Hamlet: Globe to Globe. Dominic Dromgoole
troops in the Netherlands. Frequently it was because they could make more money on the Continent. The economic instinct is a powerful one for an actor. There are almost always too many actors and too few jobs.
The kind of theatre presented in a German market square would have been distinct from what was presented at the Globe. The moniker ‘Comedians of England’ provides a clue as to their playing style. There is evidence the plays were substantially cut, and that broad farce, music and gymnastic feats were highlighted over delicate psychological acting. Hamlet, as we can surmise from contemporary accounts and from early translations, would probably have run at about an hour, with an extended dumbshow, and with incidents like the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played out in graphic fight sequences rather than reported. The kings of the companies were the clowns, who had to be bilingual so they could crack local jokes and bridge complicated narrative jumps with a little live storytelling. The resident Gdańsk clown went under the moniker Pickleherring, and a German one called himself Hans Stockfish, which tends to imply that German humour has been something of a historical constant.
We know the names of almost a hundred English actors working across Europe during this period, acting alone as house entertainer, travelling with companies, or joining local outfits throughout Scandinavia, the Lowlands, northern Germany, Austria, Bohemia and the Baltics. (France was left almost completely off the circuit, principally because of its Catholicism.) Amongst that list of actors are some distinguished names, including Ben Jonson and (from Shakespeare’s company) Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas Pope. The last two both spent time working in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, which is a substantial clue as to how Shakespeare knew so much about the tide-splashed rocks without and the cold stone gloom within. Many question how Shakespeare knew so much of the places he wrote about, while forgetting the most powerful transmitter of information in history – conversation. Bryan and Pope, having frozen the tips of their fingers off for a couple of years entertaining the Danish court, were probably never short of a memory or an anecdote, and it is little surprise that Shakespeare’s evocation of the wind-whipped, forbidding grandeur of Elsinore is so accurate.
English actors were popular not for their delivery of text, but for the physicality of their performance. An Englishman, Fynes Moryson, travelling in Germany in 1618 remembered a group of English players, ‘having neither a Complete number of Actors, nor any good Apparell, nor any ornament of the stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a word they said, flocked wonderfully to see their gestures and action’. English plays were popular because the London theatres of the time were play-factories, turning out thrilling history after lurid bloodbath after psychological thriller after rom-com-sex-farce. One of the first plays in German is Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Brother Murder), a radically cut version of Hamlet, though essentially the same play. A German noble, Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Cassel (they don’t make titles like that any more), was so enamoured of the English theatre that he kept his own company of English performers. They toured under his patronage and played in a theatre he had specially built for them. Landgrave Maurice even travelled to London to commission new plays from English writers. This dashing and quixotic figure could be a neglected inspiration for Hamlet. We now see Prince Hamlet and his joy at the arrival of the Players in Denmark in a new light: the scenes around the play-within-a-play are not only a celebration of his ludic ingenuity, but also of his internationalism. When he welcomes the Players, for his contemporary audience he would not be an Englishman welcoming an English troupe, he would be a Dane welcoming an international troupe. Thus Hamlet becomes an early beacon of cosmopolitanism and a reflection of his own world.
Hamlet is a play full of a broad international awareness. Hamlet, a Dane, attends university at Wittenberg in what is now Germany. Laertes travels to find his fortune in Paris. Fortinbras travels from Norway to pass through Denmark on his way to fight in Poland. Hamlet is sent away in the Fourth Act to England, which is in a client relationship with Denmark. He escapes his fate there through the intercession of some pirates, and pirates are the first and last word in internationalism. This is not a narrow or insular play. It is in its geography a Hanseatic play, a league of countries surrounding the Baltic, held together by trade, by conquest, and for a short while by the touring chutzpah and ambition of English actors. We are following an old cultural drove road.
In about 1600, the first theatre was constructed in Poland. A former fencing school in what is now Gdańsk (then Danzig), it was converted to host professional players from London. A rectangular courtyard space open to the elements, modelled on the Fortune Theatre in Clerkenwell, it proved popular with the locals, and audiences flocked in. The traditional practice was for these English companies to petition the local mayor, requesting permission to play. Copies of these petitions to the mayor of Gdańsk are extant and provide evidence of the touring tradition. They are fawning in tone but shot through with the deal-making toughness of men who know their own worth. There are moans about the rain at recent performances, negotiations over ticket pricing, and accounts of having to improvise venues at the last minute when the plague would not allow access to the fencing school (our Hamlet tour had to skirt West Africa for similar reasons).
In a classic bid to reassure the burgomasters, they plead: ‘Our entertainment will be so modest and polite that nobody will be offended by it; on the contrary, there will be all manner of instruction for everyday life to be gained.’ It sounds like an application to the Arts Council stressing educational value. Permits were often refused, with forbidding words about how taxes weren’t paid on the last visit, and sometimes granted, though accompanied with dire warnings about the fines that would follow excessive fly-posting. These petitions form a sweet testament to how little has changed over the intervening centuries: making and staging theatre is still an odd blend of flashy bombast, pragmatic horse-trading and naked begging.
Shakespeare and his colleagues’ approach to the international market was a large part of the London theatre scene in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare’s world was a genuinely European one, both in its ambitions for its work and in its audience at home. London was a city teeming with overseas visitors; Shakespeare himself boarded near the Blackfriars Theatre with a French family. Most of our knowledge of the layout of the Globe comes from a diary entry by a Swiss tourist, Thomas Platter, and a sketch of the Swan theatre by a Dutchman, Johannes de Witt. The Globe has always had a reciprocal relationship with the wider world, accepting audiences at home and travelling out to meet them.
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It used to be taken as read that the early modern acting companies upped sticks and left London to go on the road because of the plague. That, and the rage and contempt of the city fathers. There’s truth in both, but there is now ample evidence that touring carried on when the London theatres were open and healthy, and that companies ran an extensive touring programme alongside their building-based work.
Why tour? First, money. There was an audience of hungry citizens unable to come to London to be entertained. There were also wealthy parochial patrons eager to impress client networks and posh neighbours with shows they could sponsor and present. Money, and making it, is the most original practice of all. This is hard to credit in our day, full of shyly presented outreach programmes so stuffed with proof of virtue and condescending good works that mischief and fun (the motors of all good drama) hardly get a look in. Equally defeatist is our glum expectation that people deserve a medal for playing in ‘the provinces’, an expectation fuelled by a snobbish centralisation of artistic legitimacy. Within such contemporary contexts, it is impossible to get our heads around the confidence and desire with which these companies would travel. They didn’t arrive timidly in the hope that an audience might show up, promising workshops and Q&As as an inducement; they kicked the door down, saying, ‘We’re here! Come and get it. We’re going to shag some story into you.’
Touring was in these people’s blood. For several hundred years, British theatre was touring. The fun palaces built in London in the 1570s and 1580s were Johnny-come-lately edifices. For centuries, British theatre had improvised stage realities, conjuring up Christian ritual in the courtyard of an inn, ancient Rome on booth stages in market squares, and English history at one end of a Guild Hall. Theatres were made not from wood and brick and plaster, but from the collaborating imagination and willpower of actors and audiences.
Shakespeare’s own company, the Lord