Shakespeare and the Theater of the Self JO H N PAU L R OL LERT

On the afternoon of 29 June 1613, near the end of the first act

of Henry VIII, the cannon stationed in the attic of the Globe Theater made loud announcement of the monarch’s arrival. The peal of that primitive special effect had been heard by full houses for years, but either because of poor luck or careless packing, the wadding blew forth at the report and sparked the thatching of the open-air roof. At first the gunsmoke hid the gathering calamity, but at some point the players stopped playing, the crowd grew quiet, and all looked at the unholy halo overhead. “It kindled inwardly,” an eyewitness said, “and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground.” Given that the theater was almost entirely made of wood and had only two doors to accommodate as many as two thousand people straining to escape, it is a small miracle no one was killed. One man’s “breeches” did catch fire, but in a scene that might have been culled from The Merry Wives of Windsor, a “provident wit” doused them with pot of ale. “See the world’s ruins,” Ben Jonson said of the great Globe’s remains. Shakespeare didn’t. The news almost certainly reached him in Stratford, where he was increasingly preoccupied with the pecuniary affairs of a provincial burgher, his final role. The loss must have upset him, but how deeply is anyone’s guess. William Shakespeare was always remarkably casual about his own artistic achievement—he failed even to leave an authorized copy of King Lear—and those who admire him are accustomed to being sentimental on his behalf. Still, the burden is heavy in the case of the Globe fire. Here was the stage where Shakespeare taught others to lose sight of him. Where he taught himself to lose sight of Shakespeare. The first lesson served him as a player, the second as a playwright. Lose sight of the Globe, and you lose sight of both. 108

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This opinion is not universally shared. Shakespeare’s experience as an actor has often seemed either incidental or an indictment, a pleasing lark before the real work of writing plays or an argument against their authorship. Both are legacies of the low esteem in which actors were held long before, and long after, Shakespeare strode onto the stage. When he joined the profession sometime in the mid1580s, the orbit of the actor was already circumscribed by the Vagrancy Laws of 1572, which mandated that traveling troupes had to find aristocratic patronage. Rogue players ran the risk of being flogged, branded, and finally hanged. It was a harsh law and rarely enforced in full, but it reflected published mores and polite opinion, both of which held players as a harlequin hybrid of panhandler and whore. They used the tricks of each trade, sympathy and seduction, and turned public solicitation into performance art. Even playwrights scorned them. “Yes, trust them not,” counseled one, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his “Tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide” supposes he is as well able to bombast out blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

The warning was from Robert Greene, a Cambridge-educated wit who aimed to underscore the common opinion of players—uneducated, unrefined, and generally untrustworthy—to keep one “upstart crow” in his place. “Let those apes imitate your past excellence,” he admonished scholar-scribblers of the unlettered likes of Shakespeare. They must be trained, for they haven’t been taught. Of course, Shakespeare’s failure to receive an elite education did not keep him from writing the Henry VI trilogy that prompted Greene’s rebuke, but then again neither did Hamlet prevent Jonson’s jibe that his friend had “small Latin and less Greek.” Prejudices are always stubborn, but never more so than when they are proven amiss. The greater legacy of this one is the lingering odor of the

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“authorship controversy.” It filled movie theaters in the fall of 2011 with the release of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, a thirty-milliondollar attempt to convince cinemagoers that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been the author of Shakespeare’s plays. A “controversy” that only took shape in the late nineteenth century (for the first three-hundred-fifty years after his death, no one doubted dear Will), the work of writing Shakespeare’s plays has been variously reassigned to Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and several other aristocrats, including the current favorite, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who shared with the others the appurtenances of good taste: the occasion for refinement, the income for a library, and the impression, if not always the imprimatur, of a university degree. The lesser legacy of the prejudice against actors is that Shakespeare’s time as an actor is often overlooked or even forgotten. Mention that the playwright made his start strutting and fretting his hour on the stage, and you will be greeted with a look of surprise or else a shoulder shrug. Elizabethans were more attentive. As late as 1640, nearly a quarter century after his death, he was still remembered as “that famous Writer and Actor, Mr. William Shakespeare.” John Aubrey, the first of many to try his hand at writing a biography of the Bard, included the estimation of William Beeston that Shakespeare “did act exceedingly well.” True, Aubrey’s account is delightfully unreliable—did you know that Shakespeare’s father was a butcher? neither did Shakespeare—but Beeston’s verdict is actually strengthened by the fact that he couldn’t possibly have seen the Bard play. Born in 1606, or roughly five years after Shakespeare left the stage, he almost certainly inherited the opinion from his father, Christopher, who played alongside Will in the 1590s. Like Shakespeare, the elder Beeston knew the gross intimacy of the Globe, where people packed the timbered amphitheater for yearround performances. The least among them paid a penny to squeeze into the pit, chewing hazelnuts and reeking of their trade, mooning up at the players on the squared stage that jutted into the open yard. The rest—university wags, merchants in felt hats, the occasional lord or lady—bedecked the galleries, sniffing pomanders and smoking

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their pipes, watching with haughty lassitude the verbal traffic below. If an elevated seat signaled an elevated station, the tendency to criticize was catholic. From beginning to end of a performance, playgoers of all classes had no qualms about publishing reviews. They volunteered advice, often hissed, and occasionally hurled an orange or two. When Hamlet admonishes Polonius of the players, “After your death you were better / have a bad epitaph than an ill report while you live,” the same warning might have been applied to an actor by the audience. A poor player did not last long and tended to make a loud exit. That Shakespeare endured the judgment of such audiences for over fifteen years, the better half of his adult life, attests to his skills as an actor far beyond the ability of any single tribute. But his achievement is even more impressive if we remember the fact that the vagaries of performance precluded anything resembling an official script. Plays were constantly evolving, not only in response to critical reception but also to meet the demands of a given day. If a featured player departed or a fresh face joined the company, if the troupe traveled to a smaller venue or some circumstance limited stage time, if a command performance for the Queen saw the Master of Revels strike obscene material, if costumes or props or even a player were for whatever reason unavailable—in all cases, the actors had no choice. They did abide, or they didn’t eat. For Shakespeare’s readers, the benefit of such shifting demands is a surfeit of dialogue that a single performance could never accommodate, as well as delightful variants across the Quartos and Folios. For the actors, however, the experience must have been hellish, particularly because the fateful run of Henry VIII is the only account we have of concurrent performances of the same show—a run that stopped abruptly at three. The Globe was not a Broadway playhouse; it was a repertory theater, and members of the ensemble typically performed six different shows a week. Supporting players often played multiple roles in a single play, while a leading man like Edward Alleyn could expect to deliver more than four thousand lines of verse every week.

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As a matter of reputation, Shakespeare the Actor fell somewhere between these poles. While there is no indication that he was ever a box-office draw—that responsibility was left to the drollery of Will Kemp and the brooding heroics of Richard Burbage—along with these men, he was always classed among the principal players of the company that eventually became, in recognition of its final patron, The King’s Men. Apparently, the royal affinity suited Shakespeare, for he was said to favor “kingly parts,” with legend having Hamlet’s father as his farewell role. Whether this accurately captures or even fairly reflects his experience is anybody’s guess, but if, as it seems, he never stole the show, one might be forgiven for believing this was by choice, that Shakespeare preferred the quiet craft of the character actor who dissolves into his role. This is no mean trick. To appear before a familiar crowd everyday without reminding everyone that you, the actor, are busy inhabiting a role—indeed, to leave the audience with no other impression than that demanded by a particular character—is an art of remarkable modesty and extraordinary self-restraint. “Let your own discretion be your tutor,” Hamlet warns the players: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing.

The point of this passage, if we may be allowed to take one, is to commend utter self-effacement. The actor must abandon any interest he might bring with him to the stage in favor of a full commitment to the passions and predicament of another, his character. He may purchase a spectacle for the audience by out-Heroding Herod, but not the suspension of disbelief. Contemporary players have taken Hamlet’s advice. The point of departure for the most famous line of modern dramatic training, the Stanislavsky technique and its American cousins, the various strains of Method acting, is the idea that an actor fails whenever he appears to be acting. Indeed, whenever he is acting. The art that forgets itself

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is preferred. And while the classical elements of the craft remain— vocal training, body work, script analysis, line reading, and the rudiments of dramaturgy—fundamentally, the line between good acting and bad is rather simple: to be, or not to be. !

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Obliterating the distinction between being and acting is something of an innovation in twentieth-century drama, but Romantic authors and some of their immediate influences seemed to anticipate it when they tried to explain Shakespeare’s powers as a playwright and, in particular, his uncanny gift for creating characters. To “assume the precise character and passion” of his creations, the critic Lord Kames said, the playwright must clear a space within, “annihilating himself” and in consequence providing room for the “sentiments that belong to the assumed character.” Shakespeare was the avatar of such creation. Elizabeth Montagu compared him to the whirling dervish of the Arabian Nights, “who would throw his soul into the body of another man, and be at once possessed of his sentiments,” while William Hazlitt dubbed him “the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as his own.” The terms these authors use to describe Shakespeare’s achievement invite comparison to his time as an actor, but his theatrical experience is almost entirely neglected in their writings—indeed, they can occasionally seem like they are straining to overlook it. When Hazlitt attempts to analogize the “art” by which a poet “throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given,” the word he finds is “ventriloquist.” Yet if they failed to make the obvious connection between Shakespeare’s considerable experience as a player and his protean quality as a playwright, critics like Hazlitt had a keen sense of what was required to channel the sentiments of another, regardless of the chosen end. “He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be,” Hazlitt said, a statement that shouldn’t be confused for one

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celebrating Shakespeare’s altruistic spirit. Hazlitt was not drawing our attention to Shakespeare’s capacity for sympathy, but to his capacity for empathy, a radical form of empathy, the selfless quality which—as player, playwright, and finally person—the Bard so eerily embodied. No one better appreciated this quality than John Keats, who regarded Shakespeare as the quintessence of the “poetical Character.” As he would describe that “Character” in a letter to a friend, it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet.

As Keats envisions it, in order for the dramatic poet to channel the gross variety of the globe, there must be nothing in him—no habit, no inclination, no sensibility—that might reject an alien spirit. This is the reaction we tend to have whenever we confront a sentiment that seems ugly or unwarranted. We push back, unwilling to allow ourselves to be compromised or contaminated. Empathy, as such, is mostly a warden for the unreflective ethics we live by. To enter into the feelings of another who experiences the world the way we do is merely to underscore our opinion of it. The shoes of such a person fit us quite comfortably, and stepping into them takes no imagination, only instinct. But when the feelings of another confront us, when they indicate a being who confounds our sense of the moral order, we do not channel those feelings. We resist. We cannot equally delight in conceiving an Imogen and an Iago. We are apt to embrace one and reject the other for essentially the same reason. At least, that is, in everyday life. It didn’t escape notice that, on stage, the character of Iago was far more affecting than the chaste princess of Cymbeline. “The shining Monsters of Shakespeare” is how Voltaire described this first class of characters. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Voltaire was part of an earlier generation

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of authors who had criticized Shakespeare for flagrantly disregarding traditional standards of decency and good taste, a fault for them that would have made the central contention of the “authorship controversy”—that an aristocrat wrote Shakespeare’s plays—less unlikely than absurd. Critics like Voltaire and David Hume focused on the tendency of Shakespeare’s “shining Monsters” to captivate the audience, which is another way of saying that they found a moral failing in a dramatic success. As Hume explained it, Shakespeare “frequently hits” on a “striking peculiarity of sentiment” in his characters, but “a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold,” leaving his greatest characters somewhat like his genius, “disproportioned and misshapen.” Or, as Voltaire described the discomfiting achievement, strewn throughout Shakespeare’s plays were “such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful Scenes” that it was as if he had assembled “all that we can imagine of what is greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness without wit can contain of what is lowest and most detestable.” The Gallic gremlin preferred Joseph Addison’s Cato, “the greatest character, that was ever brought upon any Stage,” Voltaire said, adding, “but then the rest of them don’t correspond to the Dignity of it.” No one doubted the dignity of Addison’s creation; the question was whether he was compelling. The “Roman, with all his perfections, is cold and uninteresting,” the critic John Ogilvie replied. “We admire his virtues, as we may do those of a deceased friend.” By contrast, he said, consider Hamlet, who holds “the keys of the human heart, from which he calls out alternately, love, pity, terror, indignation, grief, amazement, horror, and anguish.” That range of emotion is central to Shakespeare’s world, and the passage through it inevitably exposes us to scenes that are neither dignified nor proper but engrossing all the same. This is not the art of reassurance, but a drama of disruption, and to create it, one had to be acutely sensitive to the passions that harrow and rack the human heart without ever being carried away. For Keats, such a capacity was purchased at a very high price. “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence,” he said,

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“because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.” So, too, is the player. His success depends on that same quality of selfless empathy, the radical ability to channel the emotional life of another without the resistance that reminds us of who we are, that marks out our identity. !

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Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s Globe collapsed into a hell of cinders and black smoke. The players stood beside the glowing heap, still arrayed in their finery, and if they heard any voice, it was that of the one who was always with them, even when he was away: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

These are Prospero’s words, Shakespeare’s voice. They form an epitaph for the Globe and a tribute of sorts to a man who left almost no trace of himself even as he furnished the selves of so many others in so many imagined worlds. Perhaps the actor in him understood that the creation was contingent on the disappearance, that the price of his professions was himself. His self. For Shakespeare the Man made no effort to proclaim to the world that he was there. He merely proclaimed to the Globe that Hamlet was there. Lear was there. Cleopatra was there. Iago was there. Falstaff was there. Mercutio was there. Rosalind was there. Richard was there. Beatrice was there. Bottom was there. Viola was

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there. Shylock was there. Caliban was there. Brutus was there. Malvolio was there. Macbeth was there. And on and on. Shining monsters all.