Sep 14, 2020
Inside Tiffany Stern’s book titled “Shakespeare in Parts” which she co-authored with Simon Palfrey, there is a picture of a piece of paper captioned “The part of Orlando from Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso” from the 1590s. The image represents the historical reality that for Shakespeare, plays were always distributed in parts--meaning a single actor would have had a copy of what his character was supposed to say, but when he was on stage to perform those lines, he would be hearing the words of his fellow characters often for the first time, generating, as you might expect, some pretty dramatic responses from the players themselves. This image of the lines for Robert Greene’s Orlando is additionally fascinating because not only is it hand written in ink on paper (instead of printed with type pressed letters the way we find plays inside the First Folio, for example) but aside from some lines across the page periodically to indicate a separation between spoken lines, there isn’t anything else on the page at all. It surprises me, quite honestly, because visually, this 16th century script looks totally different from modern play scripts. So why is the script written in a single part instead of having everyone’s lines all together? Is this the way players acted in the theater--everyone in their own part instead of bringing it all together as a group? Here to help us answer these questions and explore the research from her book, Shakespeare in Parts, about the history of scripts, performance, and the assumptions we make about what really happened when Shakespeare’s actors performed 16th century plays, is our guest Tiffany Stern.