Shakespeare (38 page)

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 impersonated 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

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 Joseph 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.

T
he Lord Chamberlain’s Men
began performing in June 1594, but before that date Shakespeare had completed his second long narrative poem.
The Rape of Lucrece
may have been written at Titchfield, while the writer was working under the auspices of the Earl of Southampton, and it is in any case dedicated to the young earl in effusive terms. “The loue I dedicate to your Lordship,” Shakespeare writes, “is without end.” He goes on to claim that “what I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours.” What he had “done” was to compose a poem on the rape of Lucrece, the wife of Collatine, by Sextus Tarquinius. The mythical event is dated 509 BC, and has been used as an explanation for the rise of the Roman Republic. Shakespeare obtained his theme from the
Fasti
of Ovid and from the Roman history of Livy. They were standard grammar-school texts with which he was well acquainted. There is no direct copying of Ovid’s Latin, however. He takes the plot but not the poetry. This suggests one method by which he worked. He took up a copy of the
Fasti
, read it quickly, and then put it down without further reference to it. He needed only the raw materials to excite his imagination.

The history is not, however, what interests the poet. Shakespeare is concerned with the play of feeling between the two protagonists, as Tarquin prepares himself to rape the lady and then, after the deed, slinks away. The poem is chiefly remarkable for Lucrece’s sorrowful meditations after the event, in
the course of which she determines to kill herself in front of her husband. The energy and fluency of Shakespeare’s verse are again immediately apparent. The poem, like his drama, begins
in medias res
with a rushing speed and it maintains its dramatic momentum throughout. He even introduces the word “Actor” into the proceedings. Shakespeare renders everything instinct with palpitating life.
The Rape of Lucrece
is extravagant in diction, elaborate in cadence, filled with paradoxes and oppositions, epithets and exclamations, conceits and images; it has a vaunting rhythm and an arresting rhyme-scheme. It is, in other words, a high-spirited performance in which Shakespeare displays all of his excitement and eloquence. Once more the pleasure of the reader is equalled only by the pleasure of the writer.