A Bit of Theatre History: Shakespeare, Female Characters, and Big Leads

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on here about the distant past — it’s been a while since I’ve written anything on here at all! — but because I’ve been playing around with data a bit this week, I thought I might as well share some of that, and ask some questions.

For over a year now, I have had a spreadsheet compiling virtually all published plays in the early modern canon, giving the size of roles by word-count. (This was built for me, using Martin Mueller’s “Shakespeare His Contemporaries” corpus and the Folger Shakespeare Digital Texts, by a U of T grad student and my RA at the time, Lawrence Evalyn.) It remains a work in progress — the XML tagging that allowed the data to be gathered is imperfect, and for some plays, seriously flawed; but it still allows for analyses that haven’t been possible so far.

In brief, with this data, we can get a sense of patterns, within individual playwright’s oeuvres or for specific companies or as they developed over the decades, in the distribution of roles across a cast of players — how large leads were, how leading roles compared to smaller parts, how male characters compared to female ones, how many identifiable “lead roles” there were in particular plays, or kinds of plays, how distributions of role sizes change over time or between genres, and so on. In the past, the data that would have allowed this kind of analysis was really only available for Shakespeare; in almost all cases, arguments about role sizes have relied on line-counts. In giving us access to word counts instead, my database bypasses the problem of underestimating the size of roles with a large proportion of prose (or overestimating the size of those in short-line verse — a problem especially evident, say, in Midsummer Night’s Dream). The tool remains a blunt one, though: it essentially reduces roles and their actors to textual formations, ignoring all other aspects of what makes a theatrical performance memorable; it is easy to think of characters that dominate the play they appear in even if they do not speak the most words. Jack Cade and Edmund, for instance, are far down the ranking of characters with the most words in their respective plays, yet clearly among the most significant figures in them, and other examples are easy to find (Titania, even if doubled with Hippolyta, is the smallest female role in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Puck’s is only the sixth-largest role; Herminone barely cracks the top 10 in Winter’s Tale and is only in a smattering of scenes, and so on; perhaps more surprising: none of Lear’s daughter are in the top six largest roles in that play — even though in the earlier King Leir ALL THREE daughters are among the six most prominent parts.) But still: with all its limitations, the data is rich and new enough to reveal all kinds of patterns and allow for all kinds of new questions.

Here’s one: how unusual are Shakespeare’s female characters? That he wrote some very substantial female roles isn’t news — Rosalind (c. 5,700 words), Portia in Merchant of Venice (c. 4,600), and Imogen in Cymbeline (c. 4,420) are the most textually dominant characters in those plays by some distance (in each instance, by over 1,000 words), and characters such as Cleopatra (c. 4,700) and Juliet (c. 4,270) are second only to their even more loquacious partners.

Well, it turns out, Shakespeare did write uncommonly large female roles, and trusted his company’s apprentices to take on substantive parts more frequently than most other playwrights. More specifically, he wrote a female lead in 13% of his plays; a female character is the second-largest role in 21% of them, and the third largest in a further 32%. Only 34% of Shakespeare’s plays do not have a woman among their three largest roles. (Some in the latter category are unsurprising, including the entire second Henriad. But we also find plays with very prominent female roles in that group: Hamlet, Titus, King Lear, and Much Ado [!].) Compare this to the corpus as a whole: 10% of plays have a female lead, 13% a female role as the second largest, 17% as the third largest, and a full 59% don’t feature a woman among the top three characters at all. Or take some of Shakespeare’s colleagues: five of Marlowe’s seven plays don’t have a woman in the top three. And Jonson is much worse: out of 15 plays, a total of two have a female character as the third-largest role — 87% of his plays relegate female parts to the fourth rank or, more often than not, below. Only Fletcher (and his various collaborators) approach Shakespeare’s distribution of female roles, with only 38% of plays without a woman in the top three characters.

Shakespeare was unusual among his immediate contemporaries in this, too: out of 24 plays written in the 1590s that have a woman among the three biggest roles, thirteen are by Shakespeare. But his women weren’t just prominent — the roles he entrusted to apprentices occasionally were of a size few other dramatists wrote for anyone. Among all 65 plays surviving from the 1590s, only four have a secondary lead larger than Juliet (and only five, including her, have more than 4,000 words). That same corpus contains a total of 36 roles of 4,000 words or more — and 16 of them were written by Shakespeare (three for apprentices). On average, Shakespeare’s leads in the 1590s have about 4,600 words; everyone else’s leads are over a thousand words shorter. (It is worth noting, though, that Thomas Heywood outdid Shakespeare in one respect: the third-largest role he wrote for anyone was Bess Bridges in 1 The Fair Maid of the West; at c. 4,200 words, only Jupiter in The Golden Age [c. 4,750] and Chartley in The Wise Woman of Hoxton [c.4,400] are bigger parts. Rosalind is only Shakespeare’s 11th-largest lead. The only other 1590s female lead of more than 4,000 words not by Shakespeare is Alice Arden, of Faversham — and perhaps that’s not a non-Shakespearean role either….)

That Fletcher comes closest to Shakespeare’s distribution of roles is likely not a coincidence: both men wrote primarily for the same company, after all. It is unclear whether Shakespeare’s writing habits in the 1590s were formed by a company with an exceptional cadre of boy players, or whether the Chamberlain’s Men developed their specific practices of training up apprentices partly in response to Shakespeare’s penchant for prominent female roles. But by the turn of the century, with a repertory in which some of Shakespeare’s plays were key elements, the strength of the company’s boy players had become an established fact, and one that is reflected in the King’s Men’s repertory. Female lead characters are strikingly more present in plays written for that company (and the Lord Chamberlain’s players before it) than in the repertory of all other companies. Only 45% of King’s/Chamberlain’s Men’s plays don’t feature a woman among their top three roles; by contrast, this is true for 68% of plays written for other adult companies between 1594 and 1642. Shakespeare’s habits, in other words, seem to have become (or reflected) an emerging company policy.

We might expect that the situation would be different for boys’ companies: after all, without the split between adults and adolescents, and with perhaps most if not all performers capable of playing female roles, casts with more equal gender distributions should be possible, perhaps even desirable. The story turns out to be more complicated than that, though. In the 1580s, judging almost exclusively from Lyly’s plays, it is indeed the case that the boys’ companies performed a remarkably different repertory than their adult colleagues. 33% of their plays had female leads, and only a third of them did not have at least one female character among the top three. By contrast, there’s not a single female lead in any play written for an adult company in the 1580s, and even secondary and tertiary female leads are a rarity (one of each!). 88% of adult plays from that decades have no women at all among their three largest roles.

The second wave of boys’ companies, though, present a completely different picture. There, from 1598 to 1610 or so, we find a pattern of distribution similar to that of most adult companies — and one that strikingly differs from the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men’s. Of the 54 plays written for “Children’s” troupes in those 12 years, a mere three (6%) have a female lead, and 59% don’t have a woman in the top three roles at all; other adult companies had a female lead 8% of the time, with 67% of plays featuring no female characters in the top three. The Chamberlain’s/King’s Men’s figures: 11% female leads, 53% of plays without a top-three female character — and as we have seen, those figures would shift towards even more prominent presence of female roles in the 1610s and after.

I would hesitate to draw too wide-ranging conclusions from these numbers, but it certainly seems that the specific pleasure of watching boys’ companies in the late 1590s and early 1600s had as much to do with seeing young boys portray grown men as with seeing them play women. Perhaps this is not all that surprising, especially in a theatrical context in which professional adult companies included well-trained adolescent men in female roles as a matter of course: boys playing women could be found everywhere; boys as adult men only in the indoor playhouses. (And as for those boys’ ability to pull off large roles, it’s probably worthwhile to note that the average size of leads written for the children companies did not differ markedly from those written for the adults: 3,970 words (21% of the total text) for the largest roles in the boys’ repertories, 3,910 (20% of the total text) in plays written for adult companies other than the King’s Men. And the same holds true for the smaller leading roles: 2,780 (15%) and 2,170 (12%) for the secondary and tertiary leads among the boys, 2,600 (14%) and 2,000 (10%) for the adults. If anything, the children were tasked with slightly larger roles than their grown-up competitors!

Or rather — their grown-up competitors outside of the King’s Men. In that company’s repertory for the twelve years in question, leads had to master an average of 4,800 words (23% of the total), secondary leads, 3,180 words (15%), and tertiary leads 2,300 words (11%). But, driven largely by the excessive length of Shakespeare’s plays (or perhaps only their printed versions), the average Chamberlain’s/King’s Men’s play also was a good deal longer than other scripts: at 21,000 words, that average exceeded the other adult companies’ by almost 2,000 words, and the boys’ by close to 2,500.

I’ll end this first exploration of the database on a related note: how big did leads get? And what exactly was an “unusually” large lead role? There are very obvious cases: no other part rivalled Hamlet, with its over 11,000 words. 29 leads had more than 6,000 words; only two secondary leads (Volpone and Othello) had more than that. The average lead was about 3,800 words (so Hamlet was almost three times as long!). And very large roles were not a historical constant: after 1610, only two parts exceeded 6,000 words (Bajazet in Thomas Gough’s The Raging Turk and Luke Frugal in Massinger’s The City Madam). But absolute length is only one way of measuring a lead’s importance, of course. Another measure of uncommon prominence is the total share of the text. And on that count, Marlowe’s leads stand out even more than Shakespeare’s. Faustus speaks over 45% of the words in the A text of Doctor Faustus; Barabas 42% of the words in The Jew of Malta; and Tamburlaine dominates 2 Tamburlaine almost as much as Hamlet does his play (with roughly 39% each) — but unlike Hamlet, who has Claudius with over 4,000 words as his secondary lead, Tamburlaine has no character like that on his heels. But overly prominent roles were just as unusual as very long ones and similarly became uncommon over time: only 38 leads speak more than 30% of their plays’ words, and only one of them, the aforementioned Luke Frugal, was written after 1611.

(To be continued.)