Elizabethan Stage-Practice and the Transmutation of Source Material by the Dramatists

Summary

Harley Granville-Barker, in his study of Hamlet, says of Shakespeare: “The play as it leaves his hands is not a finished product, only its performance makes it that.” This conception of a text as a kind of theatrical score requiring the actor and the producer to bring it to life has practical consequences for the student of Shakespearian as well as many other kinds of drama. The study of dramatic structure, speech patterns, imagery, characters, ideas, and meanings in a play cannot be independent, but demands a clear idea of the play-in-performance in the reader’s mind. A similar awareness should direct those investigating such practical matters as stage-structure and methods of acting and production. The play-in-performance as a governing idea renders impossible both the purely literary interpretation of a theatrical text and the purely technical interest in matters of theatrical research. Considering the present state of our knowledge of the texts and of the methods of production in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres, it now seems particularly promising and necessary to study the relationship between the playwright’s words and stage events, to correlate what the actors spoke and did, what the spectators heard and saw. It leads to the comprehension of what we may call a play’s theatrical physiognomy—the ensemble of all those features of a text that define, explicitly or implicitly, its realization on the stage for which it was originally written. This article can only glance briefly at the most important features.