We know little about Shakespeare's own acting roles--an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in As You Like It and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage's lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.
Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear's Fool, which were written for Armin.
One thing that is clear from surviving "plots" or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary. 2 Henry VI has more than sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters only appear in a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn't Paris go to the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In The Winter's Tale, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.
THE KING'S MAN
The new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain's Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King's Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare's career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors--and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria's reign.
Shakespeare's productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King's Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth only survives in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare's death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well.
From 1608 onward, when the King's Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they only used the outdoor Globe in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King's Men's company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612-14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes' Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title "All is True"), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer's "Knight's Tale." These were written after Shakespeare's two final solo-authored plays, The Winter's Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.
The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare's career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero's epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare's personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company's indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little more than a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.
About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large "Folio" format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him "a monument without a tomb":
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give ...
He was not of an age, but for all time!
SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS:
A CHRONOLOGY
1589-91 ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship)
1589-92 The Taming of the Shrew
1589-92 ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship)
1591 The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible)
1591 The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of coauthorship probable)
1591-92 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1591-92; perhaps revised 1594 The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele)
1592 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others
1592/1594 King Richard the Third
1593 Venus and Adonis (poem)
1593-94 The Rape of Lucrece (poem)
1593-1608 Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover's Complaint, poem of disputed authorship)
1592-94 or 1600-03 Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)
1594 The Comedy of Errors
1595 Love's Labour's Lost
1595-97 Love's Labour's Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)
1595-96 A Midsummer Night's Dream
1595-96 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
1595-96 King Richard the Second
1595-97 The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)
1596-97 The Merchant of Venice
1596-97 The First Part of Henry the Fourth
1597-98 The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
1598 Much Ado About Nothing
1598-99 The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)
1599 The Life of Henry the Fifth
1599 "To the Queen" (epilogue for a court performance)
1599 As You Like It
1599 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1600-01 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)
1600-01 The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597-99)
1601 "Let the Bird of Loudest Lay" (poem on "The Phoenix and Turtle")
1601 Twelfth Night, or What You Will
1601-02 The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida
1604 The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
1604 Measure for Measure
1605 All's Well That Ends Well
1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton
1605-06 The Tragedy of King Lear
1605-08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)
1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)
1606-07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus
1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins
1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline
1611 The Winter's Tale
1611 The Tempest
1612-13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)
1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher
1613-14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher
FURTHER READING
AND VIEWING
CRITICAL APPROACHES
Bate, Jonathan, "A Voice for Ariel," in his The Song of the Earth (2000), pp. 68-93. An ecological approach.
Berger, Harry Jr., "Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest," Shakespeare Studies V (1969), pp. 253-83. A superb close reading.
Brower, Reuben A., "The Mirror of Analogy" (1951) in The Tempest: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer (1991), pp. 153-75. Close reading with classical context.
Brown, Paul, " 'This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1985), pp. 48-71. Self-consciously postcolonial approach.
Felperin, Howard, Shakespearean Romance (1972). Sophisticated sense of the slipperiness of the genre.
Gillies, John, "Shakespeare's Virginian Masque," ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 53 (1986), pp. 673-707. The "brave new world" in historical context.
Hulme, Peter, and William Sherman, eds., "The Tempest" and Its Travels (2000). Excellent collection of essays, covering postcolonial approaches and more.
Kermode, Frank, "Introduction to The Tempest" (1954), in The Tempest: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer (1991), pp. 151-67. On Prospero's white magic, and on nature and art, from classic introduction to old Arden edition.
Knight, G. Wilson, "The Shakespearian Superman" (1947), in The Tempest: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer (1991), pp. 111-30. Quasi-mystical, full of poetic insight.
Lamming, George, "A Monster, a Child, a Slave," in his Pleasures of Exile (1960), pp. 95-117. View from a Caribbean-born writer.
Lindley, David, "Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest," in his The Court Masque (1984), pp. 47-59. Very clear account of why music matters.
Nuttall, A. D., Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (1967). Dazzling but demanding.
Orgel, Stephen, "Prospero's Wife," Representations 8 (1985), pp. 1-13. On questions of gender and a key absence.
Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (1991). Fascinating material.
THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE
Brook, Peter, The Empty Space (1968). Perhaps the modern theater's most influential director's manifesto.
Brooke, Michael, "The Tempest on Screen," www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/564758/index.html. Valuable overview. Registered schools, colleges, universities, and libraries have access to video clips, including the complete twelve minutes of the silent 1908 version.
Dymkowski, Christine, The Tempest, Shakespeare in Production (2000). Covers many key productions.
Greenaway, Peter, Prospero's Books: A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest (1991). Screenplay.
Hirst, David, The Tempest: Text and Performance (1984). Good range.
Lindley, David, The Tempest, Shakespeare at Stratford (2003). RSC stagings and earlier ones.
RSC "Exploring Shakespeare: The Tempest," www.rsc.org.uk/explore/plays/tempest.htm. Aimed at students.
Suchet, David, "Caliban," in Players of Shakespeare 1, ed. Philip Brockbank (1985). An actor's view.
Voss, Philip, "Prospero," in Players of Shakespeare 5, ed. Robert Smallwood (2003). Another actor's view.
For a more detailed Shakespeare bibliography and selections from a wide range of critical accounts of the play, with linking commentary, visit the edition website, www.therscshakespeare.com.
AVAILABLE ON DVD
The Tempest, directed by Percy Stow (1908), on Silent Shakespeare (DVD 2004). Twelve minutes of brilliant visual innovation: easily the best Shakespeare from the age of silent film.
The Tempest, directed by Derek Jarman (1979, DVD 2004). Highly original, punk-influenced, sometimes camp.
The BBC Shakespeare: The Tempest, directed by John Gorrie (1980). Staid, literalistic, not recommended.
Prospero's Books, directed by Peter Greenaway (1991, DVD 2007). Extraordinary re-visioning, in which John Gielgud as Prospero speaks all the lines; sometimes pretentious but dazzlingly inventive attempt to fuse the play's magic with the quasi-magical technological potential of cinematic art.
REFERENCES
1. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols, 1930), 2, 342. The performance took place in the Banqueting House.
2. Chambers, Shakespeare, 2, 343.
3. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Mathews (1972), vol. 8, pp. 521-2.
4. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (1991), p. 180.
5. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, p. 181.
6. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (1966), p. 109.
7. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, p. 183.
8. Lady Benson, Mainly Players: Bensonian Memoirs (1926), p. 179.
9. William Winter, New York Daily Tribune, 7 April 1897.
10. Shakespeare's The Tempest as Arranged for the Stage by Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1904), p. xi.
11. Beerbohm Tree, Tempest, p. 63.
12. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, p. 189.
13. Jeanne Addison Roberts, "The Washington Summer Festival, 1970," Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970), pp. 481-2.
14. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, p. 191.
15. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956), trans. from Psychologie de la Colonisation (1950).
16. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, p. 192.
17. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, p. 193.
18. David Hirst, The Tempest: Text and Performance (1984), p. 46.
19. Hirst, Tempest, p. 48.
20. Hirst, Tempest, p. 43.
21. Hirst, Tempest, p. 43.
22. Hirst, Tempest, p. 62.
23. Robert Brustein, Review of The Tempest, New Republic 213 (4 December 1995), pp. 27-8.
24. Ann Thompson, " 'Miranda, Where's Your Sister?': Reading Shakespeare's The Tempest," in Feminist Criticism: Theor
y and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (1991), p. 54.
25. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1968), p. 135.
26. Christine Dymkowski, The Tempest, Shakespeare in Production (2000), p. 1.
27. KB, Independent on Sunday, 13 August 1906.
28. Bernard Levin, Daily Mail, 3 August 1963.
29. RSC Programme, 1963.
30. J. C. Trewin, Peter Brook: A Biography (1971), p. 135.
31. Michael Coveney, Financial Times, 13 August 1982.
32. Chaillet, The Times, 13 August 1982.
33. Cahiers Elisabethains 22 (1982), p. 117.
34. Michael Billington, Guardian, 12 August 1982.
35. Alex Renton, Independent, 1 August 1988.
36. Kate Kellaway, Observer, 31 July 1988.
37. Michael Billington, Guardian, 29 July 1988.
38. Benedict Nightingale, Times, 13 August 1993.
39. Russell Jackson, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), p. 343.
40. Michael Billington, Guardian, 13 August 1993.
41. Interview with Peter Lewis, Sunday Telegraph, 8 August 1993.
42. Anthony Cookman on John Gielgud's performance, Tatler, 28 August 1957.
43. David Lindley, The Tempest, Shakespeare at Stratford (2003), p. 45.
44. Michael Billington, Guardian, 12 August 1982.
45. Michael Billington, Guardian, 29 July 1988.
46. Dymkowski, Tempest, p. 24.
47. John Peter, Sunday Times, 31 July 1988.
48. Michael Coveney, Financial Times, 28 August 1988.
49. Michael Hordern, in Shakespeare in Perspective, vol. 1, ed. Roger Sales (1982), p. 174.
50. Judith Cook, Shakespeare's Players (1983), p. 167.
51. Francis King, Sunday Telegraph, 31 July 1988.
52. Helen Rose, Time Out, 3 August 1988.
53. Kate Kellaway, Observer, 31 July 1988.
54. Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 14 September 1982 (reviewing the London transfer).
55. Paul Vallely, Mail on Sunday, 18 September 1983 (London transfer).
56. Helen Rose, Time Out, 3 August 1988.
57. Christopher Hart, Sunday Times, 13 August 2006.
58. Benedict Nightingale, Times, 10 August 2006.
59. David Suchet, "Caliban," in Players of Shakespeare 1, ed. Philip Brockbank (1985), p. 169.