COGNITION IN THE GLOBE
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Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance Literature, Science, and a New Humanities Jonathan Gottschall Engaging Audiences Bruce McConachie The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois Ryan Schneider Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture Jill Stevenson Shakespearean Neuroplay Amy Cook Evolving Hamlet Angus Fletcher Cognition in the Globe Evelyn B. Tribble
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Cognition in the Globe Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre
Evelyn B. Tribble
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Copyright © Evelyn B. Tribble, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11085–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tribble, Evelyn B. Cognition in the Globe : attention and memory in Shakespeare’s theatre / Evelyn B. Tribble. p. cm.—(Cognitive studies in literature and performance) ISBN 978–0–230–11085–4 (hardback) 1. Theater—England—History—16th century. 2. Theater— England—History—17th century. 3. Acting—History—16th century. 4. Acting—History—17th century. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564– 1616—Stage history—To 1625. 6. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Stage history—England. 7. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Dramatic production. I. Title. PN2589.T75 2011 792.0942⬘09031—dc22
2010041243
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
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To Timothy Ruggles Mixter and Emelia Hillis Mixter
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Contents
Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgments Introduction
ix xiii 1
1
The Stuff of Memory
25
2
Action and Accent: Voice, Gesture, Body, and Mind
69
3
Social Cognition: Enskillment in the Early Modern Theatre
111
Conclusion: Toward a Model of Cognitive Ecology
151
Notes
167
Works Cited
173
Index
189
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Series Editors’ Preface
Noam
Chomsky started a revolution in human selfunderstanding and reshaped the intellectual landscape to this day by showing how all languages have deep features in common. Gone or at least retreating is the idea that the mind is a blank slate. In its wake, fierce debates have broken out about what the mind is and how it works. At stake are some of the most urgent questions facing researchers today: questions about the relationship between brain, mind, and culture; about how human universals express themselves in individual minds and lives; about reason, consciousness, and the emotion; about where cultures get their values and how those values fit our underlying predispositions. It is no secret that most humanists have held fast to the idea that the mind is a blank slate. Not only has this metaphor been an article of intellectual faith, it has also underwritten a passionate moral agenda. If human beings have no inherent qualities, our political and social systems are contingent rather than fixed. Intellectuals might be able to play an important role in exposing the byways of power and bringing about a fairer world. But evidence is rapidly piling up that humans are born with an elaborate cognitive architecture. The number of our innate qualities is staggering; human cognition is heavily constrained by genes and by our evolutionary past. It is now known that we are born with several core concepts and a capacity for developing a much larger number of cognitive capabilities under ecological pressure. Beyond that bold headline, however, the story gets murkier. Each of the mind sciences is filled with dissonant debates of
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their own. In her magisterial investigation into the origin of concepts, Susan Carey writes that her goal “is to demonstrate that the disciplines of cognitive science now have the empirical and theoretical tools to turn age-old philosophical dilemmas into relatively straightforward problems.”1 Notice her sense of being on the verge rather than on some well-marked path. The terrain ahead is still unmapped. But notice, too, her sense that scientific methods will eventually transform fuzzy questions into testable ones. How brave, then, are language and performance scholars who, driven by their passion to understand how the mind works, seek to explore this new terrain? Brave, but increasingly in good company. The Modern Language Association discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature has grown exponentially in the last decade.2 And the working session in cognition and performance at the American Society for Theatre Research is flourishing. Many scholars are fascinated by what cognitive approaches might have to say about the arts. They recognize that this orientation to literature and performance promises more than just another “ism.” Unlike the theories of the last century, the mind sciences offer no central authority, no revered group of texts that disclose a pathway to the authorized truth. Indeed, cognitive approaches to the arts barely fit under one broad tent. Language-processing, reader and spectator-response, pragmatics, embodiment, conceptual blending, discourse analysis, empathy, performativity, and narrative theory, not to mention the energetic field of literary Darwinism, are all fields with lively cognitive debates. Cognitive approaches are unified by two ideas. The first is that to understand the arts we need to understand psychology. Humanists have uncontroversially embraced this idea for decades, as their ongoing fascination with the now largely discredited theory of psychoanalysis suggests. Now that psychology has undergone its empiricist revolution, literary and performance scholars should rejoice in the fact that our psychological claims are on firmer footing. Second is the idea that scholarship in this field should be generally empirical, falsifiable, and open to correction by new evidence and better
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theories—as are the sciences themselves. Of course this epistemological admission means that many of the truth claims of the books in our series will eventually be destabilized and perhaps proven false. But this is as it should be. As we broaden our understanding of cognition and the arts, better science should produce more rigorous ideas and insights about literature and performance. In this spirit, we celebrate the earlier books in our series that have cut a path for our emerging field and look forward to new explorations in the future. BLAKEY VERMEULE AND BRUCE MCCONACHIE
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Acknowledgments
I have incurred many debts in the writing of this book. I would first like to thank Roslyn L. Knutson, whose advice and support has been enormously helpful over the years. I met Roslyn at the first American Shakespeare Center Blackfriars conference in 2001, and audiences at that meeting and each subsequent conference there have heard successive iterations of material that has finally been embodied in book form. Audience members and organizers at those conferences who have provided useful suggestions and support include Lois Potter, Bruce Smith, Peter Holland, Alan Armstrong, Leslie Thomson, Stephen Booth, Paul Menzer, Gail Kern Paster, Penny Gay, Tiffany Stern, Ralph Cohen, and Mary Hill Cole. I also presented this material at the Australia–New Zealand Shakespeare Conferences in 2007 and 2010, and I would like to thank audiences there for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank Jon Golder and Gay McAuley for inviting me to present at the Sydney colloquium on pre-modern rehearsal in 2009; this event probably did more than any other to shape this book. I would especially like to mention Tim Fitzpatrick, whose input and advice has done much to strengthen my claims about stage space. Maryanne Garry provided me with an invaluable opportunity to present this work to an audience of psychologists at the University of Victoria, Wellington. Zdravko Radman gave me the opportunity to present some of the material on gesture to an interdisciplinary colloquium on the hand, and I would like to thank those participants, including Andy Clark, Richard Menary, Michael
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Wheeler, Susan Stuart, Jonathan Cole, Daniel Hutto, and Matthew Ratcliffe. Andy Clark and Michael Wheeler in particular have provided valuable assistance and advice throughout this project. I especially wish to thank John Sutton, whose encouragement and support have helped to bring this project to print. The 2009 SAA seminar on the Queen’s Men organized by Helen Ostovich and Jennifer Roberts-Smith provided an invaluable opportunity to extend my research beyond Shakespeare. I would also like to thank members of the audience at the Marlowe Society of America’s MLA 2008 session for their comments on my work on Marlowe. I would like to thank the Folger Shakespeare Library for awarding a shortterm fellowship that allowed me to begin the research for this book. The Marsden fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand provided me with the resources to write this book, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Portions of this book have appeared in print, and I would like to thank The Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reproduce this material here. Copyright © 2005 The Folger Shakespeare Library. This article, “Distributing Cognition in the Globe,” first appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2005 pp.135–55. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 5–17. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. The members of the English department at the University of Otago have listened patiently to numerous redactions of this material. The general staff in the English Department have been extremely helpful throughout: thanks to Liz Lammers, Kylie Smail, Irene Sutton, and Kirsten Francis. My research assistant Sarah Entwistle has been involved in this project from its
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very beginning and has been of enormous help to me. Thanks also to Karen McLean for her attention to detail and endless good humor, and to Lisa Marr for her indexing skills. I would also like to thank the staff at Palgrave including Samantha Hasey and Joel Breuklander, as well as the series editors and the anonymous readers of the manuscript. And finally, I owe my family a huge debt of gratitude. I come from a long line of women deeply committed to education and learning, including Hillis Carmean Tribble, Elizabeth Barnette, Byrd Barnette Tribble, Carmean Tribble Johnson, and Nancy Benda. My father James Emery Tribble showed great interest in this project, and I deeply regret that he did not live to see it finished. My sister Mary Carlton Tribble and my brother Lewis Herndon Tribble have also been enormously supportive. Finally, much thanks to my wonderful husband Tim Mixter and my daughter Emelia Mixter, who, along with our menagerie of Askur, Midnight, and Soleil, have kept me safe and grounded.
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Introduction
Early modern adult playing companies coped with enormous mnemonic loads, apparently performing up to six different plays a week, with relatively infrequent repetition, all the while learning and mounting a new play more than once a month. As Lois Potter (1991) has noted, such cognitive demands were especially intensive in the highly competitive era of the 1590s, when multiple companies sought to entice audiences into the relatively new environment of the purpose-built theatre. Companies successfully delivered performances, day after day, bringing together script, player, playing space, and audience in what seems like an unimaginably demanding environment. Cognition in the Globe seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: How did they do it? It is possible to propose a range of answers to such a question. We could simply posit that early modern players had better memories than we do. In one sense this hypothesis is undeniably true, but it begs crucial questions, including the definition and scope of “memory,” as well as the mechanisms through which such abilities were inculcated and transmitted. If we instead suppose that standards were simply lower, we confront ample contemporary testimony to high levels of skill displayed by the players, including the comments of overseas visitors. Some theatre historians have suggested that stock routines and playing “within a line” were strategies for coping with the demanding workload. Famously, M. C. Bradbrook asserted that the “general consensus” on Elizabethan acting was that “there would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalized. Conventional movement and
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heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off dramatic illusion” (1932: 109). Yet evidence points equally to the perception that gesture and movement were viewed as the pinnacle of the players’ art, the “grace” that enlivened the words of the playwright. Moreover, the terms “conventional” and “formalized” imply a set of hack routines; instead, we might more fruitfully see such practices as shared assumptions undergirding a sophisticated techné. In this book I adopt a systems-based approach to address these issues. System here is not to be seen as the relatively abstract level of Michel Foucault’s episteme or even Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, but instead as a dynamic model that attends to the art of playing at a range of levels. These include the material conditions of playing, including playing space; artifacts such as parts, plots, and playbooks; the social structures of the companies, including methods of training and coordination; internal cognitive mechanisms such as attention, perception, and memory; and actor–audience dynamics, among many others. This is an anti-localizable account, in which system “cannot be understood in its development or function as strictly localized within one level of analysis” (Clancey 2009: 17). In a dynamic model of system, no one element can be identified as the unit of analysis. As William Clancey suggests: “We cannot locate meaning in the text, life in the cell, the person in the body, knowledge in the brain, a memory in a neuron. Rather, these are all active, dynamic processes, existing only in interactive behaviors of cultural, social, biological, and physical environment systems” (2009: 28). To model such a system, I have turned to research in Distributed Cognition, the closely cognate field of Situated Cognition, and Extended Mind theory in philosophy. These fields hold in common a view that “cognition” is not a brainbound activity, but rather is “unevenly distributed across social, technological, and biological realms” (Sutton 2006: 239). We might begin by defining cognition simply as “thinking,” but only if we bear in mind that “thinking” is not detached from embodiment, affect, and the environment. The tenet
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that cognition is embedded within and extended out into the world is fundamental to these fields, which arose from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Distributed Cognition has its origins in the human sciences and attempts to study memory, perception, attention, and learning in natural rather than experimental settings, while Extended Mind theory arose through challenges to internalist models of thought within philosophy of mind. The related term “Situated Cognition” similarly refers to attempts to study cognition within an embedded, embodied, and extended framework; indeed in a recent paper, Robert Wilson and Andy Clark argue that “we should think of situated cognition as a form of cognitive extension, or rather as a variety of forms that such cognitive extension can take” (2009: 55). Distributed Cognition is an interdisciplinary field of study that draws upon research in a wide range of areas, including philosophy, psychology, education, sociology, business, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. Studies have included qualitative analyses of grocery store shopping, the differences between everyday and school math, work in a dairy plant, appraising cattle for breeding, and ship navigation, among many others.1 Although the precise configurations of the model vary, advocates of these theories hold in common a view of cognition that foregrounds its social and environmental nature. As David N. Perkins puts it: “1) The surround—the immediate physical and social resources outside the person— participates in cognition, not just as a source of input and a receiver of output, but as a vehicle of thought. 2) The residue left by thinking—what is learned—lingers not just in the mind of the learner, but in the arrangement of the surround as well” (1993: 90). Similarly, Gavriel Salomon attempts to stake out a middle path between individualist and system-oriented models of cognition: “To study a system assumed to entail more than the sum of its components, one needs to assume neither (a) that its components are fully determined by the whole system, not having any existence of their own, nor (b) that they are totally independent of the system affecting one another without being changed themselves in some but not all of their
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characteristics through the interaction” (1993: 121). Salomon argues for what he calls a “spiral-like” model “whereby individuals’ inputs, through their collaborative activities, affect the nature of the joint, distributed system, which in turn affects their cognitions such that their subsequent participation is altered, resulting in subsequent altered joint performances and products” (123). Similarly, R. Keith Sawyer examines group creativity and improvisation in jazz and in theatre through a framework of “collaborative emergence” (2000: 181). As Jean Lave (1988) reminds us, “distributed” does not mean “parceled out”; distribution is not a zero-sum game: “ ‘Cognition’ observed in everyday practice is distributed— stretched over, not divided among—mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings (which include other actors)” (1). David Kirsh summarizes Distributed Cognition as “the study of the variety and subtlety of coordination. One key question which the theory of distributed cognition endeavors to answer is how the elements and components in a distributed system—people, tools, forms, equipment, maps, and less obvious resources—can be coordinated well enough to allow the system to accomplish its tasks” (2006: 258). Put otherwise, Distributed Cognition studies how “groups of skilled practitioners may be considered as complex systems with socially distributed cognitive properties.” In such a system “[s]pecific sensibilities and capacities . . . are engendered through the active socialisation of apprentices into structured and shared contexts of practice” (Grasseni 2004: 47–8). Among the most promising branches of this research for analyzing early modern theatre is the work of the cognitive anthropologist Ed Hutchins. In Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins reports on the results of an ambitious ethnographic study of “naturally situated cognition” (1995a: xii). Rather than studying memory, attention, and perception in an artificially constrained laboratory setting, Hutchins sought to observe these processes “in the wild,” through an intensive observation aboard a contemporary naval vessel. Observation in such a rich material and social setting allows him to examine the “relationship between cognition seen as a solitary
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mental activity and cognition seen as an activity undertaken in social settings” (1995a: xiii). His ethnographic study of ship navigation is a compelling analogue to the historically remote and extraordinarily complex activity that was the early modern theatrical system. Hutchins criticizes the tendencies in anthropology and other social sciences to view culture as a “collection of things” rather than a “cognitive process that takes place both inside and outside the minds of people.” He argues that the lines between “inside” and “outside” are frequently misdrawn or misidentified, “creat[ing] the impression that individual minds operate in isolation and encourag[ing] us to mistake the properties of complex sociocultural systems for the properties of individual minds” (1995a: 355). That is, human beings create smart structures predicated on a system of constraints that, paradoxically, enable the execution of complex tasks. Hutchins identifies a number of examples of cognitive artifacts that function as such constraints. On board a modern naval vessel, these include charts, GPS systems, navigational electronic tools, the material configuration of the control room, and the social structures of shipboard life. Hutchins argues that “the environments of human thinking are not ‘natural’ environments. They are artificial through and through. Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers. At present, so few of us have taken the time to study these environments seriously as organizers of cognitive activity that we have little sense of their role in the construction of thought” (169). Hutchins thus offers a powerful model for thinking that bridges traditional divides between culture and cognition. While some work in Distributed Cognition focuses on “everyday” cognition—the working strategies based on environmental props that people use to cope with mundane demands of the world—Hutchins is particularly interested in expert group cognition. Unlike many studies of expertise that focus on individuals, Hutchins focuses on the distributed social processes that produce expert activities in group settings.2 Moreover, the hierarchical structure of the naval vessel, overlaid with the need for collaborative work, as well as the
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constant need to integrate novices into the system, contains promising though, of course, inexact parallels to the repertory company system. Finally, Hutchins himself, unlike many writers in the field, is unusually aware of the need for historical and cross-cultural context, and he includes a consideration of earlier navigational practices using the astrolabe as well as an account of Micronesian navigation, which is based on entirely different principles than Western navigation. A closely related body of work has been produced in philosophy under the rubric of the Extended Mind hypothesis. Its most influential proponent is Andy Clark, who in a series of books and articles has developed a powerful account of mind as “spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself” (2005: 1). Arguing that “much of what matters about human-level intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two” (2001: 154), Clark suggests that human beings are “naturalborn cyborgs.” That is, the “biological plasticity” of human beings leads us to soft-assemble cognitive systems that extend beyond the body in “literal (and repeated) episodes of sensory re-calibration, of bodily reconfiguration and mental extension” (2007: 263). For this reason, our on-board biological system is only one of a number of factors in the complex web that makes up thinking. As Michael Wheeler has suggested, an “embodied-embedded cognitive science ” is marked by the need to “put cognition back in the brain, the brain back in the body, and the body back in the world” (2005: 11). This model of cognition invites historical and interdisciplinary work. Research in the Extended Mind requires “new multidisciplinary alliances” (Clark 2001: 154), collaborations across the sciences and humanities studying “the range and variety of types of cognitive scaffolding” (Clark 2002: 1). In essays picking up and elaborating such invitations, John Sutton has explicitly laid out a model for historical cognitive science. One approach to such a study is “the analysis of other and older theories of mind,” while another, and the focus of this book, is the study of historical “cognitive practices” (2000:
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117). If we take seriously the idea of cognition as distributed across body, brain, and world, then historical shifts in tools and practices can also be construed as cognitive shifts. Sutton thus calls for historically situated studies of the shifting and unstable boundaries between inner and outer, engrams and “exograms,” thought and the cognitive artifacts that structure it (and vice versa) (2000: 117).3 Similarly, Kirsh has called for extending and testing the tenets of situated cognition via “closer attention to the details of natural contexts [through] close ethnographical and micro-analytic study” (2009: 303). While Kirsh may have in mind contemporary studies, I would argue that historical ethnography may lay an equal claim to contribute to a robust model of situated cognition. Thus I argue that cognition is distributed across a coordinated yet shifting and uneven triad of insides, objects, and people: internal neuro-biological mechanisms that constrain and enable such processes as memory, perception, and attention; material tools (“cognitive artifacts”) and environments; and social systems. No one of these elements, taken alone, has sufficient explanatory power; it is only through examining their interplay that we can come to a satisfactory account of the early modern theatrical system. The boundaries separating these categories are fluid rather than fixed, and the relationship between cognitive and social systems is never distinct. As Sutton suggests, “Inner and outer realms are not pre-divided into natural and artificial, each with its own inevitable proprietary characteristics: rather, such boundaries are hard-won and fragile developmental and cultural achievements, always open to renegotiation” (2006: 243). By offering a historically informed account of distributed cognitive activity, I hope to contribute to debates in Distributed Cognition and Extended Mind. The humanities has much to offer an extended and capacious version of cognitive science. My goal is not to “apply” cognitive theory to early modern theory, but instead to seek two-directional communication between the sciences and the humanities. The cognitive framework offers new insights into pressing questions within theatre studies; in turn, I hope that this work
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will modify and illumine work in the cognitive sciences. In this reading of the complex structures of early modern theatre, I offer a thick description of a particular social and material moment which configures the boundaries among insides, objects, and people in a very particular way, often off-loading the attentional and mnemonic demands of the enterprise onto technological and social structures. In testing the models of Extended Mind/Distributed Cognition through specific historical cases, my aim is to contribute to the ongoing investigation of the “extended cognitive architectures” (Sutton 2010: 213) of the past. Students of early modern literature and culture are generally willing to accept the profound importance of social and environmental shaping, but they may be less happy to concede the role of internal cognitive mechanisms, perhaps fearing that attention to such matters will result in false universalizing and essentialism. Yet an understanding of human neuro-biological capacities and constraints is essential to any informed understanding of memory and attention in the early modern playing system. Anyone asking how Shakespeare’s actors (and audiences) coped with the mnemonic, attentional, and perceptual burdens of performance must have an account of these internal mechanisms, as it is impossible to approach the question sensibly without an understanding of the biological and psychological constraints governing human memory. For example, the erroneous assumption that perfect verbatim recall is consistently possible for human beings governed a good deal of the work on so-called “memorial reconstruction” at the turn of the last century. As Laurie Maguire (1996) has argued, the poor understanding of human memory that governed this theory resulted in the consignment of any text with even slight verbal variations from the ideal “fair copy” to the ranks of the “pirate.” Studies of memory, such as David C. Rubin’s Memory and Oral Tradition (1995), have shown that even within tightly governed constraints such as those afforded by verse, so-called verbatim recall always involves elements of reconstruction as much as reproduction. These issues will be discussed in full in Chapter 3. Theatre also capitalizes on the cognitive capacities
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(and constraints) of the audience, which must rely upon its short-term or working memory to make sense of the action. Watching a performance of an unknown play is a complex cognitive process, demanding that audiences attend to identifying characters, following and predicting action, interpreting spatial cues, and listening to complex patterned language. In his suggestive book, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, Bruce McConachie notes that “more than simple awareness, attention requires conscious, selective effort” (23–4). These efforts of conscious attention lead us to ignore elements that are not salient —that do not stand out from the rest. In this dynamic, forgetting can be as useful as remembering. As will be shown in Chapter 1, this forgetting/ remembering dynamic strongly influences the way that the playing space is employed. On the other hand, lest it seems as though I am suggesting only that cognitive psychology can be used as a means of correcting what the humanities get wrong, let me also make the point that ignoring the material and social factors governing a cognitive enterprise such as theatre is equally problematic. This is indeed a failing of much work in psychology, which tends to have a very attenuated sense of the past and often attempts to “control for” the very elements that seem to humanists as constitutive of the practice under study. One example is the work of the psychologists Tony and Helga Noice, who have been studying the nature of actors’ memories for many years, and are indeed among the very few seriously researching this question (1997a, 1997b, 2001, 2006). The Noices have conducted ambitious and valuable qualitative studies of the memorizing techniques of contemporary professional actors. One of the real strengths of their approach is to design experimental models that make use of the expertise of trained actors, rather than relying upon studies using only novices drawn from the university student population easily available to experimenters.4 This method allows them to study memory in an “ecological” way, outside of strict experimental conditions.5 Despite these strengths, limitations of the Noices’s research remain, at least when seeking to extrapolate their conclusions
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to historical situations remote from contemporary theatre. Their studies are limited by a tendency to situate cognition intracranially, without a sufficient consideration of the effect of material and social factors constraining the practices. In the introduction to their book on the subject (1997a), the Noices point out that memorization is rarely discussed explicitly in acting handbooks, and that directors and acting instructors were relatively reluctant to give explicit advice on part-learning, a finding that is consistent with the general deprecation of memory in contemporary Western culture. Actors generally dislike the question “How do you remember all those lines?” because remembering lines is often regarded as a “mere mechanistic skill,” to quote an actor with whom I recently corresponded. Especially insofar as talent or innate ability is valued, so-called purely technical skills such as learning lines may be seen as, again in the actor’s words, “the least interesting part of what we do.” In this account, memory is disarticulated from understanding and so-called higher-level cognitive skills. In keeping with this view, the Noices argue that for modern actors, verbatim memory is rarely an explicit goal. Instead, actors are trained to scan the text carefully for beats of goaldirected dialogue; to carefully elaborate the lines in search of clues to motivation and ways to turn the dialogue into action; and, in the case of actors working in the Stanislavskian tradition, to employ “self-referencing,” or develop a method-based account of “emotional memory” that will permit deep encoding of the material. As I will indicate, there is much of great value in the Noices’s conclusions, both for contemporary actors and for students of the early modern theatre. However, they do not fully acknowledge the extent to which the actors they study are embedded in very specific and historically situated material and social circumstances. Thus, when they claim to have arrived at “a general model of acting cognition” (1997a: 114), they fail to see the socially distributed nature of this model. Though such techniques may seem to be intracranial, they in fact depend upon a vast array of material and social practices. The actors that the Noices study have achieved a kind of cognitive integration with
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these tools that has rendered the artifacts essentially invisible. But the techniques used would have been incomprehensible to early modern actors. For one, these methods pre-suppose a deep knowledge of the whole of the play, and in particular of other character’s actions and reactions to their character. However, a textually detailed understanding of another character can only be gleaned from owning a good edition of the play, which can be marked up, and also depends upon the wealth of commentary, criticism, and documentary evidence of past staging practices that is available to the contemporary actor. For another, the psychological presuppositions that underpin these practices are derived from modernist principles and practices that value subtext over text, and that assume that what a character is saying is not what he means. In turn, these actors are often working with texts that eschew the sort of surface verbal features that make pre-modern texts amenable to memorization (e.g., rhyme, rhythm, alliteration). In the absence of these, which otherwise provide hooks for remembering, the actor needs to elaborate a meaningful and hence memorable relationship between the words and their significance. Moreover, the material practices are supported by social practices and modes of professional organization, such as the hierarchical relationship of actors to directors; the demands of the technical elements such as sound, set, and lighting; the search for novelty in staging classic plays; employment insecurity and the relative rarity of established companies that promote familiarity with fellow actors; the existence of competing methods of rehearsal and play preparation, which may require the actor to adopt unfamiliar practices in a new production; and so on. Lack of knowledge about how the contemporary theatre differs from that of the early modern period causes psychologists to confuse a particular set of practices with a general cognitive mechanism. This is another form of the “theatrical essentialism” that Alan Dessen has described in his critique of the original practices movement (2008: 46). I will return briefly to reconsider the Noices’s work in the conclusion. For now, I build upon it to show the importance of historically situated cognition that takes account of the
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entire triad of insides, objects, and people; that is, we need a theory of cognition and memory that is both historically and socially aware. While the biological principles that underpin memory and attention may be relatively constant, the cultural and material surround of the individual is crucially important in determining how these mechanisms work in any particular historical moment. In one sense, of course, the Noices’s findings are directly relevant to the present study: While the particular tools used for encoding are entirely different, they are nevertheless both socially distributed in structure. As I will discuss in the conclusion, a true cognitive ecology of the contemporary theatre would have to include the entire range of practices and artifacts that shape any one act of memory, including all the elements mentioned above. Thus I am arguing for the critical importance of attention to the material, social and environmental surround, and the study of the cognitive integration of players with these elements. I offer this approach as a model to bring together disparate strands of research in both early modern theatrical history and work in cultural history and theory. Early modern theatrical history has sometimes operated in the absence of a commonly held model or framework for its investigations. The strength of this discipline has always been its commitment to empirical investigation and archival work, which has produced a wealth of material about the landscape of early modern theatre. Research into theatrical apprenticeship, conducted by David Kathman, and new work on provincial touring, led by the late Barbara D. Palmer and the University of Toronto-based research project, Records of Early English Drama (REED), are just two of the many recent examples of new archival research challenging long-held beliefs about the early modern theatrical system. Yet a larger conceptual framework into which to integrate such discoveries is lacking. Knowledge in the field too often has been organized around originating narratives that often reduce the complexity of the systems at work. In the early part of the twentieth century, the bewildering disparities between printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays were accounted for through increasingly individualist assumptions about “rogue
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actors” and “pirate printers,” as Paul Werstine (1990) has shown in his deft unmasking of the individualist assumptions behind the models of memory and transmission that underpinned theories of memorial reconstruction. Another example of individualist narrative is Andrew Gurr’s influential account of the “duopoly” founded and controlled by two powerful patrons after 1594, a model that masks the more complex and diverse social, commercial, and aesthetic factors governing the theatrical scene in that period.6 In the first chapter of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Times , Roslyn L. Knutson discusses the long-standing tendency to frame “theatre history as personality” (2001:1). She carefully shows how models of the business of playing have been shaped by discourses of individual rivalry. Examples include narratives of the antagonism between John Alleyn and James Burbage in the famous Brayne lawsuit that supposedly ignited the “feud” between their respective companies, as well as the purported antagonism between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a supposed rivalry that was said to have sparked the so-called “war of the theatres” at the turn of the sixteenth century. Knutson thus shows how scholars from the early twentieth century onward have privileged narratives of individual rivalries and personal quarrels over accounts of group practices and cooperation.7 These issues are part of a larger difficulty in accounting for group systems, including sharers, the role of boys and apprenticeships, and situating companies within a commercial marketplace. Often system is discussed only in deprecating terms, with invidious distinctions between the hack practices of the common players and the expertise of the elite. Bradbrook’s evaluation of reliance on formulae and convention mentioned earlier is echoed in more recent studies as well. Michael Hattaway imagines Shakespeare’s actors “nervously consult[ing] their plots . . . . having performed the massive task of committing lines quickly to memory, each player must have drawn heavily on his own repertoire of stock gestures or routines” (1982: 54).8 Similarly, Gurr suggests that “The temptation . . . to introduce stock poses must have been strong, and would have been reinforced by the practice of allocating parts
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according to acting types” (1992: 103). While of course conventions of movement and gesture would have been a valuable resource, such knowledge might well be considered part of the player’s toolkit, a crucial element of the skill gained through long practice, rather than a “stock” routine resorted to only because of exigency. A system-based approach to early modern theatre, I argue, stands to contribute to emerging evidence about the material practices of the stage. The recent innovative work by Tiffany Stern (2000) and Simon Palfrey and Stern (2007) is a case in point. Stern’s work has done much to dispel anachronistic assumptions about early modern playing. Modern rehearsal practices, with director-centered models and weeks of preparation for each play, were clearly not possible in Shakespeare’s theatre. Instead, as Stern shows, much preparation was individual, facilitated by the individual parts containing only the character’s lines and his cues. Drawing attention to this material artifact has opened up new avenues of investigation into early modern playing practices, as will be explored more fully in Chapter 1. Stern’s insistence that “creativity” was not a part of the preparation process is a welcome corrective to views of rehearsal that are overly influenced by anachronistic models of playing that assume a director and a set of actors seeking novelty. Her emphasis upon the responsibility of individual players for their own preparation is indeed warranted, but it does not therefore follow that the performance was routinized or that “prompters” organized most group-level activity, as Stern suggests: “group rehearsal was only actually necessary for parts of plays that could not be learnt alone . . . and was therefore the most dispensable part of play preparation, especially as blocking, music, even, perhaps some gestures, seem to have been conducted during performance by the prompter and his men” (2000: 122).9 This view draws an unnecessarily firm line between the players and the “prompter” and posits an orchestrating individual to manage the performance, down to the gestures themselves. Her account of the preparation of the players similarly stresses a somewhat mechanistic view of system. She suggests that actors worked within a line and that
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“having a formula that covered every performance made sense in a theatre in which there was little preparation time: it is always easier to play roughly the same part” (2000: 72).10 While some role specialization seems to have occurred, especially in the case of the leading man and the clown, the implication that players “had a formula that covered every performance” is not warranted and confuses the framework (the type of parts generally played) with the individual performance (the unique demands made by any one part written and performed within that general framework). Indeed, if the parts were too similar to one another, the actor risked confusing similar roles, due to the problem of interference with recall.11 As I show in the following chapter, a distributed or dynamic-systems approach to early modern playing has the potential to account for the full range of factors in play across a shifting landscape of insides (cognitive mechanisms), objects and environments, and social systems. For most post-structuralist theorists, the sticking point in this theory may well be the emphasis upon internal cognitive mechanism. Post-structuralist critiques explode conceptions of controlling individual agency and instead emphasize system. Yet this concept of system operates at a level unavailable to individual (or group) agency and change. In many standard literary-historicist accounts of the relationship between subjects and objects, external resources such as writing implements, maps, and observational instruments become merely the tools of ideological domination and power. In Jonathan Goldberg’s Writing Matter, for example, which discusses humanist manuals of handwriting in early modern England, he argues: With the instruments to hand—knife and quill, paper and ink—the instrumental hand is instructed to write . . . . Copying is meant to insure the re-marking of the subject within the domains of script . . . . The ideological work of the books— [is] to make the hands conform and to regulate their activity. (1990: 111)
Goldberg here jettisons the internal entirely in favor of a controlling object, itself the product of an invisible level of systemic
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control. While models of theatre history have been hampered by the individualist bias of the assumptions underpinning them, the absence of a theory of mind in post-structuralist theory limits its ability to account for the dynamic interplay among a variety of levels of analysis. Indeed, in much contemporary critical theory, accounts of the cognitive fall prey to the humanist and post-humanist stereotype of cognitive science as imposing a rigid, monolithic vision of mind as dull mechanism. Slavok Zizek, for instance, defines “cognitivism” as “the attempt of the standard functioning of academic knowledge—professional, rational, empiric, and problem-solving theory—to reoccupy the terrain, to get rid of this intruder [i.e. cultural studies]” (2002: 31). Such a view reinstates outdated dualisms in which cognition is figured as truly or wholly internal and rational, while emotion, embodiment, and social interaction are relegated to exteriority, treated as mere triggers or contextual influences to be studied by other, softer disciplines. As F. Elizabeth Hart has written, this partial view of so-called “cognitivism” collapses into a portmanteau term equivalent for “science” and perpetuates “misleading” binaries between “realist” and “relativistic” poles (2001: 319). However, “cognitive science” is not one thing; it is a loosely organized interdisciplinary field marked by internal fissures and debates just like any other. The contemporary cognitive sciences are not settled and inert background accounts of mind or, worse, the brain. An extended view of the human mind, while granting the importance of our evolutionary heritage, suggests that the plasticity of the brain is key. As Wheeler and Clark argue, the mind has “an extended cognitive architecture whose constancy lies mainly in its continual openness to change. Even granting that the biological innovations which got this ball rolling may have consisted only in some small tweaks to an ancestral repertoire, the upshot of this subtle alteration would be a sudden, massive leap in cognitive-architectural space: the emergence of a cognitive machine intrinsically geared to self-transformation, artefactbased expansion, and a snowballing/bootstrapping process of
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computational and representational growth” (2008: 3572). In a paper on the use of cognitive science in the field of political theory John G. Gunnell observes that “cognitive science . . . is composed less of a coherent body of knowledge than a differentiated and often opposed collection of claims” (2007: 711). A particular subset of those claims is sometimes “selectively and strategically appropriated in the course of underwriting prior commitments and criticizing contrary assumptions” (705). For scholars in literary studies as well as in social theory, one of the perils of working across fields is gaining a sense of the shape of the target discipline(s). Choosing one figure as representative of an entire area of inquiry, especially one as diverse as cognitive science, is risky indeed. Such pitfalls became clear in the 1980s, when first generation new historicists who relied primarily upon Lawrence Stone’s account of the emotional aridity of the early modern English family underestimated the vigor of the debate surrounding interpretation of the evidence for familial affect in the period.12 Similarly, literary critics seeking to explore cognitive approaches to literature often choose from a relatively narrow band of evidence. For instance, in an otherwise engaging and provocative chapter, Tobin Nellhaus writes that “cognitive science’s most public face is probably the collaborative work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson” (2006: 76). This statement, which limits cognitive science to a narrow and contested, albeit important, swath of linguistic research, would come as a considerable surprise to almost all cognitive scientists, who work in disciplines as diverse as psychology, anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. In turn, newer work in literary-cognitive studies has begun to take on an increasingly wider array of work in the cognitive sciences, including studies of attention (Boyd 2009; McConachie 2008), theory of mind (Zunshine 2006), and conceptual integration theory or “blending” (Hart 2001; Cook 2006, 2010). As theorists that include Hart, Patrick Colm Hogan (2003), and David Herman (2003) have pointed out, a “cognitive turn” in the humanities does not necessitate adopting a universalizing or essentializing stance. Indeed, there have been robust and
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valuable contributions to Shakespearean criticism that employ a historically inflected cognitive approach. Chief among these is Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain. Crane adopts a range of cognitive approaches, including Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, in a historically nuanced discussion of “the cognitive and cultural forces that determine the meanings of words and the shape of subjectivity” (2001: 25). Other historically oriented scholars that use cognitive theory for early modern scholarship include Amy Cook (2007, 2008, 2010) and Ellen Spolsky (2007).13 In addition, scholars such as Bruce Smith (2010) and Gail Kern Paster (2004) have produced exciting works engaging historical phenomenology that approaches the historical cognitive science of which Sutton (2009) writes. While none of these are explicitly distributed approaches, each exemplifies the impulse to connect cognition and culture. Because the kinds of learning that embodied human brains naturally favor involve the co-opting of highly specific external resources, cognitive science must always remain deeply embedded in culture, and distributed approaches offer the most robust framework for analyzing these relationships. Chapter Outline At one point in Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins imagines a nest of ants occupying the untracked surface of a beach after a storm has scoured it clean. Over time, their activity lays down trails that ultimately organize the activity of the ants, which now appear to be “smart through [their] simple interaction with the residua of the history of [their] ancestor’s actions” (1995a: 169). The adult playing companies of the 1590s were in the process of developing these trails and tracks in the relatively untested environment of the purpose-built permanent playhouse. In this book, I analyze these tracks and trails through three chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter examines a different set of configurations among internal mechanisms, cognitive artifacts and environments, and social systems. As a theory of
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Distributed Cognition would predict, these elements are not easily separable, and my account stresses their interplay and the uneven and shifting relationships among them. Chapter 1, “The Stuff of Memory,” examines the tools, artifacts, and environments that comprised the early modern playing system. These included the parts distributed to individual players; the playbook held by the company; the plots that tracked part assignments and prescribed entrances and important stage business; and the material surround of the theatre, particularly the doors. By beginning with the supposition that the early modern theatre was a workplace, I review a range of research in Distributed Cognition that explores contemporary workplace practices. The first section, on the physical environment of the theatre, begins by exploring the long-standing controversy over the configuration of the playing space, particularly the question of the number of entrances commonly available. Models of Distributed Cognition would predict that the hypothesis most likely to reduce cognitive demands upon individual agents would probably be correct. In keeping with these, I discuss theories of attention and working memory to understand the constraints of these internal mechanisms upon both players and audience members. The doors are used to manage the workspace of the stage, simplifying choice for the actors and perception for both actors and audience. Moving from the material surround to the cognitive artifacts used by the players, the second half of the chapter examines parts, plots, and playbooks. While the importance of the cuescripts or players’ parts has been recently recognized through the work of Stern (2000, 2009), Palfrey and Stern (2007), and Paul Menzer (2008), the remaining artifacts have been accorded much less attention. Playbooks and plots, in particular, have frustrated theatrical historians because the information they provide seems sketchy or incomplete. Playbooks are often seen as deficient because they do not provide a settled or fully articulated record of performance. Plots, the one-page diagrams of casting, entrances, and important stage business that seem to have hung in the tiring house area, are rarely discussed at all, so inconsistent and enigmatic do they appear.
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In contrast to researchers who stress the deficiencies of such documents, I argue that their lacunae and redundancies are only to be expected in a dynamic playing system that relies upon the complex interaction of its component parts and is regulated neither by master-text nor master-director. Each of these tools structures the activity of the players in different ways, with little overlap between them. The plots, or the general outlines of action and entrances that may have hung backstage, work on analogy with our contemporary whiteboards, facilitating shared attention and displaying the structure of the play at a glance. Playbooks work not as archival records of company decisions, but as a means of tracking and orchestrating material that cannot be off-loaded onto the individual part. Parts isolate the most important (salient) elements of the play for each actor and minimize mnemonic burdens by stripping all unnecessary information, facilitating information “underload.” The various material elements are brought together by the group expertise of the players, in onthe-fly cognitive integration during the moment-to-moment demands of live performance. The overriding theme in this chapter is the principle of cognitive thrift. This principle holds that in order to meet the apparently crushing mnemonic and attentional demands of the frequent performances of new plays, players in the early modern theatre practiced information underload, offloading as much as possible onto the environmental and social system. In this, they followed a common strategy for human beings engaged in expert group cognition: They created a smart space that prompts and constrains activity within it. Chapter 2, “Action and Accent: Voice, Gesture, Body, and Mind,” moves from the material elements of the theatrical system to examine the embodied, extended nature of cognition in relationship to the fundamental components of early modern playing: accent and action, or word and gesture. The formal features of the verse of course are a prime means of prompting memory, and this chapter begins with a consideration of research by cognitive psychologists on the effects of rhyme and rhythm on memory. These so-called surface features act as a
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constraint upon memory by limiting the number of possible choices facing a performer. Combining constraints decreases the mental effort of recall (Rubin 1995). While verse form prompts recall, it equally provides a framework for what I term “fluent forgetting.” Standards of exact verbatim fidelity were unlikely to have held sway in Shakespeare’s theatre, and a framework that allowed fluid and unnoticeable substitutions would have been a necessity in the driven environment of the early modern theatre. This chapter re-examines the verse structure of Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of current research on verbal memory, yet also shows how psychological studies of memory must be historically informed. Building upon the work of Maguire and others, I also show how attention to mechanisms of attention and memory shed light on theories of memorial reconstruction. The second half of the chapter examines the crucial role of gesture in the actor’s craft, employing the considerable body of literature on gesture by cognitive linguists. Far from being mere hand-waving, gesture is now seen as constitutive of thought, part of an integrated and complex brain–hand– language system. This new research offers fresh insights into the widespread practice of rhetorical training in conjoining action and accent. When learning their parts, players mapped the passions onto the verbal spine of the play through gesture, a form of embodiment that harnessed the brain–hand– language system and provided a powerful and extended set of frameworks for remembering lines. In contrast to accounts of theatrical gesture that dismiss it as a formal or stereotyped device resorted to by ill-prepared players, my work establishes gesture as central to the cognitive–corporeal art of playing. I conclude this chapter with a reading of Thomas Kyd’s innovative use of implied gesture in The Spanish Tragedy, arguing that Kyd’s true innovation was technical: his ability to yoke language to the body. “Social Cognition: Enskillment in the Early Modern Theatre,” is the topic of Chapter 3. The final piece of the puzzle is the social structures of the company itself, particularly the ways that these structures worked to induct younger players
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into the theatrical system. This chapter draws upon the wealth of evidence about apprenticeship, as recently uncovered by the extensive archival research of Kathman (2004a, 2005, 2009). While we now know a great deal about the formal arrangements for binding apprentices, much less is known about how the boys were trained and the mechanics of enskillment that undergirded their progress through the company. Here I build upon recent research calling for greater attention to the role of boys (Belsey 2005; McMillin 2004; Madelaine 2003), and to the plays as providing training structures for these novice players. Research in Distributed Cognition provides a useful theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence of the playtexts. Hutchins (1995a and b) and Cristina Grasseni (2004) demonstrate that skill is shaped through being embedded within a dynamic, cognitively rich working environment. This chapter employs these models through an extensive reading of the plays themselves, especially the roles apparently intended for small boys. I examine plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and other playwrights for examples of “scaffolding techniques” used to induct novice actors. Playwrights use a range of strategies to ensure the success of their young players, including the shepherding of younger actors by more experienced boys; double-embedded cues; attentional devices; and explicit embedded instruction. This chapter concludes with a reading of a range of roles written for very young boys in the early modern adult playing companies, showing that the roles were constructed so that some of the cognitive demands, especially for attention, were off-loaded onto more experienced players in the company. I conclude the book with an examination of the concept of “cognitive ecology.” Another way to frame a distributed or situated view of cognition is as an ecological model. A cognitive ecology of early modern playing would hold that a complex human activity such as theatre must be understood across the entire system, which includes attention to neuro-biological systems, material artifacts, the social surround, and technologies such as sound and lighting among others. I offer this model as
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a useful framework for the study of theatre more widely, showing how this concept can illuminate expert group cognition across a range of periods and practices. The model of cognitive ecology meshes well with recent company or repertory specific histories; for example, the cognitive ecology of the early boys’ companies seems to have been quite distinct from the adult sharer companies, inasmuch as training and enskillment was based more upon a school-derived setting than a workplace model. I conclude the book with an analysis of a range of contemporary original practices companies through the lens of cognitive ecology, arguing that this model helps to illuminate both the potentials and the limitations of such enterprises.
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Chapter 1
The Stuff of Memory
This chapter explores Distributed Cognition through examination of two major elements that comprise the stuff of memory: the physical environment of the stage and the cognitive artifacts used by the players to inform and shape their work. My key assumption is that the early modern theatre is a workplace. While this point is scarcely debatable, its full implications are not always realized. In fact, there is a strong strain of Shakespearean criticism overtly or implicitly hostile to the idea of the theatre as a business. One persistent strand of argument, for example, contrasts the purportedly dodgy business practices of Henslowe’s company with the more artistically high-minded practices of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. F. G. Fleay suggested that Henslowe’s diary reveals not the practices of Shakespeare’s company, but instead “set[s] before us the selfish hand-to-mouth policy on which its principal rivals were guided” (1890/1964: 118). As C. C. Rutter (1999) and Knutson (1991: 15–20) document, this mythical distinction between commercial money-grubbing and the artistic aim of producing “plays of lasting interest” (Fleay 1890/1964: 117) had a strong hold on later theatrical historians. Despite some reservations, W. W. Greg endorsed Fleay’s dichotomy (Rutter 1999: 4), and such judgments rapidly became received wisdom. E. K. Chambers denigrated Henslowe as a “capitalist,” deliberately exploiting the “poor devils” or impoverished playwrights who came within his grasp (1923: 368). Glynne
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Wickham accepted the narrative as indisputable fact (see Rutter 1999: 4–5), and traces of this false dichotomy remain in contemporary scholarly accounts, including Gurr’s description of the advantages the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had over the Admiral’s Men: “They did not have to depend on a landlord or impresario as playhouse-owner, who took rent from them” (2004a: 293). Recently a number of scholars have begun to take seriously the “business of playing,” as William Ingram (1992) terms it, and to grapple with the implications of the commercial nature of the playing enterprise. Even so, the evidence is sometimes applied capriciously, with economic constraints or mean expediency invoked to argue for particular theories or anomalies. In the teeth of the evidence, for instance, James Forse claims that men rather than boys must have played the female parts, since “no hardheaded businessman like Henslowe would expend that kind of money on women’s costumes which would have to be altered substantially or replaced, as boy actors grew” (1993: 79). Outmoded notions of rival duopolies or of touring as a last resort for a company unable to earn its keep in London are still promulgated in some works on the economics of playing, as in Melissa Aaron’s Global Economics, which argues against the Henslowe-as-capitalist model only by pointing out the untidiness of his account book. Knutson’s work has been instrumental in re-casting the commercial model and revealing the ordinary business practices that guided the decisions of the companies. As she writes: “Instead of focusing on quarreling dramatists, I turn attention to the behavior of companies and theatrical entrepreneurs who faced, on the one hand, a political environment that imposed limitations on their business but, on the other, a customer base that encouraged expansion” (2001: 12). Knutson argues that “commerce among the playing companies was built on patterns of fraternity, the roots of which were feudal hierarchies such as kinship, service, and the guild” (10). She persuasively explores the “networks of friendship, kinship, and parish residence” (24) that linked players both within and beyond the playing company. The guild model was a collective
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enterprise built upon shared work habits and assumptions that implicitly guided the practices of the early modern playing companies.1 Such an approach takes seriously the competencies and the expertise of the playing companies, neither reducing them to one individual (“Shakespeare” or “Marlowe”) nor equating group practice and commercial concerns with mere immediate expediency. It points the way to a model of group practice that emphasizes its potential productiveness and creativity, its ways of bringing about the “artful accomplishment” of a particular time-constrained task (Suchman 1997: 50), and its status as “mindful practice” (Engestrom 1996: ix). The rich vein of ethnographic research on the distributed cognitive properties of contemporary workplace settings can illuminate our understanding of the workings of these historical working environments. Cognitively rich environments have a profound effect upon the activities of agents working within them. Lucy Suchman’s research on “The Workplace Project” has generated many extended studies of the cognitive coordination between workers and the “smart spaces” they inhabit and construct. Her case study involved observation of airport operations room personnel charged with coordinating gate assignments. Within this time-pressured and intensive work environment, workers “assembl[e] knowledge . . . through the juxtaposition and relationship of a diverse range of technologies and artifacts” (1996: 47). Tools and artifacts are quickly scanned for information and for the perpetual and ongoing task of trouble shooting, or of bringing actual events into line with the “typified action sequence” of the organization’s tasks (Jordan 1992: 27). As Suchman argues, this “normal order is contingent on its faithful reproduction through the artful practices of personnel dedicated to its accomplishment, on each next occasion and across the unique and unpredictable circumstances that each occasion provides” (1997: 50). Suchman describes such environments as “Centres of coordination . . . characterizable in terms of participants’ ongoing orientation to problems of space and time” (1997: 42). While a contemporary airport operations room and an early modern theatre may at first blush seem to have little in
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common, Suchman’s description points to important commonalities between the two: Both are “event-driven, highstakes activities” (Hutchins and Palen 1997: 24) and feature a time-pressured environment, a group of trained workers within a purpose-designed space, and the interplay between set protocols and the constant adjustments and improvisations needed to meet moment-to-moment contingencies. In such a situation, the working environment is crucial: “Workspaces are not simply physical locations but are also actively constituted fields of perception and interaction” (Suchman 1997: 53). Competent use of the space “involves learning how to see one’s environment in an informed way” (55). As Hutchins and L. Palen point out, one role of spatial configurations is to allow agents within them to share and manage attention, and to use voice, gesture, and bodily orientation to “develop a shared understanding” (30). Researchers in Distributed Cognition have found that the clarity with which a physical environment is organized plays a vital role in prompting people to act within it. In their discussion of airplane cockpits, Hutchins and Palen argue that the “topology” of the instrumentation “permits the crew to do conceptual inferences with simple and robust perceptual skills” (1997: 36). In a related study, Hutchins suggests that alertness to certain salient aspects of the environment allows naval pilots “to develop internal structures to coordinate with predictable structure in the task environment” (1995b: 280). Donald A. Norman cites a particularly telling example of the configuration of the environment to manage attention. In complex control rooms such as those used in nuclear power plants, enormous levers and buttons are used (1993: 139–46). The levers themselves merely interface with a computer and could easily be replaced with much smaller controls. But the large controls are retained because they orient the agents within a particular space, clarifying and organizing it to maximize situation awareness. Attention is directed to the visually prominent features of a scene. Moreover, shifting a large lever is more likely to produce some form of muscle memory for the action than is pressing a tiny button. In a similar vein,
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Kirsh’s well-known paper on “The Intelligent Use of Space” describes the various ways that humans “manage the space around us” (1995b: 31). Kirsh identifies three principal methods of using space: “spatial arrangements that simplify choice; spatial arrangements that simplify perception; spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation” (35). The management of spatial environments, whether consciously planned as such or not, is a key mechanism for distributing cognitive burdens. The playing spaces used by early modern theatre companies offer us an opportunity to test such arguments historically. While Suchman, Hutchins, Norman, and Kirsh study contemporary work environments, the underlying principles behind the coordination of insides, objects, and people can be applied in the early modern setting, as long as the historical specificity of that environment is kept in mind. The expertise and experience in shaping and exploiting their environment were among the many crucial skills possessed by early modern players. As is well known, players worked in a variety of spaces, some of which provided the full array of vertical and horizontal space, such as the balcony above and the trap below. Others such as great halls and the Inns of Court provided only horizontal space, with a hall-screen or some other device furnishing space for entrances and exits. Only two elements seem to have been absolutely vital: the playing space itself, and doors or openings for entrances and exits. These were the essential demarcators of the stage. Already it is apparent that one of Kirsh’s categories may be relevant: the use of space to simplify choice. The fundamental features of early modern playing spaces were extremely simple: some means of distinguishing on-stage from off-stage and the use of two flanking entrances. These provide the baseline structuring of space in the early modern theatre. The nature and function of these entrances have been studied exhaustively and contentiously and for good reason: It would be difficult to overestimate their importance in structuring, organizing, and simplifying the complex activity of the playing companies. I would concur with David Bradley’s colorful account of the doors as “the systole and diastole of the great heart-beat of
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the Elizabethan stage as it fills and empties, fills and empties” (1992: 29). The structuring of the space shapes what can be done within it; “this simple machine” (1992: 21), as Bradley called it, organizes and orients mental activity in space. Yet the scholarship about the entrances remains contentious, with a variety of theories about their number and their use. A prime example is the long-standing debate about the use of—and the number of—stage doors. How did actors know which door to use? Not surprisingly, “enter” is the most common stage direction that Dessen and Leslie Thomson record, numbering in the thousands (1999: 73, 84). Of these, only about six hundred specify a door for entrance, most often through the convention of “enter character X at one door and character Y at another” or “enter at several doors” variety. Indeed, the very paucity of written information about the use of stage doors is a powerful indication of the tacit, invisible, and deep understanding of the stage that must have underpinned the work of the companies. But how, in practice, did such conventions work? In both playbooks and plots, explicit nomination of the entry doors is the exception rather than the rule, and exit doors are nominated even less frequently. Beckerman has proposed a solution in which a simple convention governed: Actors entered at one door and left at the opposite door, just as the next group enters the original door. Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa dub this the “O” rule and suggest that it may have been the prevailing rule of thumb (2000: 97). However, they cite ten patterns that violate this rule, including entrances at “several” doors, entering and exiting to fetch something, and passing over the stage. They also posit that a third opening was available and was used for discoveries, concealments, special effects such as masques, and “formal and ceremonial occasions” (113; see also Ichikawa 2002). This addition of a third door has important cognitive implications, as we will see shortly. Bradley considers that the rule was instead that the actor always “re-enters the stage through the door he last left by” (1992: 32). In contrast, Tim Fitzpatrick argues that the doors function relationally: “one of these offstage spaces is ‘further inwards,’ a more private
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place—and . . . the other place is ‘further outwards,’ more public” (2002: 103).2 M. M. Mahood argues that the doors nominate fictional space: One door leads inward and one outward, “especially in interior and urban scenes” (2000: 34). While the final answer of course must be conjectural, the principles of Distributed Cognition allow us to evaluate competing hypotheses. Research on the desirability of organizing and simplifying space such as that of Kirsh and Hutchins would predict that the hypothesis most likely to reduce cognitive demands upon individual agents would likely be correct. Indeed, I would argue that one of the strengths of Distributed Cognition is that it allows us to construct models that permit inference about the likely organization of the activities of the players. Among the principles I advance to guide evaluation of the competing claims are: 1. Movement across the stage should not in general impose excessive cognitive demands on-the-fly on the part of individual actors. Performing on stage requires complex attentional demands, among them remembering lines, orchestrating action, situation awareness, and cognizance of audience reaction. In this context it is vital to reduce both the mnemonic and calculating burdens. 2. Knowing what we do about the availability of time for rehearsal, movements across the stage should not demand minute planning in advance. 3. We should not expect that entrances and exits are worked out by some central figure or are dependent upon complex backstage orchestration, except perhaps for particularly complex entrances or such effects as discoveries that would be prepared from backstage. 4. Entrances and exits should not violate proxemics, a culture’s general, everyday, tacit rules about space. Fitzpatrick suggests that “playwrights and audience shared and exploited at least a rudimentary concrete spatial commonsense” (2012 forthcoming). 5. Directions for entrances and exits will need to be somewhere, but they need not be everywhere. That is, we should
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not expect redundant information, and we should certainly not expect systematized information. Direction for movement may be dispersed across dialogue, plots, parts, or playbooks. 6. Most importantly, a distributed view of workplace expertise would predict that movement across the stage would be governed by powerful yet partially tacit conventions and that explicit instruction or elaboration marks a departure from normative practice. Attention to internal cognitive mechanisms is vital for evaluating such claims. Specifically, we must take account of the propensity of human beings who, when confronted with cognitively complex tasks, to offload them onto the environment: “Space is a resource that must be managed, much like time, memory, and energy. When we use space well we can often bring the time and memory demands of our tasks down to workable levels. We can increase the reliability of execution, and the number of jobs we can handle at once” (Kirsh 1995b: 32). In an environment as cognitively demanding as the early modern playhouse, every incentive would have been to minimize any additional cognitive burdens. Together, these principles constitute a model that I term “cognitive thrift.” In contrast, modern directors devote enormous attention to blocking during the rehearsal process; indeed, the technology of lighting demands that movement be planned and memorized in advance. There is some evidence that this kinesthetic encoding supports memory, and that actors retain a physical memory for action that aids them in recalling lines (Noice and Noice 1997b: 360). However, this form of memory is born from the elaborations made during rehearsal. In the contemporary theatre, the blocking choices tend to be salient, or to stand out as privileged modes of interpretation that underpin the encoding of the lines. A good director does not arbitrarily dictate movement across the stage but allows that movement to arise out of the relationships being forged and represented on stage. Moreover, modern directors devote an enormous amount of time and energy to blocking, and these practices
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are supported by a complex distributed set of material artifacts. For example, the 1987 textbook on The Director as Artist gives the following set of guidelines for “preblocking” a play: “1) draw or obtain a ground plan of the stage areas/furniture; 2) compare this groundplan with each page of the script so that the stage picture is always under consideration; 3) make pencil notations in the text margin for the movement of performers; 4) if possible, use a photocopy of the groundplan so you can notate major changes in each scene . . . 5) keep these plans in your prompt book, and make changes as desired in rehearsal for technical requirements” (O’Neill and Boretz 1987: 58). Another technique is to build a set to scale and move “toy figures around on it” (58). During rehearsal “actors can discover more specific choices in rehearsal” (58) based upon the director’s previous work in identifying key physical boundaries on the set.3 It is evident that blocking in this system comprises a large part of the cognitive load of rehearsal and performance, with elaborate tools needed to plan movement meticulously and record it in the prompt book, much rehearsal time given over to the planned mapping of movement onto the theatrical environment, and considerable attention to integrating lighting and sound technology with movement. In this environment, blocking choices support memory because they are part of the elaborations made by the actor and director during the rehearsal process. But none of these conditions apply to early modern playing. Given the need for swift encoding of lines in a wide range of plays, a particular entrance or exit is only committed to memory when it is salient; most of the time it is not. In my 2005 article on this topic, I concluded that the modified Beckerman/Gurr hypothesis of designating one door for entry and the other for exit was the most likely to reduce cognitive burdens on the players. This simple convention, which is based upon the most obvious and prominent features of the stage space, would obviate the need to calculate each entrance and exit on the principle that the more thinking that is off-loaded onto the environment, the more mental energy is available for the other attentional demands of playing. A
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model such as that of Fitzpatrick-Mahood seemed to require the actor to map fictional space onto theatrical space in a deliberate fashion. This, in turn, would impose the additional cognitive burden of remembering the fictional geography of each play, or having such mapping provided for the actor in the form of prompting, plots, or part annotation. Because fictional space by definition is different for each play—and indeed for each scene, I argued—positing it as the basis for conventions governing stage movement is dubious; a model that works primarily for “interior and urban scenes” (Mahood 2000: 34) could not have governed stage practice as a whole. However, I now wish to return to their arguments, especially that of Fitzpatrick, to determine whether such a model is indeed compatible with framework derived from Distributed Cognition. The question here is what constituted the “default setting” (Fitzpatrick 2012 forthcoming) that governed stage movement and the use of doors: Was it the simple formula of moving across the stage, as Beckerman suggests, or are there cognitive advantages in a scheme that designates one door as “inwards” and one as “outwards”?4 A major impediment to accepting the Beckerman/Gurr “O” hypothesis is immediately apparent: the long list of the ten exceptions to the general pattern outlined by Gurr and Ichikawa. Although Gurr and Ichikawa argue that these ten patterns are “based on no more than three modes of practice” (2000: 104), a “rule of thumb” as complex as this becomes an impediment rather than an aid to fluid movement across the stage. Certainly this hypothesis violates the principles of cognitive thrift outlined above. Gurr and Ichikawa propose that the “players could have inferred which rule they followed instinctively from the dialogue” (104). This observation provides an important way forward, demonstrating the importance of recognizing the distributed nature of the cognitive activity under study. The ways in which the dialogue meshes with the constraints of the stage space, the conventions governing it, and the social space of the stage itself must all be taken into account. Dialogue and stage movement can potentiate space, turn it from neutral to highly localized and laden
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with significance. For the many plays reliant upon a sense of interior space, a common convention designating an inward/ outward door binary could have provided an important locus of attention and focus beneficial to both audience and player alike. The value of this approach is that it allows space to expand and contract, to take up, so to speak, a positive, negative, or neutral charge depending upon the particular scene. Such a system also capitalizes upon the cognitive capacities and constraints of the audience, which must rely upon short-term or working memory to make sense of the action. So-called “short-term memory” used to be seen as a “unitary store” (Baddeley 2000: 417). However, more recent researchers prefer the term “working memory,” a system made up of visual, phonological, and executive functions (Baddeley 2003: 830). Randall Engle (2002) suggests that working memory capacity is distinct from short-term memory and is a function of executive attention. The constraints and capabilities of the visual–spatial elements of working memory are especially relevant for understanding the mechanisms of audience attention. The phenomenon of “change blindness” is well documented in the literature—in laboratory studies, people are very poor at noticing differences between two very similar scenes. Normally, of course, such differences are not especially important, in large part because we can rely upon the external world as its own record—the world works as “an outside memory,” in the words of J. K. O’Regan (1992: 461). As Mark Rowlands notes, working memory is “essentially hybrid,” made up of both biological and external factors (1999: 25). Moreover, attention can be manipulated remarkably easily. The ease with which attention can be shaped has been demonstrated by the famous “gorilla” study of “inattentional blindness” by D. J. Simons and C. F. Chabriss (1999). Subjects were shown a video and instructed to count the number of times a basketball was passed between team members wearing white jerseys. So immersed did the subjects become in the task that over half failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit pass through their main field of vision, wave, and exit. When later shown the gorilla, many subjects insisted that the video had been
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altered. Depending on what they are being asked to attend to, audiences may observe acutely or fail to notice events that take place right before their eyes. Watching a performance of an unknown play is a complex cognitive process, with many demands upon the attention of the audience. Indeed, in many ways theatre is the art of attention. Convincing an audience to attend, to listen, and to orchestrate its focus is absolutely essential to a successful performance; a command of the art of managing audience attention is crucial to the conjurer, the confidence trickster, and the actor. Actors can exploit this cognitive process by either calling explicit attention to a visual element or ignoring it. They intuitively know the vital importance of maintaining attention and focus throughout a scene—so-called supernumerary characters can, through gaze and body posture, convey an enormous amount of tacit information about the key events of the scene: “Gaze tracking is one important spatial cue ubiquitous in the theatre. Simply put, spectators tend to focus their attention on the same people or objects at which the actors are gazing” (McConachie 2008: 24). Attention and gaze direction is also fundamentally social in nature; we take our attentional cues from others. Eye and head direction are particularly critical. There is abundant evidence that human beings are especially attuned to eye direction and movement, and that gaze and shifts in gaze are particularly salient in reading a scene. For this reason, the art of attention can be seen both as part of stage management—a means of subtly orchestrating actors while on stage—and as a crucial tool for audience direction— and, perhaps even more importantly, indirection. While attention and perception are internal cognitive mechanisms, they are also fundamentally cultural in nature. Research into a “cognitive ethology” of attention (Smilek 2006: 101) has begun to move away from a purely information processing model in which attention is studied in laboratories using highly stylized, reduced forms of stimulus that assume “the basic mechanisms, or processes, of attention are stable across situations” (Smilek 2006: 102). In contrast, D. Smilek and other advocates of “cognitive ethology” stress the importance
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of “situational context” (2006: 111) in real-world settings, noting that the pattern of interpreting attentional cues in, for example, a basketball game are heavily dependent upon a rich domain knowledge of the sport (see 2006: 106).5 Thus, while certain patterns have been confirmed in real-world social scenes, such as a preference for eyes, head position, and bodily orientation in reading the attentional cues of others, these will be modified by a viewer’s competence in reading a particular type of social scene. Early modern audiences possessed a rich inferential knowledge of social conventions and hierarchy that would have been integrated into the economy of attention on the early modern stage. Technological and material factors are also essential in understanding attention. Contemporary theatres rely heavily upon the technology of lighting to literally throw focus on particular stage areas and to attract the audience’s eyes. In this environment, the work of attention is given over almost entirely to the lighting technician. Shakespeare’s theatre, by contrast, had fewer such technologies. Sound, of course, was one potent means of directing attention, and the early modern theatre used it extensively. Smith (1999) has shown that many plays begin with a high intensity sound as a means of marking off the start of the performance, and the myriad of auditory cues such as flourishes and shouts or cries within demonstrates the adept use of acoustic technologies to shape audience attention. The manipulation of attention is a key factor in understanding how the doors were used on the early modern stage. A door can be a neutral space, or one charged with meaning, and players and playwrights can use the evanescence of working memory to their advantage. Gurr and Ichikawa have discussed how a door “temporarily represents the entrance to a particular place,” and cannot be used to represent another place “until it becomes simply a neutral stage door again” (2000: 103). Fitzpatrick elaborates upon this principle, which he refers to as “wipe and reset” (2006: 38). This dynamic is made possible by both the tendency to forget information that is not salient, by manipulating inattentional blindness
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(Simons and Chabris 1999: 1059), and by the robustness of the “recency” effect, defined as the tendency to remember the latest items in a sequence most vividly.6 The skillful manipulation of these cognitive mechanisms orients both audience and actors to the spatial dynamics of the unfolding scene. For an example of these dynamics at work, I now turn to a set of scenes from King Lear, a play that is preoccupied with space and place. Act 2, scene 2–Act 2, scene 4 in the folio (TLN 1076–1614 in the Quarto) is an especially complex exercise in logistics and space, yet its spatial dynamics are handled relatively effortlessly.7 This scene exemplifies the meticulous coordination among dialogue, the movement of the players across the stage, offstage sound effects, the explicit stage direction, and the management of attention of both players and playgoers. The scene begins with the entrance of Kent and Oswald: “Enter Kent, and Steward severally.” 8 In the folio, this is the only explicit stage direction that nominates the doors in the scene or at opposite doors; the Quarto omits “severally.” The stage direction sets the spatial logic in motion. Oswald’s opening query: “Art of the [Q: 1076] this [F:1076] house?” designates one of the entry doors as Gloucester’s house, although of course Oswald is mistaken in assuming that Kent is a member of the household. Once nominated in this way, Kent’s entry door is re-set from a neutral space into a particular house— the door from which the off-stage characters associated with Gloucester’s house must enter and exit. Here we can see that an inward-door convention—the inward door as stage right, as Fitzpatrick proposes—would be a useful rule of thumb for the actors in determining which of the two “severall” doors Kent uses, as Beckerman’s entry–exit door thesis would provide no guidance here. Once the fracas between Kent and Oswald escalates, Oswald’s cries for help disgorge the characters: “Enter Edmund with his rapier drawn, Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess [Q: 1116] / Enter Bastard, Cornwall, Regan, Gloucester, and Servants [F:1117].” Here two things must be accomplished. The first is the practical matter of establishing where we are: Gloucester’s house. The second is more complex, as the play’s
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fiction violates cultural protocols of hierarchy: Cornwall usurps Gloucester’s social place by taking the lead role in sorting the quarrel and dispensing justice. His order to “bring forth the stocks, ho?” [Q:1203] must be directed back to the entry door. This order simultaneously confirms the fictional location to be Gloucester’s house and reinforces the impression of Gloucester’s displacement. If a convention of the inward door operated, this would of course simplify the question of where the stocks are to come from—the actor playing Cornwall knows which way to orient his body and project the order, and the awaiting actors–servants would position themselves accordingly. Once placed in the stocks, Kent remains upstage, positioned so that he marks the space insistently as the front of Gloucester’s/Cornwall’s dwelling. This physical placement effectively prevents any wipe–reset of the door. In Kirsh’s taxonomy of the intelligent use of space, this disposition is an example of a blocking strategy. Blocking restricts the space “so that certain preconditions are clobbered . . . . Some spatial arrangements say, ‘don’t do X.’ They cue a prohibition” (1995b: 45). Kirsh gives the example of a rag left on a hot handle, signaling that the pot is temporarily off limits. Kent acts temporarily as the rag on the pot, constraining further entrance possibilities. None of the remaining entrances can be made according to the Beckerman principle. Edgar must enter from the opposite door or risk violating the hard-won nomination of the space; he cannot enter from the door associated with Gloucester’s house without seriously misleading the audience. Therefore, he both enters and exits from the opposite door, the space further outward, to use Fitzpatrick’s terminology. And he must exit from the same door, which must also be Lear’s entry door (unless a third door was used; this hypothesis is discussed below). Gurr and Ichikawa argue that “in the case of simultaneous or overlapping entrances and exits, it is essential to the smooth flow of the action that the enterer and the exiter use different doors” (96–7). However, it is not clear why this would be so; in this case, one entrance is blocked because of its strong association with a particular
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space, while the other is a relatively neutral space “beyond.” Edgar’s exit will not interfere with Lear’s entrance so long as the players take no notice of one another. If attention is not thrown to the “overlapping” exit, the audience has no reason to perceive it. The players’ skillful manipulation of audience attention determines the parameters of the noticeable. Shakespeare exploits the simple inward–outward patterning governing stage space by mapping the fiction of the play insistently upon territorial dynamics. Cornwall and Regan remain within, and Lear’s humiliating repulse and re-entry reinforces their possession of the house. As the scene unfolds, an inward– outward convention would clearly and implicitly denote the direction from which the “tucket” [F: 1469] or “trumpet” [Q: 1469] announces the arrival of Goneril: the same neutral “place beyond” from which Edgar and Lear have entered. As the scene grows in tension, the two spaces are set in greater opposition to each other. As references to the “inside” of the Cornwall/Gloucester space increase, so too do the sound effects of the storm begin to build. As references to the wildness of the night mount, the “beyondness” of the stage left door takes on more weight. This scene concludes with one set of characters withdrawing into the “little” house; the repeated directions to “shut up your doors” seal that inward space, even as they constitute everything beyond them as the space of the storm. In the following scenes, as Fitzpatrick points out, the directions for “storm still” use the resources of sound for constituting space. The stage directions in the next scene nominate entrances at “several” doors: “Enter Kent and a Gentleman at severall doores [Q: 1615]”; “Storm still. Enter Kent and a Gentleman, severally [F: 1614].” The acoustic chaos of the storm commands audience attention, and the emotional salience of this new environment wipes the inward door of its spatial significance, allowing the audience to forget its earlier significance. Attention has been deflected from the Gloucester’s house onto the storm and the hunt for the King. It is clear that in such an example—and Fitzpatrick cites many more—a mechanical crossing over the stage such as
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Beckerman suggests violates the spatial logic of the fiction in such a way as to be almost comical. A rule of thumb so often violated would not be useful, as players would have to “forget” it upon any of the many occasions in which place is potentiated by dialogue, stage movement, and sound effects. It would, on the other hand, be useful to have a commonly held agreement upon the direction of inward space for those scenes that nominate it—this logic would organize the players’ activities, orient the direction of off-stage noises, and facilitate the placement of properties, movables, and discoveries. The binary structure Fitzpatrick proposes also has the virtue of reducing complexity—or simplifying perception and choice, as Kirsh argues. Fitzpatrick argues that early modern staging requires only two doors, with a curtained “place in the middle” for concealment. Because this middle place did not provide access to the tiring house, discoveries that had to be set up backstage would be made from one of the doors. Gurr refers dismissively to this approach as “minimalist,” suitable perhaps for “less than perfect conditions” such as touring, in contrast to the “optimal” staging that might be expected “when conditions were at their best” (2001: 59, 60). Gurr (2001) and Gurr and Ichikawa (2000) use three types of arguments to support the central opening: external evidence such as stage directions; pragmatic, involving arguments about stage management and logistics; and thematic, arguments about the appropriateness of certain entrances taking place in the center—for example, the symbolic resonance of an authority figure such as the Duke of Verona entering from the center to quell the tumult in Romeo and Juliet Act 1 scene 1. It is difficult to give enormous weight to thematic arguments, given that these often reflect interpretive decisions about the play rather than the necessities of stage management.9 Although a central door might carry a “special potency” (2001: 64), as Gurr suggests, there is little direct evidence of its use in early modern staging. Certainly Shakespeare is, in general, keenly aware of both the symbolics and pragmatics of space. A clear example of this awareness is the use of the “above” in Richard II 3.3, in which Shakespeare maps the embedded
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direction for Richard to “come down” onto a searing sense of the symbolic nature of the descent: “Down, down I come like glistering Phaeton . . . / In the base court, come down, down court, down King” (3.3.177, 181).10 But there is no ambiguity here about the stage management of the space, as the dialogue makes the action more than evident. In contrast, the evidence for the actual deployment of the “visual eminence” (2001: 65) of the central door is extremely scanty, as Gurr and Ichikawa acknowledge (2000: 104). There are virtually no explicit stage directions that nominate a central door.11 Gurr reads the lack of evidence to mean that the entrance was seldom used and “reserved” for especially significant or iconic moments, such as the entrance of royalty and clowns (2001: 65). But this hypothesis sets up further problems. While it is true that tacit powerful conventions may well have ordered stage space, they cannot have been quite as invisible as this account would suggest. In particular, any resource that is seldom used would require some mechanism for signaling its employment in any particular case. Unless we assume that royal entrances always used the central door, it is hard to understand why the middle door was not nominated much more frequently. And there is ample evidence of royal entrances using flanking doors, as in the stage direction in Act 3 scene 1 of Cymbeline: “Enter in state Cymbeline, Queen, Cloten, and lords at one door, and at another Caius Lucius and attendants.” Gurr suggests that an extra symbolic resonance would be created if Cymbeline entered at the center, thus upstaging the Romans (2001: 71 n. 14). But in the absence of a stage direction specifying the middle door, we would have to adopt a rule of thumb such as “English royalty always enters at the centre door,” which seems scarcely plausible. The many examples of the stage direction “Enter severally” or “Enter at separate doors” show that commonly used yet nonstandard entrances were explicitly nominated. For this reason, an even less common choice—a reserved or special door—would have to be specified as a critical means of helping actors negotiate the space of the stage. The overwhelming number of stage directions reflects a binary rather than a tripartite scheme. Such a scheme meshes
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Figure 1.1 MSS 19, 02 Recto, the Plot of the Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins (By permission of Dulwich College)
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with the basic bilateral orientation of human beings, as well as rhetorical patterns of antitheses that often dominate the plays. Indeed the plays often explore such antitheses and oppositions, mapping the conceptual dynamic of the play onto its spatial logic. The stage doors, then, function something like the large levers in a power station, providing a visual, spatial, and hence cognitive context that structures the work of the company. Moreover, they serve as anchor points that coordinate and organize movement across the stage. The players’ use of the doors, then, is a critical component in the management of the workspace of the stage, simplifying choice, perception, and computation (Kirsh 1995b) for both players and playgoers. Plots A key document in helping us interpret the nature of the workplace that was the early modern playhouse is the “plot,” or “platt.” Unlike many elements of the playing system, including the doors, these documents can rightfully be said to be understudied. They are not accorded much discussion in general handbooks about the stage. The contents of the plots have been mined for their rich source of information about casting practices, but they have rarely been given much sustained attention as key artifacts in their own right.12 Seven of these plots survive, although some are in a very fragmentary condition, and one (Tamar Cam) exists only as reprinted by George Steevens, the original being lost (Greg 1931: 160). All are in the British Museum, save the plot of The Seven Deadly Sins, which is at Dulwich College (MS XIX). Plots are in the form of large manuscript sheets, about twelve by sixteen inches, written on one side. They seem originally to have been wrapped around the playbooks for safekeeping. The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins was found wrapped around a playbook entitled The Tell-Tale, but the label attached to that playbook reads “The Booke and the Platte of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins” (see Stern 2009: 202). Plots feature scene-by-scene accounts of entrances and casting, although some are much more elaborate in their casting
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lists than others. All plots divide scenes graphically using heavy underscores. In rare cases exits are noted, and some of the plots have very full descriptions of dumb shows, as well as notes of properties needed and sound and music cues. Some of the plots show signs of a hole at the top, presumably for hanging on the wall of the tiring house. Most of the existing plots belonged to the Admiral’s Men, as players belonging to that company are regularly nominated in them. In one case—The Battle of Alcazar—we have both a plot and an extant play.13 It was for some time thought that The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins had a Strange’s Men/Admiral’s Men provenance, owing to its being found in Dulwich College Library, along with the other material from those companies including Edward Alleyn’s part for Orlando Furioso. However, Kathman has now convincingly demonstrated that The Seven Deadly Sins was probably acquired by Dulwich through the William Cartwright papers (2004b: 16) and that it therefore belonged to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This is a significant discovery because it indicates that the use of plots was not confined to one company, but was apparently a widespread practice, at least in the 1590s. The evidence Kathman’s adduces for re-assigning The Seven Deadly Sins plot to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men shows that the plots were standard working documents in at least two of the major acting companies of the period, and that they were useful and important backstage artifacts.14 The plots have received little sustained attention, in part because of the difficulty in interpreting them. They are contradictory and inconsistent and the individual information they display varies considerably. Precisely what they reveal has been debated since Greg’s pioneering study of them. Greg describes each plot at great length, cataloguing their commonalities and differences and assigning them to various dates and companies. He argues that the plotter followed the playbook, sometimes blindly, and suggests that vague references such as “some attendants follow” or “w[i]th as many Iewels robes and Gold as can cary” have a “distinctively literary flavour” (1931: 117). Such traces reveal the tendency of authors “to have thought or at least expressed themselves rather in literary or ideal terms
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rather than in those of the material conditions of the playhouse” (1931: 87). This argument is consistent with Greg’s theories about the distinction between “literary” authorial copy and the more pragmatic theatrical language forged by the day-to-day workings of the theatre. Greg further contends that the fact that these “purely technical documents . . . constantly preserved features and phrases of a literary rather than theatrical character” (1931: 87) reveals the domination of the author-centered “literary” book over the plot. A more economical reading of this evidence, however, would be that the literary/theatrical distinction is not nearly as rigid as it might seem and that so-called “literary” directions could be useful prompts to actors. This is precisely the argument that Michaela Calore mounts in her discussion of Greg’s preoccupation with the distinction between literary-fictional signals and theatrical directions. Calore rightly points out that such distinctions make little sense in the collaborative world of the theatre; this skepticism is also evident in the research of Dessen and Thomson on “fictional” stage directions (1999: 90–1; see also Dessen 1995). The so-called literary descriptions in dumb shows indicate that “the Elizabethan theatre relied on a specialized code that differentiated, by means of careful linguistic choices, those aspects of stage business that would have required special effects and/or actions and gestures” (Calore 2003: 255). Scholarly complaints about inconsistency between literary and theatrical language may well be artifacts of century-old assumptions about theatrical practices with residual currency. Perhaps the problem is the anachronism of these assumptions, not inconsistencies in the artifacts themselves. Indeed, the discussion of the use of the doors in the previous section indicates the practical usefulness of the “fictional” level of discourse; the fluid mapping of stage space onto fictional space was an important cognitive tool for players, who by definition must simultaneously command both discourses. Many scholars have declared themselves to be flummoxed about the precise function of the plots. The most exhaustive contemporary treatment of them is Bradley’s From Text to
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Performance in the Elizabethan Playhouse: Preparing the Play for the Stage (1992). Bradley announces the purpose of his book in this way: “the aim of this study is to rescue the theatre Plots from the critical neglect they have fallen into, to interpret their functions as working documents of the stage, and to explain the witness they bear to the way the dramatists of the age understood their craft and the requirements of the companies of men and boys for whom they wrote” (1). Bradley’s difficulty in achieving these aims perhaps testifies to the problems that await anyone who attempts a full account of these odd documents. In the end, Bradley argues that they primarily served for the “management of the acting cast: the fitting of the character roles called for by the text to the cast of available actors” (83). In this view, plotting is the first step in the process of preparing a play for the stage: the “plotter,” or the playhouse scribe responsible for devising the document, begins with the simple necessity of determining which actors are available for which roles, and thus the chief function of the plot is the management of the acting cast. Thus, the plot primarily works as a means of off-loading the calculating work onto pencil and paper, keeping a working record of the complex casting requirements, a task far too taxing to commit to working memory. In this view, the plots are working cognitive documents for the plotter himself, in order to “keep track . . . of the actors who are in use and those who are still available” (1992: 24). The plots also constitute a means of “making out the actors’ scroll correctly” (89). Certainly the mapping of player to role is a preoccupation of the existing plots, some of which offer this information redundantly, although one plot—The Dead Man’s Fortune—contains almost no casting information, with the occasional casting notes entered in another hand in the margins (Greg 1931: 1:99–100). It is hard to understand how plotting aids in the actual process of making out the parts, as parts are by definition constructed for each character, not each actor. Obviously the casting of supernumeraries must occur before the parts are distributed to individual actors, but the parts themselves can be constructed from the book. (Indeed, as will be discussed in the following,
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some of the books were constructed with heavy rules under each speech, perhaps to facilitate plot making.) Unlike Greg, who assumes that the plots were “prepared for the guidance of actors and others in the playhouse” (1:3), Bradley ultimately concludes that the plots were too cryptic to serve as guides for the players, complaining that in none of them “is there evidence of a fully settled and regular way of registering whatever information it is they are intended to register” (78). His chief piece of evidence for this is the use of the epithet “the red fast [faced] fellow” in The plott of the First parte of Tamar Cam. Such an appellation, he argues, militates against the documents that would have been hung publicly backstage: This plot “could hardly have remained on display in the tiring-house without becoming at best a standing joke, and would have been impossible for use by a call-boy who valued his skin” (79). There are two problems with this argument. The first is that we can confidently draw any conclusions from such slender evidence as an insulting name. There are a variety of appellations used in the plots and nicknames are common, especially for the boys; for example, “Dab” (Battle of Alcazar) and “Black Dick” (Frederick and Basilea). Other examples include “old Brown” and “the other little boy” (Tamar Cam). Calling the player the “red-fast fellow” may indeed have been a “standing joke”; we simply do not know. The second problem is the assumption that plots were used by “call-boys.” There is little evidence that “call-boys” were used on the pre-Restoration stage. As William B. Long has remarked of the equally anachronistic term “prompt-book,” such terminology can be “highly judgemental label[s] connoting the function of playwrights, players, theatre personnel, their relation to each other, and assumptions of how these people worked to get plays on the stage” (1999: 415). Such assumptions may unwittingly be based upon practices that post-date the earlier part of our period; after all, the repertory system appropriate to a set of purpose-built London playhouses is a relatively new phenomenon in the 1590s, and we cannot assume that practices were settled or, especially, that they reflected business procedures developed for the different
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environment of the post-Restoration stage. For example, the plot of the Dead Man’s Fortune mentions a “tiring man” who seems to be pressed into service to make up a train of attendants—he is not written in the original plot but is squeezed into the margins. This example alone shows that the division of responsibilities upon the Elizabethan stage was by no means as fixed as it became in later periods, and that playhouse personnel were creative and flexible when coping with the unexpected. As Bradley points out, the emphasis upon entrances in these documents is most striking; nearly every entry begins “Enter”: “[i]t is not an exaggeration to say that the action of an Elizabethan play consists of entrances. They are the means by which the story is told: the controllers of the illusion of time and place: the sign-posts for the understanding of the plot” (1992: 23). Moreover, the object of the verb is always a person or persons, who enters not a specified fictional space but either onto an empty space (at the beginning of the scenes) or “to” a group of actors already on stage. As Dessen and Thomson point out, the “to them” locution is used more extensively in plots than in playbooks, and the plots emphasize the filling and emptying of the stage, the rhythms of the scene (1999: 231–2). Internal exits are rarely mentioned; once an actor is on, he can get off either cued by the dialogue or with the help of his fellow actors. The door from which they enter, the timing of the exit, and the door through which they exit, all these are only occasionally specified. When a plot is more specific, it is usually in the context of the “enter at several doors” direction discussed previously, or in the context of the elaborate stage directions necessary for a dumb show. Some dumb shows are explicated in considerable detail; those in The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins could probably be performed only from an informed reading of the plot itself; the book would not necessarily need to be consulted. In contrast, the action of the dumb shows in The Battle of Alcazar, our only example of a plot with an accompanying playtext, is not always clear from the plot alone. The opening dumb show, as the plot reports it, describes only the entrances and
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casting; the playtext, in contrast, describes the full events of the smothering of the young princes (although the dialogue of the Presenter, in conjunction with the plot, makes the action reasonably clear).15 The plots are often parsimonious with information—it has been noted, for instance, that the plot of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins does not cast three of the major roles: Henry VI, Lydgate, and Mercury. Nor does it specify who are to play the SINS themselves who stage a mock battle at the end of the first scene: “[Enter] to them Pride, Gluttony, Wrath and Couestousness at one door, at an other dore Enuie, Sloth and Lechery. The Three put back the four and so Exeunt.” Envy also passes over the stage in the subsequent scene. Kathman argues that the parts of the major leads are not nominated because they are never doubled: Henry VI remains on stage the entire time, and Lydgate as a choral figure speaks in eight separate scenes. Tacit knowledge of the casting is enough here; because there are no calculations to be performed, there is no need to display the information. Mercury, Kathman argues, may have been played by Kemp, as he was the remaining known member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men not assigned a part. The six boys who elsewhere play a variety of parts would have played the remaining SINS in the opening dumb show. Bradley ultimately backs away from arguing that the plots were central cognitive artifacts for the players themselves, although he acknowledges their potential importance as a “skeleton or ground plan of the action” (1992: 89). But if the plots do not in themselves provide the information we think they should, is this not to be expected in a theatrical system that relies on the complex interaction of its component parts and is not regulated by master text and master director? Any one piece of the system is necessarily incomplete. Although their lack of consistency is frustrating, focusing on their deficits may result in overlooking what the plots actually do tell us. While the plots are often maddeningly incomplete, they were not meant to solve problems for scholars four hundred years hence, but to help a company put on a play. Just as the “playbooks are the product of professional players in the process of
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bringing a play to life on the stage” (Long 1999: 432), so too are the plots. With this in mind, then, we can return to the plots to see what they do tell us, particularly the inferences that they allow us to make about the task dynamics of the company. Most importantly, these are large documents, capable of being viewed by more than one person at once. Their most obvious graphical feature is the underscore that divides scenes. The heavy horizontal line under each scene reinforces the most basic tenet about scene construction: A scene begins when characters enter, and it ends when the stage is cleared. As Bradley argues, the underscore confirms the centrality of the scenic unit for the Elizabethan stage. The plots display the scenes with striking clarity. Moreover, the “underscore” seems to have been of particular importance in the early modern theatrical economy—a visual signal used across playbook, plot, and part to indicate crucial divisions: between speeches in the case of the playbook, scenes in the case of the plot, and speakers in the case of the part. A key component of the “skilled vision” (Grasseni 2004: 41) underpinning the expertise of the player, author, and backstage personnel alike was attention to the line. The conclusions of researchers in Distributed Cognition offer insights into these apparently inconsistent, contradictory, and fragmented documents. Hutchins carries out an extensive discussion of navigational charts and the associated aids and readouts available on the naval vessel. He argues that charts act both as “spatial analogies” and as “carefully crafted computational device[s]” (1995a: 61). Through an extensive study of Micronesian navigation, Hutchins also shows that the navigational process is not necessarily dependent upon sophisticated technology such as today’s GPS systems. Instead, reading charts and displays is a way of mapping the task onto the world. Becoming a skilled user of such an artifact involves learning to read and to see in a very particular way: “seeing is not a passive perceptual process. Rather it is the projection of external structure . . . and internal structure . . . onto a single, spatial image” (68). Similarly, Grasseni argues that vision
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should be seen as “an embodied, skilled, trained” sense that is developed in different ways among particular communities of practice (41). What sort of “skilled vision” might be required to read the plots? The plots can be seen as a two-dimensional chart of the play designed to be mapped on to the three-dimensional space of the theatre and to be used in conjunction with the parts, the space of the stage, and the playbook. It must be remembered that the players had limited access to the full text of the play. Sharers would hear the play read by the author (Holland 1991), but the plot allowed them a unique opportunity to see it in its entirety, to track the comings and goings of actors on the stage, and particularly to understand the rhythms of the scenes. Charts have very different structures than codices; a codex is sequentially organized, although it allows relatively easy random access to a particular point. In contrast, charts are designed to present information in a way that allows the whole to be easily seen. The play is here, and here only, given a shape easily graspable to all members of the company. To pursue the analogy of the map: If we imagine the “book” of the play as the street guide, containing all the information necessary to mount the play but dispersed across many pages and relatively unavailable to the individual player, the plot becomes the map in which the architecture of the information is displayed, reduced to its most important component parts. The relative clarity and the constraints of the physical spaces of the stage—the doors, the traps, the pillars—combined with the very paucity and hence clarity of the information contained in its two-dimensional rendering, the plot, provides a coherent way through the time and space of the play. Moreover, the plot, like the naval chart Hutchins describes, is not merely a spatial representation; it is also a “computational device,” to use Hutchins’s term. The plots provide a spatial analogue, the play at a glance, so to speak, as well as a way to chart temporality and repetition, as the players, alone or in teams, enter and re-enter the stage. For the actor doubling many small parts, it was indeed a calculating device. In The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, for instance, the player Richard Cowley plays a
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lieutenant (induction), a soldier (scene 4), a Lord (scene 8), Giraldus (scene 10), and another Lord (scene 21). Certainly the complex demands of such a series of roles would have required an external aid. Bradley recognizes the need for the scaffolding of pen and paper for the plotter to calculate doubling, but he discounts the value of the finished document as a cognitive trigger not only to those who were doubling, but also to the entire company, who could here see the play spread before them. In addition, the complex formatting needed to make the document is scarcely necessary for a mere doubling chart, an aid to the plotter’s work. To produce the plots as we have them would require a considerable commitment of resources, both in time and in materials. The size and display rules of the documents alone show that they were public documents, available for consultation as part of the complex workspace that made up the early modern theatre (see Stern 2009). The plots clearly provide an action plan for orchestrating backstage activity; notes for music and for properties are common to many of them. The Battle of Alcazar calls for such properties to be ready as “a whipp, brand & chopping knife”; “Chairs; boxes for presents”; “raw flesh”; “3 violls of blood and a sheps gather”; “Dead mens heads & bones banquett blood.” It should be recognized how much more useful a chart format is for such notations than a codex format. A chart renders all necessary properties visible at once; in the time-pressured environment of the playhouse, such a system would have allowed easy cross checking. The plot also helps to organize the collaborative backstage activity of performing a play. Here is an advantage of size: More than one person can view the plot simultaneously, which can act as a useful means of error correction. Like our contemporary cognitive artifact, the whiteboard, the plots were key elements in facilitating collaboration. Work on the cognitive uses of the whiteboard in trauma centers has shown that the “physical and perceptual properties” of the whiteboard are exploited by physicians “to support rapid paced, highly dynamic work” (Xiao et al. 2001: 259). In an analogous way, plots facilitate shared attention.
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Even a distributed cognitive framework cannot force the plots to yield all their secrets. Yet this approach may point a way forward to further research on these perplexing documents. If we abandon the assumption that they must be master documents of some kind, we can begin to draw conclusions about their role in the larger system. The key is to consider the principle of coordination and the ways these particular cognitive artifacts facilitate thinking in groups. Playbooks A closely related cognitive artifact is the playbook itself. Some sixteen of these survive in manuscript from the pre-Restoration stage. Dating from 1590 to 1635, they provide a rich source of information about playhouse practices although, like the plots, they vary considerably and are not at all consistent in the kinds of information they provide.16 Long’s work (1985, 1989) has been important both in drawing scholarly attention to the documents and in demonstrating the extent to which they depart from models used in the Restoration period and beyond. We have already seen that many contemporary directors prepare prompt books as a complete record of the performance and a guide to all movement, properties, and lighting effects. Assumptions that early modern playing companies viewed the book in this way have led to much frustration and misunderstanding, particularly among editors. The earlier playbooks differ considerably even from their Restoration counterparts. The Restoration theatre was much more manager focused than its predecessor; moreover, the introduction of longer runs necessitated a system that would ensure continuity over a longer period and would also reward making elaborate and consistent “prompt books” that clarified stage business. In the earlier period, as mentioned above, even the term “prompt book” gives a misleading impression, implying a regular, settled format and a central controlling document. The reality for our period is far different. Indeed, as Long suggests, the salient feature of these early playbooks is their relative lack of annotation.
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As both Long (1985, 1989) and Thomson (1996) have pointed out, the belief that playbooks ought to adhere to a standard format can be traced to Greg’s assumption that there was a standard system of working over manuscripts to achieve a regularized form. Greg defines the bookkeeper’s duties as “to see to the writing of the prompt-book, to prepare it in accordance to the needs of the production, and to provide for its safe custody” (1967: 158–9). But what constituted “preparing it in accordance to the needs of the production”? Following Greg, modern editors sometimes assume that any printed text betraying irregularities of speech headings, omissions of entrances and exits, and other inconsistencies could not have been prepared for the theatre itself and must have origins in the author’s manuscript. In his Arden edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1979), Harold F. Brooks argues that the printed text must have its origins in an authorial manuscript rather than a theatrical “prompt book.” He writes: “The stage-directions of the Q1 text would not have been satisfactory for regulating performance—the function of a promptbook” (xxii). Note first the assumptions here—the use of the anachronistic term “prompt book,” as well as the statement that the book “regulat[es]” performance, implying its function as a central arbiter or controlling document. Brooks goes on: “The Q1 exits are some twenty short of those an editor finds essential” (xxii, emphasis added). The point here is telling. Brooks is (rightly) preoccupied with preparing a text that allows the reader to grasp the stage action easily, and no doubt those twenty exits are necessary for this purpose. But an editor is by definition preparing a central controlling document; his task is entirely different from that of the early modern bookkeeper, who by no means conceived of his role in the same way. Instead, he relied heavily upon the expertise of the actors, the redundancy of information across parts, plots, and book, and the tacit knowledge of stagecraft underpinning any performance in this period. One example Brooks gives of an exit a “prompter” would find essential is Philostrate’s exit at 1.1.15: “Go, Philostrate, / Stir up the Athenian youth to merriment . . . . The pale companion is not for our pomp” (1.1.11–13, 15). But this exit is clearly dialogically
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marked. The embedded command to leave is clear enough, and the actor playing Theseus knows from the ensuing line in his own part that he turns his attention next to Hippolyta. Even if the actor playing Philostrate were not alert enough to leave upon command, the layering of hierarchy within the fiction (and perhaps in the backstage world as well) enables Theseus, as Duke, to orchestrate his underling off stage, should that be required. As the discussion of plots demonstrated, exits are not marked nearly as consistently as entrances; indeed, in almost all cases, in the plots the actors are left to themselves to get off stage. This is only a problem for an “ill-served” prompter if we assume that exits need to be centrally managed, rather than dispersed across the other material and social elements of the theatre. (It is in any case unclear what a prompter can do about a missed exit, because this by definition occurs only if the actor is already on stage. If he cannot get himself off, the other actors, not the stagekeeper, will need to intervene.) Similarly, David Bevington, in his edition of Henry IV, Part 1 (1987), argues that the stage direction “ ‘Enter Glendower with the Ladies’ at 3.1.186 is clear enough for the reader in context but too offhand for the prompter” (88). He concludes that “throughout, the stage directions read like the author’s script before it has received any attention from the book-keeper” (88). Yet it is far from clear what sort of sustained “attention” most bookkeepers gave to their manuscripts. As many scholars have noted, existing playhouse manuscripts by no means demonstrate the level of consistency and regularity that Greg and subsequent editors have imagined as their ideal form. As Long argues, “there is not even anything approaching a demonstrable pattern of regular marking or adaptation for the stage” (1985: 92–3). Similarly, Thomson’s examination of the marked-up print quarto of The Milkmaids in the Folger Shakespeare Library shows that annotations are sparse and inconsistent. Where annotations do appear, they are concerned almost exclusively “with what happened before an actor went on stage” (1999: 197) rather than exit directions. Thomson suggests that this annotated quarto is quite consistent with the evidence from manuscript playbooks: “it becomes apparent that seventeenth-century bookkeepers
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played by their own rules. If these annotations are incomplete, then the others are too, and probably for the practical reason that the performance of a play was the result of active collusion, cooperation, and communication between players and bookkeeper” (1999: 198; see also Stern 2009). There do seem to have been some features common to most playbooks, especially those associated with professional playwrights. The sheet was folded into four columns, one for speech headings (usually written in italic hand), two for the play itself, usually in secretary, and a final column for stage directions. As Long suggests, this system facilitated easy reference. Annotations were made primarily to maximize “noticeability” (1999: 421). For example, important entrances or timing cues (especially those calling for music) were given prominence by means of underscoring and framing, by moving the direction from the bottom of one page to the top of another, and so on. Most playhouse scribes simplified the task of preparing the parts by underscoring the final line of each speech, thus clarifying the crucial structure of the parts and emphasizing the cue words. In most cases, additional annotations are sparse and inconsistent, save for directions for music, song, and dumb shows, all of which are provided in some detail. For example, in John a Kent, the direction “musique” is provided in the left hand margin and then elaborated on the right: “Musique whi [. . . .] he opens the doore” (Munday 1923: 25). Dumb shows and other prolonged silent stage action is described in some detail, as in “the boy trips round about Oswen and Amery . . . and they the one after the other lay them vsing very sluggish gestures, the Ladyes amazed about them” (Munday 1923: 35). Like the parts, the playbooks bear witness to a distributed cognitive framework. They show almost no interest in “regularization and compartmentalization” for its own sake; rather, annotations appear when they solve problems, usually difficulties of timing (Long 1999: 423). If the playwright’s directions were not used, they were ignored. For example, in a number of cases playwrights call for “two or three” players or suggest possible alternative stagings such as “the fourth [enters] out of a tree, if possible it may be” (Long 1999: 419). No
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annotator has gone back to specify the precise decisions made, leaving the document as flexible as possible. However much theatre historians and editors may wish that the documents were accurate records of performance choices, the fact is they were very pragmatically conceived. The more professional and practiced the playwright, the fewer traces remain. Professional playwrights relied upon tacit knowledge of company practices. Amateur authors, in contrast, “add far more playwrights’ advisory directions than do the professionals, presumably because the amateur is less well acquainted with the backstage workings of the theatre and thus does not always understand the abilities of the players to handle his play” (Long 1999: 417). The playbooks are one element in a system of coordination of the embodied experience and tacit knowledge of the players, other cognitive artifacts such as parts and props, the playhouse environment, and the work of musicians and backstage workers responsible for music and sound cues. The book differs from these elements in that it is the only full record of the lines and cues and functioned as an essential means of cross-checking. It also provides a central clearing house, so to speak, of any action that is not obvious from an individual part or that needs backstage facilitation—musical cues being a prime example. As we would expect, there is some overlap with the plots in this regard: Material that is prominently displayed in the plots, such as dumb shows and musical cues, generally requires group coordination and cannot be off-loaded onto individual actors. Parts The players’ parts or cue-scripts at first seem to be the most individual of all elements in the theatrical system, but for that very reason they require the glue of coordination. Players learned their parts from individual cue-scripts, containing only their own lines and cues; in performance, these scattered documents were stitched together in exquisite and time-pressured acts of coordination. One lengthy Elizabethan part survives: Edward Alleyn’s cue-script from Orlando Furioso. The document is preserved at
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Dulwich College and partly reproduced in facsimile in Greg’s Dramatic Documents. The play itself has also survived in print, allowing comparison of the two documents.17 The Orlando part is written on long strips of paper with a few corrections in another hand, most likely Alleyn’s himself. The part consists almost entirely of his lines, which are separated by prominent horizontal rules, at the end of which are his cues. The cues are scanty indeed, often only a word or two, and interlocutors are not specified, though sometimes implied as in the annotation “A [Orgalio] begins to weepe” (Greg 1923: 158). The Quarto stage direction reads “Orgalio cries,” so we might speculate that the boy has a similar annotation in his own cue to motivate Orlando’s next line (missing in the part): “Ah, poore slave, so, crie no more now” (Q 872: 159). Occasional annotation of stage business is in the left-hand margin in a different hand, such as “dragges him in,” and “enters with a mans legg,” (Greg 1923: 152–3). These notations are somewhat fuller when they appear as stage directions in the printed text. The quarto reads “He draws him in by the leg” (751) for “dragges him in,” while the full cue for Orlando’s re-entry in the quarto is “See where he comes with a leg on his necke” (756); “enters with a man’s legge” (part). Here the dialogue clearly indicates the exact disposition of the legprop. The additional annotation of the part perhaps works to avoid an unintentionally funny mismatch between dialogue and action, clear evidence of everyday coordination that must have marked the early modern playing system, whether or not formal rehearsals were routine. The Orlando cue-script records only the most vital information. In contrast, the few remaining amateur parts from the seventeenth century are somewhat less parsimonious, as David Carnegie’s (1982) examination of the seventeenth-century part for the Play of Poore reveals. Written for a university performance, these amateur parts contain fuller cues and also provide crucial interlocutor information by noting the addressee of each speech. These would be the most important pieces of information to add, particularly for performers in a one-off amateur production rather than in a well-established repertory
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system. The contrast between the professional and amateur cue-script parts demonstrates the threshold for implicit versus explicit knowledge. For an amateur, the issue of orientation and situation awareness is crucial; knowing the addressee minimizes the need to draw inferences and greatly reduces working memory load. Similarly, longer cues provide a crucial breathing space that facilitates timely recognition and response. For the experienced actor, the intimate knowledge of company practices would reduce the uncertainty about the identity of interlocutors—indeed, in the case of Orlando’s part, these are mostly made obvious through embedded dialogue. If, as is the case for a good deal of the dialogue in Orlando Furioso, a sharer is paired with his boy, then the learning of the parts becomes embedded in the training process—another valuable result of stable company structures.18 The parts have seemed extremely sparse to some critics: A typical response is that it is very difficult to imagine “oneself playing Polonius without knowing any of Hamlet’s lines or any of the stage action while Polonius is off” (Rutter 1984: 51). The painstaking research that modern actors do into their parts, such as that studied by the Noices, would be counterproductive in a situation in which it is necessary to master or re-master a part as quickly as possible. But their very spareness offers significant advantages: The form of the part strips all unnecessary information. The emphasis is upon—and only upon—the essential elements of the text, which literally unfold to reveal the changing passions as the player moves through the play: “the speech bloc carries a massive weight of self- and situational definition for the actor” (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 391). Rather than adopt a deficit model in which we wonder at the abilities of players to perform despite such inadequate equipment, we can see the parts as enabling a high level of efficiency and expertise. The form of the part is much more than a mere accident of transmission, a practical expedient to save time and paper; instead, the cognitive artifacts profoundly shape the theatrical system. As Palfrey and Stern argue, the parts could produce a “concentration of effect,” “a communicative economy,” and should not be seen as “some severed or atrophied limb of
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an ertswhile holistic unity” (2007: 5). Such an approach entails recognizing that our own assumptions about information are context bound. We live in an information-dense society and tend to think that more information is better.19 We can offload such information onto computer hard disks, file folders, software organizers, calendars, and so on. However, coping with the mass of data that we have involves serious challenges that are met with organizing devices such as calendars, diaries, iPhones, and RSS feeds. Our cognitive needs involve managing and filtering rather than committing to memory. In contrast, the early modern player needed to practice cognitive thrift: to learn exactly what was needed, and no more. Recent scholarship by Stern (2000), Palfrey and Stern (2007), and Menzer (2008) has explored the implications of the cue-script for the early modern theatrical system. Palfrey and Stern make much of the deliberate attention and acts of listening that the part-based system promoted: Shakespeare himself “must often have felt that strange nervousness that comes from knowing when ‘something’ is coming but not knowing what or when it will arrive . . . . The actor’s exclusion from much of the play’s working machinery will always prompt an alert and eager gathering of any clue that might fill out his place and purpose” (2007: 121). Stern suggests that the scripts contained within themselves most of the information that the actor needed. She argues that “playwrights . . . seem to have enwrapped their ‘direction’ into the form in which they wrote their plays in the first place: they produced texts that, divided in parts, would bring about the action required in performance—without the actor necessarily needing to understand what is going on” (2000: 88). The actor’s limited knowledge of the play is a central claim in Stern and Palfrey’s work. They make much of the built-in directive possibilities of the premature and repeated cues, both of which are seen as mechanisms of “determinative scripting” (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 192). They also offer a range of readings of Shakespeare’s plays through renewed attention to the crucial role of cues in orienting and directing actors. A key example, discussed in both Rehearsal from
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Shakespeare to Sheridan and Shakespeare in Parts, is the use of cues in The Merchant of Venice. Stern and Palfrey are particularly interested in premature cues that might induce an actor to attempt to interrupt. In Act 3 scene 3 of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock repeats the lines “Ile haue my bond” five times. Because this line is also Solanio’s cue, Shylock’s repetition of it will induce “Solanio” to repeatedly interrupt “Shylock.” Stern argues that the frustration this repeatedly failed cue induces in the player would provoke the correct emotion for speaking his line: “it is the most impenetrable curre / That ever kept with men” (3.3.18-19). Stern argues: “Weighed down with the irritation and embarrassment of repeated false cues, the actor playing Solanio will have been wrought to a pitch of uncompromising anger by the time he was actually permitted to speak” (2000: 89). The premature cue system allows for the proper response to happen more or less unconsciously: “playwrights seem to have written in such a way that the appropriate action would simply happen in performance . . . . Nor does it seem likely that actors, trained to perform in parts, would have ‘learned’ through performance to ignore premature cues” (2000: 92). This argument is developed into an entire chapter in Shakespeare in Parts: “The Battle for the Cue-Space.” Palfrey and Stern argue that a repeated and premature cue constitutes “a false arrest and a frustrated beginning” (2007: 192). In their view, actors engage in “battle for possession of the cue space” (2007: 196). They exemplify this battle through a reading of Shylock’s speech that begins “How like a fawning publican he lookes” (1.3.36). Bassanio’s cue for his line “Shylock do you heare” is “forgive him”—or possibly, as Palfrey and Stern suggest, only “him.” If the cue is only the one word “him,” the actor playing Bassanio might be prompted to utter his line by up to three “premature cues” or repetitions of the word “him” in Shylock’s speech. Palfrey and Stern argue that “clearly, there is room here for comedy: Bassanio might speak the first attempted interruption to Shylock and, having failed, the second or third or even fourth to the audience” (2007: 197). More importantly, they argue that the competition
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between the two characters becomes a competition for the attention and confidence of the audience “by simultaneously attempting to turn the other into a derisive object” (198). Similarly, if Antonio’s cue for his speech that begins “I am as like to call thee so againe” (1.3.125) is the single word “moneyes,” rather than the phrase “thus much moneyes,’ ” Antonio might attempt his line prematurely three times. Palfrey and Stern offer meticulous readings of the patterns of repetition and response teased out here, suggesting that “the cues are pointers in a game of murderous quid pro quo; but it is up to the actors how to ‘play’ them” (2007: 200). They offer similar reading of premature cues to word “ducats” in Merchant 2.8. In mocking Shylock’s grief at the loss of his daughter and his money, Solanio uses the word “ducats” six times. If his cue consisted only of that single word, Salarino might attempt to deliver his line up to six times: “Why all the boyes in Venice followe him.” The result, they argue might be akin to “a shared ‘aria’ filled with repetition and affirmation, that parodically recalls Shylock’s echoing cues” (2007: 204). These readings are ingenious and usefully direct our attention to the cue structures underpinning the plays. Yet is the picture painted entirely plausible? As Palfrey and Stern acknowledge, some of the examples depend upon positing very sketchy cues indeed. If Shylock’s cue is merely “him,” it is less informative than any of the extant cues in Edward Alleyn’s part from Orlando Some of Alleyn’s cues are only one word; examples include “lord” (Greg 156); “neither” (156); “Angelica” (166); “penylesse” (172); “Armourer” (174); “Orlando” (194); “Lunacye” (194). None of these, with the exception perhaps of “neither,” is anything like as common a word as “him.” Most of the single-word cues are fairly unusual and memorable words, and more common words are generally given at least two words—an example is “to him” (174). Indeed, the speculation that the one word cue was used contradicts Palfrey and Stern’s own reading of the part of Orlando. They argue that: “If the addition of a word helps to give the cue a tangible presence or memorability, then a word will often be added; conversely, if one or two words give a sufficiently pithy picture,
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then a third word will often be deemed redundant” (2007: 21). While Palfrey and Stern acknowledge that we might expect a longer cue than “him,” they also suggest, in a rather circular fashion, that “his cued line seems to helplessly comment upon the circumstances, and in particular upon the likely consequences of the repeated cue” (2007: 197). Palfrey and Stern usefully draw attention to the possibility that repetition and premature cues were integral components of stagecraft that have been overlooked because of the neglect of the implications of the part format. However, these readings neglect the crucial element of group expertise that must have come to bear upon both the preparation and the production of plays. Palfrey and Stern offer the following analogy: In one sense, the actor learning a part and bringing it to the production is something like a trumpeter learning his part in an orchestral piece. He brings a separately learned piece— one in which he will have decided phrasing and mood—to an ensemble performance. There he is “directed” in his performance by a prompter who, like the orchestra conductor, is responsible for basic timing, and for melding the individual pieces together. (78)
While in some ways this is an apt comparison, it does not fully acknowledge that a playing company is an ensemble rather than a collection of individual agents. Two types of agents are here both imagined in entirely individualistic terms: the actor, in possession of the script, and the prompter, charged with linking these individual bits into a coherent whole. But this model neglects the ensemble-level expertise of the company, the subtle orchestration and modulation that produces the “artful accomplishment” (Suchman 1997: 50) of group tasks. The actors seem at times to be thought of as mechanically repeating their responses to the cues, even as the interlocutor insists upon finishing his speech. If the actor trying to speak is thwarted, he builds up anger appropriate to his character; alternatively, if he repeats his line, an aria-like effect might be created—or perhaps a comic appeal to the audience. Certainly it is possible to imagine such an effect being created on the
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Elizabethan stage, though we would have to accept a high tolerance for stylized delivery to accept the “aria” proposition. However, the very phrase “battle for the cue-space” indicates that the dynamic between the actors is imagined as agonistic. In an exchange between two players involving premature or repeated cues, one of them will know that the cues are repeated: “the actor throwing out the repeated cue will know that he is scripted to do so. He can therefore choose to do so in various ways. He can ‘play’ the moment; he can equally ‘play’ the actor whom he is cueing” (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 163). Here control or agency seems to be a zero-sum game: a model of struggle and one-upmanship as the actors battle for cue space. This reading assumes an overly individualistic model of behavior in what is after all a group enterprise. In this model, one actor holds the knowledge and may reveal or withhold it at his pleasure; only one of these actors is allowed some license. But let us assume in the first instance that the actors have a common goal: the smoothest possible performance. “Smoothest” here means not word-perfect—for this is, as I argue in the following chapter, an anachronistic concept—but a performance that satisfies the audience’s basic expectations for a professional production. This model implies coordination, planning, and error correction, through an ongoing mutual modulation of the unfolding, time-pressured event. This does not preclude individual rivalry, upstaging, or the complete breakdown of the performance. Nor do we need to posit that only elaborate group rehearsals could have facilitated the artful accomplishment of the performance. Rather, mutual modulation could be achieved even in performance through gestures—subtly or otherwise signaling the interlocutor to await the full cue, for example, which could certainly work in character. If “Bassanio” threatens to interrupt prematurely on the cue “Ile haue my bond,” “Shylock” can easily forestall the interruption while still remaining in character. Moreover, another agent is involved in this process: the scribe making out the cue-script. Playbooks are prepared to facilitate making out the parts, using rules to separate each speech. If the
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cue length is not arbitrary, as Stern and Palfrey argue from their reading of Alleyn’s part, this is due to the expertise of the scribe, who can easily adjust the length of the cue to avoid premature or ambiguous cues. A cue consisting of as common a word as “him” would seem to be an incompetent choice on the part of the scribe. Despite the individual study of the part, and despite the dispersal of the play into these atomistic units, theatre is a group exercise and involves group expertise. This would have been all the more true in the close-knit world of Elizabethan theatre where, as Knutson has shown, players lived and worked in close proximity, remembered each other in their wills, and intermarried. Stressing the part alone does not give sufficient attention to social cognition and group dynamics. The social dynamic of study, rehearsal, and performance would include attention to mistakes and self-correction, of the sort no doubt facilitated by the use of the repeated cue. It will be evident that there are numerous examples of dialogic information other than cues that might force actors to adjust their performances. Macbeth’s plea to the ghost of Banquo to “shake not thy gory locks at me” is cued through the line itself; if the actor playing Banquo does not perform the required gesture before the line, the effect is unintentionally comic. This is just one of countless examples of the need for constant modulation of the performance in light of the actions and speech of other actors. The excessively mechanical reactions posited by Palfrey and Stern do not take sufficient account of the expertise of the players, and particularly of the true hallmark of the expert: situation awareness.20 Moreover, to argue that full group rehearsal of the “dress” or “technical” variety was not a feature of early modern theatrical practices does not thereby rule out the possibility that actors worked together in smaller, more ad hoc groups. Menzer’s approach to the use of the cue-script takes fuller account of company expertise. In The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (2008), Menzer examines the various cue-scripts for the three extant versions of Hamlet. He demonstrates that discrepancies among the versions are at least
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partially explicable by the re-arrangement of cues for more fluid performance. In Act one, cue variants seem to have arisen in response to possible problems with audibility, particularly when the ghost speaks—“Sweare”—from the trap. Menzer suggests that “moments of cue divergence might also mark rehearsal adjustment since cues are both dialogue and a collaborative mechanism” (2008: 44). Cue divergences in Hamlet occur in scenes that “require careful coordination of offstage (or understage) voices and intricate entrance and exit cues” (2008: 44). As Menzer suggests, this evidence asks us to revise Stern and Palfrey’s model of rehearsal as “a walkthrough by players slavishly reciting their parts. It may have provided a unique opportunity for the players who would act the play to alter, revise, amend, and indeed author the plays in which they were to appear” (2008: 45). In this view, cues are not imagined as the sole property of the individual actor, but instead as the glue of coordination. Affordances This chapter has surveyed the “stuff” of theatre—the material and environmental surround of the early modern theatrical system. No one of these artifacts or environments alone holds the key to understanding the system. As important as the cue-script is, it is only one element in a distributed system and cannot be seen as the master document. Indeed, each cognitive artifact can be seen to have a different “affordance” in the distributed framework that made up the early modern theatre. “Affordance” is a term coined by J. J. Gibson in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). An “affordance” is that feature of an object or an environment that invites a certain mode of use and discourages others: a chair “affords” sitting. While a chair can be used to stand upon, using it in this way goes against the grain of the design; one can sit on a ladder, but not very comfortably (1979: 127–36).21 Affordances are relational; they are only meaningful within an environment. Each cognitive artifact under study in this chapter has a distinct affordance. As Peter Stallybrass (2002) has argued, scrolls
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and codices offer very different models of reading. The reader holds the two objects differently and moves through them differently. A codex provides “random” access to textual material across the book, while a scroll must unfold sequentially. Similarly the part (in scroll form) “affords” understanding the unfolding shifts in passion of an individual character. The playbook by contrast affords comparisons between temporal moments in the play and a grasp of the structures of the scene. Typically, contemporary actors using a full script will highlight their own part, precisely because the book as a whole obscures the salient material: their own lines. For an actor in the early modern period studying a part, the moment-to-moment shifts in emphasis and “passion” would have been more salient than direct comparison of, say, a point very early and very late in the play: “what would have been very clear with such a technology [the scroll], however, is how one ‘shape’ of speaking precedes or proceeds upon another” (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 390). While the codex affords relatively easy reference across scenes and characters, the part affords an unfolding sense of the “passions” of each character—information that is actually quite difficult to glean amid the myriad of other distractions in a playbook. In contrast, the remaining cognitive artifact, the “plot,” offers a different set of information architecture in a completely different format: In this case, the entire structure of the play is easily grasped immediately, reduced to its basic form: the scene. As Clancey (2009) argues, a situated view of cognition is by definition “anti-localizable.” We cannot isolate or privilege any one element of the system, but must instead see them in a shifting and dynamic relationship to one another. Indeed, the material and environmental elements of the playing system can provide only a very partial account of its accomplishments; for a fuller picture we need to turn to the embodied skills of playwrights and players themselves. This will be the subject of the second chapter.
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Chapter 2
Action and Accent: Voice, Gesture, Body, and Mind
In the previous chapter, I surveyed a wide range of the material elements that made up the distributed cognitive system of the early modern theatre. This chapter takes up two further crucial elements: the language of the play and the bodies of the actors as they delivered the verse and graced it with their gestures. In the technical language of the period, derived from the classical rhetorical tradition, these twin arts were referred to as “accent and action.” “Accent” comprised pronunciation, or the technical art of speaking the verse, while “action” refers to gesture and the movement of the body. A key element in the distributed system of activity that comprised the early modern theatrical system was, obviously, the language of the play—or, more precisely, the formal features used to structure the language to maximize memorability. That is, playwrights used linguistic devices closely attuned to the capabilities and constraints of human memory. Before I elaborate on this point, let me define the parameters of the issue: What precisely was the expected level of fidelity to the words of the playwright? There is little scholarly consensus on this issue. In “Nobody’s Perfect” (1991), Potter describes her research into the forgetting and remembering on the part of a contemporary Shakespearean repertory company. She surveyed a number of members of the English Shakespeare Company following a long tour of productions of the Henry VI cycle. The
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questionnaire asked actors to describe how well they remembered both current parts and parts performed in the past. Many of them report embarrassing moments of forgetting their lines, but often the errors they reported are relatively trivial. One actor recalls a time when he confused similar speeches from different plays—an interference error—and said “Good my lord of Lanc—Leicester—Gloucester” (“ ‘all famous cheeses,’ he pointed out”) (1991: 94). While this is a very amusing story, the actor’s classification of this relatively trivial slip as an error might well seem odd to an Elizabethan player. In fact, the error is not so much confusing “Lancaster” with “Leicester” with “Gloucester” as it is exposing the slip by correcting himself. Forgetting or being found “out” of one’s part is a terrifying experience. In sonnet 23, Shakespeare describes the shame associated with forgetting one’s lines: “As an unperfect actor upon the stage / Who is with fear put besides his part.” As will be seen in the next chapter, Shakespeare’s plays abound with examples of amateur actors drying up, correcting themselves, and fleeing the stage in disgrace. However, the standards of fidelity to the precise words of the playwright is still an open question; what counted as being “perfect” or complete in one’s part is a matter of debate. Assumptions about verbatim memory are context bound. Indeed as I. M. L. Hunter (1985) has demonstrated, the very concept of “verbatim” memory is an artifact of chirographic and print culture; societies with relatively little experience with writing have very different concepts of “fidelity” and place little value on exact verbal reproduction, however much they value memory in a wider sense. We live in a text-rich environment in which sophisticated technologies of reproduction allow relatively easy comparison of an original text to a particular performance of it (one thinks of audiences at Stratford who read the text of the play during live productions). We also live in a culture that values Shakespeare’s words— his precise words—very highly, and disseminates exact (more or less) copies of these words freely. We have precisely what Shakespeare’s actors did not. While certain famous speeches seem to have been widely known, as the ubiquitous references to The Spanish Tragedy bear out, there could have been little sense in this period of complete textual fidelity.
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Assumptions derived from the very different environment of contemporary society lead to a misunderstanding of the nature of memory and forgetting. For example, Bentley argues that the large number of new plays performed by early modern companies meant that “a letter-perfect rendition must have been unheard of, and prompting a constant necessity” (Bentley 1984: 82). While it is probable that “letter-perfect” performances were indeed “unheard of,” Bentley seems to have a deficit model in mind, in which players try but fail to reproduce the text verbatim, saved from abject failure only by “constant” prompting. As I established in the previous chapter, speculations about the work of the prompter tend to be based upon a model of central control and thus fail to recognize the distributed nature of the system. Othello refers to a prompter in the following lines: “Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it / Without a prompter.” However, the “prompter” imagined here does not remind the player of his lines, but of the stage actions he must perform. The question of whether words prompted from backstage could even have been heard in the Elizabethan theatre remains open (see Gabriel Egan and Gurr 2002 and Stern 2001). Bentley’s reference to the prompter, however, implies that “letter-perfect” recall, in which each word is reproduced exactly, is the primary goal of the players and the company. This reflects a standard of verbal fidelity to Shakespeare’s words much more likely to have been current in later theatrical systems, when familiarity with the playtexts became ubiquitous. Instead, I would argue that in the early modern playing system, prompting was built into and distributed across the system: It is called “verse.” The use of verse as a mnemonic has long been recognized, of course. As Samuel Daniel writes, “verse is but a frame of words confined within certain measure; differing from the ordinary speech, and introduced the better to express men’s conceits, both for delight and memory” (Daniel 2004: 210). Similarly, Sir Philip Sidney compares verse to the art of memory itself: “they that have taught the art of memory have showed nothing so apt for it as a certain room divided into many places well and thoroughly known. Now, that hath the verse in effect perfectly, every word having its natural seat, which seat must needs make the words remembered” (Sidney
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2004: 32).1 Rhyme is an especially effective mnemonic system, as Daniel reminds us, “consisting of an agreeing sound in the last syllables of several verses, giving both to the ear an echo of a delightful report and to the memory a deeper impression of what is delivered therein” (2004: 210–1). Repetition and the use of patterns of tropes and figures, so characteristic of the drama of the 1590s, also aid recall. The cognitive psychologist David Rubin, in his work Memory in Oral Traditions, terms such forms “surface features” (1995: 72). The accumulation of surface features acts as a “constraint” upon memory by limiting the number of possible choices facing a performer. Combining constraints decreases the mental effort of recall and “increases the stability of transmission by limiting choices and by cuing the recall of words and phrases” (94).2 Thus to pursue Sidney’s analogy of seats: The multiple constraints of the early verse line provide an orderly line of chairs for the matter to sit in. If the word itself goes missing, the chair will serve it up by conserving rhythm, employing rhyme, and thus limiting the possible choices. Such a structure facilitates retrieval and also, and possibly more importantly, provides a framework not just for memory, but also for fluent forgetting. Fluent forgetting allows us to think about how players coped with the mnemonic demands of their profession. Following Hunter, Rubin argues that “verbatim memorization of long texts in cultures without writing has never been documented” (1995: 196). Verbatim recall is a product of literate culture, and it exists only within the context of “the pursuit of interests which involve a strong concern for verbatim fidelity” (Hunter 1984: 433). Exact verbatim memory is notoriously difficult to achieve, even when supported by multiple constraints, and I would agree with Maguire and Lukas Erne, who have emphasized the ways that our view of memory and memorization has been shaped by concepts of exact verbatim fidelity that were unlikely to have operated in Shakespeare’s period. According to Julie Stone Peters, print resulted in a greater emphasis upon verbatim memorization in the theatre, especially in contrast to earlier plays, which seemed to provide a space for improvisation (2000: 102–4) on the part of the actors. Certainly the advent of technologies of reproduction affect the ways that memory
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is understood; Douwe Draaisma (2000) has also documented the way that assumptions about memory have co-evolved with the tools and metaphors for conceptualizing it. Yet this effect should not be overestimated, as printed plays represent only a small fraction of the number of plays performed. The vast majority of plays performed were never published at all, or were published only well after their initial performances. Very few playtexts, then, would have been widely known. In such an environment, as long as the player recalls the beginnings and the ends of speeches (for cuing purposes), and as long as he never gives the appearance of being out, who is to know? Another factor to consider here is that the “book” of the play constituted an official document that had to be approved by the Master of the Revels. The players were to forbidden to add material that was not in the approved book. However, as Potter notes, “in practice . . . this rule must have referred to the content rather than the precise words of the text; unless the Master of the Revels had a phenomenal memory, he could hardly have checked on the latter in detail” (1991: 87).3 This point is amply confirmed by Maguire’s study of slips of memory in the BBC Shakespeare film series that was initiated in 1979. The BBC issued a playtext with each film, allowing cross-checking of text and film. These films had the explicit goal of fidelity and accuracy and, of course, could be re-shot. Despite this, and despite highly trained and competent actors, Maguire found myriad small deviations from the copy text throughout, yet deviations so tiny that they had gone unrecognized. These slips typically remain within the constraints of the verse, or alter it only slightly. For example: “to look on death no more” becomes “to look on earth no more”; “[b]ut as the devil would have it” becomes “[b]ut as ill luck would have it” (138). Slight alterations to words that still conserve meaning and meter tend to go entirely unnoticed. Considering New Bibliographers and their commitment to memorial reconstruction, Maguire observes that: [Here] we encounter a problem caused by the difference between sixteenth century and twentieth century culture. When the New Bibliographers talked about memorial reconstruction, the
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ideal they seemed to have in mind was a perfect reproduction: a tape-recording, a facsimile, memory behaving flawlessly. This is very much a twentieth-century ideal derived from a printbased culture which values textual fidelity. We do not know if Elizabethan actors shared this ideal. (1996: 147)
Maguire concludes that small slips such as those she detected in the BBC recordings are simply the condition of human memory. Shakespeare’s theatre was a hybrid system, in which the demand for textual fidelity is mapped onto a strong residue of orality. Iambic pentameter is not just a structure for remembering; it is also a structure for forgetting. That is, the establishment of a rhythmical structure prompts the memory and allows what I have termed fluent forgetting, the substitution of words within the metrical framework and the sense of the text. The ease of substituting words within a constrained framework is borne out by Rubin’s study of undergraduates’ memory for Beatles’ lyrics in the late 1980s. He found that rhythm and poetics tended to be conserved, and often meaning was as well, within these constraints. So, for example, the line “to help with good Rocky’s revival” was remembered as “to help with good Rocky’s survival” (1990: 210).4 At this point it is vital to note what I do not mean by fluent forgetting. Fluent forgetting is not meant to imply indifference to the task of memory or to the playwright’s words. As Ioppolo and others have pointed out, we can detect in the period a strong sense of the actor’s obligations to the playwright’s words, albeit primarily through expressions of outrage at players who violate such expectations. Ben Jonson’s title page to the New Inn (1631) nicely encapsulates the playwright’s umbrage at the poor performance of his work: “As it was never acted, but most negligently play’d, by some, the Kings Servants.” Other plays provide evidence of antagonism to poor speaking on the part of players. In Thomas Middleton’s Mayor of Queensborough, players indifferent to the script are condemned as frauds. They are accused of taking “the name of country-comedians to abuse simple people
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with a printed play or two, which they bought at Canterbury for sixpence; and what is worst, they speak but what they list of it, and fribble out the rest” (Mann 1991: 90). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to fribble” as “to falter, or stammer out.” In his compilation of representations of acting on the Elizabethan stage, David Mann suggests that players such as these are “at the tail-end of the player spectrum” (1991: 76), “fribbling” words rather than personating. In Brome’s Antipodes, Lord Letoy describes an actor: . . . that will never be perfect in a thing He studies; yet he makes such shifts extempore, (Knowing the purpose what he is to speak to) That he moves mirth in me ’bove all the rest For I am none of those poetic furies, That threats the actor’s life, in a whole play, That adds a syllable or takes away. If he can fribble through and move delight In others, I am pleas’d. (2.2.16–10; Mann 1991: 65)
A range of expertise is represented here, from the players in Middleton who only “fribble out” a few words of the text, to the more fluid ability of Brome’s player, who neglects to study his lines, but makes “shifts extempore” only within a context appropriate to the play (“knowing the purpose what he is to speak to”). The question of the expertise of the players will be discussed more fully in the following chapter. For now, it is important only to note that contemporaries recognized a range of levels of fidelity to the author’s words. Some playwrights are represented as “poetic furies” who demand that the actors adhere to the very syllable, while at the other end of the scale, incompetent players have no commitment at all to the author’s words. While fictional condemnations of players obviously cannot be taken at face value, as evidenced by the debates about the status of Hamlet’s advice to the players, it is nevertheless possible to detect a basic standard of professional conduct. Fluent forgetting is not fribbling, papering over incompetence. Indeed, fluent forgetting is a crucial component of expertise, as
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I shall explore in the following chapter. Rather than wholesale improvisation, fluent forgetting is a fluid ability to adapt and shift within a highly constrained structure. We might think of this as a series of layers. For a professional player, the foundation is the structural understanding of the part and the experience and intelligence that allows working memory to cope with the attentional and mnemonic demands of performance. The player’s materials—the verse of the playwright—facilitates competence at the level of syntax and structure, allowing the words to drop into their “seats,” as Sidney describes it. If the precise phrase goes missing, the structure of the verse provides the structure for fluent and unnoticeable improvisation. As we will see in the next chapter, novice or unskilled actors are likely only to have that top level of knowledge: the precise words. Without the deeper knowledge of the structures underneath, they cannot forget fluently and are forced to halt. There is some evidence that the cognitive work of memory is transferred increasingly from the formal structures of verse to the expertise of the player as Shakespeare and other playwrights develop their craft over time. That is, while earlier plays make extensive use of formal mnemonic markers, these are increasingly dispensed with through the seventeenth century. Especially in the plays of the early 1590s, when the purposebuilt theatres were still relatively new and when companies were constantly producing new content, rhetorical mnemonic markers are particularly evident. As George Wright (1988) has established, Shakespeare inherited such a verse form from his Tudor predecessors and employed it with considerable regularity in the early plays. Overt verbal rhetorical patterning such as alliteration, repetition, echoing, and rhyme all feature in speeches of the earlier plays—phrase and line tend to be aligned rather than athwart; lines tend to be end-stopped; and set speeches that lend themselves to memory are common. These early plays, argues Wright, are marked by long continuous lines and line-by-line accumulation of rhetorical segments (1988: 219–20). As Rubin suggests, the use of multiple constraints may point to a mode of remembering that involves “much less of a thought process and much more of a patternrecognition device” (1995: 120).
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We see such insistent patterning frequently in the early plays, with multiple and overlapping verbal and conceptual constraints. A good example might be the closing scene of 1 Henry VI, in which Suffolke convinces Henry to take Margaret as his wife, which exhibits a wide range of formal mnemonic markers: For what is wedlock forcéd but a hell An age of discord and continual strife Whereas the contrary bringeth bliss, And is a pattern of celestial peace. Whom should we match with Henry, being a king But Margaret, that is daughter to a king? Her peerless feature joinéd with her birth Approves her fit for none but for a king. Her valiant courage, and undaunted spirit, More than in women commonly is seen Will answer our hope in issue of a king. For Henry, son unto a conqueror, Is likely to beget more conquerors If with a lady of so high resolve As is fair Margaret he be linked in love. Then yield, my lords and here conclude with me: That Margaret shall be queen, and none but she. (5.7.65–78)
A variety of “surface features” here support the work of memory. Lines are either end-stopped or are marked by clear phrase boundaries; the first four lines each end with a distinct phrasal unit. The passage features marked internal repetition (“being a king . . . daughter to a king”; “son unto a conqueror . . . beget more conquerors”); internal alliteration (“pattern of peace”; “linked in love”); rhetorical tropes of balance and contrast (“Hell” and “celestial peace”); and rhyme to underscore the key point (“conclude with me” . . . “none but she”); and regular meter. This style of writing provides a set of seats for memory, each unstressed syllable pulling out the chair for the stress to sit in. The array of surface features in this passage combine to provide multiple constraints that allow the actor to remember, but also, if necessary, to forget fluently, since if one word escapes, the larger structure would allow another similar word to be caught.
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Such constraints also function at the level of the trope and convention. The proverbial comparison of “forcéd wedlock” to a “hell” is pieced out by a conventional elaboration: “an age of discord and continual strife.” The trope that follows is one of the most familiar and recalled rhetorical figures—antithesis: “whereas the contrary bringeth bliss / and is a pattern of celestial peace.” The reliance of the speech upon commonly peddled aphorisms and readily recalled antitheses provides a general cultural schema for the lines that would aid both “exact” recall and fluent forgetting. As we know from Joel Altman’s The Tudor Play of Mind (1978), underlying such patterns was the educational scaffolding provided by the Tudor grammar school, which traded in the trope of in utrumque partem, the mental habit of arguing on both sides of the question, inherited from the rhetorical traditions of classical antiquity. So powerful is this trope of antithesis and balance that it may provide a way of accounting for some of the characteristics of the so-called bad quarto of Hamlet (Q1). Maguire correctly argues that the New Bibliographers were operating from dubious assumptions about the general reliability of memory; they were too quick to assign minor verbal variants to the malicious operations of rogue actors collaborating with pirate printers. Research in the cognitive constraints that mark remembering and forgetting can at least shed some light upon the priority of two given passages—that is, can help to determine which of two variants might have come first. The competing Quarto 1 and Folio versions of the “picture of two brothers” speech of Hamlet provide particularly pertinent examples. As with the 1 Henry VI passage, we can see the power of antithesis and balance, possibly the easiest of all figures to remember. Antithesis is grounded in the bilateralism of the human body itself—the common tendency to figure two propositions as binary opposites: “on the one hand” and “on the other.” This trope structures the Folio speech at the outset: Looke here vpon this Picture, and on this, The counterfet presentment of two Brothers: See what a grace was seated on his Brow,
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Hyperions curles, the front of Ioue himselfe, An eye like Mars, to threaten or command A Station, like the Herald Mercurie New lighted on a heauen-kissing hill: A Combination, and a forme indeed, Where euery God did seeme to set his Seale, To giue the world assurance of a man. This was your Husband. Looke you now what followes. Heere is your Husband, like a Mildew’d eare Blasting his wholsome breath [brother Q2].
In Quarto 1, the analogous passage reads: 1477: Why this I meane, see here, behold this picture, 1478: It is the portraiture, of your deceased husband, 1479: See here a face, to outface Mars himselfe, 1480: An eye, at which his foes did tremble at, 1481: A front wherin all vertues are set downe 1482: For to adorne a king, and guild his crowne, 1483: Whose heart went hand in hand euen with that vow, 1484: He made to you in marriage, and he is dead. 1485: Murdred, damnably murdred, this was your husband, 1486: Looke you now, here is your husband, 1487: With a face like Vulcan. 1488: A looke fit for a murder and a rape, 1489: A dull dead hanging looke, and a hell-bred eie, 1490: To affright children and amaze the world: 1491: And this same haue you left to change with this.
The changes in these two speeches provide virtually a case study in the selective pressures of remembering. The Folio speech begins with the trope of antithesis—“look upon this Picture and on this.” For a player studying a part, the deictic “this” no doubt had a special meaning in that it required the player to hold or point to an object or person. While contemporary productions sometimes use pictures on the wall for the “this,” it is likely that the player would have used a miniature of some sort, and the balance of the first two lines: “look on this” and “on this”: “the counterfeit presentment of two Brothers” signals the actor that the speech will have a bilateral
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structure: one (or in) the one hand, and on (or in) the other. Despite this apparent oppositional structure, the speech itself persistently eschews balance and simple contrast, evading the one hand/other hand binary that it posits for the player at its outset. Rather than a simple balanced contrast between a good brother and a bad one, the Folio elaborates the divine attributes of Old Hamlet at some length: Hyperion’s curls, Jove’s “front,” the commanding eyes of Mars, the “station” of Mercury. Nine lines are needed to describe the “combination and form” of the dead king. When the subject shifts to the “other hand,” or the portrait of Claudius, the metaphor and context abruptly shifts as well. Instead of elaborating the tropes of contrast and antithesis, the speaker introduces a new and unexpected simile, and the trope moves from a fairly conventional list of heroic attributes to the enigmatic comparison of Claudius to infected grain: “a Mildew’d eare / Blasting his wholesome breath. [brother Q2]” In the Quarto 1 speech, the actor still “holds” two portraits in his hand, and still retains a basic sense that the speech (a) involves comparisons to mythological figures and (b) is designed to contrast a good man with a bad. But the speech as a whole contains far more overt antithesis and is structured by the sort of commonplace epithets that characterized Suffolk’s speech in 1 Henry VI. The myriad of deities attached to Old Hamlet are reduced to one: “See here a face, to outface Mars himselfe, / An eye, at which his foes did tremble at.” The internal repetitions such as “face” to “outface” and the use of alliteration such as “face” and “foes” provide easy anchors for memory. Indeed, the speech generally trades in culturally scripted commonplaces such as “whose heart went hand in hand.” Moreover, far from abandoning the trope of antithesis as does the Q1 speech, this version cultivates and develops it. Instead of the array of positive mythological qualities ascribed to the good king in the Folio, the passage settles upon one mythological figure: Mars. The player now figuratively holds “Mars” in one hand. Looking for help in the other hand, he finds Vulcan there, a conventional contrast familiar to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of mythology. (Perhaps
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the most obvious pairing with Mars is Venus, in which case the initial “V” consonant might provide an added prompt for the use of “Vulcan.”) “Vulcan” then is tricked out in conventional negative epithets that further balance and contrast the positive attributes of Mars. So compelling is the trope of antithesis that the two halves of the speech are much more balanced in Quarto 1 than they are in the Folio. The epithets associated with Old Hamlet/Mars and Claudius/Vulcan take up about seven lines each, with the description of Vulcan clumsily elaborated through a build-up of conventional and nonspecific negative descriptions such as “A looke fit for a murder and a rape / A dull dead hanging look, and a hell-bred eie.” In the Quarto 1 speech, complex patterns are simplified, the one hand balances the other, and the demands of memory are met by relying upon cultural clichés. Such a trajectory exactly fits what might be predicted by constructivist psychological studies of memory, as the pioneering memory scholar F. C. Bartlett described some eighty years ago in his classic study of remembering.5 Bartlett told a number of acquaintances at Cambridge a story adapted from F. C. Boas entitled “The War of the Ghosts,” which contained a number of odd and disconcerting elements. He conducted his research by simply asking his friends to recall the story whenever he encountered them. As time went on, features of the story that did not conform to conventional (for this group) norms were abandoned, and the story began to more closely take on a standard form. Bartlett termed these processes familiarization, rationalization, and conventionalization: Both familiarisation and rationalisation are, in fact, results of a common tendency to change all presented material into such a form that it may be accepted without uneasiness, and without question. The influence of this tendency is exerted upon absolutely all material which is received into and preserved within a mental system. Sometimes the effect is that specific reasons are evolved to account for the form of given material; sometimes, even when such reasons are lacking, the form of the material is changed into something which can be readily accepted simply because it is familiar. (1920: 37)
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This dynamic is particularly obvious in the case of the move to formulaic or proverbial speech: As Bartlett notes, “where the epithets are original they tend to become current commonplace terms” (1932: 137). In the case of Hamlet, these principles point to the conclusion that the speech in the Folio is anterior to the speech in Q1. Whoever has remembered the Q1 speech has moved from the unusual, the unpredictable, and the unbalanced to commonplace clichés. In turn, these clichés are presented in a simple and easily improvisable antithetical format, which in turn accords with the cultural schema of antithesis that would have been particularly familiar to anyone schooled in the early modern rhetorical tradition. While it is possible to suggest as Kastan does, that the Q1 version of “To Be or Not To Be” only seems to be deficient because we know the Q2/F versions so well (Kastan 2001), the example of the two brothers’ speech clearly shows how the constraints on memory produce very particular forms of remembering and forgetting. In the case of “To be” we can also see the force of antithesis when faced with an unfamiliar line. Instead of “the undiscovered country, from whose bourne the traveller never returns,” the passage in Q1 picks up on the trope of eternal judgment: And borne before an euerlasting Iudge, From whence no passenger euer retur’nd, The vndiscouered country, at whose sight The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.
The final line here—“the happy smile” and “the accursed damn’d”—follows precisely the pattern identified in the “two pictures” speeches, where the conventional cultural expectation of what happens at judgment results in the commonplace contrast of “the happy smile” and “the accursed damn’d.” The passage also shows a strong tendency to become more balanced through the trope of antithesis, just as the “two pictures” speech did. To argue that the cognitive psychology of memory conclusively demonstrates that the Q1 speech is a remembered/ reconstructed version of the Folio does not in any way help
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us to determine the source of the act of reconstruction. The narratives of piracy and actor perfidy that underpinned New Bibliographic theories of memory reconstruction have been critically examined by Werstine (1990) and Maguire (1996), among others. Most recently, Menzer (2008) has offered a new set of theories to account for the competing versions of Hamlet extant. Menzer points out that producing a play in the early modern period produced a wide array of “textual debris” (2008: 15). Most notably, every part of every play mounted in the period was written out on a separate scroll. Only one of these remains from the period for the professional theatre— Alleyn’s part discussed in the previous chapter—but thousands of these must have existed at one time. Menzer draws our attention to this theatrical detritus, arguing that “bad” quartos probably had hybrid origins, incorporating existing parts, revised playbooks, and, where necessary, reconstructions from memory. Through an ingenious examination of the cue-scripts for three extant playtexts of Hamlet, Menzer demonstrates convincingly that Q1 is, paradoxically, “not the most theatrical but the most literary of the three printed texts of Hamlet in that it was designed for a reader, not for any practical theatrical use” (2008: 62-3). In particular, Q1 shows a persistent indifference to retaining cues. Because cues are the glue by which a play is reconstructed from its disparate parts, the chances that this text represents a player or players’ imperfect memory of a performance are slight. Yet, as the analysis of its memorial drifts clearly shows, it is the product of some form of memorial reconstruction, coupled with some written artifacts such as, perhaps, Marcellus’s cue-script. There is nothing essentially theatrical in the reconstructed speeches—indeed one could argue that there is less help to the actor in Q1, as it does not alert the player to the fact that there are two portraits under scrutiny.6 While we might be tempted to call the Q2/F version more “literary” in that its language is more subtle, its syntax and the interplay of phrase and line more complex, it is also more theatrical in that its embedded instructions to the player are more coherent, providing a structure for him that is grounded in the essential action of the part.
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Over the course of his career, Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, abandons many of the overt mnemonic constraints used so extensively through the 1590s. Rhyme is one of the first and most powerful to go, but all metrical and verbal patterns become more erratic after 1600, so that “in Shakespeare’s later plays, . . . we rarely encounter a passage of more than a few lines that does not break the basic pattern in some way” (Wright 1988: 101). Such a shift points toward very different mnemonic demands made upon his actors by the line structures of the later plays. The shift in Shakespeare’s later plays to a much more irregular rhythm, and especially to an emphasis upon short and shared lines, which Wright estimates at over twenty percent in many of the later plays, in contrast to less than five percent in the earlier ones, moves the mnemonic emphasis away from remembering singular set, end-stopped, internally patterned speeches and toward a more dynamic, dyadic mode of memory. In short, the later plays become decidedly unbalanced, and scaffolds for memory are situated less within the conventional verse structures of the individual parts. Instead, the demands of memory are distributed across the various actors, who become more closely bound because remembering one’s own part hangs upon another in ways that go beyond simply remembering one’s cue. Patterns, echoes, and repetitions regularly cross speech boundaries. Sidney’s seats become more like musical chairs than orderly rows. In such a situation, actors are more likely to be kept off-balance; their scope for fluent forgetting, at least on a large scale, is much reduced. Because fluent forgetting depends upon an orderly structure, the irregularity of the later plays demands a different sort of attention to one’s fellow player, and the echo of words and phrases snaking across a series of speeches provides a different sort of scaffold for memory. Act 5, scene 1 of The Winter’s Tale provides a particularly good example of this dynamic, because the attempts of two characters in the scene, Cleomenes and Dion, to balance the present needs of the state with the past crimes of Leontes are consistently undermined by Paulina’s and Leontes’s
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intersubjective remembering. Leontes’s first speech ends “True,” which is picked up by Paulina’s “Too true” (5.1.12– 3). Shakespeare explores the potential of words to echo across lines with Paulina’s sly reminder of “she you killed,” which prompts Leontes to painfully echo; “Killed? She I killed? I did so. But thou strik’st me sorely to say I did” (5.1.16–17). In this scene, as well as the final scene of the play, no speech ends with a full pentameter verse line; actors are more than usually dependent upon their fellows. Moreover, phrase struggles with line to the extent that the line itself threatens to disappear, taking Sidney’s seats with it. By the time Shakespeare wrote these late plays, he had been working with the same company for over a decade (albeit the “same” in the way that the proverbial axe that has had three new handles and two new heads is the “same”). In that time, if we go by the mnemonic changes in the verse, we can see a decreasing reliance on individual set speeches written to conform to the selective pressures of memory, and an increasing reliance on the dynamics of player interaction to prompt memory. Action: Gesture, Encoding, and Performance But imagining the art of the player as essentially verbal— that is, most importantly about “remembering the words”— grossly misrepresents the true nature of the craft. For the player was not simply uploading and repeating words, but was instead using the cue script as a complex guide to personation, particularly through attention to the changing “passions” of the characters as they ebb and flow throughout the play. The art of playing encompasses both action and accent. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Boyet describes precisely this method in the account of the rehearsal process Moth undergoes: “Action and accent did they teach him there / Thus thou must speak” and “Thus thy body bear” (5.2.101–2). “Action” comprises all forms of movement, including gesture and facial expression, while “accent” describes the arts of speech and pronunciation, the delivery of the words themselves. These terms of art governed both theatrical and oratorical practice; discussions of
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them are found in classical oratorical treatises, as codified by Cicero, Pseudo-Cicero, and, especially, Quintilian. In the Apology for Actors (1612), Thomas Heywood emphasizes the importance of both these arts. In writing of the value of acting in the university for “junior scholars,” Heywood describes the art of “accent” as skill in parsing the lines and observing the points: “to come to Rhetoricke, it not onely emboldens a scholler to speake, but instructs him to speake well, and with judgement, to obserue his comma’s, colons, & full poynts, his parentheses, his breathing spaces, and distinctions” (1612: C3v). As important, however, is the training in facial and bodily deportment necessary for expressing even the rudiments of action. The young rhetor can use acting skills: to keepe a decorum in his countenance, neither to frowne when he should smile, nor to make vnseemely and disguised faces in the deliuery of his words, not to stare with his eies, draw awry his mouth, confou[n]d his voice in the hollow of his throat, or teare his words hastily betwixt his teeth, neither to buffet his deske like a mad-man, nor stand in his place like a liueless Image, demurely plodding, & without any smooth & formal motio[n]. It instructs him to fit his phrases to his action, and his action to his phrase, and his pronuntiation to them both. (1612: C3v–C4r)
In this account, the text works more like a score for molding proper action than a mere transcript for words. In this passage, Heywood emphasizes ways that amateur/university speakers can use the tools of acting to hone their skills. While university students can use action to speak effectively, in Heywood’s view the skill of the actor lies in the absolutely transformative effect of true personation: A Description is only a shadow receiued by the eare but not perceiued by the eye: so liuely portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture, to mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration: but to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier: to see a Hector all besmered in blood,
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trampling vpon the bulkes of Kinges. A Troylus returning from the field in the sight of his father Priam, as if man and horse euen from the steeds rough fetlockes to the plume in the champions helmet had bene together plunged into a purple Ocean: To see a Pompey ride in triumph, then a Cesar conquer that Pompey, labouring Hanniball aliue, hewing his passage through the Alpes. To see as I haue seene, Hercules in his owne shape hunting the Boare, knocking downe the Bull, taming the Hart, fighting with Hydra, murdering Gerion, slaughtering Diomed, wounding the Stimphalides, killing the Centaurs, pashing the Lion, squeezing the Dragon, dragging Cerberus in Chaynes, and lastly, on his high Pyramides writing Nil ultra, Oh these were sights to make an Alexander. (1612: B3v–C1r)
A high level of expertise is needed to “mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration.” To “mooue the spirits” is no mere metaphor, but an allusion to the physiological mechanisms thought to link actor and spectator (Roach 1993). Heywood’s account exemplifies the profound respect held for action and personation in the early modern period. Gesture was an art, a techne essential to the craft of the actor. In this section, I link historical evidence about the gestural arts to current research in the cognitive sciences concerning the relationships among gesture, language, body, and thought. I argue that the “art” of action is a cognitive mechanism harnessed to enlist powerful linguistic–somatic structures in the task of encoding the lines. Gesture has not always been seen in this way. Indeed, there remains a strong strain in Shakespearean criticism that views the art of gesture as an embarrassing holdover from outmoded, “formal” acting practices. This attitude is perhaps best encapsulated by Bradbrook’s well-known position to which I alluded earlier: On the Elizabethan stage, gesture was “formalised,” and actors relied on “[c]onventional movement and heightened delivery” (1932: 109). Alfred Harbage argued for a similar view of formal acting, suggesting that the conditions of the Globe would have necessitated it: [T]he open-air theatre of Shakespeare’s day, with its un-localized, relatively unadorned, and centrally placed stage, was better
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suited to formal than to natural acting. That the boy companies acted formally I consider almost a prima facie case, yet until nearly the end of Shakespeare’s active career the boys monopolized the indoor theatres. The position of Burbage was more nearly that of his ancient fellow in the Greek amphitheatre than of his modern fellow behind a proscenium arch. He was almost surrounded by his audience. He was part of a statuary group rather than part of a picture. His attitudes must have been statuesque, and his gestures such as would convey meaning to the considerable portion of his audience who could not see his face. The whimsical smile, the arched brow, the significant sidelong glance would not do. He had to act with his body. (1939: 704)
Harbage is responding to Harley Granville-Barker’s argument that the actors of Shakespeare’s time were instead engaging in “imaginative interpretation” of the play and that they used a “natural” style. The assumption is the player who “had to act with his body” is by necessity acting in a “formal” fashion, rather than the purportedly naturalistic style possible in smaller venues where the face can be easily seen. The terms of the argument were replayed in the midtwentieth century, when Marvin Rosenberg attacked the first edition of Bertram Joseph’s Elizabethan Acting (1951) as the culmination of the “orthodox formalist movement” (1954: 916). According to Rosenberg, “Joseph’s discussion of rhetorical gesture amounts to the contention that actors were ‘skilled automatons’ who ‘moved like clockwork’ ” (920), but “[n]o genuine acting manual is extant that sets out rote procedures for Elizabethan players” (1954: 921). I will return in a moment to Joseph’s work, which I argue Rosenberg’s article misrepresents, but for now it is worth noting that the idea that early modern playing companies operated on the basis of a rigidly stylized set of conventional gestures, learned and transmitted by rote, still exists, as evidenced by the descriptions of gesture by Gurr (1992) and Hattaway (1982) mentioned in the Introduction. In this view, gestures are a kind of “clip-on” feature, a superfluous decoration that helps to paper over lack of command of the words. Naturally,
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this is not to say that gestures and action were not sometimes used in this fashion, as parodied by Thomas Nashe in Summer’s Last Will and Testament: “and this I bar, over and besides, that none of you stroke your beards to make action, play with your cod-piece points, or stand fumbling on your buttons when you know not how to bestow yourselves” (qtd. Harbage 1939: 697). Indeed, defenders of a more fluid or “natural” acting style do not defend the art of rhetoric from the charges of involvement in the “stereotype training of actors” (Rosenberg 1954: 921). Rather, as Menzer has pointed out, they tend to argue for “a new naturalism of playing at the turn of the sixteenth century” (2004: 29), assuming that playing evolved from a stylized to a naturalized mode. To cite one instance, Gurr suggests that a new mode of “realistic characterization” began in that period around 1600, characterizing Edward Alleyn as representative of the older “exaggerated” outmoded style.7 Menzer neatly demolishes the opposition between “formal” or “artificial” and “natural” acting that underpins this entire debate. He argues that “the ulterior binary . . . is ‘now/then,’ the rhetoric of the infinite regress. This temporal model enables critics to script fictions of progress” (2004: 32). This narrative of progress is encouraged by actors themselves, who contrast their own skill, ease, and “naturalness” with the formal, “rhetorical,” outmoded styles of the past. In a process of “mimetic innovation,” Menzer writes, “[p]layers create the illusion of naturalism by constantly distancing their own playing from actors of the recent past” (2004: 34). Menzer, then, exposes a persistent binary, in which rhetorically based “formal” acting is contrasted to acting that is “natural,” “expressive,” or, to use Granville-Barker’s terms, engaged in “imaginative interpretation” (qtd. Harbage 1939: 686). Both sides of the debate are equally dismissive of the art of rhetoric itself, which each camp equates to stylization and mere external artifice. As Menzer acknowledges, neither pole of the debate tells us anything “about the way early modern actors shaped and presented the human body on stage” (2004: 32).
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I wish to re-examine the gestural arts as powerful extended tools for memory and attention rather than dismiss them as mere external gimmicks. To do so, I first revisit the research of Bertram Joseph and Joseph Roach on acting, gesture, and the passions, contextualizing this historical evidence with a range of current research in the cognitive sciences on the relationships among gesture, language, and embodiment. Despite Rosenberg’s characterization of the first edition of Elizabethan Acting (1951), Joseph’s later work on gesture, rhetoric, and acting on the early modern stage explicitly repudiates a purely formal or mechanistic mode: “The rhetoricians’ art strikes the modern who does not understand it as it existed in the renaissance as a matter of applying conventional gestures externally, whereas real acting is expressing what is felt within” (Joseph 1969: 84). Joseph argues that the orator’s art “was anything but formal and stereotyped; on the contrary, it was a lively and truthful art designed to portray real emotion truthfully, and was based on a deep conviction that ‘action’ should spring always from real inner feeling, not from any conventional system of external cliches” (84). Far from a “formal stereotyped code,” the art of “action” was learned as part of a techne of body and mind that gave visual and kinetic shape to the passions within. Joseph relies in large part upon Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chrionomia, which Rosenberg describes dismissively as “a manual of rhetorical delivery” (Rosenberg 1954: 921). Bulwer’s text, however, it is not simply prescriptive, but is a complex physiological and psychological treatise. The art of gesture involves training the body both to experience and to regulate the passions, which Thomas Wright compares to the art of musical playing: “the passion in the persuader seemeth to me to resemble the wind a trumpeter bloweth in at one end of the trumpet, and in what matter it proceedeth from him, so it issueth forth at the other end, and cometh to our ears, even so the passion proceedeth from the heart, and is blown about the body, face, eyes, voice, and so by gestures passeth into our eyes, and by sounds into our ears” (Wright 1604: 174; qtd. Joseph 1969: 90).
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The best guide to these dynamics as they apply to the art of acting is Roach’s The Player’s Passion (1993). Roach vigorously defends Joseph’s arguments and argues that, like Quintilian, Bulwer has been misunderstood. Gestures are not mere mechanical form but instead rise out of physiological forces: “It was widely believed that the spirits, agitated by the passions of the imaginer, generate a wave of physical force, rolling through the aether, powerful enough to influence the spirits of others at a distance” (Roach 1993: 45). The actor’s art was to find and experience these passions, but keep them “within the bounds of what Heywood called ‘a smooth and formal motion’ . . . and what Thomas Wright called ‘a prudent mediocritie’ ” (Roach 1993: 52). Roach writes: Far from denying natural inspiration in acting by substituting disembodied hieroglyphs for truthful gestures, the rhetoric of the passions proposed a means of harnessing inspiration’s inexorable synergistic effects. Rhetors saw the body of the actor “fallen into a passion” as brimming over with emotions in need of channeling into properly regulated conduits— hence the rules for gesture, posture, deportment, voice, physiognomy, and expression that fill so many pages in our earliest acting textbooks. A passion, once unleashed, cannot be suppressed, but it can be shaped into outwardly expressive forms. An oratorical gesture, a prescribed pattern of action, serves as a pre-existing mold into which this molten passion can be poured. (55)
As Paster writes, “passions actually were liquid forces of nature,” representing a “literal early modern understanding of the relation of body to world” (2004: 4). Paster discusses two examples from Minerva Brittanna: the contrasting humors of the choleric and the phlegmatic man. For a player in this period, to play the choleric man is not simply to assume the outstretched and “fiery” stance of such a character, but to generate and then regulate the passions that would result from reading such lines—that is, the passion would seize his heart and move his body in the fiery way that cholera does, which would in turn infect the air itself and the spectators.
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A skilled actor does not “tear a passion to tatters,” sawing the air, but is able to channel and regulate passion for maximum effect. Shakespeare provides an example of this effect in Hamlet’s description of the skilled performance of the First Player, who in “a dream of passion” Could force his soul so as to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d. Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit.
The “conceit” (or imagination, fiction, concept) produces a physical effect that results in physiological changes that produce (and do not merely represent) the forms appropriate to the lines. These in turn produce physiological changes in the auditors . . . sorrow in Polonius—“I prithee, no more”—and mimetic rage in Hamlet. As Sutton writes, “early modern neurophilosophers” never saw the body as “just an inert house for a ghostly soul. The body’s fluids and spirits, and the traces it conceals, were always active, always escaping notice, always exceeding the domain of the will” (1998: 16). The art for the player is “suiting” his conceit (or his passions) to the “forms.” This art is neither mimetic nor mechanical; like Wright’s trumpeter, the player experiences but also manages the passions. When Hamlet imagines the Player having the “cue for passion” he possesses, his own mismanaged passion leads him to become a bad actor, tearing the passion to tatters and cursing like a “very drab.” The work of Joseph, Roach, and recent researchers in the passions and the humors points to a theory of gesture that dispels the myth of a static, mechanical system applied by rote, or a stock repertoire of stage business meant to cover up lack of preparation. When juxtaposed with recent findings about the relationship of gesture, cognition, and language, the importance of the art in harnessing the brain–language–body system becomes apparent. Gesture has become an increasingly important area of research in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, and embodied cognition. Long ignored as random hand waving, gesture is
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now widely seen to play an active causal role in thought and in language production. Rather than seeing gesture as simply an add-on to language—as is implied in the concept of “body language”—or as completely separate from spoken language, which is defined as “speech sounds plus a grammar” (McNeill 1992: 12), linguists such as David McNeill, Adam Kendon, and Susan Goldin-Meadow have compiled an impressive body of evidence on the “thought–language–hand link” (McNeill 2005: 252). Gesture has been studied along a continuum defined by Kendon (1982) and described by McNeill (1992), running from “gesticulation”—those spontaneous gestures co-present with speech—to emblems, pantomime, and sign language. Since the work of David Efron (1941), there has been an increasing tendency to study gestures “in life, as they occur spontaneously during conversation” (qtd. McNeill 2005: 13). As McNeill and others acknowledge, the technologies of video reproduction have been crucial in reconfiguring the field, as these allow the study of otherwise ephemeral phenomena. The ability to capture and study the gestural components of language has led to an explosion of research in this area, but has also resulted in a devaluation of the art of gesture, which, as I will suggest below, is unwarranted. The tight link between gestural and linguistic systems has been demonstrated by the case of Ian Waterman (“IW”), a patient studied at length by McNeill and Jonathan Cole. As a result of a virus, IW lost his proprioceptive abilities and had lifelong impaired instrumental action (McNeill 2005: 240). That is, every movement he makes must be under deliberate conscious control and be monitored visually. This remains true of all movement for IW except gesture. Although he had to work consciously to regain control of gesture, it is now nearly automatic (Cole 2009: 345). Gesture occurs spontaneously with speech and is modulated with it just as in unimpaired subjects. According to McNeill, “gestures, as part of the process of speaking, are generated as an integral component. Without imagery, there could not be speech; gestures embody these images. For this reason someone with impaired instrumental action should still spontaneously gesture. And this is true of
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IW” (2005: 233). Key to this point is the inseparable link between language and imagery. For McNeill, the “imagerylanguage dialectic (materialized in gesture and speech) is an interaction between unlike modes of thinking. The disparity of these modes is the ‘fuel’ that propels thought and language; the dialectic is the point at which the two dimensions intersect” (2005: 4). Such gestures have been studied in two ways: as integral to a subject’s ability to think—“as part of the individual speaker’s ongoing mental life” and as “part of the social interaction in which the person participates” (McNeill 2000: 11). As McNeill himself acknowledges, this is something of a false dichotomy, as it artificially separates cognition from the social. Nevertheless, the distinction between gesture as a means of cognitive boot-strapping and gesture as a communicative medium may be a useful heuristic. The work of Goldin-Meadow has been of particular value in examining the first of these phenomena. In Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think (2003), Goldin-Meadow reviews a range of recent research about the role of gesture in thought, particularly the ways that gesture is deployed in educational and developmental contexts. “Mis-matches” between speech and gesture are especially revealing: “Speakers can reveal in gesture information that they may not know they have” (GoldinMeadow 2003: 55). That is, specific constraints on speech production limit its versatility: “speech conforms to a codified, recognizable system . . . by and large, we are constrained to the words that our language offers” (2003: 23). In contrast, gestures can provide imagistically rich material “unencumbered by the standards of form that language imposes” (2003: 24). Unlike the linear properties of language, “Gestures are free to vary on dimensions of space, time, form, trajectory . . . and can present meaning complexes without undergoing segmentation or linearization” (2003: 25). Because they are not reducible to propositional content, gestures are undervalued yet essential components of human “languaging.” Goldin-Meadow also presents considerable evidence that gesture “lightens the speaker’s cognitive load” (2003: 150).
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Difficulties in producing or remembering speech tend to increase gesture, and more complex cognitive tasks—such as describing a picture from memory rather than while viewing it—result in more gesture production (2003: 48). It is her contention that gesture “plays a causal role in thinking” (2003: 150; emphasis added), a hypothesis that she tested by manipulating gestural conditions during difficult cognitive tasks. If gesture is simply a separate and additive task joined to speech, we would expect gesture to increase the cognitive load, but if gesture reduces the load, speakers who gesture while performing difficult tasks should perform better (2003: 157). GoldinMeadow found that when subjects were given the dual task of solving a mathematical problem and remembering a list of words, gesture significantly aided memory. That is, our hands help us think. What then does gesture do for the listener/spectator? A number of studies have sought to understand the effect of gesture upon memory and comprehension on the part of audiences. In a study on “indexical understanding of instructions,” Arthur Glenberg and David Robertson demonstrated that video instructions accompanied by pointing are retained and implemented much better than the same instructions without the “deictic gesture” (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 163; Glenberg and Robertson 1999). As Goldin-Meadow summarizes, “Gesturing may make it easier to link a speaker’s words to the world” (2003: 163). Similar results have been found in studies of material retained from lectures in a gesturepresent or gesture-absent condition. In a study on “The Role of Gesture in Memory and Social Communication” (Church et al. 2007), the authors found that representational gesture—iconic gestures that show information about objects or actions—result in greater retention of material. As McNeill suggests, “if speech and gesture are integrated into one system for the speaker, they should also be integrated for the listener” (1992: 134–5). These new findings on gesture have been of great interest to researchers in Distributed Cognition/Extended Mind. In Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive
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Extension, Clark explores the relevance of this work for theories of cognitive extension. He argues that gestures “extended cognizing in action” (2008: 123). Using Goldin-Meadow’s and McNeill’s work as outlined above, Clark suggests “the act of gesturing is part and parcel of a coupled neural–bodily unfolding that is itself usefully seen as an organismically extended process of thought” (2008: 125–6). Gesture helps us to “create a stable physical presence that may productively impact and constrain the neural elements of thought and reason” (2008: 128)—gesture does not simply dress up pre-existing thoughts, but gesture and speech form “interacting parts of a distributed, semi-anarchic cognitive engine” (2008: 133). Gesture becomes recruited into a “soft-assembled” extended system that opportunistically uses material to hand, across what we might think of as boundaries of brain, body, and world. Attention has also been paid to gesture in distributed cognition literature. In a paper entitled, “Complementary Strategies: Why We Use Our Hands When We Think,” Kirsh discusses the ways in which we use “our hands to help think, remember, and perceive” (212) and to manage attention. Gestures thus become a “complementary strategy,” defined as “any organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads . . . fingers or hands and surrounded material objects are recruited for cognitive use” (1995a: 216). In “Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things,” Hutchins suggests that “in some circumstances, the body itself can become a cognitive artifact, upon which meaningful environmentally-coupled gestures can be performed. In such settings, motion in space acquires conceptual meaning and reasoning can be performed by moving the body” (2006: unpag.). Both material and somatic “anchors” for thought can be used to manage attention and memory. Hutchins discusses the ways that workers in “complex culturally constituted settings,” such as ships, airplane cockpits, and laboratories, use “multiple sense modalities” to manage the complex perceptual, attentional, and mnemonic demands of complex online activities. Gestures can work as “somatic” anchors—the body itself serving as a means of stabilizing and thus manipulating complex cognitive processes.
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While this research primarily studies online spontaneous gestural production, it may also provide a framework for a reconsideration of theatrical and oratorical gesture. Gesture is not simply decoration, nor is it an outmoded formal system superimposed upon and perhaps competing with speech. Rather, research on its deep links with speech, the hand–thought–language system, its ability to provide access to nonverbal knowledge, its effect on lightening the cognitive load, memory, and attention—all of these elements lead us to see that the art of gesture is a vital part of the distributed cognitive toolkit of the early modern actor. As McConachie puts it, “Long before cognitive science discovered it, actors have always treated gestural (articulatory and manual) events as single units of communication” (2009: 89).8 Especially in the absence of long rehearsal times and other material carriers for memory, the production and encoding of gesture—the coupling of action with accent—is a powerful tool for the player and one of the foundations of his expertise. For a novice performer, “Thus thou must speak,” and “Thus thy body bear” might very well seem to be a double cognitive burden, having to remember two things rather than one, resulting in poor timing and artificiality. We have all perhaps seen novice speakers or actors painfully map an action onto a word, often a beat or two behind the proper moment. But this is precisely what we would expect of novices, because one of the major challenges in learning any skill is to get to a level at which performance becomes fluid and formerly disparate skills become integrated. For this reason, training in the art or techne of gesture is absolutely crucial to the development of the cognitive systems underpinning theatre. An immediate objection to this line of argument might be mounted: When Clark, Goldin-Meadow, McNeill, and Kirsh discuss gesture, they are explicitly not interested in rehearsed or “conventional” gesture—that is, for them, the gestures worthy of discussion are the “online” spontaneous gesture that is produced in immediate, face-to-face discussions—gesture produced more or less unconsciously during the production of
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“free speech.” Following Kendon’s “continuum” of gesture, McNeill in Hand and Mind carefully distinguishes contemporary linguistic research on gesture from its counterpart in rhetoric. He writes that the Roman rhetorician Quintilian and the early modern writer John Bulwer “took care to specify gestures that could be designed in advance as deliberate elements in a choreographed presentation. They are thus quite distinct from the spontaneous gestures that are the subject matter of this book” (1992: 3). He repeats this characterization of rhetorical gesture in Gesture and Thought, writing that the field has left behind the study of rhetorical gestures, “the mannered performances of orators with the hands and the body comprising more or less deliberate gestured embellishments on spoken public performances” (2005: 13). He describes treatises such as Quintilian’s as “the prescription of public and monologic gestures for oratorical use . . . . there is behind the theme the belief that gesture and language compete; thus gesture must be regulated and defined prescriptively” (2005: 14). This characterization of the art of rhetorical gesture as static and rote is similar to the account of “formal” acting discussed earlier. In the opposition of spontaneous and natural versus rehearsed and formal, the former qualities will invariably be preferred. But is this opposition as stark as it appears? The first question might be whether the handbooks are in fact simply prescriptive, as McNeill assumes. The exhaustive listing of gestures in Bulwer’s Chirologia, and, especially, Chironomia, and in Quintilian’s Oratorio may well give the impression of a formal, routinized system. Quintilian lauds the power of the hands in particular: “As for the hands, without which the Delivery would be crippled and enfeebled, it is almost impossible to say how many movements they possess, for these almost match the entire stock of words. Other parts of the body assist the speaker: the hands, I might almost say, speak for themselves” (Oratorio 2001: 11:3:85). Quintilian follows this statement with an exhaustive description of the range of gestures available to the orator. But perhaps any codification would give a similar impression; in the case of Quintilian, Jon Hall has argued that gestures were not “part of a complex
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and artificial system largely alien to the experience of most Romans” (2006: 152), but instead were essentially descriptive of the range of gestures used in Rome at the time, with discussions on their decorum for use in oratory itself. Indeed, Quintilian specifically advises against young orators planning gestures too minutely in advance (see 11:3:109). Rather, voice and action arise naturally from the embodiment of language— punctuating the breath with gesture, which creates a physiological effect: “when the temperature goes up, Gesture too will become more frequent as the Delivery becomes faster” (Quintilian 2001: 11:3:111). The idea that because a system is subject to description, and because it is available as an “art,” that it is therefore by definition somehow insincere and merely mechanical represents a misunderstanding of the true dynamics of gesture in the early modern period. Bulwer’s work is often similarly misrepresented. The widely reprinted and often misunderstood plate attached to Chirologia cataloguing the “Alphabet of naturall Gestures of the Fingers” gives the misleading impression that Bulwer’s treatise is prescriptive. While it is true that the second book, Chironomia, catalogues the available repertory of gestures used in the “arte of manuall rhetoric,” the over-arching aim of Bulwer’s treatises is to describe the “two Amphitheatres” of the body, “proceeding either from the effect of sufferance or the voluntary motions of the Mind . . . . Which wee cal the Speaking Motions, or Discoursing Gestures, and naturall language of the Body, to wit the Hand and Head” (Chirologia 1644: A7r–v). Bulwer’s treatises in many ways anticipate some of the findings of the cognitive linguists, especially about the constitutive role of the hands in thought. Like a “ready Midwife,” the hand has a “naturall competency to express the motives and affections of the Minde . . . . [And] takes oftentimes the thoughts from the forestalled Tongue, making a more quicke dispatch by gesture . . . . For the gesture of the Hand many times gives a hint of our intention, and speakes out a good part of our meaning, before our words, which accompany or follow it, can put themselves into a vocall posture to be understood” (B2v). Having escaped “the curse at the confusion of Babel” (B4r), the hand
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is “ready and cunning to expound our intentions” (B4v). This account is far removed from a mechanical mapping of gesture onto word; rather, the hand and tongue are virtually in “contestation,” seeking to “over-match” one another in a dynamic, spontaneous act of cognition. The second book of Chironomia addresses the question of the art of gesture, “Whereby the Naturall Gestures of the Hand, are made the Regulated accessories or faire-spoken Adjuncts of RHETORICALL Utterance” (1644: title page). In the prelude on the “necessitie and dignitie of this Art,” Bulwer cites schools, theatres, “the mansions of the muses,” churches, courts, and the “councell-Table” as places “where we daily see many admirable things done by those, who in the course of Humanitie and profitable studies, have been well instructed and inform’d in this facultie of the Hand” (A6r). Although some peoples are naturally gifted at gesture—the Greeks “by reason of the thinness and the puritie of the aire” were able to use “motions of the Minde and Body . . . with an incredible facilitie” (A6v)—not everyone is so naturally proficient, as we can tell by the example of inept orators who are seen “so preposterously & ilfavouredly expressing their minds” (A8r). Because “the actions of the Hand are not perfect by Nature,” the art of gesture must be taught. Bulwer compares the art to the military training: “this artifice of the Hand is no lesse necessary to excellent discourses and conceits, then discipline among Soldiers, without which courage is of no effect, and valour most commonly proveth unprofitable” (B5r). This disciplining of the hand, tongue, and mind takes enormous study, similar to the art and skill of painting; among the qualities are “a good fancy and sound judgement, actively apt to every thing, and industrious in the observing of mens natures, and assimilating their manners” (C3r). The “hand of the eloquent man [will] move aptly” when he “hath converst with Nature, and insinuated himselfe into all the veines of the affections of the Hand, and by diligent study hath attained to an exquisite experience in the properties of the fingers,” (C3r-v). Thus Bulwer is adamant that “in all action, nature bears the greatest sway: every man must
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consider his own nature and temperament . . . . Wherefore a rhetorician must now himself, yet not by common precepts; but he must take counsel of nature for the framing of the complexional and individual properties of his hand” (K8r). Before proceeding to his catalogue of gestures in manual rhetoric, then, Bulwer stresses the twin ethics of nature and discipline; the true manual artist does not memorize pre-formed gestures and join them to words in a rote fashion, any more than a true painter copies patterns. Rather, he draws upon natural aptitude, observation, and discipline: The movements of the hand are part of a techne, a distributed system harnessing the hand–brain–language nexus, extended social networks, treatises, institutions (including educational systems, religious, professional), and embodied expertise, including experience in rhetorical invention and, in the case of actors, ability to parse written language for its action. In this regard, the art of gesture may well have a claim to be seen as a genuinely extended (rather than merely embodied) practice. Clark likens gesture to the self-stimulating process of sub-vocal rehearsal of material to be kept in working memory or “self-direct, overt or covert speech” (2008: 127). As he suggests, gesture can be “usefully seen as an organismically extended process of thought . . . . [that] need not stop at the boundary of the biological organism” (126). Clark buttresses this claim with the familiar example of writing, in which the act of inscribing is the act of thinking, a “kind of coupled neuralscribbling-reading unfolding” (126). Certainly the example of the paper (or computer) as forming part of a neural–bodily– artifactual system is plausible, as is the account of gestures as forming part of an extended system. But I would argue that the art of gesture can more robustly claim to be part of a genuinely extended system than can the spontaneous self-stimulation of our online neural–language–gestural system. In training the “online system,” the subject recruits not only the thought–language–hand–body system, but also a wide range of material, social, and institutional resources as part of a complex process of enskillment. The online gestures made in free speech production are by necessity outside of conscious control and to
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some extent outside of conscious awareness—part of the vast percentage of thought that takes place implicitly. In McNeill’s terms, gesticulation is “non-conventionalized” (2005: 12). In this way, gestures are similar to the soldier’s qualities of valour and courage, in Bulwer’s analogy. These are necessary but not sufficient conditions—the true art of soldiership lies in training these qualities through discipline. The work of Jurgen Streeck provides a useful model for bridging these two perspectives. Streeck stresses gesture as a craft, suggesting that “we may for the moment think of gestures as a kind of artifact, a cognitive artifact, that enables flexible, dynamic, and multimodal representations which operate both inter-psychologically, that is, in the intersubjective, public realms, and intra-psychologically, that is in the realm of individual imagination and thought” (2009: 173; original emphasis). Derived from Lev Vygotsky, this view of gesture begins to open a space for the consideration of it as a discipline, a “sustainable art” (203), “a mode of communicative praxis and craft, comprising skills, methods, and techniques” (203). This “craft” is “acquired through observation, imitation, and practice, as well as variation and invention by individual human bodies, who develop gestural signature or style in the process” (203). Yet the analogy Streeck makes between gesture and craft is at times rather vaguely framed, as he is primarily interested in pragmatics, not in “creativity or beauty or skill itself . . . . The craftsman’s standards apply to gesture only in a loosened fashion; refinement is not measured, only situated success” (204). Despite his interest in developing the implications of gesture as a craft, the “art” seems to operate outside of conscious awareness, developing through immersion in something like a habitus. While this is a powerful account of the implicit and pervasive shaping of gesture and the body through social embedding, it nevertheless neglects the realm of conscious skill development—the entire art of the hand, which is explicitly concerned precisely with matters of beauty and skill. Streeck dismisses this tradition in a footnote describing the art of rhetoric as “attempts to codify gestures and train orators and actors in proper gesticulation” (203).
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Roman Katsman offers a contemporary example of the training of hand and body in a context of craft and expertise: the gestures used by Yemenite Jews when reciting the Torah. Katsman describes a distributed gestural system, in which a reciter of the Torah is guided by hand gestures performed by an instructor. This technique is used both in instructing young children in recitation and in guiding the work of more experienced, even expert, reciters in the synagogue. Katsman argues that the gestures used are neither normative nor spontaneous—that is, they fall between the categories often used to classify gestures. He suggests that “Torah learning is a mechanism whereby micro-dynamic cognitive-corporeal programs are created through an ongoing interaction between teacher and student, which are then assimilated by the student and become automatic semi-conscious reflexes for him. Learning consists of constructing links among various activities: vocal movement, hand movement, and body movement” (2007: 5). He further suggests that “the Yemenite gestures have the role of managing the cognitive-emotional-corporeal activation of two men who recite the Torah and through them, through the voice of one of them, to activate the entire congregation” (12). Here is a potential model for thinking about gesture in a way that does not assume that learned gesture is therefore “rote” gesture, but that it can be seen instead as a form of bodily discipline that provides a powerful mechanism for encoding, yet does not result in a rote reproduction of performance. As I will argue, this research has important implications for the art of gesture—“action”—as it was practiced in the early modern playing system. The powerful hand–thought– language nexus identified by contemporary researchers in gesture may have informed the work of the early modern player. Once this connection is recognized, it is possible to identify a role for the art of gesture that does not reduce this practice to mere rote reproduction of a codified system. In early modern accounts of “action,” it was this ability above all that enlivened the words of the playwright. As Roach suggests, the player’s part is parsed for passions, shifts in emphasis and emotion that are lifted out of the words into the body of
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the actor, and from there, literally communicated to the spectators. Palfrey and Stern’s account in Shakespeare in Parts confirms the importance of this quality above all others in the process of individual “study” of the cue-script. They write: “[i]nevitably, we cannot recover all such actions when looking at parts . . . . What we must be is meticulously alert to an individual’s part’s prompts for action: in a part that, cues aside, excludes all others, there is nothing more fundamental for orientating the actor to a role’s often quickly changing contexts” (2007: 327).9 As Holger Schott Syme reminds us, even in prefaces to printed plays critical of performances, playwrights acknowledged the key role of action; John Marston suggests that “the life of these things consists in action,” and Webster argued that “a great part of the grace of this (I confesse) lay in Action; yet can no Action euer be gracious, where the decency of the Language, and Ingenious structure of the Scaene, arriue not to make up a perfect Harmony” (qtd. Syme 149). Webster’s comment here, however interested in making a claim for the importance of language and structure, points to the importance of seeing a distributed structure at work, as the success of performance rests both with the dramaturgical and linguistic skills of the playwright and the skill of the performer in gracing both with action. Astington has argued that Shakespeare was a particularly skilled poet of gesture. While some scenes demand that actors “work out in detail . . . quite specific requirements about mutual contact and facial gesture,” others are “invitations to virtuosity” moments in which the text calls for “physical invention”: the embodied expertise of the skilled player (2006: 254). Astington argues that Shakespeare is innovative in this respect, comparing the supple and fluid calls for gesture in Shakespeare’s plays to the more static, monolithic verse of a play such as Gorbuduc: “for the actor faced with long speeches and declarations the challenge is first and foremost that of vox: how to keep the rhetoric aloft, connected, and compelling. The play is not written in anything approaching naturalism— movement, gesture, and facial expression are seldom indicated or required by context—and the words of the play are at a long remove from lived experience” (2006: 257). Like Suffolk’s
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long speech from Henry VI discussed earlier, the speeches in Gorbuduc are relatively inert, requiring the actor to rely primarily upon “skillful modulation” of the verbal elements of the text to aid memory and performance (257). If we put this in cognitive terms, we could argue that plays such as Gorbuduc do not take full advantage of the language– hand–brain nexus—that is, that the actor learning such a part does not have a fully integrated system upon which he might rely. In other words, the appropriate gestures must be added by the actor, an extra step that is more cognitively costly than mapping gesture-potentiated language onto the body. Much of pre-Shakespearean drama is under-written, dependent upon the physical ingenuity and improvisation of the actor to fill out a verbally sparse part, as we see with some of the plays of the Queen’s Men, as Scott McMillin and Sally Beth MacLean have argued. But there is a considerable distance between Gorbuduc and Shakespeare, as Astington himself acknowledges. In concluding this chapter, I wish to examine a play that may point to a way of understanding the relationship between a technical and cognitive innovation on the Elizabethan stage: The Spanish Tragedy. The popularity and enduring appeal of this play has long been recognized. In an anecdote reported by Richard Braithwaite and repeated disapprovingly by Prynne, a woman on her deathbed asked not to be reconciled to God but to see Kyd’s play once more: “Hieronomo hieronomo. O let me see Hieronomo acted.”10 What was it that thrilled people about this play? Usually the answer is “spectacle,” and there is spectacle enough in the play. Other accounts would point to its “embodiment of the essence of revenge tragedy” (Fraser and Rabkin 1976: 167). But this is a surely a hindsight of a sort; original audiences would not be aware that a new genre was being forged. I argue instead that the true innovation was technical—a yoking of action and accent such that the word extends into the world through the medium of the actor’s body. Kyd’s work is among the first to harness the hand–language–brain nexus, through the means of the techne of the art of gesture, which is itself coupled with the bodily discipline of regulating the passions. We might then call this
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the hand–language–brain–passion nexus, a powerful tool for the actor seeking control over memory and attention. Erne has called Kyd the first English dramatist to write dramatically, suggesting that “[t]he sophistication of its dramatic artistry as well as the tremendous emotional impact the play had on its early modern audiences. . . . do not suffer from comparison with some of Shakespeare’s plays” (2001: 95). Wolfgang Clemen’s analysis of speech in Kyd distinguishes Hieronomo’s soliloquies from “set speeches” such as those that characterize Gorbuduc: “[t]his is a soliloquy which is not only spoken, but also acted”; it demands “properties or appropriate gesture . . . . Even the outbursts of grief, . . . are associated with direct references to action” (Clemen 1980: 109–10). In Kyd, Clemen argues, “[t]he histrionic quality of the popular drama has here forced its way into the static, declamatory monologue of the classical tradition” (1980: 111). Even in so set a speech as Don Andrea’s exposition, we can see the use of formal action within the rhetorical tradition cuing the actor into the means of mapping his speech onto the play world. In recounting his experience in the underworld, Don Andrea describes “three ways”: The right hand side Was ready way unto the foresaid fields . . . The left-hand path, declining fearfully, Was ready downfall to the deepest hell . . . ’Twixt these two ways, I trod the middle path. (1.1.59–72)
This simple example recalls the “counterfeit presentment” of the two brothers speech in Hamlet, in which the bilateralism of the human body easily maps from the rhetorical trope of antithesis. Moreover, in the case of the early modern stage, the left/right binary maps onto the culturally determinate position of hell on the left-hand side, a position familiar from visual iconography as well as the conventional placement of hell from the late medieval visual tradition. The positioning of the two actors—Revenge and Andrea—on stage similarly
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provides evidence of Kyd’s command of visual stagecraft, as Eleanor Tweedie has argued (1976: 224-5). Similarly, in the second scene, the tropes of antithesis and balance that underpin the General’s description of the battle structure this long expository sequence in an organized and coherent fashion. But as might be suggested by the notoriety attached to the character of Hieronomo, it is in these speeches that we can see most starkly Kyd’s technical innovation in yoking gesture (action) and words. This technique maximizes the player’s ability to call upon the tight neural link between language and gesture, as well as his embodied expertise and experience in the arts of “manual rhetoric.” Hieronomo’s famous lament upon finding Horatio’s body shuttles effortlessly between the language, the actor’s body, and the stage environment. The screams of Bel-Imperia cue the action, an example of the canny use of the acoustic environment and the tight relationship between sound and fear. As Stallybrass and Jones have shown, early modern theatre goers were exceptionally attentive to the semiotics of clothing, and the direction “Enter Hieronomo in his shirt, etc.” prompts both player and audience to attend to the rawness of the passion. The true innovation in this soliloquy is its incorporation of time (see Clemen 1980). The speech does not encapsulate a pre-existing state, but instead unfolds dynamically in time. It begins with Hieronomo’s initial bewilderment and fear triggered by the scream: “What outcries pluck me from my naked bed / And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?” (2.5.1–2). The following lines map his search through the “garden” for the source of the sound, and the body is discovered in “real time”: “but stay, what murderous spectacle is this?” The speech cues the player to cut the body down and examine it, and stages the growing realization of its identity, when he recognizes the garments and then the boy himself: “Those garments that he wears I oft have seen. Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet son!” The implied movement of the action from the vertical—the body hanging from the bower—to the horizontal—the body lying on the stage floor below the kneeling father—is then underscored by the rhetorical tropes that govern the speech.
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Horatio is first addressed and embraced: “O, was it thou that call’dst me from my bed? O speak, if any spark of life remain.” As the action unfolds, the question “Who hath slain my son” is directed outward to the unknown “savage monster” responsible. The outcry is followed by renewed attention to the body: “And left thy bloody corpse dishonour’d here, / For me, amidst these dark and deathful shades / To drown thee with an ocean of my tears?” The sequence of apostrophes—“O heavens . . . O earth . . . O poor Horatio . . . O wicked butcher”—clearly moves the body in different directions, both vertically and horizontally across the space of the stage. This is not a rote or formal set of movements, but instead these are “cues for passion,” as Hamlet would say, patterns of language that frame the actor’s body through the rapidly shifting passions demanded by the speech. The play also uses an array of properties and visual spectacles to extend the passions beyond the body. The “handkercher besmeared with blood” that Hieronomo carries, the sword which he “sets unto his breast” and then discards, the petitioners’ papers that are rent and torn, and, of course, the severed tongue that he spits from his mouth—all of these are means of extending the animation of the language through the actor’s body, via the interior motions of the passions, through the body and into the properties. That it was this dynamism that impressed Kyd’s contemporaries is attested to by the nature of the “additions” commissioned for the play. None of these advance the plot—to the contrary, they tend to halt its forward movement—nor do they add spectacle or develop the revenge tradition. Rather, they tend to rehearse and expand precisely the qualities of Hieronomo’s most famous speech, increasing the ferocity of the passions. The First Addition to 2.5 essentially draws out and replays the first horror of recognition, first by having Hieronomo misrecognize the body and then by replaying the discovery Say you? Say you? Light! Lend me a taper, Let me look again—O God! Confusion, mischief, torment, death and hell
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Drop all your stings at once in my cold bosom, That now is stiff with horror. (2.5.88–92)
The valued qualities—those that Henslowe found it worth paying playwrights to imitate—are the cues for action, the passions inextricably linked to the words. Perhaps the most obvious example of the popularity of these qualities is the addition of the painter’s scene, another example of the repeating patterns of bereft fathers to which McMillin calls attention (1972). Hieronomo rehearses the discovery scene in visual terms, offering a version of events both condensed and extended: “bring me forth, bring me through alley and alley, still with a distracted countenance going along, and let my hair heave up my nightcap . . . . There you may show a passion, there you may show a passion.” The specifically visual aspect of passion rehearsed here is another indication of the value placed upon the dynamic aspects of action in the play. That the action is an art is indicated by Hieronimo’s abilty to manage these passions. In his revenge speech (3.13) he enjoins himself to a bodily discipline that will hide the outward evidence of the passions: No, no, Hieronimo, thou must enjoin Thine eyes to observation, and thy tongue To milder speeches than thy spirit affords, Thy heart to patience, and thy hands to rest, Thy cap to courtesy, and thy knee to bow, Till to revenge thou know, when, where, and how. (3.13.39–43)
Quieting the spirit demands quieting the hands, just as the excitation of the spirit in passion will animate the hands. Like Hamlet’s Player, who finds “forms to suit his conceit,” Hieronimo here reflects upon the connection between spirit, body, and the social world manifested by the cap and the knee. Certainly the passions manifested by the yoking of action and accent very quickly begin to seem overdone and outmoded, as attested by the many parodies and echoes of the play that
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pervade the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is merely a confirmation of Menzer’s argument about “infinite regress”: what looks thrillingly natural to one generation of theatre goers is hopelessly hammy to the next. Shakespeare’s rather more subtle and supple mapping of action onto accent has perhaps blinded us to the nature of Kyd’s innovation in this art. From the point of view of the actor learning his part, especially in a part-based system, playwrights who open the language up to the actor’s expertise and training in action allow him to use, harness, and display the passions, to extend them through the body, to the properties, to other actors, and to the audience. This is a genuinely extended system, in which the rhetorical training undergone by all schoolboys trains the body in gesture, in effect piggy-backing on the powerful brain–hand–language nexus, entraining the body and mind into a system that communicates the passions. A player who divorces action from accent “out-Herods Herod”; in contrast, a playwright who controls the technical material at his disposal, ranging from meter to action, provides his player the material to “suit the word to the action, the action to the word.” This chapter has examined crucial elements of the skill and expertise of both player and playwright. The verbal spine of the play and its implicit calls for gesture and passion formed the basis for the expert forging of personation on the part of the player. The means by which such skills were transmitted and inculcated has yet to be considered, however. These matters are taken up in Chapter 3.
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Chapter 3
Social Cognition: Enskillment in the Early Modern Theatre
From the triad of “insides, objects, and people” set forward in the Introduction I have thus far focused primarily upon the first two elements. But no account of any distributed cognitive system can neglect the absolutely crucial role of “people,” or the complex social structures that integrate with and, in turn, modulate the cognitive mechanisms, objects, and environments that constitute the early modern playing company. Indeed, separating these elements is something of an artificial exercise, as their coordination is the key principle of Distributed Cognition. As argued in Chapter 1, for example, only by integrating study of the cue-script into an account of the social coordination of the company members can this cognitive artifact be fully understood. Nevertheless, the structures and practices of the company merit attention in themselves, for these ultimately give shape and form to the plays. This chapter develops further my analysis of the early modern theatre as a workplace through an extended discussion of the social mechanisms of training and expertise employed by the companies. The precise structure of these workplaces and their inner workings are not entirely clear and must be pieced together from a scattered array of evidence and inference, including Henslowe’s diaries and archival records of apprenticeship contracts and lawsuits. The basic organizational model for
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commercial practice available in early modern England was the guild. Although playing companies were a new form of enterprise and therefore could not be formally recognized as guilds, Knutson argues that they were nevertheless organized along guild-like lines, suggesting that the companies “learned strategies of growth and productivity from the guild structures where newly authorized members were absorbed into the commercial life of the profession” (2001: 20). Knutson observes further that: As a commercial paradigm, the guild does not preclude hierarchical lines of power between a company and its patron; indeed, the guild is itself a hierarchical structure. Yet its design offers stability for the company when beset by misfortunes such as changes in membership, changes in patronage, playhouse closures, and personal quarrels. (23)
Stability at the core of the company made a vital range of embodied experience available that could be called upon when inducting new apprentices and hired men into its structures and practices. A stable set of social relationships, facilitated by an established organizational model and the material stability afforded by permanent playhouses, nurtured the expertise of the novice members of the company. But by the same token, the presence of particularly talented players, especially boys, affected the nature of the plays that were written for the company, as evidenced by the complex array of female roles in Shakespeare’s later plays. This chapter examines the mechanisms by which young boys mastered the skills necessary to personate an extraordinary range of female parts. A range of tools is needed to examine this issue. Methodologically, we need accounts of skill and expertise: a robust model of thinking that encompasses knowledge, affect, embodiment, and environment. We also need the rich vein of archival evidence on apprenticeship that has recently been mined by scholars such as Kathman. Finally, we require careful attention to the playtexts themselves, as they reveal practices of skill development and attitudes toward expertise.
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Studying the playing companies within the context of skilled practice and expertise dispels lingering doubts about the capacity of boys to perform complex female roles. As Stanley Wells has recently noted, skepticism about the abilities of boy actors to portray women still exists. Rather than settling for a deficit model in which the plays work despite having to make do with boys, we can turn the equation around see that the training and enskillment constantly going on within the plays (and more widely within the larger teaching environment of apprenticeship) enabled the development of high levels of sophistication in the female roles. In this chapter, I employ theories of social cognition and skill development within the context of Distributed Cognition, arguing for the crucial role of the social embodiment and embeddedness of agents within a complex system. These theories throw light upon Shakespeare’s representation of skill, expertise, and failure in his plays, especially as portrayed through his depictions of novice and expert players within them. From this foundation, the second half of the chapter re-examines the evidence for apprenticeship practices and the treatment of boys within the company. As found in the discussion of the material elements of the theatre, it is crucial to consider the evidence in the context of an entire distributed system of activity, rather than to concentrate on one element alone. I demonstrate this argument through an examination of a range of plays by Shakespeare and others that feature parts for young actors playing small boys. I offer a model for reading these roles as training parts, using the work of Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner on scaffolding, as well as research into distributed workplace practices. Expertise and Enskillment: A Distributed View A large literature exists around the nature of expertise. Much of this work focuses on individual expertise, with perhaps the best-known work having been done in the area of chess (de Groot 1966). Two distinct strands of expertise theory have been proposed: the dominant classical computational
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model, exemplified by the work of Eric Ericsson, and a phenomenological model developed by the philosopher Herbert Dreyfus. The Ericsson model emphasizes deliberate practice, expert domain knowledge, and the creation and cultivation of models of mental representation that normally operate in the background but can be explicitly evoked in times of need.1 Individualist-oriented accounts of expertise tend to focus on practice and skill development over time, as might be entailed in learning a musical instrument. This is the model adopted in large measure by the Noices’s study of expertise in acting, discussed in Chapter 1. In contrast, Dreyfus’s model stresses “spontaneous, transparent coping,” where expert practice often operates well beyond conscious control and cannot be reduced to propositional content (Dreyfus 2002: 417). While each model illuminates some elements of the cognitive mechanisms underlying skill development, both tend to neglect the crucial importance of the social surround and the phenomenon of group expertise, in which the collective organization of skill envelops the novice, so to speak, and constrains and prompts his activity. In contrast, the research of Hutchins, discussed in Chapter 1, is especially helpful in illuminating the distributed and situated nature of skill development within a setting of group expertise. The naval vessels he studies are characterized by a strongly organized and hierarchical social system within a purpose-built space. Such an arrangement offers substantial cognitive support to the novice. Even without explicit instruction, the novice may be able to accomplish tasks in that environment that would be impossible otherwise. Writing of the ability of midshipmen to perform complex navigational calculations, Hutchins observes: One can embed a novice who has social skills but lacks computational skills in such a network and get useful behavior out of that novice and the system . . . . The task world is constructed in such a way that the socially and conversationally appropriate thing to do given the tools at hand is also the computationally correct thing to do. That is, one can be functioning well
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before one knows what one is doing, and one can discover what one is doing in the course of doing it. (1995a: 224)
This is a distributed view of expertise, focusing not on individual skill development alone, but on the complex environment within which a novice works, in which some of the knowledge and expertise needed to perform in the task world is off-loaded onto tools, spatial configurations, and social systems, in a fluid and dynamic integration of insides, objects, and people. As Suchman suggests, expert workplaces, especially in timepressured collaborative environments, are characterized by “a strong mutual orientation among co-present workers to each other and developing situations” (Suchman 1997: 51). Such orientation is particularly important in inducting novices, as Charles Goodwin shows in his discussion of the “exquisite coordination of apprentice and teacher” in learning flight tracking (Suchman 1997: 54; see also Goodwin 1991). This research has been confirmed and extended by contemporary anthropological research on expertise and enskillment. “Enskillment” is a term coined by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. He describes the process in this way: The novice watches, feels, or listens to the movements of the expert, and seeks through repeated trials to bring his own bodily movements into line with those of his attention so as to achieve the kind of rhythmic adjustment of perception and action that lies at the heart of fluent performance . . . . This process . . . is one not of information transmission but of guided rediscovery. As such, it involves a mixture of imitation and improvisation. Copying is imitative, insofar as it takes place under guidance; it is improvisatory, insofar as the knowledge it generates is knowledge that novices discover for themselves. (2001: 141)
Greg Downey elaborates on the complex articulation between master and novice in such an environment, arguing that “imitative learning is often not simply a matter of modeling and copying . . . teaching and what is learned may not [be] identical” (2008: 210). That is, enskillment is not a simple matter
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of rote imitation but instead involves creative acts of coordination between teacher and student. Other contemporary anthropological research on the induction of novice practitioners into a skilled workplace setting has confirmed the importance of the social and environmental surround. In her work on the development of “skilled vision” for identifying good breeding stock among Tuscan cattle, Grasseni argues that perception is not an inert mechanism, but instead must be trained through a process of “education of attention” (2004: 48). In such a system “[s]pecific sensibilities and capacities . . . are engendered through the active socialisation of apprentices into structured and shared contexts of practice” (48). This framework demands that we examine the “process of enskilment in a culturally, socially and materially structured environment” (43). Kirsh’s argument that Distributed Cognition is the study of the “variety and subtlety of coordination” has profound implications for the way we understand skill—as Downey writes, “learning a skill is the development within the novice of an ability to coordinate the body with the environment” (2008: 211). Similarly, Harley Shaiken’s “Experience and the Collective Nature of Skill” describes the way that, in learning the job, apprentices “learn more than technical skills: they develop the world view of the journeymen and the community into which they are being initiated” (1996: 285). Explicit instruction is by no means the most important means of inculcating skill. In an ethnographic observation of tailors, Lave “found that [they] had evolved a systematic ordering of instruction. From time to time, she observed explicit instruction . . . . Far more important was the way in which apprentices were kept busy in productive activities while getting exposure to—and practice in—subsequent steps in the tailoring process” (Cole 1985: 157). Similarly it has been shown that girls learning to weave have observed the process for years before they start formal instruction. At that point they begin to “practice what they already know” (Cole 1985: 157). These views hold in common that “learning is always situated” (Sawyer and Greeno 2009: 348). In these accounts, skill
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is not simply a suite of abilities but is always developed within a specific context, framework, and environment. Skill is profoundly social. Even when practiced in isolation, skill is undergirded by a myriad of social practices, technologies, and tools. In particular, the development of expertise builds upon internal mechanisms of perception and attention, situated within an embodied and socially rich environment. A cognitively rich environment is especially important for the development of “situation awareness,” which is perhaps the most relevant aspect of expertise for the early modern player. Situation awareness is defined as the ability to adapt to changing and unexpected conditions; often it is not explicitly taught, but instead it “develop[s] silently alongside more observable features like skilled physical performance” (Endsley 2006: 633). Highly skilled athletes, especially in team sports, stand out from their fellows for their ability to see patterns in the action, predict upcoming events, and cope with unusual circumstances. When the unexpected happens, “[e]xperts fail gracefully; novices crash” (Feltovich 2006: 56). The superior performance of experts in part results from their development of the capacity of attention. Sian Beilock, Sarah A. Wierenga, and Thomas H. Carr have discussed the crucial importance of attentional mechanisms in gaining mastery of a skill: “Less practiced performance that demands the active memorial maintenance of skill knowledge should require extensive attentional resources for successful implementation” (2002: 1212). Anyone who has learned a new skill is familiar with the stage of “active memorial of skill knowledge.” Learning a technical skill such as driving a golf ball or archery demands a long initial phase in which the steps must be consciously rehearsed, taxing working memory and making it difficult to cope with additional task demands. That is, the novice’s need for “explicit monitoring and control”—keeping in working memory the task demands—requires nearly all of the novice’s “attentional resources” (1212); none is left over for coping with unexpected or unusual situations. This hypothesis has been tested by contrasting the performances of novices and experts in a “dual-task”
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environment. In one experiment, Beilock and colleagues contrasted the performance of experts and novices in golfputting. When asked to divide attention between putting and a word-recognition task, experts were able to rely upon their rich resources of procedural memory and domain knowledge to compensate, while the performance of the novices plummeted. Forcing novices into a “dual-task environment” dramatically reduces performance and results in a crash (1228). Novices and Experts: Shakespeare’s Plays Experts differ from novices not simply in what they know, but in how they know. One element that distinguishes amateur from expert performance is the apprehension of the core nature of the activity under study. Novices are often not aware of the true components of expertise, often mistaking a particular isolated element of performance for the larger gestalt. In the case of the theatre, novice or inexperienced actors are preoccupied with learning lines and verbatim reproduction at the expense of other elements of performance, especially fluency and personation. We might think of memory for the lines as the top level of performance—for the expert, a pyramid of experience undergirds the delivery of the lines, while for the novice, line-learning sits precariously atop a thin level of knowledge of the task demands. As they are represented in Shakespeare’s plays, novices are essentially operating in a dual-task environment. The memory for the lines and gestures represents one task, and in rehearsal or private study the amateur assumes that remembering them constitutes the entire task. But they reckon without the audience, which effectively constitutes the second task. Coping with the unexpected—and often rude— reactions of the audience splinters the attentional resources of the novice, and he is no longer able to maintain the lines in working memory. Shakespeare’s plays frequently stage novices or amateur actors performing, and none of them can cope with the unexpected. As established in the previous chapter, the key to
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“remembering” your lines is never to give the appearance of forgetting—that is, never stop, but instead engage in “fluent forgetting.” Amateur actors represented always stop; any interruption disrupts the brittle cognitive system. The best-known example of this dynamic is of course the inset play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Before the performance, Theseus describes the effect of his presence upon those unaccustomed to addressing someone as exalted as he: Where I have come, great clerks have purposed To greet me with premeditated welcomes; Where I have seen them shiver and look pale, Make periods in the midst of sentences, Throttle their practised accent in their fears And in conclusion dumbly have broke off, Not paying me a welcome (5.1.93–9)
The young aristocrats watching Pyramus and Thisbe, however, are not content to “give them thanks for nothing.” Like all inset plays in Shakespeare, this performance is marked by a series of rude interruptions and purportedly witty comments that completely disconcert the novice players. Quince loses his grip upon the punctuation of his speech when faced with an actual audience. Starveling/Moonshine is disconcerted by the audience interruption and simply repeats his lines: “This lantern doth the horned moon present . . . / This lantern doth the horned moon present / Myself the man i’th’ moon do seem to be” (5.1.231, 235). Further interruptions render him dumb until Lysander explicitly instructs him to continue: “Proceed, Moon.” At this point Starveling steps out of character, seemingly to ensure an end to the ordeal: “all that I have say is to tell you that the lantern is the moon, I the man i’th moon, this thorn bush my thorn bush, and this dog my dog” (5.1.246–7). Perhaps the most extensive treatment of the vicissitudes of amateur performance appears in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the issue is explored twice: in Moth’s failed oration to the ladies and in the pageant of The Nine Worthies that concludes
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the play. The first of these is especially relevant to the question of the boy actor, as Moth is one of the most striking boys in Shakespeare’s canon; indeed, his skill and versatility underpins the representations of failure that mark the comedy. Boyet’s description of the process of coaching young Moth for the presentation before the ladies provides an account of methods of training boys in “action” and “accent”: Their herald is a pretty knavish page That well by heart hath conned his embassage. Action and accent did they teach him there. ‘Thus must thou speak,’ and ‘thus thy body bear.’ And ever and anon they made a doubt Presence majesticall would put him out, ‘For,’ quoth the King, ‘an angel shalt thou see Yet fear not thou, but speak audaciously.’ The boy replied, ‘An angel is not evil. I should have feared her had she been a devil.’ With that all laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, Making the bold wag by their praises bolder. (5.2.97–108)
As we saw in Chapter 2, Moth’s training consists of two elements. He is instructed in “accent” or correct pronunciation: “thus thou must speak.” He also must learn “action” or gesture: “and thus thy body bear.” As Boyet presents it, Moth is “perfect” in these tasks, having “well by heart con’d his embassage.” But “conning” a part and performing before an audience are two very different tasks, the one demanding a quick wit and a ready memory, the other demanding the “situation awareness” that is gained only through experience. The young men fear that their performer will choke under the pressure of appearing before the “presence majestical” of the Princess: “an angel shalt thou see / Yet fear thou not, but speak audaciously.” As Edel Lamb has pointed out, training boys to be “audacious” was a primary goal of grammar school performances, citing Thomas Heywood’s argument that play acting was “necessary for the emboldening of their junior schollers to arme them with audacity” (2009: 99). Young Moth seems
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to confirm his audacity when he responds with a quip: “An Angel is not evil. / I should have feared her had she been a devil.” The false bravado displayed here is immediately found out when the Princess decides to confound the expectations of the young speaker, and plots “to their penned speech render we no grace / But while ‘tis spoke each turn away her face’ ” (5.2.146–7). Boyet predicts the effect upon young Moth: “Why, that contempt will kill the speaker’s heart / And quite divorce his memory from his part” (5.2.148–9). And so it proves. Moth addresses the ladies as “[a] holy parcel of the fairest dames / That ever turn’d their—backs to mortal views.” The ladies’ rudeness causes Moth to lose the thread, substituting the more relevant description “backs” for the rehearsed word. Berowne hisses: “ ‘Their eyes,’ villain, ‘their eyes’!” causing Moth to try again: “That ever turned their eyes to mortal views. / Out,” whereupon Boyet interrupts with “True, out indeed!” Once more Moth attempts: “Out of your favours, heavenly spirits, vouchsafe / Not to behold—” but he is here corrected by Berowne: “ ‘Once to behold,’ rogue!” He starts again: “Once to behold with your sun-beamed eyes—/ With your sun-beamed eyes,” prompting the feeble joke of Boyet: “They will not answer to that epithet / You were best call it ‘daughter-beamed’ eyes.” Moth is now well and truly out and breaks character, finally complaining that “they do not mark me, and that brings me out.” Berowne sends him off in disgrace: “Is this your perfectness? Be gone, you rogue!” (5.2.155–70). The scene amusingly plays with failure. First, it presents with the pleasurable disjunction of watching skilled actors personate unskilled characters, as the actor playing Moth has already turned in a virtuoso performance that is remarked upon by many of the other characters in the play. As watching an actual failed performance is excruciating, it vital that the audience has absolute confidence in the control of the “real” actors in order to enjoy watching the devastating collapse. Young Moth may be “perfect” under test conditions, and he has been coached by learning to imitate the words and gestures, the “action” and “accent,” of his part. However, given
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the unexpected action of the ladies, the demands of working memory are such that he forgets everything and crashes. Despite his braggadocio about his “audacity,” he founders when confronted by the dual tasks of remembering lines and coping with audience inattention. Tellingly, Moth’s predicament is represented by his lack of fluency—his need to repeat, often from the beginning—after each interruption. As Rubin (1995) has shown, material learned in rote fashion rather than through deep understanding of content is generally recalled only in the exact order in which it is committed to memory, with the novice learner needing a running start to recall any lines. Moreover, Berowne’s over-riding concern with exact verbatim reproduction is counterproductive, as it simply creates another layer of complexity with which the boy must cope. The pageant of The Nine Worthies follows a similar path. Costard begins his speech three times: I Pompey am— [Boyet]—You lie, you are not he. —I Pompey am— [Boyet]—With leopard’s head on knee [ . . . ] —I Pompey am, surnamed the Big [Dumain]—‘The Great.’
The final interruptions prompts Costard to acknowledge the audience and to continue: It is, ‘Great,’ sir:— Pompey surnamed the Great, That oft in field, with targe and shield, did make my foe to sweat, And travelling along this coast, I here am come by chance, And lay my arms before the legs of this sweet lass of France.— If your ladyship would say, ‘Thanks, Pompey,’ I had done. (5.2.539–50)
Costard cheerfully integrates the prompt into the speech and in turn informs the Princess what is expected of her. In a
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manner similar to Bottom, his naiveté about the boundaries of performance allows him to treat the event with aplomb: “I hope I was perfect—I made a little fault in ‘great’ ” (5.2.553). Nathaniel and Holofernes are not so fortunate. Nathaniel is utterly “dismayed” when subjected to the rude gibes of the aristocrats and leaves the scene in disgrace: When in the world I lived I was the world’s commander. By east, west, north, and south, I spread my conquering might. My scutcheon plain declares that I am Alisander,— [Boyet]—Your nose says, no, you are not for it stands too right. [Biron] Your nose smells ‘no’ in this, most tender-smelling knight. [Princess]—The conqueror is dismayed. Proceed, good Alexander. [Nathaniel] When in the world I lived, I was the world’s commander,—
Like Moth and Costard, Nathaniel makes a running start from the beginning at each attempt, until the combined force of the interruptions finally overcomes him completely and he must be helped off by Costard: “A conqueror and afeard to speak! Run away for shame, Alisander.” In his apology for the performance, Costard refers to Nathaniel as “an honest man, look you, and soon dashed,” a description that also implies reproof of the behavior of the young aristocrats. Holofernes, presenting Judas Maccabeus, makes the most spirited attempt to deliver his speech, but is defeated by the jeers and interruptions of the court. Despite his determination not to be “put out of his countenance,” Holofernes too fails to finish his speech. This failure seems due less to insufficient presence on his part than to the complete unruliness of the audience. In this context, his exit line is a well-deserved rebuke to the court: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (5.2.617). In these depictions of amateur performance, Shakespeare explores the nature of expertise. The novice/amateur actors show a range of abilities to cope with the provocations of the
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audience. For most, the gap between their preparation and knowledge and the time-pressured, on-line demands of performance results in abject failure. The “choking” of the amateur actors stands in sharp contrast to the skill of the only purportedly professional acts encountered within the fiction Shakespeare’s plays: the “tragedians of the city” who visit Elsinore in Hamlet. These players have, of course, been the subject of an enormous critical literature, particularly with respect to Hamlet’s remarks upon the children’s companies and his advice to the players. Less remarked has been their significance as models of skill and expertise. Their fluent, effortless professionalism stands in sharp contrast to the hesitancies and failures of the novice actors. The players display these qualities from their first appearance. After a brief greeting, Hamlet demands an immediate performance: “We’ll have a speech straight. Come, give us a taste of your quality, come a passionate speech” (2.2.395–5). The demanding nature of a “passionate speech” will display the “quality” of the player to best advantage. An avid amateur, Hamlet searches his memory for the speech he hopes to hear: “One speech in it I chiefly loved—‘Twas Aeneas’s tale to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter. If it live in your memory, begin at this line—let me see, let me see.” Hamlet’s first attempt at the line is inaccurate: “The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’Hyrcanian beast— ‘tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus— “The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms . . .”
In the first quarto Hamlet’s search for the right lines is emphasized more strongly; when he lights upon the correct line, he states, “O I haue it.” Like most amateurs, Hamlet becomes fluent only once he establishes the beginning of the speech; once launched properly, he delivers twelve lines of verse with considerable aplomb until he turns the speech over to the player. [Hamlet] With eyes like carbuncles the hellish Pyrrhus Old grandsire Priam seeks.
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So proceed you. [Polonius] Fore God, my lord, well spoken, with good accent and good discretion. [First Player] Anon he finds him Striking too short at Greeks.
From the perspective of expertise, the most salient characteristic of the First Player’s performance is its fluency and unflappability. The First Player picks up Hamlet’s final line effortlessly, even sharing the line with him across Polonius’s interruption so that together they deliver a full pentameter line. There is no halting recollection, only immediate and fluid recall, until the moment Polonius rudely interrupts: “This is too long” (2.2.459). Hamlet angrily retorts: “It shall to the barber’s then, with your beard” and commands the player to “say on. He’s for a jog or a tale of bawdry. Say on, come to Hecuba.” Polonius’s evaluative comment and Hamlet’s response to him is not unlike the dynamics of the amateur inset plays, in which spectators of a superior social class apparently feel entirely free to openly evaluate the performance before them. Indeed, once the First Player continues, he manages to deliver only one line—“but who, ah woe, had seen the mobled queen”—before Hamlet himself evaluates the line: ‘ “the mobled queen?’ / [Polonius] That’s good; ‘mobled queen is good.’ ” Despite the second set of comments, the Player yet again picks up precisely where he was interrupted to complete the line: “run barefoot up and down.” Moreover, the interruption takes place just at the moment at which the passion of the speech is building to its climax, resulting in the physiological changes to his body and face that Hamlet notes in the final speech of the play. In this case, expertise is exhibited both through the stunning delivery of the speech itself— the Player’s ability to “force his soul” to produce the somatic effects of passion—and through his ability to control the dualtask environment, effortlessly coping both with the demands of memory and personation and with the vicissitudes of handling that always unpredictable entity: the audience. The King’s Men were apparently noted for such aplomb. At a performance of Pericles for the French court, an observer
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noted an unusual supper break: “After 2 actes the players ceased till the french all refreshed them w/th sweetmeates/ brought on chinay voyders [i.e., China plates] & wyne & ale in bottells, after the players begann a newe.” As Ioppolo notes, “Apparently it was the actors’ dexterity in seamlessly rejoining their play after a long interruption, rather than the gluttony of the French, that produced this reaction” (2006: 58). Such fluency is also exhibited in The Murder of Gonzago, in which the players attempt to carry on with the play to the very moment at which Claudius storms out, despite constant disturbances and the typically rude and inattentive behavior on the part of aristocrats that always seems to accompany Shakespeare’s plays within plays. Hamlet’s command to Lucianus to “leave thy damnable faces and begin” is often taken as a condemnation of the outmoded mugging of the Player. But the Player needs some way to cover the six lines of by-play between Ophelia and Hamlet that intervene between his entrance and his first lines. Thus the “faces” being made by the Player probably represent his attempt to improvise business during this long exchange— that is, to paper over the long delay in attention on the part of his audience. As Shakespeare represents it, then, the hallmark of expertise is situation awareness, or the aplomb to cope with the unexpected. Boy Actors, Enskillment, and Apprenticeship How is such aplomb developed? We now have a fairly clear picture of the apprenticeship structure of the adult early modern playing companies, thanks in large part to the archival research of Kathman (2004a; 2005; 2009). Far from a purely ad-hoc and random set of arrangements, apprenticeship was a far-reaching system, based in large part upon the existing London livery model. As we have seen, the playing profession was not an officially recognized guild, but companies nevertheless used its mechanisms when apprenticing boys. Players who were free of the livery companies could legally bind apprentices, even if their training was unrelated to the titular guild. As a freeman of the Grocers’ Company but also
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a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, John Heminges bound two boys, both of whom are mentioned in the existing plot of The Second Part of the The Seven Deadly Sins (2009: 5). Edward Alleyn is known to have bound a boy to a shorter covenant servant contract in the same period. He was also the “master” of John Pig, a boy in the Lord Admiral’s Men (Kathman 2004a: 18), for whom Henslowe bought both male and female costumes over the years, including a “lytell jacket” in 1598 (Foakes 2002: 317). Theatrical apprentices were between twelve and twenty-one or twenty-two years old, with a “median age of around sixteen to seventeen” (Kathman 2005: 220), roughly the same age range as other London apprentices. Using legal records, Henslowe’s diaries, and the evidence of the plots, Kathman has also discovered much evidence about their careers; they usually remained with their companies throughout their apprenticeship, playing progressively more difficult roles. Usually they progressed from female to adult male roles, as evidenced by the plots, which show the same boy (e.g., “Mr. Alleyns boy”) playing female and smaller male roles (2005: 220–46). As Astington points out, not all players passed through the apprentice system, nor did all apprentice players enter the profession (2010: 4). Nevertheless, the evidence for a widespread training system based at least loosely on the guild system is compelling. Kathman’s evidence effectively dispels arguments based upon the assumptions that boys were not capable of playing demanding female roles. Nevertheless, as Wells has recently demonstrated, such judgments still linger. Rosenberg’s 2001 article “The Myth of Shakespeare’s Squeaking Boy Actor—or Who Played Cleopatra” argues for the absurdity of accepting: [T]he image of a stripling, however precocious, sustaining Shakespeare’s increasingly complex, weighty women’s roles against experienced male players in perhaps the greatest acting company the world has known. As if an ultimately designed racing vehicle were to be run on three full-size wheels and a half-size one.” (2001: 5–6; see also Rosenberg 1954)
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This image of the lopsided racing car is a classic deficit model of understanding the past. Moreover, it imagines the car as the sum of its individual parts, rather than as a dynamic mechanism. Rather than imagining a deficit model in which the plays work despite having to make do with boys, we can turn this round to see that the training and enskillment constantly going on within the plays (and more widely within the larger teaching environment of apprenticeship) enabled the development of high levels of sophistication in the female roles. Rosenberg’s use of the term “stripling” assumes that the boys were very young, which is a common misconception. As mentioned earlier, Forse similarly argues against the widespread use of boys citing, among other things, the cost of providing costumes for growing children, persistently referring to the boys as “pre-pubescent” (1994: 78). However, Kathman establishes that boys often played female roles into their late teens, the same age as many boys entered university (2005). Suggestions that boys cannot have played women (or at least cannot have played them well) rest on the assumption that a boy is necessarily “pre-pubescent,” but this equation is not borne out by the evidence. Steve Brown argues that the biological onset of puberty was not widely used as a marker of the end of “boy” status in the early modern period (1990: 245). While it is sometimes assumed that boys could play women only before their voices had broken, this argument does not distinguish between the singing voice, in which register is crucial, and the spoken voice, which with skill and training can approximate a range of registers (Mann 2008: 35; see also Bloom 2007). In Twelfth Night, for example, Viola-Cesario has an exceptionally demanding speaking role. However, despite Viola’s early statement that “I can sing / And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.2.54–5), all the occasions upon which he might sing are taken up by Feste. Thus it is possible that this particular boy could credibly reproduce the spoken female register, but could not carry off singing “as a eunuch” (1.2.53). This dismissal of boys as pre-pubescent youngsters also neglects the vital point that these boys were trained in ways that are impossible to replicate in modern settings, with
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regulations on work hours, schooling, and occupational safety. As Bentley writes: The convention of the Shakespearean theater most difficult for moderns to accept is that of the boy players . . . . Since comparatively few moderns have ever seen professionally trained juvenile actors performing any roles except those corresponding to their own age and sex, many are baffled by the imaginative feat of an adolescent boy enthralling a sophisticated audience with his performance of Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Webster’s Duchess, or Ford’s Annabella. (1984: 113)
The inability to imagine trained boys also lies behind decisions to cast adult men as women when all-male casts are desired. Wells notes that the practice under Mark Rylance of casting adult men in the female roles at the New Globe may have created the misleading “impression that this is indeed a return to original practice” (2009: 173). Such assumptions rest behind David Muse’s discussion of his all-male casting of Romeo and Juliet for the Shakespeare Theatre in 2008: “the reason I believe that the love poetry in this play is so glorious is in part because Shakespeare knew that two young men would be performing this play. And that you couldn’t just count on two actors up there, looking at each other and realistically being in love in a way that the audience was going to buy” (Fox 2008 unpag.). Such views isolate a single element in the system, imagining the boy as an autonomous individual rather than viewing his work within a system of embodied practice and group expertise. If a boy of today would be unable to perform a role such as Cleopatra convincingly, this is due not so much to the individual talent of the hypothetical boy, but the absence of training and workplace structures that would nurture it. The vast majority of contemporary critics, of course, accept the widespread use of boys in the playing system. However, they often argue that the relationships thus created were inherently exploitative and necessarily highly eroticized. Dympna Callaghan has argued that the theatrical system was inherently exploitative: “[t]heatre as an institution was, however,
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implicitly based upon the forced expropriation of child labour and the threat of sexual victimization” (2000: 67). Harbages’s vivid description of the plight of the child actor in the boys’ companies set the tone for many analyses to come. He describes the boy as “little more than a chattel” (1952: 33) “divorced from his parents, huddled up in lodgings, worked to what must have been the limit of his physical endurance” (1952: 32). The emotionally laden language here neglects the social and cultural context of apprenticeship in the society at large, in which a stable future could only be secured through forms of service. Many critics have pointed to the actual or potential eroticization of the boys. Alan Sinfield suggests that “[w]hen boys perform Ganymedes and page boys, therefore, they are rehearsing a version of their actual social position” and that “the page, or other youthful minion, was understood as contributing to the erotic system of the household” (2006: 117). Michael Shapiro and Laura Levine, among others, cite antitheatrical fulminations against boy players as key evidence for the erotic economy of boy players. Shapiro assembles a range of lewd references and innuendo about the sexual availability of “play-boys,” as he persistently refers to them. In More Dissemblers Besides Women, Donaldo says of an attractive page boy that “I could never get that little monkey yet to / put off his breeches.” Shapiro claims that this comment “illuminates what was widely perceived as the common treatment of apprentices in all-male theatrical troupes” (1994: 57). Similarly, he suggests that a reference in The Four Prentices of London “registers the female character’s embarrassment at having to impersonate a boy and perhaps at being used sexually as one, as play-boys were alleged to be in the world of the playhouse” (1994: 120). But what is the actual evidence about how boys were treated and regarded? As Mann has pointed out, the evidence cited is not completely conclusive. Anti-theatrical diatribes are not necessarily to be taken as evidence of widespread practice or indeed of popular opinion. Christian M. Billing’s book Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage questions the
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relevance of these sources for “elite or popular thought concerning sex identity in a period spanning more than half a century” (2008: 8). As Mann points out, many of Shapiro’s references are taken from poetic or dramatic satire. These include Jonson’s joke in Poetaster about boys becoming “ingles” or sexually available “pets” to the adult actors and Middleton’s reference to “a nest of boys who can ravish a man.” I do not mean to dismiss this evidence or to underestimate the importance of the rich vein of recent work on the gender dynamics of the plays. However, my argument does depend upon a recognition of the professionalism and developing expertise of the boy player. An exclusive concentration of the erotics of spectatorship is not sufficient for a full account of the complex issue of boys and performance—indeed the manipulation of the latent erotics of spectatorship should be seen precisely as an element of developing expertise, not merely as some accident of the boy’s natural body. Contemporary accounts of boy actors that emphasize their skill can thus be set beside those that emphasize their erotic appeal. It has often been noted that spectators use the female pronouns when describing boys playing women’s parts. Henry Jackson’s famous 1610 letter describes a performance of Othello, noting that [A]ssuredly that rare Desdemona, killed in front of us by her husband, although she consistently pleased her cause eloquently, nevertheless was more moving dead when, as she lay still on her bed, her facial expression alone implored the pity of spectators. (Tillotson 1933: 494)
In the same year Richard Burbage and the boy player John Rice performed at a pageant honoring Prince Henry and were described as “two absolute actors, even the verie best our instant time can yield.” Rice played Corinea “a very fayre and beautiful Nimphe, representing the genius of olde Corineus Quene of the Province Cornwall, suited in her watrie habit yet rich and costly with a Coronet of Pearles and Cockle Shells on her head” (qtd. in Bartholomeusz 1971: 11). Four years
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earlier, when he delivered a speech written by Ben Jonson to King James, Rice was described as “a very proper Child well spoken, being clothed like an angell of gladness with a Taper of Frankincense burning in his hand” (Bartholomeusz 1971: 11). Kathman estimates that Rice would have been about fifteen in 1607 and eighteen in 1610 (2005: 232).2 Both accounts emphasize his skill; the 1610 description explicitly ranks him alongside Burbage as an “absolute Actor,” while the 1607 account contains that hint of patronizing commendation that seems to mark his youth. Thomas Coryate’s equally famous remark on women actors in Venice also stresses the skill of the boys, which he is surprised to see matched by women: “I saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before . . . . and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a Player, as ever I saw any masculine Actor” (Shapiro 1994: 222). Thomas Nashe specifically refers to boys playing women as an argument for relative decency and modesty of the English theatre: “Our players are not as the players beyond sea, a sort of squirting baudie Comedians, that have whores and common Curtizens to playe womens partes, and forbear no immodest speech or unchast action that may procure laughter” (qtd. Shapiro 1994: 246). Shapiro dismisses this evidence: “Given the controversy over cross-gender casting and the allegations of homoeroticism surrounding the play-boys, I read Nashe’s statement ironically” (1994: 246). But Nashe’s remark can much more plausibly be taken at face value, and Shapiro is surely cherry picking the evidence. At the least, Nashe’s comment needs to be set alongside the anti-theatrical accounts of boys. In respect to the issue of the working conditions of the boys, so vividly described by Harbage, the evidence is mixed. Our most notorious examples come from the early boys’ companies rather than the adult playing companies. The bestknown example is the Henry Clifton suit. Using the authority to impress boys as choristers for the Chapel Royal, Nathaniel Giles and Henry Evans seized young Thomas Clifton on his way to school and “did to the great terror and hurt of him . . . . Haul, pull, drag, and carry away” to the playhouse.
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There they gave the boy “a scroll of paper, containing part of one of their said plays and interludes . . . . And commanded [him] to learn the same by heart” (Chambers Vol. 2:44). It is hard to deny the exploitation of this act, and the Star Chamber accepted Clifton’s suit and censured Gilbert for exceeding his authority. As Lamb points out, the suit hinged on the insult to gentlemen’s sons and thus had class resonances; Clifton objected to the potential downward mobility of his son’s occupation. Indeed, the children’s companies moved to a more apprentice-like structure in later years, in an example of the changing cognitive ecologies of that system (a point to which I will return briefly in the conclusion). As Lucy Munro writes, “the children’s companies’ repertories and dramaturgy did not remain static” (2005: 3). In the case of boys apprenticed to the adult companies, there is ample external evidence of close affective relationships between masters and apprentices. Playhouse wills show the network of close affiliations among both “fellow” players and apprentices. In 1604 Augustine Phillips willed “Samuell Gilborne my Late Apprentice the some of ffortye shillinges and my mouse Colloured veluit hose and a white Taffety dublet A blacke Taffety sute my purple Cloke sword and dagger” (qtd. Honigman 1993: 73). To his other apprentice, James Sandes, he gave “my base viall . . . the some of ffortye shillinges and a Citterne a Bandore and a Lute, To be paid and deliuered vnto him at thexpiracon of his {terme of} yeares in his Indentur or Apprenticehood” (1993: 73). These apprentices, who received more money than the fellows of the company, were willed twenty or thirty shillings, and, perhaps more importantly, were left very valuable tools of the trade. Samuel was willed expensive clothing and weapons, while James received a suite of musical instruments. In an example of a former apprentice remembering his service in his will, Nicholas Tooley gave “vnto Mrs. Burbadge the wife of my good freind Mr. Cutbert Burbadge (in whose house I doe nowe lodge) as a remembraunce of my love in respect of her motherlie care ouer me the somme of Tenn poundes” (Honigman 1993: 125). As Richard Burbage’s apprentice (Kathman 2005: 230), Tooley clearly viewed Cuthbert’s wife in a familial light.
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In 1630, John Heminges willed John Rice, his former apprentice, “the somme of Twenty shillinges of lawfull English money for a remembraunce of my loue unto him” (Honigmann 1993: 167) and in 1614 Alexander Cooke entreated his former master Condell to manage his bequest for the “vse and bringinge vp of my poore or
nts” (Honigman 1993: 95). Apart from wills, the playful letter of John Pyk (known as Pig) to Edward Alleyn’s wife gives a strong sense of his role in the household. Written out by Alleyn for Pyk while the company was on tour, the letter is addressed to Mistress Alleyn. Pyk sends “his humbell commenda[tions] . . .” to you and to my goode master hinsley & mystiris and to my m[aster’s] sister bess for all her harde delyng w[ith] me J send her harty Comenda[tions] hoping to be behowlding to her agayne for the opinyng of the coberde: and to my neyghbore doll for calynge me vp in a mornyng and to my wyf sara for making clean my showes & to that ould Jentillman mounsir pearley [that] even fought w[ith] me for the blok in the chemeney corner.
Signed “petty prety pratlyng parlyng pyg,” this letter gives a sense of the affective bonds that could govern masterapprentice relationships and is a testimony to the networks of relationships in the household, down to the family cat.3 Writing Roles for Boys: Enskillment and Scaffolding Techniques While we now know a great deal about the formal arrangements for binding apprentices, we know less about how boys were trained and the mechanics of enskillment that undergirded their progress through the company. The extant contracts are boilerplates in which the apprentice agrees not to waste his master’s resources and promises to conduct himself honestly, and the master in his turn agrees to train the boy in the arts and mysteries of the craft. Earlier historical writing on apprenticeship tended to assume that apprenticeship worked on a two-stage model, in which a period of explicit instruction
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was followed by a gradual development of skill, at the endpoint of which the apprentice was actually adding value to the master’s enterprise. But this two-stage model of expertise has serious flaws, and the research in Distributed Cognition describes the critical importance of being embedded within a dynamic, cognitively rich working environment. Mann distinguishes these boys from “ordinary apprentices”: The concept of ‘apprentice,’ borrowed from other sorts of craft, however, still remains problematical. In the typical trade the apprentice was not paid because in theory he was not a producer of value. He would be given lots of menial tasks, and little by little would learn the skills of his trade, as did his theatrical equivalent; but the latter, if chosen for female roles, was immediately engaged in a specialism quite different from that of his master, and fairly soon working at a level far superior in skill and importance in his profession relative to that of any conventional trade apprentice. (2008: 48)
Mann’s description of the work of “ordinary apprentices” is somewhat outdated. Patrick Wallis (2007) has conducted an extensive critique of this model, arguing that most apprenticeships do not work on a static two-stage model, and that the line between “training” and “valuable work” is not nearly as clear-cut as it may seen. While Mann is correct to point to the high level of skill involved in performing female parts, this account neglects the work boys may have done before assuming these demanding roles. Almost by definition, a boy playing a complex female role is no longer a novice, and the roles for young boys in the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists may have acted as a crucial means of inculcating the skills needed to perform these more complex roles. Thus by the time boys came to play the “weighty” female roles, they were indeed highly skilled. Skill, after all, is what people pay to see. Metatheatrical references by actors playing cross-dressed female characters call attention not only to the gender dynamics of the plays, but to the virtuoso display of skill needed to perform breeches parts. Cleopatra’s reference to seeing “some
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squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness” is not an apology but a boast. A careful examination of the roles written for younger boys on the early modern stage shows that this sort of onthe-job training was a key feature of the theatrical system. In this section, I examine the mechanics by which playwrights crafted the roles they allocated to very young boys. Crucially, the skills inculcated are not merely remembering lines, which would have posed few difficulties for boys who had received any formal schooling, but also developing the necessary presence to manage the complex attentional demands of work on stage. As the character Amorphus says in Cynthia’s Revels: “It is with your young grammaticall courtier, as with your neophyte-player, a thing vsuall to bee daunted at the first presence, or enter-view” (3.1.2–5). The contrasts between Shakespeare’s novices/amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost and the experts/professionals in Hamlet showed us some of the qualities that must be inculcated in the young actor as he learned to cope with the unpredictable demands of a live audience. To understand how such qualities were developed in young players, we need to read the “theatrical intentions” of the extant playscripts (McMillin 2004: 244). Indeed, scholars such as McMillin, Catherine Belsey, and Richard Madelaine have produced readings of some of Shakespeare’s plays based upon a renewed attention to the roles of boys. Madelaine has argued that “it is time to approach Shakespearean boy actors in a way that recognizes the implications of their apprenticeship and its influence on the attitudes of the dramatists and adult actors to the boys and their roles” (2003: 225). Similarly, McMillin contends that Shakespeare sometimes wrote what he terms “restricted roles” for inexperienced players. By “restricted” McMillin refers to roles that are cued by a relatively small number of adult actors. Many prominent female roles are made up of largely two-person scenes, allowing the process of “study” for a part to be incorporated into the act of training a boy. In making this argument, McMillin modifies Stern’s contention that most of the preparation for a role consisted
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of private “study” of individual parts.4 By writing boys’ parts that could be rehearsed primarily by one or two master actors, playwrights could integrate training and their own preparation in a seamless process that erased the distinction between the two processes. Using the example of Desdemona, McMillin suggests that this role was deliberately “restricted” as a means of ensuring sufficient training and rehearsal with a master actor for the boys playing Desdemona and Emilia. Similarly, Mahood argues that: [Shakespeare] wrote some of these [bit] parts for trainee actors . . . . the plays themselves furnish evidence that Shakespeare was aware of the need to help tiro players in their first stage appearances, and that he devised some of the minimal roles in his plays almost entirely with this in mind . . . . [the stage direction] ‘Enter two or three’ can then signal ‘Two actors are needed here, but a small extra part can be made if you have a novice actor in need of work experience.’ . . . . the resultant group of two, or sometimes three, skilled men and a learner is after all a normal work group in any undertaking. (1992: 17–18)
Small speaking parts that were likely to be undertaken by boys mirrored both the patterns of deference inherent in both the apprentice system itself and the society at large. These scholars have intriguingly pointed the way for a reading of boys’ roles through the lens of theatrical training. Social and environmental support are crucial in coping with the attentional demands of playing. In scenes written for small boys, the attentional demands are off-loaded onto other actors, allowing the novice to attend solely to the absolutely crucial elements of performance. If we think back to Hutchins’s theory of the social dimensions of competence, we can identify myriad ways in which the theatrical environment operates as a “smart space,” able to constrain and enable the action of those operating within it. Early modern acting companies employed a wide range of what I term “scaffolding techniques” to structure the work of their young actors. “Scaffolding” is a term derived by Bruner from the work of the developmental psychologist Vygotsky (1978). Vygotsky
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argued that as children attempt to reach a new stage of development, they encounter the “zone of proximal development,” the step just out of cognitive reach. Adults help children attain the next stage by providing material, linguistic, and/or environmental support—“scaffolding”—to aid them in practicing the appropriate skills. The most effective forms of scaffolding may be environmental because, in such cases, a cognitively rich environment constrains possible choices and prompts the agent to perform the proper action. Such a model has been extended beyond developmental psychology into a larger framework for understanding human cognition as extended or distributed across brain, body, and world. In one sense, all theatrical action is “scaffolded” in that it takes place within a highly structured social and physical environment that supports and prompts the complex cognitive work of performing a play. But there are very specific forms of scaffolding that seem to have been widely used as a means of supporting the work of novice actors. For the novice, a scaffolded role provides a structure that constrains and thus enables his activity. McMillin’s example of the restricted role can be seen as a type of scaffolding, especially when the cues are repeated, or when the role is heavily structured to manage attention. Another form of scaffolding is explicit embedded instruction, in which direct orders such as “come hither, sirrah” are given to characters in subordinate social positions. In such cases the hierarchy in the plays mirrors the hierarchy in the larger social world and in the conditions of apprenticeship itself. One characteristic pattern of many of these roles is that they are circumscribed and restricted throughout most of the play, with a dramatically crafted “lashing out” scene late in the play that allows the boy to display his newly acquired talents to full effect. In what follows, I examine several examples of scaffolded small-boy parts across a range of plays focusing on the tactics used for the development of situation awareness. Perhaps the least-demanding way of orchestrating a boy’s first appearance on stage is through a non-speaking role, or dumb show. Small boys no doubt had many non-verbal opportunities to display
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special skills, as evidenced by Henslowe’s purchase of a “pair of hose for Nick to tumble in before the queen” (Foakes 2002). But presentational acts such as tumbling do not need to be integrated into the larger action of the play. When working with novice actors, careful orchestration is necessary to carry off effects of tragedy and pathos within the fiction of the play. The technique of shepherding, in which a boy is accompanied by an actor in a parental or master role, was an effective method of inducting boys onto the stage. The prologue to The Battle of Alcazar begins in such a way: Enter Muly Mahamet and his sonne, and his two young brethren, the Moore sheweth them the bed, and then takes his leaue of them, and they betake them to their rest. And then the presenter speaketh. Like those that were by kind of murther mumd, Sit downe and see what hainous stratagems These damned wits contriue. And lo alas How lyke poore lambes prepard for sacrifice This traitor king hales to their longest home These tender Lords his yonger brethren both. The second dumbe shew. Enter the Moore and two murdrers bringing in his vnkle Abdelmunen, then they draw the curtains and smoother the yong princes in the bed. Which done, in sight of the vnkle they strangle him in his chaire, and then goe forth.
The playwright uses the boys to create an effect of pathos, and the players distribute this effect across the company. The smothering of the young boys provides a striking visual image of their youth and helplessness. The verbal demands of the speech are handled by the presenter, who draws further attention to these very qualities, comparing the young players to “poore lambes prepard for sacrifice.” Shepherded by more experienced players, the boys are guided through the demands of the scene, extracting maximum pathetic effect with minimum risk. In the second example, taken from Selimus, the scaffolding takes the form of explicit embedded instruction. In this case the young messenger Occhiali is entrusted with lines that he
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must remember across two scenes. As we have seen, remembering the lines themselves is by no means the most difficult task for a novice actor. Nor is their perfect recall the major concern of the company. Rather, the most important element in a smooth performance is picking up the cue, for if the cue is missed, the scene will grind to a halt. Indeed, as evidenced by Shakespeare’s representation of amateur acting, novice/amateur performances collapse because a part has been learned “parrot-like,” with excessive regard to verbatim reproduction. The real challenge is coping with being on stage at all and keeping in working memory the myriad tasks that must be performed. The boy playing Occhiali is performing in a dualtask environment: He must remember the lines, or a reasonable approximation of them, but more importantly he must keep his composure on stage, listen for his cue, and respond. In this case, the scaffolding provided for the young actor is in the form of explicit embedded instruction. In scene 1, Occhiali is entrusted with a message by his master Selimus. He is alerted to his cue by his name: “Occhiali?” and replies “My Lord.” The message is: Lo flie boy to my father Baiazet, And tell him Selim his obedient sonne, Desires to speake with him and kisse his hands, Tell him I long to see his gratious face, And that I come with all my chiualrie, To chase the Christians from his Seigniorie: In any wise say I must speake with him.
Without speaking, Occhiali exits. Thus far his task is structured so that simple alertness to societal norms and patterns of deference will suffice. However, the following scene, in which he must deliver his message, is a much more complex large group scene, as the stage directions indicate: “Enter Baiazet, Mustaffa, Cherseoli, Occhiali, and the Ianissaries.” The young actor must find his place among the other characters and await his cue for the entire length of Baiazeth’s thirty-line opening speech. Upon its conclusion, Baiazet addresses him directly and asks for his
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message: “Yoong man, would Selim come and speak with vs? / What is his message to vs, canst thou tell?” This is probably the friendliest cue imaginable. The complex cognitive process of following a long speech listening for cues is greatly simplified by this strategy, thus freeing working memory for other tasks. In effect, a portion of the mnemonic and attentional load is distributed to other members of the playing company, so that the stress of listening for an arbitrary cue is alleviated. The boy playing Occhilali is alerted to his upcoming lines and dispatched such that fictive, theatrical, and extra-theatrical elements merge seamlessly, providing a kind of on-the-job training that would require relatively little additional explicit instruction. A somewhat more demanding version of this same pattern is found in the role of Olympia’s young son in Christopher Marlowe’s 2 Tamburlaine. This role closely fits the shepherding pattern. Act 3 scene 3 is the boy’s first appearance. He enters silently “above” with the Captain and Olympia. When the three characters re-enter in the following scene, the boy is first prompted to bid his father a silent farewell: “Sweet son, farewell! I die” (3.4.10). Olympia in turn addresses the boy directly: “Tell me, sweet boy, art thou content to die?” (3.4.18). The boy then has his only lines, designed to display the maximum pathos: Mother dispatch me or I’ll kill myself For think ye I can live and see him dead? Give me your knife, good mother, or strike home— The Scythians shall not tyrannize on me. Sweet mother, strike, that I may meet my father. (3.4.30)
Marlowe has chosen to minimize the verbal complexity of the boy’s language, using straightforward syntax and relatively simple vocabulary, with the exception of the word “Scythians,” which is repeated from Olympia’s speech. This scene perfectly encapsulates a “training” structure; the younger boy is carefully guided by the older, more experienced boy actor, yet is also given the opportunity to display his abilities.
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The effect of pathos requires careful orchestration. Indeed, the capacity of young boys to generate pathos seems to have been of particular interest to Shakespeare. Like other dramatists, Shakespeare combines the pathos effect with the trope of “toward” boy. These two modes are often set in play against each other. A young boy’s towardness is often said to presage his early demise, as Shakespeare’s Richard III grimly remarks of his nephew: “So wise so young they say never do live long” (3.1.79). Perhaps the most telling example of Shakespeare’s conscious production of pathos and towardness is the revision of the part of young Arthur in King John from its origins in the Queen’s Men version of The Troublesome Reign of King John. Shakespeare wrote the part of Arthur for a much younger boy than the comparable actor in The Troublesome Reign of King John. This does not of course necessarily mean that the actor himself was younger, though I tend to think so, but that the role of Arthur in King John continually stresses the childishness and “towardness” of the boy. In contrast, the role in the Queen’s Men version portrays Arthur as a somewhat older “youth.” Although both plays “shepherd” Arthur—that is, have him accompanied on stage by a maternal figure or guardian—in the Queen’s Men version he generally speaks and is spoken to in a manner little distinguishable from that of other characters. His first lines in The Troublesome Reign of King John are “Ah Mother, possession of a Crowne is much / And John as I haue heard reported of / For present vantage would adventure farre” (2.21).5 Later in the same scene he offers up, unprompted, a legal opinion on the validity of a hypothetical will disbarring him: “The law intends such testaments as voyd, / Where right discent can no way be impeacht.” In reply, Elinor says: Peace Arthur peace, thy mother makes thee wings To soare with peril after Icarus And trust me yongling for the Fathers sake, I pitie much the hazard of thy youth. (Scene 2)
The comparison with Icarus seems to point not to a very small child, but to a somewhat older “youth” overestimating his
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abilities and attempting to contend with adults—out of his league, certainly, but trying to play the game. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Arthur is written as a highly scaffolded part, with the young actor carefully shepherded throughout, up until his key scene with Hubert.6 His first entrance with King Philip is structured by a doubly embedded cue—the explicit instruction to Arthur to “embrace,” “love,” and “give welcome” to the Duke of Austria. Arthur’s dutiful set speech in reply welcomes the Duke formally, rather as the children in Elizabeth’s coronation procession had welcomed her.7 Young Arthur is then silent for over 150 lines, although he is the center of adult disputes, speaking only to protest, briefly and sadly, against his role as a pawn in the struggle between Constance and Elinor. In a scene of nearly 600 lines, Arthur has only nine, though these are carefully orchestrated for maximum effect. The pawn-like role of the boy continues in Act 3 scene 3, as he construes his plight only through the grief it will give his mother. His grandmother calls him aside with the command: “Come hither, little kinsman. Hark, a word” (3.3.18), while John simultaneously suborns Hubert to kill his young nephew. Throughout most of the play, the young actor is both shepherded and subject to explicit embedded instruction. His cues are almost always framed as direct commands of some kind, and the older actors (both the boys playing the strong female parts and the adult male players) can easily manage the young actor’s movement around the stage through their own movements, invitations, and commands. Arthur’s key scene in King John is of course Act 4 scene 1, in which he convinces Hubert not to carry out his plan. It is here that the different strategies for structuring the boys’ parts become most apparent. In The Troublesome Reign of King John, the dynamic between the characters depends less upon Arthur appealing to his youthful vulnerability than to a series of rhymed topoi about justice and mercy. There is little stylistic difference between Hubert’s and Arthur’s speeches— indeed, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, the use of parallel rhymed couplets presages the coming accord between the two. Shakespeare’s scene instead stresses the childishness of the “little Prince,” the “young lad” whose “innocent prate”
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Hubert fears will shake his resolve. The effect of the scene depends upon the pathos generated by the contrast between the childish language of the boy and the monstrosity of the contemplated act. Arthur’s use of relatively simple language— “Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes . . . and will you? . . . . Have you the heart?”—contrasts with the more prolix and florid language of the same character in The Troublesome Reign of King John, as evidenced by Arthur’s apostrophe to his eyes: Yee rowling eyes, whose superficies yet I doo behold with eyes that Nature lent Send foorth the terror of your Moouers frowne To wreak my wrong vpon the murtherers That rob me of your faire reflecting view. (Scene 12)
Shakespeare seems to be aiming for a very particular pathetic effect that depends upon structuring the scene—and indeed the role within the play as a whole—so that a small boy, rehearsed carefully by the senior actor playing Hubert, can successfully produce it. I do not mean to underplay the skill of the young actor playing this part; by any standards this is a demanding scene, and Shakespeare’s confidence in his young actor is attested to by the centrality of the young Arthur to the entire play. The point is that the role has been written so that this skill is displayed—flaunted even—through a distributed system that is designed to extract the maximum effect from the young actor while minimizing the possibility of crashing. This scene begins with the same mode of explicit embedded instruction that has been used throughout Arthur’s appearance on stage: “Young lad, come forth: I have to say with you.” Arthur enters and greets Hubert: “Good morrow, Hubert.” Hubert’s reply, “Good morrow, little prince,” is picked up and repeated by the boy: “As little prince, having so great a title / To be more prince, as may be.” Repetition across speeches is another means of reinforcing memory for lines and ensuring
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that cues are promptly picked up. Arthur’s next lines are much more lengthy than his previous speeches have been, an example of the rambling “innocent prate” that pricks Hubert’s conscience. Interestingly, about half-way through the scene, Hubert gives Arthur the warrant to read: “Read here, young Arthur.” While it is impossible to prove this point, it could be that the giving of the paper—not really necessary from the point of view of plotting—might be a means of giving the young actor an extra level of support just as the part begins to grow in length and complexity. If so, this would be another example of the distributing process doing double duty, for the proffering of the paper simultaneously demonstrates Hubert’s reluctance to carry out his mission and (if necessary) provides an additional prop for memory. Focusing on this theatrical moment in the boy’s part, Belsey argues, “[i]f Arthur were played by a younger boy in training for a leading role in due course, what would he learn from the experience? In addition to the primary skills of speech and movement and reacting to an audience, he would also have the opportunity to display precisely the kind of pathos Henry Jackson praised in the boy who played Desdemona” (2005: 61). This is absolutely correct, but the point here is that the training is both situated in its context and embedded in the range of practices and artifacts employed in the complex group activity of the company. In the larger group scenes, the cognitive demands upon the young actor are partially taken on by the older actors who prompt the boy to speak, move him about the stage, and refer to his plight. In the one “lashing out” scene, young Arthur is given a great deal to do, but the complexity of the scene is minimized; it is almost entirely done as a two-hander between Hubert and young Arthur, and thus could be rehearsed by the former actor. The emotional climax of the scene is probably the Executioners’ attempt to subdue the boy, but here the action on the part of these other actors is physical and visual; they do not engage in dialogue with the boy, and his lines—“Alas, what need you be so boist’rous-rough”—follow seamlessly from the stage directions implied in the language, that is,
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the response of the boy follows naturally from the actions of the men. In this sense, the part perfectly corresponds to McMillin’s category of the “restricted role.” The role is not necessarily of lesser power and complexity, but it minimizes the need for explicit instruction and entrusts most of the necessary rehearsal to one actor, relying upon the remainder of the effects to be integrated into and supported by the working of the larger company. Thus the role is structured so that maximum pathetic effect is extracted out of minimal preparation. The “Arthur effect” is out of all proportion with the young actor’s actual number of lines. Shakespeare employed such effects throughout his career—beginning, perhaps, with the “Rutland effect” in Act 1 scene 3 of Henry VI, Part 1. Young Rutland has twentyfour lines, almost all directed to Clifford, begging for his life. Rutland implores Clifford: “O let me pray before I take my death / To thee I pray, sweet Clifford, pity me.” This plea visually positions the boy as a figure of pathos as he kneels before the older man—akin to the “poor lambes” described by the presenter of The Battle of Alcazar. The Rutland effect far outlives the actual stage appearance of the boy. Clifford wipes the “blood cleaving to my blade” onto a handkerchief that comes, metonymically, to stand in for the child through numerous subsequent invocations by characters in this play as well as its sequel, Richard III. Similarly the violent deaths of other “toward” boys, including the little princes in Richard III, the young son of MacDuff, and Mamillius haunt the remainder of the plays in which they appear out of proportion with their actual lines. The task of remembering and invoking them falls to the other players. Just as Shakespeare exploits conventional methods of writing parts for small boys into a theatrical tour de force, so does Marlowe employ them in his depiction of Prince Edward in Edward II. In Marlowe’s one extended “little boy” part, he seems aware of the conventions governing the “toward” boy and exploits them skillfully in the play. At its outset, the role seems similar to other bit parts for small boys. The young prince is carefully shepherded in his early appearances. He is
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not mentioned until scene 9 and he makes his first entrance— and his only appearance with his father—early in scene 11.8 In the latter scene, as elsewhere in the play, the prince’s youth is stressed: He appears to be a very little boy.9 The King refers to him as “your [Isabella’s] little son” and commands him: “Boy, see you bear you bravely to the King / And do your message with a majesty” (11.72-3). The implicit contrast between the smallness of the boy and the “majesty” with which he is to deliver the message is taken up by the child himself: Commit not to my youth things of more weight Than fits a prince so young as I to bear. And fear not, lord and father; heaven’s great beams On Atlas’ shoulders shall not lie more safe Than shall your charge committed to my trust. (11.74–78)
The Prince’s “littleness” is reinforced by his ironic comparison to Atlas bearing the weight of the world, a technique also used by very little boys such as Shakespeare’s Moth.10 But another, more important technique marks him out as a little boy: the towardness or precocity that he displays in using such a figure of speech. Like other scenes with small boys, this early, highly scaffolded introduction to the prince is structured by the same patterns of deference that governed everyday life for a young boy, and undoubtedly those that governed the quasi-paternal relationship between master and boy in the apprentice system. The remainder of the scenes with Prince Edward are structured upon the interplay between deference and precocity. The prince’s next appearance is in scene 15, where he is shepherded in by Isabella, who cues his first speech: Ah boy, our friends do fail us all in France; The lords are cruel and the King unkind. What shall we do? (15.1–3)
Repeating the dismissive “ah boy” vocative, Isabella ignores the Prince’s advice to return to England to reunite with
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his father. Indeed, his answer is framed as more youthful towardness, as the next exchange with Sir John of Hainult underscores. Sir John addresses the prince in the familiar patronizing fashion: “How say you, my lord, will you go with your friends / And shake off all our fortunes equally?” (15.19–20). Young Edward’s reply again stresses both his youth and his towardness. He reiterates his deference to his mother—“so pleaseth the Queen, my mother, me it likes”—yet he also presages the future moment when he will “be strong enough to break a staff, / And then have at the proudest Spencer’s head” (15.21–2). This declaration is treated as childish bravado; Sir John approves with “Well said my lord,” while Isabella again underscores his youth and promise: “Oh, my sweet heart, how do I moan thy wrongs, / Yet triumph in the hope of thee, my joy.” Even as Edward begins to intervene more directly into the adult machinations going on around him, he still responds only to direct addresses to him. When Mortimer Junior announces that his father has escaped, “[a]nd lives t’advance your standard, good my lord,” Edward mounts a small challenge to the implicit assumption behind the statement: “How mean you, an the King my father lives? / No, my lord Mortimer, no I, I trow” (15.42–4). Isabella rebuffs this small revolt, just as she contradicts Edward’s later response to Sir John’s question: “Nay, son, not so; and you must not discourage / Your friends that are so forward in your aid” (15.69–70). In the final three scenes involving Edward, increasing breaks with the scaffolding practices associated with younger actors mirror the dramatic action within the fiction of the play. Prior to these scenes, Edward is invariably shepherded by his mother and speaks only when directly invited to do so. In scene 21, the breach among the adult characters disrupts this pattern and Edward is for the first time accompanied by someone other than his mother: “Enter the young Prince and the Earl of Kent talking with him.” The competition of the adult characters for Edward’s attention is signaled by Isabella’s summons: “Sweet son, come hither, I must talk with thee” (86). This scene also breaks the pattern of the child responding only
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to direct questions or explicit instructions by adult characters, as Edward begins to question Mortimer, finally defying him: “with you I will, but not with Mortimer” (109). The dialogue here eschews the self-conscious precocity of Edward’s earlier scenes in favor of direct and straightforward language. Mortimer dramatically reinforces his youth and vulnerability by calling him “youngling” (110) and dragging him, humiliatingly, from the stage. The coronation scene uses visual stagecraft to highlight the paradox of the two bodies of the king, particularly the contrast between the slightness of the boy and the splendor of kingship. The spectacle of the massed entry of the young King, the Nobles, the Bishop, and the Champion stands in sharp relief to the practical ineffectiveness of the young King, compelled to entreat rather than command. Once Edmund is dispatched, Edward and Isabella remain alone on stage, reverting to the doting mother/“toward” child trope: Edw. What safety may I look for at his hands, If that my uncle shall be murdered thus? Isa. Fear not, sweet boy, I’ll guard thee from thy foes Had Edmund lived, he would have sought thy death. Come son, we’ll ride a-hunting in the park. Edw. And shall my uncle Edmund ride with us? Isa. He is a traitor; think not on him. Come. (23.106–9)
With lines that stress the boyishness of the King—the “sweet boy” who must be guarded by his mother, fobbed off with a promise of a ride in the park—Isabella shepherds Edward from the stage. The abrupt disruption of this pattern gives the final scene of the play its dramatic power. Mortimer’s dismissal of the new king as “yet a child” is proved all too wrong when Edward makes his first entrance as King rather than boy. Encouraged by his lord’s advice to “fear not, my lord; know that you are a king,” Edward confronts his foe with the unadorned epithet “Villain!” His address to Mortimer changes from the formal “thou” to the subordinating “you,” and for the first time he
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commands rather than is commanded, taking charge both within the fiction of the play and on the stage itself. Marlowe thus layers the character’s trajectory during the play over the young actor’s move from scaffolded and restricted scenes to independent command of the stage.
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Conclusion: Toward a Model of Cognitive Ecology
Throughout this book I have argued that a distributed or systems-based model of cognition best accounts for the complex relationships among insides, objects, environments, and people that comprise the early modern theatrical system. Viewing the theatre as a dynamic system allows us to keep a range of levels of analysis in play without privileging any one. This distributed/systems level of analysis can equally be seen as an ecological approach. In this conclusion, I refine and extend this model through an examination of the concept of “cognitive ecology,” which I test here through a brief analysis of a range of theatrical organizations other than the early modern adult sharer-repertory system. A model of cognitive ecology posits that a complex human activity such as theatre must be understood across the entire system, which includes such elements as neural and psychological mechanisms underpinning the task dynamics; the physical environment(s), including the relationships between playing and audience space; cognitive artifacts such as parts, plots, and playbooks; technologies, such as sound or lighting; the social systems underpinning the company, including the mechanisms for enskillment; the economic models by which the company runs; the wider social and political contexts, including censorship, patronage, and commercial considerations; and the relative emphasis placed upon various elements of the enterprise, including writerly or directorial control, clowning, visuality, and improvisation. In a recent overview of trends in cognitive science, Hutchins defines cognitive ecology as “the study of cognitive phenomena
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in context” (2010: 1). In his view, cognitive science is moving from its rule-governed top-down origins in Artificial Intelligence to an increasing recognition of the inseparability of mind, body, and culture. He advocates turning from the information processing model of cognitive science that explains “cognition by reduction to internal symbolic events” (3). Instead, Hutchins proposes the proper unit of analysis is the “cultural/cognitive ecosystem” (12). The term cognitive ecology itself was borrowed by the biological sciences from the cognitive sciences as a means of integrating behavioral ecology “with an understanding of the underlying psychological and neural mechanisms” (Healy and Braithwaite 2000: 22). A series of edited books by Reuven Dukas (1998, 2009) has further articulated the discipline, stressing the interaction between cognitive mechanisms and environment. This term has also been employed in educational research; in “Going for the Zone: The Social and Cognitive Ecology of Teacher-Student Interaction in Classroom Conventions,” Frederick Erickson sets out a “neoVygotskian” understanding of the learning environment—in this view, cognition is “socially situated (a kind of production that makes purposive use of tools)” and “transpersonal (a distributed phenomenon, not simply something residing within a single head).” That is, “the organism-environment relation is one of interpenetration and of reflexively constitutive activity” (2006: 29). As Hutchins explains, cognitive ecology is also partially indebted to Gregory Bateson’s Steps To an Ecology of Mind (1972), a work that challenged traditional boundaries among human beings, bodies and the material and social surround, as well as to the work of Gibson and cultural–historical–activity theory, as articulated by Vygotsky and his followers. Following from the hypothesis that a distributed framework best accounts for theatrical practice, I outline in this conclusion a means of analyzing theatrical practices as forming distinct cognitive ecologies. An advantage of this model is that it does not privilege any one area of the enterprise, but instead emphasizes the interplay of internal cognitive mechanisms and social and physical environments. Cognitive ecologies are
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always dynamic—as one element changes, others may take up the slack, so to speak. A model of cognitive ecology would predict that some systems will place more or less weight on internal mechanisms, on central control, or on particular forms of cognitive artifacts and social systems. For this reason, a cognitive ecological model dovetails well with the recent emphasis in theatrical scholarship on companyspecific or repetorial histories. Each company has a distinct cognitive ecology, some more closely akin than others. As I demonstrated through the analysis of the role of Arthur in The Troublesome Reign of King John and King John in the previous chapter, the Queen’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had very different strategies for using boys. A further contrast in the two company’s use of boys is found in Richard Wilson’s Three Lords and Three Ladies. This play at first follows a shepherding pattern, with the adult actors Pollicie, Pompe, and Pleasure accompanied by their pages Wit, Wealth, and Wil. The adults carefully instruct their pages—addressing each as “sir boy”— as they leave, a feature commonly used in scaffolded scenes. But here the similarity ends. Wit, Wealth, and Wil are left in command of the stage to top one another in wit in vaudevillian fashion for an extended period. The performative quality of the scene is prominent, taking the form in one instance to a direct appeal to the audience when Simpcox asks the “one of the auditory” to determine “which of us sings best.” This performative impulse governs the entire scene, which is left as a play-space for the three boys—and for a fourth, playing Painful Penury, who enters toward its end. As McMillin and MacLean write, the “actors had to be agile and quick” (1998: 127); this play emphasizes such qualities rather than striving for a representational effect. Indeed, the homage to Tarlton at the center of the scene underscores its links to a clowning, improvisational tradition rather different from the more writercentered plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe. As McMillin and MacLean argue, the dramaturgy of the Queen’s Men tended to be improvisational: “the playmaker’s business is to set up the situation for the performer to exploit” (127). Relying on a presentational style, the Queen’s Men were apparently less
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concerned with careful orchestration of effects—particularly the effect of pathos—with their young actors. The direct invitation for audience participation in this comic framework suggests that the writer anticipated that players would fill out the scripted text with their own ingenuity and interaction with the audience. In the cognitive ecology, relatively less emphasis is placed upon the writer’s words and relatively more upon the performative ingenuity of the players. Contrast this to what we know of children’s companies. Adult companies used a workplace model for training apprentices, albeit one highly inflected by familial models. In adult companies, training boys was vital to the enterprise, but it had to be integrated into the ongoing and highly demanding work of the company. It is for this reason that we see the principles of “cognitive thrift” employed, with tasks doing double duty as much as possible. Training boys was not a separate, formal task, but integrated into ongoing daily work. By contrast, at least in their earlier modes, the children’s companies had a schooling model—masters were not actors themselves but were solely charged with managing the company and, presumably, seeing to rehearsal. In turn, with a much-reduced repertory and a less-demanding daily schedule, much more time for explicit instruction and rehearsal was available. In addition, the author-centered nature of these companies made it possible for playwrights to exercise a degree of control over performance. We have ample evidence of the close relationship of authors with the boy actors; Ben Jonson described Nathan Field as his “scholar” (Munro 2005: 37), and John Marston was a sharer in the Children of the Queen’s Revels (Munro 2005: 28). In these early boys’ companies, relatively more of the cognitive burden seems to have been placed on instructors and adult managers of various kinds, including, from all accounts, the playwright himself. Explicit direct instruction and practice, as in music instruction, becomes a dominant model; this both produced and is produced by very different economic and social environments. Lamb suggests that the children were designated as such not only because of their youth, but also because “they were maintained under the authority of a group
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of masters, managers, and sharers” (2009: 12–3). The cognitive ecology of the early boys’ companies, then, placed greater emphasis upon a top-down instructional model. As both Munro and Lamb point out, after the Clifton scandal, the boys’ companies began to adopt a short-term, apprenticebased system, an example of the evolving nature of the companies. Munro notes that “the children’s companies repertoire and dramaturgy did not remain static . . . . Many actors stayed with the companies, and as they grew older and more proficient dramatists were able to assume greater versatility from their experienced performers” (3). Moreover, shifts in the workplace models produced changes in the larger ecology of the company. Lamb suggests: “as the structure of the playing company changed, the status of the player of this company also altered significantly” (2009: 57). In the case of both the Queen’s Men and the various boys’ companies, an ecological model of analysis facilitates an understanding of the interplay of a wide range of factors governing the enterprise. As such, it is highly compatible with the current movement in theatre history toward company-based rather than author-based analysis. Models of cognitive ecology can also be valuable for comparative analysis. A prime example is cognitive ecology’s potential value for the study of theatrical tradition nearly contemporary with but very different from early modern English theatre: the Italian commedia dell’arte. In a book-length study of this tradition, Fitzpatrick has analyzed “how memory was managed” in the tradition from the perspective of theories of literacy and orality. Scholarship on commedia dell’arte is often centered around the sort of deficit model I described in the introduction, focusing on how the form worked in the absence of literacy, often with an implicit or explicit teleology in which literate playwrights rescue the form. Although he does not use the term itself, Fitzpatrick’s analysis is fully compatible with distributed model of cognition and/ or a model of cognitive ecology. The dramatic text or scenario is not the “single guiding principle” of the production, but is “merely one of a number of resources that the actors have to hand” (Fitzpatrick 1995b: 45). Other resources include the
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conventions of space, which act as a “mnemonic aid to the actors in remembering the situated action and the dialogue pertinent to a particular scenario’s actualization of the generic situations. The layout of the houses will define and generate the required movement patterns” (1995b: 38). The scenario acts as a form of “literate notation” that represents a basic consensus about the action of the play, while lazzi, or comic routines, and generici, or collections of dialogue, orally retained and transmitted, are adaptable to the situation offered by the scenario (see Henke 2002). Any one performance is a highly distributed act “in which oral and literate processes happily cohabited and complemented each other” (Fitzpatrick 1995b: 1–2). The cognitive ecology of the commedia dell’arte, then, places less weight upon written material, as the scenario works more as a plan or basic template than as a fully articulated script. The actors rely upon a complex ecology of written documents, embodied experience in performance of physical comedy and gags, audience interaction, conventional scenic representations, lazzi and generici (whether supported by written documents such as notebooks, or orally transmitted), and cultural scripts and schemas (Bartlett 1932) to create their performances. As Fitzpatrick suggests, “the taking of one element in isolation leads at best only to partial understanding and at worst to complete misunderstanding of the phenomenon” (1995b: 12). While a complete discussion is well beyond the scope of this study, the commedia tradition is a telling example of the diversity of cognitive ecologies governing performance and the different weights placed upon the various elements available within them. Cognitive ecology models also provide a useful mode of analysis for contemporary theatre. The research of Noice and Noice discussed in the Introduction demonstrates that the mechanisms for encoding they described are actually elements in a distributed system not unlike that employed by early modern actors. However, the components and agents of distribution—the cognitive ecology—were structured in very different ways, and the social and material elements that undergirded the ecology tend to be ignored or naturalized. The internal
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mechanisms of memory and attention studied by the Noices are only part of the picture, only one element in a larger cognitive ecology, and in themselves were profoundly conditioned by the material and social environment. A truly ecological view of acting and cognition demands that we focus on the entire system, not just on one part of it. One example is the relative weight placed upon the formal features of the playscript. The sample text used by the Noices in their experiments is The Second Man by S. N. Behrman. This is a typically modernist text, deliberately stripped of verbal embellishment: KENDALL: Storey’s dressing. I’m the first one here. AUSTIN: Monica’s not come yet? K: No. Cigarette? A: Er—thanks (She lights it for him). Thanks. K: You and I are the only prompt ones. A: Yes . . . K: Do you know what time it is? A: (Looking) Ten minutes past eleven. (Noice and Noice 1997a: 123–4)
Almost anorexic in its simplicity, this text is virtually free of the “surface features” that Rubin identifies as important for memorability. As I argued in Chapter 3, the early modern writer composes to afford remembering, with rich verbal and aural patterning that facilitates either close recall or fluent forgetting. In this ecology, much of the work of memory is distributed onto the writer, who fashions his scripts in a form that enhances recall. In contrast, modernist plays such as Behrman’s eschew such formal patterning and are written so that the formal surface of the language serves to conceal rather than reveal a character’s motivations. This strategy then displaces some of the cognitive work from the writer to the actor, who must painstakingly interpret the seemingly trivial words and actions of his or her character in order to embody their subtext. Similarly, the director takes on some of the cognitive load in managing and planning performances, but his or her work is also profoundly conditioned by environmental constraints
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such as built sets and lighting. As discussed in Chapter 2, in most modern theatres, lighting offers a powerful mechanism for managing attention that in other circumstances must be managed aurally and interpersonally. Yet lighting in turn creates its own profoundly important sets of cognitive burdens, demanding technical rehearsals and carefully planned blocking so that the actors coordinate with the technical systems. A model of cognitive ecology also provides a useful means to analyze “original practices” productions on the part of a variety of contemporary companies purporting to use this approach. These include Patrick Tucker’s Original Shakespeare Company, the American Shakespeare Theatre placed at the Blackfriars theatre in Staunton, Virginia, and Shakespeare’s Globe. There have been a number of critiques of such enterprises, for failing to live up to their pretensions of authenticity (Kennedy 1998; Worthen 2003; Silverstone 2005). These objections, to some extent, miss the point. In any case, critique along the cultural tourism lines is not my intention. Rather, I will use an ecological model to analyze the collision of original practices with contemporary contingencies, ranging from diverse models of training, commercial pressures, mastering an unfamiliar theatrical vocabulary (Dessen 2008), and audience expectations, enculturation, and experiences. By definition, “original practices” must be very selectively implemented, and each company attempting them has its own interpretation of the appropriate practices. These might range from using ambient lighting in a “restored” building, to authentic costumes, to all-male casts, to the use of cognitive artifacts unfamiliar to contemporary actors, such as parts and plots. Original practices cannot include, for example, kidnapping choirboys to impress into the company, replicating the rhetorical training all schoolboys underwent, or, more broadly, negotiating the gap between early modern and contemporary cultural practices, from the perspective of both cast and audience. Tucker’s Original Shakespeare Company sought to replicate original rehearsal techniques by adopting the cognitive artifacts employed by Shakespeare’s company. Tucker’s Secrets of Acting Shakespeare (2002) documents the processes by which
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he and his company experimented with using cue-scripts (derived from the First Folio); “platts” constructed upon the lines of sixteenth-century plots; dispensing with directors and most group rehearsal; and playing in ambient light. Thus, the company selected a range of cognitive artifacts, some elements of social structure and company organization, and one element of the theatrical environment (lighting) as the primary targets. As Tucker describes it, the process underwent significant modification as it evolved: We started by just sending the actors their Cue Scripts and telling them on the day where they came from and went to. It soon became apparent that the actors needed to tell each other certain things. For example, King Lear wanted someone to hand him the map when he stuck his hand out, so we invented a time when the actors could do this, and named it Burbadge time . . . . I took advantage of this time to give the actors their entrances and exits. (2002: 38)
In “Burbadge time,” entrances and exits are worked out, and actors can “raise anything that troubles them, or is seen as a potential problem for the performance” (2002: 262). This period is also used to coordinate action between actors: “If you have information that you suspect no one else has (Hang off thou cat, thou bur), and you need others to cooperate with you, then get help from your fellow actor in the Burbadge time. Remember it could be intentional that you speak of something that is not happening” (260). In Chapter 1, I argued that the more extreme versions of the actor-autonomy model of rehearsal could result in unintentionally comic moments—or, if we accept Stern and Palfrey’s account, intentionally emotional moments, in which repeated cues produce the writer’s desired effects. I suggested there that models of social cognition, especially of expertise in long-associated groups, might provide a better account of how these potential difficulties were met. What in the early modern cognitive ecology may have been tacit or casually shared knowledge, here must be made explicit, and so must be formally structured rather than left to chance.
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Similarly, Tucker here confronts the vast discrepancy between the expertise of Shakespeare’s actors, who were speaking language that, however elevated at times, was still their own; and that of contemporary actors who, however skilled, must reconstruct unfamiliar language and cultural reference. These potential problems are solved through “one of the most powerful weapons that the OSC has in preparing its productions: the verse nursing session” (2002: 38-9). The verse-nurse was a one-on-one session between the actor and Tucker, attended by the Book-Holder: “The actors go over all their lines with only their cues being given to them, and they are never told how to act, and certainly not given any attitudes of emotions, but are simply challenged with ‘Have you found this clue?’ and— crucially—what are you going to do about it?” (39). Tucker describes this session as a form of “actor empowerment”, though we might wonder about the actual line between being “told how to act” and being prompted to find the “clues” (39). Nevertheless this is another example of explicit instruction being introduced to compensate for what was probably largely tacit, expert knowledge on the part of the original players in Shakespeare’s time. Another modification Tucker made was the relative fullness of the “platts” used. These are versions of the plots discussed at length in Chapter 2. As we saw there, the plots vary considerably in the information they display; some are quite full, while others are very sketchy. The platts Tucker fashioned provide considerably more detail, especially about exits, than do any of the original plots. The platts also describe stage business in some detail; for example, “Rosalind gives Orlando a chain from around her neck”; “They all sing the Song. Jacques does a parody of the Song” (2002: 77). In contrast, in the plots from the 1590s, little business is mentioned, and full descriptions of stage action are generally confined to dumb shows, which would not appear in an individual actor’s part. Some so-called original cognitive artifacts, then, were modified, while new tools were introduced: “A good way of learning your lines is to write the cue words on one side of a card and the full speech on the other” (2002: 261). Bells
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are rung backstage if someone has missed an entrance (263). Moreover, social coordination of one actor by another is encouraged: “If other actors are not in the best place for you, it is quite allowed for you, gently to take them to a better one by a firm grip on the elbow. You can also ‘invite’ them to take them to a better one by a firm grip on the elbow. You can also ‘invite’ them to rest by propelling them onto a bench, if you know you have a long speech that would benefit from having such an attentive and close listener” (264). My point is not to call the company to account for inconsistencies, but to analyze the exigencies created in the inevitable mismatch between contemporary cognitive ecologies of acting and those of the past. That is, additional cognitive burdens are imposed precisely because the practices are unfamiliar and actors cannot rely upon embodied, tacit knowledge in following the new protocols. The literature on expertise reviewed in the previous chapter shows that novices need conscious deliberate practice, placing strains on working memory until new skills are taken up into the body. While the actors in Tucker’s company came in with a suite of skills in contemporary theatre, the unfamiliar aspects of the new cognitive ecology involved conscious skill acquisition, which in turn demanded new cognitive practices and artifacts, such as “verse-nurse” sessions and more articulated “platts” for performance. A more recent set of experiments has been carried out at the Blackfriars theatre by members of the American Shakespeare Company of Staunton, Virginia (formerly the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express). All plays at the Blackfriars are performed in ambient lighting, with an established professional company that knows one another well. A recent innovation has been the “Renaissance season,” conducted over the winter when the tourist custom typically falls off. In this short season, actors perform unfamiliar Renaissance plays using techniques derived from original rehearsal practices, including the absence of directors and rehearsal from parts rather than the full playbooks. The rehearsals have been observed by scholars in the field of early modern theatre, including Stern and Rhonda Knight. The results have also been discussed at the biannual Blackfriars
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conference. In 2005, following the first winter season, some of the actors reported themselves bereft without the accustomed artifacts and props that normally supported their preparation for a play; one actor said that he highlighted his entire cue-script because he couldn’t remember anything that was not yellow. Such a result might be predicted from a theory of cognitive ecology—simply changing the “objects” or cognitive artifacts does not immediately produce changes to cognitive mechanisms or social structures. At the 2007 conference, however, members of the company discussed the ways that the practice had evolved over time. One change simply evolved from the greater familiarity of the established members of the company with the processes of rehearsal. This facilitated an informal enskillment process, in which experienced members of the company were able to induct new players into the procedures and habits of the company. Such an ad-hoc arrangement is far removed from a formal apprentice system, yet shows the power of social structures in distributed cognition. In addition, new cognitive artifacts such as whiteboards were introduced.1 The ingenuity of the company in adopting new artifacts exemplifies the dynamic nature of any cognitive ecology: Unfamiliar cognitive artifacts such as cue-scripts are supplemented by more familiar tools that work to manage and distribute the cognitive load. Such an outcome is precisely what we might predict using a model of cognitive ecology that stresses system rather than focusing on any one element in isolation. All aspects of the system—including the training, habits, and customs of contemporary actors; the tools and materials to which they have access; and the very specific historical goals of this particular company—must be considered in any understanding of a cognitive ecology of the theatre.2 The third of the original practices group is rather more complex: Shakespeare’s Globe. The complexity arises in part from the high expectations engendered by the project; the competing agendas necessitated by the array of sponsors, partners, and participants in the project, including actors, scholars, tourists, government, and the education branch of the Globe trust; and the ways that the enterprise has evolved over time. As Menzer points out in his review of the recent collection Shakespeare’s
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Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2009), it is possible to detect an elegaic tone in the essays about early experiments in original practice, especially in the wake of the appointment of Dominic Dromgoole as the new artistic director in 2005, which marked a shift away from original practices as interpreted by Rylance. The processes of rehearsal and performance of the first production at the New Globe, Henry V as directed by Richard Olivier, have been extensively documented by Pauline Kiernan, both in the Globe Research Bulletin (1998) and in her book (1999). As she reports it, the “authentic brief” for Henry V included an all-male cast; extensive doubling; cuts for fastpaced performance; five performances held without intermissions; authentic costumes and weapons; period instruments for music; and stage management “as close to Elizabethan conditions as was possible within the safety constraints of the modern Globe” (1998: unpag.), including the use of the music room and the lords’ room. It can be seen from this summary that the choices for approaching an early modern cognitive ecology are quite different from those employed by the Original Shakespeare Company (OSC) or the American Shakespeare Company (ASC). The OSC and the ASC attempted to alter the structures underpinning rehearsal and preparation, eschewing the modern directorial approach and adopting early modern cognitive artifacts such as the cue-script. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Globe retains the administrative infrastructure of director and artistic director. Their “authentic brief” is primarily environmental, focusing on stage management, the use of ambient lighting, and other explorations of the possibilities afforded by an Elizabethan stage architecture. The primary social–personnel shift—and perhaps one of the most controversial—was the occasional use of the all-male cast.3 While I cannot fully review the range of responses to this experiment here, it can nevertheless be said that simply casting all actors as male cannot begin to approach the actual practices of the early modern theatre. The point here is not the biological sex of the actor, but how he is embedded in the social system of the theatre— and indeed within the larger social structures of deference and
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hierarchy of the culture. As I argued in Chapter 3, it is impossible to replicate the training and enskillment that underpinned the apprentice system. Rylance found that the voices of boys in their teens did not carry well in the New Globe, but his experience of this tells us little about the effect of the trained voice of a boy performing in the early modern period. Accounts of the early rehearsals of Henry V reveal an overlay, sometimes uneasy, of original practices and modern assumptions about exploration and depth. According to Kiernan’s notes, preparation included “discussion of myths and fairy tales,” including St. George and the dragon and Roman de la Rose, as well as a “weekend at a disused army camp in the country to work on the play and to have the opportunity of exploring the ‘brotherhood’ theme . . . [including] ritual work on learning to look on death.” It is easy to point out the contradictions between such experiential preparation and the much more instrumental rehearsal practices of the early modern theatre. But without fully embracing a more distributed cue-script–based mode as is done elsewhere, actors and directors must rely on established and mutually understood methods of preparation. This element of the cognitive ecology remains unchanged, part of the material exigencies of a large complex operation such as the Globe, combining as it does commercial, artistic, and educational agendas. The effect of the environmental elements of the cognitive ecology must nevertheless be taken into account. I would argue that despite the complaints by W. B. Worthen (2003) and others about “Disneyfication” and “cultural tourism,” there is nevertheless a discernible effect exerted by the shifts in the environmental surround, most powerfully because of the effect that ambient lighting has on actor–audience interaction. While some of the enthusiasm about unmediated relationships between actor and audience is overblown, the effect of full lighting on the economy of attention in the theatre is difficult to dispute. Actors and critics often comment upon the “rowdiness” of the audience, speculating that Shakespeare’s audience must have been even tougher. While anecdotal evidence of, shall we say, “spirited” reactions on the part of early modern spectators certainly exists,4 sometimes it seems that departures
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from current theatrical protocols (such as moving around, eating and drinking, vocal responses) are extrapolated, with the implication that Shakespeare’s audience must have been even more boisterous. But if we think about behavior protocols at sporting events rather than theatrical events, we can see that physical movement, shouting, and consuming food and drink are by no means incompatible with intensive immersion, attention, and deep domain knowledge of the area. Jacalyn Royce has observed of early modern theatrical environments that “physical space has consequences” (2009: 480). As Kirsh (1995b) argues, experts manage the space around them to accomplish intelligent action, and the constraints of that space in turn provide the basic cognitive parameters in which action takes place. Space and ambient lighting cannot magically transform contemporary actors and audiences into their early modern counterparts, but it undeniably shapes attention, both through a larger potential for acoustic and visual distraction and equally through the ability to manage shared attention. Christie Carson’s chapter on “Democratising the Audience?” challenges Worthen’s critique of “historical romanticism” by situating the actor–audience relationship within contemporary trends in theatrical space and performance away from the proscenium arch (Carson and Farim-Cooper 2008). Carson uses Philip Auslander’s recent revision of his concept of “liveness” (Auslander 1999, 2008) in light of expectations generated by the new dominance of digital media, rather than television, the “dominant media” he discusses in Liveness. She argues that one of the reasons for the popularity of the Globe is that it has value both for older audience members seeking cultural tradition and for younger audiences accustomed to more interactive relationships with media. The ability to be physically mobile is particularly prized by such audiences and the experience works by “appealing quickly and directly to the new digital aesthetic which demands at least a sense of democracy and fuller individual participation” (Carson 2008: 121). While the “democratising” claims could be challenged, Carson’s discussion represents a canny understanding of the relational elements of cognitive ecology.
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A full account of the cognitive ecology of Shakespeare’s Globe and other original practices experiments, then, would need to take the entire array of these factors into account. As Menzer suggests: Watching the impress of a reconstructed Globe or Blackfriars upon modern actors should reveal fascinating details about the way theater architecture governs theatrical convention and the way physical space dictates decorum. We may be able to watch actors themselves unlearn modern theatrical conventions as they adjust to the material conditions of early modern theaters. We may be able, that is, to watch modern actors register the “shock of the old.” (2006: 228)
A model of cognitive ecology allows us to see the dynamic and relational component of any theatrical enterprise. This concept can illuminate expert group cognition across a range of periods and practices, and researchers of both historical and contemporary performance can benefit from reconceptualizing rehearsal and performance through a distributed, ecological lens. This book has examined in detail methods and resources for reconstructing the cognitive ecology of early modern theatre. Students of contemporary theatrical practices have the additional advantage of being able to directly witness the process of theatre making and to interview participants within it. However, reporting what actors and director say about their practices is inadequate; instead, we must analyze how they grapple with the stuff of theatre. It is my hope that other scholars will find models of cognitive ecology and Distributed Cognition useful for studying both historical and contemporary theatre. In particular, I would like to build theoretically and historically informed accounts of skill, within a genuinely embodied and extended model of cognition. In turn, this foray into historical cognition will, I hope, prompt researchers in the cognitive sciences to seek collaborations and partnerships with their counterparts in the humanities. Only in such a way can a genuinely interdisciplinary model of Distributed Cognition evolve.
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Notes
Series Editors’ Preface 1. Carey, Susan. The Origin of Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 4. 2. See Zunshine, Lisa, “What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1.
Introduction 1. See Salomon (1993), as well as Lave (1998) S. Scribner (1984), Hutchins (1991), and Richard A. Carlson (1997). Lave has worked on math, Scribner on the dairy plant, and Hutchins on ship navigation. 2. There is a vast literature on expertise, some of which is discussed in Chapter 3. Much of the founding work on individual expertise was done through studies of chess masters; see A. D. de Groot (1946/1978; 1966). 3. The term “exogram” was coined by Merlin Donald (2001) on analogy with “engrams,” or internal memory traces. As part of the “external memory field, “exograms” transform the architecture of human conscious awareness” (308). 4. For an example of the limitations of research on memory done with this population, see Robert McIver and Marie Carroll (2004). This study attempts to establish empirically the question of the transmission of the synoptic gospels, but uses contemporary undergraduates as its subject, ignoring the vast differences in enskillment and training in remembering orally received material between today and the period under study. For a recent critique of the experimental methodology in cognitive psychology, see Joseph Henrich et al. (2010). 5. For ecological studies of memory, see the overviews by Ulric Neisser (1997, 1982).
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6. See The Shakespeare Company (2004) and Shakespeare’s Opposites (2009) for a description of the duopoly. Knutson has challenged this view in “What’s So Special about 1594?” (2010). I am grateful to Professor Knutson for sharing this work with me prior to publication. 7. See also David Kastan (2001) for an account of the perfectly ordinary business practices that in fact underlaid the activities of the printers of the quartos. 8. In other respects, Hattaway’s account of the working practices of the theatre largely confirms my own. 9. Peter Thomson (1992) also argues for a minimum of group rehearsal. See also his “ ‘Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama’.” Hattaway (1982) concurs with this point. See also John Astington (2010). 10. For the second quotation, Stern cites Thomas Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (1961), albeit with some reservations. The argument about playing in a “line” was vigorously disputed by Bernard Beckerman and by Gerald Bentley (1984). This theory has been revived by David Grote (2002). 11. On interference as a factor in forgetting, see Henry Roediger (2000), esp. pp. 153–8, and Rubin (1995). 12. For an account of the historiography used by New Historicists, see David Cressey (1991). 13. For an example of the array of cognitive approaches marshaled in Shakespearean studies, see the 2006 special issue of College Literature on “Cognitive Shakespeare.”
1
The Stuff of Memory
1. I expand upon this point in the discussion of apprenticeship in Chapter 3. 2. Fitzpatrick put this argument forward first in “Shakespeare’s Exploitation of a Two-Door Stage: Macbeth,” 1995, 207–30. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to see his book Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance, forthcoming from Ashgate, in manuscript form. 3. This approach to directing is predicated on a fairly traditional directorial model, based upon built sets and modernist plays. Many other approaches, such as devised theatre, would be much less directive than this model, which does, however, typify a common approach in contemporary directing. 4. Note that Mahood’s contention that the door “inwards” is intended to designate primarily interior spaces is not shared by Fitzpatrick, who models the doors relationally rather than fictionally. 5. See also Elina Birmingham (2008) and A. Kingstone, et al., (2003).
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6. See also Kingstone 2003: 176–80 and James Lake (2000) for an application of primary and recency effects to the plays of Shakespeare. 7. The folio divides these scenes into three, but as one character— Kent—remains on stage throughout, they can be seen to operate within the same set of spatial dynamics. 8. Quotations from King Lear are taken from: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Lr/F1/default/ 9. See also A. Armstrong (2006) for a similar argument about thematically driven claims about doubling. 10. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare (1997). Hereafter act, scene, and line numbers will be given. 11. See Fitzpatrick (2012) for a discussion of the very few exceptions, most of which occur at the beginning of the plays. 12. An exception is Stern 2009, which devotes a chapter to the plots. Her more recent argument revises her original view (2000) of the plots, which concurred with that of Bradley. 13. Greg made an exhaustive comparison of the plot and the play in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements (1923); see also Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts (1996) for a critique of her theory of memorial reconstruction in relationship to the play. 14. Gurr (2007) has challenged Kathman’s conclusions on the basis of the “hand” of The Seven Deadly Sins plot, as well as the age ascribed to some of the boy actors. “Hand C” wrote the plot, sections from Sir Thomas More, as well as some of the Admiral’s Men’s plots. Gurr argues that this would constitute implausible “shifts of loyalty” between the two companies on the part of the plotter, whom Gurr argues must have been a company member. Yet this argument is predicated upon the “rivalry” hypothesis that assumes an agonistic rather than a cooperative attitude between the companies. See Knutson (2001). The argument Gurr makes about the usual age of apprenticeship of boys is easily refuted by the documentary evidence compiled by Kathman (2005). Kathman’s refutation of Gurr is forthcoming in Early Theatre 14:2 (2011). 15. Greg (1923) meticulously compares the information available in the plot to the extant playtext. See Maguire (1996) for a critique of her view of memorial reconstruction in relation to this play. 16. Grace Ioppolo suggests that this number may be grossly underestimated, based on the very large number of dramatic manuscripts she has examined. She argues that “it is nearly impossible to distinguish which of the extant manuscripts . . . were used in the playhouse and which were not” (2006: 8). 17. The entire part is printed side by side with the relevant sections from Greene’s play in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: “The Battle of Alcazar” and “Orlando Furioso.”
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18. The question of actor training will be taken up in the following chapter. 19. See also Ann Blair (2003: 11–29) for a discussion of the historically situated nature of contemporary perceptions about managing information. 20. Situation awareness is discussed in detail in Chapter 3. 21. McConachie discusses the usefulness of Gibson’s term in relationship to spectatorship and attention (2008: 74).
2
Action and Accent: Voice, Gesture, Body, and Mind
1. Compare Smith’s essay on “Speaking What We Feel About King Lear” (2006), in which he discusses this passage. 2. See also Hunter, and A. Ellis (1985). 3. See Richard Dutton (1991) for an account of the relative flexibility of English censorship practices. See also Stern (2009: 234–5). 4. See also Rubin (1995), in which he argues extensively for the value of multiple constraints in aiding recall in both verbatim and gist contexts. Rowlands (1999) discusses the implications of Rubin’s work for cognitive philosophy. Erne (2003) has also argued, based upon variations between texts, that players seem to have substituted words fairly frequently. 5. Bartlett (1920); see also his book-length account (1932). 6. In a recent article, Stallybrass and Zack Lesser (2008) argue that the Q1 is the more “literary” version of the two on the basis of its use of quotation marks to signal commonplaces. 7. Gurr (1992: 100) quoted in Menzer (2004); see also Gurr (1963), which Menzer discusses on p. 40. 8. McConachie discusses the ways that Tennessee Williams writes gesture into his plays on pp. 87–92 of Engaging Audiences. 9. This argument seems at odds with Palfrey and Stern’s earlier contention that the parts were taught according to a rote reproductive system, as when they contend that parts were inherited with “all the gestures and emphases established” (2007: 68). 10. Kyd 1959: 1, see introduction by Phillip Edwards. All further references of the Spanish Tragedy come from this edition.
3
Social Cognition: Enskillment in the Early Modern Theatre
1. A wide selection of Ericsson’s work and work within this model can be found in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
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2. In “How Old were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?” Kathman notes that Rice is described as Heminges’ boy, but was not formally apprenticed to him (231). 3. Rutter (2007: 22). Belsey (2005) gives an extensive reading of this letter. 4. See Stern (2000) Rehearsal, as well as Palfrey and Stern (2007) Shakespeare in Parts. 5. Quotations are from The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey http://lion.chadwyck. com). 6. Belsey, in “Shakespeare’s Little Boys,” has noted this pattern in respect to Arthur and also remarks upon the relative profligacy of boys’ parts in Shakespeare’s plays. 7. See Rutter (2007). 8. References to Edward II come from the New Mermaids edition, which uses scene numbers rather than act divisions. 9. Although the historical Edward was fifteen, this boy is represented as much younger. It is probable, of course, that the boy playing Edward was about the same age as the historical Edward, but then as now, boys who could play younger than their age may have been valued for their versatility. 10. See Belsey (2005) for more examples of the stress on the “littleness” of Shakespeare’s boys.
Conclusion: Toward a Model of Cognitive Ecology 1. See P. Dillenbourg and D. Traum (1997), as well as the brief comparison of whiteboards and plots in Chapter 1. 2. Rhonda Knight has informed me, however, that in the most recent season the use of the whiteboard has been confined to listing songs. My thanks to Rhonda for sharing her experiences with me. 3. All female casts were also used for other productions. 4. See the accounts in appendix 2 of Gurr (2004b).
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Index
Aaron, Melissa, 26 accent, 20–1, 69–86, 87–8, 105, 118–20, 121–2, 124–6 see also voice acting contemporary, 9–12, 60, 68, 69–70, 156, 165 see also original practices productions, playing action, 20, 21, 69, 85–110 and accent, 85–6, 97, 98–9, 100–1, 102–3, 105–10, 120, 121 personation, 85, 86–7, 110 see also gesture, movement actor–audience dynamics, 2, 31, 87, 104, 118–24, 125–6, 136, 145, 153–4, 156, 164–5 actors, see actor–audience dynamics, boy actors, players Admiral’s Men, the, 26, 45, 169 n. 14 affect, 2, 17, 112, 133–4 affordances, 67–8, 170 n. 21 Alleyn, Edward, 45, 58–9, 63, 89, 127, 134 Altman, Joel, 78 apprenticeship, 4, 12, 13, 22, 111–13, 115–16, 126–8, 130, 134–5, 136–7, 138, 147, 154–5, 162, 164, 169 n. 14 affective bonds in, 133–4
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contracts, 111, 127, 134 lawsuits, 111 see also boy actors, enskillment, playing companies (children’s) artifacts, 2, 10–11, 12, 14, 19, 22, 27, 33, 44, 46, 51, 145, 162 see also cognitive artifacts Astington, John, 104–5, 127 attention, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 17, 19 attentional cues, 36–7 attentional demands and loads, 8, 20, 22, 31, 33, 76, 97, 136, 137, 141 cognitive ethology of, 36–7 economy of, 37, 164–5 and enskillment, 115–18 gesture and, 90, 96–7, 106 inattentional blindness, 35–6, 37–8 managing attention, 28, 35–6, 37–40, 96–7, 138, 158 mechanisms of, 21, 117, 157 shared, 20, 53, 165 to the line (or underscore), 51, 57 and the part-based system, 61, 84 see also audiences (and attention), cognitive thrift, knowledge (domain), working memory audiences, 1, 8, 31, 64, 65, 88, 106, 131, 158
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audiences—Continued and attention, 9, 35–6, 37–40, 62–3, 107, 165, 170 n. 21 cognitive capacities and constraints of, 8–9, 19, 35 gesture and, 95–6 see also actor–audience dynamics Auslander, Philip, 165 Baddeley, Alan, 35 Baldwin, Thomas, 168 n. 10 Bartlett, F. C., 81–2 Bateson, Gregory, 152 The Battle of Alcazar, 45, 48, 49–50, 53, 139, 146, 169 n. 13 Beckerman, Bernard, 30, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41, 168 n. 10 Behrman, S. N. The Second Man, 157 Beilock, Sian, 117–18 Belsey, Catherine, 136, 145, 171 n. 3, 171 n. 6 Bentley, Gerald, 71, 129, 168 n. 10 Bevington, David, 56 Billing, Christian M., 130–1 Boas, F. C., 81 body, 21, 36, 39, 69, 78, 87–8, 90, 93, 103, 106, 107–8, 116, 152, 161 and cognition, 4, 6–7, 138 as a cognitive artifact, 96 and gesture, 91, 93, 96, 97, 98–103, 105, 110 and passions, 91–3, 103, 106, 108–10, 125 see also action, gesture Boretz, N. M., 33 boy actors, 13, 48, 50, 57, 59, 126–7, 131–2, 153, 164, 169 n. 14, 170 n. 2 anti-theatrical accounts of, 130–1, 132 in children’s companies, 130, 132–3, 154–5
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eroticization of, 129, 130, 131, 132 exploitation of, 129–30, 132–3 female roles, 26, 112–13, 127–8, 131, 135–6, 143 pathos effect, 139, 141–2, 144, 145–6, 154 restricted roles, 136–7, 138, 146, 150 roles for young boys, 22, 113, 136, 138–50, 171 n. 6, 171 n. 9, 171 n. 10 towardness, 142, 146, 147–8, 149 training of, 22, 60, 120–2, 128–9, 134–6, 154 working conditions of, 113, 129–30, 132–3, 134 see also scaffolding techniques Bradbrook, M. C., 1–2, 13, 88 Bradley, David, 29–30, 46–7, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 169 n. 12 Brayne lawsuit, 13 Brome, Richard Antipodes, 75 Brooks, Harold F., 55–6 Brown, Steve, 128 Bruner, Jerome, 113, 137 Bulwer, John, 90–1, 98, 99–101, 102 Burbage, James, 13 Burbage, Richard, 88, 131, 132, 133 Callaghan, Dympna, 129–30 call-boys, 48 Calore, Michaela, 46 Carnegie, David, 59–60 Carr, Thomas H., 117–18 censorship, 73, 151, 170 n. 3 Chabriss, C. F., 35–6 Chambers, E. K., 25 charts, 5, 51–3 Clancey, William, 2, 68
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INDEX
Clark, Andy, 3, 6, 16–17, 96, 97, 101 Clemen, Wolfgang, 106, 107 Clifton suit, Henry, 132–3, 155 cognition, 2–7, 16, 92 and culture, 5, 8, 18, 36, 152 expert group, 5–6, 20, 23, 166 extended/distributed, 2–8, 20, 138, 151, 166 historically situated, 7, 11–12, 166 internalist models of, 3, 10 models of, 3–4, 6–7, 151, 152 naturally situated, 4–5 see also cognitive ecology, Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind theory, Situated Cognition, social cognition cognitive architectures, 8, 16 cognitive artifacts, 5, 7, 18, 19, 25, 50, 54, 58, 60, 67–8, 151, 153, 158–9, 160–2, 163 whiteboards, 20, 53, 162, 171 n. 2 see also body, gesture, parts, playbooks, plots, props cognitive capacities, 8–9, 35, 117 cognitive cost, 105 cognitive demands and loads, 1, 8, 31–4, 61, 96–7, 145, 154, 157–8, 161 see also attention (attentional demands), cognitive thrift, gesture, mnemonic demands cognitive ecology, 22–3, 151–66 and comparative analysis, 155–6 and contemporary theatre, 12, 156–8 definition of, 151–2 distinct theatrical ecologies, 133, 151, 152–5 see also commedia dell’arte, environment, original
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practices productions, playing space cognitive extension, 3, 95–6 see also Situated Cognition cognitive integration, 10–11, 12, 20 cognitive linguistics, 21, 92, 99–100 cognitive mechanisms, 11, 15, 21, 38, 87, 111, 114, 151, 152, 162 see also attention, internal cognitive mechanisms, memory, perception cognitive practices, 6–7, 161 cognitive processes, 4–5, 7, 9, 36, 51, 96, 97, 100–1, 141 cognitive psychology, 9, 20–1, 72, 82–3 critiques of experimental methodology in, 9, 167 n. 4 cognitive science, 6, 7–8, 16–18, 87, 90, 97, 151–2, 166 cognitive systems, 6, 7, 69, 97, 111 cognitive thrift, 8, 19, 20, 22, 29, 31–2, 33–5, 47, 58, 61, 115, 137, 141, 145, 154, 162 Cole, Jonathan, 93 Cole, Michael, 116 collaboration, 4, 5, 6, 46, 53, 57, 67, 115 commedia dell’arte, 155–6 commercial factors, 13, 25–7, 111–12, 151, 158, 164, 167 n. 7 contemporary critical theory, 15–16, 17 Cook, Amy, 17, 18 Cooke, Alexander, 134 Coryate, Thomas, 132 costumes, 26, 127, 128, 158, 163 semiotics of clothing, 107 Cowley, Richard, 52–3 Crane, Mary Thomas, 18 cue-scripts, see parts
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cultural environment, 2, 4, 10, 12, 39, 70, 80–1, 82, 97, 106, 116, 130, 156, 158, 160, 163–4 see also cognition (and culture), cognitive ecology Cynthia’s Revels, 136 Daniel, Samuel, 71, 72 The Dead Man’s Fortune, 47, 49 Dessen, Alan, 11, 30, 46, 49 dialogue, 10, 32, 34–5, 38, 41, 42, 49, 50, 59, 60, 67, 149, 156 see also scaffolding techniques (explicit embedded instruction) directing, 10, 11, 14, 46, 50, 57–8, 61, 64, 151, 157–8, 159, 161, 163, 164, 168 n. 3 blocking, 14, 32–3, 39, 158 prompt books, 33, 48, 54, 55 see also dialogue, stage directions Distributed Cognition, 2–4, 5–6, 7–8, 18–19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34, 51, 96, 111, 113, 116, 135, 166 distributed systems, 4, 5–6, 10, 15, 67, 69, 71, 101, 103, 104, 111, 113, 144, 151, 156 see also gesture, tools Donald, Merlin, 167 n. 3 doors (stage), 19, 29–32, 33–5, 37–44, 46, 49, 52, 141, 168 n. 4, 169 n. 11 doubling, 50, 52–3, 163 Downey, Greg, 115, 116 Draaisma Douwe, 73 Dreyfus, Herbert, 114 Dromgoole, Dominic, 163 Dukas, Reuven, 152 dumb shows, 45, 46, 49–50, 57, 58, 138, 160 Efron, David, 93 embodied experience, 58, 101, 104, 107, 112, 156, 161
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embodiment, 2, 3, 6, 16, 20, 21, 90, 93, 99, 112, 129 see also gesture Endsley, M., 117 Engeström, Yrjö, 27 Engle, Randall, 35 English Shakespeare Company, 69–70 engrams, 7, 167 n. 3 enskillment, 21–2, 23, 101–2, 112–13, 115–16, 128, 134–5, 151, 162, 164, 167 n. 4 explicit instruction, 116, 134, 141, 146, 154–5, 160 imitation, 102, 115–16, 121 improvisation, 115–16 performance in dual-task environments, 117–20, 121–6, 140 situated learning, 115–17, 145, 152 task demands, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 140–1 see also expertise, players (expert), scaffolding techniques entrances and exits, see doors, stage directions environment, 1, 2–3, 4–5, 7, 8, 12, 15, 18–19, 67, 112, 151, 152, 164 see also enskillment (situated learning), external world, playhouses, playing space, space, working environments Erickson, Frederick, 152 Ericsson, Eric, 114, 170 n. 1 Erne, Lukas, 72, 106, 170 n. 4 ethnographical studies, 4–5, 7, 27, 116 exograms, 7, 167 n. 3 expertise, 9, 27, 29, 32, 55, 60, 66, 87, 97, 103, 110, 111, 112–13, 117, 123, 160, 167 n. 2 computational model, 113–14, 170 n. 1
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INDEX
embodied, 101, 104, 107 fluency, 97–8, 115, 118, 122, 124–6 phenomenological model, 114 skilled vision, 51, 52, 116 see also fluent forgetting, gesture, group expertise, knowledge (domain), personation, players (expert), situation awareness Extended Mind theory, 2–3, 6, 7–8, 95 extended systems, 20, 27, 95–6, 101, 110, 138 see also gesture external world, 3, 7, 35, 51, 92, 95, 96, 106, 138 Feltovich, Paul J., 117 Field, Nathan, 154 Fitzpatrick, Tim, 30–1, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 155–6, 168 n. 2, 168 n. 4 Fleay, F. G., 25 fluent forgetting, 21, 72, 73, 74–6, 77–8, 84, 119, 157 forgetting, 9, 37–8, 40–1, 69–70, 71, 78, 82, 122, 168 n. 11 see also fluent forgetting formulae, 13, 15, 34, 82 Forse, James, 26, 128 The Four Prentices of London, 130 Frederick and Basilea, 48 gesture, 14, 20, 21, 28, 46, 65, 66, 69, 85, 105, 118, 170 n. 8 the art of, 2, 87–8, 90–1, 93, 97, 98–9, 100–4, 106 and the audience, 95–6, 110 brain–hand–language system, 21, 87, 92–8, 101–2, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 110 conventional, 13–14, 88, 90, 92, 97, 170 n. 9 as a craft, 87, 102–3
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formalized, 1–2, 87, 88–9, 90, 97–8 and the humors, 91, 92 natural, 88, 89, 98, 99–100, 110 “online” spontaneous, 97, 101 and passion, 21, 90–2, 103, 106, 108–10 rhetorical, 88–91, 97, 98–101, 102 as a tool for memory and attention, 90, 95–7, 101, 106 training, 90, 97, 101–2, 103, 110, 120, 121 Yemenite, 103 Gibson, J. J., 66, 152, 170 n. 21 Gilborne, Samuel, 133 Glenberg, Arthur, 95 Goldberg, Jonathan, 15–16 Goldin-Meadow, Susan, 93, 94–5, 96, 97 Goodwin, Charles, 115 Gorbuduc, 105, 106 Granville-Barker, Harley, 88, 89 Grasseni, Cristina, 4, 22, 51–2, 116 Greeno, J., 116 Greg, W. W., 25, 45–6, 48, 55, 56, 59, 63, 169 n. 13, 169 n. 15 Grote, David, 168 n. 10 group expertise, 5, 20, 23, 64, 66, 114–15, 129, 159, 166 group systems, 5–6, 13, 27, 28, 66, 145, 154–5 sharers, 13, 23, 52, 60, 151, 154–5 see also apprenticeship, rehearsal practices Gunnell, John G., 17 Gurr, Andrew, 13–14, 26, 30, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41–2, 71, 89, 169 n. 14 Hall, Jon, 98 Harbage, Alfred, 88, 130, 132 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 16, 17
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Hattaway, Michael, 13, 88, 167 n. 8, 168 n. 9 Heminges, John, 127, 134, 170 n. 2 Henslowe, Philip, 25–6, 109, 111, 127, 139 Herman, David, 17 Heywood, Thomas, 86–7, 91, 120 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 17 Hunter, I. M. L., 70, 72 Hutchins, Ed, 4–6, 18, 22, 28, 29, 31, 51, 52, 96, 114–15, 137, 151–2, 167 n. 1 Ichikawa, Mariko, 30, 34, 37, 39, 41, 42 improvisation, 4, 28, 72, 76, 82, 105, 115, 126, 151, 153 Ingold, Tim, 115 Ingram, William, 26 “insides, objects, and people,” 7, 8, 12, 15, 29, 111, 115, 151 see also cognitive mechanisms interference, 15, 70, 168 n. 11 internal cognitive mechanisms, 2, 7, 8, 15, 18, 19, 32, 36, 117, 152–3, 156–7 see also attention, memory, perception Ioppolo, Grace, 74, 126, 169 n. 16 Jackson, Henry, 131, 145 John a Kent, 57 Johnson, Mark, 17, 18 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 107 Jonson, Ben, 13, 132, 154 New Inn, 74 Poetaster, 131 Jordan, Brigitte, 27 Joseph, Bertram, 88–9, 90–1, 92 Kastan, David, 82, 167 n. 7 Kathman, David, 12, 22, 45, 50, 112, 126, 127, 128, 132, 169 n. 14, 170 n. 2 Katsman, Roman, 103
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Kemp, Will, 50 Kendon, Adam, 93, 98 Kiernan, Pauline, 163, 164 King’s Men, the, 125–6 Kirsh, David, 7, 28–9, 31, 32, 39, 41, 96, 97, 116, 165 Knight, Rhonda, 161, 171 n. 2 knowledge, 14, 27, 37, 60, 76, 97, 112, 115, 117, 118, 124 domain, 37, 114, 118, 165 implicit vs. explicit, 27, 40, 60 tacit, 30, 31, 32, 42, 50, 55, 58, 159–60, 161 Knutson, Roslyn L., 13, 25, 26, 66, 112, 167 n. 6 Kyd, Thomas, 21, 106, 107, 110 The Spanish Tragedy, 21, 70, 105–10 Lakoff, George, 17, 18 Lamb, Edel, 120, 133, 154–5 language, 108, 110, 141, 144, 149, 160 formal features of, 20–1, 46, 69, 157 and imagery, 93–5 literary/theatrical, 45–6, 83, 170 n. 6 see also gesture (brain–hand– language system), mnemonics Lave, Jean, 4, 116, 167 n. 1 Lesser, Zack, 170 n. 6 Levine, Laura, 130 lighting, 11, 22, 32, 33, 37, 54, 151, 157–8, 159, 161, 163, 164–5 literacy, 72, 155, 156 see also orality Long, William B., 48, 50–1, 54–5, 56, 57–8 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the, 25, 26, 45, 50, 127, 153 MacLean, Sally Beth, 105, 143, 153
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Madelaine, Richard, 136 Maguire, Laurie, 8, 21, 72, 73–4, 78, 83 Mahood, M. M., 31, 34, 137, 168 n. 4 Mann, David, 75, 130, 131, 135 Marlowe, Christopher, 22, 27, 153 Edward II, 146–50, 171 n. 9 Tamburlaine, Part 2, 141 Marston, John, 104, 154 material surrounds, 2, 4–5, 9, 10–12, 14, 19–20, 37, 46, 53, 56, 67–8, 101, 112, 116, 152, 156–7 see also cognitive artifacts, objects, playing space, tools McConachie, Bruce, 9, 36, 97, 170 n. 21, 170 n. 8 McMillin, Scott, 105, 109, 136–7, 138, 143, 146, 153 McNeill, David, 93–4, 96, 98, 102 memorability, 11, 63, 69, 157 see also mnemonics memorial reconstruction, 8, 13, 21, 73–4, 82–3, 169 n. 13, 169 n. 15 memorization, 9–10, 11, 32, 72 memory, 1, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 19, 25, 28, 61, 76, 78, 82, 84–5, 105, 120–1, 125, 167 n. 3, 167 n. 4 the art of, 71–2 constraints on, 7, 8–9, 12, 19, 20–1, 35, 69, 72, 82 ecological studies of, 9, 157, 167 n. 5 gesture and, 90, 95–6, 97–8, 106 mechanisms of, 1, 12, 21, 157 procedural, 118 short-term, 9, 35 studies of, 3, 4, 8, 81 verbal, 21 verbatim, 8, 10, 21, 65, 69–71, 72–5, 83, 118, 122, 140
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see also cognitive artifacts, forgetting, memorial reconstruction, memorization, mnemonics, playing space, remembering, working memory Menzer, Paul, 19, 61, 66–7, 83, 89, 110, 162–3, 166, 170 n. 7 Middleton, Thomas, 131 Mayor of Queensborough, 74–5 The Milkmaids, 56 Minerva Brittanna, 91 mnemonic demands and loads, 1, 8, 20, 31, 60, 72, 76, 81, 84, 96, 125, 141 mnemonics commonplaces, 80–1, 82 conventions, 78, 80–1, 82 echoes, 63, 76, 84–5 patterning, 63, 72, 76–7, 78, 81, 82, 84 player interaction, 84–5 repetition, 62–3, 64, 72, 76, 77, 80, 84, 144–5 rhyme, 11, 20, 72, 76, 77, 84, 143 rhythm, 11, 20, 72, 73, 74, 77, 84, 110 surface features, 11, 20–1, 72, 76–7, 157 verse, 20–1, 71–2, 76, 84, 85 see also repetition, space, tropes More Dissemblers besides Women, 130 movement, 54, 69, 85, 88, 101, 103, 104, 108, 115, 143, 145 conventional, 1–2, 14, 88 stage, 31–5, 36, 38, 41, 44 Munro, Lucy, 133, 155 Muse, David, 129 Nashe, Thomas, 89, 132 Nellhaus, Tobin, 17 New Bibliographers, 73–4, 78, 83
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Noice, Helga, 9–12, 60, 114, 156–7 Noice, Tony, 9–12, 60, 114, 156–7 Norman, Donald A., 28, 29 objects, 7, 8, 12, 15, 29, 67, 96, 111, 115, 151, 162 see also cognitive artifacts, tools O’Neill, R. H., 33 orality, 8, 72, 74, 155, 156, 167 n. 4 O’Regan, J. K., 35 original practices productions, 11, 23, 129, 158–64, 166 American Shakespeare Company, 158, 161–2, 163 New Globe, 129, 158, 162–3, 164, 165–6 Original Shakespeare Company, 158–61, 163 Orlando Furioso, 45, 58–9, 60 pageants, 131 children’s roles in, 143, 171 n. 7 Palen, L., 28 Palfrey, Simon, 14, 19, 60–4, 65–6, 67, 68, 104, 159, 170 n. 9 Palmer, Barbara D., 12 parts (or cue-scripts), 2, 19, 20, 47, 51, 52, 55, 58, 67, 83, 104, 110, 111, 120, 137 for amateur players, 59–60 annotation on, 34, 59 and attention, 61, 62–3, 76 cues in, 57, 58, 59–60, 63–4, 65–7 direction in, 32, 59, 61 repeated and premature cues, 61–3, 64–5, 66 the scribe’s role in creating, 57, 65–6 use of in original practices productions, 158, 159, 160, 161–2, 163, 164
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Paster, Gail Kern, 18, 91 patronage, 13, 112, 151 perception, 2, 3, 4, 7, 19, 28, 29, 36, 41, 44, 115, 116, 117 Perkins, David N., 3 personation, 75, 85, 86–7, 110, 112, 118, 121, 125 Peters, Julie Stone, 72 Phillips, Augustine, 133 Pig, John, 127, 134, 171 n. 3 playbooks, 2, 19, 20, 30, 32, 43, 45, 47–8, 49, 50–1, 52, 54–8, 65, 68, 83, 151, 161 bookkeepers, 55, 56–7 players, 12, 14, 19–20, 25, 31, 58, 110 contemporary, 9–11, 60, 68, 158, 165 expert, 13, 20, 60, 113, 117–18, 124–6, 131, 136, 165 novice, 9, 22, 70, 76, 97–8, 112, 113, 118–24, 136–7, 138–40, 161 playhouses, 18, 32, 44, 46, 48–9, 53, 58, 112 playing, 1–2, 14, 15, 20, 88–89 the art of, 2, 21, 69, 85–6, 90–2 the business of, 13, 26 in a line, 1, 14–15, 168 n. 10 see also accent, action, gesture, players playing companies, 1, 18, 64, 111 business practices of, 13, 25–6 children’s, 23, 124, 130, 132–3, 154–5 as cognitive ecologies, 23, 153–5 guild model, 26–7, 111–12, 126, 127 the importance of stability in, 60, 112 networks of friendship and kinship within, 26, 133–4 practices, 11, 13–14, 21, 25, 27, 34, 44, 45, 54, 58, 60, 85, 87, 111, 112, 145
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INDEX
see also Admiral’s Men, cognitive artifacts, embodied experience, English Shakespeare Company, expertise, Henslowe, Lord Chamberlain’s Men, original practices productions, social structures, space, training structures playing space, 1, 9, 19, 25, 29–31, 53, 58, 67, 107–8, 111, 137, 155–6, 157–8, 159, 163, 165 and fictional space, 31, 34, 39, 40–1, 46, 49, 168 n. 4 see also dialogue, doors, movement (stage) Play of Poore, 59 playtexts, 8, 10, 11, 22, 33, 50, 52, 55, 59, 60, 61, 70–1, 73, 112, 136, 157 playwrights, 2, 25, 31, 37, 48, 57–8, 61–2, 68, 69, 74–5, 104–5, 136, 154, 155, 157 see also Jonson, Kyd, Marlowe, Middleton, scaffolding techniques, Shakespeare plots (or platts), 2, 13, 19–20, 34, 44–54, 55, 58, 68, 127, 151, 169 n. 12, 169 n. 14 and casting, 19, 44–5, 47, 50 as charts or maps, 51–3 and doubling, 50, 52–3 and entrances (and exits), 19, 30, 31–2, 44–5, 49–50, 51, 52, 56 and the play’s structure, 20, 44–5, 49, 50, 51, 52 plotters, 44, 46, 52, 169 n. 14 and shared attention, 20, 53 and stage business, 19, 45, 46, 48, 51, 53 use of in original practices productions, 158, 159, 160 The Plott of the First Parte of Tamar Cam, 44, 48 Potter, Lois, 1, 69–70, 73
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preparation (of plays), 11, 14–15, 47–8, 54–5, 57, 64, 65, 93, 124, 136–7, 146, 160, 162, 163, 164 print, 70, 72–3, 74 see also literacy prompters, 14, 55–6, 64, 71 props (theatrical), 41, 45, 53, 54, 58, 59, 108, 110, 162 Prynne, William, 105 Queen’s Men, the, 105, 142–3, 153–4, 155 Quintilian, 86, 91, 98–9 recall, 15, 21, 32, 72, 78, 122, 125, 157, 170 n. 4 see also memory (verbatim) Records of Early English Drama (REED), 12 rehearsal practices, 11, 14, 59, 66, 67, 85, 97, 117, 118, 154, 166 contemporary, 14, 32–3, 158 group, 14, 65, 66, 159, 168 n. 9 in original practices productions, 158–9, 161–2, 163, 164 small group rehearsals, 66, 137, 144, 145, 146 see also preparation remembering, 9, 11, 34, 69–70, 74, 76–82, 84–5, 95–6, 146, 156, 157 novice actors and, 97, 118–19, 122, 139–40 the recency effect, 38, 168 n. 6 remembering lines, 10, 21, 31, 71–2 see also forgetting, memory (verbatim) repetition, 52, 62–3, 64, 72, 76, 77, 80, 84, 144–5 rhetorical training, 21, 78, 82, 86, 106, 110, 158 rhetorical devices, 76–8, 107 see also gesture (rhetorical)
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Rice, John, 131–2, 134, 170 n. 2 Roach, Joseph, 90, 91, 92, 103 Robertson, David, 95 role specialization, 15 Rosenberg, Marvin, 88–9, 90, 127–8 rote, 88, 92, 98, 101, 103, 115–16, 122, 170 n. 9 Rowlands, Mark, 35, 170 n. 4 Royce, Jacalyn, 165 Rubin, David C., 8, 72, 74, 76, 122, 157, 170 n. 4 Rutter, C. C., 25, 59 Rylance, Mark, 129, 163, 164 Salomon, Gavriel, 3–4 Sandes, James, 133 Sawyer, R. Keith, 4, 116 scaffolding, 6, 53, 78, 84, 137–8 see also mnemonics scaffolding techniques, 22, 137–9, 147, 148, 153 attentional devices, 22, 137, 138, 141 double-embedded cues, 22, 138, 143 explicit embedded instruction, 22, 138, 139–41, 143, 144, 148–9 restricted roles, 136–7, 138, 145–6 shepherding, 22, 139, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153 Scribner, Sylvia, 167 n. 1 The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52–3, 127, 169 n. 14 Selimus, 139–41 Shaiken, Harley, 116 Shakespeare, William Cymbeline, 42 Hamlet, 60, 66–7, 75, 78–81, 82–3, 92, 106, 108, 109, 124–5, 126, 136
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Henry IV, Part 1, 56 Henry V, 163, 164 Henry VI, Part 1, 77–8, 80, 105, 146 King John, 142, 143–5, 153 King Lear, 38–40 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 85, 119–23, 136 Macbeth, 66 The Merchant of Venice, 62–3 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55–6, 119, 136 Othello, 71, 131 Richard II, 41–2 Richard III, 142, 146 Romeo and Juliet, 41, 129 Twelfth Night, 128 The Winter’s Tale, 84–5 Shapiro, Michael, 130, 131, 132 Sidney, Sir Philip, 71–2, 76 Simons, D. J., 35–6 Sinfield, Alan, 130 Situated Cognition, 2, 3, 7, 67 situation awareness, 28, 31, 60, 66, 117, 118–26, 138–50 skill, 1, 10, 14, 29, 40, 51–2, 68, 86, 88, 92, 97, 102, 104–5, 110, 161, 166 see also accent, enskillment, gesture skill development, see enskillment, expertise smart spaces, 20, 27–9, 137 Smilek, D., 36–7 Smith, Bruce, 18, 37, 170 n. 1 social cognition, 3, 21–2, 66, 113, 152, 159 see also enskillment, expertise, social structures, training structures social structures, 2, 4, 5, 8, 21–2, 111, 112, 151, 159, 162, 163–4 deference, 137, 140, 147–8, 163–4
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INDEX
hierarchy, 5–6, 11, 26, 37, 38–9, 56, 112, 114–15, 138, 163–4 see also apprenticeship, expertise, training structures social surround, 2–3, 4–5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 34, 109, 114–15, 116–17, 138, 152–3, 154, 156–7 social systems, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 10–11, 12, 15–16, 18, 37, 56, 66, 94, 101, 102, 113, 114– 15, 137, 151, 153, 161, 163 sound, 11, 22, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 58, 90, 107, 151, 165 music, 14, 45, 53, 56, 57, 163 space, 29, 32, 53, 114, 165 configuration of, 5, 28, 29, 115 cue-space, 62–3, 65 see also playing space, smart spaces Spolsky, Ellen, 18 stage business, 19, 46, 54, 59, 92, 160 stagecraft, 55, 64, 107–10, 149 stage directions, 30, 31–2, 38–9, 40, 41–4, 46, 49–50, 55–6, 57, 59, 107, 108, 137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 148 stage management, 36, 41–2 stage space, see playing space Stallybrass, Peter, 67–8, 107, 170 n. 6 Stern, Tiffany, 14–15, 19, 60–64, 65–6, 67, 68, 88, 104, 136–7, 159, 161, 168 n. 10, 169 n. 12, 170 n. 9 Stone, Lawrence, 17 Strange’s Men, 45 Streeck, Jurgen, 102 Suchman, Lucy, 27–8, 29, 64, 115 Sutton, John, 2, 6–7, 8, 18, 92 Syme, Holger Schott, 104 technologies, 8, 22, 27, 37, 70, 72–3, 93, 117, 151
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see also lighting, sound “textual debris,” 83 theatre, 8–9, 36 see also playing space, theatrical practices, workplaces theatre history, 1–2, 12–13, 16, 25–6, 153, 155, 166 theatre studies, 7 theatrical conventions, 155–6, 166 for boy actors, 129, 146–50 of movement and gesture, 1–2, 13–14, 89–90, 98 see also doors “theatrical essentialism,” 8, 11 theatrical practices, 10, 11, 12, 14, 23, 32–3, 46, 48–9, 66, 152, 166, 167 n. 8 see also gesture, movement, original practices productions, playing companies (practices), rehearsal practices Thomson, Leslie, 30, 46, 49, 55, 56–7 Thomson, Peter, 168 n. 9 Tooley, Nicholas, 133 tools, 4, 7, 10–11, 14, 19, 20, 22, 27, 33, 36, 46, 96, 115, 117, 133, 160, 162 see also gesture, parts touring, 12, 26, 41, 69 training processes, 2, 22, 23, 60, 116, 128–9, 145, 158, 162, 164 in action and accent, 120, 121 see also gesture (training), rhetorical training training structures, 111, 127, 129, 141 on-the-job training, 135, 136, 141, 154 in plays, 22, 113, 128 two-person scenes, 136–7 see also apprenticeship, boy actors (training of),
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training structures—Continued enskillment, rehearsal practices (small group), scaffolding techniques tropes, 72, 77, 78–81, 82, 107, 142, 149 antithesis, 78–81, 82, 107 balance, 77, 78, 81, 107 contrast, 77, 80–1, 82 The Troublesome Reign of King John, 142–4, 153 Tucker, Patrick, 158–61 Tweedie, Eleanor, 107 voice, 20, 28, 86, 91, 99, 103, 128, 164 Vygotsky, Lev, 102, 113, 137–8, 152 Wallis, Patrick, 135 Waterman, Ian, 93–4 Webster, John, 104 Wells, Stanley, 113, 127, 129 Werstine, Paul, 13, 83
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Wheeler, Michael, 6, 16–17 Wickham, Glynne, 25–6 Wierenga, Sarah A., 117–18 Williams, Tennessee, 170 n. 8 Wilson, Richard Three Lords and Three Ladies, 153 Wilson, Robert, 3 working environments, 22, 27–9, 135 working memory, 9, 19, 35, 37, 47, 60, 76, 101, 117, 118, 122, 140, 141, 161 “change blindness,” 35 workplaces, 19, 23, 25, 27–8, 32, 44, 111–12, 113, 115, 116, 129, 154, 155 Worthen, W. B., 164, 165 Wright, George, 76, 84 Wright, Thomas, 91, 92 writing, 15, 30, 44, 55, 57, 59, 70, 72, 77, 83, 101–2, 156 Žižek, Slavok, 16
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