Shakespeare and the Modern Stage; with Other Essays

ing in Shakespeare's lifetime chief r?les in his plays, few survived him long. All of them came in p

dle age. Lowin at twenty-seven took part with Shakespeare in the first representation of Ben Jonson's Sejanus in 1603. He was an early, if not the first, interpreter of the character of Falstaff. Taylor as understudy to the great actor Burba

theatrical enterprise, they were acknowledged to stand at the head of their profession.[12] Taylor lived through the Commonwealth, and Lowin far into the reign of Charles the Second,

nd of the century, by John Downes, the old prompter and librarian of a chief London theatre. According to Downes's testimony, Taylor repeated instructions which he had received from Shakespeare's own lips for the playing

s day. Through him they were permanently incorporated in the verbal stage-lore of the country. No doubt is possible of the validity of this piece of oral tradition, which reve

and Lowin's actor-contemporaries. These men were never themselves in personal relations with Shakespeare, but knew many formerly in direct relation with him. Probably the seventeenth century actor with the most richly stored memory of

her, brothers, and son were all, like himself, prominent in the profession, and some of them were almost as long-lived as himself. His own career co

t William Beeston as a boon companion who was generous in his entertainment of threadbare scholars. Christopher Beeston, this man's son, the father of the Shakespearean gossip, had in abundance the hereditary taste for letters. He was at one time Shakespeare's associate on the stage. Both took part together in the first representation of Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, in 1598. His name was again linked with Shakespeare's in the will of their fellow-actor, Augustine Phillips,

kespeare, whose

th or Passion

or. And Beeston had direct concern with the volume called An Apology for Actors, to which Heywood appended his report of these words of Shakespeare. To the book the actor, Beeston, contributed preliminary verses addressed to the author, his "good friend and fellow, Thomas Heywood." There Beeston briefly vindicated the recreation which the playhouse off

he Government through an alleged insult to the King in one of the pieces that he produced, and he had to retire from the Cockpit to a smaller theatre in Salisbury Court. Until his dea

any you have most judiciously discoursed of Poesie." In the judgment of Kirkman, his friend, the old actor, was "the happiest interpreter and judg of our English stage-Playes this Nation ever produced; which the Poets and Actors these times cannot (without ingratitude) deny; for I have heard the chief, and most ingenious of them, acknowledg their Fames and Profits essentially sprung from your instructions, judgment, and fancy." Few who heard Beeston talk failed, Kirkman continues, to subscribe "to his opini

; "he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country;" "he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit;" he and Ben Jonson gathered "humours of men daily wherever they came." The ample testimony to the excellent influence which Beeston exercised over "the poets and actors of these

er of farces, was one of Beeston's closest friends, and, having been personally acquainted with Ben Jonson, could lend to ma

lived till he was twenty-one, and Richard Robinson, the fellow-member of Shakespeare's company who first taught Hart to act, survived his pupil's adolescence. That Hart did what he could to satisfy the curiosity of his companions there is a precise oral tradition to confirm. According to the story, first put on record in the eighteenth century by the painstaking antiquary, William Oldys, it was through Hart that some actors made, near the d

tention than it has received, from an actor of a comparatively recent generation, John Bowman