Worlds Elsewhere

by Andrew Dickson

  But the Fortune’s Polish twin flourished. In 1635 a ‘lords’ room’ was installed, after which an Italian architect added complex stage machinery for the avant-garde art form known as opera. In 1695, space was made for an orchestra, and in 1730 the theatre’s owners finally gave in to the biting Baltic winters and tacked on a roof. A visiting English merchant described it as ‘a large arena for the Baiting of Bulls, Bears and wild Beasts, Amphitheatre-like, capable of containing a vast Number of Spectators, strongly inclosed with Wood, and having convenient Galleries for that Purpose’.

  The story was remarkable: a chunk of Elizabethan theatre history that had washed up here on the Baltic coast. The men responsible were assembled in front of me on the page. I turned another leaf: beneath the boldly inscribed names ‘John Green’ and ‘Robert Rainold’ were the words ‘die Englischen Comedianten’. Even I could translate that.

  But who were the English Comedians? What drew them? What drove them?

  In a café opposite St Mary’s church, with the photos I had taken at the archive and a jumble of books and notes, I worked through some answers. On the other side of the room a British stag party was clustered limply around a table, surrounding a formidable installation of Żywiec beer bottles. One man, shirt half off despite the temperature outside, was slurringly attempting to chat up the waitress. Another sported a foam hat in the shape of a giant cheese. The waitress gave me a sharp look as she went back to the bar: English comedians, all of us.

  The historical variety began to tour continental Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. In Renaissance Europe no less than the present-day G8 it was customary for diplomats to bring substantial entourages, and given that some of these aristocrats had become enthusiastic patrons of the theatre, it was known for actors to travel, too – part entertainment, part political theatre. When one of Elizabeth’s showiest nobles, the Earl of Leicester, landed at Flushing in 1585 to support the Dutch in a war against the Spanish, he was accompanied by a group of musicians and fifteen players.

  One of Leicester’s entourage, a man called Robert Browne, seems to have been bitten by the touring bug. In 1590, Browne crops up in the records at Leiden in the Netherlands, and he led companies that roamed around the northern – generally Protestant – parts of the continent for another thirty years. Usually troupes travelled from town to town, playing at markets and fairs when they could get permission, in addition to being hosted by friendly merchants and nobles, who (assuming they could afford it) were only too delighted to welcome practitioners of this newly chic English art. Indeed, for a certain breed of European noble English Comedians became a must-have accessory: Maurice of Hesse maintained actors at his residence in Kassel for many years, eventually constructing them a theatre, while the Polish royals imported an entire English company wholesale from London to Warsaw in 1617.

  The Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria seems to have been a devotee, according to a letter she composed to her brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, in February 1608:

  I must tell you, too, about the English players and the plays they gave. Well, after they arrived on the Wednesday after Candlemas, they recovered from the journey on the Thursday, and began on the Friday with The Prodigal Son, the same play as they had performed at Passau; this was followed on the Saturday by the Godly Woman of Antwerp, truly a very good and proper play. On the Sunday they performed Doctor Faustus, and on the Monday a play about a Duke of Florence who fell in love with a nobleman’s daughter, on Tuesday they gave Nobody and Somebody – that was vastly agreeable. Fortunatus and his Purse and Wishing-Cap was also very enjoyable on the Wednesday; on Thursday they gave another of the plays they had performed at Passau, the one about the Jew, and on the Friday they and ourselves all had a good rest …

  Seven plays in seven days: these actors had more than earned their ‘good rest’.

  So why did these men – women were not permitted to act professionally in England or this part of the continent, and most wives stayed at home – spend so much time in foreign lands, taking their chances with princes and audiences alike? Wanderlust must have played a part, but to find the rest of the answer one had to look back to Britain.

  When we think of the surname Shakespeare, we think of William – a hugely successful royal servant who died in his bed in the second-largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon, having done extraordinarily well in the entertainment business. But William had a brother, Edmund, sixteen years younger – also a performer, also in London. Edmund’s shadowy career as a ‘player’ only grazes the documentary record twice, in the funeral notice for his son (born out of wedlock), followed by his own death four months later in the harsh winter of 1607 at the age of twenty-seven. As far as anyone can tell, Edmund was a failure. I had always found it tantalising that William Shakespeare called the scheming younger son of Gloucester in King Lear ‘Edmund’; it seemed a gloomy irony that, having failed to make his own mark on stage, Edmund Shakespeare was immortalised (somewhat unflatteringly at that) by his tiresomely successful sibling.

  Edmund was, if anything, the norm. The late sixteenth century may have been the great golden age of English drama, but life for all but a lucky few Jacobethan players was desperately precarious (the word ‘career’ in this period retained its older sense of something a horse does under you when it tries to bolt). A government statute of 1572 branded players as ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’, and, unless they could acquire the protection of a patron, they were exposed to the whim of the authorities. The Puritan City fathers in London detested theatres and all they stood for, and endlessly, bad-temperedly, angled for them to be closed down: breeding grounds for bubonic plague, incitements to sedition, lewdness, frivolousness, time-wasting. Between 1603 and 1612, London theatres went dark for nearly eighty months, often for long stretches at a time, forcing actors into other work or out on to the road. In the harsh theatre closures of 1592–93 (when even Shakespeare attempted to find another job, as a courtly poet), as many as 200 players were cast out of work.

  Some travelled around England and Scotland, hoping that authorities in the provinces would be more forgiving (sometimes they were, often not). A hardy few took their chances in Europe. That same year, 1592, the English traveller Fynes Moryson came across a flabbergasting sight at the annual September fair in Frankfurt:

  I remember that when some of our cast[-out-of-work] despised Stage players came out of England into Germany, and played at Franckford in the tyme of the Mart, having nether a complete number of Actours, nor any good Apparell, nor any ornament of the Stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a worde they sayde, both men and women, flocked wonderfully to see theire gesture and Action, rather than heare them, speaking English which they understand not.

  ‘Germany hath some fewe wandering Comedyians, more deserving pity then prayse,’ Moryson went on. ‘The serious parts are dully penned, and worse acted, and the mirth they make is ridiculous, and nothing less then witty.’

  Yet even the drama-despising Moryson was impressed (or perhaps alarmed) at how successfully his compatriots found an audience. In an era long before theatre surtitles Robert Browne employed a German-speaking clown who could help translate (as well as, presumably, score some extra dirty laughs), but otherwise – as Moryson’s account implies – performances were in English, with plentiful ‘gesture’. They were also noisy affairs: according to one local who saw them in Frankfurt, Browne’s troupe ‘have such wonderful, good music, and are so perfect at jumping and dancing that I have never yet heard nor seen their like’.

  As the seventeenth century progressed, the English Comedians became both less English and less comical. (‘Comedyian’ arguably had its older meaning, of a player who could perform any role, comic or tragic.) Naturalised as Wanderbühnen, ‘travelling companies’, they began to introduce German and Dutch performers into their casts, and translate the plays they were performing. In 1605 one company boldly announced it had twenty-four ‘comedies, tragedies and pastorals’ to offer; another boast
ed ‘chronicles, histories and comedies’. A playlist from 1608 includes such scripts as The Proud Woman of Antwerp, The Jew, Doctor Faustus, Fortunatus, The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek. A later list from the same company, under the leadership of John Green, includes plays called Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Nobody and Somebody, Orlando Furioso, The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Fortunatus, The Jew of Malta, King Lear, The Prodigal Son and Hamlet.

  It was Green’s signature I had seen in the archives earlier. A rambunctious comedian who started out playing biddable young women, he had graduated to male parts, one of which was a clownish, two-faced vagabond known as ‘Pickleherring’ who bore a resemblance to the trickster Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale and became a stock character in English plays. (Pickled herring was associated with gluttony and lechery, hence Sir Toby Belch’s dyspeptic complaint in Twelfth Night, ‘a plague on this pickleherring’.) Green had joined Browne around 1603 in Lille, and four years later struck out with his own troupe, which visited Graz, Wolfenbüttel, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague and a number of other cities as well as Gdańsk – many hundreds of square miles of territory. It was Green’s troupe who had played the newly erected Gdańsk Fencing School in 1612, and perhaps at whose behest it had been built.

  The titles he and his colleagues offered were what made my ears prick up. These were dramas by Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare and a panoply of other Elizabethan dramatists besides – a fair spread of what had been available to audiences back in late Elizabethan London.

  Were they actually the same plays? No one was sure: few of these early touring scripts had survived. It was almost impossible to tell whether the Spanish Tragedies or Faustuses delighting the burghers of Frankfurt or Warsaw bore any relation to the versions written by Kyd or Marlowe, still less whether the Archduchess’s reference to ‘the one about the Jew’ was Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or another play entirely (or some kind of unholy amalgam, in a medley of languages).

  The question on which Limon had bet the farm came next: was Shakespeare ever actually acted in Gdańsk? Again, it was tantalisingly difficult to say. King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar were among the plays – or the plots – that were doing the rounds in the German states in the early seventeenth century. The Merchant of Venice flits vaporously through the archives: in addition to that play ‘about the Jew’ theatre historians have identified a Jud von Venedig given at Halle in 1611 and another in 1626 in Dresden, called Die Comödia von Josepho Juden von Venedig. A version of Titus Andronicus made its way into the first collection of plays by the English Comedians published in 1620 – the first occasion many of these titles appeared in print.

  Whether Shakespeare would have recognised these adaptations, daubed with plentiful splashes of local colour, is debatable. A surviving manuscript of Romeo and Juliet dating from later in the seventeenth century refers to towns in south Bohemia and northern Austria, and the Thirty Years’ War; it also makes a sizeable part for Pickleherring, who cracks jokes over Juliet’s body. In the 1611 Jud von Venedig he was given an even lengthier part, abounding in anti-Semitic gags. He was almost the star of the play.

  Perhaps this was the point. Generations of critics have dismissed the work of the English Comedians as Fynes Moryson saw it – trivial, crowd-pleasing tinsel, hacked-down texts for audiences who didn’t know any better. But I wondered if another way of looking at their achievement was to see it as the truest distillation of theatre, as an adaptive, responsive art that was different every time – every place – it was played.

  British writers have often depicted the English Comedians as hardy adventurers exporting Elizabethan drama into the uncivilised wilderness of mainland Europe (much as the crew of the Red Dragon were supposed to have brought Hamlet to the natives of Sierra Leone).

  Myself, I saw something more subtle going on: a process of translation and re-localisation, which helped bring Shakespeare’s work – and work like it – alive in unfamiliar environments and in front of new audiences. The comedians weren’t really ‘English’ at all. These trans-cultural, multilingual conglomerates made theatre that was starting to be global.

  One other play hovers over the records like a ghost: Hamlet. It seems likely that John Green’s company performed a script of that name at Dresden in 1626, but no one is sure which Hamlet this was. Altogether more fascinating, if more spectral still, is the playtext known as Der Bestrafte Brudermord (‘Brother-Murder Punished’), printed in 1781 but almost certainly derived from early seventeenth-century performances by the English Comedians.

  I had brought the script of Der Bestrafte Brudermord with me. It made for a lively travelling companion. Just one fifth the length of Hamlet, shorn of soliloquies and bristling with comic business nowhere to be found in Shakespeare’s text, the play was exactly as everything I had read about the English Comedians had led me to expect. Ophelia fell in love with a preposterous courtier called Phantasmo before running mad, and there was a perplexing subplot to do with a peasant and his unpaid tax bill. Even the Ghost got in on the laughs, beating one sentry about the head.

  In place of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two buffoonish ruffians, who are outwitted by the Zorro-like hero while attempting to shoot him:

  RUFFIAN 2 Quickly to work; it must be so! You fire from this side, I from the other.

  HAMLET Listen to one word more from me. Since even the wickedest evildoer is not executed without being given time to repent, I, an innocent prince, beg you to let me first address a fervent prayer to my Creator; after which I shall willingly die. But I shall give you a sign: I shall raise my hands to heaven, and as soon as I spread out my arms, fire! Level both pistols at my sides, and when I say shoot, give me as much as I need, and be sure and hit me, that I may not suffer long.

  RUFFIAN 2 Well, we may do that much to please him; so go right ahead.

  HAMLET [Spreads out his hands] Shoot! [Meanwhile he falls down forward between the two servants, who shoot each other.]

  Scholars hotly disagree on what Der Bestrafte Brudermord really is – a distillation of the text we know? A translation of the elusive ur-Hamlet that supposedly predates Shakespeare’s? Another version of the story altogether?

  When the pioneering English director William Poel staged a translation of Brudermord in London in 1925, the audience fell about laughing; one critic called it ‘funnier than any burlesque on Hamlet than one can recall’. Poel was horrified, but it is tempting to say that spectators got the point: this is a play that released the comedy latent in Shakespeare’s. It plays this longest and most ponderous of tragedies almost entirely for laughs, casting the Prince as the biggest clown of all.

  There was one moment in particular that seized my attention, the scene in which the Players arrive at Hamlet’s residence to perform for the King, enabling Hamlet to smoke out his villainous uncle (the use of the play-within-the-play remains intact):

  CHARLES [FIRST ACTOR] May the gods bestow on your Highness many blessings, happiness, and health!

  HAMLET I thank you, my friend. What do you desire?

  CHARLES Pardon, your Highness, but we are strangers, High-German actors, and we wanted the honour of acting at his Majesty’s wedding. But Fortune turned her back on us, and contrary winds their face towards us. We therefore beseech your Highness to allow us to act a story, that our long journey be not all in vain.

  HAMLET Were you not some few years ago at the University of Wittenberg? It seems to me I have seen you act before.

  It seems to me I have seen you act before … It was a neat meta-dramatic doubling: a touring company of players playing a touring company of players, and a hero half aware he’s seen them somewhere else. The reference to ‘Wittenberg’ – for Shakespeare’s audience a faint reference to a town closely associated with Martin Luther, if at all – became, in Germany, much more precise. As an actorly in-joke, it was worthy of Sh
akespeare himself.

  As I read, I found my mind drifting to another Shakespearian connection, an old theory about Hamlet, wildly unfashionable now. It was this. After the Earl of Leicester had landed in the Netherlands in 1585, he appears to have recommended his players to King Frederick II of Denmark, who had recently rebuilt an old medieval fortress, Kronborg, as a sumptuous Renaissance palace. The palace’s location was Helsingør, on a narrow peninsula looking out on to the Øresund strait towards Sweden.

  The actors travelled there to play for the Danish king later in 1585, and were so popular that locals broke down a wall to see them. The following year, a small troupe of English ‘instrumentalists and tumblers’ came back, and stayed for three months at Helsingør. Will Kempe, the leading figure in Leicester’s Men and the greatest comedian of the age, was among their number, as were the actors George Bryan and Thomas Pope. All three would go on to be members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men alongside Shakespeare, so important that they were later named as ‘Principall Actors’ in the 1623 First Folio, the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, published seven years after his death.

  It seems improbable that Shakespeare was there with Kempe, Bryan and Pope in 1586 – this was only a year after the birth of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, and he had yet to make a name for himself on the London stage – but it was surely likely he heard the stories long afterwards. Did dewy-eyed actors’ tales about that visit to the Danish royal castle – a wild reception by a Danish crowd, munificent royal fees – prompt him to begin writing a tragedy set in Denmark, a compendium of Icelandic sagas populated by Danes, Norwegians and ‘Polacks’? Did Helsingør feed into the Elsinore he imagined in Hamlet? Did the English Comedians come alive once again as the travelling ‘tragedians of the city’ whom the Prince greets so warmly like old companions, almost his only true friends in the play?