Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre 9781474257473, 9781474257503, 9781474257497

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text
List of Contributors
Introduction
Part One: Taxonomy
1. Inventing Stage Directions; Demoting Dumb Shows
2. The Boundaries of Stage Directions
3. ‘Peter falls into the hole’: Nonce Stage Directions and the Idea of the Dictionary
Part Two: Text
4. Reading Shakespeare’s Stage Directions
5. Shakespeare’s Literary Stage Directions
Part Three: Editing
6. When is a Missing Stage Direction Missing?
7. Editing and Directing: Mise en scène, mise en page
Part Four: Space
8. ‘By indirections find directions out’: Unpicking Early Modern Stage Directions
9. ‘Strikes open a curtain where appears a body’: Discovering Death in Stage Directions
Part Five: Plays
10. ‘Enter Macduffe, with Macbeths head’: Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Staging of Trauma
11. ‘(From the Dutchesse Grave)’: Echoic Liminalities in The Duchess of Malfi
12. Understanding Dumb Shows and Interpreting The White Devil
Notes
Critical Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre

ALSO AVAIL ABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Broadcast your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media Edited by Stephen O’Neill ISBN 978-1-474-29511-6 Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Will Tosh ISBN 978-1-350-01388-9 Queering the Shakespeare Film Anthony Guy Patricia ISBN 978-1-474-23703-1 Shakespeare’s Artists B.J. Sokol ISBN 978-1-350-02193-8 Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Culture in the Drama Keir Elam ISBN 978-1-408-17975-8 Shakespeare and Greece Edited by Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou ISBN 978-1-474-24425-1 Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters Oliver Ford Davies ISBN 978-1-350-03846-2

Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre Edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Sarah Dustagheer, Gillian Woods and contributors, 2018 Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Pippa Nixon as Ariel in The Tempest, 2016. © Photographer Marc Brenner/RSC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-474-25747-3 PB: 978-1-3501-1881-2 ePDF: 978-1-474-25749-7 eBook: 978-1-474-25748-0 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  ix Note on the Text  xi List of Contributors  xiii

Introduction  1 Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods Part One  Taxonomy 1 Inventing Stage Directions; Demoting Dumb Shows  19 Tiffany Stern 2 The Boundaries of Stage Directions  Laurie Maguire

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3 ‘Peter falls into the hole’: Nonce Stage Directions and the Idea of the Dictionary  Paul Menzer and Jess Hamlet

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Part Two  Text 4 Reading Shakespeare’s Stage Directions  Emma Smith

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5 Shakespeare’s Literary Stage Directions  Douglas Bruster

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contents

Part Three  Editing 6 When is a Missing Stage Direction Missing?  141 Suzanne Gossett 7 Editing and Directing: Mise en scène, mise en page  163 Terri Bourus Part Four  Space 8 ‘By indirections find directions out’: Unpicking Early Modern Stage Directions  191 Martin White 9 ‘Strikes open a curtain where appears a body’: Discovering Death in Stage Directions  213 Sarah Dustagheer, with Philip Bird Part Five  Plays 10 ‘Enter Macduffe, with Macbeths head’: Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Staging of Trauma  241 Andrew Hiscock 11 ‘(From the Dutchesse Grave)’: Echoic Liminalities in The Duchess of Malfi  Sarah Lewis

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contents

12 Understanding Dumb Shows and Interpreting The White Devil  287 Gillian Woods Notes  311 Critical Bibliography  323 Index  337

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank Margaret Bartley, Emily Hockley, Susan Furber and the team at Arden for their support and enthusiasm for this project. They are also grateful to the anonymous readers for their instructive comments. The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, Shakespeare Bulletin and the Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck provided funding for a very valuable seminar for some of our contributors; we thank Bernhard Klein, Pascale Aebischer, Louise Owen and Fintan Walsh for enabling this funding to be released. Thanks also to theatre-­ makers James Wallace, Paul Russell and Rebecca Maltby for taking part in the seminar. Ideas relating to this project were also discussed at an SAA panel on ‘Stage Directions and Interpretation’ in New Orleans. We are grateful to the Program Committee for giving us this platform and to the participants and auditors for their insights. Most importantly, we thank our contributors for responding to the questions posed by the phenomenon of Renaissance stage directions with such energy and imagination. Sarah Dustagheer: My daughter, Martha, made her entrance into the world while Gill and I were busy thinking about stage directions! Therefore I would like to thank my husband, my parents and in-­laws – Tom Chivers, Angela and Ibrahim Dustagheer, Chris Chivers and Hannah Kanter – whose support and babysitting have enabled me to complete this collection. Finally I want to thank Gill for her generous invitation to be part of the book and her kindness and flexibility concerning my maternity leave. She is a brilliant, hard-­working and dedicated collaborator and friend, and I hope I am lucky enough to work with her again.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gillian Woods: I would like to thank my colleagues at Birkbeck for their support and interest in this project. Fleur Rothschild provided valuable assistance at a key moment and I am very grateful to her. Thanks also to my husband, John Garai, and to my parents, Colin and Valerie Woods. Special thanks are due to Martha, for loaning me her mother. And, of course, I would like to thank my wonderful co-­editor, Sarah Dustagheer, who has remained heroically committed to the book while getting to know her new daughter, and helped to keep the project fun. I dedicate my contribution to Edith Owen.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

This collection recognizes that stage directions appear in a variety of forms, across a range of early and edited play-­texts, and have different purposes and users. Accordingly, contributors quote from both early modern texts and modern editions, depending on their needs and approaches. Unless otherwise specified, all pre-­eighteenth-century publications are printed in London. All critical references have been collated in a single bibliography located at the end of the book; primary references are found at the end of each chapter.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Philip Bird is an actor, director and playwright. Having performed at Shakespeare’s Globe for the first time in 1997, he has since played there in The Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice, King John, Cymbeline, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Troilus and Cressida in Original Pronunciation. He directs rehearsed readings for Read Not Dead and was Text Associate on Deafinitely Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is involved in practice-­based research at the Globe, devising sessions for the Outside/In conference with Blackfriars, Virginia and for the Research in Action workshops in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Terri Bourus is Professor of Theatre in the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University. She is one of the four general editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, and co-­author of the general introduction to the Modern Critical Edition (2016). Her other work includes Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance (2014; paperback 2017) and The Creation and Re-Creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes (2013). After a professional career in the American theatre, she founded Hoosier Bard Productions, which conducted theatrical experiments to test editorial theories about Shakespeare. She has directed plays ranging from Lysistrata to The Vagina Monologues. Douglas Bruster is Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas. His research seeks to place Shakespeare within the market of representations of his day. Among his publications are Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare and To Be or Not To Be, as well as editions of The Changeling, A Midsummer

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Night’s Dream and, with Eric Rasmussen, ‘Everyman’ and ‘Mankind’. Sarah Dustagheer is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent, and a member of Shakespeare’s Globe’s Architectural Research Group. Her book Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and Blackfriars, 1599–1613 is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is the co-­author of Shakespeare in London (Arden Shakespeare, 2015). Her essays on early modern playwriting and theatre space and contemporary Shakespearean performance have appeared in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Literature Compass, Cahiers Élisabéthains and Shakespeare Bulletin. Suzanne Gossett is Professor Emerita of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is a General Textual Editor of The Norton Shakespeare, third edition; General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, and the editor of such early modern plays as Eastward Ho!, Philaster, A Fair Quarrel and Bartholomew Fair. She has edited Pericles for the Arden Shakespeare and is currently completing the Arden 3 edition of All’s Well That Ends Well. She is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and together with Dympna Callaghan edited the Association’s 2016 collection, Shakespeare in our Time. Jess Hamlet is a PhD candidate with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She also holds a Master of Letters and a Master of Fine Arts, both in Shakespeare & Performance, from Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia. Jess works in early modern drama, particularly with Shakespeare’s role in the early years of the United States. Her work on the early modern book trade and the role of the absent mother in Shakespeare’s plays is currently in print. Andrew Hiscock is Professor of English Literature at Bangor University, Wales and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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et les Lumières (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III). A Fellow of the English Association, he is English literature editor of the Modern Language Review, series editor for The Yearbook of English Studies and series co-­editor for the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. His most recent monograph is Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (2011) and he is at present co-­editing a critical collection, Shakespeare and Memory, and preparing a critical study of Shakespeare’s history plays. Sarah Lewis is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London. She has also lectured at University College Dublin, University of Roehampton, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and Shakespeare’s Globe. She is currently working on her first book, Time and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. She is a director of the research network, ‘Grasping Kairos’. Laurie Maguire is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author or editor of nine books on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. With Emma Smith, she won the 2014 Calvin Hoffman prize for their co-­authored article, ‘How Shakespeare Read his Marlowe’. She is currently preparing the British Library Panizzi lectures for 2018, running a collaborative cognitive research group with colleagues in Classics and Psychology (funded by the Calleva Centre), and writing a book on Shakespeare and medicine. Paul Menzer is a professor and the director of the Mary Baldwin University Shakespeare and Performance graduate program. He is the editor of Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006), author of The Hamlets: Cues, Q’s, and Remembered Texts (2008), Anecdotal Shakespeare: a New Performance History (2015), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center (2017) and of dozens of articles, essays, reviews, and chapters on theatre history, textual criticism and performance studies. Emma Smith teaches early modern literature at Hertford College, Oxford. Her work centres on the reception of early

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

modern drama, especially Shakespeare, in print, criticism and performance. Her recent books are The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (2015) and Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016). Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007) and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009). She has edited the anonymous King Leir (2001), Sheridan’s The Rivals (2004), Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer (2010), and Brome’s Jovial Crew (2014), and co-­edited, with Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (2013). She is general editor of New Mermaids and Arden Shakespeare 4. Martin White is the Emeritus Professor of Theatre and former Foundation Chair of Drama at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on the plays and theatre practices of the early modern theatre, and the work of modern practitioners on the plays of that period. He directed scores of plays at Bristol, is a Senior Research Fellow and Theatre Associate of Shakespeare’s Globe – where he developed the candle lighting for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – works regularly as an adviser to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is a General Editor of the Revels Plays series. Gillian Woods is a Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on early modern theatricality, visual culture, nostalgia and post-Reformation religion. She has written articles on a range of early modern dramatists, including Marlowe, Munday and Ford. She is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism: Romeo and Juliet (2013) and Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (2013; joint winner of the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award). At present, she is writing a book on Renaissance theatricalities.

Introduction Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods

Thunder and Lightning. Enter Ariell (like a Harpey) claps his wings vpon the Table, and with a quient deuice the Banquet vanishes. SHAKESPEARE 1623: B1r

In Act 3, Scene 3 of the Folio text of The Tempest, Prospero’s servant Ariel makes a fantastical appearance via a stage direction. The play’s Arden editors, Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, note that ‘the spectacle that follows visually alludes to the Aeneid’, reminding us of the classical imagery of this moment in the play (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011: 3.3.52.1n). This collection’s front cover represents the stage direction as realized in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2016: Pippa Nixon’s Ariel in descent from a trap above the stage, with wings of tawny brown canvas, a bright gold star emblazoned on his chest, his hair slicked back and his cheeks covered in shining metallic powder.

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Working through this one example we encounter the myriad forms of a single stage direction and the many agents who may be involved in its representation and realization. The stage direction is both text and action: it can be read, interpreted, edited, glossed, heard, seen and made. Stage directions are produced by the pen of the playwright, or others involved in the making of performance and text (the book-­keeper, the printer), the mind of the reader, the notes of the editor and, of course, on the stage of the playhouse in the rehearsals of the theatre company, in the bodies of the actors and in the sensory experience of the audience. Stage directions may exist in all these arenas, or may be missing in action: realized on stage but absent in the text, or vice versa. Stage directions mutate in their different forms. Ariel’s ‘Harpey’ is the movement of the actor, the wings, the cosmetics (stage); it is the six-­letter type created by the First Folio compositor (text); it is the classical reference noted by the editor for the reader (edition). Stage directions function, and are experienced, in all these realms and at various times: when the play was first staged; when it is staged currently; and when we open our First Folio and/or Arden edition to read, to examine or to realize it as students, as literary scholars or as theatre-­makers. Stage directions are thus fundamentally mutable, enigmatic and various. Figuring out how to analyse stage directions is challenging, not just because of their metamorphic forms, but also because their origins are felt to be uncertain. It is widely assumed that the direction featuring Ariel’s harpy is provided by the play’s scribe, Ralph Crane, rather than Shakespeare (a view challenged by Bruster, below). Questions of authorship and provenance arise because the stage directions for any given Renaissance play survive only in incomplete form. Instructions to enter and exit the stage, produce props, create sound-­effects and mount visual spectacles, were spread across several different documents, including the playbook, backstage plot and individual actors’ parts. The playbook (sometimes anachronistically referred to as the ‘promptbook’) was the company’s fullest copy of the play-­script, containing all the

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actors’ speeches and many of the stage directions. By contrast, the backstage plot provided only the bare structure of the play, listing when actors needed to enter a scene (along with some of the props they should take), and indicating through horizontal lines when the stage should be cleared (Stern 2009: 201–31). Actors’ parts were specific to a particular character and contained all of his/her dialogue and two or three cue-­words, but not other characters’ speeches. The part also contained stage directions relevant to the actor using it, possibly in more precise positions than in the playbook, but space was not wasted through the detailing of ‘stock’ gestures (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 31, 22). Unfortunately, only eighteen manuscript playbooks, six backstage plots and one professional English part have survived. But analysis of them suggests that playing companies felt no need to standardize their multiple performance documents to ensure that, for example, every exit was recorded in a part and the backstage plot and the playbook (Werstine 2013: 208). The compositors of printed plays (the form in which about 98 per cent of extant English Renaissance drama survives) did not consult all of these sources, which were nevertheless necessary for performance in early modern theatre. Small wonder modern scholars and editors find the stage directions in surviving plays ‘inadequate’ (Thomson 1988: 88): amongst other difficulties, exits are often inconsistently registered. Other, less obviously absent, stage directions might also have become lost in transition. Awareness of these fractured textual origins causes stage directions to be viewed with suspicion. Editors frequently move and remove, augment and invent stage directions with a latitude not exercised in relation to a play’s speeches, and without always making such interventions clear. Judging by their treatment, stage directions are perceived to lack the authority of other parts of the play. The authorship of stage directions is often assumed to be more uncertain than the words given to actors to speak. But this distrust might stem not so much from direct evidence of problematic provenance, as from critics’ preference for the ‘literary’ language of speeches

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over the shifty idioms of stage directions, which slip awkwardly between fictional and technical terminology. Indeed, William B. Long argues that manuscript playbooks – our most direct witness to early modern playhouse practice – reveal that theatrical personnel intervened in scripts less often than we might expect: ‘A 2,500-line playbook might bear twenty-­five theatrical alterations, or ten, or none’ (1999: 416). There are some instances, of course, where stage directions have been retrospectively added to the play-­text for theatrical purposes: a book-­keeper adds a direction for ‘Hoyboyes’ to clarify the playwright’s call for ‘Loud Musique’ in the playbook of Charlemagne or the Distracted Empreror (1999: 423–24). But there is also evidence of book-­keepers making some ‘textual’ changes too, as in the manuscript of Thomas of Woodstock, where Long detects a book-­keeper ‘filling in [. . .] a lacuna left by the playwright’ and changing a word (1985a: 105). So stage directions are not the only parts of the text subject to ‘non-­ authorial’ influence. And when stage directions are altered by theatrical personnel the change often concerns bibliographical location rather than staged action. Paul Werstine demonstrates that book-­keepers would copy (abbreviated) stage directions to different parts of the manuscript, moving them from the right margin to the left, or ‘from the tops of versos to the bottoms of preceding rectos’ (Werstine 2013: 158–60). Thus these rearrangements served not to change the function or timing of stage directions, but to make them more noticeable to the user of the playbook. Having scrutinized such evidence, Long concludes: ‘So infrequently do theatrical alterations occur that if a stage direction exists in a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-­century play text, manuscript or printed, it is most likely a playwright’s’ (1999: 417).1 In other words, the provenance of stage directions is not that much more uncertain than other parts of a play-­text. Nevertheless, trusting that a stage direction is ‘most likely’ written by (one of) the play’s author(s) does not resolve the problems it presents. Long also suggests that the presence of a stage direction in a playbook or printed text is no guarantee

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that the instruction was enacted in early performances. He points out that extant manuscript playbooks indicate that experienced playwrights tended to write far fewer ‘advisory directions’ (detailing matters such as expression and gesture) than amateur dramatists, presumably because they knew actors were best placed to make decisions about performance technique (1999: 417). Since these same playbooks also show that book-­keepers did not concern themselves with correcting every inaccuracy in a script or recording every stage action, they are not exact reports of what happened in a performance. Just as players would have necessarily ignored one of the two stage directions requiring Anselmus to die in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy manuscript playbook, they could also disregard directions found in other playbooks that did not suit their professional needs.2 Thus a stage direction might be authorial but not performable, or, at least, not performed. If we assume that stage directions are quintessentially theatrical – that they are parts of the play-­text that point most clearly to its embodiment away from the page, on the stage – then we are left with an interpretive problem. What is the significance of a stage direction that might not have made it to the stage? In this way, stage directions foreground the familiar ontological difficulties – and pleasures – of plays. Is ‘the play’ best conceptualized as the work imagined by its authors, unchained by theatrical practicalities? Or, given its raison d’être, is the truest form of the play a performance? If so, which one: the first, the most recent, or the one (subjectively judged) best? The reason there is no satisfactory answer to these questions is that ‘the play’ is all of these forms of itself; it is constantly on the move. Stage directions highlight the ways that a play is stretched between text and performance. Just as it is not always clear that a stage direction was performed in early modern playhouses, neither is it altogether certain for whom it was written. A direction such as ‘These speches are seuerall kinds of distractions and in the action should appeare so’, in Webster’s The White Devil, sounds very prescriptive: a clear-­cut instruction about how the

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actors should deliver their lines (Webster 1612: Kr). But as an experienced dramatist by 1612, Webster would, according to Long’s logic, know that actors could be trusted to interpret play-­scripts. Indeed, Anthony Hammond contends that Webster added extra ‘elaborately descriptive directions’ to The White Devil, specifically for the printed version of the text; the stage directions direct the readers’ imaginations rather than the actors’ actions on the stage (1992: 73). In some ways, then, this stage direction makes the text more ‘literary’, more usable for readers looking at a page rather than a stage. However, such ‘page’ directions simultaneously insist on the theatricality of the play, speaking of a performance accessible only in the mind (‘in the action should appeare so’).3 The direction pinpoints the contradictory nature of a play which is always in some sense incomplete: as text it lacks performance; but as a performance it is only ever one manifestation of the multiple possibilities of the text. In this collection we propose that, far from invalidating stage directions’ significance, these complications of provenance and purpose are provocative starting points for investigation. Recognizing that stage directions speak to different people (book-­keepers, actors, readers) in different ways helps us to gain a firmer grasp of the various ways in which plays make meaning. In fact, we suggest that stage directions take us to the heart of how meaning is made in plays precisely because they foreground the dynamic between text and performance. Thus on one level they simply point to the very practical business of production. For instance, stage directions indicate that a theatrical tragedy is not only created through a plot that pitches a protagonist against the social order, or through speeches musing on the profundity of the human condition, but also in physical actions that register violent upheaval (‘The battell enters, Richard wounded’), sound effects that create a sense of scale (‘Sound a flourish with drums’), and bloody spectacle that makes the fatal trajectory of the story visceral (‘Enter Giouanni with [a] heart vpon his Dagger’).4 But in their ambiguously theatrical and readerly purpose,

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stage directions also remind us of the multiple modes in which plays make meaning. In The Thracian Wonder (1661), a play perhaps falsely attributed to Webster and Rowley, one stage direction bluntly instructs: ‘A mad Dance, they dance off ’ (Dv). Theatrically speaking, this instruction is simultaneously prescriptive and permissive: if they pay attention to it, actors should comport their bodies in a specific manner (‘A mad Dance’), but how they interpret that requirement is left open. Exploring the theatrical demands and options presented by stage directions obviously provides a fuller insight into the play’s performed meaning. However, the bald idiom of the stage direction also has an impact on readers. In this example, the unruly gestures implied by the instruction ‘A mad Dance’ are at odds with the concise proportions of the stage direction itself; the sense of disjunction is appropriate to the event described. Of course, not all stage directions generate equivalent experiences for spectators and readers.5 But by lingering on stage directions, rather than skimming over them to reach the less conceptually awkward speeches, we can gain a fuller understanding of how a play works, in both its textual and theatrical forms. Similarly, the category is most revealing when we acknowledge that the label ‘stage direction’ points to a variety of activities, ranging from the basic (‘Enter’, ‘Ent.’) to the spectacular (‘A hand from out a cloud, threateneth a burning sword’), and from technical instructions about space and material properties (‘there is a sad Song in the MusickeRoome’, ‘A Bed thrust out vpon the Stage’) to acting directions governing gesture and expression (‘She playes the vixen with euery thing about her’).6 These different forms are all loaded with meaning. ‘Enter’ and ‘exit’ might seem like drably functional instructions, but they direct the traffic of the stage and provide the structure upon which the play hangs. As such, they can elucidate a play’s thematic concerns. For example, the interplay between public and private realms in a domestic tragedy such as Arden of Faversham comes into focus when its entrances and exits are analysed for how they produce

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(gendered) interior and exterior spaces. And, as Suzanne Gossett and Sarah Lewis demonstrate in very different ways below, entrances and exits are often far from clear-­cut, whether in terms of their timing or the action they direct. Other types of stage directions might also affect issues such as imagery and characterization. Thus some directions have an obviously iconic significance, as when the suicidal Hieronimo enters ‘with a Ponyard in one hand, and a Rope in the other’ in The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd 1592: G3v). And a play’s verbal images might be less graphically, but still significantly, informed by the visual and auditory effects signalled by stage directions: a play such as Othello, which offers a flickering perspective on different kinds of lightness and darkness, is illuminated by a consideration of what the stage directions say about its use of torches. Furthermore, stage directions might inform ideological interpretation too: knowing that ‘when one figure drags another’, it is ‘usually a male who enters with a female’ raises possibilities for ‘gendered readings’ of characterization (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 75; Hirschfeld 2003: 188). Stage directions are thus rich with interpretative possibilities. They are also eccentric. Not only is their language sometimes pleasingly (or infuriatingly) quirky, but they are also literally out of the centre: frequently positioned in the margins of play-­ texts, they have been marginal to scholarly concerns. Eric Rasmussen wryly observes that in modern editions: Stage directions, quite literally, don’t count [. . .] convention dictates that stage directions be linked to the previous line of dialogue and that each line of the stage direction receive a decimal point, for example, 37.1. Numerically, at least, a stage direction is worth exactly one tenth as much as a line of dialogue. (2003: 226) This collection seeks to make stage directions count, to bring them out of the margins and to see what happens when they are placed at the centre of literary and dramatic analysis.

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If the value of ‘original’ stage directions is decimated by the referencing apparatus, it is also compromised by the frequent addition of editorial stage directions. Where editors have discussed their practices concerning stage directions, consensus mainly lies only in a sense of dissatisfaction. David Bevington complains that decisions regarding when to supply editorial stage directions are ‘haphazard’ (1984: vii). Countering Margaret Jane Kidnie’s recommendation for keeping editorial stage directions in the margin, to maintain a distinction between Haupttext (dialogue) and Nebentext (all other words of the text), John Cox calls on editors to ‘reduce sharply or even eliminate completely the stage directions they add to early texts’ (Kidnie 2000; Cox 2004: 178). But few if any editors can resist the pressure to clarify the problems presented by early texts (illustrated by Gossett below), that would make reading difficult for modern student readers. And sometimes editorial intervention is not so easy to detect. Leslie Thomson pointed out that Oxford’s William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986) printed Folio and Quarto King Lear as separate versions of the same play, but ‘stage directions from the one have been shifted silently into the other’ (1988: 186). Furthermore, Paul Werstine has convincingly demonstrated that editorial assumptions about whether a given play derives from ‘foul papers’ (an author’s messy draft) or a ‘promptbook’ (a supposedly ordered theatrical script) are flawed. Stage directions, in particular, are not a helpful diagnostic tool in this respect since the descriptive stage directions thought to indicate ‘foul papers’ are found in extant theatrical playbooks; those same theatrical playbooks also feature the irregularities of stage directions (such as two entrances for one character) that had been seen as a signal of ‘foul papers’ (2013: 132, 173). Stage directions thus help to reveal that those old scholarly categories do not hold good and editorial traditions need rethinking. While editors have grappled with the textual origins of stage directions, theatre historians have used them as indicators of stage practice and playhouse dimensions. For many stage

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directions are crucial – yet often difficult, ambiguous and unreliable – evidence of what may or may not have occurred on the early modern stage. Richard Hosley famously distinguished between ‘theatrical’ and ‘fictional’ stage directions, suggesting that words like ‘above’ spoke in technical terms about the specifics of the playhouse structure, whereas references to represented places like ‘window’ or ‘study’ are fictional. Michela Calore (2001) has since shown the theatrical/ fictional binary to be false, with both forms of the stage direction appearing even in the emphatically ‘theatrical’ backstage-­plots. But work by Hosley (1959 and 1975), T.J. King (1971) and G.F. Reynolds (1940) lays the foundation for using stage directions as a contested body of evidence for architectural design and/or stage practice. Mariko Ichikawa (2013) assesses stage directions to address problems such as the usage of tiring house doors, the likely location of theatrical musicians, and the removal of corpses from the stage, and Tim Fitzpatrick (2011) scrutinizes them to produce a theory about stage space.7 Analysis of stage directions makes a frequent appearance in recent scholarship on indoor theatre practice, and the research which informed the construction of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2014 (Gurr and Karim-Cooper 2014); Martin White’s essay, below, showcases this kind of approach. Stage practice has also been excavated through analysis of stage directions, with Janette Dillon (2004) producing revealing work on early theatrical technologies and Lucy Munro (2013) vividly tracing the props used to produce such bizarrely violent stage directions as ‘They eat each other’s arms’ and the ‘aesthetic, sensory and bodily impact of blood and dismembered body parts in the early modern playhouse’ (2013: 77). Munro’s work forms part of an important collection by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (2013) that in its discussion of theatrical effects, while not explicitly focussed on stage directions, inevitably provides insights into the intriguing demands for particular stage action. Linda McJannet is the only scholar to discuss early modern stage directions in a full monograph. Her book, The Voice of

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Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code (1999), focuses on the emerging conventions that start to govern the form of stage directions in the period, identifying a ‘theatrical code’ that has a particular grammar and rhetoric. All such work has been invaluable in identifying and evaluating stage directions in ways that provide insight into performance; furthermore it has translated some of the vocabulary and language of the stage direction that was once familiar to many playwrights, actors, audiences, readers and printers. However, attempts to codify stage directions as historical ‘evidence’ of theatrical practice risk overlooking the eccentricity of many stage directions and their literary and creative potential. And so, we suggest, stage directions are ripe for the exploratory, imaginative and literary re-­evaluation which occurs in the pages that follow. Underpinning the questions posed and explored by this collection is Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s seminal study of stage directions, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (1999). Taken from approximately 500 surviving professional plays, the Dictionary consists of over 900 entries of key words and phrases found in early modern stage directions. As such it is a vital research resource for editors, critics and students, as references to it throughout this collection attest. The dictionary format, however, means that the book deliberately cannot and does not provide extended investigation into the interpretative challenges produced by stage directions. As Paul Menzer and Jess Hamlet discuss below, the itemizing and categorizing of stage directions risks muffling the different idioms of their theatrical language. Needless to say, Dessen and Thomson are fully attuned to the implications of their work; indeed in his groundbreaking book, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary, Dessen points out that whenever we learn any language, ‘to master the dictionary definitions (or elementary vocabulary) is at best a first step’ (Dessen 1995: 44). In their introduction to the Dictionary, the authors invite ‘additions, corrections and comments from our readers’; the following collection takes up that invitation. Stage

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Directions and Shakespearean Theatre explores the details, lacunae and ‘what ifs . . .?’ of stage directions, often inspired by Dessen and Thomson’s invaluable work. As a collection of essays, this volume speaks with diverse voices, and thereby responds to the heterogeneity of stage directions themselves, with their various functions and different users. It aims to start new conversations about how and why stage directions matter. Some of these exploratory chapters thus focus on the quiddity of stage directions, investigating what the term means and the (potentially problematic) implications of creating a category with this label. Other essays analyse the usage of stage directions by particular groups, evaluating editorial practice, and identifying the often overlooked fact that readers necessarily engage with stage directions at a literary level, despite the theatrical connotations of their name. Some contributors test what happens when stage directions are foregrounded in the interpretation of drama, either by concentrating on a specific type of stage direction, or by taking stage directions as a starting point for understanding a particular play. Via different methodological approaches, each of these chapters points to the interpretive richness of stage directions, whether our field of study is bibliography or theatre history, performance or literary criticism. The essays that follow explore the oddity and ambivalence of stage directions. Thus in Part One, entitled ‘Taxonomy’, contributors scrutinize the meanings of the term ‘stage direction’ and the principles behind the ways in which we classify this type of text. To begin Tiffany Stern charts the somewhat ignoble origins and history of the phrase ‘stage direction’, coined by Lewis Theobald in 1726 as a derogatory term for non-­authorial dumb shows. Stern demonstrates how the use of the term ‘stage direction’, and its muddled meanings across time, has hidden the variety of agents involved in theatrical production, as well as the range of authors and motivations behind these unique pieces of play text. Like Stern, Laurie Maguire also unpicks our understanding of the status of stage directions. By identifying their ambiguous role,

Introduction

13

Maguire invites us to reconceptualize stage directions, arguing that they manage the boundaries of the fictional play world and its theatrical presentation, meeting the needs of both actors and readers. The ‘Taxonomy’ section ends with a chapter that, in fact, offers an anti-­taxonomy. In an examination of the one-­off and unique stage directions of early modern drama, Paul Menzer and Jess Hamlet seek ‘to push gently back against the tendency towards systemization, taxonomy and standardization’ of the stage direction. In a chapter that has a particular focus on Thomas Heywood, Menzer and Hamlet challenge our notion of stage directions as a shared theatrical vocabulary and think about moments of difficult theatrical communication. Stage directions on the page are central to Part Two, entitled ‘Text’, as chapters by Emma Smith and Douglas Bruster consider stage directions in the reader’s imagination and in the playwright’s mind respectively. Smith suggests that, regardless of provenance, stage directions ‘exist in the act of reading’ and therefore function as ‘snippets of narrative’ that can be read productively in the context of narrative theory and reader-­ response criticism. Drawing on examples from across the Shakespearean canon, Smith demonstrates that stage directions can be as revealing as dialogue in terms of characterization and literary meaning. Douglas Bruster is also interested in rethinking our understanding of what stage directions do, insisting that ‘very few actually “direct”. Instead, most describe and narrate’. He reads stage directions as ‘instances of Shakespeare’s compositional practice’ and argues for a creative correlation between dialogue and stage directions. Part Three concentrates on one of the frontlines of stage directions: editing. In a chapter on missing stage directions, Suzanne Gossett provides an account of the interpretative and often speculative work modern editors must undertake to create a readable and performable text. Gossett highlights the discrepancies and ellipses in the many plays she has edited over the course of her career (including work by Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, John Fletcher and Francis

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Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre

Beaumont) and delineates the challenges of the editorial process. Terri Bourus’s chapter likewise illuminates this process with a consideration of the text layout of early modern manuscripts and Shakespeare’s 1623 Folio. Bourus contends that placing some stage directions in the margin, following manuscript rather than Folio layout, may give editors and their readers a less prescriptive experience of stage directions. She also explores the ways editors might effectively engage with performance history to illuminate explicit and implicit stage directions. In Part Four on ‘Space’, Martin White, Sarah Dustagheer and actor-­director Philip Bird scrutinize some of the practical implications of stage directions. Drawing on his practice-­led research at the University of Bristol’s Wickham Theatre and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, White explores stage directions that are often misunderstood and overlooked on the page but which make sense and gain a significance in performance. In an inquisitive discussion of plays by Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson and John Marston, White also contemplates stage directions that remain confusing even when examined in practical terms. In the next chapter, Dustagheer discusses stage directions that demand the revelation of a dead body in a previously off-­stage curtained space referred to as the discovery space. She argues that this seemingly simple stage direction had a rich symbolic meaning associated with postReformation cultural anxieties about death. In thinking about the theatrical practicalities, the chapter was conceived and created in conversation with actor-­director Philip Bird who, in contributions emboldened throughout, offers thoughts on how the scenes may have been performed. In the final section, ‘Plays’, contributors offer discussions of stage directions in specific plays, showing how focussing on these neglected parts of the text can open up the meanings of well-­known early modern dramas. Andrew Hiscock’s chapter on Macbeth uses Shakespeare’s tragedy as a starting point for a discussion of textual authority and provenance, before turning to questions of the performance of the ‘rich vocabulary

Introduction

15

of aural and visual signs experienced from the page and the stage’ in this play. By tracing the play’s stage directions, Hiscock provides new perspectives on the violence, imagery and soundworlds of Macbeth. In the following chapter, Sarah Lewis homes in on one particular stage direction from John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi which concerns the possibly posthumous appearance of the Duchess from her grave and the figure of Echo. The stage direction has inspired many editorial interventions which Lewis charts in order to establish the critical responses to Echo and to the Duchess over the years. This one stage direction, Lewis suggests, allows us to access ‘the central crux of Malfi’, as a play that engaged with ‘the destruction of the body, the voice, and individual agency’. In the final chapter of the book, Gillian Woods returns to the form of stage direction with which the collection began: the dumb show. She argues that the dumb show directions often work in a contradictory way, both helping ‘spectators orient themselves relative to the play’s fictional dimensions and disorient[ing] them’. The chapter culminates in a close reading of Webster’s The White Devil as Woods unpicks the dynamic ‘between dumb shows and main action, and stage direction and dialogue’. None of the essays that follow sees stage directions as a definitive solution to a particular theatrical or textual problem. They propose that stage directions’ mixed functions and variable forms open up possibilities for interpretation rather than resolving it. And so we ‘Enter out’.

Primary references Ford, John (1633), ’Tis Pitty Shee’s a Whore. Kyd, Thomas (1592), The Spanish Tragedie. Lodge, Thomas and Robert Greene (1594), A Looking Glasse for London and England. Lyly, John (1597), The Woman in the Moone. Middleton, Thomas (1630), A Chast Mayd in Cheape-Side.

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The True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594). Shakespeare, William (1623), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). Webster, John and William Rowley [false attrib.?] (1661), The Thracian Wonder. Webster, John (1612), The White Devil.

PART ONE

Taxonomy

1 Inventing Stage Directions; Demoting Dumb Shows Tiffany Stern

It was in 1726 that Lewis Theobald coined ‘stage direction’ for a prompter’s note on a play. He popularized the term, however, in his Works of Shakespeare published in 1733. There he used ‘stage directions’ to describe the ‘blundering’ content of the dumb show in Hamlet, and a similar ‘shew’ in Macbeth, both written, he believed, by Heminges and Condell. In the phrase’s first editorial outing, then, a ‘stage direction’ was a term of abuse; it described instructions for dumb action that were too bad to be authorial. This chapter is in three parts. In the first, it will investigate the oddity of dumb shows and similar sequences – their redundant titles, their easy loss and misplacement in playbooks, their unusual typography, their non-­authorial content – to show why Theobald condemned them with the insult ‘stage direction’. In the second, it will examine the way Theobald’s noun phrase was adopted and adapted over time, creating ‘stage directions’ as we now understand them. In the third, it will explore how applying the modern concept of ‘stage

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direction’ to Shakespearean plays has misled scholars. Considering early modern ‘scribe directions’, ‘stage keeper directions’, ‘prompter directions’ and ‘fiction directions’, it will ask whether any Shakespearean paratexts are ‘stage directions’, either by our definition, or by Theobald’s.

Dumb shows in print and performance It is no surprise that the look, authorship and textual placement of dumb shows – small mimed sections of play – worried eighteenth-­century editors. For dumb shows sit oddly in playbooks, often differing in typeface as well as content from the dialogue surrounding them. As Lewis Theobald was to use them to define what we mean by ‘stage directions’, this chapter starts by analysing early modern dumb shows in situ. Only then will it be clear what features Theobald saw and disliked in Shakespearean dumb shows and why in fact such features may be there. Meeting dumb shows in early modern plays, performed or on paper, is often a confusing experience. In the fictions in which they occur, they are ‘unnecessary’ in that they are generally followed by, preceded by or interspersed with explanations, meaning that plays with dumb shows convey the same information twice: once in action; once in words. Much has been written about the ‘redundancy’ of dumb shows, and a number of explanations have been offered for them: that they intensify the drama they are in; that they allow large plot moments to be compressed at speed; that they provide code-­cracking pleasure for an audience habituated to analysing emblem books.1 But in fact, as the presentation and placement of dumb shows inside playbooks reveals, the very way that dumb shows came into being and circulated made them from the outset different from other so-­called ‘stage directions’. Take the label itself, ‘dumb show’, which stands above many such paratexts, and even opens the anonymous play The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (1600):

Inventing stage directions

21

A dombe showe. After an Alarum, enter one way the Duke of Burgundie, an other way, the Duke of Aniou with his power, they encounter, Burgundie is slaine . . . (A3r) ‘A dombe showe’ will not be spoken, and cannot itself be performed; the words are apparently superfluous, as the action they herald is described beneath. Yet most dumb shows have similar titles, usually situated above the content, and often, as here, centred. The result is that dumb shows, despite their (generally) italic typeface, stand out from other directions in plays, as though they constitute mini-­genres in their own rights. This remains the case even for those dumb shows that do not have separate headings. In Robert Armin’s Valiant Welshman (1615), the instruction is ‘Enter a dumbe show, Codigune, Gloster, and Cornwall at the one dore . . . enter at the other dore, Octauian, Guiniuer, and Voada . . .’ (C4v), where ‘dumbe show’ is a collective noun that is part of the direction itself. As above, however, it is instantly glossed by a list of the people who are in fact to enter, and so is again ‘unnecessary’. It once more serves to differentiate this variety of paratext from others. Even when directions lack the ‘dumb show’ label altogether, particular ‘pantomimes’ tend to be distinguished from other paratexts. Thus the direction in the Induction to Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, ‘Enter the other 3. Termes, the first bringing in a fellowe poore, which the other 2. Advanceth, giving him rich Apparell, a page, and a pandar. Exit’ is encased in a large bracket labelled ‘Musicke playing’: on the page, it is highlighted, as it will be in performance, as a special kind of action (1607: A2v). Given that music, or instrumental calls, were the typical complement to dumb shows, the bracket and its labelled content seem to be this play’s way of designating a dumb show and, as ever, setting it apart from other kinds of non-­dialogue paratexts.2 A reason why dumb shows so often look different from other ‘stage directions’ is revealed by their placement in printed playbooks. Several plays have dumb shows situated en masse

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before or after the dialogue. This suggests that the printer(s) received the shows on detached papers, aside from the rest of the drama. Thus George Gascoigne’s Jocasta (1573) opens with ‘The order of the dumme shewes and musickes before every Acte’ (71); while Thomas Hughes’ Certaine Devises and Shews (1587) has, at its start, ‘The Argument and manner of the first dumbe shewe’ (A1r). In Robert Wilmot’s Tancred and Gismund (1591), the dumb shows (‘introductios’) to acts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are crushed together on the verso of the ‘epilogus’, and abbreviated, so that the errata list can fit on the same page – the ‘introductios’ are, like the errata, ‘additional’ texts, appended after the rest of the play had been set (H4v). As Tancred and Gismund is a 1591 revision of a play from 1568 for which there are no dumb shows, the ‘introductio’ sequences are, it seems, new embellishments for the play, presumably by a different ‘author’, that have not made their way inside the book (Foster 1912: 10). Sometimes dumb shows are placed at a wrong spot in the dialogue: a further indication that they were sometimes delivered to the printer aside from the ‘play’. Such is the case in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1594), in which the Presenter has to give a speech to introduce the dumb show. It is set, on the page, like this:   Presenter

   . . . [Muly Mahamet] now you may behold,    With deuils coted in the shapes of men.       The first dumbe shew.   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 . . . (A2r–v) 3

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23

Here punctuation and layout render this sequence nonsensical: the Presenter should presumably say ‘[Mully Mahomet] now you may behold, / With deuils coted in the shapes of men, / Like those that were by kind of murther mumd’ – meaning that you may now see Mully Mahomet with his ‘devils’ (attendants) silenced in just the same way that people murdered by their kindred are silenced.4 Not only is ‘mumd’ (‘silenced’) the logical end of the sentence, it is also the logical last word before silent action. In this instance, the compositor, unable to follow the speech, has apparently set the dumb show a line too high. He has, however, inserted the correct dumb show at this point, aided by numbering: this is ‘The first dumbe shew’ (subsequent dumb shows in the play are titled ‘The second dumbe shew’, A2v, and ‘the last dumbe show’, E4v). That sequence, unnecessary for the reader, may reflect a theatrical numbering system, but seems here to have been supplied to help the printer place the shows in the correct order.5 Either way, the point is that the printer has received separate texts that he has been able to put in the right order, but not necessarily in the right place. The typography of playbooks sometimes makes dumbshows look ‘other’, even when correctly placed in the text. In Thomas Heywood’s If You Know not Me (1605), the dumb show is the focus of the page on which it features, being in larger type than the rest as well as having the ‘A dumb show’ title (D1v). Here it is not clear whether the dumb show actually came from a separate paper – its different look expressing its different origins – or was simply distinguished from the surrounding dialogue in the manuscript behind the printed text for reasons that will be touched upon later. Whatever the cause, it had, or demanded, different treatment in manuscript, traces of which are visible in the printed playbook. On occasion, only the fact of the dumb show, not its substance, makes it to the text. This suggests that the content of the paratext remained on its own paper and was never transferred into the play; it has consequently been ‘lost’. One instance can be seen in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West

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(1631), where a dumb show was obviously staged inside the Chorus’ speech – it is narrated there – though its action no longer survives:   What happen’d [to] them if you desire to know,   To cut off words, wee’ll act it in dumb show. Dumb Show.   The Dukes by them atton’d, they graced and prefer’d,   Take their next way towards Florence . . . (G4r) Similarly, in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (1592), the Ghost asks for, and is given, an explanation from Revenge about the dumb show he has seen, but, again, the show’s actual substance is not recorded in the printed text:   Reuenge    Beholde Andrea for an instance how    Reuenge hath slept, and then imagine thou,    What tis to be subiect to destinie. Enter a dumme shew.   Ghost    Awake Reuenge, reueale this misterie.   Reuenge    The two first the nuptiall Torches boare,    As brightly burning as the mid-­daies sunne:    But after them doth Himen hie as fast . . . (I2v) In both examples, the ‘dumb show’ title is left stranded, shorn of its contents. But not all ‘lost’ dumb shows leave such clear traces. There may, but may not, have been a dumb show in John Lyly’s original Endimion that was only later recovered. That play was first published in 1591 without a dumb show, so

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25

that Act 2 ended in dialogue and Act 3 started in dialogue, as below:   Dipsas   Well then let vs in, and see that you doo not so much as whisper that I did this, for if you do, I will turne thy haires to Adders, and all thy teeth in thy heade to tongues, come away, come away. Exeunt.

Actus tertius. Scaena prima. Cynthia ,

three Lordes, Tellus .

  Cynthia   IS the report true, that Endimion is striken into such a dead sleep, that nothing can either wake him or mooue him? (D3v–D4r) When the play was reprinted in 1632, however, the same two acts were divided by a dumb show concerning Endimion’s dream (later to be related in 5.1):   Dipsas   Well then let vs in, and see that you doe not so much as whisper that I did this, for if you doe, I will turne thy haires to Adders, and all thy teeth in thy head to tongues, come away, come away. Exeunt. A dumbe shew. Musique sounds.   Three Ladies enter; one with a Knife and a looking glasse, who, by the procurement of one of the other two,

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offers to stab Endimion as hee sleepes, but the third wrings her hands, lamenteth, offering still to prevent it, but dares not. At last, the first Lady looking in the glasse, casts downe the Knife. Exeunt.   Enters an ancient man with bookes with three leaues, offers the same twice.   

E ndimion refuseth, hee readeth two and offers the third, where hee stands a while, and then Endimion offers to take it. Exit.



Actus tertius. Scaena prima.



Cynthia ,

three Lordes, Tellus .

  Cynthia   IS the report true, that Endimion is striken into such a dead sleepe, that nothing can either wake him or moue him? (C7v–C8r) This particular dumb show may have been a new addition to the 1632 text as Jeremy Lopez suggests – he is the first to draw attention to its graphical oddities and to ask ‘why was it written out at all and by whom?’ (2013: 302). If it is ‘new’ to the play, then it is, like the dumb shows added to Tancred and Gismond and discussed above, written by someone other than the playwright and at some time later than the rest of the play-­ text. But the history of the publication of Endimion raises a different possibility. The revamped Endimion is the first of Lyly’s Sixe Court Comedies published by Edward Blount in 1632. Each of Blount’s Sixe Court Comedies are re-­settings of earlier Quartos, with dialogue largely unchanged but a significant quantity of paratextual material added. Twenty-­one

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27

additional songs, as well as this dumb show, feature in Blount’s reprint. As the songs are not, however, ‘new’ – several of them have pre–1630s manifestations and some had been parodied years before – it seems that they had been performed in Lyly’s original productions, but did not make it into print the first time round, presumably because they were on separate papers from the dialogue.6 The dumb show, too, is likely to be a further ‘lost’ Lyly paratext that had been re-­found, although if so, it circulated in a way distinct from other forms of ‘stage directions’, but similar to, and probably in the company of, song texts (Stern 2012b: 70). So dumb shows can have their own titles, can be misplaced in playbooks, and are often printed in such a way as to make them look dissimilar from surrounding text; they can also disappear from, or be added to, plays without disturbing the rest of the dialogue, and can be by people other than the playwright. All of this is typical of certain other play paratexts: scrolls (staged texts like letters, proclamations and riddles), prologues/epilogues, and songs.7 But the connection between dumb shows and other spoken/sung paratexts presents a problem. For scrolls, prologues/epilogues and songs had a reason for being written on papers aside from the dialogue: they were inscribed, and sometimes composed, as detached texts, and they were regularly handed to performers for reading on stage. But as dumb shows were unspoken, and would not therefore be brought to the stage for reading, why would they require separate inscription, and why – and how – might these silent texts have separate ‘authorship’? One answer relates to the ‘devisor’ of the shows. Despite being unspoken, dumb shows had to be written – or, rather, crafted and co-­ordinated. Often the people best suited to do so were action-­experts, not playwrights. This is visible in the Quarto edition of Thomas Hughes’ Misfortunes of Arthur, which has an explanatory note printed at its end: ‘The dumbe showes were partly deuised by Maister Christopher Yeluerton, Maister Frauncis Bacon, Maister Iohn Lancaster and others, partly by . . . Maister Flower’: Hughes, the writer of the play, is

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not one of the dumb shows’ creators (1587: G2r). A manuscript note added to the title page of the Geneva copy of Locrine similarly relates to a dumb show ‘devisor’. Written by Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels, it explores the notion that Locrine contains the bones of a lost play by Charles Tilney, Estrild – a play for which, Buc recalls, he once created dumb shows: Charles. Tilney wrote Tragedy of this matter hee named Estrild: I think is this. it was l by his death. & noew[?] s fellow hath published I made dumbe shewwes for it Which I yet have. G. B 8 Intriguingly, Buc still has in his possession the dumb shows he wrote, but seemingly not the dialogue of Estrild itself, which he only half recalls: he thinks Locrine is Estrild, but cannot be sure. He is a proud dumb show ‘maker’ who is vague as to the content of the play he once helped to design. Dumb show ‘authors’, as this indicates, need not be play authors, and their ‘shows’ need not therefore have been devised at the same time, or to the same remit, as the rest of the drama. Buc’s dumb show knowledge, and play ignorance, relates to a second feature of these paratexts. They also required their own form of rehearsal, independent of the rest of the play. This is partly because of their interactive content: while the dialogue of a play could be distributed and learned in separate actors’ parts, the dumb shows will have needed to be rehearsed ensemble from ‘group rehearsal’ scripts. And it is partly because they employed dance-­like movements that in themselves probably required separate practice: dumb shows are so often preceded by music cues that Linda Austern calls them ‘pantomime[s] to music’ (1992: 91–94); and Gary Taylor and Andrew J. Sabol maintain they were ‘inset dance drama[s]’ (2013: 130). It is likely that players themselves sometimes

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helped co-­devise this interactive dance-­like action: some ‘detachable’ dumb show texts may in fact be records of action rather than prescriptions for it. Separate rehearsal demands, from separate papers aside from the play, also provide an explanation for the strange disjunction between the dumb shows in the two assured ‘good’ texts of Hamlet, the Second Quarto (‘Q2’) (1604) and the Folio (1623).9 In both texts, a dumb show precedes the inner play, The Murder of Gonzago, and tells its story. Yet despite the fact that the actions required from the performers will be the same, the texts of the dumb show in Q2 and the Folio are ‘needlessly’ dissimilar. Below, Q2 is reproduced over the Folio; core verbal differences are highlighted in bold: The Trumpets sounds.   Dumbe show followes. Hoboyes play.   

The dumbe shew enters.

Enter a King and a Queene,     

 the Queene embracing him, and he her,

Enter a King and Queen, very louingly; the Queene embracing him.  She kneeles, he takes her vp, and declines his and makes shew of Protestation vnto him. He takes her vp, and d[e]clines his head upon her necke,  he lyes him downe vppon a banke of flowers, she seeing him head vpon her neck. Layes him downe vpon a Banke of Flowers. She seeing him asleepe,   leaues him:  anon  come  in  an other man, takes  off his crowne,  kisses it, a-­sleepe, leaues him. Anon comes in a Fellow,   takes off his Crowne, kisses it, and pours  poyson in the sleepers eares, and leaues him:  the  Queene  returnes,  finds powres poyson in the Kings  eares, and Exits.     The Queene returnes, findes the  King  dead,   makes  passionate  action,  the  poysoner  with  some the King dead, and makes passionate Action. The Poysoner, with some three or four    come in againe,   seeme to condole with her,  the dead two or three Mutes comes in againe, seeming to lament with her. The dead

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body is carried away, the  poysoner wooes the Queene with gifts,  shee seemes body is carried away: The Poisoner Wooes the Queene with Gifts, she seemes harsh       awhile, but in the end accepts loue. loath and vnwilling awhile, but in the end, accepts his loue. (Ham Q2: H1v) (Ham F: TLN 1990–2002)

What is strange about these Hamlet dumb shows is that most of their differences would not be discernible in the performances they bring about: the murderer who ‘pours poison in the sleepers ears, and leaves him’ in Q2 will not alter his action when he ‘pours poison in the King’s ears, and Exits’ in the Folio; while the murderers’ accompaniers who, in Q2, ‘seem to condole’ with the Queen are unlikely to change their gestures when they ‘seem’ in the Folio ‘to lament’ with her. Though it has been suggested that the Folio dumb shows may have been revised for the page, the verbal differences between the two do not readily admit of that explanation (Stern 2012a: 279). Is ‘fellow’ (Folio) an obvious improvement on ‘man’ (Q2), or ‘exits’ (Folio) more literary than ‘leaves him’ (Q2) (it is, if anything, more theatrical)? Moreover, both texts are markedly ‘stagy’, with their vague though variant requests for additional players to accompany the poisoner: ‘three or four’ (Q2); ‘two or three’ (Folio). The main substantive difference between the two dumb shows is that the Q2 dumb show is to be accompanied by trumpets, while the Folio dumb show requires hoboys, an early form of oboe. As the strident sound of the trumpet was favoured in outdoor environments, and as hoboys worked well in intimate indoor spaces, it is possible that the text was redevised, and hence rewritten for fresh rehearsals (or in the light of fresh rehearsals having taken place), when Hamlet was worked up for a different theatre. If that were the case, the Q2 dumb show might reflect the demands of an outside space like the Globe and the Folio dumb show an indoor space like Blackfriars or the court. Rehearsal for a different place, at a different time, and perhaps with a different

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set of people, may explain the ‘unnecessary’ textual variants on what is essentially the same show: loose ‘rehearsal texts’, likely to become worn and need replacing more often than full playbooks, may have been written out afresh, and so mildly revised, more frequently than other passages of the play. ‘Devisor’ or authorship issues, or, rather non-­authorship issues, beset both Hamlet shows equally, however: neither is apparently by Shakespeare. Though the play that they gloss, The Murder of Gonzago, is about a duke and duchess, the dumb shows are for a king and a queen. ‘Updating’ in the Folio does not alter that discrepancy (again, suggesting that ‘literary’ concerns are not governing this text). In its misdirection, the Hamlet dumb show resembles other ‘non authorial’ dumb shows: in the first dumb show of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, the title character is called Duke Gorboduc, though throughout the play he is ‘King Gorboduc’. Eric Rasmussen, pointing out the duke/king discrepancy, concludes that the shows for Gorboduc were memorially reconstructed and (re)placed within the dialogue later than the rest of the play (1986: 418). That is possible, but, as shown, it is in the nature of dumb shows to be poorly integrated: the Gorboduc and Hamlet shows alike seem, like others explored above, simply to have been differently authored, perhaps at different times or occasions from the rest of the play, or perhaps at the same time but for different forms of rehearsal. Dumbshows, then, really are separate in nature not just from dialogue but also from other ‘stage directions’. Even when written authorially into their plays, they are likely to have been differentiated by title or layout, so that they could be extracted by a scribe onto individual papers for rehearsal. When not authorially written, they will have been separate from the start, conceived by people other than the playwright, and not combined with the play-­text until it was retranscribed, revised or handed to the printer – and sometimes, as has been shown, not even then. That means, though, that we cannot assess – or, indeed, know – the fashion for dumb shows over time. Yes, roughly 120 dumb shows survive from plays published between 1562–1626,

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and fewer feature prominently after that, but the story of the loss and/or replacement of dumb shows seems to run parallel to, rather than together with, the story of the rest of the play (Pearn 1935: 386). As Heidi Brayman Hackel points out, The Prologue to ‘The Slip’ in Middleton’s A Mad World (1604) promises ‘dumbshows’, though none are now in the text – how many other plays contained dumb shows now lost, without highlighting the fact (Hackel 2012: 336)? Given that from creation to presentation to circulation dumb shows could be separate from – and separable from – other aspects of playbooks, their absence from a book does not mean that they were never there, their presence does not mean that they are permanent aspects of their play, and neither presence nor absence (necessarily) reveal anything about the playwright.

The invention of stage directions It is ironic, then, that it was the dumb show that promulgated the use of ‘stage direction’ as an editorial term. For it was when Lewis Theobald, in his 1733 Shakespeare Works, glossed the opening of the Hamlet dumb show ‘Enter a King and Queen very lovingly’ that he first used ‘stage direction’ editorially. He protested ‘Thus have the blundering and inadvertent Editors all along given us this Stage-Direction, tho’ we are expressly told by Hamlet anon, that the Story of this Interlude is the Murther of Gonzago Duke of Vienna’ (Shakespeare 1733: VII.295). He traced the king/duke discrepancy of the Hamlet dumb show to the people he nominated ‘the Editors’ of the Folio, the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had, he believed, misrecalled what ‘the Poet’ Shakespeare had actually intended: The Source of this Mistake is . . . from the Stage’s dressing the Characters. Royal Coronets being at first order’d by the Poet for the Duke and Dutchess, the succeeding Players, . . . mistook ’em for a King and Queen.

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Here, Theobald uses ‘Stage-Direction’ as a term of opprobrium for a passage he believed to have been written for the page by actor-­editors. In that same 1633 Works he also used ‘stage direction’ for a processional ‘shew’ in Macbeth that likewise does not make sense: ‘A shew of eight Kings, and Banquo last, with a glasse in his hand’ (Macbeth: TLN 1657–58). ‘The Editors’, he protested, ‘could not help blundering even in this Stage-Direction. For tis not Banquo, who brings the Glass; as is evident from the following Speech’ (he refers to the fact that, in the speech to come, the first king is said to be Banquo, while the last carries a looking glass: once again, he implies, the actor-­editors misremembered what they saw on stage) (Shakespeare 1733: V.443). In stating moreover, that ‘stage directions’ were written by the players who prepared Shakespeare’s texts for publication, he makes clear that by ‘stage’ he means not a text for acting, but a text by actors; by ‘direction’, he means not advice as to what to do, but a record of what was done. Indeed, ‘stage direction’ might better be replaced with ‘page reflection’. Given that both times the term is used, ‘stage direction’ is associated with ‘blundering’, it is in itself an insult as far as he is concerned. Confusingly, ‘stage direction’ had had a different remit when Theobald coined the term eight years earlier. In Shakespeare Restored (1726), Theobald had attacked Alexander Pope’s recently published edition of Shakespeare. Pope had claimed that the Folio’s nonsensical line about Falstaff in Henry V, ‘for his nose was a sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields’ (TLN 838–39) was actually a ‘direction crept into the text from the margin. Greenfield was the name of the Property man in that time . . . A Table of Greenfield’s’ (1725: I.xviii). Quite apart from the general illogicality of the argument – the text was later to be amended to ‘and a’ babled of green fields’ (1733: IV.30) – Pope, claimed Theobald, failed to understand the nature of a ‘Stage-Direction’ (a word he coined by expanding Pope’s own term, ‘direction’). Pope lacked, wrote Theobald, ‘that Acquaintance with Stage-Books, which it has been my Fortune to have’ (1726: 137), and so did

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not realize that a stage direction would be ‘mark’d . . . at about a Page in Quantity before the Actors quoted are to enter, or the Properties be carried on’ (1726: 137). As no table would be needed in the following scene, ‘A Table of greene fields’ could not therefore be a ‘stage direction’. At the point of first creating ‘stage direction’, then, Theobald used it neither as a term of opprobrium nor of praise: it simply indicated a practical addition made to a play by a prompter. Disconcertingly, then, ‘stage direction’ from the first had two meanings: a paratext written by a prompter for some kind of stage keeper (Theobald in his criticism of Pope); and an errant paratext – for dumb action – written by actor-­editors for readers (Theobald in his edition of Shakespeare). By giving the term two distinct meanings and authors, Theobald created a confusion about what stage directions are, who writes them, and for whom, that has haunted the term and the concept ever since. The next major editorial outing of ‘stage direction’ was in the 1750 edition of the works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Though Theobald had died by the time these Works were published, he had written notes for the commentary, using his ‘stage direction’ phrase, largely contemptuously, to describe paratext that he variously traced to prompters and editors. Thus ‘Sound Trumpet’ is criticized for finding its way into the text of The Two Noble Gentleman, though it ‘possibly was once only a Stage Direction’, seemingly a reference to a prompter’s note (Beaumont and Fletcher 1750: VIII.441). But ‘Enter two Servants. Roul. Ashton’ in Love’s Pilgrimage is glossed by a tirade against the playwright James Shirley, ‘the Editor of the first Folio’ of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, who ‘has in a great Measure forfeited my once good Opinion of him’: And I wish we may not have too much reason from this careless Oversight, to imagine that a great many of the Pieces in the whole Collection were not printed from any better Manuscripts than these (too often sad ones) of the several Prompters. (Beaumont and Fletcher 1750: VII.27)

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Here ‘the Editor’ is guilty of stage directions, not because he wrote them, but because he failed to take them out of the prompters’ scripts that he had received. Whatever they were, ‘stage directions’ were non-­authorial texts that did not, Theobald believed, belong in print. The term ‘stage direction’, with all its opprobrium, and lack of clarity, slowly worked its way into later eighteenth-­century editorial parlance. By 1788 the editor George Steevens, trying to rationalize the proliferation of dumb shows in Pericles, suggested the interested reader consider a list he supplied of other ‘solemn pantomimes’ which, he explained, ‘are now called the stage-­ directions, throughout the folio 1623’ (Steevens 1780: II.163). For him, ‘stage directions’ at root meant ‘dumb shows’ – though he extended their remit to include other silent actions – presumably because he was taking the term from Theobald’s Shakespeare edition. For Steevens, too, ‘stage directions’ were generally, and perhaps always, by Heminges and Condell: he explains that ‘The stage direction of entrance, where the bleeding captain is mentioned,’ in Macbeth, ‘was probably the work of the player editors, and not of Shakespeare’ (Shakespeare 1778: IV.445); while his friend/rival/enemy Edmond Malone, maintained, in 1790, that ‘the very few stage-­directions which the old copies exhibit, were not taken from our authour’s manuscripts, but furnished by the players’ (Shakespeare 1790: I.58). As this brief history makes clear, the phrase ‘stage direction’ arose in the eighteenth century, partly through a misunderstanding about the way dumb shows had come about; partly through an understanding about prompters’ notes. Its two meanings – a player-­editor’s recollection of a show as preserved for a reader, or a prompter’s advice for a show as preserved for staging – shared one common denominator: a stage direction was not written by a playwright. Shakespeare, then, did not write ‘stage directions’ according to the eighteenth-­ century meaning of the term, for any non-­dialogue paratext he did write was, by definition, therefore not a stage direction. Outside the world of editing, attitudes to ‘stage directions’ began to change. Nineteenth-­century spectators, enthralled

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by contemporary staging, started to desire theatrical information in their reading texts. A habit grew of inserting up-­to-date ‘stage directions’ into old plays in order to provide the text of the dramas as currently performed. William Oxberry advertised that his 1822 Julius Caesar was ‘THE ONLY EDITION EXISTING WHICH IS FAITHFULLY MARKED WITH THE STAGE BUSINESS, AND STAGE DIRECTIONS, AS PERFORMED AT THE THEATRES ROYAL. BY W. OXBERRY, Comedian’: this was (a version of) Shakespeare’s play, enhanced by the latest stage directions from an actor. Likewise, Cumberland’s British Theatre (1823– 31) supplied Shakespeare’s and others’ plays from acting copies with added ‘Stage Directions’ that, gushed the preliminary matter, had been garnered from ‘personal observations, during the most recent performances’: these ‘stage directions’ (in fact, again, ‘page reflections’) were from specific modern performances (Shakespeare 1828: 10). As all such ‘stage directions’ preserved particular productions, and ensured Shakespeare’s plays were manifested on the page as performance texts, they also contributed to the ‘stage versus page’ battle for ownership of Shakespeare that has raged ever since. It was later in the nineteenth century, when the actor manager evolved into the director, that playwrights themselves started crafting their own, telling stage directions. This was because the newly-­emergent ‘stage directors’ came to plays with concepts of their own about performance, and playwrights were side-­lined. Only through providing full and explicit ‘stage directions’ for actors might a playwright hope to provide some guidance for his or her own productions. Hence the otiose directions of Bernard Shaw and, later, the dogmatic directions of Samuel Beckett. But a hidden consequence of this change in theatrical governance was that ‘stage direction’ itself altered in meaning. ‘Direction’ in ‘stage direction’ was now the counterpart to the ‘direction’ offered by the ‘director’; ‘stage directions’, as a result, came to be seen not as descriptions of staging written by a prompter or a

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player-­editor, but as prescriptions for acting written by playwrights. Modern dictionary definitions of ‘stage direction’ only reflect that last, most recent, permutation of the phrase. The OED, which currently traces ‘stage direction’ back only as far as Edmond Malone in the 1790s (thus neglecting the term’s origin and first sixty-­six years), defines it as ‘a direction inserted in a written or printed play where it is thought necessary to indicate the appropriate action, etc’;10 the Merriam-Webster dictionary maintains a stage direction is ‘a written instruction in a play telling an actor what to do’.11 Yet, as will be shown, Shakespearean directions are seldom, and perhaps never, for an actor. That means that not only do few to no Shakespearean (or other early modern) paratexts meet the Theobaldian definition of ‘stage direction’; they also do not meet the modern one.

Shakespeare’s (non) stage directions The blanket term ‘stage direction’, is, these days, applied to a variety of quite different paratexts in Shakespeare’s plays, written by and for a number of different people. A study of the dumb show has illustrated how that particular text in fact stands out from other non-­dialogue paratexts in authorship, preservation and rehearsal requirements. But many other varieties of so-­called ‘stage direction’ also have unique qualities that suggest they had their own authorship, occasion, meaning and, perhaps, circulation. Take, for instance, the moment in Pericles when Pericles is to read a riddle: PERICLES

      Like a bold Champion I assume the Listes,   Nor aske aduise of any other thought,

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  But faythfulnesse and courage.       The Riddle.   I am no Viper, yet I feed   On mothers flesh which did me breed:   . . . As you will liue resolue it you.   Sharpe Phisicke is the last: But ô you powers! (Shakespeare 1609: A3v) Here ‘The Riddle’, a statement about the text that follows, is, like the label ‘dumb show’, a title that is not to spoken that cannot be performed. It is not, then, a direction for an actor, though an editor is likely to turn it into one: ‘[He reads] The Riddle’. As touched upon above, ‘The Riddle’ is a direction for the scribe, instructing him not to write this text onto the actors’ part, but to place it on a ‘riddle’ stage document to be given to the actor of Pericles to read on stage. The same can be said of all such labelled ‘scrolls’ – letters, prologues, songs etc. The labels, and/or sometimes the layout of the texts themselves, are ‘scribe directions’ and precede staging. Scribe directions constitute some of the main directorial paratexts in Shakespearean plays.12 Other Shakespearean paratexts are ‘stage keeper directions’. These include directions for large objects to be brought to the stage, like ‘A small Table vnder a State for the Cardinall, a longer Table for the Guests’ (Henry VIII: TLN 1661–62), or the directions for the apparitions in Macbeth, which read ‘1. Apparation, an Armed Head’ and ‘2 Apparition, a Bloody Childe’ (Macbeth: TLN 1604; 1617). The purpose of that last is either to instruct a stage functionary to create an armed head and a bloody child or to tell a stage functionary to take these already-­created props and lift them through the trap door sequentially. The numbering of the apparitions, ‘1’ and ‘2’, suggests the latter: someone is being told in which order to raise which apparition. ‘Stage keeper directions’ are another major strand of paratext in the plays of Shakespeare. Other directions are, it seems, for prompters. As Theobald had pointed out, ‘advanced’ prescriptions for characters or

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props to be made ‘ready’ for a future stage moment are often found on manuscript plays prepared for performance, like Philip Massinger’s Believe as You List which has ‘Table ready: & 6 chaires sett out’ a page before these will be needed; and Thomas Heywood’s The Captives which has ‘Ink: paper ready’, again, in advance of use (Werstine 2013: 209). These may be further ‘stage keeper directions’, but their being written in advance of use suggests that they are probably to remind a prompter, who has to have a full sense of the organization of a play, as to what is about to need staging. That is certainly the case with some of the directions in the printed Quarto of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, which includes advanced directions for characters and props to be ‘ready’: ‘2. Hearses ready with Palamon; and Arcite: the 3. Queenes. Theseus: and his Lordes ready’. That same text also supplies entrance calls for actors by name, ‘Enter . . . some Attendants, T. Tucke: Curtis’ (1634: C3v; L4v). Lois Potter calls these Two Noble Kinsmen directions ‘prompter’s annotation[s], not meant for printing’, agreeing with Theobald that advanced directions are for prompters, and maintaining, just as he does, that they are a form of direction so stagy as to be inappropriate for publication (Potter 1997: 275). The more usual kinds of non-­dialogue paratext found on full plays are entrances and exits, and directions for action – ‘whisper’, ‘die’ etc. The recipients of such directions are generally, these days, thought to be actors. But actors in the early modern playhouse, who will have received directions on their individual parts, will not obviously have been privy to directions in the full playbook. True, the directions in the book may be instructions as to what should be written on the actors’ parts, but if so, they are further ‘scribe directions’. Alternatively, they may serve the purpose of alerting the prompter standing in the tiring house as to what is happening on stage during performance: Warren Smith long ago suggested that most ‘time taking’ stage directions, for silent hand-­holding, kissing, dying etc., were designed to alert the prompter to the moments when

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not to prompt (1950: 178). If that is the case, they are further ‘prompter directions’. After removing from the muddle of what have been called ‘stage directions’ the ‘scribe directions’, ‘stage keeper directions’ and ‘prompter directions’, what is left? What remains are directions imbued not with staging, but with the fiction of the story that they tell. As Alan Dessen explores, there are many directions that take the form ‘Enter on the Walls, Puzel, Dolphin, Reigneir, Alanson, and Souldiers’ (1 Henry VI: TLN 639–40) (1995: 55–58 and passim). In staging terms, the actors are to be ‘above’, of course – but in this stage direction the fictional ‘walls’ have taken over. Other ‘fictional’ directions include ‘Alarum, the Romans are beat back to their Trenches’ (Coriolanus: TLN 523) and ‘Witches vanish’ (Macbeth: TLN 179). But actually all directions, regardless of who they are for, struggle with fact and fiction.13 For when a text asks Macduff to enter ‘with Macbeths head’, it does of course mean that the actor playing Macduff should enter with a simulacrum of Macbeth’s head (Macbeth: TLN 2504); when a text asks for ‘Lauinia’ to enter with ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and rausht’ (Titus Andronicus: TLN 1068–09), it means that a boy player dressed as a mutilated girl is to come on stage acting as though those terrible things have happened. Even a simple direction like ‘enter Ophelia’ is fictional: it asks that Ophelia, the fictional character, enter, rather than that a boy playing Ophelia enter. Should any text be called a ‘stage direction’ when it privileges fiction over staging? Are there in fact no stage directions in Shakespeare? This is entirely separate, of course, from the question of whether or not Shakespeare wrote non-­dialogue paratext. He certainly sometimes did, though evidence is inconclusive on the subject. So E.A.J. Honigmann maintains that ‘stage-­ directions printed only in the Folio have a smaller chance of being Shakespeare’s than those in the Good Quartos’ (1998: 187), but others have maintained that stage directions are mostly ‘authorial in origin’ (Dessen and

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Thomson 1999: viii–ix). The question, though, is whether ‘stage direction’ is ever appropriate as a term for such texts. Could it be the case that, although ‘stage direction’ was invented to describe Shakespearean text, and has been used for that purpose ever since, the term actually obscures what the paratexts are? This chapter has explored the muddled history of the word and concept ‘stage direction’. It has shown how ‘stage direction’ was used first for a prompter’s text, then for a player-­editor’s dumb show, then for a paratext by an author for an actor. Throughout, it has argued that the imposition of the term ‘stage direction’ onto the works of Shakespeare has confused all assessments of who wrote his paratext and what it is. It has hidden the varied people for whom these paratexts were intended – scribes, stage keepers, prompters (and perhaps, though that is less certain, actors); and hidden, too, the varied people by whom they may have been written. It has united Shakespeare’s non-­dialogue paratexts as a shared unit, although a brief look at them reveals that dumb shows, scribe directions, stage keeper directions and prompter directions may have been devised at different times, and for different reasons. Whatever a ‘stage direction’ is, and that is still by no means clear, the very fact of the term has, paradoxically, hidden the nature, intention and authorship of the paratexts it set out to describe.

Primary references A., R. [Armin, Robert] (1615), The valiant Welshman, or The true chronicle history of the life and valiant deedes of Caradoc the Great, King of Cambria, now called Wales. Fletcher, John and William Shakespeare (1634), The Two Noble Kinsmen. Gascoigne, George (1573), Jocasta, in A hundreth sundrie flowres. Gayton, Edmund (1654), Pleasant notes upon Don Quixot. Heywood, Thomas (1605), If you know not me, you know no bodie.

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Heywood, Thomas (1631), The fair maid of the west. Or, A girle worth gold. Hughes, Thomas (1587), ‘The Argument and manner of the first dumbe shewe’, in Certaine deu[is]es and shewes presented to her Maiestie by the gentlemen of Grayes-Inne. Kyd, Thomas (1592), The Spanish Tragedie. Lyly, John (1591), Endimion, the man in the moone. Lyly, John (1632), Endimion, in Sixe Court Comedies. Middleton, Thomas (1607), Michaelmas Terme. Peele, George (1594), The Battell of Alcazar. Shakespeare, William (1609), Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Theobald, Lewis (1726), Shakespeare Restored, London. The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (1600). W., R. [Wilmot, Robert] (1591), The tragedie of Tancred and Gismund.

Editions Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher (1750), The Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont and Mr. John Fletcher: In Ten Volumes, ed. Lewis Theobald, Thomas Seward and Thomas Sympson, London. Leinwand, Theodore B., ed. (2007), Michaelmas Term, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peele, George (2005), The Battle of Alcazar, in The Stukeley Plays, ed. Charles Edelman, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Potter, Lois, ed. (1997), The Two Noble Kinsmen, Walton-­onThames: Nelson. Shakespeare, William (1725), The Works, 6 vols, ed. Alexander Pope, London. Shakespeare, William (1733), The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols, ed. Lewis Theobald, London. Shakespeare, William (1778), The Plays, 10 vols, eds Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, London. Shakespeare, William (1790), The Plays and Poems, 10 vols in 11 parts, ed. Edmond Malone, London. Shakespeare, William (1828), A Midsummer-Night’s Dream in Cumberland’s British Theatre . . . Printed from the Acting Copies,

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as Performed at the Theatres-Royal, London, vol. 20, ed. George Daniel, London. Shakespeare, William (1968), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies [The Norton Facsimile], prep. by Charlton Hinman, New York: Norton. Steevens, George (1780), Supplement to the edition of Shakspeare’s Plays Published in 1778, 2 vols, London.

2 The Boundaries of Stage Directions Laurie Maguire

Induction: mediating boundaries Writing within a few years of each other, Michael Issacharoff (1989) and Marvin Carlson (1991) both attempted a taxonomy of stage directions. Their lists were unsurprisingly similar. Both discussed stage directions that identify place. Both considered speech prefixes as a form of stage direction (‘nominative’ directions in Issacharoff’s terminology, ‘attributive’ in Carlson’s). Both spent the bulk of their discussion on movement and gesture, Issacharoff calling ‘melodic’ those directions typically identified by an adjective or adverb that describe an actor’s ‘manner, intonation and attitude’ (1989: 24), designated as ‘performance’ stage directions by Carlson (1991: 39). Carlson additionally considered ‘structural’ stage directions, the scenic divisions that appear in French texts or plays by Ben Jonson. What both articles have most in common, however, is a vocabulary that reflects the liminality of stage directions.1 Words and concepts such as ‘mediation’, ‘translation’, ‘contradiction’, ‘stereophonic’, ‘link’, ‘intermediaries’, ‘glossing’

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and ‘extratextual’ recur. Mediation, they note, takes many forms. Stage directions turn a literary text into a performance. Stage directions are aimed at actors and directors but actors often ignore them. Stage directions are written, but they are different from other written texts. Stage directions, the ‘kinesic code’ (Issacharoff 1989: 21) that regulates the ‘conduct of actors on stage’ (Carlson 1991: 38) are subsequently read by book-­readers. Stage directions function as a gloss on the main text. In stage directions we hear the author speak whereas in dialogue the author’s voice vanishes. Not all stage directions are equal: actors might ignore or alter melodic function but they rarely challenge attribution. Most stage directions change medium in performance (they become auditory and visual) but some do not: the locational didascalia of the Elizabethan playscript are staged as text on location boards. Some of these liminal moments are created by the passing of time (when texts intended initially for performance later became directed at readers, and editors retrofitted them with melodic directions to match prevailing authorial custom). But most of them inhere in the very nature of the dramatic text. Drama and dramatic texts are about the mediation of boundaries – the boundaries between fiction and reality, between the play world and the stage world, between the play world and the audience’s world. Dramatists and theatre companies have long exploited these boundaries, with stage directions bleeding into adjacent text or performance. Thomas Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (1607) opens with a prologue ventriloquizing a stage direction. Little wonder that the Jacobean compositor printed the speech as if it were indeed a stage direction: Presenter or prologue, passing over the Stage, the Bawd-­ gallant, with three wenches gallantly attirde, meetes him, the whore-Gallant, the pocket-Gallant, the cheatingGallant, kisse these three wenches and depart in a little whisper and wanton action: now for the other the BrokerGallant, hee sits at home yet I warrant you, at this time of

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day, summing up his pawnes, hactenus quasi inductio [to this point, something like an induction], a little glimpse giving. (A2r) Reading like a direction from Shaw, with its personal speculation about a character’s offstage activity (‘hee sits at home yet, I warrant you’), the spoken direction has, in fact, more in common with Brecht as the prologue lays bare the performance of theatre. He directs the actors and then self-­ reflexively summarizes (and glosses) his stage direction in the conclusion (‘hactenus quasi inductio’, ‘a little glimpse giving’). Similarly, the lengthy formal processional stage direction in Titus Andronicus 1.1 is often considered too good a piece of text to ignore qua text: in John Barton’s 1981 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Geoffrey Hutchins spoke the paragraph from the front of the stage, in keeping with a production in which ‘the stage is filled throughout with costume racks, skips, make-­up boxes, hobbyhorses and all the necessary impedimentia [sic]; and the actors, having played their scene, stayed to watch. In short the artifice is wholly visible’ (Billington 1981). Theatre is artifice and stage directions negotiate its constituent parts, mediating the boundary between an author’s imagination and an audience’s reception. Let me conclude my own induction with ‘a little glimpse giving’ of this essay’s interests in stage directions’ mediating functions. Stage directions mediate between the bare boards of the early modern stage and the imagined location (‘Enter Geraldine as in his study reading’; ‘with his troupes marching, as being at Mileend’).2 They mediate between the reader’s experience and the viewer’s, whether explaining relationships (‘Enters the Smith, the Clownes maister’)3 or describing costume and disguise (‘Enter Coriolanus in meane Apparrell, Disguisd, and muffled’; ‘Enter Shortyard and Falslight, like wealthy Cittizens in Sattin sutes’; ‘disguised like mourners’; ‘Lucentio, in the habit of a meane man’; ‘Pedant booted and bare headed’; ‘enter Piero as at first’).4 They mediate between

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what happens physically on stage, choreographing the actors’ movements and positions (‘Gremio is out before’; ‘Simo speaketh this out of the hearing of Dauus’)5 and what happens emotionally or internally (Issacharoff’s ‘melodic function’), as when directions describe mood (‘Enter Timon in a rage’) or specify intention (‘Exit Alberto to fetch Antonio’).6 They mediate between dialogue and asides (‘He . . . speakes the rest to himselfe’; ‘speakes to himself’; ‘tacite’)7 or between dialogue and silence (‘He thinks how to cozen the bearer of the ring’).8 They mediate between the actor and what we would now call the stage manager, often using the difference between passive and active voice to do so (‘cast off the bags’ is a direction for an actor; ‘bags are set on the table’ is a cue for the stage management team).9 And they mediate between the voice of the author and the voices of his characters: ‘the author assigns to intermediaries his own role of utterer’ but ‘his voice remains present in the stage directions’ (Issacharoff 1989: 18).10 All these different boundaries combine to form the major boundary with which this essay is concerned, that between the fictional world of the play and its theatrical presentation. It is this boundary that stage directions both police and enable.

‘As it were’ The world of non-­fiction is the world of material theatre – of actors entering stage doors, wearing costumes, and handling props, and of writers acknowledging the means by which illusion is created.11 The world of fiction is the play world created by the theatre world: ‘The Scene, an un-­inhabited Island’ (Tempest: TLN 2320). Theatre often deliberately blurs or plays with these boundaries as when Peter Quince in Midsummer Night’s Dream enthuses about the mechanicals’ impromptu rehearsal space in the woods: ‘This green plot shall be our stage,’ he says (pointing to the stage), ‘this hawthorn-­ brake our tiring house’ (pointing to the tiring house) (3.1.3–4). At the conclusions of plays, the play world often slips away

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gradually rather than stopping abruptly as the actors make the transition from characters in a fictional world to actors begging applause from the audience. I am thinking here not so much of the separate entity known as the epilogue (‘EPILOGUE, spoken by Prospero’; Tempest: TLN 2320–21) but of those concluding speeches which move us out of the fiction of the play. In Henry Porter’s The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1599), the characters anticipate a goose for dinner. Mall’s alarmed reaction to this suggestion cues her final thirty-­fiveline speech about hissing in which she pursues the extended analogy through to its logical conclusion: an appeal to the audience to leave hissing to geese and to show their approval with a different acoustic response – applause (M1r–v). The anonymous The Wit of a Woman (1604) ends with an invitation to dinner. The epilogue tells us that since the house is far away and they don’t have much to eat, we should not join them but applaud instead. In Thomas Heywood’s How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602), Young Arthur’s final twenty-­four-line speech to the husbands in the play becomes an address to the husbands in the theatre (I2r–v), comparing the features of good and bad wives. In the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave (1594), Honesty admonishes the onstage malefactors then begs the spectators’ indulgence before ending with prayers for Queen Elizabeth (G4r). Concluding prayers are also a feature of Queen’s Men’s plays of the 1590s: in the True Tragedy of Richard III (1594), characters bring the play’s historical material up to date, decisively leaving the world of the play by providing a chronology from Richard III through to Elizabeth I, before moving into prayers for Elizabeth (I2v).12 Dialogue is so often fluid about a play’s dramatic boundaries that we have a term for it: metadrama. Stage directions mostly stay in the world of theatre, adhering to their function as mediators.13 But sometimes they get carried away and temporarily inhabit the fictional world they are trying to create (‘Puls out his eyes’).14 Sometimes they blur the boundary between the two, deliberately or accidentally calling attention to it as in these two stage directions in Folio Coriolanus:

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Enter two Officers, to lay Cushions, as it were, in the Capitoll (TLN 1203–04) Enter Cominius as it were in retire (TLN 603) ‘As it were’ is the prevailing default mode: all theatre is ‘as it were’. No one, audience or actor, ever thought that 2.2 really took place in the Capitol.15 Misunderstanding representation in this way is mocked by Sir Philip Sidney, who says that not even children would make such a mistake: ‘What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?’ (Sidney 1965: 185). The Italian philosopher, Francesco Buonamici, makes the same point in more general terms in his Discorsi Poetici of 1597: ‘the work of verisimilitude in the spectator can never cause him – unless he be an imbecile – to mistake the thing representing for that thing represented’ (Weinberg 1961: II.695).16 In other words, the audience ‘always knows it is seeing “signs” and not the “things signified” ’ (Newsom 1988: 67). Plautus’ prologue to the Menaechmi casually makes this point in regards to location: ‘All this is Epidamnus – as long as this play lasts, anyway. In another play, it will be another place’ (Plautus 1964: 104).17 Gascoigne makes the same point through his choice of verb: ‘The Tragedie represented in Thebes’ (Jocasta 1573: K2v, my emphasis); a stage direction in Greene’s Selimus similarly acknowledges that drama is the genre of supposition: ‘Suppose the Temple of Mahomet’ (line 2021). Nonetheless, overt reminders of the distinction between fiction and reality recur in early modern stage directions, as in Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes: ‘Shift with a bag as it were full of gold on his back’ (1599: D4v, my emphasis). There is something appropriate about the two ‘as it were’ stage directions in Coriolanus: in a play whose protagonist suffers from an inability to pretend, who keeps the worlds of

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war and politics separate (even though his mother explains their identical dependence on strategy and subterfuge (Shakespeare 2013: 3.2.43–47, 48–53)), the stage directions also suffer from a literalism, reminding us (as if we needed it) that this is only pretend-Capitol and pretend-­walls. However, it may not be coincidence that the only other occurrences of this phrase outside Coriolanus occur in texts written at this late stage of Shakespeare’s career. In Henry VIII, the sleeping Queen Katherine has a vision in which spirits hold a garland over her head, ‘[a]t which (as it were by inspiration), she makes in her sleepe signes of rejoicing’ (TLN 2653–55). This play was co-­ written with John Fletcher, and the scene of Katherine’s vision is generally attributed to Fletcher. Furthermore, masques and visions present a specific subcategory of stage direction, and are generally more alert than other directions to appearances. (The verb ‘seems’, for instance, appears disproportionately often in masque directions, indicating their visionary nature and action.) Thus, this occurrence of ‘as it were’ is not directly analogous to the phrase in Coriolanus. Antony and Cleopatra does offer a parallel: ‘Enter Ventidius as it were in triumph, the dead body of Pacorus borne before him’ (TLN 1494). One conclusion might then be that the stage directions in these three Folio texts originate with the scribe and preparer of Folio copy, Ralph Crane. Peter Holland raises the spectre of Crane but stops short of drawing a conclusion: noting that the descriptive directions in Coriolanus are ‘distinctly unusual in Shakespeare’s writing’, he observes that the ones in Coriolanus, ‘the first of the tragedies in the First Folio volume, are intriguingly paralleled by the elaborate stage directions in the first of the comedies, The Tempest, probably the effect there of the work of the scribe Ralph Crane who produced the copy used for setting that play’ (Shakespeare 2013: 453). But Crane’s involvement in Coriolanus is far from being a textual certainty; neither the Arden 2 editor nor the World’s Classics editor find reason to detect Crane’s hand in Antony and Cleopatra; and Doug Bruster in this volume argues for Shakespeare’s authorship of The Tempest stage directions previously attributed to Crane.

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Elsewhere in Coriolanus the patrician vocabulary and point of view of the stage directions – faction, mutiny, rabble – makes them sound as if written not by Crane or Shakespeare but by Coriolanus himself: ‘Enter a Company of Mutinous Citizens’; ‘Citizens steale away’; ‘Enter a rabble of Plebeians’; ‘In this Mutinie, the Tribunes, the Aediles, and the People are beat in’; ‘Enter Brutus and Sicinius with the rabble againe’; ‘Enter 3 or 4 Conspirators of Auffidius Faction’ (my emphasis).18 As David Norbrook observes, these stage directions ‘seem not so much to direct as to vent, arousing alarm at plebeian mutiny and disorder’.19 It is this kind of blurring between playworld and theatre world that I wish to explore, and the question I investigate is: what are the perspectives taken by early modern stage directions?

Entering the fiction Let us take the most basic stage direction, regulating movement: enter/exit. ‘He enters’ means that the actor comes on stage, ‘exit’ that he leaves the stage. This is the most common and the most standard direction. But occasionally it buckles at the knees. In George Gascoigne’s Glass of Government (1575), a dialogue concludes with Pandarina suggesting ‘let us depart’, followed by the stage direction ‘They depart to their houses’ (C2v). The influence of Pandarina’s line on the stage direction is clear here. Although Gascoigne regularly uses ‘departeth’ for ‘exit’ in this text (and it is not quite clear whether Glass of Government is a stageable playscript or a humanist dialogue in dramatic form), he equally often uses ‘cometh in’ and ‘goeth out’; ‘departeth’ therefore scales up the standard exit. Other texts offer variants of this factual/fictional conflation.20 The anonymous Wit of a Woman (1604) combines a practical exit with a fictional destination: ‘Exeunt into his house’ (C3v).21 In Peele’s Edward I, a straightforward stage exit is amplified with a prepositional phrase of location: ‘exeunt ambo from Wales’ (1593: I3r). This is a stage direction as

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written by the Chorus in Henry V: think when we talk of Cambria that you see it. Although I have quibbled about ‘as it were’ in Coriolanus, we are accustomed to stage directions that begin this way, instructing actors in the appropriate action (an onstage action that implies offstage activity). In Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607) we read ‘Enter Franckeford as it were brushing the crums from his cloths with a Napkin, and newly risen from supper’ (D3r). The entire stage direction could be collapsed into ‘as it were newly risen from supper’ – ‘as it were’ indicates the offstage supper scene by a recognizable proxy (the actor brushing imaginary crumbs from his body with a physical prop, the napkin). This crucial prop features in a similar stage direction in Munday’s The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (1601): ‘Enter Robin Hoode . . . having his napkin on his shoulder, as if hee were sodainly raised from dinner’ (A4v). ‘As from’/ ‘as if’ phrases therefore function more specifically than they at first seem to do: they direct actors in the required costume and movement. ‘[A]s if they had been new lighted’ means booted and spurred, perhaps holding a riding crop, as in the anonymous Look about You (1600): ‘Enter Robert Hood a young Noble-­man, a seruant with him, with ryding wandes in theyr handes, as if they had beene new lighted’ (A2r).22 ‘As by night’ (Captain Thomas Stukeley 1605: D3r) means the actors must stumble, proceed cautiously, or feel their way. In fact, the full stage direction specifies as much: ‘Enter. . . . softly as by night’ (my emphasis).23 ‘[A]s inquiring for Touchstones Shoppe’ must mean the page looks around, perhaps approaching doors or people (Chapman et al. 1605: A3r); ‘as newly shipwrecked’ in Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber (1923: line 652) signifies dishevelled appearance and wet costumes, a variant of ‘Enter Mariners wet’ (Tempest: TLN 59). Heywood’s Captives not only uses both phrases but expands them: ‘Enter Palestra, all wett as newly shipwrack and escapt the ffury off the Seas’ (653–54). The two uses of ‘as it were’ in Coriolanus serve different functions. One is a locational direction (the pretend Capitol),

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the other a performance direction. Coriolanus’s locational direction (‘as it were, in the Capitoll’) is unknown outside late Shakespeare. Gascoigne’s two uses of ‘as it were’ occur not in a stage direction but in the prefatory paratexts to plays, and refer to the backdrop of entire cities rather than specific changes of scene: ‘The comedie presented as it were in Ferrara’ (1573: Biir); ‘The Comedie to be presented as it were in Antwerpe’ (1575: A2v). Although ‘as it were’ does not occur in non-Shakespearean locational stage directions, there are many equivalents: in Heywood’s How a Man May Choose a Good Wife From a Bad, we have ‘as upon the exchaunge’ and ‘as out of the house’ (1602: A2r, B4r). These locational directions, like the one in Coriolanus, are not literalisms in representation but directions for action like the ‘as if’/ ‘as from’ directions listed in the preceding paragraph. They specify locale but that is not their primary function: their more important role is to indicate the kinesic movements that different locales require. To enter ‘as [coming] from [the] church’ necessitates a different body movement from entering ‘as upon the exchaunge’.24 This is true of ‘as it were’ directions as well. My quotation earlier of Swift’s entrance ‘with a bag as it were full of gold on his back’ (Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes 1599: D4v) is not an Elizabethan equivalent of modern warnings (‘No cash is left in this vehicle overnight’; ‘This theatre does not contain real gold’) but an indication to the actor to perform the action of labouring under a heavy weight. It is an easy step – but a significant shift – to delete the ‘as’. In The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, we find ‘Enter . . . from bowling’ (Porter 1599: B1v). Technically this is no different from ‘enter as from bowling’ but the variant is revealing: the stage direction now adopts the perspective of the fiction rather than of the theatre. Much virtue in ‘as’. There are several moments when simulation drops and texts no longer acknowledge their status ‘as if’. This takes us back to the beginning of this essay and the default mode of theatre as acknowledged pretence. The absence of ‘as if’ is an acknowledgment that we take the pretence for granted and so have no need to signal it – as in the following directions:

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is swallowed (Greene and Lodge 1594: E4r)

He cuts of the Cutpurse eare (Marlowe 1594?: B8r) The conspirators . . . pluck out his tongue (Marston 1602: K2r) treads on it [the neck of the captured Rollano ] (Fisher 1633: E1v) It may be coincidence that all these stage directions depict acts of violence. Stage directions often behave strangely in the face of violence: Selimus’ ‘Puls out his eyes’ is as graphic as the later King Lear is silent at the similar moment of Gloucester’s double enucleation (neither Q nor F Lear provide a direction here). And although modern editors reliably provide a stage direction for the removal of Gloucester’s first eye, very few provide a direction for the second, even though it is equally marked by the dialogue (‘out vile jelly’). Thus, violence disrupts not only stage actions but stage directions. So far I have been looking at directions that firmly signify the world of representation (‘as . . .’) and those that identify with the fictional action. Between these two extremes are directions that slip back and forth between the world of fiction and the world of the stage. In a battlefield scene in King Leir (1605), Mumford chases the fleeing Duke of Cambria whose exit line is ‘Ile take me to my horse’. The ensuing stage direction is ‘Mumford followes him to the dore, and returnes’ (I4r). This is clearly a reference to the stage fabric and not to anything in the British countryside. A stage direction in Wily Beguiled (1606) combines two modes of direction when the weary Sophos lies down in the woods: ‘He fals in a slumber and Musicke soundes’ (F1v). The first part of the direction inhabits the fiction; the second is a

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technical direction. The same happens in Edward I when King Edward visits his queen in childbed: ‘King Edward, Edmund, and Gloster, goes [to] the Queenes Chamber, the Queenes Tent opens, shee is discovered in her bed’ (Peele 1593: F4r). The inference is that the bedchamber is represented by a tent. Later in the play, the stage direction only uses the representative term (‘tent’, not ‘chamber’): ‘The Queens Tent opens, the King his brother the Earle of Gloster enter’ (G2v). A similar elision occurs in the anonymous Fidele and Fortunio (1584) when Virginia’s (and later Victoria’s) gate is represented by a stage door. The pedant becomes a beggar (‘A begging Pedante, I a begging I goe’; E3r) with the stage direction instructing him, ‘Beg at Virginiaes gate’. He presumably knocks, as Pamphila’s attention is roused (‘What bolde begger haue we at the gate’; E3r) and she comes to the fictional gate (the actual stage door): ‘Pamphila comes to the doore’ (E3r). Thus, the Pedant begs at the fictional property while Pamphila enters at the actual property. Michela Calore (2001) has shown how ‘theatrical’ and ‘literary’ stage directions co-­exist even in theatrical plots. The boundary blurrings I have described in this section illustrate that stage directions are happily bilingual; and for as long as a play-­text is aimed at a producer rather than a reader these elisions and bifurcations do not call attention to themselves.

Reading plays Readers – early modern as now – presumably read a work for its fictional content (the story of King Leir) not as dramaturgy (a script for actors putting on King Leir). At times Elizabethan stage directions enter the narrative territory of the novel, conveniently explaining things in ways that (probably coincidentally) assist readers denied the visual support of costumes, props or wigs, or the constant visibility of non-­ speaking characters.25 An anonymous Queen’s Men’s play of the 1580s, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, is vigilant about

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specifying relationships: ‘Enter Neronis, daughter to Patranius, king of the strange marshes’ (D1r); ‘Enter Shift brought in by the two Lords who pursued Clyomon’ (B3r); ‘Enter Clyomon with a Knight, signifying one of those that Clamydes had delivered’ (E3r). Wily Beguiled (1606) is consistent (perhaps overly anxious) at indicating relationships. We are continually reminded that old Ploddell ‘and his son Peter’ enter, even when we have long got used to the relationship of the father/son duo and their appearance together. Middleton’s stage directions repeatedly provide narrative explanations: of relationships, of characters’ status or profession, of intended action or past action. Functionally, stage directions require only one label – a name or a generic designation (of status, occupation or stage role: citizen, merchant, clown) – but Middleton regularly provides both: in No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s we meet ‘Weatherwise the Gull’ (C1r); examples in The Puritan (1607) include ‘Enter the suters Sir Andrew Tipstaffe, Sir Oliver Muck-­hill, and Penny-­ dub’ (C4r); ‘Enter Moll, yongest Daughter to the Widdow’ (C3r) and ‘Enter Widdow, with her eldest Daughter Franck’ (G1r). Jonathan Culpeper notes that because we identify people as members of a social group before we identify them as individuals, generic designation affords writers ‘economy of expression: they can mean more than they say’ (Culpeper 2002: 263). Applying studies in social cognition to stage directions, he points out the similarities between stage directions that pinpoint class and occupation and today’s genre of the personal advertisement. In both cases we have texts of restricted length which necessarily rely on the shorthand of social identifications. Social identifications provide a base from which to ‘make inferences about other aspects of the person’ (2002: 264). Playwrights like Middleton whose city comedies are by definition rooted in the social fabric of Jacobean London take consistent advantage of this character shorthand in their stage directions. From the capsule explanation of relationships (‘enter maister stukley, and maister Newton, a sittisen’, ‘Enter Vernon

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with Hamdon and Ridley, two of his friends’; Captain Thomas Stukeley 1605: A3v, B4v), stage directions often develop into more complicated recapitulations of plot. ‘Enter Shortyard with writings, having cousned Sim Quomodo’; ‘Enter the Countrie-Wenches Father, that was entic’d for Lethe’; ‘Enter Lethe with officers, taken with his Harlot’ (Middleton, Michaelmas Term 1607: H3v, C3r, I1r); ‘Enter . . . Ventigius which Timon redeem’d from prison’ (Timon: TLN 338–40). These are not just stage directions but narrative sentences – sentences with subordinate clauses (this is a particular characteristic of Thomas Middleton, as these examples show.) In King Leir, a stage direction reminds us that the messenger has been corrupted and diverted: ‘Enter the Messenger that should go to Cambria’ (1605: D3r). It may be that directions such as ‘with them a messenger from Sebastian’ (Captain Thomas Stukeley 1605: H1v) indicate something about costume – a messenger wearing the livery of Sebastian’s court, for instance. Directions in Edward I give superfluous details about letters and messengers – ‘Lluellen reades his brother Davids letters’ (C3r); ‘Enter two messengers, the one that David shall be hangd the other of the Queenes sinking’ (K2r); ‘Edmund reads a line of the Queens sinking’ (K2v). Issacharoff calls these ‘autonomous’ or ‘spurious’ directions, ‘not very useful for production purposes’ (1989: 20, 21). Peter Holland elaborates this point in relation to Coriolanus: the long and elaborate opening direction for 1.7, ‘Titus lartius, having set a guard upon Corioles, going with Drum and Trumpet toward Cominius and Caius Martius, enters with a Lieutenant, other Soldiers and a Scout’, contains information that the bookholder and the acting company do not need to know and that, in terms of early modern performance, there is no evidence of their wishing to know, for what Lartius was doing offstage and where he was heading are facts that have no impact on the playing of this scene. (Shakespeare 2013: 454)

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This is not entirely true, for directions that explain relationships, motivation, destinations and contextual reminders are helpful for actors in a proto-Method way, especially as actors in a part-­based system would also receive the attendant stage directions. The stage directions below help the actor know how and what to act: Enter the Clowne and his crew of Ruffians to drinke (Greene and Lodge, A Looking Glass for London and England 1594: B1v) Enters . . . with Bags and Plate, and things to hide (The Weakest Goeth to the Wall 1600: B2v) fights to save Stukly (Captain Thomas Stukeley 1605: L4v) Enter . . . to serve her (Middleton, Michaelmas Term 1607: E2r) Enter . . . to arrest Easie (Middleton, Michaelmas Term 1607: F2r) Enter . . . All Timons Creditors to wait for his coming out (Tim: TLN 117–18) As we saw with locational entrances (‘as upon the exchange’), these motivational direction are acting instructions, regulating body movement and attitude (Issacharoff’s ‘kinesic’ and ‘melodic’ directions). Many stage directions specifying time or position choreograph a play’s action. In Alphonsus, King of Aragon: ‘Rise up Alphonsus out of his chair, who, all this while hath bene talking to Albinius’ (line 1832).26 In Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass: ‘Ambler tells this with extraordinary speed’ (H4r). In the

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first scene of Edward I: ‘The Queene Mother being set on the one side and Queene Elinor on the other, the king sitteth in the middest mounted highest’ (A3v). ‘Below’ stage directions clearly choreograph the action and are, again, as helpful to readers as to actors, but they may additionally tell us something about the author’s perspective or the process of composition. In Ram Alley, one scene begins with an instruction to Mistress Taffeta and Adriana to ‘Enter below’ (Barry 1611: C4r). The previous scene was not ‘above’, and so one wonders why the direction does not simply read ‘enter’. But the scene in which these characters last appeared had indeed been ‘above’. The author was clearly remembering their previous scene – and may even have been writing the characters’ scenes consecutively. One suspects that this kind of direction was helpful in the actor’s part and its presence here may have been designed for translation to parts (or derived from it). Let us return to readers. Several stage directions and their cousins – speech prefixes (‘nominative’ or ‘attributive’ didascalia) – help the reader negotiate the thorny territory of disguised characters. Here again Middleton is unusually consistent in indicating disguises and aliases: ‘Enter Curtezan with her disguised father’ (Michaelmas Term: G4v); ‘Enter . . . Shortyard alias Blastfield’ (Michaelmas Term: B4v and cf C4); ‘Enter Falselight for [i.e. as] Maister Idem’ (Michaelmas Term: E1v). The anonymous author of The Wit of a Woman is similarly helpful with ‘Enter Filenio now called Niofell, and his servant Goffo, now called Foggo’ (1604: B4v; the author has chosen the simple option of making the disguise names anagrams of the characters’ real names.) Early modern texts (like modern editions) differ as to which speech prefix they choose once a character is in disguise. In the example above from Wit of a Woman, the dialogue begins with the speech prefix Fi (for the undisguised name of Filenio) which immediately becomes Nio(f) (for Niofell); Goff is consistently Fog. This standardization offers the reader considerable help. Viola, by contrast, is always Vio[la] rather than Ces[ario] in Twelfth Night. Once she is in disguise, she is not addressed as

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Viola until the denouement; it is her cryptic allusions (‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house’ (2.4.120); ‘I am not that I play’ (1.5.179) and her body that remind us of her sex. Readers receive this visual reminder in textual form via speech prefixes. Early modern readers had no helpful Arden editors to standardize speech prefixes or clarify stage directions. The directions which ‘translate’ a text into a performance rarely translate it back into a reading text; the development of stage directions specifically designed to assist the reader when plays were published as reading texts had yet to occur. In the examples above, stage directions cross the boundary between actors’ needs and readers’ needs. A related boundary is that between actor and audience. Today, all stage directions take the perspective of the audience: thus, ‘enter stage left’ in modern prompt books refers to the view from the auditorium. What do positional terms mean in the early modern theatre? Here are two entrance directions in Marlowe’s 1 Tamburlaine (1597): To the battaile, and Mycetes comes out alone (B6v) Sound trumpets to the battell, and he runs in (B7v) Where is ‘out’? Where is ‘in’? A modern playwright (and many early modern playwrights) would code these directions as ‘Enter Mycetes’ / ‘Exit Mycetes’ which answers the question: ‘out’ means onstage (he comes out of the tiring house) and ‘in’ means backstage (he runs into the tiring house). (The out/in adverbs are retained in phrasal particles such as ‘a bed thrust out’ or ‘hallowing within’.)27 This out/in phrasing occurs in only two Marlowe texts, the other being The Massacre at Paris (although this text has not come directly from Marlowe’s pen):

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They beare away the Queene and goe out. (A7r) All goe out, but Nauarre and Pleshe . (B6v) Goe out all, but the Queene and the Cardinall . (B8r) They march out with the body of the King (D6v) McJannet notes that the Tamburlaine directions are unusual in that they ‘reverse the usual prepositions’: Mycetes ‘exits by running in’ (1999: 144). But unusual by what measure? Only by our expectations. They are not unusual by Elizabethan practice where the formula continues throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods: although it is eclipsed, it is never extinguished by the more standardized enter or exit, continuing to co-­exist with the Latin verbs, often in the same sentence: ‘Sacrepant . . . goes out and his man enters’ (Greene, Orlando Furioso 1594: D1r, my emphasis); ‘As the young princes go out, enter Tirill’ (Heywood, 2 Edward IV 1600: K1r, my emphasis). Shakespeare uses ‘out’ / ‘in’ infrequently. ‘In’ appears in Q1 Romeo and Juliet (1597) (‘Nurse offers to goe in’, G2r; ‘Paris offers to go in’, G2v), in Richard II (‘The murderers rush in’, 1597: K1r) and in Q Henry V (‘Enter Flewellen and beats them in’, 1600: C2v) where the same adverbs mean opposite things: ‘Nurse offers to goe in’ means the Nurse offers to exit whereas ‘The murderers rush in’ means they enter. The display of Goneril and Regan’s dead bodies in King Lear is of interest here: Q’s stage direction reads ‘The bodies of Gonerill and Regan are brought in’ (1608: L3r), whereas the Folio, describing the identical staging, reads ‘Gonerill and Regans bodies brought out.’ (1623: ff2v). Dessen and Thomson

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document the same inconsistency within a single play: in 1 Henry VI Bedford is ‘brought in sick in a Chair’ (TLN 1469– 70) for his entrance on stage yet ‘dies, and is carried in by two in his Chair’ (1558) for his exit. This linguistic duality almost collapses in on itself in Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (1599) where Shift’s line – ‘now come and follow after me’ – is followed by the prima facie contradictory direction ‘Enter out’ (D3v). In fact, the scene depicts the release of Clamydes from prison so the ‘out’ refers to his liberation (from a stage property prison? The stage door? An inner stage?). Although semantically illogical to the reader, the direction has stage logic.

Conclusion: crossing generic boundaries In keeping with their liminal ontology, stage directions continue to straddle boundaries outside plays. Dekker and Middleton’s The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary (1604) is a plague-­ year pamphlet which begins with an allegorical dialogue ‘between War, Fame and the Pestilence’. This inductive dramatic framework, with centred speech prefixes, concludes (‘FINIS’ A4v), and is followed by an apparently new work with a half-­title whose subordinate clause mimics title pages: THE MEETING / Of Gallants at an / Ordinarie. / Where the Fatte Host telles Tales at the upper / ende of the Table (B1r). But in this new prose work, the tellers of the tales are given centred speech prefixes, and the tales themselves include recognizably dramatic stage directions: ‘Entring into the Ordinarie’ is centred and italicized on B4v. The ensuing ‘Welcome, welcome Gentlemen, I have Tales, and Quailes for you: seat your selves Gallantes, enter Boyes & Beardes with dishes and Platters; I will be with you againe in a trice’ clearly interrupts the Host’s welcome with a stage direction about tavern activity so that the Oxford Middleton presents it typographically as another stage direction: ‘Welcome, welcome,

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gentlemen, I have tales and quails for you. Seat yourselves, gallants. (Enter boys and beards with dishes and platters.) I will be with you again in a trice’ (lines 291–94). Yet more hybrid are the marginalia in the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of The Holy Rood (1609) by John Davies of Hereford. The section of the poem on the Crucifixion is marked up (in Davies’ own hand) with a series of marginal notes that look initially like glosses, rendering the poetic as the prosaic, but are in fact quasi-­stage directions: They give him vinegar & gall to drinke (G1v) The multitude scoff at /him. (F1r) Hee being crucifiged [sic]/ the Crosse is set up (E4r) His feete are / nayled to ye /crosse (E3v) Christ goeth up ye / mount Calvary (E2v) Hee is presented againe / to Pilate who seeing him so tormented, saythe. / Behold the man (D3r) A reed is put / into his hand (D1v) A crowne of thornes / is put upon his head (D1r)

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The Crucifixion is the only part of the poem to be marked up in this way. One wonders if it was dramatized at Easter? Or whether Davies, moved by the content, simply summarized the section’s key dramatic and emotional moments in marginal shorthand that resemble stage directions? Once again, stage directions cross boundaries. If all the world’s a stage, all the text’s a stage direction. This observation was made as early as 1982 in Ann Pasternak Slater’s Shakespeare the Director; it was reiterated a decade later by Anthony Hammond (1992). The boundaries between the play world and the real world, between the voice of the author and the voice of the actor, between the stage directions and the audience – and between the voice of the poet, John Davies of Hereford, and his imagined drama – are everywhere apparent.

Primary references Barry, Lodwick (1611), Ram Alley. Captain Thomas Stukeley (1605). Chapman, George, Ben Jonson and John Marston (1605), Eastward Ho. Cooke, Io. (1614), Greene’s Tu Quoque. Davies, John (1609), The Holy Rood. Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton (1604), The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary. Fidele and Fortunio (1584). Field, Nathan (1612), A Woman is a Weathercock. Fisher, Jasper (1633), Fuimus Troes. Gascoigne, George (1575), Glass of Government. Gascoigne, George (1573), Supposes and Jocasta, in A Hundred Sundry Flowers. Greene, Robert (1594), Orlando Furioso. Greene, Robert and Thomas Lodge (1594), A Looking Glass for London and England. [Heywood, Thomas?] (1600), 1 and 2 Edward IV. Heywood, Thomas (1602), How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad.

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Heywood, Thomas (1607), A Woman Killed with Kindness. Jonson, Ben (1631), The Devil is an Ass. King Leir (1605). A Knack to Know a Knave (1594). Locrine (1595). Look about You (1600). Marlowe, Christopher (1594?), The Massacre at Paris. Marlowe, Christopher (1597), 1 and 2 Tamburlaine. Marston, John (1602), Antonio’s Revenge. Marston, John (1604), The Malcontent. Marston, John (1613), The Insatiate Countess. Middleton, Thomas (1607), Michaelmas Term. Middleton, Thomas (1607), The Puritan. Middleton, Thomas (1607), Your Five Gallants. Middleton, Thomas (1653), No Wit / Help Like a Woman’s. Munday, Anthony (1601), The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington. Munday, Anthony (1601), The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington. Peele, George (1593), Edward I. Phillip, John (1569), Patient Grissell. Porter, Henry (1599), The Two Angry Women of Abingdon. Selimus (1594). Shakespeare, William (1597), Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, William (1600), Henry V. Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (1599). The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (1600). Wily Beguiled (1606). The Wit of a Woman (1604).

Editions Greene, Robert (1908), The Tragical Reign of Selimus, 1594, Malone Society Reprint, ed. W. Bang, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greene, Robert (1926), Alphonsus, King of Aragon, Malone Society Reprint, ed. W.W. Greg, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heywood, Thomas (1953), The Captives, Malone Society Reprint, ed. Arthur Brown, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Marlowe, Christopher (1993), Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Middleton, Thomas (2007), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Munday, Anthony (1923), John a Kent and John a Cumber, Malone Society Reprint, ed. Muriel St Clare Byrne, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plautus (1964), The Rope and Other Plays, trans. E.F. Watling, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shakespeare, William (1968), The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman, New York: Norton. Shakespeare, William (1974), The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G.B. Evans, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Shakespeare, William (1995), Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, London: Arden/Routledge. Shakespeare, William (1994), Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William (1962), Comedy of Errors, ed. R.A. Foakes, London: Arden/Methuen. Shakespeare, William (2008), Comedy of Errors, ed. Charles Whitworth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William (2013), Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland, London: Bloomsbury/Arden. Sidney, Philip (1965), An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, London: Nelson.

3 ‘Peter falls into the hole’: Nonce Stage Directions and the Idea of the Dictionary Paul Menzer and Jess Hamlet

You speak a language that I understand not The Winter’s Tale 3.2.79 ALAN DESSEN, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary

If you look up ‘dictionary’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, it resists the obvious tautological joke (‘QED OED’ or the more brusque, ‘you’re looking at it’) and offers the following: a. A book which explains or translates, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary), giving for each

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word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information . . . The definition goes on to historicize ‘dictionaries,’ explaining that they did not always mean what today they mean. Nevertheless, the OED’s primary definition glosses the sense in which Leslie Thomson and Alan Dessen intended it when they compiled their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642, a work no doubt cited in this collection more than any other and without which this collection would look very different. If the Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama did not exist, this collection probably would have invented it. The Dictionary was a long time in the planning. Alan Dessen first called for it in his 1995 work, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary – indeed, he previewed a sample of it there – and it has since become conventional, almost reflexive, to speak in terms of a shared theatrical ‘vocabulary’ or ‘language’ when we speak of early modern stage practice. Examples are not hard to find. Joel Altman refers to Shakespeare’s ‘theatrical language’ – ‘gestures . . . voice and body . . . metatheatrics and extratheatrics’ – as distinct from the poetic kind (1999: 183). Paul Yachnin describes ‘theatrical practice’ as a ‘language through which the plays speak and with which they make meaning’ (2015: 184). Or Andrew Mousley can speak of the ‘theatrical language which pervades’ Hamlet, intending something other than ‘metatheatrical’ dialogue (2007: 37). These examples, drawn more or less at random from sources close at hand, all differentiate ‘theatrical language’ from the dialogic material that scripts require actors to memorize and to speak. It is, perhaps, revealing that our vocabulary struggles to find a word other than ‘language’ – or ‘vocabulary’ – to describe theatrical articulations other than spoken language. We invariably, perhaps inevitably, fall back on language to name the unwritten, to speak of the unspoken. Scholars have tried to get around this ‘language barrier’ that finds us converting non-­linguistic forms of theatrical

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communication back into linguistic forms. Louise George Clubb’s influential Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time introduced the term ‘theatregram,’ which Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson gloss as a ‘semiotic unit that is materialized in theatrical performance, detachable, transportable, and recombinable across geographical boundaries’ (2008: 13). Tellingly, the term was coined and is now most often deployed to describe theatrical conventions that cross national and linguistic borders and that therefore translate between or among theatrical traditions that do not share a written or spoken language. Theatregrams are semiotic units that, in Clubb’s terms, both Italians and the English ‘speak’, a common theatrical language in which both constituencies are fluent, whatever other differences they do or do not share. In sum, to speak across traditions that do not share a common language, theatres use non-­verbal ‘theatregrams’ to find common ground and to make common meaning. It is a compelling idea, particularly at a scholarly time fascinated with transnational exchange, a way of thinking about acting, and actors, without borders. The idea of the ‘theatregram’ can renovate an overly parochial reading of trans-European theatre. Within the borders of English theatre, however, the assumption is that a common ‘language’ prevails, a lingua franca, to mix metaphors. In other words, we often imagine the world of early English playmaking as a homogenous culture, a unified, coherent ‘nation’ of theatre makers whose practices are accessible, legible, and wholly intelligible to one another, howsoever impenetrable their spoken language might be to non-­native speakers. The notion is not necessarily wrong, but it does reinforce the boundaries that a transnational idea of theatrical exchange seeks to efface or challenge. It might occlude, at the same time, the notion that boundaries and borders existed within national theatrical traditions, not just at their geographical margins. At the very least, the idea of a common theatrical language risks collapsing into coherence an early English theatrical marketplace that may well have been marked by various forms of incoherence and difference,

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not least the differences that emerged over time and across spaces. This idea that playmakers shared a common language across the theatre industry existed before the Dessen/Thomson Dictionary, but it is partly beholden to Dessen’s life-­long labour, which has helped codify our conception of early English theatrical practice. Yet the implications of the ‘vocabulary’ metaphor – aided and abetted by the apparatus of a ‘dictionary’ – have gone largely unconsidered, at least since Dessen himself, with characteristic caution, considered those implications in Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. Every assertion that Dessen makes about Shakespeare’s theatrical vocabulary, for instance, is carefully hedged by his alertness to what is lost between the then and there and the here and now. As so often with innovative work, the inventor’s own concerns about the project’s conceptual limitations and implications disappear in the aftermath of its adoption. While allowing, then, the utility of the ‘vocabulary’ approach to early modern theatrical practice, we might ask what ‘dialects’ does the idea of a ‘theatrical vocabulary’ or a ‘language’ threaten to flatten out? What, for instance, of those nonce stage directions – those that appear just once in the printed corpus of early modern drama? How do they challenge the notion of shared theatrical language, of shared theatrical standards? How does a dictionary – the idea of a dictionary as much or more than the fact of it – deal with the abnormal? ‘Peter falls into the hole’ appears just once in the Dictionary of Stage Directions, for instance, however many times he may have fallen into the hole on the early modern stage. Does the novel conjunction of ‘fall’ and ‘hole’ bespeak illiteracy or un-­ fluency on the part of Robert Tailor (the stage direction appears in his Hog Hath Lost his Pearl)? Or does it point to Tailor’s neo-­linguistic innovation or avant theatrical practice? How, in short, do unique stage directions – those hapax legomena of stage practice – complicate and enrich our understanding of a shared theatrical vocabulary, of a common theatrical practice in the English Renaissance?

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It is the argument of this chapter that one-­off stage directions might reveal an early modern stage that ‘spoke’ its practice not invariably in a common tongue but often in an idiomatic one marked by patois, barbarism and regional accents – and that, in this case, ‘regional accents’ might be peculiar to individual playwrights, even individual companies.1 In sum, idiosyncratic stage directions can renovate our understanding of theatrical practice by drawing our attention to the aberrant rather than the exemplary and, in so doing, suggest that the early modern theatre industry was anything but standard, maybe even anything but an industry. The chapter seeks to push gently back against the tendency towards systemization, taxonomy, and standardization in our quest to recover the practices of theatrical professionals working within an industry that may not have conceived of itself as one.2 As so often, the tools we use to do our work shape and alter the work we do and the products we produce. In this case, the form and idea of a dictionary shapes our outcomes, the what we work on as well as the how. By making such claims and raising such questions, this chapter may seem to challenge or break with Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s work. It does not. Not least because Dessen is himself sceptical about the dictionary principle and, indeed, raises the matter of unique stage directions as a vexed issue for the makers of a Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama. This chapter therefore dilates the dilemma of the nonce stage direction, asking, after Dessen, what to make of them. It does so, first, by asking some conceptual questions about the way the idea of a dictionary shapes our understanding of the early modern stage. It then explores the way that the large print corpuses of a handful of playwrights, Shakespeare more than any, dominate our understanding of a ‘fluency’ in a language they disproportionately ‘invented’. It then turns, as a counter example, to the work of Thomas Heywood, who is the Shakespeare of the nonce, since his work contributes a disproportionately large number of one-­off stage directions.

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Comparing Shakespeare and Heywood is meant to question the idea of an early modern theatrical world in which a prevailing lingua franca bound its practitioners in a common cause. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the hapax stage direction reveals a play world in which companies may have developed their own theatrical shorthand, but it seems less than clear that it was one across which a common language prevailed. We aim, in short, to argue that Heywood’s idiosyncrasies are typical. And if ‘typical idiosyncrasies’ sounds oxymoronic, then so much the better, since this chapter thinks about the anomaly as something other than a reinforcement of the representativity of the non-­anomalous. Above all, we ask if the idea of the dictionary has bound us to a way of thinking about theatrical practice that can only read that practice in terms of the normative and the aberrant.

A dictionary of hard words To pursue the present study, we built a database of unique stage directions for this project in conjunction with Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary and our own knowledge of early modern drama. We first scoured the Dictionary for entries that suggested rare or unique directions or combinations of directions (for example, there are plenty of ‘falls’ but significantly fewer ‘holes’, and Peter is the only character successfully to do the former into the latter), then chased those directions to their original printings to establish their full contexts. We arrived at 106 entries spanning eighty years of printed dramatic materials and including eighty-­two plays by thirty-­four named playwrights (and the ever-­prolific Anonymous) across at least eighteen playing companies. The principle of selection here was, then, simple: stage directions that failed to appear more than once in the printed annals of early modern drama. In the compilation of this database, we certainly have missed some nonce directions, if not many, but produced that database

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to prompt some thinking about the problem of the anomaly. What this work produced, then, is something closer to an early modern dictionary of hard words rather than the comprehensive kind that did not yet exist in the period. As is well known, the first monolingual dictionaries in the period were ‘hard word’ dictionaries, like that of Robert Cawdrey in 1604, followed by John Bullokar’s English Expositor (1616), Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary (1623), and Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656). These dictionaries sought to define peculiar and strange terms as opposed to those in common usage. The assumption at the time seems to have been that it was the odd and offbeat that required elucidation rather than the common vocabulary, an assumption this chapter shares. Furthermore, given the flexibility of early modern orthography, these early dictionaries did not arise to regularize spelling. The notion of ‘correct’ spelling and usage was still emerging at the time. In crude terms, then, Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary follows the model of the great eighteenth-­century general language dictionaries of Nathan Bailey and Samuel Johnson. If the Dessen/Thomson Dictionary is Johnsonian in its comprehensiveness, the Hamlet/Menzer one is Cawdreyan in its self-­imposed limitations. Once our entries were categorized, trends were easy to spot: with nineteen nonce directions, Heywood was responsible for nearly a fifth of all the entries on our list. Massinger produced eight unique directions, and Marston, Middleton, and Shakespeare each turned in seven. The Atheist’s Tragedy and The Brazen Age produced four unique directions each, making them tied for the top play. Finally, the most unique stage directions appeared in print between 1601 and 1610, and between 1631 and 1640. Each decade turned out twenty unique directions. One immediate conclusion from these trends is that we might expect the one-­off stage directions to dwindle over time as a commercial theatre industry slowly codified its terms. The opposite is the case. Furthermore, Thomas Heywood emerges as the star of this dictionary of the nonce. We take up Heywood at some length below, since his

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case produces a certain hermeneutic interest, one that palpates the problem of abnormality. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, we built a dictionary of freaks. In doing so, we draw attention to a unique feature of the Dessen/Thomson Dictionary, a way in which it is both like other dictionaries, and unlike them. The OED, for instance, will tell you what a word means and offer instances of its expression, but it will not tell you how often a word was used. (The OED will tell you that a word is ‘now considered archaic’, but its frequency bands offer no sense of how common a term was at a given place and time before 1970.) In short, there is no frequency-­of-use feature in the OED or other general language dictionaries. By contrast, while the Dictionary of Stage Directions is a dictionary it also shares some features with concordances, since it tells us where a stage direction appears and offers instances of its use – sometimes comprehensively, sometimes representatively (the entry for ‘flourish’ begins with a notation that it appears over 500 times, but lists only about eighty of them). It is able to do so since the total data set of stage directions is relatively small (smaller than a dictionary of every word that is, both ‘hard’ or ‘easy’). The ‘Dictionary of Hard Stage Directions’ compiled here can have no similar aspirations to concordance-­like status. Or as a concordance it is of limited utility, since it refers only to the one time a particular formulation was used. In the end, our database is neither dictionary nor concordance; it is merely a list of stage directions, less taxonomy than parataxis. What it is meant to do, however, is to encourage us to think about theatrical language in simultaneously more expansive and more granular ways. The list of directions enables us to think, for instance, about moments of potential theatrical failure, even incomprehension, when communication might have failed not between the past and the present but within the past. It allows us to imagine a theatrical culture where what it might have had in common were peculiar as opposed to shared values.

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A dictionary without words As a conceptual metaphor, it is not hard to see how useful the idea – as well as the fact – of a ‘dictionary of stage directions’ might be. To recover the period’s theatrical vocabulary, we need something like a lexicon; in fact, a dictionary. After all, as Dessen writes, ‘When reading the early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays, we regularly confront a theatrical shorthand murky to us yet accessible to the early players and playgoers’ (1995: 38). It is worth commenting that, in some instances, Shakespeare’s plays stage incomprehension – dumb shows, for instance, often baffle their onstage auditors – ‘What means this, my lord?’ (Hamlet 3.2.136) – providing an instance where theatrical shorthand proves more murky than accessible to early playgoers.3 The early modern stage often traffics in, if not thematizes, theatrical incomprehension. A modern dictionary of past practice articulates the idea, however, that what is lost on us was always clear to them. Furthermore, the powerful conceptual utility of the dictionary principle might obscure some salient features of the culture of the commercial theatre industry in early modern London. Playmakers of the period obviously did not have a ‘dictionary’ – they would not have needed one, the argument obviously would go; they were it; it was they – but did theatre-­ makers in the period truly have a shared theatrical vocabulary? And by shared vocabulary, we mean something approximating terms of art that both suffused and transcended the theatrical industry (so that playgoers knew them as well as players). Are we overconfident in imagining an industry with a well-­ established, totally legible, always accessible theatrical shorthand, that is murky to us but clear as day to them? The question of periodicity obviously follows hard upon such concerns. Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary covers sixty years, over which time an ‘industry’ and even ‘industry standards’ may have indeed emerged. If so, then at the very least that industry changed, as new performance technologies emerged, institutional memories were made (and forgotten),

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and theatrical trends altered. And fashions change, of course. What was ‘shorthand’ in 1580 might well have been cryptic by the 1640s, or simply archaic. (This chapter does not use the words ‘problematize’ or ‘interrogate’; ten years ago it might well have. It might also have been called ‘Dictionarying the Stage Direction’. Today’s jargon is tomorrow’s embarrassment.) For instance, the last entry in our ‘dictionary of hard words’ – one sequenced by date of print publication, not performance – Thomas Killigrew’s The Princess (printed 1664), requires that a character ‘crys hup, and holds his breath’ (H2v). Is this innovation or evolution (or simply a tantrum)? For that matter, our earliest entry is from George Peele’s Arraignment of Paris from 1584, which requires that ‘An artificial charm of birds being heard within, Pan speaks’ (1.2.97.1). Is this naiveté, an attempt at a theatrical control later abandoned (what other kind of ‘charm of birds’ other than ‘artificial’ might be relied upon offstage?) The lingua franca of the 1630s might have been all French to the 1590s, and so on. A similar question about location might ask if the language prevailed both on the road and ‘at home’ for those few companies fortunate to have a determined playing space. Moreover, though Dessen and Thomson exempt such plays from their collection, did academic plays speak a common theatrical language as commercial plays? What of companies that exclusively toured, or those that travelled abroad? Were there rural ‘accents’ and urban ones? Court masques are also excluded from the dictionary, although professional playing companies frequently participated in their presentation. Did, in short, this common theatrical language – fossilized in printed stage directions – transcend time and space, binding varied and various entertainments and entertainers in a similar fashion that contemporary academics share a common jargon at home and abroad? The larger prevailing question here is whether there truly was an industry, as opposed to a loosely aggregated group of particulated playing companies in what we call the ‘early modern period’. That question is larger in scope than the present chapter can hope to tackle, but do we misunderstand

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the notion of the early modern theatrical climate by imagining that a ‘standard operating procedure’ existed at the time? Furthermore, is this a principle that the nonce stage direction might challenge? Alan Dessen anticipates us by asking a related question in Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. He points to the ‘irregularities, nuances, and idioms not easily codified in a handbook’; an instance, to put it baldly, of preEnlightenment practices baffling post-Enlightenment ones. Furthermore, he asks, ‘what happens when a word or phrase turns up only once?’ (1995: 44). For Dessen, the nonce – ‘the irregularities, nuances, and idioms’ – represents an insuperable challenge to the interpreter today since ‘the absence of supporting evidence from contemporary playscripts (or other sources) prevents any definitive glossing’ of the idiomatic, or idiosyncratic, term. Furthermore, for Dessen, ‘rare and unique examples can easily lead to misleading inferences about stage practice and authorial intention’ since they cannot be made to typify practice (1984: 30). In these terms, the dictionary principle – to give ‘an explanation of its meaning or meanings’ – requires that a word be used more than once to come into meaning, or to do meaningful work for the modern interpreter. Meaning is the effect of reiteration so that the one-­off stage direction remains opaque in its singularity. Worse, according to Dessen, that singularity can prove misleading. For Dessen, then, the nonce or hapax puts up a barrier against our understanding – challenges our ability to compile a translation handbook. Still, Dessen imagines those odd terms to be ‘accessible’ to their original interpreters, the players charged with realizing the stage directive. The confusion, in other words, is always ours, never theirs. When it comes to nonce stage directions, confusion is always between the then and now. Here, we consider the possibility that confusion might have existed within the then and there. To consider an entry selected almost at random, in the 1592 Quarto of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy we find that Pedrigano ‘Shoots the Dagge’ (E4r). This is the single formulation in these terms in Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary, although ‘dagges’ also appear in

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Claracilla and The Fatal Dowry (though that instance could be a misprint for ‘dagger’). The similarity of ‘dagge’ and ‘dagger’ points up the problem of interpretation. We might have trouble knowing the one from the other at a 400-year remove, but the common theatrical shorthand of the period should render the meaning immediately transparent, if a standard ‘shorthand’ prevailed. And yet, this stage direction is unique. Do we gather from this that Kyd did not know what he was talking about, or to whom he was talking (or writing)? There is an easy out in this instance, since Pedrigano is asked moments before to enter ‘with a Pistoll’. We might safely determine that Kyd’s lapse into patois would be forgiven by his earlier care in designating that Pedrigano shoots a pistol, not daggers. Yet within the conception of a common theatrical language, Kyd’s private idiom produces a notion that Kyd operated outside the norms of the theatrical industry, an industry he is often credited with creating, not least in what David Bevington calls ‘the grandfather of revenge tragedies’, one ‘justly viewed as a classic of the London theater’ (2002: 3). Thus, in a play viewed in the period as a ‘classic’, Kyd uses a theatrical language that was never adopted, never imitated, and so produces a play that is simultaneously aberrant and typical. Grandfather Kyd mutters directions in a language lost upon the younger set.4 Or consider those verbs that might easily be mistaken. In Richard Brome’s 1640 play The Antipodes, he includes the stage direction ‘They buffet’ (H4v). It seems unlikely that in 1640 any actor might imagine that Brome is asking them to enjoy a light, ambulatory repast. Still, it is the single appearance in the whole Dictionary of the term ‘buffet’ for ‘fight’ (which appears in ‘roughly 380 examples’ (1999: 91)). What did Queen Henrietta’s servants make of the direction? Was ‘buffet’ common parlance enough that its oddity here would pass unremarked? Why did Brome – a practised playwright, fifteen plays of whose were consulted in the construction of the Dictionary – here employ ‘buffet’ rather than ‘they fight’? Why did he not rather use the prevailing theatrical shorthand? We do not know, but we wonder if we are asking the right question.

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In keeping with calls for violence, Marston’s What You Will (printed 1607) directs that Albano ‘bastinadoes Simplicius’ (E2v), meaning, according to the OED, to cudgel someone with a stick. Neither ‘buffet’ nor ‘bastinadoes’ seem to have achieved shorthand status, which, once more, raises a question about Brome’s or Marston’s mastery of theatrical vocabulary, although they are taken to be ‘seasoned’ playwrights by the Dictionary.5 The questions raised here of why these playwrights employed ‘buffet’ or ‘bastinado’ instead of ‘fight’ are of the variety of ‘time machine’ questions, in that they could be easily answered by time travel. In this respect, they are not particularly interesting questions. What is more interesting – and less easily determined by a Tardis – is the question of the pressure these instances of idiolect put on the idea of a theatrical vocabulary. Buffets and bastinadoes may, or may not, have been as clear as day – or mud – to the theatre-­makers who first read them, but the tendency to read their singularity either as aberrant or as a mark against their utility is one that dictionaries abet. Dessen and Thomson put these one-­off directions down to authorial idiosyncrasies rather than changes over time or shifts in locations (1999: x). They are almost certainly correct (though we argue that those idiosyncrasies are more normative than not). However, if we consider the paradigmatic case of Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), we run into a play with a profusion of anomalies (as noted above) that tests the idea of the idiosyncratic. In 2.4, the play directs that D’Amville ‘thrusts him downe into a gravell pit’ (E2r). In 4.1 the play dictates that he ‘Pulles out a sheete, a haire, and a beard’ (H4v). On the same leaf, the play directs that ‘To get into the Charnell House, he takes holde of a Death’s head, it slips and staggers him’ (H4v). Then, infamously in 5.1, ‘As he raises up the Axe, strikes out his own brains. Staggers off the scaffold’ (L3r). The Atheist’s Tragedy, the 1611 Quarto tells us, was printed ‘As in diuers places it hath often beene acted’. Possibly a property of the Lord Chamberlain’s servants – the most stable, durable company across the entire period – The Atheist’s Tragedy is a play deeply embedded in its theatrical moment, self-­conscious

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about its genre, self-­reflexive of its inherited tradition, composed by a playwright who – if not ‘seasoned’ – exhibits a deep familiarity with the period’s drama. It is a play we might expect to speak a theatrical language in common with the plays with which it keeps company, that communicates in a theatrical shorthand shared by players and playgoers. The Atheist’s Tragedy, so conventional in many respects, boasts a highly unconventional para-­text. Judged by the standards of a common theatrical vocabulary, it speaks a language that might be ‘understood not’, and not just by its modern readers. The play’s theatrical patois, its peculiar argot, could be put down to the fact that Cyril Tourneur is not a ‘seasoned’ playwright. Indeed, his theatrical idiolect might support the notion that seasoned playwrights spoke a common tongue, one unseasoned playwrights did not share – or did not have access to. The argument is tautological, however, since the dictionary is built upon the plays of seasoned playwrights. Of course they were fluent in their own language. The larger question produced by a dictionary is, then, how to read the abnormal against the normative – Tourneur against Shakespeare – and vice versa, without succumbing to a binary logic in which ‘normal’ stage directions reveal a writer’s fluency and the abnormal the writer’s inarticulacy. When we consider Heywood below, we see that what could look like ‘inarticulacy’ can be hailed as innovation, but the challenge with the dictionary idea is that it can be very hard – within this model – to tell the one from the other. The further challenge, taken up in what immediately follows, is to take care not to conflate ‘fluency’ or ‘normality’ with the ‘Shakespearean’: a larger challenge for any scholar working with early modern drama.

Shakespeare’s theatrical fluency A popular meme, circulated via the Internet, appearing on posters and tote bags, will tell you that Shakespeare ‘invented’ hundreds of words and phrases. Indeed, Shakespeare’s neo-­

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logistic fecundity is one of his most cited and most praised attributes. Data mining is undermining such claims, however. In the time it takes to read this chapter, one could, with sufficient laptops, bandwidth, and will, find an earlier instance of a word the OED credits to Shakespeare. We do not know how many words Shakespeare ‘invented’, but we would place our bet on a number ending in zero, and beginning with it as well. The scaling fallacy is clear here. Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays – as other playwrights did – but he left a massive print legacy. Shakespeare’s vocabulary was obviously large, but no larger than other writers working at the time, as Hugh Craig’s work on Shakespeare’s vocabulary has proven (2011: 53–74). As he puts it: ‘Whatever quantitative measures reflecting Shakespeare’s acknowledged exceptional status are explored in the future, the evidence of vocabulary size and word-­use frequency places Shakespeare with his contemporaries, rather than apart from them.’ The problem is the data set. Shakespeare left a larger data set than many of his contemporaries. That is because Shakespeare left a large print legacy: the Folio, of course, but also the sonnets and narrative poems and Quartos. There are not many other writers of the period with a commensurate footprint – pun intended, even if not appreciated. The obvious parallels are Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, who both published fairly widely during their working lifetimes. The obvious but disappointing end is that they have similarly large vocabularies, which is merely to reach the inevitable conclusion that to have a large vocabulary you have to write a lot. To be sure, Dessen and Thomson make no exceptional claim – or claims for exceptionality – for Shakespeare’s theatrical fluency. Their dictionary is – other than a modest introduction on methodology – a commendably ‘just the facts’ affair. However, an analysis of the stage directions broken down by playwright reinforces the way that just a handful of playwrights dominate the ‘conversation’. Of the 493 plays included in the Dictionary, Shakespeare and Fletcher share the lead

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with thirty-­nine plays each (collaborations upping their respective counts), so that Shakespeare and Fletcher contribute over 15 per cent of the plays in the dictionary (obviously, the total number of stage directions contributed by individual playwrights varies widely depending upon how many stage directions the printed copies of their plays contain). Shakespeare and Fletcher are only surpassed by that prolific playwright ‘Anonymous’, who – though we organize plays under his single authorship – is obviously not singular. Heywood, Dekker, Massinger and Middleton comprise a second rank of playwrights, each contributing over twenty-­five plays to the dictionary’s scrutiny. Though Dessen and Thomson do not suggest as much explicitly, it would be easy to conclude that Shakespeare and Fletcher were the period’s most fluent speakers of a common theatrical language. When we compile a dictionary of stage directions from the period, we are faced with a kind of confirmation bias. Shakespeare features heavily in Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary not just because Shakespeare wrote an unusually large number of plays, but also because an unusually large number of his plays reached print. The problem extends beyond Shakespeare to other playwrights with a large print corpus. The Dictionary makes ‘plentiful use of evidence from the canons of such seasoned (and prolific) playwrights as Dekker, Shakespeare, Heywood, Middleton, Fletcher, Massinger, Brome and Shirley. The thousands of extant stage directions provide the only substantive clues to the language shared by these and other theatrical professionals’ (1999: ix). A dictionary made mainly out of the materials of the canons of seven writers will obviously reinforce the sense that those seven writers shared that language. Indeed, what makes them ‘seasoned’ is that they ‘wrote’ the dictionary. As Dessen and Thomson rightly note, these stage directions are the evidence of the stage directions used in the period, but the extent to which this language was shared beyond the print legacy of this cadre of writers is less certain. The instance of Thomas Heywood, whose twenty-­eight printed plays make him among

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the larger contributors to the dictionary, offers a compelling challenge to the way we read, use, and interpret its array of information.

Heywood’s theatrical illiteracy As noted, Thomas Heywood (c. 1573–1641) presents us with a curiously large sample of unique stage directions. Of the 106 stage directions considered for this project, Heywood’s corpus provides nineteen of them, vastly outstripping Massinger’s eight. Of Heywood’s nineteen directions, eleven of them come from his cycle of history plays (The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Brazen Age, both parts of The Iron Age). Heywood was also something of an equal-­opportunity employee, flitting from playing company to playing company and landing wherever the money was. At different times in his career, Heywood wrote for the King’s Men, Queen Anne’s Men, Queen Henrietta’s Men and the Earl of Derby’s Servants. The question, then, is this: is Heywood responsible for so many unique stage directions because he never settled with any playing company long enough to learn the language and the vocabulary of the theatres he wrote for, or because the existing language did not suit his needs, or because he did not know the language of the stage? In other words, was Heywood an oblivious outsider or a brazen innovator? Certainly, other early modern playwrights were writing about the same subjects as Heywood. Both Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote plays about the Greeks (to match Heywood’s cycle of Ages); Middleton (and several others) wrote plays about or prominently featuring witches (in counterpoint to Heywood’s collaboration with Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches); and both Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote English history plays (Heywood provided 2 Edward IV to the stock of early modern English plays about kings), just to name a few. And if Shakespeare and Marlowe were doing it, the logic follows that a vocabulary existed (although perhaps

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that vocabulary was mostly or exclusively available to those playwrights’ intimates). As evidence of Heywood’s at least cursory knowledge of his contemporaries’ work and the vocabulary of the theatre, take this stage direction from the 1600 printing of Heywood’s 2 Edward IV: ‘Enter the two Parators, with mistris Shoare in a white sheet, bare footed, with her haire about her eares, and in her hand a waxe taper’ (K6r). Next, compare it to this stage direction from the 1594 Quarto of The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI): ‘Enter Dame Elnor Cobham bare-­ foote, and a white sheete about her, with a waxe candle in her hand, and verses written on her backe and pind on, and accompanied with the Sheriffes of London, and Sir John Standly, and Officers, with billes and holbards’ (D2r). There are striking similarities between the two directions – the bare feet, the white sheet, the wax candle in hand – but no similarities between author, year or playing company. What’s more, these two stage directions account for half of all the stage directions containing bare feet catalogued by Dessen and Thomson. (The other two barefoot stage directions are for a king in mourning and citizens of a captured city.) The barefoot women are arrayed so for rituals of public penance. Since bare feet seem to go along with states of dissolution, Heywood was certainly privy to at least a portion of the lingua franca – although whether this portion was specific to the theatre or to larger cultural ideas of despair is harder to determine. Since most of the unique stage directions Heywood penned come from his cycle of plays about the ancients, it seems likely that Heywood was, in fact, inventing a language and vocabulary of his own, since few other playwrights had need of stage directions that governed the classical worlds of the Greeks and Romans. Take, for example, this direction from The Golden Age: ‘A confused fray, an alarme’ (1611: D1v). Heywood was the only early modern playwright who ever used the word ‘fray’ in a stage direction, and he used it once each in The Golden Age, The Silver Age and The Brazen Age.6 Heywood is also responsible for the only instance of a cock onstage (The

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Brazen Age 1613: H4v), an ‘abortive infant’ (The Silver Age 1613: K1r), fireballs (1 The Iron Age 1632: G4r), and the only stage direction in early modern drama that directly references hell as a destination: ‘Pluto, hels Judges, the Fates and Furies downe to hell: Iupiter, the Gods and Planets ascend to heauen’ (The Silver Age 1613: L1r). In other cases, Heywood took words used by his fellow playwrights and adapted them for his own purposes, such as in The Fair Maid of the West. Maid includes the direction ‘They bustle. Carroll slaine’ (1631: B4r). As a description of a minor scuffle, ‘bustle’ appears about ten other times in early modern drama. Heywood, however, is the only playwright to use ‘bustle’ to describe an altercation in which a character dies. Similarly, in A Maidenhead Well Lost, Heywood employs a covered dish, like many of his contemporaries – but this one has a child in it (1634: I1r). Considering the evidence – the bare feet, the fray, the bustle, the dish, the cock, the infant and the fireball – Heywood asserts himself as a playwright who had some knowledge of the theatrical vocabulary around him but found it insufficient for his purposes. Heywood frequently uses the existing language, but alters its meaning to keep pace with the needs of his plays. Especially when it came to his cycle of Ages, Heywood’s drama had specific requirements that the current theatrical vocabulary could not match. He was, therefore, more innovative than inattentive. Does Heywood look ‘innovative’ only because we insist on organizing, standardizing and categorizing early modern drama, however? Richard Rowland thinks not, arguing that Heywood wrote his stage directions differently from his contemporaries because he was thinking differently about the theatrical space (2005: 107). Linda McJannet concurs, concluding that ‘Heywood’s directions are often idiosyncratic’ (1999: 121). Especially in his cycle of Ages, Heywood’s stage directions express a preoccupation with the play’s visual choreography and the ways in which actors might convey spectacle to an audience. Heywood writes directions that

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would be difficult for many modern theatres, with large budgets and special effects teams, to execute. Spectacle was not impossible, nor even uncommon, in early modern playhouses, but imagination easily outstripped resources. Heywood routinely calls for special effects in his plays – The Late Lancashire Witches requires ‘an invisible spirit’ (1634: D4r), The Brazen Age asks for a character to leave the stage and immediately re-­enter as a dragon and for another character to disappear from the stage and have a cock rise in his place (1613: B3r, H4v), The Silver Age needs a bed to catch on fire and fly up (1613: K1r), 1 The Iron Age calls for Ajax to uproot a tree (1632: F1v). Heywood used his stage directions to create a richly detailed world onstage, but also to exercise control over the ways his plays were performed. By requiring elaborate and specific stage directions, Heywood himself sought to control the way his works were executed, thereby retaining authority over his plays and taking back some of the actors’ agency. His attention to detail focused on the final picture presented to the audience (a tactic employed by many modern playwrights, Shaw and Williams among them). Does this make Heywood one of the first theatre directors?7 We offer no solution or answer to this question because we are attempting instead to think about the kinds of questions that the dictionary principles produce. We ask if Heywood was innovative (or Shakespeare hyperfluent) because the concept of a ‘vocabulary’ or a ‘theatrical language’ produces such questions as well as ready-­made answers. In other words, the systems of knowledge that we use to organize the past ultimately systemize the past. That is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. Once we commit data to a rationale, it rationalizes that data, even data as irrational as that generated by playwrights who, over four hundred years ago, hoped to convey something about stage behaviour to the actors who would give their plays ‘lively action’ along with utterance. Dictionaries are a form of ‘information technology’ – a phrase that does not only apply to things invented after we were born. They emerged during the ‘mechanical age’ of

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technologies that rose to meet the information explosion prompted by the rise of the print.8 Dictionaries organize, store and manipulate information, whatever the nature of that information. In so doing, they de- and then re-­contextualize that information in ways that ease and enable retrieval and access. Dictionaries commit information – phonic, linguistic data – to a system governed by a logic all its own (however arbitrary. There is nothing inevitable about alphabetical order). A dictionary of stage directions, be it as comprehensive as Dessen and Thomson’s, as limited as one of the nonce, brings a principle of organization – a system – to bear upon information, and in so doing invites us to imagine that that system was there all along. W.B. Worthen once pointed out that ‘print – the printing process, the forms and shapes of printed books – has long troped our understanding of a lush variety of cultural production’ including ‘our understanding of stage performance’ (2005: 5). Worthen’s point is that the master tropes of print potentially occlude rather than clarify our thinking about early modern theatrical practice, since print privileges qualities quite alien to performance: standardization, reproducibility and, above all, uniformity. William B. Long, who has looked closely at Elizabethan, Jacobean and Carolingian manuscript playbooks, echoes Worthen in finding those playbooks characteristically unorthodox: ‘Only printing and print culture demand regularity, consistency, and other such modern expectations,’ with which playmakers of the period ‘were little concerned’ (1985b: 123). While dictionaries do not require print, Worthen’s point about standardization might extend to any books (handwritten, printed, digitized) that bring a system to bear upon theatrical practice. What if early modern theatre-­making was a practice without a principle, a system without a system? Or, if that seems an untenable question, what if that system was highly particularized, always local, even ad hoc – practice was always time-­to-time, occasional in the root sense? In short, we need not imagine that theatrical practice tends towards conformity

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simply because print (in Worthen’s terms) or dictionaries (in ours) does so. This chapter, therefore, has attempted to counter the master trope of the dictionary with a hermeneutics of the quirk, an idea that privileges not regularity and standardization but idiosyncrasy and the ad hoc.

Primary references Brome, Richard (1640), The Antipodes. Heywood, Thomas (1600), The First and Second Partes of King Edward the Fourth. Heywood, Thomas (1611), The Golden Age. Heywood, Thomas (1613), The Brazen Age. Heywood, Thomas (1613), The Silver Age. Heywood, Thomas (1631), The Fair Maid of the West, Part I. Heywood, Thomas (1632), The Iron Age. Heywood, Thomas (1634), A Maidenhead Well Lost. Heywood, Thomas and Richard Brome (1634), The Late Lancashire Witches. Killigrew, Thomas (1664), The Princess. Kyd, Thomas (1592), The Spanish Tragedy. Marston, John (1607), What You Will. Shakespeare, William (1594), The First Part of the Contention. Tailor, Robert (1614), The Hog Hath Lost his Pearl. Tourneur, Cyril (1611), The Atheist’s Tragedy.

Edition Peele, George (1933), The Arraignment of Paris, in English Drama 1580–1642, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton, Paradise, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.

PART TWO

Text

4 Reading Shakespeare’s Stage Directions Emma Smith

Everyone in Othello calls its main character ‘Moor’ at some point in the drama. Brabantio, Roderigo, the Senators, Montano, Cassio, Lodovico, Emilia and Desdemona all use the term of address, often when Othello is present, and it is not only Iago for whom it is a more common appellation than Othello’s own proper name. His derogatory language in the opening scene, however, establishes an association of the name ‘Moor’ with the accusation of sexual transgression: ‘your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs’ (1.1.114–15). The play’s double title, printed prominently as a running head across both the 1622 and 1623 editions – ‘The Tragedy of Othello The Moore of Venice’ – thus has its counterpart in the divided form of address for its main character within the dialogue. One aspect of both texts, however, is almost entirely consistent in how it designates Othello: the stage directions. Throughout the First Folio text, stage directions always use the name ‘Othello’, just as his speech prefix is the standard ‘Oth.’ Characters in the play may perform the renaming that shifts

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Othello from individual to type, that is to say, but the apparatus of the play as printed in 1623 does not. The Quarto of 1622 is also consistent in the speech prefix ‘Oth.’, and largely uses the name ‘Othello’ in its stage directions, with three distinctive exceptions. When Othello and Desdemona leave the Venetian courtroom in 1.3, Othello promises ‘but an houre / Of loue, of worldly matters, and directions, / To spend with thee’ (Shakespeare 1622: Dv). It is an early example of what Michael Neill has explored as ‘the obscure erotic fantasies that the play both explores and disturbingly excites in its audience’ (Neill 1989: 390): an explicit textual concatenation of race and sex in the evocation of their offstage bed, already obscenely foregrounded in the play’s imagination by Iago in his opening charivari. It is therefore particularly striking that the exit stage direction in the Quarto reads ‘Exit Moore and Desdemona’ (Shakespeare 1622: Dv). The racial transgression that so titillates the play is underlined by its first example of a shift in the stage direction from name to type. Summoned to the Duke’s war cabinet, the military general enters with his name; exiting for a stolen hour honeying with his Venetian bride, he has become ‘Moore’. It is therefore not surprising, perhaps, that the next time such a shift in address occurs is at an analogous moment. Drawing Desdemona back to their chamber after the disturbance of Cassio’s brawl, with the reassuring ‘All’s well now sweeting / Come away to bed’, Othello is again ‘Moore’ in the exit stage direction (Shakespeare 1622: F2v). What Neill dubs the play’s ‘scopophile economy’ is further excited by the play’s own pornographically inspired anonymity, the use of a ‘perverted erotic stereotype’ of ‘Moor’ (1989: 396). The third and final such stage direction example is, inevitably, in the play’s last scene, with the marriage bed, decked with wedding sheets and with the body of Desdemona, in full sight. Taunted by Emilia as a ‘murderous Coxcombe’, Othello’s impotent revenge is also racialized in the direction: ‘The Moore runnes at Iago’ (Shakespeare 1622: M4v). As the play’s dialogue acknowledges, ‘that’s he that was Othello’: the play’s apparatus

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appears to withdraw its endorsement of Othello’s individuality at these critical moments when it reinscribes him as the sexual or violent early modern racial generalization, ‘Moor’. Despite the central importance of race to the play’s recent critical history, no modern edition notes these differential uses of the word ‘Moor’ in Quarto stage directions as significant. Editors who routinely repopulate their text with Quarto oaths, such as the play’s first word ‘Tush’, do not show the same interest in the specific form of its stage directions. These examples of ‘Moor’ in the play’s apparatus complicate Leah S. Marcus’s suggestion, based solely on the play’s dialogue, that ‘the play’s most racially charged language’ exists in the Folio text only (2004: 23), and that, if the revision theory of the two texts is accepted, the reviser of Q to F has ‘revised in the direction of racial virulence’ (2004: 30). Editing Othello continues to be particularly beset by ideological assumptions masquerading as textual ones (Potter 2003). Explaining her new introduction to the Arden edition of Othello originally edited by E.A.J. Honigmann, Ayanna Thompson suggests that while her predecessor’s ‘editorial decisions remain both useful and admirable, the birth of early modern race studies changed critical approaches’ to the play since its publication in 1997 (2015: 5). Her generous implication is that editorial practice is absolutely distinct from race studies: treatment of the Quarto stage directions might suggest otherwise. In using ‘Moor’, a term for Othello borrowed from one of the other characters in the play (since Othello never calls himself ‘Moor’), those anomalous Quarto stage directions enact a narrative abdication of the central character’s worldview. They betray a shift in narrative sympathy: a shift that, whatever its causes, can only be experienced in reading. If these stage directions are meaningful, they are meaningful for readers and need to be understood as part of a reading process which integrates them with the dialogue with which they have so much thematic and lexical overlap. Perhaps we can see what might be at stake in this redirected hermeneutic emphasis by taking up one recent and influential

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argument about the status and transmission of Shakespeare’s texts. As part of his ongoing investigations into what his book calls Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), Lukas Erne has suggested that stage directions are unnecessary where spectators can see what is happening. Their presence therefore indicates a text specifically prepared for the page. Thus the stage direction ‘She kneeles downe’ in the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet after Juliet’s line ‘Good father, heare me speake?’ is not included in the amplified, and to Erne more literary, Q2 lines: ‘Good father, I beseech you on my knees/ Heare me with patience, but to speak a worde’ (Erne 2003: 223). The longer, ‘literary’ version has absorbed the stage direction into its dialogue for the benefit of readers. But there is an ontological problem in Erne’s argument. Neither Q1 nor Q2 of Romeo and Juliet is a performance: both exist only in print, only in that they are read texts. As such, as documents that exist only in the hands of their readers, perhaps there is less substantive difference between the two. Readers either read that Juliet kneels in a stage direction or read that she kneels in her own speech. Only if we imagine that one read text is in fact somehow actually a performed text, to which reading is an incidental activity, does this discrepancy actually illustrate the difference between showing and telling. In reading, both the stage direction ‘She kneeles downe’ and the character’s line ‘I beseech you on my knees’ are diegetic rather than mimetic. It makes little difference whether the narrative of action is presented within the dialogue or outside it, since for readers these are all forms of printed information to be absorbed, assessed and synthesized as part of reading. Marco de Marinis’s insistence on the ‘irreversible’ nature of printed stage directions – in that they represent a kind of ‘theatrical transcoding’ from which ‘it is never possible to move “backward”’ to dramatic performance – is helpful here (de Marinis 1993: 29): stage directions are instead part of a forward momentum into the act of reading. John Jowett argues that stage directions ‘lead a double life’: as text, ‘words that signify’, and as witnesses to ‘a different semiotic

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system, that of stage action’. He goes on to amplify their separate status, and to justify a different approach by editors in presenting them to modern readers, because, unlike the dialogue, ‘their realization is not in language’ (Jowett 2007: 147). My approach in this essay challenges the assumption that stage directions exist primarily or exclusively as the semiotic encoding of performance. Instead I suggest that we should reinstate stage directions in early Shakespeare texts as the property of readers, and as understood instances of a different mode of narration in printed playbooks. That is, contra Jowett, their realization is precisely in language. I begin by uncovering two related critical emphases: on original stage directions as either post hoc clues to a recoverable textual prehistory in manuscript or on stage; and in editorial stage directions as helpful anticipatory instructions for future or imagined performances. I suggest instead that we should locate stage directions in their post-­authorial, post-­ theatrical life on the page, developing the narratological implications of the position that all stage directions in early printed texts, whatever we might speculate about their provenance, exist in the act of reading. They are all read by readers, whether or not they were drafted with readers in mind, and wherever they might fall in the various theatrical and authorial taxonomies. In print form they function as snippets of narrative, and are susceptible to narratological analysis. I thus use narratology to think about the voice of stage directions in Shakespeare’s First Folio, and their function in inscribing plot. Throughout, my aim is to suggest ways of thinking about stage directions less as nuggets of textual or theatrical information, and instead in terms more closely correlated with narrative theory and reader response criticism.

Reading stage and page Studies of early modern stage directions have long been preoccupied with questions of provenance. Stage directions in printed playbooks are thus primarily interesting to scholars as

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traces of the text in a prior, even original state. This conjectural former existence might be in an authorial manuscript, a theatrical working copy or the experience of seeing the play on the stage: what matters is that all these possibilities suggest that the stage direction is an elegiac remnant of something prior, and that its main interest therefore lies in the access it promises to the recessive manuscript or performance witnesses to the drama. The New Bibliographers distinguished between ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ stage directions in order to try to categorize the nature of the papers lying behind the printed text. R.B. McKerrow observed: ‘what could be more natural than that a skilled dramatist closely connected with the theatre and writing, not with any thought of print, but with his eye solely on a stage production, should give stage directions in the form of directions to the actors (as they might appear in a prompt-­ book)’ (1931: 273). John Dover Wilson suggested that in imperative stage directions such as ‘ly downe’ or ‘sleepe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘we hear the managerial voice giving real “directions” to the players’ (the adjective ‘managerial’ makes it clear that he takes this to be some theatrical bureaucrat, not the dramatist) (1940: 80). Although many textual critics have complicated these early divisions between literary and theatrical stage directions, they still tend to focus on what they tell us about textual transmission. The other major interest in early modern printed stage directions has been as evidence of contemporary stage practice. Richard Hosley’s taxonomy of stage directions as ‘theatrical’, in that they refer ‘to theatrical structure or equipment’, or ‘fictional’ ones that operate within a ‘dramatic fiction’ remains influential, not least because, as Hosley acknowledges, his distinction ‘corresponds to that drawn by textual critics between directions usually written by a bookkeeper and by an author’. Hosley suggests that ‘theatrical directions will occasionally furnish clues about the stage for which they were written’, and he discusses, for example, the kind of gallery that might have been implied by Rose play stage directions such as

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entries ‘upon the walls’ (1957: 16–17). Gathering together their A Dictionary of Stage Directions in Early Modern English Drama, Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson suggest that while dialogue is ‘shifting sands’ when trying to understand theatrical practice, relying on stage directions is ‘to stay within the realm of what was or could have been done in the original productions’ (1999: viii), suggesting a legible and dependable back projection from stage direction to production. In these kinds of analysis, it is not the prior textual life of the stage directions that is of interest but their relation to dramatic representation. Both approaches identify stage directions as temporally and textually disjointed clues to the past – either in the theatre or in the manuscript – rather than as integral parts of the play’s present in the hands of a reader. Relatedly, stage directions have tended to be a point of considerable editorial intervention in modern editions and accounts of their procedures.1 McKerrow judged them to be ‘accessories’ ‘to some extent’, and advocated that the best text for the general reader would be one furnished ‘with full stage directions aiding them to visualize the action as it would be if staged by a reasonably conservative producer’ (1939: 53). Stanley Wells’ treatment of stage directions in his Re-­editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader is revealingly titled ‘The Editor and the Theatre’, again suggesting that the sole purpose of these textual elements is to provide scaffolding for actual or supposed performance: ‘The principle operative here is a theatrical one: that the editor may sometimes be able to provide information at a point equivalent to that at which its visual correlative would be apprehended in the theatre’ (1984: 76). The Oxford Shakespeare recognizes that ‘early editions are often deficient in directions for essential action’, so ‘we try to remedy the deficiencies’ (Wells and Taylor 2005: xli), drawing on the idea that theatrical manuscripts were accompanied by ‘an unwritten paratext . . . a life-­support system of stage directions’ supplied by the author himself (Wells and Taylor 1987: 2). Life ebbs from the supine dialogue, the image suggests, without the iron lung of editorial stage directions.

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The Oxford Shakespeare works to an effective blueprint of print drama described by Martin Meisel in his book How Plays Work: Reading and Performance (2007): ‘Reading plays in the fullest sense, then, means being able to read the dialogue and descriptions as a set of directions encoding, but also in a measure enacting, their own realization’ (2007: 1). For Meisel, as for the Oxford editors, the play’s dialogue and stage directions interlock in a reading process that is essentially visual or theatrical. In the same vein, Ernst Honigmann’s essay ‘Re-­enter the Stage Direction’ urges editors to be bolder in ‘textual tidying’ of stage directions, since this ‘could greatly help future producers of the plays’ (1976: 117). Margaret Jane Kidnie proposes a new edited page layout that ‘builds into the spatial presentation of the page the textual indeterminacy typical of directions found in early modern printed and manuscript drama’ to ‘transfer the interpretative activity from the editor to the reader’ (2004: 165). All of these varying prescriptions suggest that extant Shakespearean stage directions are inadequate and in dire need of amplification by editors. The effect of these injunctions may well be to produce texts that are more able to enact ‘their own realization’ in the minds of attentive readers, but they may also have the unintended consequence of ignoring the specific form and impact of those early stage directions that are present, in favour of more consistent and expansive editorial intervention. Textual critics have often proposed an absolute conceptual distinction between the spoken text of the play, to which the editor owes particular fidelity, and its outlying apparatus, which demands less commitment. M.J. Kidnie, drawing on the work of Roman Ingarden, distinguishes between a play’s Haupttext (dialogue) and its Nebentext (side text). She suggests that Nebentext ‘includes those features that distinguish drama from a genre such as prose fiction’ (Kidnie 2000: 460). These features are visually distinguished on the early modern printed page. For example, stage directions are often, but not always, typographically differentiated from play speeches, tending to be in italics and to be centred or aligned to the right hand

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margin. Editorial theories of the difference between dialogue and apparatus suggest that such differences are unique to – even ontologically constitutive of – the printed play. But, in fact, printed plays were not the only place where early modern readers might need to deploy an interpretative facility across representational modes on the page. One obvious example is the careful typographical sophistication of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), where different narrative voices and reading requirements are represented in the transitions between blackletter, roman and italic type founts. Early playbook readers who might also have read adjacent prose fictions would also have been accustomed to toggling between extended passages of direct speech and shorter passages of narrative direction or plotting as part of the same reading experience. If we look, for instance, at Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), a book read by Shakespeare, and his source for As You Like It, it is immediately clear that the pages are divided typographically between passages of direct speech and of narration printed in blackletter, songs and other poetic interludes, printed in italic, and roman headings that mark off significant moments in a manner reminiscent of stage directions in printed plays. When the lovers Rosalynde and Rosader woo, their alternate speeches are set out with centred speech headings in the manner of a play-­text (Lodge 1590: K3–K4). Examples of other stage direction lookalikes include the roman headings ‘Rosalynde passionate alone’ (Lodge 1590: I2) and ‘Saladynes discourse to Rosader unknowen’ (Lodge 1590: L4). The point here is that variant typefaces are being used to signal different forms of narrative – in Kidnie’s terms, a kind of Haupttext and Nebentext – in the printed text, and that readers of play-­texts may well have brought a facility in negotiating these typographical code-­ switches from other reading material. Rather than finding stage directions inconsistent or inadequate, that is to say, they may have instead implicitly understood them as exemplary instances of what Wolfgang Iser calls ‘structured blanks’ that ‘stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader

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on terms set by the text’ (Iser 1980: 169) – or, to put it another way, as narrative to be read.

Fragments of narrative Whether or not they are produced with readers in mind, then, printed Shakespearean stage directions are there to be read. Indeed, sometimes reading gives information that is in narrative excess of the performed scene. The final scene entrance of The Winter’s Tale, for example, appears to pre-­empt its coup de theatre: ‘Enter Leontes, Polixenes, Florizell, Perdita, Camillo, Paulina: Hermione (like a Statue:) Lords, &c.’ (Ccr).2 To read this text is to be privy to a kind of parenthetical narrative hint, since to be ‘like’ something, rarer in stage directions than in dialogue, is generally a relation of visual rather than essential similarity (Titus is not, but only ‘like a Cooke’ in the final scene of Titus Andronicus (ee2r); the kings’ courtiers are ‘habited like Shepheards’ at the masque in the first act of Henry VIII ([t6r])). Readers thus register a textual raised eyebrow about the status of Hermione who, the spoken dialogue of the play maintains, died as a result of her husband’s cruelty some sixteen years previously. Some of what has come to be known as dramatic irony – the comfort of audiences in knowing more than is understood by the plays’ characters – is amplified through similarly revealing stage directions. It is clear to readers of early texts of 1 Henry IV, for instance – whereas it is not to Prince Henry – that Falstaff ‘fals down as if he were dead’ (f5v). Readers of Cymbeline, by contrast, share the false perception of the two brothers that their guest is dead: ‘Enter Arvirargus with Imogen dead, bearing her in his Armes’ (bbb). To read the stage directions is not always to occupy a privileged narrative position. If stage directions are taken as fragments of narrative to be read, in many cases they respond to the kind of close or ‘literary’ reading that we are used to applying to the lines spoken by the plays’ characters. Relatively few analyses have

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taken such a literary-­critical approach. Stage directions have been valuable as textual clues or inadequate and therefore editorially supplemented as framing narratives of dramatic action. Marga Munkelt is unusual in attending to stage directions as part of the poetic fabric of the play text, although I do not share her assumption that these meanings convey the intentions of the author. Munkelt cites the stage direction at the beginning of Act 5 in the 1623 Folio text of 1 Henry IV: ‘Enter the King, Prince of Wales, Lord John of Lancaster, Earle of Westmerland, Sir Walter Blunt, and Falstaffe’, suggesting that, by separating the Prince so decisively from Falstaff, the order of persons here exposes the ‘incompatibility of the subplot and main plot’ and that ‘Falstaff’s isolated position [she doesn’t note it, but the lineation of the stage direction means he is actually alone on a line] contrasts with Hal’s integration into the sphere of the main plot’ (1987: 255). That’s to say her argument is that the stage directions do not primarily encourage the reader to visualize them and thence to take their implication of new alliances among the play’s personnel. Rather they are to be read as literary narrative. Elsewhere, Munkelt notes the stage direction for the fight between Hal and Hotspur: ‘The Prince killeth Percie’. It is the only time Hotspur is named in the play’s apparatus by his family name, and thus the alliteration of the stage direction amplifies Hal’s own description of their fatal parity: I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy, To share with me in glory any more. Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, Nor can one England brook a double reign Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales. (5.4.62–66) The harmony of ‘Prince’ and ‘Percie’ in the stage direction emphasizes that structural equivalence between the two young men that has been so important from the beginning of the play and the king’s wish that Hotspur were his real son. To develop

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Munkelt’s approach: this stage direction is not simply literary, it is a particular kind of narrative. 1 Henry IV is a play particularly attentive to the power of naming: Falstaff’s name for the Prince, ‘Hal’, conjures up a world of intimacy far distinct from the King’s preferred ‘Harry’, even as Falstaff’s own name is a substitute for the more toxic and topical original ‘Oldcastle’. The onomastic precision of the direction ‘The Prince killeth Percie’ appears deliberately to echo Prince Henry’s own lexis and emphasis at this point in the play. This apparently simple and descriptive stage direction offers itself, therefore, as an unexpected example of what theories of prose would recognize and locate in the late eighteenth-­century novel, as free indirect discourse. Writing brilliantly of this technique, Henry Louis Gates Jr identifies free indirect discourse in terms that are highly suggestive for the role of stage directions in drama. Quoting Michal Ginsberg, Gates proposes that free indirect discourse ‘is a mimesis that tries to pass for a diegesis’ or perhaps vice versa, such that ‘we are unable to characterize it either as the representation of an action (diegesis) or as the repetition of a character’s words (mimesis)’ (1988: 208). Studies of stage directions have been trapped by the concepts of descriptive or prescriptive diegesis, but the terms of Gates’s insight offer a way to read published stage directions as free indirect discourse, that third term between showing and telling, or between action and representation. This narrative style is common elsewhere in Shakespearean stage directions once we look for it, and reading stage directions as examples of free indirect discourse reveals some surprising narrative affiliations and sympathies. Antony and Cleopatra opens with Philo’s deeply disapproving account of Antony’s erotic servitude to Cleopatra. For Philo, the warrior Antony is emasculated from his former military virility and ‘become the Bellowes and the Fan / To coole a Gypsies Lust’. The stage direction immediately following corroborates this assessment: ‘Flourish. Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her Ladies, the Traine, with Eunuchs fanning her’ ([vv6v]). The insistently feminized

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list of personnel identifies Antony as what early modern English understood as effeminate: ‘womanish, unmanly’ and perhaps ‘devoted to women’ (OED, effeminate 1 and 3). The repeated word ‘fan’ aligns Antony with the eunuchs and the women in Cleopatra’s retinue. The voice of the stage direction here aligns itself with Philo’s perspective. Rather than descriptively or neutrally indicating how the main characters could or should or did enter the stage, that’s to say, the direction is, in Mieke Bal’s explanation, an ‘activity of focalization’: ‘the relationship between the “vision”, the agent that sees, and that which is seen’ (1996: 118). It extends Philo’s speech and his narrative consciousness, and, we might say, introduces the entire Egyptian narrative of the play from a particular censorious Roman perspective. As Bal notes, where the point from which the elements are viewed lies with a character in the fiction, ‘that character will have a technical advantage over the other characters. The reader watches with the character’s eyes and will, in principle be inclined to accept the vision presented by that character’ (1996: 118–19). This stage direction works by collocation or framing: placing Antony in a lexical field corroborating the charge of voluptuousness against which he struggles to defend himself throughout the play. Antony is a character in his own story, rather than his own focalizor. The case of Coriolanus is rather different. Here the hero’s disdain for Rome’s lower orders runs through some increasingly derogatory stage directions.3 The common people are introduced as ‘a Company of Mutinous Citizens’ (aa) in the play’s opening direction. They are demoted to ‘Plebeians’ (bb) and then as a ‘Rabble of Plebeians’ (bb2) and ‘the rabble againe’ (bb2v) as the fraught vertical relations of the play’s polis worsen. Both the terms ‘plebeian’ and ‘rabble’ are used by Coriolanus and other patricians during the play: Coriolanus never speaks the more respectful form of address denoted by the word ‘citizen’. The play is thus progressively focalized through patrician views in the partisan vocabulary of the stage directions. Elsewhere, stage directions point to more mobile forms of focalization. In the Folio text of

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Titus Andronicus, a stage direction ‘Enter the Emperor, Tamora and her two sons, with the Moore’ ([cc5v]) in Act 1 sets the pattern for Aaron’s designation when in company, when he tends to be identified as a type rather than an individual. His solo entrance in the following scene, ‘Enter Aaron alone’ ([cc6r]), suggests a quite different, individualistic focalization. The stage directions cue a different engagement with the character and a different perspective on him: again, an experience available only through attention to the stage direction as a snippet of free indirect discourse. We might develop this interpretative suggestion at more length by comparing two versions of a longer stage direction: the description of the players’ dumb show as printed in Q1 of Hamlet (1603) and in the 1623 Folio. In the play on stage, Hamlet establishes himself as interpreter of the action, introducing the players and providing a gloss on their actions, explaining both the plot and the occasion. ‘What means this, my lord?’ asks Ophelia, and Hamlet’s riddling reply ‘miching mallecho’ remains one of the play’s interpretative cruxes. It’s an explanation that apparently only he understands. Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that the entire stage direction narrating the dumb show in the Folio text seems to be a further example of free indirect discourse. The dumb show stage direction purports to describe an autonomous action but in fact reveals itself lexically to be a further example of Hamlet’s own narrative control on his play. Just as Hamlet’s own descriptions of events, such as his condemnation of unseemly public intimacies between his mother and stepfather, are often taken by modern directors as implicit stage directions for how the couple should behave, so too his perspective shapes the depiction of events that are apparently distinct from him. The Folio stage direction reads: Hoboyes play. The dumbe shew enters. Enter a King and Queene, very louingly; the Queene embracing him. She kneeles and makes shew of Protestation vnto him. He takes her vp, and dcclines his head vpon her neck. Layes him

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downe vpon a Banke of Flowers. She seeing him a sleepe, leaues him. Anon comes in a Fellow, takes off his Crowne, kisses it, and powres poyson in the Kings eares, and Exits. The Queene returnes, findes the King dead, and makes passionate Action. The Poysoner, with some two or three Mutes comes in againe, seeming to lament with her. The dead body is carried away: The Poysoner Wooes the Queene with Gifts, she seemes loath and vnwilling awhile, but in the end, accepts his loue. Exeunt. ([oo6r]) Tiffany Stern has noted that the dumb show ‘seems to express Hamlet’s point of view’ in its ‘stress on the queen, on her behaviour, and on the ease with which she moves from man to man’. She picks out ‘passionate’, and ‘seems’ as echoes of Hamlet’s repeated reference to ‘untrustworthy passions as against real emotion’ within a broader ‘distrust of seeming (pretending) against being’ (Stern 2012a: 278). There are other specific lexical pointers too, that align the stage direction with Hamlet’s habitual forms of expression. In particular, the colloquialism ‘fellow’ echoes as a repeated part of Hamlet’s vocabulary (‘you hear this fellow in the cellarage’, ‘I would have this fellow whipped’, ‘I will speak to this fellow’, ‘a fellow of infinite jest’); ‘anon’, too, is one of his adverbs (‘you shall see anon’). Gertrude’s ‘neck’ is a particular focus of Hamlet’s sexualized revulsion, imagining Claudius ‘paddling in your neck with his damned fingers’. These words and attitudes align the stage direction with Hamlet. But there is another shadow, an echo of another speech here: not only does the dumb show action corroborate the Ghost’s account of his murder, it echoes its narrative and, more significantly, its vocabulary. ‘Loath’, ‘crown’, ‘ears’, ‘decline’, ‘seeming virtuous’, ‘sleeping’ are words shared between the stage direction and the Ghost’s speech in 1.4. The location of the free indirect discourse of the stage direction shifts between the Hamlets. If we compare this with the version of the dumb show published in Q1 of 1603, we can see that it is much less narrative in tone:

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Enter in a Dumbe Shew, the King and the Queene, he sits downe in an Arbor, she leaves him: Then enters Lucianus with poyson in a Viall, and powres it in his eares, and goes away: Then the Queene commeth and finds him dead: and goes away with the other. (F3r) The only piece of vocabulary to echo significantly elsewhere in the play is the specificity of the word ‘vial’, which comes from the Ghost’s account of his murder. Otherwise the direction appears disembodied from the play’s characters and their specific idiolects. The narrative effect of the two versions here is quite distinct. Linda McJannet’s valuable study, The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions, traces ‘the emergence of an efficient, unobtrusive, self-­effacing dramatic code’ for stage directions in print drama of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period (1999: 137). She summarizes and gives numerous examples of this ‘impersonal and objective tone’ (1999: 193). Perhaps we might see Q1 Hamlet’s dumb show stage direction as part of this broader trajectory. Nevertheless, my suggestion here that some Shakespearean stage directions approach the narrative condition of free indirect discourse finds a different and more personal, subjective tone to these elements of the text, and suggests some of the ways they respond specifically to reading and to readerly attention.

Plot and narrative The difference between the more subjective and detailed Folio and the neutrally descriptive Q1 dumb show stage directions, and their narrative content, recalls a famous example in narratology. In a much-­quoted passage of Aspects of the Novel (1927), E.M. Forster distinguished between plot and narrative with a royal example:

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We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-­sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. (1962: 87) Stories, he suggests, feed an undiscerning readership with the ‘and then’ of serial events. ‘Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?” ’ Plots, by contrast, require ‘intelligence and memory’ (Forster 1962: 87). For Forster, the difference between plot and narrative is as much social and educational as it is syntactic and formal: informed readers appreciate plots and uninformed ones crave stories. Forster, as the title of his work makes clear, is distinguishing his analysis from Aristotle whose literary focus is drama, and focusing instead on the world of prose fiction. But nevertheless his account is suggestive for a discussion of drama and its readers. In its absence of causality or of adverbial modifiers and its focus on sequence, ‘The king died and then the queen died’ approaches the condition of a stage direction. What distinguishes it from a usual stage direction is the tense. While there are a handful of plays with past tense stage directions – such as the dumb shows in Gorboduc – stage directions exist in the present tense or imperative mode (and perhaps, as McJannet notes, sometimes in ‘elliptical forms of plural indicative directions’, such as ‘[They] draw’) (1999: 116). If the syntax does not quite fit, the story certainly does: the narrative the example gestures towards seems more familiar to us from the contours of the theatre than the novel. Forster’s exemplary story is, after all, an impressively brief counter-Hamlet as projected from the point of view of its puritanical young prince: a foreshortened and ethically complete version of the dumb show we have already discussed. What Hamlet most desires at the opening of the play, as he compares his disgustingly vital mother with the ideal widow she should have

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become, is that implied normative hierarchy of ‘the king died, and then the queen died’:        Why, she should hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on. And yet within a month – (Let me not think on’t – Frailty, thy name is Woman). (1.2.143–46) Gertrude’s refusal to play the widow’s part that the story would allocate her propels both Hamlet and Hamlet: it orients the play from ‘and then’ towards ‘why?’ The stage direction minimalism of ‘the king died and then the queen died’ might suggest that, in Forster’s terms, stage directions give us story rather than plot. The issue is complicated by early modern uses of the world ‘plot’, or ‘plat’, to refer to a document listing actors’ entrances used by theatre personnel to organize or run a performance. As Tiffany Stern identifies from the seven surviving examples of such plots, these documents are predominantly concerned with ‘movement out onto the stage and exits at the end of scenes from the stage’ (2009: 211). The majority of extant plots refer to character by their fictional names, occasionally supplemented with the name of the actor, such as the example from the British Library plot for The Battle of Alcazar: ‘Enter Muly Mahamett mr Ed: Allen’ (Stern 2009: 212), but they show little consistent interest in fictional space (in Hosley’s terms, they are ‘theatrical’ rather than ‘fictional’). ‘Plot’, in this specific technical early modern sense, looks much like Forster’s simple ‘story’: the terms, perhaps helpfully, begin to merge as they do in the reception of Forster’s ideas. Forster’s distinction between story and plot is one echoed throughout narrative theory’s interest in histoire/récit or in fabula/sujet. These distinguish between the totality of the narrated events on the one hand, and the form of the narrative discourse in which they are represented, on the other. But Forster’s stress on implicit causality as the defining feature of plot has been challenged. Revisiting that exemplary

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case of royal mortality, Gerard Genette proposes that ‘The king died’ is itself sufficient, as every event is already a minimal narrative. As he adds: ‘there are time and places for story; there are time and places for plot’ (1988: 20). Time and places for story in stage directions are numerous, although importantly they capture their events in perpetual present tense rather than the past tense of Genette. But in early Shakespeare texts there are examples of stage directions functioning in more complex narrative ways: perhaps these might be read as instancing time and place for plot. To take some First Folio examples: the introduction of ‘Adriana, wife to Antipholis Sereptus, with Luciana her sister’ (H2r) at the beginning of Act 2 of The Comedy of Errors seems curiously to identify one new character by reference to another character not on stage or previously mentioned. One effect of this is descriptively to thicken out the interlaced sociality of the play’s depiction of Ephesus. Like this example, the directions ‘Enter Rosaline for Ganimed, Celia for Aliena, and Clowne, alias Touchstone’ (As You Like It: [Q6r]) or ‘the Emperour brings the Arrowes in his hand that Titus shot at him’ (Titus Andronicus: [dd5v]) or ‘Enter Sir Richard Ratcliffe with Halberds, carrying the Nobles to death at Pomfret’ (Richard III: [r6v]) or ‘Enter Buckingham from his Arraignment’ (Henry VIII: [t6v]) each go beyond the minimum format, and use more complicated syntactic structures to convey information verbally that is in excess of what might be performed. That’s to say, they do narrative work for the reader. The direction in Coriolanus ‘Titus Lartius, having set a guard upon Carioles, going with Drum and Trumpet toward Cominius, and Caius Martius, Enters with a Lieutenant, other Souldiours, and a Scout’ (aa3v) uses the stage direction neither to cue nor to describe action but to state that it has already happened (‘having set’). In Henry VIII the deictic direction ‘Enter Lorde Chamberlaine, reading this Letter’ (v1r) suggests that both the written text of the stage direction and of the prop letter are to be similarly interpreted by the reader. Similarly in Timon of Athens, the direction ‘Enter Lord Timon, the States the Athenian Lords, Ventigius which Timon

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redeem’d from prison. Then comes dropping after all Apemantus discontentedly like himselfe’ (gg2v) implies a causal relationship between these clauses. It seems unlikely, given how much narrative play-­readers must have been habituated to holding in their minds, that the reminder of the particular debt owed by Ventidius to his Lord is a practical consideration (Timon agrees to help him only a couple of scenes before). Rather the stage direction can be read as narrative. The same is true of the reiterations of familial relationships in the parade of ghosts cursing Richard III before the battle of Bosworth: ‘Enter the Ghost of Prince Edward, Sonne to Henry the sixt’ and ‘Enter the Ghost of Anne, his Wife’ (t1r–v). In their designations of the spirits, the stage directions serve both as reminder and recapitulation of the plot, and as amplification of Richard’s unnatural internecine brutality. In 2 Henry VI the direction ‘Enter two or three running over the Stage, from the Murther of Duke Humfrey’ does comparable narrative work. In terms of conveying what is happening it is surplus, immediately duplicated in the following speech which confesses ‘We have dispatcht the Duke as [Suffolk] commanded’ (n3r). In narrative terms, however, it articulates the distinction between showing and telling not in terms of the difference between performance and reading, but in alternating the fictional texture of dialogue and narrative. The stage direction works to construct the play-­text as literary: not in intention or provenance, but in its reception by the reader. The most famous stage direction of all may be the best place to end this survey. The Winter’s Tale’s ‘Exit pursued by a Beare’ ([Aa6v]) is the only stage direction to have become a famous and recognizable quotation in its own right, implicitly asserting its claim to be read as a literary or narrative fragment alongside the dialogue of the play. Indeed, it has probably become its play’s best-­known line. But commentary on the line has tended to be preoccupied with the question of past or hypothetical performance, and the question of whether a bear, perhaps even a fashionable Jacobean polar bear, might have been brought on stage (Biggins 1962; Bristol 1991). Compelling as these

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questions are, my suggestion here is a simpler one. The pleasure of this stage direction is derived from the pleasure of reading. It is not primarily referential but poetic or literary. It enacts the shock that it presents, since it is an exit stage direction which has no preceding paired entrance. The indefinite article ‘a’, where ‘the’ might have been more expected, executes the joyfully random ursine irruption into the narrative. Part of its effectiveness derives from careful crafting and associations. Its seven syllables produce the trochaic tetrameter – evoking the otherworldly meter of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fairies, or the elegiac ‘Fear no more the heat o’the sun’ in Cymbeline (4.2.257), or the songs of Spring and Winter that end Love’s Labours’ Lost. Closer to hand, the stage direction’s specific meter is echoed in Autolycus’s ballad ‘Lawn as white as driven snow’ (4.4.220). Like the trickster Autolycus himself, this stage direction is a boundary-­crosser, intervening to divert the play from tragedy to comedy and combining with the figure of Time, the transition to a new location in Bohemia, and the move from verse to prose to disrupt the play’s generic shape. The stage direction simultaneously evokes and disavows any speaker as it inserts itself between comically impossible mimesis and unattributed diegesis. But in demanding, and rewarding, reading, it is exemplary of the narrative work stage directions can do for the reader of early Shakespearean texts.

Primary references Lodge, Thomas (1590), Rosalynde. Shakespeare, William (1622), The Tragedy of Othello. Shakespeare, William (1623), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

Editions Kastan, David Scott, ed. (2002), Henry IV, Part 1, London: Arden. Pitcher, John, ed. (2010), The Winter’s Tale, London: Arden.

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Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor, eds (2016), Hamlet: Revised Edition, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Thompson, Ayanna (2015), ‘Introduction’, in Othello: Revised Edition, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Wayne, Valerie, ed. (2017), Cymbeline, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor (general eds) (2005), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, John Dover, ed. (1940), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

5 Shakespeare’s Literary Stage Directions Douglas Bruster

A stage direction is something someone has written – a word, phrase, sentence or paragraph committed to paper. To be sure, many directions for staging early modern plays must have begun in rehearsal speech: ‘When do I come in?’ ‘I should be carrying the letter.’ Accordingly, words like Enter and Exit stake some claim to permanent anonymity; it is difficult to say just who produced them. If anonymous, they are also nearly transparent, for their routine nature shifts them. It moves them, that is, not just from the creative to the functional, from the idiosyncratic to the general, but from the realm of entertainment itself to the domain of something closer to building codes. Even as ‘Exit’ signs are so standard in public and commercial buildings worldwide that we both depend on and rarely notice them, so do we expect arrivals and departures to be signalled clearly enough in the stage directions of our texts that, confident of characters’ ingress and egress, we can focus instead on what they say. Stage directions, in this reading, are meant to be invisibly helpful.

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Yet if most stage directions in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are simple, indicating who arrives, who leaves, and when, others are elaborate. Stage directions can describe, evaluate, interpret and even judge. Complex as well as simple, stage directions ask to be seen as written things. Treating them as the products of pens and type on paper helps us relate them to other kinds of writing. It also helps us recognize their function in whole texts. As we will see, stage directions are misunderstood from the beginning, for very few actually ‘direct’. Instead, most describe and narrate. This property means that the category of ‘literary’ stage directions – the announced topic of this essay – is also something of a misnomer, as all stage directions contain signals from and to the imagination. All are therefore literary in a fundamental way.

Literary stage directions Tradition leads us to call the more elaborate stage directions in the works of Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries ‘literary’ stage directions. But this need not imply a division of stage and (printed) page. E.K. Chambers cautioned, early on, that such elaboration is by no means removed from playhouse practice. Playwrights, in Chambers’s account, composed stage directions partly for actors and others connected with the entertainment industry of early modern London. Thus stage directions ‘are in part designed to explain the structure of his play to the company and to make clear the way in which he wishes it to be staged’ (1930: I.119). For Chambers, it was important to remember that actors and prompters are readers, and thus among the first of those addressed by what he called the ‘pretty full’ directions surviving in many manuscripts and printed plays (1930: I.118). In a larger taxonomy, W.W. Greg took these ‘pretty full’ directions to be ‘of no immediate help to the prompter’; they instead describe ‘a scene as [playwrights] imagined it while writing’. Greg pronounced that

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In their evocative quality many of the directions have, indeed, a literary appeal, as though they were written for the reader rather than the actor. This too is natural enough, for a play was, as a rule, read to the company and had to secure approval before it was accepted, and the more readily and vividly it could be followed the better its chances would be. (1955: 124) Modifiers like Chambers’s ‘pretty full’ and Greg’s ‘evocative’, ‘[vivid]’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘elaborate’ (these last two from later in his text) go some way toward defining the literary. Yet Greg further itemized thirteen things characteristic, to him, of this kind of stage direction. They are listed here with a corresponding example from Shakespeare. To Greg, ‘literary’ stage directions might include: 1. status and relationship information Enter adriana , wife to Antipholus Sereptus, with luciana , her sister. (CE, 2.1.1)1 2. reason or occasion of appearance Enter a soldier in the woods, seeking Timon . (Tim, 5.3.1) 3. character grouping lucentio , tranio

stand by. (TS, 1.1.47)

4. habits and disguises Enter old capulet in his gown, and his wife. (RJ, 1.1.74)

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5. required stage properties Enter the clown with a basket, and two pigeons in it. (Tit, 4.3.77) 6. action that accompanies or follows an entrance They knock, and titus opens his study door. (Tit, 5.2.8) 7. independent action She gives the Duchess a box on the ear. (2H6, 1.3.138) 8. characters’ appearance upon entrance Enter martius bleeding, assaulted by the enemy. (Cor, 1.4.61) 9. characters’ attitudes and gestures alonso ,

with a frantic gesture.

(Tem, 5.1.57) 10. characters’ expressions and mental conditions Enter cromwell , standing amazed. (H8, 3.2.372) 11. noises A flourish of trumpets, and two pieces goes off. (Ham, 1.4.6) 12. asides (speaking to Bona ) (3H6, 3.3.59)

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13. location scaling-­ladders at Harflew (H5, 3.1.1) These examples illustrate the extraordinarily capacious nature of the ‘literary’ in Greg’s definition. For Greg, that is, a literary stage direction is one that provides practically any information beyond entrance, exit, or name. Ironically, because his definition is so broad – including virtually any information that could be of interest to actors – it necessarily defines actors as listeners and readers and thus complicates if it does not forestall a division of stage and page. By reducing the verbal requirements for the ‘literary’ (we could note the brief directions in the last two examples, above), Greg enfranchises performers as part of a literary dynamic. His actors are, at first, listeners attending to a recited playbook. The stage directions, in such a scenario, stand as necessary prompts to imagining particularities of scene and action. We should note that this contrasts with how literary stage directions were defined prior to Greg’s study, during his career, and after. A more common way of defining a literary stage direction had taken its cue from the developing practice of modern dramatists like George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams (to name only these).2 Such playwrights often generated paragraphs of description that seem to blend the deeply descriptive habits of novelistic prose with the traditionally sparer form of the stage direction. Stanley Wells gives us a fortuitous conjunction of this subgenre and a Shakespearean text in observing that various early volumes of John Dover Wilson’s New (Cambridge) Shakespeare feature ‘literary stage directions in the manner of Shaw or James Barrie: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for example, “Another part of the wood. A grassy plot before a great oak-­ tree; behind the tree a bank overhung with creepers, and at one side a thorn-­bush” (2003: 362–63). By identifying Wilson’s editorial insertion with contemporaneous ‘literary’ stage

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directions like those of Shaw and Barrie, Wells reminds us that the very label is something of an anachronism, having more to do with the twentieth century than the sixteenth. It was during the twentieth century that the idea of a literary stage direction hardened in the critical imagination. The following is a typical example of such a usage; in it, Gabriel Egan discusses what he calls ‘an extended literary “stage direction” ’ in Anthony Munday’s 1610 water pageant, London’s Love for Prince Henry: CORINEA , a very fayre and beautifull Nimphe, representing the Genius of olde Corineus Queene, and the Prouince of Cornewall, suited in her watrie habit yet riche and costly, with a Coronet of Pearles and cockle shelles on her head, saluteth the PRINCE .

(Egan 2006: 163) Egan’s quotation marks around ‘stage direction’ in his phrase ‘extended literary “stage direction” ’ are meant to convey irony: this is not, Egan implies, a direction for the stage at all. Instead, it is something that ‘recreates the scene for the reader’ (2006: 163). As such, it has only an ancillary and subsequent relation to the spectacle it describes. Key to identifying this stage direction as ‘literary’ seems to be the modifier with which Egan precedes the phrase: ‘extended’. Paragraphs of description like this – and like those found in the work of many playwrights following Shaw and Barrie – appear better suited to, and therefore aimed at, readers of printed drama. In contrast to Greg, whose definition of literary stage directions was so expansive that, encompassing directions of only a few words, it enfranchised performers as listeners and readers, Egan implies that length is a typical quality of such directions; he thus contracts the definition so much that it draws a brighter line between stage and page. If literary stage directions are associated with their length, perhaps this is because what Chambers called ‘pretty full’ directions only make more obvious the descriptive potential realized in many directions of the period. Greg gave us a menu of

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things he recognized as defining features of such directions: as noted above, they could be ‘evocative’, ‘vivid’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘elaborate’. When cataloguing such stage directions, however, he offered as examples multiple directions that are more abbreviated than the Munday paragraph cited by Egan. Greg realized that even a brief stage direction could possess information that, strictly defined, had little necessary impact upon the realized performance of a play. His explanation was that plays were first read to and approved by acting companies; the more detail in such oral recitations, the more clearly sharers could envision a script’s potential. On this account, literary stage directions are an aid to the imagination of actors involved in a purchasing decision. Greg’s characterization of even brief directions as ‘literary’ thus comes from his theory of a totality of such directions helping an elite group of sharers decide on a play. The more typical reference to literary stage directions exemplified in Egan’s use of the term identifies the genre in relation to a longer and more explicitly detailed passage. As with every account of literary stage directions, however, both instances emphasize the imagination. Literary stage directions are considered literary because they have an imaginative surplus – sometimes for the actor, sometimes for the reader and sometimes for the actor as reader or hearer.

Fictional stage directions The ‘literary’ has always been hard to define. Such is also true for literary stage directions, where the ‘literary’ qualifier is no easier to pin down. It is no surprise to see the imagination becoming central to such a task, nor to see qualities of texture and composition involved as well. One of the more popular alternatives to the notion of literary stage directions attempts to bypass such difficulties by use of another label and category: ‘fictional stage directions.’ Generated by Richard Hosley in an article of 1957, fictional stage directions ‘usually refer not to theatrical structure or equipment but rather to dramatic fiction: upon the walls, before the gates, within the prison, on shipboard

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[etc.]’ (1957: 17). In contrast, Hosley’s ‘theatrical stage directions’ are those which ‘usually refer not to dramatic fiction but rather to theatrical structure or equipment: upon the stage, at another door, within [etc.]’ (1957: 16). While these categories have an attractive distinction, they begin breaking down as soon as Hosley attempts to apply them.3 For instance, he acknowledges the spaces of a playhouse and of dramatic fiction overlap in a number of situations and terms: within or at another door, for example, and words like aloft as well as room. All of these are troubling owing to their architectural aspects: given an opposition between playhouse (theatre) and fiction, is a door in a stage direction thought to refer primarily to a theatrical door or a fictional one? Does tomb (in, say, Romeo and Juliet) refer to a mock tomb, onstage, or to an imaginary (fictional) one? That such questions are unanswerable does not deter Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson from adopting the term in their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. There they eschew the idea of ‘literary’ stage directions altogether, preferring ‘theatrical’ and ‘fictional’. Their description of these genres follows Hosley, but adds pejorative aspects to his definition of the fictional stage direction. Their account holds that ‘in fictional directions a dramatist sometimes slips into a narrative, descriptive style seemingly more suited to a reader facing a page than an actor on the stage so as to conjure up a vivid image more appropriate to a cinematic scene than an onstage effect at the Globe’ (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 90). Oddly, Dessen and Thomson imagine not a single inappropriate media for the perceived disjunction in such stage directions but rather two: narrative fiction and cinema. It is a telling gesture, not least because they piece out the theatrical potential in several ostensibly fictional directions through some creative writing themselves. Acknowledging the ‘complications’ involved in distinguishing their two modes, Dessen and Thomson declare, hopefully, that such complications are further compounded by the presence of an explicit or implicit ‘as if’; ‘Enter Marius solus from the

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Numidian mountains, feeding on roots’ (Wounds of Civil War, 1189–90) initially may appear to be a fictional direction that tells the story, but a starving Marius who has been alone in exile could enter ‘[as if] from the Numidian mountains’ so that the actor will use ‘feeding on roots’ along with disheveled costume and hair to convey his mental and physical state . . . (1999: 91) By understanding an ‘as if’ to be implied in this stage direction, Dessen and Thomson rescue it from fiction and deliver it to the theatre, where (in their scenario) ‘the spirit of as if ’ combines ‘suitable acting’, ‘a shared theatrical vocabulary’ and ‘the imaginative participation (and acquiescence) of the playgoer’ (1999: 14). In this account there is much virtue in ‘as if’, for the phrase which reassures Dessen and Thomson as to the essential theatricality of a stage direction involves imagining an imaginative aspect to the direction which it already possesses. That is, their ‘as if’ – a phrase borrowed from other stage directions, and boldly pasted into the Wounds direction – licenses an actor to do the kinds of thing that Dessen and Thomson imagine an actor could do – should do – in order to suitably invite the ‘imaginative participation (and acquiescence) of the playgoer’. This legerdemain implies that Dessen and Thomson’s category of fictional stage directions has something of the fictional itself to it, a convenient notion in which to place words that don’t fit an idealized conception of theatrical praxis or textual reality. Their ‘as if’ is too useful a phrase to be trusted, however, and too flexible for their larger distinction to be true. At this point, we should consider whether the weak boundaries and unstable foundations of these terms, literary and fictional stage directions, might not come from the fact that the term ‘stage direction’ itself is a misnomer. As Dessen and Thomson acknowledge, true imperatives (such as, for example, make, bring, let and suppose) are rare in printed playbooks after the early 1590s.4 As drama became more sophisticated, so did its linguistic apparatus. Under a strict

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definition of the term, very few stage directions in early modern plays actually direct. To the contrary, almost every stage direction describes. Our most familiar instances, exit and enter – the latter of which Dessen and Thomson rightly identify as ‘by far the most widely used term in stage directions’ – provide monitory examples of how directions, if they do direct, do so only through description. Exit and Exeunt are of course the Latin present, third-­person singular and plural, respectively. They signify not a command but a narration: ‘She leaves’; ‘They leave.’ It is convention that collapses the reading process of a narration into an imperative: ‘She should leave at this point’; ‘At this juncture, they should depart’. True, such convention is important, but it does not alter the third-­person point of view found not only in Exit and Exeunt but in most directions. So while the word enter in stage directions of the time seems an imperative, in context it is as descriptive a term as exit and exeunt. For entrances, dramatic tradition had the choice of such Latin terms as the imperative veni, but chose the more neutral French loanword enter. In practice, play-­texts require the word enter to do so much work, as a verb, that its mood shifts from the imperative (‘Come in!’) to the indicative (‘Here X character comes in’). We can see this in the first page of the First Folio, where such stage directions as ‘Exit. Enter Boteswaine.’ come so closely upon one another that it is difficult to imagine anyone (whether an actor or armchair reader) shifting among the various moods of the verbs deployed. So when ‘A confused noyse within’ comes alongside ‘Enter a Ship-­master, and a Boteswaine’ and ‘Enter Mariners wet’, readers (including actors) take such directions as directions only by first translating them. In terms of a performance: ‘Here someone backstage needs to make a confused noise so that the audience hears it.’ For a reader: ‘I need to imagine what a confused noise would sound like at this point.’ Furthermore, the indefinite article – a Ship-­master and a Boteswaine – reveals the fiction of the imperative that is not really an imperative. Imperatives talk to us directly, without articles: ‘Boteswaine, come in!’ rather than ‘A Boteswaine comes in.’ A stage direction from Richard III makes clear the impossibility of taking enter as a comprehensive

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(perhaps even customary) imperative: ‘Enter the corse of Henry the Sixt , with Halberds to guard it, Lady Anne being the mourner’ (1.2.0). Because even the most ardent champions of performance could not claim to believe that such is a direction to a corpse, these and other instances of enter ask us to understand the verb in the indicative: a Boteswaine enters, The corse of Henry the Sixt is brought out. In this way, ‘by far the most widely used term in stage directions’ is less a direction than a malleable descriptive verb which (like most directions) reveals the hybridity that necessarily results when stage meets page.

Stage directions as text Defining certain directions as theatrical and others as literary or fictional is beside the point. For stage directions are, in practice, descriptions conventionally interpreted as imperatives. All are literary or fictional – or, conversely, none are. Custom has carved out the briefest ones as most theatrical through a selective understanding of performance and of the practice of literary composition itself. But plays give us little reason to divide the descriptions in their dialogue from that constituted by stage directions. Indeed, it is a paradox that some of the most memorable stage directions in Shakespeare have become ‘literary’ through their deep connections to the business of dramatic plot: Exit pursued by a bear. (Winter’s Tale 3.3.58) Holds her by the hand, silent. (Coriolanus 5.3.182) 5 Thunder and lightning. Enter ariel , like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes. (Tempest 3.3.52)

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Each of these three stage directions has parallels, in terms of vocabulary and phrasing, in the Shakespeare canon generally and sometimes in the dialogue of the same play. To take up the Coriolanus direction, we could note that (as in many plays) the characters’ dialogue gives implicit description of hand taking, hand holding, and holding in hand: ‘Your hand, and yours!’ Coriolanus remarks to Volumnia and Virgilia (2.1.194); later his mother returns the favour by saying ‘Go to them, with this bonnet in thy hand’ (3.2.73); and Coriolanus addresses Menenius with ‘Give me thy hand’ (4.1.57). Like the more famous stage direction they contextualize, these items of dialogue affirm stage business by demonstrating the importance of proximity through bodily shows of allegiance. In contrast to ‘Holds her by the hand, silent’, however, these speeches are actual directions – orders, that is, issued in the imperative mood. By singling out the famous Coriolanus direction as especially poetic, we end up separating it from other uses of hand in the play. In thinking of this stage direction as exceptional, we also forget that one of its sensory aspects has appeared in another stage direction as well, in the Folio text of 3 Henry VI: Enter warwick , clarence , oxford , somerset , and French Soldiers, silent all. (4.3.22) We could think also of the way the word and its various forms function in such instances as Titania’s ‘Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently’ (MND, 3.1.201), or Cordelia’s ‘Love, and be silent’ (KL, 1.1.62), or Prospero’s ‘No tongue! all eyes! Be silent’ (Tem, 4.1.59). As with the hand instances from Coriolanus, all of these dialogue passages give orders. As such, they are legitimately stage directions, and understandably share vocabulary with what we more commonly identify as directions for the theatre – but which, as we have seen, are actually descriptions conventionally interpreted as directions. The question of shared rather than distinct vocabulary is important. This is not only because resources such as Dessen and

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Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions have made strong claims about the nature of early modern plays and performance, but because belief in the distinctiveness of stage directions from other kinds of writing has led to a misunderstanding of what plays like The Tempest are. For an example, we might return to the famous stage direction quoted above: Thunder and lightning. Enter ariel , like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes. (Tempest 3.3.53) In an influential essay, John Jowett argued that this and other stage directions in The Tempest were written not by Shakespeare but rather by Ralph Crane, a well-­known scribe of early modern manuscripts. Jowett rightly notices features of Crane’s scribal practice in the formatting of The Tempest, and takes that as a prompt to make a larger claim about stage directions in the romance: ‘The directions in The Tempest . . . are qualitatively different from those of any other Shakespeare play. . . . . . [T]he elements which distinguish The Tempest are non-­theatrical, and would be peculiarly ineffective in instructing the players’ (1983: 107–20). Jowett observes, further, that ‘It is the literary quality of the directions in The Tempest which is their most distinctive trait’ (1983: 110).6 To support his argument for Crane’s authorship of these literary stage directions, Jowett divides Shakespeare’s output into two different kinds of vocabulary: that found in other stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays; and that found in the dialogue. This gesture is followed by a further critical move, for he quickly compresses the category of ‘new Shakespeare stage-­ direction vocabulary’ to the simpler but potentially misleading category of ‘new vocabulary’ (Jowett 1983: 111). Subsequently, assertions about the putatively non-Shakespearean nature of certain stage directions are supported with such phrases as ‘Moreover, it is new vocabulary’ (1983: 111).

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Yet the argument against Shakespeare’s authorship of the stage directions in The Tempest weakens when we examine its stage directions as instances of writing. Oddly, even though Crane published a book of moral poems in 1621, The vvorkes of mercy, both corporall, and spirituall, revised in 1625 as The pilgrimes new-­yeares-gift, Jowett never compares the vocabulary of these acknowledged instances of Crane’s creative writing with the stage directions in The Tempest. And Jowett often omits to tell the reader when and where Shakespeare had used similar phrases in his acknowledged writings (other than stage directions) as well. If Jowett had done so more fully, the argument against Shakespeare and for Crane would have seemed much weaker. To note just a few examples from the direction at hand, the phrase ‘Thunder and lightning’ is so common that we are not at all surprised to find it in the stage directions for 2 Henry VI (1.4.40), Julius Caesar (1.3.0), Cymbeline (5.4.92), earlier in The Tempest itself (1.1.0), as well as in the Witches’ familiar opening to Macbeth: ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ (1.1.2). The phrase ‘Enter Ariel , like a harpy’ has analogues not only in the dialogue of The Tempest, where Prospero says ‘Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou / Perform’d, my Ariel’ (3.3.83–84), but also in uses of harpy in Much Ado (2.1.271) and the Shakespearean portion of Pericles (4.3.46). Likewise, the phrase ‘claps his wings upon the table’ has verbal parallels to Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio mocks the idea of a fellow who ‘claps me his sword upon the table’ (3.1.6–7), and in a more complex way in a passage in Antony and Cleopatra where Scarus says that Antony ‘Claps on his sea-­wing’ to follow Cleopatra (3.10.19). As for the phrase ‘with a quaint device’, the word ‘device’ appears often in Shakespeare, where a ‘device’ may be ‘excellent’, ‘monstrous’, ‘new’, ‘noble’, ‘old’, ‘palpable’, ‘rare’, ‘treacherous’ or ‘whole’, among other things. The word ‘quaint’ appears in Vernon’s ‘forged quaint conceit’ in 1 Henry VI (4.1.102), in Margaret’s ‘fine, quaint, graceful, and excellent fashion’ in Much Ado (3.4.22–23), in Katherina’s appraisal of a ‘quaint’ gown in Shrew (4.3.102), and Fenton’s

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description of Anne’s costume as ‘quaint in green’ in Merry Wives (4.6.41). Further, Titania’s ‘quaint mazes’ (2.1.99) and ‘quaint spirits’ (2.2.7) in Dream seem apposite, in various ways, to the stage direction in The Tempest, which – like Titania’s twin usages – pairs with an earlier ‘quaint’ in the play’s dialogue: ‘My quaint Ariel, / Hark in thine ear!’ (1.2.317– 18). Finally, Shakespeare uses ‘banquet’ (‘banket’) in the stage directions of Shrew (5.2.0), Macbeth (3.4.0) and Antony and Cleopatra (2.7.0), and ‘vanish’ in the stage directions of Macbeth (4.1.132) and Cymbeline (5.4.122). Forms of both words arise many times in his dialogue. The vocabulary of the stage directions in The Tempest is Shakespeare’s, not Crane’s. Ironically, deciding that the play’s directions were ‘literary’ led Jowett to segregate them from Shakespeare’s full writing practice, effectively disappearing good evidence for the latter’s authorship of the whole of The Tempest. But Jowett’s assumption that Shakespeare had a separate vocabulary for stage directions and dialogue does not stand up to what we have seen earlier in this essay: almost all stage directions describe, and when characters describe in their dialogue they often do so with a vocabulary like that found in stage directions, ‘literary’ and otherwise. Even as Dessen and Thomson resort to ‘as if’ to license their actor to carve out a theatrical space within an ostensibly fictional direction, so does Jowett shrink Shakespeare’s vocabulary (and raise Crane’s) so as to disclaim the playwright’s hand in what he calls the ‘literary’ stage directions of The Tempest. Once we recognize the basic illogic of such a procedure, it becomes clear that Shakespeare himself wrote the ‘pretty full’ stage directions in the play that begins the First Folio.

Shakespeare writing To imagine Shakespeare writing various stage directions in his plays requires us to set aside the ‘as if’ move we have seen in performance-­centred scholarship. It is too easy to suggest that,

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by miming the language in the surrounding text, scribe X or compositor Y composed a stage direction as if Shakespeare. Because it is a created scenario about creativity, we ought to be particularly suspicious of the story it tells. Because it is, further, impossible to disprove, it lacks persuasive force. If alternate theories of stage direction authorship fall short for these reasons, the verbal textures of many directions in the plays also point to Shakespeare’s authority. To examine these textures in relation to their contexts is to see that many directions are no more or less literary (or, for that matter, fictional) than the dialogue in their immediate vicinity. We could begin an examination of the links among stage directions and the speeches that precede and follow them by noting the logical continuation of character, object, and action from speech to direction, and back again. It is no surprise, for example, to encounter a stage direction for a character’s entrance after he or she has been summoned or otherwise hailed in a play’s dialogue. The direction ‘Enter Juliet ’ is the logical consequence and expected result of her Nurse’s repeated hailing: ‘Now by my maidenhead at twelve year old, / I bade her come. What, lamb! What, ladybird! / God forbid! Where’s this girl? What, Juliet!’ (RJ, 1.3.2–4). A bit more meaningful, perhaps, but still routine are those directions which respond with only slight variation or amplification to something from the preceding dialogue. In Twelfth Night, for instance, when Orsino bids Feste ‘prithee sing’, the text’s stage direction, Music., comes immediately prior to these words: ‘The Song ’ (2.4.50). Because it is difficult to imagine a plausible variant of this trio – ‘sing’, ‘Music.’, ‘The Song ’ – the relation among its words seems more mechanical than creative. Other stage directions reveal a deeper set of verbal and imaginative links with surrounding text. Sometimes these links stretch to material within stage directions themselves, as with the following direction from The Taming of the Shrew: Exeunt ambo. Manent

Tranio

and Lucentio . (1.1.145)

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Here ambo, Latin for ‘both’, refers to Gremio and Hortensio (whom the Riverside Shakespeare includes in a bracketed insertion following that word). Shakespeare uses ambo in only two other plays – 3 Henry VI (5.2.50 [Q1]) and Much Ado (5.1.109) – and both these times, as in Shrew, in stage directions. The Latin term seems particularly appropriate in Shrew because it rhymes with not only the departing Grumio and Hortensio, but also with both Tranio and Lucentio. In Much Ado, the characters who ‘both’ exit with ambo are, similarly, Leonato and Antonio. For an –o rhyme like this elsewhere in Shrew, we might look to the way Tranio also pairs a non-Latin word with a Latin one in his couplet: If love have touch’d you, nought remains but so, ‘Redime te captum quam queas minimo.’ (1.1.161–62) That ambo rhyming with the character names may be more than a coincidence seems to be suggested by a similar construction in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, where the stage action for a lead character is signalled by the following direction: Enter proteus solus. (2.6.0) As with the –o rhymes in Shrew and Much Ado, here the ending of a character’s name possesses a sympathetic resemblance to a Latin term within the language of a stage direction. It is easy to see how a writer could be influenced by the sound of adjacent words when selecting another vocabulary item: Italianate –o names leading to ambo, the –us of Proteus chiming with solus. With these rhyming resemblances, we are moving from that which is called for by the logic of dialogue – a summoned Juliet soon arrives on stage, a song called for is sung – toward relationships based on the textures of language.

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Some of these verbal relationships have been eradicated through the editing process. To remain with The Taming of the Shrew, we might miss the relationship between Shakespeare’s dialogue and one of his stage directions in a modernized version of Petruchio’s lines: Faith, sirrah, and you’ll not knock, I’ll ring it. I’ll try how you can sol, fa, and sing it. He wrings him by the ears. (1.2.16–17) It is easier to see a verbal tie between dialogue and stage direction in the Folio version: Faith sirrah, and you’l not knocke, Ile ring it, Ile trie how you can Sol, Fa, and sing it. He rings him by the eares (212; TLN 582–84) Modernized spelling submerges the ring/ring homographs. Although this relationship is potentially activated in performance – with an audience, that is, that knows the phrase ‘wringing one’s ears’ and recognizes that such is what Petruchio is doing to his servant – a reader can miss the identity of spelling that must have been present to Shakespeare as he wrote this seamless passage. His pun – not ringing a bell to arouse a house, but rather wringing the ears of his ostensibly disobedient servant – came to him through their status as homographs, which he represents on the page. The idea of the word rings in the stage direction surely preceded its verbal double in the dialogue, as well as the rhyme-­word sing which anticipates Grumio’s howls of pain in response to his master’s torment. In this way, Shakespeare’s stage direction demands to be read, first, as an instance of writing.

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These kinds of puns occur in other stage directions by Shakespeare. We are tempted to call them ‘visual’ puns to acknowledge that we see but don’t hear their completion (the way we hear such words as son or sole and are asked to imagine sun or soul as their doubles). Consider the following, familiar passage from 1 Henry IV. It involves Prince Henry and the malingering Falstaff during the battle of Shrewsbury: Prince

  I prithee lend me thy sword. Falstaff

  Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive, thou gets not my sword, but take my pistol, if thou wilt. Prince

  Give it me. What? is it in the case? Falstaff

  Ay, Hal, ’tis hot, ’tis hot. There’s that will sack a city.   The Prince draws it out, and finds it to be a bottle of sack. (5.3.48–54) Like the ring/wring pun in Shrew, this small episode of stage comedy has at its centre a word (and the object it represents) deferred into a stage direction. It is of course difficult to imagine a character more identified with a particular commodity, so we are not surprised by Falstaff’s ‘sack’ joke. But the joke not only benefits from but depends on a verbal tie between the written elements of a stage direction and aspects of dialogue and stage action, as Henry never utters the word. We can observe Shakespeare’s mind at work in a similar way in All’s Well That Ends Well, where – like Falstaff’s sack – something soon to play a role in the stage action nudges its way into the dialogue. In an exchange concerning Bertram’s courting of Diana, the Widow assures Helena that Diana ‘is arm’d for him, and keeps her guard / In honestest defense’

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(3.5.73–74). The stage direction that follows immediately thereafter reads: Drum and Colors. Enter Count Rossillion , parolles , and the whole army. This is the first time the word ‘army’ has appeared in All’s Well, and while it is certainly appropriate visually to align a virgin under amorous assault (Diana) with a parading force, the reader and audience benefit from the verbal link of arm’d/ army as well as the word ‘defense’. The traditional conceit of virtue under siege, with love as a kind of conquering force, is thus made manifest not just through the dialogue, or through the action described in the stage direction, but rather through their combination in language. Shakespeare’s stage directions frequently reveal a phonetic basis to his imagination, as when Hastings stops to talk with a ‘good fellow’ in Richard III (3.2.95). The stage direction has identified this figure as a ‘Pursuivant’ (3.2.94), which makes the following conclusion to their dialogue all the more significant: Hastings

  Gramercy, fellow. There, drink that for me. Throws him his purse. Pursuivant

  I thank your honor. Exit Pursuivant . (3.2.106–07) Unlike the visual pun on ‘sack’ in 1 Henry IV, readers and audience members have not been so primed for the purse/ pursuivant pairing. Seeming to remember this link, however, Shakespeare has Hastings identify the ‘fellow’ with his punning occupation two scenes later when the former regretfully announces ‘I now repent I told the pursuivant, / As too

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triumphing, how mine enemies / To-­day at Pomfret bloodily were butcher’d’ (3.4.88–90). While there is no logical connection between the words ‘purse’ and ‘pursuivant’ (in fact, they are etymologically unrelated), the resemblance between the two must have served as a deep source, in Shakespeare’s imagination, for the conception as well as composition of the scene. Sound precedes and shapes sense in a number of instances where stage directions tie into dialogue. A straightforward instance occurs with the repetition of sounds from dialogue to stage direction. For instance, in Shrew we encounter the m/p sounds in Gremio’s ‘Hark, hark, I hear the minstrels play’ echoed immediately in the stage direction ‘Music Plays’ (3.2.183; emphasis added). A more complicated example comes later in the same comedy, where the dialogue inverts sounds from the stage direction:         Enter curtis , a servant. Grumio

  Where is he? Curtis

  In her chamber, making a sermon of continency to her . . . (4.1.180–82; emphasis added) Here we get a glimpse into the way in which sound could structure Shakespeare’s writing. Shakespeare writes a stage direction which no one in a playhouse could hear, and reads in what he wrote a cue for subsequent dialogue. A more extended example of this phenomenon comes in 2 Henry VI, with the dominance of the word ‘sheet’ in Shakespeare’s imagination. In 2.4, Shakespeare prepares us for the spectacle of the Duchess of Gloucester being paraded in shame through the streets of London. He bookends the spectacle with an introductory stage direction: ‘Enter Duke Humphrey and his Men in mourning cloaks’ (2.4.0). The dialogue preceding mention of the Duchess’s punishing ‘sheet’ dwells on the long –e sound with uncanny effect:

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  Gloucester    Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud,    And after summer evermore succeeds    Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold;    So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet    Sirs, what’s a’ clock?   Servant       Ten, my lord.   Gloucester    Ten is the hour that was appointed me    To watch the coming of my punish’d duchess.    Uneath may she endure the flinty streets,    To tread them with her tender-­feeling feet.    Sweet Nell, ill can thy noble mind abrook    The abject people gazing on thy face,    With envious looks laughing at thy shame,    That erst did follow thy proud chariot-­wheels   When thou didst ride in triumph through the streets.    But soft, I think she comes, and I’ll prepare    My tear-­stain’d eyes to see her miseries. Enter the duchess , in a white sheet and a taper burning in her hand, with the sheriff , and officers . (2.4.1–16; emphasis added) Here we see as well as hear Shakespeare thinking about the white sheet that the Duchess will wear in the stage direction. He prepares for this as early as the contrasting mourning cloaks he describes Gloucester and his men wearing. Like the song in Merchant whose rhymes subtly nudge Bassanio toward the lead casket containing Portia’s picture, the dialogue prior to ‘white sheet’ trembles with anticipation of the spectacle to come. Just as with Hastings and the pursuivant, characters do not utter the term from the stage direction until later. Stanley says ‘Madam, your penance done, throw off this sheet’, and the Duchess replies ‘My shame will not be shifted with my sheet’ (2.4.105, 107). So the effect of the rhyming between

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‘sheet’ and the long –e words depends on a reader parsing the stage direction or audience members thinking ‘sheet’ before they witness the spectacle. The difficulty of the latter reminds us why we have to read, not just watch, Shakespeare’s plays.

Conclusion We have seen that Shakespeare’s literary stage directions are rarely directions, and are literary only to the extent that everything in a play is literary. Although some directions, as Chambers remarked, are ‘pretty full’, they are not different in kind from the shorter and more efficient directions that have become largely transparent to us. Stage directions describe. In this, they use the same language that Shakespeare’s characters use to describe. They are not separate vocabulary or paratext, but rather integral to every text in which they occur. Like every writer, Shakespeare read his own words as he wrote, and before anyone else. No surprise then, to find him weaving together the words his characters spoke (the dialogue) with the words spoken about them (the stage directions). As we have seen, it is hard to say with confidence which of the directions in his plays came originally from his pen. Rather than an invitation to agnosticism, however, this admission should spur further investigation as to the source of his directions and the various influences and agents that shaped them. For reading Shakespeare’s stage directions as constructed instances of language is to gain insight into the creative realm unfolded through both the writing and performance of his plays.

Edition Shakespeare, William (1997), The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

PART THREE

Editing

6 When is a Missing Stage Direction Missing? Suzanne Gossett

From the vantage point of an editor and a general editor, the apparently theoretical question, when is a stage direction missing, can become urgent. True, eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century editors often ignored the matter, adding nothing to the base-­text directions, however scanty. There have also been recent attempts to evade the issue. The Oxford Shakespeare invented a typography – ‘special’ or half brackets – to indicate that ‘the action signalled, its placing, or the identity of the speaker, is . . . open to question’ (2005: xliv). M.J. Kidnie proposed reorganizing the page layout, using a column for marginal stage directions ‘to make readers aware of textual indeterminacy’ (2004: 263). The RSC Shakespeare has ‘directorial interventions’ in a different typeface, and some additions between arrows to indicate uncertain placement (2007: lx). Among the Guidelines that Gordon McMullan and I, as General Textual Editors, wrote for the Norton Shakespeare, Third Edition, are those advising our individual editors about when to add stage directions. We note that current practice

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divides into two: ‘some editors advocate the addition of numerous, fairly extensive stage directions, including for such actions as kneeling, pulling out of swords, etc. Others advocate adding few stage directions, allowing maximum imaginative freedom to readers and performers.’ For the Norton, we chose a ‘middle position’, instructing editors to begin with the stage directions in the base text and only then consider where else a reader might need assistance. We concluded that: ‘We do not wish to insult our readers and so will not add the obvious, but we do want to help readers recognize and follow action that would be obvious to the audience in the theatre. At a bare minimum, it is an editor’s duty to be sure that all requisite characters are brought on and off the stage; remember that “Exit” is the direction most frequently omitted’ (2009: 10). On paper this seems pretty clear, and it became my mantra to those editing individual plays for Norton that ‘At the very least, you must get all your characters on and off stage’. Perhaps I was so insistent because I still treasure a missive I received from David Bevington many years ago. There he, as the General Editor of the Revels Student Editions, complained that at one point in my edition of Bartholomew Fair for that series I didn’t provide an entrance for a character who speaks, and that at another point a character who is addressed late in a scene exits thirty lines earlier without re-­entry. The only way I could salve my conscience was to remember that not only I but David – by then for many years the editor of a Complete Works of Shakespeare – had been over my text multiple times and missed these ‘missing directions’. However, neither editorial carelessness nor the kind of complicated staging required as characters come and go from the pigwoman Ursla’s tent is enough to account for all the difficulties raised by that apparently simple call for ‘a middle position’. The more I have edited, the more I have realized that any intervention is interpretive. Furthermore, the texts we have from the period are hardly consistent. Long ago E.K. Chambers, noting the frequent absence of exit directions in early modern texts, concluded that the companies assumed the ‘actors might

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be trusted to find their own way off the stage’ (cited Werstine 2013: 208). Greg proposed the presence or absence of stage directions as a criterion for classifying texts as based either on authorial ‘foul papers’ (effectively, rough drafts) or ‘promptbooks’ (scripts prepared for staging). However, as part of his convincing attack on this New Bibliographical distinction Paul Werstine shows that ‘missing exits’ and ‘missing entrances’ come variously from manuscripts ‘by apparently non-­theatrical scribes’, ‘theatrical scribes’, and ‘Authorial manuscripts’, as well as from printed texts. He thus demonstrates that neither the author nor the book-­keeper felt it incumbent upon himself always to clarify the actors’ movements. In fact, Werstine writes, ‘Book-­keepers’ versions of SDD . . . can be less reliable as a guide to who entered . . . than the SDD playwrights furnished’ (2013: 194). Particularly infrequent are re-­entrance directions for characters who have already entered and then left the stage. Take, for example, the only manuscript we have of Middleton’s The Witch, prepared by the scribe Ralph Crane.1 Act 3, Scene 2 of The Witch begins with the entrance of Gaspero and Florida; there are directions for Gaspero to enter again at line 29 and again at line 62, but there are no previous directions for him to exit. Similarly, there are entrances for Isabella at 47 and 168 but she has no intervening exit. On the other hand, in 1.2, Crane includes an exit for Firestone at 101, and since Firestone speaks at 182 the modern editor has to supply an entrance (O’Connor 2007: 1147–50, 1136–37). In general, it seems, the actors expected more help in being told when to come on stage than in finding the appropriate moment to exit. Werstine concludes that ‘to judge from the repeated absence of directions for re-­entry into the same scenes and the occasional absence of SDD for re-­entry into immediately subsequent scenes, [actors] were expected to time their own re-­entrance according to verbal cues provided by their fellow actors’ (2013: 208). The actors were not quite as abandoned to their own devices as the manuscripts might make it seem. In actual production they were apparently assisted by backstage ‘plots’, which were

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skeleton outlines of a play showing entrances and exits. These plots were divided into boxes in which were given a series of characters’ and sometimes actors’ names: each box ‘lists who is to enter first and who is then to enter to them’. Werstine gives the following example, ‘Enter Frederick Kinge Mr Jubie R Allenn To them Basilea seruant Black Dick, Dick.’ The horizontal line below each box indicates a clear stage, so there was no need to write ‘Exit’ or ‘Exeunt’ on the plot; a quick glance would indicate the end of the scene (2013: 109–10). Perhaps authors and scribes, aware that such a plot would be constructed for backstage use, didn’t always feel the need to write in exits. Hence, stage directions as we know them do not give a full picture of the instructions available to early modern actors. Such ambiguity, and the actors’ consequent freedom, means that we cannot guarantee that entrances and exits always occurred at the same moment in every performance. In printed texts a further, if occasional, source of ‘missing’ directions and consequent indeterminacy was a convention of literary formatting. In preparing texts for the Shakespeare Folio, obviously intended to be an impressive volume, Crane used ‘massed entries’, probably influenced by the presentation of drama found in the Latin plays grammar school boys like Shakespeare studied. For example, in Seneca’s tragedy of Troades the third act is headlined ‘Andromacha. Senex. Vlysses.’, but as a modern edition shows, Ulysses only enters near the end of the act. Similarly, in Hercules Furens Actus Quartus lists at the beginning ‘Hercvles. Thesevs. Amphitryon. Megara’ but again Megara enters much later than the others. Jasper Heywood’s translation – should the boys have looked for a crib – duplicates the Latin format. The classicizing Jonson had used these massed entries in his 1616 Folio, and Crane did the same when he prepared a manuscript from A Game at Chesse in which he systematically transformed ‘the description of entrances and their relationship to scenes. Crane’s explicitly literary massed entrances were not reproduced in any other extant text of the play’ (Taylor and Lavagnino 2007: 844). It

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appears Crane made the same kinds of transformations in his contributions to the Shakespeare Folio.2 Massed entries leave considerable work for a modern editor deciding when and where directions are ‘missing’. For instance, the opening direction for Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 4, Scene 2, which Crane prepared for the Folio, reads ‘Enter Protheus, Thurio, Iulia, Host, Musitian, Siluia’ (C5r).3 In the Norton text, edited by Nathalie Rivère de Carles and indebted to generations of earlier editorial labour, the scene instead begins with a seventeen-­line soliloquy by Proteus. Two lines before Proteus concludes, Turio enters with Musicians, followed eight lines later by the entrance of Julia and the Host, who ‘talk apart’. Silvia will enter at line 77, and the modern edition directs that this entrance must be ‘above’, since Proteus tells Turio ‘must we to her window / And give some evening music to her ear’. To complicate things further, the scene as presented in the Folio contains no exits at all, even at its conclusion. In fact the action at the end of the scene may be interpreted in different ways. In the Folio the following scene begins, ‘Enter Eglamore, Siluia’ (C5v). Eglamour comes on stage meditating that ‘This is the hour that Madam Silvia / Entreated me to call’ and he shouts ‘Madam, madam!’ The modern text reads ‘Enter SILVIA above’, but this requires adding an exit for her in the preceding scene. In fact, she might simply remain at the window throughout. One way to realize how wide the gap between silence and instruction could be, or, to put it another way, how much may be missing, is to consider the difference between masque and stage directions. Here’s one from the Folio Macbeth, again our only text: ‘Musicke. The Witches Dance, and vanish’ (Mm6v; 4.1.131). The second is from Jonson’s Masque of Queens, performed at court a few years after Macbeth and featuring an antimasque of witches: At which, with a strange and sudden music they fell into a magical dance, full of preposterous change and gesticulation . . . dancing back to back and hip to hip,

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their hands joined, and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange fantastic motions of their heads and bodies. (Lindley 2012: 317) The description here is helpfully clarifying. Masque descriptions are ex post facto; they tell us what did happen rather than what should. The witches in The Masque of Queens were played by professional actors from the King’s Men, and this is how they danced. But does that mean that an editor of Macbeth should direct that the witches (very possibly played by the same actors) dance ‘back to back and hip to hip’? This takes us to the difficult questions implied by my title. If a stage direction is ‘missing’, what is it missing from and for whom is it missing? Considering that the surviving manuscripts suggest that neither author nor book-­keeper was particularly concerned about complete directions, it cannot be that the modern editor is creating a text that supplies material mistakenly absent from the point of view of either of them. Nor, apparently, is she supplying material that the actors required. In actuality we cannot be sure that competent early modern actors did not need ‘stage direction’ (as opposed to written out ‘stage directions’), since we are uncertain of the extent to which they received verbal instructions as they prepared a new play. Tiffany Stern shows that the stage directions on an actor’s part were (re)written from the point of view of his character, but she does not suggest that there were any more stage directions on those parts, consisting of the actor’s lines and cues, than on the manuscript from which they derived (2009: 244–45). So if the editor thinks of herself as supplying stage directions for actors, the assumption is that she considers modern actors to need more instruction than Shakespeare’s contemporaries did. That, of course, may be true: lack of easy familiarity with the language and customs of Shakespeare’s age can make it helpful for even an experienced actor to be reminded that when the Lafeu comes in to the King with his ‘tidings’ and the

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King tells him ‘I’ll fee thee to stand up’, the courtier must have kneeled as he entered the royal presence. In fact, Lafeu replies, ‘Then here’s a man stands that has bought his pardon’ (Gossett and Wilcox: AW 2.1.59–61). An actor could infer the required actions. Still, a quick glance at four accessible modern editions – Arden 2, New Cambridge, Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics – shows that modern editors uniformly add the directions ‘kneeling’ and ‘rising’. I believe that most modern editors think of themselves primarily as creating texts for readers. Nevertheless, as Stern writes, by adding entrances and exits even ‘book-­based editions for readers . . . remain frankly theatrical in many of their editorial insertions’ (2015: 373). Consciously or unconsciously editors assume that, given their intense familiarity with the text in question, they can envision its action better than an inexperienced reader who may be encountering a complex plot, elaborately motivated characters, dense imagery and early modern diction for the first time. And if that is so, then how does an editor decide that something is missing and, even harder, what and how much to supply? Werstine’s phrase for what warns us that a particular action is needed is a ‘verbal cue’: actors ‘speaking from “within” or offstage . . . are evidently expected to follow the verbal cues provided by actors already onstage in order to time their own entrances’ (2013: 208 and passim). For Stern, the need to add exit or entrance directions is ‘inferred from circumstance’ (2009: 210). I myself, thinking of all added stage directions, not only exits and entrances, prefer to use the phrase ‘the logic of the action’, conceived as including both the dialogue and the sequence of the plot. For the rest of this chapter I will discuss several categories of action where reasonable people may disagree about whether the ‘cue’, the ‘circumstance’, the ‘logic’ requires an added stage direction and, if so, what that direction should be. Most of my examples will come from plays that I have edited or general edited, thus sharing the actual concerns of an editor with readers. Crucially, many of these plays are non-Shakespearean, and hence the need to assist the reader is

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arguably more critical than in the case of Shakespearean drama, where even a first-­time reader may know the outlines of the plot.

Discover, within Dessen and Thomson write that ‘discover’ signals either the removal of a disguise or ‘the opening of a curtain or door to reveal scenes ranging from the simple to the complex’; ‘within’ is ‘widely used . . . to indicate the location of a sound or the presence of a figure within the tiring house and therefore offstage out of sight of the playgoer’ (1999: 253).4 In Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho!, an editor who desires to help her reader envision the action might feel the need in one case to clarify directions that are present in the base text, in another case to supply a ‘missing’ direction. The first case is easier: in the most complex scene of the play, 4.1, the Quarto directs ‘Enter Slitgut, with a paire of Oxe hornes, discouering Cuckolds-­hauen aboue’ (1605: F2r). Dessen and Thomson include this direction as one of several that ‘have figures discovered above’, but in editing the play David Kay and I realized that in what seems to have been an exception to the usual practice of pulling back a curtain in discovery scenes, Slitgut ‘discovers’ Cuckold’s Haven in the course of the first fifteen lines by affixing the horns mentioned at 4 below high on one of the pillars or posts of the balcony above the stage. His ‘Up, then!’ at line 6 presumably marks the start of his climb. (Gossett and Kay 2012: 600) Consequently, we add ‘He climbs the pole’. For the rest of the scene Slitgut remains above, observing as one by one almost all the characters in the play are thrown from the stormy Thames onto different places along its bank. Except for the first, Security, to whom Slitgut speaks, these characters play out

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their scenes without interacting with him. The attentive editor has to remember, therefore, to modify the repeated ‘Exeunt’ and indicate that Slitgut remains on stage. Then at the end of the scene there is a good example of what might seem an ‘optional’ direction: with everyone gone, Slitgut announces ‘Now will I descend my honourable prospect’ and bids farewell to ‘thou horn tree’. We add ‘Climbing down’ (2012: 608), which is certainly based on a ‘verbal cue’ but which may, for that very reason, be unnecessary. Directions for ‘within’ may be intimately connected to ‘discovers’. A late play, Brome’s A Jovial Crew, has a particularly clear example of the usual meaning, with directions supplied in the original Quarto (1652). In Act 2 Brome calls for ‘A confused noyse within of laughing and singing, and one crying out’, a noise that Randall identifies as ‘The Beggars, Sir. Do’e hear ’em in the Barn?’ When Hearty asks ‘Pray, let’s see ’em, sir’, the direction reads ‘Randal opens the scene. The Beggars discovered at their Feast’ (F2r–F3r; Stern 2014: 2.2.129–30). However, in Eastward Ho! 5.4, action within has to be inferred. The scene begins with the goldsmith Touchstone refusing to hear the pleas of his wife and daughters. In his anger he threatens, ‘Away, sirens. I will immure myself against your cries and lock myself up to your lamentations’ and although his wife begs, ‘Gentle husband, hear me’, he concludes ‘I am deaf, I do not hear you’. An original stage direction then calls for the entrance of the Keeper of the Counter, Wolf, who asks ‘where’s Master Touchstone? I must speak with him presently . . . Master Deputy Golding is arrested’. Mildred says ‘Ay me! Do you hear, father’ and there is a line for Touchstone: ‘Tricks, tricks, confederacy, tricks!’ Wolf asks ‘Who’s that? Master Touchstone’, and despite Mrs Touchstone’s line ‘Why, it is Master Wolf himself, husband’ and Mildred’s ‘Father!’ Touchstone says, ‘I am deaf still, I say . . . Avoid my habitation, monsters!’ Wolf, puzzled, says ‘Why, you are not mad, sir? I pray you look forth and see the token I have brought you’ (Gossett and Kay 2012: 632–33). This passage makes sense only if Touchstone can be heard but not seen; that is, if he has gone ‘within’ and the women are

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conceived as ‘calling’ out to him. Accordingly, our edition adds a series of stage directions, starting with an exit for Touchstone after he announces he does not hear the women and concluding with an entrance for him when he responds to Wolf’s call that he come to see the ‘token’. Once again, the stage directions clarify the ‘logic of the action’, but whether they can be seen as ‘missing’ and therefore necessary will depend very much on the needs of the individual reader. Occasionally one text of a two text play will add a direction, which suggests it is missing or at least could be usefully inserted in the other text. An example noted by Henry Woudhuysen occurs in Romeo and Juliet, where Q2 twice has an unassigned marginal ‘Madam’ as Juliet bids goodnight to Romeo from her balcony. As Woudhuysen notes, these words are ‘usually given to the Nurse as if she is speaking “Within” – in fact the Folio supplies the stage-­direction and again ranges the two “Madam”s right’. Woudhuysen suggests that the ‘typographical ingenuity’ may have been ‘designed to suggest simultaneous or at least antiphonal performance’ (2005: 84–85) but critically, adding an editorial ‘Within’ helps the reader understand that the Nurse is not present as Juliet speaks her farewells to Romeo.

Wounds and death Actions for which stage directions are often surprisingly meagre or absent – leaving the reader to infer what has happened and an audience to depend on the actors to show it – are fights, wounds and deaths. Sometimes, of course, these are clear and precise: ‘Enter Fighting, and Macbeth slaine’ seems satisfactory, though no further direction explains how to proceed to ‘Enter Macduffe, with Macbeths head’ (nn4r): the punctilious Arden editors add ‘Exit Macduff with Macbeth’s body’ (Clark and Mason 2015: 5.8.34).5 But there is no direction for Macduff’s son’s death, or in Troilus and Cressida for the first fight of Achilles and Paris or Hector’s death at the hands of the Myrmidons. Of the three texts of Romeo and Juliet, Q1 (1597), Q2 (1599) and F, only Q1 has a

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direction, ‘They fight’, for the death duel between Paris and Romeo. Q1 helpfully explains how Mercutio is killed – ‘Tibalt vnder Romeoes arme thrusts Mercutio in, and flyes’ (1597: Fv) – but neither Q2 nor F has any direction for the fight, merely ‘Away Tybalt’. Of course Mercutio says ‘I am sped’ (1599: F3v; 1623: ff2v); Achilles says ‘So, Illiom, fall thou’; Paris says ‘I am slaine’ (1623: ¶¶6v; gg2r): are the stage directions missing or is editorial insertion redundant? The so-­called ‘bad’ Quarto of Hamlet, Q1 (1603), not identified until the nineteenth century, has fuller stage directions than the ‘good’ texts, Q2 (1604) and F (1623). These include ‘Enter the ghost in his night gowne’ (G2v), ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing’ (G4v) and ‘Leartes leapes into the graue. Hamlet leapes in after Leartes’ (I1v). Neither F nor Q2 says anything about what the ghost wears in Gertrude’s ‘closet’; until the discovery of Q1, in performance he simply continued to wear the armour of his first act appearance. Neither good text describes Ophelia as she enters after her father’s death. The second Quarto gives no graveside directions; the Folio has a direction for Laertes to leap into the grave but none for Hamlet to follow. As Dessen rightly says, these Q1 directions ‘may be of considerable interest to the historian or the imagist’ (1984: 38), but does that justify presenting them to every reader?6 Apparently most helpful is Q1’s direction for the final duel: ‘They catch one anothers Rapiers, and both are wounded, Leartes falles downe, the Queene falles downe and dies’ (I3v). Q2 gives no direction at all for the Queen’s death or the duel; the Folio also ignores her but has a brief explanation of how Hamlet is poisoned: ‘In scuffling they change Rapiers’ (qqr). How is an editor to treat these directions, which come from a Quarto that famously includes a soliloquy that begins ‘to be or not to be, ay there’s the point’? We do have a verbal clue that at some point Hamlet and Laertes must change rapiers: ‘The treacherous instrument is in thy hand’, says Laertes to Hamlet. If Q1, however ‘bad’, reflects performance, should we borrow its directions?

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Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are very celebrated plays, and many audiences and readers know what will happen in the various fights, although a reader could easily miss the Queen’s death. In less familiar drama a reader might more easily misunderstand the sequence of the action without some assist from stage directions supplied by the editor. For example, the plot of Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel turns on a duel between Captain Agar and the Colonel. The Captain, whose mother the Colonel has called a ‘whore’, refuses to fight because he cannot be sure that the insult is untrue. His seconds drag him to the field, but he holds back until the Colonel insults him as a ‘base submissive coward’. On that score he feels justified in responding, and his actions are evident from his friends’ comments: ‘By this light he fights, sir! . . . an absolute punto, hey!’ There are no stage directions for the fight, however, and in the Quarto the scene ends with ‘Exeunt Captaine and his Friends’ and an exit for the Colonel, ‘led by’ his friends (Middleton and Rowley 1617: Fv). Only from the subsequent dialogue does it become apparent that the Colonel is wounded and close to death. The Colonel’s Friend asks, ‘Alas, how is it, sir? / Give us some hope / Of your stay with us’ and the Colonel replies ‘If this flame will light me / But till I see my sister, ’tis a kind one’ (Gossett 2007: 3.1.169–70). 4.2 begins with the Sister inquiring ‘what hope is there’ of the surgeon, and observing ‘Alas, his strength decays!’ (4.2.3, 42). All of this can be helpfully clarified with a few directions: ‘The Colonel falls’, ‘The Colonel discovered in bed’, ‘she approaches the bed.’ Especially in retrospect there are verbal clues – in the final scene the Captain announces ‘the noble Colonel’s recovered’ (5.1.409) – but again a reader might well not follow the logic of the action without some supplied directions. Even more complicated is the action in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, and the original stage directions again only partly clarify. Philaster has been misled into believing that his beloved Arethusa is having an affair with her page Bellario; he sees them together in the woods and, enraged, tells Arethusa to take his sword and search his heart. When she refuses, he warns

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her to ‘do or suffer’. The Countryman who then enters observes to his horror ‘a courtier with his sword drawn . . . upon a woman’ and hears Arethusa tell Philaster she is at peace ‘with heaven and earth’, to which Philaster replies, ‘May they divide thy soul and body’. Outraged – ‘Strike a woman?’ – the Countryman turns on Philaster and there is a direction, ‘they fight’. Philaster then wounds Bellario, who when found attempts to take responsibility for wounding Arethusa, until Philaster ‘creeps out of a bush’ and confesses ‘By all the gods, ’twas I’ (Gossett 2009: 4.5.45–4.6.105). This perfect sequence of tragicomic action is the heart of the play, and is even pictured on the title page of the first Quarto. But the sequence makes little sense if the reader does not realize that, first, Philaster actually stabs Arethusa, and that in his fight with the Countryman both are bloodied, so that Philaster’s motive for wounding Bellario is to mark him with the same sort of wounds that he, Arethusa’s attacker, has. Q1, based on a ‘partially censored, theatrically abridged, performance version, or a recollection of one’ (Gossett 2009: 86), adds several key directions to the ‘better’ Q2 text: ‘She [Arethusa] sits downe’ ‘PHY. wounds her’ ‘Boy falls downe’, suggesting that whoever put Q1 together thought that there were, indeed, missing stage directions.

Exits and privacy It is not always clear when exits are ‘missing’. Obviously, when there is no exit or exeunt at the end of a scene and the next scene begins with entirely new characters, the person making the ‘plot’ would have no difficulty knowing where to draw his horizontal line. But does everyone always exit? We have already seen one problematic moment in Two Gentlemen of Verona; a more debatable example comes from the conclusion of Hamlet’s confrontation with his mother in her closet. Hamlet leaves to ‘lug the guts into the neighbour room’ and in the usual editorial treatment the scene (3.4) and act end. In Q2 the next direction reads ‘Enter King, and Queene, with

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Rosencraus and Guyldensterne’ (1604: Kr). However, F has merely ‘Enter King’ (pp2v). As Thompson and Taylor point out, ‘none of the three texts provides an exit for the Queen’ (2006: 359) and many critics, sometimes followed in performance, think the Queen simply remains on stage and is joined by the King, and that consequently the beginning of Act 4 should occur later in the play.7 The problem of exits segues into the problem of privacy, demanding decisions about when a conversation is overheard. Does the Clown in All’s Well remain on stage in 3.2 to hear the Countess receive the news of her son’s flight? Does the Porter remain on stage for the conversation between Lennox and Macbeth? Editors tend to have these characters disappear during the dialogue of their ‘betters’, even when they are neither ordered off nor have an exit line, but stagings can sometimes make their presence a meaningful comment on the action.8 Occasionally two texts of a play treat entrances and exits differently; an example is found in 3.5 of Richard III. The scene begins as Richard and Buckingham appear in ‘rotten armour’, behaving as if they are ‘distraught and mad with terror’. In the Quarto the next direction is ‘Enter Maior’. Richard then gives a series of orders: ‘Looke to the drawbridge there!’ ‘Catesby ouerlooke the wals!’ (1597: G2v). However, Catesby only enters a few lines later, carrying Hastings’ head. The Folio corrects the apparent illogic by directing that Catesby enter with the Mayor and that Lovell and Ratcliffe bring on Hastings’ head. However, as Tom Cartelli explains in a Textual Comment to the Norton 3 text, Catesby does not need to appear before he arrives with Hastings’ head: ‘Gloucester’s order, “Catesby o’erlook the walls”, is issued for the Mayor’s benefit, and possibly serves as an improvised ruse not designed to be responded to by Catesby himself.’ The Oxford edition, treating the confusion as arising from ‘the substitution of Catesby for Lovell and Ratcliffe’ (Wells and Taylor 1987: 241) adds a stage direction for Richard, ‘calling as to one within’. Some editors treat even F as missing directions: Anthony Hammond, the Arden 2 editor, added an

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exit for Catesby after he receives Richard’s order.9 A similar problem arises in Macbeth when Seyton first tells Macbeth that the noise he hears ‘is the cry of women’ but when asked again, ‘Wherefore was that cry?’ replies ‘The Queen, my lord, is dead’ (Clark and Mason 2015: 5.5.7–16). The Folio has no exit and re-­entry for Seyton to gain that information between his lines. Editors usually supply the directions, but Dessen suggests that a staging without them can be ‘eerie, powerful, perhaps quite unnerving’ and that by adding the direction such ‘literal-­mindedness’ may ‘end up masking a truly distinctive Jacobean effect’ (1984: 507).

Interpretation These last examples show clearly how issues of textual provenance and construction intersect with issues of critical interpretation. Therefore I will conclude by considering some directions about which there is little or no agreement but which affect the reader’s interpretation. A good case is the ‘aside’. Consider Hamlet’s very first line. Having dealt efficiently with the ambassadors and then with Laertes, Claudius turns to his next problem. He begins, ‘And now my cousin Hamlet, and my son—’. Hamlet snidely comments, ‘A little more than kin and less than kind’. And Claudius continues, ‘How is it that the clouds still hang on you?’ (Thompson and Taylor 2006: 1.2.64–66). Is Hamlet’s line an ‘aside’? Claudius’s speech is continuous, as if he doesn’t hear Hamlet. Or is it a confrontational interruption that the wily King chooses to ignore? Editors don’t agree: Riverside and the 2015 Bedford, based on the new Cambridge, mark the line aside, but RSC, Oxford, Norton 3 and Arden 3 do not. Whether something is said aside or to other characters on stage can affect evaluation of a character. For example, in his forthcoming edition of Edward II, Jeffrey Masten notes that in the first scene determining ‘what Gaveston speaks aside, openly, or within the hearing of all or some of the Poor Men involve

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interpretations of the brazenness of his character’; as he summarizes in his edition of The Old Law, inserting an aside ‘must always be read . . . as an interpretive act by the editor’ (Masten 2007: 1341). Even when most editors do agree that an aside is necessary, as when Shylock confesses, ‘I hate him for he is a Christian’ (MV 1.3.38), or when Richard III comments on Prince Edward, ‘So wise so young, they say, do never live long’ (3.1.79), there may be other possibilities – Buckingham’s lines about the Prince of York, ‘With what a sharp-­provided wit he reasons . . . So cunning and so young is wonderful’ (3.1.132– 35), are just ‘aside’ in Arden 3, but are, following a long tradition, ‘aside to Hastings’ in John Jowett’s Oxford 2. For a conscientious editor trying to help her reader envision the actions necessary to make sense of the plot, the greatest temptation is to impose an interpretation through her additions, and these are much more likely to be stage directions than emendations to the dialogue. Theatre directors, of course, do this all the time, but their productions are commonly understood to be both interpretive and temporary – this is Macbeth as seen from the point of view of an Vietnam-­era antiwar audience, this is Much Ado set in a twenty-­first-century Southern California household where it is unsurprising to find Beatrice and Benedick in bed. An editor, on the other hand, a bit like an old-­fashioned textual critic, is trying, she imagines, to present ‘the work’ from which successive different performances may derive and deviate. Two examples reveal the range of editorial thinking. In Othello Act 4, Scene 1, all modern editors add a direction for Othello to strike Desdemona. It might be argued that this is hardly necessary, given Lodovico’s verbal clue: ‘What! strike his wife!’ (272). However, Lodovico says this thirty lines after the incident, and a first-­time reader might not understand the reference of ‘this’ in the immediate reactions of Desdemona – ‘I have not deserved this’ – and Lodovico – ‘this would not be believed in Venice’ (240–41). On the other hand, editors uniformly hold back when the Queen in Hamlet says, ‘What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me—’ (3.4.20–21). No

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early text has a direction, and no modern editor adds one. So just what does Hamlet do? Approach menacingly? Shake her? Put his hands on her neck? Or as he promised, merely ‘speak daggers to her’ (3.2.386)? Stage and film productions which conspicuously include a bed in Gertrude’s ‘closet’, or which go so far as to have Hamlet climb on top of his mother later in the scene, point to a particular interpretation of the relationship, but seldom does an editor feel entitled to shape interpretation to that extent. In general contemporary editors are more self-­conscious about adding directions than some earlier ones were. As an example, later in the first scene of Edward II, as Gaveston enters, Edward’s lines are ‘What, Gaveston! Welcome! Kiss not my hand; / Embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee. / Why shouldst thou kneel? Knowest thou not who I am?— / Thy friend, thy self, another Gaveston’. Masten comments that a large range of embodied stage actions is indicated by this speech, but the absence of specific SDs in Q1 raises questions of interpretation: where Gaveston kneels; whether he rises or Edward raises or attempts to raise him; whether Gaveston succeeds or merely attempts to kiss Edward’s hand; whether he ‘kiss[es] not’ Edward’s hand but then something else; how reciprocally the men ‘embrace’ etc. Not adding descriptive stage directions in the context of this play might seem to endorse homophobia or erotic/affectional reserve, at the same time that precisely locating and wording these actions interprets the relationship whose erotic and political meaning and content are at the heart of the play. Similarly, in some performances Hamlet’s query to Ophelia, ‘Where’s your father’ (3.1.129), is stimulated by catching a glimpse of Polonius putting his head out. Dover Wilson supported this view by observing that Q2 places Hamlet’s entry before Polonius tells the king, ‘Withdraw, my lord’, which makes Hamlet suspicious throughout. But no editor that I know has actually added a stage direction for Polonius to be seen.

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We may end by considering endings, a favourite place for theatre directors to impress their interpretation on a play as a whole. For example, the mood of Merchant of Venice can be deeply affected by the way Shylock disappears (F includes no direction for him at all, not even an ‘exit’, after the Duke says ‘Get thee gone, but doe it’ (Qr)) and by the treatment of the silent Jessica at the conclusion of Act 5. In Michael Radford’s 2004 film she was left alone on stage, holding the turquoise ring and looking regretfully towards Venice, as all the other characters followed Portia’s instruction, ‘Let us go in’. Is Jessica, then, part of the Exeunt, or could/should the editor add ‘manet Jessica’? Similarly, in many productions of Twelfth Night Antonio remains on stage, similarly alone and excluded, as the couples, Orsino and Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, leave the stage. Is he part of the Exeunt, or is he, like the Clown who is then directed to sing, exempted? Should the direction read, as in Arden 3, Exeunt [all but Feste] or should it say Exeunt [all but Feste and Antonio]? Writing about the texts of King Lear James Shapiro finds the Quarto text ‘bleak and hopeless’, noting that it ‘even lacks the almost obligatory closing stage direction indicating that the survivors march off. The play ends instead with the frozen tableau of the dead king holding his murdered daughter’ (2015: 303). However, as John Kerrigan explains, ‘this is exactly the sort of stage direction that gets omitted . . . when playwrights are composing what used to be called “foul papers” ’ (2015: 5). In fact, in the twenty-­one Shakespeare Quartos, twelve, or slightly more than half the plays, lack a final Exeunt.10 It is not only exits that are in question but concluding actions that may affect the entire shape of a play. What should an editor do at the end of Measure for Measure, where there is no Folio stage direction for Isabella’s response to the Duke’s invitation, ‘Give me your hand, and say you will be mine’ (5.1.490). Ever since the 1980s productions have played with the possibility that she silently indicates her refusal, but editors are more cautious. The New Bedford hedges by adding no stage direction but including a pop-­up aside quoting Lamb’s

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Tales from Shakespeare, which provide the traditional view that the Duke’s earlier ‘friendly offices . . . made her with grateful joy accept the honour he offered her’. The Norton 3 has a descriptive ‘Performance Comment’ in the digital edition and a waffley summary in the print version, ‘It is not clear from Shakespeare’s text how Isabella responds to the Duke’s proposal of marriage’. Is this equity, or cowardice? Similarly, no editor adds a stage direction at the end of All’s Well, when Bertram responds to Helen’s appearance as ‘The name and not the thing’ with ‘Both, both! O, pardon’ (Gossett and Wilcox: 5.3.304). Critics are divided about whether he is begging pardon from his abandoned wife or from his offended king, to whom he will address his final lines. Almost all modern interpretations of the play are heavily influenced by this final scene, and yet there are no directions to tell us whether Helen is visibly pregnant or how Bertram responds to her. Even more notoriously ‘missing’ is a stage direction for the death of the king in Marlowe’s Edward II, and Christopher Shirley shows that the range of editorial directions responding to this ‘crucial stage omission’ corresponds to the ‘variety of critical positions on the play as a whole’ (2014: 280–81). The more one considers ‘missing’ stage directions the clearer it becomes how slippery such a category is. It is commonly bruited among editors that theatre directors would rather receive a text with no directions at all, not even the original ones, in which case there is a sense in which no direction would ever be ‘missing’. Yet readers almost certainly need some help if they are to ‘recognize and follow action that would be obvious to an audience in a theatre’. Since we have seen that we cannot expect that the ‘play in the state in which it left the author’s hand’ (Stern 2015: 373) or even the play as notated on the book-­keeper’s copy, would necessarily provide all the help necessary, the editor is left to judge when to intervene. There is no easy answer. I stick by my recommendation to ‘get all the characters on and offstage’, but after that, deciding what is missing is up to editorial discretion and unspoken assumptions about the reader for whom the edition is intended.

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Primary references Brome, Richard (1652), A Jovial Crew. Chapman, George, Ben Jonson and John Marston (1605), Eastward Hoe. Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley (1617), A Faire Quarrell. Shakespeare, William (1597), The Tragedy of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, William (1597), Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, William (1599), Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, William (1603), Hamlet. Shakespeare, William (1604), Hamlet. Shakespeare, William (1623), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.

Editions Of collected Shakespeare Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2007), William Shakespeare Complete Works, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Evans, G. Blakemore and J.J.M. Tobin, eds (1997), The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds (2015), The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., New York: W.W. Norton. McDonald, Russ and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds (2015), The Bedford Shakespeare, Boston: Bedford Books. Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor, eds (2005), The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Of single-­text Shakespeare (alphabetical by play) Everett, Barbara, ed. (1979), All’s Well That Ends Well, London: Penguin. Fraser, Russell, ed. (2003), All’s Well That Ends Well, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gossett, Suzanne and Helen Wilcox, eds (forthcoming), All’s Well That Ends Well, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

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Hunter, G.K., ed. (1959), All’s Well That Ends Well, London: Arden. Snyder, Susan, ed. (1993), All’s Well That Ends Well, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor, eds (2006), Hamlet, London: Arden. Forker, Charles R., ed. (2002), King Richard II, London: Arden. Hammond, Anthony, ed. (1981), King Richard III, London: Arden. Jowett, John, ed. (2000), King Richard III, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Siemon, James R., ed. (2009), King Richard III, London: Arden. Clark, Sandra and Pamela Mason, eds (2015), Macbeth, London: Arden. Lever, J.W., ed. (1965), Measure for Measure, London: Arden. Drakakis, John, ed. (2010), The Merchant of Venice, London: Arden. Brooks, Harold F., ed. (1979), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London: Arden. Honigmann, E.A.J., ed. (1997), Othello, London: Arden. Elam, Keir, ed. (2008), Twelfth Night, London: Arden.

Of other writers (alphabetical by editor) Gossett, Suzanne, ed. (2007), A Fair Quarrel, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gossett, Suzanne, ed. (2009), Philaster, or, Love Lies A-Bleeding, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, London: Arden Early Modern Drama. Gossett, Suzanne and David Kay, eds (2012), Eastward Ho!, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson and John Marston, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindley, David, ed. (2012), The Masque of Queens, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masten, Jeffrey, ed. (2007), The Old Law, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masten, Jeffrey, ed. (forthcoming), Edward II, Christopher Marlowe, London: Arden Early Modern Drama.

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O’Connor, Marion, ed. (2007), The Witch, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Tiffany, ed. (2014), A Jovial Crew, Richard Brome, London: Arden Early Modern Drama.

7 Editing and Directing: Mise en scène, mise en page Terri Bourus

In any historical period, the process of putting on a play begins with the size and shape of the playing space. That space – the number of square feet of the stage, the depth and width and height of the stage, its orientation to the audience, whether it has multiple vertical layers of playing space, whether the stage is raked and if so the angle of that rake, how many ways onto and off the stage and where they are located, the relationship of playing space to audience space and of both to the geography of the larger community – will shape or reshape the directions of performance, whether there is a director and designer or simply a joint-­stock company of actors dealing with a familiar or unfamiliar venue, or with two familiar venues with different shapes. Performers must always think spatially. Printers, too, must always think spatially. Putting a play into print begins with the size and shape of the page. The most important distinction between early printed texts of Shakespeare is therefore the difference between the relatively

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wide, squat pages of early Quartos and the narrow tall columns of the 1623 Folio. Book historians and editors have long recognized the cultural importance of the Folio format and the authority of Heminges and Condell as representatives of the King’s Men (Connor 2014). But the size of the Folio as a book can be misleading. It has many more pages that any of the Shakespeare Quartos, and each full Folio page contains more type, more words and punctuation marks, than a corresponding full Quarto or octavo page. That size is necessary in order to accommodate thirty-­six plays instead of one. The Folio has much more vertical space than the Quartos: not counting framing material like headlines and catchwords or titles, the Folio text block is typically 27.3 cm tall, in contrast to the 14.7 cm height of a typical Shakespeare Quarto, like the 1600 first edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, printed by Richard Bradock. But the superior height of the Folio page makes little difference to the substance of the text. It does not constrain or liberate the actions of a compositor.1 Much more important than height, in setting a play text, is width. The 1623 Folio of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, unlike the 1616 Folio of The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, is set in double columns.2 This means that although the 1623 Folio page is two columns wide – which allows it to fit more type on a page than any of the Shakespeare Quartos – the actual text block of the Shakespeare Folio is only the width of a single column, or 8.3 cm wide. The text block of the 1600 Quarto of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is exactly the same width: 8.3 cm. The difference is that the Quarto has much more unused blank space on either side of the text block. The narrowness of the Folio column and the Quarto text block has two significant effects on Shakespeare’s texts. First, and most obviously, it affects the verse. As editors and bibliographers have long been aware, many of Shakespeare’s blank verse lines will not fit on a single type line of the narrow Folio column. The Folio therefore often splits a single verse line into two type lines. This is especially likely to happen if a

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new speech (with indented speech prefix) begins with a complete iambic pentameter line. Different compositors seem to deal with this recurring mechanical problem in different ways: sometimes the Folio simply splits one long verse line into two shorter lines, but sometimes a single long verse line results in a cascade of mislineation, as the compositor begins to break verse lines into syntactical units that fit onto type lines. These mislineations are usually easy enough to correct, in part because it is clear why they happen, and in part because we have a pretty good idea of what Shakespeare’s verse looks like when it is not constrained by a narrow text-­block. These mislineations in the Folio were almost all corrected by eighteenth-­century editors, and continue to be corrected in twenty-­first-century editions.

Paratext But the more significant and enduring problem created by a narrow text-­block is stage directions. Stage directions are much less predictable than blank verse. And stage directions often, in their original context, required the full width of a manuscript page, because they were, literally, ‘paratext’: that is, beside-­the-text. This literal paratextuality is visible in surviving playhouse manuscripts. For instance, on fol.7b of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore (photographically reproduced in Wilson and Brown 1961: xlix), the stage direction ‘Enter A messenger’ is written in the blank space to the right of the text block, and boxed to make it more conspicuous; this placement is visible in the Malone Society transcript (Add.II, line 85), but not in a modern edition (Bate and Rasmussen 2013: 2.3.18.1). Likewise, on fol.3v of Sr Iohn Van Olden Barnavelt (photographically reproduced in Howard-Hill 1980: xviii), the direction ‘Enter Bredero, | Vandort | Officers.’ is written in the blank space to the right of the text block, in larger lettering: the position, lettering, and darker ink make it more visible than anything else on the page. But in the Malone

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Society transcript (Howard-Hill 1980: TLN 284–86) the direction is placed on the right, but not physically separated from the text block; indeed, most of it is not as far to the right as line 281, just above it. In the standard Cambridge edition of the play in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, the direction is simply tucked into the text block, like most entrance directions in the Shakespeare Folio, and all entrance directions in conventional modern editions of early modern drama (Bowers 1992: 1.2.46). Sometimes stage directions are placed to the left of the text block: in the untitled 1611 King’s Men manuscript of a play now usually called The Second Maiden’s Tragedy or The Lady’s Tragedy (British Library MS Lansdowne 807), on fol. 55b (photographically reproduced in Greg 1909: xix), the stage directions ‘Enter Nobles’ and ‘Enter Heluetius’ and ‘florish’ are all placed to the left of the column of speech prefixes, and that arrangement is preserved in the Malone Society transcript. But in the standard Oxford edition of Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works, these directions are instead tucked into the text block, like most modern stage directions (Briggs 2007: 904). Only one early printed text of Shakespeare’s plays preserves this literal marginality of playhouse directions. In the 1634 Quarto of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, the text block is the same width as the Folio column or the Midsummer Night’s Dream Quarto: 8.3 cm. But seven directions are placed to the left of the text block, in the 3.2 cm of normally blank space between the text-­block and the edge of the untrimmed page (Fletcher and Shakespeare 1634: C3v, C4v, E4v, G1v, G2v, G3v, H1v), and one in the 3 cm normally blank space to the right of the text block (F2r); all these directions are printed in small roman type. Notably, the seven on the left occur on versos, and the one on the right appears on a recto, so the right–left positioning reflects the layout of the printed Quarto, not necessarily that of the printer’s manuscript copy. But there is every reason to believe that the marginality itself reflects a manuscript, similar to Edward Knight’s transcripts of The Honest Man’s Fortune and Believe as You

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List. However, this unusual printing is limited to the first three Acts of the play (or the first 57 per cent of the pages). The two compositors ‘presumably began by setting the directions as they found them in their copy, but at some point a decision was made to integrate the remaining directions into the body of the text’ (Proudfoot and Rasmussen 2005: xii). Thus, only a little over one half of a single printed Shakespeare Quarto preserves some of the physical marginality that was common in playhouse manuscripts. The decision ‘to integrate . . . directions into the body of the text’ is conspicuous in The Two Noble Kinsmen, because it happened in the middle of typesetting; but such a decision must have been made, for many other printed plays, before typesetting even began. Because there was no such wealth of blank space available in the Folio column, the decision ‘to integrate’ was made simultaneously with the decision to adopt a two-­column format. That single global decision to move marginal directions into the main body of the text forced individual compositors to make hundreds of local decisions about exactly where, in the centre, to place something originally in the margin, and often they placed such directions a line above or a line below what most editors and directors would consider the ‘correct’ location. Undoubtedly, there were more marginal directions in the lost manuscripts than there are in the extant printed texts. And the marginality of stage directions is directly related to their authority. Stage directions in the margin are often written in a different hand and with a different ink than the hand and ink used for the main body of the text. Consequently, when our only early surviving text of a play is an early printed edition, we cannot be certain of whether the hand and ink that wrote the stage directions were authorial. The original inks in the manuscript have been replaced with printer’s ink, the original hands of the manuscript have been replaced with compositorial hands. And what was literally in the margin of the manuscript may be instead placed in the centre of a printed Quarto or Folio page. In the Folio, the double-­column format leaves very

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little marginal space for stage directions (and none for stage directions outside the text block). As a result, compositors must have routinely moved some stage directions in their copy out of the margin and into the main body of the column. Thus, printing eliminates much of the evidence that a manuscript might give us, and no amount of analytical bibliography or book history will restore those particularities of ink, handwriting, and placement. Moreover, because stage directions are usually formulaic, usually short, and usually disproportionately consist of character names, we can seldom identify any lexical evidence which would establish who wrote a stage direction, or whether it was written at the same time as the dialogue, even when we can prove who wrote the surrounding dialogue. There are some exceptions to this: Shakespeare’s preference for ‘aloft’ rather than ‘above’ (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 4), Thomas Middleton’s unusual ambiguous formula ‘Enter X meeting Y’ (Holdsworth 2012; Taylor 2014), and Arden of Faversham’s unique interlocking systematic combination of entrance directions that begin with ‘Here’ and other directions that begin with ‘Then’ (Bourus and Taylor 2017). But most stage directions in most printed play texts are, effectively, anonymous. This combination of marginality and anonymity will seem symbolically appropriate to many people. If we regard Shakespeare as a ‘literary dramatist’, and if we are primarily interested in the words that he gave to his characters, then the spoken words are primary, and the stage directions are tedious scribbling in the margin of a masterpiece. Or, if we are a modern director, we may regard stage directions as trespassing on our own artistic freedom to control the visual and temporal aspects of a play or film. Original or editorial stage directions are, from that perspective, equally superfluous, and equally annoying. In order to free our own imaginations, as readers or theatre artists, we need to scrub our brains and our texts clean of all those previous, uninspired directives about who enters when, who does what, what they are wearing or carrying, what visual universe they inhabit.

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However, I do not know of any play manuscript from the early English commercial theatres that contains no stage directions. So the material and historical evidence does not give us an excuse for eliminating, or ignoring, all stage directions. Likewise, I do not know of any such manuscript that contains no stage directions in the same hand and ink as the main body of the text. Many stage directions in our early texts of Shakespeare are therefore almost certainly Shakespeare’s own instructions for performance. But other stage directions in those same texts are almost certainly marginal annotations by other people who read the manuscript and annotated it for performance, or annotated it for the convenience of early readers or perhaps patrons.

Editing paratext This is a messy situation, which does not lend itself to comfortingly tidy theories. Almost any stage direction in our earliest texts may be authorial original text, or non-­authorial paratext. But that confusion about the agency behind stage directions in our earliest extant documents has been compounded by modern editions. Since at least 1623, editors of printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays have treated stage directions differently than the text to be spoken. The Folio text of The Merchant of Venice, for instance, is in most respects simply a reprint of the earlier Quarto text, and there is no clear evidence that its dialogue reflects consultation of a supplementary manuscript source. But the stage directions have, in a few places, been changed in ways that seem to reflect theatrical practice (for instance, the added Folio ‘Cornets’ after 2.1.46 is unlikely to have been made up by a compositor).3 However, the Folio text of Merchant does not distinguish its few added directions from its many inherited directions: only by collating the earliest editions can we identify which directions enter at which stage of the play’s history in print. The Folio’s sporadic addition of new directions became a policy

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of systematic addition and standardization with Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition, and such standardization has been a routine part of editorial practice in the three centuries since Rowe. The 1986 Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works placed some editorial stage directions (which the editors considered to be conjectural or speculative) in ‘half brackets’, but not others (which they considered to be clearly necessary); that policy remained in the second edition (Wells and Taylor 1986, 2005). Without consulting the lists of original stage directions scattered throughout the Wells-Taylor Textual Companion (1987) – and not available at all for Edward III or Sir Thomas More, added in 2005 – most readers of the plays in the old Oxford edition cannot distinguish what the editors added from what the earliest document supplied. Even hardy souls who check the Textual Companion will usually find no explanation of why some directions get half-­brackets, and others do not; alterations considered ‘necessary’ by that edition do not seem necessary to everyone. Whatever the other merits of the old Oxford Shakespeare as an innovative scholarly edition, its treatment of stage directions is profoundly confusing. In a scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the treatment of stage directions should not be messy. It should be very clear what is retrospective editorial annotation, and what belongs to an early document. That distinction is usually signalled by the use of square brackets, surrounding added or changed material. In most cases, that editorial convention is entirely satisfactory. But it does not solve all editorial problems. For instance, it does not easily distinguish between stage directions added by modern editors and stage directions added (or altered) by another early modern document. In the 1594 Quarto first edition of Titus Andronicus, the action runs in a single continuous scene for over six hundred lines, from the initial stage direction for the entrance of the Tribunes and Senators aloft (Shakespeare 1594: A3r) to the ‘Exeunt’ of Aaron, Demetrius and Chiron after they have decided on a plan to rape Lavinia (D1r). But in the Folio this long scene is broken in two. Just before Aaron’s first speech, a soliloquy, the Quarto

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calls for a general ‘Exeunt’, but specifies ‘manet Moore’ (C2v). In the Folio, the same ‘Exeunt’ (cc6; TLN 552) is followed by ‘Actus Secunda’ (boxed), then the stage direction: Flourish.  Enter Aaron alone. There are two things to notice about this added Folio direction. First, the blank space between the music direction and the entrance suggests that the compositor is trying to replicate the use of marginal space in the manuscript. Second, more importantly, editors here confront two different early modern stagings. We can solve this problem by regarding the Folio as an entirely different version of the play, as the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare does (Greenblatt et al. 2015). Or we can solve the problem by editing one version of the play (as almost all other editors since 1623 have done). But at this particular juncture, readers and performers have to choose – and both of these choices were available to early modern readers, and both of them seem to have been acted in early modern theatres. Neither set of competing stage directions here is the conjecture of a modern editor, and neither should be square-­bracketed, or otherwise treated as though it were just a guess. Moreover, square brackets are almost always limited to verbal content. Certainly, editors should put into square brackets stage directions that they have added or emended. But should they also square-­bracket stage directions like those in The Two Noble Kinsmen, or Sir Thomas More, when they move them from the margin to the centre of the text block? The words have not changed, but the space has. I do not know of any edition that square-­brackets such re-­positioning of stage directions – or any edition that calls attention to the fact that it is, editorially, closing up the blank space between ‘Flourish’ and ‘Enter Aaron alone’. Although directors and compositors think spatially, editors seldom do. In part, this may reflect their lack of control over textual space. Most Shakespeare editors are commissioned to supply text for a book, or a series, with a spatial design already

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determined by the publisher. Nevertheless, there are some conspicuous exceptions. The ‘RSC Edition’ prints some stage directions, which it describes as ‘directorial interventions’, in the right margin in a different typeface. This is a creative and interesting use of the editorial mise-­en-page, which in some ways is obviously parallel to the treatment of stage directions in early modern manuscripts; the distinction between directorial and editorial stage directions is also potentially valuable. However, in the RSC Complete Works marginal ‘directorial’ directions are distinguished, visually, from ‘Folio-­ style directions (either original or supplied)’ (Bate and Rasmussen 2007: lx). That is, although all the marginal directions are editorial, some of the centred directions are also editorial. Moreover, Bate and Rasmussen admit that ‘There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind’ (lx). The Bate-Rasmussen system is as intellectually messy and unsatisfactory as the Wells-Taylor approach. None of these editors is stupid or careless. In the treatment of stage directions, there has always been a tension between the needs of readers, the needs of theatre practitioners and the limits of historical evidence. Drama is a story-­telling art form, and the actions of characters help to tell the story. This is as true of literary drama, written and printed to be read, as it is of a script specifically written for commercial performance. Editors are therefore caught between the demand for authenticity (preserving only those directions present in the most reliable early texts) and the demands of legibility (making the story intelligible for readers). With the passage of time, as Shakespeare’s language and his theatrical conventions have become less familiar to most readers, as verse has been replaced by prose and drama by the novel, Shakespeare’s stories have become harder for ordinary readers to follow. This creates an increasing pressure to clarify the action by supplying additional, ‘directive’ or ‘Folio-­like’ stage directions. That pressure prompted John Dover Wilson to write a paragraph-­ long opening stage direction for the second scene of Antony and Cleopatra:

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The same [i.e, ‘Alexandria: A room in Cleopatra’s palace’]; some hours later. Servants bearing dishes pass to and from a room beyond, whence a sound of feasting is heard. Presently enter from the feast ENOBARBUS and three other Romans talking with a Soothsayer; and, a little after, Cleopatra’s attendants CHARMIAN , IRAS , MARDIAN THE EUNUCH , and ALEXAS . (Wilson 1950: 5) Dover Wilson was one of the most important Shakespeare editors and textual scholars of the twentieth century. But the bibliographical knowledge and disciplinary skills that make a good editor (who can often work well, or even best, in solitude) are not necessarily the same skills and creative knowledge that make a good director (who never works in isolation). None of us would want to attend a production of Hamlet directed by Fredson Bowers, or base an argument about early modern staging on Julie Taymor’s script of The Tempest.

Alternative paratext How, then, can an editor keep her commitment to historical authenticity while also satisfying the demands of modern readers for intelligible story-­telling? For instance, consider Antony and Cleopatra, which survives in only one substantive early text, the posthumous 1623 Folio. That edition includes these two consecutive type lines: Cleo.  My Sallad dayes, When I was greene in iudgement, cold in blood (TLN 608–09) There is no stage direction here in the Folio, and the editorial tradition does not supply one. Nevertheless, ‘my salad days’

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has become a famous phrase. After all, this is a moment in which Cleopatra reflects on her own past; this is part of her backstory, and how she differentiates her mature identity from her ingénue youth. Historically, this passage has often been a key moment in theatrical interpretations of Cleopatra. That is something that most readers, encountering the play for the first time, will not know unless an editor tells them. What is an editor (as opposed to a playwright or a director) to do? This is the fundamental question raised by the unstable relationship between editing and directing. Just as individual performances are shaped by the particulars of a playing space, so individual editorial decisions are shaped by the space of the page. Different page-­designs create different editorial options. Just as the Folio’s global decision to impose a double-­column format limited the options of compositors, so a global decision by the publisher or the general editors or the two in combination about the design of a particular modern edition of Shakespeare will affect the options available to an individual editor. But all editorial options, in a case like this, should be understood as decisions about paratext. In my opinion, we cannot and should not solve the problems created by this moment in Antony and Cleopatra with the particular form of paratext that we call ‘stage directions’. But we can provide an alternative kind of paratext, something that is clearly not a stage direction. My own annotation of this passage for the Modern Critical Edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare (Bourus 2016: 2586) records, Judi Dench conveyed a thoughtful, sad acknowledgment of passing years; Vanessa Redgrave, after a pause and comic turn of the head, expressed embarrassed disdain at the memory of her own immaturity. Or consider another famous moment in the role of Cleopatra: the scene when the messenger from Rome tries to flatter or pacify Cleopatra by describing Antony’s new wife Octavia in

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entirely negative terms. He caps this anti-­encomium by reporting Octavia’s age. Again, the Folio gives us two type lines: Mes.  And I do thinke she’s thirtie. Cle.  Bear’st thou her face in mind? Is’t long or round? (TLN 1659–60) Notably, in all the previous exchanges in this scene Cleopatra, and sometimes also her women, respond triumphantly to the details that the Messenger supplies, repeat his words, amplifying them, commenting on them, sometimes even interrupting him to pounce on a negative detail. Here alone, Cleopatra and her women completely ignore what the messenger says. We know that the actor playing Cleopatra would have memorized the character’s lines using a player’s part, a document which included the last few words of the cue; here, the cue must have included the word ‘thirty’, and probably the two words ‘she’s thirty’. So the actor, from the very beginning of memorizing and preparing the role, would have recognized that Cleopatra was conspicuously ignoring her cue (because her question has nothing to do with age). There is no stage direction in the Folio; we do not know, we will never know, exactly how the original actor performed that space between the messenger’s cue and the Queen’s reply. But I do think that readers of a modern edition should be alerted to the fact that something happens on stage in that interval. Here is my own commentary note on that passage: she’s thirty Cleopatra does not verbally reply to this news, but in performance the actor always reacts physically in some way. Sarah Siddons ‘drew herself up to a most imperial and queen-­like dignity.’ Vanessa Redgrave’s 1986 Cleopatra gave ‘her attendants a deadly look when she hears her rival is only 30, mocking her own jealousy.’ See the description of Judi Dench’s performance in the introduction.

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My introduction (Bourus 2016: 2569), cross-­referenced here, quotes a passage by Stanley Wells, describing Dench’s Cleopatra in the 1987 National Theatre production directed by Peter Hall; here is the relevant sentence: As she questioned the messenger about Octavia, her self-­ confidence grew until, as he said ‘I do think she’s thirty’, the smile froze on her face and, gathering her skirts, she swirled abruptly around, ran towards the door, and almost left the stage. (Wells 2015: 230) Now, editors might disagree about whether any of this information about physical action on stage in these two moments should be included at all in a critical edition of the play; or an editor might choose to record details from different productions. The 2007 Bate-Rasmussen RSC edition of Shakespeare’s complete works does not have a note on the staging of either passage, and neither does the 2015 Norton edition. But we would all agree that this kind of information should not be included in the text of the play. Judi Dench’s interpretation of the moment was brilliant, but no editor would or should add a stage direction: MESSENGER

  And I do think she’s thirty. Cleopatra gathers her skirts, swirls abruptly around, runs toward the door, and almost exits, before turning back and addressing the messenger CLEOPATRA

  Bear’st thou her face in mind? is’t long or round? This information about staging belongs to the paratext, and that editorial paratext needs to be clearly separated from the text-­block, and identified as a form of scholarly annotation.

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What form that scholarly annotation takes depends in part on the larger design of the page within a modern edition. For instance, volumes in the Cambridge University Press ‘Shakespeare in Production’ series devote their introductions and their on-­the-page commentary entirely to performance history. They do not supply other kinds of historical, linguistic, and textual commentary common in other kinds of edition. This is a perfectly acceptable, scholarly and useful way to deal with issues like these. Other editions, like the Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare, or the New Cambridge Shakespeare series, or the individual volumes in the Oxford ‘Worlds Classics’ series, mix performance notes with other kinds of commentary at the bottom of the page. Again, this is a useful, scholarly system for editions of individual works, but inevitably it gives less space for performance issues, because so many other issues also have to be addressed in the same limited paratextual space. Printed editions of the ‘Complete Works’ (as opposed to digital editions) present editors with a different set of spatial problems, created by the form of the codex and the limits of binding technology. In a printed book, there simply is not enough space at the bottom of the page to provide, for the Complete Works, the level of annotation common in recent scholarly editions of individual works. Three recent editions of the Complete Works have tried to solve this problem by combining notes at the bottom of the page with innovations in the paratextual editorial use of the margin. All three abandon the double-­column format that has been common from the 1623 Folio to the 2005 Oxford Shakespeare. In the 2007 RSC Shakespeare, the marginal space is used for optional stage directions. In the Third Edition of the Norton Shakespeare (2015), the marginal space is used for brief glosses of individual words or phrases, and the foot of the page for longer notes, including anachronistic ‘Location’ notes at the beginning of each scene and a handful of notes, in each play, labelled ‘Performance Comment’. In the 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare, the bottom of the page is used for commentary notes, and the

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margin for ‘Performance Notes’. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these three systems, and none of them provides the scale of theatrical paratext that can be found in some recent editions of individual plays. The New Oxford Shakespeare performance notes differ from what is found in the RSC edition or the new Norton edition, but they also differ from traditional stage histories. Whether the New Oxford Shakespeare system is better than previous editorial treatments of staging I leave future scholars, directors, critics and teachers to decide for themselves. What I can do is point out some elements of the structure of my own notes, quoted above about the performance of Cleopatra. Everything that I have quoted here, about the performances of Sarah Siddons, Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, is specific and physical, and would have been possible in the first performances of the play at the Globe Theatre in the first decade of the seventeenth century. None of these interpretations contradicts in any way what we know about early modern stages or early modern performers. None of these interpretations contradicts anything in the text itself. None of them requires us to alter or cut anything in the original dialogue. That is not true of many details of the stage history of Antony and Cleopatra recorded by Richard Madelaine (1998), or in any stage history of a Shakespeare play. So, although the performance information I supply in my own notes is anachronistic, in that the details come from performances long after Shakespeare’s death, this information about the physical interpretation of the play in the theatre is compatible with the original text. Although these stage Cleopatras were all adult actresses, their actions could have been performed just as easily by a Jacobean adolescent male actor. The actions described in these notes are not structurally or intrinsically anachronistic. Moreover, in both cases I have identified, in these notes, more than one way of performing the scene. That is, I am not identifying any interpretation of either of these moments as necessary, or as preferable to another. The purpose of the note is instead to alert readers to specific possibilities, and to the

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interpretive freedom and creativity of the actor. I am not telling readers, or actors, how the moment should be performed, but instead pointing to some specific examples of how it has been performed, historically, and all those examples are compatible with how it could have been performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Although I think that every Shakespeare editor, and every editorial theorist, would agree that this kind of information belongs to the editorial paratext, and not to the text-­block itself, there are other, similar cases where anachronistic staging options have been imposed on Shakespeare’s dialogue. Such editorial anachronisms have been particularly damaging to Antony and Cleopatra. We know, for instance, that the act divisions supplied in seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century dramatic texts were, in fact, stage directions: they indicated a break in the performance, a break usually filled with instrumental or vocal music, and after 1660 also almost always indicating a change of theatrical scenery connected to a change in the visual location of the action.4 We also know that there are no such act divisions in any seventeenth-­century text of Antony and Cleopatra.

Act and scene divisions Although the 1623 Folio text of Antony and Cleopatra contains enough error to warrant sustained editorial scrutiny, careful emendation and conjecture, in one crucial respect the 1623 text is far more reliable than any modern edition. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the original manuscript of the play from which the Folio was printed contained act divisions, which were all accidentally omitted by the compositors in Jaggard’s printing house, or deliberately removed by a publisher or editor. The most radical editorial intervention in the history of this play was the interpolation, by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, of a five-­act structure, and of scenic locations within those five acts. All modern editions of Shakespeare’s play perpetuate the anachronistic act divisions

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interpolated into the play more than a century after it was first written and performed. This is still true in the new Norton edition (Greenblatt et al. 2015), and even true of the Internet Shakespeare edition, which interpolates those divisions into its online ‘transcript’ of the 1623 text. Like all the early Quartos published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, the Folio contains no such structural divisions in Antony and Cleopatra, and the play must have been written before the King’s Men began regular performances at the indoor Blackfriars theatre, where they first introduced regular act intervals. Harley Granville-Barker’s pioneering defence of the play’s structural artistry (1946) shows how profoundly act-­divisions and scene locations widen the gap between reading and performing the play, and how seriously those editorial interpolations have misled performers. In Peter Brook’s 1978 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, his fast-­paced, virtually uncut text abandoned the eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century tradition of spectacular sets, and displayed ‘the play’s architecture but none of its archaeology’ (Billington 1979). Subsequent productions have been more accepting than Brook of the play’s sexuality, playfulness, charisma and carefully chosen bursts of visual splendour, but (like Brook) in various ways they have all also recognized the need for speed, simplicity and clarity. It is time for editors to abandon the eighteenth-­century neo-­classical conventions of act divisions and scene locations. The traditional act-­scene divisions, which are the basis for centuries of commentary on the play, are retained in the margin of my New Oxford Shakespeare text of Antony and Cleopatra for the convenience of modern readers, but they are visually subordinated to continuous scene numbers (spatially and through a smaller type size), and the scene numbers are the basis for cross-­references. Moreover, the act divisions are explicitly rejected in my performance notes. For instance, at the end of the fifth scene of Antony and Cleopatra, I have a marginal note adjacent to the stage direction ‘Exeunt’:

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Exeunt Modern editions anachronistically mark this as the end of Act I; but the uninterrupted stage action moves immediately to the next entrance. This marginal note is followed by another one, adjacent to the immediately subsequent entrance direction, and in particular the Folio phrase: in warlike manner This phrase is usually interpreted to mean that the men who enter here are armored, armed, and muscled, and perhaps accompanied with martial music – in striking contrast to the previous scene with Cleopatra and her women. In other words, I do not simply remove the anachronistic act division from the text itself; I also provide performance notes to emphasize the importance of narrative, theatrical and interpretive continuity. I have similar marginal notes on either side of the traditional editorial division between the end of Scene 12 and the beginning of Scene 13: Exeunt . . . Enter Eighteenth-­century editors anachronisti­ cally inserted an interval here between Acts Two and Three, but the action is continuous: the disorganized, drunken, cacophonous exits from the banquet on Pompey’s galley contrast with the military discipline of the immediately following entrance. Likewise, at what is traditionally labelled the beginning of Act 4: Enter Caesar . . . army Eighteenth-­century editors placed an anachronistic act-­break before this scene, but the action is continuous, and this confident, disciplined group entrance contrasts with the isolated, despairing exit of Enobarbus that immediately precedes it. As I have said, instead of these anachronistic act divisions I indicate only a succession of scene divisions. Of course, it might

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be objected that those scene divisions and scene numbers are also editorial interventions. But the scene divisions do reflect something that was actually a part of early modern performance practice, and that is present in early modern theatrical documents, like the plots or plats that seem to be backstage documents that help to regulate the entrance of actors and the props they carried with them. The division between one scene and another is indicated by a clearing of the stage: an exit or exeunt of all the characters present on stage, followed by an entrance of one or more new characters. The scene divisions are thus simply numbers that reflect a particular sequence of action in two successive stage directions in the early documents. They do not reflect changes of locale, but changes in the spatial disposition of actors on the stage. Scenes, in this sense, are units of action, units of movement in theatrical space. Moreover, scenes are units of action recognized in early modern performance and early modern playwriting. They differ from the division by theatrical ‘beats’, which are indicated in the RSC edition (Bate and Rasmussen 2007). Such ‘beats’ are a familiar part of modern theatrical vocabulary, and are important to some theatre theorists and some performance practice. But they were never a part of my own experience as a professional performer in the American theatre, and theorists and practitioners disagree about the exact definition of a beat. But such differences should not obscure the central historical fact that the ‘beat’ was not a unit of performance recognized in the early modern theatre, or reflected in any surviving documents from those theatres. The RSC edition’s ‘beat divisions’ are as anachronistic as Rowe’s act divisions. Scene divisions divide Shakespeare’s plays into recognizable structural units of performance, which were also, we know, sometimes units of authorial composition and collaboration. But although we mark and number the succession of scenes, we do not link those numbers to particular fictional locales, and our performance notes instead stress the continuity or contrast created by such linked pairs of original exit and

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entrance directions. For instance, at the beginning of the eleventh scene in Antony and Cleopatra, I have a marginal note on the musical cues in the opening entrance direction: Flourish . . . marching Martial trumpet blasts and the drumming that accompanies and regulates the famously well-­organized Roman military march. The strong Roman entrance contrasts with the preceding exit of the ranting, fainting Cleopatra and her women. Likewise, here’s a performance note on the exit of Octavia at the end of Scene 14, and the immediately following entrance of Cleopatra at the beginning of Scene 15: Octavia . . . Cleopatra The exit of Octavia overlaps with the entrance of Cleopatra, usually with a strong sense of contrast between the two women. Or, again, a note on the end of Scene 15 and the beginning of Scene 16: Exeunt. / Enter Once again, Cleopatra and Octavia virtually overlap on stage, with Antony between them. In all these examples, I keep the paratext of act and scene divisions literally marginalized, in the margin of the text. These notes also focus on movement, on visual and aural contrast and interaction, rather than anachronistic fictional locations and anachronistic breaks in continuity. Most editors do not consider these act or scene divisions very important, editorially: they are regarded simply as conveniences of reference, as paratext that is added but is treated as though it were not an emendation of the copytext. But in other cases, editors have intervened to alter the text itself, unnecessarily, on the basis of their assumptions about performance. For instance, let’s go back to the beginning of the second scene in Antony and Cleoaptra, where Dover Wilson

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introduced his Shavian paragraph-­long narrative in place of the Folio stage direction: Enter Enobarbus, Lamprius, a Southsayer, Rannius, Lucilli -us , Charmian , Iras , Mardian the Eunuch , and Alexas . (TLN 77–79) Three of the names in this stage direction do not appear anywhere else in the Folio text, and they are often assumed to be what editors call ‘ghost characters’; indeed, they are sometimes cited as evidence that the Folio text of Antony and Cleopatra was printed from what twentieth-­century editors and bibliographers called ‘foul papers’ (an author’s draft manuscript, not yet finalized or prepared for performance). That whole category of manuscript has been attacked as a fiction by Paul Werstine (2013), and we do not recognize ‘foul papers’ in the New Oxford Shakespeare. But it is easier to avoid the use of the phrase or the concept of foul papers than to deal with the specific issues of ‘ghost characters’. Since the early eighteenth century, such characters have been pruned from Shakespeare’s texts by his editors. So the question for twenty-­first-century editors of Shakespeare is: do we or do we not delete ghost characters from stage directions? I do not delete them from Antony and Cleopatra. Here are my performance notes on the opening stage direction of Scene 2: Enter They may all enter together, or from separate directions (one male Roman group, one primarily female Egyptian group). Lamprius . . . Rannius, Lucillius These characters never speak, and are usually deleted by editors; in performance they can simply be Roman men – as their names clearly indicate – to balance the Egyptian women. Unlike the entourage of Octavius, Antony’s entourage is unstable: the Roman men who surround him repeatedly change.

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Wilson’s stage direction had reduced the three proper names to the generic ‘three other Romans’, so in a way my own note reaches the same conclusion as his stage direction. But what Wilson put in the text block, I put in the editorial paratext. And I retain the proper names. They matter to actors, they matter to readers: they suggest individuals, rather than a generic crowd. Even Shakespeare’s bit parts can surprise us, and when we read these three names we do not know whether they will appear again, whether they will speak, whether they will be important to the story. Few readers new to Shakespeare will know, at this point, whether Enobarbus is any more important than the other Romans. This performance note on Lamprius, Rannius and Lucillius is related to another note on another ‘ghost character’, who is specifically identified in the entrance direction to Scene 24. Agrippa He says nothing, and is often cut from this and several other scenes, but his presence alongside Caesar throughout the play creates a visible emblem of loyalty and continuity (in contrast to Enobarbus and other supporters of Antony). Ghosts are choices. Do we accept their presence, and try to make sense of them? Or do we evict them from the text, exorcise them, deny their existence? Unlike the eighteenth-­century act divisions, which continue to haunt our texts, the so-­called ‘ghost characters’ of Agrippa, Lamprius, Rannius and Lucillius are present in the only documents that have any claim to the authority of Shakespeare. It seems to me, as a director and an editor, more sensible to find a meaning in the stage directions we have. But I also hesitate to impose my own directorial impulses. So these performance notes acknowledge the choices that they reject, even in the act of rejecting them.

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Conclusion Shakespeare has appealed to so many of us, as readers and as theatre artists, in part because he gives us so many choices. Sometimes those choices are explicit: do we accept the Quarto or the Folio directions for the stage action immediately before Aaron’s first speech? Sometimes they are implicit: how do we fill the gap between the Messenger’s speech and Cleopatra’s reply? Is there a significance to the presence in a stage direction of a character who does not speak and is not specifically addressed? I do not imagine that the choices that I would make, as a director or an editor, will satisfy all readers or all spectators. But although a director has to choose, an editor need not. We can use the space around the text-­block to ask questions and offer possibilities. We can accept our own marginality.

Primary references Fletcher, John and William Shakespeare (1634), The Two Noble Kinsmen. [Peele, George and William Shakespeare] (1594), Titus Andronicus.

Editions Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2013), William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2007), William Shakespeare: Complete Works, New York: Modern Library. Bourus, Terri, ed. (2016), Antony and Cleopatra, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, gen. eds Taylor et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourus, Terri and Gary Taylor, eds (2017), Arden of Faversham, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Critical Reference Edition, gen. eds Taylor et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bowers, Fredson, ed. (1992), The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. VIII, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briggs, Julia, ed. (2007), The Lady’s Tragedy, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Clarendon. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., gen. eds (2015), The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition, New York: W.W. Norton. Greg, W.W., ed. (1909), The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 1611, Oxford: Malone Society. Hinman, Charlton, ed. (1968), The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, New York: W.W. Norton. Howard-Hill, T. H., ed. (1980), Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, Oxford: Malone Society. Madelaine, Richard, ed. (1998), Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare in Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Proudfoot, G.R. and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2005), The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1634, Oxford: Malone Society. Taylor, Gary et al., gen. eds (2016), The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor, gen. eds (1986), William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, Oxford: Clarendon. Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor, gen. eds (2005), William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon. Wilson, F.P. and Arthur Brown, eds (1961), The Book of Sir Thomas More, rev. ed., Oxford: Malone Society. Wilson, John Dover, ed. (1950), Antony and Cleopatra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART FOUR

Space

8 ‘By indirections find directions out’: Unpicking Early Modern Stage Directions Martin White

For many years, my teaching and research, my writing and my practice have focused on neglected early modern plays (especially those originally performed indoors) that have little or no place in the repertoire of the professional theatre or the current curricula of universities. In the course of this work I have repeatedly come across aspects of staging that, as a result of not being considered in practical terms, have to my mind been misinterpreted or overlooked or which I am not confident I understand. So in this essay I want to explore some stage directions that I hope will illustrate my point. In trying to unpick these directions I shall draw on my own practice-­led research and full productions I have directed at the University of Bristol, and especially on my experiences with a

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reconstruction of a candle-­lit indoor theatre, first at Bristol1 and more recently at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) that opened in January 2014.

Act breaks Gary Taylor has observed that whereas few plays written for the adult playing companies before 1607 had act divisions, ‘well over half of the plays published between 1609 and 1616’ contain them, and that every one of the 245 extant plays written for those companies between 1616 and 1642 was divided into five acts (1993: 7). In Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611), ‘Act’ is defined as a ‘Pause in a Comedy or Tragedy’ – in other words, not a unit of a play’s action but rather the break between those units.2 Taylor, however, shrewdly queries why editors and critics regularly pay attention to pauses and silences in the dialogue, yet at the same time frequently overlook the impact of these breaks in the overall action of the play, given that they are significant ‘elements of dramatic meaning, which we ignore to our cost’ (50). Taylor describes the break as coming when ‘all the characters collectively stop acting and speaking, and the play itself hesitates’ (3), at which point audience members could stretch their legs and chat about the play and so relieve ‘the tension between [their] attention and their corporeality’ (Holland 2001: 129). Ben Jonson dramatized these ‘exchanges of authority over the text between audience and production’ (Holland 2001: 129) in the intervals of The Magnetic Lady (Blackfriars, 1632)3 as two hyper-­critical spectators, Damplay and Probee, loudly debate what they see as the play’s many shortcomings. While the audience relaxed, the theatre’s musicians might have played or perhaps provided the accompaniment to some entr’acte entertainment, until by the 1630s ‘music, song, the spoken word and country dance were a part of the afternoon’s entertainment featured in between the acts of the play’ (Clegg and Skeaping 2014: 48).

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But there were also occasions when the play did not hesitate with the arrival of the act break, but the fiction of the play continued and the interval became, in effect, part of the play. In Philip Massinger’s and Nathan Field’s 1632 tragedy, The Fatal Dowry (Blackfriars, c.1632), a stage direction at the end of Act 2 reads ‘Hoboyes [oboes]. Here a passage over the Stage, while the Act is playing, for the Marriage of CHARLOIS with BEAUMELLE, &c’.’4 While this clearly indicates that there was music to accompany it, the dumb show was more important because it advanced the story. In Massinger’s solo comedy, The City Madam (Blackfriars, 1632), the direction at the end of the fourth act – ‘Whilst the Act plays’ – again refers to music, but indicates that the interval also allowed the stage-­keepers to set out ‘the Footstep, little Table, and Arras hung up for the Musicians.’ But what is almost always either ignored or at best underestimated in discussions of interval activity, on and off stage, is the issue of the management of the indoor playhouse’s most distinctive feature – its lighting. Taylor recognizes the need for the candles to be trimmed, and sees the act-­intervals as providing ‘a convenient opportunity’ to do so (31). But I see it the other way round: that it was the need to manage the lighting that required breaks in the action, and from that all other uses of the intervals followed. It seems that usually the candles were lit for the start of the play, but there are instances where the process is part of the action, such as the opening of John Marston’s What You Will (Paul’s Playhouse, c. 1601): Before the music sounds for the Act: Enter Atticus , & Phylomuse , they sit a good while on the Stage before the Candles are lighted, talking together, & on sudden Doricus speaks.

Doricus ,

Enter Tireman with lights. Three actors (representing audience members) sit on stage having an unscripted chat, with only the light from any

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windows and a few auditorium candles: a visitor to a theatre in Leipzig in 1783 complained he fell down the steps to the auditorium because it was so dimly lit. The cue for the tireman to enter are also the opening lines of the play: ‘O fie, some lights, sirs, let there be no deeds of darkness done among us. Ay so, so. Prithee tireman, set Signor Snuff afire; he’s a choleric gentleman, he will take pepper in the nose instantly’ (referring to the light crackling sound that burning candles can make). The trio talk for 92 lines before the lighting is apparently complete and they begin to depart; more than enough time – as the practice at the SWP demonstrates – to light all the candles and hoist the chandeliers, especially if, as Atticus explains, the stage was ‘so very little’. Then, once all is ready, the Prologue is delivered, music ‘sounds for the Act’ and the play proper begins. We cannot be sure of the burning time of the candles, their numbers or exactly where they were deployed, but in the intervals the candles would always need attention, either to be snuffed or replaced. Snuffing is often used to mean ‘extinguish’, but it specifically refers to the need to clip the wick when it gets too long and curls down, so letting its tip take up already molten wax and causing it to burn too fiercely and smoke: mending or trimming ensures a regular and brighter flame.5 That all takes time, and involves lowering some or all of the chandeliers to their initial resting point. So while a solitary boy could dance while the ‘mending’ took place (as specified at the end of Act 1 of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, first performed c. 1607 at Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen’s Revels),6 it is hard to see how an entertainment such as that between Acts 2 and 3 described in Q2 (1640) of Thomas Middleton’s comedy A Mad World My Masters could be combined with the management of the candles – ‘A song, sung by the musicians, and after the song, a country dance, by the actors in their vizards to a new footing’ (E2r) – and if any candles in the auditorium needed to be attended to there would be a further delay. There is no reason or evidence to suggest that all intervals were of equal length, but on occasion the need to accommodate

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all these diverse activities may have been the reason for a book-keeper to note that a particular break would be longer than others, and what looks like a reminder to this effect is found in stage directions in a small number of contemporary plays.7

‘Long’ The stage direction ‘Long’ usually refers to the length of a sound or music cue, such as ‘A long flourish’ in the Folio (but not the Quarto), of Richard II (1.3.122), or the more specific, visual cue to the musicians in the Folio of Titus Andronicus, ‘A long Flourish till they come down’ (1.1.233). In the same vein, the Quarto of Part 1 of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (1631) prints ‘Hoboyes long’ in Act 4, but it also has ‘Act long’ in the interval between Acts 4 and 5 (H3r). But the use of the signal ‘long’ that perhaps brings us closest to an early modern production is found in the surviving MS of Massinger’s Believe As You List (Blackfriars, 1631). As were all plays, it was subjected to scrutiny by the Master of the Revels, an office held at that time by Sir Henry Herbert who, on 11 January 1631, recorded that ‘I did refuse to allow of a play of Massinger’s, because it did contain dangerous matter as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal, by Philip the (Second), and ther being a peace sworne twixte the kings of England and Spayne’ (Bawcutt 1996: 171–72). Massinger immediately set about revising his play, drawing mainly on accounts of the life and times of Antiochus the Great (241–187 bc ) mixed with episodes from the life of Hannibal. Herbert licensed the new version on 6 May 1631, though he added a note to the end of the manuscript ordering that it could be played only on condition that ‘the reformations [revisions] be most strictly observed.’8 The play was evidently never printed, but survives in Massinger’s revised manuscript (BL MS. Egerton 2828), written in his usual mix of English and Italian hands and showing many of his characteristic quirks of spelling. More

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important for this discussion is that in addition to Massinger’s and Herbert’s, a further hand is evident: that of the King’s Men’s book-keeper, Edward Knight, who prepared the manuscript for performance. He marked the act divisions and rearranged the text to suit his own practical preferences, crossing through some of the stage directions that Massinger had placed to the right-­ hand side of the page and moving them to the left, Knight’s preferred position. He also inserted the word ‘Long’ in two intervals. I have provided my transcript in which Knight’s additions are in bold. The first is between Act 1 and 2: ___________ Act: 2: Long___________ ________ ______ _______ ____________ Ent: —— Actus secundi, scæna prima. flaminius. | & Calistus: R: Bax Knight gave the interval its own space, separated from the end of Act 1 and the entrances for Act 2, crossing out Massinger’s Latin act and scene designation – Knight for the most part deleted references to scenes as these did not create a pause in the action. He added the ampersand before Calistus and inserted the name of the actor, Richard Baxter, who had, presumably, been cast as Calistus by the time Knight got the script. The second use of ‘Long’ is used in the interval between Acts 3 and 4.9 long Act: 4: —____________ Ent: Metelus: — A metellus Actus quarti, scæna prima. Sempronivs a      proconsul of Lusitania. Sempronivs a Centurion. & Sempronius 2 chaires set out Again, the interval is separated from the text by horizontal lines above and below. But here, ‘long’ appears to have been

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added after Knight had written ‘Act 4’, as it is squeezed in to the left-­hand margin which, as in any prompt copy, then or now, suggests to me something that emerged in rehearsal, rather than being an instruction evident from the text, such as an entrance or exit. I have no solution to offer as to the particular reason for why these intervals needed to be longer than the other two, but I believe it may be as close as we can get to the impact on the running of the production of the management of the lighting and possible entr’acte entertainment.10 Given that the operational demands of the lighting were rewarded by the extraordinary theatrical effects they made possible, surprisingly little attention is paid to this aspect of performances in studies of early modern drama.11 The interrelationship of lighting with all other production elements was a key part of indoor performance. As the candles flicker, smell, perhaps smoke a little and gently crackle, they play constantly with the decorative scheme of the stage, the make-­up and clothing of the actors – and the audience. These are qualities that no artificial candle can begin to reproduce. The reason why the proposal to use real – as opposed to any kind of artificial – candles at the SWP was acceptable to the London Fire Service, once their rigorous concerns about safety were met, was that they, just as those of us working on the project, recognized the unique qualities of live flame. Productions at the SWP have demonstrated the effectiveness and practicality of staging scenes – such as the murder of Bergetto (3.7) in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Cockpit, c.1633), and the ‘dead man’s hand’ (4.1) in The Duchess of Malfi (Blackfriars, 1614) – in actual darkness, and revealed that the latter is an entirely different scene when played at the Blackfriars or the Globe.12 Catiline was originally performed by the King’s Men, first published in Quarto in 1611, and later included in the 1616 Folio of Jonson’s Works. My example is taken from the first act, here modernized in spelling and layout:

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catiline



Boy, see all doors be shut, that none approach us On this part of the house. Go you, and bid The priest he kill the slave I marked last night, And bring me of his blood, when I shall call him. Till then, wait all without. vargunteius        How is’t, Autronius! autronius

  Longinus? longinus  Curius? curius       Lecca? vargunteius       Feel longinus

you nothing?

A strange unwonted horror doth invade me; A darkness comes over the place. I know not what it is! lecca          The day goes back, Or else my senses! curius         As at Atreus’s feast! fulvius

  Darkness grows more, and more! lentulus             The vestal flame A groan of many people is heard under ground. Another. I think be out. gabinus      What groan was that? cethegus                Our fantasies. Strike fire out of ourselves and force a day. autronius

  Again it sounds! bestia        As all the city gave it! A fiery light appears.

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cethegus   We fear what ourselves feign. vargunteius          What light is this? curius   Look forth. lentulus    It still grows greater! lecca               From whence comes longinus

it?

  A bloody arm it is, that holds a pine Lighted, above the Capitol! And now It waves unto us! catiline       Brave and ominous! Our enterprise is sealed. cethegus          In spite of darkness That would discountenance it. Look no more; We lose time, and ourselves. (305–25) The stage directions in this extract were not included in the Quarto, but were added by Jonson to the Folio text in order, some would argue, to clarify the action for the reader (see Wright 1991: 257–85). Inga-Stina Ewbank, the editor of the play for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (2012), notes that these ‘marginal stage directions . . . together with the fear indicated by the dialogue, suggest the theatrical effectiveness of this episode’, and that ‘Whether at the Globe or Blackfriars, it is likely that the “darkness” was suggested by the dialogue rather than realized, since in the candle-­lit indoor playhouse a temporary extinction of candles was impracticable, and “the playwrights could rely on the audience’s readily understanding the same lighting conventions in a variety of lighting environments” (Graves 1999: 200; 214).’ The statement would undoubtedly be true of an outdoor, afternoon performance, when one can envisage the actors’ physical and gestural performances matching actions illustrated on the title page of Part 2 of Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age (Red Bull, c. 1612) where a figure is shown with his spear in

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his right hand, his left arm stretched out in front of him and his head turned sharply to his right, embodying Heywood’s Act 2 stage direction ‘as if groping in the dark’ (E3v). But it is simply not possible to conflate a Globe with a Blackfriars performance, and while Robert Graves’s study of early modern playhouse lighting is a seminal work, productions at the SWP have demonstrated that the operation and flexibility of the lighting are more user-­friendly than Graves proposes as a result, I see indoor stage directions such as these not as merely suggestive to a reader of the ‘theatrical effectiveness’ of the scene but as a precise description of how it was experienced by its audience when performed indoors. The stage at the SWP is lit by six chandeliers, each holding twelve candles, each candle ten inches in length and three-­ quarters of an inch in diameter at the base, the size that research indicates was the Jacobean standard.13 The chandeliers are suspended around waist-­height while the candles are lit, then hoisted to their normal resting place, 2.4 metres (eight feet) above the stage. However, raising the chandeliers further rapidly reduces the light on stage to a marked degree and if lifted to their highest point (known as the ‘top end dead’), the stage becomes to all intents and purposes, dark. The effect is perhaps most pronounced for spectators in the lower gallery or pit, but it is also effective for those in the upper gallery, as the chandeliers are well out of their line of sight to the stage.14 Given the references earlier in the scene from Catiline to the slowness of the day to break, it is possible that other sources of light – such as from candles fixed to the pillars of the lower gallery or through the windows – might have been reduced from the beginning of the scene.15 With the light level significantly lower, the impact of the voices — and possibly music — from beneath the stage and of the ‘fiery branch’ would have been even more striking.16 This scene was explored in a Research in Practice workshop I curated at the SWP in July 2014. The significance of the lighting changes and how they prompted the characters lines was striking, and responses from actors and audience confirmed the cumulative impact of the stage effects.17

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The Guardian It is common for an early modern stage direction – which is intended to clarify the stage action – to be difficult to decipher, often because it needs to be read as one component in a complex of original performance practices, but we are uncertain of what those were.18 My example of this difficult situation comes from Massinger’s The Guardian. The play was licensed on 31 October 1633 but not published until 1655, and described on the title page as a ‘Comical-History . . . often acted at the Private-House in Blackfriars’, but there is no evidence of any subsequent performances. The stage directions in The Guardian are numerous, and as the Oxford editors observe, ‘If they are all Massinger’s, he was intent on indicating just what was to happen on stage’ (my emphasis; Edwards and Gibson 1976: iv.111). For example, He strikes Adorio, the rest make in, they all draw (1.1.221); Enter Severino (throwing open the doors violently) having a knife (3.6.142); A noise within, as the fall of a Horse, —— then / Enter Durazzo (4.1.0), where the ‘achingly long dash’19 seems designed to indicate a very definite pause before the actor enters. As the play is not particularly well known, I’ll give some brief detail of the story running up to the particular stage direction I want to unpick. The setting is Naples. Severino is a gentleman who fought a duel with his brother-­in-law, Monteclaro, and left him for dead on the field of combat. Alphonso, king of Naples, is adamantly opposed to duelling and refuses to pardon anyone who has killed a rival, so with no hope of reprieve, Severino has retreated to the countryside. His wife, Iolante, remaining in Naples, develops a friendship with her neighbour, Calypso, who flatters Iolante at every turn for her virtue. Iolante, however, has spotted a visiting French nobleman called Laval, and, encouraged by Calypso, has developed a passion for him. ‘Laval’, however, is actually her brother Monteclaro, who has recovered from his wounds, but has returned to the city in disguise to avoid Alphonso’s wrath. Calypso acts the part of a bawd, taking a letter to ‘Laval’ and setting up an assignation between him and

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Iolante, unaware they are siblings. ‘Laval’ is wary and suspicious, but curious too, and agrees to visit Iolante at her home. As with all indoor plays we need to take note of any changes in the lighting states suggested in the dialogue. At the outdoor playhouses these would be verbal clues to inform the actors’ physical performances and to help the spectators ‘to piece out [the] imperfections with [their] thoughts’ (as Shakespeare notes in the Prologue to Henry V). Indoors, however, as I argued in my discussion of Catiline, I believe these references refer to changes on the stage that both characters and audience actually witness and experience. So, the scenes running up to 3.6 contain pointers to the increasing darkness as night draws on: in 2.5 Calypso promises Monteclaro that ‘At twelve, / I’ll be thy convoy’, and the interval between Acts  2 and 3 may have included some reduction in the auditorium lights (harder to access in performance) and perhaps some adjustment to the shutters, given that 3.6 is the last scene in Act 3 so the interval following it would provide the opportunity to establish a new lighting state. These references increase in Act  3 as midnight and the planned assignation approach, including ‘this very night’ (3.2.61), mention of the seductive ‘thin night mantle’ for Iolante (3.4.16), and allusions to the passing of time – ‘’Tis eleven by my watch’, ‘The darkness friends us too’, ‘the sable night’, ‘smock night-­work’ (3.5.1, 30, 34, 39). By the time Severino enters, announcing ‘’Tis midnight’ (56), I believe the chandeliers would have reached their ‘top end dead’, and as with Catiline, the stage would actually be notably darker. This makes Severino’s and Monteclaro’s failure to recognize each other more plausible, and when Monteclaro tells us he will ‘grope out my way / As well I can’ (3.5.92–93), he presumably exits not ‘as if’ in the dark but actually in it. Once Monteclaro has left, Severino informs us that he can enter the house via ‘a secret passage / Unknown to my wife, through which this key will guide me’ (94–95), and exits. Act 3, Scene 6 is headed by a stage direction which, as the Oxford editors note, ‘raises very interesting questions’ (Edwards and Gibson 1976: v.247) but which has nevertheless received only scant attention:

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Enter Iolante (with a rich banquet, and tapers) (in a chair, behind a curtain.)   Iolante    I am full of perplexed thoughts. Imperious blood,    Thou only art a tyrant: judgment, reason,    To whatsoever thy edicts proclaim    With vassal fear subscribe against themselves.    I am yet safe in the port, and see before me,    If I put off, a rough tempestuous sea,    The raging winds of infamy from all quarters    Assuring my destruction. Yet my lust    Swelling the wanton sails (my understanding    Stowed under hatches), like a desperate pilot,    Commands me to urge on. My pride, my pride,    Self-­love and over-­value of myself    Are justly punished. I, that did deny    My daughter’s youth allowed and lawful pleasures,    And would not suffer in her those desires    She sucked in with my milk, now in my waning    Am scorched and burnt up with libidinous fire,    That must consume my fame. Yet still I throw    More fuel on it.

5

10

15

Enter SEVERINO   Severino    ’Tis her voice, poor turtle.    She’s now at her devotions, praying for    Her banished mate. Alas, that for my guilt    Her innocence should suffer! But I do    Commit a second sin in my deferring    The ecstasy of joy that will transport her    Beyond herself, when she flies to my lips,    And seals my welcome. Iolante!   Iolante             Ha?    Good angels guard me.   Severino         What do I behold?

20

25

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To my knowledge there have been only five attempts by editors and critics to unpick this section, each proposing a different solution. The Guardian was first edited in 1744 for volume viii of Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays, by Thomas Coxeter (1759) and William Gifford, whose 1805 edition provided most commentators with their copies of the plays. Gifford drew on Dodsley and Coxeter, inserting both silent and acknowledged textual emendations as well as new stage directions, and in so doing decided on the sequence of the action. Gifford’s version removes any ambiguity from the scene, starting with a revised opening direction: SCENE VI.—A Room in Severino’s House. IOLANTE is heard speaking behind a curtain. He follows Coxeter in adding to Quarto’s stage direction at l.18 to read, Enter SEVERINO before the curtain and expands the direction introduced by Dodsley at l.25 – Draws the curtain – using wording from the scene’s opening direction, slightly emended, and adding ‘set forth’: Draws the curtain, and discovers IOLANTE seated, with a rich banquet, and tapers, set forth. T.A. Dunn credits Gifford as the source of all his quotations from the play, but it is clearly Coxeter who he follows in his comments on what he calls this ‘unusual opening’: When she, heard but still unseen, has finished, ‘Enter Severino before the curtain’ in a straight-­forward walking-­on entrance. He has heard the last few words, imagines the ‘poor turtle’ is at her prayers, and drawing the curtain, ‘discovers Iolante seated, with a rich banquet, and tapers, set forth’. (Dunn 1957: 79) But that doesn’t account for the fact that her ‘last few words’, confessing that she is ‘scorched and burnt up with libidinous fire / That must consume my fame. Yet still I throw / More fuel on it’, are hard to misconstrue.

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The Oxford editors leave the text and directions alone apart from including the direction ‘Draws the curtain’, which originates in Dodsley and was augmented by Coxeter. They note that ‘it is difficult to see what the audience would make of the disembodied voice from the back of a bare stage’, and so consider whether ‘the curtain is arranged within [sic] the discovery-­space, to conceal Iolante from Severino but not from the audience’, although I can’t envisage how this would be achieved with the audience seated on three sides of the stage (Edwards and Gibson 1976: v.247; The Guardian is published in vol. iv). The only other examination of this moment that I know of is Chris Meads’s, but he describes the action differently from what the text implies: ‘Expecting Monteclaro, she is more than surprised when she hears the voice of her exiled husband, Severino, approaching the chamber. Severino bursts in, takes one look at the banquet laid out in the bedchamber, and jumps angrily to the obvious conclusion’ (Meads 2001: 195). However, this interpretation not only compresses the action but treats the stage as the fictive place it represents, and I want to try to understand the workings of the directions as related to the Blackfriars stage. The first thing to consider is the lay-­out of the opening direction, particularly the use of the brackets. It is similar to a direction at the opening of Act 3 in Middleton and Rowley’s 1622 tragedy, The Changeling, performed at the Cockpit in Drury Lane and at Salisbury Court, which reads: Enter ALONSO and DE FLORES . (In the act-­time DE FLORES hides a naked rapier.) The direction in parentheses refers to actions in the interval that precede the entrance of the characters. So is it possible that the direction in brackets in The Guardian, by expanding on the simple ‘Enter Iolante’, was inserted by the book-keeper to make the staging arrangement absolutely clear? Massinger’s tragicomedy, The Bashful Lover, published alongside The Guardian, also includes a number of directions that employ

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brackets to identify particular details of actions or props in performance. The opening to Act 5 is particularly interesting: Enter ALONSO, OCTAVIO, PISANO, MARIA (with a purse), GOTHRO. Maria is, in fact, as the audience knows by now, in disguise as Ascanio, a page, and the purse is not referred to specifically in the scene but is needed later when she is instructed to pay Octavio. It is an addition that has all the indications of being a reminder in performance. So what did the Blackfriars audience actually see and hear as 3.6 began? Enter Iolante. As nothing can happen on stage until someone does this, Enter is unsurprisingly by far the most widely used direction, but as with so much of early modern stagecraft it isn’t entirely clear cut in terms of what it instructs the actor actually to do. ‘Enter’ may refer not just to the act or manner of entering on stage but the circumstance or place in which the character is found, while any number of plays from outdoor and indoor theatres have directions that refer unequivocally to a character or some kind of property being discovered ‘behind’ a curtain. At the opening of the anonymous Globe play The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1602), the Prologue ‘Draws the curtains’ to reveal Peter Fabel, the Devil of the title, describing him lying on his ‘couch’, near his ‘necromantic chair’ and with a ‘fatal chime at his head’. But I know of only one direction that closely matches that in The Guardian. In Dekker’s Satiromastix, performed first by Paul’s Boys indoors, and later outdoors by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe, 1.2 opens with: sitting in a study behind a Curtain, a candle by him burning, books lying confusedly: to himself.

Horace

Horace then has a very amusing speech, before he is interrupted by a friend, Afinius Bubo, and the scene continues with their conversation. There is no specific direction or indication in either the spoken text or implied action to suggest a moment that Afinius draws back the curtain to reveal Horace, which might mean, given he is speaking ‘to himself’, that it may not

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have been practical to have him concealed, even in the comparatively smaller performance space of the Paul’s Playhouse, let alone at the rear of the Globe stage. So was the audience of The Guardian confronted by an empty stage before hearing a disembodied – though recognizable – voice from behind a curtain? Or does the direction ‘in a chair, behind a curtain’, mean that as the scene opened the curtain of the discovery space was closed, and then drawn to reveal her, ‘armed for service’ in ‘thin night mantle’ and ‘pearl embroidered pantophles’, surrounded by a subtly lit banquet with its ‘candied eringos’ (3.4.13–18), before she began her speech?20 That would certainly aid what is an extremely active, lively speech, and allow the interaction between the character and the audience that we associate with soliloquies and asides. The specification of tapers is important and their use is carefully tracked by stage directions later in the scene. These are the smallest of the hand-­held lights, so not only is this scene dimly lit (requiring the audience to listen particularly carefully) but as Robert Graves notes, ‘because of the taper’s relative weakness as a light and its association with the bedroom, playwrights often use it to signal the frailty of human love and passion’ (Graves 1999: 22). So far, so good. But we are not the only ones who overhear Iolante’s words. Severino is clearly instructed to enter as she finishes her speech and – if we have been able to see her – the curtain is drawn by a stage-­keeper. Perhaps she closes the curtain herself, but there is only one direction, so far as I know, that indicates that the curtain across the discovery space was drawn by the character who is concealed by it. In 1.3 of the 1598 Quarto of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, ‘Bobadill discovers himself: on a bench’. However, in the 1616 Folio (now in 1.5), the direction is revised in a note in the margin to read ‘Bobad. is discovered lying on his bench.’ (see also Wright 1991: 270). More problematic, however, is Severino’s response to her words, which he has evidently heard, but could not possibly have interpreted as an expression of wifely love and devotion.

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So where is Severino, where he can hear ‘her voice’ but not register exactly what she is saying? There are instances earlier in this play where characters onstage do not hear what each other says, while the audience hears both: in 1.1, a character eavesdrops on a conversation and comments to the audience on what he hears, and in 2.1 Iolante and Calypso observe and assess the men, their words unheard by them but audible to the audience. The significant difference in 3.6, however, is that we hear Iolante say one thing and Severino hears another.21 So where is he? Is there perhaps a clue in the lines Severino has right at the end of the previous scene – ‘there is a secret passage / Unknown to my wife, through which this key will guide me / To her desired embraces . . .’ (3.3.94–96)? There seems little point in this detail unless it in some way informs his entrance and it also explains how he has avoided Calypso who we learn later in the scene (104–06) has been stationed outside Iolante’s room waiting for the delayed Laval. So if Severino needed to enter from this ‘secret passage’, he could perhaps have used the other stage door, but a more theatrically satisfying solution would be for him to enter from below, using the trapdoor in the stage at the Blackfriars. A direction inserted by Knight in Act 4 in his working copy of Believe As You List notes that this operation required two men: ‘Gascoine & Hubert below: ready to open the Trap door for Mr Taylor’, who played Antiochus, and who thirty lines later must be ‘ready: under the stage’. Antony Hammond observes that ‘One of the plagues of academic attempts to reconstruct Elizabethan staging is the plethora of mights, could haves and possiblys that such hypothetical writing entails’, and what I have written above certainly bears that out. But he goes on to say that, ‘From this point of view, a responsible and intelligent modern director’s prompt-­book of a Renaissance play can often be more illuminating than an original MS’ (Hammond 1992: 71–79). Unfortunately, no such prompt book of The Guardian exists, so while not claiming to meet his description, but as someone who does direct early modern plays, and partly because I think

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Iolante’s speech is too vivid and histrionic to be spoken while concealed, I think the sequence should (I almost wrote ‘might’) go as follows, and still be ‘true’ to the stage directions.22 At the end of 3.5 Severino exits, heading for the secret passage. If some shutters have been closed in the interval leading into Act 3, and the height of the chandeliers been adjusted at points during it, one final raising of the chandeliers will ensure the stage is now effectively dark. Possibly accompanied by appropriate music,23 the curtain across the discovery space is drawn back to reveal the tableau of Iolante in her seductive outfit, with her banquet, lit by tapers. At some point she moves out from the discovery space on to the main stage, and towards the end of her speech, or even as she finishes, returns to her chair.24 While she is still speaking, Severino raises the trapdoor just enough to let the audience know he is there and then closes it, without looking at his wife, which may help explain why he hears her voice but not what she says, before he speaks his first line. He can then climb out on to the stage to speak directly to the audience, still without looking at the scene upstage, which will ensure the spectators’ full enjoyment of his certainty that his devoted wife, his ‘poor turtle’,25 is in prayer. It is only when he turns and sees her that the shocking truth dawns on him, his exclamation (‘Iolante!’) matched by her equally aghast surprise (‘Ha?’), and the lines that follow, many of which are shared, suggest to me each of them appealing to the heavens or the audience for some sympathy at their shock and undoing:   Iolante    Good angels guard me.   Severino         What do I behold?    Some sudden flash of lightning strike me blind,    Or cleave the centre of the earth, that I    May living find a sepulcher to swallow    Me and my shame together.   Iolante            Guilt and horror    Confound me in one instant; thus surprised . . . (27–32)

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Although again there are no specific directions, these lines are clearly directed to the spectators and suggest that Iolante has moved again onto the main stage to share her dismay with (especially, maybe) the women in the audience. Although it is inevitable that some in the audience can at no time in the scene see what is concealed in the discovery space, which might seem to dilute the coup de théâtre of Iolante’s and Severino’s discovery of each other, the freedom to use the stage and, of course, her come-­hither costume and the vigorous language of the interchange will tell them all they need to know. Interestingly, however, experiments at the SWP have revealed that some of those seated in the auditorium where they could not see clearly, or at all, what was in the discovery space, very much enjoyed not only the reaction of the characters but also of audience members who could see, some even preferring this ‘knock on’ effect; Sarah Dustagheer discusses the obscurity of the discovery space sightlines in her chapter for this book.26 Finally, the energy of this section of the scene will ensure the grisly events that follow upon it will be in the greatest contrast possible, and the laughter of the audience at Severino may be precisely what fuels the violence of his subsequent actions. Although I think this staging keeps true to the explicit and implicit stage directions, serves the shifting tones of the play and fits with what we know (or think we do) of the structure and resources of the indoor stage, I am always aware when trying to understand these complex early modern plays of Ben Jonson’s brilliant words that should act as a warning to all theatre historians and practitioners: a good play is like a skein of silk, which, if you take by the right end, you may wind off at pleasure . . . but if you light on the wrong end, you will pull all into a knot . . . which nothing but the shears or a candle will undo or separate. (The Magnetic Lady, Induction: 130–35)

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Primary references Elliot Jr, John R., Alan H. Nelson, Alexandra S. Johnston and Diana Wyatt, eds (2004), Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, 2 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Editions Beaumont, Francis (1984), The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Edwards, Philip and Colin Gibson, eds (1976), The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, 5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jonson, Ben (1973), Catiline, eds W.F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner, London: Edward Arnold, 1973. Jonson, Ben (2000), The Magnetic Lady, ed. Peter Happé, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marston, John (1980), What You Will, ed. M.R. Woodhead, Nottingham: Nottingham University Press. Sisson, Charles J., ed. (1927), Believe As You List, London: Malone Society Reprints.

9 ‘Strikes open a curtain where appears a body’: Discovering Death in Stage Directions Sarah Dustagheer, with Philip Bird

In the final scene of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592), Hieronimo devises an elaborate piece of court entertainment to enact revenge for the murder of his son, Horatio. Stage directions outline how he sets up before the entertainment begins: ‘Enter Hieronimo, he knocks up the curtaine’ (K2v). On the Rose stage, where the play was first performed, either he secures a curtain across the double doors at the centre of the stage, or perhaps he places a curtain around a booth or frame extending from these central doors. At the crescendo of the court play, stage directions demand Hieronimo draw back a curtain to show the body of his dead son in the discovery

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space. He justifies his violent actions to the onstage audience and reveals Horatio’s corpse: Beholde the reason vrging me to this, Shewes his dead sonne. See heere my shew, look on this spectacle (K4r) This piece of stage business exemplifies what Emma Smith has described as The Spanish Tragedy’s ‘uncanny, ghostly repetition’ (1998: xvii). With the revelation of Horatio’s body in the final scene, this repetition is realized in the stage directions and subsequently physicalized in the discovery space. This location is the arbour where Horatio was murdered earlier in the play; his murderers ‘hang him in the arbour’ and ‘stab’ him. His wounded hanging body became the iconic stage image of this popular play, appearing on its 1615 Quarto title page. The play’s stage directions dictate that Horatio is stabbed in a specific location, then re-­appears there – the discovery space is both site of murder and site of revelation of that murder and its avenging. This stage space, through stage directions, accrues symbolic meaning throughout the play. In this chapter I am concerned with The Spanish Tragedy and other revenge tragedies – The Tragedy of Hoffman, Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Lady’s Tragedy and The White Devil – in which stage directions demand the revelation of a dead body in a previously off-­stage space, often behind a curtain. Alongside dialogue, these stage directions create significant physical gestures and visual resonances that enrich the themes of bereavement, revenge and the afterlife with which these plays are concerned. As several critics have noted, revenge tragedy was a genre which engaged with the radical changes in cultural understandings of and practices around death brought about by the Reformation (Neill 1997; Watson 1999; Engel 2002; Zimmerman 2005; and Rist 2008, for example). However, through focussing on similarities in stage directions in these plays, I want to suggest

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that we can see this response to the Reformation emerging in the visual imagery of the plays and playwrights’ thinking about theatricality, and in their use of the specifically theatrical language of stage directions. There was a repeated imaginative construction of the discovery space in revenge tragedies which situated and associated this stage space with post-Reformation cultural anxieties about death. The seemingly simple physical gesture of drawing back a curtain to show a dead body had a rich symbolic meaning. By identifying and mapping the development of this trope on the early modern stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it is possible to see its manipulation in subsequent plays such as The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi. I want to attend to the symbolic and cultural meanings of a very specific stage direction; but, in addition, to consider how these meanings are created through the theatrical practicalities of moments where bodies are revealed behind curtains on the early modern stage, considering what these directions demanded of both actors and audiences. As such this chapter has been conceived and created in conversation with the actor-­director Philip Bird, whom I asked to reflect on how he envisaged the scenes being performed on the evidence of the actors’ text and stage directions. His extensive knowledge of the early modern stage, a result of working in venues such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, has proved invaluable. Our discussions have been instrumental and Philip’s specific thoughts are emboldened and referenced in brackets with his initials throughout the chapter. The stage directions examined here focus on a somewhat controversial part of the stage which requires a little exposition. The term ‘discovery space’ was created by scholars to identify scenes where the word ‘discovered’ is used to reveal someone or something in a previously curtained or somehow enclosed stage space. It is generally assumed to be the area just behind the central doors of the stage – a recess which could be concealed from view by the doors of the central opening or by curtains, and revealed on stage at key moments by drawing

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back the curtain or opening the door. On occasions, however, it could equally well have been a booth-­like structure, temporary or otherwise, or an architectural feature of theatres with an angled frons and a weight-­bearing platform or ‘tarras’, supported by pillars above the central doors, creating a space beneath capable of being enclosed by curtains. An analysis of Henslowe’s list of large properties and an examination of the specific requirements of some of the plays encourages this view (PB). There has been much discussion about exactly how the space functioned in practice in different playhouses and plays. I find Janette Dillon’s thoughts on this architectural feature most compelling. She reminds us of the need to keep an open mind from play to play, and to conceive the early modern stage as fluid, adaptable and always informed by a range of possibilities inherited from medieval drama, including rear curtains; curtained booths or traverses (both free-­standing and set against the rear wall). (2013: 201) Dillon suggests that there are always several options that might be at work when we encounter the words ‘discover’ and/or ‘curtain(s)’ in stage directions, and we have to remain sensitive to all of them. Moreover it was not just bodies that were revealed on the early modern stage: Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary tells us that more than ninety stage directions use the word ‘discover’ to signal the opening of a curtain or a door to reveal a range of fixed tableaux (1999: 69). Suzanne Gossett, in her chapter for this book, considers some examples of the ‘discover’ stage directions. Survey works by Richard Hosley (1959), David Carnegie (1996), Frederick Kiefer (2007) and Mariko Ichikawa (2013) identify many of the uses of curtains and discovery on the early modern stage, citing examples such as the curtains drawn to reveal the caskets in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; Jonson’s The Case is Altered, where a shop is discovered; and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, where Hell is

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discovered. However, as this book establishes, among very useful survey and collation work on early modern stage directions, there is a gap for the literary and theatrical interpretation of specific directions that are imaginatively, culturally and symbolically interrelated. Therefore this chapter offers a sustained exploration of stage action which reveals dead, and seemingly dead, bodies in previously unseen (often curtained) stage space. I begin by examining the meaning of this stage direction in the context of the plays’ interest in revenge and memory, before turning to wider cultural preoccupations with death. Finally I consider why such preoccupations are explored so theatrically through stage directions and stage architecture.

Revenge and memory There are several well-­noted conventions of the revenge genre as outlined by MacDonald P. Jackson: ‘ritual oaths, uncovering scheming, heavenly portents, use of poison, young woman threatened or victimized, wholesale slaughter, hero’s reliance upon an occasion afforded by the enemy, portrayal of an unbalanced mind, catastrophe in which a court entertainment encroaches upon the reality of the play’ (2007: 541). It is possible to add to this list the revealing of the body of a loved one within an off-­stage space, which often provides the impetus and justification for revenge. In The Spanish Tragedy, Horatio’s body provides the visual explanation of Hieronimo’s words. He tells the onstage audience he is a ‘hopeles father of a haples Sonne’, but notes that their ‘lookes vrge instance of these words’ and therefore shows his son: ‘Beholde the reason urging me to this’. The revelation of Horatio’s body incites an extended, rhetorically formal, public lament from his father: See heere my shew, look on this spectacle: Heere lay my hope, and heere my hope hath end: Heere lay my hart, and heere my hart was slaine:

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Heere lay my treasure, heere my treasure lost: Heere lay my blisse, and heere my blisse bereft (K4r) The repeated use of ‘Heere lay’ is interesting for a number of reasons. Dead Horatio is presumably displayed lying down, not in the position in which he was killed: Hieronimo ‘cuts him downe’ (D3r) from where he was hanging lifeless in the arbour. This second revelation of Horatio’s body is thus very different from the first; he is now on display as a piece of evidence and a justification for his father’s act of revenge. Having in the modern sense discovered Horatio when he came across his body in Act  2, Hieronimo ‘discovers’ him to the onstage audience in Act 4. His requiem for Horatio and the use of the past tense in ‘lay’ manages to conflate the present, lying body with the past lost treasure and with ‘Heere’ he brings the arbour, ‘a place [. . .] made for pleasure, not for death’ (D3r) back into the identical theatrical space that dead Horatio now occupies (PB). Following on from this discovery, Hieronimo outlines the details of Horatio’s death, his vow of revenge and his role as ‘Author and actor in this tragedy’ (L1r). Thus we see that the act of revelation makes physical and material the vow of revenge. There are parallels to Hieronimo’s use of Horatio’s body as a declaration of his avenging purposes in other revenge tragedies written in the wake of Kyd’s popular The Spanish Tragedy. Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman begins with his eponymous character summoning ‘up revenge’ and the ‘dead remembrance of [a] living father’ (1631: B1r). Accompanying these lines, stage directions demand that he ‘Stikes ope a curtaine where appears a body’. The verb ‘Strike’, Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary notes, is mostly used as in the sense to ‘strike’ another person; it is a basic term to ‘signify violence’ (1999: 219). The verb, then, gives the actor playing Hoffman a clear sense that his movement must be a sudden and violent one. It is worth considering the pace at which an actor can decide to make a revelation. Hieronimo, for instance,

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could well take his time as he draws the curtain theatrically to ‘show’ and reveal Horatio’s body: ‘Beholde the reason vrging me to this’ (K4r) is potentially full of suspense. While discoveries do often surprise onstage audiences, a sudden reveal is likely to have been designed to surprise and shock the audience in the theatre as well (PB). Chettle’s ‘Strike’ and the subsequent force/ pace of the physical action underlies the fierce determination to revenge expressed in Hoffman’s soliloquy. In addition this forceful gesture serves to foreshadow the prominent physical violence of the rest of the play, which includes stabbings, poisonings and flaming crowns placed on heads. The exposure of his father’s body prompts Hoffman’s declamatory vows of revenge: ‘I’le execute justly in such a cause’ (B1r); ‘I will not leave thee, until like thy selfe / I’ve made thy enemies’ (B1v). The exposure of the body becomes a way to remember the dead, and the action required to avenge their killing. The sense of memorialization of the dead is particularly noticeable where the discovery space is deployed more than once as a site of killing or for corpses, underscoring its mournful associations throughout a play. In The Spanish Tragedy, this stage location becomes the arbour where Horatio is murdered in the second act. In the third act, one of his murderers, Pedringano, is publicly executed, and with no reference to or time for the bringing onstage of a scaffold it is reasonable to assume that it would have been set in the discovery space. Isabella enters her ‘garden Plot’ (K2r) in the fourth act and the discovery space once again represents the arbour, scene of her son’s death and a place haunted by his ghost. Having laid waste to the entire range of flora within, she then kills herself. Time and again the discovery space is portrayed as a place of death (PB). Similarly in The Tragedy of Hoffman, an echo of the play’s opening is seen in the beginning of the fourth act in the stage direction and use of the discovery space: ‘Enter Ferdinand and Sarlois, open a curtaine: kneele Saxony, the Hermet and Mathias: tapers burning’ (G1r). Behind the curtain are the bodies of Lodowick and Austria, secretly murdered by Hoffman. Unlike Hoffman’s father, though, these bodies are

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entombed, in a ‘blacke dormitory. . .layd / On the cold bed of earth’ (G1r). Stage directions which construct the off-­stage space as tomb – makeshift for Hoffman’s father and formalized for Lodowick and Austria – are supported in the text by a nexus of words/phrases associated with mourning and death, including ‘funeral rites’ (E4r; I2r), ‘interr[ing] the dead’ (E4r) and ‘invocat[ing] the dead to life’ (G2r). John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge similarly deploys curtained off-­stage space as a site of death throughout. The play begins with Duke Piero ‘vnbrac’t, his armes bare, smeer’d in blood, a poniard in one hand bloodie, and a torch in the other’; he instructs his servant to ‘binde Feliches trunke / Unto the panting side of Mellida’ (Marston 1602: A2v), Antonio’s betrothed wife. This opening image is a visual echo of The Spanish Tragedy where Hieronimo appears ‘with a Ponyard in one hand, and a Rope in the other’ (G3v), one of the parallels between the two plays which demonstrates Kyd’s influence on Marston’s revenge tragedy. Another is the revelation of Feliche’s body. From the opening scene, which informs of Feliche’s murder, the audience has to wait until the third scene before the appearance of the body, and the moments before are full of dramatic irony. Antonio finds he is a revenger hero without, crucially, a body as impetus and evidence. He describes his ‘heavy’ spirit and dreams of ‘Two meager ghosts’ that ‘cride Revenge’ (B2v). Marston portrays the familiar troubled insomniac tasked with revenge but Antonio’s feelings are a premonition of the avenging roles which await him; he lacks the tangible and material realization of his revenge task. Some lines later, with the aid of music, the hero tries to leave behind his melancholy and expectantly waits for his bride Mellida to wake and appear to him at her window: See, looke, the curtaine stirs, shine natures pride, Loves vitall spirit, deare Antonio’s bride. The Curtain’s drawne, and the bodie of Feliche , stabd thick with wounds, appeares hung up.

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What villaine bloods the window of my love? What slave hath hung you gorie ensigne up, In flat defiance of humanitie? (B4r) It seems likely that this discovery took place at an upper window. Antonio is waiting for Mellida to wake up, and Galeatzo and Castilio have been singing in order to rouse her (a familiar trope, not least from Marston’s own Antonio and Mellida.) The playwright ensures that the audience’s focus is on the window with ‘See, looke, the curtaine stirs’ so that the revelation has maximum effect. What is also interesting about this stage direction is that the discovery is effected by an unseen hand. This is no premeditated act by an onstage avenger; this is sudden, shocking and seemingly outside human agency (PB). This revelation begins a pattern in the play for curtains drawn back to reveal the dead behind previously unseen off-­stage space. The ghost of Andrugio, Antonio’s dead father, appears via the following stage direction: ‘Maria draweth the courtaine: and the ghost of Andrugio is displayed, sitting on the bed’ (G1r). At the end of the play Andrugio’s Ghost ‘is placed betwixt the musick houses’ (K1v) which, editor Gair notes, is the upper acting area of the Paul’s stage (1978: 28); therefore the murdered Andrugio appears in the same site as the murdered Feliche. When revenge is completed, with the killing of Duke Piero, ‘The curtains [are] drawne’ (K3r) and Andrugio exits. The drawing of curtains confirming death and departure from the stage is echoed a few lines later for the murderer, rather than murdered, when ‘curtains are drawne; Piero departeth’ (K4r). The dying Duke is likely placed in the discovery space alongside the dish containing the flesh of his dead son Julio. Again, as in Hoffman, the repeated iconography of curtains, off-­stage space and the dead bodies (of Feliche, Andrugio, Piero and the mutilated Julio) comes in the context of a play obsessed by funerals and its associated rituals. For example the dumb show of Andrugio’s funeral, complete with ‘two mourners with torches . . . the coffin . . . the hearse’ (C3r);

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or Feliche’s burial where his body is carried in, mourned by his father and Antonio, before ‘They all helpe to carie Feliche to his graue’ (I1v). The importance of the memento mori in revenge tragedy – Horatio’s bloodied handkerchief in The Spanish Tragedy or Gloriana’s skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy – is well established. In addition, though, in these plays stage directions construct the discovery space as a site for memento mori, a focal point for the violence, deaths and mourning which the plays contemplate. Memory, as many spatial theorists have pointed out, requires – or at least is supported by – its placing within a specific site. For Edward Casey, ‘memory is naturally place-­ orientated or at least place-­supported’ (2000: 187). In the texts examined here, it seems that stage directions serve to orientate death and mourning into early modern stage architecture.

Cultures of death: monument, portrait, stage Beyond the deaths in the play, though, what is located and memorialized in the repeated use of the discovery space within plays and the genre is a wider cultural pre-­occupation with the relationship between the dead and the living – during a time when the ‘meaning, performance and trappings’ of death ‘were all subject to question in the generations following the Reformation’ (Cressy 1997: 379). The abolition of Catholic Purgatory and forms of intercession (Masses for the dead soul, indulgences and prayers) meant that the dead lay beyond the reach of the living. There occurred a ‘relocation of the dead in terms of formal theology’ as well as ‘a far-­reaching reconfiguration of the cultural and emotional nexus that bound the living to the dead, of the idioms in which feelings, anxieties, and aspirations about the dead could be expressed’ (Marshall 2002: 188). It is in this context, as several critics have asserted, revenge tragedy ‘regularly enacts remembrances

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of the dead, drawing attention to the period’s change in religious practices and deriving significance from them thereby’ (Rist 2008: 6). This interrelation between cultural context and genre are especially pronounced, I suggest, in the visual language of the genre’s stage directions and the subsequent deployment of the discovery space. Specifically, the onstage tableaux of mourned bodies in the discovery space appear to reflect a post-Reformation trend in elaborate funeral monuments. As Neill points out, ‘Funeral monuments, were, if anything, the object of even more extravagant attention’ and became ‘conspicuously secular substitutes for the liturgical memento of the Mass’ (1997: 40–41). In such monuments, figures such the Virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity, for instance) were constructed as ‘in a tableau vivant as bearers of architecture, tablets of instruction or in holding back curtains’ (Llewellyn 2000: 129) to display a representation of the deceased. For Jean Wilson, monuments represent a ‘dramatic event’ (1995: 88) or ‘frozen drama’ (90) that provide an insight into the general architecture of the early modern playhouse façade and its general use (81–95). However, there is a more specific point to be made: these real-­ world marble works that memorialize the dead through revelation behind curtains are quite directly echoed in the moments of discovery in early modern revenge tragedy. Scenes where curtains are drawn back to reveal bodies that are gazed at, mourned and contemplated, are staged versions of the funeral monument. If monuments were ‘dramatic’, as Wilson and Llewellyn note, then their dramatic counterparts were mimetic; stage and sculpture mirrored one another. Attempting to explain the ‘particular dramatic device’ of the monument with curtains, Llewellyn points out that ‘In Tudor England, curtains protected valuable pictures and other works of art and were associated especially with painted portraiture’ (2000: 129). In several areas of early modern material culture, then, the curtain marked the boundary between life and a representation of life whether in marble (monument) in paint (portraiture) or in the static body of the

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actor (theatre). In John Webster’s The White Devil the echoes between portrait, monument and stage architecture are apparent in the play’s first dumb show (the theatricality of which is discussed by Gillian Woods, below). Scheming adulterer Brachiano’s portrait is revealed behind a curtain and covered in poison, before his wife Isabella enters. In Webster’s extended stage direction Isabella is described ‘in her night-­ gowne as to b[e]d-­ward, with lights after her’, and her actions are prescribed: ‘shee kneeles downe as to prayers, then drawes the curtaine of the picture, doe’s three reverences to it, and kisses it thrice’ (D4v), before fainting and dying. This curtained painting of Brachiano is described as a ‘dead shadow’, a lifeless substitute for the man, that in many respects Isabella treats as a monument to her husband. She brings ‘lights’ to this ‘dead shadow’ (D4v), pays her respects in gesture (she kneels, does reverences) and kisses this substitute for Brachiano; all behaviours that were associated with funeral rites and practices. The curtained portrait, I suggest located in the discovery space, then becomes the site of Isabella’s death. As editor Christina Luckyj notes, Isabella’s murder in this dumb show foreshadows Brachiano’s own poisoning later in the play (2008: n.23, 48). But it is also perhaps the behaviours around his ‘dead shadow’ which imagine him entombed and monumentalized that prefigure his fatality. In addition, as in other examples we have seen, Webster’s configuration of discovery space as site of death is repeated in The White Devil. Later on in the play, Flamineo discovers his mother with the body of Marcello, the brother he murdered: ‘Cornelia, the Moore and 3. other Ladies discovered, winding Marcello’s Coarse. A song’ (L1r). The tableau remains held in place for the song, a fixed image, framed by the architecture of the discovery space, confirming what Luckyj describes as its ‘almost emblematic significance’ (Luckyj 2008: n.59, 145). Again demonstrating links between stage image and painting, as Luckyj notes, this discovery recalls the tradition of pietà, painting or sculpture that depicts the Virgin supporting the dead body of Christ. Certainly this image invokes one of the

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few moments of remorse for Flamineo who feels ‘a strange thing’, possibly ‘Compassion’ (L2r). The link between funeral monument, portraiture and discovery space tableau of the dead becomes relevant in cases where the revealed body, most often female, is visually foregrounded through stage effects, as well as objectified and gazed at much like a portrait or a monument. In Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, the discovery of Antonio’s dead wife, who ‘the Duchesses youngest Sonne rauisht’ (C1v), inspires a public and joint mandate for revenge. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (as in The Spanish Tragedy), the body is evidence of grief and injustice that demands attention from the onstage spectators. Antonio insists on focussing the group’s gaze, asking them to ‘Draw neerer Lords and be sad witnesses’ (C1v). Like Hieronimo he uses the same imperative and declamatory verb: ‘Behold’. Antonio’s wife is used largely as an exhibit to excite fear and pity in the beholders and stir them into action. We do not know her, so we have no attachment to her personally and are not invited to grieve for her, however much we deplore her fate. In the same way we never knew Hoffman’s father, or Feliche (unless we recall him from Antonio and Mellida) and arguably Horatio is not in The Spanish Tragedy for long enough to make a strong impression. These discoveries of corpses often seem to be much more concerned with the inciting effect that they have on those engineering or witnessing them than they are with simply offering an opportunity for mourning. Having seen Antonio’s dead wife, rather than expressing grief, the Lords spend most of the scene plotting and swearing to avenge her (PB). Drawing both the gaze of his onstage and the playhouse audience to the image, her husband notes the ‘prayer Booke the pillow to her cheeke’ (C1v); others confirm she is a ‘wondrous Lady’ (C2r), so ‘faire a Monument’ (C2v). Middleton’s later play, The Lady’s Tragedy, provides a similarly striking image: On a sudden in a kind of noise like a wind, the doors clattering the tombstone flies open, and a great light

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appears in the midst of the tomb; his Lady as went out, standing just before him all in white, stuck with jewels and a great crucifix on her breast (Briggs 2007: 4.4.42.1–6) Govianus discovers the body of his betrothed is missing from her tomb and instead encounters her spirit. Once again stage directions create an off-­stage deathly revelation which provides an impetus and vow of revenge; Govianus undertakes to kill the Tyrant who has exhumed his Lady’s body and then to ‘make [himself] / Over to death too’ (4.4.81–82). Middleton’s stage direction is specific about the appearance of the Lady’s spirit and the ‘great light’ underscores her entrance. Like a portrait, the visual details of the Lady’s appearance draw the spectator’s eye in to the scene. She is, Farah Karim-Cooper notes, ‘dressed in white, reflecting her luminescent neo-Platonic beauty’; complete with a crucifix she is ‘purity and feminine modesty’, ‘a saint’ (2006: 85). This saintly embodiment of the Lady’s spirit contrasts with the next appearance of her body, dressed up and idolized by the Tyrant; here she is ‘the visual embodiment . . . of the fetishistic objectification of painted beauty’ (Karim-Cooper 2006: 82). The portrait, the tomb and the onstage corpse offer a representation of an absent live presence, one that demands observation and gazing. Middleton’s revenge tragedies blur the distinction between these three cultural forms of mimesis. Most of the onstage bodies differ in one crucial aspect from the figures represented by their real-­world funeral monument counterparts: since they have had no funeral rites, they are unburied and thus in liminal and unsanctified sites, waiting for vengeance. Their status is made clear in vows such as Hieronimo’s to Horatio: ‘Seest thou thoss wounds that yet are bleeding fresh, / Ile not intombe them till I have reveng’d’ (D3v). Or consider Hoffman’s promise to his father that only once he’s killed his enemies, father and son will ‘walke to paradise’ (B1v). The presence of these bodies, created through stage directions which demand a moment of discovery, figure

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the revealed area of the stage, I suggest, as kind of Purgatory, a spiritual no man’s land: these are dead characters incongruously revealed in the mortal world of the play; dead bodies amongst breathing ones; spirits in limbo between Hell and Heaven. The spiritual uncertainty that the stage direction creates through tableau is reflected and embodied in the language which surrounds the moment of revelation in many of the plays; opening the Purgatorial discovery space invokes references to Heaven, Hell and Earth. Discovering Horatio in the arbour, Hieronimo curses ‘O heavens, why made you night to cover sinne?’ When Hoffman reveals the body of his father, a stage direction demands thunder and lightning, traditionally associated with Hell and the underworld, though Hoffman interprets this Hellish sound as the ‘powers of Heavens’ agreeing with his injustice. In The Lady’s Tragedy, Govianus realizes his Lady is un-­tombed and in ‘black eternity’ (4.4.64); he must ‘dispatch this business on earth’ (4.4.84) before joining her in heavenly death. Interpreted in this way, the discovery space becomes a significant location in the symbolic architecture of the early modern stage. The Shakespearean playhouse had a cosmic symbolic architecture, ‘[w]ith painted heavens above and trapdoor [. . .] leading to the underworld below, the main stage could suggest earth itself, the realm of human activity’ (Bevington 1984: 99; see also Stern 2013: 17). In this cluster of revenge tragedies, stage directions ensure that the discovery space serves to complicate this straightforward symbolic verticality, revealed between the roofs of Heaven and the Hell under the trap door and produced by playwrights as a liminal in-­between space of Purgatory.

Boundaries of life and death Stage directions which demand the revelation of a body, and the rich visual and spiritual meanings this created, locate postReformation examination of death, funeral rites and Purgatory quite specifically in the discovery space, and visually enrich the

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spiritual and cultural ‘issues of death’ the plays are interested in. An awareness of this stage trope and its meanings enables us to see where playwrights seek to invoke and manipulate it, something that occurs in a cluster of plays from the King’s Men’s repertory, c. 1610–13. In The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi, an apparent staging of the trope is inverted as those that are believed to be dead are, in fact, alive. In The Tempest, Prospero ‘discovers Ferdinand and Miranda, playing at Chesse’ (TLN 2141–2). For Alonso, and the other Neapolitans on stage, this tableau appears to be a ‘vision of the Island’ (TLN 2149) or a ‘most high miracle’ (TLN 2151), as Ferdinand, they believe, is dead. The otherworldly appearance of a dead loved one discovered on the stage, revealed to be other than it is, is part of a wider pattern in The Tempest in which genre markers of revenge tragedy are invoked and deliberately altered. The act of discovery then rather than revealing death confirms life for the onstage audience; but not, of course, for the actual audience who have been aware of Ferdinand’s survival for the course of the play. In The Winter’s Tale, this dramatic irony is denied for audiences and they directly experience, as they do not in The Tempest, the emotional effect of the inverted stage trope. In the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, the statue of Leontes’ dead wife, Hermione, is revealed behind a curtain. Their long-­lost daughter kneels and so, as Gillian Woods notes, Perdita ‘becomes part of the monumental tableau, just as early modern tombs frequently depicted living children on the tombs of dead parents; like those effigial children, she kneels’ (2013: 176). Again, as in the other examples considered, the dramatic tableau parallels marble funeral monuments. Crucially, though, this tableau is disrupted when Hermione comes to life: unknown to audience and onstage audience alike, except Paulina, Hermione did not die but rather has been alive and hidden for sixteen years. Shakespeare plays out in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, as it were, the ultimate wish fulfilment of those who discover their loved ones dead in that space earlier in that decade. Considering that, through the various

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instances of its use, the early modern audience may have seen this stage action of drawing a curtain to reveal an unseen space and body as a sort-­of Purgatory, crystallizes some of the emotions of his scenes. Leontes’s actions in the first scene of The Winter’s Tale placed all his family in a form of Purgatory, scattered and alienated. Realizing his error, Leontes spends his time repenting. We are told, in language that resonates with the ideas of suffering, Purgatory and redemption, that he has . . . perform’d A Saint-­like sorrow: No fault could you make, Which you have not redeem’d; indeed pay’d downe More penitence then done trepas (TLN 2727–30) In the final scene, his penitence is rewarded. Not dissimilarly, on Prospero’s island Alonso comes to atone for his sins against the Duke, and is compensated with the undoing of his son’s ‘death’. Two years after The Winter’s Tale, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi again saw the King’s Men engaged with cultures of death. As several critics have established at length, Webster’s tragedy is deeply interested in death, grief and memorialization (Bergeron 1978; Neill 1997; Chalk 2011; Owens 2012; Loughnane 2013). ‘Tombs, graves, and decaying ruins are recognizable staples of Webster’s imagery’ (1997: 333), Neill suggests; and this imagery reaches its climax in the play’s final two acts. For my purposes it is 4.1 which is particularly pertinent. In this scene, the Duchess’ brother reveals the supposed dead bodies of her husband and children: ‘Here is discouer’d, (behind a Trauers;) the artificial figures of Antonio, and his children, appearing as if they were dead’ (Webster 1623: I1v). Crucial to note here is the different experience of readers and audiences of the play because of this stage direction. Readers are made aware that these are ‘artificial figures’; conversely, in performance the audience remain unaware, directly suffering and empathizing with the Duchess

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until her exit, when Ferdinand reveals to Bosola that these are ‘wax figures’. As Margaret Owens (2012) and David Bergeron (1978) note, this macabre tableau owes much to early modern cultural practice of effigies, the wax figures displayed in funerary ceremonies – most notably the funeral of Prince Henry in the wake of which Webster wrote his play. It is also part of the rich schema of morbid imagery and language of the play, and Webster’s interest in cultures of death and memorialization. In addition, though, this scene fits into the dramaturgical pattern with which I am concerned. Webster recalls and inverts the stage trope established in earlier revenge tragedies for the ‘bodies’ displayed here are, of course, just wax figures and still alive. The location of the figures, and the way in which the stage direction demands that they are revealed on stage, though, encourage the audience to, like the Duchess, believe the bodies are dead. In many of the early modern stage directions examined here it is the curtain pulled back which marks a boundary between the dead and the living or, in its later inverted form, the seeming dead and living. This physical gesture demanded by the stage direction was one with a rich liturgical and artistic heritage, as art historian Martha Hollander notes: The curtain had been a feature of liturgical architecture since the late Middle Ages. Curtains suspended on a rod around an altar would be pulled back at the climax of the Mass to reveal the body and blood of Christ, miraculously transformed into the Eucharist. Accordingly the curtain was featured in fourteenth- and fifteenth-­century religious art as an instrument of divine revelation, at once hiding and, at an important moment, disclosing a sacred object. (2002: 69) Jennifer A. Low draws on Hollander’s work to suggest that ‘the link to the divine revelation that the curtain provides is particularly relevant in The Tempest, given that Prospero has been playing God through much of the play and has had to

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learn humility in order to deserve God’s grace’ (2013: 120). We might also read The Winter’s Tale in light of Hollander’s point, though, as Paulina also fashions herself as revealing the divine, something that requires ‘you do awake your Faith’ (TLN 3301). Until Hermione ‘comes to life’, the scene plays as a kind of memorial service, with the frons acting as a boundary or barrier between life and death. Perdita kneels to her mother and Leontes to his wife, seeking comfort and forgiveness. Hermione then steps down, re-­enters the land of the living and performs absolution (PB). Conversely in the cluster of revenge tragedies where the curtain reveals death and murder, there is an inversion of this divine and sacred gesture, thereby underscoring the hellish and macabre imagery which permeates these plays. Moving on from late medieval associations of the drawn curtain which still resonated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is worth noting the post-Reformation meaning of the gesture. In her excellent analysis of sacred spaces, Jeanne Halgren Kilde notes that in the Catholic Mass, there was a ‘marked separation’ of ‘screens and curtains’ that divided priest and congregation; access to the celebrant and the divine presence brought about through Mass was mostly ‘fragmented’ and ‘concealed’ (2008: 74–75). After the Reformation, however, ‘No longer were the mysteries of the Mass to be hidden from the gaze of the faithful’. Services were ‘a visual spectacle meant to be gazed upon’ (Halgren Kilde 2008: 99); in other words, the curtain had been permanently pulled back. The act of discovery on the early modern stage, then, in its desire to expose, to gaze at and to know the body in intent and effect, owed much to Protestant ideology. Therefore, while I do assert that the discovery space offers a form of substituted Purgatory, it would be wrong to read stage directions and the construction of the discovery space in these plays as entirely nostalgic for Catholicism. Work by Gillian Woods, Thomas Rist, Alison Shell and Susan Zimmerman, to name a few, reminds us that theatre’s theology was ambiguous and complex and, more often than not, a confusion of Catholic and Protestant imagery and thinking. This ambiguity extends to

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the revelation of dead bodies behind curtains: for while they invoke Purgatory and are frequently surrounded by the aesthetics of Catholicism (candlelight, for example) the act of revelation and exposing of the body is one with Protestant sympathies that in many ways opposes the ideology and practices of the old religion. I have been suggesting that stage directions that reveal dead and living bodies behind curtains and in previously unseen stage space had a rich meaning relating to cultures of death and remembrance, visual cultures of portraits and funeral monuments and liturgical pre- and post-Reformation practices. To end I want to examine why such complex cultural and theological concerns manifest in the theatrical language of stage directions, in physical gesture and in the stage architecture of the discovery space.

Theatricality The staged revelation is crucial to the establishment of the revenge plot and often marks a moment when a private individual grievance becomes public and communal. This shift from private to public is particularly notable in The Spanish Tragedy. Hieronimo has been identified as a new type of psychologically rich early modern character; Gordon Braden suggests that inwardness is a feature of his response to his son’s murder, a response which we can see as, ‘a hyperbolic and unappeasable privacy’ (1985: 213). Notably Hieronimo keeps the murder of his son secret until its dramatic discovery in the court entertainment. Kyd makes us aware of Hieronimo’s isolation and independence in the setting-­up of his ‘show’. He is seemingly unaided and makes very particular preparations, as suggested by the Duke’s response to seeing him ‘knock . . . up the curtain’: ‘where’s your fellows, / That you take all this paine?’ (K2v). In an earlier scene we saw him as playwright and wardrobe master, and now he is bustling about as both stage manager and front-­of-house manager, materially

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concerned with the title display, the key, a cushion, a chair and an actor’s beard (PB). Suddenly, though, Hieronimo’s private grief becomes public in a stage location that very much marks a public/private boundary. Peter Womack points out in his discussion of off-­ stage space that in the early modern theatre the ‘galleries and the yard are inhabited by the public . . . the space is theirs’ and ‘Correspondingly, the tiring-­house belongs to the actors: it is their habitation, the conspicuous repository of their property and their secrets . . . the company’s private property’ (2013: 79). The drawing back of the curtain to reveal a tableau in the discovery space troubles this straightforward binary as the area just inside the tiring-­house, or at least stage space that has been off-­stage and ‘private’ to the acting company, suddenly becomes exposed to the rest of the public theatre space. Geographer YiFu Tuan asks us to Consider the sense of an ‘inside and outside’, of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space. People everywhere recognize these distinctions, but the awareness may be quite vague. Constructed form has the power to heighten the awareness and accentuate, as it were, the difference in emotional temperature between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (1977: 107) By ‘constructed form’, Tuan refers to the public courtyard space of early Chinese houses, as contrasted with their private elaborate domestic interiors. His analogue, though, is apt for stage directions which create the discovery space as ‘constructed form’. In moments where bodies are revealed, there is a heightened awareness of inside and outside, public and private; and the exposure of these bodies dramatically alters the ‘emotional temperature’ of the scenes in which they appear. The architecture of the discovery space offers an onstage location that physicalizes these subjective and abstract emotions. In her analysis of discovery space scenes in light of Renaissance paintings of enclosed vistas, Jennifer A. Low

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points out a ‘similar optical experience’ between the two, suggesting that ‘staging focused attention on an important sight half-­obscured by shadows’ (2013: 114). She notes Hieronimo’s delay in identifying Horatio’s body in the bower which ‘indicates the obscurity that the discovery space was intended to effect; visual clutter, if not actual shadow, might have concealed some degree of the violence enacted upon Horatio’s body until Hieronimo brought the body out of the space and downstage, where the audience could see the effects that Hieronimo describes’ (Low 2013: 116–17). Wherever the discovery space is situated, lighting it from above is problematic and it is likely that figures within it will be less easy to make out in detail than those onstage. This obscurity is of course dramatically useful, as characters are half-­lit, or half-­alive, or waiting to be brought into the light. Not only are the occupants of the discovery space less well-­lit, they are also partially or even completely invisible to some members of the audience. In many cases the language can replace the act of seeing and the image of the discovered can be richly presented to our mind’s eye: the ‘fair, comely’ wife of Antonio is described as lying ‘A prayer Booke the pillow to her cheeke [. . .] and another / Plac’d in her right hand, with a leafe tuckt up’ (C1v); Hieronimo is confronted by a ‘murdrous spectacle . . . A man hangd up and all the murdrers gone’ (D3r); and the descriptions of the veins, wrinkles, lips, posture and even breath of Hermione’s statue are sufficient to recreate her image in the mind of the audience. Furthermore, those who can see less of the dead discovered find themselves focusing more on the living and watching the effect of the discovery on them – which, as suggested earlier, is often the principal dramatic purpose of these discoveries (PB). The audience’s emotional interest and sympathy is not with the unknown corpse, but with the grieving living character left behind. Yet, in part, the obscurity of the discovery space, the way it is both a site of revelation and concealment, is part of its dramatic appeal. As Ashley Denham Busse has argued, the discovery space is ‘a site for staging the “obscene” that which

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is too horrific, indecent and corrupting to be seen or staged’ (2013: 73). Busse draws on Julia Kristeva’s work on the ‘abject’ in Powers of Horror to examine the ‘obscene’ nature of the discovery space. For Kristeva, the abject is the horrified and visceral response to an object that is vile and repugnant, something that requires exclusions because it disturbs the sense of a material living being self. Reaction to the corpse is the prime example of the abject: ‘corpses’, Kristeva notes, ‘show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live . . . There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being’ (quoted in Denham Busse 2013: 74). The covering and discovering of corpses on stage allow playwrights to foreground the experience of the abject: simultaneously to exclude what is vile and challenging but also to reveal it in order to provoke a strong emotional and visceral reaction in on- and off-­stage audiences. The potential obscurity of the corpse is part of the appeal of these stage directions. The power and excitement of the discovery space is precisely that its content is discovered only to some members of the audience. If these contents are somehow moved forwards on stage, potentially there are ripples of discovery as more of the audience see it and the ‘discovery’ or ‘revelation’ is an extended dramatic process. Nevertheless it is perhaps the lack of visibility that creates a different, but equally unsettling, experience as seeing the corpse on stage. The imagery and language patterns of many of these plays – with their focus on death rites, funerals, revenge, horror and violence – encourage audiences to imagine their own images of death, violence and the afterlife. Hearing, but not quite seeing, the frightening contents of the discovery space leaves a gap for the audience’s imagination. When the bodies revealed in the discovery space are shown to be those that have been killed during the course of the play (Horatio in The Spanish Tragedy; the Lady in The Lady’s Tragedy; Marcello in The White Devil, for example), we find that embodied character transforms into represented corpse, actor morphs into staged prop. Indeed, in a nuanced discussion of the symbolic and imaginary uses of curtains,

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Nathalie Rivère de Carles argues that in Antonio’s Revenge, it is as if the revealed body of Feliche behind the curtain ‘is symbolically changed into a cloth [. . .] the body becomes an unnatural tapestry in its own right’ (2013: 68). The prohibited cost of wax effigies suggests that it is likely that corpses would have been actors ‘playing’ dead (Bergeron 1978: 334; Owens 2012: 861; Loughnane 2013: 225). Often especially heightened theatrical or metatheatrical language clusters around directions for the revelation of curtained off-­stage space. For instance in The Tragedy of Hoffman, the anti-­hero figures his father’s corpse in theatrical terms as ‘the prologue to the un’suing play’ (B4r) and ‘the prologue to a Tragedy’ (C2v). Playwrights seem to draw attention to theatricality and disruptions in dramatic form that discoveries cause, the way in which distinctions between on and off stage, and so real and fictional, as well as embodied and represented, that corpses in the discovery space confuse. They do so because the complexities of theatricality – present and non-­present, real and represented, visible and obscured – parallel some of the fundamental post-Reformation anxieties about dead loved ones, how to mourn and the interaction between the dead and the living. Questions such as: is the spirit present or not? Is the dead body simply a representation of the life that was? What are the values of exposing, rather than obscuring, the mysteries of the Mass? The theatre provides an apt testing ground to think through cultures of death. But, more than this, what is apparent is that this testing is located in the most essential and unique qualities of the theatre: its language (the stage direction) and its materiality (its architecture and its embodiment). Death was not just ‘discovered’ in the stage direction, it was re-­ conceptualized and re-­imagined there.

Primary references Chettle, Henry (1631), The Tragedie of Hoffman. Kyd, Thomas (1592), The Spanish Tragedie.

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Marston, John (1602), Antonio’s Revenge. Middleton, Thomas (1607), The Revenger’s Tragedy. Webster, John (1623), The Duchess of Malfi. Webster, John (1612), The White Devil.

Editions Briggs, Julia, ed. (2007), The Lady’s Tragedy, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gair, Reavley (1978), ‘Introduction’ to John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jackson, MacDonald, P. (2007), ‘Introduction: The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luckyj, Christine, ed. (2008), John Webster, The White Devil, London: Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, William (1968), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies [The Norton Facsimile], prep. by Charlton Hinman, New York: Norton. Smith, Emma (1998), ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie, London: Penguin.

PART FIVE

Plays

10 ‘Enter Macduffe, with Macbeths Head’: Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Staging of Trauma Andrew Hiscock

It was a constant complaint of the old actors, who lived in Queen Anne’s time, that if Jonson’s plays were intermitted for a few years, they could not know how to personate his characters, they were so difficult, and their manners so distant, from those of all other authors. To preserve them required a kind of stage learning, which was traditionally hoarded up. Mosca, in Volpone, when he endeavours to work upon the avarice of Corvino, and to induce him to offer his wife to the pretendedly sick voluptuary, pronounces the word think, seven or eight times: there is a difficulty arises here in various pause and difference of sound. Many niceties of this kind were

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observed by the old comedians, which are now absolutely lost to the stage. (Davies 1783–84: II.94–95)1 Such was a lament voiced in Thomas Davies’s Dramatic Miscellanies of 1783–84, bearing witness to the loss of the institutional memory of the early modern playhouse in operation some 150 years earlier. Here, Davies poignantly signals the key significance of the transfer of knowledge in a richly collaborative, unscripted, performative repertoire of exchanges (gestural, rhetorical, acoustic and of theatrical tempi) and of the consequences when access to such practices had slipped through the fingers of later generations of performers. Working a parallel vein some fifty years earlier than Davies, Henry Fielding had drawn attention to yet another rupture in cultural knowledge which continued to bear down upon the encounters of Georgian audiences with the growing figure of a national poet: ‘Many Characters in antient Plays (particularly in Shakespear) which were drawn from the Life, lose half their Beauty to us who are unacquainted with their Originals. Sir John Falstaff and his whole Gang must have given much more Entertainment to the Spectators of Queen Elizabeth’s Days, than to a modern Audience’ (Fielding 2003: 395). Despite the enormous growth in our material knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouse in recent decades, this form of mourning, acknowledged by voices such as those of Davies and Fielding in the eighteenth century, has persisted as a notable pressure upon contemporary critical debate surrounding the playhouse of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Alan C. Dessen, for example, contends that ‘The most important reason for the difficulties in recovering Shakespeare’s theatrical vocabulary is painfully simple. Most of the relevant evidence, including many things so obvious to players and playgoers in the 1590s and early 1600s as to be taken for granted, has been lost – as much as ninety percent, perhaps even more’ (Dessen 1995: 6); and, similarly minded,

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Margaret Jane Kidnie has underlined, ‘the written text has survived, while the oral text has been irrevocably lost’ (2000: 459). Interestingly in this context, the frequently unacknowledged role which the dramatist might assume in enabling a given performance to achieve its full potential was highlighted on some occasions even for early modern audiences. In the ‘Epilogue’, for example, to Richard Brome’s The Court Begger (perf. 1640–41?), we learn that in opposition to other unscrupulous individuals passing themselves off as dramatists, ‘this small Poet vents none but his own [work], and his by whole care and directions this Stage is govern’d, who has for many yeares both in his fathers dayes, and since directed Poets to write & Players to speak till he traind up these youths here to what they are now’ (Brome 1653: S8r–v). The present discussion focuses particularly upon how the study of the theatrical marker of the stage direction in the 1623 Folio text of Macbeth might serve to contribute to this ongoing critical debate, offering pause for thought in terms of questions of textual authority and provenance, collaborative playmaking and theatrical potential for one of Shakespeare’s most familiar and widely studied tragedies. Reviewing some of the possible implications of recovering stage directions for critical attention, this discussion turns to questions of the production, circulation and consumption for these markers down the centuries from the seventeenth to the present day. Throughout, the emphasis remains upon how the spoken and the unspoken in Shakespearean dramatic narrative return us to questions of theatrical potentiality and to a rich vocabulary of aural and visual signs experienced from the page and the stage. If my sequence of enquiries remains engaged throughout upon a consideration of the staging of trauma in the Folio Macbeth, in general terms, Dessen is surely right to stress that the vast majority of stage direction is concerned with ‘traffic control – getting actors and properties on and off the stage’ (2009: 515) – what Henry S. Turner has elsewhere included under the heading of ‘proxemic signs’ (2006: 159). As Laurie Maguire underlines at the opening to her own discussion in this

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collection, this seemingly irrepressible desire to establish a taxonomy for stage directions continues to exercise critical debate. However, if the term ‘stage-­direction’ was being used as early as 1726 by Lewis Theobald in his Shakespeare restored (Theobald 1726: 158),2 it is clear from evidence in earlier print culture that theatrical ‘direction’ in this sense was being deemed worthy of comment for the preceding generations of seventeenth-­century readers, as may be witnessed in Dryden’s Notes and Observations on ‘The Empress of Morocco’ (1674): ‘he cannot refrain from non-­sense in his direction. “The Scene opened is presented a Hell” Viz. The opened Scene is presented a Hell. Very good English: and a Hell, as if there were more than one’ (Dryden 1674: 44). Responding to mounting critical appetite to recover more complete knowledge of the multi-­medial experience presented to those watching and listening in the early modern playhouse, ‘the crabbed stage directions’ (as Muriel Bradbrook termed them; Bradbrook 1932: 52) have inevitably come under scrutiny, even if they seem to raise an increasing number of queries about their target audiences (player? audience? reader?), their sources and their points of entry in the evolution of the script. Nonetheless, what does remain evident is that for whichever audiences they were designed, stage directions signal an extra-­theatrical realm, one of alternative action and, more pragmatically, of preparation. Peter Womack has persuasively urged us to view ‘off-­stage space [. . .] [as] dramatically significant’, not inhabited per se by players, but relating to those who ‘are merely ceasing to be present’ (2013: 73). In the majority of early modern plays, and Macbeth is not an exception, one of the most significant functions of the transitions from the extra-­theatrical or off-­stage realm is to indicate the activation of stage space and/or stage time: ‘Enter a Doctor of Physicke, and a Wayting Gentlewoman’ (5.1);3 or ‘Enter Lady, with a Taper’ (5.1). Such signals may or may not supplement evidence already present in the spoken dialogue. Indeed, spoken dialogue, drawing variously upon the resources of description, repetition, direct address, imperative and so on,

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may itself be a vehicle or stimulus for direction: ‘Marke King of Scotland, marke’ (1.2); ‘Let me enfold thee, / And hold thee to my Heart’ (1.4); ‘Goe get some Water, / And wash this filthie Witnesse from your Hand’ (2.2); ‘Helpe me hence, hoa’ (2.3). Elsewhere, characters may be attributed with choric or semi-­ narratorial roles, drawing attention to movement, gesture or delivery: ‘The weyward Sisters, hand in hand, / [. . .] Thus doe goe, about, about’ (1.3); ‘Good Sir, why doe you start’ (1.3). Moreover, as edition after edition of Macbeth has been produced down the centuries, such verbal interventions have often attracted incrementally an array of stage directions, designed to ease the player’s and/or reader’s passage through the play-­text. This concern with stage directions in the printed text, which may supplement and/or extend the spoken script, has continued to exercise Shakespearean editors. If Leslie Thomson argued, for example, that ‘every Shakespeare play requires the addition of some basic stage directions and correction of others’ (1988: 180), more recently John D. Cox has asserted equally emphatically ‘that editors reduce sharply or even eliminate completely stage directions they add to early texts’ (2004: 178). However, the scholarly concern with the stage direction spans the centuries. Interestingly, in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, Edmund Malone had Macbeth particularly in mind when pondering the question of editorial authority in the prefatory remarks to his 1790 edition of Shakespeare: [that] the very few stage-­directions which the old copies exhibit, were not taken from our authour’s manuscripts, but furnished by the players is proved by one in Macbeth, Act IV. sc. i. where ‘A shew of eight kings’ is directed, ‘and Banquo last, with a glass in his hand;’ though from the very words which the poet has written for Macbeth, it is manifest that the glass ought to be borne by the eighth king, and not by Banquo. All the stage-­directions therefore throughout this work I have considered as wholly in my power [. . .] The reader will also, I think, be pleased to find the place in

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which every scene is supposed to pass, precisely ascertained: a species of information, for which, though it often throws light on the dialogue, we look in vain in the ancient copies, and which has been too much neglected by the modern editors. (‘Preface’ in Shakespeare 1790: lviii–lix) Antony Hammond has submitted that ‘So far, there has been remarkably little analytical discussion of stage-­directions, as distinct from pragmatic commentary on where editors have gone wrong’ (1992: 73). Certainly, in more recent debate there has been little inclination to follow Malone’s lead and attribute stage-­directions to the hands of players. There were many pairs of eyes and hands that might be involved in the generation of a script for production and printing: players (in whose number the dramatist might or might not be included), copyists, and compositors in the print shop, to name but a few. However, with the resources of stylometric testing amongst others, the balance of critical opinion often returns to viewing the dramatist as a frequent point of origin for such directions, and Douglas Bruster’s discussion in this collection offers persuasive reasons why this might be so. Nonetheless, Malone’s prefatory matter draws attention to a broader concern with which the reproduction, or production, of stage-­directions is intimately involved: the recovery of a mythically finalized master text, a perceived control text, a reassuring textual account of a performance experience in its entirety. And in edition after edition it soon becomes apparent that this perennial yearning for comforting forms of complete knowledge may come at the cost of foreclosing theatrical and hermeneutic potentialities within the surviving script. More generally, attention to the non-­verbal or paralinguistic codes (see Turner 2006: 159), the Nebentext (see Kidnie 2000: 460, and Emma Smith’s discussion of Kidnie’s argument in this collection), or what Hammond has termed ‘encounters of the third kind [. . .] which relate essentially to whatever the words leave out’ (1992: 74) within a dramatic text can offer a new

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lens and generate unexpected paths of enquiry for a very familiar play such as Macbeth. As I have indicated above, such enquiries must necessarily remain exploratory, tentative, because they must operate in a realm sensitive to theatrical potentiality. Indeed, prior to his timely reminder that ‘To build edifices on stage directions [. . .] is to confront a series of problems’ (Dessen 2001: 28), Dessen had submitted wryly to the critical debate that in such investigations we might most fruitfully concentrate upon signal, rather than signature: ‘for dramatists like Shakespeare, Heywood, and Fletcher, to assume a disjunction between the virginal work of the author and the subsequent contamination by the players may be to introduce a working model that reveals more about the scholar’s assumptions about the artist and the theatre than about Elizabethan practice’ (Dessen 1984: 24). Clearly, enduring investments in individual creativity, authorship and agency need to be continually revisited. To enter the often italicized territory of stage directions on the page (with its concerns to attribute speech, to place properties, to designate player presence and absence, to trigger aural and visual display, and so on) is not only to attend to questions of textual and theatrical organization, it may also render us more responsive to pressures which have continued to shape engagement with a play down the centuries. At the opening of a dramatic script, for example, we are frequently introduced to a list of dramatis personae whose modes of sequencing, identification and typography may engender further questions concerning schemas of taxonomy, priority, inclusion and subsequent attribution of dramatic speeches. In her discussion in this collection, Emma Smith underlines the double-­ness of Othello’s ‘divided form of address’ and the textual disquiet that this can generate. In an analogous manner, the most recent editors of the Arden Macbeth, Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, have highlighted that such scrutiny can lead to a querying of received knowledge and habits of thinking about some of the most celebrated texts from the early modern repertoire:

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Quite simply, [Lady Macbeth] does not exist in Shakespeare’s play. [. . .] She is consistently described simply as ‘Lady’ in the speech prefixes. That designation distinguishes her from [. . .] ‘Macduffes Wife’ [. . .] and is ‘Wife’ throughout her speech prefixes. Shakespeare’s text emphasizes the marital relationship for both women and makes a simple but clear distinction between them in the speech prefixes: Lady as against Wife. [. . .] [for Simon Forman] she is ‘his [Macbeth’s] wife’ [. . .] Stage directions and speech prefixes do not register verbally in the theatre, and Forman’s account is a useful reminder of the need to consider what name and identity a character is granted within the text; either through their own words or through the comments of other characters. (Shakespeare 2015: 311) In this way, the study of stage directions may be found to interrogate uninspected modes of performance and reception which a play-­text has come to assume over the passage of time and, in the case of Macbeth, since the publication of the 1623 First Folio. Lodged in the Folio between Julius Caesar and Hamlet under the category of ‘Tragedies’ (which famously also includes Cymbeline), Macbeth sustains (like all the other plays contained in the tome) an intricate narrative matrix of theatrical, nonverbal signals for a stage whose ‘fixed features’, as Tiffany Stern points out, ‘could not be substantially remoulded for specific performances, and few efforts seem to have been taken to change general ambiance from one production to another. Though references suggest that genre-­ specific hangings might be employed – black hangings signalling a tragedy (so making a literary rather than a “realistic” statement) – general staging seldom acknowledged the separation of one play from another’ (Stern 2013: 12). In the light of all the caveats outlined in the sections above, the discussion which follows is necessarily explorative, suggestive, rather than exhaustive or conclusive.

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Violent entertaining In Histrio-­mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie (1633), William Prynne railed that ‘the acting of forreine obsolete, and long-­since forgotten Villanies on the Stage, is so farre from working a detestation of them in the Spectators mindes (who perchance were utterly ignorant of them, till they were acquainted with them at the Play-­house, and so needed no dehortation from them;) that it oft excites degenerous dunghill spirits’ (1633: 104). As my chosen title indicates, this discussion focuses upon long-­since forgotten villanies, upon the staging of trauma in Macbeth or, more particularly, upon how the play’s verbal and nonverbal codes in the Folio text might urge us to revisit the possibilities of violent spectacle in the play. R.A. Foakes has argued that Shakespeare remained deeply interested in ‘the primary act of violence, or primal scene’ (2003: 16) and this consuming dramatic interest might, of course, be communicated through a variety of methods. Indeed, it is timely to remind ourselves that in the theatre (and other auditoria) our anticipated repulsion from violence may itself be a reassuring fiction. On the eve of the Second World War, the philosopher R.G. Collingwood could be found arguing vigorously that ‘Malice, the desire that others, especially those better than ourselves, should suffer, is a perpetual source of pleasure to man; but it takes different shapes. In Shakespeare and his contemporaries, bullying in its most violent form is so common that we can only suppose the average playgoer to have conceived it as the salt of life’ ([1938] 1963: 87). Certainly, even in the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the Folio stage directions often compel us towards a detailed consideration of violence and trauma as if responding to anticipated pleasure principles in the audience, an unslakeable desire for the violation of body and community in our consumption of tragic fare. In The Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder acknowledge the familiar belief that the representation of violence links directly to the legitimation of such acts, while

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(equally importantly) they argue that ‘it also produces tangible results ranging from dead bodies to the redistribution of space, the relocation of people or the occupation of new territory [. . .] there exists no more important resource for an ideology of violence than the representation of past violence, of former dead, former loss and former suffering’ (2001: 8). All of these critical voices, from the seventeenth century to the contemporary period, choose to interrogate the perceived cultural pressures which have led to the re-­presentation of violence for eager audiences – and the implications of such operations which ask us to consider the legitimation of radical political upheaval, a heroism linked explicitly to menace and slaughter, and the lure of bloodthirsty witness. In a play such as Macbeth, we are urged to focus down hard not only upon the performance and vanquishing of evil, but upon the renewal of self and nation through butchery. A strategic and constitutive marker of identity, violence (both verbal and physical) impresses itself as the most dynamic driver of human action in the intrigue and is explicitly linked with social mobility and premature inheritance in the play world. Indeed, such desires are amply in evidence at the very outset in the spoken exchanges of the characters where the Captain lately arrived from the battlefield celebrates ‘braue Macbeth’ who: with his brandisht Steele, Which smoak’d with bloody execution (Like Valours Minion) caru’d out his passage, Till hee fac’d the Slaue: Which neu’r shooke hands, nor bad farwell to him, Till he vnseam’d him from the Naue to th’Chops, And fix’d his Head vpon our Battlements. King

  O valiant Cousin, worthy Gentlemen. (1.2) In this dramatic world, violence is all too frequently presented as note-­worthy, awesome, demanding admiration and

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congratulation – indeed, as the seemingly dominant mode of political engagement. Appetite for its detail is regularly accommodated even for audiences onstage – in this instance, Duncan. If the physical playworld is thus stirred, nay thrilled by bloodletting, the audience is nonetheless never allowed to forget that the mental world of the characters is equally convulsed by these developments. Macbeth’s wife is portrayed as a most effective and dire stimulant to the protagonist: ‘I may powre my Spirits in thine Eare’ (1.5). Her husband confesses, ‘O, full of Scorpions is my Minde, deare Wife’ (3.2) and it seems that this highly volatile state of affairs leads inevitably to the sequence of acts of ‘dreadfull note’ (3.2). Thus, in such a playworld, the dramatis personae are repeatedly compelled to confront cycles of unceasing horror from which they can recoil (‘Thou canst not say I did it: neuer shake / Thy goary lockes at me’, 3.4), but which only serve to arouse and excite imaginations on- and off-­stage.

The soundworlds of Macbeth In his discussion for this collection, Douglas Bruster proposes that many directions for staging must have begun in rehearsal speech. Elsewhere, Linda McJannet has speculated that ‘In Elizabethan times, actors might have heard the play read to them prior to reading it (or the ‘sides’ with their individual parts) themselves. Thus their first encounter with the text might have been aural rather than visual’ (1999: 22–23). These suggestions remain intriguing, offering up a host of possible lines of enquiry. However, whatever the case may be, it is clear that attention to the nonverbal codes of a play such as Macbeth can render audiences particularly responsive to its rich acoustic language and offer supplementary points of entry to its textual meanings. The play begins as news and messengers invade the stage from the chaotic slaughter of the battlefield where war is being waged against foreigners and traitors: ‘Norway himselfe, with

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terrible numbers, / Assisted by that most disloyall Traytor, / The Thane of Cawdor, began a dismall Conflict’ (1.2). In this precarious political environment, the disoriented Duncan (like us) avidly awaits increasingly updated information concerning his traumatized realm. The desperate state of political unravelling, of sparagmos in the body politic, evoked vividly in the opening scene of the play is expertly juxtaposed in subsequent scenes by stage directions establishing the manner by which sovereignty (in seemingly less militarized times) may make itself known: Flourish. Enter King , Lenox , Malcolme , Donalbaine , and Attendants (1.4) Hoboyes, and Torches. Enter King , Malcolme , Donalbaine , Banquo , Lenox , Macduff , Rosse , Angus , and Attendants (1.6) Ho-­boyes. Torches. Enter a Sewer, and diuers Seruants with Dishes and Seruice ouer the Stage. Then enter Macbeth

(1.7) Most anxiously attentive to the political conventions of power assertion and transferral at work in their world, the Macbeths (like Claudius in Hamlet) are subsequently shown to strive for affirmations of political continuity through the expression of these wonted courtly codes of ritual, deference and largesse. Thus, the now royal Macbeth is accompanied by an appropriately majestic soundworld: ‘Senit sounded. Enter Macbeth as King, Lady, Lenox, Rosse, Lords, and Attendants’ (3.1). A sense of ceremonial decorum is similarly encountered just a few scenes later when we discover, a ‘Banquet prepar’d. Enter Macbeth, Lady, Rosse, Lenox, Lords, and Attendants’ (3.4). The aural pomp and visual grandeur communicated in

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such directions are also, it seems, accompanied by an ordered measure of entry and exit in this elite arena. Otherwise, in the disarray occasioned by Macbeth’s sighting of Banquo’s ghost, his wife’s insistence that the attendant lords should not ‘Stand not vpon the order of your going, / But go at once’ (3.4) would make little sense. Drawing upon the resources of speech acts and paralinguistic signals, Shakespeare’s Macbeth thus urges us to attend to the visual and aural bienséances of a court world so that we remain richly sensitive to any departures from it in the company of sovereigns unequal to their duties. In this way, Macbeth continues to query the identity and performance of true sovereignty, to unmask the rupturing of political society, by offering strategic demonstrations to our ears and eyes of how legitimate authority might articulate itself to wider audiences (both in Scotland and beyond its geographical and theatrical borders). Significantly, when we quit the confines of court spectacle, the nonverbal codes of the play signal that there are other soundworlds which must compete for our attention. Dessen stresses that ‘when dealing with “place” the student of theatrical vocabulary is especially hampered by the dearth of external evidence (e.g., comments by contemporary playgoers) and hence is cut off from information that would have been taken for granted by the original spectators’ (1995: 151). However, in some cases, it may be that the precise details of locale are not expressly required by the audience at certain junctures in a given early modern play-­text and thus were not recognized in the scripts which organized the earliest productions. Elsewhere, if, as was seen earlier, precise indications of locale were not in evidence when scenes opened, when they were needed, the spoken dialogue might perform in due course the task required (‘This Castle hath a pleasant seat’, 1.64) – and, in the process, open up, on occasions, the contrary motions of stage and audience perception. The scenes (and deviant loci) of the witches in Macbeth, for example, may be primarily significant in terms of an emphasis upon a given cosmological trajectory, a place of mental and/or affective disorder, or a signal of human

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marginality, rather than an identifiable habitat. Reminiscent of many contemporary expectations of operatic and cinematic consumption, the supernatural company is heralded on stage with its own acoustic leitmotif: Thunder and Lightning. Enter three Witches (1.1) Thunder. Enter the three Witches (1.3) Thunder. Enter the three Witches, meeting Hecat . (3.5) Thunder. Enter the three Witches (4.1) Such deliberately unnerving and disruptive directions may have been communicated in the early modern playhouse, as Gwilym Jones has argued more generally, by ‘Shining rockets shooting across the stage, cannonballs trundling in the echoing wooden heavens, drums rolling and ordinance discharging’ (2013: 34). Furthermore, such operations need not have been experienced in uniform ways by all members of the audience on such occasions. These atmospheric effects can clearly traumatize and/or dynamize the experience of performance. However, they may also act as memorial prompts in the unfolding dramatic narrative, confirm visually and aurally significant divisions in the theatrical spaces being enacted, and/ or return attention in an arresting fashion to the play’s obsessive thematic investment in trauma and violation. More generally, such directions specifically force us to engage with the weird sisters through violent bursts of light and ominous soundscapes – expressed both in the heavens and around the cauldron. Furthermore, in this context, we may be reminded of the contention of the cultural theorist Dick Hebdige that

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subcultures [may be seen to] represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence [. . .] We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation. (2005: 355) Thus, the disruptive aural experiences and arresting light shows which accompany our encounters with the witches are intimately bound up with the play’s undertaking to involve its audiences in profoundly unsettling enquiries into the operations of power and knowledge in this dramatic universe. Indeed, this is a disturbing investigation which the play may be only partially willing to indicate textually: ‘Musicke, and a Song. [. . .] Sing within. Come away, come away, &c.’ (3.5) – at such moments, a stage direction draws us intriguingly into an elliptical exchange between its author and the company. The latter is requested at this point to exploit its customary or available resources for musical and theatrical intervention to effect. Elsewhere, in the morally unnerving night world of Macbeth when we learn that ‘A Bell rings’ (2.1), we are asked to listen strenuously for the possibilities of earthly and unearthly agency: ‘it is a Knell, / That summons thee to Heauen, or to Hell’ (2.1). If, as Glynne Wickham persuasively urged, we should think of the Macbeths’ gate as theatrically re-­membering an ‘older memory’ from medieval playmaking where ‘strange noises in the air which alert the devils of impending disaster [. . .] Thunder, cacophony, screams and groans were the audible emblems of Lucifer and hell on the medieval stage. Those same aural emblems colour the whole of 2.3 of Macbeth and, juxtaposed as they are with thunderous knocking at a gate attended by a porter deluded into regarding himself as a devil, their relevance to the moral meaning of the play could scarcely have escaped the notice of its first audiences’ (Wickham 1970: 73). However, this vivid renewal of the gueule d’enfer for the early modern

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stage may also combine with the fact that the toll is being told also within this tragedy of state. When Macduff exclaims, ‘Ring the alarvm Bell. Murder and treason!’ (2.3) and later Lady Macbeth complains that ‘such a hideous Trumpet calls to parley / The sleepers of the House?’ (2.3), we are simultaneously being asked to count the loss of a single soul, the demise of kin and the collapse of the pater patriae. The soundings, and indeed remembered soundings (‘One: Two: Why then ’tis time to doo’t’, 5.1), continue to remind the audience of the division in this world between the polluted crime scene of traitorous desire and the external world of ignorance, of witness and judgement. In Shakespeare’s remorseless account of human decline, the seemingly inviolate authority of the bell is joined by that of repeated knocking (‘Hearke, more knocking’, 2.2), located typographically on the right margin at the close of lines in the First Folio. Here, both character and audience must be rendered anxious by the insistent pulse which resounds at the edge of Macbeth’s page and stage, at the distinction between the theatrical and extra-­theatrical, and frames the dramatic action and the thematic investment of a play which, as Lorna Hutson has argued, unmasks ‘Scotland as a country cursed and undone by its lack of constitutionality, its failure to identify a passion for justice in its people’ (2015: 143). The dramatic world of Macbeth is thus being pounded in its spiritual and political crises by the violent and recurrent eruptions of light and sound onto the stage. However, we may also like to consider how the alternative axes of stage space are being shaped and re-­shaped by the authority of stage direction in the course of the play. In the same way that attention has been drawn to the ways in which lateral movements of ‘traffic control’ are articulated by non-­spoken signals in the Folio, there are also encouragements in the directions to explore stage space vertically to offer a more universal vision of disorienting theatrical experience. If, in Hamlet, we learn that the ghostly presence has descended to a purgatorial netherworld which accompanies the ‘fellow in the selleredge’ (1.3), in Macbeth spirits may eerily withdraw (‘whither are they

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vanish’d?’, 1.3) and cauldrons may ‘sink’. Womack’s reminder is timely that ‘In an open-­air amphitheatre the tiring-­house is literally a house, and the stage is literally outside it, under the sky. Consequently the ordinary term for “off-­stage” is “within” ’ (2013: 81). Certainly, in the company of the witches we learn that there is a ‘Drum within’, greeted by the Third Witch with ‘A Drumme, a Drumme: Macbeth doth come’ (1.3). In the same company much later in the play, King Macbeth exclaims ‘Why sinkes that Caldron? & what noise is this?’ and is further unnerved by the sound of ‘Hoboyes’ (4.1). As Stern underlines, ‘Hautboys, the ancestors to the oboe, with their reedy, nasal sound, were taken to symbolize the fact that something bad was about to happen’ (2004: 108). At such moments, the Folio’s stage directions extend beyond the lived experience of stage space and envelop the sensate world of those existing beyond its fiction.

The visual world of Macbeth The early modern playhouse was a place for listeners, but also for spectators who might prove alert to visual displays of different kinds. Both spoken dialogue and stage-­direction work vigorously, for example, throughout Macbeth to impress upon everyone concerned that we are having commerce with a benighted world: ‘Enter Banquo, and Fleance, with a Torch before him’ (2.1); ‘Enter Macbeth, and a Seruant with a Torch’ (2.1); ‘There’s Husbandry in Heauen, / Their Candles are all out’ (2.1). Furthermore, in the presence of the tyrant Macbeth audiences on- and off-­stage are never allowed to forget the fact that snuffling out in such contexts is never simply about the loss of light. If, in an afternoon at the Globe or evening in a much more formal elite residence, we need to be reminded of Macbeth’s physical (as well as spiritual) darkness, it seems that we must also encounter various displays of bodily trauma. At the beginning of the play, universal political tumult is evoked in an

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emblematic encounter with the carnage: ‘Alarum within. Enter King Malcome, Donalbaine, Lenox, with attendants, meeting a bleeding Captaine. King : What bloody man is that?’ (1.2). Having duly performed his role as nuntius, the Captain returns to his initial symbolic function as maimed figure, hovering between life and death: ‘I am faint. My Gashes cry for helpe’ (1.2). The bloodied trunk of the Captain serves as an incisive communication of the appetite for blood at work within this dramatic world (and perhaps beyond), but different permutations of this ailing figure regularly punctuate Shakespeare’s tragedy and serve to impress upon us the very fragility of living forms in the face of remorseless attrition. In due course, we are introduced to those who, at various points, have become victims of violence, are mentally tormented (like the Macbeths and Macduff) and even to those who are untethered from the mortal world altogether: Enter the Ghost of Banquo, and sits in Macbeths place. (3.4) Thunder. 1. Apparation, an Armed Head. (4.1) Thunder. 2 Apparation, a Bloody Childe. (4.1) Thunder. 3 Apparation, a Childe Crowned, with a Tree in his hand. (4.1) At such intense theatrical junctures, audiences are placed under pressure to decipher the complex cycles of experience at work in the dramatic world, like the protagonist himself. Elsewhere, if, as we have seen, royalty demands its own pomp and circumstance on Macbeth’s stage, the theatre of war also demands its own expression in the multi-­medial languages

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of the play: ‘Drum and Colours. Enter Menteth, Cathnes, Angus, Lenox, Soldiers’ (5.2); ‘Drum and Colours. Enter Malcolme, Seyward, Macduffe, Seywards Sonne, Menteth, Cathnes, Angus, and Soldiers Marching’ (5.4.1); ‘Enter Macbeth, Seyton, & Souldiers, with Drum and Colours’ (5.5); ‘Drumme and Colours. Enter Malcolme, Seyward, Macduffe, and their Army, with Boughes’ (5.6). Again, in such instances, the concerns of the stage direction are not primarily with locale, but with impressing upon those who read them of the import of such developments in the intrigue which warrant some detail of pageantry and ceremonial, a roll call of the political power magnates, and a convergence or congestion of bodies on a stage which has in recent action all too often been characterized by claustrophobia and desertion. Interestingly, in this context, Marga Munkelt drew particular attention to the visual spectacle of marching signalled in stage directions for Act V which, she argued, is ‘undoubtedly dynamic and militant [. . .] It may be no coincidence that Macbeth [. . .] is not marching: a statement on his hopeless situation is being made’ (1987: 260). Whatever the case, the failed state of Scotland and the final demolition of Macbeth’s regime are conveyed theatrically by the rapid and mostly violent redistribution of bodies across the stage. The carefully orchestrated, collective entrances noted above of a militarized landscape are inevitably followed within a short space of time by more energetic engagements: ‘Fight, and young Seyward slaine’ (5.7); ‘Exeunt fighting. Alarums. Enter Fighting, and Macbeth slaine. Retreat, and Flourish. Enter with Drumme and Colours, Malcolm, Seyward, Rosse, Thanes, & Soldiers’ (5.7); ‘Enter Macduffe; with Macbeths head’ (5.7). In this way, spoken dialogue and stage direction work symbiotically for those who have access to them to evoke the volatility, disorientation, urgency and bloody spectacle with which violent regime change is all too often presented. Macbeth’s castle world of spiritual and political inertia is thus radically transformed by the vigorous interventions of light, sound and gesture brought by the invading forces of his antagonists.

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Concluding thoughts Munkelt argued some decades ago that ‘Though recently interest in the nonspoken material as a whole has increased, the treatment of stage directions is still characterized by skepticism as regards authenticity and literary value’ (1987: 253). The purpose of the present discussion has been to interrogate this ‘skepticism’. However, rather than dwelling primarily on questions of signature, I have sought to reflect upon possible hermeneutic modes for the textual markers which have been bequeathed to us from the Folio text of Macbeth. In the scholarship surrounding early modern stage directions, McJannet has strategically highlighted that this ‘distinctive verbal and visual code [. . .] [that is] now so familiar [. . .] [has acquired] a measure of “invisibility” ’ (1998: 86). In seeking to recover the stage direction from its wonted invisibility, we are not restoring some mythical textual wholeness or integrity, but we are attending more sensitively to the accounts of a play which has survived down into our hands. As was witnessed at the opening of this discussion, the study of stage direction has all too often been characterized by exasperation at the lacunal nature of the transmission of theatrical experience from one age to the next. Dessen, for example, submits that ‘With access only to stage directions, dialogue, and the rare eyewitness account, the interpreter today often cannot determine whether a tomb, a forest, a tent, or a prison was represented by verisimilar properties brought onto the stage or, in contrast, was represented by means of dialogue, appropriate actions, costume, and portable properties in conjunction with the imaginary forces of the spectator’ (1995: 196). The truth of such contentions is undeniable, but rather than concentrating upon historical and epistemological loss, it may just be time to reflect more strenuously upon questions of textual and theatrical potentiality – and the stage direction can operate as an excellent stimulus in such an undertaking.

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Primary references Brome, Richard (1653), The Court Begger. Dryden, John (1674), Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco. Prynne, William (1633), Histrio-­mastix The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie. Shakespeare, William (1623), Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies Published according to the true originall copies. Theobald, Lewis (1726), Shakespeare restored: or, A Specimen of the Many Errors as well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr. Pope.

Editions Davies, Thomas (1783–84), Dramatic Miscellanies, consisting of Critical Observations on several Plays of Shakespeare: with A Review of his Principal Characters, and those of Various Eminent Writers, as represented by Mr. Garrick, and other Celebrated Comedians with Anecdotes of Dramatic Poets, Actors &c., III vols., London: for Thomas Davies. Fielding, Henry (2003), Contributions to ‘The Champion’ and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shakespeare, William (1790), The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes, vol. I, ed. Edmond Malone, London: H. Baldwin. Shakespeare, William (2015), Macbeth, eds Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

11 ‘(From the Dutchesse Grave)’: Echoic Liminalities in The Duchess of Malfi Sarah Lewis

Echoes resonate through both the dramatic form and thematic content of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a play in which stage directions themselves work as anticipatory pre-­ echoes. The mass entrance stage directions of the 1623 Quarto occupy liminal positions in space and time: they describe both the ‘now’ and the ‘not quite now’ of the narrative, telling us what is happening and what is about to happen; who is on the stage and who is about to be on the stage. Like echoes themselves, which are sounds suspended in reverberation between the point of origin and the point of return, these stage directions are perpetually in between. One particular stage direction, ‘Antonio, Delio, Eccho, (from the Dutchesse Grave.)’, from the beginning of 5.3, draws attention to its own spatial and temporal indeterminacy because it describes the presence (or absence) of the shadowy figure Echo herself

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(Webster 1623: M3v). Perhaps because of this double-­liminality in terms of both form and content, this stage direction has been the site of much editorial intervention. Through an exploration of those interventions it is possible to build a picture of the various critical responses to this scene, to the figure of Echo, and ultimately, to the Duchess herself, which have shaped readings of the play over the last half a century. In this chapter, I suggest that analysing this stage direction and this scene through a consideration of temporal and spatial liminality, and through an acknowledgement of Echo’s classical contexts, enables us to open up the central crux of Malfi, a play that relentlessly interrogates the cultural construction and destruction of the body, the voice, and individual agency.

A play full of echoes Critics have long been preoccupied with the echoes that reverberate through The Duchess of Malfi. In the introduction to her 2009 edition of the play, Leah S. Marcus demonstrates that this is a play full of echoes – not only the literal Echo of 5.3 but the ‘echo’ of stolen information and numerous ‘echoes’ in the action onstage, in which one scene repeats another with variations to powerful effect. ([2009] 2015: 89) The Duchess’s secret marriage to Antonio in 1.2 ‘reverberates through the play like a Freudian return of the repressed’, recurring at 3.2 when Ferdinand surprises the Duchess with a dagger, at 4.1 when he gives her the gift of a severed hand, and at 4.2, ‘Bosola’s “love scene” with the almost-­dead Duchess’ (Marcus [2009] 2015: 43). Christina Luckyj argues that the Duchess’s wooing of Antonio in act one reappears in a ‘distorted or exaggerated’ form in Julia and the Bosola’s perverse tryst of 5.2, and Lois Potter imagines an echoing connection between

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Delio’s somewhat baffling seduction of Julia in 2.4 and Ferdinand’s bribery of Bosola in Act 1 (1987: 278; 1975: 180). In fact, as these examples suggest, echoing strategies connect scenes of destructive desire and sexual violence with scenes of romantic love in this play. Brian Gibbons argues that the whole of 5.3, the Echo scene itself, in which we witness Antonio’s continuing devotion to the wife he does not yet know has been murdered: is the reverse, as in the mirror, of the episode in III.ii where Antonio (with Cariola) watches helplessly from off-­stage while on-­stage, the Duchess, gazing at her face in her mirror, is threatened by Ferdinand. ([1964] 2001: xxviii) The Duchess, in Gibbons’s reading, is unseen in 5.3, pining for her husband from the ruins, as the wasting Echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses pines for Narcissus from ‘lonely caves’ (Melville 1986: III.394). Antonio is himself, then, presented as Echo in 3.2, when he, similarly unseen, watches the narcissistic Duchess being urged to suicide by her poniard-­brandishing brother. Gibbons argues that echoes work in multiple temporal directions in Malfi, and that 3.2 connects with 5.3 as a pre-­ echo of that later scene: ‘in this play so much depends on prefiguring and reflection, on pre-­echoes and echoes’ (Gibbons [1964] 2001: xxviii). Echoes also operate on a smaller scale, connecting specific lines across the play. For example, Gibbons points out that Antonio’s ‘never see her more’, which is repeated by the Echo in 5.3, is prefigured in 3.5, when he says goodbye to his wife for the last time: ‘If I do never see thee more, / Be a good mother to your little ones’ (Gibbons [1964] (2001) 5.3.41n, Neill 2016: 3.5.80–81). In fact, this earlier line is also an echo: it repeats Ferdinand’s ‘I will never see you more’ and ‘I will never see thee more’ from 3.2 (Neill 2016: 3.2.136, 140). Echo is woven into this play as an element of Webster’s dramatic technique, a technique which relies heavily on repetition. Marcus suggests he draws repeatedly on echoing

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constructs, pointing out that he ‘frequently uses stage properties to echo and reinforce the language’. For example, he uses the image of the jewel, an object that has a ‘connection with the Duchess’s body [and that] reverberates through the play’ ([2009] 2015: 43). The use of echo in Malfi is metatheatric in that it draws attention to the dramatic structure of the play itself. The echoes that are presented through the imagery of the play, and through the figure of echo in 5.3, are themselves echoes of the various kinds of repetition which are at Malfi’s structural core. Gibbons argues that ‘Echo constitutes a metatheatrical allusion, and a bold one, alluding to Webster’s own technique of construction’ ([1964] 2001: xxviii n25). The use of echo in the play is also metatheatric in that it destabilises the division of actor and audience member John Russell Brown has highlighted the use of sententiae in the play, which appear as moralizing commonplaces at the end of scenes. ([1964] 1997: 18). These ‘ “echoing” aphorisms’, likely to be familiar to audience members, operate as ‘a form of echo’, an echo which rebounds not within the play-­world, but between the characters of the play and the readers or spectators of early modern London (Marcus [2009] 2015: 5.3.19n, 89). In this chapter, I suggest that the metatheatric nature of the echo works to penetrate the division between play-­world and ‘real’-world, particularly in terms of Malfi’s engagement with early modern gender politics, and specifically its presentation of the Duchess’s sexuality. The echoic structures and images that permeate Malfi connect antithetical actions and, as a result, bring together the individuals that perpetrate those actions. Therefore these echoes work to destabilize our sense of a character’s motivations. For example, the fact that the Duchess’s murderer and her husband both use the same phrase encourages us to interrogate the nature of the tragedy itself: what, exactly, is the cause of the Duchess’s downfall? Of what or whom is she a victim? These reverberations between characters complicate the moral landscapes presented in the play, particularly in relation to the Duchess’s sexuality and

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gendered identity. In turn, the reverberations between play-­ world and the ‘real’-world these echoes effect force the play’s readers and spectators to scrutinize the moral landscapes they themselves inhabit.

Stage directions as pre-­echoes Despite Gibbons’s assertion that the Duchess remains unseen in 5.3 (an assertion to which I will return), Echo’s appearance on the stage could certainly be surmised from the stage direction at the beginning of the scene. In Q1, stage directions often indicate mass entrances, listing all of the characters that are to appear as the scene progresses. Marcus suggests these are the work of Ralph Crane, the theatrical scrivener to whom the copy behind Q1 is often attributed ([2009] 2015: 74). She argues that the mass entrances, which fail to identify when exactly a character will make their appearance on the stage, ‘along with the paucity of stage directions of all kinds, give modern editors and performers much mystification and also much freedom’ ([2009] 2015: 74).1 This particular stage direction is no exception: is Echo, in fact, a voice, or a physical presence in this scene? If she does appear, when and how does she make that appearance? Through the years, editors, readers and practitioners have approached this stage direction as a puzzle to be fathomed, and in fact all stage directions present puzzles in one way or another. Who has written them? Do they record actual performance choices, or make suggestions for them? How should they be read in relation to the scene itself, and how should actors engage with them in performance? The instability of early modern stage directions has been extensively explored by scholars, but I want to suggest a different lens through which to consider the unruly nature of the mass entrance stage directions in this particular play. These stage directions are, to use Gibbons’s term, pre-­echoes of the scene that is to come. They exist in the liminal space between the end of the previous scene, and the beginning

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of the scene that is to follow, as they are both imbedded in the scene they are part of, and yet also distanced from it. They both tell readers what is happening ‘now’ on the space of the stage, and what is about to happen in the imminent, or perhaps not-­ so-imminent, future. The spatial and temporal liminality of the stage direction must be central to our understanding of its relationship to both text and performance. The particular example I am interested in examining, ‘Antonio, Delio, Eccho, (from the Dutchesse Grave.)’, offers rich material for a consideration of the liminality of mass entrance stage directions because the figure of echo which is embedded in this scene and in this mass entrance is also defined by liminality. Echoes are: delayed returns of sound; they are incomplete reproductions, usually giving back only the final fragments of a phrase. An echo spans large gaps of space (sound reverberates between distant points) and time (echoes aren’t instantaneous), but it also creates gaps of meaning and intelligibility. (Scott 2001: 291) As Joan W. Scott suggests, echoes are spatially and temporally cut adrift: not here or there, not then or now, but somewhere in between. This sense of dislocation is key in 5.3 of Malfi. Does this echoing voice have an identity? Is it the Duchess’s ghost? Does it have agency? Can it communicate a message, or only repeat phrases spoken by Antonio and Delio?

The classical narratives: Echo pursuing, Echo pursued In order to begin to answer some of these questions about Echo’s agency, and to think about how echoic imagery and structure, as well as the figure of Echo herself in this play, might work to complicate our perception of the Duchess’s own

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sexuality and gendered identity, it is crucial that we acknowledge the classical contexts that defined the figure of Echo in the early modern period. As I have suggested, echo is liminal in terms of its structure – always between now and then, here and there – but its liminality is also defined by the originating content of the Greek narratives found in the Homeric Hymn to Pan and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the former being the first recorded personification of echo in literature (Lowenstein 1984: 14). I want to spend some time outlining those two narratives, as although Joseph Lowenstein suggests that few English dramatic echo dialogues pay attention to classical presentations of Echo, I would like to argue that early seventeenth-­century English drama does in fact draw on both those classical stories in order to engage with early modern debates about female agency (Lowenstein 1984: 73 n35). Cynthia’s Revels, Ben Jonson’s play of 1600, features one of the best-­known echo scenes from the drama of the period, and that scene can help us think about the ways in which Echo is constructed on the early modern stage through the classical Homeric and Ovidian narratives. In the Metamorphoses, Echo is a talkative nymph whom Jove tasks with distracting Juno with conversation:    for many a time, When the great goddess might have caught the nymphs Lying with Jove upon the mountainside, Echo discreetly kept her talking till The nymphs had fled away (Melville 1986: III.364–68) Juno discovers the part Echo has played in concealing Jove’s infidelities, and punishes the nymph by denying her the power of speech:     ‘Your tongue’, she said, ‘With which you tricked me, now its power shall lose, Your voice avail but for the briefest use.’

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The event confirmed the threat: when speaking ends, All she can do is double each last word, And echo back again the voice she’s heard. (Melville 1986: III.369–74) Ovid goes on to describe the silenced Echo’s desire for the proud youth Narcissus, whom she ‘stealthily’ and silently pursues through the wood, besotted yet unable to voice her suit. Narcissus eventually calls out for his friends, whom he believes to be in the wood with him, giving Echo the opportunity to present herself, which she does by repeating his words: ‘Join me here’, Narcissus bids the companions he thinks are hiding from him, and Echo, thrilled to be invited, repeats his bidding, and ‘throw[s] her longing arms about his neck’ (Melville 1986: III.386, 389). Narcissus, however, is surprised, and rudely rebuffs her, and she, ‘shamed and rejected’, hides in the woods and ‘lonely caves’, where ‘weeping vigils waste her frame away’ until only her voice remains (Melville 1986: III.393, 394, 396). In Ovid’s narrative, Echo’s speech is figured as ‘excessive, skilled, and put to immoral purpose’ (Deitch 2001: 232). Thus in this classical story we find the familiar association of female loquaciousness with female sexual desire. Echo’s babbling is an enabler of Jove’s sexual digression, and perhaps more importantly, the two parts of Ovid’s story – Echo’s punishment by Juno, and her pursuit of Narcissus – work to connect her verbal effluence and her rapacious sexual desire. Echo’s loss of speech and loss of her desiring body go hand-­in-hand. In Cynthia’s Revels, which was first performed on the Blackfriars stage by the Children of the Chapel, Jonson picks up the story where Ovid left off. Mercury, at the bidding of the repentant Jove, commands that Echo shall, after ‘three thousand years . . . take a corporal figure and ascend’, and she obeys his bidding, at first answering him, or rather echoing him, from ‘[below]’ the stage, and then rising up, as Matthew Steggle and Eric Rasmussen, recent editors of the play, suggest, ‘probably from the trapdoor in the middle of the Blackfriar’s stage . . . but possibly from a rear trapdoor or from inside the fountain

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itself’, the fountain (or pool) of Narcissus, the fountain of self-­ love, which is at the heart of the play (Steggle and Rasmussen 2012: 1.2.0n). However, Echo’s corporeal reprieve is short-­ lived, and ultimately Jonson re-­enacts the same punishment of Echo we find in Ovid’s narrative. To be able to stay in her body, to ‘dwell on earth and sport thee there’, Mercury tells her she must ‘[f]orgo thy use and liberty of tongue’ (Steggle and Rasmussen 2012: 1.2.81, 80). But Echo, after thousands of years of silence, understandably does not heed this warning, and launches into a series of mournful laments through which she bemoans the loss of her beloved Narcissus, as well as the fates of a range of figures depicted in the Metamorphoses. Mercury unsuccessfully attempts to interrupt her: mercury

  Nay, but hear – echo

  But here, oh, here, the Fountain of Self-Love . . . (Steggle and Rasmussen 2012: 1.2.88–89) Anatanclasis transforms ‘hear’ to ‘here’, enabling Echo to continue her monologue and disregard Mercury’s interjections. Eventually, Echo’s deafness to these attempts to silence her leads Mercury to condemn her again to shapelessness beneath the earth:    Stint thy babbling tongue, Fond Echo. Thou profan’st the grace is done thee. So idle wordlings, merely made of voice, Censure the powers above them. Come away! Jove calls thee hence and brooks no stay . . . . . . Then thy speech must here forsake thee, Echo, and thy voice, As it were wont, rebound but the last words. Fare well. (Steggle and Rasmussen 2012: 1.2.92–96, 105–07)

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At this point, the Cambridge edition of the play suggests Echo ‘[begins to descend]’. She only ‘begins’ to descend, because her departure is delayed by the courtier Amorphus: ‘Dear spark of beauty, make not so fast away!’, he calls to her as she starts to exit the stage (Steggle and Rasmussen 2012: 1.3.1). Amorphus, transfixed by Echo’s beauty, attempts to woo her as she lingers in this liminal space, half on and half off the stage. However, through her selective echoing replies, the nymph rejects him: ‘beleeve me’, he begs of her, but her response makes the nymph’s feelings clear: ‘leave me’, she tells him (Steggle and Rasmussen 2012: 1.3.5–6). This moment of exiturus draws on the earlier Homeric version of the Echo myth, which presents Echo not as an Ovidian nymph in pursuit of a desired beloved, but as a nymph pursued by the lustful God Pan. In the Homeric Hymn to Pan, Echo is championed as a preserver of virginity and a victim of male sexual desire. Her refusal to accept Pan’s advances drives him to order wild animals to tear her limb from limb. Despite her death and dismemberment, the far-­ flung body parts of the innocent Echo continue to sing an enchanting song, keeping Pan in an anticipatory state of continually aroused yet eternally frustrated desire. The classical narratives which feature the figure of Echo use both space and time as markers of her polarized, and therefore paradoxically liminal, sexual identity. Both the desiring Echo of Ovid and the victimized and virginal Echo of Homer reside in the spatial margins of the classical world: in caves and in woods. As Lowenstein suggests, ‘[i]f she haunted a place, it was her habit never to be quite there’ (1984: 11). Both her punishment for speaking and desiring too much (in the Narcissus legend), and the preservation of her chastity (in the Pan legend), are presented in these myths through the positioning of Echo on the geographical edges of her society. Similarly, temporality is also used to mark out her diametrically opposed sexual identities in these two myths. She is associated in both narratives with delay: in Ovid’s tale, as temptress, she delays Narcissus in the woods, and in the Pan version of her story, as virtuous virgin, her chastity permanently delays Pan’s

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sexual fulfilment. The delay of Echo positions her as temporally liminal; eternally waiting, but never complete. So, although these classical narratives present Echo’s sexual identity in antithetical ways, they both use spatial and temporal in-­ between-ness to define those opposing sexual subjectivities.

Echoic agency The parallels which connect these classical personifications of Echo with the desiring and desired, pursued and pursuing, eloquent and silenced, transgressing and punished Duchess, are stark, and suggest that Webster was in fact influenced by classical echo narratives, and by the spatial and temporal liminality of echo both as a character and as a dramatic technique. Whereas Cynthia’s Revels, and as I will argue, Malfi, draw on both the Narcissus and Pan Echo myths, and therefore present a complex picture of Echo’s sexual identity, the majority of plays which represent echo on the early modern stage (and Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson identify fifteen plays in which the device is mentioned in a stage direction) can be divided into those that draw on the Pan legend, and those that present Echo as she is found in the Narcissus story (1999: 82). As a result of this binary opposition of echoic personification – Echo is either pursued or pursuing, virgin or whore – these plays in their use of Echo potentially work to strengthen the early modern construction of the moral polarities of female sexual behavior, something I will argue Malfi challenges through its temporal and spatial presentation of the figure of Echo as the Duchess’s ghost. One of the most common uses of the Echo device on the early modern stage draws on the Pan legend to present the female voice of Echo as virtuous and dependable: sweet, gentle, courteous and friendly Echo answers questions and soothes confusion, preserving life and steering the confounded away from disaster. This figuration of echo is common throughout the period. From Thomas Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War of the

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late 1580s, to Thomas Randolf’s Amyntas, first performed in 1630, Echo is presented as a virtuous victim: a trustworthy and honourable voice from another world, representing victimized innocence and perpetual virginity. Equally as common are representations of Echo that draw on Ovid’s tale from the Metamorphoses. Several examples of echoes from plays across the early modern period use the device in order to attack the vanities of female speech, which are invariably connected to the vanities of female sexual desire, as they are in Ovid’s tale. In The maydes metamorphosis, printed in 1600, Echo is feared as ‘pratling’, and in Brome’s The queenes exchange, printed in 1657, she is ‘mocking’ and ‘babling’ (1600: Cr; Brome 1659: D2v). As Old Fortunatus, the title character of Thomas Dekker’s play suggests, the echo is a: fool that mockes me, and swears to haue the last word (in spite of my téeth) I, and shee shall haue it because shee is a woman, which kind of cattell are indéede all Eccho, nothing but tongue, and are like the great bell of S. Michaels in Cyprus, that kéepes most rumbling when men would most sléepe. (1600: A3v) Female speech, through association with Ovid’s Echo, is presented as at best confused and at worst wilfully confusing, and in these plays, is often connected with female sexual desire and the ‘leading astray’ of innocent men. In Robert Wilson’s The coblers prophesie, for example, Echo mocks, and then entices Raph: Raph

  Harke souldier some body mocks thee. Eccho

  Mocs thee. Raph

  Mocks me much. Eccho

  Much.

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Soul

  Hold thy peace good Raph. Eccho

  Good Raph. Raph

  Raph, thats my name indeede,   But how shall I call thee? Eccho

  I call thee. Raph

  Dost thou: Mas and Ile come to thee, and   I knew where thou art. Eccho

  Thou art. Raph

  Art: faith and thou be as pretty a wench as any of these  three, my mad wife shall neuer know that I play a mad part. Eccho

  Part. Raph

  Part: Ile come. Eccho

  Come. Raph

  Faith and I will, haue at thee. (1594: C2r–v) Echo here elicits Raph’s eager pursuit with her responses. He hopes to ‘play the mad part’ with Echo, to, presumably, sexually possess her. These examples of representations of Echo as either virgin or whore, drawing on either Homer or Ovid, make it clear that a play like Cynthia’s Revels, which uses both the Pan and Narcissus legends, challenges an audience to question the polarities of female sexuality that were so common on the early modern stage. Along with the Echo scene in Cynthia’s Revels, 5.3 of Malfi is perhaps the best-­known example of the use of

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the echo device from the period. As I want to explore in the remainder of this chapter, this scene, and the play more broadly, draws on both versions of the Echo story in its complex spatial and temporal presentation of the Duchess’s sexuality. What can analysing this stage direction tell us about how Echo was presented in this scene? How is an editor’s reading of this stage direction tied in to their reading of the scene and of the character of the Duchess more broadly? And how can this echo stage direction, and echo as a dramatic device, be used to consolidate or complicate meaning in the play, particularly in relation to the Duchess’s agency? In the last half a century, editors of Malfi have felt it necessary to intervene at the beginning of 5.3 in a range of ways. The ambiguity of the mass entrance stage direction is one of the drivers of that intervention, but another is the implied presence of the liminal figure of Echo herself. It is through their manipulation of this stage direction that, I would like to suggest, these editors express their own readings of the figure of Echo, and furthermore, their understanding of the character of the Duchess and of the gender politics at work in the play as a whole.

Editorial interventions John Russell Brown is the first editor to make a convincing case for the Duchess’s physical appearance as Echo in 5.3. He suggests that the Duchess should appear on stage when she speaks her final words, ‘Never see her more’, at which point Antonio comments that ‘on the sudden, a clear light / Presented me a face folded in sorrow’ (Neill 2016: 5.3.43, 45–46). For Brown, the Duchess at this point returns to the stage, ‘appearing within a grave that now opens’ and illuminated by a ‘lighting-­ effect’ (Brown [1964] 1997: 5.3.42–45n, xxxv). Brown argues that it would be ‘strange and unnecessary’ to include the stage direction which is found in the Quarto, ‘Eccho (from the Dutchesse Grave)’, if the Duchess’s voice were to come ‘simply, from somewhere off-­stage’. He claims that this stage direction

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is ‘a remarkable elaboration’ in a printer’s copy of the play that seems to have had ‘little more than bare entry-­directions’, and therefore one to which we should pay attention (Brown [1964] 1997: xxxv, xxxv1n). Brown suggests that Webster most probably wrote this scene in order to make use of a piece of machinery owned by the King’s Men, and previously employed in The Lady’s Tragedy, as indicated by an elaborate stage direction from 4.4 of that earlier play: On a sudden in a kind of noise like a wind, the doors clattering the tombstone flies open, and a great light appears in the midst of the tomb; his Lady as went out, standing just before him all in white, stuck with jewels and a great crucifix on her breast. (Briggs [2007]: 4.4.42.1–6) This tomb should be placed in the discovery space, and from it, Brown argues, the Duchess should enter. Brown defines the stage direction in the Quarto, therefore, as a definite pre-­echo, for the reader, of the Duchess’s physical appearance later in the scene. Brown adds three words to his version of the stage direction: ‘[There is an] ECHO from the Duchess’ grave’, words which support his understanding that the Duchess should be concealed from the beginning of the scene inside her tomb in the discovery space ([1964] 1997: 5.3.0.1). For Brown, it is from her tomb that her voice should emanate.2 He argues that the end of 5.2 provides a precedent for the Duchess’s ghostly appearance in 5.3 when, wracked with guilt for his part in the murder of the Duchess, Bosola exclaims ‘[s]till methinks the Duchess / Haunts me. There, there! ([1964] 1997: 5.2.344–45). Brown’s note on this line argues that ‘[p]erhaps a stage direction should be added to indicate that the Duchess enters . . . Certainly Bosola should act as if he actually sees her, even if the audience does not’ ([1964] 1997: 5.2.345–46n). Brown’s argument for the physical appearance of the Duchess is convincing, and all subsequent editors of the play have acknowledged his reading of this scene. Some, however, like

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Neill, and like Gunby, Carnegie and Hammond, remove the reference to Echo from the initial stage direction entirely, and instead add ‘(from the Dutchesse Grave)’ to her first line, ‘Like death that we have’ (Gunby, Carnegie and Hammond 2007: 5.3.19). This has the effect of surprising the reader with Echo’s interjection, rather than pre-­echoing her voice, and perhaps her emergence from the tomb, and ensures there can be no confusion about when exactly the Echo should first be heard, or perhaps seen. Gibbons acknowledges Brown’s conjecture about the use of the stage property from The Lady’s Tragedy, but he doesn’t give the idea much credence. He is in fact particularly definite in his assertion that the Duchess should not be visible in 5.3. He argues that the stage direction in the Quarto is for readers, because ‘it makes no reference to any visual special effect, and Delio does say that Antonio only imagines seeing the Duchess’ face’ ([1964] 2001: 5.3.0n). He amends that stage direction to simply ‘[Enter ANTONIO and DELIO]’, removing all trace of the Echo itself ([1964] 2001: 5.3.0.1). For Gibbons, Echo is an ‘acoustic phenomenon’, and one which is ‘questionable’ for both Delio and the audience, because it is ‘only a voice’ ([1964] 2001: xxviii). He acknowledges that ‘she can show herself’ as a vision to Antonio, but that ‘[i]t is more effective if the audience imagine it than if it is shown’ ([1964] 2001: xxix). Similarly, Gibbons makes no mention of the Duchess’s potential ghostly appearance to Bosola in 5.2, and Brown’s ‘There, there!’ which suggests Bosola is pointing to the apparition on the stage, becomes, in his edition of the play a soothing ‘There there’ uttered by Bosola not as an exclamation of horror, but to calm himself (Brown [1964] 1997: 5.2.345; Gibbons [1964] 2001: 5.2.338). Other editors, such as Michael Neill, find a middle-­ ground, drawing on both Brown and Gibbons. Like Brown, Neill acknowledges the possibility of the Duchess’s appearance in 5.2, although it is not a possibility he approves of: ‘if no spirit were visible to the audience, they would be more likely to understand the haunting simply as a projection of the characters’ melancholy’ (2016: 5.2.345–46n). Neill, in fact, seems to be aligning with Gibbons here, for whom the ‘clumsier melodrama’

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of a ghostly appearance, which Webster stages in The White Devil, is avoided in this later and more sophisticated play ([1964] 2001: xxix n28). Marcus’ recent edition of the play draws on Brown to argue that the Duchess should embody Echo in this scene as a physical presence. She nuances Brown’s reading however, to argue that potentially, Echo enters at the very beginning of the scene, ‘unseen along with Antonio and Delio, perhaps from a different door’ ([2009] 2015: 5.3.0SDn). She alters the stage direction accordingly, to ‘[Enter] ANTONIO, DELIO [and] ECHO [unseen]’ ([2009] 2015: 5.3.0.1). However, she also puts forward the possibility that Echo might enter with her first line, rather than her last. The stage direction from the beginning of the scene in the Quarto from 1623, then, is manipulated by editors in various ways in order to open up different possibilities for the presentation of the Echo/the Duchess. Whereas for Brown she is most definitely on the stage at line 42, for Gibbons, she is only a vocal presence throughout the scene, and for Marcus, she potentially enters at three different moments, or perhaps, as we shall see, not at all. These editors struggle to work out where, or when, to place the Duchess: like Echo herself, she is neither here nor there, now or then.

The Duchess pursued and pursing The stage direction that opens the scene, and which creates Echo and the Duchess as liminal figures, evokes the Homeric myth of Echo pursued by Pan: a chaste victim of male desire. In the Pan narrative, as I have suggested, it is Echo’s temporal in-­between status – somehow between life and death – which keeps Pan in a similarly in-­between state: perpetually aroused and yet permanently frustrated in his unsatisfied desires. She is not then and not now but always and never at the same time, and as a result Pan is kept in temporal limbo: always desiring, always unsatisfied. The Duchess in Webster’s play is similarly

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presented as existing between life and death in temporal terms in 5.3. As Echo in the Pan legend frustrates the god’s desire to possess her through her liminal status between life and death, which he has in fact enforced by ordering her murder, so the Duchess here as Echo, or perhaps as purgatorial ghost, confounds the desires of her brothers to possess and control her body and her sexuality from beyond the grave. The Duchess is also presented as spatially liminal in this scene, like the Echo of the Pan legend. As in Cynthia’s Revels, the body of this Echo – the body of the Duchess’s ghost – potentially appears on the stage. However, despite her physical presence, the audience is aware (although Antonio is not) that the Duchess has been murdered. She is both there and not there: potentially physically on the stage, as both a dead body in a grave and as a ghost, yet also off the stage at the same time, and indeed, her voice in production often emanates from the architectural margins.3 The Duchess, like the classical figure of Echo from the Pan myth, haunts the stage, but is never fully ‘there’, either in time or space. The disembodiment of Echo, who Pan commands must be torn to pieces by wild animals, is echoed both in this scene through the Duchess’s physical liminality, and also throughout the play as a whole. Antonio says that his brothers have ‘dispersed / Bloodhounds abroad’ to hunt the fleeing family down, and the Duchess bemoans that, like a rusty old canon, she will ‘fly in pieces’ (Neill 2016: 3.5.47, 102). Although Brown suggests this scene can be cut from performance, the various ways in which echoic imagery is used to connect it to the rest of the play is a strong argument for its retention. For example, the Duchess’s appearance to Antonio, with a face ‘folded’ in sorrow, is pre-­echoed in Acts 3 and 4. In 3.2, Ferdinand admonishes his sister:    Thou art undone: And thou hast ta’en that massy sheet of lead That hid they husband’s bones, and folded it About my heart. (Neill 2016: 3.2.111–14)

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Ferdinand’s image of the corpse of her first husband and his own heart, foreshadows the Duchess own face ‘folded in sorrow’ as it appears to Antonio. Furthermore, Antonio’s image of the Duchess’s face illuminated by a ‘clear light’ is also pre-­echoed in 4.2 when, following her murder, Ferdinand asks Bosola to ‘[c]over her face. Mine eyes dazzle; she died young’ (Neill 2016: 4.2.249). The way in which these images of the Duchess’s disembodiment echo across the play invite spectators and readers to make connections between her status as innocent murder victim in 4.2 with her identity as Echo and as Pan’s victim in 5.3. These connections strengthen our sense of the her as an innocent casualty of the patriarchal quest to sexually possess and silence women. Editors of the play, however, also explore the extent to which the Duchess as Echo does in fact have agency in this scene. The echo device on the early modern stage is often employed to answer questions, to provide guidance, or offer comfort, and this echo is no exception. In 5.3, Echo is selective in what she repeats, and alters the emphasis of her repetitions to convey her message. Thus, Antonio’s sense that necessity compels him toward the Cardinal, and that similarly, Delio would find it impossible ‘[t]o fly your fate’ is echoed as ‘Oh, fly your fate!’ (Neill 2016: 5.3.36). A general reflection becomes a direct command; a prophetic foretelling of Antonio’s death, as Marcus suggests, issued by the Duchess as Echo ([2009] 2015: 5.3.34n). In the Quarto, Antonio’s line ‘’Tis very like my wiue’s voyce’ is echoed as a confirmation of that identity: ‘I, wifes-­ voyce’ (Webster 1623: M4r). Editors of the play usually amend the ‘I’ of this line to ‘Ay’, in order to more directly illustrate to the reader the way in which the Duchess as Echo is not just repeating Antonio’s phrases, but altering meaning and making her own voice heard through those amended repetitions. However, Marcus and also Gunby, Carnegie and Hammond, all retain the Quarto’s ‘I’, and Marcus argues that ‘I suggests the Duchess is revealing her self through the echo’ ([2009] 2015: 5.3.26n). Whichever spelling is used, the outcome is the same: the Duchess’s subjectivity, her voice, and her agency, are

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confirmed in this scene. As well as engaging with the Pan legend, then, Webster also seems to be drawing on the Narcissus myth, in which Echo is constructed not as a passive victim, but as a subjective force. It seems, however, that recognizing that agency also necessitates its punishment. The Duchess’s strength of will is established at the beginning of the play, in 1.1, the scene in which the Duchess convinces Antonio to become her husband. When he suggests that they should solemnize their verba de presenti union with a church service, the Duchess objects: ‘How can the church bind faster? / We are now man and wife, and ’tis the church / That must but echo this’ (Neill 2016: 1.1.476–78). Through this echo metaphor, the Duchess suggests that the Church can only offer an empty repetition of the vows that they have already spoken. It is the Duchess’s agency, expressed through her verbosity and rhetorical skill – her ability to get her own way through her mastery of language as we see in her persuasive use of metaphor in this scene – for which her brothers punish her. Like the Echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Duchess is condemned for talking and for desiring too much. Thus the Duchess’s punishment, like Echo’s, is fitting. In appearing as Echo in 5.3, she is forced to become that which she derides earlier in the play: like the corrupt Church itself, she becomes a flattering, vain and empty repetition, unheeded and banished to the temporal and spatial margins of her society. She is tied to the ruins of the religious architecture she dismisses in the opening scene of the play in 5.3; the ‘dead stones’ of the ruined abbey itself seem to project her voice. Marcus points out the striking fact that within the narrative of the play, ‘there is no reason to suppose the Duchess would be buried in Milan, since she died in Amalfi’ ([2009] 2015: 5.3.0SDn). She suggests that rather than having to imagine her improbable burial at the Cardinal’s residence, the ‘ruins’ and ‘dead stones’ from which she speaks are enough to conjure a sense of her final resting place ([2009] 2015: 5.3.0SDn). The architecture of the playhouse itself, which is used to represent the ruined abbey, resonates with the Duchess’s ghostly voice, meaning there is no need for her to

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appear, or for her grave to be revealed in the tiring house. The theatre itself becomes her tomb. Paradoxically, this reading of the stage direction and of the scene strips the Duchess of her physical presence by locating her within the architectural materiality of the abbey and of the playhouse itself. She is the ‘dead wall’ which Bosola suggests separates the elect from hell in 5.2, and she is likened to the ‘dead walls or vaulted graves / That, ruined, yields no echo’, at the very end of the play (Neill 2015: 5.2.322, 5.5.95–96). The Duchess as Echo cannot be found amongst the ruins, as she has become the ruins themselves. Indeed, her agency as Echo is ultimately ineffective, as Antonio pays no heed to her warning, and as a result, meets his death. In fact, the Duchess in this scene becomes not the echoing, subjective voice itself, but the unresponsive physical matter from which language will always fail to emanate.

Conclusion Those interested in Echo in the early modern period are generally concerned with the subjectivity of the speaker, rather than of Echo itself. As Gina Bloom suggests, ‘if speech is the primary trait that defines “humanness” ’, then the disembodied voice of an echo, a ‘voice’ which is not rooted in any clear locatable subject, would be disconcerting . . . because echoic sound violates assumptions about the relation between speech and the human body, between voice and selfhood. (Bloom 2001: 134) Echo works to threaten the speaker’s sense of identity, challenging semantic stability and destabilizing the boundaries between the public and the private (Lowenstein 1984: 18). However, when examining 5.3 of Malfi, scholars have been less concerned with the speaker’s sense of self – with Antonio’s identity, and the threat to his subjectivity posed by the Cardinal

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or by Echo – and more focused on the Duchess’s subjective authority as Echo herself. The ambiguity of this stage direction presents Echo as a puzzle to be fathomed, and therefore opens up the scene, and the character of the Duchess/Echo as we have seen, to editorial and performative intervention. It challenges us to decipher Echo’s position in time and space within the complex landscape which is described by Antonio and Delio (the cloister, the ruins of the abbey, the Cardinal’s fortification, the open courtyard, the river, the wall, the window), and in doing so, asks us to recognize that it is the Duchess’s contested subjective identity, and her place within the moral landscape of the play itself, which is at the heart of this tragedy.

Primary references Brome, Richard (1657), The queenes exchange. Dekker, Thomas (1600), Old Fortunatus. The maydes metamorphosis (1600). Webster, John (1623), The Duchess of Malfi. Wilson, Robert (1594), The coblers prophesie.

Editions Briggs, Julia, ed. (2007), The Lady’s Tragedy, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, John Russell, ed. ([1964] 1997), The Duchess of Malfi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds (1983), The Selected Plays of John Webster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbons, Brian, ed. ([1964] 2001), The Duchess of Malfi, 4th ed., New Mermaids, London: A & C Black. Gunby, David, David Carnegie and Anthony Hammond, eds (1995), The Works of John Webster: An Old Spelling Critical Edition, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, Leah S., ed. ([2009] 2015), The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, London: Arden Early Modern Drama.

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Melville, A. D., trans. (1986), Ovid: Metamorphoses, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neill, Michael, ed. (2016), The Duchess of Malfi, London and New York: W. W. Norton. Steggle, Matthew and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2012), Cynthia’s Revels, or the Fountain of Self-Love, in Martin Butler, David Bevington and Ian Donaldson (eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson 429–548, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12 Understanding Dumb Shows and Interpreting The White Devil Gillian Woods

In the middle of a rant about bad theatre, Hamlet sneers at ‘the Groundlings: who (for the most part) are capeable of nothing, but inexplicable dumbe shewes, & noise’ (oo5v).1 This complaint reveals some of the pleasures and problems associated with dumb shows. They are fodder for spectators whose interpretive ‘capabilities’ stretch only as far as spectacle. Hamlet sets shows against language: Claudius Hollybrand’s A Dictionarie French and English (1593) defines ‘inexplicable’ as that ‘which cannot be expressed, expounded or made plaine with words’ ([R5r]); thus dumb shows are beyond the reach of language both in their action and their meaning. Small wonder the soliloquizing Prince is not keen. They are equivalent to non-­verbal ‘noise’. Indeed, Hamlet’s description marks dumb shows as somehow resistant to understanding itself: ‘inexplicable’, they are ‘inscrutable, unintelligible’ (OED). Yet as with most of Hamlet’s pronouncements on theatricality, his dismissal of dumb shows is not as absolute or clear-­cut as it

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first seems, either in relation to his own play or Renaissance drama more broadly. After all, Hamlet himself commissions a dumb show within The Murder of Gonzago. Furthermore, his accusation of inexplicability sits uneasily on a form that claims to ‘show’ narrative, action, and meaning. Dumb shows appear in Renaissance drama from the 1560s and survive into the seventeenth century (see Mehl 1965). They take the form of actions mimed by actors who might otherwise be expected to speak (Pearn 1935: 385). Condensing unwieldy plot or providing an allegorical gloss on the main narrative, they communicate units of meaning. But the fact that they are almost always accompanied by expository dialogue in the scene that follows, or a presenter’s formal explanation, belies the illustrative purpose of the show itself. This chapter explores the contradictory function of dumb shows, which is both to reveal significance and to make it more difficult to access. Since dumb shows produce meaning in a different register from dialogue, they are at one level literally inexplicable: their full impact is not ‘made plaine with words’. Understanding dumb shows is not only a matter of interpreting a gesture as a representation of a particular action or plot development, but also responding emotionally and viscerally to their spectacle and ‘noise’. In this respect, dumb shows further multiply the responses demanded by theatrical performance more broadly, and therefore provide a crucial insight into the experience of theatricality itself. Such diversity is one of the issues this volume seeks to open out: what various modes of attention are required of theatrical spectators? By focusing on stage directions, we gain a clearer sense of the texture of the plays in which they appear; plays where actors do many things other than speak words. In this chapter, I analyse how these dumb-­show stage directions intervene in the meaning-­making process. Elsewhere in this collection, Tiffany Stern argues that dumb shows – a distinctive form of the jumbled ‘stage direction’ category – are ‘mini-­genres in their own rights’ and often composed by someone other than the play’s main author(s). This chapter takes a theatrical perspective

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on dumb shows’ potentially disjunctive relationship with their plays. Considering a range of different dumb shows, I suggest ways in which this form shapes an audience’s understanding of dramatic performance; that is, how dumb shows both help spectators orient themselves relative to the play’s fictional dimensions, and disorient them, to emphasize the challenges of interpretation. Scholarship often attempts to ‘solve’ dumb shows by giving them an overarching purpose; I argue instead that they are best understood when their constitutive oddness is foregrounded rather than explained away. I conclude with a detailed examination of one particular play, Webster’s The White Devil, to assess the interpretive relationship between dumb show and main action, stage direction and dialogue.

Making meaning Dumb shows could be seen as theatrical punctuation: structuring devices that help an audience understand how one part of the play connects to another. They can work like an ellipsis that yokes together temporally disparate action, or an exclamation mark that highlights a particular scene as important. Like punctuation, they help manage the timing of the narrative, but this is not necessarily only a matter of letting us know ‘when’ we are, but of putting time and our experience of it in question. Dumb shows are temporally elastic: they can rewind, fast-­forward and pause the play’s action. When presenters apologetically introduce a dumb show, their conventional excuse is that this device speeds up the plot. In Fletcher’s and Massinger’s The Prophetess (licensed 1622) a dumb show is used for the ‘conveniencie of time’ (1647: 38), while in Gervase Markham’s and William Sampson’s Herod and Antipater the form conveys ‘what Words / Cannot haue time to vtter’ (1622: [F4r]). Such reasoning draws on the idea that sight is speedier than sound, and that words risk making action ‘tedious’ (Heywood 1613: I3v). Yet, as Jeremy Lopez points out, ‘dumb shows are almost always inefficient’ (2013:

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296). Those dumb shows attended by a presenter frequently involve lots of words: the characters in the mime are silent, but the presenter laboriously explains their actions. Even without extended glosses, dumb shows that cram action into a condensed form, or which sequence a series of significant gestures, take time to show. As alternatives to dialogue exposition they are not particularly quick and, as we shall see, they make greater demands on the actors involved. In fact, narrative dumb shows that are not formally explained are almost always followed by dialogue that reiterates what has just happened, rendering the show itself superfluous in strict plot terms.2 Thus dumb shows often involve a representational tautology. On occasions when dumb shows provide an allegorical riff on the central narrative, action is totally suspended. A revised version of Locrine (1595) has symbolic dumb shows at the beginning of each act, featuring animals that emblematize the human morals of the main story. This structure reframes the plot’s chronology, so that its moment-­ to-moment happenings are linked to a universal time-­scheme. But time can also be made urgent and personal through this form. In various dumb shows the passing of time is carefully choreographed. A small child is ‘at last’ seen by the performers of the dumb show in Dekker’s and Middleton’s Bloody Banquet (performed 1608) and ‘at last’ taken up by the clown (1639: Dv). These directions elongate the wordless action, and the absence of dialogue intensifies spectators’ frustrated concern about what will happen to the child. Time is experienced differently at such moments. And that is part of the point of dumb shows: not only do they pragmatically steer audiences through action that supposedly cannot fit into the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’, but they also emphasize time’s quirks, which is rarely experienced in the uniform manner clock-­time deceptively promises. Space can also be reorganized in dumb shows. It is well known that early modern drama was far less concerned with detailing ‘realistic’ settings than the elaborately scenic theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even so, at the level

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of an individual scene, dialogue provides a degree of fixity and a sense that a person speaking is in a particular place, however loosely defined. Of course, a speaking actor does not necessarily speak in a ‘naturalistic’ manner, but stripping away speech takes a performance even further away from real life. When an unwanted baby is hidden ‘in a Corner’ during a dumb show in A Mayden-Head Well Lost, the child is lost to all topographical space, on some literally insignificant part of the Cock-­pit stage (Heywood 1634: [D4v]). Only a scene later, at the beginning of the next act, do we learn through dialogue that the baby was dumped in a ‘Groue of Trees’ (1634: Ev). For a while, the abandonment is total, lacking even representational markers. Relieved of such vestiges of ‘realism’ as speech can create, dumb shows provide especially easy opportunities to reconfigure space. Vast distance is squeezed into the Curtain’s stage by the dumb show in The Travailes of Three English Brothers. The choric Fame entreats the audience: But would your apprehensions helpe poore art Into three parts deuiding this our stage: [The brothers] all at once shall take their leaues of you, Thinke this England, this Spaine, this Persia, Your fauours then to your obseruant eyes: Weele shew their fortunes present qualities. Enter three seuerall waies the three Brothers (Day 1607: [H4r–v]) The show is partly taking place in the thoughts of spectators, whose imaginations are enlisted to work the special effect. The trick is similar to that performed by the Chorus in Henry V when he instructs the audience to ‘Suppose within the Girdle of these Walls /Are now confin’d two mightie Monarchies’ (hr). But dumb shows can choreograph the imagination more precisely. In The Travailes of Three English Brothers the dynamics of the dumb show anchor the audience’s thoughts: the triple entrance signifies international distance between the

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brothers; the flexible mode of the dumb show makes that distance believable. Multi-­door entrances and exits are not unusual in dumb shows. Theatre historians have debated both the number of doors available for stage traffic in various Renaissance playhouses, and the ways they would have been used. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa claim actors usually enter through one door and exit through another (making additional use of a central opening); whereas David Bradley posits that an actor must enter through the same door that he last used for an exit; and Tim Fitzpatrick suggests doors designate entrances and exits to particular fictional places.3 Evelyn Tribble persuasively argues that ‘a system organized to reduce cognitive demands’ would support the hypothesis of Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa that generally speaking, actors would all use one door for entrances and the other for exits (2005: 143). Early modern players wrestled with a rapidly changing repertory and did not have much time to learn their parts; an entrance/exit practice that did not involve extra learning is professionally sensible. Furthermore, as Tribble argues, the existence of stage directions specifying ‘Enter character x at one door and character y at another [. . .] clearly indicates that this kind of entrance is a departure from the norm and implies that only such movements need be specified’ (2005: 144). These stage directions appear in various places in numerous plays. But it is striking that in the plays listed by Dessen and Thomson as featuring labelled dumb shows, nearly half of them include dumb show stage directions in this form. While the unusual entrance/exit instruction certainly was not unique to dumb shows, it seems to have been a technique deployed within a significant number of them. And this usage makes semiotic sense. Lacking dialogue, dumb shows make meaning through alternative means: precisely choreographed gestures, symbolically appropriate props, resonant sound effects, and spatially significant entrances and exits. Having characters enter the stage from different doors vividly charges the stage space. Two-­door entrances are a good way of creating an agonistic impact, as in the battle dumb show

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in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (1600: A3r) or in the mute moral face-­off between good angels and would-­be assassins in If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (Heywood 1605: E3v). Dual entrances also give dynamic emphasis to scenes of union: characters attempting to marry in A Mayden-Head Well Lost enter their dumb show from two doors (1634: [F4v]). Similarly, some characters depart ‘one way’ and some ‘another’ to perform the separation of the leave-­taking dumb show in Middleton’s Hengist (printed as The Mayor of Quinborough 1661: Bv–B2r). But perhaps these atypical entrances and exits had a phenomenological affect as well as a semiotic effect. Which is to say, while the use of multiple doors suggests specific narrative meanings, they might also produce more ambiguous feelings of disorientation in spectators used to seeing entrances from one door and exits at another. I am not suggesting that such disorientation would be particularly pronounced, but rather that the subtle restructuring of stage action could contribute to a dumb show’s representational disruption. The final dumb show in Heywood’s relentlessly spectacular Red Bull play, The Golden Age (1611), exploits all possible spatial dimensions in its entrances and exits: Sound a dumbe shew. Enter the three fatall sisters, with a rocke, a threed, and a paire of sheeres; bringing in a Gloabe, in which they put three lots. Iupiter drawes heauen: at which Iris descends and presents him with his Eagle, Crowne and sceptre, and his thunder bolt. Iupiter first ascends vpon the Eagle, and after him Ganimed . [. . .] Sound. Neptune drawes the Sea, is mounted vpon a sea-­horse, a Roabe and Trident, with a crowne are giuen him by the Fates [. . .] Sound, Thunder and Tempest. Enter at 4 seuerall corners the 4 winds: Neptune riseth disturb’d: the Fates bring the 4 winds in a chaine, & present them to Æolus , as their King. [. . .]

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Sound. Pluto drawes hell: the Fates put vpon him a burning Roabe, and present him with a Mace, and burning crowne. ([K2v]; my emphasis) The ascents and descents give the stage a divine axis, but Heywood stretches the space further still with an unusual reference to ‘4 seuerall corners’, perhaps implying entrance from the yard as well as the tiring house.4 The multi-­directional movement works together with the environmental props (‘a Gloabe’, ‘heauen’, ‘sea’, and ‘hell’) to expand the sense of space. Heywood consolidates the impact of his thrilling spectacle (which includes a ‘burning crowne’ and ‘burning Roabe’) with entrances from unexpected directions. The dumb show shapes a fairly detailed understanding of the narrative, but it also impacts on the spectators’ physical relationship with the play, and their proximity to its actors, who are brought closer even as they cross supernatural distances. Dumb shows provide obvious opportunities for dramatists to exploit theatre’s ability to flout the order of time and space. Such subversions are certainly not unique to dumb shows, but there are significant representational differences between shows and the main dramatic action. The two modes of performance had different logistical demands. Lacking dialogue, the actors who perform in them cannot learn their performances from cue-­scripts; group rehearsal is a requirement of the dumb show, but not the main action. This different pressure is evident in the handful of surviving ‘plots’. These documents tabulate entrances, as well as some prop usage and sound effects. Essentially they convey the structure of a play in terms of its stage traffic and have been helpfully described as ‘back-­stage’ plots by Tiffany Stern (2009: 201–31): they seem to chart the activity that needs to take place behind the stage. As practical documents, they are efficiently minimal in the amount of information they convey. Therefore the fact that ‘dumb shows’ are labelled in plots for The Battle of Alcazar, The Dead Man’s Fortune and 2 Seven Deadly Sins indicates that something

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different had to happen in them. Indeed, the directions for dumb shows in back-­stage plots are atypically full, describing not just a movement on to the stage, but also the gestures and actions that actors needed to perform when they got there (Calore 2003: 255). The provision of extra information reveals the additional challenges dumb shows brought with them. These different practical demands seem to have been accompanied by different performance strategies too. Critics now recognize that early modern acting styles are likely to have been varied: formal and exaggerated at some moments and ‘naturalistic’ and understated at others (Karim-Cooper 2016: 77–78). But it is nevertheless clear that dumb shows diversified the performance practice within individual plays through their comparatively excessive manner. Without dialogue to express themselves, actors in dumb shows primarily make meaning through physical actions; the various calls for ‘signs’ and ‘passionate action’ invite extravagant gesture (Astington 2010: 20). Indeed ‘dumb show’ and ‘dumb action’ seem to imply a particular performance style. A direction in Satiromastix stipulates: ‘the King is welcom’d, kisses the Bride, and honours the Bride-­groome in dumbe shew’ (Dekker 1602: [D4r]). Arriving at the end of the instruction, ‘dumb show’ functions more like a verb than a label. Similarly, in A Warning for Faire Women, within a stage direction already framed as a dumb show, Chastitie enters ‘in dumbe action uttering her griefe’ (1599: G3r). The tautological direction to be ‘dumb’ partly clarifies that the ‘uttering’ is silent, but it also implies that ‘dumbe action’ looks different from other action. Likewise, in The Duchess of Malfi (performed 1613), one dumb show is nested within another when, during the course of a show, the Duchess, Antonio and their children ‘are (by a forme of Banishment in dumbe-­shew, expressed towards them by the Cardinall, and the State of Ancona) banished’ (Webster 1623: Hv). ‘Dumb show’ is a term that can label both a full sequence and a particular kind of intense performance. Indeed, the metaphorical use of ‘dumb show’ to signify an exceptionally visible (but mute) display of emotions implies that the staged

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practice involved pronounced gestures and facial expressions. Thus when in The True Chronicle History of King Leir Ragan ‘knits her brow, bytes her lips, / And stamps’, she is said to be making ‘a dumbe shew of disdayne, / Mixt with reuenge, and violent extremes’ (1605: Ev). Similarly, Michael Drayton (himself a playwright) uses the image of the dumb show to emphasize Edward II’s vividly emotional response to his deposition: His faire cheeke couered in pale sheets of shame, And as a dumbe shew in a swowne began, Where passion dooth such sundry habits frame, As euery sence a right Tragedian, Truely to shew from whence his sorrow came, Beyond the compasse of a common man, Where Nature seems a practiser in Art, Teaching Dispaire to act a liuely part. (1605: 102) However overblown Edward’s ‘dumbe shew’ might seem, Drayton claims that acting is a form of authenticity. He likens the ‘swowne’ to a dumb show because tragic performance allows Edward ‘Truely to shew’ the cause of his sorrow. There is something disingenuous about this reasoning. Edward’s demonstration is deeply embedded in theatricality: ‘Nature seems a practiser in Art’. Is it Art or Nature that puts Edward ‘Beyond the compasse of a common man’? Does the dumb show truly make the emotion showy, or is the show true?

Disrupting meaning Due to their extravagant performance style, dumb shows raise questions about the legibility of human behaviour. Forms of the word ‘seem’ and ‘seeming’ are, according to Dessen and Thomson, most frequently found in stage directions detailing ‘dumb shows and other pantomimed actions’ (1999: 190).5

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Given that ‘seeming’ is a pretty good description of what actors do throughout any performance, the word is redundant in dumb show instructions. Its presence perhaps accentuates the obviously acted quality of dumb actions: an actor does not simply display sadness, but rather seems to be sad; spectators notice the ‘seeming’ as well as the ‘sadness’. Christina Luckyj suggests that dumb shows therefore served ‘as a site where women and men alike were exposed as performers, dissemblers, hypocrites’ (2002: 100). It is certainly true that hypocrisy or pretence seems particularly pronounced in a dumb show’s exaggerated gestures (indeed, the form makes successful deception plausible since the frame enables the audience to recognize an action as over-­the-top that is not legible as such to other characters). But hypocrisy does not dominate extant dumb shows, and the wordless form does a rather better job of exposing the difficulty of judging apparently legible behaviour than it does of defining it as fraud. Their different performance style from the main action is but one way in which dumb shows create a disruption. Dumb shows change the rules of representation within any given play. As Lopez notes, they ‘require a different form of attention’ from the audience (2013: 294). After all, there is something wilfully awkward about the way dumb shows shift theatrical gears. In narrative shows, language is removed from action that would normally be accompanied by dialogue. Without this obvious medium of meaning, audiences are asked to interpret action using means that usually consolidate language: gesture, movement, non-­verbal noise and even smell. And as the semiotic significance of the actor’s body intensifies, its phenomenological impact also changes. Bert O. States points out that ‘theater – unlike fiction, painting, sculpture, and film – is really a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be’ (1985: 20). The actor on stage performs the body of a character with an actual body, whereas a painting uses oily marks on canvass and a novel makes do with printed words on the page. Some of the continuity between theatre and reality is broken when the

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speaking actor/character suddenly withdraws into dumb action. In this respect, dumb shows are importantly different from mute characters: a mute character represents a recognizably real phenomenon; a dumb show takes an extra step away from the real world. Not surprising, then, that Gower should describe the actors in the dumb shows he presents in Pericles as ‘moats and shadowes’ (1609: G2v). Acting in dumb show, the players become somehow insubstantial. Some dumb shows exploit this sense of phenomenological change by staging supernatural or visionary action. Introducing the show in The Devil’s Charter, Guichiardine demarcates the representational shift with ‘a siluer rod’ as he ‘mooueth the ayre three times’ (Barnes 1607: A2r). The ‘vision’ that follows explodes with special effects: devils ascend and descend, thunder is cued four times, and ‘fearfull fire’ and ‘sulphurous smoke’ assault the audience’s senses (A2v). Other supernatural shows draw a boundary between ‘real’ action and ‘visionary’ show only to question that same boundary. The dumb show in If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605) is an effective vehicle for staging a battle between good angels and the Catholics who would assassinate the sleeping Princess Elizabeth. The shifty representational status of the show enables it to drift between allegory, dream and real divine intervention without ever landing on one specific meaning. However, the ideological significance – that Elizabeth is defended by God – is stressed by the material impact that the show has on the main action. Elizabeth awakes to find a prop has been moved: her Bible is now open, with her finger resting at a verse which glosses what has just happened. The show has pushed into the mimetic action to claim a larger ‘truth’ about Elizabeth’s place in God’s universe. A denominationally different show plays with the same boundary in Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (performed 1612). Here the audience share the Catholic perspective of the sleeping Queen Katherine, who is visited by ‘Personages, clad in white Robes’ (xv) that dance around her and crown her with a garland. This time the margins of the

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heavenly show are blurred by the way its music is cued. Stage directions such as ‘Sound a dumb show’ or ‘Music. Dumb show’ imply that shows were conventionally initiated with music. But in Henry VIII music is pointedly called for within the main action, when Katherine asks for music to help her sleep. The ‘Sad and solemne Musicke’ plays before, during, and after the show (which concludes with a direction clarifying ‘The Musicke continues’ (xv)). In this way, the mimetic action never quite gives way to the dumb show: the music is ‘really’ happening, but the figures who dance to it may be figments of Katherine’s imagination or a ‘real’ heavenly visitation. Like other parts of this play, the drama here questions if ‘all is true’. Understanding this dumb show means recognizing the subjective nature of understanding. However apt the form might be for dreams and visions, B.R. Pearn calculates that only a minority of extant dumb shows represent such content (1935: 393). While dumb shows might lend themselves to clever visionary performance, their function far exceeds this use. Indeed, the relative paucity of illusory or dream-­like dumb shows makes it all the more striking that this form nevertheless seems to have been regarded as an especially insubstantial part of what actors (or ‘shadows’) did on stage. Thus in The Hogge Hath Lost His Pearle, Wealthy exclaims ‘sfoot is vanisht as sodainly as a dumbe shewe’ (Tailor 1614: E2r). The same simile was used by Robert Cotton, who mocked the idea that ‘Popery will vanish like a dumb shew’ (1641: 24). Lancelot Andrewes indirectly linked dumb shows’ propensity to ‘vanish’ to a sense of their insubstantiality. Preaching on John 20.13, which describes the angels at the tomb of the resurrected Christ, he explained: ‘It was not a dumb shew, this, a bare apparition, and so vanished away. It was a visio & vox, a vocall vision’ (1620: 16). Visions that lack words also lack material substance, Andrewes’ logic suggests. While such analogies might imply that staged dumb shows conventionally ended in a sudden disappearance, not many extant stage directions record this specific exit instruction (‘vanish’ is found in Henry VIII and the plot of Seven Deadly

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Sins). Instead, the simile perhaps more accurately conveys the aura of ethereality produced by dumb shows; at these moments actors surrendered the sense of consubstantiality with the audience by pointedly refusing to behave like them. But, of course, dumb shows are not really dumb. They are always framed by words, whether in the form of expository dialogue or a presenter’s explanation.6 And because dumb shows are not left to signify for themselves, they frame a tension between actions and words. Many commentators regard dumb shows as moments of intensified meaning within a play. Tiffany Stern regards them as highly symbolic, comparing them to emblems in books or impresa on shields (2012a: 275). And certainly allegorical dumb shows foreground the thematic or moral concerns of a play. B.R. Pearn suggests that such shows might have helped ‘the audience to understand the arguments and long speeches’ of their plays (1935: 392), although this diagnosis rather overlooks the fact that such shows themselves needed explaining. For Dieter Mehl, all forms of dumb shows – the earlier allegorical forms and the later narrative devices – served the same purpose of clarifying the meaning of the play. Dumb shows formed part of playwrights’ attempts to ‘make everything as clear and impressive as possible’ (1965: 12). Such readings rightly highlight the densely significant content of dumb shows. Their interpretive function is evident in their metaphorical use outside the theatre. For example, Thomas Bradshaw described the face or ‘countenance’ as ‘a certain sylent speech and dombe shewe to declare what the minde and bodie are’ (1591: E3v); likewise, Richard Barnfield called ‘a wanton eie’ the ‘hearts dumb shew’ (1595: E2v). Dumb shows ‘say things’, however silently. Nevertheless, just as important as dumb shows’ significant content is the fact that they disrupt the process of signification. It is telling that early modern writers sometimes used the phrase ‘dumb show’ to describe an incomplete or ambiguous sign. Robert Cleaver carefully distinguished between a legal marriage (performed with words) and less binding signs of

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union: ‘if a Contract be a promise, it is not onely a purpose of the heart, nor a dumbe shew, or doubtfull signification of promise: but a plaine promise vttered & pronounced in a right forme of speech’ (1598: H3r). Similarly, Arthur Lake, expounding Matthew 3.16 and the appearance of the Holy Spirit like a dove, explains: ‘A visible signe of it selfe is but a dumbe shew, it may amaze, it cannot instruct, because it must bee illustrated; and it is here illustrated, by an audible word, the word is called Vox de Caelo, a voyce from Heauen’ (1629: 160). In these texts dumb shows are imperfect signs that need supplementing with words to communicate real meaning. Other writers are much more scathing in their figurative use of the term. The concept of the dumb show is spat out in numerous sectarian tracts critiquing the overly theatrical practice of other faiths. Attacking Irish Catholics, John Rider railed against the ‘va[in]e shewing of Christ his death by such ydle gestures and dumbe shewes [. . .] in stead of a comfortable declaration of the Lords death, they haue a histrionicall dumbe-­shew, without true signification of sence warranted from Christs trueth’ (1602: Lv–L2r). Oliver Omerod made the same complaint against ‘papists’, claiming that they make the Mass ‘a dumb shew, which I take to bee the cause, why the people in Italy doo not say to their neybors [. . .] Let vs go heare a Masse, but, Let vs go see a Masse’ (1606: 59). Drawing on Calvin, Thomas Morton expanded on this theme, declaring that Catholics ‘make a pompous shew of Ceremonies that are not vnderstood, as if it were some stage-­like dumbe shew’ and concluded, ‘can there be a better example of a Dume Ceremonie; or a more iust reason of casting it out, then because it is dumbe?’ (1618: 94–95). The critical use of theatrical comparisons is commonplace in anti-Catholic tracts, but it is revealing that dumb shows help to pinpoint a particular fury about ‘histrionicall’ excess and a corresponding lack of understanding. Dumb shows are especially theatrical moments of theatre that produce semiotic malfunction. All show and no substance, they prompt, it is alleged, the kind of mindless gawping so hated by anti-­theatricalists. And Catholics as well

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as Protestants could exploit the term’s hollow significance. One Saint Omer publication dismissed anti-Catholic pamphlets as ‘a dumb-­shew of obiections, a vayne terrour of words without strength of reason, without substance of truth’ (S.N. 1622: Mm3r). Paradoxically, these metaphorical dumb shows are made up of words; what makes them dumb shows is their lack of reason and substance. Of course, the concept of dumb shows is being bent to a propagandist purpose in these tracts, in a discursive context in which theatricality is definitively damnable. But the idea that dumb shows mystify meaning is taken for granted so many times in such texts that it is worth considering the possibility that staged dumb shows do not so much intensify meaning as disrupt it. After all, even onstage viewers admit their bafflement, as when Horatio demands Revenge wakes up and ‘reueale this misterie’ (Kyd 1592: I2v). That such display might confuse seems to be the assumption lying behind the witches’ show in Macbeth (performed 1606). Desperate for prophetic reassurance, the newly crowned Macbeth visits the witches. They conjure a series of talking apparitions (an armed head, a bloody child, a child crowned with a tree in his hand) that concludes with a mute ‘Shew’ that is announced three times: ‘A shew of eight Kings, and Banquo last, with a glasse in his hand’ (mm6v).7 Like the visions that preceded it, the show is emphatically symbolic: it is meaning unshackled by narrative. But Macbeth is poorly equipped to interpret such a show effectively. He might rightly read Banquo’s royal lineage, but he wrongly assumes he is being shown a future he can avoid, not a provocation that will cause him to seal that fate. The temporal distortions inherent in the dumb show form fit into the witches’ strategic prophesying. In this play, the disruption of meaning brought by the show is part of the tragic action.8 Dumb shows require understanding while simultaneously emphasizing that understanding is challenging. When the presenter of the dumb show in The Prophetess promises the audience ‘with such Art the Subject is conveigh’d, / That every Scene and passage shall be cleer / Even to the grossest

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understander here’ (1647: 38), her tongue might be firmly in cheek. There is, perhaps, a joke on the lack of ‘cleer’ meaning in such shows. The presenter’s concern for ‘understanders’ or groundlings (those who traditionally stood around the stage) hints at their association with this device. Compare Hamlet crediting dumbs shows’ popularity with groundlings who might nevertheless find them ‘inexplicable’. Comments like these highlight the heterogeneous quality of audiences; not everyone would respond to plays in the same way. (It is not the case that ‘understanders’ are necessarily less comprehending than their wealthier counterparts.) But these remarks remind us that dumb shows are especially unpredictable in their impact, and invite a consideration of the kind of understanding they promote. William West observes that Renaissance writers used the term ‘understanding’ in both a cognitive and a physical sense: people might intellectually grasp a play and/or they might ‘stand’ near it. He argues: ‘for many audiences physical understanding was a sufficient reward for playgoing’ (2006: 124). Certainly, other performances that worked similarly to dumb shows produced diverse responses. Street pageantry, such as the Lord Mayor’s Shows, likewise included highly symbolic devices enacted by silent performers, accompanied by speakers or explanatory placards. But enthusiastic spectators did not necessarily focus their attention on decoding the pageants’ literary meaning. Tracey Hill points out that eyewitness accounts often record the spectacular experience of such events, rather than their complex symbolism. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Venetian Orazio Busino describes Middleton’s 1617 Lord Mayor’s Show without engaging with the symbolic meaning Middleton elaborated in his text (2010: 169). But some English viewers had similar priorities: Henry Machyn’s impressions of the 1553 Lord Mayor’s Show ‘were primarily of colours and noise’ (2010: 130). And Gilbert Dugdale’s misidentification of a figure on one of the ceremonial arches of James’ 1604 royal entry reminds us that interpreting outdoor shows was not always easy (2010: 175). Renaissance spectators were better trained than twenty-­first-century viewers at reading

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iconographic signs. But that does not mean that the pleasures of shows (in the playhouse and in the street) were entirely cerebral or reliably intelligible. In plays, shows offer a break from listening to dialogue and a chance to revel in visual display. Enjoyment can be gained from standing near the show – physically ‘understanding’ it – and figuring out its significance. Paradoxically, dumb shows are at once hotspots for meaning and moments when intellectual understanding might be suspended. It would be a mistake to think that their purpose is wholly semiotic; that is to say, dumb shows are not only concerned with conveying a meaning that is entirely equivalent to the meaning produced by words. Gesture is accurately thought of as body language, but its effects are more wide-­ ranging than that. Indeed, the non-­verbal parts of dumb shows show us something that words cannot: the dumbness of the action defamiliarizes it. But, enclosed in wordy frames (whether formally presented or surrounded by dialogue), they also emphasize our reliance on language. In this way, dumb shows are ambivalent moments which offer wordless action both as a form of clarification, and as a means of pointing out the limited quality of all interpretation. There is something epistemologically honest about the way they foreground the strain involved in making sense of things.

Understanding The White Devil In the final section of this chapter, I am going to explore the larger impact of dumb shows in one particular play, Webster’s The White Devil (1612). This tragedy is especially concerned with problems in understanding; it asks, how can you read what you see? These problems may have been too knotty for original viewers. In his address ‘To the Reader’ in the 1612 Quarto, Webster complained that the first production lacked ‘a full and vnderstanding Auditory’ (A2r). The play itself refuses easy answers to interpretive problems: its ‘bad’ characters are mitigated by the injustice of their society and ‘good’ characters

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are compromised by ideological flaws. Vittoria is adulterous and incites the murder of her husband, but she is also victim of misogynist double-­standards; Isabella is painfully pious, but her devotion to her husband tips into image worship. The mistreated devil is counterpointed by an idolatrous saint, and the audience is constantly made to feel the challenge involved in interpretation. Paying attention to the tragedy’s stage directions, in particular its dumb shows, reveals a number of shifts in modes of representation. These shifts further entangle the audience in the play’s problems with understanding. The two dumb shows enact the first deaths in the tragedy. In the first show, Isabella is murdered on the commission of her husband, Bracciano: Enter suspiciously, Iulio and Christophero , they draw a curtaine wher Brachian’s picture is, they put on spectacles of glasse, which couer their eyes and noses, and then burne perfumnes afore the picture, and wash the lips of the picture, that done, quenching the fire, and putting off their spectacles they depart laughing. Enter Isabella in her night-­gowne as to bed-­ward, with lights after her, Count Lodouico , Giouanni , Guid-­ antonio and others waighting on her, shee kneeles downe as to prayers, then drawes the curtaine of the picture, doe’s three reuerences to it, and kisses it thrice, shee faints and will not suffer them to come nere it, dies, sorrow exprest in Giouanni and in Count Lodouico , shees conueid out solemnly. ([D4v]) 9 Featuring death by poisonous picture, this is a show that is especially concerned with looking and visual representation. Multiple frames draw attention to the act of seeing: a ‘show’ within a play, it stages a picture that is also curtained. And even before the show begins, the audience are cued to question the status and validity of what they see. The dumb show is cast by

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a conjurer, at the behest of Bracciano, who wants to know if and how the murders he has ordered have taken place. For Dieter Mehl this set-­up makes the dumb-­show pleasingly organic, since it is integral to the central action (1965: 139). But while the dumb show is securely linked to the main story in narrative terms, Webster emphasizes its representational ambiguity. Not only is this an illusion produced by a conjurer, that conjurer spends eighteen lines reminding the audience that some conjurers ‘cheate’ and that others infringe supernatural health and safety by calling up spirits: they ‘indanger their owne neckes’ when intending a mere ‘squib’ ([D4r]). So before audience members witness the dumb show, they are reminded that it might be a con-­trick and, alternatively, that if it is not a con-­trick, it might be dangerous precisely because it is real. Aside from the worry about interpreting what they see, the audience are primed to feel uneasy about the form of the spectacle. One obvious effect of this spectacle is that it emphasizes Bracciano’s cruel detachment from his crimes, as he admiringly watches them played out at a safe distance. But the form also lends a symbolic resonance to the murder. Earlier dumb shows functioned like embodied emblems or allegorical mimes (see, for example, Gorboduc). While the Jacobean dumb show in The White Devil advances the narrative, its form also lends it an emblematic significance, which speaks as much to the dangers of idolatry, as it does to the villainy of the poisoners. The stage direction associates Isabella’s image-­use with religious devotion: ‘shee kneeles downe as to prayers’. The narrative context may create sympathy for this abused wife gazing on the picture of her husband, but the show itself could be taken from an anti-Catholic tract mocking papists who get amorously carried away in their image worship. Part of the complexity of this play is to emblematize a sympathetic character in an ideologically dubious way. In watching this show of visual devotion, the audience witnesses the dangers of images. Furthermore, while the multiple framing devices create a sense of interpretive distance, the audience is nevertheless made physiologically vulnerable to the sensory experience of

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the show. The poisoners ostentatiously wear spectacles that cover their eyes and noses before burning perfumes, but the audience are directly exposed to the show’s sights and smells. Indeed, both the audience and Bracciano are subsequently forced to take responsibility for what they see. The raucous second dumb show, with its soundtrack of ‘louder musicke’ ([Dv]) is more physically brutal: Camillo has his neck broken under the cover of a vaulting competition; variously innocent and guilty characters are apprehended for the murder. Bracciano claims not to fully understand this show, and so the Conjuror begins to gloss the actions, only to break off: ‘your eye saw the rest, and can informe you / The engine of all’ (Er). If the dumb show provides an ambiguous frame that makes Bracciano’s uncertainty credible, the Conjuror’s insistence that seeing constitutes enough information forces a kind of interpretive complicity with the murder. Understanding is dangerous and does not necessarily need spoken words. Some of the dumb show directions are very firmly enmeshed in the preoccupations of the play’s dialogue: the ‘spectacles’ used by Isabella’s murderers physically recall the perspective spectacles Flamineo references earlier in the play (B3r–v); and the ritualized kissing links to the kiss Bracciano denied Isabella (Dr), and the later ones forbidden to Giovanni, who is not allowed to kiss his poisoned mother (F3r), and Vittoria, who is warned not to kill the dying Bracciano (Kr). But paying attention to the representational difference between the dumb shows and the dialogue helps to pinpoint the way this tragedy creates uneasiness – an uneasiness that is at the heart of the tragic problem. The two dumb shows are shortly followed by Vittoria’s trial (both the shows and the trial are demarcated by subtitles in the Quarto). There is a structural counterpoint here: visualized meaning is replaced by a very wordy trial scene, in which anxieties are raised about how language can be used to obfuscate and manipulate meaning. However, we could also see the dumb shows as an interpretive warm up for the trial scene: a way of focusing the audience on key details. After all, when Monticelso takes over the prosecution, he frames his

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attack in visual terms: instructing his audiences to ‘Obserue’ and ‘see’ the villainy in Vittoria (E3r). Firing the lawyer who is comically unable to speak clearly, Monticelso warns Vittoria: ‘I shall be playner with you, and paint out / Your folies in more naturall red and white, / Then that vpon your cheeke’ (E3r). But Monticelso’s ‘plain’ language is artful. There is scope for a just prosecution here (Vittoria is hardly innocent), but Webster complicates matters by making it a specious (not to mention misogynist) argument. Monticelso damns Vittoria not with evidence but rhetoric: she is a painted whore wearing unnatural colours on her cheek. He not only mounts a flimsy prosecution (she is probably wearing make-­up, she is obviously a murderer), but he also associates himself with the poisoning painters of the first dumb show: his supposedly plain speech will ‘paint out’ her follies. The prosecutor’s methods are uncomfortably linked with the mode of murder. What matters is not so much that association, as the fact that, moments after showing the dangers of visual spectacle, Webster goes on to emphasize the unreliability of language: the way it can be used to confuse rather than clarify, and to mislead and manipulate. As the play progresses, its representational logic keeps shifting. While the dumb shows were questionably supernatural illusions, and the trial scene a more straightforward realism, the terms of representation shift again when Francisco meditates on his dead sister. Trying to remember Isabella’s face, Francisco somehow summons up Isabella’s Ghost. He identifies this vision as a psychological projection rather than a supernatural apparition: ‘how strong / Imagination workes! how she can frame / Things which are not!’ (G2r–v). Yet this rational reading of another dumb spectacle is counterbalanced by Flamineo’s later encounter with a differently framed ghost. Stage directions detail that Bracciano’s ghost appears in ‘his leather Cassoc[k] & breeches, bootes, a co[wl,] a pot of lilly flowers with a scull int’ (L2r). As if this memento mori were not emphatic enough, the ghost throws earth at Flamineo and ‘shewes him the scull’ (L2r). This time around, the ghost is read as supernatural: Flamineo admits, ‘This is beyond

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melancholie’ (L2r). The play’s fiction cannot settle on what should be taken as real and what as imagined. But even though Flamineo does believe in the ghostliness of this ghost, and understands the message he brings him, the embodied memento mori fails to do its job, since Flamineo decides to ‘dare’ his ‘fate’ anyway (L2r). This disregard for a sign’s meaning encapsulates the play’s bleak idea about understanding: maybe it doesn’t change anything. The riddle in the title – The White Devil – warns us about the difficulty of interpreting what we see. It is not that this play is particularly metatheatrical: it does not explicitly ask viewers to be conscious of how theatre makes meaning. Instead, its shifts are subtler – slyer even – than that. The play’s disorienting way of asking spectators to read its representations in different terms emphasizes just how total that problem of understanding is. The audience participates in the play’s tragic condition. It is a problem of understanding that is produced by the interplay between dialogue and stage directions. Dumb shows are an especially obvious instance of stage directions participating in and complicating the way a play makes meaning. But exploring the semiotic and phenomenological implications of all forms of stage directions helps illuminate the workings of theatrical representation, and how it enthralls understanding.

Primary references Andrewes, Lancelot (1620), A Sermon Preached at Whitehall, on Easter Day of the 16th April 1620. Barnes, Barnabe (1607), The Devil’s Charter. Barnfield, Richard (1595), Cynthia. Bradshaw, Thomas (1591), The Shepherds Starre. Cleaver, Robert (1598), A Godlie Forme of Householde Gouernment. Cotton, Robert (1641), A Treatise against Recusants, in Defence of the Oath of Alegeance. Day, John (1607), The Travailes of Three English Brothers. Dekker, Thomas (1602), Satiromastix.

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Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton (1639), Bloody Banquet. Drayton, Michael (1605), Poems. Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger (1647), The Prophetess, in Comedies and Tragedies. Heywood, Thomas (1605), If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. Heywood, Thomas (1611), The Golden Age. Heywood, Thomas (1613), The Brazen Age. Heywood, Thomas (1634), A Mayden-Head Well Lost. Hollybrand, Claudius (1593), A Dictionarie French and English. Kyd, Thomas (1592), The Spanish Tragedy. Lake, Arthur (1629), Sermons with Some Religious and Diuine Meditations. Markham and Sampson (1622), Herod and Antipater. Middleton, Thomas (1661), The Mayor of Quinborough. Morton, Thomas (1618), A Defence of the Innocencie of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England. N., S. (1622), An Antidote or Treatise of Thirty Controuersies, Saint Omer. Omerod, Oliver (1606), The Picture of a Papist. Rider, John (1602), A Friendly Caveat to Irelands Catholickes, Dublin. Shakespeare, William (1623), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). Shakespeare, William [and George Wilkins] (1609), Pericles. Tailor, Robert (1614), The Hogge Hath Lost his Pearle. The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605). A Warning for Faire Women (1599). The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (1600). Webster, John (1612), The White Devil. Webster, John (1623), The Duchess of Malfi.

Edition Clark, Sandra and Pamela Mason Brown, eds (2014), Macbeth, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

Notes Introduction 1 Change in theatrical practice over time perhaps alters this likelihood. Werstine shows that ‘The responsibilities of the book-­keeper seem to have undergone a considerable expansion by the 1630s’, resulting in the addition of more ‘warning stage directions’ by non-­authorial hands in extant playbooks (2013: 209). 2 For more details on the uncorrected nature of early modern playbooks, including the presence of doubled stage directions, see Werstine (2013: 107–99). 3 By contrast, the words ‘A bed / for woodstock’ found in the left margin of the Thomas of Woodstock manuscript have the clipped tone of a stage direction, but read closely seem more likely to have been a note highlighting the property requirements of the play (Long 1985a: 107–08). 4 See the anonymous The True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594: H3r); Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare 1623: xx6r); and ’Tis Pitty Shee’s a Whore (Ford 1633: K2r). 5 Genevieve Love (2000) provides a fascinating reading of how Marston’s stage directions create similar responses in readers and spectators. 6 A Looking Glasse for London and England (Lodge and Greene 1594: G2r); A Chast Mayd in Cheape-Side (Middleton 1630: K2v, [E4r]); The Woman in the Moone (Lyly 1597: [A4v]). 7 See also Gurr (1996) and Gurr and Ichikawa (2000).

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Chapter 1 Grateful thanks to helpful observations by Bailey Sincox and Pascale Aebischer. 1 See Lopez (2013: 296); Mehl (1965: 163); Stern (2012a: 275); and Daly (1979: 169–71). At the end of this collection, Gillian Woods analyses the hermeneutical uncertainty of the dumb show. 2 Theodore B. Leinwand, in his edition of Michaelmas Term in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007: 337), labels this section of the induction ‘dumb show’ in the list of ‘The Persons of the Play’. 3 For ease of reference, names in speech prefixes are provided and expanded as necessary, and page layout, here and throughout, is regularized for clarity. 4 For a gloss of this line, see Peele (2005: 64). 5 The dumb shows are also numbered in the backstage plot that survives for a different version of the same play – see the reproduction in Greg (1931: 2: plot VI). In the theatre, the numbering enables the shows to be learned sequentially as well as called by number by the prompter. 6 The songs are discussed in Greg (1905: 46); and Stern (2009: 121; 128; 133). 7 These are discussed in successive chapters, ‘Prologues, Epilogues, Interim Entertainments’, ‘Songs and Masques’, and ‘Scrolls’ in Stern (2009). 8 Cropped note on copy of Locrine (1595) in ‘The Fondation Martin Bodmer’, Cologny, Geneva. Reproduced on The Lost Plays Database (https://www.lostplays.org/index. php?title=Estrild; accessed 10 August 2016). Contractions have been expanded and i/j regularized. 9 First Folio quotations are taken throughout from the facsimile prepared by Hinman (Shakespeare 1968), using the through-­ line-numbers (TLN) of that edition. Quotations from Quarto texts are referred to by signature. 10 ‘Stage, n.’, OED Online [online], available at http://www.oed. com.ezproxy.lib.bbk.ac.uk/view/Entry/188653?rskey=IfkztR& result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed 10 August 2016).

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11 ‘Stage direction’, Merriam-Webster Dictionary [online], available at http://www.merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/stage%20 direction (accessed 18 August 2016). 12 For more on ‘scribe directions’, see Stern (2009: 154, 181, 182–84). 13 For further discussion of this struggle between fact and fiction, see Maguire, Smith and Bruster in this volume.

Chapter 2 1 See also Sarah Lewis’s chapter in this volume for discussion of the liminality of stage directions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. 2 Greene’s Tu Quoque (Cooke 1614: B4v); 1 Edward IV ([Heywood?] 1600: B4r). 3 A Looking Glass for London and England (Greene and Lodge 1594: D2v). 4 Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare are to the First Folio facsimile prepared by Hinman (Shakespeare 1968). Coriolanus (TLN 2621–22); Michaelmas Term (Middleton 1607: G1r); Selimus (1594: H1v); Taming of the Shrew (TLN 897 and 2200–01); Antonio’s Revenge (Marston 1602: B4v). 5 Taming of the Shrew (TLN 2379–89); Andria (Terence 1588: C3v). 6 Timon (TLN 1210); Antonio’s Revenge (Marston 1602: G3r). 7 Selimus (1594: D4v); Wily Beguiled (1606: D2v); The Malcontent (Marston 1604: D2v). 8 The Devil is an Ass (Jonson 1631: F4v). 9 Captain Thomas Stukeley (1605: I2v). 10 Playhouse personnel may revise stage directions (their additions and clarifications are visible in MS plays – see, for example, Thomas Heywood’s The Captives) but the critical consensus is that ‘most stage directions are authorial in origin’ (Dessen and Thomson 1999: ix). This logical assumption is based on the fact that, although many stage directions are generic, many are not.

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Thus in 1999 Linda McJannet could speak of a Munday ‘signature’ in stage directions – ‘mid-­scene directions for action expressed as phrases’ (1999: 187). Dessen and Thomson note that ‘Chapman is more likely than any other professional dramatist to use Latin terms, but it is Massinger who is particularly fond of ‘ “exeunt praeter . . .” ’ (1999: x). R.V. Holdsworth has made the most detailed study of stage directions’ usefulness in identifying an author’s voice, from his unpublished PhD thesis (1982: 218–35) to his essay on the subject in 2012. 11 For example, some printed speech prefixes retain the name of an actor rather than the character name. Sincklo, the actor John Sinckler, appears in F Shrew and Kemp (the comedian William Kempe) in Q Much Ado. 12 This habit seems to have begun early in Elizabeth’s reign: in John Phillip’s Patient Grissell (1569), the last speech (technically an epilogue as it follows an Exeunt and switches from character name to actor designation (‘The last speaker and postemus actor’) morphs into prayers for Queen Elizabeth (I1r–v). 13 The exception is character names, which are almost always in character (Lear) rather than actor (Burbage). Stage directions which name the actor are rare (see note 11). Thus, we take for granted that a direction like ‘Exit Hubert, for the Monke’ in Death of Robert Earl of Huntington remains in the story world when the reality is that one actor exits for another (Munday 1601: I2v). 14 Selimus (1594: F2v). 15 One exception to this understanding seems to have been the perceived illocutionary power of Faustus’ incantations in the 1590s, which raised an extra devil; see discussion by Bevington and Rasmussen (Marlowe 1993: 50). Other exceptions include Julie Hankey’s list of Othello productions in which audience members intervened to avert the catastrophe or remonstrate with Iago (Shakespeare 2005: 17, 4–5). 16 Buonamici has never been translated into English. This excerpt is quoted and translated by Weinberg. 17 William Warner’s Elizabethan translation of this play omits the prologue.

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18 Coriolanus (TLN 1–2, 279, 1886, 1949–50, 1992, 3658). See also Emma Smith’s discussion of Coriolanus, below. 19 David Norbrook, ‘Rehearsing the Plebeians: Coriolanus and the Reading of Roman History’ (forthcoming). 20 For further discussion of the blurring of factual and fictional categories, see Smith and Bruster in this collection. 21 Martin Wiggins (2015: 138) speculates that the stress on houses indicates university auspices. 22 Alan Dessen (1984) offers extensive analysis of this kind of direction. 23 Today these stage directions are replaced or complemented by lighting cues. 24 The church references come from The Insatiate Countess (Marston 1613: A4r); A Woman is a Weathercock (Field 1612: D3v); The Puritan (Middleton 1607: B2v); the Exchange reference is from How a Man May Choose (Heywood 1602: A2r). 25 For further discussion of stage directions and narrative theory, see Smith below. 26 From an actor’s point of view, it might have been helpful to have had the second part of this direction precede the first, although the sequence is not unusual in medieval or early sixteenth-­ century drama. 27 For beds ‘thrust out’ and ‘within’, see Dessen and Thomson (1999: 24–25; 253).

Chapter 3 1 When working out what makes a stage direction conventional, there is the added complication that many early modern play-­texts do not survive. David McInnis and Matthew Steggle note that at least 744 known plays were lost before the modern period, compared to 543 plays that survive (2014: 1). 2 See also Martin White’s chapter in this collection for a discussion of the ways stage directions pose multiple questions about performance practice.

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3 See Lopez (2013) and Woods below. 4 Although certainly some stage directions were recorded by the playhouse prompter or inserted by the printing house compositors, we treat stage directions here as the creation of the playwright. 5 On John Marston’s idiosyncratic treatment of stage directions, see Love (2003). 6 Shakespeare uses ‘fray’ eighteen times in eleven plays, but always as a part of the dialogue. 7 Heywood is not the only early modern playwright, of course, who wrote such prescriptive directions. John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon (printed 1597), for example, contains twenty stage directions in its first act, many of which govern what we would today consider acting choices: ‘She thrusts her hands in her pocket’, ‘She winkes and frownes’ (B1r). 8 See Jeremy G. Butler, A History of Information Technology and Systems, University of Arizona, https://tcf.ua.edu/AZ/ ITHistoryOutline.htm (accessed 29 January 2016).

Chapter 4 1 For further discussion of editorial practice concerning stage directions, see Gossett and Bourus in this volume. 2 Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare are to the Folio (1623) or most recent Arden edition. 3 See also Laurie Maguire’s discussion above.

Chapter 5 1 All references to Shakespeare’s works in this essay are to Shakespeare (1997). Occasionally a bracket insertion has been omitted when quoting this edition. List here compiled from Greg (1955: 124–32). Citations in this list omit the customary ‘s.d.’ to save space; for the same reason, another example from Titus has been substituted for Greg’s instance of a stage property

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direction. Greg calls such directions ‘picturesque’ on pp. 133, 134, and ‘elaborate’ on p. 133. 2 See, for instance, Hamilton (1917). Hamilton says of Shaw that ‘He equipped his plays with elaborately literary stage-­directions (the sort of stage-­directions which, though interesting to the reader, are of no avail whatever to the actor)’ (1917: 630). 3 See also chapters by Maguire and Smith in this collection for further analysis of the questionable distinction between ‘theatrical’ and ‘fictional’ stage directions. 4 See Dessen and Thomson (1999), under make (p. 14, ‘as [if]’); bring (p. 39, ‘bring, brought’); let (p. 131); supposed (p. 139, ‘suppose’; p. 222, ‘supposed’). 5 Riverside emends to ‘Coriolanus holds her by the hand, silent.’ 6 For further discussion of Crane’s possible hand in various stage directions, see also Maguire and Gossett in this collection.

Chapter 6 1 See also chapters by Maguire and Bruster in this volume for further discussion of Ralph Crane. 2 In classical texts, the scenes begin with a mere listing of names without any entry direction, thus creating texts ‘to be spoken or read, not “acted” ’ (McJannet 1999: 164). In the Shakespeare Folio and The Witch, Crane does begin such directions with ‘Enter’. 3 Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare are to the latest Arden edition. 4 See also Dustagheer and Bird, elsewhere in this collection, for further exploration of stage directions concerning the discovery of dead bodies. 5 For further discussion of the violence of Macbeth’s stage directions, see Andrew Hiscock’s chapter in this collection. 6 Dessen (1984) discusses the leaping at 21, the hair indicating madness at 36–38, the nightgown at 41–44. 7 See Appendix 4 of the Arden 3 Hamlet (2006) for a description of the editorial and the theatrical tradition.

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8 See Werstine (2013: 374–75) for a list of missing entrances and re-­entrances in the twenty-­two manuscripts and printed texts he studied. 9 For further discussion, see Arden 3 Richard III (2009: 451–54). 10 Much Ado ends with ‘Dance’ and A Midsummer Night’s Dream has ‘Exeunt’ before the entrance of Puck and the subsequent entrance of the King and Queen of Fairies. The latter are, however, usually considered alternative endings, and neither includes a final exit.

Chapter 7 1 If a page has not been cast off properly, then the compositor may need to compress the text or expand it, but such problems are not specific to a particular format (folio or quarto) but to a particular mode of setting (seriatim or by formes). 2 Unlike the plays, the preliminaries of the Shakespeare Folio are set in single column; this may have been done to make the Shakespeare volume look more like the Jonson volume, initially at least. 3 Act, scene and line references here and elsewhere in this essay refer to Taylor et al. (2016). 4 Martin White explores some of the staging practicalities of the act-­break in his essay in this collection.

Chapter 8 I am very grateful to the actor and director, Philip Bird, the director and independent scholar, Gerald Baker, and the historian of early theatre performance practice, John Marshall, for their ideas and the generous help they gave me in preparing this chapter. 1 See my interactive DVD: White (2009), The Chamber of Demonstrations: Reconstructing the Jacobean Indoor Playhouse, Ignition Films/University of Bristol.

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2 In the early modern theatre, the term ‘act’ could refer to three elements of a performance: (1) the entr’acte entertainment; (2) one of the five segments of a play; and (3) performing an action (see Dessen and Thomson 1999: 2). 3 I directed a production of this neglected play in the Wickham Theatre, University of Bristol, in 2001. 4 All references to Massinger’s plays are from Edwards and Gibson (1976). 5 Massinger used the distinction between these two meanings in The Roman Actor (Blackfriars, 1626) for a man on the verge of death as ‘Extinguishing the taper of my life / Consumed unto the snuff’ (2.3.350–51). 6 See ‘The Interludes’ in Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1984: 170–72). 7 Andrew Gurr states that ‘in the indoor theatres act-­breaks were designed to last the length of no more than thirty lines of verse, little more than a minute’ (Gurr 2009: 218). However, this is clearly not feasible in the light of the evidence of what sometimes had to be achieved in that break, or of the ‘intermeans’ in The Staple of News (79, 69, 56 and 87 lines) or the act breaks in The Magnetic Lady (70, 85, 38 and 36 lines), although these cannot be used as a clear indication of the time the breaks actually lasted. 8 ‘In several places names belonging to the story of Sebastian were copied from the original draft [and the] majority of slips and corrections in the manuscript are characteristics of a transcript rather than of fresh composition’; Edwards and Gibson (1976: 293–94). 9 Dessen and Thomson in their Dictionary (1999), and Hutchings (2013: 263–79), mistakenly place the second ‘Long’ at the end of Act 4 rather than in the interval before it. 10 See the detailed analyses of the manuscript of Believe As You List in Sisson (1927), Edwards and Gibson (1976) and Werstine (2013: 392–97). 11 Sturgess (1987) is an exception, though the discussion is brief and he asserts, mistakenly I think, that ‘the lighting design was non-­existent or extremely rudimentary in the private theatre’ (47).

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12 See White (2012: 53–54) and White (2014: 134–36). 13 See White (2014) for details of the lighting research that underpins the choices at the SWP. 14 This was successfully achieved in productions at the SWP of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (which also paid attention to the four interval structure of that play) and Francesco Cavalli’s opera L’Ormindo. 15 In 1636, when Charles I saw two plays at St John’s College, Oxford, one in the afternoon, the Chancellor of the university, Archbishop Laud, ‘caused the windows of the Hall to be shut, the candles lighted, and all things made ready for the play to begin’ (Elliot Jr et al. 2004: i.541), which I take to refer to using shutters to create darkness for the performance. 16 The Cambridge Online Edition suggests that this is held from the trap in the ceiling of the playhouse used for descents, but a torch held downwards is a dangerous thing as the flames, fanned by the heat rising from below, come up towards the holder. More likely it was held on the balcony above the rear of the stage. 17 I am grateful to Dr Will Tosh, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe, for his documentation of this session and the responses of those involved, on and off stage. 18 See also Menzer and Hamlet’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of unique stage directions. 19 This apt phrase is actor and director Philip Bird’s. I am intrigued as to how this sound effect was achieved. 20 ‘Pantophles’ in this context probably means slippers, while ‘eringos’ are the ‘candied root of the Sea Holly, formerly used as a sweetmeat, and regarded as an aphrodisiac’ (OED). This all suggests it was a more opulent affair than the comparatively simple set-­up suggested by a marginal note in 5.1 of Edwards and Gibson (1976): The City Madam presumably derived from the prompt copy: ‘The Banquet ready. One chair, and wine’. 21 Compare the confusion between seeing and hearing in 2.3 of Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice. 22 On my DVD, The Chamber of Demonstrations, the scene is played first as the stage and textual directions suggest, and then with Iolante emerging on to the stage but returning to her

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chair and closing the curtain before Severino enters. Despite Monica Dolan’s and Jamie Glover’s spirited performances, the first version was difficult to remain engaged with, and the second, though more effective in my view, looked too contrived. 23 The stage direction that closes 3.1 in Massinger’s The City Madam reads, ‘Exeunt, wanton Musick plaid before ’em’. 24 Hosley (1959) identifies a number of such moves, including the opening of Act 4 ‘Alexander in his study beholding a magical glass’ which is followed six lines later by ‘Alexander cometh upon the stage out of his study with a book in his hand’ from Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter (1607). 25 Referring to the custom for turtle doves to mate for life, a common early modern emblem of marital fidelity. 26 The discovery space was the subject of a Research in Action session at the SWP on 27 September 2014.

Chapter 10 1 For further discussion here, see Hiscock (2014). 2 See also Stern, above, for further discussion of Theobald’s use of the term ‘stage direction’. 3 All quotations and scene designations of Shakespearean texts are taken from: Shakespeare (1623). 4 See also Laurie Maguire’s discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this collection.

Chapter 11 1 For further discussion of the difficulties of editing mass entrances, see Gossett in this collection. 2 Dollimore and Sinfield also insert ‘There is a’ in their edition of the play. 3 In the 2012 production at the Old Vic directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Eve Best, the Duchess’s voice was played through

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speakers at the back of the theatre in the Echo scene. In the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2014, in a production directed by Dominic Dromgoole and starring Gemma Arterton, the Duchess, unseen, spoke as Echo from the upper tiring house, appearing briefly when she delivered her final line.

Chapter 12 My thanks to Sarah Dustagheer, Lucy Munro and Emma Whipday for their generously instructive comments on this chapter. 1 Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare are to the Folio (1623). 2 Sometimes, as shown by Stern above, dumb shows are printed out of place, at a distance from such dialogue. 3 These positions are summarized by Evelyn Tribble (2005: 143). 4 Dessen and Thomson note that the direction ‘Enter four at several corners’ appears in No Wit and ‘the Devils appear at every corner of the stage’ in the Silver Age (1999: 57). 5 See also McJannet (1999: 162) and Luckyj (2002: 100–1). 6 Pearn gauges that only half of extant dumb shows are accompanied by a presenter’s explanation (1935: 386). 7 Modern editors, including Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason Brown (2014), correct this confusing stage direction: ‘A show of eight kings, the last with a glass in his hand; and BANQUO’ (4.1.110.1–2). 8 For an alternative reading of Macbeth, focusing especially on its violent stage directions, see Hiscock elsewhere in this collection. 9 See also Dustagheer above for an analysis of the spatial significance of this show.

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Woods, Gillian (2013), Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worthen, W.B. (2005), Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woudhuysen, H.R. (2005), ‘The Foundations of Shakespeare’s Text’, Proceedings of The British Academy, 125: 69–100. Wright, Peter M. (1991), ‘Jonson’s Revisions of the Stage Directions for the 1616 Folio Workes’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 5 (1991): 257–85. Yachnin, Paul (2015), Shakespeare’s World of Words, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Zimmerman, Susan (2005), The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Index actors 29–30, 59, 71, 142–4, 146–7, 201, 233, 288, 290, 292 ignoring stage directions 5, 46 instructed by stage directions 5–6, 7, 36–7, 40, 45, 47–9, 53–4, 88, 98, 116, 119, 123, 215, 218, 295–300, 316 n.7 modern performance practice 175–9 named early players 39, 41, 110, 144, 196, 314 n.11, 314 n.13 parts 2–3, 28, 38, 39, 59, 60, 146, 175, 251, 292 rehearsal 28–31, 37, 48, 115, 197, 251, 294–5 as writers of stage directions 32–6, 245–6, 247 see also backstage plots Altman, Joel 70 Andrewes, Lancelot 299 Arden of Faversham (anonymous) 7–8, 168 Armin, Robert Valiant Welshman, The 21 Astington, John 295 Austern, Linda Phyllis 28 backstage plots 2, 3, 10, 56, 110, 143–4, 153, 182,

294–5, 299–300, 312 n.5 Bal, Mieke 105 balcony see stage architecture Barnes, Barnabe Devil’s Charter, The 298, 321 n.24 Barnfield, Richard 300 Barrie, J.M. 119–20 Barry, Lodwick Ram Alley 60 Barton, John 47 Bawcutt, N.W. 195 Baxter, Richard 196 Beaumont, Francis Knight of the Burning Pestle 194, 319 n.6, 320 n.14 Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher Love’s Pilgrimage 34 Philaster 152–3 Works (1750) 34–5 Beckett, Samuel 36 Bergeron, David 229, 230, 236 Bevington, David 9, 80, 142, 227, 314 n.15 Biggins, Dennis 112 Billington, Michael 47, 180 Blackfriars see playhouses Bloom, Gina 283 book-keeper 2, 4–6, 98, 143, 146, 159, 195, 196, 205, 311 n.1

338

Index

Bradbrook, M.C. 244 Braden, Gordon 232 Bradshaw, Thomas 300 Bristol, Michael 112 Brome, Richard 84 Antipodes, The 80–1 Court Begger, The 243 Jovial Crew, A 149 Queenes Exchange, The 274 see also Heywood, Thomas and Richard Brome Brook, Peter 180 Buc, George 28 Buonamici, Francesco 50 Busse, Ashley Denham 234–5 Butler, Jeremy 316 n.8 Calore, Michela 10, 56, 295 Captain Thomas Stukeley (anonymous) 48, 53, 57–8, 59 Carlson, Marvin 45–6 Carnegie, David 216, 278, 281 Casey, Edward 222 Chalk, Brian 229 Chambers, E.K. 116, 117, 120, 137, 142–3 chandelier see stage architecture Chapman, George 313–14 n.10 Chapman, George, Ben Jonson and John Marston Eastward Ho! 53, 148–50 Chettle, Henry Tragedy of Hoffman, The 214, 218–20, 221, 225, 226–7, 236 Children of the Chapel see theatre companies Children of the Queen’s Revels see theatre companies

Cleaver, Robert 300–1 Clegg, Roger 192 Clubb, Louise 71 Cockpit, The see playhouses Collingwood, R.G. 249 compositor 2, 3, 23, 46, 130, 164–9, 171, 174, 179, 318 n.1 Connor, Francis X. 164 Cooke, John Greene’s Tu Quoque 47 costume 47, 53, 56, 58, 123, 129 Cotton, Robert 299 Cox, John D. 9, 245 Craig, Hugh 83 Crane, Ralph 2, 51–2, 127–9, 143, 144–5, 267, 317 n.2 Cressy, David 222 Culpeper, Jonathan 57 curtain see stage architecture Curtain, The see playhouses Daly, Peter Maurice 312 n.1 Davies, John 64–5 Davies, Thomas 241–2 Day, John Travailes of Three English Brothers, The 291–2 Deitch, Judith 270 Dekker, Thomas 84 Old Fortunatus 274 Satiromastix 206, 295 Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton Bloody Banquet 290 Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, The 63–4 de Marinis, Marco 96

index

Dench, Judi 174, 175, 176, 178 Dessen, Alan 72, 151, 155, 243, 247, 315 n.22, 317 n.6 Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary 11, 40, 69, 72, 77, 79, 242, 253, 260 see also Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama (Dessen and Thomson) 11–12, 62–3, 319 n.9 on attribution 40–1, 81, 168, 313–14 n.10 definitions from 148, 218, 319 n.2 methodology of 72–85, 89, 99, 122–4, 126–7 statistics from 8, 74, 79, 83–4, 86, 216, 273, 292, 296, 322 n.4 Dillon, Janette 10, 216 directors (of modern theatre) 36, 106, 156, 158, 159, 163, 167, 168, 171, 173, 185, 186, 208 discovery space see stage architecture disguise 47, 60–1, 117, 148, 201, 206 doors see stage architecture Drayton, Michael 296 Dryden, John 244 dumb show see stage directions Dunn, T.A. 204 Earl of Derby’s Servants see theatre companies

339

Echo Homeric Hymn to Pan 269, 272–3, 275, 279–81, 282 Ovid’s Metamorphosis 265, 269–73, 274–5 editions of plays Arden Macbeth (ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason) 150, 155 Arden 2 Richard III (ed. Anthony Hammond) 154–5 Arden 3 Richard III (ed. Charles R. Forker) 156 Bedford Shakespeare 155, 158–9 Cambridge Beaumont and Fletcher 166 Cambridge Eastward Ho! (ed. Suzanne Gossett and David Kay) 148–50 New Cambridge Shakespeare 155 New Oxford Shakespeare 174–9, 180–5 Norton Shakespeare 141–2, 145, 154, 155, 159, 171, 176, 177, 178, 180 Oxford Massinger 201, 202, 205 Oxford Middleton 63, 166 Oxford Shakespeare 9, 99–100, 141, 154, 155, 156, 170, 177 Revels Bartholomew Fair (ed. Suzanne Gossett) 142 Riverside Shakespeare 155

340

Index

RSC Shakespeare 141, 155, 172, 176, 177, 178, 182 see also stage directions, editorial treatment of Egan, Gabriel 120, 121 Engel, William E. 214 Erne, Lukas 96 Fidele and Fortunio (anonymous) 56 Field, Nathan Woman is a Weathercock, A 54, 315 n.24 see also Massinger, Philip and Nathan Field Fielding, Henry 242 Fisher, Jasper Fuimus Troes 55 Fitzpatrick, Tim 10, 292 Fletcher, John 83–4, 247 see also Beaumont, John and John Fletcher Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger Prophetess, The 289, 302–3 Sir John van Olden Barnavelt 165–6 Fletcher, John and William Shakespeare Henry VIII 38, 51, 102, 111, 118, 298–9 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 39, 166, 167, 171 Foakes, R.A. 249 Ford, John Love’s Sacrifice 320 n.21 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore 6, 197, 311 n.4 Forster, E.M. 108–9, 110

Foster, F.A. 22 foul papers 9, 143, 158, 184 frons see stage architecture gallery see stage architecture Gascoigne, George Glass of Government 52, 54 Jocasta 22, 50, 54 Supposes 54 Gates, Henry Louis Jr 104 Genette, Gerard 111 gesture 3, 7, 30, 45, 70, 118, 214–15, 219, 224, 230–2, 245, 259, 288, 290, 292, 295–7, 304 ‘ghost characters’ 184–5 Globe, The see playhouses Gossett, Suzanne 153 Gossett, Suzanne and David Kay 148–50 Granville-Barker, Harley 180 Graves, Robert 199, 200, 207 Greene, Robert Alphonsus, King of Aragon 59 Orlando Furioso 62 Selimus 47, 48, 49, 50, 55 see also Lodge, Thomas and Robert Greene Greg, W.W. 116–19, 120–1, 143, 166, 312 n.5, 312 n.6 Gurr, Andrew 10, 292, 311 n.7, 319 n.7 Hackel, Heidi Brayman 32 Hamilton, Clayton 317 n.2 Hammond, Anthony 6, 65, 154–5, 208, 246, 278, 281

index

heavens see stage architecture Hebdige, Dick 254–5 Heminges, John and Henry Condell 19, 32–3, 35, 164 Henke, Robert 71 Henslowe, Philip 216 Herbert, Henry 195–6 Heywood, Jasper 144 Heywood, Thomas 13, 73–4, 75–6, 82, 84–90, 247 Captives 39, 53, 313 n.10 Brazen Age, The 75, 85, 86–7, 88, 289 2 Edward IV 47, 62, 85, 86 Fair Maid of the West, The 23–4, 87, 195 Golden Age, The 85, 86, 87, 293–4 How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad 49, 54, 315 n.24 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody 23, 293, 298 Iron Age: Parts 1 and 2 85, 87, 88, 199–200 Maidenhead Well Lost, A 87, 291, 293 Silver Age, The 85, 86–7, 88, 322 n.4 Woman Killed with Kindness, A 53 Heywood, Thomas and Richard Brome Late Lancashire Witches, The 85, 88 Hill, Tracey 303 Hirschfeld, Heather 8 Hiscock, Andrew 321 n.1

341

Holdsworth, R.V. 168, 313–14 n.10 Holland, Peter 51, 58, 192 Hollander, Martha 230–1 Hollybrand, Claudius 287 Honigmann, E.A.J. 40, 95, 100 Hosley, Richard 10, 98, 110, 121–2, 216, 321 n.24 Hughes, Thomas Certaine Deuises and Shews 22 Misfortunes of Arthur 27–8 Hutchings, Mark 319 n.9 Hutchins, Geoffrey 47 Hutson, Lorna 256 Ichikawa, Mariko 10, 216, 292, 311 n.7 Iser, Wolfgang 101–2 Issacharoff, Michael 45–6, 48, 58, 59 Jones, Gwilym 254 Jonson, Ben 14, 45, 83, 144, 241–2 Case is Altered, The 216 Catiline 197–9, 200, 202 Cynthia’s Revels 269–72, 273, 275, 280 Devil is an Ass, The 48, 59 Every Man in His Humour 207 Folio (1616) 164, 197–9, 207, 318 n.2 Magnetic Lady, The 192, 210, 319 n.7 Masque of Queens, The 145–6 Volpone 241–2

342

Index

see also Chapman, George, Ben Jonson and John Marston Jowett, John 96–7, 127–8, 129, 156 Karim-Cooper, Farah 10, 226, 295 Kerrigan, John 158 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 9, 100, 101, 141, 243, 246 Kiefer, Frederick 216 Kilde, Jeanne Halgren 231 Killigrew, Thomas Princess, The 78 King Leir (anonymous) 55, 56, 58, 296 King’s Men see theatre companies King, T.J. 10 Knack to Know a Knave, A (anonymous) 49 Knight, Edward 166, 196 Kristeva, Julia 235 Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy, The 8, 24, 79–80, 213–14, 217–18, 219, 220, 222, 225, 232–3, 235, 302 Lake, Arthur 301 lighting 193–5, 197–200, 202, 234, 257, 276, 315 n.23, 319 n.11, 320 n.13 Llewellyn, Nigel 223 Locrine (anonymous) 28, 290, 312 n.8 Lodge, Thomas Rosalynde 101

Wounds of Civil War 273–4 Lodge, Thomas and Robert Greene Looking Glass for London and England, A 7, 47, 55, 59, 311 n.6, 313 n.3 Long, William B. 4–5, 6, 89, 311 n.3 Look About You (anonymous) 53 Lopez, Jeremy 26, 289–90, 297, 312 n.1, 316 n.3 Lord Chamberlain’s Men see theatre companies Lord Mayor’s Show 303 Loughnane, Rory 229, 236 Love, Genevieve 311 n.5, 316 n.5 Low, Jennifer A. 230–31, 233–4 Lowenstein, Joseph 269, 272, 283 Luckyj, Christina 224, 264, 297, 322 n.5 Lyly, John Endimion 24–7 Woman in the Moon, The 7, 311 n.6, 316 n.7 Malone, Edmond 35, 37, 245–6 manuscript playbooks 2–5, 9, 39, 89, 311 n.1, 311 n.2 Marcus, Leah S. 95, 264, 265–6, 267, 279, 281, 282 Markham, Gervase and William Sampson Herod and Antipater 289 Marlowe, Christopher 85 Doctor Faustus 216–17, 314 n.15

index

Edward II 155–6, 157, 159 Massacre at Paris, The 55, 61–2 Tamburlaine: Parts 1 and 2 61, 62 Marshall, Peter 222 Marston, John 14, 75, 311 n.5, 316 n.5 Antonio and Mellida 221, 225 Antonio’s Revenge 47, 48, 55, 214, 220–2, 236 Insatiate Countess, The 54, 315 n.24 Malcontent, The 48 What You Will 81, 193 see also Chapman, George, Ben Jonson and John Marston masques 51, 78, 102, 145–6 Massinger, Philip 14, 75, 84, 85, 313–14 n.10 Bashful Lover, The 205–6 Believe as You List 39, 195–7, 208, 319 n.10 City Madam, The 193, 320 n.20, 321 n.23 Guardian, The 201–10 Roman Actor, The 319 n.5 see also Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger Massinger, Philip and Nathan Field Fatal Dowry, The 80, 193 Maydes Metamorphosis, The (anonymous) 274 McInnis, David 315 n.1 McJannet, Linda 10–11, 62, 87, 108, 109, 251, 260, 313–14 n.10, 317 n.2, 322 n.5

343

McKerrow, R.B. 98, 99 Meads, Chris 205 Mehl, Dieter 288, 300, 306, 312 n.1 Meisel, Martin 100 memento mori 222, 308, 309 Merry Devil of Edmonton, The (anonymous) 206 Middleton, Thomas 75, 83, 84, 85, 166, 168, 303 Chast Mayd in Cheape-Side, A 7, 311 n.6 Game at Chesse, A 144 Lady’s Tragedy, The 5, 166, 214, 225–6, 227, 235, 277, 278 Mad World My Masters, A 32, 194 Mayor of Quinborough, The/Hengist 293 Michaelmas Terme 21, 58, 59, 60, 312 n.2, 313 n.4 No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s 57, 322 n.4 Old Law, The 156 Puritan, The 54, 57, 315 n.24 Revenger’s Tragedy, The 214, 222, 225 Second Maiden’s Tragedy see Middleton, Lady’s Tragedy, The Timon of Athens see Shakespeare, Timon of Athens Witch, The 143, 317 n.2 Your Five Gallants 46–7 see also Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton

344

Index

Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley Changeling, The 205 Fair Quarrel, A 152 Morton, Thomas 301 Mousley, Andrew 70 Munday, Anthony 313–14 n.10 Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, The 314 n.13 Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington, The 53 John a Kent and John a Cumber 53 London’s Love for Prince Henry 120–1 Munkelt, Marga 103–4, 259, 260 Munro, Lucy 10 music 171, 181, 183, 192, 193, 195, 200, 209, 220 song 27, 38, 101, 113, 130, 131, 136, 192, 194, 224, 255, 272, 312 n.6 see also stage directions, music music house see stage architecture National Theatre see theatres, modern Neill, Michael 94, 214, 223, 229, 265, 276, 278, 280, 281 Newsom, Robert 50 Nicholson, Eric 71 Nixon, Pippa 1 Norbrook, David 52 Omerod, Oliver 301 O’Neill, Eugene 119

Ovid see Echo Owens, Margaret 229, 230, 236 Palfrey, Simon and Tiffany Stern Shakespeare in Parts 3 Paul’s Boys see theatre companies Pearn, B.R. 32, 288, 299, 300, 322 n.6 Peele, George Arraignment of Paris 78 Battle of Alcazar, The 22–3, 110, 294, 312 n.4 Edward I 52–3, 56, 58, 60 see also Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Phillip, John Patient Grissell 314 n.12 pillar see stage architecture pit see stage architecture Plautus 50 playhouses Blackfriars, 30, 180, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199–200, 201, 205–10, 270 Cockpit, The 197, 205 Curtain, The 291 Globe, The 30, 122, 178, 197, 199–200, 206–7, 257 Red Bull, The 199, 293 Rose, The 98–9, 213 see also theatres, modern Pope, Alexander 33–4 Porter, Henry Two Angry Women of Abingdon, The 49, 54 Potter, Lois 39, 95, 264–5

index

properties 2, 7, 10, 33–4, 111, 118, 206, 235, 260, 266, 278 in backstage plots 2, 182, 294 in dumb shows 292, 298 in Henslowe’s Diary 216 in manuscript playbook 311 n.3 in stage-keeper directions 38–9 symbolic work of 48, 53 Prynne, William 249 Purgatory 222, 227–32, 256, 280 Queen Anne’s Men see theatre companies Queen Henrietta’s Men see theatre companies Queen’s Men see theatre companies Radford, Michael 158 Rasmussen, Eric 8, 31, 165, 167, 172, 176, 182, 270–1, 314 n.15 Red Bull, The see playhouses Redgrave, Vanessa 174, 175, 178 Reformation 215 and memorial practice 214–15, 217–36 Reynolds, G.F. 10 Rider, John 301 Rist, Thomas 214, 222–3, 231 Rivère de Carles, Nathalie 145, 235–6 room see stage architecture Rose, The see playhouses

345

Rowe, Nicholas 170, 179, 182 Rowland, Richard 87 Rowley, William see Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley; Webster, John and William Rowley [false attrib.?] Sam Wanamaker Playhouse see theatres, modern Sampson, William see Markham, Gervase and William Sampson Schmidt, Bettina E. 249–50 Schröder, Ingo W. 249–50 Scott, Joan W. 268 Seneca Hercules Furens 144 Troades 144 Shakespeare, William 35, 37–41, 51, 62, 73, 75, 82–5, 93–113, 115–37, 168 All’s Well that Ends Well 133–4, 154, 159 Antony and Cleopatra 6, 51, 104–5, 128, 129, 172–6, 178, 179–86 modern production 174, 175–6, 180 As You Like It 101, 111 Comedy of Errors, The 111, 117 Coriolanus 40, 47, 49–52, 53–4, 58, 105, 111, 118, 125–6, 315 n.18, 317 n.5 Cymbeline 102, 113, 128, 129, 248 Folio 29–31, 35, 40, 51, 83, 93–4, 95, 132, 144–5,

346

Index

150, 151, 154, 164–5, 167–8, 169–71, 173 Hamlet 19, 29–31, 32–3, 40, 70, 77, 106–8, 109–10, 118, 151, 152, 153–4, 155, 156–7, 173, 248, 252, 256, 287–8, 303, 317 n.7 Henry IV, Part 1 102, 103–4, 133, 134 Henry V 33, 52–3, 62, 119, 202, 291 Henry VI, Part 1 40, 63, 128 Henry VI, Part 2 86, 112, 118, 128, 135 Henry VI, Part 3 118, 126, 131 Julius Caesar 36, 128, 248 King Lear 9, 55, 62, 158 Love’s Labour’s Lost 113 Macbeth 14–15, 19, 33, 35, 38, 40, 128, 129, 145–6, 150, 154, 155, 156, 243–61, 302 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 128–9 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 48, 98, 113, 119, 164, 166, 318 n.10 Measure for Measure 158–9 Merchant of Venice, The 136, 158, 169, 216 modern production 158 Much Ado About Nothing 128, 131, 156, 314 n.11, 318 n.10 Othello 8, 93–5, 156, 314 n.15 Pericles 35, 37–8, 128, 298 Richard II 62, 195

Richard III 111, 112, 124–5, 134–5, 154, 156, 318 n.9 Romeo and Juliet 62, 96, 117, 122, 128, 130, 150–1, 152 Taming of the Shrew, The 47, 48, 117, 128, 129, 130–1, 132, 133, 135, 314 n.11 Tempest, The 1–2, 48, 49, 51, 53, 118, 125, 126, 127–9, 173, 215, 228, 230–1 Timon of Athens (with Middleton) 48, 58, 59, 111–12, 117 Titus Andronicus 40, 47, 102, 105–6, 111, 118, 170–1, 195, 316 n.1 modern production 47 Troilus and Cressida 150 Twelfth Night 60–1, 130, 158 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 131, 145, 153 Winter’s Tale, The 69, 102, 112–13, 125, 215, 228–9, 231 see also Fletcher, John and William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Globe see theatres, modern Shapiro, James 158 Shaw, George Bernard 36, 47, 88, 119–20, 317 n.2 Shell, Alison 231 Shirley, Christopher 159 Shirley, James 34, 84 Siddons, Sarah 175, 178

index

Sidney, Philip 50 Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (anonymous) 50, 54, 56–7, 63 Sir Thomas More 170, 171 Skeaping, Lucie 192 Slater, Ann Pasternak 65 Smith, Emma 214 Smith, Warren 39–40 song see music speech prefixes 45, 60–1, 63, 93–4, 165, 166, 248, 314 n.11 Spenser, Edmund 101 stage architecture balcony 148, 150, 320 n.16 chandelier 194, 200, 202, 209 curtain 148, 204–7, 209, 213–21, 223, 224, 228–33, 235–6, 305, 320–1 n.22 discovery space 205, 207, 209–10, 213–36, 277, 321 n.26 doors 10, 48, 50, 53, 56, 63, 122, 148, 176, 201, 208, 213, 215–16, 225, 277, 279, 292–3 frons 216, 231 gallery 98, 200 heavens 227, 254 music house 221 pillar 148, 200, 216 pit 81, 200 room 7, 122, 173, 204 tiring house 10, 39, 48, 61, 148, 233, 257, 283, 294, 321–2 n.3 trapdoor 1, 38, 208, 209, 227, 270, 320 n.16

347

stage directions above 1, 10, 40, 60, 145, 148, 168 aloft 122, 168, 170 aside 48, 118, 155–7, 207 ‘as it were’/‘as if’ 48–54, 102, 122–3, 129–30, 200, 202, 229 attribution of 46, 48, 52, 60, 98, 99, 103, 127–9, 130, 137 authorial idiosyncrasies 58, 81 non-authorial 19–20, 27–9, 31–41 uncertainty of 2–5, 79, 115, 168, 246–7 below 60, 208, 227, 270, 320 n.16 critical work on 4–5, 8–12, 45–6, 70–2, 96–101, 116–17, 119–23, 242–8 dance 7, 28–9, 145–6, 192, 194, 298–9, 318 n.10 discover 56, 148–50, 152, 204, 206, 207, 210, 213–37 drum 6, 58, 134, 183, 254, 257, 259 dumb show 19–43, 77, 106–8, 109, 193, 221–2, 224, 287–310 echo 263–84 editorial treatment of 3, 8–9, 32–6, 38, 97, 99–101, 141–59, 163–86 in Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 51

348

Index

in Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster) 276–9, 281 in Guardian, The (Massinger) 204–5 in Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, The (Dekker and Middleton) 63–4 in Macbeth (Shakespeare) 245–6 in Othello (Shakespeare) 95 in Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare) 132 in Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 51 entr’acte 179, 192–5, 197, 319 n.2 entrance 3, 7–8, 9, 88, 99, 115, 130, 204, 244, 257–9 in backstage plots 3, 110 editorial treatment of 142–5, 148–51, 153–5, 157, 181–5, 278–9 fictional/theatrical boundary of 40, 47–8, 52–64, 117–19, 122–5 as instructions to actors 33–4, 35, 39, 165–6, 277 massed entry 144–5, 263, 267–8, 276 missing 113, 142–5, 147, 148–50, 151, 153–5, 317 n.2, 318 n.8 as narrative 105–6, 111–12 timing of 202, 205–8 unusual forms of 168, 291–4, 322 n.4

exit 2–3, 7–8, 30, 39, 52, 61–3, 94, 115, 124 in backstage plots 2–3, 110, 143–4, 153, 182, 299–300 editorial treatment of 147–2, 150–5, 158, 181–3 fictional/theatrical boundary of 48 missing 143, 147–2, 150–5, 158 as narrative 112–13, 124 unusual forms of 292–3, 299 ‘fictional’ 10, 40, 49–50, 54–6, 121–5 flourish 6, 76, 104, 118, 171, 183, 195, 252, 259 harpy 1–2, 128 hoboys 30, 193, 195, 252, 257 ‘like’ 102, 112 ‘literary’ 117–21, 123, 125, 129 long 195–200 missing 2–3, 141–59, 167, 173, 242 music 21–2, 28, 55, 130, 145, 193–4, 255, 299, 307, 321 n.23, see also music (main entry) nonce 69–90 prompter directions 19, 20, 34–5, 38–40, 41, 61, 116, 312 n.5 punning 132–5 quaint device 128–9 readers of 6–7, 56–63, 93–113, 115–37,

index

141–2, 147–8, 150, 151–3, 155, 156, 159, 199 rhyming 131–2, 135–7 scribe directions 20, 38–41, 313 n.12 silence 23, 35, 39, 48, 55, 125, 126, 158, 270–1, 290, 295, 300, 303, 317 n.5 soundworlds 251–7 stage keeper directions 20, 38–41 ‘theatrical’ 10, 98–9, 122–3, 125 thunder and lightning 128, 227, 254–6, 258, 298 trumpet 30, 34, 58, 118, 183, 256 violence 6, 80–1, 218, 222, 259 see also actors; speech prefixes stage keeper 193, 207 stage manager 36, 48, 98, 232 States, Bert O. 297 Steevens, George 35 Steggle, Matthew 270–2, 315 n.1 Stern, Tiffany 10, 27, 30, 107, 147, 159, 227, 248, 300, 312 n.1 Documents of Performance in Early Modern England 3, 110, 146, 147, 294, 312 n.6, 312 n.7, 313 n.12 Making Shakespeare 257 see also Palfrey, Simon and Tiffany Stern Sturgess, Keith 319 n.11

349

Tailor, Robert Hog Hath Lost his Pearl, The 72, 299 Taylor, Gary 28, 99, 144, 154, 168, 170, 172, 192, 193 theatre companies Children of the Chapel 270 Children of the Queen’s Revels 194 Earl of Derby’s Servants 85 King’s Men 85, 146, 164, 166, 180, 196, 197, 228–9, 277 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 81, 206 Paul’s Boys 206 Queen Anne’s Men 85 Queen Henrietta’s Men 80, 85 Queen’s Men 49, 56 theatres, modern National Theatre 176 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 10, 192, 194, 197, 200, 210, 215, 320 n.13, 320 n.14, 321 n.26, 321–2 n.3 Shakespeare’s Globe 215 University of Bristol, Wickham Theatre 191–2, 318 n.1, 319 n.3 see also playhouses Theobald, Lewis 12, 19, 20, 32–5, 37, 38–9, 244 Thomson, Leslie 3, 9, 245 see also Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama

350

Index

Tilney, Charles 28 tiring house see stage architecture Tourneur, Cyril The Atheist’s Tragedy 75, 81–2 trapdoor see stage architecture Tribble, Evelyn 292 True Tragedie of Richard the Third, The (anonymous) 6, 49, 311 n.4 Tuan, Yi-Fu 233 Turner, Henry S. 243, 246 University of Bristol, Wickham Theatre see theatres, modern Warning for Faire Women, A (anonymous) 295 Watson, Robert 214 Weakest Goeth to the Wall, The (anonymous) 20–1, 59, 292–3 Webster, John 6 Duchess of Malfi, The 15, 197, 215, 228, 229–30, 263–85, 295 White Devil, The 5–6, 15, 214, 224–5, 235, 278–9, 289, 304–9 Webster, John and William Rowley [false attrib.?] Thracian Wonder, The 7

Weinberg, Bernard 50 Wells, Stanley 99, 119–20, 154, 170, 172, 176 Werstine, Paul 3, 4, 9, 39, 142–3, 144, 147, 184, 311 n.1, 311 n.2, 318 n.8, 319 n.10 West, William N. 303 White, Martin 318 n.1, 320 n.12, 320 n.13 Wickham, Glynne 255 Wiggins, Martin 315 n.21 Williams, Tennessee 88, 119 Wilmot, Robert Tragedie of Tancred and Gismund, The 22, 26 Wilson, Jean 223 Wilson, John Dover 98, 119–20, 157, 172–3, 184–5 Wilson, Robert Coblers Prophesie, The 274–5 Wily Beguiled (anonymous) 55–6, 57, 313 n.7 Wit of a Woman, The (anonymous) 49, 52, 60 Womack, Peter 233, 244, 257 Woods, Gillian 228, 231 Worthen, W.B. 89, 90 Woudhuysen, H.R. 150 Wright, Peter M. 199, 207 Yachnin, Paul 70 Zimmerman, Susan 214, 231