Two Typefaces

If you've been keeping up with our most recent posters, you've probably noticed that our Second Shepherds' Play poster uses a different type face than some of our others....

That moderately fancy, and somewhat hard to read typeface in The Second Shepherds' Play title is what we refer to as "black letter," which differs from the more familiar typeface that you find in The Cronicle Historie of Henry the V the The Taming of a Shrew titles on their posters. And, yes, there is a reason for it.

The written word has been around a lot longer than the printed page, and around 1450, when Gutenberg introduced mechanical movable type printing to Europe, the earliest type faces were designed to emulate the letters of written script. We actually do this today all the time, and the number of typefaces (aka fonts) that come with whatever word processor you use: not only will your word processor simulate manuscript letters (think of your signature typefaces), but it will also simulate other forms of type, including the descendant of the type face on the Henry V and A Shrew titles above... Times New Roman.

The roman type face was a later development, and in its earliest applications was used for books printed in Latin (most schooling after the age of 6 would have been in Latin and Greek in early modern London). By the end of the 16th century, you can almost judge a book by it's typeface: books printed in roman typefaces catered to the more educated reader (who would have been accustomed to the typeface from their studies), and books designed for those without a formal education were printed in the blackletter typefaces that were reminiscent of the texts used in the most rudimentary levels of schooling.

The Wakefield manuscript, opened to the first page of
The Second Shepherds' Play

The use of a typeface that simulates those found in early modern printshops is one of the ways we set the tone for the type of performances you'll see at Bad Quarto Productions, and so we offer the blackletter font for our Second Shepherds' Play poster this year as a gesture to the manuscript writing that The Second Shepherds' Play survives in.

If you're interested in learning more about these fonts, or using them yourself, they are produced and distributed by Jeff Lee, and they are freely downloadable (and licensed for use) from his website.

A Dramaturg's Thoughts on the Production Footage

As the dramaturg for this production I mostly wrote these blog posts over the last couple months. Living on a different continent, I won’t be able to attend any of the performances, but Tony asked me if I’d like to watch some production footage and write a few thoughts on the show, so here I am! Here are some things about the performance that seemed especially strong:

• How well the actors had prepared. Each actor gave a strong, dedicated and shining performance. I kept being impressed by different actors as they gave their individual speeches, maintained separate personas for each character they played and really brought their “A game” to this endeavor.

• How quickly the actors were becoming a company. In most shows the actors have a lot of time to build up a rapport with one another. There’s a whole run of rehearsals, and maybe bonding exercises. In Shakespeare’s day the core of a particular company often stayed together for years, and produced hundreds of shows together, one can only imagine the teamwork they would display. It was something I looked for in the footage I could see of Taming, and what I saw was a group of actors vigorously accepting each other’s choices, and running together. I saw laughter as they got ready to sing together, I saw chemistry in the couples, I saw enthusiasm in the dialogue (dialogue that they’d only been able to rehearse together over one day?) This struck me as one of the most impressive parts of the show. These actors embraced their identity as a team, and together, really sold the show, and I could tell that that unity would only grow as they became more and more comfortable with each other.  

• The tricky bits of staging. There were so many pieces of the play that required special attention. The singing, the stage combat, (complete with ukulele and an over the shoulder carry!) the massive group scenes all of which take a lot of rehearsal time in normal circumstances, all looked as though the actors trusted each other and were totally in control of the situation.

• How much attention everyone paid to the text. While this was true of the actor’s delivery, it was also true of the costume choices. Ferando did have a red cap! The various servants did wear their master’s colors and insignia when described. When substitutions were made (for the various foods mentioned) the actors clearly sold the cookies or crackers as the “Beef and mustard” or whatever food it was supposed to represent.

• How well this text works as a play. Despite working on this play as a dramaturg I am still much more familiar with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew version from the folio, and this is the first time I’ve seen the bad quarto version staged. I was totally delighted by the pair of younger sisters, and I really enjoyed how much the cast brought out the protofeminist leanings of this text as opposed to the folio.

Those are my thoughts for now! On a more personal note, I’d love to congratulations to the cast and crew on such a fun show, and thanks to Tony for asking me to work on this project with him. It’s been great being part of the team.

Early Modern Rehearsal Structures Today

With preparations in full swing for The Taming of a Shrew, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell a bit about how Bad Quarto rehearsals fit in with a history of early modern rehearsal process. James Overton gave his enthusiastic perspective as an actor on Wednesday, and Tony wrote about the scary rehearsals a while back but just in case you missed those posts, Tony has cast this production and he is working individually with each cast member over Skype, but the whole cast will have only one rehearsal together before opening night. If you scroll through this blog you’ll see that this hasn’t been the way the process has worked for each production, but as a company, Bad Quarto has experimented with different variations on the idea of the early modern rehearsal.

So what are some of the precedents for this sort of rehearsal structure? From Henslow’s Diary and other artifacts from the time we know that a single company of actors could put on twenty different plays a month, leading to huge questions of how they could have possibly rehearsed them all. One of the companies to try out some of the hypotheses was The Queen’s Men, a well funded and heavily researched all male company performing in 2006-7 who list the steps they posit the acting companies in Shakespeare’s Day would have followed. They suggest 5-9 weeks preparation for a new play but only one day of rehearsal.

At about the same time, Tiffany Stern published her groundbreaking book Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, where she details the evidence available about rehearsal practice in Shakespeare’s day. In response to Stern’s research, the American Shakespeare Center set up the Actor’s Renaissance Season, where the first play goes up in just two days, there are no directors, do designers, and no full scripts. It’s still just one of the seasons at the ASC, but it’s one that has gained a lot of attention.  Oxford made a lovely little video about the collaboration between The ASC and Tiffany Stern’s research, which is well worth a watch.

In 1993, The New York Times picked up on the trend writing about companies performing without directors and with minimal rehearsal time, and as these practices gained notice they became more and more prevalent. Today these projects are becoming common and more and more is being learned from experiments with this sort of process. Other companies doing this sort of rehearsal process right now include:

• Original Practice Shakespeare Festival in Portland currently performs many plays with play roles in hand, without rehearsing a particular cast together.

• Back Room Shakespeare Project- this ensemble in Chicago performs Shakespeare without directors and only rehearse one time before performing in bars.

• Oxford Shakespeare Company- Performs with three days of rehearsal-- in this instance Richard III performed at Stratford on Avon.

• A Masters’ student at The Theatre School at DePaul University wrote this lovely take on “Not Rehearsing Shakespeare” and what he learned from the process.

These companies and projects all ask many questions: What was it like in Shakespeare’s day? What kind of benefits can we gain from doing a similar rehearsal process today? Are they just financial and practical--no need to deal with multiple schedules and rent a rehearsal space? Does this sort of environment capture the energy of improv theater? What can we learn about the plays themselves, and in what way were these plays written to facilitate this sort of rehearsal structure? I hope that as these experiments continue (in Taming and beyond) theater will change dramatically and for the better. It certainly seems to be making some waves already.

Cross Casting and Gender

As you may have noticed Bad Quarto Productions has released the casting of Taming of a Shrew, and one thing that you may have noticed in this production and others in this company is the casting of various women actors as male characters. When producing Shakespeare’s plays today there is a lot of flexibility in how to portray the genders of the various characters.

Shakespeare’s male characters massively outnumber his female characters, and modern directors often cast women actors in some of the male roles in Shakespeare’s plays. The fact that all the roles would have originally been played by men and boys gives gender a history as part of the performance of Shakespeare, not just a current anomaly.

Theaters such as The Globe often performs All Male productions, such as the recent Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance as Olivia. These productions aim to recreate the past, and are often produced in period costume and makeup, often with period music to accompany. Most of them have adult men playing the women rather than prepubescent boys, so the historic recreation is faulty at best, but it is an interesting exploration of at least part of historical traditions of casting.

Some theaters perform all female productions, such as Phyllida Lloyd’s lauded production of Julius Caesar. These productions go nicely in conversation with the all male productions. They are often more politically charged, often make casting more women actors as a specific reason for these directing choices.

Many more cross cast some roles and not others. This can look very different depending on the production. Sometimes that means the gender of the character and the text of the play is changed to accommodate the sex of the actor. Polonius becomes Polonia, and Laertes and Ophelia's mother. Usually this sort of choice is on the sidelines of a production, (such as in Joss Whedon's Much Ado) but sometimes the main character is changed in productions like Julie Taymor’s Tempest.

Other times the text is left as it is, and the actors simply play a character with a different gender from their own. This is the route Bad Quarto is taking, a fascinating one in its own right. Particularly interesting in a show such as Shrew where there is so many questions of gender roles and theatrical roles (the play is itself a play within a play). When are the characters playing parts? When are the actors? What does it mean to be male or female? These are all questions to wrestle with when thinking about performance.

Shakespeare's Scary Rehearsals

I like to finish auditions for Bad Quarto shows by going over the rehearsal process a little bit, because it is very different than what most actors are used to, and right before I ask the auditioner if I've scared them off at all, I like to remind them that our approach to rehearsals is, more or less, the approach Shakespeare and his fellow players used.

And, for the record, yes, sometimes it does scare people off.

For those interested in the full story, I recommend Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare, and Stern and Palfrey's Shakespeare in Parts. These books present a version of rehearsals on the stages of Renaissance London that goes a little like this: the company would rehearse together once, on the day they opened a new play. They would meet at the playhouse at about dawn, and stage the play in its entirety before performing at about two o'clock that afternoon. Prior to that rehearsal, senior members of the company would meet with junior members for "individual instruction," where the leading players would essentially tell the junior players how to say their lines.

That's more or less how things work here at Bad Quarto, too. Although I don't give line readings to actors, and would never encourage another director to do so, "individual instruction" sessions via Skype are a vital part of our rehearsal process so we can explore the subtleties of language to develop character. But just as important, to my mind, is the lack of shared rehearsal time.

Knowing that we'll only rehearse the play together once forces us all to trust one another, and it forces us to make bold choices in acting and directing because we won't have the chance to polish things for weeks. This method of rehearsal helps give our actors a strong sense of their own characters while providing a performance context that forces them to actually listen to one another. Most actors, by the time a show opens, have already heard every conversation in the play they're in at least a hundred times. In a Bad Quarto show, the rawness of the experience is still fresh, and the result is that our shows capture a mastery of verse and character combined with the liveliness of improv.

It's my mind that plays on the stages of early modern London functioned similarly. Most companies rehearse more than us, and some rehearse less, but I'm of the mind that our method captures the spirit of the texts in performance in a way that only rehearsing the plays as they were intended to be rehearsed can.

I understand why that can scare some actors off, and I'll never hold it against them. And while we'll never been able to offer perfectly polished performances and pieces of stagecraft that are pinnacles of engineering, we can offer you a performance of Shakespeare's plays that brings his plays, and the plays of his contemporaries, to life in a way you have never seen before, and will help you see some of the greatest works of English literature as, quite simply, not the play you think it is.

Our upcoming production of The Taming of a Shrew will be a fine example of these principles in action, and I hope you'll be able to join us for it.

Pembroke's Men: A Timeline

When people talk about playing companies around Shakespeare's day, they mostly talk about the company Shakespeare acted with (called first The Lord Chamberlain's Men, and after James was crowned, The King's Men), and The Admiral's Men performing in The Rose theatre. However there were several other companies in London, including The Lord Strange's Men and The Pembroke's Men. Where there is not a great deal known about this company, we do know that they had several very financially successful tours, and that they got in a lot of trouble over a play called The Isle of Dogs. This play caused enough of a stir with its political satire that three of the Pembroke actors were arrested. 

Last week I wrote about title pages, and one of the things we know from the title page of The Taming of A Shrew is that The Pembroke's Men performed it. When it was published in 1594, it was likely published by the company, although we cannot know for sure. For more about The Lord Pembroke's Men, see the information on the Lost Plays database. The following timeline shows key points from their information on the right, and contemporary events in London on the left. 

Again, thanks for reading and feel free to comment with questions if there are things you'd like to hear about!

Two Kates, Two Answers. A look at the final speech in both texts.

In my last post, I wrote about what a “bad quarto” is, and how different printings of plays by Shakespeare can be wildly different. In the case of The Taming of a/the Shrew there is not even any scholarly consensus on whether The Taming of a Shrew was written by Shakespeare, or which play came first. Today I’m going to look at the ways in which the two plays are different in a very particular passage.

The two plays follow the same plot for the most part—the characters (excepting Sly and Kate) have different names but most of the scenes run parallel to their counterparts in the other play. In the final scene of the play (in both versions) Kate and her husband return to Kate’s father’s house for the wedding celebration of Kate’s younger sister(s). At one point the men make a bet about whose wife will come when he calls, and only Kate comes when commanded, promptly obedient, and fetches the other women as well. Kate’s husband then asks her to instruct the other women how they should treat their husbands, and in both versions Kate gives a long speech, but the content of those speeches is quite different. In The Shrew Kate gives a longer lecture, and covers a broader range argumentation over full forty-four lines. In A Shrew Kate has only 29 lines and confines her argument to a religious premise that women are inferior by design and by their own actions and history. Here are the two speeches in full, we’ll discuss them in closer detail in the following paragraphs. 

Kate in The Shrew gives her speech mainly comparing husbands and wives to kings and subjects. In her introduction (where she insults the women for their disagreeable facial expressions) she titles their husbands with the terms, "thy lord, thy king, thy governor." Throughout the speech she gives several reasons why women should not fight their husbands. In the first place, it's unattractive (with the troubled fountain analogy), secondly it's wrong (women owe their husbands obedience), and thirdly if you try to fight them you'll lose because they're stronger ("our lances are but straws").

Kate in A Shrew gives a bit more of a complex argument, even though she does it in a shorter space of time. Instead of merely asserting that husbands are the lords of their households, she gives an elaborate invocation of God as the creator of all things and bestower of power. Just as God creates, he also bestows order, gives bodies, and in his good will, woman became the "woe" to man, and therefore for her sin Adam died. In response women should behave should Sarah, Abraham's wife in the old testament, and their defining feature should be their obedience to the authority of their husbands, service to them in every way. Kate ends her speech (as in The Shrew) by offering her hand beneath her husband's foot. This speech reminds me of two speeches by Shakespeare's women. In the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice Portia answers Shylock's question about why he should be merciful by broadening the argument to show how God is merciful. Isabella, in Measure for Measure also talks about authority as coming from God. By contrast Isabella does not link authority and virtue, and unlike Anonymous' Kate, Isabella points out a certain fragile and arbitrary quality to authority. For Isabella authority is something you are dressed in, but for Kate, the ordering of the chain of authority is set in the epic language of creation and the cosmos.

BBC Shakespeare Retold, a personal favorite

At the level of the text, both of these speeches make me feel a little sick. It upsets me that these ideologies were ever considered valid, and upsets me still more that I continue to see similar sentiments expressed in our culture today. But I stand with Tony in considering the shorter of the two speeches to be the less misogynist of the two. There are many less debasing insults to women in the version from A Shrew, and the justification, while not one I stand with, is at least succinct and specific in its argument. However, like every text intended for performance, the words themselves only convey a fraction of the meaning when performed onstage. Either of these speeches is a wildly different statement depending on Kate's state of being. Has her husband broken her so she's speaking out of brainwashing? Is she showing up her sister? Has she learned the cultural expectations so well that she can perform them on cue whenever it's advantageous to do so? Is she wildly, passionately in love? I do not know what Tony plans on doing with this scene as he directs it, but I know that the audience is in for a unique view of this story. Whatever interpretation of the scene the actors present, the text they will speak is so rarely performed that it will be well worth the audience's attention. 

What does "Bad Quarto" even mean?

Curious person: Hey, you’re the dramaturg, right? That means you answer questions?

Dramaturg: To the best of my ability.

CP: So, what is a “bad quarto” anyways?

D: A “bad quarto” is what some scholars call the early printings of plays by Shakespeare and other writers in his time.

CP: Okay, but what makes them bad?

D: Well, they don’t fit neatly into the simplest progression of a play from the Author’s mind to the printed playbook, and people don’t agree where they come from.

CP: How do plays usually get printed?

D: The simplest story is that the author writes out the play, and it’s copied by a scribe with nice handwriting and that copy is called “the fair copy” and it is what a playing company would buy. Maybe they’d use it as the prompt book, maybe they’d make another copy, but if later they decided to get the play printed they could take that same copy to the printers and it would get printed. There’s still some room for error in this very simple story (at least one scribe copying, and the typesetter laying type) but it seems to be a pretty clear progression.

CP: But that’s not the whole story? Why not?

D: Well, sometimes plays got printed many times. Nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays were published after his death in The First Folio, a big impressive volume, but many were published earlier as Quartos, smaller, less expensive books with just one play each.

CP: Like today, you can get a big Complete Works of Shakespeare or a little copy of Romeo and Juliet for your English class.

D: Yeah, except some of the quartos were pretty different from the Folio.

CP: Different, how?

D: Some Quartos are much shorter than the Folio versions, some have different character names, the scenes could be in a different order, or the words are just different. The titles are sometimes a little different, or some of the plays we think were written by Shakespeare don’t have his name on them in the original printing.

CP: That seems like a lot more than copying errors! How did they get so different?

D: There are three answers scholars typically give to this question. The first is that the “Bad quartos” are pirated copies; audience members transcribed the plays as they watched them and then sold their faulty versions to printers before there were legitimate published versions of the plays.

CP: Like when people record movies in theaters on their phones? It’s an awful version of the film, but it’s good enough till it’s available on DVD or whatever?

D: Same old piracy idea. Except people transcribing are gonna make a lot more mistakes than the video on your phone. The second typical answer to the question of where all the differences came from is that the actors sold their parts.

CP: But in Shakespeare’s theater the actors didn’t get the whole play, right?

D: The actors only had what we call “cue scripts.” The company would probably have one full copy of the play, that fair copy, that they’d use for prompting. But the actors wouldn’t get that whole book. Their part would have their lines and their cues and nothing more, so if an actor sell his script to a publisher, he would have to write out everything else in the play from memory. This theory is called “memorial reconstruction” and it’s also a common explanation of why there are so many differences or “mistakes” in the early quartos.

CP: So what’s the last explanation?

D: The last explanation is the biggest and messiest, and it that the early quartos show an earlier (or later, or just different) version of the plays. Usually people think it’s an another version by the same author, but that doesn’t need to be the case. With the Anonymous Taming of A Shrew, we’re not even sure if it was written by Shakespeare or if Shakespeare based his play The Taming of THE Shrew on it or vica versa.

CP: Is that possible? Would Shakespeare write a different version of someone else’s play that was already doing well elsewhere?

D: Totally. Shakespeare almost certainly did this with The Famous Victories of Henry V, an anonymous earlier play, and John Fletcher wrote a sequel to one or both of the Shrew plays called The Tamer Tamed. Copyright was a more flexible thing in that century, but the same sort of thing happens even today. Think about the themes in kids movies. Disney makes fairytale movies, Dreamworks makes fairytale satire movies. Dreamworks makes a Scottish-y medieval-y magic-y story with dragons? Pixar makes one with bears. Think Finding Nemo vs. Shark’s Tale, or Antz coming out at the same time as A Bug’s Life.

CP: I still don’t get why they’re called “bad."

D: Well, most of the time the quartos people call “bad” are earlier than other quartos and earlier than the Folio for sure. There’s always been a reason to call the earlier version bad. Think about Lord of the Rings enthusiasts, who have all the DVDs in the extended versions. What do they call the other version of the films? Not the original or theatrical version but something with a little more stigma…

CP: The “unextended version”?

D: Yeah! So it makes sense for those who really love the version of Shakespeare that they’ve read most (based on the late, more “authentic” quartos or the Folio). They’re unfamiliar with these shorter, less noticed, alternative versions, and when they read them suddenly Hamlet is saying “aye there’s the point” instead of “that is the question” and it seems like it’s all wrong, all bad. But scholars today are beginning to embrace the early quartos. Just because these quartos are different than the Shakespeare we are most familiar with, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking at them. If anything, the bad quartos are an opportunity, an undiscovered country in performance and scholarly opportunities.

If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below! I’ll answer them in a future post.

Why Taming of a Shrew? Why Now?

I wanted to direct The Taming of a Shrew because Kate makes me want to be a better boyfriend. There are lots of interesting textual curiosities in this play, and there are many ways that The Taming of a Shrew can be said to create a dialogue with it's Folio cousin (The Taming of The Shrew, as it is more commonly known), especially in light of the pamphlet wars that marked a revolution in proto-feminist thought in early modern London at this time. But, at the end of the day, what really strikes me care about The Taming of a Shrew is the way Kate comes when her husband calls for her.

In A Shrew, during the concluding wager scene, one of Kate's sisters gives the answers that she's busy right now, but she'll come to her husband soon. If I'm being completely honest with myself, that's the answer I've been most likely to give with any lady I've thought of as my significant other, which probably has a lot to do with why they're now ex-significant others. And that's probably why Kate and Ferando (Petruchio in the Folio version) are described as being wed, and the other couples are "sped" at A Shrew's conclusion.

Kate and Ferando are both intelligent, strong willed people, and they're attracted to each other for that reason, but through the process of the eponymous taming, they're able to create a companionate marriage for themselves where they can both put the relationship first. Ferando refuses to call Kate for a hundred pounds of silver ("She shall not come so far for such a trifle"), and sets the value on her time and effort at 500 pieces of gold; it's particularly noteworthy because, while Ferando is clearly not poor, he's also not nearly as rich as members of his social circle). Kate, for her part, comes without hesitation, merely because her husband wants her there.

I want to be more like Kate.

But that's just me.

There are lots of reasons why Bad Quarto Productions should be producing this play, especially at this point in time: A Shrew interrogates the explicit misogyny of The Shrew by making Kate a consensual participant in her own taming. Kate tells the audience in an aside she wants to make sure her would-be husband is man enough to make her act like a proper woman, which removes the taming plot from the realm of domestic abuse and, along with the indefinite article of the play's title, raises a further question of who is taming whom.

Ferando is described as a perfect match for Kate: "As blunt in speech as she is sharp of tongue, /
And he I think will match her every way," and his antics are poorly received by his friends. He enters with every bit as much of an air of unsuitability to marriage as Kate does, and their mutual happiness at the play's conclusion testifies that Ferando has been tamed to husbandry as much as he has tamed his wife. Couple that to the promise Ferando makes to Kate that she "shall rule tomorrow," and we're left with a picture of a household governed by a partnership of husband and wife. Modern production of The Shrew never quite so well achieve this, however so they strive, and whatsoever devices they use, as the rarely performed 1594 quarto does with words alone.

But there is also here the possibility that Kate's sisters are the real tamers, making their young gentlemen callers into more suitable husband material, and taking part in a game of courtship to secure not just husbands, but also advantageous social positions. Shakespeare is replete with exercises in taming future spouses, and if Kate is the only shrew we're talking about in this taming, the Shrew play(s) would be unique: Shakespeare's other comic tamers are all women, from As You Like It's Rosalind, to The Merry Wives of Windsor, all the way on through Twelfth Night's Viola.

And, of course, there's also the fact that A Shrew doesn't let you forget that the taming was all just a play within a play.

Given the lack of evidence any historian or textual bibliographer is bound to confront head on, it's impossible to say beyond a reasonable doubt whether A Shrew is a different version of The Shrew, and that Shakespeare is responsible for both, and if so, which version is later and reflects revision, or even whose revision it reflects. The Taming of a Shrew does what good suspect texts do: it makes us re-think and re-imagine a play that we think we know well, and forces us to confront the reality that we maybe don't know it so well after all.

The Taming of a Shrew has given me a lot to think about, and I look forward to exploring this text through performance with you all, and I hope you'll join us for our October 2015 production!