A recent review in the Guardian of a production of Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, was entitled “Romeo and Juliet review – the Globe’s perverse show vandalises Shakespeare.” The invocation of ‘vandalism’ to describe a bad production at a theatre built to preserve and rediscover Shakespearean “original practices” demonstrates how Shakespeare has become a cultural monument; the man and his works as concretised certainties of a “universal individual genius creating literary texts that remain a permanently valuable repository of human experience,” which it is possible for a poor production to deface. This essay will argue through a close analysis of Romeo and Juliet that examining the works not as a solid, individually and organically produced whole, but rather as “an assemblage of textual pieces [which] comes to be seen as a solid dramatic work” [my emphasis], offers a better understanding of early modern theatre practice, which not only democratises Shakespearean drama by revealing it as the product of theatrical collaboration, but offers up possibilities for performance not evident in a linear, regularised modern text. Firstly, I will examine the prologue as an unfixed theatrical feature of the play, then through close analysis of the Act 1 Scene 3 examine the role of actors’ parts, midline switches and cues in the construction of character and direction of stage business and then finally examine how inconstant speech prefixes facilitate an examination of the movement of the play from theatrical manuscript to literary document.
In Making Shakespeare: from Stage to Page Tiffany Stern sets out how prologues were a temporary feature of a play, performed when the play would receive its ‘trial’ on its first performance. This is reflected in the meta-theatricality of the prologue in Romeo and Juliet which after a thorough, if brief, synopsis of the play asks that the audience treats the “two hour traffic of our stage” with “patient ears” and assures them that “What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend”, that what the play lacks the actors will work to improve. The prologue’s theatrical function is not only marked in its content, its separateness from the body of the play is marked in the Second Quarto with a different type set, as was typical of early printed drama. Further, it sits behind the main title page but in front of the first scene which is again headed with the title. This physical separation, the way the prologue is sandwiched between two title pages and set in a different type, mark it as subordinate to the play ‘proper.’ Moreover, whilst in the Second Quarto it is textually subordinate, it is absent from the ‘bad text’ of the First Quarto and also from the ‘good text’ of the First Folio, which evidences the functional impermanence, fragility and inherent theatricality of the prologue in Shakespearean drama.
The prologue’s fragility and its position as subordinate to the rest of the play text is particularly interesting when considering Romeo and Juliet as cultural artefact. For example, this fragment of line from the prologue, “A pair of star crossed lovers,” separated from its textual context, broken from the choric sonnet which houses it, has become a synonym for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and arguably, more broadly, for Shakespeare as cultural icon. The phrase stands in not only for the play or the man and his work, but for a broad narrative type of romance in literature or popular culture; this two-way construction over time solidifies the play text, problematically rendering it a known and complete quantity. In this way, disembodied fragments of text contribute to the cultural construction of Shakespeare’s works as a solid whole. However, the centrality and solidity of the literary and cultural motif of the “star crossed lovers” is destabilised when the prologue is acknowledged as a temporary theatrical tool.
The idea of textual difference and separation within a seemingly solid play is also useful when considering the performance of dialogue and associated stage business in Shakespearean drama. Actors were not given the whole text to learn, rather they were given parts made up of their lines and their cue, typically the last two words of the speech before they were due to speak. This separation of the writer’s ‘foul copy’ into actor’s parts reflects that the theatrical manuscripts were hand written and that it was therefore impractical to provide the play in full for each member of the cast. Further, it was not in the playhouse’s financial interests to have too many whole copies of a new play in case one made its way without the playhouse’s permission to a printing house. In this way the material conditions of the play’s production results in the separation of actors from overarching narrative.
Act 1, Scene 3 is particularly revealing when considering the effect of actors’ parts as discrete entities and how the isolation of these parts was a fundamental feature of performance. The scene is Juliet’s first entrance; she is called on to stage by her mother via the nurse to be instructed that she is to consider marrying Paris. When Juliet, after some comic delay, arrives on stage Capulet’s Wife dismisses and then immediately calls back the Nurse through a set of short midline switches.
This is the matter – Nurse give me leave a while,
We must talk in secret, Nurse come back again.
I have remembered me, thou’s hear our counsel.
Thou knowest my daughter is of a pretty age. (8-11)
Not only do the switches give the actor playing Capulet’s wife an indication of character type, there is a distractedness built in to the to and fro of her lines. They also seem to function as comedic stage direction rooted in status. If the actor playing the Nurse does not have access to this passage other than his cue “pretty age” (11), when he is instructed to “give me leave a while” (9) and then to “come back again” (10) half a line later the actor would have had to follow those instructions, perhaps confusedly or uncertainly as he would know when asked to leave that he had a whole speech yet to come in the scene. The midline switch offers the actor playing Capulet’s wife the potential to add further comedy to the scene by extending or shortening the pause before he says “come back again.” This comedic movement sequence requires a spontaneity and responsiveness in the moment of performance from both actors which Stern suggests was highly prized on the early modern stage.
This sense of spontaneity and direction built into the actors’ part is also evident when in response to Capulet’s Wife’s straight forward question “How long is it now till Lammastide?” (16) the Nurse responds with a thirty two lines speech. The written part for the actor playing Capulet’s Wife would not have contained the Nurse’s unpredictably long and circuitous ramblings, the actor would perhaps then be waiting ready for their next cue, “said ‘Ay’” (49) upon which they could speak their next line. This waiting interminably to speak, whilst the nurse speaks at length to little purpose would replicate for the actor the fictional space of the play.
This textual construction of fictional atmosphere through the actor’s part is developed by the use of repeated cues in the Nurse’s speech. In Shakespeare in Parts Palfrey and Stern demonstrate that this speech contains two sets of repeated cues and that this cue “said Ay” is the cue for both Capulet’s Wife and Juliet to speak (49, 58). Further even when the cue is extended to include more of the line, it remains the same or perilously similar. This seems to create an inevitability of cross speaking, where both Juliet and her mother try to come in on the first cue, speaking over but failing to stop the Nurse, then again on the second cue Juliet could give way to her mother who finally gets to speak her whole line, then on the 3rd cue Juliet tries and again fails to stop the nurse, with the delivery of the 4th “said Ay” allowing the Juliet actor finally to says his whole line uninterrupted. Whilst it is possible that this repeated cue is unintentional, it seems unlikely, as where repeated cues do appear in Shakespeare’s work they function in theatrically similar ways, creating interruptions and overlaps and helping to develop character types by building into the text a refusal to give up their verbal space, like the Nurse in this scene. This investigation of the possibilities presented by cues and the actors’ part is not set out to demonstrate a new understanding of authorial intention, but rather to demonstrate how examining actors’ parts reveals interpretive possibilities for the actor and how these possibilities make clear that the play is rendered whole through performance, that there is a direct dependent relationship between actor and part. This suggests that there was and is a potential for playfulness around the cue which is only revealed when the play is considered in textual pieces. This renders the play unfixed and open to interpretation in its realisation in the playhouse.
This scene, as well as providing interesting insight into the way in which midline switches, repeated cues and actors’ parts may have functioned in Shakespearean drama, also facilitates a useful examination of speech prefixes and the process by which play texts moved from stage to printing house. In the Second Quarto, Act1 scene 3 begins with Enter Capulet’s Wife and Nurse, Capulet’s wife’s prefix is then abbreviated to Wife from (TLN359) until (TLN 395) when she becomes prefixed as Old La. for Old lady which counter intuitively is also around the time she tells her daughter that she is approximately 26 years old; the prefix then changes again for a final time, in this scene, to Mo. for Mother (TLN 431). There are a number of possible reasons for this. One is that it is the result of the Second Quarto being printed from a ‘foul copy’, the 1st draft of the manuscript passed to the playhouse by Shakespeare, during which he has labelled characters in line with their narrative function in a particular moment rather than the character’s name, which would be straightened out by the playhouse in the ‘fair copy’ as such characterological uncertainty would be an “intolerable nuisance to a prompter.” If this theory is applied to Act 1 Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet, Capulet’s wife’s primary function at the start of the scene is her maternal and social status, then it is her age to draw contrast with Juliet’s youth, and finally her role as Juliet’s mother that are of primary concern. However, this is problematic as when Capulet’s Wife is labelled as Old Lady she is primarily acting as Juliet’s mother, not as “some generalised Old Lady”, perhaps this speech fix inconsistency reflects issues at the printing house deciphering handwriting from a manuscript, or from limited access to typeset. A further theory suggests that these variations in character markers were introduced in the playhouse by the prompter and master of revels, who made notes and amendments on the ‘fair copy’.
The uncertainty which frames this discussion usefully illustrates the textual instability accrued by the play as it moved from writer to playhouse to page. The writer’s foul copy was made into a fair copy, which was then marked up by the prompter, then subjected to further editing and censorship from the Master of Revels before being passed back to the playhouse where it would exist as a working document until an emended version of the play was provided, at which point the extant version would potentially arrive with a printer, so by the time the play was printed in Qaurto it would have changed considerably from what was originally submitted as ‘foul paper’ by Shakespeare. This journey with its addition and emendations troubles the sense of the play as solid whole.
By analysing Romeo and Juliet in terms of the pieces from which it is constructed; the prologue and actors’ parts, and examining the process by which those textual pieces were assembled both in collaboration with the actor and through the processes of early modern theatre, the solidity of this play is destabilised. The words “two star crossed lovers” culturally synonymous with the play become subordinate to it, the order in which lines are spoken is rendered uncertain and the names of the characters speaking those lines are no longer fixed. By observing the play as an “assemblage of textual” pieces generated through historically specific theatre practices, as opposed to a concrete single authored cultural artefact vulnerable to vandalism, possibilities and uncertainties are made visible which deny Shakespearean drama solidity and suggests that it can be made whole only through performance.