Читать книгу A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles - Sir Sidney Lee - Страница 42

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The chief differences between the methods of theatrical representation in Shakespeare’s day and our own lay in the fact that neither scenery nor scenic costume nor women-actors were known to the Elizabethan stage. All female rôles were, until the Restoration in 1660, assumed in the public theatres by men or boys. [38c] Consequently the skill needed to rouse in the audience the requisite illusions was far greater then than at later periods. But the professional customs of Elizabethan actors approximated in other respects more closely to those of their modern successors than is usually recognised. The practice of touring in the provinces was followed with even greater regularity then than now. Few companies remained in London during the summer or early autumn, and every country town with two thousand or more inhabitants could reckon on at least one visit from travelling actors between May and October. A rapid examination of the extant archives of some seventy municipalities selected at random shows that Shakespeare’s company between 1594 and 1614 frequently performed in such towns as Barnstaple, Bath, Bristol, Coventry, Dover, Faversham, Folkestone, Hythe, Leicester, Maidstone, Marlborough, New Romney, Oxford, Rye in Sussex, Saffron Walden, and Shrewsbury. [40a] Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling all his professional functions, and some of the references to travel in his sonnets were doubtless reminiscences of early acting tours. It has been repeatedly urged, moreover, that Shakespeare’s company visited Scotland, and that he went with it. [40b] In November 1599 English actors arrived in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher and one Martin, and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the king. [41a] Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but is not known to have been one earlier. Shakespeare’s company never included an actor named Martin. Fletcher repeated the visit in October 1601. [41b] There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shakespeare’s company. In like manner, Shakespeare’s accurate reference in ‘Macbeth’ to the ‘nimble’ but ‘sweet’ climate of Inverness, [41c] and the vivid impression he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths, have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience; but the passages in question, into which a more definite significance has possibly been read than Shakespeare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and the theatres after James I’s accession.