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.

I received a very interesting comment to my December 18 post which asked whether George Kittredge's theory regarding dramatic necessity being the reason for the creation of the Porter gave enough credit to the actors that Shakespeare was working with - particularly, in this case, the comic actors Will Kempe and Robert Armin - for inspiring characters such as this one. After all, he had to provide them with work. I would definitely agree (in fact, in my post of December 10, I compared Shakespeare to Duke Ellington in this regard), and as I was re-reading Frank Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare (2004), I found that one of the greatest literary scholars of the last fifty or so years is also on this side of the argument. In the chapter on the Globe, he states that there is "no doubt that Shakespeare wrote with particular members of the company in mind", and for proof, he contrasts the earlier comic roles written for Kempe, with the more sophisticated ones (such as Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear) that were written for Armin, a more subtle actor in Kermode's opinion: "It is fair to say that if Armin had not joined the company these roles might not exist in the forms familiar to us". And I think it's fair to say that we owe both of these actors a round of applause.