Shakespeare

It is interesting to contemplate Shakespeare as actor. At grammar 7 school he would have had some rudimentary training in oratory, and one educationalist described the requirement for schoolboys “to pronounce with pleasing and apt modulation, tempered with variety.”¹ The emphasis was upon “sweete pronunciation” which, given Shakespeare’s general disposition and reputation, would seem to have been one of his attributes. Like his colleagues he must have possessed a truly phenomenal memory, having had to learn literally hundreds of parts. There was a section of rhetoric, taught at school, which dealt with precisely this matter. It was called mnemonics.

He remained an actor for more than twenty years, a longevity that required considerable energy and resilience. He knew that actors were recommended to exercise the body, to practise moderation in meat and drink, and to sing plainsong. He was originally taught to sing and to dance, possibly to play a musical instrument and to tumble like an acrobat. English actors were well known, on the continent, for their skills in “dancing and jumping”² as well as music. They performed in English in such countries as Germany and Denmark, but they were still widely admired. English actors were generally believed to “excel all other in the worlde,”³ a statement that may be true still. Shakespeare was also taught how to wrestle. He learned to fence, too, in what were highly realistic bouts with rapier and dagger or broadsword. Actors were often trained at the fencing school of Rocco Bonetti, in Blackfriars, and Shakespeare may well have attended. There are a great many stage-fights in his plays; no other dramatist of the period used them so frequently or with such dramatic effect, which suggests some particular interest on his part. His audiences were in any case thoroughly acquainted with the art of fencing in all of its forms. It was an aspect of daily life. Most males above the age of eighteen would carry a dagger.

There has been endless speculation about the roles Shakespeare played, ranging from Caesar in Julius Caesar to the Friar in Romeo and Juliet, from Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida to Orsino in Twelfth Night. It has been suggested that he played the Chorus as well as the Friar in Romeo and Juliet and Egeon in The Comedy of Errors; he was Brabantio in Othello and Albany in King Lear. Theatrical legend has claimed over the centuries that he played the Ghost in Hamlet and the part of Adam, the aged retainer, in As You Like It. He is also presumed to have enjoyed “kingly” roles. It is supposed that he played the king in both parts of Henry IV. We can speculate that he was the monarch in Henry VI, King John, Henry IV and Cymbeline as well as the dukes of The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We may expect, then, an authoritative and even regal bearing with resonant voice. He seems also to have impersonated dignity and old age. There is a preoccupation with encroaching old age in the sonnets – was he exorcising his fear by acting it out? He is said to have played “a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person.”⁴ If the account is not wholly apocryphal, this would be Adam in As You Like It. These characters also have a tendency to be of, but somehow apart from, the action. One biographer has described it as a “blend of centrality and detachment,”⁵ which seems curiously like Shakespeare’s general bearing in the world. No doubt, in the process of composition, he had a pretty shrewd idea of what parts he himself would play.

He rarely played comic roles, and might have “doubled” two or three minor parts rather than the central or principal part. It is sometimes suggested that he would say the first line, or the last line, of the play: an attractive idea, but one that could not always have been possible. It does seem likely, however, that he took on the character of prologue and epilogue or chorus in those plays where they were introduced. In that sense he was what the French called the “orator” of the company, coming on stage at the beginning or end of the play to represent all of the players. This was the role of Moliere, the author and actor who most resembles Shakespeare, at the Palais-Royal Theatre. It has been said of Moliere that he “was all actor from his feet to his head; it seemed as though he had several voices; everything in him spoke; and by a step, a smile, a glance of the eye or the shaking of the head he suggested more things than the greatest talker could have said in an hour.”⁶ Given the difference in nationality and culture, this seems like an approximate description of Shakespeare himself.