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The Stars of Shakespeare's Time
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Andrew Gurr |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Whom did you make a date to see 400 years ago on the Shakespearean stage? Who were the famous clowns and tragedians around 1600? Drawing on contemporary accounts, Andrew Gurr, professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Reading, England, profiles the famous players who first gave life to Shakespeare's words. |
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| A full-length portrait of Edward Alleyn, founder of Dulwich College, artist unknown. | |
 omething of the history of acting as well as actors can be found in the careers of the famous players. The first great names of the 1580s were the clowns of extempore, Richard Tarlton and Robert Wilson, whose fame far exceeded that of their contemporary straight actors in the Queen's Men, Bentley and Knell. By 1600 the position was reversed, and the reputations as tragedians of Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage dominated the theatre world; in 1599 Will Kemp jigged his way out of the "world," and his successor Robert Armin was as renowned for being a playwright as for being a clown. Subsequently fame fell not so much on the tragedians who inherited Alleyn's and Burbage's famous roles, Richard Perkins or Joseph Taylor, as on the actor-managers like Christopher Beeston or actor-playwrights like Nathan Field. First the witty entertainers, next the great tragedians, lastly the impresarios. Like gentility, fame proved increasingly a commercial consideration. |
Famous clowns
Tarlton was not only a stage clown but a man of many parts, a maker of plays and ballads, a drummer, tumbler and qualified Master of Fencing. He became famous in the 1570s, a byword in the 1580s, and a popular legend for a century after his death for his extemporised jests. |
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| Richard Tarlton in clown's rustic apparel, with pipe and tabor. | |
Howes's additions to Stowe's Annales in 1615 characterise his facility as "a wondrous plentifull pleasant extemporall wit," as distinct from that of his fellow-member of the Queen's and fellow-playwright Robert Wilson, whose wit was "quicke delicate refined extemporal" (p. 697). His 1585 play, The Seven Deadly Sins, enormously popular though it was, has not survived in print (we have only the "plot" of the second part), and the bulk of the evidence for his facility appears in the numerous jestbooks published after his death and purporting to record the witticisms of his life. |
Jestbooks were extremely popular reading fare in the sixteenth century, and since the usual practice of fathering common tales on semi-legendary wits like Skelton was also applied to Tarlton few of the anecdotes can be relied on. Fortunately some of his jokes were distinctive enough to be repeated by more reputable authorities than the jestbook writers. John Manningham noted one he heard, in his Diary (1602): |
Tarlton called Burley House gate in the Strand towardes the Savoy, the Lord Treasurers Almes gate, because it was seldom or never opened. |
This was very likely heard at second or third hand, if not at a further remove, since it was noted down fourteen years after Tarlton's death. Henry Peacham (Truth of our Times (1638)) told one at first hand: |
I remember when I was a schoolboy in London, Tarlton acted a third son's part ... His father being a very rich man, and lying upon his death-bed, called his three sonnes about him ... To the third, which was Tarlton (who came like a rogue in a foule shirt without a band, and in a blew coat with one sleeve, his stockings out at the heeles, and his head full of straw and feathers), as for you, Sirrah, quoth he, you know how often I have fetched you out of Moorgate and Bridwell, you have beene an ungracious villaine. I have nothing to bequeath to you but the gallowes and a rope. Tarlton weeping, and sobbing upon his knees (as his brothers) said, O Father, I doe not desire it, I trust in God you shall live to enjoy it your selfe. |
The reply may or may not have been extempore; certainly Tarlton's reputation did not entirely rest on his ability to extemporise. He is described as having a squint eye and a flat nose, and his very appearance, as Peacham also noted, was often funny enough: |
Tarlton when his head was onely seene,
The Tire-house dore and Tapistrie betweene,
Set all the multitude in such a laughter,
They could not hold for scarse an houre after. |
As early as 1592 Nashe in Pierce Penilesse had described a similar reaction and its consequences when the Queen's company was travelling in the country; |
A tale of a wise Justice. Amongst other cholericke wise Justices, he was one, that having a play presented before him and his Towneship by Tarlton and the rest of his fellowes, her Majesties servants, and they were now entring into their first merriment (as they call it), the people began exceedingly to laugh, when Tarlton first peept out his head. Whereat the Justice, not a little moved, and seeing with his beckes and nods hee could not make them cease, he went with his staffe, and beat them round about unmercifully on the bare pates, in that they, being but Farmers & poore countrey Hyndes, would presume to laugh at the Queenes men, and make no more account of her cloath in his presence. |
Tarlton's compeer, Wilson, a more scholarly wit, played in the same company with him. Evidently the value of having extemporising wits and versifiers in the group was sufficient to justify two such performers sharing the same performance. Wilson also spent some time with Leicester's Men, touring the Netherlands with them in 1585-6, when he shared his work with "my lord of Lesters jesting plaier" as Sidney described him, Will Kemp, the clown who later became the resident extemporising comedian in Shakespeare's company and probably the first actor of Falstaff. |
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| Will Kemp dancing a jig, from the title-page of Kempes Nine Daies Wonder (1600). The accompanist has the same gear (pipe and drum) as Tarlton. | |
Kemp was the last of the famous Elizabethan clowns. He was better known for harlequinade and jigs than wit, and probably served his turn mainly for the dances and jigging sketches that normally accompanied performances on the public stages. He is rightly or wrongly thought to have been the culprit charged by Hamlet with speaking more than was set down for him, and it has even been suggested that his departure from the Chamberlain's Men in 1599 was because he had a hand in the piracy of the last Falstaff play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. |
What is clear is that the role of the clown in adult company plays had diminished markedly in value as plays began to offer more scope for the tragic actors. Hamlet's reprimand simply reflects an aristocratic impatience with knockabout and extempore. Kemp's duties as a clown with a role in almost every play of his company's repertory probably did not decline, but his occupancy of the stage during the performance proper was probably less. The parts we know he played include Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado, where he was given no more than a couple of scenes in which to indulge himself. |
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| Robert Armin in the long coat of a "natural" fool, from the title-page of his History of the Two Maids of More-clake (1609). | |
His successor had significantly different talents. Robert Armin was a playwright as Tarlton and Wilson had been, but much less an extemporiser. He was known for his singing rather than his wit. Where Shakespeare had written Falstaff and Dogberry with Kemp in mind, for Armin he produced Feste and Lear's Fool. Both Kemp and Armin claimed descent from Tarlton, but between 1580 and 1600 the inheritance had dropped sharply in value. Alleyn's Tamburlaine now bestrode the stage. |
Famous tragedians
Alleyn was born in 1566, the son of a London "innholder." Possibly his father's occupation brought him into early contact with the players, for he was already with a leading company, Worcester's, by the time he was sixteen. By 1592 he was the outstanding player of his day. |
As Henslowe's son-in-law and business partner, both in the theatrical affairs and in the bull- and bear-baiting business, he rose to an unparalleled prosperity, not only for himself but for the reputation of the stage as a whole. He became famous as Tamburlaine, Faustus and Barabbas in Marlowe's plays, as Orlando in Orlando Furioso, Muly Mahomet in The Battle of Alcazar and Tamar Cam in the play of that name. |
His "stalking Tamburlaine" drew similes from several pamphleteers at the end of the century. His own self-mocking name for himself in a family letter was "the fustian king." Fuller remembered him as "the Roscius of our age, so acting to the life, that he made any part (especially a majestick one) to become him" (Worthies (1662)). He took the part of Genius in King James's triumphal pageant through London in 1604; Dekker records that "his gratulatory speech was delivered with excellent Action, and a well tun'de, audible voice" (The Magnificent Entertainment (1604)). |
Early in the new century he gave himself up wholly to his business interests, retaining his shares in the Admiral's Men as manager rather than as player. He began negotiations to purchase the manor of Dulwich in about 1605, when he was thirty-nine, and began the school and hospital which have since become Dulwich College as a work of piety in 1613. The property cost £ 10,000 initially, and subsequent expenditure was about £ 1,700 a year, all of which derived in the first instance from Alleyn's theatrical interests. He and his College were the age's highwater mark for the commercial and pietistic respectability of his first profession. |
The name linked with Alleyn's by the early historians of the Elizabethan stage as the greatest of its players was of course Burbage. Baker's Chronicle (1674) celebrates "Richard Bourbidge and Edward Allen, two such Actors as no age must ever look to see the like." |
Two years younger than Alleyn, Burbage was a younger son of the carpenter turned impresario who built the Theatre in 1576, and first appears at the age of twenty-three, named in a lawsuit as defending his father's takings. He protected them with "a broom staff" when the deponents came to collect their share in accordance with a Chancery Court order, and |
scornfully and disdainfully playing with this deponent's nose, said that if he dealt in the matter, he would beat him also, and did challenge the field of him at that time. |
He was then in Alleyn's company with the Strange's-Admiral's amalgamation of 1590. He probably left them for Pembroke's after this, and reappeared with the new Chamberlain's Men in 1594, as their leading actor and a major shareholder. His father left the Theatre and his Blackfriars property to Richard and his elder brother Cuthbert when he died in 1597. |
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| Richard Burbage, thought to be a self-portrait. | |
Burbage seems to have been far less commercially minded than Alleyn. He avoided the temptations of managership and remained in acting until his death in 1619, when he left his wife according to contemporary rumour "better than £ 300 land," which though considerable for his day hardly compares with Alleyn's holdings or even with those of his fellow-player Shakespeare in Stratford. |
He was fifty when he died, by which time he had made famous such roles as Richard III, Jeronimo, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Ferdinand in Webster's Duchess of Malfi; his name appears in all the King's Men's plays for which lists of players survive between 1599 and 1618. |
"N. Feild the Player"
In the second decade of the seventeenth century Nathan Field came to rival Burbage in fame. Jonson linked the two names in Bartholomew Fair in 1613, and Richard Flecknoe in a retrospective comment in 1664 spoke of them as the leading players at the time when Jonson, Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher were the leading playwrights. "It was the happiness of the Actors of those Times to have such Poets as these to instruct them and write for them; and no less of those Poets, to have such docile and excellent Actors to Act their Playes, as a Field and Burbidge." |
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| Nathan Field, artist unknown. | |
Field was a contemporary of Burbage in the King's Men for the last four years of his life, and died only a few months after him. His fame was not entirely for playing. He died a bachelor with a considerable reputation, of the kind not uncommon among players, for success with women. A story circulating in 1619 reckoned that the Earl of Argyll had paid "for the nourseing of a childe which the worlde says is a daughter to my lady and N. Feild the Player." |
After Burbage and Field the names most prominent in theatre affairs were those of such men as Beeston and Richard Gunnell, who was a leading player with Palsgrave's in 1622--Alleyn leased the rebuilt Fortune to the company with Gunnell and Charles Massey as the chief sharers--and who built the Salisbury Court playhouse in 1629. Gunnell and Beeston were not directly involved in playing, so far as we know, in their years as impresarios. |
The chief fame of the last years was mainly reserved first of all for the King's Men's trio of Taylor, Lowin and Swanston, and then for the clowns of the leading companies--Shank at the Blackfriars, Timothy Reade at Salisbury Court and Andrew Cane at the Fortune. In a number of ways the notes we have on them curiously echo the praise given to the clowns of the 1580s. Shank's fame was for his knockabout and dancing, as was Cane's. |
The latter was remembered as late as 1673, when Henry Chapman excused the presence of an appendix in his pamphlet by saying it was the fashion, "Without which a Pamphlet now a dayes, finds as small acceptance as a Comedy did formerly, at the Fortune Play-house, without a Jig of Andrew Kein's into the bargain." Reade is linked with Cane in a pamphlet of 1641, "The Stage-Players Complaint, in a Pleasant Dialogue between Cane of the Fortune and Reed of the Friers [i.e., Whitefriars, or Salisbury Court]." |
In the pamphlet Cane is called "Quick" and described as able to "outstrip facetious Mercury in your tongue," while Reade is "Light," and described as nimble-footed, with heels "as light as a Finches Feather." Reade seems to have used the same trick of poking his head through the curtain as Tarlton in Nashe's anecdote. In Goffe's The Careless Shepherdess (1656) a character reminisces |
I never saw Rheade peeping through the Curtain,
But ravishing joy enter'd into my heart |
and claims to have preferred Reade's "Craps and Quibbles" to "the gravest speech in all the Play." |
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