William Shakespeare - Humanities-Ebooks

Hamlet 12
supply a stream of new plays, a team to handle production, finance, and the public
once admitted, the blessings of central government and local authority, and a financier
willing to lend you a very large sum on the strength of these plans … but Burbage
pulled it off, and built in Shoreditch, just east of the City of London, what was simply
called The Theatre.
It had to be outside the City wall because the City Fathers had religious beliefs
(and social convictions) that led them to disapprove of theatre in all forms, but even in
Shoreditch other restrictions applied. A great show-woman herself, Queen Elizabeth
knew very well just what theatricality could achieve politically, and plays for public
performance had to be licensed by her Master of the Revels; offenders could and did
find themselves in prison for a month or three, and any playwright venturing towards
religion or recognisably current politics did so at their (and the actors’) peril. But it all
worked! Within two years a second theatre, The Curtain, was providing competition,
and the 1580s saw steady growth, however measured, so by the time Shakespeare
came to London, probably in the later 1580s, the stage was in every way set for him.
A body of actors had emerged for whom increasingly talented and professionally
assured playwrights were beginning to write great roles, and company structures had
been created that for the sharers were beginning to produce real wealth. Above all,
Londoners had taken to the new entertainment in a big way, and the acting profession,
despite its perennial insecurities, was already entrenched in popular and elite cultures.
That was the working world Shakespeare entered, and as sharer-playwright of the
premier company from 1594–1613 bestrode.
1.2 Companies—Actors—Stages—Audiences
Theatre is always, of necessity, a practical group business. When it is also putting
food on the actors’ tables, and must finance a building as well as covering the initial
and running costs of performance, there is no room for mavericks or spendthrifts—yet
much about theatre seems to attract, and worse to need and benefit from, people with
exactly those qualities. The main answer to this conundrum in Shakespeare’s day was
the company, a professional business in which individual interests were merged and
individual commitments had to follow. Next to nothing is known about Shakespeare’s
career as an actor, so he clearly did not strike his contemporaries as an outstanding
stage-performer, but it was as an actor able to put up the necessary cash that he gained
his position in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—and only that position, held as an actor