William Shakespeare, Actor Shakespeare, Actor Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University Grants for Engaged Learning

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Theatre Explore the vibrant world of early modern theatre, including plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and the cultural impacts of performance. Performance Comedy Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Literature and the Arts First Folio (1623) Published file. Fixed typos in bibliography. Updated metadata proofed added two figures and citations. updated author respStmt. added tags to sources. Added Johnson cit to print sources. Edited file after encoding Created File Michael Best 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.

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Janelle Jenstad 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

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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
Shakespeare the Actor

Modern 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.

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.
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.

Scholars 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. <q>Johannes fac Totum?</q>: 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. <title level="m">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.