Complete Plays, The (62 page)

[
1
] An extract from the Concordia Regularis, a tenth-century appendix to the monastic "rule" of St. Benedict, describes this ceremony. "While the third respond is chanted, let the remaining three follow [one of the brethren, vested in an alb, had before this quietly taken his place at the sepulcher], and let them all, vested in copes, and bearing in their hands thuribles with incense, and stepping delicately, as those who seek something, approach the sepulcher. These things are done in imitation of the angel sitting in the monument, and the women with spices coming to anoint the body of Jesus."

[
2
] The three unities of action, place, and time are usually believed to have been formulated by Aristotle, who is supposed to have said that a tragedy should have but a single plot and that the action should be confined to a single day and a single place. As a matter of fact, Aristotle is responsible for only the first of these, and this he presented as an observation on the actual condition which prevailed in Greek tragedy rather than as a dramatic principle for all time. The other principles, which were later deduced from the general practice of the Greeks,—a practice arising from the manner in which their plays were staged,—were, together with the first, elevated by the Romans to the dignity of fixed dramatic laws.

[
3
] The following quotation from Euphues (ed. Bond, i, 289) illustrates this style: "Hee that seeketh ye depth of knowledge is as it were in a Laborinth, in which the farther he goeth, the farther he is from the end: or like the bird in the limebush which the more she striveth to get out, ye faster she sticketh in." With this cf.
Hamlet
, III, iii, 69;
I Henry IV
, II, iv, 441.

CHAPTER III

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER

In 1575 London had no theaters; that is, no building especially designed for the acting of plays. By 1600 there were at least six, among which were some so large and beautiful as to arouse the unqualified admiration of travelers from the continent. It is the purpose of this chapter to give in outline the history of this rapid development of a new type of building; to describe, as accurately as may be, the general features of these theaters; and to indicate the influence which these features exerted upon the Shakespearean drama. But before doing this it is necessary to point out the causes which made the first Elizabethan theater what it was.

The Predecessors of the Elizabethan Theater
.[
1
]—Of these, the most important was the innyard. As soon as the acting of plays ceased to be merely a local affair, as soon as there were companies of actors which traveled from town to town, it became necessary to find some place for the public presentation of plays other than the pageants of the guilds or the temporary scaffolds sometimes erected for miracle plays. Such a place was offered by the courtyard of an inn. The larger inns of  this period were, for the most part, built in the form of a quadrangle surrounding an open court. Opening directly off this court were the stables, the kitchen, and other offices of the inn; above these were from one to three stories of bedrooms and sitting rooms, entered from galleries running all round the court. When such a courtyard was used for theatrical performances, the actors erected a platform at one end to serve as a stage; the space back of this, shut off by a curtain, they used as a dressing-room; and the part of the gallery immediately over it they employed as a second stage which could represent the walls of a city or the balcony of a house. In the courtyard the poorer class of spectators stood; in the galleries the more wealthy sat at their ease. These conditions made the innyards much better places for play acting than were the city squares, while they were given still another advantage from the actors' point of view by the fact that the easily controlled entrance gave an opportunity for charging a regular admission fee—a fee which varied with the desirability of the various parts of the house. Thus the innyards made no bad playhouses, and they continued to be used as such even after theaters were built.

They had, however, one obvious disadvantage; their long, narrow shape made a large number of the seats and a large proportion of the spaces available for standing room distinctly bad places from which to see what was happening on the stage. To remedy this defect, the builders of the theaters took a suggestion from the bull-baiting and bear-baiting rings. These rings, of which a considerable number already existed  in the outskirts of London, had been built for fights between dogs and bulls or bears, sports vastly enjoyed by the Elizabethans. The rings, like the innyards, had galleries in which spectators could sit and an open yard in which they could stand, and they possessed the added merit of being round. Very possibly these rings, like the Cornish rings used for miracle plays, originated in the stone amphitheaters built by the Romans during their occupation of Britain, buildings occasionally used, even in the sixteenth century, for the performance of plays. It is hardly necessary, nevertheless, to look farther than the bear ring to find the cause which determined the shape of the Elizabethan public theater.

The History of the Public Theaters
.—With such models, then, James Burbage—the father of Richard Burbage, later the great actor manager of Shakespeare's company—built the first London theater in 1576. It was erected not far outside the northern walls of the city, and was called simply the Theater. Not far away, a second theater, the Curtain, was soon put up, so called not from any curtain on the stage, but from the name of the estate on which it was built. The next theater, the Rose, was situated in another quarter, on the Surrey side of the Thames, where the bear-baiting rings were. This was constructed, probably in 1587, by Philip Henslowe, a prominent theatrical manager. Some time after 1594, a second theater, the Swan, was put up in this same region, commonly called the Bankside. The suitability of the Bankside as a location for theaters is still further attested by the removal thither of the Theater in the winter of 1598-1599. The owner of the land on which the Theater had originally been  built had merely leased it to Burbage—who had since died,—and, when the lease expired, he attempted to raise the rent, probably believing that the Burbage heirs were receiving large profits from the building. Being unwilling to pay this increased rent, the Burbages took down the building, and reërected it on the Bankside, this time calling it the Globe. The last to be built of the great public theaters was the Fortune, which Henslowe erected in 1600. The situation of the Fortune outside Cripplegate, although a considerable distance west of the Curtain, was, roughly, that of the earlier theaters, the northern suburbs of the city.

This list does not include all the theaters built or altered between 1576 and 1600, nor did such building stop at the latter date,—the Globe, for instance, was burnt and again rebuilt in 1613,—but the sketch is complete enough for our purposes. By the end of 1600 all the more important public theaters were open, and after that date, so far as we know, no important changes in construction were made. The next real step—which was to do away altogether with this type of theater—did not come until after the Restoration.

The Buildings
.—Before describing the buildings themselves, it is necessary to make one qualification. It is impossible to speak of the 'Elizabethan theaters' or of the 'Elizabethan stage' as if there were one type to which all theaters and stages conformed. The Fortune was undoubtedly a great improvement over the Theater, the outcome of an evolution which could be traced through the other theaters if we had the necessary documents. If the various theaters did not differ from each other as some of our modern theaters do, they  still did differ in important points. For example, while the Globe and the Curtain were round, other theaters were hexagonal or octagonal, and the Fortune was square. Likewise, there were certainly differences in size. In spite of these facts, it is, however, still possible to describe the theaters, in general terms which are sufficiently accurate for our present purpose.

An Elizabethan theater was a three-story building of wooden or half-timber construction. The three stories formed three galleries for spectators. The first of these was raised a little above the level of the ground, while the yard, or 'pit,' in which the lower class of spectators stood, seems to have been somewhat sunken. The galleries were supported by oaken columns, often handsomely carved and ornamented. They were roofed and ceiled, but the yard was open to the weather. Although we know that the Fortune was eighty feet square outside, and that the yard within was fifty-five feet square, we are left in uncertainty about the seating capacity. From fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred is, however, the most convincing estimate. There were two boxes, or 'gentlemen's rooms,' presumably in the first balcony on either side of the stage. Besides these, there were other, cheaper boxes, and the rest of the balcony space was filled with seats. The better seats were most comfortably cushioned, and the whole theater anything but the bare rude place which people often imagine it. Coryat, a widely traveled Englishman of the period, writes of the theaters which he saw in Venice that they were "bare and beggarly in comparison of our stately playhouses in England; neither can their actors compare with us for stately apparel,  shows, or music." That this was no mere British prejudice is shown by the similar statements of foreigners traveling in England.

The most striking difference between Elizabethan and modern theaters was in the position of the stage, which was not back of a great proscenium frame, but was built out as a platform into the middle of the yard. At the Fortune, the stage was forty-three feet wide,—wider, that is, than most modern stages.[
2
] Jutting out from the level of the top gallery, and extending perhaps ten feet over the stage, was a square structure called the 'hut,' which rose above the level of the outside walls. Built out from the bottom of this, a roof, or 'shadow,' extended forward over a large part of the stage. The front of this 'shadow' was borne, in the better theaters, on two columns. The shadow and the hut, taken together, are often referred to as the 'heavens.'

The Stage
.—When we turn from these general features of the theaters to the stage, we shall find it convenient to speak of a front and a rear stage, but this does not imply any permanent line of demarcation between the two, or that they were not often used together as a single field of action. The rear stage is simply that part of the stage which could be shut off from the spectators by curtains; the other, that part which lay in front of the curtains. In other words, the front stage is that portion of the stage which was built out into the yard, for the curtains continued the line made around the rest of the house by the front  of the galleries. In both front and rear stages were traps out of which ghosts or apparitions could rise and into which such properties as the caldron in
Macbeth
could sink. From the 'heavens,' actors representing gods or spirits—as Jupiter in
Cymbeline
or Ariel in
The Tempest
—
could be lowered by means of a mechanical contrivance.

TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 4. OUTER SCENE.

Trumpets sound. Enter Alcibiades with his
Powers before Athens.

Alc
. "Sound to this Coward, and lascivious
Towne. Our terrible approach."

Sounds a parly. The Senators appeare upon the Wals.

Reproduced from
The Shakespearean Stage
, by V. E. Albright, through the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.

The arrangement of the rear stage may have differed considerably in the various theaters, but the typical form may best be described as an alcove in front of which curtains could be drawn. This alcove was by no means so small as the word may seem to imply, but must have been about half as wide as the front stage and perhaps a quarter as deep. In its rear wall was a door through which the actors could enter without being seen when the curtains were drawn, and it seems to have had side doors as well. To the right and left of it were doors for such entrances to the front stage as could not properly be made through the curtains. This part of the stage was used for such scenes as the caves in
Cymbeline
or
The Tempest
, for the tomb in
Romeo and Juliet
, and for scenes in which characters concealed themselves behind the arras, as in
I Henry IV
or
Hamlet
. Since the front stage could not be concealed from the spectators, most heavy properties were placed on the back stage, so that this part of the stage was generally used for scenes which required such properties. For many of these scenes, however, both parts of the stage were used, the actors spreading out over the front stage soon after the beginning of the scene.