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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
A decade ago the analysis of the structure of the plays performed by the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline professional theatre companies, in order to discover patterns of doubling of the roles, seemed to hold considerable promise for further inquiry. D. M. Bevington's pioneering From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe and W. A. Ringler's article ‘The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays’ offered direct evidence and tools for structural analysis, and were followed by important studies by Scott McMillin, Irwin Smith, and others. Nevertheless, since then interest in this area – and particularly in doubling on the seventeenth-century stage – seems to have declined. The assumption made explicitly by Bevington and implied by most other commentators has been that as the professional acting companies expanded their resources, found patrons, and increased the number of their liveried personnel, the frenetic doubling of the Tudor era became unnecessary. Apart from some unhurried doubling of very minor characters and extras, they believe this practice virtually disappeared from the Jacobean stage, rendering further investigation unnecessary. The small amount of direct evidence to the contrary, first noted by W. J. Lawrence in 1927, has been analysed as an interesting but aberrant phenomenon; occasional atavistic survivals in a more opulent and refined age whose taste was turning towards ‘realism’ in acting and production methods.
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14. The present author has tested this role-change in production, and even though the final eight and a half lines of V, x, do pass quickly (tempers are short and some of the lines are shouted interjections), the change is quite feasible.
15. Omitted from the present study are two minor cases of doubling of messengers, attendants, etc.; these are the revival of The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1625–1626)Google Scholar and The Soddered Citizen (c. 1630).Google ScholarCarlell, Lodowick's The Deserving Favourite (1629)Google Scholar has been recorded by Bentley, G. E. (The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, I (1941), pp. 84–5)Google Scholar as providing an example of doubled roles, but the specific instance referred to proves on reading the text to be a case of disguise. Richard Robinson played the banished Count Orsinio, appearing first disguised as a hermit, and only in Act V discovering his true identity by removing his beard. The cast list, which states ‘Mr Robinson, Count Orsinio, and Hermite’ has caused the confusion.
16. Bevington, D. M., From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe, p. 112.Google Scholar
17. Wickham, G. E.. Early English Stage: 1300 to 1660. 2 (London: Routledge, 1963), Preface, pp. vii–viii.Google Scholar
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20. Herford, C. H. and Simpson, Percy, Ben Jonson, 9 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), pp. 224–5.Google Scholar
21. But not the first. The phrase is adapted from Solomos, Alexis, The Living Aristophanes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 238.Google Scholar Solomos is referring to the disappearance of choral songs and dialogues from Middle Comedy (as shown in Aristophanes' Plutus) for economic and political reasons.
22. comp., J. D. Wilson, Life in Shakespeare's England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 220.Google Scholar
