Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach (review)

Patrick Tucker may come to be considered a present-day William Poel. Tucker's advocacy of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio for its acting utility has raised the hackles of many Shakespearean textual scholars. While winning him the fierce loyalty of a company of accomplished professional Shakespearean actors, Tucker's investigations into Elizabethan methods of play production have riled some in the mainstream theatrical community. The reason for all this heat has to do with the friction that Tucker's work applies to widely held estimations about Shakespearean text and performance. Like Poel, though, Tucker's greatest contributions may eventually emerge in the work of other directors and teachers who incorporate his findings into mainstream performance aesthetics.

Tucker is a prolific stage and television director and a former assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is Vice Chair of the Artistic Directorate of the International Shakespeare's Globe Center on London's Bankside and the head of an intrepid company of London actors, the Original Shakespeare Company (OSC). The OSC works from the Folio, paying special attention to its punctuation, spellings, capitalizations, and lineation. In keeping with Elizabethan practice, OSC members receive only their own parts, or sides, what Tucker calls cue scripts, which contain the individual character's lines and the brief cues that precede them. The actors engage in private study and practice, and one-on-one sessions with Tucker or the OSC's other "verse nurses" (passim). The actors work on the play as a group just once before giving a public performance, and then only to address logistics such as locations of entrances and exits, and to practice previously choreographed dances or fights. The events of discovery that usually take place in a closed rehearsal hall happen instead before a live audience during the perform-ance. This spontaneous creation before and in collaboration with their audiences creates a relationship of immediacy between stage and stalls that I have not encountered anywhere else.

Tucker is a Shakespearean purist whose faith in the Folio seems firm. In comparing speeches done via traditional techniques to ones relying on his methods for acting from the Folio, Tucker says that "the First Folio version always plays better. Not sometimes, not almost, but always performs better" (Tucker's emphasis, 226). Tucker offers some caveats, while justifying the extremity of his position on the practical grounds of its utility for players: "[i]f you twisted my arm, and asked me if I really believed that the Folio is correct in every variation I would reply no, but that if it is actable, then it is worth trying, and anyway, with my actors striding out onstage with nothing to guide them except the text, I find that using the 'original' text allows them to act and make theatrical decisions with great confidence" (Tucker's emphasis, 229). What can be more empowering for an actor than the understanding that he, as Tucker is wont to say in public appearances, is being "directed by" William Shakespeare?

This suggestion, of course, raises the sticky subject of Shakespearean authority: given what is currently understood about Shakespearean textual transmission it is difficult to accept that every mark in the Folio comes to us directly from old Will himself. But does one need to have such faith in order to reap reward from Tucker's techniques? Current textual scholarship has placed renewed value on individual versions of early modern texts and has urged the reader to examine the specific materiality of them. Recent critical work has also rebelled against editorial practices that have diminished the orality and theatricality found in early texts: the progress of Shakespeare's plays toward enshrinement in the cathedral of literature has not been without cost. In a move in concert with newer textual theoretical models and in contrast to earlier practices of looking for an ideal iteration hidden beneath the material reality of early printed versions...