Shakespeare

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.