Shakespeare ‘played the jealous husband’

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE played a jealous husband in a 1598 drama by fellow playwright Ben Jonson, an academic has suggested.

Dr Darren Freebury-jones, a lecturer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-avon, said he had identified “striking similarities” between phrases recited by Thorello in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and those used in Shakespeare’s Othello, Hamlet and Twelfth Night, written between 1600 and 1603.

Mr Freebury-jones said that it was known that Shakespeare acted in his own plays, as outlined in the 1623 First Folio, but there are no details about the roles that he took. It is believed that he played the ghost of Hamlet’s father as well as Adam, Orlando’s favourite servant in As You Like It.

The lecturer said there had previously been little documentary evidence about the specific roles that Shakespeare took as an actor.

Mr Freebury-jones told The Guardian: “What I’ve found are some really interesting connections in terms of language, which suggest that Shakespeare was, perhaps unconsciously, remembering his own lines.

“I can’t say that Shakespeare definitely played Thorello, but this is new evidence. No one’s ever discovered it before. I think it makes an interesting, quite compelling case.

“It’s great to bring attention to Shakespeare as an actor, as well as a playwright. Acting was absolutely crucial to his literary career.”

The research involved an electronic database which compared the texts of more than 500 plays dating from 1552 to 1657, showing whether particular phrases were rare or unique.

Mr Freebury-jones said the “grammatical patterning and likenesses of thought” between some of the lines in Shakespeare’s own plays and those of Thorello suggested that Shakespeare was “intimately familiar with that role”.

He added: “In Jonson’s play, you’ve got Bianca, unfortunate wife of the jealous Thorello, who suspects she’s having an affair. She says: ‘For God’s sake, sweetheart, come in out of the air,’ to which Thorello responds with an aside: ‘How simple and how subtle are her answers?’

“In Hamlet, Polonius asks: ‘Will you walk out of the air, my lord?’, to which Hamlet responds: ‘Into my grave.’ Polonius says: ‘Indeed, that is out o’th’ air.’ He then offers an aside: ‘How pregnant sometimes his replies are.’

“The corresponding structures and similarities in context are striking. Is this a case of Shakespeare remembering one of his cue-lines and an aside,” asks Mr Freebury-jones.