William Shakespeare, Actor

Shakespeare the Actor

Para1Modern audiences and readers know William Shakespeare as a playwright, but he was also known as an actor in his own time. Shakespeare’s profession as actor is documented in contemporary accounts and printed texts. References to him as an actor, called a player in the early modern period, do not specify the parts he played. The preface of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published by his colleagues after his death in 1623, lists him in The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes. Playwright Ben Jonson puts him at the top of the list of the principall Comoedians in his play Every Man in his Humour, first acted in 1598; Jonson’s less successful 1603 tragedy Sejanus also includes Shakespeare as a Tragedian.
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This image shows the page from a 1616 book The Workes of Benjamin Johnson for the play Every Man in his Humour, noting that Will Shakespeare was one of the ten principall comedians or main actors in the play along with Richard Burbage and eight others, including Henry Condell and John Heminges, who arranged for the publication of Shakespeare’s collected works in 1623. Courtesy of The Folger Shakespeare Library. CC By-SA 4.0.
No alternative text available.
This image shows the page from a 1616 book The Workes of Benjamin Jonson for the play Sejanus, noting that Will Shakespeare was one of the ten principall tragedians or main actors in the play along with Richard Burbage and eight others, including Henry Condell and John Heminges, who arranged for the publication of Shakespeare’s collected works in 1623. Courtesy of The Folger Shakespeare Library. CC By-SA 4.0.
Para2Scholars do not know if the order in which the names appear is significant, but these cast lists from printed editions of early modern plays confirm that Shakespeare was one of the main actors who acted in Jonson’s plays when they were first staged. Evidence of payments to Shakespeare, alongside Burbage and Kemp, also indicate he was a key part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the mid-1590s, very likely as a shareholder, playwright, and actor. The two Jonson cast lists indicate that Shakespeare was performing as an actor at least until 1603, when the King’s Men received their royal patent.

Parts Shakepeare May Have Played

Although scholars have vigorously debated which parts Shakespeare might have played, no clear assignment of parts is possible. It is often rumored that Shakespeare played the parts of old men, like Adam in As You Like It or The Ghost in Hamlet, but there are no documents of any kind that demonstrate this as a fact. In the end, all scholars can be certain of is evidence from other prominent authors of the time indicates that William Shakespeare was both an actor and a playwright. Scholars presume he gave up acting after 1603 to focus on playwriting.

Key Print Sources

King, T.J. Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Michael Dobson. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Van Es, Bart. “Johannes fac Totum?”: Shakespeare’s First Contact with the Acting Companies. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 4, 2010, pp. 551–557.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Shakespeare, Actor. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/maturity/shactor.html. Accessed 18 Feb. 2023.
Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespeare the Actor and Playwright. Shakespeare Online, 12 Nov. 2000, https://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespeareactor.html.
Nelson, Alan. The Works of Benjamin Jonson: Shakespeare Included in Two Cast Lists. Shakespeare Documented, 25 Jan. 2020 https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/257.

Image Sources

Jonson, Benjamin. The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. London: Will. Stansby, 1616. 72 and 438. Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 14751 copy 2. https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/257.

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title William Shakespeare, Actor
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University Grants for Engaged Learning
License/availability
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.