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By Bart van Es

Richard Burbage © Dulwich Picture Gallery.

It was the first performance of Hamlet around 1601 that projected Burbage into the national imagination. The earliest surviving elegy begins by saying that there will be ‘no more young Hamlet’ after the death of the star:

Oft I have seen him leap into a grave
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.

A 1605 pamphlet notes how the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet stands at the apogee of his profession, with ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ that are destined to earn him a ‘lordship in the country’. The play was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’s servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. It functioned as the calling card of its leading man.

Hamlet proved the making of Burbage, but I suggest that Burbage also had a good deal to do with the way Hamlet was made. Three things about the actor were essential. First, his wealth and playhouse investment. Second, his style of performance. Third, competition with the leading man of a rival company, Edward Alleyn.

Wealth is important because power (just as in modern Hollywood) did not come from talent alone. Before 1599 Burbage had been just one in an acting company of eight equals and his roles in Shakespeare’s plays were commensurate with that stake. But the building of the Globe in 1599 made Richard newly preeminent. He and his brother Cuthbert secured 50% of the venture, with Shakespeare and the four other ‘housekeepers’ having just 10% each. Burbage’s business dominance had immediate implications. Once Burbage was a bigger investor, the company’s playwright wrote him bigger parts. From this point on central characters become more prominent: Henry V, Duke Vincentio, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus (all products of the early Globe years) are not simply longer in their line-counts, they are also grander, more self-defining, roles. Most can be linked with certainty to Burbage and all are very likely to have been played by him. Hamlet (at 1338 lines) is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and that statistic connects pretty directly with the actor’s business share.

Of course, Burbage was not just powerful but also gifted. Ben Jonson called him the ‘best actor’ and that reputation was founded, as one elegy put it, on performing ‘so truly to the life’. According to the testimony of Richard Flecknoe:

He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer.

This distance from common actors is vital to Hamlet because it makes possible the Prince’s declaration that ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ are merely ‘actions that a man might play’ but that he ‘has that within which passes show’.

Edward Alleyn © Dulwich Picture Gallery.

A final element, though, was the rivalry between Burbage and Alleyn. Exactly like Burbage, Alleyn was an actor who had recently become a big-scale playhouse investor. In 1600 he built the Fortune playhouse to the north of the city, deliberately copying the Globe. To launch his theatre Alleyn revived the roles that had made him famous in the early 1590s: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and other leads in Marlowe plays. Amongst these was Marlowe’s Dido, in which he spoke the following lines:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,
His harness dropping blood, and on his spear
The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…

In Hamlet (written while Alleyn conducted these revivals) the Prince meets a player and requests an old speech that has a very similar ring:

The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…
—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…

Burbage, at the Globe, was pretending awkwardly to remember lines that closely resembled those of his rival on the other side of the Thames. The unpopularity of the ‘tragedians of the city’ (which has forced the player to travel to Elsinore) thus becomes a very local affair.

The player’s long speech (which ‘pleased not the million’ and bores Polonius) is partly a dig at Alleyn, but it is also something more complex. Hamlet admires the old player and behind this there is surely also admiration for Alleyn, with whom Burbage had learned his craft as a travelling actor a decade before.  His character’s inability to ‘drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ is an expression of limitation. But it also announces a new kind of acting in which the feelings of characters are not so easily known. Alleyn had starred as Cutlack the Dane with eyes of ‘lightning’ and words of ‘thunder’; Burbage would command the stage in a different way. ‘To be or not to be’ was a question of acting method. The performer whose death Thomas Middleton would describe as an ‘eclipse of playing’ had an artistic vision of his own.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Portraits of Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn used with permission of Dulwich Picture Gallery. All rights reserved. 

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Okay, I am a slacker, I admit it.  I missed Milton’s birthday on Tuesday!  To make it up to you (and him of course) here is an excerpt about music and theater in Milton’s childhood from John Milton: Life Work, and Thought by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns. The book reveals a more human Milton, flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning, as well as the literary genius who achieved so much. Campbell is a Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester. Corns is a Professor of English at Bangor University. Both authors have been elected as Honored Scholars of the Milton Society of America.

How did the music of the elder Milton affect his son?  In the case of singing, it is clear that the younger Milton created his own singing household when his nephews moved in with him; as John Aubrey notes, ‘he made his Nephews Songsters, and sing from the time they were with him’.  Certainly tastes were passed on: the poet’s preferences for part-singing, the organ, and the viol (as opposed to solo singing, the harpsichord, and the violin) place him in the same conservative musical tradition as his father.  The fact that the music was designed for performance in private houses, without an audience, hints at the centrality of music in the Milton household; there Milton learned to sing in consorts and to play the organ and bass viol, and to rejoice in the pleasure of participating in music made purely for the benefit of the players.  The music of the elder Milton is evidence of the religious sensibility of the household, and indicates a respect for liturgical and indeed ceremonial modes of worship.  The clearest example is the setting of a Latin hymn for compline, which is the last of the canonical day-hours (said or sung before retiring for the night).

The Milton household was thus clearly musical: but it seems also to have been theatrical.  Two recently discovered documents show that in 1620 the elder Milton became a trustee of the Blackfriars playhouse.  This may have been a purely financial arrangement, but it may hint at a previously unsuspected family link with the playhouses; indeed, it is possible that the trusteeship was still active in May 1647, when the elder Milton died, in which case it would have belonged to the younger Milton until it was sold by William Burbage in 1651, although it is not unlikely that the trust was wound up once its principal beneficiary came of age in 1637.  The trust was established in 1620 to meet difficulties posed by the death in 1619 of Richard Burbage, the great entrepreneurial genius behind the inexorable rise of the King’s Men during the early Jacobean period.  Richard had died, leaving a widow, a son, and a posthumously born daughter.  Within the extended Burbage family and perhaps, too, among other shareholders of the King’s Men, there was an evident concern that, should Winifred remarry, the property, which included the company’s primary performing space (though they retained the reconstructed Globe too), could fall into the possession of her new husband, perhaps against the interest of the theatrical enterprise.  A trust was established, under the supervision of two brewers, presumably solid citizens, Edward Raymond, a lawyer, and one ‘John Milton’.  The last has confidently been identified as the father of the poet, since he and Raymond had other, quite complex business dealings.

The location of an adult theatre company at Blackfriars in the heart of the city had long occasioned controversy among the civic elite.  Indeed, not until 1609 had the King’s Men taken over occupation from a company of boy actors, despite the Burbage family acquiring the property much earlier. Puritan opposition to theatres in general was well established, though in the case of the Blackfriars, its enemies sought to represent their concerns as essentially anxiety about civil order and public nuisance.  The controversy entered a particularly heated phase in the period from December 1618 to March 1619, when a campaign, led by William Gouge, a prominent clergy-man and influential puritan preacher, petitioned the Lord Myor and Corporation of London to close the theatre down. The King’s Men had royal patronage and protection, and plainly were able to resist the onslaught. The association of John Milton senior with the Burbage family and the playhouse in 1620 was significant act of defiance of civic pressure, and a clear marker of where he lined up in the debate, within the City hierarchy, about the conflicting cultures of the theatre and the pulpit.

Similarly, it has recently been established that Thomas Morley, who published music by the elder Milton, may have been a link between the Miltons and Shakespeare. There are also strong hints of theatrical interests in the writings of the younger Milton.  In Elegy I, a Latin verse letter written from London to his friend Charles Diodati, Milton refers to visits to a theatre that was covered by a roof(sub tecto, line 47); it is tempting to link the description to the Blackfriars.  ‘L’Allegro’ celebrates the greatest dramatists of Milton’s youth:

Then to the well-trod stage anon,

If Jonson’s learned sock be on,

Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child,

Warble his native wood-notes wild.

The possibility of a family link with Shakespeare is intriguing.  The elder Milton may have contributed a poem to the First Folio (incipit ‘We wondered, Shakespeare’), and the younger Milton’s ‘On Shakespeare’ in the Second Folio was his first publication.