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Shakespeare in Parts
A truly groundbreaking collaboration of original theatre history with exciting literary criticism, Shakespeare in Parts is the first book fully to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama overwhelmingly circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. It demanded the most sensitive attention to the opportunities inscribed in the script, and to the ongoing dramatic moment. Here is where the young actor Shakespeare learnt his trade; here is where his imagination, verbal and technical, learnt to roam.
This is the story of Shakespeare in Parts. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium get transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become promise-crammed repositories of meaning and movement, and of individually discoverable space and time. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take - and insist upon - unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy.
Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern's mould-altering work of historical and imaginative recovery provides a unique keyhole onto hitherto forgotten practices and techniques. It not only discovers a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but a new Shakespeare.
This is the story of Shakespeare in Parts. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium get transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become promise-crammed repositories of meaning and movement, and of individually discoverable space and time. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take - and insist upon - unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy.
Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern's mould-altering work of historical and imaginative recovery provides a unique keyhole onto hitherto forgotten practices and techniques. It not only discovers a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but a new Shakespeare.
560 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 18, 2011
The best book I have read this year is also the most ground breaking. Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey discuss what it was like to put on a Shakespearean play by looking at the parts (also called sides) that actors were given to learn their lines. Actors did not get a copy of the entire play, only their parts, so that is what Stern and Palfrey study as they try to answer questions about how the cast and company went about putting on plays. The book is in four parts:
1) What rehearsal was like in this period
2) The next 200 plus pages applies this to Shakespeare’s plays
3) Demonstrates how actors worked on their parts from the sides they were given
4) Case studies where Stern and Palfrey apply all this to eight of Shakespeare’s characters.
This book is bloody brilliant. Read it.
1) What rehearsal was like in this period
2) The next 200 plus pages applies this to Shakespeare’s plays
3) Demonstrates how actors worked on their parts from the sides they were given
4) Case studies where Stern and Palfrey apply all this to eight of Shakespeare’s characters.
This book is bloody brilliant. Read it.
June 25, 2024
One of the authors of this book was a tutor on my undergraduate English Literature course, and he was the most brilliant, intelligent, wry, esoteric, and thoughtfully hilarious teacher I've ever had, so I can't pretend to be impartial about this thing. The best way I can summarise his approach to literature was that he had a deep fascination with the ambiguity that arises in the close reading of texts. He tended to treat Shakespeare's works almost as if they were alive for their peculiarly mercurial quality; a quality that seems to recreate the halting, contradictory, and emergent complexity of living thought in a way that no other writer has quite matched.
This is particularly odd because scriptwriting in Shakespeare's time was very unlike our modern understanding of texts as these finalised, definitive collections of words that get published in their totality to be read from start to finish. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have had an almost cavalier disregard for his own texts, never really bothering to republish any of them in his retirement and instead leaving his friends to scramble around with faulty scraps of text to produce the posthumous folio editions that entire generations of literary scholars have to thank for their tenures in the never ending quest to fix an apparently endless cavalcade of editorial faults.
Nevertheless, when you read a Shakespearean text in its entirety, you are in the unusual position of knowing more of the story than the actual actors originally performing in it did. Nobody trusted the thriftless bastards of the theatre not to try selling off completed scripts to a rival company, so complete editions of the text were kept under lock and key, and actors were only ever given 'parts' - long rolls of parchment that included all of their lines as well as the last one to three words of the line preceding their own. This 'cue' could come at any time and the actor had to stand there, vigilantly attending to the events on stage for the one or two words that would signal their next line. They had no idea how long that might be - it might be within two seconds, it might be after ten minutes - but that was all they had. They had no stage directions, they had little awareness of the wider plot before it happened, and instead had to react to the dialogue and descriptions of the other actors in real time.
This fact tends to be one of those points of Shakespeare trivia we hear at some point, go 'Oh wow' at, before moving on with our day by subjecting the text to whatever hobbyhorse is currently popular. Stern and Palfrey, meanwhile, looked at that trivia for a long time and decided to test what would happen if you cut up Shakespeare's texts into their original parts and then did a really close reading of the results.
The first thing they have to do is figure out what a part looked like. No Shakespearean originals survive, so the first section of the book is a long historical survey of surviving parts from other playwrights alongside all the contemporary commentary on how Renaissance theatres worked. With that out of the way, and hyper-aware of the ensuing ambiguities, they cut the texts up, had a look, and concluded that Shakespeare was a tricksy mischief-maker who took every opportunity to constantly fuck with his actors.
Shakespeare's parts constantly give their actors little information about what is about to happen onstage, and what information they give is sometimes creatively misleading. A skilled actor could probably gain some slight insights into their character's situation by considering the cue words leading them in, and Palfrey and Stern do some close readings of these possibilities, before pointing out that over Shakespeare's career he also tends to mislead his actors, or deprive them of vital information in ways that must have made the original performance a thrilling process of reactive creativity in the moment.
One of my favourite examples of this is that Cordelia's actor in King Lear had no hint in their part about Lear's thunderous, irrational rage that ruins her life in the play's opening act. Seen from their own part, they just said something sincere to their father and the rest of their lines were fairly nondescript. Their reaction in the performance, then, must have been something special, suddenly facing Lear's apocalyptic bellowing and forced to reconsider how their character must respond to this in real-time, whilst the audience watched, and still keeping an ear out for the one or two word phrase that might at some point cue their next line, the delivery of which they might have to rapidly reassess.
As Shakespeare's career progressed, Palfrey and Stern see him constantly experimenting with how far he could manipulate the part-script format to push or stir his actors towards more sophisticated or animated performances. The final case study of Macbeth is the absolute highlight of the book, sketching out the radically indeterminate world that the actor inhabits and how the actor himself must surely have been confused by the ambiguity of who he even addresses his own speeches or pseudo-soliloquies to throughout a dark, lonely, and stressfully challenging performance.
Of course, the intensity of that case study is contingent on the possibility that we don't actually have the original Macbeth script as Shakespeare wrote it, just an abridged one, but I've never been bothered by that argument because the abridgement is the one that's survived the ages anyway, and a little literary myth-making rarely hurt anyone.
In that light, the real stumbling block of this book is that the improvisational surprises they describe presumably happened most vividly in the single rehearsal that play companies did before the main performance. The aforementioned incident of Cordelia's actor being shouted at by King Lear probably wasn't as surprising as Stern and Palfrey try to make out because he would have had it happen to him the day before. Obviously the tightly wrought tension of micro-adjusted moments and uncertainty around the dynamic specificities of their parts that make up about 90% of the case studies here still stands (an actor would have to be a cyborg to not emergently improvise such details after just one rehearsal) but the more dramatic claims about actors being surprised by big narrative events are constantly hampered by the admission that actors had already done it all at least once before - an admission that they generally handwave away with some mumbled excuse about the contingency of narrative performance and the mercurial complexity of texts that precede the actors' existence to make the texts ontologically distinct from the thespians they puppeteer and manipulate.
Quite frankly I can't blame them for this dodge. Only a fool would let facts get in the way of such a brilliant thesis.
This is particularly odd because scriptwriting in Shakespeare's time was very unlike our modern understanding of texts as these finalised, definitive collections of words that get published in their totality to be read from start to finish. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have had an almost cavalier disregard for his own texts, never really bothering to republish any of them in his retirement and instead leaving his friends to scramble around with faulty scraps of text to produce the posthumous folio editions that entire generations of literary scholars have to thank for their tenures in the never ending quest to fix an apparently endless cavalcade of editorial faults.
Nevertheless, when you read a Shakespearean text in its entirety, you are in the unusual position of knowing more of the story than the actual actors originally performing in it did. Nobody trusted the thriftless bastards of the theatre not to try selling off completed scripts to a rival company, so complete editions of the text were kept under lock and key, and actors were only ever given 'parts' - long rolls of parchment that included all of their lines as well as the last one to three words of the line preceding their own. This 'cue' could come at any time and the actor had to stand there, vigilantly attending to the events on stage for the one or two words that would signal their next line. They had no idea how long that might be - it might be within two seconds, it might be after ten minutes - but that was all they had. They had no stage directions, they had little awareness of the wider plot before it happened, and instead had to react to the dialogue and descriptions of the other actors in real time.
This fact tends to be one of those points of Shakespeare trivia we hear at some point, go 'Oh wow' at, before moving on with our day by subjecting the text to whatever hobbyhorse is currently popular. Stern and Palfrey, meanwhile, looked at that trivia for a long time and decided to test what would happen if you cut up Shakespeare's texts into their original parts and then did a really close reading of the results.
The first thing they have to do is figure out what a part looked like. No Shakespearean originals survive, so the first section of the book is a long historical survey of surviving parts from other playwrights alongside all the contemporary commentary on how Renaissance theatres worked. With that out of the way, and hyper-aware of the ensuing ambiguities, they cut the texts up, had a look, and concluded that Shakespeare was a tricksy mischief-maker who took every opportunity to constantly fuck with his actors.
Shakespeare's parts constantly give their actors little information about what is about to happen onstage, and what information they give is sometimes creatively misleading. A skilled actor could probably gain some slight insights into their character's situation by considering the cue words leading them in, and Palfrey and Stern do some close readings of these possibilities, before pointing out that over Shakespeare's career he also tends to mislead his actors, or deprive them of vital information in ways that must have made the original performance a thrilling process of reactive creativity in the moment.
One of my favourite examples of this is that Cordelia's actor in King Lear had no hint in their part about Lear's thunderous, irrational rage that ruins her life in the play's opening act. Seen from their own part, they just said something sincere to their father and the rest of their lines were fairly nondescript. Their reaction in the performance, then, must have been something special, suddenly facing Lear's apocalyptic bellowing and forced to reconsider how their character must respond to this in real-time, whilst the audience watched, and still keeping an ear out for the one or two word phrase that might at some point cue their next line, the delivery of which they might have to rapidly reassess.
As Shakespeare's career progressed, Palfrey and Stern see him constantly experimenting with how far he could manipulate the part-script format to push or stir his actors towards more sophisticated or animated performances. The final case study of Macbeth is the absolute highlight of the book, sketching out the radically indeterminate world that the actor inhabits and how the actor himself must surely have been confused by the ambiguity of who he even addresses his own speeches or pseudo-soliloquies to throughout a dark, lonely, and stressfully challenging performance.
Of course, the intensity of that case study is contingent on the possibility that we don't actually have the original Macbeth script as Shakespeare wrote it, just an abridged one, but I've never been bothered by that argument because the abridgement is the one that's survived the ages anyway, and a little literary myth-making rarely hurt anyone.
In that light, the real stumbling block of this book is that the improvisational surprises they describe presumably happened most vividly in the single rehearsal that play companies did before the main performance. The aforementioned incident of Cordelia's actor being shouted at by King Lear probably wasn't as surprising as Stern and Palfrey try to make out because he would have had it happen to him the day before. Obviously the tightly wrought tension of micro-adjusted moments and uncertainty around the dynamic specificities of their parts that make up about 90% of the case studies here still stands (an actor would have to be a cyborg to not emergently improvise such details after just one rehearsal) but the more dramatic claims about actors being surprised by big narrative events are constantly hampered by the admission that actors had already done it all at least once before - an admission that they generally handwave away with some mumbled excuse about the contingency of narrative performance and the mercurial complexity of texts that precede the actors' existence to make the texts ontologically distinct from the thespians they puppeteer and manipulate.
Quite frankly I can't blame them for this dodge. Only a fool would let facts get in the way of such a brilliant thesis.
December 27, 2014
SHAKESPEARE IN PARTS provokes deep thinking about what might be an "authentic" experience of Shakespeare for a practitioner or reader. It's one of those books, most recently, like Abigail Rokison's SHAKESPEAREAN VERSE SPEAKING, where you often stop reading to stare off into space and consider what you thought was right and good about the work you were doing.
April 29, 2025
About 30 pages worth of sharp, revelatory insight sprinkled into 500 pages of masturbatory academic fluff.
I came into this book not only with a strong interest in the material — I’ve used cue scripts in my teaching for years — but also with a higher-than-average tolerance for the kind of sock-sniffer prose that goes into academic writing on Shakespeare, having read a lot of Shakespeare scholarship over the last decade and a half.
In spite of that, I read this book with gritted teeth, slogging through 3-5 pages at a time until the insufferable prose became unbearable.
The authors seem way more concerned with demonstrating how smart they are than they are with communicating anything substantive about Shakespeare. 95% of the real estate of any given page is the kind of soulless sophistry you expect from someone defending their PhD, desperately throwing bits of Latinate jargon at the wall in the hopes that something will stick.
There are a handful of interesting ideas in this book, but reading this book was decidedly not worth it to get them.
FFO: condescension; limbs and/or outward flourishes; thesauruses, r/iamverysmart
I came into this book not only with a strong interest in the material — I’ve used cue scripts in my teaching for years — but also with a higher-than-average tolerance for the kind of sock-sniffer prose that goes into academic writing on Shakespeare, having read a lot of Shakespeare scholarship over the last decade and a half.
In spite of that, I read this book with gritted teeth, slogging through 3-5 pages at a time until the insufferable prose became unbearable.
The authors seem way more concerned with demonstrating how smart they are than they are with communicating anything substantive about Shakespeare. 95% of the real estate of any given page is the kind of soulless sophistry you expect from someone defending their PhD, desperately throwing bits of Latinate jargon at the wall in the hopes that something will stick.
There are a handful of interesting ideas in this book, but reading this book was decidedly not worth it to get them.
FFO: condescension; limbs and/or outward flourishes; thesauruses, r/iamverysmart
August 26, 2019
I give this one about 4.5 stars. The first part was purely amazing, the later parts were good, but less amazing.
In Shakespeare's day, actors did not receive an entire script to rehearse with. They just received their own lines, plus a couple of words of the last line given before each of their lines to cue them as to when they were to speak. This book takes a very deep dive into what that method of line learning allowed Shakespeare as a playwright to do - how he could cause interruptions, overlapping speech, moments of silence, and in a variety of ways actually direct the play (according to the modern conception of direction) in the script.
The second part of the book drilled down into some of the other techniques that were used by Shakespeare to create actor action - midline shifts, tempo changes, etc.
I highly recommend this book for practitioners. There's a lot of juicy stuff to think about in here when reading and performing Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare's day, actors did not receive an entire script to rehearse with. They just received their own lines, plus a couple of words of the last line given before each of their lines to cue them as to when they were to speak. This book takes a very deep dive into what that method of line learning allowed Shakespeare as a playwright to do - how he could cause interruptions, overlapping speech, moments of silence, and in a variety of ways actually direct the play (according to the modern conception of direction) in the script.
The second part of the book drilled down into some of the other techniques that were used by Shakespeare to create actor action - midline shifts, tempo changes, etc.
I highly recommend this book for practitioners. There's a lot of juicy stuff to think about in here when reading and performing Shakespeare.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews