Who Strutted and Bellowed?

Summary

Edward Alleyn’s reputation as one of the two leading actors of the Elizabethan stage has fluctuated in the last hundred years more or less according to whether critics think Shakespeare disliked his acting or not. William Armstrong’s defence, denying that Hamlet’s speech to the players was aimed at Alleyn, and quoting praise for him from Thomas Heywood, Nashe, Jonson and Dekker, certainly repolished his reputation for us, by showing that he and Richard Burbage (who played Hamlet) were equally famous in the eyes and ears of Elizabethan theatregoers. But it does not follow, as Armstrong also claims, that they shared the same manner of acting.

If Alleyn represented a kind of acting quite distinct from that practised by Shakespeare's company and its leader Burbage, then it is possible that what Shakespeare criticized in Hamlet was in fact Alleyn's style of acting, which could have been different from Burbage's without in the least affecting his fame, if it stood in a different tradition and was praised from within that tradition.