...each company worked as a team, sharing the members' assets, income, and costs. As playing in London became a familiar form of entertainment, especially when under James I the leading companies took the names of royal patrons, financiers began to take control of the companies. But the Lord Chamberlain's Men remained a co-operative enterprise--even after they had become the King's Men--throughout their forty-eight-year existence.
         Andrew Gurr:   Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

We tend to think of a playwright creating an opus and passing on a completed text to a director and actors for production.  That may be the workable contemporary model, but it does not always lead to the most inventive forms of Theatre.  Nor is it a model that applies to the Elizabethan stage.  Shakespeare the poet may have toiled in seclusion in some of his work, but Shakespeare the playwright was part of an active company with professional commitments.  The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a co-operative, collaborative team that influenced Shakespeare's writing in a number of demonstrable ways.  There are obvious instances where the company contributed to his work, of scripts that he wrote to fit the company, and roles he created for specific actors in the company.

I must also here acknowledge the conjectural nature of this inquiry.  The written records are scarce and often incomplete; transcriptions of verbal accounts are selective and not always perfectly accurate; nicknames and spellings are both casual and confusing.  So while we can be pretty certain of some of the facts, much of what transpired can only be the most logical assumption, the best possible likelihood.  As more hard evidence turns up (and very occasionally it does) this continuously fluid discussion undergoes constant revision.   It is probably unwise to definitively accept each new speculative claim or to vehemently deny the previous equally speculative claim.

In his Dramatic Documents, W.W. Greg graciously includes a note by E.K. Chambers, commenting on a difference of opinion between them about the makeup of Eizabethan companies:  'a difference of speculative feeling on an issue as to which we agree the the data are insufficient to allow more than speculation.'  I would wish that all the scholarship were as openfaced.

 

 

1. The Cohesiveness of the Company: 

The folio lists the 'principall actors', the first eight of whom had been the original members or shareholders.  As sharers died, retired or (less often) left the company, journeymen replaced them, buying or taking over their shares. Several shareholders brought apprentices with them (I have noted apprentices in small type)  and the apprentices clearly advanced to become journeymen or eventually sharers within the company. The loyalty and stability of the company over its entire 48 years is quite remarkable.

2.   The Consistent Size of the Company:

We can count the characters in the plays, but that is clearly inadequate. To figure this out, we have to determine who was in the company. When the Chamberlain's Men was formed, the licence listed only eight actors.  Those were the original sharers, but there must have been other journeymen. Additional names can be added by looking at an earlier company, Lord Strange's Men. Strange's Men presented The Seven Deadly Sins in 1590-92. Many of the actors in that company became the sharers in Chamberlain's Men. Their apprentices would have followed them and my assumption is that at two or three journeymen did as well.

Fortunately a company plot exists that may be for that show. There is some doubt about the date of this document, which I will discuss later. Regardless of its date, what is immediately obvious is that some actors played more than one role. Because of this doubling there cannot a direct correlation between the size of the company and the number of characters in the plays. I will also make the assumption that doubling roles was a common economically necessary practice then as it is with companies now.

Lord Strange died in 1593, leaving the company without a patron. Some of the actors joined Lord Pembroke's Men. In 1594 a new company was formed under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain.  We can start getting a handle on the personnel by comparing charters of the two companies and Seven Deadly Sins plot to see how many of the Lord Strange actors became Lord Chamberlain's Men.

      Compare this to the casting requirements of the early plays:

Titus Andronicus                   1594-95       8 men, 5 apprentices + doubling
The Taming of the Shrew       1594-95     10 men, 5 apprentices + prologue doubled
Two Gentlemen of Verona     1594-96     10 men, 5 apprentices + outlaws doubled
Love's Labours Lost              1594-95     10 men, 5 apps + Jaquinetta, Forester, Marcade d'ed
Romeo & Juliet                     1594-95 ?  10 men, 5 apprentices + doubling
Richard II                             1595-96
Love's Labours Won ?           1595-96
Midsummer Night's Dream    1595-96     12 men, 7 apprentices + doubling

While it may be that a company of fifteen was formed to perform existing plays, it is also true that Shakespeare continued writing specifically for a company of fifteen actors. This uses Rosalind Knutson's chronology which assumes a number of plays already written when the company formed. Knutson refers to Scott McMillin's logical (though speculative) cast lists for Shakespeare’s Henry VI, parts 2 and 3, and for The Taming of a Shrew. He concludes that ‘Pembroke’s men seem to have consisted of eleven principal adults, four boys’

David Bevington suggests a similar number for Edward II: ‘ten or so company members, additional hired actors, and two to four boys’.

\Roslyn Knutson: Pembroke's Men in 1592–3, Their Repertory and Touring Schedule

There is support for this in contemporary production.  Vancouver's Bard on the Beach typically uses a company of fifteen or sixteen actors to present a two shows each year in repertory. The pairings vary, but the number of actors at Bard on the Beach is remarkably consistent year to year.

In 1603 King James became the company patron. The new patent reflects the ongoing changes in personnel, but the size of the company remained pretty constant.  And it is also clear that Shakespeare was writing for his available personnel even in the later plays.  The 2008 Bard on the Beach production of The Tempest, for example, used a company of fifteen actors.

Kings's Men   1603 The royal patent names 9 men: Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustyne Phillippes, Iohn Heninges, Henrie Condell, William Sly, Robert Armyn, Richard Cowley, and the rest of their Associates: Alex Cooke is listed in the cast of Ben Jonson's Sejanus's Fall, so presumably he is a sharer or journeyman in 1603. Samuel Crosse is a sharer in 1604, though he dies soon after. and, speculatively, the usual 5 or so apprentices.

Kings's Men   1605 John Lowin joined the King's Men shortly after their formation. Augustine Phillips dies 1605 Nicholas Tooley is a sharer 1605: So in 1605 the company is: Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Iohn Heninges, Henrie Condell, William Sly, Robert Armyn, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cooke John Lowin Nicholas Tooley plus apprentices

This next is an acknowledgement of an alternative theory, just to complicate things more.  David Kathman suggests that the The Seven Deadly Sins plot is not from the 1590-92 Strange's Men production, but rather from a Chamberlain's Men production in 1597-98. This would actually make sense of the apprentices, many of whom would have been probably too young in 1590. If Kathman is correct, there must be a different scenario for the formation of the company.  But however the company came about, the The Seven Deadly Sins plot can still account for ten Chamberlain's Men actors and their five apprentices. The additional actors are known to have been part of Lord Pembrokes men and not usually associated with Chambelain's. In this case, the company would appear to have hired five men and an apprentice from Pembroke's Men to fill out the very large cast. Hiring additional actors was indeed possible, as in the case of Merry Wives of Windsor. Will Kemp, in that case, had clearly left the company and was brought back to play Falstaff.

David Kathman: Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins

Shakespeare's name does not appear in the Sins plot, nor Hemmings nor Kemp. All three were important members in the company in 1597, so for Kathman's scenario to work, we have to assume that 2 of the 3 were the unnamed actors. Hemmings was most likely, assuming that his apprentice Sannder (Alexander Cooke) is mentioned. By the same reasoning, Shakespeare could be a possibility if Ned is indeed Edmund Shakespeare, and if Edmund is Will's apprentice. Where is Kemp in this scenario? Or if the final unnamed actor is indeed Kemp, then what was Shakespeare doing? So while the plot can account for ten Chamberlain's Men actors and five apprentices, it does suggest that there were actually eleven actors in the company.

3. Re-inventing the clown:

Who made up the company is easy enough to ascertain, but the roles they created is more difficult.
There are a minimal number of confirmed roles in the company:

Burbage played Richard III  Gwynne Blakemore Evans, John Joseph, Michael Tobin:The Riverside Shakespeare
Burbage played Hamlet   
Burbage played Lear
Burbage played Othello  Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, William Ingram:  English professional theatre, 1530-1660
Kemp played Peter in R&J
Kemp played Dogberry in Much Ado
Shakespeare played Adam in AYL
Shakespeare played Ghost in Hamlet
Jack Wilson played Balthasar in Twelfth Night

Beyond this list, the rest require some conjecture.

Though only two of Kemp's roles can be confirmed, there are several contemporary references that he succeeded Richard Tarleton as the most popular clown in London.  Kemp probably played Grumio, Bottom, and almost certainly Falstaff.  There is a distinct progression in the importance of each character.

Grumio is a minor character, but he keeps interrupting, basically making himself a niusance.   It is easy to interpret Grumio's asides as interpolated dialogue, inserted not by Shakespeare, but by Kemp.  And when Petruchio tries to shut him up, it is equally easy to see that not as Shakespeare, but as Burbage trying to control Kemp's upstaging:
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Shr/F1/scene/2.1

Grumio improvises a joke, making Petruchio the straight man (line 2140). There is a hint of 'now what?' in Petruchio's line:
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Shr/F1/scene/4.3

Bottom pretty much commands the scene even when he is asleep. He wants to play all the roles, basically a whole character based on Grumio's interruptive style. It is a very good comic device and Bottom is as interesting a character as any of Dream's leads. Shakespeare and Kemp share the responsibility for Bottom.  Because it is written in prose, it is easier for Kemp to adjust the dialogue, and harder to distinguish what lines might have been written by which Will:
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/MND/F1/scene/1.2

Falstaff is a huge role, fully integrated into the main plot of Henry IV.  While the lead character may nominally be Hal, the show really belongs to Falstaff.  And again, the prose form makes it hard to know how much of the dialogue was composed by Shakespeare.
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/2H4/F1/scene/1.2

Shakespeare seems to revel in the invective he causes Hal to fling at Falstaff. Or possibly some of these insults are Burbage taking this golden opportunity to roast Kemp. Either way it does seem excessive:

there is a Deuill haunts thee, in the likenesse of a
fat old Man; a Tunne of Man is thy Companion: Why
do'st thou conuerse with that Trunke of Humors, that
Boulting-Hutch of Beastlinesse, that swolne Parcell of
Dropsies, that huge Bombard of Sacke, that stuft Cloake
bagge of Guts, that rosted Manning Tree Oxe with the
Pudding in his Belly, that reuerend Vice, that grey Ini
quitie, that Father Ruffian, that Vanitie in yeeres? where
in is he good, but to taste Sacke, and drinke it? wherein
neat and cleanly, but to carue a Capon, and eat it? where
in Cunning, but in Craft? wherein Craftie, but in Villa
nie? wherein Villanous, but in all things? wherein wor
thy, but in nothing?
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/1H4/F1/scene/2.4

And of course for Merry Wives of Windsor Kemp revived Falstaff in a play written expressly for him. This is not speculation.  Merry Wives came about because Elizabeth I wanted to see more of Falstaff.  Audiences and patrons clearly adored this sort of humour, the Chamberlain's Men were adept at it, and Shakespeare wrote material to satisfy the need.

On the other hand, Hamlet's advice to the players is completely opposed to the style Shakespeare adopted with Kemp.  Either Kemp had become a pain in the ass, or if not, Shakespeare at least acknowledges that he knew full well what he was doing in collaborating with Kemp:
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/2H4/F1/scene/1.2

Will Kemp left the company in about 1599 to be replaced by Robert Armin.  Though there is no real evidence in this case, artistic differences like this usually involve some hurt feelings.  Particularily given that Shakespeare created Touchstone in As You Like It while Kemp was still in the company.  Kemp would not likely have played such a character, and in writing such a juicy role specifically for Armin, Shakespeare may have alienated Kemp. Touchstone is the first of a line of philosophical fools, much darker, much more contemplative in nature; Feste; the Porter; the Gravedigger; Lear's fool.  Leslie Hotson refers to “the shadows and fitful flashes of the borderland of insanity”. 
Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare’s Motley

The contrasts between Kemp and Armin are several. Where Kemp depended on physical comedy, Armin depended on wit.  Kemp's humour was raunchy and debauched, Armin's was cynical and penetrating.  And where Kemp had made his subplot characters an integral part of the main action, Armin's characters served as a counterpoint to the themes of the main plot, a pause for reflection on the state of play.  

Armin seems to have been capable of a much broader range of roles than Kemp.  Gary Schmidgall suggests it is possible that he played Iago, for instance.  And while watching Raoul Bhaneja's one-man Hamlet recently, I was struck by just how funny is Polonius.  Of course Polonius is conveniently dead long before the Gravedigger has to appear, so Armin could easily have played both roles.  While the Gravedigger is a brilliant character, it would seem to be a waste of a good actor's talents if Armin's only contribution were such an abbreviated role.  If Armin did play Polonius, one possibility is that the company assigned roles to whoever was available, or maybe this is another instance of Shakespeare creating a script that makes use of a specific actor's skills. Of course, Shakespeare was a good enough craftsman to achieve both.

Its not so much that Shakespeare disliked Kemp's work.  Indeed Kemp enjoyed a great deal of popularity and was certainly good for the company.  But Shakespeare seems to have become interested in something completely new, and Kemp was not the man he needed to work with.  Shakespeare and Armin together were creating the tragic fool.
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Mac/F1/scene/2.3
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/F1/scene/5.1
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Lr/F1/scene/3.2

 

 

4.  The Burbage Influence:

Of the hundreds of plays and thousands of roles for actors that date from the 1580-1610 era, there are only twenty or so roles that are longer than 800 lines. Edward Alleyn was the first English actor to manage such roles, in Marlowe's Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta; but the majority of these star roles, thirteen of the twenty, were acted by Burbage.
Scott McMillan, The Elizabethan Stage

Vincentio (820)                            Volpone
Richard III  (1124)                        Subtle
Henry V (1025)                            Malcontent
Hamlet (1422)                              Malfi
Coriolanus (809
Othello (860)
Iago (1097)   Burbage could not have acted both roles, so who was Iago? Robert Armin?

I'm not going into depth here because plenty has been said about Burbage.  There are plenty of references to Burbage dominating the London stage.  It is not much of a stretch to imagine a magnificent actor for whom Shakespeare and others would want to create massive characters.

 

 

5. The Apprentices:

This investigation actually started from an observation I made some years ago after reading Thomas Baldwin's Organization and Personnel.  He lays out the casting for all the plays.  Given the paucity of actual information, this is a rather ambitious and imaginative task, with much conjecture and lots of opportunity for fiasco.  But what was intriguing is that Baldwin attributed all the plum women's roles from 1595-99 to Robert Gough.  If that were true, it seemed to me that Shakepeare was writing for a specific apprentice who was talented enough to allow him to develop truly significant women's roles for the first time.

Edmund Malone, it turns out, had had a similar thought about two hundred years ahead of me, except that he attributed all the roles to Alexander Cooke.  Interestingly, Baldwin and Malone base their casting opinions on much the same data.  The long and short of it is we cannot say for certain.
Edmund Malone: The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare: An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage

David Grote suggests a Saunder to whom he attributes Juliet. Not impossible, but Grote offers no explanation as to where this actor came from, nor why he never appears again.  The Saunder or Sannder or Sander of The Seven Deadly Sins was far more likely to have been Alexander Cooke, in which case Grote's assessment supports Malone's thesis.

So lets stick to what we can know. What is certain is that Shakespeare had one tall and one short actor for his great women's roles. Look at the number of times he uses the contrast of the taller and the shorter woman either for plot reasons or for comedy.   He used this discrepency to comic advantage in Midsummer NIght's Dream, and he paired a tall actor with a short in As You Like It.  Whoever played the women's roles, we can infer a couple of significant attributes from the texts. 

Midsummer Night's Dream: Helena is tall, Hermia short.  And Shakespeare builds a whole comic scene one the difference (line 1323 ff.)
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/MND/F1/scene/3.2

As You Like It:  Celia is tall, Rosalind not.   Orlando says Rosalind is 'just as high as my heart', however high that is.  But if we ascribe a double meaning, she is markedly shorter than him. (line 1460)
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/AYL/F1/scene/3.2

When Orlando asks which is the Duke's daughter (line 440), the answer is unequivocal.
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/AYL/F1/scene/1.2

But Shakespeare confuses the issue less than 200 lines later when Rosalind says she is 'more then common tall' (line 580).  I'm not sure how to interpret this inconsistency. Perhaps both actors were taller than the average woman?.
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/AYL/F1/scene/1.3

Love's Labour's Lost: Princess is the tallest   (line 1020):
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/LLL/F1/scene/4.1

Romeo & Juliet: Shakespeare takes great trouble to tell us she is not yet fourteen, and logically, not very big.

Twelfth Night Viola is described by Malvolio: 'in standing water, betweene boy and man.'  Again, it does not describe a large person.
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/TN/F1/scene/1.5

And the comic duel make more sense if Viola is small and obviously non-threatening.
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/TN/F1/scene/3.4

Merchant of Venice:  Portia's first line in "my little body is a wearie of this world':
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/MV/F1/scene/1.2

The two most experienced apprentices were indeed Cooke and Gough, so it is logical to assume that the characters were created for these two.  I am assuming Cooke was the taller and Gough the shorter of the two actors, though this is not certain.  In The Seven Deadly Sins, Cooke plays the Queen, while Gough plays Aspatia, a young woman.  Flimsy information on which to base a hypothesis, but I would not be the first.  Gough then would be the likely originator of Juliet, Hermia, Rosalind, Portia and Viola.  Cooke would have originated Princesse of France, Helena, Celia and Olivia.

It is not only the comic difference between the two that Shakespeare exploited.  Rosalind, Portia and Viola are very similar characters: strong intelligent practical women who spend most of the play dressed as a boy.  Celia, Olivia and Princesse are also similar roles: courtly, elegant, stately.  Shakespeare had two talented, experienced young actors who could each carry a scene.  So he created roles to allow them to do that.  In As You Like It Rosalind and Celia have scenes together that develop a significant relationship between them.  The Viola and Olivia relationship is a major part of Twelfth Night. Good women's roles were a rarity. To thus assign complete scenes to apprentices demonstrates the confidence Shakespeare had in these two actors. And of course Portia is the only female role in all of Elizabethan drama that is the largest in the play. 

All this lasted until about 1599-1600, when Shakepeare moves on to write the big tragedies.  It may be that he just wanted to do something different.  But it may equally have been a factor that Alexander Cooke and Robert Gough just got too old to do women's roles.  Combined with Will Kemp's decision to leave the company, Shakespeare found himself writing for significantly different personnel.  He created a whole new series of plays to respond to the changes.

The Boys

 

Alfred Harbage:   The Pelican Shakespeare , London Pelican, 1969,   Introduction
Thomas Baldwin: The Oganization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, New York, Princeton, 1927http://openlibrary.org
David Scott Kastan: A Companion to Shakespeare , Blackwell 1999
Edmund Malone: An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, Various Publishers 1813
J. Payne Collier: Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of   Shakepeare, Piccadilly, Shakespeare Society 1853
Andrew Gurr:   The Shakespeare Company 1594-1642,   Cambridge, 2004
Andrew Gurr:   The Shakespeare Stage 1594-1642,   Cambridge, 1992
E. A. J. Honigmann:  Shakespeare: The Lost Years, Manchester Universty Press, 1985
F. G. Fleay: On the Actor Lists, 1578-1642, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 9, 1881http://www.jstor.org
David Grote:   The Best Actors in the World,   Greenwood, 2002
Gary Schmidgall:  Shakespeare and Opera, Oxford University Press, USA 1990
Peter Thomson:   Shakepeare's Theatre , Routledge, 1992
Rosalind Lander Knutson: Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time , Cambridge, 2001
W. W.Greg: Dramatic documents from the Elizabethan playhouses, Oxford, 1931 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Deadly_Sins_(play)
Gary Wills: Verdi's Shakespeare, Penguin 2011 http://books.google.ca/books?
Brian Morris, The Taming of the Shrew, Methuen 1962 http://books.google.ca/books?