Although the Elizabethan theater did not have scenery as we understand it, it had many ways of setting the scene. The theater manager Philip Henslowe includes in his 1598 inventory of properties “the city of Rome” (presumably for Mephistopheles' and Faustus's visit in Marlowe's Dr Faustus); another equally ambitious prop—“the cloth of the Sun and Moon”—indicates how these background scenes were presented: on painted backcloths. But backcloths like these are infrequent in Henslowe's inventory, which is more typically populated with large props: Tantalus's tree, a rainbow for Iris, several tombs (distinguished by owner: the tomb of Guido, the tomb of Dido), a great horse (possibly the Trojan horse for a play about Troy), a cauldron (for Marlowe's The Jew of Malta), a dragon (for Dr Faustus) and a hellmouth (presumably also for Faustus).
The Elizabethan stage had an overhead “heavens” (so called because it was painted with the signs of the zodiac) which housed winching machinery from which props and people could descend. Large props such as beds could be pushed in and out from a door or doors at the center back of the stage; a bed thrust forth is a common stage direction (Philip Henslowe's 1598 inventory of the props belonging to the Admiral's Men contains “1 bedstead”). A key prop tells us where we are just as much as realistic background scenery.
Small hand-held props and costumes also indicate location. A mirror and a hairbrush indicate a lady's (and sometimes a man's) chamber; a napkin from which one brushes imaginary crumbs indicates that the character has just finished dinner; spurred boots indicate a travel scene. Stage directions that require characters to enter “as from bed,” “as from hunting,” “as in prison,” “as in his study” use costumes and small props to set the scene: a nightgown implies a bed, a hawk on a wrist implies an open field; gyves imply a cell; books on a table imply a backdrop of bookcases.1 But as these examples show, one of the most important instruments of scene-setting was the actor's body. It is the actor's actions rather than the props that do the work: As it were brushing the crumbs from his clothes with a napkin, as newly risen from supper (Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, 2.1.181). It is not clear in this example whether the napkin actually exists or is governed grammatically by the hypothesis “as it were.”
Shakespeare's plays are sparse in stage directions. The usual explanation is that because he was a sharer in his company he was on hand to instruct; thus, detailed stage directions were not necessary. This may well be true. It is notable that his early plays (before he was a sharer) and his late plays (when he was in semi-retirement—did he sell his shares to buy the Gatehouse in 1610?) contain more detailed instructions, such as The Tempest's Solemne and strange Musicke: and Prosper on the top (invisible:) Enter severall strange shapes, bringing in a Banket [banquet]; and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations, and inviting the King, &c. to eate, they depart (Act 3, scene 3; we quote from the Folio, TLN 1535–8). But masques of the period are also characterized by detailed stage directions; the masque-like qualities of his late plays are perhaps indebted to this. And Elizabethan writers were generally fluid in their staging requirements. At the end of Robert Greene's Alphonsus of Aragon we find the direction: Exit Venus; or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up (ll. 2109–10). Probably something equally imaginative lies behind the many stage directions in Elizabethan drama that state simply “Exit X.”
With its large props and descending chairs, the Elizabethan stage was an intensely visual space. Chariots are a spectacular feature in both George Peele's Battle of Alcazar and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, written within a year of each other. We must not underestimate the dramatic effect of such items on a small stage. When the Rose theater on the south bank of the Thames was excavated in 1989, it turned out to have a small, lozenge-shaped stage: the stage was 37′ 6″ wide at the back, tapering to 24′ 9″ at the front, and 15′ 6″ at its deepest (subsequent Elizabethan rebuilding work moved the stage further north but did not much alter its size). When Tamburlaine in his chariot has an eighteen-line speech of ambitious visions—“still climbing after knowledge infinite, / And always moving as the restless spheres” (2.7.12–29)—he speaks the Neoplatonic language of upward movement to divinity. However, the only possible movement for his chariot on the small Rose stage is circular. The stage picture undercuts the verbal effect: we hear the language of endless ascent but what we see is a character going nowhere. Thus, props help establish the setting but, unlike a backcloth, they can also be thematically integrated into the play's meaning (see Myth 27).
It is often said jokingly that the prologue to Henry V shows Shakespeare wishing that someone would invent Hollywood film: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them” (Prologue 26; see Myth 26). The Chorus to Act 4 apologizes that “we shall much disgrace, / With four or five most vile and ragged foils, / Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous, / The name of Agincourt” (4.0.49–52). But in the theater you only apologize for your most reliable effects. Shakespeare clearly had complete confidence in his language's ability to suggest cavalries and his actors' ability to turn four or five weapons into an epic battle.
Shakespeare's plays are interested in the visual effects and scene-setting that can be created by actors' bodies, especially processions and procedures. An unusually lengthy and detailed stage direction at the opening of Titus Andronicus indicates what the stage should look like (we reproduce the direction as it appears in the quarto):
Sound Drums and Trumpets, and then enter two of Titus sonnes, and then two men bearing a Coffin covered with black, then two other sonnes, then Titus Andronicus, and then Tamora the Queene of Gothes and her two sonnes Chiron and Demetrius, [actually three sons, including Alarbus] with Aron the More, and others as many as can be, then set downe the Coffin, and Titus speakes.
The scene begins with ceremonial sounds (“Drums and Trumpets”). The processional order is precisely choreographed with a series of “then”s, a marker of temporal sequence functioning simultaneously as a spatial marker. Action is specified: “then set downe the Coffin.” Only then do we get speech. Shakespeare is very focused on the stage picture. 1 Henry VI, a few years earlier, opens with a ceremonial funeral procession interrupted by a succession of three messengers rushing onstage to deliver increasingly bad news about lost French territory. Both these examples are from opening scenes—scenes that indicate location by establishing occasion (a funeral in Henry VI, a triumph in Titus) and mood (formal in both).
This is not just true of opening scenes. Kneeling structures an entire scene in Richard II when the Duchess of York, on her knees, begs the newly crowned Henry IV to forgive her traitorous son, Aumerle; her husband, the Duke of York, also on his knees, begs Henry to punish the traitor. Both refuse to rise until Henry has granted their wish. (In fact, it is not clear that they ever do rise to their feet. Sheldon Zitner suggests we should import a stage direction from Sheridan's The Critic: Exit kneeling.2) Shakespeare does not just write speeches; he writes stage pictures. And in Titus, 1 Henry VI, and Richard II the stage pictures are created not by scenery but by actors' bodies.
Modern productions provide many examples of the spectacular visual effects that can be achieved by the actor's body. Barry Kyle's production of Two Noble Kinsmen opened Stratford's Swan Theatre in 1987. Imogen Stubbs played the Jailer's daughter and in her first mad scene she entered from rear stage right in a handstand; she walked on her hands across the long diagonal to front stage left, singing a mad song. It was not just a memorable image but one that expressed the upside-down, topsy-turvy world view of the madwoman more succinctly than any “special effect” could have done. On stage, the actor's body is a special effect. Marlowe uses actors' bodies in a similarly imaginative way in Dr Faustus when Mephistopheles transforms two of the clowns into an ape and a dog. The transformation is effected by the actors' talents at animal imitation.
But Shakespeare has another scene-setting tactic at his disposal: language. He often begins a scene with a discussion of loc
ation. (This is one of the reasons his plays transfer so well to radio.) “What country, friends, is this?” asks the shipwrecked Viola in Twelfth Night. “This is Illyria, lady,” responds the sea captain, orienting both Viola and the audience (1.2.1–2). At this stage we do not know who Viola is, nor who the captain is, nor have we been given a name for either. But we know one thing: where we are. “What sport shall we devise here in this garden / To drive away the heavy thought of care” asks the Queen in Richard II, 3.4.1. “Well, this is the forest of Ardenne” says Rosalind in As You Like It (2.4.13). The line both sets the tone (“huh” might be an accurate paraphrase; she is not yet impressed. Or perhaps the tone is one of exploratory wonder?) and sets the scene.
We see the same throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream. “Here's a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal” says Peter Quince at the start of Act 3. “This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house” (3.1.2–4). The line is not just an economic way of setting the scene but part of a play-long joke in which Shakespeare contrasts his artistry in creating scenes with the literal approach of the mechanicals. In their playlet the mechanicals can see no way to indicate that a scene takes place at night except by bringing in moonshine (quite literally: they use an actor to play the man in the moon), or that there is an impediment to the lovers meeting except by bringing in a physical wall. When the mechanicals meet to rehearse, Shakespeare extends the joke: the green plot that Quince indicates for use as a stage is actually a bare stage that he has first imagined as a green plot; the hawthorn brake that he presses into use as a tiring-house is actually a tiring-house that the audience and actors are imagining is a hawthorn brake. Even this early in his career, then, Shakespeare is showing his audiences alternatives to literal stage representation; not for him a backcloth representing “the city of Rome” or “a wood outside Athens.” The Victorian and Edwardian spectacles of directors such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree would have been his worst nightmare. Beerbohm Tree's 1900 production of Midsummer Night's Dream showed the moon rising over the Acropolis, presented an entire corps de ballet of fairies in tutus sitting on ascending mushrooms, and had live bunnies hopping across the stage. He staged the pastoral of The Winter's Tale with a woodland glade, a shepherd's cottage, and a babbling brook; his Tempest opened with a replica Elizabethan ship and a realistic storm; his Merchant of Venice recreated a Renaissance Venetian ghetto. To create further realism where Shakespeare had unaccountably omitted it, he added the staging of the Magna Carta to King John and the coronation of Anne Bullen to Henry VIII. This is Shakespeare as directed by Peter Quince.
Notes
1 Alan Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); id., Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
2 Shelden P. Zitner, “Aumerle's Conspiracy,” Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), pp. 239–57.
Myth 9
Shakespeare's tragedies are more serious than his comedies
Surely this one is a no-brainer. A story such as King Lear, in which a king is rejected by his daughters, loses his power, and descends into madness and then death must be counted more serious than one about the farcical confusions ensuing when two sets of twins converge on the same city (The Comedy of Errors) and one of them almost sleeps with the other's wife. The playwright George Bernard Shaw denounced Shakespeare's comedies as commercial “potboilers which he frankly called As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and What You Will [the alternative title for Twelfth Night].”1 According to Shaw, then, the very titles of the comedies betray their intrinsic superficiality. And it's not only Shakespeare's tragedies that are assumed to be more serious than his comedies, but the two genres themselves. The nature of tragedy is part of one of the foundational documents of Western culture—Aristotle's fourth-century BC treatise Poetics, which states that “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.” No such ur-text of comic theory exists, although Umberto Eco's medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose turns on the existence of Aristotle's lost tract on comedy, which Eco imagines as a document feared by the church because it gave philosophical backing to comedy's anti-authoritarian impulses. George Puttenham, writing a manual for would-be poets called The Arte of English Poesie (1589), evaluated the differences between comedy and tragedy in terms that collapse literary, social, and stylistic categories. According to Puttenham, comedies deal with “common behaviours … of private persons, and such as were the meaner sort of men,” whereas tragic writers “meddled not with so base matters: for they set forth the doleful falls of infortunate & afflicted Princes.”2 Comedy's “base matter” and its socially inferior protagonists compare unfavorably with the regal and “doleful” tragedy.
There is no doubt that Shakespeare's tragedies embrace weighty philosophical, personal, and political themes. Macbeth, for example, circles incessantly around issues of guilt and of manliness as it repeatedly poses questions about who or what is in charge of our actions. Is Macbeth driven by his own “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27), or by the goading encouragement of his wife, or by the “supernatural soliciting” (1.3.129) of the Weird Sisters? In dramatic form Shakespeare is presenting significant philosophical debates about agency associated elsewhere with the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes. In Julius Caesar, as in Richard II and Richard III, the question is the nature of good rule, and this insistent political issue swirls around Shakespeare's tragedies. It is not simply because they have further to fall that tragic characters are princes and emperors, but because their actions combine the public and private, and their sphere of influence is the polis rather than the household. Tragedy, wrote the Elizabethan courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, “openeth the greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” and “maketh kings fear to be tyrants and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours.”3 It's a picture of tragedy that sees it intimately involved in anatomizing court corruption, imagined as the ulcer beneath the skin or rich clothing—a role akin, perhaps, to satire. Hamlet's play “The Mousetrap” would fit Sidney's definition admirably.
We tend now to value tragedies not because they depict great men—Aristotle prescribed that a tragedy must concern “one who is highly renowned and prosperous”—but rather because they show us more universal experiences (see Myth 29). That Hamlet is a prince is downplayed in most modern productions, which often show him, as in Rory Kinnear's portrayal at the National Theatre directed by Nicholas Hytner in 2010, dressed in a studenty hoody rather than a princely doublet (see Myth 3). Rather, his appeal is as a man struggling with grief at the death of his father, and with his own place in a familial and social structure after that life-changing event. Similarly, that Lear is a king seems irrelevant compared with his role as father and as a man losing his powers as he ages: the politics of the union of the kingdoms and the parable of the dangers of national division which spoke to King James's unionist aspirations when the play was first performed have lost their edge. Again, the relationship between husband and wife in Macbeth seems important to us in psychological terms and the “barren sceptre” (3.1.63) that haunts their marriage is freighted more with emotional than political and dynastic resonance. Shakespeare's tragedies occupy particular life-stages and achieve a wider significance through the echoes of his characters' experiences, if not their social situation, in his audiences.
That Shakespeare's tragedies obviously address serious and significant themes in public and private life need not mean that his comedies are correspondingly insubstantial: Shaw's dismissal of the comedies as vacuously populist needs some modification. The later twentieth century has taught us that comedy and its physiological response, laughter, are neither neutral nor benign, but expressive of violent and dominating energies. Unacceptable, aggressive, or sexual desires are sublimated in telling jokes, Freud asserts in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Consider the wood in A Midsummer
Night's Dream to which the lovers escape from the repression of Athenian life: like the joke itself, this space offers a release which is both comic and terrifying. Performances often double the repressed Athenian rulers Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy counterparts Oberon and Titania, making the passionate dispute in the woodland world which disrupts the “mazèd world” (2.1.113) into the expressive obverse—perhaps the unconscious—of Theseus's winning his Amazonian bride “doing thee injuries” (1.1.17). Dark, dangerous desires can be rehearsed in the frightening freedom of the wood: dreams, as Hermia finds when in sleep “methought a serpent ate my heart away, / And you sat smiling at his cruel prey” (2.2.155–6), are full of what Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Nashe called “the terrors of the night”: Nashe proposes that there is “no such figure of the first chaos whereout the world was extraught [extracted] as our dreams in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded, and meet together.”4 An influential book by the Polish theater director Jan Kott described A Midsummer Night's Dream, often considered an innocent, rustic depiction of a fairy world and a play particularly suitable for children, as Shakespeare's “most truthful, brutal and violent play” in which sexual desire is violently dehumanized in the interchangeability of the lovers and the animal transformation of Bottom; Kott's vision lay behind Peter Brook's landmark production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon, which stripped the conventional rustic frou-frou from the staging and set the play on swinging trapezes in a white-painted box.5
In Shakespeare's plays we tend to be encouraged to laugh at (Dogberry's verbal mix-ups in Much Ado About Nothing, Malvolio's cross-garters in Twelfth Night), rather than with: such laughter is, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it a half-century after Shakespeare, an attack of self-satisfaction, either of pleasure in “some sudden act” of one's own, or “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof [we] suddenly applaud ourselves.”6 “Laughter,” writes Henri Bergson at the beginning of the twentieth century, “is a corrective.”7 In showing us our own aggression, comedy is a serious business, based on a complicated form of recognition and on forms of social control. Shakespeare did not, unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, leave us any theoretical writings on drama, so perhaps Jonson's own description of comedy showing “an image of the times,” showing “human follies” rather than “crimes”—“such errors as you'll all confess / By laughing at them, they deserve no less” (Every Man in His Humour, 1598)—can stand in.
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