The prosperity of the actor caused many to adopt the calling. His vocation, we are told, was the most excellent one in the world for money, and therefore players grew as plentifully “as spawn of frogs in March.” It was open to the actor to buy shares in his theatre, and he could, by becoming a shareholder, attain the position of owner, and would, in Shakespeare’s theatre, as one of the King’s players, be provided from the royal wardrobe “with a cloak of bastard-scarlet and crimson velvet for the cape.” He could also term himself “gentleman,” a rank he was allowed to assume, and which he was very glad to adopt in defiance of the enemies of theatrical performances, who constantly taunted him, in the words of the old statute, with being “a rogue and a vagabond.” The popularity of the stage as a profession excited the envy of scholars and lawyers. They taunted the actor with his vanity in believing that his fame would descend to posterity. They blamed the public for affording these “glorious vagabonds” means to ride through the “gazing streets” in satin clothes attended by their pages, and for enabling those who had done no more than “mouth words that better wits had framed” to purchase lands and possess country houses. The actor retaliated by deriding the scholar’s poverty and ridiculing the lawyer’s use of bad Latin. They contended that it was better “to make a fool of the world than to be fooled of the world as you scholars are.” There is an anecdote related of Nathan Field which shows that actors did not underrate their own importance.
“Nathan Field, the player, being in company with a certain nobleman who was distantly related to him, the latter asked the reason why they spelt their names differently, the nobleman’s family speling it ‘Feild,’ and the player spelling it ‘Field’? ‘I cannot tell,’ answered the player, ‘except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew to spell.’” It would hardly have been agreeable to this tragedian to learn that he and his fellows, Shakespeare and Burbage, were “writ down” by the Master of His Majesty’s Revels as “players, jugglers, and such kind of creatures”; nor would Ben Jonson have felt flattered by the candid confession of an admirer who “could not understand how a poet could have so much principle.”
Most of the leading actors in Shakespeare’s theatre had their apprentices. A stage aspirant was often called upon to appear before the leading members of the company, and to give some proof of his talent. No little importance was attached to the youth’s appearance, to his command of facial expression, and to the sufficiency of his voice. If the young man’s talent lay in the direction of comedy, Kemp might address him after this manner: “Methinks you should belong to my tuition, and your face, methinks, would be good for a foolish mayor, or a foolish justice of peace.” Not seldom the efforts of novices to copy nature excited the derision of experts. Kemp, as a character in a play—“The Return from Parnassus” acted about 1601—says to Burbage: “It is a good sport in a part to see them never speak but at the end of the stage, just as though, in walking with a fellow, we should never speak but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where a man can go no further.” Besides having a good memory, an actor needed the gift of studying quickly. It is not generally known that the expression “to sleep on a part,” still in use among actors, was current in Shakespeare’s day; but we read in an old play of an actor, whose memory had failed him while acting his part, blaming the negligence of the man in charge of the stage: “It is all along of you. I could not get my part a night or two before to sleep upon it.” The prompter, or “bookholder,” as he was more often called, was not an unnecessary person on a “new day,” the first performance of a new play. He would have received many a warning to “hold the book well, that we be not non plus in the latter end of the play.” And Ben Jonson has given an amusing description of an additional supervision on the part of the author that was not of the actor’s seeking, “to have his presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the bookholder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the music out of tune, and sweat for every venal trespass we commit.” The members of a theatrical company being limited in number, it was often necessary for the impersonators of kings and heroes to represent very inferior characters in the same play, a circumstance to the advantage of the dramatist, who could thus obtain capable exponents for the parts of messengers and attendants, and was able, therefore, to “write up” these parts without fear of the author’s lines being mangled by incompetence, or made ridiculous by false pretension. Actors who doubled their parts wore the double cloak—a cloak that might be worn on either side. A turned cloak, with a false beard and a black or yellow peruke, supplied a ready, if not effectual, disguise.
Although the theatres were prosperous, their existence was often imperilled by the action of the city magnates, who forbad the acting of plays within their own jurisdiction. They viewed with annoyance the crowds that came from north and south to bring money to the playhouses, and they disliked the inducements these afforded to their sons and apprentices to neglect their occupations. No opportunity was lost by the Corporation of urging the Sovereign to abolish the theatres. The Puritans, also, if not influential at Court, were still potent in affecting public opinion against stage-plays, in the pulpit and by means of the Press; while playwrights were even more violently attacked by them than were the actors. The sonorous and majestic verse of the Elizabethan poets, that has become the pride of our country, appeared in the eyes of the “godly” but as an invention of Satan to entice the unwary into his “chapel.”
“Because the sweete numbers of Poetrie flowing in verse do wonderfully tickle the hearers eares, the devill hath tyed this to most of our playes, that whatsoever he would have sticke fast to our soules might slippe down in sugar by this intisement; for that which delighteth never troubleth our swallow. Thus when any matter of love is interlarded, though the thinge it selfe bee able to allure us, yet it is so sette out with sweetnes of wordes fitness of Epithites, with Metaphors, Alegories, Hyperboles, Amphibologies, Similitudes: with Phrases so pickt, so pure, so proper; with action so smothe, so lively, so wantō, that the poyson creeping on secretly without griefe chookes us at last and hurleth us downe in a dead sleepe.”
This vigorous opposition to the stage had its advantage. It kept managers alive to their responsibilities, and obliged them to maintain a high standard of work. The poets were called upon to justify the existence of playhouses, and to defend their own reputations, and in this they were triumphant. They showed that playwrights had followed the advice of Cicero, and could create a drama which was “the schoolmistress of life, the looking-glass of manners, and the image of truth.” They contended that in the theatre men were shown, as in a mirror, “their faults though ne’er so small.” Of Shakespeare’s comedies it was said, they are “so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, and all such dull and heavy-witted worldings, as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations have found that wit there that they never found in themselves, and have parted better-witted than they came.” Thomas Heywood contended that plays had made “the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English Chronicles, and what man have you now of that weak capacity that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded, even from William the Conqueror; nay, from the landing of Brute until this day.” Perhaps it was well for the public of Shakespeare’s day that it attached an educational value to the theatre, and consciously adopted an attitude of diffidence towards the labours of the dramatist. He was left free to teach as well as to amuse. If the amusement consisted in putting into the mouths of the clowns “unsavoury morsels of unseemly sentences,” the teaching consisted in making folly appear ridiculous and vice odious. So long as the dramatists were not hampered by demands from the audience to have its social, political, or æsthetic fancies humoured, and from the actor to have his egotism flattered, the drama flourished as an art as well as a business. But when managers began to consider the whims of their patrons, when the King’s Players petitioned the People’s Parliament for leave to continue their vocation because “they will not entertain any comedian that shall speak his part in a tone as if he did it in derision of some of the pious,” then the theatre ceased to be a looking-glass that could image life truthfully. Indeed, it cannot be doubted that if ever the drama shall again enlist the best talent of the time in its service it will be when the nation becomes conscious of the power of the stage, which is capable, as Bacon says, “of no small influence, both of discipline and corruption.”
II
THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE