. George T. Wright from the University of Minnesota is giving the Keynote today, entitled “Climbing Shakespeare’s Ladder, and Other Sound Patterns.” Wright is well-known among the both the conference attendees and the graduate students at Mary Baldwin due to his seminal work Shakespeare’s Metrical Art.

After some announcements from Sarah Enloe, director of Education at the ASC, Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen takes the stage to introduce Wright. Wright is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Minnesota. Besides Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, Wright has also written Hearing the Measures: Shakespearean and Other Inflections and Poetical Craft and Authorial Design.  Dr. Ralph says that when the graduate Shakespeare program at MBC began, he really wanted to use Shakespeare’s Metrical Art as a classroom textbook. He was worried that some students, less familiar with Chaucer and poetry, might find it difficult. He says he made the mistake of using a different book, but for year two of the program Ralph “switched to the Wright/right book.”

Wright begins by noting his growing interest in ladders in Shakespeare’s text, and that years ago he noticed too many actors underplaying long verse speeches and rhetoric. They were being cheated of their force, brought down to the prose moments of the play.

Wright grew aware of growing interest amongst British actors and directors in speaking Shakespeare’s verse. Wright was interested in how verse was heard by the ear of the audience. These actors and directors were looking for guidance and rules for shared lines, pauses, enjambed versus end stopped lines, etc. Wright cares much more about the weight given to stressed and unstressed lines as they are critical to the emotional intensity of the text.

Wright notes that there are three kinds of people interested in the meter of the verse: Actors, editors, prosodists. The questions each group asks are how shall we speak the lines, how shall we print the lines, and how shall we hear the lines, respectively. Wrights says that editors and actors must print and speak the lines in a way that allows us to read and hear the lines as metrically coherent.

Wright has consulted many texts of Shakespeare’s verse and has not found much dealing with the ladder. As an example, he presents an early speech from Julius Caesar, a speech Wright says in a perfect example of a ladder.

And do you not put on your best attire?
And do you not cull out a holiday?
And do you not strew flowers in he way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
(1.1.48-55)

The first four lines step up, and the last three lines step back down the ladder. A ladder is sequences of clauses that keep elaborating on a topic until it’s been exhausted and then the actor has to run back down.

After 1593, Shakespeare’s line really find their range. Wright says we have the plague to thank, as it caused Shakespeare to write the sonnets. With the sonnets, Shakespeare was training himself to compose verse speech in a larger four line unit. Though many sonnets are end stopped at the end of each line, usually do to the rhyme scheme. The end stopping of the lines halts the rising of the verse. There is an inherent rise and fall in the structure of the sonner. The quatrains build up and then down.

Shakespeare then used more ladders in his blank verse. Wright demonstrates Shakespeare’s powerful buildup via ladders with Richard II’s “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,” John of Gaunt’s This England, and Henry V’s famous St. Crispin Day speeches. Shakespeare had found a new way to be seriously expressive. Why say a thing once, when saying it differently and again and again will make it more memorable?

Wright notes that the performance of these ladders is not always the same, nor is it a continuous rise. The voice likes to back track a little, or down track a little, before it continues to the next level of the speeches. Wright speaks some of Macbeth’s speech, “Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, / Loyal and neutral, in a moment?” This speech goes up and down constantly, as if Macbeth doesn’t know where he wants to be.

Wright launches into Claudio’s speech from Measure for Measure, “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,” a speech Wright calls, “one of the finest of all ladder speeches.” This speech goes up for many lines, and then steps down powerfully. The imagery is as over the top as the dramatic structure of the ladder, and Wright suggests that Shakespeare intended that.

Wright notes that every actor will not perform ladders the same way, but that the device should be recognized as respecting it creates a powerful effect. Shakespeare was an extraordinary writer but also an extraordinary listener.

Wright loves the increasing attention given in recent years to the performance of verse, but the more he reads about it the more questions he has. Metrical variations add texture to Shakespeare’s verse. Readers, editors, and voice professionals need to note these variations. Not just the normal variations such as trochees, but the rarer ones such as hexameter, broken-back lines, and epic caesuras, should be considered. Shakespeare uses these irregularities more than the other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and we should wonder why.

Wright then takes a few questions from the audience. One person asks about Wright’s suggestions that we have some reservations when we hear a ladder, and wonders if that is connected to a feeling that the ladder is calculated. Wright likes the idea and the suggestions it gives for performance. Another scholar asks about evangelism and whether Wright thinks Shakespeare could have picked up some of the ladder technique from church. Wright thinks it is completely possible and beautifully quotes a poem of John Donne. Mary Baldwin professor Matt Davies mentions that the sonnets were metrically regular, and that so were the examples, there weren’t a lot of inverted feet in them, which might cause a trip in the ladder.  He asks whether regularity is essential to building a ladder. Other audience members respond to this idea and ASC actor James Keegan says he notes that sort of thing a lot in Tamburlaine. Keegan then notes that he feels contemporary actors are afraid of pitch, of singing the pitch, and has anxiety about it. Wright agrees, and says that they are afraid of going of the top. But Wright says he’d like to hear actors going over the top a bit more and notes that you can find fine examples of this, nodding to Keegan’s fine performance as Prospero in The Tempest the night before.

BLACKFRIARS CONFERENCE 2011 – PLENARY SESSION I

Cross-posted from the American Shakespeare Center's blog

I’m Charlene V. Smith, and I’ll be liveblogging Plenary Session I from 1pm to 2:15pm.

Leslie Thomson, University of Toronto
The Tempest and the Stage-Sitters

Thomson starts by pointing out that the King’s Men had already started using the Blackfriars by the time that Shakespeare started writing The Tempest. Thus he would have known that the most expensive seats would have been those on stage. Thomson asks what effect the gallants onstage might have had, for example they created a type of stage dressing, and caused an alienating effect by reminding the audience that they were at a play.

The stage-sitters would have completed with the players for staging space and for audience attention, so Thomson explores whether the plays at the time included elements meant to counteract this or remind the sitters to behave? Thomson argues that The Tempest is constructed to quiet the stage sitters using elements such as soliloquies, discoveries, masques, and other staging devices.

The Tempest's 78 uses of “now”and  numerous mentions of the island create a single shared time and location. Events in the play such as the shipwreck, banquet, and the masque draw attention to drama onstage as opposed to the drama offstage. The text also suggests a number of sitting, reclining, or leaning positions. Groups of figures are also regularly observed by others. All these features help point the audience’s attention to the play itself. Thomson then suggests that Prospero acts as a stage-manager, speaking directly to the playgoers, and controlling moments of action during the play.

Thomson concludes with the thought that the presence of stage-sitters couldn’t be ignored during the early modern era and therefore shouldn’t be ignored now. By considering their effect on the performance, we can gather a more accurate and fuller picture of early modern theatre.

Mark Z. Muggli, Luther College
“After the first death, there is no other”: Except in the Case of Falstaff

Muggli mentions that much attention has been paid to Falstaff’s reported death in Henry V, and says he instead wants to focus attention on Falstaff’s first death in Henry IV, part one. Falstaff, to avoid fighting in the battle, “falls down as if he were dead.” The “as if” is ambiguous.

Should Falstaff rise up thirty lines later to the audience’s complete surprise? Or should he fall down with a wink to the audience so that we know he is faking during Hal and Hotspur’s fight?

Muggli says that a Falstaff who informs the audience that he is faking is an impressive trickster, but he is only a trickster. A Falstaff that convinces the audience that he is dead is a Falstaff who has the power to resurrect himself.

Muggli mentions a production he saw recently where an overweight Falstaff apparently suffered a heart attack and falls down. To Muggli, it was convincingly real. While speaking to colleagues about this production, one disagreed, telling Muggli that “it was obvious that Falstaff was faking.” Muggli suggest the cultural legacy of Falstaff means that audiences, even nonspecialists, are aware that he does not die in the first play he appears, and so his resurrection can never truly come as a surprise.

Walter Cannon, Central College
Complex Hearing

Cannon describes complex hearing as a moment when a character hears something that he or she cannot respond to directly, either due to disguise, eavesdropping, decorum, tact, or prevailing social norms.

Cannon says the character’s reticence and a restraint can be used as a guide to emotional and psychological complexity.

To demonstrate his point, Cannon looks at two speeches of Edgar’s in King Lear. The first in 3.6 is a soliloquy in which Edgar speaks out-loud to himself. The second is the speech he delivers in 5.3 to Albany and Edmund. These speeches deal with Edgar’s disguise of Poor Tom.

Cannon points out that disguises are often used to gain or regain power, but Poor Tom gives Edgar knowledge, but not power. It is a disguise that puts an emotional burden on Edgar that he reveals after his fight with Edmund.

Cannon stages the speech in 5.3 in order to demonstrate that the onstage hearers guide audience response. Edgar faces entirely upstage, where Albany and Edmund are located. Edmund and Albany’s faces were therefore much more visible to the majority of the audience.

Bill Gelber, Texas Tech University
A “Ha” in Shakespeare: the Soliloquy as Excuse and Challenge to the Audience

Gelber begins by mentioning the large debate surrounding soliloquies: should they be internal and introspective or external and taken to the audience? To explore the answer, Gelber looks at Shakespeare’s use of a single word, “Ha.” “Ha” can be a shorter version of the word “have,” when elision is necessary, or it can be repeating to simulate a character’s laughter: “ha, ha, ha,” or it can be a word of chiding, especially when located after a question.

Gelber is interested in this final use, especially when it occurs in a soliloquy. Shakespeare uses it sparingly, and Gelber with the help of the actors explores two examples.

The first is from Measure for Measure, 2.2. Angelo asks, “Who sins most? Ha?” In this moment he is looking to the audience for an answer. Gelber argues that the “ha” here is an interjectional interrogatory used to explain Angelo’s previous aside in the scene with Isabella, an aside that is an abrupt and surprising admission of temptation. In this soliloquy, Angelo is making his case before a jury of playgoers.

Gelber then briefly looks at a couple examples where “ha” us used in dialogue, where it is used to provoke other characters to respond. Gelber says “ha” is used in much the same way in a soliloquy, only the other character is the audience.

Hamlet says “ha” in his “Am I a coward?” soliloquy. Gelber argues that the “ha?” seeks an actual response, otherwise why would Hamlet bother? This soliloquy assumes response. Gelber mentions the famous production of Hamlet starring David Warner where one night when Warner asked, “Am I a coward?,” a man called out, “Yes!” When Mark Rylance played Hamlet he performed this soliloquy at the edge of the stage, as close to the audience as possible in order to provoke a response.

Evelyn Tribble, University of Otago
Inset Skill Displays

Tribble’s paper is on early modern actors and their skill set. She bemoans that this aspect is not paid much attention in current studies. For example, the art of gesture is often dismissed as static and old-fashioned. Tribble feels that we should look at these skills positively and as part of an ecology of skill.

Tribble notes that the abundant stage directions in early modern play texts call for a wide range of physical and verbal abilities, including speaking, fencing, wrestling, vaulting, dancing, tumbling, and singing. Londoners could experience many of these skills in arenas other than the theatre, meaning that they were educated and informed.

Fencing displays were part of theatrical tradition and also civic life. and therefore viewers of drama were likely to have a high knowledge of the sport. Many plays also call for highly technical forms of dance. Dance had a wide cultural currency. Spectators attended performances at London’s dancing schools.

Tribble encourages us to consider how an early modern performer’s skills existed in a whole culture that cannot be discovered by looking at the printed page alone.

Katherine Mayberry, Grand Valley State University & Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company
Judging Spectators: The Manipulation of Audience Critical Response

Mayberry took the stage to discuss the use of prologues and epilogues in early modern drama. These speeches address the theatre audience as an audience; they define the audience role and give specific instructions. These prologues and epilogues frequently refer to the audience’s power to judge the performance, but manage to shifts the responsibility for the play’s success or failure onto the audience.

Playwrights use several tactics in their prologues and epilogues, including scripting and cueing applause, preemptively apologizing, anticipating criticism and dismissing them, and stating that the play will appel to discerning auditors.

Shakespeare cues the audience’s applause in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and As You Like It. Puck says, “Give me your hands if we be friends.” This is a conditional phrase. The audience must either applaud or cease to be the players’ friends. Rosalind’s epilogue scripts the audience response: “bid me farewell,” and cues the audience: “when I curtsy.”

In the opening Chorus of Henry V, Shakespeare uses the tactics of preemptively apologizing, and anticipating criticism and dismissing it, specifically demands for onstage realism. The Chorus also enlists the audience in the creation of performance, thus suggesting if the play’s not successful the audience has failed.

Mayberry moves onto examples where the playwright is more insulting to the audience. Ben Jonson’s prologues were often antagonistic. He disparages the judgement of those who criticize the play. Jonson doesn’t solicit the audience’s help, but places blame for negative response on the audience’s poor taste.

John Ford’s The Broken Heart offers auditors membership in an elite club of those with “noble judgement” and “clear eyes.” giving an incentive to like the play. Thomas Middleton’s No Wit/No Help Like a Woman concedes failure before the play begins: “How is it possible to suffice so many ears? So many eyes?”

Mayberry concludes that early modern authors recognized the audience’s power over playwright and performer and sought to control it. They sought to wrest that power back by orchestrating audience response.

The speakers in this session were aided by ASC actors John Harrell, Allison Glenzer, and Gregory Jon Phelps.