Squeaking Cleopatras

 

A child’s life experience in the early modern period was totally different from that of a child today. Indeed, by our standards there was really no such thing as childhood; young people were exposed almOSt from birth to all the unpleasant aspeCts of life. Elizabethan houses for all but the prosperous were very small and there was little privacy. The homes of the very poor have not survived but those of the slightly better off tradespeople, for example often consisted of one room downstairs and two above. The corridor had not yet been adopted in construCtion, and bedrooms, even of the very rich, led out of each other, the second entered via the first. This lack of privacy throughout society meant that life was lived in public, almost as if on stage. Even going to the lavatory in large houses was an experience shared with other people, as archaeological finds at Hampton Court have shown. Sexual and bodily functions would be apparent to the observant child; frequent pregnancies and childbirth without anaesthetics, the cruelty of illnesses unrelieved by antibiotics and with only herbal remedies to help, were there for all to see. Lack of basic hygiene meant that Elizabethan and Jacobean men and women would be exposed to all kinds of diseases that spread rapidly. Influenza, the periodic, dreaded bubonic plague.

And

The iambic pentameiter has five unstressed and five stressed beats. The stressed beats are absolutely firm and dictate the pulse of the verse. If, as'sometirnes happens, the rhythm is broken, this indicates to the actor that something dynamic is happening either to the character or in the p10t. This in turn signals the same to the audience. The beat conveys the sense to them bOth, the important words always coming on the down or stressed beat. The Elizabethans went to bear, not see, a play and were more attuned to the verse than audiences today who, in the main, see plays either in the theatre or television, or who go to the films, where the visual, it may be argued, is as at least as important as the words. The language of today’s plans is impoverished compared to the brilliance of the Elizabethan drama. For the actor in verse plays: the rhythm is his life-blood, intelligence and guide. The iambic

pentameter is, according to Professor George T. Wright:

characteristic that appears in many of the pieces written for women characters the list: a series of short but leisurely phrases, such as the lists of flowers in speeches by Ophelia, Gertrude, Perdita and the Queen in Cymbe/ine; Ophelia’s naming of Hamlet’s charaCtetistics in ‘0, what a noble mind’; Olivia’s naming of her beauties, though this is not necessarily a device which is exclusive to the women characters.

Throughout the whole canon similar patterns of speech for the women characters exist. Of course, today’s actresses phrase the speeches in their own way, and being larger, having bigger rib-cages they do not need to take as many breaths as a smaller boy would, and every actress has her own pattern of breathing. But in the following speeches it will be seen that it is possible to break the blank verse, or the prose, into'small phrases, capable of being spoken by a boy Without destroying the sense: indeed, the speeches seem to demand to be so fragmented. It is noticeable that as Shakespeare’s verse became more supple, more complex, so his use of subordinate clauses or ideas expressed in parenthesis becomes more and more prevalent, especially in the women’s speeches. A late character such as Innogen in Cymbelz'ne or Volumnia in Coriolcmm, while speaking the most complex of thoughts does so in short phrases; the earlier women tend to speak in more regular verse. It seems, too, that particularly in the earlier plays, the verse for the women’s parts is very accented, again giving the maximum help to

the boy player. One early example is Julia in Two Gentlemen 0 Verona whose speeches have a heavy beat:

1nd so on throughout the speech, which also contains Other characteristics of the boys’ speeches a list, spaciousness for

thought and breath, and alliteration to help the thought. These, then, are the principal qualities Which are found in the speeches made by the early heroines. It has n0t been possible in the space

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available to write about every speech, but the principles remam the same. In every speech the boy has room to explore the thought because the phraseology, even when the thought is passionate, enables him to breathe easily and adequately. The pace and dynamic is different from that found in the men's speeches even in the same plays. The thought and structure grow more complex as Shakespeare becomes more assured in his writing, but nowhere does he ever forget the smaller breathing capacity of the boys who created these parts. The same principles apply to his tragic heroines and those who appear in the so-called ‘Problem Plays' Meamre for Measure, Troilus and C ressz'da, All ’5 Well That E 72d; Well. In most of the tragedies the women play a far less important role, their parts being, in the main, subordinate to the men in length though pivotal in action. The verse takes on a more measured pace and dynamic and becomes less end-5t0pped and very flexible. This, of course, helps the aCtor and many of the speeches become like arias. Ophelia’s at the end of the Nunnery scene in Hamlet is one. (See Appendix 1 where it is punctuated according tothe interpretations given it by various editors.) Here it is punctuated by the need to breathe.

&

....An actor does something different. He is creating an imaginary character and, in the case of Elizabethan drama, a character of which the first audiences knew nothing, for they had no way of reading the text beforehand as we can today. The experience of seeing a new play is totally different from seeing a play with which one is familiar and about which one can say “That was not my idea of Hamlet’, for example. The audience of a new play has no preconception of what the actor is trying to portray. 

Although costume can, and in Elizabethan times did, reveal a character's class, profession or trade and a particular actor might be known for playing a particular ‘line’, the audience has no idea of the attributes of the character until the play unfolds. An Elizabethan audience would be full of expectation about character and plot, would not be distracted by visual complexity, and would be aware of itself as both audience and as a collection of individuals watching a play in which actors were telling a story with characters who were both part of their consciousness and the consciousness of the dramatist. The players were also aware of what they were doing, responding to the audience’s reaction and editing their performances to suit that audience. This makes for a complex and multi-layered experience. 

So our cross-dressing boy player was taking part in something that was mainly happening in the minds of people, who had come to the theatre to be entertained and were willing to do their part by entering into a collusion that what they were seeing was real. There were few effects to distract and alienate; there were only words and costume and acting. The audience and the actors all decided to see something that was a real woman, though on another level they were well aware that ‘she’ was a cross-dressed boy, much as a present-day audience conspires with the soprano playing Oktavian in Der Rosenkavalier that he is a boy who then pretends to be a girl, as does also the singer of Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. 

But something else is also happening. The actors and audience are also colluding with the writer, to believe in his vision and, thus, to make something greater than what is actually on the page. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed this about music. He pointed out in a lecture at Cambridge, in about 1930, that: 

. the relation between a musical score and a performance cannot be grasped casually (as though we find mysteriously, that a certain score causes us to play in a certain way), nor can the rules that connect the two be exhaustively described — for, given a certain interpretation, any playing can be made to accord with the score. Eventually, we just have to ‘see the rule in the relation between playing and score’. If we cannot see it, no amount of explanation is going to make it comprehensible; if we can see, there comes a point at which explanations are superfluous — we do not need any kind of ‘fundamental’ explanation. 

To apply this to the Elizabethan theatre, it can be said that che audience and the boy players, colluding in what was ‘belief’ and having superb words to appreciate and help, were agreeing with each other that the ‘fundamental’ explanation (to use Wittgenstein’s words) was superfluous, and what they were doing and watching transcended any mundane reality, producing a greater truth about which there are no logical explanations. 

But the boy’s body was present, and identity 1s very much tied up with physical attributes. Could a boy really convincingly portray a woman? What did the Elizabethans think about sexuality? In today’s prurient society people are labelled by their sexuality — heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual. These terms meant nothing to the Elizabethans. Men could, and did, have passionate friendships that might or might not be sexually expressed. Hamlet’s speech to Horatio is a fictional representation of this type of friendship, but the relationship is not overtly sexual. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets show an ambiguity about sex, and the young men and young women in the plays show great affection one to the other. The sleeping arrangements of even the very rich (corridors had not been invented and bedrooms led out of each other) made bodies very familiar and less an object of salacious enquiry than now. As we have seen, clothes minimised sexual differences too. The cult of women wearing men’s clothes and men becoming ‘effeminate’ was prevalent throughout the period, and so the sexual differences were blurred. The boy player, portraying a girl who was wearing men’s clothes, would be more believable to an age used to women wearing men’s clothes. Nowadays it is sometimes difficult to tell young women from young men when they are both wearing jeans, T-shirts, trainers and hair which can be either long or short. So the sexual differences in the Elizabethan age were similarly indistinct. The master/mistress figure of the boy player would be entirely credible. There would be no doubt in the audience’s mind that this was a girl being portrayed on the stage, a reality of the imagination — a different experience, and one entered into willingly from seeing a real girl, just as King Lear or Hamlet are not living beings but products of Shakespeare’s imagination and the acting of Richard Burbage. The truth of the imagination is what theatre deals in and when entering its doors this is what an audience consents to conspire in.