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

Carew's Ordinary 57
128 James Howell, A New Volume of Letters, London, 1647, quo. in OED, sv. Maggot, n, 2a. See
also brainworm, n, 1. The word is obsolescent, not obsolete. See John Fowles, A Maggot
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 5.
129 In rehearsing his own production of the Secunda Pastorum in the manner of Carew’s
Ordinary, Butterworth reports that scripts were passed out before rehearsals and that his actors
were to read them and select two scenes to be performed (p. 129). ‘Groningen’, pp. 129-37.
130 In distinguishing between “the kind of prompting delivered by the Ordinary” and “more
recent and current forms” of prompting, Butterworth concedes that “this difference begs some
further questions. Why did this changed function or mode exist? What was the ‘Ordinary-player’
relationship required to do that was different from more recent practice?” Except to deny that
such a prompting performance would have seemed somehow crude and unsophisticated to the
audience, he does not provide an answer to this question. Butterworth, ‘Carew's “Ordinary”’, pp.
328-29.
131 See above, section 3, and Spriggs, ‘Where Cornish Was Spoken’, pp. 228-69, passim.
132 Bakere, Cornish Ordinalia, p. xxxvi.
133 Butterworth, ‘Groningen’, pp. 129-36.
134 Butterworth insists, (p. 159) that although the actors became “familiar” with the lines, they
did not memorize them. I accept this assurance, even though I remain unclear as to the
distinction between the two terms since the actors did not have to “pronounce aloud” what the
prompter “telleth them softely beforehand.” Rather, hearing one or two words, they could speak
the rest of their lines from memory.
135 See above, n. 122.
136 Stern, Rehearsal, pp. 10-11. Stern’s takes rehearsals from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries as her topic; these practices, she thinks, remained fairly constant throughout these
centuries, hence the reference to Garrick and Shakespeare in the same sentence.