Part 24 (2/2)

That certainly cannot be said of the construction and arrangereat deal has been written of late years, and as regards many details there is still much difference of opinion[10] But fortunately all that is of greatto bring it out, I will begin by ree, and not the rest of the theatre, that is of special interest here; and no serious harine Shakespeare's theatre with boxes, circles, and galleries like our own, though in the shape of a ine, of course, an area too; but there, as we shall see, an ie may be called a box with one of its sides knocked out

Through this opening, which has an ornaht sides (for we nore the bottom and the top) are coed fro the course of the play Before the play and after it the opening is blocked by a curtain, dropped from the top of the fra the perfored

In all these respects the Elizabethan arrangee came forward to about thethe house would have coincided with the line of footlights, if there had been such things The stage was therefore a platform viewed fro its sides, as well as in front of it, stood the people who paid least, the groundlings, soly derided by dra' Obviously, the sides of this platform were open; nor were there movable scenes even at the back of it; nor was there any front curtain It was overshadowed by a projecting roof; but the area, or 'yard,' where the groundlings stood, was open to the weather, and accordingly the theatre could not be darkened It will be seen that, when the actors were on the forward part of the stage, they were (to exaggerate a little) in the middle of the audience, like the performers in a circus now And on this forward naked part of the stage most of a Shakespearean drae[11]

If noe look towards the rear of this stage, what do we find? In the first place, while the back of our present-day box consists of a e was for-room, of the actors In its ere two doors, by which entrances and exits were ht represent a room, a house, a castle, the wall of a town; and the doors played their parts accordingly Again, when a person speaks 'fro-house, opens one of the doors a little, and speaks through the chink So apparently did the pro-house was the 'upper stage' or 'balcony,' which looked down on the platfore It is hardly possible to make brief statements about it that would be secure For our purposes itforward a little fro-house; and it will suffice to add that, though the whole or part of it was on some occasions, or in some theatres, occupied by spectators, the whole or part of it was sometimes used by the actors and was indispensably requisite to the performance of the play 'Enter above' or 'enter aloft' e or balcony Usually, no doubt, he reached it by a ladder or stair inside the tiring-house; but on occasions there were ascents or descents directly froe, as we see from 'climbs the tree and is received above' or 'the citizens leap from the walls' The reader of Shakespeare will at once remember many scenes where the balcony was used On it, as the city wall, appeared the Governor and citizens of Harfleur, while King Henry and his train stood before the gates below From it Arthur made his fatal leap It was Cleopatra'sAntony Juliet talked to Romeo frooeth down' to the e Richard appeared there between the two bishops; and there the spectators iined Duncan murdered in his sleep[12] But they could not look into his cha, like all Elizabethan stage curtains, on a rod

In the third place, there was, towards the back of the e, a part that could be curtained off, and so separated froe It is the matter about which there is eneral description just given would be accepted by almost all scholars and will suffice for us Here was the curtain (h which the actors peeped at the audience before the play began, and at which the groundlings hurled apples and other nify disapproval of thee' was essential to many performances, and was used in a variety of ways It was the roo; the cave of Timon or of Belarius; probably the tent in which Richmond slept before the battle of Bosworth; the cell of Prospero, who draws the curtains apart and shows Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess within; and here, I i the potion, 'falls upon her bed within the curtains'[13] Finally, the back stage accounts for those passages where, at the close of a death-scene, there is no indication that the corpse was carried off the stage If the death took place on the open stage, as it usually did, this of course was necessary, since there was no front curtain to drop; and so we usually find in the dialogue words like 'Take up the bodies' (_Ha Lear_) But Desdee; and there died also Othello and Emilia; so that Lodovico orders the bodies to be 'hid,' not carried off The curtains were drawn together, and the dead actors withdrew into the tiring-house unseen,[14]

while the living went off openly

This triple stage is the pri to re well forward into the yard, co further back a part that could be curtained off, and overlooked by an upper stage or balcony above the tiring-house Only a few further details need be h scenery was unknown, there were plenty of properties, as athered from the dramas and, er of the Rose Chairs, benches, and tables are a matter of course

Kent sat in the stocks The witches had a caldron Ien slept in a bed, and Iachimo crept out of his trunk in her rooe in a clothes-basket I have quoted the direction 'cliures in Henslowe's list, and in the _Te one in He h not likely, that the tomb of the Capulets was a property; and he mentions a 'moss-bank,' doubtless such as that where the wild thy for titania Her lover, you remember, wore an ass's head, and the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_ a buck's There hole anis' is in Henslowe's list; and in a play not by Shakespeare Jonah is cast out of the whale's belly on to the stage Besides these properties there was a contrivance with ropes and pulleys, by which a heavenly being could descend froe-roof (the 'heaven'), as in _Cyle When his speech is over we find the direction 'ascends' Soon after comes another direction: 'vanish' This is addressed not to Jupiter but to various ghosts who are present For there was a hollow space under the stage, and a trap-door into it Through this ghosts usually made their entrances and exits; and 'vanish' seeh it, too, arose and sank the witches'

caldron and the apparitions shown to Macbeth A person could speak froe, as the Ghost does when Hao and play there, as they do in the scene where Antony's soldiers hear strange ht before the battle; 'Musicke of the Hoboyes is under the Stage' the direction runs ('Hoboyes' were used also in the witch-scene just mentioned)

4

We have now to observe certain ways in which this stage with its arrangements influenced the dramas themselves; and we shall find that the majority of these influences are connected with the absence of scenery In this, to begin with, lies the h not the whole, explanation of the shortness of the performance In our Shakespeare revivals the drama is always considerably cut down; and yet, even where no excessive proiven to scenic display, the tiood deal ather froues to _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Henry VIII_), the customary time taken by the un-shortened play was about two hours And the chief reason of this great difference obviously is that the ti scenes his conal certain characters appeared Unless a placard announced the place where they were supposed to be,[15] the audience gathered this from their conversation, or in the absence of such indications asked no questions on the subject They talked for a time and went away; and at once another set appeared The intervals between the acts (if intervals there were, and however they were occupied) had no purpose connected with scene-changing, and must have been short; and the introduction and removal of a few properties would take next to no time from the performance[16] We may safely assume that not less than a hundred of the hundred and twenty iven to the play itself

The absence of scenery, however, will not wholly account for the difference in question If you take a Shakespearean play of average length and read it at about the pace usual in our revivals, you will find, I think, that you have occupied considerably more than a hundred or a hundred and twenty minutes[17] The Elizabethan actor can hardly have spoken so slowly Probably the position of the stage, and especially of the front part of it where e to hi alreat distance from any section of it, he could with safety deliver his lines much faster than an actor can now

He could speak even a 'passionate' speech 'trippingly on the tongue'

Hamlet bids him do so, warns him not to mouth, and, when the time for his speech comes, calls iin; and this is not the only passage in Elizabethan literature which suggests that good judges objected to a slow and over-emphatic delivery We have some actors not inferior in elocution, we e or Taylor, but even Mr Vezin or Mr Forbes Robertson ibly, e-box[18]

I return to the absence of scenery, which even in this e or the preference for rapid speech It explains, secondly, the great difference between Elizabethan and more modern plays in the nues somewhere about twenty: it reaches forty-two in _Antony and Cleopatra_, and sinks to nine in _Love's Labour's Lost_, the _Midsuht's Dream_, and the _Tempest_ In the fourth act of the first of these plays there are thirteen scenes, no one of thee nuht In plays written now it corresponds not unfrequently with the nuh not the only one, is, I presus, at the least, for every part of the story Such surroundingsexpensive, takes a long tily who is a dramatist and wishes to hold his audience by the play itself, it is an advantage to have as few scenes as may be

And so the absence of scenery in Shakespeare's day, and its presence in ours, result in two totally different systems, not merely of theatrical effect, but of dramatic construction

In certain ways it was clearly an advantage to a playwright to be able to produce a large nu to his pleasure, and separated by almost inappreciable intervals Nor could there be any disadvantage in this freedo for draift for it, and a determination to construct as well as he could But, as a matter of fact, many, perhaps the ether very loosely; scene follows scene in the ood deal is admitted for the sake of its immediate attraction and not because it is essential to the plot The freedoh it could not necessitate these defects, gave the widest scope for them; the majority of the audience probably was, and continued to be, well-nigh indifferent to thee proportion of the plays of Shakespeare's tie drareat merits of a strictly dramatic kind, but it is not well-built, it is not e ood play'; and if we look at it from the restricted point of view implied by that phrase we shall be inclined, I think, to believe that it would have been a better play if its author had been coements to halve the number of the scenes These rehtful dramas, indeed,--for instance, the two Parts of _Henry IV_--make little or no pretence to be well-constructed wholes; and even in those which fully deserve that title a certain amount of matter not indispensable to the plot is usually to be found In point of construction _Othello_ is the best of his tragedies, _Julius Caesar_ better than _King Lear_, and _Antony and Cleopatra_ perhaps the faultiest To say that this depends solely on the number of scenes would be ridiculous, but still it is probably significant that the nuhteen, twenty-one, and forty-two

The average Elizabethan play could not, of course, have been converted into a well-built fabric by a _mere_ reduction of the nuement of the whole material employed could have produced this result This means, however, on the other hand, that the Elizabethans, partly from the very simplicity of their theatrical conditions, were able to handle with decided, though usually imperfect, drareater, if not insuperable, to a playwright now And in Shakespeare we can trace, in this respect and in others, the advantages connected with the absence of scenery He could carry his audience freely from one country, town, house or room, to another, or from this part of a battle-field to that, because the audience iined each place and saw none I take an extre to modern editions, contains thirteen scenes, and these are the localities assigned to them: (1) a plain in Syria, (2) Rome, an ante-chamber in Caesar's house, (3) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace, (4) Athens, a room in Antony's house, (5) the same, another room, (6) Rome, Caesar's house, (7) near Actium, Antony's camp, (8) a plain near Actium, (9) another part of the plain, (10) another part of the plain, (11) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace, (12) Egypt, Caesar's ca this Act would take on our stage, where each locality must be represented Three hours perhaps, of which the perforhth But in Shakespeare's day there was no occasion for any stage-direction as to locality throughout the Act

Again, Shakespeare's ely on his ability to bring the persons belonging to the two plots on to the stage in alternate scenes of no great length until the threads are co Lear_; and there we can observe, further, how he varies the pitch of feeling and provides relief by interposing short quiet scenes between longer exciting ones By this means, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the Storm-scene on the heath, which if undivided would be intolerable, is broken into three, separated by very short duologues spoken within the Castle and in prose Again, since scene follows scene without a pause, he could make one tell on another in the way either of intensification or of contrast We catch the effect in reading, but in our theatres it is usually destroyed by the interval Finally, however many scenes an Act lued to the play throughout the Act, because there are no intervals So can our playwrights, because they have but one or two scenes in the Act But in our reproductions of Shakespeare, though the number of scenes is reduced, it can scarcely ever be reduced to that extent; so that several ti the play, we are withdrawn perforce from the dramatic atmosphere into that of everyday life, solitary i conversation, third-rate ood music half-drowned in a babble of voices

If we consider the characteristics on which I have been dwelling, and bear in mind also the rapidity of speech which we have found to be probable, we shall realise that a perforhhter in movement, than a revival now And this difference will have been observed by those who have seen Shakespeare acted by the Elizabethan Stage Society, under the direction of Mr Poel, who not only played scene after scene without intervals, but secured in a considerable degree that rapidity of speech

A e, we have seen, had no front curtain The front curtain and the use of scenery naturally cae was concerned, was dependent on the first; and as we have already glanced at some effects of the absence of the second, that of the first will require but a few additional words It was clearly in soe; for every situation at the front of the stage had to be begun and ended before the eyes of the audience In our dramas the curtain may rise on a position which the actors then had to produce byto the play; and, what isclireatly diminished and soe instead of being suddenly hidden In Elizabethan plays, accordingly, we seldoh it is not difficult to discover places where it would have been appropriate But we shall not find theedies This effect, in other words, appears properly to belong to comedy and to melodrama (if that species of play is to be considered here at all); and the Elizabethans lost nothing by their inability to edy Whether it can be artistic to end any serious scene whatever at the point of greatest tension seems doubtful, but surely it is little short of barbarous to drop the curtain on the last dying words, or, it edy the Elizabethan practice, like the Greek, was to lower the pitch of emotion from this point by a few quiet words, followed perhaps by sounds which, in intention at least, were majestic or solemn, and so to restore the audience to common life 'in caledies always close; and the end of Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_ is not _Exeunt Devils with Faustus_, but the speech beginning

Cut is the branch that ht, And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough, That soreithin this learned man

In this particular case Marlowe, if he had not been a poet, ht have dispensed with the final descent, or ascent, fro the catastrophe; but in the iedies the Elizabethans, even if they had wished to do as we too often do, were saved from the temptation by the absence of a front curtain[21]