Monday, March 11, 2019
Richard Burbage: Shakespeare's leading man and the reason Hamlet was fat
theconversation.com: It’s 400 years since the death of Richard Burbage, the first person to play the roles of Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth in the original version of the Globe in London. As far as Shakespeare was concerned, Burbage was both a blessing and a curse. He was a good actor, and he seems to have been a particular draw for female audience members – an anecdote by the contemporary diarist John Manningham tells of a citizen’s wife who was so smitten after seeing Burbage play Richard III that she sent a note backstage to make an assignation, only for it to be intercepted by Shakespeare, who went off to the rendezvous himself with the remark that “William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third”.
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I always forget that Shakespeare was writing in real time as they were performing so he knew who he had to work with and who would play what part. The structure of traveling acting troupes is so lost now (for the most part, I’m sure there are exceptions and are similar structured companies now) that I just do not think of a playwright writing for a cast. While I have learned, and apparently forgotten repeatedly, about Shakespeare and his writing timeline and his consistent troupe, I do not think I have ever learned about how it influenced the structure and staging of his plays. Knowing who his people were also adds another layer to the jokes that directly mentioned actors, as the article pointed out. Shakespeare is set up as this incredible, lofty writer, but (not that he wasn’t an incredible playwright) he really was writing for the people, pointing things out to get a rise and laugh the common man and repeated fan could understand.
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