Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!
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Today is the observed birthday for one of the greatest playwrights in theatre history. Born to a glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 Shakespeare became famous in his own time as an actor, playwright, poet and part owner of the London theatre company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
Shakespeare’s body of work consists of approximately 38 plays and 154 sonnets and various poems. Though his works were not as innovative, dramaturgically speaking, as those of contemporaries like Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare is famous for his ability to elegantly wrap all of the human experience into rhyming couplets, with a keen understanding of the inner workings of his fellow man and the intellect to weave his knowledge into a witty and engaging tale.
Whether you consider him a hack or a genius, one person or many, or don’t care at all, today is a day of remembrance for every actor. We are all in debt to those who have come before us and Shakespeare is certainly one to be kept in high esteem.
So Happy Birthday (and ironically, Deathday) to William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon.
If you’re interested in Shakespeare’s life and works, I suggest the books below that can be found at either Amazon, any major bookstore or your local library.
You Can’t Be an Actor and a Gentleman.
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“It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else’s eyes.”
–Sally Field
You may recall a while back when I wrote about my “Crisis of Confidence” as I’ve referred to it in Great Acting: Catching Lightning in a Bottle and The Actor Who Succeeded by Failure. It been a strange mode I’ve existed in as an actor for the last two months or so. I find myself not being happy with my work and not really understanding why. I know the cause is my lack of boldness, my lack of courage, but these are recently acquired shortages and I’m not sure what brought them on. Well, today the spell might’ve been broken . . . and it turns out I knew the answer all along.
I’ve said in the past that you cannot be a gentleman and an actor at the same time. I can’t remember when exactly I said that, but I think it was in Podcast number two. It was a lesson I learned a few years back that I resisted with all my might at the time. I liked being a gentleman. I’m a very amiable guy and I like doing nice things and being genuinely kind to people. I heard that I couldn’t be a gentleman and an actor and balked. “No!” I said. “Sure you can. You’re not just one or the other!” With every fiber of my being I strained against the idea. It just wasn’t right, it wasn’t true. It took me a little while to figure out that it was true. You can be one or the other, but never both at once.
I’m sure there are some readers out there who are balking the same way I did, but let me explain. Onstage, we are required to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do in our day to day lives. If you’ve playing Oedipus,
When you leave rehearsal for the night and head home, feel free to be as kind and thoughtful as you wish to be; be as gentlemanly as you can muster. When you’re onstage that default of courtesy must take a backseat to the adaptability of the moment. Playing Jessie Cates
Offstage we can be gentlemen and ladies, but onstage we must be whatever we are told to be. We must be adaptable to the life of the fictional circumstances that are given to us.
It’s this fact that has gone a long way in ridding me of my new-found timidity. During rehearsal just today the director pulled me aside. “I’m going to take you to task a little bit,” Thomas said. “And I’m going to do it in your own words. You want to be a gentleman in this scene and you can’t be.”
And there it was. My own words coming back to remind me of what I already knew, but had somehow forgotten
And suddenly I realized that he was right. I had let my desire to ruffle no feathers get in the way of my ruffling some feathers. I felt a little lighter as the rehearsal picked back up and suddenly everything started working better than it had been. It wasn’t perfect, it was just better. This may be just the first step in my ridding me of this “Crisis of Confidence” but it has taught me two valuable lessons: 1. The answers I need are the lessons that I have simply forgotten; I know them, now I just have to remember them. 2. You really can’t be an actor and a gentleman.
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