11 11 Richard Burbage

There is but one recorded expression of grief upon the death of William Shakespeare: the epitaph by William Basse that places the poet beside Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont as a ‘rare tragedian’.¹ Although these verses were quite widely distributed in manuscript it was not until seven years later, with the publication of the First Folio by the company’s surviving founding fellows, that there came a broader public response to the nation’s loss. The case of Shakespeare’s leading actor was different—so voluminous were the declarations of regret that they caused a minor scandal because they reputedly dwarfed the recognition of the death of Queen Anne, which also occurred in 1619.² British Library manuscript Stowe 962, a miscellany largely put together in the 1620s and 1630s, contains the earliest of the surviving elegies for Burbage, which it attributes to John Fletcher.³ It is an indication of the relative neglect of Shakespeare’s actors as influences on the playwright that no direct transcription of this manuscript has been printed in full.⁴

MS Stowe 962 is a sophisticated literary collection that probably emanates from Christ Church, Oxford. It contains reliable early copies of work by Donne, Carew, and Jonson, as well as speeches and letters on political topics that reflect an elevated coterie. The appearance of a lengthy and splendidly laudatory elegy on Richard Burbage in such company is noteworthy.⁵ Although the poem is well known, its unique qualities are worth highlighting. No other early modern actor was the subject of such posthumous adulation.⁶ Contemporary acknowledgement was made of the talents of important players such as Richard Tarlton, Edward Alleyn, William Kemp, Thomas Greene, and Robert Armin, but none was praised in such detail or by such a wide constituency. In his lifetime Burbage was depicted on stage in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus at St John’s College Cambridge and in the Induction to Marston’s The Malcontent at the Globe. Jonson in Bartholomew Fair, performed at the Hope by Lady Elizabeth’s players, called him the ‘best actor’; Webster took him as the model for his prose description of ‘an excellent actor’; and Middleton, in another obituary poem, termed Burbage ‘that great master in his art’.⁷ At the very highest level, the Earl of Pembroke, dedicatee of the First Folio, ‘could not endure to see’ another play soon after the loss of Burbage.⁸ Middleton called this an ‘eclipse of playing’ and the memory of his excellence would live on in theatrical circles for generations to come.

The first point to note is Burbage’s outstanding ability, a skill in performance rooted in verisimilitude—‘so truly to the life’ as the elegy stresses.⁹Second, there is a marked emphasis on tragedy. Although Burbage was also a comic actor, taking the lead in Jonson’s Volpone for example, his reputation was established above all through serious performance. MS Stowe 962 declares that ‘no man can act so well/ This point of sorrow’ and counsels poets to cease writing tragedies ‘since tragic parts you see/ die all with him’ (fols 62^b, 63^a). This matches the depiction in the Parnassus trilogy (where Burbage instructs a young hopeful) and is confirmed in the list of parts for which he was celebrated: Richard III, Othello, Lear, Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi and—most of all—Hamlet.¹⁰ The actor’s pre-eminence rested in the ‘true’ depiction of grief.

A third aspect of Richard Burbage’s impact on Shakespeare is less commonly noted. This is his financial power and role in the attainment of patronage. Richard and his brother Cuthbert had a family partnership that bore comparison with that of Alleyn and Henslowe. Their father James was, as Cuthbert proudly proclaimed, ‘the first builder of playhouses’ in England: not only the Theatre at Shoreditch but also the indoor stage at Blackfriars owed their construction to his sense of enterprise.¹¹ James made investments, based on substantial borrowing, that bore fruit for his children.¹² Equally important, he was, like Edward Alleyn, a theatrical insider. The family had performance experience dating back to the 1540s and James had been a leading member of the first truly famous travelling company, the Earl of Leicester’s Men.¹³ As with Alleyn’s close connection with Lord Howard, this ability to call upon support from members of the high nobility was essential for the long-term success of a company. Cuthbert, the eldest son and chief financier, secured employment with Sir Walter Cope, Gentleman Usher to the Lord Treasurer, who was closely associated with the Cecils. Although Leeds Barroll has rightly cautioned against an overestimate of the closeness between players and court patrons, it was impossible for a dramatic enterprise to function without high-level support.¹⁴ For the Burbage duo, just as with the Alleyn–Henslowe business, associations at court helped to smooth the way at moments of conflict, such as the time when Cuthbert was fighting a legal action for the survival of the Globe in the years 1599–1601.¹⁵We get a glimpse of this occluded aspect of Shakespeare’s professional life from a chance survival in the accounts of Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland (whose brother, Roger, the fifth Earl, had been so obstructive to the Theatre): in 1613 Shakespeare designed an impresa for him, which was painted in gold by Richard Burbage, so it could be worn in the accession day tilts.¹⁶ Such personal connection with the nobility evidently depended on the two brothers: in a surviving letter to Robert Cecil, for example, Cope reports as follows:

Burbage is come and says there is no new play that the Queen hath not seen, but they have revived an old one called Loves Labour Lost, which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly. And this is appointed to be played tomorrow night at my Lord of Southampton’s, unless you send a writ to remove the corpus cum causa to your house in Strand. Burbage is my messenger ready attending your pleasure.¹⁷

The ‘Burbage’ in question here is most likely Cuthbert, but the brothers were first housemates and then immediate neighbours and evidently worked hand in glove.

The events of 1599–1600 made Richard Burbage much more important to Shakespeare. The departure of Kemp left him the undisputed leading performer of the company and this dominance was reinforced by a massive increase in his financial investment in his own acting career. Richard and Cuthbert owned the old materials that were used in the new playhouse and it was they who had organized the lease of the land. Together the brothers held a 50 per cent stake in the enterprise, whereas Shakespeare, like the other ordinary housekeepers, held only one-tenth. Thus the playwright, by becoming a Globe sharer, had made a personal commitment to Richard Burbage. From this point on he was a stakeholder in a company of which the Burbages had near majority ownership. It was the Burbage brothers who took the lead in the move to the Bankside and Shakespeare’s decision to join them would prove a pivotal one.

One basic way of measuring the effect of Richard Burbage’s new status is to measure the size of the roles that Shakespeare wrote for him. In the years 1594 to 1598, when the power balance between sharers was relatively equal, so too was the division of parts. In no play did the lead role take more than a quarter of the line total and on average the largest part had less than a fifth of the overall lines.¹⁸ In plays that can be dated from 1599 to 1608, starting with Henry V, the division is very different: eight of the fourteen plays written in that period have a lead who speaks over a quarter of the line total, and major parts such as Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth, Timon, and Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure speak more than 30 per cent of the whole. The lead part from 1599 onwards, moreover, is almost always suited to Burbage. In the first five years of the fellowship the leading roles, in terms of line length, included Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Portia in Merchant of Venice, and Falstaff in Henry IV  Part  1, Henry IV  Part  2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor—none of these are parts that Burbage could have played. Although we cannot always be sure of which parts were taken by him, the situation after 1599 was markedly different. There are eleven dominant roles in the plays dated 1599–1608, which on average take 29 per cent of the lines: of this total, nine are strongly suited to what we know of Richard Burbage’s style.¹⁹

Such line counts are only one form of evidence, but they do confirm what is apparent simply from overview. In the second phase of the company’s history, with the Globe as a permanent place of performance, the major male roles become both more dominant and more distinctive: Henry V, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus are all a product of this time. There is not in all cases proof positive that these parts were taken by Burbage, but the likelihood is overwhelmingly strong. Later company history shows us these roles were considered as a unit, to be taken by the ensemble’s leading man.²⁰ Pre-eminence in major productions was evidently prized by the players;²¹ so that even if we cannot trace it in every detail, the effect upon Shakespeare’s writing of Burbage’s strengthened position was immediate and profound.

One role that we can be certain was written for Burbage is Hamlet. At 1338 lines in the Second Quarto, it is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and more than double the length of any play’s leading role between 1594 and 1599. Even in Burbage’s lifetime the role was legendary. In Ratseis Ghost, an anonymous pamphlet published in 1605, the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet is presented as the apogee of his profession, a figure whose parts are the most demanding in the repertory and whose ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ are destined to earn him ‘some place or lordship in the country’.²² That prophecy, though tinged with anti-theatrical resentment, was not unrealistic: on a scale that was grander than that of Shakespeare and the other fellows in the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men the Burbage family acquired a country residence in addition to their London property and had strong bonds of connection with the higher echelons of power.²³  Hamlet, as the title page of the First Quarto reminded its readers, was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’ servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’; it thus functioned in elite circles as the calling card of its leading man.

The character of Hamlet must have emerged as a corollary of Burbage’s pre-eminence. More than this, when combined with external evidence on the actor’s roles and reputation, it provides significant insight into the way that Burbage performed. At the heart of this stands the Prince’s first oration, which Shakespeare penned in full knowledge of the capacities of the person for whom it was meant:

‘Seems’, madam—nay it is, I know not ‘seems’.

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’,

For they are actions that a man might play,

But I have that within which passes show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(Hamlet, Q2 1.2.76–86)

These lines offer something different from the standard self-reflexivity of Renaissance drama. It is usual for revenge tragedies to depict acts of performance: we find this in Shakespeare’s own Titus Andronicus and seminally in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, whose lead character Hieronimo ends the play as an actor in a performance and tells his on-stage audience ‘Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts,/ That this is fabulously counterfeit,/ And that we do as all tragedians do’ (4.4.76–8). In plays of this genre, including the Admiral’s Men’s Lust’s Dominion and St Paul’s Boys’ Antonio’s Revenge, we find a ‘play within a play’ in which the revenger suddenly reveals that his actions are real. It is logical that the lost original Hamlet, which evidently featured a pretended madness, also contained this element. But what Shakespeare’s Hamlet opens by saying is almost the reverse of this standard closing revelation: it is not that the performance is real, but rather that an interior reality negates outward performance.²⁴

In making this claim and in delivering his later reflections on the player’s speech about ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ (Hamlet, Q2 2.2.485–540) Burbage needed to speak in a way that could be distinguished not just from the on-stage ‘tragedians of the city’ (2.2.292) but also from the words of his ‘cold mother’ (as the Quarto text has it) or the portentous ranting of Laertes later in the play. To dismiss all outward forms of grief as ‘actions that a man might play’ (1.2.84) is a risky move in a tragedy, especially one like Hamlet, which does not court the comic artificiality of Antonio’s Revenge.²⁵ For the play to work the audience must at some level accept the idea that Hamlet’s emotions are more real than those that are performed around him. That possibility as something achieved through Burbage’s acting is clearly proclaimed in the elegy on his death:

No man can act so well

This point of sorrow, for him none can draw

So truly to the life this map of woe;

That grief’s true picture.

(MS Stowe 962, fol. 62^b)

This description is delivered specifically in reference to Hamlet and so cannot be dismissed as formulaic praise. It matches with the account of Richard Flecknoe, who is certainly a reliable authority and who may even have seen Burbage performing in his final years.²⁶ Alone among the actors of the period, Flecknoe praises Burbage at length as follows:

He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring-house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer, who knows all his graces and can artfully vary and modulate his voice, even to know how much breath he is to give to every syllable.²⁷

Not just a great orator, Burbage was, according to Flecknoe’s account, a consistent embodiment of the character he was performing even when not directly involved in the action, ‘never falling in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gesture maintaining it still unto the height’.²⁸ Webster, who worked closely with Burbage and wrote while the actor was still performing, insisted that ‘what we see him personate, we think truly done before us’.²⁹ Even more so for Thomas Bancroft, another likely contemporary witness, Burbage offers a case of total absorption in the present moment (the subject of his poem being vanity and the way material things come to obsess the worldly mind):

Such, like our Burbage are, who when his part

He acted, sent each passion to his heart;

Would languish in a scene of love; then look

Pallid for fear; but when revenge he took,

Recall his blood; when enemies were nigh,

Grow big with wrath, and make his buttons fly.³⁰

It is important to be cautious of ascribing an ahistorical ‘realism’ to this form of acting, which is still connected to the rhetorical traditions of the age.³¹ As Palfrey and Stern point out, Bancroft’s praise highlights something different from straightforward verisimilitude, it is what they call the ‘seemingly spontaneous change from one passion to another’ that is the true mark of the actor’s greatness in this account.³² Still, the testaments to Burbage’s acting do consistently credit him with an unprecedented emotional contact with the character he embodies.³³ This intensity, combined with the quality of rapid transition, sets Burbage apart from the formulaic and protracted single emotional state that is described in Hamlet’s speech on ‘seeming’, or projected in the oration by the player that Polonius finds ‘too long’ (Hamlet, Q2 2.2.436).

In Hamlet Shakespeare juxtaposes a series of different modes of acting: that of the newly revived children; the older rhyming moralities depicted in The Murder of Gonzago; the university drama in which Polonius ‘was accounted a good actor’ (Q2 3.2.96–7); and the grand pseudo-Marlovian cadences of the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ (2.2.390) speech that Hamlet requests. Burbage’s own performance stood alongside these and demanded attention, above all through the character’s defining changeability in his interior state. To speak of Hamlet’s indecision is, of course, amongst the oldest clichés of English literary criticism and Margreta de Grazia has recently offered a powerful counterblast to what can seem like a tired way of understanding this work.³⁴ Yet the notion of a ‘transcendent inwardness’ to Hamlet, which de Grazia decries as a modern invention, is not without its original historical context. The intense introspection of his soliloquies can be placed not only as a reaction to the surface artifice of the children’s productions but also as a response to contrasting modes of delivery in the adult theatre world.

The Fortune playhouse, built unashamedly on the model of the new Globe, was under construction as Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and held its first performances while Shakespeare’s new drama appeared on the stage. To launch his new theatre Edward Alleyn returned from retirement.³⁵ Thus, just as Shakespeare had begun to craft a new kind of role for his leading player–investor, the outstanding performer and theatrical impresario of the first half of the 1590s had re-emerged to public view. Alleyn was the original Tamburlaine, Faustus, Muly Mahamet, and mad Orlando.³⁶ He had also performed work by Shakespeare before the playwright joined the Chamberlain’s Men and probably had a prominent role in the first performances of Titus Andronicus. Besides Burbage, Alleyn was the only celebrated tragic actor of this period. The two men had travelled together in 1593 during the closure of the theatres, but since 1594 they had been the central figures in two competing theatrical troupes.³⁷ Their capabilities must inevitably have been the subject of comparison, especially now that the heroic roles that had set the standard in the previous decade were to be seen anew on the London stage.

The speech that Hamlet requests from the First Player involves something more complicated than mere nostalgia because it so closely approximates the roles that Alleyn was reviving. At one point it becomes a virtual quotation from Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that at some stage had been performed by the original Children of the Chapel but which was now in the repertory of the Admiral’s Men.³⁸ In Nashe and Marlowe’s play Aeneas’s lengthy oration describes this part of Troy’s destruction as follows:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,

His harness dropping blood, and on his spear

The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…³⁹

Hamlet remembers very similar lines as a prompt to the player for a speech he ‘chiefly loved’:

hamlet:  The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…

—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.

The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,

Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…

(Hamlet, Q2 2.2.388–91)

This is not straightforward parody and it is also something different from the casual ‘Marlovian’ rhetoric that Shakespeare commonly deployed in his pre-1594 dramas. The Prince’s endorsement of the speech’s quality stands curiously alongside Polonius’ scepticism, making a role that must have been associated with Alleyn appear both antiquated and refined. The scene is intriguingly different from a comparable one in Jonson’s Poetaster, which was likewise written at the highpoint of the conflict between the rival playhouses: in this play a young boy performs ‘the rumbling player’ as he acts out various roles associated with Alleyn, leaving the custom-starved sharer, Histrio, looking on.⁴⁰ As a comedy performed by the Children of Blackfriars, Poetaster’s approach is essentially parodic, but Hamlet (a tragedy written for adults) takes a subtly different tack.

Hamlet’s second great soliloquy, which is prompted by the player’s oration, juxtaposed Burbage’s acting with Alleyn’s. As Susan Cerasano has shown, Alleyn’s abilities were widely admired—his roles were marked by charismatic self-projection and the skilful delivery of heroic blank verse.⁴¹ Edward Guilpin, who saw him perform as Cutlack the Dane (a role with particular resonance for Shakespeare’s tragedy), remembered him possessed by humours, with eyes of lightning and words of thunder.⁴² Hamlet offers admiration and even envy for such qualities as performed by the player:

Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit.

(Hamlet, Q2 2.2.490–2)

If we accept that the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ speech must bring Alleyn to mind then the allusion is partly deferential, yet the word ‘forms’ must also remind the audience of the first speech by Hamlet concerning ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ as ‘actions that a man might play’ (1.2.82, 84). Were the player to have Hamlet’s cause, we are told, he would ‘drown the stage with tears,/ And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ (2.2.497–8), a description that edges dangerously close to the oratorical whirlwind later condemned by the Prince in his instructions to the actors (Q2 3.2.1–43). As with the earlier speech on ‘seeming’, Hamlet’s description of acting serves as a point of contrast that differentiates Burbage:

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak

Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,

And can say nothing.

(Hamlet, Q2 2.2.501–4)

There is at this point a doubleness in operation: for while the Prince can say ‘nothing’, the actor who embodies him must be eloquent to an unprecedented degree, moving from indecision to sudden rage. The strange shifts of logic in this soliloquy make the representation of a conflicted interiority possible. This happens, for example, when the speaker reaches a point of break-down in his self-accusation for cowardice and comes up with the plan of testing the King’s guilt by means of a play:

Oh, vengeance!

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,

That I, the son of the dear murderèd,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must like a whore unpack my heart with words,

And fall a-cursing like a very drab,

A scullion!

Fie upon’t, foh! About, my brains. Hum, I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul…

(Hamlet (conflated text), 2.2.534–44)⁴³

At one level this speech fails utterly to give an adequate account of Hamlet’s interior. Is he, as he proclaims, a coward? If so, then the invention of a need to test Claudius is a characteristic ploy to delay. Or is the test a sensible precaution? If this is the case then the earlier self-admonition about his cowardice has been insincere. This soliloquy forces on the audience that which de Grazia finds supremely ahistorical in critical responses to Hamlet: the notion of ‘self-deceit’.⁴⁴ Her forensic scepticism on this point is useful because it highlights the innovativeness of Shakespeare’s characterization. Yet to declare self-deception an impossibility is to make history close down rather than open up the joint achievement of Shakespeare and Burbage. The dysfunctional grammar of Hamlet’s soliloquies is precisely what allows the speaker to move beyond mere ‘seeming’. As Hamlet puts it after his meeting with the Captain from Young Fortinbras’s army:

Now whether it be

Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on the th’event

(A thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward) I do not know

Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,

Sith I have cause and will and strength and means

To do’t.

(Hamlet, Q2 4.4.38–45)

In this final great soliloquy (which exists only in the Quarto) Hamlet not only propounds the notion of self-deception but also shows it in action. It is plainly contradictory that he should have ‘cause and will and strength and means’ to perform the murder and yet fail to do it—thus his sentence never settles to express a clear meaning. This speech functions instead to go beyond mere ‘seeming’ because these are actions that a man, ordinarily speaking, cannot play.

In Hamlet Burbage went definitively beyond even the great speeches of self-doubt in Alleyn’s role of Faustus. The primary achievement is of course Shakespeare’s, but it should not therefore be detached from the material circumstances of his leading performer and the specific pressures on his acting company. Hamlet was and remained a defining character for Burbage, a moment of professional self-definition that set a marker for subsequent writing, not only by Shakespeare but also by other playwrights who worked for the company. It was inevitable, for example, that the philosophical, skull-contemplating heroes Vindice (of Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy) and Charlemont (of Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy) would be written for the lead actor with Shakespeare’s earlier creation in mind.⁴⁵ Burbage alone was celebrated by contemporaries specifically for his true-to-life performance. From this point on Shakespeare would write a string of plays in which the internal state of the central protagonist was an open question: the Duke in Measure for Measure, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus. It is almost certain that all of these were written for Burbage. The great tragedian was now Shakespeare’s primary partner and by the middle of the decade the dramatist would entirely abandon the writing of comedies.

With Burbage still more so than with Armin it was possible for Shakespeare to develop devices and characters over many years of partnership. Their names are conjoined in over a dozen theatrical documents and Burbage was one of only three London acquaintances remembered in the playwright’s will.⁴⁶ A few months after the playwright’s death, Burbage named what would be his only surviving son ‘William’.⁴⁷ This closeness must have enabled a new level of authorial adaptation, one obvious feature of which is that Shakespeare’s leads age over the course of the canon, so that eventually we come to fathers such as Pericles, Cymbeline, Leontes, and Prospero. Although we do not always have proof of the roles taken by Burbage this should not blind us to his influence. The external evidence offers coherent witness to his talents and an almost unbroken history of the plays in performance—from Joseph Taylor to Thomas Betterton through Garrick, Kean, Olivier, and beyond—is testament to his line.⁴⁸