Promptbooks

When I first discovered promptbooks in 2016, I was completely appalled. I was just twenty years old, embarking on an undergraduate research fellowship to study the performance history of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Perhaps I was naïve, thinking it horrible that theatre practitioners had taken liberties with a Shakespearean performance text. After all, by their very nature, promptbooks (or prompt books) are annotated scripts, marked with deletions, additions, substitutions, rearrangements, and reassignments within the text of a given play. I was taken-aback that anyone would even want to edit the grand plays of Shakespeare, let alone need to. Then again, it was my very first time in an archive – the wonderful Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. – and I had so much to learn. Five years later, however, promptbooks have consumed my thoughts, monopolized my research, and impacted the trajectory of my life. 

Cover of PROMPT Lear 25, Folger Shakespeare Library. 1882.

While at the Folger, I was immediately directed to Charles H. Shattuck’s The Shakespeare Promptbooks, published in 1965. It remains, perhaps, the seminal work on promptbooks, offering an enormous bibliography of the Shakespearean promptbooks held in the world’s libraries, museums, and archives. It has also become somewhat the bible for my research. In his introduction, Shattuck offers a personifying interpretation of promptbooks, illuminating, as he puts it, their ‘tricky, secretive, stubborn’ character:

They chatter and exclaim about what we hardly need to know: that certain characters are being readied by the callboy to make their entrances; that the scene is about to change or the curtain to drop; that the orchestra is about to play at the act-end. They fall blackly silent just when we most hope to be told where the actor stood or how he looked or what he did. Rarely do they give us a hint of voice or temper or histrionic manner. They tell lies, as anybody knows who ever produced a play and failed to write in the book his own last-minute revisions or the happy inspirations that come to the actors midway in a run of performances. (Shattuck, 3)

It is true that promptbooks have the potential to be deceptive, for we never will know if what they contain actually occurred. Such potential alludes to the beauteous trouble that comes with studying theatre history — there are things we simply will never know because we simply were not there. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a sixteenth century definition for ‘prompt’, noting that it meant ‘an act of instigation or excitement’. By the early eighteenth century, this understanding had grown to ‘something said or done to aid the memory’ (prompt, n.2). To prompt, then, is to provoke, but while these promptbooks detail what was meant to happen, we can never know if it actually happened. Which begs the question – why should we even use promptbooks if they have the possibility of being misleading? To answer this, I will first define just three of the many types of promptbooks: an actor’s copy, a preparation copy, and a final or souvenir copy. 

Pages denoting storm cues from PROMPT Lear 25, Folger Shakespeare Library. 1882.

As the term seems to suggest, an actor’s copy of a promptbook is just that – an actor’s copy. Also known as a part book, an actor’s copy usually focuses on the actor’s given role in a production. This could follow the early modern theatrical practice of an actor only receiving the text for their role, or conversely, it could be a copy of the entire script with only the actor’s role marked. Additionally, depending on the actor, the actor’s copy could include rehearsal notes, including where to stand, when to move, or what props they need to carry. The actor’s copy serves that actor, and can include anything they deem necessary or helpful when approaching their given role. 

While the actor’s copy focuses on a single actor, a preparation copy focuses on the entire cast for the production. The preparation copy was usually was prompter’s copy, inclusive of all important theatrical cues, lines, and scenic components. This would enable the prompter to move the performance along when needed, or to prompt the various scenes and acts to proceed. Today, that role has evolved into the modern stage manager. 

Concluding this exploration of promptbooks is a final or souvenir copy. This kind of promptbook is the final copy of a given book. This copy is usually the perfected one, often transcribed from previous copies and with fewer extraneous notes. It is also known as a souvenir copy because admirers of a given performance may have requested such a ‘souvenir’ in order to later reminisce about their experience. The purpose behind a final or souvenir copy, then, is not necessarily a productive one, but rather, that of a token or keepsake. 

Studying these three kinds of promptbooks — actor copies, preparation copies, and final or souvenir copies — allows for varying levels of retroactive engagement with a theatrical, historical, and literary past. Actor copies allow for an individualized study of how one particular actor approached a given role, and what kinds of notes were needed to fully understand and embrace that character. Preparation copies offer a broader range of data, including production notes that were all-inclusive and all-encompassing. Final or souvenir copies, by contrast, are mementos that highlight what those present at a particular cultural moment wanted most to remember or preserve from a theatrical experience.

Over the course of the five years following on from my initially appalled reaction, I have fallen in love with promptbooks. As a budding Shakespearean theatre historian, I want to focus on how his plays were performed across time — from the moment of their inception until the modern day — and promptbooks have become my primary artefacts. A promptbook offers a unique dual study: not only is one able to study the time in which the performance actually occurred, but also the play within the book and its origins. In turn, one is able to discover what people at other historical moments thought and wrote about Shakespeare. Shakespearean promptbooks, in this sense, always participate in the study of early modern theatre. By studying what was cut, added, substituted, rearranged, or reassigned in a performance of Shakespeare’s plays, we are studying the man, his work, and his infinite afterlives.

Alexandra E. LaGrand is a PhD Student in the Department of English at Texas A&M University.

Selected Bibliography.

King Lear. 1882. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., PROMPT Lear 25.

Shattuck, Charles H. The Shakespeare Promptbooks (Illinois, 1965).

10 June 2021.