Nick De Somogyi - Shakespeare on Theatre

1 ACTOR. Gods of the theater, smile on us.

2 ACTOR. You who sit up there, stern in judgment, Smile on us.

1 ACTOR. You who look down on actors

BOTH. And who doesnt?

Stephen Sondheim (1974)

W hatever else he was or wasnt and bookshelves groan with contending theories William Shakespeare (15641616) was a working man of the theatre to his core. If, to quote the maxim he perfected, All the worlds a stage And one man in his time plays many parts, then the world of the theatre in which he lived and worked supplied him with a lifetime of roles. The stage-struck boy, watching in wonder the outlandish spectacle of touring productions. The young father drawn to the amateur dramatics of local maygames and revels. Then, talentspotted by a later touring troupe, the industrious jobbing actor, hitching his fortunes to the grinding wagon of provincial rep, and learning the tricks of this gradually lucrative trade. Next, in step with his growing confidence as an actor, his precociously impressive skills as a textual fixer for the increasingly creaky melodramas of the repertoire an improviser of verse and plot no less impressive than the showier repartee of the company Clown. In time, of course, the Londoner, and after sharing the modern duties of dramaturg, prompter, and ASM another new title to go with his burgeoning success as a junior co-author: upstart. Despite being disparaged by the Oxbridge lite in 1592 as a provincial jack of all trades, as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of them, Shakespeares parts proliferated: bestselling love-poet (1593); founder-member, with the actor Richard Burbage and the clown Will Kemp, of the Lord Chamberlains Men (1594); published and publicized playwright (1598); shareholder and artistic director at the Globe theatre (1599); the best and chiefest of our modern writers (1601); principal dramatist of the Kings Men, and celebrity box-office gold (1603); financial and artistic investor in the Blackfriars theatre (1609); senior co-author, mentor, and consultant (161314); and eventually, after a lifetime spent in a profession legally defined as little better than that of rogues and vagabonds, the part he may have cherished most, the one with which he described himself in his will (1616): gentleman. But when, in 1602, an officer at the College of Heralds expressed doubt over Shakespeares right to his coat of arms, the condescending term he used probably in fact best defines the mans lifelong rank, profession, or occupation: Shakespear ye Player.

Shakespeare was a player in nearly all the definitions available in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gambler, competitive contestant, professional (as opposed to gentleman), financial speculator, sexually successful individual, respected, or influential person but chiefly, of course, in the specifically theatrical sense that enabled all the others throughout his lifetime: A person who acts a character on the stage; a dramatic performer, an actor. From the late 1580s to the early 1610s, Shakespeares life was regulated by the demands made on him as a dramatic performer. His calendar years were divided into theatrical seasons, themselves irregularly organized (by politics or plague) between Londons playhouses, its various aristocratic households, and the slog of provincial touring. The odd month or so was presumably snatched back home in Stratford, but his London weeks were determined by an exhausting schedule of all-but daily performance, whether for public profit at the theatre, or private reward at court. The diary of his London days was principally governed by the demands of the public theatres in which he worked the Theater, the Curtain, the Rose, and the Globe-where, open to the skies, performances largely depended on daylight, the three hours or so of their typical duration therefore starting at around two oclock in the afternoon. (The candle-light of the indoor Blackfriars theatre was later to extend the available playing time, for a richer clientele, into dark winter afternoons and evenings.)

The rival public theatres seem to have competed for their trade by presenting a different, often new, play every day (while regularly rotating performances of the staple favourites) a schedule that must have dictated a punishing rgime for its actors. With his afternoons devoted to performance, Shakespeares mornings must often have involved group rehearsals on the unattended stage sorting out a new plays blocking, for example, rehearsing its duels, dances, battles, and special effects, or else simply refreshing the collective memory of an earlier production required for its revival that afternoon. Days were long, and those evenings that were free from the demands of private performance at court or elsewhere would presumably have been as much taken up with the constant grind of learning lines and in Shakespeares case writing and revising them as the riotous boozing and wenching of popular imagination. Playing was as it has always been extremely hard work.