The Red Bull Company and the Importunate Widow

Summary

We would gladly give a wilderness of monkeys today, with many a turquoise into the bargain, for a sight of Burbage’s notes upon his parts of Richard III or Hamlet, or for a record of his discussions with Shakespeare and his fellows when the poet brought a new play and the business of shaping it for the stage began. We may well wonder how far the actors in Shakespeare’s day thought of themselves as above all the interpreters of the work of their dramatists. Despite modern experience, we may yet find it difficult to conceive that they may on the contrary have looked upon dramatists as the purveyors of vehicles for their own art. There is, certainly, the First Folio, a monument erected to Shakespeare the poet after his death by his fellow-actors Heminge and Condell, with their famous tribute to introduce it. But we hear little about plays in stage-history except in reference to the accidents of the actors’ trade. The performance of Sampson at the Red Lion in Whitechapel in 1567 was important chiefly as evidence of the satisfactory completion of carpenters’ work done at this theatre. Eastward Ho! in 1605 landed two famous dramatists into jail. “Chambers” fired off during a performance of Henry VIII in 1613 set the theatre ablaze. But we know nothing of the actors as literary critics. We do not know what Burbage thought of the Hamlet he played, or whether it was in his view a landmark in his career.