Richard Carew. The Ordinary, The Ordinalia, and the Ordinary Actor ...

Carew's Ordinary 38
that particular production, but for all subsequent productions. New actors being
trained to perform established roles were taught to mimic precisely the manner in
which the part has first been acted: rehearsal was only necessary to ensure that the
actor had “correctly” received a part, and young players were harshly judged
against their “originals.”136
Players were thus prompted in learning their roles, even as they memorized their lines from their
actors’ parts. The performance of each actor was carefully controlled to make sure that the
speeches were correctly pronounced and the interpretation of each role true to received tradition.
We even hear Garrick and Hamlet unconsciously echoing the Ordinary’s admonition, that the
actors “must say after him.”
In rehearsing guary-mirkles, it seems likely that new actors would be asked to begin
rehearsal without having memorized their lines beforehand. The Ordinary would want to teach
the actor his part by reading it to him and having him repeat the lines after him. If the play were
an annual performance or revival of an old play, he would want to train the young actor to ensure
that he had correctly “received” his part. He would also have to demonstrate how to perform the
role at the same time: When you hear your cue, you go onstage and pomp about. When you say
this line, descend from your tentum. In that way, the Ordinary could assess the actor’s ability to
understand Cornish and he could better ensure that the delivery and interpretation of the lines
would be to his liking. Then he could be given his part to memorize, and thereafter he could be
continually monitored and corrected throughout rehearsals to make sure that the performance is
precisely what the Ordinary expects.
If the guary-mirkle were a traditional fixture, one performed regularly over a period of
time, the Ordinary’s job of supervision would be considerably easier. If a good number of actors
were veterans and performing the same roles they had played before, then they would have their
roles already memorized and would need less attention. The Ordinary, as the Conveyour
evidence suggests, may well be a master actor himself, thereby making his authority to tell other
actors how to perform their roles even more secure. He is unlikely to have been a cleric untrained
and untested in theatrical performance.
Then as now, rehearsals often encourage “good-humoured banter,” as Butterworth calls it
when it manifested itself in his own rehearsals (131). One could thus well imagine a “pleasant
conceyted gentleman” offering to undertake “an Actors roome,” and to show his mettle and class
superiority, he might well wish to practice “a merry pranke” on the Ordinary. As the Ordinary
begins to teach him his role by reading it to him from the “booke in his hand,” he might well
pretend to confuse stage directions with speeches, thus bringing about the practical joke that
Carew has recorded. For all we know, however, he went on to perform his role splendidly.
Carew, after all, does not tell us that the actor was fired or that he refused to perform his role in
the end. But he certainly broke up the rehearsal “with a great deale more sport and laughter, then
20. such Guaries could haue afforded.”
We cannot know which of these “conventions” is more correct: the continuous onstage
prompter, or the rehearsal strategy. Both depend upon presumed adjustments to Carew’s account
which cannot be documented. I would suggest, however, that the rehearsal convention is more
likely in that we can be sure that it actually existed. By contrast, the existence of an onstage
prompter-director convention simply cannot be shown to have existed as a medieval or Early