Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609

by Bernard Beckerman

II. THE INFLUENCE OF THEATRICAL TRADITIONS UPON ELIZABETHAN ACTING

Although Elizabethan rhetorical tradition was essentially continental, Elizabethan theatrical tradition was largely native. For the better part of a century, troupes of four men and a boy had crisscrossed the English countryside, bringing plays to village and court. Though the Queen’s men, with twelve actors, at its formation in 1583 became the largest troupe, the smaller troupes continued to flourish. The English troupe that traveled to Denmark in 1586 numbered five men, and the various companies that are portrayed in Sir Thomas More, Histrio-mastix, and Hamlet all number either four or five. Naturally, when the theater became stabilized in London, increasingly so after 1575, the companies tended to grow larger. But periodic difficulties because of politics or plague caused frequent resort to the small troupe during the next twenty years.

Small companies required the actor to play several roles in one play. Cambises divides thirty-eight parts among eight men, with five of the men playing either six or seven parts each. Only the Vice had fewer than three parts. Horestes divides twenty-seven parts among five. Even actors of the larger companies had to play several roles. Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, presented by the twelve men of the Queen’s company, contained seventeen substantial roles, plus twenty-one for supernumeraries. This tradition of doubling gave the Elizabethan actor no opportunity to develop a specialty. He could not concentrate on a specific genre, for he was called upon to play courtly men and country men, villains and saints. Probably we should except the leading comic from this stricture. Usually he played fewer roles, and through the recurrence of the Vice figure and the practice of extemporal improvisation, he had the conditions necessary to the development of a distinctive type. But the other actors had to enact all sorts of roles. Unlike the Italian comedian who devoted himself to his forte, the Elizabethan tried to become flexible and varied in his abilities. It is evident that the attention of the actor had to be concentrated on telling the story, not developing the characters. Since the shift from one character to another necessitated some change in appearance or manner, readily discernible characteristics must have distinguished each type of part. As we shall see, this kind of acting was in harmony with the generic nature of Elizabethan characterization.

Systematic training of the popular players does not seem to have been the rule either. Stephen Gosson in Playes Confuted in five Actions (1582), describes three sources of recruitment:

Most of the Players have bene eyther men of occupations, which they have forsaken to lyve by playing, or common minstrels, or trayned up from theire childehood to this abhominable exercise.

But the latter group, for which we can reasonably assume careful training, does not seem to have supplied many actors to the professional companies before 1600. Of the six men in Leicester’s company we know the background only of James Burbage, who had been a carpenter by trade. Of the twelve in the Queen’s men, we know little more. John Dutton may have been a musician, since Lincoln’s Inn paid him for musicians in 1567–1568. Richard Tarleton, the renowned clown, tended swine, according to Fuller. But his fellow, Robert Wilson, asserted that he had been an apprentice waterbearer whose native wit led him to the stage.

When we come to the actors of the Globe company, the information is somewhat fuller. Shakespeare himself did not leave Stratford before 1584, when he was over twenty years of age, so that we can assume that he went from some craft or from a schoolhouse to the theater. Besides Shakespeare, there were thirteen other sharers in the company between 1599 and 1609: Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Richard Cowley, Richard Burbage, William Sly, Henry Condell, and Robert Armin, all members before 1603, and Laurence Fletcher, John Lowin, Alexander Cooke, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Goffe, all of whom became members after 1603. Of the antecedents of most of the members we know little. Thomas Pope had been one of the English players in Denmark and Germany in 1586–1587. Heminges, in his will, calls himself “citizen and grocer,” which may indicate that he, too, was an artisan turned player. Burbage presumably grew up in his father’s theater. While quite young, he appeared in the Seven Deadly Sins. Armin was said to have been an apprentice to a goldsmith. Condell is conjectured to have been the “Harry” of Seven Deadly Sins, but the identification is inconclusive. Thus, of the earlier group of actors, several seem to have come from the trades. In the later group of five, three may have been apprentice actors and one, Lowin, had been an apprentice goldsmith. Fletcher seems to have been connected with a troupe in Scotland. The evidence, inconclusive as it is, indicates that with the increased stability of the theater and the alteration in theatrical taste the source of actors shifted from adults to trained boys.

The ready transfer of a man from trade to stage in the early period argues that an elaborate training, at least at the beginning, was not expected. The ready conversion of the tradesmen into actors in Histrio-mastix (Sig. B1^r), once a poet has been secured, further demonstrates that the possession of a story, not the cultivation of a manner, was requisite. What the details of early acting may have been, we do not know. The conditions of training and the methods of recruitment, however, were not conducive to the development of precisely executed conventions.

The actual skills of the early Elizabethan actors can be inferred in part from references to various actors. Tarleton and Robert Wilson were commended for their “extemporall wit.” In letters dealing with English players on the Continent in the 1580’s, acting is always linked with dancing, vaulting and tumbling. Thomas Pope and George Bryan, a Lord Chamberlain’s man until the end of 1597, were among the five “instrumentister och springere” at the Danish court in 1586. These scattered allusions reinforce the opinion that simple characterization, rude playing, native wit, and physical vigor were the qualities of the early actor.

We must turn to the plays presented by the public companies before 1595 to round out the picture of the theatrical tradition. Character was not fully developed in the popular theater until Marlowe. Before his plays appeared, character had been barely differentiated from generic types, such as kings, vices, rustics, tyrants, etc. A word is necessary about generic types. Each of the generic types arises from a social class, and the characters within each type reflect their class. Differences between generic characters of the same type are not as great as similarities. Some distinctive habits of thought and behavior cluster about each type, but these are never rigidly fixed. Simple representatives of the generic type are the merchant and the potecary in John Heywood’s interludes of The Weather and The Four PP. respectively. The generic type differs from the stock figure partly in source but mainly in definition. The stock figure tends to coalesce into a single perfect representative of each type: a Scapin, a Columbine, a Harlequin. The generic type encourages multiplicity. The stock figure, such as the doctor from Bologna, often has a regional origin. From the region of his birth he usually derives physical or social idiosyncracies, for example, a dialect, an item of apparel, or a distinctive manner. As the stock figure develops, additional external features become attached to him. Certain bits of stage business, quirks of personality, modes of dress, and style of playing, become his trade-marks. But the generic character seldom becomes fixed and traditional. Instead, he constantly undergoes change according to the demands of the story.

The early popular plays definitely show that the actors were used to playing generic characters. Thus, they were able to concentrate on the story, the sentiment, and the sententiousness of their plays. In limited ways they relied on dress to identify types of characters. Alan Downer has shown that there was some symbolism in costume. Hotson has traced the evolution of a distinctive garment for the Elizabethan “natural.”[17] Henslowe lists certain costumes which were probably generic or symbolic. But features of dress remained generalized rather than becoming attached to a stock type. Whether habits of carriage or gesture corresponded with types of roles, we do not know. But it is certain, as we found in our study of rhetoric, that no traditional, systematic scheme of vocal and physical conventions developed.

Actually, in a rudimentary way, the early plays show tendencies toward the kind of structure described in the [chapter on dramaturgy]. In Cambises, it is not the discovery or death of Sisamnes which occupies our attention, but the responses of the son, Otian, to his father’s execution. Affective display and rhetorical pronouncement occupied the center of the stage. Some time ago, Albert Walker demonstrated that the methods for expression of emotions in the pre-Shakespearean plays can be found in Shakespeare’s plays.[18] Many of the ways of portraying grief, joy, anger, rage, could be and were handed down from one theatrical generation to another. For the actor, the projection of grief in the following speeches would not be very different in each case.

Otian. O father dear, these words to hear

—that you must die by force—

Bedews my cheeks with stilled tears.

The king hath no remorse.

The grievous griefs, and strained sighs

My heart doth break in twain,

And I deplore, most woeful child, that I

should see you slain.

[Cambises, 445-448]

Neronis. Ah wofull sight, what is alas, with these mine eyes beheld,

That to my loving Knight belongd, I view the Golden Sheeld:

Ah heavens, this Herse doth signifie my Knight is slaine,

Ah death no longer do delay, but rid the lives of twaine:

Heart, hand, and everie sence prepare, unto the Hearse draw nie:

And thereupon submit your selves, disdaine not for to die

With him that was your mistresse ioy, her life and death like case,

And well I know in seeking me, he did his end embrace.

[Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 1532–1539]

Aga. What greater griefe had mournful Priamus,

Then that he liv’d to see his Hector die,

His citie burnt downe by revenging flames,

And poor Polites slaine before his face?

Aga, thy griefe is matchable to his,

For I have liv’d to see my soveraignes death,

Yet glad that I must breath my last with him.

[Selimus, 1863–1869]

Queen. A sweet children, when I am at rest my nightly

dreames are dreadful. Me thinks as I lie in my

bed, I see the league broken which was sworne at

the death of your kingly father, tis this my

children and many other causes of like importance,

that makes your aged mother to lament as she doth.

[The True Tragedy of King Richard III, 802-807]

Essentially the actors were provided with methods for making emotion explicit. In the first three illustrations the characters name their emotions outright, in the last the Queen describes it. Descriptions of external manifestations of grief, such as “strained sighs,” and apostrophe, either to another (“O father dear”) or to oneself (“Aga, thy griefe”) or to abstract properties (“Ah wofull sight”), or to divinity (“Ah heavens, Ah death”) are common. The later plays were subtler in the depiction of emotion. In Selimus, the similarity of his state to that of Priam conveys the overwhelming grief of Aga. In The True Tragedy, the Queen expresses the grief of the moment through the terror of a dream. By utilizing these various methods for years, the actor had become familiar with openly rendering the character’s emotion. Furthermore, the quality of the emotion was not highly differentiated. In force and depth, the grief for the loss of a loved or revered one, in each of the instances cited, is fundamentally the same.

One major development in the acting conditions must be noted. In the plays of the 1560’s and 1570’s the verse was regular and conventional. The galloping fourteener left little opportunity for nuance. The rhythm and accent of the verse in Cambises, for example, intruded upon the character. It erected a barrier to the immediate impact of emotion upon the auditor. The actor who rendered such verse was encouraged in the conventional expression of emotion and the reliance upon rhythmic sweep for his success.

In the 1580’s the verse became suppler. Rhyme was abandoned, rhythm because subtler and more varied. The total effect was less stentorian and more lyrical. It was possible to utilize the superior advantages of poetic drama without the artificiality to which it is liable. For the actor the change tore down a veil. Character portrayal could be more vivid. Contact between actor and actor was easier to achieve. In a word, the actor was able to make events more “real.” At the same time, he had a more difficult task in rendering speech. Whether or not this change led to a realistic style of acting will be discussed in connection with the Globe plays. To these plays the early actor contributed experience in playing all kinds of roles before all kinds of audiences, portraying generic types through conventional means, emoting in extravagant and conventional fashion, speaking verse with vigor and sweep, and performing in the peripheral arts of dancing, tumbling, and vaulting. The picture he presents is of a rough-and-ready trouper, not a sophisticated and refined artist.