Shakespeare’s Conditional Prompts

In Shakespeare, prompts and implied stage directions embedded in the dialogue appear frequently to have provided players with choices, generating ethical cruxes whereby actors possessed the agency to determine staging outcomes for themselves. Apart from providing players with choices, however, Shakespeare sometimes goes one step further than this by harnessing what this article terms ‘conditional prompts’ – prompts which specify an action which can or should be performed only in the event that some prior action has already been performed by another player. By conditionalizing prompts in this way, Shakespeare forces players in scenes from plays like Richard III, Julius Caesar, Edward III and The Taming of the Shrew to make ethically loaded decisions when the action stipulated in an implied stage directive is contingent upon the fulfilment of another prompt. As a way of multiplying the availability of potential staging outcomes, conditional prompts provide a valuable new insight into the sophistication of Shakespeare’s stagecraft, highlighting how he harnesses theatrical techniques in order to complicate the interpretative ethics of moments that pivot upon actorly choices.