7. The Swan Theatre: a copy, by Aernout van Buchel, of a drawing made about 1596 by Johannes de Witt, a Dutch visitor to London

Somewhere in the backstage area, perhaps in or close to the gallery, must have been a space for the musicians who played a prominent part in many performances. No doubt then, as now, a single musician was capable of playing several instruments. Stringed instruments, plucked (such as the lute) and bowed (such as viols), were needed. Woodwind instruments included recorders (called for in Hamlet, 3.2) and the stronger, shriller hautboys (ancestors of the modern oboe); trumpets and cornetts were needed for the many flourishes and sennets (more elaborate fanfares) played especially for the comings and goings of royal characters. Sometimes musicians would play on stage: entrances for trumpeters and drummers are common in battle scenes. More often they would be heard but not seen; from behind the stage (as, perhaps, at the opening of Twelfth Night or in the concluding dance of Much Ado About Nothing), or even occasionally under it (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.3). Some actors were themselves musicians: the performers of Feste (in Twelfth Night) and Ariel (in The Tempest) must sing and, probably, accompany themselves on lute and tabor (a small drum slung around the neck). Though traditional music has survived for some of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays (such as Ophelia’s mad songs, in Hamlet), we have little music which was certainly composed for them in his own time. The principal exception is two songs for The Tempest by Robert Johnson, a fine composer who was attached to the King’s Men.

Shakespeare’s plays require few substantial properties. A ‘state’, or throne on a dais, is sometimes called for, as are tables and chairs and, occasionally, a bed, a pair of stocks (King Lear, Sc. 7/2.2), a cauldron (Macbeth, 4.1), a rose brier (I Henry VI, 2.4), and a bush (Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.3). No doubt these and other such objects were pushed on and off the stage by attendants in full view of the audience. We know that Elizabethan companies spent lavishly on costumes, and some plays require special clothes; at the beginning of 2 Henry IV, Rumour enters ‘painted full of tongues’; regal personages, and supernatural figures such as Hymen in As You Like It (5.4) and the goddesses in The Tempest (4.1), must have been distinctively costumed; presumably a bear-skin was needed for The Winter’s Tale (3.3). Probably no serious attempt was made at historical realism. The only surviving contemporary drawing of a scene from a Shakespeare play, illustrating Titus Andronicus (reproduced on the following page), shows the characters dressed in a mixture of Elizabethan and classical costumes, and this accords with the often anachronistic references to clothing in plays with a historical setting. The same drawing also illustrates the use of head-dresses, of varied weapons as properties—the guard to the left appears to be wearing a scimitar—of facial and bodily make-up for Aaron, the Moor, and of eloquent gestures. Extended passages of wordless action are not uncommon in Shakespeare. Dumb shows feature prominently in earlier Elizabethan plays, and in Shakespeare the direction ‘alarum’ or ‘alarums and excursions’ may stand for lengthy and exciting passages of arms. Even in one of Shakespeare’s latest plays, Cymbeline, important episodes are conducted in wordless mime (see, for example, 5.2-4).

Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career his company regularly performed in a private theatre, the Blackfriars, as well as at the Globe. Like other private theatres, this was an enclosed building, using artificial lighting, and so more suitable for winter performances. Private playhouses were smaller than the public ones—the Blackfriars held about 600 spectators—and admission prices were much higher—a minimum of sixpence at the Blackfriars against one penny at the Globe. Facilities at the Blackfriars must have been essentially similar to those at the Globe since some of the same plays were given at both theatres. But the sense of social occasion seems to have been different. Audiences were more elegant (though not necessarily better behaved); music featured more prominently.

8. A drawing, attributed to Henry Peacham, illustrating Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

It seems to have been under the influence of private-theatre practice that, from about 1609 onwards, performances of plays customarily marked the conventional five-act structure by a pause, graced with music, after each act. The need to trim the candles was a practical reason for introducing act breaks. Previously, though dramatists often showed awareness of five-act structure (as Shakespeare conspicuously does in Henry V, with a Chorus before each act), public performances seem to have been continuous, making the scene the main structural unit. None of the editions of Shakespeare’s plays printed in his lifetime (which do not include any written after 1609) marks either act or scene divisions. The innovation of act-pauses threw more emphasis on the act as a unit, and made it possible for dramatists to relax their observance of what has come to be known as ‘the law of re-entry’, according to which a character who had left the stage at the end of one scene would not normally make an immediate reappearance at the beginning of the next. Thus, if Shakespeare had been writing The Tempest before 1609, it is unlikely that Prospero and Ariel, having left the stage at the end of Act 4, would have instantly reappeared at the start of Act 5. We attempt to reflect this feature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy by making no special distinction between scene-breaks and act-breaks except in those later plays in which Shakespeare seems to have observed the new convention (and in Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth, since the texts of these plays apparently reflect theatre practice after they were first written, and in The Comedy of Errors, a neo-classically structured play in which the act-divisions appear to be authoritative, and to represent a private performance).

9. A reconstruction of the Blackfriars playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, opened in 2001, and regularly used for performances

Dramatic conventions changed and developed considerably during Shakespeare’s career. Throughout it, they favoured self-evident artifice over naturalism. This is apparent in Shakespeare’s dramatic language, with its soliloquies (sometimes addressed directly to the audience), its long, carefully structured speeches, its elaborate use of simile, metaphor, and rhetorical figures of speech (in prose as well as verse), its rhyme, and its patterned dialogue. It is evident in some aspects of behaviour and characterization: Oberon and Prospero have only to declare themselves invisible to become so; disguises can be instantly donned with an appearance of impenetrability, and as rapidly abandoned; some characters—Rumour at the opening of 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter’s Tale, even the Gardeners in Richard II—clearly serve a symbolic rather than a realistic function: and supernatural manifestations are common. The calculated positioning of characters on the stage may help to make a dramatic point, as in the scene in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.2) in which the disguised Julia overhears her faithless lover’s serenade to her rival, Silvia; or, more complexly, that in Troilus and Cressida (5.2) in which Troilus and Ulysses observe Diomede’s courtship of Cressida while they are themselves observed by the cynical Thersites. Not uncommonly, Shakespeare provokes his spectators into consciousness that they are watching a play, as when Cassius, in Julius Caesar, looks forward to the time when the conspirators’ ‘lofty scene’ will be ‘acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (3.1.112 -14); or, in Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus reach out from the past tense of history to the present tense of theatrical performance in a ritualistic anticipation of what their names will come to signify (3.2.169-202).