And Richard Burbage Also Had a SisterBy Freya Shipley
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We know that Judith Shakespeare once lived, and now lies buried at the crossroads outside the Elephant & Castle. The actor Richard Burbage also had a sister. One autumn afternoon she was taken across the river (to a spot not far from that same public house) to hear a play.
Behind its mask (decently covering her for the occasion, so that her reactions would not become public property), her face glowed with thoughts utterly unlike those that usually occupied her: at church, say, or while doing the household accounts. (For Elizabeth Stampe, née Burbage, was married to a butcher in Shoreditch, and so since the age of seventeen had been responsible for the daily administration of a domestic economy based on beef and blood.) What seized her that day at the playhouse was an overwhelming and all-illuminating awareness of her own humanity:
"I am a human being, caught in time, alive now -- and now -- and now."
Something like that might have popped out of her mouth if she’d been able to speak at that moment. But unlike Judith Shakespeare, who never doubted her own voice, Burbage's sister finds speech a tenuous tightrope, designed for other feet than hers, slung across dangerous and all-too-familiar chasms.
Lack of vocabulary is not the problem. Elizabeth reads eagerly whenever her duties are momentarily done, and her husband out of the room. Her mother, while not embarrassingly learned, admired the aristocratic ladies of her own generation who not only wore Dutch lace, but translated Greek and Hebrew. The Queen herself was one such, and though Her Majesty expressed no general approval of education among her sex, she reassured by example some few who might otherwise have despaired of their bookish daughters. One of these was Mistress Burbage.
When little Bess picked up a book -- Gerard's Herbal, was it, or Fox's Book of Martyrs? -- the girl was allowed to make what she could of it. So it was that Elizabeth Burbage became a passionate and catholic reader (though Greek and Hebrew, and even her brother's schoolboy Latin, remained forever closed to her).
It is not linguistic poverty, then, that keeps Elizabeth Stampe silent in the noisy Globe gallery, even as the wilderness of her spirit explodes for the first time into full, rapturous bloom.
"This is what it is to be alive," she might have said. "I see what it is, undiluted, stripped of distractions. For the first time in my life, I'm awake!"
But she can’t say it. Certainly not in the middle of a play. Not while men who speak more compellingly than she can ever hope to do are holding forth, pouring their words out to the crowd, making it possible for her to understand what she has just understood. Like priests, she thinks. (O impious, wicked woman!) Like priests, they have been granted power to enact a public ritual during which something mysterious changes: a miracle, by which those words spoken from a bare stage create something that is more than the sum of themselves, and the gathered listeners suddenly understand what it is that listens.
There's Elizabeth's own brother there, his face suffused with passion and intelligence, speaking more gloriously than any of them. What must it be like, Elizabeth wonders, to feel the eyes of three thousand strangers on one's body?
She thinks then of a story that her grandfather likes to tell about King Harry, magnificent as the sun, showing himself to his people in cloth of gold. How the young monarch stood in the forecourt at Richmond, bathed in adoration, and how that reverence welled up into something like the lust of the starving, and how the King gave himself to the mob. They shredded his garments, seizing every scrap and jewel as relics, and might have torn the King himself to pieces -- Elizabeth’s heart beats fast thinking of it. What was King Henry in that moment? And what is Dick now, there on the stage, possessing his audience by giving himself up to them? O Agnus Dei qui tollis peccati mundi . . .
Elizabeth stares at her brother. It’s incredible that she can see each muscle in his throat, every turn of his head -- that thanks to his skill, she is actually inside his head -- all this, while to him she is an all-but-invisible dot in a sea of auditors. She wants to leap out of her seat and howl, "Pick me up, Dick! Pick me up! Up, up! The words used by her own tiny daughter Anne, before the child learned to bear herself modestly and in silence.
Now Dick has tipped his wings and soared into comedy. A laugh is rushing around the playhouse like wind. She watches how it starts with the groundlings pressed up almost against the players’s ankles, and with the gentlemen on the nearest benches. From there it sweeps outward, spreading to the back of the yard and simultaneously whipping round the galleries, until it meets itself in the center, at the point furthest from the stage.
Elizabeth herself is laughing. Beside her so is Edward Stampe, butcher of Shoreditch. The couple glance at each other, and again Mistress Stampe wants to tell her husband what's happened to her. She wants him to understand that an elusive animal has just lain down at her feet and allowed itself to be stroked. That being alive has a simple, potent significance that gets forgotten day to day like a dream. That there's wonderful mystery in the way a laugh moves around the Globe Playhouse.
The customary time for a man to hear his wife is at night, in private, when the busy world of politics and commerce and poetry is set aside for a few hours. Then a married couple may converse. Then a sentimental husband may be prevailed upon to grant his wife stuff for a new gown, or perhaps an afternoon at the playhouse.
In any case, the moment has passed. The players are speaking once again. Elizabeth wants to seize those words and hang onto them forever. She would -- she suddenly feels, in a burst of something between joy and rage -- she would! -- gladly leave her husband and child, gladly abandon the weary effort of trying to say things to them, and the even wearier task of keeping quiet, for the chance to run away with those words. She would be disgraced, ostracized, lost in sin, but she could bear it all for the sake of living and sleeping and waking up with those words.
How pitiably feminine, we may sneer. Is she really incapable of experiencing Art except as a manifestation of the breeding instinct? Is Poetry nothing to her but a kind of gypsy lover out of a sentimental ballad? She must be an ordinary, dull female after all. Not a heroine to dress herself in boy's clothes and dash about the world, oblivious to the desire she provokes, bent on adventure and achievement. No: the daughter of the great James Burbage is just a plain woman, seduced as plain women are by men’s words.
Two players are speaking now, giving and taking with abandon. Some faint taste comes to Elizabeth of the intimacy born between them. It's shameless, she realizes. No wonder the Puritans complain. She thinks for a second of the straightforward, unimaginative pleasure of her marriage bed. A pleasure that is always paid for, because afterwards Edward always turns inward and away from her. It seems to her that these players are closer to each other than she has ever been to her husband. This is true communion, not mere joining of bodies.
If only she could be one of them. If only the poet filled her body and mouth as he filled Dick’s --
For an instant she feels the back of her throat become a cathedral, the space inside her skull a boundless universe.
What must it be like to go through the world equipped with such a voice as these players have? A voice that takes for granted its own right to be heard? That celebrates its own glory like a peacock's tail? A voice like Edward's, or Dick's, or her own father's, which still reverberates in her head? Even her gentle grandfather who was never harsh with anyone, yet never doubted his right to discourse at length and without interruption, counting and recounting his memories from the days of Great King Henry. What would it feel like, Elizabeth wonders, to tell a story that lasts for ten or fifteen minutes, and to feel one's dinner guests listening all that time with eager, deferential interest? In all her life, Elizabeth can’t remember ever having talked for even one whole minute at a time. Long before that she inevitably stops, as someone interrupts or her own sense of decency silences her.
Now another player is speaking: a boy playing a female role. His voice is not as strong as Dick's, but even in its woodwind charm it penetrates to every part of the playhouse. It carries no hint of real femininity. No tentativeness, no stain of self-doubt. It vibrates with effortless confidence in its own importance -- a mere magnification of what runs through the voices of his brothers the world over. How did men’s voices acquire that note of authority? At a word from them apprentices hop to it; dinner companions revise their opinions; three thousand playgoers weep or laugh or hold their breaths. And on a bright afternoon in Southwark, at the Globe Playhouse, a woman understands what it means to be alive.
All this time Mistress Stampe has remained in her state of ecstatic wakefulness. The thoughts that rush through her head do nothing to distract her from the delight of the moment, or to dull her feeling that she has fallen in love with someone or something that she can’t quite name. She wants to wriggle like little Anne, so urgent is her desire to -- to do what? To jump up, to shout, to grab hold of Dick and the boy with a voice like a flute?
In that instant the boy raises his chin and says something blindingly beautiful. He says it in words that seem to Elizabeth to point to something wordless beyond themselves, some essential truth that she knew long ago and lost, and now recognizes with a stab of joy that is also grief.
It's the words, thinks the sister of Richard Burbage. Without these words not even Dick could make a thousand people fall in love. Without them, none of this -- the glittering heavens, the flute-throated boy, the groundling pissing in a doorway, the swallows hatched last spring beneath the thatch, the curly-haired wherryman who gets his living at Cardinal's Cap Steps -- none of this would exist. These men are not merely licensed to speak: they are licensed to speak the words of Master Shakespeare. That is the blessing that makes everything possible.
Mistress Stampe pictures herself going about her daily tasks soft-voiced and almost invisible. She thinks how hard it is to put her inner life into words, and how impossibly presumptuous to imagine that anyone would ever want to hear them. How she says brief, practical things to her husband and daughter: "Hand me that basin," or "God keep you." Never anything like what that boy has just said, standing between the Pillars of Hercules.
That is what she longs to do. That is what she lusts for: to raise her voice and say such things as the poet puts into the mouths of these players. (She has met him several times, and really, the man is almost as quiet as she is herself. Gentle and obliging, and nothing like so impressive as Dick. Yet he seems to speak for everyone. Even for women. How does he do it? How does he know?)
I could never do what Shakespeare does. But to do what these players do: to be the channel, the vessel, the borrowed voice and body? Could she clothe herself in his language and be heard?
If these men could speak what Shakespeare wrote -- if that boy-heroine could voice the truths rooted somewhere in Elizabeth's own secret soul -- why, then --
But they have the license, of course. An actual document signed by His Majesty King James the First. The King's Men. Elizabeth knows that anyone caught acting without such authority is liable to be stripped to the waist and whipped through the streets until the blood runs. That's the law. Now and then a woman is punished in that way. As if public nakedness could add to her disgrace: she who has already felt the eyes of a crowd upon her body, and not retreated into privacy and silence. Elizabeth feels nausea at the thought. Such a woman is worse than the lowest prostitute.
And after all, mere listening is an intoxicating pleasure. No one can forbid her to listen. Except that her visits to the playhouse are rare, as Edward Stampe is inclined to agree with those City Fathers who complain that the theatre corrupts apprentices and weakens trade. Only Stampe's calculating respect for the Burbages's business acumen ensures that, twice a year or so, his wife gets to hear a play.
The scene is swelling now. With a pang Elizabeth sees that the play is near its end. Confusions are cleared away; lovers find one another. These actors, Elizabeth thinks, might pass their whole lives without ever resolving a misunderstanding or finding true love. It doesn't matter. As long as they're the priests of this temple -- as long as they take onto themselves the life of Shakespeare's mind, and somehow through him the lives of all their audience-- (O Agnus Dei ...)
A roar goes up as the final song ends, and Dick, sweating and radiant, takes his bows. His audience want him, and he wants them. What is the alchemy of this desire? Elizabeth doesn’t know. But it possesses her utterly. This is the most human of all loves.
"What’s that, cully?" says Edward by her side. Elizabeth realizes that she's spoken aloud. But Edward's attention is on the players, triumphant amid the tumult. He does not notice that his wife keeps silent, and he does not repeat the question.
Behind its mask (decently covering her for the occasion, so that her reactions would not become public property), her face glowed with thoughts utterly unlike those that usually occupied her: at church, say, or while doing the household accounts. (For Elizabeth Stampe, née Burbage, was married to a butcher in Shoreditch, and so since the age of seventeen had been responsible for the daily administration of a domestic economy based on beef and blood.) What seized her that day at the playhouse was an overwhelming and all-illuminating awareness of her own humanity:
"I am a human being, caught in time, alive now -- and now -- and now."
Something like that might have popped out of her mouth if she’d been able to speak at that moment. But unlike Judith Shakespeare, who never doubted her own voice, Burbage's sister finds speech a tenuous tightrope, designed for other feet than hers, slung across dangerous and all-too-familiar chasms.
Lack of vocabulary is not the problem. Elizabeth reads eagerly whenever her duties are momentarily done, and her husband out of the room. Her mother, while not embarrassingly learned, admired the aristocratic ladies of her own generation who not only wore Dutch lace, but translated Greek and Hebrew. The Queen herself was one such, and though Her Majesty expressed no general approval of education among her sex, she reassured by example some few who might otherwise have despaired of their bookish daughters. One of these was Mistress Burbage.
When little Bess picked up a book -- Gerard's Herbal, was it, or Fox's Book of Martyrs? -- the girl was allowed to make what she could of it. So it was that Elizabeth Burbage became a passionate and catholic reader (though Greek and Hebrew, and even her brother's schoolboy Latin, remained forever closed to her).
It is not linguistic poverty, then, that keeps Elizabeth Stampe silent in the noisy Globe gallery, even as the wilderness of her spirit explodes for the first time into full, rapturous bloom.
"This is what it is to be alive," she might have said. "I see what it is, undiluted, stripped of distractions. For the first time in my life, I'm awake!"
But she can’t say it. Certainly not in the middle of a play. Not while men who speak more compellingly than she can ever hope to do are holding forth, pouring their words out to the crowd, making it possible for her to understand what she has just understood. Like priests, she thinks. (O impious, wicked woman!) Like priests, they have been granted power to enact a public ritual during which something mysterious changes: a miracle, by which those words spoken from a bare stage create something that is more than the sum of themselves, and the gathered listeners suddenly understand what it is that listens.
There's Elizabeth's own brother there, his face suffused with passion and intelligence, speaking more gloriously than any of them. What must it be like, Elizabeth wonders, to feel the eyes of three thousand strangers on one's body?
She thinks then of a story that her grandfather likes to tell about King Harry, magnificent as the sun, showing himself to his people in cloth of gold. How the young monarch stood in the forecourt at Richmond, bathed in adoration, and how that reverence welled up into something like the lust of the starving, and how the King gave himself to the mob. They shredded his garments, seizing every scrap and jewel as relics, and might have torn the King himself to pieces -- Elizabeth’s heart beats fast thinking of it. What was King Henry in that moment? And what is Dick now, there on the stage, possessing his audience by giving himself up to them? O Agnus Dei qui tollis peccati mundi . . .
Elizabeth stares at her brother. It’s incredible that she can see each muscle in his throat, every turn of his head -- that thanks to his skill, she is actually inside his head -- all this, while to him she is an all-but-invisible dot in a sea of auditors. She wants to leap out of her seat and howl, "Pick me up, Dick! Pick me up! Up, up! The words used by her own tiny daughter Anne, before the child learned to bear herself modestly and in silence.
Now Dick has tipped his wings and soared into comedy. A laugh is rushing around the playhouse like wind. She watches how it starts with the groundlings pressed up almost against the players’s ankles, and with the gentlemen on the nearest benches. From there it sweeps outward, spreading to the back of the yard and simultaneously whipping round the galleries, until it meets itself in the center, at the point furthest from the stage.
Elizabeth herself is laughing. Beside her so is Edward Stampe, butcher of Shoreditch. The couple glance at each other, and again Mistress Stampe wants to tell her husband what's happened to her. She wants him to understand that an elusive animal has just lain down at her feet and allowed itself to be stroked. That being alive has a simple, potent significance that gets forgotten day to day like a dream. That there's wonderful mystery in the way a laugh moves around the Globe Playhouse.
The customary time for a man to hear his wife is at night, in private, when the busy world of politics and commerce and poetry is set aside for a few hours. Then a married couple may converse. Then a sentimental husband may be prevailed upon to grant his wife stuff for a new gown, or perhaps an afternoon at the playhouse.
In any case, the moment has passed. The players are speaking once again. Elizabeth wants to seize those words and hang onto them forever. She would -- she suddenly feels, in a burst of something between joy and rage -- she would! -- gladly leave her husband and child, gladly abandon the weary effort of trying to say things to them, and the even wearier task of keeping quiet, for the chance to run away with those words. She would be disgraced, ostracized, lost in sin, but she could bear it all for the sake of living and sleeping and waking up with those words.
How pitiably feminine, we may sneer. Is she really incapable of experiencing Art except as a manifestation of the breeding instinct? Is Poetry nothing to her but a kind of gypsy lover out of a sentimental ballad? She must be an ordinary, dull female after all. Not a heroine to dress herself in boy's clothes and dash about the world, oblivious to the desire she provokes, bent on adventure and achievement. No: the daughter of the great James Burbage is just a plain woman, seduced as plain women are by men’s words.
Two players are speaking now, giving and taking with abandon. Some faint taste comes to Elizabeth of the intimacy born between them. It's shameless, she realizes. No wonder the Puritans complain. She thinks for a second of the straightforward, unimaginative pleasure of her marriage bed. A pleasure that is always paid for, because afterwards Edward always turns inward and away from her. It seems to her that these players are closer to each other than she has ever been to her husband. This is true communion, not mere joining of bodies.
If only she could be one of them. If only the poet filled her body and mouth as he filled Dick’s --
For an instant she feels the back of her throat become a cathedral, the space inside her skull a boundless universe.
What must it be like to go through the world equipped with such a voice as these players have? A voice that takes for granted its own right to be heard? That celebrates its own glory like a peacock's tail? A voice like Edward's, or Dick's, or her own father's, which still reverberates in her head? Even her gentle grandfather who was never harsh with anyone, yet never doubted his right to discourse at length and without interruption, counting and recounting his memories from the days of Great King Henry. What would it feel like, Elizabeth wonders, to tell a story that lasts for ten or fifteen minutes, and to feel one's dinner guests listening all that time with eager, deferential interest? In all her life, Elizabeth can’t remember ever having talked for even one whole minute at a time. Long before that she inevitably stops, as someone interrupts or her own sense of decency silences her.
Now another player is speaking: a boy playing a female role. His voice is not as strong as Dick's, but even in its woodwind charm it penetrates to every part of the playhouse. It carries no hint of real femininity. No tentativeness, no stain of self-doubt. It vibrates with effortless confidence in its own importance -- a mere magnification of what runs through the voices of his brothers the world over. How did men’s voices acquire that note of authority? At a word from them apprentices hop to it; dinner companions revise their opinions; three thousand playgoers weep or laugh or hold their breaths. And on a bright afternoon in Southwark, at the Globe Playhouse, a woman understands what it means to be alive.
All this time Mistress Stampe has remained in her state of ecstatic wakefulness. The thoughts that rush through her head do nothing to distract her from the delight of the moment, or to dull her feeling that she has fallen in love with someone or something that she can’t quite name. She wants to wriggle like little Anne, so urgent is her desire to -- to do what? To jump up, to shout, to grab hold of Dick and the boy with a voice like a flute?
In that instant the boy raises his chin and says something blindingly beautiful. He says it in words that seem to Elizabeth to point to something wordless beyond themselves, some essential truth that she knew long ago and lost, and now recognizes with a stab of joy that is also grief.
It's the words, thinks the sister of Richard Burbage. Without these words not even Dick could make a thousand people fall in love. Without them, none of this -- the glittering heavens, the flute-throated boy, the groundling pissing in a doorway, the swallows hatched last spring beneath the thatch, the curly-haired wherryman who gets his living at Cardinal's Cap Steps -- none of this would exist. These men are not merely licensed to speak: they are licensed to speak the words of Master Shakespeare. That is the blessing that makes everything possible.
Mistress Stampe pictures herself going about her daily tasks soft-voiced and almost invisible. She thinks how hard it is to put her inner life into words, and how impossibly presumptuous to imagine that anyone would ever want to hear them. How she says brief, practical things to her husband and daughter: "Hand me that basin," or "God keep you." Never anything like what that boy has just said, standing between the Pillars of Hercules.
That is what she longs to do. That is what she lusts for: to raise her voice and say such things as the poet puts into the mouths of these players. (She has met him several times, and really, the man is almost as quiet as she is herself. Gentle and obliging, and nothing like so impressive as Dick. Yet he seems to speak for everyone. Even for women. How does he do it? How does he know?)
I could never do what Shakespeare does. But to do what these players do: to be the channel, the vessel, the borrowed voice and body? Could she clothe herself in his language and be heard?
If these men could speak what Shakespeare wrote -- if that boy-heroine could voice the truths rooted somewhere in Elizabeth's own secret soul -- why, then --
But they have the license, of course. An actual document signed by His Majesty King James the First. The King's Men. Elizabeth knows that anyone caught acting without such authority is liable to be stripped to the waist and whipped through the streets until the blood runs. That's the law. Now and then a woman is punished in that way. As if public nakedness could add to her disgrace: she who has already felt the eyes of a crowd upon her body, and not retreated into privacy and silence. Elizabeth feels nausea at the thought. Such a woman is worse than the lowest prostitute.
And after all, mere listening is an intoxicating pleasure. No one can forbid her to listen. Except that her visits to the playhouse are rare, as Edward Stampe is inclined to agree with those City Fathers who complain that the theatre corrupts apprentices and weakens trade. Only Stampe's calculating respect for the Burbages's business acumen ensures that, twice a year or so, his wife gets to hear a play.
The scene is swelling now. With a pang Elizabeth sees that the play is near its end. Confusions are cleared away; lovers find one another. These actors, Elizabeth thinks, might pass their whole lives without ever resolving a misunderstanding or finding true love. It doesn't matter. As long as they're the priests of this temple -- as long as they take onto themselves the life of Shakespeare's mind, and somehow through him the lives of all their audience-- (O Agnus Dei ...)
A roar goes up as the final song ends, and Dick, sweating and radiant, takes his bows. His audience want him, and he wants them. What is the alchemy of this desire? Elizabeth doesn’t know. But it possesses her utterly. This is the most human of all loves.
"What’s that, cully?" says Edward by her side. Elizabeth realizes that she's spoken aloud. But Edward's attention is on the players, triumphant amid the tumult. He does not notice that his wife keeps silent, and he does not repeat the question.
Freya Shipley is a freelance writer and editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has worked in classical theater for many years, both in the UK and the US. This piece touches on four of her lifelong passions: Shakespeare, fiction writing, sociolinguistics, and feminism. Visit her at www.freyashipley.com.