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Shakespeare’s Theatre

 

The London theatres - The Globe, The Theatre, The Fortune and The Swan - gave performances every afternoon.   There could be no evening shows, of course, because the theatres were open to the skies and there was no satisfactory way of lighting them.   The buildings themselves were round or octagonal: if you can imagine a two- or three-tier corridor bent round into a circle with a round open space in the centre, you will have some idea of what an Elizabethan theatre looked like.

 

 

Into the open area jutted the stage, which could be as large as 13 metres square - that is, about four times the size of your class­room.   The rear half of the stage was roofed over, with several doors in the back wall.   Over these doors was a gallery which might be used by very special members of the audience, or else as a part of the acting area - the balcony scene from `Romeo and Juliet', for example, took place there.   In the roof space above the stage there was usually a trapdoor and a windlass which was used for lowering actors or chariots which were supposed to be coming down from heaven.

 

There were no women actors in Shakespeare’s time – boys would play the part of women.   The actors played mainly in their ordinary clothes with a few props to help their parts - crowns for kings, swords for soldiers, and so on.   There was no scenery, and the players had to tell the audience where they were supposed to be.   For example, in the final scene of the Romeo and Juliet, the first speech is given to Paris, who says:

‘Give me thy torch, boy: hence, and stand aloof:

Yet put it out, for I would not be seen.

Under yonder yew-trees lay thee all along,

Holding thine ear close to the hollow ground;

So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread,

Being loose, unfirm, with digging up of graves.’

– thus the audience are told that it is night, and that the actors are in a churchyard: in Tudor times people came to the theatre to listen and use their imagination, rather than to watch. 

 

Admission to the ‘pit’, that is, standing on the ground round the three sides of the stage, was a `penny' (½ p).   This was where the common people went, and it would be very crowded, smelly and dirty; for another `penny' or two you could go into the galleries, which had seats, and a roof in case of rain.   For about 6d (22p) there were a few stools on the stage itself, which was very pleasant if you could afford it, but not so pleasant for the `penny' `standers' in the pit, who therefore couldn’t see the action because you were blocking the view.  

 

If the audience liked the actors, they would cheer and offer advice and even demand – for example – that an actor ‘die’ again.   If they were not enjoying the acting, they would throw rotten fruit and even stones.   For this reason, characters in Shakespeare’s plays often turn and talk to the audience, as if the other characters on the stage cannot hear them ('asides'), and Shakespeare often uses a device called ‘dramatic irony’ – where the audience knows something that the characters do not.   ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is full of dramatic irony – most obviously at the end of the play, where Juliet is just drugged, but Romeo thinks she is dead.  There is another example in Act Two, where Lady Capulet talks about how she wishes that Romeo could be poisoned – little knowing, as we the audience do, that that is how he does die in the end.

(adapted from Peter Moss, History Alive (1968)