The 'Bard' is dead - long live the inky-fingered playwright:

An excellent review by Charles Nicholl of what sounds like an even more excellent book by Bart van Es (no, me, neither!) entitled Shakespeare in Company - and if 'SoD' is reading this you may look no further for a birthday gift for your dearly beloved father next year - er, I am 'dearly beloved', aren't I?!  In his review Mr. Nicholl dismisses with contempt verging on irritation the title 'The Bard' with which poor old Will, a jobbing playwright with ambition and, as it happens, genius, has been saddled.  Apparently the book forsakes the 'high falutin'' and concentrates on Shakespeare the 'wage slave', if you like, that is, a man with inky fingers who worked as part of a team in a busy workshop of actors, writers, businessmen, back-stage labourers, printers, clerks and so forth.  Mr. van Es concentrates on setting 'our Will' in his own ambience and thus showing the literal as well as literary truth in the phrase that "all the world's a stage".  Here is an example from Mr. Nicholl's review:

Not much is known about the Elizabethan actor John Sincler, a colleague of
Shakespeare’s in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, but we do have a pretty good idea of what he looked like – very thin, bony, pasty-faced. We know
this because in the quarto edition of Henry IV Part 2 (1600) his name
appears in a stage direction – “Enter Sincklo and three or foure officers” –
which shows that he played the part of the First Beadle. In a short scene
resounding with the complaints of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, whom he
has arrested, the beadle is variously described as a “thin thing”, a “famished
correctioner”, a “starved bloodhound”, a “nut hook”, an “atomy” (emended in the
Folio text to “anatomy”, i.e. a corpse ready for dissection) and “goodman
bones”; he is also called “tripe-visaged” and “paper-faced”. It is generally
agreed that the copy used for the quarto was Shakespeare’s own “foul papers” or
working draft of the play (rather than a marked-up prompt copy), so the casting
of Sincler is in Shakespeare’s mind as he writes the part, and the actor’s
particular physical characteristics condition the writing of it. It can further
be argued – or at least intelligently guessed – that Sincler played other skinny
Shakespearean characters such as Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor (who as well as being
slender has a “whey face”) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night,
though he is perhaps unlikely to have tackled the more serious part of “lean and
hungry” Cassius in Julius Caesar. His last known appearance was in a
King’s Men production of John Marston’s The Malcontent, performed at the
Globe in 1604. In a new prologue, specially written for this production by John
Webster, five members of the company appear on stage as themselves; one of them is Sincler. There are further physique-related jokes about him looking like a
viola da gamba, and having “four elbows”.

This reminds me of a moment, still magical to me even now, watching a performance of Henry IV, Part I in which Prince Hal and Poins, his hanger-on, tease a particularly dimwitted waiter called Francis.  The Prince engages him in conversation whilst Poins, in a distant part of the pub, keeps hollering for service to which the unfortunate Francis can only answer with a repeated cry of "Anon, anon, sir".  Sitting in that superb 'time capsule', the modern-day Globe, it suddenly struck me (dummy that I am!) that, of course, there had been a real-life 'Francis' living some 400 years ago, eking out a living as a tapster in one of the ale-houses frequented by Shakespeare and his no doubt ribald company of actors who had enjoyed teasing Francis with constant calls for service.  In that instant, a time-line was drawn from the 21st century straight back to the 16th century in a way that was direct and personal.

Apparently, Mr. van Es concentrates, quite properly, on the principal actor (and shareholder!) in Shakespeare's company, Richard Burbage, for whom the great roles in the later plays would have been written with him in mind.  But also, close attention is paid to the two 'clowns' who would have been part of the inspiration for many of those mysterious (and frequently unfunny) 'fools' who appear in his plays.  It is noticeable, even to an amateur like me, that these 'clowns' become increasingly complex as characters after the removal of Will Kemp as 'chief clown' and his replacement by Robert Armin.  One senses that Kemp was, so to speak,  an 'old style', almost music-hall, comedian where-as Armin had much greater depth as an actor.

Anyway, this sounds like a very rare example of a down-to-earth book on Shakespeare which concentrates on the nuts and bolts of his working life.  It's a 'must -have', really - are you getting this, 'SoD'?

  

Comments

[dearieme]

D'ye ken this 'un, Duffers?

BY DEPUTY

As Shakespeare couldn't write his plays
(If Mrs. Gallup' s not mistaken)
I think how wise in many ways,
He was to have them done by Bacon ;
They might have mouldered on the shelf
Mere minor dramas (and he knew it !)
If he had written them himself
Instead of letting Bacon do it.

And if its true, as Brown and Smith
In many learned tomes have stated.
That Homer was an idle myth.
He ought to be congratulated.
Since thus, evading birth, he rose
For men to worship at a distance :
He might have penned inferior prose
Had he achieved a real existence.

To him and Shakespeare men agree
In making very nice allusions ;
But no one thinks of praising me,
For I compose my own effusions :
As others wrote their works divine
And they immortal thus to-day are.
Perhaps had some one written mine
I might have been as great as they are.

Arthur St. John Adcock

[David Duff]

Thanks, DM, and I suspect that Arthur St. John Adcock would have been excellently witty company with whom to share a pint in 'Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese' in Fleet Street. By the way, is it true that it is really you who writes my blog?

[dearieme]

You may very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

[David Duff]

Quite!