Studying one's part preceded meeting for the full rehearsal of a given play, limited as the latter activity may have been in the English theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Extended rehearsal periods under the supervision of a director developed only in the later nineteeth-century theatre, and even then they were something of a luxury. Up to the middle of the last century actors in ‘weekly rep’, or even at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, did not see much rehearsal time: they were hired to play a range of parts in existing plays, and were expected to know the main framework into which they were to fit. Searching and original work on text and character simultaneously with attention to an ensemble style, overseen by one guiding artistic intelligence, the kind of approach practised at the Royal Shakespeare Company, for example, from about 1960 onwards, stems from such experimental nineteenth-century practice as that pioneered by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and, notably, Konstantin Stanislavski.