Speeches, Speech Order, and Performance in Shakespeare’s Printed Playtexts

On February 7, 1601, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men famously received “xl^s more than their ordinary” for a command performance of Richard II. According to a deposition given by Augustine Phillips, he “and his fellows were determined to have played some other play, holding that the play of King Richard to be so old and so out of use. …” Despite their concerns, the company received their extra fee and “played it accordingly” on the eve of the Earl of Essex’s failed attempt to remove counselors of Elizabeth I from power (qtd. in Chambers 205). Originally examined in terms of the relationship between the early modern theater and the state, this performance has more recently been treated as one of many bits of evidence attesting to the flexibility of early modern playing companies: Phillips overheard the request no more than two days before the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played Richard II.¹

The company’s ability to accommodate the would-be insurrectionists’ request to re-learn and re-stage a retired play is certainly to be understood as a testament to the talents and memories of early modern players. However, in addition to the apparently formidable capacities of the players themselves, performance critics have explained the company’s ability to perform the play by pointing to a series of systematic and professional processes used for the production of every one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s plays. Critical consensus holds that Richard II was brought back to the stage according to the same practices by which it was originally staged. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were able to play Richard II at such short notice because, like all early modern plays, the text was cut into actors’ parts to be studied privately, reassembled in as few rehearsals as possible, and performed with the aid of cues and a stage apparatus including a backstage plot, book holder, prompter, and attendants.²

Important context provided by actually working with the full text required time that playing companies didn’t have. When the theaters reopened in 1594, the Admiral’s Company resumed playing six days a week; the company offered a total of thirty-eight plays—twenty-one of which were new that year—in the 1594–95 season (Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 103). By January of 1596, this already demanding schedule became even more crowded as, in that single month, the Admiral’s Company performed fourteen different plays (Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist 148).³ Of those fourteen plays, six appear to have been performed only the single time. New plays are thought to have been produced in as little as three days, roughly the same amount of time as that provided for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to dust off Richard II.⁴

While critics have always recognized the professional practices central to early modern performance, the most recent conceptualization of the relationship between early modern companies and their playwrights suggests that plays were written specifically to accommodate the use of cued parts in a climate that afforded companies very little rehearsal (Palfrey and Stern 2). The two days given to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to prepare Richard II may not have allowed them to produce a modern play like George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion or August Wilson’s Fences because, for the most part, twentieth-century plays were not designed to be broken into privately-studied parts or played according to cues in a crowded repertory system where actors needed to keep dozens of plays in or near their heads. Richard II was written by a company playwright—an actor no less—working under the same constraints by which the play was produced and revived. Like all early modern plays written for the English stage, Richard II was built to ease the burdens of early modern performance.

The textual bridge between early modern playwrights and early modern companies working in such constraints was the players’ parts, documents comprising a player’s lines and their corresponding one-to-three-word cues. For the 1601 command performance of Richard II, the player responsible for...