Transcript ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
 400 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I was on the English
throne; she reigned for a long period from 1558 to 1603 45 years in all;
 Shakespeare was born in 1564 and he died in 1616, so he
was essentially an Elizabethan, though he survived the
Queen by 13 years.
 He grew up in the little country town of Stratford-onAvon where he went to the local Grammar School and
learned the 'small Latin and less Greek' which Ben Jonson
attributed to him. Round about 1585/6 he went to
London and his first play (the first part of Henry VI) was
produced about 1590.
 The first theatres for Elizabethan drama were
of two kinds and both were make-shift: Innyards and Great Halls. As far as we can see,
despite the example of ancient Greece and
Rome, there were no specially-designed
buildings for presenting plays until the last
quarter of the century.
1. INN-YARDS
 In mediaeval times plays were performed on carts that
the players pushed around from village to village; the
actors were known as 'Strolling Players' because they
walked or 'strolled' round from place to place, setting up
their cart as a stage in the market place or the village
square.
 They were actors, tumblers, jugglers, all rolled into one:
they performed plays, they walked on stilts, they
juggled, they created slapstick scenes - anything to
please, to entertain and, of course, to earn themselves
not only applause hut money to live on.
 Gradually, the innkeepers learned that
when the Players came to town business
was brisk; entertainment in those days was
not easily come by and the arrival of the
Players brought everyone out on holiday.
 Thus, the innkeepers began to offer the
shelter of their inn-yards for the
performances and the Players would stand
their carts at one end of the inn-yard whilst
the local audience stood around to watch,
buying their ale and mead and treating it
as a festive occasion.

It was from this that the more
involved role of the inns developed: a
temporary stage would be erected at
the end of the yard and the audience
would gather, not only in the yard
itself, but would be able to pay for a
view, perhaps even a seat inside the
inn by a window overlooking the yard.
 Many of these inns had tiers of galleries all
round the yard and some of them became
for a while almost permanent theatres.
 It was the inn-yards that later dictated the
shape and form of the custom made openair theatres built in the last quarter of the
sixteenth century.
2. GREAT HALLS
 More refined performances took place in the
great halls of noblemen's houses, of the Inns of
Court, or of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. In
1603, during the Great Plague, the King and his
Court left London to stay at Hampton Court
Palace and there Shakespeare's company
performed their plays to entertain them.
 The Great Halls were, again, make-shift theatres
and the Players would act in such places by
invitation. A screen would be erected at one end
of the hall and behind it there would be room for
the actors to dress, to move around and so on; in
front, they would perform their play.
 Shakespeare himself presents several
'plays-within-plays': for instance, in The
Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost,
A Midsummer Night's Dream and, most
notably, Hamlet. These are all performed
in noble houses as were a number of his
own plays, particularly the later comedies.
Just as the Inn-Yards dictated the shape of
the later open-air theatres, the Great Halls
influenced that of the indoor theatres.
 There were some obvious advantages of both
such theatres; first of all, the Players were in
no way responsible for their upkeep;
secondly, in both the Inn-Yards and the Great
Halls there would be ready-made audiences.
 On the other hand, there were very obvious
disadvantages: the Players always had to rely
on the hospitality of inn-keepers or of the
noblemen and others who owned the Great
Houses; then, they had no storage space, so
they had to carry all their properties and
costumes with them.
 However, the biggest disadvantage of all was that
the City of London authorities were hostile to them.
 Then as now, London was like a magnet and the
Players, particularly, were drawn to it, since the
population was such that they could perform the
same play a number of times and still get an
audience; furthermore, there was some prestige in
playing in London; everybody who was anybody
went to London to make his name .
 Thus, hostility from the City authorities made life
very difficult. Nevertheless, it was this hostility that
brought about the great advances in the theatre
which took place in the sixteenth century.
3. OUTDOOR THEATRES
 In 1575, when Shakespeare was only
eleven, the City authorities imposed a
Code of Practice upon the Players which so
displeased them that they decided to
withdraw outside the City boundaries.
 Thus it was that in the following year, 1576,
the first custom-made London theatre,
appropriately called 'The Theatre' was built
in Finsbury Fields and the next year, 1577,
The Curtain was built in the same area.
 Finsbury, now a bustling part of London, was
then almost a country area but within easy
reach of the City. These two theatres were so
successful that ten years later another spate
of building began, but this time across the
river on Bankside, which gradually became a
theatre centre.
 In 1587 The Rose was built, in 1595 The Swan,
in 1599 The Globe and in 1600 The Fortune, all
in the same vicinity.
 The Globe was built by the Burbage Brothers,
Richard and Cuthbert, whose father, James, had
built The Theatre back in 1576.
 The Globe was, in fact, a sort of reconstruction of
The Theatre, for in 1597/8, when the lease ran
out, The Theatre was demolished and its fabric
taken to Bankside and used in the building of The
Globe.
 It was The Globe where, after 1599,
Shakespeare's company, at that time called the
Chamberlain's Men, performed his plays.
 What then do we know about Elizabethan theatres? Well,
first, they were, in general, round, square, octagonal, or
something of the sort. This is supported both by the
specifications for the Fortune Theatre and also by
Shakespeare's words in the Prologue to Henry V
 pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
 Notice here "this cockpit" and "this
wooden O", both of which indicate
Shakespeare's awareness of the shape of
his theatre; also, "this unworthy scaffold"
reminiscent of the makeshift stage of
earlier times.
 What seems to be certain is that the
buildings were not longer in one
dimension than another; it is now, in fact,
believed that the Globe was a 24-sided
polygon and we know that the Fortune
was square.
 The theatres were, in effect, open-air theatres the building, surrounded an open yard (like the
Inn-Yards) with the stage at one end, jutting out
into the audience to about half the depth of the
theatre; the width was considerably more.
 Round three sides of the yard were three tiers of
galleries where the wealthier or superior
members of the audience sat; the rest of the
audience stood in the open yard around the
stage and (for obvious reasons) they were known
as 'the Groundlings'.
 It was the Groundlings whose
presence most impinged upon
the Players for they were close
to the stage. Shakespeare,
however, never insulted his
audience for he knew they
were the lifeblood of the
theatre.
 Some of his contemporaries were less
kindly ; Ben Jonson, for instance,
castigated the Groundlings in one of his
plays, despising the
 popular applause
Or foamy praise that drops from common
jaws,
 and John Marston objected to coming too
close to the common audience where he
maintained he would be,
 "choked/With the stench of garlic ... pasted to
the balmy jacket of a beer- brewer".
 But this common audience paid dearly for their
entertainment.
 It cost a penny to get into the theatre and prices
were accumulative, so that for a further penny
you could sit in the "twopenny gallery" on the
top tier and for further pennies still you could go
into one of the lower galleries.
 The Groundling paying his penny would be
spending the better part of a day's wages to go
into the theatre.
 Despite the smallness of the theatre (80 x
80 feet), it has been estimated that 2500
people could be accommodated inside.
 The Elizabethans were, in fact, smaller
than we are today and had shorter legs
which enabled them to fit into more
cramped conditions.
4. PERFORMANCES
 The uses of this multiple stage are, in many
ways, obvious.
 The main action took place on the main stage and,
because it was surrounded on three sides by the
audience, the apron stage made for an intimacy we do
not get today on the conventional stage with a
proscenium arch; soliloquies could appear to be
spoken confidentially to the audience and on the large
stage 'asides ' were less artificial than they often are
today.
 The curtained recess at the back would be used, for
instance, for the Capulets' tomb in Romeo and Juliet or
for Desdemona's bedroom; the balcony, for Juliet's
bedroom; and a trapdoor to the space below the stage
would be Ophelia's grave.
 There was no scenery or scene painting as
such, but plenty of stage properties, some
simple, some considerably more elaborate.
There were realistic noises off, sometimes
from the 'heavens' - for example, in the storm
in King Lear.
 Lear's words: "Blow, winds, and crack your
cheeks! rage! blow!" would be accompanied
by appropriate noises of thunder from above;
in other plays, the sounds of battle would be
heard from behind the stage and from under
the stage would come such sounds as the
music 'Under the earth' in Antony and
Cleopatra or the Ghost in Hamlet saying
"Swear!"
 Costumes were elaborate and lavish but
there was little attempt to present
historical accuracy.
 The whole canon of Shakespeare's plays in
his own day, whatever the geographical
setting and whatever the chronological
period, would present Elizabethan
England.
5. INDOOR THEATRES
 Simultaneously with the growth of the
outdoor theatres, a number of indoor ones
were built for the companies of Boy
Actors.
 They were smaller than the outdoor
theatres, rectangular, roofed and lighted
by candles.
 They were attended by a somewhat
different class of audience; admission was
more expensive and they housed
something like 700 spectators.
6. THEATRE AND DRAMA
 There is little doubt that the theatre of the time
influenced contemporary drama in many ways.
 Where today elaborate scenery provides the
settings, Shakespeare had to do it by the words
in his play; if the setting is important, the
audience learns about it through the characters'
speeches:
 Why should I war without the walls of Troy
That find such cruel battle here within? asks
Troilus at the beginning of Troilus and Cressida,
simultaneously telling us where the play is taking
place and describing to us Troilus's mental state.
 Again, the outdoor theatre performances
always took place in the light, so Shakespeare
had to establish different times of day and
night by the words of the play. For example
 "The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve" (A
Midsummer Night 's Dream)
 "The moon shines bright" (A Merchant of Venice),
 “Look Hector, how the Sun begins to set;
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels,
Even with the vail and darking of the Sun,
To close the day up, Hector's life is done.” (Troilus
and Cressida)
 Duration of Time is also effectively conveyed
through the words of the play. Take for instance,
the murder of Duncan in Macbeth Act II, scene i;
it begins with a discussion between Banquo and
Fleance:
 B. How goes the night, boy?
F. The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
B. And she goes down at Twelve.
F. I take't 'tis later, sir. The scene then progresses
through, "the king's a-bed" . . . "Good repose", to the
knocking on the door and Macduff and Lennox
greeting Macbeth with "Good-morrow, noble sir!"
 I suppose the best example of this way of dealing
with time is to be found in Marlowe's Dr Faustus
where, in the last scene over a period of some
ten minutes, the audience is taken through the
last agonising hour of Faustus's life from the
moment he exclaims,
 Ah, Faustus!
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned eternally,to the
closing moments of his life when he is dragged away
by devils.
 Everything had to be conveyed to the
audience through the words and there is
little doubt that the audience had better
memories and probably higher powers of
attention than we do today, so that they
took in and retained the information given
to them.
 Most people could not read so they had to rely
on word of mouth and on memory; this is
apparent in Romeo and Juliet when the Servant is
sent to bid the Capulet's guests to dinner. He
can't read the list he has been given and he asks
Romeo to read it through to him; he hears it read
once and then goes off to find the guests; yet,
there are thirteen people on the list to say
nothing of sisters, wives, daughters, nieces and
so on.
 There were no programmes so plays were
often preceded by a 'Dumb Show' which
was in effect a sort of synopsis of the
action. Though there is no evidence that
Shakespeare's own plays had such a
preliminary, we see him making use of this
convention in " The Mousetrap" in Hamlet.
Entrances and Exits
 Perhaps the most significant influence upon the
plays was the nature of the Elizabethan stage.
Being an apron stage it was not possible to draw
curtains across it and, since it was essentially an
open air stage it was never possible to hide it in
darkness. As a result, Shakespeare could not
open or close plays - or even scenes - with a set
scene or a great dramatic gesture.
 Remember - it took half an hour to get the
audience in or out and they could all the
time see anything that was going on on
the stage. Thus, Shakespeare would start
his plays perhaps with a procession or with
two characters walking on, talking to each
other; later scenes often start with such
words as, "Look where he comes" or some
such introductory words.
 More of a problem was getting the dead off the
stage at the end of a tragedy. A modern
playwright would be able to swallow up the end
of Hamlet in darkness or draw curtains across the
front of the stage. But the Elizabethan audience
could see the stage as they slowly made their
way out of the theatre. How the illusion would be
spoilt, the spell broken, if the mutilated bodies
should rise and walk off the stage!
 So Shakespeare had to find methods to
remove the dead:
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a Soldier to the stagecries
Fortinbras, or Octavius Caesar says of
Cleopatra, Take up her bed
And bear her women from the monument.
 It was the exigencies of his theatre that forced
Shakespeare to end his tragedies with the
tension lowered, the forces of evil losing hold
and normality gaining control, He is often
praised for his psychological understanding of
his audience - not allowing them to rush out into
the streets when emotion was at its height, but
calming them down, sending them out quietly.
 He certainly understood the power at his
command, for he shows in Julius Caesar
how Antony rouses the crowd and what
the results of sending an audience away in
a highly tense and emotional state can be.