Blocking The QM (Draft)
Deciphering Stage Directions
The Queen’s Men plays are very hard to read. The language for the most part is not as exciting and engaging as later Elizabethan playwrights. Often it is quite generic and it is difficult to establish exactly what is going on. Part of the production process involved reading these texts for clues to stage action. This module is designed to take you through the decision-making process behind one particularly tricky section of
Famous Victories.
[Image of the tavern setting with caption]
Getting to Know The Space
Before we begin, however, you need to know a little about the stage on which the plays were performed and our approach to rehearsal and blocking.
The stage you can see in the window to the right is the basic stage on which we operated. We refer to it as the "tavern stage" as we imagine this is the kind of thing that might easily have been set up in the inn-yards or interior rooms of the taverns that the Queen’s Men visited on tour. It is comparable to stages in the theatres that were later built in London. [Click]
[Swan drawing.]
The Swan Theatre
This is sketch of the interior of the Swan theatre drawn by an eyewitness, a Dutch tourist named Johannes de Witt. It is the only contemporary image we have of the interior of an Elizabethan professional theatre. Strip away the trimmings and both stages are quite simple featuring a rectangular playing area which can be accessed through two entrances at the back. The curtains on our stage are equivalent to the two doors on the drawing of the Swan. [Click]
[picture of the Globe with a discovery space]
The New Globe Theatre
This is an image of the newly build Globe theatre in London, England. Here you will see there is another opening in the centre of the back wall. This is what is often referred to as a discovery space. It is thought that it might have been used to represent, interior rooms like Bacon's study or Juliet's bedroom, or to reveal surprises such as the statue of Hermione at the end of Winter's Tale. [Click]
[return to picture of our tavern stage]
Our Stage
Although on a much smaller scale the central panel of curtains on our stage could also be used as a discovery space.The curtained space at the back is referred to as the tiring house and is where the actors changed their costumes. Since the Queen's Men were a touring company and would of necessity have worked on a variety of stages, our stage was designed so that it could be re-configured to create a different relationship between the actors and the audience. [Click]
[picture of the university setting]
The University Stage
We referred to this configuration as the "university stage" as it was based on Alan Nelson’s research [link to ref] on a stage used at Trinity College, Cambridge. Nelson established that the important members of the audience sat behind the stage and that there were two tiring houses on either side of the stage. While there is no evidence that this arrangement was common in Elizabethan England it was so striking that we felt it worthy an experiment. To our knowledge, Elizabethan plays have not been performed in such a setting since. [Click]
Other Settings
On our brief tour of Hamilton and Toronto, we also performed the play with no stage at all. [click]
[Image of Quarters]
This is a performance in Quarters, the student union bar at
McMaster university. For this performance we strung the curtains along the back of the space and gathered chairs and tables around to form a semi-circle playing space in front of them. The actors freely improvised in this space, interacting with the audience and taking some the action out into and behind the audience. [click]
[Image of the court setting Leir]
This is our final performance of King Leir at University College, University of Toronto. The room if configured to represent a performance at court. The queen sits at one end of the hall on full display flanked by important dignitaries. Other important nobles sit in a skaffold opposite. The action of the play takes place in the space between them with lesser nobles seated on either side. [click]
The Challenges of Touring
[Images of rehearsal in Rosedale Church, singing and fighting]
The problems presented by performing in different spaces and different configurations night after night was only one of many challenges confronted by the modern actors in our company. The process we designed was enormously challenging for modern actors. We prepared three plays for performance in the space of 8 weeks which by modern standards is incredibly fast. The company also needed to learn how to sing Elizabethan songs, dance and to fight with Elizabethan weapons. [click]
[Link to an image of my Leir text with diagrams]
As the company director/facilitator, I was acutely aware of the amount of new information and new techniques I was asking the actors to learn in a short space of time. I needed to find a way to make the actors comfortable when approaching the constantly changing conditions of performance. I initially created a blocking plot for each play, marking characters' entrances and exits on in little diagrams on my script. It soon became clear that this would be enormously complicated and would likely create problems when we moved from venue to venue. It also struck me that evidence suggests that Elizabethan companies gave themselves little time for such work. [click]
[Image of Tiffany Stern's book - Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan]
Tiffany Stern's analysis of evidence on Elizabethan rehearsal practice suggests most Elizabethan rehearsal was conducted individually and was a mainly matter of learning lines.
[Link to module on rehearsing with parts] Once the lines were learnt the evidence implies that the full company would meet only once and rehearse for a maximum of four hours. [click]
[Image of a promptbook]
The Elizabethan company would keep track of movement on and off the stage in a prompt book. It is notable that none of the extant promptbooks [link to rehearsing with parts module] indicate which door the characters should enter through except when two characters or groups of characters are entering the stage simultaneously through different doors. Given the time constraints and the fact that specific doors were not recorded for entrances and exits, I felt that early modern theatre professionals must have had some shorthand or protocol actors could follow for every play. I decided to experiment with the possibility that characters always entered through one door and exited through another. I chose stage left for entrances and stage right for exits. The advantage of this simple system is that it avoids the possibility of collision and traffic problems as the characters get on and off the stage, since they will never try to enter and exit through the same door/curtain. This protocol proved to be very effective in practice and is one of the premises for the following exploration of the staging of the central King/Prince scenes in
Famous Victories.
To get the most out of this process it would be best if you read the scene once through and considered how it might be staged. By clicking on the button below right you can print out a PDF version of the section of the play we will be analyzing. Read through the text, highlighting any moments where you think the text implies movement on the stage: you might find clues in the stage directions, within the dialogue, or from the sudden appearance of characters not mentioned in the scene before. Make notes about what you think is going on and where you think the action is taking place.
[Once they have printed the text a new link should come up in the comments window which says: Click here once you have read the text and made your notes. On clicking the hyperlinked text should appear and the following text in the comments window. The picture window might feature the bare tavern stage.]
Read through the text again in the window to the right and click on the hyperlinks when you reach them.
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StaceyWheal - 21 Jun 2007
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