Worlds Elsewhere (7 page)

‘Germany hath some fewe wandering Comedyians, more deserving pity then prayse,' Moryson went on. ‘The serious parts are dully penned, and worse acted, and the mirth they make is ridiculous, and nothing less then witty.'

Yet even the drama-despising Moryson was impressed (or perhaps alarmed) at how successfully his compatriots found an audience. In an era long before theatre surtitles Robert Browne employed a German-speaking clown who could help translate (as well as, presumably, score some extra dirty laughs), but otherwise – as Moryson's account implies – performances were in English, with plentiful ‘gesture'. They were also noisy affairs: according to one local who saw them in Frankfurt, Browne's troupe ‘have such wonderful, good music, and are so perfect at jumping and dancing that I have never yet heard nor seen their like'.

As the seventeenth century progressed, the English Comedians became both less English and less comical. (‘Comedyian' arguably had its older meaning, of a player who could perform any role, comic or tragic.) Naturalised as
Wanderbühnen,
‘travelling companies', they began to introduce German and Dutch performers into their casts, and translate the plays they were performing. In 1605 one company boldly announced it had twenty-four ‘comedies, tragedies and pastorals' to offer; another boasted ‘chronicles, histories and comedies'. A playlist from 1608 includes such scripts as
The Proud Woman of Antwerp, The Jew, Doctor Faustus, Fortunatus, The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek.
A later list from the same company, under the leadership of John Green, includes plays called
Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Nobody and Somebody, Orlando Furioso, The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Fortunatus, The Jew of Malta, King Lear, The Prodigal Son
and
Hamlet.

It was Green's signature I had seen in the archives earlier. A rambunctious comedian who started out playing biddable young women, he had graduated to male parts, one of which was a clownish, two-faced vagabond known as ‘Pickleherring' who bore a resemblance to the trickster Autolycus in
The Winter's Tale
and became a stock character in English plays. (Pickled herring was associated with gluttony and lechery, hence Sir Toby Belch's dyspeptic complaint in
Twelfth Night,
‘a plague on this pickleherring'.) Green had joined Browne around 1603 in Lille, and four years later struck out with his own troupe, which visited Graz, Wolfenbüttel, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague
and a number of other cities as well as Gdańsk – many hundreds of square miles of territory. It was Green's troupe who had played the newly erected Gdańsk Fencing School in 1612, and perhaps at whose behest it had been built.

The titles he and his colleagues offered were what made my ears prick up. These were dramas by Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare and a panoply of other Elizabethan dramatists besides – a fair spread of what had been available to audiences back in late Elizabethan London.

Were they actually the same plays? No one was sure: few of these early touring scripts had survived. It was almost impossible to tell whether the
Spanish Tragedies
or
Faustuses
delighting the burghers of Frankfurt or Warsaw bore any relation to the versions written by Kyd or Marlowe, still less whether the Archduchess's reference to ‘the one about the Jew' was Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta,
Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice
or another play entirely (or some kind of unholy amalgam, in a medley of languages).

The question on which Limon had bet the farm came next: was Shakespeare ever actually acted in Gdańsk? Again, it was tantalisingly difficult to say.
King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream
and
Julius Caesar
were among the plays – or the plots – that were doing the rounds in the German states in the early seventeenth century.
The Merchant of Venice
flits vaporously through the archives: in addition to that play ‘about the Jew' theatre historians have identified a
Jud von Venedig
given at Halle in 1611 and another in 1626 in Dresden, called
Die Comödia von Josepho Juden von Venedig.
A version of
Titus Andronicus
made its way into the first collection of plays by the English Comedians published in 1620 – the first occasion many of these titles appeared in print.

Whether Shakespeare would have recognised these adaptations, daubed with plentiful splashes of local colour, is debatable. A surviving manuscript of
Romeo and Juliet
dating from later in the seventeenth century refers to towns in south Bohemia and northern Austria, and the Thirty Years' War; it also makes a sizeable part for Pickleherring, who cracks jokes over Juliet's body. In the 1611
Jud von Venedig
he was given an even lengthier part, abounding in anti-Semitic gags. He was almost the star of the play.

Perhaps this was the point. Generations of critics have dismissed the work of the English Comedians as Fynes Moryson saw it – trivial, crowd-pleasing
tinsel, hacked-down texts for audiences who didn't know any better. But I wondered if another way of looking at their achievement was to see it as the truest distillation of theatre, as an adaptive, responsive art that was different every time – every place – it was played.

British writers have often depicted the English Comedians as hardy adventurers exporting Elizabethan drama into the uncivilised wilderness of mainland Europe (much as the crew of the
Red Dragon
were supposed to have brought
Hamlet
to the natives of Sierra Leone).

Myself, I saw something more subtle going on: a process of translation and re-localisation, which helped bring Shakespeare's work – and work like it – alive in unfamiliar environments and in front of new audiences. The comedians weren't really ‘English' at all. These trans-cultural, multilingual conglomerates made theatre that was starting to be global.

One other play hovers over the records like a ghost:
Hamlet.
It seems likely that John Green's company performed a script of that name at Dresden in 1626, but no one is sure which
Hamlet
this was. Altogether more fascinating, if more spectral still, is the playtext known as
Der Bestrafte Brudermord
(‘Brother-Murder Punished'), printed in 1781 but almost certainly derived from early seventeenth-century performances by the English Comedians.

I had brought the script of
Der Bestrafte Brudermord
with me. It made for a lively travelling companion. Just one fifth the length of
Hamlet,
shorn of soliloquies and bristling with comic business nowhere to be found in Shakespeare's text, the play was exactly as everything I had read about the English Comedians had led me to expect. Ophelia fell in love with a preposterous courtier called Phantasmo before running mad, and there was a perplexing subplot to do with a peasant and his unpaid tax bill. Even the Ghost got in on the laughs, beating one sentry about the head.

In place of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two buffoonish ruffians, who are outwitted by the Zorro-like hero while attempting to shoot him:

Scholars hotly disagree on what
Der Bestrafte Brudermord
really is – a distillation of the text we know? A translation of the elusive
ur-Hamlet
that supposedly predates Shakespeare's? Another version of the story altogether?

When the pioneering English director William Poel staged a translation of
Brudermord
in London in 1925, the audience fell about laughing; one critic called it ‘funnier than any burlesque on
Hamlet
than one can recall'. Poel was horrified, but it is tempting to say that spectators got the point: this is a play that released the comedy latent in Shakespeare's. It plays this longest and most ponderous of tragedies almost entirely for laughs, casting the Prince as the biggest clown of all.

There was one moment in particular that seized my attention, the scene in which the Players arrive at Hamlet's residence to perform for the King, enabling Hamlet to smoke out his villainous uncle (the use of the play-within-the-play remains intact):

It seems to me I have seen you act before
… It was a neat meta-dramatic doubling: a touring company of players playing a touring company of players, and a hero half aware he's seen them somewhere else. The reference to ‘Wittenberg' – for Shakespeare's audience a faint reference to a town closely associated with Martin Luther, if at all – became, in Germany, much more precise. As an actorly in-joke, it was worthy of Shakespeare himself.

As I read, I found my mind drifting to another Shakespearian connection, an old theory about
Hamlet,
wildly unfashionable now. It was this. After the Earl of Leicester had landed in the Netherlands in 1585, he appears to have recommended his players to King Frederick II of Denmark, who had recently rebuilt an old medieval fortress, Kronborg, as a sumptuous Renaissance palace. The palace's location was Helsingør, on a narrow peninsula looking out on to the Øresund strait towards Sweden.

The actors travelled there to play for the Danish king later in 1585, and were so popular that locals broke down a wall to see them. The following year, a small troupe of English ‘instrumentalists and tumblers' came back, and stayed for three months at Helsingør. Will Kempe, the leading figure in Leicester's Men and the greatest comedian of the age, was among their number, as were the actors George Bryan and Thomas Pope. All three would go on to be members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men alongside Shakespeare, so important that they were later named as ‘Principall Actors' in the 1623 First Folio, the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's works, published seven years after his death.

It seems improbable that Shakespeare was there with Kempe, Bryan and Pope in 1586 – this was only a year after the birth of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, and he had yet to make a name for himself on the London stage – but it was surely likely he heard the stories long afterwards. Did dewy-eyed actors' tales about that visit to the Danish royal castle – a wild reception by a Danish crowd, munificent royal fees – prompt him to begin writing a tragedy set in Denmark, a compendium of Icelandic sagas populated by Danes, Norwegians and ‘Polacks'? Did Helsingør feed into the Elsinore he imagined in
Hamlet
? Did the English Comedians come alive once again as the travelling ‘tragedians of the city' whom the Prince greets so warmly like old companions, almost his only true friends in the play?

It is an enticing idea, particularly as no previous version of the
Hamlet
story features professional travelling actors: they seem to be wholly Shakespeare's invention.
The Taming of the Shrew
likewise features a cast of ‘players', who perform the play-within-the-play that forms the majority of the action; and there is a theory – even less fashionable these days – that Shakespeare got a start in acting when he joined yet another touring troupe, the Queen's Men, who visited Stratford. Were memories of life on the road behind the various strolling players he put on stage?

Maybe. Yet for all Shakespeare's apparent affection for the players in
Hamlet,
he makes them isolated, somehow out of joint, with their lumbering verse forms and their quaint tragedies about Priam and Hecuba. They are never permitted a bow: sent packing, they are forced to flee the moment King Claudius takes offence. If this is a recollection of life in the gilded cage of a glittering European court, Shakespeare treats the subject coldly. In
Hamlet
he allows his actors nothing approaching a home.

Still, it was a theory. Even if Shakespeare's plays had never been performed in Poland during his lifetime, I liked the idea of him paying a typically cryptic tribute to the kind of drama toured by his colleagues through northern Europe. And the town that Pope and Bryan visited next, after their stint in Helsingør? The sources said it was Gdańsk.