Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (review)

Tiffany Stern has compiled more data about rehearsal procedures over the periods of the English stage she studies than is available in any other single source and more than many will have thought recoverable. For each era, Stern discusses selected companies; the number and kinds of rehearsals; the functions of bookholders, prompters, and managers; acting training; and textual revisions by authors, managers, actors, and lords chamberlain. In a research tour de force, she draws richly on each era's plays (including the not-always-reliable rehearsal-format plays), prologues, epilogues, biographies, and other primary sources. Play editors should attend to Stern's tracing of the rehearsal process for new plays and the mutability of all texts in daily playhouse practice: viable theaters have always shaped and reshaped playtexts. The art is a collaborative one and transient by nature.

Stern may have ridden one argument too hard. Establishing that actors in these periods worked from the parts ("sides") distributed to them, not full scripts, she mounts a major case that they had no knowledge of "the play as a whole" until they came to a final group rehearsal. Between this and Stern's tireless accumulation of anecdotes about the desultory preparations of actors, the reader may be left wondering how actors from Burbage to Garrick ever astonished their audiences.

Stern begins examining early usages of such terms as rehearsal, tryall, and study before and during the developing professionalization of the English theater. A touring company's private "rehearsal" of a play before a provincial mayor was a test of its suitability for performance. Puritan objections to performances by the boy or adult companies were defended as rehearsals for court appearances. In Shakespeare's era, the first public performance of a new play was commonly considered a trial before especially astute (and apparently vocal) audiences, who, according to Henslowe's records, paid double for the privilege of being the first to register their opinions. Playwrights watched anxiously, taking their cues for revisions from these first performances—if the play survived the first hearing at all. In scene 6 of The Staple of Newes, Ben Jonson has Gossip Mirth describe the playwright in the tiring house during performance: ". . . he hath torn the book in a Poetical fury, and put himself to silence in dead Sacke." As Stern notes, this puts in vivid context the claim of Heminges and Condell in their preface to readers in the First Folio that Shakespeare's plays had "had their triall alreadie and stood out all appeals." Stern braves the opinion that "some of the texts that we have in two versions could well be the result of overnight revision rather than of the long reflective period of rewriting that has often been imagined" (120). Actors adjusted texts in performances, of course; Stern concludes at one point that "it is performance itself that emerges as a major forum for revision" (112). Authors had some input, writing major roles for particular actors and otherwise influencing casting. But beyond the initial revising period, they seem to have had little control of their texts in these eras. Jonson's is an exceptionally sore case in point, to judge from his complaints about playhouse alterations. Playwrights were given benefit performances, one of many practices that connect Shakespeare's theater with those of later eras.

There were various types of rehearsals: the playwright's reading of a new play to a company; group rehearsals; rehearsals of selected scenes and songs, dances, or duels; individual study (including instruction such as a playwright might give to a principal actor or senior actors to the less experienced); and refresher rehearsals. Perhaps it was in a one-on-one rehearsal that Burbage had from his playwright the business of having his hand continually on his dagger as Richard III. As Andrew Gurr has nicely noted, this detail is in Holinshed, where Shakespeare would have gleaned it.¹

Stern's overarching argument is...