Dear Me,

  Yay!!  Chapter 40!

Shakespeare:  The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Four

Chapter 40:  Bid Me Discourse.  I Will Inchaunt Thine Eare

It is interesting to think of Shakespeare as an actor.  At grammar school he would have had some rudimentary training in oratory.  The emphasis was upon "sweete ponunciation" which, given Shakespeare's general disposition and reputation.  There was a section of rhetoric, taught at school, which dealt with precisely this matter.

He remained an actor for more than twenty years.  He knew that actors were recommended to exercise the body and to sing plainsong.    They performed in English in such countries as Germany and Denmark but they were still widely admired.  He learned to fence in what were highly realistic bouts with rapier and dagger or broadsword.

There has been endless speculation about the roles Shakespeare played .  We may expect an authoritative and even regal bearing with a resonant voice.  He seems to have impersonated dignity and old age.  He is said to have played "a decrepit old man, with a long beard, and appeared to so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person."  This would be Adam in As You Like It.  No doubt, in the process of composition, he had a pretty shrewd idea of what parts he himself would play.

He rarely played comic roles.  It does seem likely that he took on the character of prologue and epilogue or chorus in those plays where they introduced.  It would also be sensible to suppose that Shakespeare played those roles in which he could simultaneously watch or "direct" the other actors in rehearsal.  In many of the parts to which he would remain on stage for much of the action.There was a long theatrical tradition that Shakespeare instructed the actors in the performance of their parts.  

There was in this period the usual assaults upon Shakespeare's propensity for plagiarism as well as amorousness.  But the charge of plagiarism was formulaic.  Imitation and borrowing were part of the craft of composition.  But he had no interest in inventing plots. For these he went to his multifarious sources.  But Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself.  In his late he can sometimes revert to an earlier style.  He will use the same scenario of a father reading the purloined letter of a son.  That was how his imagination worked.  It took on archetypal forms.  In the process of imitating  himself.  He knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self distillation.