Philosophy of the Performing Arts

168 performance as art
the actors, and that the other principal source of revisions was the opinions
of the audience on “first night.” Furthermore, revisions after the distribu-
tion of parts were nearly always within speeches, or involved the deletion of
exchanges between parts, so as to avoid affecting the “cues.”^19
But, it might be thought, the ingredients model doesn’t require ensemble
revision, even if this is a prominent feature of modern theatrical practice.
The crucial question is whether we can identify something in sixteenth- to
eighteenth-century practice that functions as a performable work. One
final feature of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English theatrical practice
is relevant here. I noted earlier that rehearsal was almost entirely individ-
ual in nature, with actors being schooled by author, manager, or prompter,
or even another actor, on how their part should be played. It was also
assumed that, however the part was played by the first actor to whom it
was assigned, this was how the part was to be played by other actors in
any subsequent productions. The individual rehearsal of later actors was a
training in mimicking the performance of earlier actors who had played
the part. This meant that there was no real conception of an actor (or,
indeed, anyone else, such as the prompter) interpreting a part, since it was
assumed that there was only one way in which it could be played. Garrick’s
contribution, in the late eighteenth century, was to school actors – again
in private study – to act parts from earlier plays in a new way. But Garrick
was simply trying to replace one fixed way of playing the part with another
equally fixed way. Prior to Garrick, it was assumed that a revival of a play
would preserve the parts from earlier productions. Where changes were
made in a revival of an earlier production, they were not artistically moti-
vated, but reflected practical considerations, such as the lack of a relevant
skill by the new actor playing a part, or the architectural features of the
theater in which the performance was to take place.
The preparatory process as a whole, incorporating the first night and the
subsequent revisions, seems to eventuate in something that subsequent per-
formances and productions aim, and are expected to aim, to present to audi-
ences. Thus we might view such subsequent performances as of works, so
construed – collections of parts to be played in certain ways and an encom-
passing narrative into which those parts enter.^20 But, if we take sixteenth- to
eighteenth-century English theatrical performances after the first night to
be of works so conceived, responsibility for those works obviously cannot be
assigned to any single individual, let alone to the hapless author. A compari-
son with cinematic works is tempting here. It has been argued that films are
“multiply authored,” by their screenwriters, actors, directors, and so on.^21
Similarly, in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English theatrical practice, the
playwright provides something like a screenplay; the manager, like a direc-
tor, “theatricalizes” this to get something that works for the stage; the actors