Here Is a Play Fitted exhibition material

This article offers a comprehensive list of each piece included in Here Is a Play Fitted: Four Centuries of Staging Shakespeare, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger.

The Earliest Texts & the Unstable Script (cluster 1)

Roughly half of Shakespeare's plays were printed in individual quarto editions before thirty-six of the plays were printed together in the First Folio in 1623. Several quarto plays vary significantly from the version of the same play printed in the Folio. Many scholars have devoted their careers to determining the relationship between the quarto texts and the First Folio: are they early drafts, acting versions, versions used while touring, or separate works? The earliest versions of the plays in this exhibition—Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream—each reveal a different relationship to the Folio text.

Compare the Romeo and Juliet "potion" scene in the First Folio with the same scene from the first quarto. This first quarto of Romeo and Juliet has been called a "Bad Quarto" because it is nearly 800 lines shorter than the First Folio version. These pages show Juliet’s famous "potion" soliloquy, which is only half as long as the version of the same speech in the Folio. This page also includes the intriguing stage direction, "She falls upon her bed within the curtains," which does not appear in the Folio. The First Folio's version of the same scene runs forty-five lines long.

Early quartos of the four plays examined in this exhibition give us evidence that theater practicioners have always played with and adapted texts.

Items included

Who Changed Shakespeare (Wall above cluster 1)

FACSIMILE.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare: Revision and Adaptation (cluster 2)

Parliament closed the London theaters between 1642 and 1660, during the English civil war and Interregnum. When they reopened at the Restoration of Charles II, Shakespeare’s plays were still popular, but many of the new performance scripts bore little resemblance to the plays Shakespeare wrote. The scripts were cut, altered, and amended to appeal to both theatrical practice and literary taste. In order to suit the actor-managers who ran the playhouses and starred in productions, some scripts were revised to focus more attention on main characters. Other plays were altered to fit the literary demands of “poetic justice,” the neoclassical unities, and decorum.

Colley Cibber (1671–1757) was an actor, playwright, and the manager of Drury Lane Theatre. He heavily adapted Shakespeare’s Richard III in 1699, and placed more emphasis on Richard (the character that Cibber himself played in his production). Cibber kept only a quarter of Shakespeare’s lines, added over a thousand of his own, and included lines from seven other Shakespearean plays. Cibber’s version has an engaging theatrical flow, which made it the standard stage version until the early twentieth century. Cibber's influence can still be seen in Laurence Olivier's version of Richard III.

The Theatre Royal, Smock Alley, in Dublin was one of three Restoration theaters opened when Charles II resumed the throne of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1660. The Smock Alley promptbook of Othello shows the play as it would have been performed in the theaters in the 1670s and 80s. Notice the cuts to the script made on these pages.

Hear curator Denise A. Walen discuss the cuts made to the Smock Alley promptbook.

Items included

David Garrick's Adaptations (cluster 3)

David Garrick (1717–79), was manager of Drury Lane Theatre, a talented playwright,and England’s first celebrity actor. He organized the Shakespeare Jubilee, the first civic celebration of Shakespeare’s life in Stratford-upon-Avon. His dedication helped establish Shakespeare’s reputation as the finest playwright in the English-speaking world. Despite his reverence for the Bard, Garrick also heavily altered Shakespeare’s plays. His adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, in which he cut some of Shakespeare’s text but also added surprisingly to the play, became the standard acting version in England and the United States for a hundred years, from 1750 through the mid 1800s.

David Garrick adapted Romeo and Juliet for Drury Lane in 1748. He wrote in the preface that he wanted to purge the “jingle and quibble” that marred the play. Of Garrick’s many changes, his most significant was an addition to the tomb scene. Rather than dying instantly after drinking poison, Garrick’s Romeo drinks a slow-working poison that allows him a long exchange—nearly sixty lines of dialogue—with Juliet before he dies.

This image shows David Garrick as Romeo with the actress George Anne Bellamy playing Juliet in the final tomb scene from Garrick’s extended version, which allowed Garrick the opportunity to display a wide range of tragic emotion.

Actors Michael Goldsmith and Kate DeBuys explore the differences between the original Shakespeare and the Garrick adaptation in this video.

For more on Garrick's adaptions, read this article.

Items included

An Actress's Life for Me (Wall above cluster 3)

Items included

Romantic Shakespeare: J. P. Kemble and Edmund Kean (cluster 4)

The Romantic movement influenced theater in the early nineteenth century just as it influenced other art forms during that time. The careers of John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) and Edmund Kean (1787–1833) perfectly reflect the changing attitudes that specifically affected Shakespearean productions. Kemble was the consummate patrician hero whose productions were stately examples of spectacle and monarchial grandeur. Kean, in contrast, was the passionate rebel, both on and off the stage, who emphasized the social and political prejudices that oppressed his characters. Kemble retired from the theater as Kean gained prominence in parts such as Othello, which contemporary critics considered Kean's greatest role.

Actor John Philip Kemble is shown in this portrait as Richard III which he played as a darkly handsome royal figure rather than a deformed villain. In fact, Sir Walter Scott said Kemble was too "eminently fine" a man to play Richard; that he could never “seem constitutionally villainous” and "could never look the part." Kemble believed that, as a prince, Richard should not be presented as calculating, cruel, or vulgar, which must have made many of his lines difficult to deliver.

Edmund Kean’s performances of Othello were unusual in that he consistently overshadowed any co-star’s portrayal of Iago. It was a perfect role for him as it reflected his inner passion and fury, qualities that made his finest roles seem both dangerous and exciting. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, "To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." Unfortunately, heavy drinking and the effects of venereal disease often made him unfit for performance during the last ten years of his life. His last role was at Covent Garden Theatre where he played Othello opposite his son Charles as Iago in 1833. This promptbook notes the spot in the play where Edmund Kean "sank on the neck of his son and was carried off the stage."

Items included

Cluster 4

  • W. Sheldrick. Mr. Kean as Othello Dawn by E.F. Lambert. [Great Britain? : s.n., mid-19th century?]. Colored lithograph. Call number: ART File K24.4 no.59 (size S) and LUNA Digital Image.
  • Elizabeth Cavendish. Autograph letters signed and unsigned from Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, London, to Edmund Kean. Manuscript, 1818 October 14, 20. Call number: Y.c.1427 (1–2) and LUNA Digital Image.
  • George Keating. Mr. Kemble in the character of King Richard the Third, from the original picture in the possesion [sic] of John Pybus, Esq. [England]: John & Josiah Boydell, 1788. Mezzotint. Call number: ART File K31.4 no.52 copy 1 (size M) and LUNA Digital Image.
  • William Shakespeare. King Richard the Third. Promptbook marked by John Philip Kemble for Covent Garden (1811). Call number: PROMPT Rich.III 14 and LUNA Digital Image.
  • William Shakespeare. Othello, the Moor of Venice, a tragedy, revised by J. P. Kemble. London: for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1804. Call number: PROMPT Oth. 20; displayed p. 49.
  • John Philip Kemble. Richard III. Autograph manuscript of Kemble's parts in 34 plays in the hand of John Philip Kemble Manuscript, 1783–1805. 34 v. Call number: T.a.13 and LUNA Digital Image.

Playbills: What's on Stage? (Wall above cluster 4)

  • Manchester, Theatre-Royal. King Richard III (Mainpiece), The Lying Valet (Afterpiece). [John Philip Kemble as Richard III]. Playbill. 29 May 1798. Call number: Craven playbills: 242062 ART and LUNA Digital Image.
  • London, Covent Garden. The Tragedy of Othello (Mainpiece), A Nabob For an Hour (Afterpiece), and Masaniello (Ballet). [Edmund Kean as Othello]. Playbill. 25 March 1833. Call number: Bill Box G2 C85 1832–33; (image).
  • William Hamilton. John Philip Kemble as Richard IIIOil on panel, ca. 1787. Call number: FPb24 and LUNA Digital Image.

Instructive Shakespeare: William Charles Macready (cluster 5)

Antiquarian Shakespeare: Charles Kean (cluster 6)