In honor of Shakespeare’s maybe-birthday last weekend, I want to look at one of his maybe-roles: Adam in As You Like It. While we know that Shakespeare was an actor at least sometimes, we have no idea which roles he played. Unfortunately, unlike play texts by other authors, none of his printed editions contain a cast list broken down by actor. We know who Burbage played through references in other places, we know who Kemp played because of stray stage directions, and we can confidently infer who Armin played because of his general comic persona and the timing of his entry into the company. But we don’t know the identity, for example, of any of the boys who originated Shakespeare’s most famous female roles. And we don’t know who Shakespeare played in any of his own plays.
In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom, with all the confidence of a Victorian scholar, asserts with no citation that we ‘know’ Shakespeare played Adam. It’s one of the pieces of trivia that floats around about Shakespeare’s history as an actor, almost always unattributed. For example, I found an article from 1912 that claims that ‘tradition tells us that the author of “As You Like It” impersonated Adam, the faithful old servitor of the hero,’ but at least gives an indirect citation: Sir Sidney Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare, published in 1898. Lee records some passing, posthumous references to Shakespeare’s skill as an actor by contemporaries, and Nicholas Rowe’s assertion in his short biography that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet’s father, though he does not clarify where he found this information beyond asking around.
Lee also gives us the origin of the Adam story: another set of oral anecdotes that accompanied a 1778 edition of Shakespeare, compiled by William Oldys and published after his death. Oldys cites one of Shakespeare’s brothers, supposedly Gilbert (yes, he had a brother named Gilbert), who described seeing his brother carried onstage by another man in a play that he wrote. Adam gets carried onstage by Orlando, thus, the role in question may have been Adam. Around a hundred years later, Lee does not report the details of the anecdote at all— he just presents the conclusion that Gilbert saw Shakespeare play Adam in As You Like It (but does note that Gilbert was elderly and his memory was failing by the time he told this story).
Fictional biographies like to give Shakespeare more active and thematically juicy roles in his own plays: Romeo in Shakespeare in Love, Oberon in Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows, or constant indirect associations with Prospero in real-life productions of The Tempest. Adam is a small role, and one that conjures the image of a very different kind of relationship between Shakespeare and his company of players.
Adam is an old man, a loyal servant. He’s one of the first characters to enter the play, accompanying the young hero Orlando, and interacts with almost no characters aside from him. He pledges his money, life, and service to follow Orlando when Orlando has to flee into the Forest of Arden. Then he nearly dies of weakness and hunger before Orlando happens to run into some fellow exiles, who welcome the two of them to join them, to eat and rest. Adam is carried onstage to eat while music plays, and after that point in the play, is never seen again. Bad productions like to kill him, which is tonally and thematically nonsensical, but at least ties off the random loose end of a character who has, up to that point, been fairly prominent. The assumption in staging terms is that the actor went on to play a second character in the second half of the play— possibly Corin, another older man, a shepherd—but despite this practical logic, Corin hasn’t become as firmly attached to the Shakespeare myth as Adam has.
Unlike Oberon, Romeo, Prospero, or even the Ghost of King Hamlet, Adam is not quite a mover and shaker. He does enable a key part of the plot—Orlando’s flight into the forest—but he does it as a resolutely supporting character. It is not the act of a protagonist or puppet-master, but an act of service. It’s wholly at odds with the fictional Shakespeare, who takes a leading role in his own plays, speaking his own best words, leading the company both behind the scenes and within the drama. Instead, Adam’s identity as model of devotion—the idea that the elderly Gilbert Shakespeare’s half-recalled memory of the role is of a man being carried onstage—paints an appealing picture of a journeyman actor whose true contributions to the company are happening behind the scenes. Adam has more to offer than meets the eye, and at the same time does not have the strength for the task he sets himself. There’s a compelling humility in imagining Shakespeare writing such a role for himself to play. It’s far from glamorous, but serves essential plot functions that rely on the character’s admirable devotion on one hand, but on his frailty and lack of self-awareness on the other. He’s not quite pathetic enough to be funny, nor successful enough to be really noble. He simply does what the plot needs him to do, and gets a little moment in the spotlight in the process. In other words, a true writer’s role: the guy who gets the story moving for others to play out.
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"all the confidence of a Victorian scholar" had me ON THE GROUND. Now off to read the rest ...
lovely exploration!