peak. Very
little is known of Burbage's private life, except that he was married;
perhaps Shakespeare and he may have been drawn nearer together by the
tie of a common sorrow; for, as the poet lost his beloved son Hamlet
when quite a child, so did Burbage lose his eldest son Richard.
Burbage died on March 13th, 1617, being then about 50 years of age:
Camden, in his _Annals of James I._, records his death, and calls him
a second Roscius. He was sincerely mourned by all those who loved
the dramatic art; and he numbered among his friends Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, and other "common players," whose
names were destined to become the most honored in the annals of
English literature. Burbage was the first great actor that England
ever saw, the original representative of many of Shakespeare's noblest
creations, among others, of Shylock, Richard, Romeo, Hamlet, Lear,
Othello, and Macbeth. We may fairly conclude Burbage's acting to have
had all the best characteristics of Natural, as opposed to Artificial
acting. The principles of the former are so clearly laid down by
Shakespeare, in Hamlet's advice to the players, that, perhaps, I
cannot do better than to repeat them:--

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,
trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your
players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor
do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all
gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may
say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a
temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to
the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a
passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the
groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumb-show and noise: I would have such a fellow
whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod; pray
you, avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own
discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special observance, that you
o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone
is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first
and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to
nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image,
and the very age and body of the time his f