Actually, rhetoric should be brought into the attack against affections:
Reason would become captive and servile, if eloquence of persuasions did not win the imagination from the affections’ part, and contract a confederacy between the reason and imagination against them.[16]
To infer conclusions about the details of Elizabethan acting from Elizabethan rhetoric is, as we have seen, highly conjectural. Yet, in the intellectual atmosphere of which rhetoric was a part, we can discern several attitudes that probably shaped acting. Detailed study was expended on the figures of eloquence and loving care was devoted to models of fine tropes. The oral rendition of these forms was left to the judgment of the individual, for the most part. The few expositions of delivery stress grace of expression and stirring of affections. But no thoroughly accepted conventions of voice and gesture seem to have existed. Thus, although rhetorical theory was conducive to the growth of formal and traditional acting, rhetorical delivery had not solidified sufficiently by 1610 to provide a systematic method. In seeking external forms for their conceits, the orator, and probably actor, still responded more to invention than tradition.
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.