Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time: The Art of Stage Playing (review)

In the modern theatre, actors often take curtain calls on stages without curtains, play cards in green rooms that are not green, and—in a profession unrenowned for ecclesiastical rigor—refer to the workspace above them as the "heavens." The theatre, in sum, is a conservative profession (which is why it is so famed for liberality), and just one of many strengths of John Astington's book is his emphasis on continuity over change. He explores institutions as much as individuals and outlines the means an emerging profession used to inculcate the habits to which we are heirs. If a theatre today calls its young actors "apprentices"—a euphemism for "unpaid labor"—it owes allegiance to the Renaissance stage.

Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time: The Art of Stage Playing is two books in one, or one book with two themes as its title asserts. For the phrases that flank the colon are not apposite so much as complementary. The first theme—Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time—is more interested in work than play, since chapters 2 ("Playing and education"), 3 ("Apprentices"), and 5 ("Players at work") focus on the work-a-day arrangements that enabled performance. While these chapters include familiar names and faces—Alleyn, Burbage, Lowin, and Perkins—Astington subordinates personality to practice. Rather, he braids personality to practice, twining the daily labor of a working player into the institutional practices that made it possible. Astington is, for instance, merely characteristic when he writes in "Players at work" that, "Continuity in practice was an unrivalled strength of the King's men in 1626" (161). This comment refreshes exceptionalist claims for the King's men, ones that might rather ascribe their success to a back-catalog of Shakespeare's plays or to their unique possession of two playhouses in the Globe and the Blackfriars. In these three chapters, Astington plumbs the patterns of practice, the labor arrangements, the training regiments, and the institutional affiliations that brought stability to the uncertain business of playing.

What marks this book as a product of the early twenty-first century, then, is that it is in large part a study of labor relations rather than a triumphal account of exceptional men. For instance, the primary institutional affiliation that Astington traces is between theatre companies and guilds, whose model of labor organization playing companies quite probably copied. (In this, Astington extends the pioneering work of Roslyn Knutson and David Kathman who have shown how systematically interlaced the world of play-making was with London's livery companies.) An entire chapter on apprentices earns its keep not just with the well-researched information about how playing companies brought new blood to the boards but with its thorough accounting of how senior players trained up the talent that would ultimately succeed them. Throughout, Astington is keenly interested in the ways that continuities of playing developed in the absence of dramatic academies—the lack of which forms "one theme" of the book, as Astington claims on the first page of the introduction. The theatrical industry opportunistically exploited the apprenticeship protocols of early modern England to bring young men into their profession and tutor them in the "art of stage playing." That process provides an exemplary instance of the way an emergent profession adapted existing institutional practices to develop an economical means to ensure their own survival.

The story of Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time is, therefore, one of institutional development, and is told with lucidity leavened with wit. The story of the subtitle—The Art of Stage Playing—is a more difficult one to tell. Writing about acting is notoriously challenging, even when we have the evidence of our own eyes. Introduce a four-hundred-year remove into the equation and the task becomes downright impossible. What, precisely, did those men and boys do with their bodies and voices on the stages of...