There has been endless speculation about the roles Shakespeare played, ranging from Caesar in Julius Caesar to the Friar in Romeo and Juliet, from Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida to Orsino in Twelfth Night. It has been suggested that he played the Chorus as well as the Friar in Romeo and Juliet and Egeon in The Comedy of Errors; he was Brabantio in Othello and Albany in King Lear. Theatrical legend has claimed over the centuries that he played the Ghost in Hamlet and the part of Adam, the aged retainer, in As You Like It. He is also presumed to have enjoyed “kingly” roles. It is supposed that he played the king in both parts of Henry IV. We can speculate that he was the monarch in Henry VI, King John, Henry IV and Cymbeline as well as the dukes of The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We may expect, then, an authoritative and even regal bearing with resonant voice. He seems also to have impersonated dignity and old age. There is a preoccupation with encroaching old age in the sonnets — was he exorcising his fear by acting it out? He is said to have played “a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person.”4 If the account is not wholly apocryphal, this would be Adam in As You Like It. These characters also have a tendency to be of, but somehow apart from, the action. One biographer has described it as a “blend of centrality and detachment,”5 which seems curiously like Shakespeare’s general bearing in the world. No doubt, in the process of composition, he had a pretty shrewd idea of what parts he himself would play.
He rarely played comic roles, and might have “doubled” two or three minor parts rather than the central or principal part. It is sometimes suggested that he would say the first line, or the last line, of the play: an attractive idea, but one that could not always have been possible. It does seem likely, however, that he took on the character of prologue and epilogue or chorus in those plays where they were introduced. In that sense he was what the French called the “orator” of the company, coming on stage at the beginning or end of the play to represent all of the players. This was the role of Moliere, the author and actor who most resembles Shakespeare, at the Palais-Royal Theatre. It has been said of Moliere that he “was all actor from his feet to his head; it seemed as though he had several voices; everything in him spoke; and by a step, a smile, a glance of the eye or the shaking of the head he suggested more things than the greatest talker could have said in an hour.”6 Given the difference in nationality and culture, this seems like an approximate description of Shakespeare himself.
It would also be sensible to suppose that Shakespeare played those roles in which he could simultaneously watch or “direct” the other actors in rehearsal, rather like the conductor of an orchestra. In many of the parts to which he has speculatively been assigned, he would remain on stage for much of the action. He may have choreographed the exits and the entrances, for example, and given a structure to the duelling scenes. Moliere was also considered to be a highly skilful trainer of other actors, and one colleague said that he could make a stick act. Perhaps Shakespeare had the same gift.
It is well enough known that the authors themselves did on occasions intervene. In the Induction to Cynthia’s Revels Jonson alludes to the author’s “presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the book-holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the music out of tune, and swear for every venial trespass we commit.” Shakespeare is unlikely to have sworn or stamped — Jonson himself is a much more likely candidate for that role — but as actor as well as author he is likely to have intervened in the first staging of his dramas.
There was a long theatrical tradition that Shakespeare instructed the actors in the performance of their parts. A chronicler of Sir William Davenant’s company of players, formed at the time of the Restoration, records that the part of Henry VIII in All Is True was “rightly and justly done by Mr. Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William, who had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself.” When Thomas Betterton also acted Hamlet, “Sir William (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shaksepear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it.”7 Stage traditions of this kind often contain more than a grain of truth.
There are conflicting reports about the quality of Shakespeare’s acting. John Aubrey reports that he “did act exceeding well,” and Henry Chettle described him as “excelent in the qualitie he professes.” Nicholas Rowe, on the other hand, believes that he was no “extraordinary” actor and that “the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet.”8 At the end of the seventeenth century it is reported that Shakespeare “as I have heard, was a much better Poet than Player.”9 Yet he was fully employed by the most important theatrical company of his generation, acting for more than twenty years in parts large and small. He must, if nothing else, have been a resourceful actor. The testimony of his contemporary, Henry Chettle, is perhaps the most accurate.
His progress through the ranks of the theatrical and literary world might have earned him barbs from his more envious contemporaries. A volume dedicated to the memory of Robert Greene contained an attack upon those who had “Eclipst his fame and Purloyned his Plumes.”10 A play of 1593 on the theme of Guy of Warwick has the following piece of dialogue. “I’ faith Sir I was born in England at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire … I have a fine finical name, I can tell ye, for my name is Sparrow … but I am a high mounting lofty minded Sparrow.”11 It may be coincidence, but it may not. “Sparrow” was close in pronunciation to “spear,” and was a slang word given to a lecher; sparrows were known for their lust. The Stratford man who calls himself a “bird of Venus”(the author of Venus and Adonis) has got his wife with child, and then abandoned her in Warwickshire. We may also recall the story of William the Conqueror coming before Richard Burbage. In a play of this period, too, Shakespeare is mildly lampooned as a character named Prickshafte. So there is a tendency, to put it no stronger, to associate Shakespeare with lustfulness.
He is also called “finical,” meaning finicky or fastidious, and we may recall Aubrey’s testimony that in Shoreditch Shakespeare would not be “debauched” with his colleagues. The reference here is to carousing or drinking, not to sexual misdemeanours, and so we gain a picture of a man given to lustfulness but fastidious in other particulars. By curious chance this consorts well with the imagery of the plays where there are plentiful references to bawdiness, but also evidence of a general sensitivity to unpleasant sights or smells.