The most important resource was, of course, the actors themselves. They needed many skills: in the words of one contemporary commentator, "dancing, activity, music, song, elocution, ability of body, memory, skill of weapon, pregnancy of wit." Their bodies were as significant as their voices. Hamlet tells the player to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action": moments of strong emotion, known as "passions," relied on a repertoire of dramatic gestures as well as a modulation of the voice. When Titus Andronicus has had his hand chopped off, he asks "How can I grace my talk, / Wanting a hand to give it action?" A pen portrait of "The Character of an Excellent Actor" by the dramatist John Webster is almost certainly based on his impression of Shakespeare's leading man, Richard Burbage: "By a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention: sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the actor is the centre...."
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 on stage 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 only appear in 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
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 only survives 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 only used the outdoor Globe 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 royal-ism 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 prais
e 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, George 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 or 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"[turtle-dove]) 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
Adelman, Janet, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (1992). Psychoanalytical approach.
Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Immensely influential.
Colie, Rosalie L., Shakespeare's Living Art (1974). Excellent on the idea of melancholy.
Frye, Roland Mushat, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses 1600 (1984). Invaluable historical placing.
Granville-Barker, Harley, Hamlet in his Prefaces to Shakespeare Vol. 1 (1946). Very satisfying reading by a great man of the theater.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001). Powerful reading of context of religious controversy.
Jones, Ernest, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Extended Freudian reading.
Knight, G. Wilson, "The Embassy of Death" in his The Wheel of Fire (1930, repr. 2001). Very strong on imagery.
Mercer, Peter, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (1987). Worth comparing with Prosser.
O'Toole, Fintan, Shakespeare Is Hard, but So Is Life (2002), originally published as No More Heroes (1995). Highly sensible introductory account, with strong emphasis on politics; dispels the myth of the "tragic flaw."
Prosser, Eleanor, Hamlet and Revenge (1967). Worth comparing with Mercer.
Rosenberg, Marvin, The Masks of Hamlet (1992). Scene-by-scene account, using actors' and directors' interpretations down the ages.
Wilson, J. Dover, What Happens in Hamlet (1935). Thorough investigation of key problems.
THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE
Brooke, Michael, "Hamlet on Screen," www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/566312/index.html. Valuable overview. Registered schools, colleges, universities, and libraries have access to video clips, including extracts from the 1913 silent version, Olivier's 1948 film, and the 1964 production at Elsinore.
Dawson, Anthony B., Hamlet, Shakespeare in Performance (1996). Excellent roundup.
Hapgood, Robert ed., Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Shakespeare in Production (1999). Good accounts of wide range of productions.
Howard, Tony, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (2007). Fascinating, and of even further-reaching interest than its title suggests.
Lavender, Andy, Hamlet in Pieces: Shakespeare Reworked by Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson (2001). Lively accounts of experimental versions.
Maher, Mary Z., Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies (2003). Based on interviews with actors, including David Warner, Ben Kingsley, Kevin Kline.
Players of Shakespeare 1, 2, 3 (1985-93). Each of these three volumes includes excellent interviews with actors who have played major roles in Hamlet.
Royal Shakespeare Company, "Exploring Shakespeare: Hamlet," www.rsc.org.uk/learning/hamletandmacbeth/keyidea/hamletkeyidea.htm. Rehearsal footage, actor and director interviews, commentary on Michael Boyd's 2004 production.
For a more detailed Shakespeare bibliography and selections from a wide range of critical accounts of the play, with linking commentary, visit the edition website, www.therscshakespeare.com.
AVAILABLE ON DVD
Hamlet, directed by Hay Plumb (1913, DVD 2004). The longest Shakespeare film from the age of silent film.
Hamlet, directed by Laurence Olivier (1948). Highly influential.
Hamlet, directed by Grigori Kozintsev (1964). Powerful Russian version.
Richard Burton's Hamlet, directed by Bill Colleran (1964). Film of American stage production.
Hamlet at Elsinore, directed by Philip Saville (1964). Film of BBC television production that played at Elsinore; not currently available, but extracts may be seen via screenonline website (see above).
Hamlet, directed by Tony Richardson (1969). Film of London Roundhouse stage production starring Nicol Williamson.
Hamlet, BBC Television Shakespeare, directed by Rodney Bennett (1980). Starring Derek Jacobi.
Hamlet,
directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1990). Starring Mel Gibson.
Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh (1996). Uncut text.
Hamlet, directed by Michael Almereyda (2000). Underrated version transposed to contemporary New York.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, directed by Peter Brook (BBC4 television, tx. 6 March 2002, DVD 2006). Starring Adrian Lester; superbly lucid version, in heavily cut text, with a documentary "Brook by Brook."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AND PICTURE CREDITS
Preparation of "Hamlet in Performance" was assisted by a generous grant from the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning) of the University of Warwick for research in the RSC archive at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded a term's research leave that enabled Jonathan Bate to work on "The Director's Cut."
Picture research by Helen Robson and Jan Sewell. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for assistance with picture research and reproduction fees.
Images of RSC productions are supplied by the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, Stratford-upon-Avon. This library, maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, holds the most important collection of Shakespeare material in the UK, including the Royal Shakespeare Company's official archives. It is open to the public free of charge.
For more information see www.shakespeare.org.uk.
1. "Rapier and Dagger" in private collection (c) Bardbiz Limited
2. "They change rapiers" in private collection (c) Bardbiz Limited
3. London's Drury Lane Theatre, Forbes Robertson (1913). Reproduced by permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 4. Sarah Bernhardt (1899). Reproduced by permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 5. Directed by Peter Brook (1965). Reg Wilson (c) Royal Shakespeare Company
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