ABSTRACT
Acting in the open air playhouse, like the staging, was largely conventional. Several factors contributed to this: lack of rehearsal time, a repertory system which made huge demands on the actor, the need for doubling – not just the need for one player to play several parts, but also occasionally the need for different players to play the same part – and also for type casting, which (as the Italian actors in commedia dell’arte discovered) made for smoother, quicker role-creation. Almost all Elizabethan and Jacobean plays had casts which required every member of the company to be fully employed. Once a play had been accepted, each character’s part was copied by a scribe onto a long roll, so that the actor received the lines of his speeches preceded by two or three cue words, but not a full text. In performance, he was expected to listen for the cue words and speak his own lines immediately when he heard them. If this meant that what we might consider the nuances of interpretation were lacking in any speech, it also meant that every actor on the stage was extremely alert, listening, concentrating, involved. The Elizabethan actor spent little time finding subtext or psychology, and the play was able to rattle through.
