“Boy my greatness”: Imagining Shakespeare’s actor Alexander Cooke

William Shakespeare wrote one of the great meta-theatrical jokes of the early-modern period. Near the end of Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen—originally played by one of Shakespeare’s boy actors—muses that she and Marc Antony will be portrayed on a “stage” at some point in the future where she “shall see / some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore.” Whether this knowing wink got an actual laugh from Shakespeare’s audience or just nods of recognition, the moment acknowledges the circular reality of a boy actor playing a powerful woman…imagining a boy actor playing a powerful woman.

Author Nicole Galland goes even further in examining gender performance in her new novel Boy, which imagines Shakespeare’s boy actor Alexander “Sander” Cooke at the height of his teenage fame as an androgynous beauty known for playing Rosalind in As You Like It.

Galland writes that Rosalind was “the largest female role Shakespeare had yet written,” and that she had been created “specifically to show off [Sander’s] bedazzling, unnerving charms.” Though Sander learns that Shakespeare is writing Viola in Twelfth Night “expressly for him,” and that it’s a role of “greater depth, complexity, and nuance than Rosalind,” he still worries about his future with Shakespeare’s company and what kinds of roles he’ll be able to graduate to.

His best friend Joan Buckler has her own challenges as a woman with a sharp intellect who can only pursue her passion for natural philosophy in disguise. Fortunately, among Sander’s many important friends and admirers is the Queen’s councilor Francis Bacon, a natural philosopher who agrees to mentor Joan. As she and Sander navigate multiple levels of Elizabethan society against a background of impressively lived-in historical detail, their adventures in Shakespearean cross-dressing are fraught with both comedy and danger, and feel surprisingly contemporary in their exploration of gender roles both onstage and off.

One of Galland’s singular accomplishments in Boy is how brilliantly, like Shakespeare, she mingles fact with fiction. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men are asked to perform Richard II by supporters of the Earl of Essex, Sander seizes the opportunity to play the title role, his first male lead, instead of Richard Burbage, who originated the role and doesn’t want to re-learn the lines of a six-year-old play. Watching Sander onstage, Joan marvels at how he not only transforms the role of Richard II but the meaning of the character. “She could not imagine anyone but Sander doing it,” she thinks to herself, “Burbage had the majesty, but Sander had the grace.” The controversial 1601 performance, however, coming as it does on the day before the failed Essex Rebellion, put Shakespeare’s real-life actors in jeopardy and called before the Queen’s Privy Council, requiring Galland to create some canny cross-dressing subterfuge to free her fictional characters.

Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 | List of actors
The 26 actors listed in the First Folio, shown at left, including Shakespeare himself, were the first to bring Shakespeare’s plays to life on the stage. Since women did not appear on the stage, men and boys played all of the male and female parts. Alexander Cooke is the last actor listed in the lefthand column.  

It’s possible that Galland wrote Boy just for me, as its mashup of young love, backstage banter, romantic comedy, historical drama, political intrigue, and richly imagined descriptions of Elizabethan London are right up my street. In fact, in one particularly magical, almost time-traveling sequence, a circuitous journey to avoid both soldiers and rebels takes the reader from the Globe playhouse in Southwark—the heart of theatrical London then—past Shaftesbury Avenue, St. Martin’s Lane, and Charing Cross—the heart of theatrical London now.

And yet, also like Shakespeare, Galland doesn’t allow the facts to get in the way of her story. In real life, Cooke was too young to have played a major male role in 1601, having only been apprenticed to John Heminges (one of the co-editors of Shakespeare’s First Folio) in 1597. It’s also unlikely that Shakespeare actually wrote Rosalind and Viola for Cooke; as Galland reveals in Boy’s Afterword, Sander was more “likely [to have] featured in [Shakespeare’s] tragedies than [his] comedies.” This suggests the intriguing possibility that the real Alexander Cooke might well have played Shakespeare’s tragic heroines Lady Macbeth, Cordelia in King Lear, and—yes—even Cleopatra.