William Shakespeare - Humanities-Ebooks

Hamlet 14
actors) boys playing women of all ages was a fixed condition of performance. Little
is known about individual boys, but the companies’ main source of supply was choir
schools, as the many songs in female roles attest; the potent tragedy of some roles
also makes it clear that comparisons with modern ‘drag’ acts or school plays will not
do, and that the boys were a true theatrical resource. But exclusion of women was a
severe craft limitation that Shakespeare probably found as irksome as Shakespeare in
Love suggests; there is certainly a case that he was careful in writing his female roles
not to demand the kind of breath-length ► he could from Burbage and the other fullgrown
adults, and in many plays his heroines voice sharp complaint at (performative)
restrictions on women.
At the same time, as theatre-goers familiar with reconstructed amphitheatres will
know, exclusion of women was theatrically a lesser problem than it would be today,
because Shakespeare’s theatre did not depend on illusion—the presentation of a
fiction as ‘real’. His audiences did not sit in warm, covered darkness, gazing through
a proscenium arch into the illuminated world beyond: they stood in the open air or
sat in open galleries, certainly on three and perhaps all four sides of a stage, watching
by afternoon-light and so constantly seeing one another as well as the actors. There
was no convention of silence during performance, dis/pleasure would have been
freely expressed, and Hamlet’s complaint about clowns ad-libbing points to freedoms
of reception as well as performance, so Coleridge’s famous tag about the “willing
suspension of disbelief” simply doesn’t apply to the Shakespearean stage. Audiences
knew full well at all times what was/n’t real, and cannot have ‘suspended disbelief’;
rather they ran belief (faith, credit) and disbelief (reason, knowledge) always in jointharness,
and seem not to have distinguished boy-plays-woman from commoner-playsking,
living-plays-dead, or a London stage playing Rome, Damascus, or wherever
was needed for a given performance.
It is this duality between expansive fiction and constraining reality amongst both
audiences and actors that underpins the ‘metatheatre’ often noted in Shakespeare
in plays that have ‘plays-within-plays’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet) or
‘boys-playing-girls-playing-boys’ (As You Like It, Twelfth Night). These are certainly
metatheatrical devices, forcefully reminding audiences to think about what they and
A few older female roles, notably the comic nurse in Romeo and Juliet, are thought to have been
played by adults, but all others, from Juliet to Cleopatra, by boys.
Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 14; Coleridge was actually discussing the process of reading poetry,
not the business of attending drama—on which see his ‘Remarks on the stage’ (1808) and lecture
of 1818–19, both in e.g. R. A. Foakes, ed., Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection
(London: Athlone Press, 1989).