Richard Burbage

English actor

• Born: c. 1567
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 13, 1619
• Place of death: London, England

Actor and shareholder with Shakespeare in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Burbage created many of Shakespeare’s most striking characters, including Richard III, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello.

Early Life

Richard Burbage (BUR-bihj) literally grew up with the Elizabethan theater. His father, theatrical entrepreneur James Burbage (c. 1530-1597), built what was perhaps the first private theater in London, the Red Lion, in 1567, about the time Richard was born. Nine years later, with capital from his brother-in-law John Brayne and his professional skill as a joiner (carpenter), James Burbage built the much larger theater called—with a bravado contemporary accounts imply was justified—simply The Theatre. Richard’s only brother, Cuthbert, would become a partner in his own theatrical enterprises; of their three sisters, Joan, Helen, and Alice, only Alice would survive to own a share of the theaters.

James Burbage, who had himself been an actor, encouraged his sons Richard and Cuthbert to enter the profession. Cuthbert’s participation in the theatrical boom of the period was limited to the business end, but Richard must have been a boy actor from the start, because by the 1580’s, he was already known as one of the premier actors of his day. The earliest surviving credit for a role was the printed version of an interlude by Richard Tarleton called The Seven Deadlie Sins (1585), listing “R. Burbadg” as playing both King Gorboduc and Tereus. The following year, James Burbage purchased a house in the Blackfriars district (so called because it had been owned by the Dominican order before Henry VIII seized all Catholic holdings). He converted the house to a theater, which Richard would later inherit. In 1588, Richard created the most celebrated role of the pre-Shakespearean Elizabethan stage: that of Hieronymo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. c. 1585-1589, pb. 1594?).

Life’s Work

By 1590, Richard Burbage, by then an actor in the Lord Admiral’s Men, saw his interest in The Theatre sufficiently established to defend its profits. In November of that year, Nicholas Bishop, legal agent for Burbage’s aunt, John Brayne’s widow, burst into The Theatre demanding the receipts for that day’s performance in the widow’s name. A legal deposition concerning the brawl testifies that Burbage grabbed Bishop by the nose and threatened to beat him if he did not leave. The following year, James Burbage severed his connection with the Lord Admiral’s Men, which merged with Strange’s Men and moved, apparently without Richard, to the Rose Theatre.

Despite his separation from this popular company, Burbage in 1592-1593 scored another hit with a role that became associated with him for the rest of his career, the title role of William Shakespeare’s Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593, rev. 1623). As M. C. Bradbrook observed in 1962, the hypocrite Richard is the consummate actor, a role seemingly tailor-made for Burbage—which indeed it was, for Shakespeare wrote it with his fellow actor in mind.

In the spring of 1594, the major players of the amalgamated Lord Admiral’s/Strange’s company formed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men , in which both Burbage and Shakespeare were major stockholders. That Christmas, Burbage was summoned, with Shakespeare and the comic actor Will Kempe, for the first of many command performances before Queen Elizabeth I herself. If Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595-1596) had been finished by then, it might have been among the plays in which Burbage performed on December 27 and 28 for the queen, for the playwright John Marston records in a 1598 satire that Burbage was the first to act the role of Romeo.

In 1597, James Burbage’s lease on the land on which The Theatre stood lapsed. The elder Burbage was negotiating for a renewal of the lease when he died in the spring of 1597. The suit was taken up by Richard and his brother Cuthbert. The brothers Burbage had undisputed right to The Theatre itself, since their father had built it, but the land was owned by Giles Allen, who, attracted to the lucrative gate of The Theatre, was not about to renew the lease without some part of the profit.

A year into the suit, in December, 1598, or January, 1599, the brothers boldly outmaneuvered Allen, dismantling The Theatre and reassembling it across the river on land they had secured at Bankside. The Theatre was now indisputably theirs (in partnership with their sister Alice), as was the Blackfriars Theatre , which they leased to one of the companies of child actors, the Queen’s Majesty’s Children of the Chapel. While most of Burbage’s acting successes were at the Globe Theatre, built for Chamberlain’s company in 1599, Burbage also appeared in most of the major plays Ben Jonson and John Marston premiered at the Blackfriars Theatre, indicating his prestige as an actor.

The roles that Burbage premiered in the following years were some of the most celebrated of the Elizabethan stage: comic roles in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor (pr. 1598, pb. 1601, revised pr. 1605, revised pb. 1616) and Every Man Out of His Humour (pr. 1599, pb. 1600), and the tragic title characters of Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (pr. 1603, pb. 1605; commonly known as Sejanus) and Catiline His Conspiracy (pr., pb. 1611; commonly known as Catiline). Jonson’s most famous character, the eponymous protagonist of Volpone; Or, The Fox (pr. 1605, pb. 1607), was also first realized by Burbage. For Shakespeare, Burbage gave the first life to the title characters of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601), Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, rev. 1623), and King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606). With the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, her successor, King James I , gave tribute to the preeminence of Chamberlain’s company by becoming its patron and changing the group’s name to the King’s Men.

Burbage’s share of the profits of the company matched his “box office” value, and by 1601, he could afford to marry. His wife, Winifred, bore him five daughters and two sons, of whom only two daughters and a son survived him.

In the second decade of the seventeenth century, a new dramatic vogue known as tragicomedy (for which Shakespeare had laid the groundwork with his romance plays, including The Winter’s Tale [pr. c. 1610-1611] and The Tempest [pr. 1611]) took the London stage, and the leading playwrights of the genre, Francis Beaumont (c. 1584-1616), who wrote for the children’s company at Blackfriars, and John Fletcher (1579-1625), turned to Burbage to ensure the success of their plays. He had lead roles in all of the plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher between 1611 and 1618. In 1609, Burbage bought out the lease of the Blackfriars from the children’s company, giving him an interest in the three most successful theaters of the era: The Theatre, the Globe, and the Blackfriars.

On June 29, 1613, Burbage was acting in the Globe, in a play recorded as “All Is True” but assumed by scholars to be Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, when the theater caught fire. Burbage barely escaped with his life, and the theater was rebuilt the following year.

On March 13, 1619, Burbage died, leaving a sizable estate to his widow and children. His will is not specific as to the amount, but a contemporary of Burbage named Chamberlain attests that he left behind three hundred pounds in land, no small sum in the seventeenth century.

Significance

Burbage became the most famous actor of his day with an acting style that was probably close to the ideals of more modern times: realism, an avoidance of extremes of emotion and gesture, and identification with the role. These qualities are summarized by Hamlet’s famous “advice to the players,” a speech that Burbage was the first to speak on stage. Those values were also attributed to Burbage himself by Irish poet Richard Flecknoe (c. 1600-c. 1678), who as late as 1660 wrote in admiring memory of the acting style he had seen in his teen years in London. Flecknoe praised Burbage for not dropping character until he had returned to the “tiring house” or dressing room, and for reacting in character even when he had no lines to speak. Flecknoe called Burbage “Proteus,” after the Greek god who could assume any form he wished, and objected to calling Burbage a “player,” because to him acting was not play, but business.

Bibliography

Bradbrook, M. C. The Rise of the Common Player: A Study of Actor and Society in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. An excellent introduction to the nature of Elizabethan acting, recording many sixteenth and seventeenth century anecdotes about Burbage.

Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1923. This standard reference work on the subject, in four volumes, contains thorough documentation of the era, including in volume 2 a biography of all the major actors, of which Burbage’s (pages 306-310) is the longest.

Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespeare Company, 1592-1642. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. An exhaustive reconstruction of Burbage’s theatrical company, with invaluable appendices offering biographies of Burbage and his fellow actors, and all of their shareholders’ documents.

Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael. Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage. New York: Haskell House, 1970. A reprint of the most thorough documentation of Burbage’s career, originally published in London in 1913.