Though Burbage was admired above all others, praise was also heaped upon the apprentice players whose alto voices fitted them for the parts of women. A spectator at Oxford in 1610 records how the audience were reduced to tears by the pathos of Desdemona’s death. The puritans who fumed about the biblical prohibition upon cross-dressing and the encouragement to sodomy constituted by the sight of an adult male kissing a teenage boy onstage were a small minority. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of the leading apprentices in Shakespeare’s company. It may perhaps be inferred that one was a lot taller than the other, since Shakespeare often wrote for a pair of female friends, one tall and fair, the other short and dark (Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero).
We know little about Shakespeare’s own acting roles—an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in As You Like It and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage’s lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.
Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear’s Fool, which were written for Armin.
One thing that is clear from surviving “plots” or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary. 2 Henry VI has over sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters appear in only a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn’t Paris go to the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In The Winter’s Tale, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.
THE KING’S MAN
On Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King’s Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare’s career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors—and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Shakespeare’s productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King’s Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth survives only in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare’s death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.
From 1608 onward, when the King’s Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they used the outdoor Globe only in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline, and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King’s Men’s company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612–14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title “All Is True”), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.” These were written after Shakespeare’s two final solo-authored plays, The Winter’s Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.
The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company’s indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.
About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large “Folio” format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him “a monument without a tomb”:
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give …
He was not of an age, but for all time!
SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS:
A CHRONOLOGY
1589–91 ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship)
1589–92 The Taming of the Shrew
1589–92 ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship)
1591 The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of co-authorship possible)
1591 The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of co-authorship probable)
1591–92 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1591–92 perhaps revised 1594 The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably co-written with, or revising an earlier version by, G
eorge Peele)
1592 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others
1592/94 King Richard the Third
1593 Venus and Adonis (poem)
1593–94 The Rape of Lucrece (poem)
1593–1608 Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover’s Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship)
1592–94/1600–03 Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)
1594 The Comedy of Errors
1595 Love’s Labour’s Lost
1595–97 Love’s Labour’s Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)
1595–96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1595–96 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
1595–96 King Richard the Second
1595–97 The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)
1596–97 The Merchant of Venice
1596–97 The First Part of Henry the Fourth
1597–98 The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
1598 Much Ado About Nothing
1598–99 The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)
1599 The Life of Henry the Fifth
1599 “To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance)
1599 As You Like It
1599 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1600–01 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)
1600–01 The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597–99)
1601 “Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove])
1601 Twelfth Night, or What You Will
1601–02 The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida
1604 The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
1604 Measure for Measure
1605 All’s Well That Ends Well
1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton
1605–06 The Tragedy of King Lear
1605–08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)
1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)
1606–07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus
1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins
1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline
1611 The Winter’s Tale
1611 The Tempest
1612–13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)
1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher
1613–14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher
FURTHER READING
AND VIEWING
CRITICAL APPROACHES
Barber, C. L., Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies (1959). One of the best critical books on Shakespeare ever written.
Bloom, Harold, ed., William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Modern Critical Interpretations (1988). Diverse collection of recent influential essays.
Brown, John Russell, ed., Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, Casebook Series (1979). Valuable collection of early essays and production reviews.
Colie, Rosalie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (1974). Elegant and sophisticated account of the play’s language.
Frye, Northrop, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (1965). A slim work of supreme power.
Gay, Penny, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (1994). Now classic account of plays’ gender politics; chapter 2 on As You Like It discusses productions from 1952 to 1990, pp. 48–85.
Gay, Penny, William Shakespeare: As You Like It, Writers and Their Work Series (1999). Fascinating introduction which attempts to re-create the original Elizabethan response to the play—full of interesting detail.
Halio, Jay, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of As You Like It (1968). Useful introductory collection of essays.
Maslen, R. W., Shakespeare and Comedy (2005). Sets the Elizabethan comedies in the context of both theatrical traditions and anti-stage polemic.
Neely, Carol Thomas, “Lovesickness, Gender, and Subjectivity: Twelfth Night and As You Like It,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (2000). Theoretically informed account of desire and the plays’ gender-bending.
Tomarken, Edward, ed., As You Like It from 1600 to the Present: Critical Essays (1997). Wide selection of material from early essays to discussions of recent productions; includes Samuel Johnson’s notes on the play.
THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE
Jackson, Russell, “Remembering Bergner’s Rosalind: As You Like It on Film in 1936,” in Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (2006), pp. 237–55. Account of the distinguished Austrian actress’s career and her acclaimed Rosalind.
Jackson, Russell, and Robert Smallwood, eds., Players of Shakespeare 2 (1988). Includes Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson on playing Celia and Rosalind, and Alan Rickman on Jaques.
——, Players of Shakespeare 3 (1993). Sophie Thompson on Rosalind (and Celia).
Mann, David, Shakespeare’s Women: Performance and Conception (2008). Focuses on female roles in Elizabethan plays, examining them in terms of the dramatic conventions of cross-dressing rather than an exploration of gender politics; numerous passing references to As You Like It.
Marshall, Cynthia, ed., As You Like It, Shakespeare in Production Series (2004). Introduction has a comprehensive stage history of the play and footnotes to text with stage directions from important productions.
Parsons, Keith, and Pamela Mason, Shakespeare in Performance (1995). Useful introduction, lavishly illustrated.
Rutter, Carol, Clamorous Voices (1988). Actresses discuss roles they’ve played—in the last chapter Juliet Stevenson and Fiona Shaw talk about playing Rosalind and Celia, respectively, in Adrian Noble’s 1985 RSC production.
Smallwood, Robert, ed., Players of Shakespeare 4 (1998). Includes David Tennant on the trials of playing Touchstone, pp. 30–44.
Smallwood, Robert, As You Like It, Shakespeare and Stratford Series (2003). Comprehensive account of RSC productions up to 2001.
AVAILABLE ON DVD
As You Like It, directed by Paul Czinner (1936, DVD 1999). Charming, eccentric, with Elisabeth Bergner’s unconventional Rosalind and the young Laurence Olivier as Orlando; script was adapted by J. M. Barrie and the film’s editor was David Lean.
As You Like It, directed by Basil Coleman for BBC Shakespeare (1978, DVD 2008). Worthy if very pedestrian BBC version shot (perhaps unwisely) on location at Glamis Castle, with a distinguished cast including Helen Mirren as Rosalind, Richard Pasco as Jaques, James Bolam as Touchstone, and Tony Church as Duke Senior.
As You Like It, directed by Alexei Karayev, from the Welsh/Russian co-productions, The Animated Tales of Shakespeare series (1992, DVD 2004). One of twelve plays adapted by Leon Garfield for this award-winning series. Oil painting on film cells is a device that creates a magical Forest of Arden, with Rosalind voiced by Sylvestra le Touzel.
As You Like It, directed by Christine Edzard (DVD 1992). Unconventional modern-dress version in the gritty setting of London’s Docklands. Many critics felt the disjunction from the play’s pastoral language was too great, despite interesting individual performances.
As You Like It, directed by Kenneth Branagh (DVD 2008). Set in Japan in the late nineteenth century, it opens with Duke Frederick’s violent usurpation of his brother (both roles played by Brian Blessed) with a glance to Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. The rest of the film is an all-singing, all-dancing romp. Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind was nominated for a Golden Globe award, but the film did not win general critical favor.
REFERENCES
1. T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (1927), p. 240.
2.
E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), Vol. 2, p. 278.
3. Cynthia Marshall, ed., As You Like It: Shakespeare in Production (2004), p. 7.
4. Ibid., p. 8, suggests a contemporary political reference to George I’s proclamation regarding hunting rights and the Black Act of 1723.
5. Anthony Vaughan, Born to Please: Hannah Pritchard, Actress, 1711–1768 (1979), p. 19.
6. John Hill, The Actor: or, A Treatise on the Art of Playing (1755, reprinted 1972), pp. 61, 274.
7. Marshall, As You Like It, p. 12.
8. Hill, The Actor, pp. 104–5.
9. Marshall, As You Like It, p. 12.
10. For a full account of her life see Claire Tomalin, Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Actress and the Prince (1994).
11. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt: With Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries (1850) Vol. I, pp. 148–49.
12. Marshall, As You Like It, pp. 14–15.
13. Charles H. Shattuck, Mr. Macready Produces As You Like It: A Prompt-Book Study (1962).
14. Marshall, As You Like It, pp. 25–26.
15. William Winter, “As You Like It,” in his Shakespeare on the Stage, second series (1915), pp. 215–341.
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