Shakespeare and his actors, and the kind of plays he didn't write

I have been reading the brilliant 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro (now James S. Shapiro).

One thing people generally don’t know, or don’t think about, is that Shakespeare wrote for his actors—he didn’t write a play then cast for the roles, but had to write the parts for actors in his company (The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later called The King’s Men). 

“When Shakespeare sat down to write King Lear, he knew that he would be writing the part for Richard Burbage, the finest tragedian of the age. He had already created for him such career-defining roles as Richard the Third, Hamlet, and Othello. Burbage was now in his late thirties, which also meant that Shakespeare could expand his imaginative horizons and write plays that starred more grizzled and world-weary protagonists. Before 1606 was over, he would challenge Burbage not only in the role of Lear, but also in another pair of older tragic roles, Macbeth and Antony (while this same year Ben Jonson wrote for Burbage the brilliant part of Volpone, who play-acts the role of an infirm old man). No actor may ever have faced more daunting newly written roles in so short a time span.” (Ch.1)

It’s like Shakespeare was writing the plays and thinking, “let’s see what Burbage can do”. But imagine being the actor for whom Shakespeare wrote the roles of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony! 

“Genius may be a necessary precondition for creating a masterpiece but it’s never a sufficient one. Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays depended on the raw talent of his company.” (ibid.)

That’s an important point. After writing about the tragedian, Shapiro writes about the comedians: 

“The company’s first star comedian, Will Kemp, had parted ways with them back in 1599, pursuing a solo career, a blow to the company, for audiences were drawn to the theater for Kemp’s clowning as much as they were for Burbage’s tragic roles or Shakespeare’s words. Kemp’s replacement, Robert Armin, was a very different kind of comedian. While Armin could step into some of the roles Shakespeare had written for Kemp (such as Dogberry in Much Ado), Kemp’s improvisational and physical style and commonsensical if at times dim-witted demeanor couldn’t have been further from the sardonic, witty style of the diminutive Armin. It took a while for Shakespeare to figure out how best to write Armin into his plays. He had some early success with the parts of Touchstone in As You Like It and Feste in Twelfth Night, and with smaller roles as the Gravedigger in Hamlet and perhaps Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. But it wasn’t until King Lear that Shakespeare created a truly defining role for Armin, Lear’s Fool (and it was probably with this role in mind that, four years later, John Davies praised Armin as one who could “wisely play the fool”).

The Fool would be a role unlike any Shakespeare had ever written before or after—witty, pathetic, lonely, angry, and prophetic in turn, a part rich in quips and snippets of ballads and the kind of sharp exchanges for which Armin was famous. Armin’s range was extraordinary and it’s not surprising that this almost bewildering role was cut for much of King Lear’s stage history. It wasn’t only Shakespeare’s relationship with both Burbage and Armin that had matured, but also the relationship of the star comedian and tragedian with each other.” (ibid.)

This is one of those facts that make you see Shakespeare’s plays differently. I never thought much about the change in the comic roles in the plays.

These facts also make you realise Shakespeare couldn’t have been an earl or some aristocrat being away somewhere writing alone—it had to be a man of theatre, a man within the acting company, as William Shakespeare was. As Shapiro writes in Contested Will:

“You couldn’t write Rosalind’s part in As You Like It unless you had absolute confidence that the boy who spoke her seven hundred lines, a quarter of the play, could manage it. You couldn’t write a part requiring the boy playing Lady Percy in The First Part of Henry the Fourth to sing in Welsh unless you knew that the company had a young actor who could handle a tune and was a native of Wales. Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of everyone in the company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents.” (“Four: Shakespeare”) 

There’s a mistake—the one singing in Welsh in Henry IV, Part 1 is not Lady Percy but Glendower’s daughter who marries Mortimer—but the point stands. 

“The author of Shakespeare’s plays could not have written the great roles of Richard III, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello and Lear unless he knew how far he could stretch his leading tragedian, Richard Burbage. Writing parts for the company’s star comedian was even tougher. How could anyone but a shareholder in the company know to stop writing comic parts for Will Kemp the moment he quit the company in 1599 – and start writing parts in advance of the arrival of his replacement, Robert Armin, whose comic gifts couldn’t have been more different?” (ibid.) 

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1606 has lots of interesting facts and it would take me forever to talk about them, so I’m just going to single out another: the kind of plays Shakespeare didn’t write.  

“Though he was now the most experienced dramatist in the land, Shakespeare had not written the masque and, had he been invited to do so, had said no. It would have been a tempting offer. If he cared about visibility, prestige, or money, the rewards were great; the writer responsible for the masque earned more than eight times what a dramatist was typically paid for a single play. And on the creative side, in addition to the almost unlimited budget and the potential for special effects, the masque offered the very thing he had seemingly wished for in the opening Chorus to Henry the Fifth: “princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene” (1.0.3–4). That Shakespeare never accepted such a commission tells us as much about him as a writer as the plays he left behind. There was a price to be paid for writing masques, which were shamelessly sycophantic and propagandistic, compromises he didn’t care to make. He must have also recognized that it was an elite and evanescent art form that didn’t suit his interests or his talents.” (Prologue) 

1606 is making me love Shakespeare more and more.