Editor’s Note: This year, as we did a year ago to mark Shakespeare’s birthday, we are featuring a conversation between a poet who is also a Renaissance scholar (Brett Foster) and a theater director who also has extensive experience as an actor (Mark Lewis).
Brett: Mark, I have been on the lookout, after the pleasures of our exchange last year around Shakespeare’s birthday, for that next book that we could profitably discuss together to mark the same occasion. We needed something new that engaged with both your and my respective disciplines in theater (both acting and directing) and literary scholarship. Stanley Wells’ Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh fits this description very nicely.
Mark: I am thankful once again, Brett, to wish our friend William the happiest of birthdays by drawing attention to this new book about him.
I was taken with Wells’ new volume, in which he offers a series of meticulously researched essays identifying the actors he considers to be the greatest ever to act in Shakespeare’s plays. It is a thrill to follow the line of those whom my Shakespeare teacher Eloise Watt might refer to as great “inheritors of the text,” stretching forward from members of Shakespeare’s own Company and ending (in a time frame that some might find a premature foreclosure) with Kenneth Branagh and Simon Russell Beale, born in 1960 and 1961 respectively. It’s especially fun to consider the careers of actors who were (or are) contemporaries, and to see how their careers, personalities, and acting styles interplay with one another.
Brett: Yes, and to see how the actors variously interplay with their dramatic and poetic source, Shakespeare himself, the writer of their scripts. At one point Wells quotes James Agate’s rationale for the same plays being ever watchable and rewatchable for the playgoer. Agate speaks of the “two-fold joy of one fine talent super-imposed upon another.” That is, we love to watch a fine actor in partnership with the literary genius who provides the material there to be shaped into an individual performance, a more fully human dimension compared to what we find on the page, however dazzling those findings.
And yes, even my less expert awareness of the acting world led me to wonder about Wells’ “premature foreclosure” (as you deftly call it), ending with Branagh and Beale. Though he is timely enough to nod toward Branagh’s recent return to the Shakespearean stage, in the title role of a Macbeth which was performed in a church in England and then in The Armory for its New York run. (The show was in production when Wells was writing.) Coverage-wise, however, where is Mark Rylance? It takes a certain obstinacy to leave him off a present-day list of great Shakespearean actors, though perhaps Rylance’s uniqueness is not to Wells’ taste.
Mark: Of course there are limitations to any such list, and Wells’ version is no exception. Are we really to believe that there are no living actors of Shakespeare under the age of 50 to be considered great? I too, Brett, was struck particularly by the omission of Mark Rylance, whose leadership and performances at London’s Globe Theater have been magnificent and widely heralded for decades.
Perhaps a clue to this particular choice lies in some of the criteria Wells lists in his introduction. He seems enamored by the conscious manipulation of the actor’s voice and body in ways that most modern practitioners of the craft would perhaps consider overstated. It is one thing to say, as Olivier did, that he owed some of his great success to that fact that his eyes were shallowly set, enabling them to be “read” at the back of very large houses, and quite another to say, as Wells does, that “actors must be able to control their facial muscles so that they can register changes of expression, sometimes in large spaces, conveying through physical means a sense of what is going on in the character’s mind.” Well, yes, in a way—but overt and conscious changes of facial expression (or for that matter changes of pose) are not any longer widely held as an earmark of great acting. An actor like Rylance, whose vocal instrument is reedy and whose line readings are often subtle, might have fallen off Wells’ list for just that reason.
Similarly, I will betray here my own prejudice by saying that there just have to have been great American Shakespeareans since, well, Edwin Booth, who died in 1893. (He is the most recent of the three Americans to make Wells’ list). I readily acknowledge that the American theater has not supported the development of great Shakespearean acting in the way the British theater has, and the numbers are certainly nowhere near comparable. But I might offer John Barrymore, Orson Welles, Stacy Keach, and Kevin Kline as examples of names to at least consider for inclusion.
Brett: I noticed that, too, Mark—that Wells clearly privileges British actors. He says he has seen in person performances by about half of the nearly forty actors included. That is a pretty impressive run of theatergoing. But it does feel a bit Brit-centric. As antidote, you offer some fine candidates from among American actors. (And as I recall, you were surprised as well to find the Welshman Richard Burton not making Wells’ list.)
Heck, a really contemporary list might include Rylance’s step-daughter, Juliet Rylance, who has played Cressida and Desdemona and Perdita, and was Rosalind and Miranda in Sam Mendes’ acclaimed Bridge Project a few years ago. Or Lily Rabe (born in 1982), who received rapturous responses as Portia in New York’s “Shakespeare in the Park” production of The Merchant of Venice. More recently she’s appeared in As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing in the same summer setting, at Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre. Admittedly, these actors may still be too early in their careers to be seriously considered for a “greatest” list. And did you notice Wells’ dedication? “To all great Shakespeare actors not included in this book.” That’s classy, and rather humble for a scholarly dedication. So let’s give him that!
Mark: Even with these quibbles, though, I greatly enjoyed Wells’ book. If he had called it “My Favorite Shakespearean Actors,” I might have enjoyed it even more!
Brett: I couldn’t agree with you more, although I’d say this book will be of most interest to readers who are already quite familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, whether as audience member or reader. For those who aren’t, Wells already has other more helpful books for them to seek out. Wells is a doyen among Shakespeare scholars, serving as Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-on-Avon, and an active player (but not in the acting sense) at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has co-edited some essential reference volumes (The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide), and is among the editors of The Oxford Shakespeare.
Even so, there is a critical consistency maintained with this new study of great Shakespearean actors. Wells has shown himself in his many books to be one of those refreshing scholars whose academic attention never drifts far from the performative origins of Shakespeare’s plays, of the man who wrote them, and of the centuries of actors who continuously reinterpret them, those “inheritors of the text” that you spoke of earlier, Mark. His biography of Shakespeare is styled as “A Life in Drama,” and thematic works such as Shakespeare, Sex, and Love frequently draw upon the performance tradition for examples. Co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, Wells has also written Shakespeare & Co., which focuses on the playwriting network during Shakespeare’s working days, while Shakespeare for All Time belongs on a shelf with the great studies of the influence and reception of Shakespeare and his works. In this present book, he has drawn upon eyewitness accounts by William Hazlitt, George Bernard Shaw, and others previously collected in his anthology Shakespeare In the Theatre.
Let me end more fittingly, with some final impressions of this new book. Mark, you’re so right—many readers will find much to enjoy here. I’m a sucker for short biographies of actors, since their lives are often so much more interesting than ours. (I know, my friend, that will sound like flattery!) His first entry, on William Shakespeare himself, helpfully reminds us that the Bard was almost certainly an actor first, playwright second, and theater owner third. I was particularly taken with Shakespeare’s name appearing on a list of actors for his rival Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedy Sejanus, which Wells tells us “bombed” in 1603. Can you imagine the smirking Jonson must have endured from that one particular actor, who had recently written a little play called Hamlet and who would have then been writing Othello? It’s like an early version of Mozart and Salieri! It must have made the ambitious Ben Jonson feel so dismal.
The 18th-century actor Charles Macklin’s remark that he was “well listened to” one night reminds us that audiences have not always been so sport-coated and proper as they typically are at Shakespearean occasions today. Sarah Siddons, roughly contemporary with Macklin, deserves our interest as the first female actor to play Hamlet, though she was most famous for her Lady Macbeth. She went against tradition, and her manager’s wishes, in choosing to put down her candle so as to more obsessively rub the “damn’d spot” from her hands; her manager immediately approved. One of her brothers, too, was known for being able to play Falstaff “without padding.” I guess you take whatever reputation you can get.
There are lovely details to discover about the modern actors, too. I didn’t know Kenneth Branagh was born in Belfast, or that Paul Scofield’s first Shakespeare roles were Juliet and Rosalind! Or that Simon Russell Beale, lately regarded for his turn as Lear, played the role previously—at the age of 17! And how perfectly apt for Judi Dench, who is on the short side, to tell the great director Peter Hall, “I hope you know what you are doing. You are going to have a Cleopatra who is a menopausal dwarf.”
Finally, the literature prof in me appreciated hearing new interpretive possibilities in the plays. Some of Simon Russell Beale’s roles were of particular interest. As Ariel, the indentured spirit in The Tempest, he made a shocking exit by spitting in his master Prospero’s face. As Hamlet, he found a new dramatic moment in the intense scene when his father’s ghost appears in his mother’s chamber. The son reaches for Gertrude with one hand and his ungraspable father in the other. That proximity is intense. He is trying to bring about a family reunion that can no longer be. He is trying, as Wells nicely puts it, to bridge two worlds, this one and the “undiscovered” next. Beale seems so widely respected for his acting because of an interplay (to use that word again) of qualities that he can bring out in Shakespeare’s characters. His Richard III is both campy and murderous. His Malvolio is one of the “funniest and most heartbreaking” that Wells has ever seen.
That’s why lovers of Shakespeare do well to love the actors who give him to us, always making him and his writing new. That’s why we’re celebrating the birthday today of a certain Elizabethan actor named Shakespeare, who wasn’t too bad of a writer, either, as it turns out.
Brett Foster and Mark Lewis are professors at Wheaton College, of English and Theater respectively. They often collaborate on things Shakespearean in Wheaton's Arena Theater. They have also co-taught an intensive (theater- and literature-friendly) "Shakespearience" course at Wheaton's campus in Wisconsin's North Woods, and have participated in a "What Can Scholars Learn from Directors? What Can Directors Learn from Scholars?" seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference.
