Shakespeare and Other Men of the Theater

This essay revisits various aspects of Shakespeare’s theatrical career: his acting, his relations with other actors, and (drawing particularly on Tiffany Stern’s idea of the early modern playtext as a patchwork) the other theatrical tasks in which he might have been involved, such as announcing or advertising his plays. I look again at the question of when and why he might have retired from the public stage. Rather than imagining a complete break in his career at this point, I suggest other venues for private performance (the Inns of Court, private houses, and the smaller rooms in the royal household) and the possibility, in the case of still-unpublished plays or potentially controversial works, of readings by the author himself. Here, I draw cautious analogies with what is known about the careers of other actor-dramatists, particularly Molière. My conclusion is that although Shakespeare may have wanted to prepare a collected edition of his plays, he was so complete a man of the theater that he found it impossible to fix them in a definitive form for publication.