Shakespeare the Actor (ePub)

William Shakespeare was a player before he was a playwright. He didn't stop acting once his writing 'took off' and he is even listed as one of the 'Principall Players [in] All these plays' on the frontispiece of the First Folio of his dramatic works in 1623, seven years after his death. He acted in his own plays but also those of Ben Jonson and, seemingly, others, and plausibly he did so for his entire London career.Taking these simple and long-established truths, award-winning historian Ian Kelly, an actor and playwright himself, tells Shakespeare's story from a fresh vantage point. Shakespeare was an actor who wrote, and this informed his work and its unique place in our literary culture in keys ways. How did being an actor inform his world view and his writing? What was the working traffic of his stage, from apprentice to company man to theatre-share-holder? What was it like being Shakespeare the player? How could a mere actor, an 'upstart crow', change forever the English theatre and its language? Only an actor, Kelly argues, could have written like William Shakespeare. And perhaps, being an actor, Shakespeare was deliberately and instinctively reticent to ever tell us too much about himself, explaining some of the supposed enigma of the most notable man of his age. On the occasion of 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this new take on what it was to be a player, theatre practitioner and writer in the golden age of English drama gives background to the semi-hidden story of the boy from Stratford who changed the English language and world drama, with a recreation of the London theatre scene that Shakespeare knew and loved.