The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-Four Pickleherring's nine muses

In these great decadent days that are upon us, they are allowing women to act upon the stage. The first was Mrs Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert's mistress. She took the part of Desdemona. If she was any good, I do not know. I did not go. I said I was in pain.

In my day women's parts were of course played always by boys. Some moderns affect to believe that this must have taken from the excellence of the performance. But permit me to assure you to the contrary that it added much to it. Even if it had not, this was the way it was, and Mr Shakespeare wrote those parts for boys to play. Would you hear a tune for the flute performed on the sackbut? It will sound different. The music will not be the same.

The restriction (if you want to call it that) was one, in any case, that our playwright accepted, and he made the best of it in all kinds of ways. You might even say that the fact that Shakespeare knew that it would be a boy who would be playing the parts he wrote for a woman brought things out of his imagination that might otherwise never have seen the light of day. It was an inspiring constraint. It enabled him to enact the confusions in his own heart. Besides which, the prevalence of boy actors was in my view no drawback to the stage in general. Nearly all boys can act, and some boys can act extremely well. There are few men and women who can act at all.

It pertains to quite a different order of seriousness to admit that the playing of women's parts by boys may have limited not Mr Shakespeare's art as a whole but the shape of the parts themselves. His women are kept within a range of thought and feeling likely to be understood by boys. This probably accounts for their pure animal spirits. There is no trace of the idle woman in her megrims in any Shakespeare play. But then both men and women alike in his work are alive. They never forget that they are animals. They never let anyone else forget that they are also divine.

In Mr Shakespeare's comedies, the women dominate. In his tragedies, they do not. Forget Ophelia and Desdemona - they are helpless victims. What catches and enflames our author's imagination, usually, is a young woman of a different kind - one who by her wit and energy manages to control events in the world around her. A bright young woman. A woman with spunk in her. He had a model for such a woman at home in Anne Hathaway. He had another to hand in the person of picklesome me.

'Acting a part' - that's the thing of it. At the heart of Mr Shakespeare's comedies there is frequently a female character who is acting a part, whether disguising herself as a boy or pretending in some more subtle fashion to be something or someone she is not. (And here I am, sir, doing it all again.)

Believe me, it is not difficult for a boy to play the part of a woman in comedy, especially when like Rosalind, Portia, Viola, and Imogen he takes the part of a girl pretending to be a boy. Nor does the unsexed Lady Macbeth present many more difficulties. But it gets a bit harder when it comes to the tragic parts of Juliet, and Desdemona, and above all Cleopatra.

Mr Shakespeare helped me by not making the love passages get ridiculous. There is no passionate kissing in his plays. Better yet, have you ever noticed how his lovers use words to hold each other at arm's length? Rosalind and Orlando are like a pair of fencers. The same could go for Beatrice and Benedick, and Kate and Petruchio. This device, which works well in comedy, he had to abandon when disposing his tragic lovers. He then found different solutions in different plays. Othello has wooed and married Desdemona before the play begins, and is most intimate with her when he kills her. Cleopatra and Antony are never left alone together, so that unlike the holy priests the audience never sees the queen when she is riggish. In the most passionate scene of Romeo and Juliet the lovers are kept apart by the height of Juliet's balcony.

When lovers come together on stage in Shakespeare it is always to die, and not just to make love. Thus he avoided a certain ludicrousness inherent in such situations, given that the woman on stage is really a boy. You might laugh at two same-sex lovers, but not if there's death in their caress. All the same, when the boy playing the woman has to be the active partner there can be a little trouble, as in that moment when Cleopatra takes Antony in her arms and kisses him, perhaps the most difficult scene in all Shakespeare for a boy to play. (I always found it so.)

Talking of Cleopatra, Mr Shakespeare even has her remind the audience of the fact that she is being played by a boy, when in Act V, Scene 2, imagining possible indignities, she says:

I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I' the posture of a whore.

This was a daring remark, when you come to think about it, in that it was tempting the audience to laugh at me. And thereby hangs a tale. For although Cleopatra was perhaps in theory the greatest part that Mr Shakespeare wrote for me, by the time I came to play it my voice was going. The top of my performance had been Rosalind. I had now begun to croak like any raven. When I first read those lines he was making me say, I protested. Mr S would not have it. 'If you say it then they will not,' was all he said, meaning that my self-criticism would disarm our audience. He was right. All the same, I did squeak and croak a bit as Cleopatra, and the play was never the success he knew it should have been.

I don't know if it proved a success for Prince Rupert's sackbut. Had she asked my advice I would have told her (or any woman) to begin her study of how to play a woman's part in Shakespeare by first of all imagining herself a boy. It is a perverse paradox, no doubt, madam. And yet I do assure you that it holds a truth.

There are nine Muses, but don't ask me to name them. I forgot all things like that long, long ago. But there are also nine great woman's parts in Shakespeare, female roles which correspond in some degree to the nine Muses, only because they are women not immortals they are more interesting. Those parts are these: Cleopatra, Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Portia, Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind. (I leave out Cressida because that's actually a smaller part than everyone seems to remember, and I never cared for that scene in which she has to kiss the Greek generals in turn.) I played all those parts for Mr Shakespeare. O yes, I, Pickleherring, was his nine muses.

Let me try now to recall for you a few of the details I put into them - in common with my method throughout this book, the sort of things you will never learn anywhere else. I wore, of course, different wigs for the different women. Ophelia had hair like barley; Desdemona was gold; Beatrice was auburn; Viola was dark; Rosalind had red hair - but then I used the same wig for Lady Macbeth, with the late Mr Shakespeare's approval, he liked little tricks like that.

As Rosalind, I used not just to strut, but to jump about. I played her as not so much a character as the characterisation of a mood, an exquisite poetic 'essence'. Impetuous starts and headlong darts, provocative pouts and charming - well, I almost said 'shouts' for the sake of the rhyme, but I don't think I ever shouted in the part of Rosalind, nor in any other part save Ariel. (By the time of The Tempest I was too antique and venerable for women's roles, being twenty-eight years old when we did it first at court.) So let us say that I spoke the part of Rosalind in much the same voice that Lear approves in his dead Cordelia when he remarks: Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low - an excellent thing in woman. It made a good contradiction: soft voice and boyish gestures. That proved much to our author's liking.

I think that's what he liked in me from the start, my voice. For the voice I employed for Rosalind was really my own voice. Once I asked Mr Shakespeare what it was he liked in me that day when I first met him. 'Your boots,' he said. But when I frowned and pouted (as I daresay I did) he said that my thought that day had been sweet-voiced and quick as a singing bird's. That pleased me very much. That he thought that I thought.

Anyway, I remember that I could always enchant him, on stage or off, with that simple phrase of Rosalind's to Celia, after she has got rid of Orlando: 'O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz.' I could make that sound soft and intimate and sleepy, like the murmur of a ring-dove.

What did Mr Shakespeare teach me as an actor? He taught me principles of grace and sweetness. He taught me to say my lines and to listen with my eyes as well as my ears when I was on stage while others were saying their lines. He instructed me not to knock over the furniture or trip in my gowns. (I had in those far-off days a waist that suited a stomacher, and I had sufficient agility to manage the Elizabethan farthingale, more cumbrous than girls' skirts you see today.) He encouraged me to be myself, whoever and whatever that might be. He gave me lessons in expressing the infancy of knowledge, in which he said I had to learn to read with the eye of a bird, and to speak with the tongue of a bee, and to understand with the heart of a child. These were not easy lessons, but I was a willing pupil. Give me leave to wonder if Mrs Hughes went to school like this.

Mr Shakespeare, my master, did not care for mannish women. Boyish ones, yes, they were a different matter. Bold ones, sharp-tongued ones, disarming ones: they were to his liking. Slim ones, and fashionable. I cut a fashionable figure, let me tell you, when I was playing any of those girl-into-boy-into-girl transformations of which he was so fond. He liked to get me out of my dress and into doublet, cloak, and trunk-hose - and then back again, once I'd strutted my stuff for a bit. All this cross-dressing suited some secret theatre he kept in his head, where all his plays came from.

I think that Mr Shakespeare wanted me not just to be a heroine who put on masculine apparel, but one whose speech had always a slightly ambiguous, indefinably hermaphroditical cast. Not that I was an in-between, you understand. He did not want that. He could never abide (nor I) a masculine whore. He wanted me to be first the boy playing the woman, then the woman being the girl, then the girl playing the boy, then the boy turning back into the woman, then at last the woman coming out of the play to be a boy again. The differences and the extremes, that's what he liked. And I think he liked nothing better than the thought of the male phallus under the petticoats. Unless it was the fact of the male phallus under the petticoats.