5 - Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2019
Summary
I have never been nervous before a lecture, a broadcast, or a performance. My wife thinks I am abnormal. Personally, I think it is more to do with being in control of what is about to happen. If you have prepared properly, then what is there to be nervous about? I know many actors would disagree. Maybe I'm just lucky. But when you have prepared something for other people to perform, and you are suddenly completely out of control, that, it seems, is a different matter. As I left the Green Room before the first performance, I felt something in the pit of my stomach I did not recognize. I reported it to Hilary, and she recognized the symptoms immediately. ‘Butterflies’, she called them. So that's what butterflies feel like, I thought. I had only known the cast a few weeks, had hardly exchanged a hundred non-Shakespearian words with most of them, and yet I felt for them as if they were my children.
There was a real atmosphere of expectation as the audience gathered. I was curious to see who would be there. Would it be all scholars and Shakespeare buffs? No, it seemed a typical Globe audience, with an across the- board age range, teachers and students, families, business parties, enthusiasts, Japanese tourists, Americans … Some – as I learned in the talkback session – were unaware there was to be anything special about the performance that night until they arrived, or if they had known they had forgotten. At the same time, there was a definite presence of people who had come specifically to hear the OP. The Friends of Shakespeare's Globe were out in force. I also recognized a couple of university faces, and a few actors. There were people with an interest in Early English music. I knew a group from the Lute Society was coming on the Sunday, interested in the extent to which their musicology and my linguistics would overlap, but there were lutenists present on the Friday too.
I wandered around the yard eavesdropping on conversations. The OP was a definite talking point.
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- Information
- Pronouncing ShakespeareThe Globe Experiment, pp. 133 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019