A Lecture on
Elizabethan Theatre
This lecture is Copyright © Thomas Larque, 2001 and 2005. See the copyright notice on http://shakespearean.org.uk for more details.
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Elizabethan Theatre
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1.
Drama Before Theatres
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 there were no
specially designed theatre buildings in England. Companies
of actors toured the country and performed in a wide variety
of temporary acting spaces, sometimes building stages and
scenery for a particular series of performances, and
sometimes simply using an unaltered hall or open space.
There are records of actors performing in churches, in the
great halls of Royal Palaces and other great houses, in Inn
Yards, in Town Halls, in Town Squares and anywhere else that
a large crowd could be gathered to view a performance.
Acting companies were usually small and mobile. Records
suggest that an average touring company consisted of five to
eight players, often consisting of four adult men and a
single boy to play all the female parts. Although we are
mostly concerned with the larger companies that inhabited
the large theatre buildings that were built later in
Elizabeth’s reign, touring companies of this kind (using
temporary acting spaces throughout the country) continued to
perform throughout Elizabeth’s reign, and even the major
companies could be forced to tour to the Provinces when
Plague shut the London theatres or money was low.
Soon after Elizabeth came to the throne laws began to be
passed to control wandering beggars and vagrants. These made
criminals of any actors who toured and performed without the
support of a member of the highest ranks of the nobility.
Many actors were driven out of the profession or
criminalised, while those who continued were forced to
become officially servants to Lords and Ladies of the realm.
Touring was increasingly discouraged and many of the
remaining companies were encouraged to settle down with
permanent bases in London. The first permanent theatres in
England were old inns which had been used as temporary
acting areas when the companies had been touring - the Cross
Keys, the Bull, the Bel Savage and the Bell were all
originally built as inns. Some of the Inns that became
theatres had substantial alterations made to their structure
to allow them to be used as playhouses. The Red Lion in
Stepney, in particular, had a rough auditorium with
scaffolding galleries built around the stage area - a design
that may have influenced the building of later purpose built
theatres such as the Theatre and the Globe.
2. The First Theatre
The first purpose built Theatre building in England -
originally and solely intended for performance - was called
“The Theatre”, eventually giving its name to all such
buildings. It was built in 1576 by the Earl of Leicester’s
Players who were led by James Burbage - a carpenter turned
actor. The design of the Theatre was based on that of bull
baiting and bear baiting yards (where crowds of spectators
watched animals torn to pieces for sport) which had
sometimes been used by actors as convenient performance
venues in the past. Not much is known about the design of
the Theatre, but it appears to have been wooden and
polygonal (with many straight sides making up a rough circle
of walls) and may have had three galleries full of seating
stacked one above another. The main area of the theatre was
open to the sky, with a large yard for spectators to stand
and watch the action if they could not afford a seat. In
1599 Burbage’s sons became involved in a dispute over the
land on which the Theatre stood and solved their problems by
secretly and suddenly tearing down the Theatre building and
carrying away the timbers to build a new playhouse on the
Bankside, which they named The Globe. By this time the
Burbages had become members of the Lord Chamberlain’s
Company, along with William Shakespeare, and the Globe is
famously remembered as the theatre in which many of
Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.
Although the Globe is the most famous Elizabethan Theatre,
and the building which we will concentrate upon, there were
many other theatres built during this period - each one
different from the others in the way in which it was
designed and built. The theatres fell into two main types,
however, the “public” amphitheatre buildings (such as the
Theatre, the Globe, the Curtain and the Swan) which were
open to the air, and the smaller and more expensive
“private” theatres (such as Blackfriars and the Cockpit)
which were built to a hall design in enclosed and usually
rectangular buildings more like the theatres we know today.
The private theatres had a more exclusive audience since
they charged considerably more - the cheapest seat in a
private theatre cost sixpence, while public theatres like
the Globe charged twopence for a seat in the galleries or a
single penny to stand in the yard. The adult companies did
not start to use the private hall theatres until after
Elizabeth’s death - which technically puts them beyond our
consideration of Elizabethan Theatre - but they were used by
the boy companies (made up entirely of child and teenage
actors) in Elizabeth’s reign and were used by Shakespeare’s
Company - by this time the King’s Men - and other adult
companies in the Jacobean period, so we will consider them
in passing.
3. The Globe
The original Globe Theatre was built in 1599 with a thatched
roof above the galleries (covering the seats: the yard -
where poorer spectators stood - was still open to the air).
This roof caught fire in 1613 when cannon fired off during a
performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII sent sparks
into the thatch and the whole theatre burned to the ground.
A second Globe was built with a tiled roof, and this was
finally demolished in 1644 when all plays had been banned by
the Roundhead Parliament during the Civil War. In modern
times several replica Globe Theatres have been built around
the world, including the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in
London, which was completed in 1997. Although the modern
Globe Theatre is an inexact imitation of the real Globe -
with many of its characteristics based on guesswork, and
others altered to pass modern fire regulations and
accommodate a modern audience (taller, fatter and expecting
more luxurious surroundings than their Elizabethan
ancestors) - the design, building and use of the new Globe
has given much useful information about how an Elizabethan
Theatre works and how it affects the performances of actors
who use such a stage.
The size and exact shape of the original Globe can only
really be guessed at, but surviving records about the Globe
and other Elizabethan theatres (including some very rough
drawings of the outside of the Globe in drawings of the
city) together with archaeological examination of parts of
the Globe’s remains (most of which are unfortunately buried
under modern London buildings and cannot be examined) have
allowed the people who built the modern Globe Theatre
reconstruction to make what they hope is a faithful
reproduction of the original theatre. The modern Globe is a
hundred feet (30 metres) in diameter. Instead of being
circular, as some early scholars believed it to be, the
building is a polygon with 20 straight walls. There are
three layers of seating in galleries on all sides of the
stage except directly behind it. Directly in front of the
stage is a large yard nearly 80 feet (24 metres) in diameter
for the groundlings (standing spectators who pay a cheaper
entry price than those who have seats). The stage itself is
unusually wide by modern standards - 44 feet (13.2 metres)
wide, 25 feet (7.5 metres) deep, and 5 feet (1.5 metres)
high. There is roofing over the gallery seating and over the
stage itself, the stage roof being held up by two huge
pillars that stand on the stage - obstructing the view of
audience members from various angles - but the yard is open
to the air. Behind the stage there is a curtained “discovery
space” - a small room behind a curtain - which allows
characters to be suddenly revealed by opening the curtain
(as Ferdinand and Miranda are suddenly revealed in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, playing chess). There are
two other entrances in the upstage wall, on the left and
right. Behind the entrances is the tiring house, for actors
to dress, prepare and wait offstage. There is a balcony
above the stage which was sometimes used in the performance
(it was probably Juliet’s balcony in Romeo and Juliet),
sometimes housed the theatre musicians and was sometimes
used for more audience seating. There is a trapdoor in the
centre of the stage and the Elizabethans had simple
machinery to allow ghosts, devils and similar characters to
be raised up through the trapdoor and gods and spirits to be
lowered from the “heavens” in the stage roof.
Visiting the reconstructed Globe is a magical experience,
but it is important to remember that it does not exactly
resemble the conditions of the original theatre. The modern
Globe can hold 1500 spectators: the original Globe (which
had smaller and less comfortable visitors) packed twice as
many people into the same space. Modern fire regulations
force the modern Globe to have four six foot wide entrances.
The original Globe had only two narrow doorways. Similarly
the modern Directors did not like the original positioning
of the two obstructive stage pillars and insisted that they
should be further back on the stage and closer together than
the architects, builders and historians thought they really
should have been. The modern reconstructed stage is designed
to allow two columns of soldiers to march abreast in front
of the stage pillars. The pillars in the original theatre
were probably further apart and much closer to the front of
the stage, restricting the number of actors passing in front
of the pillars and causing more frequent obstructions to
audience sightlines.
4. The Players
The number and type of actor involved in Elizabethan Theatre
varied from one performance to the next, but there were
invariably many more parts than actors. The London companies
with their fixed theatres tended to use many more actors
than the touring companies we considered earlier. In a
performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for
example, a spectator remembered that he had seen “about
fifteen” actors perform the play. There are 40 named roles
in Julius Caesar along with an unspecified number of
extra “Plebeians” and “Senators, Guards, Attendants etc.”
all played by members of the fifteen strong cast.
Elizabethan Theatre, therefore, demanded that an actor be
able to play numerous roles and make it obvious to the
audience by changes in his acting style and costume that he
was a new person each time. When the same character came on
disguised (as, for example, many of Shakespeare’s female
characters disguise themselves as boys) speeches had to be
included making it very clear that this was the same
character in a new costume, and not a completely new
character.
All of the actors in an Elizabethan Theatre company were
male. There were laws in England against women acting
onstage and English travellers abroad were amused and amazed
by the strange customs of Continental European countries
that allowed women to play female roles - at least one
Englishman recorded his surprise at finding that the female
actors were as good at playing female parts as the male
actors back home. One woman - Mary Frith, better known as
Moll Cutpurse - was arrested in the Jacobean period for
singing and playing instruments onstage during a performance
of a play about her life (Middleton and Dekker’s The
Roaring Girl) and some suggest that she may actually
have been illegally playing herself in the performance, and
women sometimes took part in Court Masques (a very stylised
and spectacular sort of performance for the Court, usually
dominated by singing and dancing), but otherwise English
women had no part in the performance of Elizabethan plays.
The male actors who played female parts have traditionally
been described as “Boy Actors”, but there is now an academic
controversy about exactly how old these actors would have
been. Some academics are convinced that very young actors
could not possibly have played such important, complex and
emotionally difficult parts as Shakespeare and his fellow
playwrights wrote for women, and argue that references to
“men” playing women’s parts prove that these actors were in
fact fully grown adults. My friend Dave Kathman, however,
has researched this issue and points out that whenever we
know or can guess the age of an actor who was known to be
playing a female part in a particular performance, that
actor was a teenager - most between the ages of roughly
fourteen to nineteen. Because of differences in diet and
upbringing, boys’ voices broke much later in the Elizabethan
period than they do now, which made it possible for boys to
play women’s parts convincingly for much longer than some
modern scholars assume possible.
The rehearsal and performance schedule that Elizabethan
Players followed was intense and demanding. Unlike modern
theatres, where a successful play can run for years at a
time, Elizabethan theatres normally performed six different
plays in their six day week, and a particularly successful
play might only be repeated once a month or so. There were
exceptions to this rule, such as Middleton’s immensely
successful Jacobean play A Game At Chess which played
for nine days in a row before being banned for political
reasons, but runs of this kind were reserved for plays which
were an immense success and were viewed as extremely
unusual. In a typical season Henslowe’s Company performed
thirty-eight different plays, twenty-one of which were
entirely new and seventeen of which had been performed in
previous years. The Elizabethan actor did not have much
time, therefore, to prepare for each new play, and must have
had to learn lines and prepare his blocking largely on his
own and in his spare time - probably helped by the tendency
of writers to have particular actors in mind for each part,
and to write roles which were suited to the particular
strengths and habits of individual actors. There were few
formal rehearsals for each play and no equivalent of the
modern Director (although presumably the writer, theatre
managers, and the most important actors - who owned shares
in the theatre company - would have given some direction to
other actors). Instead of being given full scripts, each
actor had a written “part”, a long scroll with nothing more
than his own lines and minimal cue lines (the lines spoken
by another actor just before his own) to tell him when to
speak - this saved on the labourious task of copying out the
full play repeatedly by hand. There was a bookholder or
prompter who held a complete script and who helped actors
who had forgotten their lines. The bookholder usually also
had a “plot” or a brief summary of the play, scene by scene,
listing the various entrances and exits and telling which
characters and properties were required upon the stage at
any one time. Surviving plots have a square hole to allow
them to be hung upon a peg in the playhouse.
We know little more about most Elizabethan actors than their
name, when this has happened to survive on theatrical
records, in cast lists, or elsewhere - but there were a few
star actors who have left a more detailed reputation behind
them. The two most famous Elizabethan actors normally played
tragic and romantic heroes. They were Edward Alleyn, lead
actor of the Admiral’s Men, and Richard Burbage who was the
lead actor in Shakespeare’s Company (belonging at various
times to Leicester, Lord Strange, the Lord Chamberlain and
finally becoming - in the Jacobean period - the King’s Men).
Alleyn was probably the most famous Elizabethan actor, who
was best known for his performances in Christopher Marlowe’s
plays - playing Tamburlaine a shepherd who became a mighty
military leader and conquered vast swathes of territory,
Doctor Faustus who made a pact with the devil, and Barabas
the villainous Jew in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Alleyn
made so much money from his acting and his share in the
theatre company to which he belonged that he was able to buy
the Manor of Dulwich on his retirement (costing £10,000 - an
unbelievably huge sum of money at the time) and established
Dulwich College, where the papers of his father-in-law, the
famous theatre manager Philip Henslowe, were stored - the
most important cache of theatrical documents to have
survived the Elizabethan period. Richard Burbage is now
probably better known than Edward Alleyn because of his
connection with Shakespeare and he originated most of
Shakespeare’s famous lead roles including Romeo, Hamlet,
Othello, Richard III, Henry V, King Lear and others. It is
suggested that the contradictions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
where the lead character is apparently a young student at
the beginning of the play but is referred to as “fat” and
aged thirty towards the end of the play, were particularly
added to suit the middle-aged and portly figure of Burbage
himself. Burbage also became wealthy on the profits of his
profession, although not nearly so well off as Alleyn. Both
were admired and remembered by numerous Elizabethan writers.
The other actors to become household names were the Clowns
or Fools, and we will consider them later.
The income of actors varied enormously according to their
position in the Company, and the type of Company to which
they belonged. The least well paid actors were the boys, who
were apprenticed to adult actors and whose small wage (the
Admiral’s Men paid one boy player three shillings a week)
was paid to their masters. In return they were given board
and lodging and a very meagre allowance to spend on
themselves. Next lowest in the acting hierarchy were the
hired men, adult actors who were paid a fixed wage for each
working day. Actors in Henslowe’s London Company received
ten shillings a week, but those performing in smaller
companies or touring outside London could receive half that.
The most important actors in a theatre company, however,
were taken on as sharers - owning a particular portion of
the theatre company or its theatre building and subsequently
earning a proportion of the Company’s profits from every
performance. Shakespeare earned enough from his share in the
Globe Theatre to buy the second most expensive house in his
home village of Stratford and to invest in lands and
property, and he was also able to buy himself a coat of arms
and the right to refer to himself as a Gentleman (an
important step up the social ladder in class conscious
Elizabethan times).
5. The Playwrights
During the Middle Ages nobody is known who could be referred
to as a professional English playwright. Pageants and Church
plays were often written by members of the Clergy and the
writers of plays for touring companies were largely
anonymous and few of their works have survived. In the Tudor
period, and a little before it, men who earned their living
as writers and poets began to be recognisably connected with
plays. The earliest professional playwright of whom we know
may have been Henry Medwall who wrote a Morality Play and an
Interlude, that survive, for performance in the house of his
master, John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury. John Heywood,
during the reign of Henry VIII, wrote a large number of
Interludes for performance at the Court, but when
Elizabeth’s reign began most plays were still written by
people we would regard as amateurs or occasional
playwrights. The increasing professionalism of the acting
companies, however, meant that they increasingly needed to
employ professional dramatists to provide them with the
large and continually changing repertory that they required.
The first wave of professional playwrights were mostly
University educated men who earned a living from their pens.
These men were incredulous and envious when subsequently
confronted by less well educated playwrights - such as
Shakespeare, the son of a glover, who seems to have learned
his skills as a member of the acting profession and became a
writer without being educated in the great Universities, who
became rich through his connection with the theatre while
many of the better qualified University playwrights lived
and died in poverty, given only a few pounds for each of
their plays. Shakespeare earned money as a Sharer in the
Theatre Company (given a proportion of the Theatre’s profits
for every production rather than just a wage), a position
that he probably gained largely because of his acting
background.
The form which Elizabethan plays took was still developing
at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. Elizabethan
Universities studied Greek and Roman plays in the original
language, and the students sometimes performed them within
the University. During Elizabeth’s reign translations of
these Greek and Roman plays became widely available and
began to have a heavy influence upon English playwrights.
Greek and Roman Plays were largely divided into two genres,
Comedy and Tragedy. The first full length English Comedy,
written in about 1553, was Ralph Roister Doister -
written by Nicholas Udall, former headmaster of Eton - in
which Ralph, a character based on the Roman Dramatist
Plautus’ stereotypical Braggart, pursues a widow who is
betrothed to an absent sea captain, until the widow finally
drives him off with the help of her maids armed with mops
and pails. The first full length English Tragedy was
Gorboduc - written in 1561 by Thomas Norton and Thomas
Sackville - which tells the story of a mythical English King
in a style in imitation of the Roman Dramatist Seneca,
complete with choruses and long rhetorical speeches.
Gorboduc also influenced the later creation of a
peculiarly English dramatic genre, not based on Classical
examples, the Chronicle or History play which was neither
Comedy nor Tragedy, but told the story of a genuine
Historical period - usually the reign of a particular
English Monarch. It is not known which was the first English
History play, but early examples included Shakespeare’s
Henry VI (eventually a trilogy of plays) and Marlowe’s
Edward II. Originally English Tragedies and Comedies
tended to be written in close imitation of Greek and Roman
models and much was made of the Classical rules of writing
plays - rules which Renaissance writers took from
Aristotle’s Poetics and expanded upon. These rules included
the assumption that Tragedy and Comedy should never mix and
that a play should take place according to the Unities of
Time and Place - meaning that the stage should represent a
single place and all of the play’s action should take place
within a single fictional day at most. Fortunately English
playwrights increasingly rejected the restrictions of
slavishly following Classical models and began to write
Tragedies and Comedies in a much looser and more relaxed
style. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, for example,
a bloodthirsty tale of murder and revenge, generally ignored
the Classical rules and strongly influenced many subsequent
Elizabethan plays including Shakespeare’s early Titus
Andronicus and his later Hamlet (it is even
suspected that Thomas Kyd may have been the author of an
early Hamlet play that existed before Shakespeare’s). It
also became traditional for comic characters to appear in
even the most serious of Tragedies, like the comic
gravedigger in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
At the same time that the genres of English plays were
becoming fixed and accepted, a particular form of dramatic
poetry was discovered to be ideal for dramatic composition.
This was blank verse - first used in Gorboduc. Blank
verse was usually unrhymed (except for occasional couplets
in significant places) and used ten syllables a line divided
into five iambic feet of alternately unstressed and stressed
syllables. The main advantage of blank verse was that
despite being regular and poetical it could be made to sound
very much like natural English speech. Early blank verse was
very regular, with all sentences end-stopped (finishing
exactly at the end of the blank verse line) and with very
little variation in the stresses and pauses in the lines. As
time passed Marlowe, Shakespeare and other dramatists began
to use blank verse in a much more flexible and inventive
manner - allowing sentences to run from one line into the
next and finish wherever in the line was necessary, breaking
the blank verse rules when it suited them to allow extra
syllables in the line or irregular stresses and pauses.
Generally speaking the later a blank verse play was written
the more natural its language sounds. Shakespeare and other
Elizabethan dramatists often used a mixture of blank verse
and prose, usually giving the unstructured prose (following
no poetical rules and without line endings) to their comical
or rustic characters or those who for some other reason were
considered more casual in their speech than the significant
or serious characters who routinely spoke verse. The
majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were written in
blank verse after Gorboduc, but some were written in
other forms, such as prose or rhyming couplets.
6. Politics and
Religion
Elizabeth began her reign in a fast changing and dangerous
period for the English nation. Elizabeth’s father, Henry
VIII, had broken off from the Catholic Church and
established the Protestant Church of England. After the
death of Henry and his sickly son Edward the throne had
passed on to Elizabeth’s older sister Mary, a Catholic - who
had brought England back into the Church of Rome, and had
married the firmly Catholic King of Spain. When Mary died
without children the Protestant Elizabeth inherited the
throne and England became a Protestant Nation once more.
Each stage in this process involved bloody trials and
executions of those following the wrong religion - and
Elizabeth had to consider the fact that a large proportion
of her population had been or still was Catholic. While some
Catholics continued their religion secretly and otherwise
supported Elizabeth, others were openly rebellious.
Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope who encouraged all
Catholic Kings and subjects to work to assassinate Elizabeth
and overthrow her regime. Elizabeth managed to resist the
Northern Rebellion - where Catholic Lords and subjects in
the North rose up against her - and escaped a number of
planned assassination attempts. She also fought off the
Spanish Armada, an invasion force blessed by the Pope.
In times such as these, plays, which gathered huge crowds
and exposed them to a particular view of the world - which
could be an excellent form of propaganda - were viewed with
a great deal of concern. This is hardly surprising since a
single performance at a playhouse could attract 3000
spectators when the population of London was only 200,000.
This meant that one and a half percent of the London
population were gathered in one place and exposed to the
same influence at every performance - enough people to begin
a riot or even a rebellion. To protect against these
threats, the Elizabethan authorities imposed a range of laws
and systems to ensure that they could control just about
every word that was spoken onstage. The official in charge
of this control was the Lord Chamberlain, but most of the
real work was carried out by his subordinate, the Master of
the Revels. Before the performance of any play, the script
had to be submitted to the Revels Office for checking and
the Master of the Revels made any alterations in the script
that he felt necessary - making sure that the play remained
morally and politically safe and did not trespass into
religious matters or use inappropriate blasphemies. The
punishments for writers whose works were felt to be
seditious or offensive could be extreme, including
imprisonment, torture and mutilation - but in fact the
Elizabethan Censors were more lenient than is sometimes
suggested and did not come down heavily on many actors or
dramatists during this period.
One of the major incidents of suppression during the
Elizabethan period was prompted by the production of Thomas
Nashe and Ben Jonson’s The Isle of Dogs. The exact
content of this play is not known, as it was ruthlessly
suppressed and never printed, but it has been suggested that
it may have been a satirical attack on Elizabeth’s
courtiers. After the play had been performed in 1597, the
players - Pembroke’s Men - and the playwright Ben Jonson
were arrested and imprisoned while Thomas Nashe fled to
Yarmouth. Nashe’s house was searched for papers and Jonson
was questioned and then secretly imprisoned with two
informers who encouraged him to betray himself to them. The
Privy Council was so outraged by the performance that it
went as far as to ban all plays in London and its
surroundings for much of the rest of the year. After having
failed to incriminate himself, however, Jonson was released
and his imprisonment did not damage his future reputation or
prospects in any significant way.
Another major scandal involved Shakespeare’s Richard II,
a performance of which was specially commissioned by
followers of the Earl of Essex, who - unknown to the Players
- were planning to stir up support in London for a rebellion
against Elizabeth the following day. The Earl, who had lost
the Queen’s favour and been discredited, led a small band of
armed followers through London with the intention of
capturing the Queen, but they were not supported by the
London populace and the rebellion failed. The reason for
choosing the play was that it showed the decline and fall of
Richard II, a weak King closely connected to corrupt
favourites, who was overthrown by a rebellion led by the
Earl of Bolingbroke who had the King murdered and took his
crown. Elizabeth was vastly upset by the rebellion and
particularly commented upon the attempts to compare her to
the corrupt and successfully overthrown Richard II of the
play. “I am Richard II, know you not that?” she told Francis
Bacon and complained “This tragedy has been played forty
times in open streets and houses”. Augustine Phillips, one
of the leading actors of Shakespeare’s Company, was called
in and interrogated about the actors’ role in the affair,
but he maintained that they had known nothing about any
seditious intent and that they had simply been encouraged to
reprise an old play - so old that they didn’t expect much of
an audience - and had been paid ten shillings over the
ordinary to perform it. The authorities treated the actors
leniently and no punishment seems to have been forthcoming.
On the day before Essex was executed Shakespeare’s Company,
perhaps as a sign of forgiveness, was invited to perform
before the Queen.
More typical of the censorship of Elizabethan plays was the
suppression of Sir Thomas More - a play which was
written and then amended by a large group of different
playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare - who may have
written scenes in his own handwriting in the manuscript. It
was an odd choice of a subject for a play, since Thomas More
was a Catholic Martyr who had been executed by Elizabeth’s
father for opposing his divorce and establishment of the
Church of England. The Master of the Revels disliked many of
the scenes within the play and sent it back repeatedly for
alterations - particularly to a scene in which More talked
with poor rioters, which was seen as particularly dangerous
in its presentation of More himself and its dangerous
sympathy with rebellious poor people who opposed the Tudor
regime. Despite many such alterations the play was never
considered acceptable and so was never granted a licence to
be performed or published. We know the play only because the
original manuscript survives.
7.
Costume, Scenery and Effects
Some modern companies consider the Elizabethan performance
style to have been very close to what we now call
Minimalism. Companies like the Shenandoah Shakespeare
Express claim to be closer to the original Elizabethan
performance style because they perform in modern dress, with
no scenery and few props, and without using modern lighting,
sound or stage effects. Although Minimalist performances of
this kind may be closer to the Elizabethan originals than,
for example, the spectacular Victorian performances of
Shakespeare’s plays (with detailed painted backdrops and
archaeologically correct costumes and stage designs, and
sometimes even real horses, real boats and real canals) they
are still very far from Elizabethan performances. In reality
the Elizabethans used far more sophisticated props, costumes
and stage effects than is sometimes assumed.
Elizabethan costuming seems to have been a strange
combination of what was (for the Elizabethans) modern dress,
and costumes which - while not being genuinely historically
or culturally accurate - had a historical or foreign
flavour. A famous picture of a performance of Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus (one of the few pictures of
Elizabethan actors at work) shows Titus in a breastplate and
a supposedly historical garment, very loosely based on the
Roman toga, while one of his guards (in a play set in Roman
times) wears the familiar armour of an Elizabethan soldier
and another wears a foreign looking, possibly Turkish
influenced, suit of armour. Many of the authentic
Elizabethan garments owned by a Theatre Company had been
passed onto them, secondhand, by members of the nobility.
Strict laws were in force about what materials and types of
clothes could be worn by members of each social class - laws
which the actors were allowed to break onstage - so it would
be immediately obvious to the Elizabethan audience that
actors wearing particular types of clothes were playing
people of particular backgrounds and types. Extensive
make-up was almost certainly used, particularly for the boys
playing female parts and with dark make-up on the face and
hands for actors playing “blackamoors” or “Turks”. There
were also conventions for playing a number of roles - some
of which we know from printed play scripts. Mad women, like
Ophelia, wore their hair loose and mad people of both sexes
had disordered clothing. Night scenes were often signalled
by characters wearing nightdresses (even the Ghost of
Hamlet’s father appears in his nightgown, when Hamlet is
talking with his Mother in her chamber).
The Elizabethans did not use fixed scenery or painted
backdrops of the sort that became popular in the Victorian
period, but those who claim that the Elizabethans performed
on a completely bare stage are wrong. A wide variety of
furniture and props were brought onstage to set the scene as
necessary - ranging from simple beds, tables, chairs and
thrones to whole trees, grassy banks, prop dragons, an
unpleasant looking cave to represent the mouth of hell, and
so forth. Such props often played a major part in the play,
as in The Spanish Tragedy where a man is
spectacularly hanged by the neck from an arbour, apparently
a complex wooden frame with a bench and leaves - a scene
illustrated in a published copy of the play.
Death brought out a particular ingenuity in Elizabethan
actors and they apparently used copious quantities of animal
blood, fake heads and tables with holes in to stage
decapitations (an illustration of an Elizabethan conjuring
trick shows a table with two holes in it, one boy sitting
hidden under the table with only his - apparently
decapitated - head above it another lying on the top of the
table with his - apparently missing - head hidden below it:
tricks of this kind were almost certainly used on the
Elizabethan stage). Heads, hands, eyes, tongues and limbs
were dramatically cut off onstage, and probably involved
some sort of blood-drenched stage trick.
A number of other simple special effects were used. Real
cannons and pistols (loaded with powder but no bullet) were
fired off when ceremonial salutes or battles were required.
Thunder was imitated by rolling large metal cannon balls
backstage or by drumming, while lightning was imitated by
fireworks set off in the “heavens” above the stage.
Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale calls for a man to be
pursued across the stage by a bear and there is much
academic argument about whether a real (tame) bear would
have been used or whether it would have been a man in a bear
costume (probably a real bear skin). Some plays bring dogs
onstage, although it has been suggested that Shakespeare
only once used a dog in his plays because the animal proved
to be more trouble than it was worth.
One thing that Elizabethan theatres almost completely lacked
was lighting effects. In the outdoor theatres, like the
Globe, plays were performed from two o’clock until about
four or four thirty in the afternoon (these were the times
fixed by law, but plays may sometimes have run for longer)
in order to take advantage of the best daylight (earlier or
later performances would have cast distracting shadows onto
the stage). Evening performances, without daylight, were
impossible. In the hall theatres, on the other hand, the
stages were lit by candlelight - which forced them to hold
occasional, probably musical, breaks while the candles were
trimmed and tended or replaced as they burned down.
Elizabethan actors carried flaming torches to indicate that
a scene was taking place at night, but this would have made
little difference to the actual lighting of the stage, and
spectators simply had to use their imagination. The nearest
that the Elizabethans came to lighting effects were
fireworks, used to imitate lightening or magical effects -
the devils in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus apparently
cavorted around the stage with squibs, small exploding
fireworks, held in their mouths.
8. Performance
Techniques
We know very little, unfortunately, about how Elizabethan
actors actually played their roles. Performances probably
ran continuously without any sort of interval or Act Breaks.
Occasionally music may have been played between Acts or
certain scenes, but scholars think this was quite unusual
except in the hall playhouses, where candles had to be
trimmed and replaced between Acts. We do not even know how
long Elizabethan plays usually ran. The law (mentioned
above) expected plays to last between two and two and a half
hours, and Shakespeare talks about “the two hours traffic of
our stage” in Romeo and Juliet, but some plays - such
as Hamlet, which in modern times runs for more than
four hours - seem much too long to have been performed in
such a short time. It is possible that the scripts which
have been passed down to us are the playwright’s first draft
and that they would have been cut considerably for
performance. It is also possible that Elizabethan actors
performed at a much faster speed than modern actors without
so many pauses and without speaking slowly for emphasis.
What props and scenery there were in the Elizabethan Theatre
were probably carried on and off while the scenes continued,
which means that there would have been no need to wait for
scene changes - something which could double the length of a
spectacular Victorian performance.
Some idea of the sort of hand gestures that an Elizabethan
actor may have used may have been preserved in a peculiar
book called Chirologia or the Naturall Language of the
Hand. This was supposed to explain hand gestures used to
show emotions or give emphasis in normal conversation rather
than in stage performance, but if gestures of this kind were
used offstage then they were almost certainly used on it as
well. Some of the gestures seem very odd and extravagant to
modern eyes, but may well have seemed perfectly natural to
an Elizabethan.
Another aspect of Elizabethan performance that we know a
little about was the use of clowns or fools. Shakespeare
complains in Hamlet about the fact that the fool
often spoke a great deal that was not included in his
script, and in the early Elizabethan period especially it
seems to have been normal for the fool to include a great
deal of improvised repartee and jokes in his performance,
especially responding to hecklers in the audience. At the
end of the play the Elizabethan actors often danced, and
sometimes the fool and other comic actors would perform a
jig - which could be anything from a simple ballad to a
quite complicated musical play, normally a farce involving
adultery and other bawdy topics. Some time was apparently
put aside for the fool to respond to challenges from the
audience - with spectators inventing rhymes and challenging
the fool to complete them, asking riddles and questions and
demanding witty answers, or simply arguing and criticising
the fool so that he could respond. One of the famous clown
Tarlton’s jokes, for example, was given in response to a
woman in the audience threatening to cuff him. She should
only reverse the spelling of the word, he told her, and she
could have her will immediately. It has been suggested that
the first fool in Shakespeare’s company - William Kempe -
was famous for improvisational humour of this kind and for
rejecting Shakespeare’s scripts in order to make his own
jests, and that his replacement Robert Armin may have been
more of an actor and less of an improvisational comedian,
respecting the words that Shakespeare had set down for him.
Performances by modern actors at the reconstructed Globe
have given us some insight into aspects of performance on a
stage of this kind which may help us to reconstruct the
behaviour of Elizabethan actors, but may sometimes be
misleading - since the modern Globe actors are a 21st
Century company performing for 21st Century audiences.
Modern Globe actors have found the Globe to be an excellent
performing space which actors find very appealing, but it is
also very different from the modern stages that they are
used to and requires a very different style of performance
to make use of the theatres strengths and alleviate its
weaknesses.
Companies performing on the Globe stage have to take into
account the strange positioning of the audience. The Globe
seating almost completely surrounds the stage, with audience
members at the extreme ends of the circle almost behind the
upstage corners of the stage and looking at the action from
the back forwards - and with the views of all parts of the
audience occasionally blocked by the obtrusive stage
pillars. The modern Globe Directors have found that, as a
result, they need to keep their actors in constant motion.
They also need to have actors facing in as many different
directions as possible during a scene. When I went to see
King Lear this Summer I was surprised to find that
despite sitting in the worst position, at the most extreme
upstage left corner of the stage, behind the actors, I was
always able to see at least one actor’s face throughout the
performance and was therefore included in the play’s action
and not frustrated by seeing only backs. The actors also
found that even when conversing privately the Globe stage
encouraged them to stand at a distance from one another, in
a long diagonal, rather than standing close together as they
would on a more intimate modern stage. Similarly while
modern stages encourage actors giving soliloquies to step to
downstage centre and address the audience, the more powerful
positions on the Globe stage turned out to be in the front
corners of the stage rather than downstage centre, or best
of all upstage centre - which turned out to be the most
powerful position on the stage. Before performing on the
stage it had been assumed that the actors would need to use
big voices and broad gestures, but they found that clarity
of speech and movement was more important than volume or
size, and much more subtle acting was possible. The
acoustics of the stage (once all of the genuine oak had been
installed) turned out to be excellent, although actors
tended to misjudge the effect of their own voices at first
and were tricked into shouting when they didn’t need to.
Oddly, when casting male actors to play the female role of
Princess Katherine in Henry V, the Globe casting
directors felt that teenage actors’ voices didn’t carry well
in the Globe space and selected an actor in his early
twenties. The historical records seem to show that the same
view was not held in Shakespeare’s day since Dave Kathman’s
research suggests that teenage boy actors were the norm. The
modern Globe staff were very satisfied by audience reactions
to the cross-dressing boy actor, however. Some failed to
realise that the actor was male and apart from knowing
laughs at lines about being a woman, the audience seemed
able to suspend its disbelief and view the character as a
normal and convincing female even when the actor was not.
Naturally, the set up of the Globe encourages intimacy with
the audience and it has been found that Globe audiences are
enthusiastic to take part in the production in ways that the
actors sometimes find distracting. This may in part be
explained by the atmosphere of the Globe itself - the
Globe’s Artistic Director actively encouraged audiences to
shout back at the actors before the first performance was
given - but it is also probably explained by the great
visibility of the Globe audience. With no modern stage
lighting to enhance the actors and put the audience into
darkness, Globe audience members can see each other exactly
as well as they can see the performers and the Groundlings
in particular are near enough to the stage to be able to
touch the actors if they wanted to and the front row of the
Groundlings routinely lean their arms and heads onto the
front of the stage itself. The Groundlings are also forced
to stand for two or three hours without much movement, which
encourages short attention spans and a desire to take action
rather than remain completely immobile. This means that the
Groundlings frequently shout up at the actors or hiss the
villains and cheer the goodies. During King Lear the
audience were quick to offer their advice when Edmund
(Gloucester’s bastard son) asked himself which of Lear’s
competing daughters he should accept as his lover.
Elizabethan audiences seem to have been very responsive in
this way - as their interactions with the Fool suggests -
and were particularly well known for hurling nut shells and
fruit when they disliked an actor or a performance. The
Elizabethan audience was still more distracted, however,
since beer and food were being sold and consumed throughout
the performance, prostitutes were actively soliciting for
trade, and pickpockets were busy stealing goods as the play
progressed.
It is important to remember, however, that the opinions of
modern actors may bear little relationship to the way in
which Elizabethan actors viewed their stage and gave their
performances. One hint that Elizabethan audiences may have
viewed plays very differently gave us the origin of the word
“audience” itself. The Elizabethans did not speak of going
to see a play, they went to hear one - and it
is possible that in the densely crowded theatre - obstructed
by the pillars and the extravagant headgear that richer
members of the audience were wearing - the Elizabethan
audience was more concerned to hear the words spoken than to
be able to see the action. This idea is given extra weight
by the fact that in the public outdoor theatres, like the
Globe, the most expensive seats were not the ones with the
best views (in fact the best view is to be had by the
Groundlings, standing directly in front of the stage), but
those which were most easily seen by other audience members.
The most expensive seating was in the Lord’s box or balcony
behind the stage - looking at the action from behind - and
otherwise the higher the seats the more an audience member
had to pay (a seat in the Lord’s Room cost one shilling or
twelve pence, a seat in a Gentleman’s Room cost sixpence, a
seat in the galleries cost twopence and it cost only a penny
to stand in the pit) . Some Elizabethan documents suggest
that the reason for this range of prices was the richer
patron’s desire to be as far from the stink of the
Groundlings as possible.
9. Further Reading
The one book suggested by the BTEC syllabus is The
Shakespearean Stage by Andrew Gurr, and this gives a
very detailed description of Elizabethan theatre and
performance. I would also suggest that you look at
Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe by Pauline Kiernan
if you want to find out a bit more about the reconstructed
Globe and the way in which the modern actors and directors
responded to it.
Some of the other books that I used to write this lecture
were:
The Development of the English Playhouse by Richard
Leacroft.
Shakespeare’s Stage by A.M. Nagler.
Shakespeare’s England edited by Sidney Lee (Vol. 2
has chapters on Actors and Playhouses)
The Design of the Globe by the Bankside Globe
Project.
This Wooden ‘O’ by Barry Day.
Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe by Andrew Gurr.
If you want to read some Elizabethan plays then some of the
more interesting scripts include the following
(unfortunately many of the best Renaissance plays were
Jacobean, so do not appear here):
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare.
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare.
Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.
Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare.
Henry V by William Shakespeare.
Richard III by William Shakespeare.
Edward II by Christopher Marlowe.
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.
Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe.
The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd.
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson - the version
set in Italy, the other was Jacobean.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Thomas Dekker.
A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood.
King Leir (Anonymous) - the play on which Shakespeare
based his own Jacobean King Lear.
Arden of Faversham (Anonymous).
It is best when you are first reading Renaissance plays to
try and find editions with plenty of notes and glossaries to
explain what you are reading. The Arden editions of
Shakespeare’s plays have particularly detailed and
interesting notes and introductions.
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