The Elizabethan-Jacobean Script-to-Stage Process: The Playwright, Theatrical Intentions, and Collaboration

As a theatre historian my focus is: What can be determined about authorial intentions in a manuscript targeted at Elizabethan and Jacobean players, playgoers, and playhouses, a manuscript inextricably tied to in-the-theatre practices largely lost to us? A playwright such as Shakespeare attached to a given company could have played a significant role in the process of turning an authorial manuscript into a performed play, but, despite the labors of generations of scholars, there is much of significance that we do not know about the script-to-stage process in this period. In this essay, I first review the evidence about material conditions in the theatre, including references to a playwright reading his work aloud to an assembly of players, and then discuss what can be learned from the extant stage directions. What emerges is a sense of a collaborative theatrical process, where playwrights took for granted the professionalism and expertise of the players. In reading their playscripts today we therefore enter into the middle of a conversation — a discourse in a language we only partly understand — between a playwright and his player-colleagues, a halfway stage that was completed in a performance now lost to us. Although we will never reconstitute that performance, we may be able to recover elements of that vocabulary and hence better understand that conversation, whether the pre-production concept of the playwright or the implementation by the players.