Tabi Katalin

Where Page and Stage Meet

Re-editing Shakespeare in the Mirror of Stage Directions

When we think of the phrase ‘stage direction’ we can think of two things: the playwright’s directions in the text of a play, and the director’s instructions from the prompt-book as acted on stage. The distinction between ‘literary’ vs. ‘theatrical’ at the very beginning of this paper shows its importance, and its intricacies at the same time.

Stage directions do not belong strictly to the corpus of the Shakespeare oeuvre. Their authority is handled in a different way from that of the main text. As for the main corpus, editors’ aim is to recover the original version as much as possible, but for the stage directions they have less demands. They treat them more freely. Most examples of this come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and we will see how the editorial attitude towards stage directions has changed by the second half of the twentieth century.

Stage directions have not always been present in the playscripts. Linda McJannet speaking of the development of stage directions observes that they became part of the text of a play only in the Middle Ages. The Greek plays had indicated the speech headings, but had not given any other written directions for the actors. Medieval mystery plays, growing out of the ecclesiastical tradition, were bound to fixed movements and positions. The play only supported the understanding of the text which was still dominant over action. Players did not feel need for free acting.

By the 1500s theatre became self-conscious enough to stand up for its rights, and the profession of an actor became socially more accepted. Talking of the roots of the Renaissance theatre McJannet claims that ’Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists obviously drew upon and developed aspects of both the classical and medieval religious drama, but with respect to onstage action, they placed themselves squarely in the native, medieval tradition. . . . At the same time, the voice of Elizabethan stage directions, unlike that of the medieval production narrative, is not dominant or restrictive.’[1] In the Renaissance, stage directions, although they provided information of stage action for the actors just like their medieval predecessors, did not necessarily compel the players to fulfil them. If stage conditions demanded changes in stage business, Elizabethan actors had the freedom to change their movements and reactions accordingly.

Shakespeare’s plays are famous for containing very few directions. This has several reasons. One could be that Shakespeare, integrally involved in the business of the playhouse, was able to trust his actors. According to William B. Long, ‘the more experienced the professional playwright, the fewer such directions he adds and the more he leaves in what he assumes or knows to be the capable hands of the players. It is thus hardly surprising - albeit frustrating - to find so few stage-directions in Shakespeare, not only a professional playwright, but also a player and a shareholder in the company.’[2]

But was it Shakespeare who wrote the stage directions in the plays? Today the theory that most Elizabethan drama is the product of more than one hand prevails. Often there are several different copies for one play. They can be either hand-written or printed. A hand-written copy can be authorial, scribal, or theatrical.[3] This manuscript goes then on to the printing house where the printers add their own emendations to the text too. That is the sources of a play can originate from the playwright or the scribe to the company player or the printer.[4]

Consequently, stage directions are also the products of different hands. In 1931, W. W. Greg and R. B. McKerrow were the first bibliographers to differentiate between ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ stage directions; the first type was inserted probably by the author, and the second by another member of the company.

Elizabethan literary stage directions define an imaginary location for scenes (e.g. before the gates, at the window), and they are characteristically ‘permissive.’ Since playwrights sometimes would not know how many hired men would be available for their plays, they would often write permissive numbers for the minor parts (e.g. Enter two or three servingmen).

Theatrical stage directions, on the other hand, use technical vocabulary typical of theatre (e.g. above, within). According to McJannet the characteristic features of theatrical directions are that they give information about blocking (e.g. at one door), props (e.g. a bed thrust out), advance notice of stage action (e.g. One ready with pen and ink), special effects (e.g. Flourish, Drum), ’early’ entries (entries that precede the entering character’s first speech by several lines), and notations for props not used until later in the scene.[5]

The categories above might help us find the authority of stage directions, but even this way we cannot say for certain which stage directions are written by Shakespeare, and which are not. An editor desperately trying to edit a text most proximate to the author’s original intentions has to face that nearly all stage directions can be authorial and therefore should be dealt with when editing a play. This observation is underscored by Anthony Hammond who, from a theatrical point of view, claims that ’in the collaboration that is an essential part of any staging, it is splitting hairs to worry whether the wording of a direction is the author's or one of his legitimate collaborators.’[6]

Any detail that might require stage business can be regarded as stage direction for it reveals something of the Elizabethan staging of a play. Therefore not only the traditionally accepted intertextual directions can be regarded as stage direction, but also the so-called ‘implied’ directions that is the textual references to props, costumes, and movements on stage.

Stage directions can be discussed considering their history, their origins, their importance compared to the text, and their classification, and yet one pitfall remains: the factor of time which expands the borders of textual researches towards cultural studies. Alan C. Dessen calls the attention to the fact that 'Behind the many different problems lies one indisputable fact that will continue to bedevil the modern detective: that the signals in the surviving Elizabethan manuscripts were not intended for us,’ and this problem applies to print culture too.

Furthermore Dessen argues that 'when one turns to the stage practice and theatrical conventions of the past, especially in the plays of Shakespeare (which seem to speak to us so readily across the wide gap of time), the historian or director or critic or editor can never be sure when we are talking the same language, when we are sharing the same assumptions.'[7] This means that whatever we argue about stage directions, we have to argue cautiously, bearing in mind the cultural gap of four-hundred years.

I found it useful to choose one play, Romeo and Juliet, from Shakespeare’s great oeuvre to illustrate the editorial problems of stage directions. Romeo and Juliet is one of those ‘problematic’ Shakespeare plays that have so-called ‘bad’ quartos.[8] The first or ’bad’ quarto dates from 1597. The second or ’good’ quarto was printed in 1599. The first quarto is shorter and its language is far less elevated than that of the second quarto. But Q1 was evidently intended for the stage (that is more theatrical), and therefore contains much more stage directions than Q2, which is more literary in this sense.

Q1 provides more elaborate and descriptive stage directions than Q2, and contains fascinating hints of Elizabethan stage practice. Most of these ‘hints’ are no more than curiosities since for us these stage directions can be recovered from Q2. For example, in 3.5 Q1 reads:

Good father, hear me speak.

She kneels down

while in Q2 Juliet says:

Good father, I beseech you on my knees,

Hear me with patience, but to speak a word.

We can see that both quartos have the same scene, but what the first quarto indicates in terms of stage directions the second quarto includes in terms of speech. This difference, however, does not provide more information for the editor or the reader.

Other directions, however, are valuable for they help us understand certain, otherwise obscure, situations. For example, in 1.4, Q1 reads:

We have a trifling foolish banquet towards.

They whisper in his ear.

I pray you let me entreat you. Is it so?

and Q2 has:

Nay, gentlemen, prepare not to be gone;

We have a trifling foolish banquet towards.

Is it e’en so? Why then I thank you all.

In this scene, it becomes obvious from the stage direction of Q1 why there is no need for the utterance of the maskers’ excuse: it is whispered in the host’s ear. In the second quarto, however, there is no such direction, and therefore we can only assume that there is some sort of stage business that induces Capulet’s words.

Dessen argues for a third group of ‘hints’ that he calls ‘complementing variations.’ He claims that some Q1 stage directions give more information about the already existing Q2 directions, that is Q1 complements Q2: ‘the second or “good” quarto of Romeo and Juliet provides only “enter Romeo's man” in V.i (K4r), but the first quarto reads: “enter Balthasar his man booted” (I3r); conversely, the second quarto but not the first has Old Capulet enter in a gown in the opening scene (A4r).’[9]

We must acknowledge that even with the help of the existing directions it is hardly possible to reconstruct an Elizabethan play as it could have been staged at that time, since ‘ninety percent of what actually happened on stage in their performance is not to be found in the stage-directions of any manuscript or printed text, or in the occasional descriptions of performances, and illustrations. The actor's movements, quite apart from their body language, their positioning and grouping (what directors call “blocking”), and their business with props, is largely unrecoverable.’[10] Hammond’s observation calls attention to the fact that it is pointless for an editor to aim at editing the text in its entirety because such does not exist. Another conclusion is that if not all the stage directions are included, the editor might take the challenge, with careful consideration, to insert more stage directions in order to make the text more explicit.

Encouraged by this revelation, in the eighteenth century it became widespread not only to discover more stage directions, but also to create new ones on the basis of the text. This editorial practice prevailed in the nineteenth century too, and resulted in several kinds of stage directions, usually one following the other, at places where the quartos had nothing. For instance, at the beginning of 2.1 when Romeo enters the Capulet orchard, the following directions ranged: ’Exit.’ (Rowe, 1709); ’leaps the Wall.’ (Capell, 1767); ’He climbs the wall, and leaps down.’ (Malone, 1790); and ’He approaches the house.’ (White, 1857). Some of these have been regarded as far-fetched, and therefore disposed of by most twentieth-century editors.[11] In contrast, they go back to the authoritative sources, and often prefer adding no stage directions at all to inventing ones perhaps alien to Shakespeare.

The duality of the various earlier directions and the simplifying twentieth-century efforts has brought about the problem of the editor’s responsibility. Stanley Wells deals with this matter in his essay, The Editor and the Theatre: Editorial Treatment of Stage Directions. According to Wells, the conscientious editor should always bear in mind that he edits a text written for the stage, and only those changes and emendations should be made which serve the better understanding of the play. The editor’s responsibility, however, is difficult to define. Editing is creating, which means that it is subjective. Dessen emphasises that an editor’s decisions can have a great influence on other people’s interpretations of a play. Therefore, although subjective, editors should be more cautious about their editorial decisions. Dessen illustrates the effects of editorial decisions through two editorial techniques: the insertion and omission of stage directions.

Insertion, as I referred to it above, means adding new directions to the text for the better understanding. Omission means that considering each stage direction of the different authoritative texts of a play the editor decides whether to edit or omit them.

The case of Romeo entering the Capulet orchard is a typical example of the first type of editorial logic. As we could see it above, the eighteenth and nineteenth century editors (thinking that it is their task to define precisely how Romeo should approach the orchard) actually confined the reader’s imagination.

Dessen explains the editorial logic of omission through the example of ’the Nurse and the Dagger.’ In this case the problem is caused by a direction which can be found in Q1 but not in Q2. When Romeo wants to kill himself in the Friar’s cell (where the Nurse is present as well), Q1 reads: ’He offers to stab himself, and Nurse snatches the dagger away.’ There are editors who include this direction in square brackets but indicate that it is a Q1 variant. Most omit the passage from the main text such as Brian Gibbons who in his 1980 Arden edition argues that the Nurse's intervention is ’neither necessary or defensible.’ He believes that this would distract the audience’s attention from Romeo and the Friar who are the key figures of this scene. His decision, however, also implies that the readers of the Arden edition will be deprived of a possible interpretation. Dessen claims that ’Since many readers concentrate upon the text rather than the notes, such an editorial decision (especially in this prestigious series) can have a greater impact upon future interpreters than an equivalent choice by an actor or a critic.’[12] 

Editors have been trying to make sense of and explain Shakespeare’s texts as meticulously as possible. Yet, as J. B. Long observes, they often forget that ’Regularization and completeness simply were not factors in theatrical marking of an author's papers. Theatrical personnel seem to have marked the book only in response to problems.’ He disapproves of the fact that ’editors tend to assume that a sixteenth-century manuscript play looked very much like a twentieth-century one.’[13]

Drama has not always been characterised by the duality of page and stage, that is the literary and theatrical forms of a play. In the Renaissance, playwrights like Shakespeare wrote their works for the stage. Stanley Wells emphasises in his General Introduction to the Complete Oxford Shakespeare that ’it is in performance that the plays lived and had their being. Performance is the end to which they were created.’[14] As a man of theatre, Shakespeare was not particularly interested in preparing his plays for the reader.

Shakespeare was celebrated in his lifetime as well as after his death. In the seventeenth century three derivative folios followed the First Folio, but it is not until 1709 that we can speak about the editorial history of Shakespeare’s plays. Nicholas Rowe is the first editor known by name whose edition was a reprint of the Fourth Folio in 1709. Rowe was followed by a large number of editors.[15] They established several editorial principles, and therefore the editorial history of Shakespeare starts with them. This is a positive result of the English literary enlightenment. A negative result, on the other hand, is that the theatre-centred approach of the Renaissance got into the background. Most of the eighteenth-century editors were poets or literary critics, consequently their editorial practice was merely literary – and not without faults.

It was only at the end of the nineteen-seventies when textual critics became aware of the importance and consequences of the fact that the plays had been written for the stage. This idea started to develop simultaneously in the literary scholars’ essays and the editors’ texts. The rethinking of plays as performance pieces (Stanley Wells), and of the implications of stage directions (Alan C. Dessen) as well as the rise of performance criticism (Bernard Beckerman) had a significant influence on the editing of the Shakespeare plays.

Romeo and Juliet is a good example of this: a definite line can be drawn between the editions before 1980 and after. In this line, the 1980 Arden edition by Brian Gibbons is the last edition that can afford disregarding the performative approach.

In the shift towards a performance-based approach the real break-through was The Oxford Shakespeare edition of the Complete Works in 1986, edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery. This edition takes certain performative problems into more profound consideration than the earlier editions. Since the publication of The Oxford Shakespeare (1986) editors have had to deal not only with the evidences of the quartos and the achievements of their earlier colleagues but also with the solutions of performances and prompt-books in order to discover more and more layers of the text.

I am convinced that the constant dialogue between bibliography and theatre, theory and practice, can lead editors much closer to the understanding of Renaissance theatre than if literary critics exclusively debate about their own hypotheses.

The Renaissance theatre was obviously different in many ways from today’s theatre. Yet there are basic rules (coming from the fact that theatre has always been about the connection between people), which make it worth for editors using the understanding of modern theatre (from the technical matters through the actor’s work to the communication with the audience) as a starting point to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s works. Such a theatrical understanding will make future editions more workable.

Dessen calls the attention to the fact that readers tend to ignore the footnotes when reading the edition of a play. They only concentrate on the text – whatever is included in it. Therefore editors have a great responsibility when editing stage directions for the shaping of people’s understanding of Shakespeare in the future.

Selected Bibliography:

Beckerman, Bernard, The Flowers of Fancy, the Jerks of Invention, or, Directorial Approaches to Shakespeare, in Shakespeare 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R.

Dessen, Alan C., Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge, 1984)

Greg, W. W., The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 2^nd Edition (Oxford, 1951)

Greg, W. W., The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford, 1955), 105-174

Hammond, Anthony, Encounters of the Third Kind in Stage Directions in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, Studies in Philology 89, no. 1 (winter 1992), 71-99, esp. 78-81

Irace, Kathleen O., Reforming the 'Bad' Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark, Del., London, and Toronto, 1994)

Levenson, Jill L., Show business: the Editor in the Theater, in Shakespeare: Text and Theater: essays in honor of Jay L. Halio, eds. L. Potter and A. F. Kinney (1999)

Long, William B., Stage-Directions: A Misinterpreted Factor in Determining Textual Provenance, Text 2 (1985), 121-137

Margeson (Toronto and Buffalo, 1972), 200-14

McJannet, L., The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: the Evolution of a Theatrical Code (London: Associated University Presses, 1999)

McKerrow, R. B., Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare: A Study in Editorial Method, (Oxford, 1939)

Munkelt, Marga, Stage Directions as Part of the Text, Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987), 253-71

Slater, Ann Pasternak, Shakespeare the Director (The Harvester Press, 1982)

Wells, Stanley, and Taylor, Gary (ed.), William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987)

Wells, Stanley, The Editor and the Theatre: Editorial Treatment of Stage Directions, in Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (Oxford, 1984), 57-78

Editions:

Levenson, Jill L., Romeo and Juliet, Oxford World's Classics (OUP, 2000)

Jowett, John, Romeo and Juliet, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford, 1986)

Evans, G. Blakemore, Romeo and Juliet, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1984)

Gibbons, Brian, Romeo and Juliet, The Arden Shakespeare (1980)

Williams, George Walton, Romeo and Juliet, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1964)

Wilson, John Dover, Romeo and Juliet, (The Old) Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1955)

Romeo and Juliet 1597, ed. Jill L. Levenson, facsimile edn. (2000)

Romeo and Juliet 1599, ed. W. W. Greg, facsimile edn. (1966)

© Tabi Katalin, 2002