Cutting Shakespeare: promptbook practice at the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 – 2021

Zaffino, Juliano (2024). Cutting Shakespeare: promptbook practice at the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 – 2021. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

For decades, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has kept promptbooks from past productions, in particular Shakespearean productions, housed in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT)’s archives. The accretion of stage, sound and light queues, casting documents, rehearsal notes and so on in a promptbook renders it a fascinating artefact by which the ephemeral (live theatre) is rendered permanent in print. It is also notable for capturing the process and the product of how the production has cut Shakespeare. Directors at the RSC, particularly under the artistic directorship of Gregory Doran (2012-2022), have often turned to these promptbooks to understand how previous directors cut the play for performance, as part of preparing their own cut for productions on the stage. Scholarship has, by-and-large, overlooked the relationship between cutting and shifting approaches to Shakespeare’s works. This thesis looks to use these promptbooks as a means of understanding how the process of cutting Shakespeare has evolved over time, specifically during the first sixty years (1961-2021) of the RSC’s history.

Chapter One of the thesis weighs up two of Shakespeare’s “tragic texts”, Hamlet and King Lear – the two most towering tragedies, which also happen to survive in multiple variant texts – and specifically how directors have approached (or ignored) the variant texts in preparing their cuts, and what that reveals about the relationship between textual and theatrical editing. Chapter Two moves on to three of Shakespeare’s comedies – The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It and Measure for Measure – each of which is often perceived now as complicated by various outdated modes, be they of language, gender expectations, or humour. In Chapter Three, I consider theatrical abridgement in the three Henry VI plays, compared with how directors approach King John (as an infrequently performed, stand-alone history play). I will then elucidate how modern theatrical intervention in the history plays is part of a wider tradition of alterations made in the name of historical fiction, in which Shakespeare himself was taking part. Finally, in Chapter Four, I look to the fringes of Shakespearean canon and stage history, to three barely performed and co-authored plays: Pericles, Timon of Athens, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Marginalised from the canon, from the stage in general, and often from the RSC’s main Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) stage to their smaller Swan Theatre stage, the approach to these plays reveals much about how directors approach both Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare. Bookending these four chapters are an Introduction, which explores the intertwined histories of promptbooks and cutting and lays out the key strands of the thesis, and a Conclusion, which ties together these strands to establish a rough “Grand Unified Theory of Cutting Shakespeare”, while also considering whether any kind of discrete cutting practice can be identified at the RSC.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):