Rehearsal: The Pleasures of the Flesh

This article argues that rehearsal potentially exceeds performance as a means of imaginative, affective and interpretive engagement with Shakespeare's plays. The argument is showcased through analysis of a rehearsal period for a production of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. Rehearsal is characterised as embodied and embedded repetition, a practice that affords intimate and unique engagement with the Shakespearean text. Moreover, rehearsal offers the opportunity, not just of repetition, but of variation, and thus the relative fixity of finished Shakespearean production is rendered more fluid by the varied experimentation-a production history all of itself-that rehearsal offers.