by Shakespeare
So a modern audience would no doubt be surprised by the amount of formality involved in all types of Elizabethan acting. It might find the acting at times risible or grotesque. The fact that at the Globe and elsewhere so many plays were produced and acted so quickly, with as many as six plays in a single week, does suggest that there were elements of “shorthand” in the performance which the actors adopted quite naturally.
Improvisation was known as “thribbling.” The players would cluster, or confront one another, in traditional formal arrangements. There were orthodox ways of signalling love or hate, jealousy or distrust. The actor would find it perfectly natural to address the audience in aside or soliloquy, but in a formal rather than confidential or colloquial way. The great set speeches were recited rather than impersonated, and would have been accompanied by traditional gestures. The only general lighting effect was daylight, and so facial expressions would have been exaggerated and deliberate. The actor was advised to “looke directly in his fellowes face.”4 A spectator of Othello in 1610 recalled of Desdemona that “at last, lying on her bed, killed by her husband, she implored the pity of the spectators in her death with the face alone.”5 Yet all of these effects would have been accompanied at the Globe by soaring poetry and words so enthralling that they took the audience with wonder.
The other consideration must rest with the size of the audience, to be numbered in thousands rather than hundreds. There could be no attempt at intimacy. The action was vivid, strident and compelling. It is clear enough that some of the surviving texts are long, and that the actors would have spoken very quickly to compress the plot within two or even three hours. Action, too, was brisk as well as lively. Without the aid of artificial tools, their voices were open and full, their speech distinctive and resonant. The word “acting” itself derives from the behaviour of the orator, and some of those oratorical gifts were still required. That is why Richard Flecknoe stated that Burbage “had all the parts of an excellent orator (animating his words with speaking, and speech with action).”6 Burbage knew, for example, how to change the pitch or tone of his voice; he was trained to abbreviate or lengthen syllables to register the stress of emotion. His delivery itself may have been rhythmic or “musical,” distinctly at odds with the rhythms of contemporary speech. Shakespeare often uses the effect of very brief sentences, one after another, in a rhetorical device known as “stichomythia.” This required a highly theatricalised version of dialogue. There was no such thing as a “normal”voice in the Elizabethan theatre, and it is extremely unlikely that the modern tones of “dialogue” were ever heard upon its stage.
Action and gesture, as any orator knew, were as important as voice. The technique was known as “visible eloquence” or “eloquence of the body.” This encompassed “a gracious and bewitching kinde of action,”7 using the head, the hands and the body as part of the total performance. Much of the audience was not able to see the actor’s face, except occasionally, so the player was obliged to perform with his body. To lower the head was a form of modesty. To strike the forehead was a sign either of shame or admiration. Wreathed arms were a sign of contemplation. There was a frown of anger and a frown of love. Dejection of spirit was noted by the pulling down of the hat over the eyes. The hand in motion must travel from left to right. There were in fact fifty-nine different gestures of the hands, to signify various states ranging from indignation to disputation. Thus in Hamlet’s soliloquy he would have extended his right hand for “To be” and then the negative left hand for “or not to be”; he would bring them together in the deliberative mode for “that is the question.” Shylock would have his fists closed for the most important scenes. The physicality of the acting was an important – perhaps the most important – aspect of the total theatrical effect. As the classical physician Galen had taught the Elizabethans, there was a vital union between mind and body. It was believed that the four humours actually changed the body and the physiognomy; sorrow literally contracted the heart and congealed the blood. When an actor suddenly changed his dominant passion in a “reversal,” everything about him changed. It was an act of self-transcendence, associated with the legendary figure of Proteus, and an act of magic. It was believed also that the overflowing animal spirits of the actor could affect the spirits of the audience. To act meant to act upon the spectators. That is why the Puritans considered the playhouses to be such dangerous places.
We may speculate, then, that the acting of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did not represent a complete break with the conventions or the traditions of the theatre. A completely new or revolutionary style would have attracted adverse comment. Of course the audience was unlikely to be aware of any distinction between the “artificial” and the “real”; it could not have occurred to them to wonder, in these first days of the public theatre, whether a particular play was real or unreal. Whatever moved their passions was real enough. For the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, therefore, it was a question of adding new techniques and attitudes to the old ones. It was no doubt characterised by a mingling of formality and naturalism which would look decidedly odd in a modern theatre but might have been exciting or “realistic” for the late sixteenth-century audience. It is a combination that can never, and will never, be repeated.
CHAPTER 40
Bid Me Discourse,
I Will Inchaunt Thine Eare
It is interesting to contemplate Shakespeare as actor. At grammar 7 school he would have had some rudimentary training in oratory, and one educationalist described the requirement for schoolboys “to pronounce with pleasing and apt modulation, tempered with variety.”1 The emphasis was upon “sweete pronunciation” which, given Shakespeare’s general disposition and reputation, would seem to have been one of his attributes. Like his colleagues he must have possessed a truly phenomenal memory, having had to learn literally hundreds of parts. There was a section of rhetoric, taught at school, which dealt with precisely this matter. It was called mnemonics.
He remained an actor for more than twenty years, a longevity that required considerable energy and resilience. He knew that actors were recommended to exercise the body, to practise moderation in meat and drink, and to sing plainsong. He was originally taught to sing and to dance, possibly to play a musical instrument and to tumble like an acrobat. English actors were well known, on the continent, for their skills in “dancing and jumping”2 as well as music. They performed in English in such countries as Germany and Denmark, but they were still widely admired. English actors were generally believed to “excel all other in the worlde,”3 a statement that may be true still. Shakespeare was also taught how to wrestle. He learned to fence, too, in what were highly realistic bouts with rapier and dagger or broadsword. Actors were often trained at the fencing school of Rocco Bonetti, in Blackfriars, and Shakespeare may well have attended. There are a great many stage-fights in his plays; no other dramatist of the period used them so frequently or with such dramatic effect, which suggests some particular interest on his part. His audiences were in any case thoroughly acquainted with the art of fencing in all of its forms. It was an aspect of daily life. Most males above the age of eighteen would carry a dagger.
There has been endless speculation about the roles Shakespeare played, ranging from Caesar in Julius Caesar to the Friar in Romeo and Juliet, from Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida to Orsino in Twelfth Night. It has been suggested that he played the Chorus as well as the Friar in Romeo and Juliet and Egeon in The Comedy of Errors; he was Brabantio in Othello and Albany in King Lear. Theatrical legend has claimed over the centuries that he played the Ghost in Hamlet and the part of Adam, the aged retainer, in As You Like It. He is also presumed to have enjoyed “kingly” roles. It is supposed that he played the king in both parts of Henry IV. We can speculate that he was the monarch in Henry VI, King John, Henry IV and Cymbeline as well as the dukes of The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We may expect, then, an authoritative and even regal bearing with resonant voice. He seems also to have imperson
ated dignity and old age. There is a preoccupation with encroaching old age in the sonnets – was he exorcising his fear by acting it out? He is said to have played “a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person.”4 If the account is not wholly apocryphal, this would be Adam in As You Like It. These characters also have a tendency to be of, but somehow apart from, the action. One biographer has described it as a “blend of centrality and detachment,”5 which seems curiously like Shakespeare’s general bearing in the world. No doubt, in the process of composition, he had a pretty shrewd idea of what parts he himself would play.
He rarely played comic roles, and might have “doubled” two or three minor parts rather than the central or principal part. It is sometimes suggested that he would say the first line, or the last line, of the play: an attractive idea, but one that could not always have been possible. It does seem likely, however, that he took on the character of prologue and epilogue or chorus in those plays where they were introduced. In that sense he was what the French called the “orator” of the company, coming on stage at the beginning or end of the play to represent all of the players. This was the role of Moliere, the author and actor who most resembles Shakespeare, at the Palais-Royal Theatre. It has been said of Moliere that he “was all actor from his feet to his head; it seemed as though he had several voices; everything in him spoke; and by a step, a smile, a glance of the eye or the shaking of the head he suggested more things than the greatest talker could have said in an hour.”6 Given the difference in nationality and culture, this seems like an approximate description of Shakespeare himself.
It would also be sensible to suppose that Shakespeare played those roles in which he could simultaneously watch or “direct” the other actors in rehearsal, rather like the conductor of an orchestra. In many of the parts to which he has speculatively been assigned, he would remain on stage for much of the action. He may have choreographed the exits and the entrances, for example, and given a structure to the duelling scenes. Moliere was also considered to be a highly skilful trainer of other actors, and one colleague said that he could make a stick act. Perhaps Shakespeare had the same gift.
It is well enough known that the authors themselves did on occasions intervene. In the Induction to Cynthia’s Revels Jonson alludes to the author’s “presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the book-holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the music out of tune, and swear for every venial trespass we commit.” Shakespeare is unlikely to have sworn or stamped – Jonson himself is a much more likely candidate for that role – but as actor as well as author he is likely to have intervened in the first staging of his dramas.
There was a long theatrical tradition that Shakespeare instructed the actors in the performance of their parts. A chronicler of Sir William Davenant’s company of players, formed at the time of the Restoration, records that the part of Henry VIII in All Is True was “rightly and justly done by Mr. Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William, who had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself.” When Thomas Betterton also acted Hamlet, “Sir William (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shaksepear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it.”7 Stage traditions of this kind often contain more than a grain of truth.
There are conflicting reports about the quality of Shakespeare’s acting. John Aubrey reports that he “did act exceeding well,” and Henry Chettle described him as “excelent in the qualitie he professes.” Nicholas Rowe, on the other hand, believes that he was no “extraordinary” actor and that “the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet.”8 At the end of the seventeenth century it is reported that Shakespeare “as I have heard, was a much better Poet than Player.”9 Yet he was fully employed by the most important theatrical company of his generation, acting for more than twenty years in parts large and small. He must, if nothing else, have been a resourceful actor. The testimony of his contemporary, Henry Chettle, is perhaps the most accurate.
His progress through the ranks of the theatrical and literary world might have earned him barbs from his more envious contemporaries. A volume dedicated to the memory of Robert Greene contained an attack upon those who had “Eclipst his fame and Purloyned his Plumes.”10 A play of 1593 on the theme of Guy of Warwick has the following piece of dialogue. “I’ faith Sir I was born in England at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire … I have a fine finical name, I can tell ye, for my name is Sparrow … but I am a high mounting lofty minded Sparrow.”11 It may be coincidence, but it may not. “Sparrow” was close in pronunciation to “spear,” and was a slang word given to a lecher; sparrows were known for their lust. The Stratford man who calls himself a “bird of Venus”(the author of Venus and Adonis) has got his wife with child, and then abandoned her in Warwickshire. We may also recall the story of William the Conqueror coming before Richard Burbage. In a play of this period, too, Shakespeare is mildly lampooned as a character named Prickshafte. So there is a tendency, to put it no stronger, to associate Shakespeare with lustfulness.
He is also called “finical,” meaning finicky or fastidious, and we may recall Aubrey’s testimony that in Shoreditch Shakespeare would not be “debauched” with his colleagues. The reference here is to carousing or drinking, not to sexual misdemeanours, and so we gain a picture of a man given to lustfulness but fastidious in other particulars. By curious chance this consorts well with the imagery of the plays where there are plentiful references to bawdiness, but also evidence of a general sensitivity to unpleasant sights or smells.
Further suggestions of Shakespeare’s amorousness emerge in a curious doggerel poem, with a prose prologue, entitled Willobie His Avisa. It purports to be written by Henry Willobie, who was related by marriage to a friend of William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Russell, although the connection may be fortuitous. The poem concerns an innkeeper’s wife, Avisa, who is pursued by several extra-marital suitors. One of them, “H.W,” is helped by a friend named “W.S” or, in a punning reference, “Will.” The relevant portion of the text suggests that “W.S” was possessed by a similar passion. H.W
bewrayeth the secresy of his disease vnto his familiar frend W.S who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recouered of the like infection; yet finding his frend let bloud in the same vaine, he took pleasure for a tyme to see him bleed … for that he would now secretly laugh at his frends folly, that had giuen occasion not long before vnto others to laugh at his owne.
The writer continues: “in vewing a far off the course of this louing Comedy, he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, then it did for the old player.”12
It is one of those Elizabethan prose riddles that may admit to several meanings. One theory suggests that the innkeeper’s daughter is in fact an emblem for Elizabeth herself. But the essential situation, of “H.W.” and “W.S” in pursuit of the same young woman, is close enough to the plot of the “Dark Lady” sonnets to suggest parallels. “H.W.” may be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and “W.S” or “Will” or “the old player” may be Shakespeare. The suggestion of lustfulness, and of resulting venereal disease, is also part of the speculation. If there were a “true story” behind the sonnets, this passage would seem to confirm that “W.S” was not immune to the favours of young women. All must remain speculation, however, with the words of the poem’s preface that “there is some thing under these false names and showes that hath bene done truely”.
There were in this period the usual assaults upon Shakespeare’s propensity for plagiarism as well as amorousness. But the charge of plagiarism was formulaic, a ritualised insult in the world of the theatre. Imitation and borrowing were part of the craft of composition. It is the normal story of influence and gradual change. The great eighteenth-century phrenologist, Franz Jo
seph Gall, believed that the mental organ for robbery was the same as the organ for the formation of dramatic plots; this may be one explanation. It should also be remembered that as an actor Shakespeare was obliged to learn the lines of other dramatists, including those of Marlowe himself, and he may have reproduced them inadvertently. But he had no interest in inventing plots or incidents; for these he went to his multifarious sources, the narratives of which he borrowed wholesale. He would sometimes copy a source line by line, and even word for word, when he knew that he could not surpass it. His interest lay in reimagining events and characters.
But Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself. He was a self-plagiarist who reused phrases, scenes and situations. The phrase “go to thy cold bed and warm thee” occurs in both The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear, it is a small example, but it is indicative of how a particular set of words was retained in his memory over many years. In his late plays he can sometimes revert to an earlier style, as if all stages of his growth were still within him. He will use the same scenario – that, for example, of a father reading the purloined letter of a son – again and again. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona there are anticipations of scenes and events in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It. There are also many scenic and structural parallels between the plays; there are strong resemblances between As You Like It and King Lear, for example, as well as between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. That was how his imagination worked. It took on archetypal forms. In the process of imitating himself, however, he also revises himself; he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self-distillation.
