shakespearean/elizabethan acting

7/27/2019 Shakespearean/Elizabethan Acting

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Acting Shakespeare

One of two styles could have existed. Acting was either formal or natural.

Natural acting strives to create an illusion of reality by consistency on the part of the actor

who remains in character and tends to imitate the behavior of an actual human being placedin his imagined circumstances. He portrays where the formal actor symbolizes. He

impersonates where the formal actor represents. He engages in real conversation where the

formal actor recites. His acting is subjective and "imaginative" where that of the formal actor

is objective and traditional. Whether he sinks his personality in his part or shapes the part to

his personality, in either case he remains the natural actor.'

Professor Harbage then, and a succession of writers subsequently,' have endeavored to prove

that formal acting prevailed on the Elizabethan stage.

When we have sifted the various arguments presented over the years by this school of

thought, we discover these common points. Oratory and acting utilized similar techniques of

voice and gesture so that "whoever knows today exactly what was taught to the Renaissance

orator cannot be far from knowing at the same time what was done by the actor on theElizabethan stage."' Contemporary allusions which compare the orator to the actor establish

this correspondence without a doubt. This system depended upon conventional gesture, "as in

a sorrow-full pane, ye head must hange down; in a proud, ye head must be lofty." 4 By

learning these conventional gestures, the actors could readily symbolize all emotional states.

Such symbolization was necessary since the speed of Elizabethan playing left little room for

interpolated action. The result was that the actor did not so much interpret his part as recite it.

His personality did not intrude, for his attention was devoted to rendering the literary

qualities of the script. Although the emotions expressed in the play were usually violent, the

actor projected them "by declaiming his lines with the action fit for every word and

sentence." In this way he properly stressed the significant figures of speech. He played to the

audience, not to his fellow actors. The final effect, several writers have concluded, was morelike that of opera or ballet than modern drama.

Rejecting this theory of formal acting, a smaller but equally fervent group of scholars is sure

that Elizabethan acting was "natural." Denying that oratory sad acting were similar, they

maintain that style was dynamic, that an older formalism gave way to a newer naturalism.

Since Renaissance art sought to imitate life, the actors in harmony with this aim thought that

they imitated life. To grasp how their style emerged from such a view, it is necessary first to

comprehend what was the Elizabethan conception of reality. Admittedly, natural acting rhea

was different from natural acting today in some respects, yet the intention was very much the

same. "What can be said is that Elizabethan acting was thought at the time to be lifelike . . .

[which would suggest a range of acting capable of greater extremes of passion, of muchaction, which would now seem forced or grotesque, but realistic within a framework of

'reality' that coincides to a large extent with ours."

Some attempt has been made to reconcile these contradictory views. Generally tire

reconciliation has taken the line that Elizabethan acting was mixed, partly formal, partly

natural. Some have thought of the mixture as a blend: a unified style midway between tire

rigidity of formalism and the fluidity of naturalism. It has also been thought of as an

oscillation: certain scenes played in a formal manner, such as longer verse passages delivered

in a rhetorical style; other scenes, such as brief exchanges of dialogue, acted in an informal

manner. The scholars who have proposed this reconciliation, despite the fact that they arrive

at slightly different conclusions from those of the proponents of formal or natural acting,

accept the fundamental premise that Elizabethan acting can be discussed only in terms offormal or natural styles.


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Elizabethan Theatre

1. Drama Before Theatres

When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 there were no specially designedtheatre buildings in England. Companies of actors toured the country and

performed in a wide variety of temporary acting spaces, sometimes building stagesand 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 toview a performance. Acting companies were usually small and mobile. Records

suggest that an average touring company consisted of five to eight players, oftenconsisting 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 Elizabeths reign, touring companies of this kind

(using temporary acting spaces throughout the country) continued to perform

throughout Elizabeths 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 touredand 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. Thefirst permanent theatres in England were old inns which had been used as

temporary acting areas when the companies had been touring - the Cross Keys, theBull, 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 roughauditorium 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 suchbuildings. It was built in 1576 by the Earl of Leicesters Players who were led by


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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 straightsides 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 thesky, with a large yard for spectators to stand and watch the action if they could not

afford a seat. In 1599 Burbages 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 Chamberlains Company, along withWilliam Shakespeare, and the Globe is famously remembered as the theatre in

which many of Shakespeares 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 andbuilt. The theatres fell into two main types, however, the public amphitheatre

buildings (such as the Theatre, the Globe, the Curtain and the Swan) which wereopen 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

Elizabeths death - which technically puts them beyond our consideration ofElizabethan Theatre - but they were used by the boy companies (made up entirely

of child and teenage actors) in Elizabeths reign and were used by Shakespeares

Company - by this time the Kings 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 ShakespearesHenry VIIIsent 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 RoundheadParliament during the Civil War. In modern times several replica Globe Theatres


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have been built around the world, including the new Shakespeares 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 thantheir Elizabethan ancestors) - the design, building and use of the new Globe has

given much useful information about how an Elizabethan Theatre works and how itaffects 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 Globes remains (most of which areunfortunately buried under modern London buildings and cannot be examined)

have allowed the people who built the modern Globe Theatre reconstruction tomake 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 directlybehind 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 pricethan 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 - whichallows characters to be suddenly revealed by opening the curtain (as Ferdinand and

Miranda are suddenly revealed in Shakespeares 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 Juliets balcony inRomeo and Juliet), sometimes housed the theatre

musicians and was sometimes used for more audience seating. There is a trapdoorin the centre of the stage and the Elizabethans had simple machinery to allowghosts, 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 wideentrances. The original Globe had only two narrow doorways. Similarly the


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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 wereprobably 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 frequentobstructions to audience sightlines.

4. The Players

The number and type of actor involved in Elizabethan Theatre varied from oneperformance to the next, but there were invariably many more parts than actors.

The London companies with their fixed theatres tended to use many more actorsthan the touring companies we considered earlier. In a performance of

ShakespearesJulius Caesar, for example, a spectator remembered that he had

seen about fifteen actors perform the play. There are 40 named roles in Julius

Caesaralong 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 numerousroles 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 Shakespeares 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 amusedand 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 duringa performance of a play about her life (Middleton and Dekkers 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 stylisedand 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 andemotionally difficult parts as Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights wrote for


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women, and argue that references to men playing womens 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 playwomens 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 intheir 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 Middletons immenselysuccessful Jacobean playA 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 Henslowes 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 mostimportant 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 awritten 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 aplot or a brief summary of the play, scene by scene, listing the various entrancesand 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 upona 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 Admirals Men, and Richard Burbage


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who was the lead actor in Shakespeares Company (belonging at various times to

Leicester, Lord Strange, the Lord Chamberlain and finally becoming - in the

Jacobean period - the Kings Men). Alleyn was probably the most famous

Elizabethan actor, who was best known for his performances in Christopher

Marlowes plays - playing Tamburlaine a shepherd who became a mighty militaryleader and conquered vast swathes of territory, Doctor Faustus who made a pact

with the devil, and Barabas the villainous Jew in Marlowes Jew of Malta. Alleynmade 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 nowprobably better known than Edward Alleyn because of his connection with

Shakespeare and he originated most of Shakespeares famous lead roles includingRomeo, Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, Henry V, King Lear and others. It is

suggested that the contradictions in ShakespearesHamlet, 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 tosuit 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 paidactors were the boys, who were apprenticed to adult actors and whose small wage

(the Admirals Men paid one boy player three shillings a week) was paid to theirmasters. 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

Henslowes London Company received ten shillings a week, but those performing

in smaller companies or touring outside London could receive half that. The mostimportant actors in a theatre company, however, were taken on as sharers - owninga particular portion of the theatre company or its theatre building and subsequently

earning a proportion of the Companys 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).


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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 largelyanonymous 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 berecognisably 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 Elizabeths

reign began most plays were still written by people we would regard as amateursor occasional playwrights. The increasing professionalism of the acting companies,

however, meant that they increasingly needed to employ professional dramatists toprovide 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 asShakespeare, 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 greatUniversities, 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 Theatres 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 ofElizabeths reign. Elizabethan Universities studied Greek and Roman plays in the

original language, and the students sometimes performed them within the

University. During Elizabeths 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,wasRalph Roister Doister- written by Nicholas Udall, former headmaster of Eton

- in which Ralph, a character based on the Roman Dramatist Plautus stereotypicalBraggart, 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 creationof a peculiarly English dramatic genre, not based on Classical examples, the


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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 ShakespearesHenry VI(eventually a trilogy of plays) and

MarlowesEdward II. Originally English Tragedies and Comedies tended to bewritten in close imitation of Greek and Roman models and much was made of the

Classical rules of writing plays - rules which Renaissance writers took fromAristotles 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 plays 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 Comediesin a much looser and more relaxed style. Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy, for

example, a bloodthirsty tale of murder and revenge, generally ignored the Classicalrules and strongly influenced many subsequent Elizabethan plays including

Shakespeares early Titus Andronicus and his laterHamlet(it is even suspected that

Thomas Kyd may have been the author of an early Hamlet play that existed before

Shakespeares). It also became traditional for comic characters to appear in eventhe most serious of Tragedies, like the comic gravedigger in ShakespearesHamlet.

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 beingregular 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 toallow extra syllables in the line or irregular stresses and pauses. Generally speakingthe later a blank verse play was written the more natural its language sounds.

Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists often used a mixture of blank verseand 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 afterGorboduc, but some were written

in other forms, such as prose or rhyming couplets.


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6. Politics and Religion

Elizabeth began her reign in a fast changing and dangerous period for the English

nation. Elizabeths father, Henry VIII, had broken off from the Catholic Churchand established the Protestant Church of England. After the death of Henry and his

sickly son Edward the throne had passed on to Elizabeths older sister Mary, aCatholic - 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 someCatholics continued their religion secretly and otherwise supported Elizabeth,

others were openly rebellious. Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope whoencouraged 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 everyperformance - 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 toensure 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 feltnecessary - making sure that the play remained morally and politically safe and didnot trespass into religious matters or use inappropriate blasphemies. The

punishments for writers whose works were felt to be seditious or offensive couldbe 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 Jonsons The Isle of Dogs.The exact content of this play is not known, as it was ruthlessly suppressed and


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never printed, but it has been suggested that it may have been a satirical attack on

Elizabeths courtiers. After the play had been performed in 1597, the players -

Pembrokes Men - and the playwright Ben Jonson were arrested and imprisoned

while Thomas Nashe fled to Yarmouth. Nashes house was searched for papers and

Jonson was questioned and then secretly imprisoned with two informers whoencouraged 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 itssurroundings 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 ShakespearesRichard II, a performance of which

was specially commissioned by followers of the Earl of Essex, who - unknown tothe Players - were planning to stir up support in London for a rebellion against

Elizabeth the following day. The Earl, who had lost the Queens favour and beendiscredited, 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 andparticularly 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

Shakespeares Company, was called in and interrogated about the actors role in the

affair, but he maintained that they had known nothing about any seditious intentand that they had simply been encouraged to reprise an old play - so old that they

didnt expect much of an audience - and had been paid ten shillings over theordinary to perform it. The authorities treated the actors leniently and no

punishment seems to have been forthcoming. On the day before Essex was

executed Shakespeares 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 ofSirThomas More - a play which was written and then amended by a large group of

different playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare - who may have writtenscenes 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

Elizabeths 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 ofMore himself and its dangerous sympathy with rebellious poor people who


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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, forexample, the spectacular Victorian performances of Shakespeares plays (with

detailed painted backdrops and archaeologically correct costumes and stagedesigns, 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 genuinelyhistorically or culturally accurate - had a historical or foreign flavour. A famous

picture of a performance of Shakespeares 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 Turkishinfluenced, suit of armour. Many of the authentic Elizabethan garments owned by a

Theatre Company had been passed onto them, secondhand, by members of thenobility. 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, particularlyfor the boys playing female parts and with dark make-up on the face and hands foractors playing blackamoors or Turks. There were also conventions for playing

a number of roles - some of which we know from printed play scripts. Madwomen, 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 Hamlets 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 thatbecame popular in the Victorian period, but those who claim that the Elizabethans


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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 isspectacularly 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 limbswere 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 ballsbackstage or by drumming, while lightning was imitated by fireworks set off in the

heavens above the stage. ShakespearesA Winters 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 playsbecause 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 oclock

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 shadowsonto the stage). Evening performances, without daylight, were impossible. In thehall theatres, on the other hand, the stages were lit by candlelight - which forced

them to hold occasional, probably musical, breaks while the candles were trimmedand 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

MarlowesDoctor Faustus apparently cavorted around the stage with squibs, smallexploding fireworks, held in their mouths.


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8. Performance Techniques

We know very little, unfortunately, about how Elizabethan actors actually playedtheir roles. Performances probably ran continuously without any sort of interval orAct 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 inRomeo and Juliet, but some plays - such asHamlet,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 beenpassed down to us are the playwrights 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 NaturallLanguage 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 tomodern 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 inHamletabout the fact that the fool

often spoke a great deal that was not included in his script, and in the earlyElizabethan period especially it seems to have been normal for the fool to include agreat deal of improvised repartee and jokes in his performance, especially

responding to hecklers in the audience. At the end of the play the Elizabethanactors 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 Tarltonsjokes, for example, was given in response to a woman in the audience threatening


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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

Shakespeares company - William Kempe - was famous for improvisational

humour of this kind and for rejecting Shakespeares scripts in order to make his

own jests, and that his replacement Robert Armin may have been more of an actorand 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 excellentperforming 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 ofperformance 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 thestage, 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 - andwith 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 seeKing

Learthis 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 alwaysable to see at least one actors face throughout the performance and was therefore

included in the plays action and not frustrated by seeing only backs. The actorsalso 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 tobe in the front corners of the stage rather than downstage centre, or best of allupstage 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 touse 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 didnt need

to.


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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 Lords box or balconybehind 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 Lords Room cost oneshilling or twelve pence, a seat in a Gentlemans 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 patrons 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 byAndrew 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 directorsresponded to it.

Some of the other books that I used to write this lecture were:

The Development of the English Playhouse by Richard Leacroft.

Shakespeares Stage by A.M. Nagler.

Shakespeares Englandedited by Sidney Lee (Vol. 2 has chapters on Actors and

Playhouses)

The Design of the Globe by the Bankside Globe Project.This Wooden Oby Barry Day.

Rebuilding Shakespeares Globe by Andrew Gurr.

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 Shakespeares plays have particularly detailed and interesting notes and

introductions.

shakespearean/elizabethan acting

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