Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance i: improvisation and rehearsal 167
One reason for proceeding in this way was the sheer number of plays put on
by any given company, and thus the number of parts that any individual actor
had to “study.” But it meant that the spectacle confronting the audience was
very different from the one with which we are familiar. Since actors prepared
for the performance only by learning their own parts; they had no assigned
roles when not actually speaking, and often fell out of character and conversed
in propria persona with the audience. The “social” nature of theatrical perform-
ance, stressed by Hamilton, was even more apparent here, audience members
freely heckling and eliciting responses from actors. Audience members, too,
viewed what was presented more as an assemblage of parts than as an ensem-
ble production, and, as noted in Chapter 6, would often walk out when the
parts that interested them no longer had a place in the presentation.
Performance practices at this time are clearly difficult to reconcile with
a text-based construal of performable theatrical works. The contribution
of the author was increasingly marginalized, especially when compared to
modern practice where living playwrights are often involved in the rehearsal
process. Playwrights, like contemporary screenwriters, furnished an initial
text that, in the Restoration and even more in the eighteenth century, was
usually radically transformed by the manager or prompter, whose task was
to “theatricalize” the drama. Unless he was involved in individual rehearsals
of one or more of the actors, further input by the author occurred only fol-
lowing the first night, when the audience was canvassed for its views on the
performance. The author was then expected to revise the play to meet their
demands. Since the author was paid receipts only on the second or third
night, and since there would be no audience unless the requested changes
were made, authors generally complied with what was requested.
The first night, known as “the trial,” was effectively an open rehearsal, not
of the acting of the play but of the play itself , its writing and plot. Since it was
expected that changes would be made, actors were not overly worried about
learning all of their lines, so the acting on the first night was generally bad.
Samuel Pepys apparently refused to attend first nights for this reason (Stern
2000, 188). The attraction of the first night, however – something for which
the public was willing to pay twice the usual fee – was that one not only got
to judge, but also to play a part in the revision of, the play. The general opin-
ion was that it was only on the second night – assuming the play survived to
a second night – that the play was presented in its finished form.
But, if sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English theatrical practice fits badly
with the text-based model of theatrical performance, it fits equally badly with
the ingredients model if the latter is taken to include ensemble revision. For,
if we ask how performances in this period stand in relation to the revision of
texts, we see that ensemble revision played almost no part, that much revision
took place in “theatricalizing” the play even before the distribution of parts to