What if?

What if there were that much more to know about the complexity of the Elizabethan Theatre?

‘As an unperfect actor on the stage’

is practically my motto. I, as an actor, am not without mustard.
I certainly sucked last night at the salon singing an awful rendition of Strauss’ Lied, Die Nacht. Then i ran away before doing my second dismemberment of a classical song, Du bist die ruh. I had an excuse, which a phone-call would have resolved, but I ran away. Blog as confessional.

‘Who calls me coward? Ha!’

Self-doubt is one of the reasons I love Sh’s sonnets. If I project that self-doubt onto a priviliged Nobleman who squandered his birthright I’m not impressed.

But if, (so much virtue in that word) i see a provincial boy turned big city playwright, poet and actor, it gives me hope.

He is no better than me. He is no worse. The equalizing factor is what draws me to Shakespeare. His servants and slaves are no better or worse than his masters and mistresses.

One heart, two eyes and ears, and one soul. What went on in that head and heart of his in any conjectured scenario is impossible to say. Whatever you think he’s telling you.

But Sh was indisputably unique in his time, though seeming the same for his contemporaries. We don’t need an alternative if you give this man an inner life. Which I would we knew more of than we do. But we don’t. So the rest remains conjecture.

We do know that English actors and their acting was not confined to the Theatre world of Elizabethan England. English actors toured Europe, even to Bohemia, all through the time that Sh was writing and acting his plays. And beyond.

It can even be argued that English comedians, as the groups of strolling players were known, ignited the Theatre worlds of Germany, and The Netherlands, which at the time was 7 provinces.

Some English players were seen at Frankfurt’s annual fair in 1592 by Fynes Moryson, the well-known Elizabethan traveller. In his ‘Itinerary’ he left us this account:

Germany hath some fewe wandering Comeydians (he had lived in Ireland), more deserving pity than prayse, for the serious parts are dully penned, and worse acted, and the mirth they make is ridiculous, and nothing less than witty (sounds like my act)…So as I remember that when some of our cast despised stage-players came out of England into Germany, and played at Franckford in the tyme of the Mart, having nether a complete number of Actours (as opposed to Actors who stay at home and don’t have to), nor any good Apparell (‘costly thy habit as thy purse can afford’), nor any ornament of the Stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a word they sayde, both men and women, flocked wonderfully to see theire gesture and action (‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action’),
rather than heare them, speaking English which they understand not.

Jerzy Limon – Gentlemen of a Company English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590-1660. C.U.P. 1985.

Another book (i’m still trying to locate. SO if you know where and how please post it to Facebook or Shaksper) was

an anthology of English Drama in German prose translations called ‘Englische Comoedien und Tragedien’ and published in 1620 and 1624. Altogether about 30 English plays were published at that time, including eight plays by Shakespeare, and by several by other dramatists such as Marlowe, Dekker, Greene, Peele and Kyd.

Funny how no one was asking who wrote this stuff?