SHAKESPEARE'S COMPANY

Shakespeare was above all else a practical man of the theatre. He performed in a number of plays by his contemporary Ben Jonson and in some of his own. He played, for example, the Ghost of Hamlet's father. But like many of the world's greatest dramatists, he was writing for specific actors whom he knew well, and whose acting strengths and weaknesses he understood and exploited. In a few cases, we know their names and something of their personalities. Some were well known to London audiences: Richard Tarleton, Will Kempe, Richard Burbage, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, George Bryan, John Heminges; some were doubtless of great skill, though their names are lost to posterity. Such is the fate of the nameless boys for whom Shakespeare wrote Juliet, Desdemona, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth and myriad others. In Shakespeare's day, there were no actresses on the English stage.

Best known of all of Shakespeare's actors was Richard Burbage (c. 1567-1619). He was without question the most famous actor of his age, and perhaps the most influential actor of all time. Shakespeare wrote roles as different as Richard III, Othello, King Lear, Hamlet and Benedick for this short, stocky man. He was established as an audience favorite by the time he was twenty years old, and was sought after by all the best playwrights of his time. With his brother Cuthbert, he built the Globe using the timbers of his father's The Theatre. One of his epitaph elegies, this one attributed to "Jo ffletcher," gives us a hint of his greatness:

Richard Burbage was a painter as well as an actor. The so-called Felton portrait of Shakespeare is attributed to him, and there is a portrait of a woman, undoubtedly by him, preserved at Dulwich College.

After the death of Richard Tarleton, Will Kempe (c. 1560-c. 1603) became the leading comedian of his day. Undisciplined, a brilliant improviser, and a gifted dancer of jigs, Kempe had to have a part in any play written at the time. When he left the company scarcely a year later to invent the world's first publicity stunt-his famous dance from Norwich to London-, Shakespeare lost the brilliant comedian for whom he had written, among others, Dogberry in Much Ado and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. He may have originated Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream as well. The loss may not have been as keenly felt by the Bard himself as by his audiences. Hamlet's admonition to the players may well have been directed at Kempe and his imitators:
And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

Women were not employed on the Elizabethan or Jacobean stage, so Shakespeare wrote all his female roles to be played by boys. Shakespeare had considerable fun with the idea of a boy playing a girl playing a boy, as is the case with Rosalind in As You Like It, or Viola in Twelfth Night, and even more theatrically with Flute playing Thisby in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Boys in the professional companies often graduated to male parts as they matured and their voices dropped and their beards grew. When Hamlet first greets the players, he recognizes one such fellow and says:

And to another:

There was nothing prurient about the use of boys in these parts, in the same way that Dustin Hoffmans' Tootsie and Robin Williams' Mrs. Doubtfire were not. Indeed, cross-dressing is still a part of British stage tradition: women often play the "principal boy"-as in Peter Pan, for instance. And the happily married Australian Barry Humphries plays to packed houses all over the civilized world in the essentially innocent persona of Dame Edna.

Though we don't know the originals' names, the name of one famous "female impersonator" has come down to us, that of Edward Kynaston (c. 1640-1706). A generation and a half after Shakespeare's death, and in direct competition with "real" actresses who were at last allowed on the stage after the Restoration of Charles II, a few boys tried to eke out a living playing female parts. Kynaston alone achieved a great popularity. He became the topic of a somewhat sensationalized 2002 film starring Billy Crudup and Claire Danes, Stage Beauty. William Davenant's stage manager remembered Kynaston in his heyday:

Pepys chronicled an evening at the theatre Saturday, 18 August 1660: