Hotspur Ink

A character in Shakespeare is a very small amount of material doing a very large amount of work. Hotspur speaks roughly six hundred lines and has been arguing with the world for four hundred years. Malvolio is on stage for a fraction of Twelfth Night and walks off it carrying the whole play's conscience. This site is a companion to that compression — to the characters, the lines that fix them in memory, and the tradition of drawing them in ink.

Why Hotspur

Henry Percy, called Hotspur, is the rival Shakespeare gives Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1. He is brave, funny, impatient and completely unable to stop talking, and he loses. He is also the most quotable figure in a play that contains Falstaff, which is not a small thing to say. Historically he was a generation older than the prince who kills him; Shakespeare flattened the ages so the two young men could measure themselves against one another, and the play is better for the lie.

Hotspur is a useful patron for a site about character because he demonstrates the mechanism so plainly. Almost nobody who quotes him has read the play recently. What survives is a temperature — a particular speed of speech, a particular impatience with ceremony — and a handful of lines that carry it. That residue is what a portrait of a Shakespearean character has to catch, and it is what this site is about.

What you will find here

The character files take individual figures and ask what makes them legible: which lines do the identifying, which stage business travels with them, and how they have been drawn and staged since. Some are leads — Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Brutus and Antony. Others are the second rank, the parts that a company casts carefully because everyone in the audience is waiting for them.

Alongside those, three essays deal with the craft rather than the plays. Pen and Ink looks at why line drawing has been the default medium for theatrical portraiture for three centuries. One Line, One Character considers how a single quotation gets welded to a face until neither can be shown without the other. The Printed Character follows that pairing off the stage and onto paper and cloth — playbills, broadsides, souvenir programmes, the festival stall.

Two reference pages round it out: a glossary of terms from the Elizabethan playhouse and the printing house that produced the texts, and a page of related links to the institutions that hold the material and publish it openly.

The texts, and where to get them

Everything quoted here is out of copyright and freely available. The Folger Shakespeare Library publishes the complete plays in edited, line-numbered form at no charge, and its digital texts are the ones most often cited in classrooms. The Internet Shakespeare Editions at the University of Victoria go further for anyone interested in how the texts were assembled, presenting old-spelling transcriptions and facsimiles beside modern editions. Where an act and scene reference appears on this site, it follows the standard modern division; older editions occasionally differ by a scene break, and the MIT complete works is a quick way to check a line's context.

What this site is not

Hotspur Ink is an independent editorial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any theatre company, festival, library, publisher or merchandise seller, and it does not speak for any of the institutions it cites or links to. Where an organisation is described, the description is drawn from that organisation's own published statements about itself. Nothing here is an official source; the official sources are linked, and they are better.

How to read a character file

Each file follows roughly the same shape. It opens with the play and the character's position in it, moves to the lines that do the identifying work, then to the interpretive argument the part has attracted, and closes with what a portraitist has to decide. That last section is the reason the site exists. A drawing of Lady Macbeth has to choose a moment — before, during or after — and the choice is a reading of the play whether or not the artist means it to be. So is the decision to show Hamlet holding the skull, which happens in Act 5 and has become, unhelpfully, the image of a play about the four acts before it.

Start anywhere. Hotspur is the obvious door; the mechanicals are the friendliest one.