I've spent a lot of time reading about and trying to imagine performances in Shakespeare's time recently and I keep coming back to a comment that I received regarding my December 20 post of last year. The gist of it was that Shakespeare may have incorporated comic characters into even his most intense tragedies, the Porter in Macbeth for example, to keep his great comic actors, such as Will Kempe and Robert Armin, in work. This strikes me as very likely indeed, and it has led me back to another comparison with Duke Ellington, who wrote parts with the specific personalities and talents of his leading instrumentalists in mind. It seems logical to assume that Shakespeare must have done the same. And like Ellington, who collaborated not only with his players, but with Billy Strayhorn and others throughout his career, the most important thing was always to get the work in front of audiences. I remain convinced that Ellington's career is the career that most closely resembles Shakespeare's in terms of working methods and results.

It occurred to me today that Shakespeare's acting career (some theorize that he did quite a bit of it, starting in the lost years) must have had quite a bit of impact on his writing one. The fact that he would have gained a lot of understanding regarding the experience of getting in front of crowds, performing actions, speaking memorized words, and carrying a story must have played a part in his work. In my December 10 post, I compared Shakespeare to Duke Ellington, but I didn't mention the performing parallel (Ellington was a great pianist), and now I realize that it might have been the most important of all. The varied experiences of these two giants, both generally acknowledged as the best in their fields, brings up the question of whether the arts, like many other endeavours, have become too specialized, compartmentalized even.

The musician I was referring to at the end of yesterday's post is Duke Ellington, whose career provides a parallel with Shakespeare's in a couple of important ways. The first is that Ellington kept a big band together for over fifty years, which is an incredible achievement by itself, but he resembles Shakespeare in that his primary reason for doing it was to make it possible for him to hear his compositions immediately and as he intended them. Shakespeare was involved with theatrical troupes for the entire twenty years of his writing career, and it's clear that every word in the plays was written with them in mind. The second is that each wrote with not only the audience in mind, but also their own performers. Whereas Ellington used to ask his musicians if they all liked their parts after they'd played a new piece, it's not hard to imagine Shakespeare doing the same with his actors. And of course, both wrote to feature and/or challenge specific individual performers. I'm convinced that it's largely because of these factors that each of these artists is now considered simply a genre of their own, with only their last names needed for identification.