Page images
PDF
EPUB

then in being at first in a very mean rank.' William Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor. Malone recorded

in 1780 a stage tradition 'that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter's attendant' or call-boy. His intellectual capacity and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers were probably soon recognised, and thenceforth his promotion was assured.

By an Act

Shakespeare's earliest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his histrionic fame, he remained a prominent member of the actor's profession till near the end of his life. of Parliament of 1571 (14 Eliz. cap. 2), which was reenacted in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4), players were under the necessity of procuring a license to pursue their calling from a peer of the realm or 'personage of higher degree'; otherwise they were adjudged to be of the status of rogues and vagabonds. The Queen herself and many Elizabethan peers were liberal in the exercise of their licensing powers, and few actors failed to secure a statutory license, which gave them a rank of respectability, and relieved them of all risk of identification with vagrants or 'sturdy beggars.' From an early period in Elizabeth's reign licensed actors were organised into permanent companies. In 1587 and following years, besides three companies of duly licensed boy-actors that were formed from the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Chapel Royal and from Westminster scholars, there were in London at least six com-. panies of fully licensed adult actors; five of these were called after the noblemen to whom their members respectively owed their licenses (viz. the Earls of Leicester, Oxford, Sussex, and Worcester, and the Lord Admiral, Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham), and one of them whose actors derived their license from the Queen was called the Queen's Company.

The patron's functions in relation to the companies seem to have been mainly confined to the grant or renewal of the actors' licenses. Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each company's history. But there seems no doubt that the most influential of the companies named - that under the

The acting

com

panies.

nominal patronage of the Earl of Leicester- passed on his death in September 1588 to the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on September 25, 1592. When the Earl of Derby died on April 16, 1594, his place as patron and licenser was sucCompany. cessively filled by Henry Carey, first lord Hunsdon, Lord

The Lord Chamberlain's

A member of the Lord

Chamberlain's.

The

London theatres.

Chamberlain (d. July 23, 1596), and by his son and heir, George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became Lord Chamberlain in March 1597. After King James's succession in May 1603 the company was promoted to be the King's players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it fully maintained the supremacy which, under its successive titles, it had already long enjoyed.

It is fair to infer that this was the company that Shakespeare originally joined and adhered to through life. Documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it in December 1594; in May 1603 he was one of its leaders. Four of its chief members - Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic actor of the day, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips-were among Shakespeare's lifelong friends. Under this company's auspices, moreover, Shakespeare's plays first saw the light. Only two of the plays claimed for him-'Titus Andronicus' and '3 Henry VI'

seem to have been performed by other companies (the Earl of Sussex's men in the one case, and the Earl of Pembroke's in the other).

was near

When Shakespeare became a member of the company it was doubtless performing at The Theatre, the playhouse in Shoreditch which James Burbage, the father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, had constructed in 1576; it abutted on the Finsbury Fields, and stood outside the City's boundaries. The only other London playhouse then in existence - the Curtain in Moorfields. at hand; its name survives in Curtain Road, Shoreditch. But at an early date in his acting career Shakespeare's company sought and found new quarters. While known as Lord Strange's men, they opened on February 19, 1592, a third London theatre called the Rose, which Philip Henslowe, the speculative theatrical manager, had erected on the Bankside, Southwark. At the date of the inauguration of the Rose Theatre Shakespeare's company was temporarily allied with another company, the Admiral's men, who numbered the great actor Edward Alleyn among them.

Alleyn for a few months undertook the direction of the amalgamated companies, but they quickly parted, and no further opportunity was offered Shakespeare of enjoying professional relations with Alleyn. The Rose Theatre was doubtless the earliest scene of Shakespeare's pronounced successes alike as actor and dramatist. Subsequently for a short time in 1594 he frequented the stage of another new theatre at Newington Butts, and between 1595 and 1599 the older stages of the Curtain and of The Theatre in Shoreditch. The Curtain remained open till the Civil Wars, although its vogue after 1600 was eclipsed by that of younger rivals. In 1599 Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert demolished the old building of The Theatre and built, mainly out of the materials of the dismantled fabric, the famous theatre called the Globe on the Bankside. It was octagonal in shape, and built of wood, and doubtless Shakespeare described it (rather than the Curtain) as 'this wooden O' in the opening chorus of 'Henry V' (l. 13). After 1599 the Globe was mainly occupied by Shakespeare's company, and in its profits he acquired an important share. From the date of its inauguration until the poet's retirement, the Globe-which quickly won the first place among London theatres seems to have been the sole playhouse with which Shakespeare was professionally associated. The equally familiar Blackfriars Theatre, which was created out of a dwelling-house by James Burbage, the actor's father, at the end of 1596, was for many years afterwards leased out to the company of boy-actors known as 'the Queen's children of the Chapel;' it was not occupied by Shakespeare's company until December 1609 or January 1610, when his acting days were nearing their end. The site of the Blackfriars Theatre is now occupied by the offices of the 'Times' newspaper in Queen Victoria Street, E.C.

in London.

In London Shakespeare resided near the theatres. Place of According to a memorandum by Alleyn (which Malone residence quoted), he lodged in 1596 near 'the Bear Garden in Southwark.' In 1598 one William Shakespeare, who was assessed by the collectors of a subsidy in the sum of 13s. 4d. upon goods valued at 5., was a resident in St. Helen's parish, Bishopsgate, but it is not certain that this tax-payer was the dramatist.

The chief differences between the methods of theatrical

Actors' provincial

tours.

representation in Shakespeare's day and our own lay in the
fact that neither scenery nor women-actors were known
to the Elizabethan stage. All female rôles were, until the
Restoration in 1660, assumed in the public theatres by
men or boys. Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of
men or boys in women's parts when he makes Rosalind,
in the epilogue to 'As you like it,' say laughingly to the
men of the audience, 'If I were a woman, I would kiss as
many of you as had beards.' Similarly, Cleopatra on her
downfall in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' v. ii. 220 seq., laments:
the quick comedians
and I shall see

Extemporally will stage us
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.

Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks. In
'Midsummer Night's Dream' (1. ii. 53), Flute is bidden by
Quince play Thisbe 'in a mask.' Similarly in Shakespeare's
day the public stages were bare of any scenic contrivance ex-
cept a front curtain opening in the middle and a balcony or
upper platform resting on pillars at the back of the stage;
from this balcony portions of the dialogue were sometimes
spoken, but occasionally it seems to have been occupied by
spectators. Sir Philip Sidney humorously described the
spectator's difficulties in an Elizabethan playhouse, where,
owing to the absence of stage scenery, he had to imagine
the bare boards to present in rapid succession a garden, a
rocky coast, a cave, and a battlefield ('Apologie for Poetrie,'
p. 52). The absence of scenery, coupled with the substitu-
tion of boys for women, implies that the skill needed, on the
part of actors, to rouse in the audience the requisite illusions
was far greater in Shakespeare's day than at later periods.

Although the scenic principles of the theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries widely differed from those of the theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the professional customs of Elizabethan actors approximated in many respects more closely to those of their modern successors than is usually recognised. The practice of touring in the provinces was followed with even greater regularity then than now. Few companies remained in London during the summer or early autumn, and every country town with two thousand or more inhabitants could reckon on at least one visit from travelling actors between May and October. A rapid examination of the extant archives of some

seventy municipalities selected at random shows that Shakespeare's company between 1594 and 1614 frequently performed in such towns as Barnstaple, Bath, Bristol, ShakeCoventry, Dover, Faversham, Folkestone, Hythe, Leicester, speare's alleged Maidstone, Marlborough, New Romney, Oxford, Rye in travels. Sussex, Saffron Walden, and Shrewsbury. Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling all his professional functions, and some of the references to travel in his sonnets were doubtless reminiscences of early acting tours. It has been repeatedly urged, moreover, that Shakespeare's In Scotcompany visited Scotland, and that he went with it. November 1599 English actors arrived in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher and one Martin, and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the king. Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but is not known to have been one earlier. Shakespeare's company never included an actor named Martin. Fletcher repeated the visit in October 1601. There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shakespeare's company. In like manner, Shakespeare's accurate reference in 'Macbeth' to the 'nimble' but 'sweet' climate of Inver

ness

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses (Macbeth, I. vi. 1–6) —

In land.

and the vivid impression the dramatist conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths, have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience; but the passages in question, into which a more definite significance has possibly been read than Shakespeare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and the theatres after James I's accession.

A few English actors in Shakespeare's day occasionally combined to make professional tours through foreign lands, where Court society invariably gave them a hospitable reception. In Denmark, Germany, Austria, Holland, and France, many dramatic performances were given before royal audiences by English actors between 1580 and 1630. That Shakespeare joined any of these expeditions is highly improbable. Actors of small account at home mainly took part in them, and Shakespeare's name appears in no extant list of those who paid professional visits abroad. It is, in fact, unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot on the

« PreviousContinue »