Shakespeare

It would also be sensible to suppose that Shakespeare played those roles in which he could simultaneously watch or “direct” the other actors in rehearsal, rather like the conductor of an orchestra. In many of the parts to which he has speculatively been assigned, he would remain on stage for much of the action. He may have choreographed the exits and the entrances, for example, and given a structure to the duelling scenes. Moliere was also considered to be a highly skilful trainer of other actors, and one colleague said that he could make a stick act. Perhaps Shakespeare had the same gift.

It is well enough known that the authors themselves did on occasions intervene. In the Induction to Cynthia’s Revels Jonson alludes to the author’s “presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the book-holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the music out of tune, and swear for every venial trespass we commit.” Shakespeare is unlikely to have sworn or stamped – Jonson himself is a much more likely candidate for that role – but as actor as well as author he is likely to have intervened in the first staging of his dramas.

There was a long theatrical tradition that Shakespeare instructed the actors in the performance of their parts. A chronicler of Sir William Davenant’s company of players, formed at the time of the Restoration, records that the part of Henry VIII in All Is True was “rightly and justly done by Mr. Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William, who had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself.” When Thomas Betterton also acted Hamlet, “Sir William (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shaksepear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it.”⁷ Stage traditions of this kind often contain more than a grain of truth.

There are conflicting reports about the quality of Shakespeare’s acting. John Aubrey reports that he “did act exceeding well,” and Henry Chettle described him as “excelent in the qualitie he professes.” Nicholas Rowe, on the other hand, believes that he was no “extraordinary” actor and that “the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet.”⁸ At the end of the seventeenth century it is reported that Shakespeare “as I have heard, was a much better Poet than Player.”⁹ Yet he was fully employed by the most important theatrical company of his generation, acting for more than twenty years in parts large and small. He must, if nothing else, have been a resourceful actor. The testimony of his contemporary, Henry Chettle, is perhaps the most accurate.

His progress through the ranks of the theatrical and literary world might have earned him barbs from his more envious contemporaries. A volume dedicated to the memory of Robert Greene contained an attack upon those who had “Eclipst his fame and Purloyned his Plumes.”¹⁰ A play of 1593 on the theme of Guy of Warwick has the following piece of dialogue. “I’ faith Sir I was born in England at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire … I have a fine finical name, I can tell ye, for my name is Sparrow … but I am a high mounting lofty minded Sparrow.”¹¹ It may be coincidence, but it may not. “Sparrow” was close in pronunciation to “spear,” and was a slang word given to a lecher; sparrows were known for their lust. The Stratford man who calls himself a “bird of Venus”(the author of Venus and Adonis) has got his wife with child, and then abandoned her in Warwickshire. We may also recall the story of William the Conqueror coming before Richard Burbage. In a play of this period, too, Shakespeare is mildly lampooned as a character named Prickshafte. So there is a tendency, to put it no stronger, to associate Shakespeare with lustfulness.

He is also called “finical,” meaning finicky or fastidious, and we may recall Aubrey’s testimony that in Shoreditch Shakespeare would not be “debauched” with his colleagues. The reference here is to carousing or drinking, not to sexual misdemeanours, and so we gain a picture of a man given to lustfulness but fastidious in other particulars. By curious chance this consorts well with the imagery of the plays where there are plentiful references to bawdiness, but also evidence of a general sensitivity to unpleasant sights or smells.