Certainly this film is full of historical accuracies which have benn regularly addressed; however, did anyone care to explain why there are actresses being featured in a film about Shakespeare, whem historical records show that there were almost no roles for women in the theater until the 1700s?
shareNo actresses in the version of the film we have here in the UK; only one young woman pretending to be a boy in order to fulfil her dream of acting on the stage. That is actually the crux of the plot, such as it is.
Do you have some sort of variant version where you are, or were you just not watching properly?
We also have Jim Carter as The Nurse and I looked up Lady Capulet who was uncredited for a while.
Turns out to have been Are You Being Served's John Inman, no less! Now you'll have to watch it again.
Never short of excuses to watch it again, Alfa, but I think that's a tease, about John Inman. The actor playing Lady Capulet - we see him in rehearsal and in the fight, and the pub afterwards, as well as on stage - is much taller than Inman, who was tiny. And in fact my son and I met him, some years later, working on some boring adverts for a change in tax credits for families (my son was a child actor at the time). I'm afraid I don't remember his name, but we were talking about what major films each of them had been in, and he mentioned Shakespeare in Love as his main claim to fame. We both looked hard at him, mentally adding wig and farthingale, and said Oh yes!
He was very good-humoured about this. The world is full of jobbing actors, neither name-in-lights nor abject poverty, just jogging along in the middle there and having fun. This particular shoot involved flying kites on Primrose Hill, and it was perishing cold and snowing. But adverts pay much better than bit parts in films!
Spot on, Suzume san. The actor's name is Mark Saban who is in the credits having played Augustine Phillips.
This is the Augustine Phillips from whom we learnt quite a lot about the mechanics of running the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He was the one who sorted out the mess after Essex decided to whip up his merry band of conspirators with a performance of Richard II. After he died in 1605, his will was contested in court with particular focus on the ownership of his shares in the King's Men and his bequests to fellow actors. The court records provide a lot of detail as Hemmings was summoned and revealed how sharers like Shakespeare made their money.
Mark Saban, yes of course! Nice chap.
Have you ever encountered a writer called Antonia Forest? She wrote mostly school/family stories for older children, but she extended this into historical fiction with The Player's Boy/The Players and the Rebels, one story chopped into two books for publication. Again, intended for young readers and with a young boy hero, but a charming and to me totally convincing portrait of the world of theatre in late Elizabethan London. I don't know if they're still in print. The second book contains a very lively description of the Essex debacle, seen through the young protagonist's eyes.
I haven't but I'll keep an eye open now.
Meanwhile you might like to try this...
http://oxfraud.com/RV-cry-murder
historical records show that there were almost no roles for women in the theater until the 1700s?
- Though it's true that there are numerically very few of them, because companies might have only a couple of boys to play them. Most plays in the Shakespeare canon have no more than two speaking female characters on stage together, so could be performed with two boys doubling all the female parts. A few never have more than one; a few have three; only a couple have more. Which suggests that the Lord Chamberlain's / King's Men very rarely had more than three boy actors on its books, and often had fewer.
shareIt was tough. They had to old enough to be good enough yet young enough to be able to do falsetto voices, so they mostly had short careers, a problem nicely caught in SiL.
shareNice point, Syntinen. We note that Lady Montague is said to have died, about halfway through Romeo and Juliet, no doubt because the boy was needed to play Paris's page in the last act. In some of the plays there are clues as to what the boys were like. There was obviously a small one who was good at comedy - Maria, the 'youngest wren of nine', in Twelfth Night, Hermia, Celia, Nerissa - and a tall one - Helena, Rosalind, Viola, Portia. The boy-playing-girl-playing-boy situation is common, and there's a lot of fun to be had with it if the actor is actually male. "Alas, what should I do with my doublet and hose?" I saw Ronald Pickup play Rosalind at the National, many years ago, getting a lot of comedy fun out of passes being made at him/her by Melancholy Jacques (that might have been Robert Stephens, I can't remember for sure).
The boy players must have been pretty good, when you consider the mature women's roles Shakespeare wrote for them - Lady Macbeth, Queen Margaret, Paulina, Cleopatra. There are even references to the practice - Cleopatra dreads being taken captive to Rome where she might see "some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness...". This is pretty daring of the playwright, to draw attention to the boy actually playing the character!
They were probably in their late teens, I think - they didn't reach puberty and have their voices break at such a young age as boys do now. So they'd had plenty of experience by the time they came to tackle these roles.
Yes; their voices might well not have broken till seventeen or eighteen, or even later.
And unlike boy singers, whose adult voices are not necessarily anything special, the boy actors must have had a clear career path into male roles. The sheer technique and professionalism it must have taken routinely to double, say, Mistress Quickly and Katherine of France, would be something an acting company would want to hang on to.
I've always assumed that this is why in SiL nobody in the company smells a rat when Thomas Kent obeys the instruction 'Ladies downstage'; they take it for granted that an actor his age has only recently graduated from playing female roles.
Actually only one actress. And the whole point is that she has to masquerade as a boy to act on stage, because it's unthinkable for a woman to act. ('A WOMAN on the stage!!! A WOMAN!!!!!')
I'm assuming from your question that you've never actually seen SiL. You should. Because it's not actually 'full of historical inaccuracies', in the sense of mistakes, at all; it's a joyous satire on the theatrical life, the Shakespeare heritage industry, what we imagine Elizabethan England to have been like, and much more besides.
It's based on the revealing insight that theatre then was very similar to theatre now and therefore the problems in theatreland were probably also very similar to the problems faced by writers and producers today. After SIL, hardly anyone doubts it.
Whatever academics like to think they have contributed to our image of Shakespeare's world over the years, the picture in a lot of heads is now the world of Martin Clunes, Geoffrey Rush and the inexcusably ignored Joseph Fiennes.
And its great achievement is that the picture the file leaves behind, however inaccurately drawn or wilfully distorted for comic purposes, is entirely faithful to its subject.
Shame so many people don't get it.
by Aliyen ยป Wed Mar 16 2016 09:24:04
IMDb member since April 2002
Certainly this film is full of historical accuracies which have benn regularly addressed; however, did anyone care to explain why there are actresses being featured in a film about Shakespeare, whem historical records show that there were almost no roles for women in the theater until the 1700s?