Dear Me,

  So excited.  I got a message from an author of a book I just discovered and really like :D.  Now back to work.  Today we cover Chapter 38 and maybe if  I can wrangle it, 39,   Heeeere we go!

Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Four

Chapter 38:  We Few.  We Happy Few.  We Band of Brothers

This extraordinary group of players, became Shakespeare's best friends for the rest of the life.  He wrote for, and acted with, them only.  They were not only his colleagues but, if his will are any proof, they were also his intimate friends.  They were also the longest running company in English theatrical history.  They were together for almost fifty years in which they performed the greatest plays in history.

We know the identity of some of them.  Apart from Richard Burbage, there was Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, John Heminges, John Sinclaire, William Sly, Richard Cowley, John Duke and the comedian Will Kempe.

The most versatile comic actor in the company was undoubtedly William Kempe.  He was the most famous clown in the country.  He was small and stout, especially with padding but quick and nimble on his feet.  He was well known for his gigs and his morris dancing.  When not dressing up as a femal street-seller he wore the costume of a country clown.  He had shaggy and unruly hair his humour was farcical and often obscene.  The humour of the Elizabethan stage survives still in farce and in pantomime.  It is one of the unchanging features of the English imagination.  He played Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV.  At the end of the play Kempe appeared on stage, still dressed as Falstaff asked the audience "If my tongue cannot intreate you to acquite mee, will you commaund me to use my legges?"  This was a cue for a jig that the rest of the players are likely to have joined.

In 1599 Kempe left the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the reason's are still unclear.  The quarrel may have been over a matter as simple as a comic performance.  As a result, in Henry V, Falstaff mysteriously disappears and his death off stage is merely described.  Since Kempe had left the comany there was no point in bringing back Falstaff.  After Kempe left the Lord Chamberlain's Men he performed a "wonder" by dancing all the way from London to Norwich.

In the company of the Lord Chamberlain's Men there were sixteen actors, including five or six boys who played female parts.  The boys had a "master" in one of the older actors, with whom they lodged and by whom they were instructed.  On contract reveals that the boy or more specifically the boy's parent's paid a sum of eight pounds.  The ambition of these young players was to rise into the profession by degrees and if possible become the integral part of the company with whom they were trained.  As the wills and estates of Shakespeare's fellow actors prove, it was about to become a very lucrative employment.

It is generally believed that only boys played the female roles on the Elizabethan stage, but there has been some cause to doubt that assumption.  Young adult males may have taken on the mature role of Cleopatra where the resources of even the most skillful boy might prove ineffectual.

As well as the actors and apprentices in the Lord Chamberlain's Men there was a book keeper who also acted as prompter with perhaps an assistant stage-keeper who also acted as prompter with perhaps an assistant stage-keeper, a wardrobe-keeper, stage musicians, a carpenter or two and people who collected the money at the door before each performance and of course stagehands.

It was a society of friends and colleagues with common interests and common obligations.  It was an extended family with actors living in the same neighbourhood.  The actors married into one another's immediate families uniting with various sisters, daughters, and windows.  In their wills they often left money, and various tokens, to one another.  It was a family that played together and stayed together.

They were also zealous and industrious.  Alone among the companies of the period the Lord Chamberlain's Men avoided serious trouble with the civic authorities and stayed out of prison.  More than any other company of their generation they helped elevate the status of actor beyond that of the vagabond and the acrobat.