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The Elizabethan-Jacobean Script-to-Stage Process: The Playwright, Theatrical Intentions, and Collaboration

2010; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

2374-6629

Alan C. Dessen,

Theatre and Performance Studies

In my work as a theater historian, I have managed to sidestep question of authorial intention. Rather, three questions that have engaged me for roughly thirty years are: 1) at those first performances of Twelfth Night and Hamlet what original playgoers actually see? 2) how can we tell today (i.e., what constitutes evidence)? and 3) to borrow persistent question from undergraduates and other non-belligerents, so what? (1) Question 2 has generated for me what seems a never-ending study of stage directions that have survived in early manuscripts and printed editions, a study enhanced by my colleague, Leslie Thomson, who compiled a database of over twenty-two thousand items from professional plays that formed basis of our 1999 dictionary. Cary DiPietro's invitation to contribute to SHAKSPER Roundtable, however, pulled me out of that comfort zone in italics and forced me to look more widely at playhouse evidence about role of playwrights (2) in script-to-stage process. As opposed to fairly stable progression from author to print in a novel or in Paradise Lost, what can be determined about authorial intentions in a manuscript targeted at Elizabethan and Jacobean players, playgoers, and playhouses, a manuscript inextricably tied to in-the-theatre practices largely lost to us? Do surviving stage directions (regularly couched in what seems to be an imperative mode) provide an authorial voice: here is how my playscript should be staged and interpreted? Or are these signals only beginning of a conversation between a playwright and theatre practitioners who will bring words and actions to stage? What follows is my own idiosyncratic formulation--so, caveat lector. First to be considered is historical evidence, such as it is. To determine contribution of a playwright to staging of his play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre company is, as with many comparable problems, to encounter a murky area where, in terms of actual evidence, norm is silence--and this situation is particularly true for practices of Shakespeare and his colleagues for most of his career, Lord Chamberlain's and King's Men. What has been standard view is provided by Gerald Eades Bentley: The dramatist sold his manuscript to acting company for which it had been prepared; after that it was no more his than cloak that he might have sold to actors at same time (82). For Bentley, examples of sale of plays by third parties without reference to author... further emphasize playwright's lack of control over his own compositions. Far from being a sacred holograph, a dramatist's manuscript was often treated simply as another theatrical commodity, like a cloth cloak or laced cuffs, 'things of small value' (87). Neil Carson concentrates on 1602-03 period in Henslowe's records and concludes: Dramatists appear to have formed loose partnerships or syndicates which worked together for short periods and then broke up and reformed into other alliances, so that the impression one is left with is of playwright as a relatively independent agent who seems to have had considerable control over his own methods of work and to have used that freedom to market his skills, alone or in association with others, to his greatest advantage (22-3). In her 2006 book, Grace Ioppolo challenges this widely accepted formulation on basis of what she teases out of her reading of Henslowe-AIleyn papers, surviving play manuscripts, and other documents (e.g., late 1630s dispute between playwright Richard Brome and Salisbury Court Theatre). In her formulation: Dramatists could, then, take an extraordinary, and hands-on, role in staging of their plays, even in purchasing costumes and therefore did not simply hand over a completed manuscript, and their authority, at playhouse door and disappear with no further contact with company, its actors, and play itself. …