Shakespeare (37 page)

It was a society of friends and colleagues, in other words, with common interests and common obligations. It was an extended family, with the actors living in the same neighbourhood. The actors married into one another’s immediate families, too, uniting with various sisters, daughters and widows. In their wills they left money, and various tokens, to one another. It was a family that played together and stayed together. They were “ffellowes,” to use the word they themselves employed.

They were also zealous and industrious. Alone among the companies of the period the Lord Chamberlain’s Men avoided serious trouble with the civic authorities and stayed out of prison. When one contemporary satirist exonerated certain actors from his aspersions, calling them “sober, discreet, properly learned honest householders and citizens well thought of among
their neighbours at home,”
³
it was of just such men as Shakespeare and Heminges that he was writing. In a volume entitled
Historia Histrionica
they are described as “Men of grave and sober Behaviour.”
⁴
More than any other company of their generation they helped to elevate the status of actor beyond that of the vagabond and the acrobat.

T
he actual nature
of their acting is still not fully understood. There is some argument, for example, over the rival claims of traditionalism and realism in the Elizabethan theatre. Did the actors rely upon formal techniques of oratory and gesture or were they exploiting a new vein of naturalism in their movement and their delivery? The published reports of Burbage, for example, tend to emphasise his naturalness and fluency. His method was described as “personation,” and was deemed to be the way of projecting an individual character “to the life” or “with lively action.” It was a way of “counterfeiting” passions that avoided what was known as “pantomimick action”.

Shakespeare often alludes to what was clearly considered to be an old-fashioned style of acting—when actors sawed the air with their arms, stamped upon the stage, interrupted their speeches with sighs, and rolled their eyes to signify fear. The old mode of walking across the stage was strutting. The word “ham,” used as a description of bad acting, comes from the visibility of the ham-string of the leg. Strutting was apparently accompanied by ranting. It is what Thomas Nashe described as “ruff raff roaring, with thwick, thwack, thirlery bouncing.”
¹

Burbage’s style could then be described as a drift away from external symbolism towards imitation. In an earlier period the essential purpose of the actor had been to represent passion; it seems likely that Burbage and his colleagues
had initiated or exploited a style of acting in which the player tried to feel or express that passion. This new emphasis can be identified with the new role of individualism in social and political life, displacing any sense of symbolic or divinely appointed hierarchy.

It may well be that some new art of emotive or emotional action, employed by Burbage and his colleagues, would help to explain the impact of Shakespeare’s plays upon his contemporaries. He may have written in a new “inward” style precisely because there were players who could readily create such effects. Shakespeare differs from his predecessors in the amount of self-awareness that his characters possess. This, too, may have been a consequence of a new style of acting. Yet it should also be remembered that the company performed many plays other than those of Shakespeare, plays that were written to accord with more conventional styles of action and gesticulation.

Of course the definition of what is “natural” changes with every generation. In the sixteenth century there were “Marks, or Rules, to fix the Standards of what is
Natural.”
²
All that can be said with any precision of Shakespeare, in this respect, is that he understood the technical language of the psychology of his period. It was required of actors, in the words of a contemporary dramatist, to “frame each person” so that “you may his nature rightly know.”
³
By “nature” he meant the dominant humour, sanguine or phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic, which in turn would seem to require some traditional representation. The aim of the sixteenth-century actor was to impersonate a specific passion or range of passions as they impinged upon an individual temperament; the majority of characters and situations on the Elizabethan stage, for example, are concerned with the tension between reason and passion in human behaviour with all its potentially comic or tragic consequences. It was also important for the actor to be able to enact “reversals” or “transitions” in which one passion suddenly gave way to another. The actors played a part, and not a character. That was why the art of “doubling” had become so important, and why boy actors were perfectly acceptable in female roles; the spectators were aware of the difference in sex, but they were more concerned with the action and the story. That is why there is very little, if any, “motivation” or “development” in a modern sense. Why is Iago malicious? Why did Lear divide his kingdom? Why is Leontes jealous? These are not questions to be asked. There was no appetite for realism as it is presently understood, which is why Shakespeare was able to set his plays in distant and enchanted places with no loss of power.

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.

I
t 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.