Falstaff, Nobody, and Will Kemp's ‘Giant Hose’

Bourke, R. D.

doi:10.1093/notesj/gjn008

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Evidence which both bears out the theory of a shift in attitudes and the need to be careful about over-simplifying is found in the intriguing possibility that Ben Jonson actually played the role of Nobody, dressed as in the play with breeches up to the neck, in his 1603 masque usually referred to as The Entertainment at Althorp. 17 This masque, coming as it did at the beginning of James' reign and performed before his queen, marked an important new start for Jonson in his attempt to raise both his own profile and the status of the dramatist, as 11 See Bourke (2008); nothing is heard of Kempe after 1602. 12 Preiss also acknowledges (17) his debt to Nora Johnson (2003) who proposed that actor-playwrights, including Heywood, challenged the association of authorship and ownership.…”

Section: The Player Nobodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player-Playwright-Poet in the Early Modern Theatre

Archdeacon

2016

Authorship

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This paper focusses on a particular moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century which has been considered to be transitional in terms of how the profession of playwright was perceived. It explores the complex authorial identities of playwrights who were also simultaneously poets and stage actors, roles which both in different ways created tensions with the role of playwright. Via an examination of the stage figure of Nobody which became popular at this time on the London stage, this paper suggests that filling the multiple roles of poet, playwright and player often led to a conflicted relationship with the idea of authorship. Metadramatic readings of the anonymous 1606 playbook Nobody and Somebody appear to support this suggestion, and to indicate that the figure of Nobody could be emblematic of the tensions and conflicts experienced by the player-playwright-poet at this time.

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Section: The Player Nobodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player-Playwright-Poet in the Early Modern Theatre

Archdeacon

2016

Authorship

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Nobodies and Somebodies: Embodying Precarity on the Early Modern English Stage

Burkert

2022

Theat Surv

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Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit performances where they chose their most crowd-pleasing roles to maximize ticket sales. Some of the pieces spoken by Nobody and Somebody were popular enough to make their way into print, excerpted in novels and miscellanies. The duo appeared in George Alexander Stevens's wildly popular Lecture on Heads (1764), which traveled across the Atlantic to stages in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, continuing to be performed in the early Republic until the nineteenth century. Offstage, the figures were staples of visual culture; as Terry Robinson has shown, audience awareness of these figures from Romantic-era political cartoons formed an important backdrop for Mary Robinson's theatrical afterpiece Nobody (1794).

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Falstaff, Nobody, and Will Kemp's ‘Giant Hose’

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player-Playwright-Poet in the Early Modern Theatre

Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player-Playwright-Poet in the Early Modern Theatre

Nobodies and Somebodies: Embodying Precarity on the Early Modern English Stage

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