Renaissance Theatres as Business

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Lenard Grant
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1 Renaissance Theatres as Business The following is based primarily on Peter Thomson s Shakespeare s Professional Career, Cambridge UP, 1992, Chapter 4: A Playtext and its Context Actors own shares and hence are the managers too, splitting profits and costs, sharing the risks, and making the crucial artistic and financial decisions. They manage to reconcile the tricky clashing roles of medieval retainer (e.g., the Lord Chamberlain s Men, The King s Men, etc.) and the new, modern style bourgeois entrepreneur. Some, like Shakespeare, became prosperous citizens. Their shares could be bequeathed and/or sold as well. Theatres had all sorts of hired men (stagehands, musicians, extras, ticket-takers, etc.) The most important in a non-acting capacity is the bookkeeper who attends to all the details relating to the play itself, both written and staged versions he gets the necessary license from the Revels Office, ensured the text was altered and revised in accordance with directions from the Revels Office, makes sure the play is copied out, delegates tasks to stagehands, etc, acts as prompter and stage manager t ensure that everything moves smoothly. The most famous of these is Philip Henslowe, who ran the Lord Admiral s Men (with a pretty iron hand). This company was the chief rival of Shakespeare s company (initially the Lord Chamberlain s Men). Henslowe demanded deposits from the actor-owners to ensure they would honour agreements to stay with the company (this is alluded to, though fictionally of course, in Shakespeare in Love). Henslowe fined actors for things like lateness, drunkenness, missing performances, etc. London then had a population of about 160,000 and about a dozen professional theatre companies, so competition was severe (and the competitors knew each other quite well, theatre circles, then as now, being fairly small). A German tourist once noted that daily some 2 or 3 lays would be running against each other simultaneously (the other companies would then be in different stages of production and rehearsal; see below for more details). In addition to the principal actors, the company has a number of trainees, boys from about age receiving a theatrical education at the hands of the experienced adult members. They would apprentice for about 7 years, learning speech, movement, music, fencing, dancing, singing, etc. Played the women s roles (actresses do not grace the stage until the Restoration in 1660; prior to that social norms of seemliness and modesty implied that the stage was too lewd and unchaste for women to permitted to act on it. Theatre, though a living, was not an entirely respectable one). Many plays of the period make in-jokes on the fact that males play female parts and some plays even depend on this for their full effects especially those plays in which girls disguise themselves as boys or vice versa (e.g., Lyly s Gallathea, Shakespeare s 12N, AYLI, Cym., etc.). Boys got some of the best roles in English theatre Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Cleopatra, Desdemona, Lear s daughters, Duchess of Malfi, Ophelia, etc. There were actresses

2 2 in Renaissance Italy, but Englishmen then regarded Italy as the den of vice (and hence it was a popular tourist destination! Cf. Sir Politic-Would-Be and his wife in Volpone. Playwrights must be au courant with fads and fashions in order to be successful. Playwright proposes story to company of actors and may be asked to furnish a plot outline broken up into dramatizable episodes; if things look promising detailed plans for writing wil be made, with perchance a downpayment of 2. Competition among theatres is severe, so new plays are at a premium and speed of composition is desirable; theatre needed a new play ever 2 weeks or so (hence considerable amount of collaborative writing). Indeed, playwrights tended to be seen as cheap, low-grade drudges by other writers, and as hacks because of how fast they had to work (and most playwrights could not have been very painstaking); given that there were many aspiring writers, it is a buyer s market. Shakespeare was in a better position than most playwrights in terms of job security because he was a shareholder in a prosperous theatre company (he did not feel the same pressing need for speed or for collaboration since his main source of income is not the writing part of the process). Playwrights often write with particular actors and their talents in mind, as well as with an intimate knowledge of capabilities and limitations of the stage (no lighting, little scenery, etc. these things are often made up for in elaborate and evocative descriptive writing, as in Romeo s description of dawn, Edgar and Gloucester on the edge of the cliffs of Dover, and so on). A complete rough draft (foul papers) in manuscript form is delivered to actors who then pay another 4 or 5 for appropriate division among the writers. The company now owns the ms and all rights pertaining thereto. The writer(s) have no copyright and no other control over the play. The play is then taken to a scribe who makes 2 fair copies one will be cut up to provide each actor with his part (the cut-up bits being pasted into a scroll; Edward Alleyn s role/roll in Thomas Greene s Orlando Furioso is 17 feet long); the other fair copy will become the stage manager s promptbook and will be marked up in various ways. Company now has three versions 1 foul papers version and 2 fair copies (the scribal copying process may very well introduce errors and variant readings). The play is usually not printed (even if it is licensed to be printed, as a way of protecting the theatre-company s ownership against pirated publications). Printing a play makes it accessible to rival companies. The company itself may later print it (in a Quarto edition, the size suitable to a single play) in order to squeeze the last bit of income from it. Also plays that are old, out-ofdate or flops on the stage might get printed. It also must have seemed rather pointless to preserve in print such transient entertainments. But when a playwright becomes extraordinarily successful or is seen to be extraordinarily talented or important, his works might appear in the more elaborate, respectable, and better edited Folio versions, as for instance, the 1616 publication of Ben Jonson s works and the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare s plays.

3 3 An actor, with his part plus necessary cues pasted into a scroll, might well know his own part inside out, but will not necessarily have a handle on the play as a whole and even in rehearsing he need concern himself only with scenes he is in. Actors work under great pressure: during a 10-week period at the Rose in 1595, the Lord Admiral s Men gave 57 performances of 20 different plays, 4 of them new. Actor s main job is to deliver a story that will hold the audience s attention, and, as today, it is the actor who draws in the crowds (playbills seldom mention author just as movie posters seldom mention screenwriters). NB plays are seen less as literary texts than as events and boundaries twixt artistic decisions and financial decisions become blurred since the theatre exists to make money. Rehearsal time is about 3 weeks duration, but actors might be working on several plays, some old some new, simultaneously, so time devoted to any one play might be quite limited. Many scenes were probably not rehearsed at all ones involving, e.g., courtly formalilty, were probably handled by formulaic blocking and staging procedures, while scenes involving low-life comic characters could be left to the improvisatory skills of the actors. The scenes that will get much practice and attention will be the difficult or demanding ones that cannot be handled formulaically. Next to his part, the actor s most precious possession is his costume. Well-established actors owned their own and they were costly items (perchance the most expensive part of the production). Some actors even willed their costumes to other actors. Just as in the society at large, costume indicates the character s status in the hierarchy of the play. NB there are many references to clothing in Renaissance plays, and disguise via clothing is a popular plot motif. A single cloak could cost 3 times as much as the play itself; in Henslowe s company s (Lord Admiral s Men) the fine for removing a costume from the playhouse was 40 times that for missing a performance. Skills required of actor: dancing, fencing, tumbling, singing. They tended to be rhetoricians more than actors of character, and the notion that speaking styles could be adapted to suit the character portrayed (beyond the requirements of decorum) was still in its infancy, but is hinted at in, e.g., Hamlet. Number of actors in company was probably One thing that was, and still is, unusual is actor-managers owning the theatre they perform in. Quite a bit of dispute concerning the composition of the audience, both in the public, open-tothe-sky, theatres and in the private, indoor, ones. Cheapest seats (i.e., standing not sitting) was 1 penny (1/84 of a week s salary for an average worker who made about 7 shillings/week; by way of comparison, beer cost 4 pennies a quart). It seems fairly certain that audiences were noisy. There are stories of riots in theatres, of confrontations among different groups in the audience and even between individual actors and audience members. Plays do not become noticeably more elevated when in the private theatres (such as Blackfriars), with their more privileged audience, and indeed, some plays were performed in both public and private theatres.

4 4 Appropriate class behaviour was not as expected in the early modern period as it is today, so it might not be all that important which class dominated the audience in which theatres. The neighbourhood in which the theatre was situated could have been more significant (audiences north of the river (where The Theatre was) were said to be rougher, more conservative and less discerning than those on its south (such as The Globe). See also, Richard Levin s article Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.2 (1989), Levin points out that although the theatre business was maledominated on the production side (there were not even actresses, since all parts were acted by males), the success of the theatre depends not on satisfying the needs and desires of the producers, but instead on satisfying those of the consumers, the theatre-goers, and many of them were women. He also points out that their possible effect on the drama depends less on their numbers in the audience than on whether te actors and playwrights saw them as a constituency whose interests and feelings need to be considered. Caveats Renaissance audiences vary from theatre to theatre and time to time; all comments about women in the audience come from men; women tend to get stereotyped by gender in these comments, while men tend to be stereotyped b vocation or class. Levin has found that in epilogues to plays, for instance, it is often suggested that women are more charitable towards the actors than are men, that women have an interest in the portrayal of women characters, and that women were indeed a distinct part of the audience that needed to be attended to. There are many reports of women being edified as a result of lessons conveyed by the behaviour and/or fate of women characters in plays. It seems unlikely that many women went to plays in order to be reformed (any more than men would) or that dramatists ever thought they did. Such comments are usually part of more general defences of the theatre against charges of immorality (cf. Gosson), and there are thus many comments about men being taught moral lessons too. Such comments also embody a masculine conception of what women spectators should be concerned with. There are many reports of women weeping in the theatre (but also of men weeping and, indeed, of entire audiences weeping; cf. The response to Romeo and Juliet in the film Shakespeare in Love). Still, there seems to be an idea that women had a special sensitivity to and preference for plots and situations with considerable pathos, an idea still with us as witnessed by soap operas and some kinds of chick flicks. Presumably, playwrights took this sort of thing into account. There is evidence of gender-concern or gender-loyalty among women spectators, especially when the play presents a version of the battle of the sexes. Some comedies of the period take the

5 5 women s side in this battle and are presumably aimed at pleasing the women spectator s. E.g., in Shakespeare s comedies enlightened and intelligent women often resolve conflicts and confusions that the men can t sort out (Portia in MV, Rosalind in AYLI, the Abess in CE). Here was also a response to The Taming of the Shrew called The Tamer Tamed. There is also a fair bit of evidence that women formed a considerable part of the readership of printed plays (evidence mostly from printer s or editor s prefatory material) enough that their interests and tastes would be taken into account. So, the influence of women spectators should be taken into account but not exaggerated; it is, Levin, concludes, not unreasonable to look for sympathetic treatments of women in early modern plays.

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