P - “Players”

When the “tragedians of the city” arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet drops his antic disposition for a few minutes and expresses his genuine excitement. He hears the hot goss from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the reason for their traveling: an upstart troupe of children players have been usurping the adult players’ box office draw of late—a topical reference to the popularity of the boys’ companies who came into fashion at the turn of the century.  

Until 1576, when The Theatre was built in London, the only manner in which a lowly member of the commonwealth could see a play was by attending a performance by a troupe of players traveling through town. They would schlep their props and costumes by horse and cart and put on shows at local halls or, weather permitting, outdoors. As a young boy, Shakespeare would have attended such performances in Stratford. Whenever plague ravaged the city—five times in total during Shakespeare’s career in London—the playhouses were shut down, so players would go on the road to make a living in the interim. 

In 19th-Century America, traveling acting companies would traverse the Wild West, mounting performances in much the same manner as the troupes of old. Shakespeare proved very popular. While on a nine-month tour of America in 1873,  the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his journal that “There is scarcely a pioneer’s hut where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare has a long history of infusing colonized countries and territories, and America was no different. Cheap, mass-printed editions spread throughout the burgeoning country, so that even the poorest pioneer on the Oregon Trail could carry a copy of Hamlet alongside their King James Bible. 

The Virginian (1902), popularly considered the first cowboy novel, contains many references to the characters’ fondness for Shakespeare, including discussions about Henry IV and Henry V. In the western film My Darling Clementine (1946), Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday (Henry Fonda and Victor Mature), are enraptured by a traveling player’s recitation of Hamlet’s famous “To be” soliloquy in a dusty saloon. Fonda would go on to star in Midway (1976), alongside Charlton Heston, Branagh’s celebrated Player King. 

Sources:

Stern, Tiffany. “The theatre of Shakespeare’s London.” The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd Ed. Edited by Margreta DeGrazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge, 2010. pp. 45-59

West side story: How Shakespeare stormed America’s frontier (The Guardian)

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