The players

I should admit the thing this whole hub has been circling. For most of my life I have felt a little outside Shakespeare, like I was being told something was the greatest thing ever made and could not quite feel why. I think I now know what the gap was. I had only ever met him on the page.

The page is the wrong instrument. What I was reading was the score, and a score is not the music. Shakespeare did not write to be read; he wrote for a specific company of actors standing in a specific wooden building in front of a few thousand people in the afternoon light. The substance of the thing is in the body and the room. So this page is the one I needed: not the text and not the criticism, but the craft. Where acting comes from, what the clown is, what the building did to the people standing in it, and what any of it means to the person who has to walk out there and be Othello tonight.

I am doing the two threads I was most curious about separately first, the thespian and the clown, because they have separate histories. Then I want to show where they turn out to be the same thing.

The word for an actor is thespian, and it is a person’s name. Thespis won the first recorded tragedy competition at the festival of Dionysus in Athens, around 534 BCE.^[1] What he is remembered for is one physical act. Greek performance up to then was choral: a group, singing and dancing a story in the third person. Thespis stepped out of the chorus and spoke as a character, in the first person, in dialogue with the group he had just left. That step is the birth of acting. Before it, you narrated a story. After it, you became someone who was not you, in front of people, and held it.

That is still the whole job, and it is why the name stuck. The thespian’s material is not language; it is embodiment. The instrument is the body and the voice and the breath, and the craft is a doubleness, being entirely yourself and entirely someone else in the same instant, on purpose, repeatably, while a room watches. Everything that gets argued about later, the declamation of the Elizabethan stage, the psychological truth Stanislavski went looking for, the Method, is a different theory of how to do that one ancient thing Thespis did when he turned around and spoke.

The economist reads Shakespeare as text. The thespian knows the text is sheet music.

This is the lens this hub keeps coming back to. Text lens is the page, what the words support. Stage lens is the body, what a living performance can make true. My disconnect was that I had been living entirely in the first one. The actor lives in the second, and the second is where the play actually happens.

The clown has its own line, older and lower and more durable than tragedy. Every theatrical culture has a figure whose job is to be laughed at and to turn the world upside down for an hour: the comic slave of Roman farce, the mute mime, the licensed jester of a real medieval court who was allowed, alone among the household, to tell the truth to power because he was not taken seriously enough to punish. The fool’s whole power is that license. He says the unsayable and survives because he is “only joking.”

By Shakespeare’s lifetime the clown had a working professional form in the Italian commedia dell’arte: stock masked types, improvised within fixed scenarios, built on physical business and timing. Arlecchino, the acrobatic trickster servant, is the ancestor of Harlequin and of a great deal of what we still mean by comedy. The clown’s material is the body in trouble: the fall, the appetite, the scheme that collapses. And the clown carries an idea bigger than its jokes. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin called it the carnivalesque, the sanctioned festival when the low mocks the high and the order of things is briefly, gloriously inverted. The clown is what a society does with the truths it cannot say with a straight face.

Here is the part that genuinely changed how I read the plays. Shakespeare’s company did not have “a clown” in the abstract. It had two great comic actors, one after the other, and they were opposite kinds of artist. When the man changed, the writing changed to fit him. The roles were built on the bodies available.^[2]

Will Kemp was the company’s clown through the 1590s, an original shareholder and a star: a physical, improvising comic who played the rustics, danced the jig that closed the afternoon, and was famous enough to morris-dance a hundred miles from London to Norwich as a publicity stunt and then sell the story.^[3] His comedy is the body and the blunder. Then, around 1600, Kemp left and Robert Armin arrived, and Armin was a different animal entirely: a singer, a writer of his own books on fooling, a wit.^[4] With Armin in the company, Shakespeare started writing the great fools, the ones who are wiser than the people they serve: Feste, Touchstone, and the Fool in King Lear who tells the king the truth no courtier will.

You can hear the changeover inside the plays. In Hamlet, right at the center of the only speech Shakespeare ever wrote about how to act, the prince turns to the comics and says:

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.^[5]

Hamlet · 3.2

That is widely read as Shakespeare, through Hamlet, telling the improvising clown to stop going off-script for cheap laughs while the plot is trying to happen. It reads like a man saying goodbye to Kemp’s way of working and hello to Armin’s. The clown stops being the act that interrupts the play and becomes a voice inside its argument.

Here is the join I did not expect. The clown is not a lesser branch of acting. It is the purest, most exposed form of the thespian’s art, the place where everything that acting actually is gets stripped down to its core.

Think about what the clown cannot hide behind. No fourth wall, because the clown talks straight to you. No grand language to carry the moment, because the joke either lands in the room right now or it dies in the room right now. No character to disappear into, because the clown is mostly working with timing, presence, and the live nerve of the audience. Thespis stepped out of the chorus to become a character; the clown is the figure who never fully stepped back in, who stays half-turned toward us, talking. That direct line to the house is the clown’s oldest tool, and it is also, exactly, Iago’s: the soliloquy that makes you an accomplice is a clown’s technique pointed at a tragic end.

And this is why the fool needs the highest craft of anyone on the stage. To play stupid intelligently. To land a truth as a joke. To be funny and then, in the same breath, devastating, the way Lear’s Fool is. The tragic clown runs straight out of Shakespeare into the modern canon: the worn-out vaudevillians of Beckett’s Waiting for Godotin their bowler hats, Chaplin’s tramp who breaks your heart between pratfalls. The clown turns out to be where comedy and tragedy were the same instrument all along.

None of this happened in the abstract. It happened in a particular building, and the building was an instrument tuned for one thing. The Chamberlain’s Men built the Globe in 1599. Shakespeare’s own Henry Vcalls it the “wooden O,” a polygonal, open-air ring three stories high around a standing yard.^[8]Here it is from the actor’s side. Every part of it is doing something to the person on the boards.

The thing the diagram is really about is the last note. Daylight, no fourth wall, the audience wrapped on three sides and standing close enough to touch the stage: the Globe was built for presence and direct address, not for the dark, sealed, one-way room we now call a theatre. It is, in the deepest sense, a clown’s house and a thespian’s house at once. When you read a soliloquy as a private interior monologue, you are reading it in the wrong building. It was written to be said to a crowd in the light, who could say something back.

Shakespeare wrote the parts every serious actor still has to get through, and he wrote them forpeople: Richard Burbage’s voice, Will Kemp’s feet, Robert Armin’s wit. The roles play on a stage because they were built on bodies standing on one. The verse trains your breath and your thinking the second you say it out loud. That line has not broken once: Burbage, Garrick, Kean, Olivier, Wendell Pierce on a stage in DC this month. The clown’s line runs Kemp, Grimaldi, Chaplin, and whatever drama school is putting a red nose on a terrified freshman tonight.

Here is why Shakespeare never landed for me, and it was never his fault: I kept trying to read him. You cannot read Shakespeare any more than you can read sheet music and call it the song. The page is the instructions; the play is what happens when somebody stands up and follows them in front of you. I didn’t love the text, and that turned out to be the right instinct: a play does not live on the page. I needed to watch an actor walk out and do the oldest move there is, become someone else and hold it in a room. The night I finally did, it landed.