Dear Me,

  Huzzah to chapter 39!  If I manage to chapter 40 I will have considered it a success.

Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Four

Part 39:  Lord How Art Thou Changed

The actual nature of their acting is still not fully understood.  Shakespeare often alludes to what was clearly considered to be an old fashioned style of acting, when actors sawed the air with their arms, stamped across the stage, interrupted their speeches with sighs and rolled their eyes to signify fear. The word "ham" come from the visibility of the ham string of the leg.  Strutting was apparently accompanied by ranting.

Burbage's style could then be described as a drift away from external symbolism towards imitation.  It seems likely that Burbage and his colleagues had initiated a style of acting in which the player tried to feel or express that passion.  It may well be that some new art employed by Burbage and his colleagues, would help to explain in impact of Shakespeare's plays upon his contemporaries.  Shakespeare may have written in a new "inward" style precisely because there were players who could readily create such effects.

A modern audience would no doubt be surprised by the amount of formality involved in all types of Elizabethan acting.  The fact that the Globe and elsewhere so many plays were produced and acted so quickly, with as many plays in a single week, does suggest that there were elements of "shorthand" in the performance which the actors adopted naturally.

The other consideration rests with the size of the audience, to be numbered in thousands rather than hundreds.  There could be no attempt at intimacy.  Burbage knew how to change pitch or tone of his voice.  His delivery itself may have been rhythmic distinctly at odds with the rhythms of contemporary speech.  There was no such thing as "normal" voice in the Elizabethan theatre, and it is extremely unlikely that the modern tones of "dialogue" were ever heard upon its stage.

We may speculate that the acting of the Lord Chamberlain's Men did not represent a complete break with the conventions of the theatre.  A completely new or revolutionary style would have attracted adverse comment.  Whatever moved their passions was real enough.  For the Lord Chamberlain's Men it was a question of adding new techniques and attitudes to the old ones.  It was no doubt characterised by a mingling of formality and naturalism which would look decidedly odd in modern theatre.