ABSTRACT
To begin where most rehearsals for a production of one of Jonson’s plays will begin: the script. Read-throughs of a Jonsonian text according to Simon RussellBeale are notorious in today’s theatre for their length, for the exhaustion (and at times the despair) they induce in the casts set upon giving that text dramatic life. Yet as rehearsals evolve and start to inhabit what is to be the playing space, actors find that text generating a remarkable dynamism and stimulating them with an exhilarating vitality. Are the texts, then, as playtexts somehow at fault? Do they give off the wrong signals and, if so, why? Why do they not on an initial encounter appear to give actors the right kind of purchase on the play by revealing to them the potential their respective roles offer? Or, to hit the bottom line, why are modern actors afraid of encounters with Jonson? If we set aside the myths and stories about Jonson’s relations with actors in his own day and his attack on audiences for not appreciating the excellences of those of his plays which failed to gain enthusiastic applause at their first viewing (issues which editors tend to rehearse in the introductions to the twentieth-century editions of the plays with a relish that must prove daunting to an actor who reads them), will we find any explanation for this state of affairs in the actual texts? The subtext of Andrew Gurr’s Prologue to this volume implies an answer which is strongly affirmative. This needs investigation.
