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But Shakespeare and his company are not merely royal servants, required to provide constant entertainment to the court; they also address the London public who flocked to see his plays at Blackfriars and The Globe, and who had their own ways of expressing their pleasure, their frustrations and – at the death of a player – their grief.
Burbage, the main actor of the King's Men, died on March 9, 1619, just seven days after the death of Queen Anne, the London public was more upset by this event than by the death of the queen, a contemporary writer – quoting, ironically, the first lines of Shakespeare in 1 Henry VI – observed with pitch.
It is therefore necessary, I think, to ask another question. Why would Burbage's death have touched the London public more deeply than the death not only of the queen but of the playwright whose work he so skilfully interpreted?
I believe the answer lies, at least in part, in the status of the profession to which Shakespeare belonged, a profession that did not yet have a usual name: the very words playwright and playwright did not have the same name. were entering the language only half a century after the death of Shakespeare
public writers who ensured their subsistence. The writers were all invisible people, who worked behind the scenes, often anonymously and in small teams; the spectators had no easy way to discover their identity. Theater programs did not exist yet. The posters often advertised the main names of actors, but it was only during the last decade of the seventeenth century that they included the names of the authors.
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