write two instances that seem to be affected when shakespeare wrote and two instances affected by the actors,setup, limitations
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How to perform or adapt Shakespeare when he has been performed over and over since his own time? The question has prompted a variety of performances, from Elizabethan dress to modern day, as well as films, novels, even comics. This undercurrent of anxiety, the fear that yet another performance of Shakespeare might somehow cause him to go stale, to become cliché, has revealed itself in different ways: productions of Shakespeare plays either try to update them and do something new, by playing with setting and gender; or they adhere to the 'Original Practices' style, incorporating costumes, acting practices and even casting methods from Shakespeare’s day.
Shakespeare was a product of his time. He did not exist in a vacuum, but was irrevocably tied to the theatre company, theatre practices, acting practices and social circumstances of his era. Revisiting the practices of his time does not somehow resurrect him into the modern age, but is part of an attempt to dip into a period we do not know enough about.
The biggest difference between theatre in Shakespeare’s time and theatre today, one that arguably coloured many other aspects of 16th- or 17th-century theatre practice, was that it lacked something modern theatre companies find invaluable: a director. If we define a director as someone who supplies direction – directing the actor’s body and movement as well as his or her inflection, directing the audience’s gaze on the stage, directing interpretations of a text – then the burden for direction in Shakespeare’s day fell on the text and the actor.
The actor inevitably became a kind of self-director. This was largely facilitated by the acting practices of the period. Each actor was given not the whole script but only his own ‘part’: his lines along with his cues, which were the last four or five words of the actor who would speak before him. A ‘plot’ of the play – a summary of the entrances, exits and other notable actions – would hang in the tiring house (the section of a theatre reserved for the actors) behind the stage for actors to consult.
Rehearsals as we know them today did not exist in Shakespeare’s day either. Actors would memorise their lines on their own, or experienced actors would practise with the younger actors who were apprenticed to them. Often the main actors would sit through a reading of the entire play with the playwright, and the entire company would rehearse the fight scenes and the jigs, which were dependent on precision and timing.
These practices were a product of necessity and practicality: paper was expensive and companies did not wish to risk having too many copies of the play lying around, so each actor was supplied the bare minimum. Candles were also expensive, so actors could only rehearse during the day. A company like Shakespeare’s typically put on six plays a week, which gave them little time to rehearse.
All this put the onus on the actor to direct his own movements and gestures, as well as on the text, which supplied countless small cues to an actor not necessarily found in stage directions: Cordelia’s ‘no, sir, you must not kneel’ reveals that Lear will kneel before her, and Banquo’s ‘Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear…?’ signals Macbeth’s reaction to the witches’ prophecy. Such acting practices seem unfathomable in the modern theatre world, which is preoccupied with details and information: producing backgrounds for characters, each actor being familiar with the entire script; months of rehearsal with the collaborative effort of a director, producer, set designer, and countless others.
However, this has not stopped modern theatre companies drawing on acting practices from the 16th and 17th century. Unrehearsed performances are especially popular, such as Emma Whipday’s Two Lamentable Tragedies, which follows the same practice of giving each actor only his or her ‘part’. Many actors and directors such as Philip Bird and Patrick Tucker argue that it gives a performance a sense of vitality and spontaneity, as each actor does not know for sure what the other is about to say, and the play becomes a sort of extempore (spoken without preparation) game. The Globe’s Read Not Dead series, which puts on lesser-known and never-performed plays, allows its actors only the morning to rehearse, and then has them perform the play with scripts in hand. But even the Globe does not adhere to authentic rehearsal practices when following 'Original Practices' style during its regular season, suggesting that some gaps simply cannot be bridged.