Shakespeare

The other consideration must rest with the size of the audience, to be numbered in thousands rather than hundreds. There could be no attempt at intimacy. The action was vivid, strident and compelling. It is clear enough that some of the surviving texts are long, and that the actors would have spoken very quickly to compress the plot within two or even three hours. Action, too, was brisk as well as lively. Without the aid of artificial tools, their voices were open and full, their speech distinctive and resonant. The word “acting” itself derives from the behaviour of the orator, and some of those oratorical gifts were still required. That is why Richard Flecknoe stated that Burbage “had all the parts of an excellent orator (animating his words with speaking, and speech with action).”⁶ Burbage knew, for example, how to change the pitch or tone of his voice; he was trained to abbreviate or lengthen syllables to register the stress of emotion. His delivery itself may have been rhythmic or “musical,” distinctly at odds with the rhythms of contemporary speech. Shakespeare often uses the effect of very brief sentences, one after another, in a rhetorical device known as “stichomythia.” This required a highly theatricalised version of dialogue. There was no such thing as a “normal”voice in the Elizabethan theatre, and it is extremely unlikely that the modern tones of “dialogue” were ever heard upon its stage.

Action and gesture, as any orator knew, were as important as voice. The technique was known as “visible eloquence” or “eloquence of the body.” This encompassed “a gracious and bewitching kinde of action,”⁷ using the head, the hands and the body as part of the total performance. Much of the audience was not able to see the actor’s face, except occasionally, so the player was obliged to perform with his body. To lower the head was a form of modesty. To strike the forehead was a sign either of shame or admiration. Wreathed arms were a sign of contemplation. There was a frown of anger and a frown of love. Dejection of spirit was noted by the pulling down of the hat over the eyes. The hand in motion must travel from left to right. There were in fact fifty-nine different gestures of the hands, to signify various states ranging from indignation to disputation. Thus in Hamlet’s soliloquy he would have extended his right hand for “To be” and then the negative left hand for “or not to be”; he would bring them together in the deliberative mode for “that is the question.” Shylock would have his fists closed for the most important scenes. The physicality of the acting was an important – perhaps the most important – aspect of the total theatrical effect. As the classical physician Galen had taught the Elizabethans, there was a vital union between mind and body. It was believed that the four humours actually changed the body and the physiognomy; sorrow literally contracted the heart and congealed the blood. When an actor suddenly changed his dominant passion in a “reversal,” everything about him changed. It was an act of self-transcendence, associated with the legendary figure of Proteus, and an act of magic. It was believed also that the overflowing animal spirits of the actor could affect the spirits of the audience. To act meant to act upon the spectators. That is why the Puritans considered the playhouses to be such dangerous places.

We may speculate, then, that the acting of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did not represent a complete break with the conventions or the traditions of the theatre. A completely new or revolutionary style would have attracted adverse comment. Of course the audience was unlikely to be aware of any distinction between the “artificial” and the “real”; it could not have occurred to them to wonder, in these first days of the public theatre, whether a particular play was real or unreal. Whatever moved their passions was real enough. For the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, therefore, it was a question of adding new techniques and attitudes to the old ones. It was no doubt characterised by a mingling of formality and naturalism which would look decidedly odd in a modern theatre but might have been exciting or “realistic” for the late sixteenth-century audience. It is a combination that can never, and will never, be repeated.

CHAPTER 40 Bid Me Discourse, I Will Inchaunt Thine Eare