Doubling
Introduction
The SQM doubling plots were largely driven by pragmatic concerns specific to our project and do not represent possible doublings used by the original company. Certain patterns discernable in the plays, however, are of historical interest. The lines of parts assigned to the master actors had a striking effect in performance. Paul Hopkins played romantic leads in each of the plays: the Gallian King in King Leir, Prince Henry in Famous Victories, and I had initially cast him as Friar Bacon but decided to cast him as Pince Edward in order to explore the effect of type casting within the company. The principle was also applied to the casting of Alon Nashman who took the line of clowns parts: Derrick in Famous Victories, Miles in Friar Bacon and Mumford and the Messenger/Murderer in King Leir, and to Don Allison who played King Leir and the two King Henries in the three plays. There was a real pleasure to be had from seeing the actors move from part to part and discovering ways in which the performance of one part informed the creation and development of the next and vice versa. The same effect was discernable in the performances of Julian DeZotti and is explored in detail in the Gender research module.
The casting of the clown as Mumford and the Messenger/Murderer is also of interest. Mumford is a Gallian aristocrat and therefore not an obvious choice for clowns who generally specialized in the performance of rustic characters. The term clown was initially used to denote working people from the country and only became part of theatrical language once such characters became a common feature of stage comedy. Casting a clown actor as an aristocratic character opens up comedic possibilities and it is suspected that Shakespeare wrote Falstaff for the company clown William Kempe 1. In King Leir, the character of Mumford alternates between verse and an earthy prose typical of stage clowns in the period. His points of reference are largely from the material world and his language contains many sexual puns and this makes his character a strong candidate for the clown in spite of his social class. Initially, I assigned this role alone to Alon but on further consideration I noticed that the character of the Messenger/Murderer is full of jokes, mixes high verse with colloquial and local references and, most importantly, when this character appears in the play, Mumford mysteriously disappears. Mumford is a constant companion to the prince in all scenes aside from Scene 16 where he is suddenly absent. The scene features a discussion between the Gallian King and Cordella on the subject of her father and this might be said to explain his absence. But Mumford engages in such conversations later in the play and his absence may also be due to the fact that the clown is now playing the Messenger/Murderer who appears in Scene 12 and then leaves the action for good in Scene 19. If we accept the theory that ‘dodging’ was more common in touring plays, it is interesting to look for moments where characters are unexpectedly absent and wonder if the actors were busy elsewhere playing another role.
The Adaptability of the Plays and the Company
As noted above King Leir was far easier to adapt than the other two plays and Friar Bacon presented enormous challenges that made the pressure of the first performance almost insurmountable. Our experience performing the plays with only four hours ensemble rehearsal suggests that a company would need more rehearsal time to prepare plays for performance with such complex doubling. The original company would have been more familiar with the process and maybe more adept at negotiating the first performances without much rehearsal, but the evidence of the extant plots suggest the general practice was to avoid such pressure in London. Our problems with recruitment forced us to make last minute changes to the casting of the plays, which proved relatively easy for the plays concerned although it increased the pressure on the actors.
The company proved increasingly adaptable as they became more familiar with the plays and the process. The adaptability of the SQM company to changing personnel was also facilitated by the actors’ use of ‘parts’, a practice that effectively divides a play into constituent units. Changing the actor playing one ‘part’ did not change all the others, your acting partner may change, a line may be spoken by a different character, but your cues and your lines remain the same and, if the new actor is capable and knows his lines and cues, it is possible to run the scene without significant rehearsal, if any. If more substantial changes were necessary and lines needed to be cut or added, the actor might do so on his part focusing his attention only on what pertains to him. The part is a device that keeps the actor focused on his own responsibilities alone and contains the effect of changes to company personnel..
Modern Doubling Technique
There are 5 steps involved in the Modern Doubling Technique:
Step 1- Break up the text into French scenes
Step 2- Determine the characters that are on stage in each French scene
Step 3- Determine the length of each French scene
Step 4- Decide which characters can be doubled
Step 5- Complete a doubling chart for the entire play.
Conditional Factors on Doubling Decisions
Distribution of Labour
When doubling one has to consider how the roles are distributed amongst the cast. In this instance, when deciding which of the clowns should double with the receivers, the fact that John Cobbler is a large role might incline the director to double the receivers with Lawrence and Robin.
Costumes and Beards
The director also needs to consider the costumes needed for each character and whether quick-change is a possibility. Generally speaking the longer the scene the easier it is for the actors to change character. However the length of time necessary varies depending on the complexity of costume needed for the characters involved: an actor can quickly transform himself into a monk or priest by throwing a cassock over his previous costume but changing from a lady into a young boy requires much more time. In this instance the receivers wore simple red tunics and striking red hats over their basic costumes to identify them as servants of the king and it would be possible for them to wear their costumes for Robin and Lawrence underneath. We also found that throwing on a false beard was an easy way to distinguish one character from the next.
Versatility of the Actors
It is also important to consider whether the two parts assigned to one actor are within that actor’s range. Will they be able to convincingly portray both of the characters? When an actor has to play two characters appearing on stage in quick succession as they would here, that actor must be able to create strikingly different characterizations to avoid confusing the audience.
Specialization of the Actors
Certain actors specialized in certain types of roles: the apprentice boys for example would play women’s roles or roles characterized as “boys.” We know that Queen’s man William Knell specialized in playing lead roles in the original company, much as Paul Hopkins did in our company. Other Queen’s Men, like Richard Tarlton and Robert Wilson, were famous for their clowning. This did not necessarily exclude them from playing other kinds of roles but we suspect that the larger roles would usually be given to a specialist. When doubling therefore one must establish what skills each role calls for and which roles require a specialist. In our example, John Cobbler requires a specialist clown actor but the supporting clowns, Lawrence and Robin, can be played by company members with less well-developed comic skills.
Contrasting Types
While we have to consider the versatility of the actors and their specializations, casting actors in contrasting roles helps them to distinguish between their characters. It is easier to distinguish, for example, between a young character and an old character, a rich character and a poor character. Characters that have specific professions like priests, taverners, scholars, etc. make for easy doubling; the numerous aristocrats in the plays distinguished only by their titles present more of a challenge because they are all of the same social class and one of the principle distinctions between characters in these plays is class. In our example, the receivers and the watchmen are all working class characters; the prince and his friends are upper class characters. The hierarchy in early modern culture was marked by clothing but also by the way people carried themselves. In the SQM experiment we developed physical distinctions between aristocratic and working class characters. In this picture, we can see the working class receivers contrasted with the Prince and his aristocratic friends.
Doubling Decision
The class of the characters proved a highly influential factor in doubling decisions for the project as it allowed the actors to make clear distinctions between the roles they were doubling. I chose not to double the receivers with the watchmen, Lawrence and Robin, partly because they were too similar in class and in attitude – they are all scared. One of the receivers (Adam Fraser) would later play the Earl of Oxford, and the other (Scott Clarkson) played numerous roles, including the thief later in the watchmen scene. While the Thief is also a working class character he believes he is higher class due to his association with the prince and his pride allowed for a different kind of self-presentation that distinguished him from the terrified and subservient receiver.
Casting the Play
Once the doubling chart is complete and all options considered, the play is ready to be cast. Doubling options are combined to create lines of characters that can be given to specific actors. The result is a final doubling chart that assigns every role in the play to an actor. The final SQM doubling chart for Famous Victories is only one solution to the casting challenges. There are always many options for doubling and, lacking concrete evidence, we cannot be sure how the plays were cast by the original company. In practice, the SQM doubling decisions were often determined by pragmatic factors rather than consideration of the historical evidence.
The Queen’s Men
All three of the plays performed in the SQM experiment were published and/or entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1594. In their doubling analysis of these plays, and of the two others that were printed that year, McMillin and MacLean argue that each play could be performed with a minimum cast of fourteen actors.
As the starting point for their analysis, they identified the limiting scene or concurrent scenes in each play: the scene that demands the largest number of actors. Strikingly, in each case, the number of characters in the limiting scene was fourteen – but could the entire plays be doubled for fourteen actors? McMillin and MacLean plotted a doubling chart for each play, working with the principle that any plural reference to supernumerary characters such as servants, officers or lords indicates the presence of two actors on the stage and that apprentices would only play female characters or characters explicitly identified as boys. They found that in each of the 1594 plays the cast of fourteen, implied by the limiting scenes, indeed was sufficient to perform the entire play.
McMillin and MacLean acknowledge that the composition of the personnel for each play varies slightly. The True Tragedy of Richard III, for instance, requires four apprentice boys, not three. In addition, our analysis of their doubling charts reveals that Famous Victories requires one apprentice to play speaking male roles in addition to a mute female role, and one apprentice to play speaking female roles and mute male roles. Without casting apprentices in male and female roles the minimum number of the cast would have to increase to fifteen. McMillin and MacLean’s rule that apprentices can play only women or male characters identified as boys is thus broken (or at least softened) in this instance in order to keep the cast down to fourteen but the consistency of their results is still striking. It does not establish definitively that the Queen’s Men at this time had a company of fourteen but it does indicate that a company of fourteen actors is the “economic ground-level” (99) needed to perform the 1594 plays as published.
The SQM Company
A full company of fourteen professional actors was beyond our financial resources. Only commercial theatre productions or the major festival companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company or Canada’s Stratford Festival can afford to employ fourteen union members to perform plays on a regular basis. After much deliberation we decided to form a company with three full union Equity artists, eight non-union but experienced professionals, a musical director who would play minor roles, and two student actors who would participate in the project for course credit playing smaller roles.
The three Equity actors were given the authority of master actors in the company, the eight other professionals were the equivalent of hired men (trained freemen of their livery companies but not masters or financial sharers in the company) and the musical director and the two students were conceived as company apprentices. Already the comparison between the composition of our company and the Queen’s Men was being stretched since the original company was formed out of two established companies and therefore would have had a predominance of master actors. Analysis of surviving playhouse documents reveals that hired men would only take minor roles in plays and the vast majority of the lines would be assigned to the company sharers and apprentices.
Furthermore, since most modern male actors are not accustomed to playing female roles, we needed actors with some experience to tackle these parts and therefore could not give them to our student “apprentices.” In practice, our student “apprentices” were used more in the manner of Elizabethan hired men, playing supernumerary characters and smaller roles. The challenges we faced with our personnel made it clear that our company could not follow the casting suggested by McMillin and MacLean’s analysis of the company and the texts.
To compound the problem still further, it proved surprisingly difficult to find students to participate in the project for course credit. At the outset of the rehearsals, we only had a company of 12 actors, not 14 and therefore had to recast King Leir and Famous Victories at the last minute to reflect the smaller size of our company. The SQM experiment could no longer test McMillin and MacLean’s casting suggestions but the problems we faced still taught us much about the plays and the workings of an early modern theatre company.
Download McMillion and Maclean Doubling
Click to Download Text Summary of McMillin and MacLean Doubling Charts (PDF)
King Lear
Famous Victories
Friar Bacon
The Adaptability of the Plays
Where McMillin and MacLean found a strong consistency in the casting demands for the three plays, our experiment discovered important differences. The problems we had recruiting student “apprentices” placed us in a position comparable to that faced by early modern companies when members left, passed away or financial hardship demanded that the number in the company be reduced. Over the course of the rehearsal process the company expanded twice, recruiting one student at the start of work on Famous Victories and the second after the first performance. All in all, the experience told us much about the flexibility of the company, the rehearsal process, and the adaptability of the plays.
We were fortunate that we were preparing the plays in our chosen order, since King Leir was easier to adapt than Famous Victories and it would have been impossible to perform Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay with a company of 12 without seriously editing the text.
King Lear
As you will see from the SQM doubling chart for King Leir , it was possible to perform this play with 12 actors simply by reducing the number of supernumerary characters. The characters that were cut from our production can be found at the bottom of the doubling chart. The lack of two actors reduced the degree of pageantry and spectacle that we were able to deliver in this production – one might especially bemoan the loss of the two half-naked men that accompany the two half-naked women in the text of the final battle – but no line had to be cut from play. The Gallian king was forced to address his battle call to the audience in the absence of any French soldiers and the battle scenes were a little sparse in relation to what we could achieve with Famous Victories. The significance and effect of certain scenes were also reduced by the lack of supernumeraries because public scenes were turned into private family matters – scene 10 in which Leir is first confronted by the hatred of Gonorill is a good example.
The new doubling, however, did not significantly increase the need for speedy costume changes. The battle sequence was a quick-change ordeal for Scott Clarkson who played a Watchman and Cambria, and David Kynaston who played the First English Captain and the Chief of the Town, but the same would have been true for Actor 3, Actor 7 and Actor 11 in McMillin and MaClean’s doubling. While the smaller company did have an impact on the performance, we were still able to adapt this play for a cast of twelve quickly and without cutting any lines.
Famous Victories
Before rehearsals began for Famous Victories we were able to recruit one student “apprentice” increasing the size of the company to 13, which was fortunate, as it would have been impossible to perform this play with 12 actors without heavy editing. As you can see from the SQM doubling plot for the play we were only able to perform this play with 13 by cutting one speaking role, the jailor who has one line at the end of the Lord Chief Justice scene, which reads: “At your commandment, my Lord, it shall be done” (4.412). We gave this line to the Clerk of the Office that reads out the Thief’s indictment and were thus able to perform the play with all the lines intact although we were lacking several characters. Famous Victories is less adaptable than King Leir largely because where Leir has 26 speaking roles and 38 roles in all, Famous Victories has 42 speaking roles and 47 when counting mute characters. The characters of Exeter and Oxford create additional problems. While they have relatively few lines, they are on stage an inordinate amount of time, especially if we presume, as is logical, that they are the plural “lords” mentioned whenever Henry is on stage in the second half of the play. The text does not name them in the stage directions, but then this is also true when they speak lines in the scenes, and it would be confusing for the audience if Henry appeared with a different set of lords at this stage of the performance. The characters of Exeter and Oxford effectively tie up two actors that might be used for doubling elsewhere. For our production we cast one of our less experienced student “apprentices” as Oxford and Scott Maynard, our Music Director, as Exeter, freeing the more experienced and versatile actors to double other roles.
The smaller cast had more substantial consequences in this play than in King Leir. In addition to numerous unnamed attendants and nobles, the mute Sheriff that accompanies the Lord Mayor of London on his visit to King Henry IV had to be cut. The Duke of York had to carry in the Archbishop of Bruges’ present for the King and the Duke of Exeter had to push the king around in his sick chair, which was hardly appropriate for men of their rank. The workload for many of the actors increased dramatically: Jason Gray, David Kynaston, Scott Clarkson, Julian DeZotti, Derek Genova and Phil Borg all had to take on four roles or more. We also had to break McMillin and MacLean’s rule that “boy” actors could only play women or boys. There is evidence in playhouse documents that apprentices might play female roles and mute male attendants in the same play but no evidence of them playing speaking male and female roles in the same play, unless the speaking male role is explicitly a boy, not a man. For Famous Victories we had to bend this rule and cast our “boys” as prince Henry’s youthful companions Ned and Tom, French Soldiers, and numerous other roles including the Dauphin. To enable this doubling we also had to cut Princess Kate’s two ladies in waiting. Although evidence from the surviving playhouse documents does not support it, casting the “boys” as youths worked well on stage. The problem we faced was not one of plausibility in the eyes of the audience, who readily accepted our young men switching from male to female roles but the logistical issues of costume changes and make-up. We could feasibly have kept one of Kate’s ladies in the final scene but only by dramatically increasing the pressure on Matthew Krist who had just finished playing a French Soldier and would have little time to get into his dress. The association of the French soldiers with femininity was also fun, supported as it is by all their textual references to clothes and the openly nationalistic ideology of the play but there is no evidence to consider such doubling as representative of Queen’s Men practice. Our doubling chart for this play was created out of pragmatic necessity and should not be considered even as a hypothetical version of the original company’s division of labour.
It was also impossible to maintain specializations in other areas. For example, John Cobbler forms part of a double act with the main clown Derrick and the role may well have been considered enough for one actor. Jason Gray who played Cobbler had to also take on the role of the Lord Mayor and the Archbishop of Bruges, two straight characters, in addition to his main clown role and the comic French Captain. Because we were still short one actor and kept the workload at a minimum for our student actor and musical director, our production demanded many quick changes and made great demands on the versatility of many of the actors. That said, we did successfully adapt the play for a company of 13 and in doing so experienced the kind of challenges the Queen’s Men might have faced when the numbers in their company fluctuated.The day before the second performance of Famous Victories we recruited our second student “apprentice” and decided we would incorporate him into the performance the following evening. We know that the major London companies used “hired men” to fill supernumerary roles and that the number of hired men available might fluctuate greatly.
Tom Tranmer’s arrival presented us with an opportunity to consider the pragmatics of such practice. The ease with which we were able to incorporate him into the show was one of the more striking discoveries of our experiment. Tom arrived on the day of our second performance and after a costume fitting and an hour’s rehearsal he was ready to perform in the evening. The fact that Tom could walk off the street and onto the stage after such a short rehearsal time confirms the practicality of using actors on a casual basis for small roles. Tom remembers that night fondly and we were certainly all impressed by his ability to cope with such an intimidating situation.
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
Friar Bacon provided even more doubling challenges for the SQM company. The demands on acting resources made by this play are significantly greater than the other two. The play can only be cast with fourteen if we ignore the reference to the Duke of Saxony in the 11th scene. The Duke’s entrance is not marked in the text’s stage directions but Henry does refer to him by name as if he were present and stage directions are not trustworthy in early modern texts. Following McMillin and MacLean’s lead we decided to ignore this reference and cast the play for fourteen. The problem we still faced, however, is that the playwright provides significant and challenging roles for each of the fourteen actors.
In the previous two plays we were able to keep the expectations placed on the less experienced actors lower but our student actors in this play had to take on numerous roles. Adam Fraser played one of the Prince’s companions Warren and the Second Scholar; Tom Tranmer played another companion to the Prince Ermbsy, Margaret’s friend Joan, and a devil. The play is full of striking comic characters and demands great versatility from the company as a whole. Our doubling decisions for this play were made in the interests of exploiting the particular talents of our actors that had become clearer now we had been working together for several weeks. Matthew Krist, for example, had proved himself a versatile comic character actor. Matthew played Gonorill in King Leir and the Cobbler’s Wife and the prince’s companion Ned in Famous Victories. Initially I had cast him as Prince Edward’s companion Lord Lacy on the grounds of the character’s youthfulness but at the last minute I asked him to create a boyish fool for Rafe Simnell and double as Friar Bungay wearing cassock and beard. The doubling served the SQM production well as Matthew was extremely funny in both roles but it was only possible because we manipulated the text. Rafe and Bungay appear in the subsequent scenes 12 and 13. We were able to pull the doubling off simply by having Rafe leave the stage early from scene 12. His exit was hardly noticed, and his costume change was quick. He merely needed to throw on his cassock and put on his beard and skullcap. After the first performance, this always worked smoothly. Again, there is no historical authority for doubling the play in such a way but there is evidence of characters making strange early exits in surviving play texts. John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II, for example, leaves the first scene before it is finished for no apparent reason but his exit allows Shakespeare to begin the next scene with Gaunt’s entrance into what we are to imagine to be a new location. Doubling plays is an extremely complex process and sometimes it is easier to edit the play than change the doubling.
The SQM doubling and quick changes were actually less intense across the board than they would have been if we had followed McMillin and MacLean’s doubling. Working with the historical constraint that the boys could only play female characters increases the workload that has to be placed on the other actors because there are relatively few roles for women in this play. McMillin and MacLean were only able to keep the cast down to fourteen by including a 10 line change for Warren-Bungay (comparable to our quicker change between Rafe and Bungay), by leaving out one clown from scene 3 and by making the Keeper’s friend female when the sex is not specified by the text. Adding the ‘other’ clown back to scene 3, creates a 14 line quick change for Actor 5. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay can be performed with a minimum cast of fourteen but only under extreme pressure.
Doubling for Touring
The idea that the London companies reduced the casts of their plays when touring has been with us for a long while. The traditional implication has been that the companies could present low budget versions of their shows in the provinces where a less sophisticated audience might not notice the difference. The more likely explanation is that touring added additional financial expenses for each member of the company to pay for travel and accommodation. A smaller cast therefore made economic sense. The SQM experiment suggests an additional reason for the smaller cast size. In London, the companies had to maintain an extensive repertoire, performing a different play every day and preparing several new plays for performance each month in order to satisfy a local audience that demanded novelty. On tour the company might only perform once in any given town and therefore could maintain a much smaller repertoire and still keep their audience satisfied. In London, plays had to be prepared quickly and might not be re-mounted for several weeks and this made heavy demands on the actors’ memories. Not only did they have to learn all the lines but also the timing of their costume changes when doubling. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the companies did not rehearse a new play as an ensemble until the day of the first performance. The SQM company followed this practice and aside from memorization of the lines, the quick changes were the single most problematic element of our ‘trial performances.’ An effective quick change requires practice, and since the actors were working principally from parts, it was hard for them to assess the time available for changing their costumes until the performance was upon them. Quick changes became one of the key areas of focus in our four hour company rehearsal before the trial performances. In spite of our best efforts the first performances of the plays in front of an audience contained delays caused by the backstage rush from one costume to another. In the context of the London theatre rehearsal process as we understand it, the evidential implication that London companies worked with larger casts makes pragmatic sense, since it reduces the number of lines each actor has to learn, the characters they have to develop and most importantly removes the need for quick changes.
A touring company like the Queen’s Men in contrast could likely manage with a much smaller repertoire because, as they moved from town to town, they could perform the same plays to different audiences. The intense doubling plots implied by McMillin and MacLean’s analysis would have been workable for a company that took a small repertoire on tour and performed the plays on regular rotation as they traveled across England. The company could have ironed out the kinks, prepared themselves for all quick changes in London as they prepared to set off to the provinces without facing the pressure of producing new material weekly for the local audience.
The SQM’s ‘trial performances’ may well have been more challenging than they need have been because the SQM rehearsal process was founded on evidence of practice in the playhouses of London but we were performing plays written for touring and using doubling techniques appropriate for a touring company. The SQM actors became very efficient with the quick changes once they were familiar with the play and had performed it twice. Performing the plays in more regular rotation on tour allows the actor to recall the complex track they have to follow from one character to the next through each play. The tight doubling plots featuring actors ‘dodging’ multiple roles would not have allowed for successful trial performances in the London repertory theatre due to the lack of ensemble rehearsal and the length of time between performances of each play but a touring company had more leisure to prepare and perfect each play they chose to perform and could perhaps pull off quick-change artistry not possible in the London theatres. While ‘dodging’ might have been rare on the London stage, it could well have been common practice when on tour.
W.W. Greg presumed that the Plot for the Battle of Alcazar which features the most ‘dodging’ of the extant ‘plots’ was created for a touring production of the play; however, Bradley argues that the company was hard pressed simply because many of the actors had to perform in black face and therefore could not double with white characters in the play (36-38). There is unfortunately no external evidence to connect any of the surviving playhouse documents with touring productions. Our theory proposed above must remain just that but if we are to consider the hypothesis that McMillin and MacLean’s tight doubling plots might approximate the practice of the Queen’s Men, we can posit certain conditions that would improve the efficient operation of the company, the first two of which were proposed by McMillin and MacLean and are mentioned above:
- The actors were skilled quick-change artists.
- The company used simple, tokenistic costumes where necessary to delineate one character from another.
- The company employed a skilled book-keeper to create the plots.
- The company traveled with “tire-men” to assist with costume changes and the co-ordination of back-stage traffic.
- The company toured with a relatively small repertoire performed in regular rotation.
- In preparation for a first performance, the company rehearsed as an ensemble more often than is suggested by the evidence from the London playhouses.
The third point begs a further question: in the absence of computer spreadsheets how did the company book-keeper create doubling plots of the plays? T.J. King argues, following David Bevingtion, that the playwrights wrote their plays with doubling options in mind and before writing the play would present a ‘plot’ to the company for approval. 5 We do not know what this ‘plot’ contained, however, King assumes it tracked the traffic on the stage much like the stage ‘plots’ used by the company back stage and gave the company some idea of the characters and story of the play. Once the play was written the company book-keeper or another delegate with intimate knowledge of theatre practice, would prepare the stage ‘plot’ of the play. It is likely that this was the principal document used for doubling the play. The extant ‘plots’ contain the names of actors assigned to specific roles and it is possible that this was done to establish the doubling patterns in the plays. In the plot of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins the actors’ names are absent from the two lead roles of Henry VI and Lidgate, likely because the actors playing these roles did not double other roles in the play.6 A stage plot marks English scenes with lines across the page, giving the plotter a visual sense of the doubling possibilities in the play. French scenes, however, are not marked as exits from the stage are not recorded, although characters delayed entrances into scenes are recorded usually by the phrase “Enter….; to him…” Anyone trying to double the play from a stage plot would not have the same amount of information presented in the SQM doubling plots. Could the book-keeper, or other member of the company, have created the intricate doubling charts necessary to keep the cast numbers to fourteen using only a stage plot and prompt book as reference?
Without further evidence it is impossible to be certain in this matter but in the absence of other documents it seems likely to me that the plot of the play was the starting point when casting the play. McMillin and MacLean created their doubling charts without knowing about the idea of the French scene, although open to the possibility that early exits and late entrances to scenes increased the doubling options. The spreadsheet charts accessible on this site were created from the SQM doubling plots and reflect the doubling that is presented in list form only in McMillin and MacLean’s book. The intricate doubling task is thus possible without knowledge of modern doubling techniques and the use of a computer spreadsheet. However, none of the extant plots offer doubling that approaches the complexity of McMillin and MacLean’s doubling. So few documents have survived from the theatre that it is dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions based on their evidence but in the absence of other evidence it is also difficult to contradict them. The consistency that McMillin and MacLean find in the 1594 plays lends much weight to the argument that touring companies operated with smaller casts and intricate doubling plots. The success of the SQM company in performing the plays in this manner, especially after the initial pressured ‘trial performance’, confirms that the kind of intense doubling proposed by McMillin and MacLean, while presenting enormous challenges within a London theatre rehearsal schedule, is fully feasible for a touring company working under the conditions outlined above.
Doubling for the London Theatres
The evidence of the surviving documents from the London playhouses suggests that their actors were rarely asked to work under such pressure. King and Bradley’s extensive analysis of the extant Plots, Prompt Books and Cast Lists from early modern English theatre reveal that actors would usually be given an entire English scene to change from one character to another 3. They also suggest that actors were not frequently asked to change character and then return to their original character – it happened, but it was relatively rare. Bradley refers to this as “dodging” (36) and decided to avoid this practice when doubling the plays under his analysis (42). Following his protocol produces a quite different doubling chart for Friar Bacon that demands a company of 21 actors, including three boys, three hired men playing smaller roles and 15 master actors or sharers 4. Such doubling increases the number of actors needed to stage the show but decreases the demands made on the actors.
3 T.J. King, T.J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s plays: London actors and their roles, 1590-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and David Bradley, From text to performance in the Elizabethan theatre: preparing the play for the stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
4 Certain roles I assigned to master actors may be considered minor due to the low number of lines and could therefore be considered work for hired men. This would bring the numbers closer in line with the personnel resources of the London playhouses, where King and Bradley argue an average of around 10 lead actors was the norm.
The SQM Doubling
The SQM doubling plots were largely driven by pragmatic concerns specific to our project and do not represent possible doublings used by the original company. Certain patterns discernable in the plays, however, are of historical interest. The lines of parts assigned to the master actors had a striking effect in performance. Paul Hopkins played romantic leads in each of the plays: the Gallian King in King Leir, Prince Henry in Famous Victories, and I had initially cast him as Friar Bacon but decided to cast him as Pince Edward in order to explore the effect of type casting within the company. The principle was also applied to the casting of Alon Nashman who took the line of clowns parts: Derrick in Famous Victories, Miles in Friar Bacon and Mumford and the Messenger/Murderer in King Leir, and to Don Allison who played King Leir and the two King Henries in the three plays. There was a real pleasure to be had from seeing the actors move from part to part and discovering ways in which the performance of one part informed the creation and development of the next and vice versa. The same effect was discernable in the performances of Julian DeZotti and is explored in detail in the Gender research module.
The casting of the clown as Mumford and the Messenger/Murderer is also of interest. Mumford is a Gallian aristocrat and therefore not an obvious choice for clowns who generally specialized in the performance of rustic characters. The term clown was initially used to denote working people from the country and only became part of theatrical language once such characters became a common feature of stage comedy. Casting a clown actor as an aristocratic character opens up comedic possibilities and it is suspected that Shakespeare wrote Falstaff for the company clown William Kempe 1. In King Leir, the character of Mumford alternates between verse and an earthy prose typical of stage clowns in the period. His points of reference are largely from the material world and his language contains many sexual puns and this makes his character a strong candidate for the clown in spite of his social class. Initially, I assigned this role alone to Alon but on further consideration I noticed that the character of the Messenger/Murderer is full of jokes, mixes high verse with colloquial and local references and, most importantly, when this character appears in the play, Mumford mysteriously disappears. Mumford is a constant companion to the prince in all scenes aside from Scene 16 where he is suddenly absent. The scene features a discussion between the Gallian King and Cordella on the subject of her father and this might be said to explain his absence. But Mumford engages in such conversations later in the play and his absence may also be due to the fact that the clown is now playing the Messenger/Murderer who appears in Scene 12 and then leaves the action for good in Scene 19. If we accept the theory that ‘dodging’ was more common in touring plays, it is interesting to look for moments where characters are unexpectedly absent and wonder if the actors were busy elsewhere playing another role.
The Adaptability of the Plays and the Company
As noted above King Leir was far easier to adapt than the other two plays and Friar Bacon presented enormous challenges that made the pressure of the first performance almost insurmountable. Our experience performing the plays with only four hours ensemble rehearsal suggests that a company would need more rehearsal time to prepare plays for performance with such complex doubling. The original company would have been more familiar with the process and maybe more adept at negotiating the first performances without much rehearsal, but the evidence of the extant plots suggest the general practice was to avoid such pressure in London. Our problems with recruitment forced us to make last minute changes to the casting of the plays, which proved relatively easy for the plays concerned although it increased the pressure on the actors.
The company proved increasingly adaptable as they became more familiar with the plays and the process. The adaptability of the SQM company to changing personnel was also facilitated by the actors’ use of ‘parts’, a practice that effectively divides a play into constituent units. Changing the actor playing one ‘part’ did not change all the others, your acting partner may change, a line may be spoken by a different character, but your cues and your lines remain the same and, if the new actor is capable and knows his lines and cues, it is possible to run the scene without significant rehearsal, if any. If more substantial changes were necessary and lines needed to be cut or added, the actor might do so on his part focusing his attention only on what pertains to him. The part is a device that keeps the actor focused on his own responsibilities alone and contains the effect of changes to company personnel.