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Shakespeare & Beyond

"This wide and universal theater": Tricks of the theatrical trade in Shakespeare's plays

1 Henry IV at Folger Theatre
1 Henry IV at Folger Theatre

“Write what you know” is the age-old wisdom young writers are always given, and though he never wrote a backstage comedy (or, for that matter, a backstage history, tragedy, or romance), William Shakespeare filled his plays with the tricks of his theatrical trade.

I’m not talking about the theater techniques any playwright uses to tell a story. From his earliest comedies to his last romances (and including at least one sonnet), Shakespeare used theater as metaphor, creating characters with surprising amounts of knowledge about actors and how they work, and situations in which playacting and pretend serve to advance the plot and reveal character.

In his first comedy, Two Gentlemen of Verona (which some argue is also his first play), Shakespeare had one of his female characters cross-dress as a man. A comic device, to be sure, but also Shakespeare’s meta commentary on the artificiality of the performance itself, an acknowledgement that the audience knows it’s a boy playing a woman playing a man, and that the character pretending to be something she’s not is a reflection on the boy actor pretending to be something he’s not.

1 Henry IV at Folger Theatre

In Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff enlists Hal to “have a play extempore,” in which they can role-play and rehearse how the young prince might answer his father. (1 Henry IV, Folger Theatre, 2019. Photo by C. Stanley Photography)

Shakespeare’s histories are similarly filled with references to and applications of the actor’s art, most certainly drawn from the playwright’s early beginnings as an actor. In Richard II, Richard is compared to his predecessor and found wanting, like a mediocre actor left onstage once the “well-graced” star has exited. In Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff enlists Hal to “have a play extempore,” in which they can role-play and rehearse how the young prince might answer his father. In Henry VI Part 3, the future-Richard III soliloquizes about how, like an actor, he can “wet [his] cheeks with artificial tears / And frame [his] face to all occasions.” In the opening speech of Richard III, Richard breaks down his appearance almost as if he’s a casting director deciding what roles he might be right for. Since he is “rudely stamped,” “deformed,” “unfinished,” and “not shaped for sportive tricks,” he concludes that since he “cannot prove a lover,” he is “determined to prove a villain.” He even coaches his accomplice Buckingham in terms a director might use: “Canst thou quake and change thy color, / Murder thy breath in middle of a word, / And then again begin, and stop again, / As if thou were distraught and mad with terror?” Buckingham assures Richard, “Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian.”