Richard Burbage

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Burbage played Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, King Lear, and Macbeth, all in their first-ever performances, and yet most people today have never heard his name. When he died on the 13th of March 1619, the public grief was so intense it threatened to overshadow the official mourning for the death of Anne of Denmark. An anonymous poet captured that loss in lines that still echo: "He's gone and with him what a world are dead. Which he review'd, to be revived so, No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo, Kind Lear, the Grieved Moor, and more beside, That lived in him have now forever died."

  Who was this man, that a whole world could be said to die with him? How did the son of a joiner from London become the most commanding stage presence of the Elizabethan age? And what does his life tell us about the rough, entrepreneurial, combustible world that produced the plays we still read today?

• 2. The Burbage Family Business

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  Burbage was baptised at St Stephen's Church in London on the 7th of July 1568, the second son of James Burbage, a joiner who had transformed himself into a theatrical impresario. James founded one of the first permanent playhouses in England, and that fact shaped his son's entire life. Working alongside his father from a young age, Richard absorbed not only the craft of performance but also the practical knowledge of colours and painting techniques that would stay with him.

  James Burbage's death in February 1597 left his sons Richard and his elder brother Cuthbert in a precarious position. Two London theatres were suddenly their responsibility, and lawsuits followed almost immediately. The Blackfriars Theatre stayed in the family, though they leased it to the lawyer and impresario Henry Evans, who filled it with a troupe of child actors. The other venue, known simply as The Theatre, posed a harder problem: they could not reach new lease terms with the landowner Giles Allen, and the building had to go.

  The solution was audacious. The brothers had the beams, posts, and timber of The Theatre physically dismantled and transported across the Thames, where they were reassembled on the south bank as a new playhouse. That reconstructed building opened in 1599 as the Globe. The Burbage brothers retained half the shares; the other half went to William Shakespeare and fellow members of the Chamberlain's Men. Income from the Blackfriars lease helped finance the entire move.

• 3. The Roles That Defined an Era

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  Of all the hundreds of plays produced between 1580 and 1610, only about twenty contained roles longer than 800 lines. Edward Alleyn was the first English actor to tackle such demanding parts, in Marlowe's Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta. But thirteen of those twenty colossal roles belonged to Burbage. That number alone captures his dominance.

  His company affiliations shifted in his early career: he was likely acting with the Admiral's Men in 1590, then moved to Lord Strange's Men in 1592, and then to the Earl of Pembroke's Men in 1593. But his lasting home was with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which became the King's Men when James I ascended the throne in 1603. There he was the undisputed lead. He created the title roles in Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and King Lear, as well as the Duke in Measure for Measure.

  Burbage was not exclusively a Shakespeare actor. Ben Jonson wrote the title role in Volpone for him, and the role of Subtle in The Alchemist. He appeared in John Marston's The Malcontent, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. He was, in short, the actor every major playwright of the age wanted at the centre of their work.

  Contemporary accounts describe him as short and stout, yet consistently paint him as a commanding, impressive figure. His defining quality was believability: he could "easily slip into character," a skill that sounds ordinary now but was genuinely difficult in Elizabethan theatre, where the form itself was still new enough that audiences had not yet learned the habit of suspension of disbelief.

• 4. Two Theatres, One Fire

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  The Globe that the Burbages built became the anchor of their enterprise, but managing two venues simultaneously was the real engine of their business. During winter months, when the open-air Globe was impractical, the company retreated to the Blackfriars, which was considerably smaller, seating around 700 people. In 1608 the brothers ended the Evans lease and moved the King's Men back into the Blackfriars as their own indoor venue.

  Burbage was present at the Globe on the 29th of June 1613 when it caught fire and burned to the ground. He had been performing there that day. The destruction of the playhouse he had helped build from the salvaged timber of The Theatre was a profound blow, though the company eventually rebuilt.

  Through all of this, Richard and Cuthbert lived as neighbours on Halliwell Street in Shoreditch, close to The Theatre and The Curtain Theatre, their professional and domestic lives running together in the way common to theatrical families of the period. Richard married Winifred Turner on the 2nd of October 1600 at St Mary's Rotherhithe, and the couple had at least eight children.

• 5. Painter, Portrait, and Speculation

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  Burbage's talents extended beyond performance. His early exposure to colours and painting in his father's workshop seems to have developed into a genuine skill. Some scholars have argued that the famous Chandos portrait of Shakespeare was painted by Burbage himself. A second attribution connects him to the "Felton" portrait of Shakespeare. Dulwich College holds a portrait of a female head that was long considered his work until 1987, when researchers concluded it was probably misattributed and was more likely the work of a North Italian painter.

  A portrait said to show Burbage and sometimes argued to be a self-portrait is now housed at London's National Portrait Gallery, alongside a second portrait. Whether he was the hand behind any of the surviving Shakespeare likenesses remains unresolved, but the fact that the question is even asked speaks to how seriously his contemporaries took his visual art.

  A separate strand of speculation surrounds Hamlet itself. Some scholars have proposed that Shakespeare's play was shaped not by the death of his son Hamnet but by the death of Richard Burbage's father James. The dates of Hamnet's death, James Burbage's death in February 1597, and the earliest drafts of Hamlet do not align neatly, and the discrepancy has led researchers to suggest that Burbage's own grief, and possibly an earlier performance of a proto-Hamlet character, fed into the play that became the most famous in the language.

• 6. Death and Afterlife

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  Burbage's last recorded performance was in 1610, when he played a central role in the pageant London's Love to Prince Henry on the 31st of May. He continued acting with the King's Men until his death in 1619, never retiring from the stage as his contemporaries Alleyn and Shakespeare had done. He remained a crowd favourite for thirty-five years.

  He was buried in St Leonard's, Shoreditch, a church near both The Theatre and The Curtain Theatre. His gravestone was said to have read simply "Exit Burbage." That stone is now lost, though a memorial to him and his brothers was erected in a later century. The epitaph, two words that play on the theatrical stage direction for a character's departure, is perhaps the most concentrated tribute in the history of English theatre.

  At his death he left his widow Winifred "better than £300" in land, a respectable estate but notably less than the substantial wealth Edward Alleyn had accumulated, and less than Shakespeare's net worth at his own death in 1616, also at the age of 52. Winifred Burbage later married Richard Robinson, another member of the King's Men, keeping her within the world her husband had inhabited.

  The elegies that poured out after his death, including A Funerall Elegye on the Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbage, mourned not just a man but the characters that had, in the poet's telling, truly lived only because Burbage gave them life. The grief was for Hamlet and Lear as much as for the actor who played them, a distinction that would have pleased a man who spent his career making audiences forget the difference.