Shakespeare's company perform Othello in Oxford

The documented appearance in Oxford of Shakespeare’s leading acting company of the day, The King’s Men, in 1610, is one of those rare moments we are able to pinpoint not only where the players performed and precisely when…but also the play they performed: Othello.

Experts even have the benefit from a ‘review’ from a member of the audience! The tantalising question remains – was Shakespeare among the cast, too?

Dr Siobhan Keenan, Reader in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, De Montfort University, investigates.

William Shakespeare’s acting company, The King’s Men, visited the university town of Oxford several times in the early seventeenth century but probably the most fascinating and best-documented visit is one that they made in 1610, when Shakespeare was still an active member of the company and could have been present.

Dr Siobhan Keenan

On this occasion a local scholar, Henry Jackson wrote a letter in which he referred to The King’s Men visit and gave brief descriptions of at least two play performances by the company. Although Jackson does not name the plays directly, we know from his accounts of them that he was referring to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) and Shakespeare’s Othello (1603-4).

While Jackson was critical of Jonson’s play and its satire of alchemists, he praised The King’s Men’s for the tragedies that they ‘acted decorously and aptly’. Indeed, he and others in the audience were reportedly moved to tears, especially by the performance of Desdemona in Othello who, according to Jackson, ‘always pleaded her case very well’ but moved the audience even ‘more after she was murdered’ by Othello ‘when lying on the bed she appealed to the spectators’ pity with her very expression’.

Jackson’s praise of Desdemona’s performance, and the power of her looks as well as her language, is especially fascinating when one considers that her performer is likely to have been one of The King’s Men’s boy apprentices. Scholars have often wondered how contemporaries viewed the cross-dressed boys of the Shakespearean stage and have debated whether or not the acting of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was naturalistic.

If Jackson’s account is representative, it would seem that the boy players were capable of believable and affecting female performances and that Shakespeare’s fellows did seek to follow Hamlet’s famous advice to the players about the importance of lifelike performance and of holding ‘as ’twere the mirror up to nature’.

Jackson does not specify the venue or the hosts, but The King’s Men were paid by the city authorities on at least one occasion in 1610. If this payment was for the visit mentioned by Jackson it is possible that the performances he documents took place in one of the traditional venues for civic-sponsored play performances, the old Guildhall.

The Guildhall included an upper and lower hall, both of which appear to have been used for performances, measuring approximately 60 feet by 31 feet and thus capable of accommodating sizable audiences. The medieval building no longer survives but was located on part of the site of the present town hall.