English Comedians

English Comedians, troupes of English actors who toured the Continent during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Although a group of English musicians is known to have visited the Danish Court in 1579–80, the first actors to appear abroad seem to have been those who accompanied the Earl of Leicester to Holland and Denmark in 1584–6. Among them was the famous clown Will Kempe who with his fellow actors was invited to Dresden. Thereafter references to visits from English actors can be found in the archives of many German towns. The first actor to become widely known was Robert Browne, who toured from 1592 to 1619. One of Browne's original actors, Thomas Sackville, broke away to form a company of his own which was for a time at Wolfenbüttel in the household of Heinrich Julius, Duke of Brunswick. Sackville was probably the first to create an indigenous comic character, Jan Bouschet (Jean Posset), designed specifically for an audience whose knowledge of English was very slight. He combined the often bawdy antics of the Clown with the wit of the Fool and relied mainly for his effects on pidgin German laced with English and Dutch phrases. He was the forerunner of such German-speaking clowns as Hans Stockfisch, created by John Spencer who with headquarters in Berlin travelled as far afield as The Hague and Dresden, and Pickelhering, the prototype of such purely indigenous characters as Hanswurst and Thaddädl.

It seems likely that the English Comedians first appeared in jigs and short comic sketches whose humour was broad enough to appeal even to a foreign audience; but a collection of texts from their repertory printed in 1620 shows that by that time they were relying more on pirated editions of full-length plays, the dialogue pruned to the minimum and the plots reduced to a series of dramatic incidents. The titles in this collection are all of English plays, but a further collection printed in 1630 shows a preponderance of German titles, and it is probable that by then the plays were given mainly in German. Even in serious plays a good deal of fooling by the clowns was added for the benefit of the groundlings, with additional music and dancing for the more sophisticated. From the literary point of view the influence of the English Comedians on German drama was negligible, but they helped to give German audiences the habit of theatre-going, and the brevity of their dialogue may have helped to counteract the native tendency to excessive discussion. Once the companies began to engage German actors the use of English was discontinued and indigenous drama, in the shape of the Haupt- und Staatsaktion, took over. In spite of the troubles of the Thirty Years War, some English actors continued to tour the Continent, particularly during the Puritan Interregnum, the last authentic record of them dating from 1659 and the last notable player in the tradition being George Jolly; but such was the prestige of the ‘Englische Komödianten’ that the name was used in Germany for publicity purposes as late as the middle of the 18th century.