“Within this Wooden O…”

Introduction

Besides being a master of his language, Shake­speare was a brilliant craftsman of the stage – an artist who chose to fuse words with action to create a special dimension not duplicated in any other art form: the magic of the living theater. To appreciate that special dimension, a reader of Shakespeare’s plays needs to put them on stage mentally, to imag­ine himself hearing the words and witnessing the action.
To help your students get the flavor of watching a Shakespearean play performed at the Globe Play­house, here are a selection of articles from America Reads anthologies. There are essays on playhouse design and how it developed, on Elizabethan acting, cos­tuming, stage properties, and special stage effects.

A. The Growth of the Theater in England
Let us imagine that we are in the center of London on a summer afternoon in 1601. Across the Thames on the south bank, flags are flying from the tops of the theaters in which performances are being given. We go over by boat and then are swept by a crush­ing crowd to the very door of the Globe Theater, where Shakespeare is the principal playwright, part owner, and actor. (It is rumored that he will take the part of the ghost in today’s performance of Hamlet.) Paying a penny, we manage to push our way into the eight-sided auditorium, which is open to the air except for a thatched roof over the jutting stage and over the tiers of galleries that line the walls. Another penny gets us seats in one of the gal­leries away from the terrible smell of the greasy, food-munching “groundlings,” or stand­ing spectators, who have just set up a tremen­dous howl at the sight of a satin-clad courtier striding across to a corner of the stage and dis­posing himself on a stool to watch the play.
Trumpets sound. The “stinkards” grow quiet. A boy appears on the stage with a sign saying that the play’s first scene takes place on the ramparts of the royal castle in Denmark. Two soldiers appear, and the play begins:
Bernardo. Who’s there?
Francisco. Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

This image of the Elizabethan theater crowd tumbling over itself to hear the most exciting plays in English history has become so fixed in our minds that we tend to forget that the English theater did not always pre­sent such an aspect – nor did it do so for long.
English drama had its beginnings with the church plays and pantomimes of the Middle Ages. Introduced by the clergy to help the unlettered congregation understand the Latin church service, these plays eventually became so elaborate and so filled with secular or hu­morous incidents that they were moved to the church porch. When this too became inade­quate, they were moved to the church lawn or graveyard. Out in the open, the plays lost even more of their religious solemnity. Audi­ences became unruly; church property was de­stroyed. Finally, an irate clergy threw up its hands in disgust and banned plays from church property altogether.
After losing the patronage of the church, the plays were taken up by the flourishing trade guilds, who came to regard good produc­tions as a matter of civic pride. Guildsmen provided funds for costumes, stage properties, and the payment of actors on condition that the acting was creditable and that the actors would attend rehearsals or be subject to fines. The plays, originally called miracle plays, in time acquired the name mystery plays, prob­ably because of a certain ritualism associated with the guilds. They were put on in cycles, a cycle being a group of short plays forming one long narrative (usually the entire Chris­tian story from the Creation to the Last Judgmerit). Under guild management each indi­vidual play was placed on a wagon. Spectators gathered at prearranged spots; wagons, mov­ing in sequence, brought the entire cycle to the waiting crowds.
While the miracle or mystery play was still in its heyday, another medieval dramatic form emerged. This was the morality play, which differed from the miracle play in that its char­acters were personified abstractions of vices and virtues competing for the possessions of man’s soul. The most famous of these plays was the fifteenth-century “Everyman”, in which a character representing all men one encounters: Good Deeds, Strength, Discretion, Five Wits, and various others as he goes on the long jour­ney to which Death has summoned him.
Morality plays were performed at schools and colleges and especially in the courtyards of inns. These innyards were unroofed inner courts surrounded by rooms on the lowest floor, above which were two or more tiers of galleries opening from the upper rooms. A stage was easily constructed by placing planks across trestles or sawhorses and by dropping a curtain at the back to conceal the actors until they made their entrances. This platform was usually placed opposite the innyard entrance.
In 1576, the Elizabethan actor James Burbage built England’s first public playhouse (“The Theatre”. “The Theatre” was used as a model for the Globe Playhouse, which was built as an eight-sided build­ing – in effect a “wooden O.”). In designing his building, he combined features of the innyard with those of the arena. Like other Londoners, Burbage was familiar with the circular arenas or “gardens,” where bullbaiting and bearbaiting contests were held. In these arenas, spec­tators stood on wooden scaffolds that sur­rounded the baiting ring. They were protected from the animals by a fence.
Burbage adapted the circular shape of the “gardens” for his playhouse. Then, in the three-storied frame of his building, he con­structed spectator galleries similar to inn balconies. He transformed the makeshift platform of the innyard into a permanent, three-sided stage that jutted almost halfway into the auditorium. This kind of stage explains in part the bubbling excitement of the Elizabethan theater-goer, for with the actors and action virtually thrust into his lap, he became not just a spectator but, in a sense, a participant caught up in the passions of actors who were almost close enough to touch.
Along with this new step in playhouse de­signing came a new kind of drama.
The medieval morality play, with its sim­plified characters who possessed only one trait (Strength, Honesty, Greed, etc.) gave way to the Elizabethan dramas – plays with complex characters reflecting many personality traits.

This transition from personified abstractions to characters drawn from real-life men and women was given impetus by the Renaissance idea that individual human beings were fas­cinating objects of study. It helped produce a veritable torrent of playwrights who were eager to try their hand at creating real-life stage characters. It also brought the Elizabe­thans flocking to the new playhouses in droves, for what could be more stimulating than to see in some actor the reflection of one’s own personality!
The crowning glory of this new kind of theater was William Shakespeare. Voraciously curious about human beings, keenly aware of their infinite depth and vari­ety, and supremely capable of finding words that would accurately portray them, he created a roster of characters who often seem more real than our own friends and acquaintances.
This kind of theater did not last long, how­ever. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Puritans succeeded in closing all the pub­lic playhouses. When they reopened at the end of the seventeenth century, during the period in history known as the Restoration, their en­tire aspect was changed.
Buildings were rec­tangular instead of round and no longer open to the sky. Artificial lighting was necessary for the first time. Women’s roles, in Elizabethan times played by boys, were now played by women. The bare Elizabethan stage, whose setting had been left to the skill of the play­wright and the imagination of the audience, was now filled with movable scenery. Above all, the jutting, three-sided Elizabethan stage began to recede into a stage that looked like a box left open on one side, or a framed canvas with actors painted on it. Only a deep apron in front of the stage served to remind audi­ences of the older Elizabethan structure. Dur­ing the eighteenth century, the stage apron was foreshortened even further, then done away with entirely in the nineteenth century when a curtain was put up to conceal the stage from the audience until show time.
This new stage produced a new kind of theater experience: audience and actor were no longer caught up together in a single emo­tional experience as they once had been. In­stead, the actor withdrew into his world inside the picture-frame stage. The playgoer tended to be less actively involved in a performance than when the stage platform was thrust into the midst of the audience.
Recently, though, a new interest in the Elizabethan-type stage has taken hold. Many modern theaters are now trying to recapture the close relationship between actor and spec­tator by reviving the platform stage. In such theaters – the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Min­neapolis, for instance – Shakespeare’s plays can be staged the way they were originally. The audience can once again be swept into the current of a turbulent Othello, or en­chanted into the magical wonder of Bottom’s forest at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London today.

B. “His hour upon the stage”
Macbeth, V, v
Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright. He must have been a competent per­former, too, for in 1594 he was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company – one of the principal acting com­panies of the time.
The acting companies usu­ally consisted of ten or twelve adult actors and six boy ap­prentices. All of the women’s roles in Elizabethan plays were performed by the ap­prentices. The patronage of an important nobleman, like the Lord Chamberlain of Eng­land, protected the actors from London authorities who wished to suppress the play­houses. What particular abil­ities did an actor possess to qualify for membership in an Elizabethan acting company?
The prime requisite must have been a resonant speak­ing voice. From his personal experience, Shakespeare un­doubtedly learned to value dialogue that could be spoken rapidly, yet clearly. In addi­tion, an actor had to be a singer and musician. Since most Elizabethan plays fea­tured songs, an actor was frequently assigned a role, like the role of Lucius in Julius Caesar, which required him to sing and play a musical in­strument.
Plays of the period also featured numerous duels and mock battles. The daggers, swords, and rapiers used in these scenes were sharp, not blunted weapons. To avoid injury, an actor had to be a competent swordsman – some plays demanded that he be an acrobat as well.

Two great tragedians of the Elizabethan stage – Edward Alleyn (left) and Richard Burbage (right).

An Elizabethan actor also must have possessed an aston­ishing memory. As many as forty plays were given during a single season. An actor might memorize eighty roles. The practice of doubling, that is, of performing two or more roles in a single play, was typical of the Elizabethan stage. Most acting com­panies had only eighteen people to enact, for example, the thirty or more speaking parts in Julius Caesar. Extra actors could be hired, but the problem was largely solved through doubling. Thus the actor who portrayed Flavius in Julius Caesar might also portray Artemidorus and Octavius.
If an actor performed well, the audience applauded; if he performed poorly, they pelted him with apple cores. An actor was paid out of the penny admissions which were charged to enter the play­house. If he was a part-owner of the playhouse, as Shake­speare was, he also shared in the gallery admissions.

C. “…With silken coats and caps…”
The Taming of the Shrew, IV, iii
Costuming on the Elizabethan stage was both lavish and colorful. Shakespeare’s fellow actors – “with silken coats and caps and golden rings, with ruffs and cuffs and farthin­gales and things” – were a brilliant sight to behold.
The costumes worn by Eliza­bethan actors usually were so costly that it was necessary to protect them from soil or other damage during the course of a performance. For this reason, rushes were strewn on the inner stage, the rear platform, and the outer edges of the platform. When the moment came for an actor to fall down, for example, he would be careful to fall on one of these rush-strewn areas.
Costuming has always been an important visual device to help playgoers distinguish one character from another. Ap­propriate costuming may also reinforce characterization. In staging their plays, Elizabe­than acting companies usual­ly did not attempt to duplicate historical dress. For example, some of the characters in Julius Caesar may have worn Roman robes and cloaks, but it is more likely that they wore sixteenth-century dress. The Globe audience did not think it strange to see Brutus and Antony in Elizabethan doublet and hose. When Shakespeare’s plays are staged today, some produc­tions will adopt historical dress, while others will adopt modern dress.

Although Elizabethans probably did not duplicate Roman dress in Julius Caesar, the chances are that their cos­tumes combined fabric and color in a symbolic way. Eng­lishmen of Shakespeare’s time were extremely class-con­scious. One indication of a person’s “high” or “low” estate was the fabric of his clothing. This was true of stage costumes as well. On the Globe platform, aristo­cratic Romans would be dis­tinguished by their costumes of satin or taffeta, damask or velvet. The commoners would be identified by their coarse linsey-woolsey; workingmen by their canvas aprons.
Color also symbolized so­cial status to Elizabethans. It was customary in those days to see apprentices, for ex­ample, in their liveries of dark blue and to see Queen Eliza­beth I in her state robes of scarlet. On the stage, dark blue was also reserved for the clothing of one who served, just as scarlet was reserved for one who ruled. In addition to symbolizing social status, color symbolized such ab­stract qualities as love or courage. A costume with many touches of yellow would indicate that the character wearing it was jealous. Simi­larly, orange would represent pride; azure blue would con­vey honor; and rose would symbolize gallantry.

D. “I will draw a bill of properties…”
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, I, ii
Shakespeare did such a mas­terful job of setting his scenes through dialogue that it was possible to stage the play without special costumes or stage properties. The stage manager at the Globe, how­ever, did have devices for heightening the illusion of reality.
Most of the properties used on the stage platform were light enough and small enough for the actors to carry on and off as part of their stage business. Backstage at the Globe could be found a large assortment of portable properties – swords and dag­gers, shields and scrolls, cush­ions, lutes, dishes, flagons. Cicero enters with a lantern and Casca with a sword in Act One, Scene 3, of Julius Caesar. Both the sword and the lantern are carried off when Casca exits with Cassius.
Larger and heavier proper­ties were stored in “Hell” – a storage area under the stage. These properties were raised onto the platform through a large trap door.
It was possible to create greater scenic effects on the inner stage. Here the walls could be hung with cloth painted to suggest a garden or with cloth drab enough to suggest the interior of a tent. Several heavy properties could also be positioned on the inner stage before the curtains were drawn apart – these properties were stored backstage or in “Hell” until needed.
Any discussion of Elizabe­than staging must take into consideration that Shake­speare’s plays were per­formed in broad daylight. How, then, did the stage man­ager help create the illusion of night and darkness? By in­dicating the need for light; that is, an actor would carry a torch or a lantern or per­haps light a taper.

E. “This dreadful night that thunders”
Julius Caesar, I, iii
During a performance, the stagehands and musicians at the Globe were busy creating a variety of special effects.
Julius Caesar, I, iii, for ex­ample calls for a “dreadful night that thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars.” To simulate thunder, stagehands in the huts (an upper level of the stage area) rolled a cannon ball back and forth or down a few stairs. Elizabethan stagehands could create lightning with a squib (a ball of shiny cloth filled with sulfur powder), which they had attached to the top of a long wire. They lowered the wire through the opening in the canopy and then ignited the squib. This small firework rolled down the wire with a fine hissing sound and exploded with a resounding “crack.”
Since Elizabethan audi­ences delighted in the sight of blood and gore, an assassination scene must have pleased them mightily. An actor portraying Caesar probably wore (beneath his costume) a bladder filled with sheep’s blood. When the moment for stabbing Caesar arrived, Casca punctured the bladder with his dagger. Later, the conspirator “washed” their hands in this blood. It is likely that Antony delivered his funeral oration over a dummy corpse of Caesar. When Antony flung Caesar’s cloak aside, the dummy’s many gaping wounds undoubtedly horrified – and satisfied – the Globe audience.
Stagehands operating the stage trap doors were responsible for the ghostly ap­pearances. A ghost ascended through the floor traps in the platform or, like the Ghost of Caesar, ascended through the floor trap in the inner stage.
If a play called for angels and spirits, the actors portraying these beings were lowered and raised (by means of a pulley) through the trap door in the stage ceiling.
Battle scenes often called for sound effects, such as the clash of arms offstage. The musicians created the alarums with their trumpets, drums, and cymbals. Sometimes real cannons were discharged to increase the realism of a bat­tle scene. However, the use of explosives in a building made of wood and thatch was ill-advised, for it was the discharge of a backstage cannon that destroyed the Globe Playhouse in June of 1613. An eyewitness account describes the fire in this way: “...and certain chambers being shot off some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke...it kindled inwardly and ran around like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground... Nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks. Only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would have perhaps broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.”

F. The (Performed) Play’s the Thing
By Alan S. Downer, English Department, Princeton University
The drama is, perhaps, the most human of all the arts. It is the only art that depends almost exclusively on human tools for its creation-actors. Strangely enough, this unique quality has only recently seemed important to scholars and critics…
Charles Lamb once said that King Lear was never meant for the stage and was much better for the study. Well, if you have all the imagination in the world, perhaps so. But even if you have all the imagination in the world, you still don’t have the controls that the theatrical representation imposes.

Performance Makes a Play
Furthermore, Lamb was apparently unaware of certain basic facts about the drama. We might state it as a first principle of theatre: The playwright is the original but not the only begetter (father) of the play.
A charming little fantasy by Maurice Baring graphically illustrates the point. In his Minia­ture Dramas Baring pictures Macbeth as it was being rehearsed at the Globe Theatre prior to its original performance.
Shakespeare is there – and, of course, Francis Bacon is sitting in the background – and the actor playing Macbeth is Richard Burbage. The rehearsal isn’t going very well and finally Burbage says, “Look, you’ve got me reacting here too quickly, and too briefly; my wife is dead – I should do more than say, “Ah, alas!”
Shakespeare, rather wearily – just to keep Burbage happy – goes over in a corner, scrib­bles something on a piece of paper and says, “Here, say this.” So Burbage says, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” – and so on.
This is one of those fantasies that, I think, is truer than fact. A play is not written – it is made. The script is a blueprint, and many other artists and craftsmen join the playwright in creating the finished work.
Furthermore, this is not something that merely used to happen; it is a basic principle as valid today as in Elizabethan times… A play cannot be considered “finished” until it is performed – and sometimes not even then, for there is a further point: a play is re-created at every performance. Like the humanity it represents, it is never twice the same; no two performances are ever exactly alike or, if they are, something is seriously wrong.

Response to Audience
We might set as a second principle of stage history that a play performed is always a re­sponse to its audience.
Let us look at King Lear again. When Shakespeare wrote the play at the beginning of the 17th century, he was telling the story of a king who was punished in direct accord with Elizabethan political attitudes for com­mitting a willful breach of his divinely or­dained responsibility. Lear was punished for not doing what he was supposed to do.
At the end of the 17th century, during the Restoration, a playwright named Tate came along and saw that while King Lear was a very fine play, it didn’t quite fit the require­ments of Restoration political thought – so he shifted it a little. He fixed it up for his audi­ence so that the Restoration Lear is a story of a king who is cruelly treated by ambitious nobles.
Another good example is Julius Caesar, the tragedy of a man – Brutus – who acted from high principles according to personal rather than conventional lights.
In 1936 Orson Welles produced a Caesar which portrayed Brutus as a kind of Franklin D. Roosevelt who rose up against the fascists – and indeed, there was Caesar, black shirt and all, looking exactly like Mussolini.
The fact is simply this: the produced play represents what the audience believes to be true about human experience.
This is a necessary, and perhaps a unique, characteristic of the drama. The novelist does not have to do this, the poet does not have to do this; they are not under the compulsion of creating an immediate response in an audi­ence. They can wait; the theatre can’t.

The Stage Plays a Role
The third principle we have to be con­cerned with is that plays are performed in theatres – and theatres differ, from building to building and generation to generation. I won’t belabor this point except to recall what happened to Hamlet.
Hamlet began in the Elizabethan period as a melodramatic revenge play, a detective story whose central figure was a sort of Renaissance James Bond. Shakespeare took the play and, with that fusing genius of his, transmuted it into a tragedy of infinite dimension by inter­weaving with the story of Hamlet a series of other actions which gave it a universal quality of tremendous scope.
Hamlet is a long, character-filled, action-filled drama, but it was played on a stage that was almost completely bare. There was noth­ing to get in the way of the actors; they zipped on, did what they had to do, zipped off while the next batch of actors came up, and the play flowed past the spectators in two or two and a half hours.
But as the centuries moved on, the theatre got more “realistic.” The proscenium arch was set around the stage, a curtain was put up, scenery was brought in – backdrops, chairs, tables, rugs, potted palms; everything, in short, to make the audience realize that this was a picture of real life. (The fact that the audi­ence was watching living people apparently wasn’t enough.)
Now, scenery means changes and changes mean lowering the curtain, and every curtain drop costs two or three minutes. In some of Shakespeare’s plays there are 30 to 40 changes of scenery, which would make a modern pro­duction of Hamlet, with scenery, run about seven hours.
Audiences won’t take this, so producers cut the text. All through the 19th century Shake­speare was being slaughtered to make room for scenery, until at its end, the great actor Sir Henry Irving, who used a great deal of scenery, produced a version of Hamlet that was practically a mono­logue. It preserved about one-third of the orig­inal text and that one-third was largely made up of Hamlet’s soliloquies.
Thus Hamlet was transformed from a melo­drama to a tragedy to a kind of monologue in a spotlight – largely because of changes in the theatre, as opposed to the changes in the audience.
Any lover of Shakespeare who saw Sir Henry’s amputated version of Hamlet would probably have agreed with Lamb’s pronounce­ment that Shakespeare cannot be performed. The point, of course, was that Shakespeare was not being performed – which is what hap­pens to a play when you abandon the condi­tions of the theatre in which it was born.
In recent years the study of the drama has changed from the study of the literary text to the attempt to study the produced play…

Audience Is the Key
The audience is, of course, the key, not only to live theatre, but to its full understanding. When Hamlet spoke of the art of acting as holding the mirror up to nature, he meant, quite literally, that the audience in the theatre was, in a sense, looking at a mirror image of themselves.
But the fact, I think, is somewhat more complex and deeper than Hamlet or any of the other people in the Renaissance were aware. The play adjusts itself to the audience, and when we study the original production of a play, or what happens to a play, we are really studying what has happened to the peo­ple who watch that play over the centuries. The audience shares directly with the acting because the drama turns so much on the individual man there before us – whether he be Oedipus or Hamlet.
My point is simply this: that when we brush away the years, the theatrical corrup­tion, the critical misunderstandings from a Hamlet or a Macbeth, we do not find the corpse of a Danish prince or Scots usurper, but ourselves – or a piece of us.