Shakespeare and English Performance Style: The European Context

Summary

Records show that Shakespeare's plays were performed in Europe during his lifetime; but no extant records, to my knowledge, show what those performances were like or how European audiences received them. I propose in this paper to use contemporary records and our wider knowledge of European performance traditions to build up a picture of the kinds of emphasis that may have prevailed in performing Shakespeare to mainland European audiences in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and to assess how far these kinds of emphasis accorded with contemporary performance styles in England. The materials I cite here are not newly discovered; instead they are assembled largely from the neglected work of older scholars in a way that creates, I think, an unfamiliar emphasis in the study of Shakespeare.

The best-known comment on Shakespeare from a European witnessing a contemporary performance of one of his plays is the Swiss Thomas Platter's account of a visit to the Globe in London in 1599, when he witnessed, he says,

an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar with a cast of some fifteen people; when the play was over, they danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.