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 Archduchessâs reference to âthe one about the Jewâ was Marloweâs
The Jew of Malta,
Shakespeareâs
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 GdaÅsk? Again, it was tantalisingly difficult to say.
King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Nightâs Dream
and
Julius Caesar
were among the plays â or the plots â 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 âabout the Jewâ 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 â 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 Yearsâ War; it also makes a sizeable part for Pickleherring, who cracks jokes over Julietâs 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 â trivial, crowd-pleasingtinsel, hacked-down texts for audiences who didnât 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 â every place â 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 Shakespeareâs work â and work like it â alive in unfamiliar environments and in front of new audiences. The comedians werenât really âEnglishâ 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 Greenâs 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
(âBrother-Murder Punishedâ), 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 Shakespeareâs 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.
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 Archduchessâs reference to âthe one about the Jewâ was Marloweâs
The Jew of Malta,
Shakespeareâs
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 GdaÅsk? Again, it was tantalisingly difficult to say.
King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Nightâs Dream
and
Julius Caesar
were among the plays â or the plots â 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 âabout the Jewâ 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 â 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 Yearsâ War; it also makes a sizeable part for Pickleherring, who cracks jokes over Julietâs 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 â trivial, crowd-pleasingtinsel, hacked-down texts for audiences who didnât 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 â every place â 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 Shakespeareâs work â and work like it â alive in unfamiliar environments and in front of new audiences. The comedians werenât really âEnglishâ 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 Greenâs 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
(âBrother-Murder Punishedâ), 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 Shakespeareâs 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.
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