The Man Who Made Shakespeare: Richard Burbage (c. 1567-1619) and Theatrical Partnership

FAIN: FZ-292834-23

Tanya Pollard
CUNY Research Foundation, Brooklyn College (Brooklyn, NY 11210-2850)

Research and writing a book that shows the nature of William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) collaborations with actor Richard Burbage (c 1567-1619). 

My book project argues that Shakespeare’s plays grew out of a now invisible collaboration with his colleague and star actor Richard Burbage. A theater insider with family connections, money, and professional savvy, Burbage loomed larger than the playwright in their time. After his 1619 death, England erupted in mourning, creating a scandal when the outpouring of grief drowned out the queen’s death the same month; Shakespeare’s death, three years earlier, drew almost no notice. Why did Burbage’s star outshine Shakespeare’s, and why have their positions since reversed? If his contemporaries were right in crediting the actor with some of the most famous literary creations in history, how did he shape them? We can’t fully understand Shakespeare or his plays without recognizing his creative chemistry with his star actor. Tracing their relationship through elegies, anecdotes, lawsuits, family records, and the plays themselves offers a new story about the making of Shakespeare’s plays.

Associated Products

“Casting Tragedy: Actors, Gender, and Transnational Tragic Roles" (Book Section)
Title: “Casting Tragedy: Actors, Gender, and Transnational Tragic Roles"
Author: Tanya Pollard
Editor: Philipp Lammers, Juliane Vogel, and Christina Wald
Abstract: Why are Shakespeare’s tragedies almost exclusively named for male protagonists, when the period’s most popular representatives of classical tragedy featured central female roles? Recent directions in theater history offer suggestive contexts for probing these discrepancies by moving beyond playwrights to considering playing companies as authorial forces. As the tragic genre re-emerged from classical Greek and Roman models into theaters across early modern Europe, new company structures led to new casting systems, which in turn shaped the form of plays. This paper will explore the effects of playing company structures on tragic templates, plots, and characters. In particular, the emerging phenomenon of celebrity actors in London’s commercial theater led to specific kinds of lead roles. In contrast not only with ancient models but also with contemporary Italy, France, and Spain, where the advent of professional actresses ushered in new plays showcasing female roles, London’s adult male playing companies fostered tragic structures designed in part to reflect the strengths of their share-holding members.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/tragedy-as-a-travelling-form-9781350466364/
Access Model: yes, it is open access
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Book Title: Tragedy as a Travelling Form: Itineraries from Thespis to Today

“Shakespeare’s Haunted Generation: Sex and Succession in King Lear.” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Shakespeare’s Haunted Generation: Sex and Succession in King Lear.”
Author: Tanya Pollard
Abstract: This paper explores King Lear’s preoccupation with birth and reproduction by situating the play in the context of the now invisible shaping power of some influential ghosts, both textual and material, looming behind the play. It argues that Shakespeare develops the play’s devastating tragic vision by putting an older model of tragedy in conversation with the lives of the actors in his playing company, especially their leading actor, Richard Burbage. Attending to the way the play is haunted, both by past literary forms and by the lived experience of its creators, offers a window in its exploration of catastrophically broken bloodlines.
Date Range: March 4, 2024
Location: Yale University

Staging the Remains of the Dead (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Staging the Remains of the Dead
Author: Tanya Pollard
Abstract: In both classical antiquity and the early modern world, playwrights peopled their stages with the undead, reviving figures from mythic pasts as well as reversing fatalities within their own plays. In remembering or resurrecting these lost characters, actors turned to morbid remnants including urns and skulls to engage in a version of necromancy, the dark art of making magic from the dead. As early modern English writers began invoking the legacy of classical theaters to bolster their own theatrical experiments, they began turning to classical anecdotes about actors to reimagine this task. Reflecting on the ambivalent relationship between the dead and the living, and between real and feigned passions, these stories at times drew on the actual material remains of the dead to imagine these unsettling acts of reanimation.
Date Range: April 12, 2024
Location: Shakespeare Association of America, Portland, Oregon

Making Characters: Acting as Co-authorship (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Making Characters: Acting as Co-authorship
Author: Tanya Pollard
Abstract: Who makes a play, and how? In an increasingly bardolatrous world, we’re accustomed to referring to the most canonical early modern plays as “Shakespeare’s,” but this wasn’t typical practice in the period. Early quarto title pages often omitted authors’ names, identifying plays instead by their actors: “as it has been many times acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men” or “as it was played … by His Majesty’s servants.” In recent years, theater historians have underscored the importance of playing companies in shaping the period’s theater. In Shakespeare in Parts, Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey describe Shakespeare as organizing plots around “types,” identified with specific actors: the king, the clown, the villain, the princess. Bart van Es goes further in Shakespeare in Company, arguing that Shakespeare developed his plays based on his experience of his company’s members. Even more pointedly, Lucy Munro’s book on The King’s Men asserts that company members were “theatre-makers in their own right,” who “shaped what we now know as ‘Shakespeare’.” What might it look like to take seriously the idea of performers as theatre-makers, not only collectively, but also in terms of their individual contributions? How might we look for traces of actors as not only co-creators, but even co-authors, of plays? In our own contemporary popular entertainment culture, we might refer to a Tom Cruise film, or a Meg Ryan film, and immediately convey a sense of its signature style. Early modern actors similarly developed reputations and associations – we might even say brands – that shaped the plays in which they performed.
Date Range: July 24, 2024
Location: International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK

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