¹ An earlier form of this article was submitted to a study seminar at the 1989 Conference of the Shakespeare Association of America entitled “Casting Shakespeare's Plays: The Doubling of Actors in Shakespearean Drama.” I am grateful for the contributions made by the participants, particularly Thomas Berger, who led the seminar, Kent Cartwright, whose paper on casting the Quarto King Lear was interesting and provocative (his “doubles” differed radically from mine in almost every instance); and Alan Dessen, who was generous with his advice. David Bevington generously read an early draft of the essay.

² Dollimore, Jonathan, in Radical Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) “decenters” the protagonist and examines the process of social dislocation in King Lear, with the illegitimate Edmund as paradigm of the socially marginalized. From my perspective, however, Edmund is on the periphery of the aristocracy, not the society; and the role of Edmund is dramatically pivotalGoogle Scholar.

³ “Indiscriminate” doubling, a term introduced by Giorgio Melchiori, presupposes a lack of audience recognition of the individual actor, roles are filled as they are introduced by any actor who is available regardless of the other roles he plays, his personal qualities, or his theatrical specialties. In “Peter, Balthasar, and Shakespeare's Art of Doubling,” Modern Language Review 78: 4 (October 1983) 777–792CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Melchiori suggests, 789–90, that Shakespeare refined the “indiscriminate,” or practical, doubling practiced by the itinerant companies into “doubling by function,” which paired characters to both create and reveal “parallelisms” between them. “Doubling by function” is similar to what Ralph Berry calls “conceptual” doubling, in which audience recognition of the doubling actor contributes to the meaning of the play as a whole. In “Hamlet's Doubles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37: 2, (Summer 1986), 204–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Berry defines “conceptual” doubling as one which “brings a hidden relationship to light,” 208; he suggests, however, that it depends on the twentieth-century interpreter-director, 208 and 212. Recently, Booth, Stephen in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Abrams, Richard in “The Double Casting of Cordelia and Lear's Fool: A Theatrical View,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27: 4 (Winter 1985), 354–368Google Scholar, have argued in favor of conceptual doubling. In “Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare's Plays,” Booth asserts that “Shakespeare used the doubling of parts in performance adjectivally, to inform, comment on, and perhaps augment the events enacted,” 134. Abrams employs Melchiori's notion of “doubling by function,” doubling Lear's “truth-tellers,” Cordelia and the Fool, in relation to the other truth-teller, Kent, 354.

⁴ The locus classicus of doubling studies is Bevington's, DavidFrom Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, which shows how company structure and doubling practice determined the dramatic structure of Tudor morality plays and secular interludes. Even when the companies grew from “four men and a boy” to eight or nine sharers, two to six boys, seven hired men, and eight or more supers, the structure of the companies and the necessity of doubling remained the same, 106. Both sharers and hired men doubled across moral, generic, and gender boundaries, 87. Doubling was practiced in Shakespeare's time and well into the seventeenth century, writes Bentley, Gerald Eades in The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 229Google Scholar.

⁵ Baldwin's, T. W. “acting lines” in The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927)Google Scholar, organized around the “line counts” of the principal parts, do not acknowledge the practice of doubling, as Ringler, William A. Jr., notes, in “The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays,” Bentley, G. E., ed., The Seventeenth Century Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 110–134 esp. p. 112Google Scholar.

⁶ Mullaney, Steven, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9Google Scholar.

⁷ Lawrence, William J., “The Practice of Doubling and Its Influence on Early Dramaturgy,” in Pre-Restoration Stage Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927) assumes that doubling was avoided whenever possible, 52–53 and throughoutCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Carson, Neil in A Companion to Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), defines the organization of the Elizabethan acting company as “two-tiered,” consisting of “eight to twelve” investing “sharers” and “a variable number of apprentices” and wageearning hired men, 34. Both Carson and Baldwin suggest that players of high status preferred to specialize, and thus to limit the range and number of their parts, very nearly implying that men became players in order to avoid playingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Booth, 136, ff; Berger, Thomas L., “Casting Henry V,” in Shakespeare Studies XX, ed., Barroll, J. Leeds (Burt Franklin and Co., Inc., 1988), 89–104Google Scholar.

⁹ Ringler, in “The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays,” 118–9, assigns speaking and mute roles and attendants for Julius Caesar. Meagher, John, “Economy and Recognition in Thirteen Shakespearean Puzzles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (Spring 1984), 7–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, tacitly eliminates attendants when he proposes a cast of thirteen, as does Thomas L. Berger in his casting of Henry V in “Casting Henry V,” 94. McMillin, Scott, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1987), 54 and 77, eliminates attendants on the basis that their number cannot be correctly determinedGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Bentley, 110.

¹¹ Bratton, J. S., ed., King Lear (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 5Google Scholar.

¹² Bratton, 6.

¹³ Strier's, Richard “Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience,” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart literature and Culture, ed. Dubrow, Heather and Strier, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104–133, focuses on the courtier “servants,” Cornwall's Servant and the CaptainGoogle Scholar. See also Barish, Jonas A. and Waingrow, Marshall, “Service in King Lear,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958), 347–355CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Empson, William, in The Structure of Complex Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951, 1989), cites the reminder of S. L. Bethell that Edgar's Tom is “a contemporary figure belonging to the Elizabethan unemployment problem,” 137Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See Urkowitz, Stephen, in Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, and Stone, P. W. K., in The Textual History of King Lear (London: Scolar Press, 1980) on these differencesGoogle Scholar, and Taylor, Gary, in “The War in King Lear,” Shakespeare Survey 33, ed. Muir, Kenneth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), on the battle scenesGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Stone, 21.

¹⁷ Greg, W. W., Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 125Google Scholar.

¹⁸ McMillin, 54 and 77; doubling charts, 161–64.

¹⁹ Ringler, 115.

²⁰ Greg, 119. Three seems to be the number required for “Drum and Colours and soldiers” in the plot of The Seconde Parte of the Seven Deadlie Sinns, printed in Greg.

²¹ Citations to the facsimile editions, Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed., Allen, Michael J. B. and Muir, Kenneth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)Google Scholar, and The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed., Hinman, Charleton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968)Google Scholar. Quarto scene divisions only from The Historic of King Lear printed in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Original Spelling Edition, ed., Wells, Stanley and Taylor, Gary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Quarto citations include Oxford scene number and page signature from Allen and Muir; Folio citations include act, scene, and through-line number from Hinman. Scene breakdowns of the characters for Quarto and Folio and doubling proposals follow the text of this essayGoogle Scholar.

²² The editors of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) give Lear only fourGoogle Scholar.

²³ Richard Strier conceives of the transformation of Servant to Knight as a promotion of the Servant, 114, rather than his elimination.

²⁴ Gary Taylor characterizes the Quarto scene as an “intimate” one with “nondescript attendants,” in contrast with more martial scene of the Folio. Taylor has enumerated most of the textual differences in the battle scenes of the two plays (note 15 above).

²⁵ Taylor, 30.

²⁶ Taylor, 28.

²⁷ Bentley maintains that trumpeters had a separate guild and did not double, though they might have been available to “super”; while trumpeters were among the hired men, other hired men probably played the drums and other instruments, 77–79.

²⁸ Although, as Bentley points out, 112, the evidence suggests that doubling within a scene was often practiced.

²⁹ Ringler, William A. Jr., in “Shakespeare and His Actors: Some Remarks on King Lear,” in Shakespeare's Art in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Aycock, Wendell M. (Lubbock: Texas Tech, 1981), 194, n. 12, agrees that the “finale” can be performed with fifteen players, but does not differentiate between the demands of the two textsGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Despite Lawrence's perplexing assertion that disguised characters do not double, 58. Doubling France with Oswald and Burgundy with Edgar is a little more practical since Burgundy exits earlier than France and Edgar enters before Oswald.

³¹ Bevington seems to suggest, 80–83, that as the companies grew, the leading part and the Vice were increasingly not doubled.

³² The middle-aged and bearded Armin. In “Shakespeare and His Actors,” Ringler argues that Robert Armin played Edgar, and that the most experienced boy actor perhaps doubled Cordelia and the Fool.

³³ The list of characters and cast for Believe as You List, which Bentley reprints from the Malone Society edition in The Profession of Player, 264–66, has influenced this casting of the hired men.

³⁴ Strier, 121, notes the depersonalizing change from Gentlemen to Messenger. “[the] second messenger is…entirely concerned with the business at hand (which is perhaps why in the Folio he is Messenger rather than Gentleman, a function rather than a social status).”

³⁵ See Greg, W. W., The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955)Google Scholar, Duthie, G. I., Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Quarto of King Lear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1943)Google Scholar, Walker, Alice, Textual Problems of the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953)Google Scholar, Walton, J. K., The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, Blayney, Peter, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), as well as Stone and UrkowitzGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Urkowitz, 3 and 55.

³⁷ Urkowitz, 74, observes that the Gentleman only needs to go to Dover in the Quarto.

³⁸ Taylor discusses the differences in the Gentleman's part, 31–32.

³⁹ Stone, 235.

⁴⁰ Stone, 236.

⁴¹ Urkowitz, 67–79; 78.

⁴² Urkowitz, 53.

⁴³ Urkowitz, 54. Warren, Michael, in “The Diminution of Kent,” in The Division of the Kingdoms, ed., Taylor, Gary and Warren, Michael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 59–73, justified the omitted 4.3 for “its concentration of the moral states of Lear and Cordelia, 66. He emphasizes, however, the theatrical and dramatic importance of the Gentleman's description of Cordelia. In choosing to study the role of Kent, of course, Warren has extended his own sympathies beyond the dramatic centerGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Although recognizing the Servant's attempt to impede Cornwall's “mutilation of Gloucester” as “one of the most remarkable and politically significant moments in the play,” 119, Strier does not remark upon the Folio omission of the equally significant dialogue between the other two servants.

⁴⁵ Stone, 235–6.

⁴⁶ Urkowitz, 50–51.

⁴⁷ Urkowitz, 52

⁴⁸ Stone, 137.

⁴⁹ Strier, 123. To Warren, 64, this scene is a negative moral example, showing a character with “a total misperception of what it means to be a man.”

⁵⁰ Urkowitz, 104.

⁵¹ Urkowitz, 47.

⁵² See Warren's “The Diminution of Kent” and the Urkowitz, chapter V, “The Role of Albany in Quarto and Folio,” which show how Kent and Albany fare less well in the Folio.

⁵³ Urkowitz, 146.

⁵⁴ Bevington maintains, 102, that the use of extras for bit parts was impractical for the itinerant companies, and that only as the companies settled down to permanent homes did it become possible to engage both “hired men” and musicians. The use of extras was impractical not only because they cost money, but because being a “mute functionary” requires skill: performing six or eight mute or minor roles in a play cannot be undertaken any more successfully by an inexperienced player than can a principal role with a high-linecount.

⁵⁵ Of course, if the Folio play had priority, then “untheatrical” elements—those which impede “concision, contrast, and surprise”—were written in, also an interesting matter for speculation.

⁵⁶ Mustapha, in The Selected Writings of Fulke Greville, ed. Rees, Joan (London: Athlone Press, 1973), Chorus Secundus, 207–208. While this has been often cited elsewhere, I am indebted to Mullaney, 94, for the referenceGoogle Scholar.