TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the numbering restarts at [1] with each new chapter. These footnotes for the main text have been kept in the section called ‘NOTES’ at the end of the text, as in the original book. Some tables in the Appendices have footnotes, denoted by (a) (b) etc, and these have been kept at the bottom of the relevant table, as they were in the original book.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.] These are indicated by a dotted gray underline.

SHAKESPEARE AT THE GLOBE 1599–1609

Shakespeare
at the Globe

1599-1609

BERNARD BECKERMAN

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1962
New York

© Bernard Beckerman 1962

All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

First Printing

The Macmillan Company, New York
Brett-Macmillan Ltd., Galt, Ontario

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress catalog card number: 62-7159

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My debts of gratitude, which this acknowledgment can hardly hope to pay, are especially due to Professors Oscar J. Campbell, S. F. Johnson, and Dr. John Cranford Adams, President of Hofstra College. To detail the extent of Professor Campbell’s assistance would be futile. I merely count myself fortunate in having enjoyed his guidance and encouragement. From Professor Johnson this study received a careful and perceptive scrutiny, to the excellence of which I trust these pages testify. In supporting my work as Director of the Hofstra College Shakespeare Festival, Dr. Adams provided me with the opportunity not only to explore the authentic staging of Shakespeare’s plays but also to draw upon his knowledge and advice. Although my present views of Shakespearean staging differ from his, nonetheless they owe much to the initial stimulus he gave and the rigorous scholarship he exemplified. In addition, I have benefited from the indulgence of various friends and scholars. Dr. Raymond W. Short read and criticized the original draft of the [chapter on dramaturgy]. Dr. James G. McManaway and Irwin Smith offered valuable suggestions for the entire manuscript, and Mr. Smith, together with Dr. Robert De Maria, Howard Siegman, and my wife, Gloria, has assisted me in the final preparation of the book.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

From 1599 to 1608 or 1609 the Globe playhouse was the home of the Chamberlain-King’s company and the only theater where it publicly presented its plays in London. The Globe was imitated by Henslowe, the theater magnate, and lauded by Dekker, the playwright. Upon its stage Shakespeare’s major tragedies enjoyed their first performances. Located among the stews and marshes of the Bankside, it drew across the Thames its audience, men and women, gentlemen and journeymen, sightseeing foreigners and native playgoers.

Yet for us the playhouse signifies more than a physical structure for the presentation of plays. It has become the symbol of an entire art. Its construction initiated a glorious decade during which the company achieved a level of stability and a quality of productivity rarely matched in the history of the theater. So rich was the achievement that virtually all interest in the Elizabethan drama radiates from the work of these years.

Circumstances attendant on the building of the Globe playhouse were instrumental in developing the distinctiveness of this endeavor. The new playhouse itself was regarded as the last word in theaters. Alleyn and Henslowe modeled the Fortune upon it. Dekker, in a widely known paragraph from The Gull’s Hornbook, praised the wonder of it. In the design of the Globe there were significant changes from former playhouses. It was a theater built by actors for actors. To subsidize it a new financial system was instituted which more fully than heretofore interrelated theater and actors.

Furthermore, young men had recently taken over the entire enterprise, playhouse and company. Until 1597 James Burbage had maintained some connection with the Lord Chamberlain’s men. Builder and owner of the Theatre, lessor of Blackfriars, he had exercised a strong influence on the course the company took. In the midst of the uncertainty marking the negotiation for a new lease on the Theatre, James Burbage died, bequeathing to his sons and, by association, to the actors an equivocal inheritance. From his death in 1597 to the building of the Globe in 1599, the company was adrift, playing mainly at the Curtain. How much responsibility and authority the elder Burbage had relinquished to the young men before 1597 is virtually impossible to determine, but the records indicate that he played an active part in the management of theatrical affairs until the end of his life.[1] After his death the erection and success of the Globe devolved upon young, presumably enthusiastic, but not green men of the theater.

At this time Shakespeare, even then the leading playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s men, was passing into a new phase of dramatic activity. The major tragedies were soon to come from his pen. The romantic comedies, in a style which he had developed earlier, were shortly to reach their perfection in Twelfth Night. The histories were to appear no longer. None of the plays written between 1600 and 1609 was considered a history by the editors of the First Folio. Since Henry V, dated 1599, probably appeared before the completion of the Globe, Shakespeare wrote no history play for the Globe company. On the other hand, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet are the only plays, written before the opening of the Globe, which were labeled tragedies. Such categorization is somewhat artificial, but it does accentuate the fact that the settlement of the company at the Globe was followed shortly by a shift of emphasis in Shakespeare’s work.

One more significant change occurred at this time. Either a dispute with his fellows or an irrepressible wanderlust led the leading clown, Will Kempe, to break with the company. Apparently before the stage of the Globe was painted and the spectators admitted, he severed his connection with the Lord Chamberlain’s men, though he had been among the original five who had taken a moiety of the lease on the projected playhouse. After his departure, there followed a period of great stability in the acting company. In the entire decade there were only two replacements, owing to the deaths of actors, and three additions with an expansion from nine to twelve members in 1603.

This nexus of events does not necessarily prove that there was a stylistic or artistic change in 1599. Nor does it imply that little in procedure, tradition, and equipment was carried over from the Theatre and the Curtain to the Globe. But it does indicate that circumstance and planning combined to modify the character of the enterprise, to make it not merely a continuation of the past but the start of a new theatrical endeavor. As such, the opening of the Globe serves as an excellent point of departure for a special study of the company sometimes dubbed “Shakespeare’s” but in this book termed “the Globe.”

In 1608–1609 the King’s men, acquiring the private indoor theater of Blackfriars, brought the distinctive period to a close, for with the leasing of Blackfriars, according to Professor Gerald Bentley, came a change of outlook.[2] He emphasizes two major factors which led to this change. First, the audience at the private theater differed markedly from that at the public playhouse: the former audience was sophisticated and exclusive whereas the latter was rude and representative. The contrast has been fully elaborated by Alfred Harbage in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions. Secondly, the indoor theater, relatively intimate, lit by candles, required an alteration in style of acting and provided a subtler control of mood. To substantiate the theory that the King’s men faced these differences squarely, Bentley cites the employment of Jonson, skilled in writing for Blackfriars and the Children of the Queen’s Revels; the appearance of a new type of play from the leading playwright, now writing with Blackfriars in mind; and the engagement of Beaumont and Fletcher, neither of whom had previously written for this company. Altogether the events grouped around the move to Blackfriars indicate that then too a new start was made, and Bentley convincingly demonstrates that within a short time Blackfriars became the leading playhouse for the King’s men in point of prestige and profit.

Until now I have alluded rather generally to the building of the Globe in 1599 and to the acquisition of Blackfriars in 1608–1609. Since the assignment of several plays depends upon a more exact dating, there is a need to arrive at more precise limits.

Shortly after the 26th of February, 1599, construction of the Globe commenced under the supervision of Peter Streete, the man with whom Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn contracted a year later to erect the Fortune theater along the same lines. From Streete’s building schedule for the Fortune, we can estimate that the Globe took twenty-eight to thirty weeks to complete, and thus the earliest opening date would have been in late August or early September, 1599.[3]

At the Blackfriars playing by the King’s men began sometime between June 24, 1608, when the company took a lease of the premises, and the autumn of 1609, when the decline of a severe plague permitted a resumption of playing. In January, 1609, the players received a reward from His Majesty “for their private practise in the time of infeccon.” Testimony by Richard Burbage and John Heminges in 1612 indicates that playing commenced some time during the winter of 1608–1609. A temporary reduction of plague deaths in February and March, 1609, makes this the likely period during which Shakespeare and his fellows first played at Blackfriars and so terminated the Globe years.[4]

In the main the canon of Shakespeare’s plays produced between 1599 and 1609 is set. Several plays are in dispute, but on the whole, considering the nature of much of the evidence, the degree of unanimity among scholars is amazing.[5]

Of about nine of the plays sufficient external evidence exists to verify their placement between 1599 and 1608. There is general agreement that Platter is referring to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when he describes a performance on September 21, 1599. Its absence from Meres’ list places it after September 7, 1598, and Chambers dates the play 1599–1600. Twelfth Night, first mentioned in connection with a performance at the Middle Temple, February 2, 1602, is variously dated 1599 to 1601. Suggestions of an initial performance at the Middle Temple by Wilson and at Whitehall by Hotson do not affect the assignment of date and need not be discussed here.[6] Despite several attempts to force back the date of the first draft of Hamlet to 1583, the year 1601 is still the accepted date for the play as we know it. In an essay in 1944 Chambers confirmed his dating which appeared in William Shakespeare (1930). Wilson supports this date, and Gray and Kirschbaum have argued against the use of Harvey’s marginalia as evidence of an earlier date.[7]

Troilus and Cressida was written before February 7, 1603, when it is listed in the Stationers’ Register “as yt is acted by my lo: Chamblens men.” The implication is of a recent appearance, but Hotson has made an attempt to set the date back before 1598. The nub of his argument is that the enigmatic title “Love’s Labour’s Won,” which appears under Shakespeare’s name in Meres’ list, really means “Love’s Pains Are Gained,” thus fitting the subject of Troilus and Cressida.[8] This line of reasoning has yet to win support.

The upper limits of Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear are set by their performances at Court on November 1, 1604, December 26, 1604, and December 26, 1606, respectively. The lower limits are unknown, but no responsible authority has suggested dating any of these plays before 1602.[9]

The limits for Antony and Cleopatra are set at the upper end by the listing in the Stationers’ Register of May 20, 1608, and at the lower by Daniel’s corrections to his Cleopatra in the new edition of Certain Small Workes (1607). On the same day on which the entry for Antony and Cleopatra was inserted, Pericles was registered. This play, however, had been witnessed by the Venetian ambassador sometime between January 5, 1606, and November 23, 1608.[10]

Stylistic evidence or contemporary allusion serves to date four plays in this period. All’s Well That Ends Well is dated in 1602–1603 by Chambers, in 1602 by Kittredge and Harbage; all do so on stylistic evidence. Allusions to the doctrine of equivocation (II, iii, 9-13) place Macbeth in 1606, and this date is widely accepted.[11] Stylistic evidence leads most scholars to place Timon of Athens in 1607–1608, and this type of evidence, combined with allusions of a tenuous nature, leads them to assign Coriolanus to 1608.

Several plays are on the borderline at either end of the period. As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry V were “staid” from printing according to the Stationers’ Register entry of August 4, 1600. Since none of them appears in Meres’ listing in 1598, they all fall within the two-year intervening period. In dating As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing there is very little evidence for narrowing the period. The appearance of Kemp’s name in speech prefixes in Much Ado (IV, ii) places it before the opening of the Globe. O. J. Campbell points out that As You Like It must have been written after the edict against satire on July 1, 1599. These facts, together with the general consensus, lead me to include As You Like It in the 1599–1608 repertory and to exclude Much Ado.

Henry V is more narrowly limited by the allusions to Essex’s campaign in Ireland (Chorus, V, 30-34). The commencement of the campaign was on March 27, 1599, the sad conclusion on September 28, 1599. Since the Globe did not open until the end of August or early September, the weight of the evidence excludes Henry V. It also excludes Cymbeline at the end of the decade. Mentioned first by Simon Forman, who saw a performance between April 20th and 30th, 1611, the play is variously dated in 1609 or 1610. The earliest date suggested by Chambers is the spring of 1609.

One play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, remains in dispute. Despite the conflict with testimony from Meres, Hotson places the first performance of Merry Wives on April 23, 1597, when it was supposedly performed for the Knights of the Garter at Windsor. Alexander accepts this date.[12] Chambers, Kittredge, and Harbage date the play in 1600–1601, and Chambers points out the appearance of a line from Hamlet, “What is the reason that you use me thus?” (V, i, 312) in scene xiii of the bad quarto of Merry Wives (1602). On this basis and in the absence of any appropriate time when the play could have been performed before the Queen at a Garter installation, Chambers dates the play in 1600–1601. McManaway admits that many questions about the play are unanswerable at present, although he grants that there may have been revisions over a period of years beginning as early as 1597. Nevertheless, as he notes, its absence from Meres’ list still remains a bar to an early dating. Consequently, we may treat it as part of the list of new plays written for the Globe playhouse.[13]

For supplementary evidence about the staging of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe, we turn to the pieces of his less gifted colleagues who supplied the Globe company with scripts. Twelve plays are extant which we know or have reason to believe were performed only by the Chamberlain’s or King’s men between 1599 and 1609. Of these, three were written by Jonson: Every Man Out of His Humour, Sejanus, and Volpone. The first was written “in the yeere 1599” according to the 1616 Folio, and the revised epilogue refers to presentation at the Globe. Sejanus, according to Jonson, was “acted, in the yeere 1603. By the K. Maiesties Servants.” Volpone, again according to Jonson, was acted “in the yeere 1605. By the K. Maiesties Servants.”

Barnes, Wilkins, and possibly Tourneur each contributed one play to the King’s men’s repertory now extant. Barnes provided The Devil’s Charter, played before the King “by his Maiesties Servants” on February 2, 1607.[14] Wilkins supplied Miseries of Enforced Marriage. Q. 1607 contains the advertisement “As it is now played by his Maiesties Servants.” The Revenger’s Tragedy, uncertainly linked with Tourneur’s name, appeared in quarto with the inscription: “As it hath beene sundry times Acted, by the Kings Maiesties Servants.” Chambers dates the play 1606–1607.

The remaining six plays are all anonymous and all ascribe production to the Chamberlain’s or King’s men on the title pages of their quartos. A Larum for London was registered on May 27, 1600, and printed in 1602. Thomas Lord Cromwell was registered August 11, 1602, “as it was lately acted.”[15] Fair Maid of Bristow, entered in the Stationers’ Register February 8, 1605, is dated 1604 by Chambers. The London Prodigal appeared in quarto in 1605 and was probably produced in 1603–1605. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, although registered on October 22, 1607, is mentioned in T. M.’s Black Book in 1604. Chambers dates the play about 1603. Lastly, A Yorkshire Tragedy, entered May 2, 1608, may have been written a year or two earlier.[16]

The final additions to the 1599–1608 repertory consist of two plays which were presented by the Chamberlain-King’s men as well as by another company. The first, Dekker’s Satiromastix, presented between the production of Poetaster in the spring of 1601 and its entry in the Stationers’ Register on November 11th of that year, contains on the Q. 1602 title page the information that it had been “presented publikely by the ... Lord Chambelaine his Servants; and privately, by the Children of Paules.” Certainly this was unusual procedure and must be taken into consideration in applying the play to Globe stage conditions. The second, Marston’s The Malcontent, dated 1604, was “found” and played by the King’s men, presumably in retaliation for the theft of one of their plays by the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The title page and induction of Q. 1604 refer to additions by Marston and Webster in order to accommodate the play to an adult company. About the status of The First Part of Jeronimo, the stolen play, it is difficult to be exact. Boas dates the play after 1600.[17] Since the extant Q. 1605 may reflect the copy of the Revels’ production, Jeronimo has been cited for supplementary evidence only.

Thus, the final list of extant works first produced at the Globe playhouse between 1599 and 1609—the Globe plays—consists of fifteen Shakespearean and fourteen non-Shakespearean plays. Upon the evidence of these scripts, the bulk of this study is based.

Chapter One
THE REPERTORY

The magnificent dramas of Shakespeare that assumed flesh and motion upon the Globe stage in its golden decade shared the boards with hack plays, near cousins to the present-day soap operas and grade-B westerns. It is easy to forget that the company which produced Hamlet also presented The London Prodigal, and that the same Burbage who shook the super-flux as Lear may well have portrayed the ranting, melodramatic husband of A Yorkshire Tragedy, a model indeed of a figure tearing a passion to tatters. Masterpieces and minor pieces followed one another in rapid succession in the same playhouse, and the customs of their production were the result of a single repertory system.

Among the various contending works on Shakespearean stage production the one subject that is invariably neglected is this repertory system. And yet, an understanding of how a theatrical company goes about the business of presenting its plays is a necessary step in working out a theory of staging. Who sees the show and who pays the bill more often determine the possibilities of production than other high-minded considerations. To know what the Elizabethan repertory system was and how it operated requires the answers to certain basic questions: How many performances was a play likely to receive? In what sequence were these performances given? How long did a play remain in repertory? How long were the rehearsal periods for new plays? How many roles did an actor have to command at one time? Where were new plays first presented? In essence, all these questions can be contained in one all-embracing question: How did an acting company market its wares? for let us remember that in the Elizabethan theater we find one of the earliest examples of theater as a commercial enterprise.

The pattern of performing which I call the repertory system came into being with the appearance of the first permanent playhouses. Their erection in London was a sign that the actors had discovered the means as well as the possibility of gaining the patronage of the large city populace for long periods of time. No longer did the players have to be nomads. No longer was it necessary for a handful of sharers with their apprentices and hired men to trudge from village to village in order to find paying audiences. After 1570 the nomadic troupes that played London for short engagements matured into resident companies that toured occasionally. Though even the most illustrious of the companies continued to travel in the provinces when conditions demanded, their welfare and status were tied to the fortunes of the public playhouses. Touring was an act of desperation. That way lay poverty. Well-being depended upon permanence and permanence depended upon the effective exploitation of the potential audience.

Naturally not every Londoner was a playgoer. The average play might have been witnessed by 30,000 people over a period of a year and a half. The assumption here is that the play performed to a capacity audience, each member of which saw the play once. More likely, however, not more than 15,000 to 20,000 people saw the average play. To calculate the size of the usual theater-going populace in London is difficult. One conclusion is evident, however. Given the capacity of the public playhouse, somewhat between two and three thousand persons, the companies had to change their bills frequently if they were to attract sufficient spectators. Their practices in doing so are the bases of the repertory system.

By 1599, the year in which the Globe playhouse was constructed, these practices were well established. A five-year period of growth in the theater preceded the construction of the Globe. A decade of relative stability in theatrical affairs followed. During those years it may not have appeared to the professional players that the time was settled, for a serious plague in 1603 severely curtailed playing schedules and lively competition from the children’s companies drew customers to the private theaters after 1600. But a retrospective survey of the years from 1599 to 1609 makes it evident that the decade was one of peak prosperity for the public theaters.

From 1597 to 1602 the Lord Chamberlain’s men and the Lord Admiral’s men shared a virtual monopoly of public stage presentation. In 1597 the production of The Isle of Dogs by Pembroke’s men had aroused the ire of the Privy Council, for what offense it is not now clear. One of the authors, Nashe, fled; Ben Jonson, either as part-author or as actor, together with two other actors, was imprisoned for some months. On July 28 all plays were prohibited. Disastrous as this event was for the Pembroke’s men, it served to strengthen the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s men, for in a minute of the Privy Council, dated February 19, 1598, they alone of the men’s companies were permitted to play in London. Not until 1602 was the monopoly successfully challenged. In that year Worcester’s men received permission to perform in London, and in actuality became a party to a new tripartite monopoly. Final confirmation of their privileges came in 1603–1604 when the Stuart family, drawing the theater under its patronage, dispensed royal patents to each of them.

A fourth company to receive a patent was the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The patent is proof that the competition of the private theaters was a serious matter. For several years between 1600 and 1605 the boys and their literary foster fathers had achieved a fashionable popularity. But by 1606 the most successful of these troupes, the Children of the Queen’s Revels, seems to have forfeited the protection of Her Majesty. Whatever may have been the reasons, the children’s companies never were able to maintain the continuity of the men’s companies.

From time to time throughout the decade minor adult companies drifted into London, played several performances, and departed. An Earl of Derby’s company appeared at Court for three performances in 1600 and 1601, thereafter passing into the provinces whence they had come. Henslowe records two performances by Pembroke’s men on October 28-30, 1600. No further word is heard of them. One performance at Court, on January 6, 1603, is noted for Hertford’s men, otherwise a provincial company. But no professional group successfully challenged the supremacy of these three leading companies which, in the course of the decade, became entrenched in their grand playhouses: the Chamberlain-King’s men at the Globe, the Admiral-Prince’s men at the Fortune in 1600, and the Worcester-Queen’s men at the Red Bull about 1605.

Concerning two of these companies, the Lord Admiral’s and Worcester’s, there is substantial evidence of the ways in which they functioned. The evidence appears in the diary of Philip Henslowe, wherein he noted dealings with both companies. The bulk of the records pertains to the Admiral’s company, for which we have performance lists from 1592 to 1597 and debit accounts from 1597 to 1603. Records of Worcester’s men appear for a shorter time in Henslowe’s Diary, but the material, debit accounts from 1602–1603, reveals that both companies operated in essentially the same ways.

For the third of these companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s men, no similar body of evidence exists. The law cases involving Heminges with Witter and Thomasina Ostler reveal the presence of a unique financial arrangement in this company, yet one which continued alongside the traditional theatrical organization. Like the other public companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s men were organized into a partnership of sharers who managed and maintained the group. As sharers they purchased plays, bought costumes, hired actors, tiremen, and bookkeepers, paid licensing fees, rented a theater, shared profits and expenses, and carried on the manifold duties of a theatrical enterprise. The novelty of the arrangement was that the company rented the theater from some of its own members. Richard Burbage, William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Thomas Pope, in varying proportions, owned profitable shares in the Globe playhouse. This overlapping of proprietary interests may tend to obscure the actual similarity of the Chamberlain’s theatrical organization to that of its rivals, for though the financing of the companies differed, the system of management was the same.

Evidence pertaining to actual performances by the Lord Chamberlain’s men is rare. What clues we have take the form partly of letters or notes discovered among nontheatrical documents and concerned only secondarily with the stage and partly of records of Court performances or title pages of texts that provide us with occasional information about what was appearing on the boards of the Globe. Alone, these items bear little weight. Their principal value lies in their agreement with the conditions reflected in Henslowe’s Diary, and it is to this source that we must turn to secure a picture of how plays were produced in the Elizabethan age.[1]

The theatrical periods for which Henslowe kept records cannot be considered seasons in the modern sense. During the severe plague of 1592–1594, playing all but ceased. After the abatement of the disease and a false start at Newington Butts, the Lord Admiral’s men commenced regular performances at the Rose on June 17, 1594. Playing continued without unusual interruption until the following March 14, 1595. After the Lenten season, the company recommenced playing on Easter Monday, April 21st, and played through June 26th. During the summer season the tour in the provinces was brief, for the company reopened on August 25th and again played without exceptional interruption through February 28, 1596. Performances resumed on April 12th, again after Lent, and continued through July 18, 1596. Here occurred an unusually long summer break which lasted until October 27th, during which time the company traveled in the provinces. Save for a curious suspension from November 16th through the 24th, the company played at the Rose from October 27th until February 12, 1597. A brief Lenten observance followed, and performances began again on March 3rd and continued until July 19th. The presentation of The Isle of Dogs halted general theatrical activity on July 20th,[2] and although the Rose opened on July 27th and 28th, the Privy Council order of the latter date suspended all playing until “Alhallontide next.”

In the preceding schedule we may discern a more or less regular pattern of playing. A Lenten suspension is almost invariably observed, though the duration of the observance varies. A less regular summer break, usually from mid-July to October, intervenes, the length of time depending upon the severity of the plague. Finally, during the Christmas holidays performances are given about half the days of the month. During each December from 1594 through 1596 this interruption occurs, and is presumably the result of the company’s activity at and about the Court.

The day by day program of the Lord Admiral’s men follows the same sort of irregularity, as a glance at two weeks of performances will show.

Let us choose a time from an ordinary, uneventful season. On Monday afternoon of November 10, 1595,[3] if we had crossed the Thames to the Rose on the Bankside, we should have seen Longshank, a reasonably new play. Already it had had four performances, having opened for the first time on the previous August 28th. However, we might have discovered that this was an old play newly revived, Peele’s Edward I. On Tuesday, the 11th, the company presented The Disguises, an even newer play, having opened on the previous 2nd of October. It had already been played five times and oddly enough this day’s performance, the sixth, would be its last. On Wednesday and Thursday, we could have seen the first and second parts of Tamberlaine. Both plays had been doing brisk business, Part I from the time of its revival on August 30th, 1594, and Part II, from its revival on December 19, 1594. Typical of the Elizabethan theater would be the performance of Part II of a play the day after Part I. We should have been particularly fortunate in seeing the Tamberlaines, for these performances were to be the last in this revival. On Friday, November 14th, we could have attended the premiere of A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies, which proved to be a moderately successful piece. The Seven Days of the Week, a very successful play, which had opened the previous June, would receive its fourteenth performance on Saturday, and was to continue to hold the stage until the following December 31st, totaling twenty-two performances in all. There was to be no playing on Sunday, which was usual, nor on Monday, which was unusual.

From Tuesday through Thursday, November 18th-20th, we should have seen Crack Me This Nutte, Barnardo and Fiametta, and Wonder of a Woman, all recent plays. The first had opened as a new play the previous September 5th and enjoyed some success. In 1601 it would be revived. The second play had had its premiere several weeks earlier, on October 30th, and was not as successful as the first. The third piece also had opened recently, on October 16th, and it too had excited only a moderate response. On Friday, a week after its premiere, we would have had the chance to hear A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies once again. It was to continue in the repertory for another year, with a total of nine performances, making it an average success. Finally, on Saturday, November 22nd, at the end of our two-week visit, Seleo and Olempo was on the bill, a play which had opened initially the 5th of the previous March. This performance, its eighth, would bring it near the end of its run of ten performances. On February 19, 1596, a little less than a year after its opening, the play would leave the boards, its prompt-book lost in the dust of the Rose playhouse.

Thus, in two weeks we could have seen eleven performances of ten different plays at one playhouse. On no day would we have found the theater repeating the play of the day before. Among the plays the majority, six of the ten, would have been new works, produced since the return of the company from its summer tour. Two others were carry-overs from the previous spring and two were older plays which had been revived. Nor would these plays have appeared regularly in the succeeding weeks. If we had remained in London for two additional weeks, we should have found some repetition of the plays we had already seen as well as some plays that would be new to us.

Again there would be eleven performances in two weeks.[4] Five performances would repeat works of the previous fortnight’s bill. The remaining six performances would have been divided among five plays: a new play for two performances; another play which had opened that autumn; two parts of a play from the previous spring, whose performances, like those of Tamberlaine, would have been arranged on successive days; and a play which would appear once and disappear. Altogether, in four weeks we should have been able to see fifteen different plays, only five of which would be repeated, and one of which would attain three performances. Most of the plays would be less than one season old, a few, holdovers from the previous season, and only two or possibly three could be considered “old” plays. Of the fifteen, two would have been completely new plays, and, in fact, the only play to have had three performances in four weeks would have been a recent addition to the repertoire, A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies.

The alternation of the plays was irregular. The choice of play from day to day must have followed the exigencies of the moment. Over an extended period, on the other hand, a broad pattern may be observed. A new play or revival usually opened to a good house despite the doubling of admission prices. Several days or a week later a second performance would be given, and then, depending on the enthusiasm of the audience response, the play would be repeated several times a month at first, then less frequently, the intervals between performances becoming longer and longer until the play would be presented once a month. Within a year or a year and a half, it would fade from the theater. Such was the usual course. Naturally, a popular work would continue longer and be revived more often, whereas a “flop” would leave the boards almost immediately.

In the total winter season from August 25, 1595, through February 28, 1596, of which we have considered four weeks, the company gave one hundred and fifty performances of thirty different plays. Eighty-seven performances, or 58 per cent of the total, were of the fourteen new plays produced that season. Five performances, 3.3 per cent, were of one play, The Jew of Malta, revived that season. Forty-six performances, or 30.7 per cent, were given by the eight plays from the previous season which were less than a year old, counting from December 1, 1594. Only twelve performances, 8 per cent, were of the seven plays which were more than a year old. This distribution, which is similar for all the seasons covered by Henslowe’s records, emphasizes how dependent the company was on the continuous addition of new plays to its stock in order to maintain itself in London.

The sheer volume of production is staggering. How strenuous the demands must have been upon the actors! Although we are familiar with the extensive repertory which an opera singer must command, at least it is a repertory which in large measure has assumed classical limitations. The Elizabethan actor, on the contrary, had to remember the old and learn the new at the same time. He had to retain the lines of the older plays, for not only might he wait weeks and months between performances of a particular play, but occasionally he might be asked to give a single performance of a long neglected play.[5] He also had to commit to memory an amazing number of new plays each season. In the three-year period from June 5, 1594, to July 28, 1597, a leading actor of the Lord Admiral’s company, such as Edward Alleyn or Thomas Downton, had to secure and retain command of about seventy-one different roles, of which number fifty-two or fifty-three were newly learned.

The manner in which the acting companies secured new plays has been fully discussed by Greg and Chambers[6] so that a brief summary will suffice. Sometimes the actors would buy a finished book, as evidenced by the purchase of Strange News Out of Poland for £6 on May 17, 1600. However, the more usual way of dealing with the impecunious poets who supplied them with scripts was for the Admiral’s men to approve a plot outline of a play, upon which approval they would pay the playwright or playwrights an advance. As portions of the book were received, further advances were given until the entire work was submitted and full payment, usually £6 in this period, was made. Although the names of a large number of playwrights appear in Henslowe’s records, most of the new plays performed by the Admiral’s men came from the pens of less than a dozen men.[7]

Three different types of relationships seem to have existed between actors and the playwrights. In one type Shakespeare and Heywood, actors of their companies, presumably wrote for their own fellows exclusively. In another Ben Jonson went free-wheeling in his passage from one company to another and back again. Between these extremes was a man like Dekker who generally confined his writing to the Admiral’s men, at least at this time, although he did write occasionally for other companies.

Upon receipt of the play from the author, the actors put it into production without much delay. Of the eighty-eight new plays presented during this period by the Admiral’s men, Henslowe records data on the purchase of both the book and properties for twenty-eight of them.[8] Only one, Polyphemus, shows a substantial lapse between the final payment for the script on February 27, 1599, and the purchase of “divers thinges” for production on October 5, 1599. Since the purchase of these “divers thinges” only totaled 8s., the play may very well have been produced earlier, the later entry relating to properties or costumes which were added to the production. Of the twenty-seven other plays, the time between final purchase of the manuscript and the first indication of production extends from three to fifty-one days, the average duration being a little over twenty days. That many of the payments were for costumes which had to be tailored indicates that the time lapse was even less than the records show. For example, the longest delay, fifty-one days, came between the purchase of Brute on October 22nd and the payment for “cottes of gyantes” for the same play on December 12, 1598. Probably the order for the coats had been placed considerably earlier.

Three special cases, those of Two Angry Women of Abington, Part II, and Thome Strowd, Part II, of the Admiral’s men, and A Woman Killed with Kindness of Worcester’s men, demonstrate that in some instances production was begun before the writing was completed. The book of Two Angry Women was paid for in full on February 12, 1599, although gowns had been paid for on January 31st and “divers thinges” on February 12th. Payment in full is recorded for Thome Strowd on May 5, 1601, although suits had been bought on April 27th. Lastly, Heywood received £3 as final payment on A Woman Killed with Kindness on March 6, 1603, although costumes had been paid for on February 5th and March 7th.

The entire conception of play producing reflected here is one of continuous presentation. As soon as a poet turned over his play to the actors, they would introduce it into the repertory with very little delay. There is no indication that special occasions provided the moment for unveiling a new play or that long-range planning for a season was part of the Elizabethan or Jacobean scheme. Immediate concerns, the nature of which we know too little, probably dictated the day-to-day program of the theatrical fraternity. Responsive to the vicissitudes of political, hygienic, and economic conditions, the players within their strictly traditional guild organization maintained an empirical, nontheoretical, professional attitude.

Let us turn back to the winter season of 1595–1596 to trace the introduction of new plays into the repertory. Four days after the opening of the season, on August 29th, Longshank was presented. Six days later, on September 5th, it was followed by Crack Me This Nutte, another play followed on September 17th (The New World’s Tragedy), and still another on October 2nd (The Disguises). For the rest of this season there were premieres on October 16th (Wonder of a Woman), October 30th (Barnardo and Fiametta), November 14th (A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies), November 28th (Henry V), and in 1596 on January 3rd (Chinon of England), January 16th (Pythagoras), January 23rd (Seven Days of the Week, Part II), and February 12th (Blind Beggar of Alexandria). The longest interval between the production of new plays was thirty-five days, November 28th to January 3rd, though the intervening performances numbered only twenty. The shortest interval, of six days, occurred twice, at the beginning and near the end of the season. Obviously the lack of regularity, apparent in other aspects of production, also existed in the frequency with which new plays were presented.

Nor does the study of the year-to-year pattern reflect any greater regularity. For example, in December, 1594, three new plays were presented, in December, 1595, none, in December, 1596, four. The presentation of so many new plays in the latter year was owing without doubt to the absence of any new plays in November, 1596. Consequently, though we cannot determine a fixed number, we can calculate the average number of new plays introduced into the repertory in one year.

Over the three-year period 1594–1597 the actors of the Admiral’s company had an average interval of 14.7 days or roughly two weeks between the opening of new plays. While the interval ranged from two days to fifty-seven, the mean interval was 13 days. Thus it would be accurate enough to say that the company produced a new play every two weeks during the playing season. For the years 1597–1603 we have evidence of the number of new plays produced each year but not of the number of performances given. Consequently, to correlate all the evidence it is necessary to calculate not only the average intervals between premieres of new plays but also the average number of plays produced from 1594 to 1597. The Diary reports the lists of performances continuously from June 5, 1594, to July 28, 1597, a total of three years and fifty-three days. Since 1596 was a leap year, the entire period consisted of 1,149 days during which fifty-four new plays were produced, averaging one play for every 21.3 days. Thus, about seventeen new plays were presented each year by the Lord Admiral’s men.

Chambers, describing the repertory of the Admiral’s men from 1597 to 1603, estimates that they added seventeen new plays in 1597–1598, twenty-one in 1598–1599, twenty in 1599–1600, seven in 1600–1601, fourteen in 1601–1602, and nine in 1602–1603. If we exclude the figures for 1602–1603, a season shortened by the death of Elizabeth, an average for the five years comes to 15.8 new plays each year. The unusually meager count of seven plays for 1600–1601 may reflect, as Chambers suggests, a reliance on the older repertory after Edward Alleyn’s return to the company. Or it might indicate that the company toured extensively that year.

Until now we have considered only one company. Fortunately Henslowe served as banker for Lord Worcester’s men from August 17, 1602, to March 16, 1603, a period of 212 days. During that time they commissioned twelve new plays. A simple equation based on the ratio of 12 plays to 212 days as x plays are to 365 days yields us twenty plays as the total this company would have reached if they had continued to produce new works at the same rate for the rest of the year. However, since the period covered by the accounts was the most active part of the theatrical year, it is likely that the total would have been nearer to seventeen. Furthermore, the average interval between the openings of new plays by the Worcester’s men comes to 16.6 days. Allowing for the uncertainty of the length of this particular season, calculated as it is on expense payments, not actual performances, this average is in line with the earlier figure of 14.7 days between openings. Thus two of the three important public playhouses in London each presented about seventeen new plays a year, grouping them in two seasons so that a new play was presented every fourteen or fifteen days.

The evidence for the third of these companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s men, is scanty; to determine whether or not it followed the system of the other two companies is hazardous at best. As Greg aptly noted more than half a century ago, “We know practically nothing of the internal workings of the Lord Chamberlain’s company.”[9] Yet, here and there, links between this company and the others suggest that in general all of them followed the same repertory practices.

Between June 5th and 15th, 1594, the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s men played together at Newington Butts. Henslowe’s performance list does not clarify whether they functioned as one company or two. In fact, only the excellent deduction of Greg, who followed Fleay in this, made it clear that the combination ceased after that date, for the list of subsequent performances proceeds without a break. Of the ten performances, five were of plays now generally ascribed to the Chamberlain’s men.

Fleay, extolling the virtues of the Chamberlain’s men at the expense of the Admiral’s, asserts that he has been unable to trace at any time “more than four new plays produced by [the former company] in any one year.”[10] This conclusion might stem from a recollection of a note by Malone: “It appears from Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book that the King’s company between the years 1622 and 1641 produced either at Blackfriars or the Globe at least four new plays every year.” He goes on: “ ... the King’s company usually brought out two or three new plays at the Globe every summer.”[11] Both statements indicate that no less than four plays were produced annually. A study of Herbert’s list of licenses supports them. From July, 1623, to July, 1624, licenses for thirty-five plays are recorded. Four may be discarded for our present purposes.[12] Of the remaining thirty-one, eleven were licensed for the Palsgrave’s company, seven (six new and one old) for the Prince’s men, eight (six new and two old) for the King’s men, four (three new and one old) for the Lady Elizabeth’s servants, and one for the Queen of Bohemia’s company. G. E. Bentley very persuasively accounts for the greater number of plays licensed for the Palsgrave’s men by pointing out that the fire at their playhouse, the Fortune, on December 9, 1621, deprived them of their prompt-books and that in 1623–1624 they were striving to repair the damage to their repertory.

The discrepancy between the six new plays of 1623–1624 and the estimated seventeen of 1594–1603 is not a mark of conflict in the evidence. Times had changed. The King’s men needed only a third of the new plays that they had produced in earlier years. The use of a private theater largely accounts for this change, for the seats of Blackfriars could be filled four or five times over by the audience from a single performance at the Globe. What is really significant is that the King’s men presented the same number of new plays as the Prince’s men, and that the practices of Shakespeare’s fellows were in harmony with those of other companies.

Only an idolatrous love of Shakespeare can lead us to conclude that from 1599 to 1609 the Lord Chamberlain’s men produced appreciably fewer plays than the other companies did. All were in lively competition, in which, as Platter noted, “those which play best obtain most spectators.” To maintain that the Globe company produced only four or five new plays a year, we must prove that Shakespeare’s plays were of such popularity that they could be repeated again and again while other companies had to change their bills daily. However, we have no evidence to show that this was the case. Certainly, Falstaff was a perennial favorite, but so was Barabas the Jew. A play such as Richard II was old by 1601. Twelfth Night, or Malvolio, held the stage, it seems, but so did The Spanish Tragedy, or Jeronimo. Yet Henslowe’s schedule reveals that the old war horses such as Jeronimo, The Jew of Malta, Faustus, and Tamberlaine, altogether, provided no more than 11 per cent of the performances of the Lord Admiral’s company throughout the entire recorded period and no more than 6 per cent in any one year (see Appendix A, chart ii). We should like to think that Shakespeare’s work had more commercial appeal than Marlowe’s or Kyd’s. But can we suppose that it had a popularity, let us say, five or six times greater? A sobering thought on the enigma of popularity must strike us when we realize that Pericles was, if its succession of quartos offers any evidence, more popular than Antony and Cleopatra, and that The Winter’s Tale, if Court performances are any measure, appealed to royalty more than King Lear. Furthermore, once we eliminate the plays which in all likelihood were given few performances, such as Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well and Measure for Measure, we are left with too few Shakespearean plays to sustain a theatrical company in the London of 1600. A reference to the list of Court performances between 1603 and 1642 verifies the pattern reflected in Henslowe’s records. Aside from their first appearances before James, when they presented many old stand-bys, the King’s men usually offered the latest plays to Their Majesties, and when Shakespeare died, the works of other writers rapidly superseded his at Court.[13] Like the commonalty, royalty expected to see the current “hit.”

The plays we now regard as great literary works were struck off in the harassing atmosphere of a commercial enterprise. Most of the plays were failures or temporary successes. Most of those produced by the Admiral’s men played their few, in many cases very few, performances and passed away without any further trace but the notation by a shrewd businessman. Of the one hundred and thirteen plays listed by Henslowe between 1592 and 1597, sixty-seven would certainly be unknown without the Diary and another twelve would probably be unknown (see Appendix A, chart i). However, among the thirty-four plays that would be otherwise known, only twenty-seven are extant, or about 24 per cent of the plays listed by Henslowe. By assuming that the twenty-nine extant Globe texts represent a similar percentage of the Globe repertory, we arrive at a conclusion that 116 plays were actually produced by the company between 1599 and 1609. But during these years the theater suffered closings of extraordinary duration because of the plague.[14] In addition, the Globe period is calculated from September, 1599, to March, 1609. Actual playing time, therefore, amounted to about seven and a half years. This estimate divided into the 116 new plays gives us a result of 15.6 plays as the average number of new works offered by the Globe company each year. Actually, in estimating these figures, some allowance must be made for Shakespeare’s superiority. How much, however, is virtually impossible to say. Nor is an actual figure necessary as long as we realize that the repertory systems of all three companies were fundamentally the same. In effect, the figures that we have for the Lord Admiral’s and Worcester’s men are a far safer guide to actual Globe practice than any other evidence.

As lovers of literature, we need be grieved little by the disappearance of 75 per cent of the plays, at least judging from contemporary response. Generally the plays that have come down to us were the more popular pieces. Either they were printed, or discussed, or alluded to. At the same time they were played more frequently. The seventy-nine plays which we know only through Henslowe provided 496 performances in five years. The other thirty-four played 403 performances in the same period. On an average we find the plays otherwise known to us played nearly twice as many performances as those mentioned by Henslowe.

Those pieces that attained popularity and whose stage life extended over a period of years run like strong threads through the repertory of an Elizabethan company. But between the strands there was much filler, plays which spoke their brief piece upon the platform and departed within a few months. Seven to eight performances were the average number for a play. Many did not attain even this many representations. Three out of every ten plays had no more than one or two performances. Less than one out of ten went beyond twenty performances. An extensive and actually wonderful process of winnowing out the chaff was at work. This process was the repertory system. As a result of it, the plays that could bring back an audience year after year survived to speak for the age (see Appendix A, chart ii).

The process of winnowing out the ineffectual pieces was supplemented by the custom of revivals. Periodically, plays of the recent past would be brought back to the stage for another run. Usually the pattern of performances for a revival would follow that of a new play: close-packed performances at first and a tapering off until representation ceased. The Spanish Tragedy, or as Henslowe entitles it, Jeronimo, offers a clear example of the process at work. In March, 1592, it was presented for three performances, in April, again for three performances, in May it reached its peak with five performances, and in June played twice. The hiatus in the summer and fall of 1592 interrupted the normal cycle. On resumption of playing in December, Jeronimo appeared again, was repeated twice in January for the last times. These performances were by Strange’s men. Four years later, on January 7, 1597, the Lord Admiral’s men revived it as a “new” play, indicating that it had been substantially revised. Subsequent performances followed with diminishing frequency with intervals of 4, 6, 5, 9, 10, 28,[15] 14, 21, 26, 29 days. The play was further revived in September or October of 1601, this time with additions by Jonson.

Twenty plays in Henslowe’s list show definite evidence of revival, either during the 1593–1597 period or the 1599–1601 period. Only Doctor Faustus shows continual performance from 1594 to 1597. Originally revived on October 2, 1594, it was performed from time to time by the Lord Admiral’s company which did not allow more than four months to elapse between performances. There was a later revival toward the end of 1602.

Among the nineteen remaining plays the manner of revival varied somewhat. Nine of them seem to have been altered or enlarged considerably for the revival. Usually these plays had been off the stage for several years. Fortunatus was reworked by Dekker in November, 1599, after it had lain idle for three and a half years. Jeronimo, as we saw already, had not been offered for four years when it was revived as “new” in January, 1597. Tambercame, Part II, was three and a half years old when presented as “new” on June 11, 1596. Two of the plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Phaethon, show evidence of alteration as do the rest, but specifically for Court performances. Though there is no certainty that revivals in the public playhouse occurred at the same time, it is not unlikely, as we shall discover.

One advantage of the Elizabethan method of revivals—abetted by the absence of copyright laws—was that it enabled a writer to rework his own or someone else’s work. Through how many versions, for example, did the narrative of Hamlet pass to reach its final stage? We know of three at least: the one played by the “Lord Admeralle men & Lorde Chamberlen” at Newington Butts on June 11, 1594; the one contained in the 1603 Quarto; the one announced as “newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.” The constant sifting of the repertory not only screened out hack pieces, it also provided time for the refinement of masterworks.

In instances where no proof of literary revision exists, there is evidence sometimes of theatrical revision. Four plays from four to six and a half years old were revived after 1597. The purchase of properties for them indicates that they received new productions. Of the last six of the twenty plays revived, only the cessation of playing and, after an extended lapse of time, the resumption of performances tell us that they were revived.

Revived plays, for all practical purposes, were treated as new. Instead of maintaining a play in continuous repertory over an extended period of time during which performances of the work would be given at regular intervals, the players permitted a work to fade out of the repertory for a time, to be restored later with or without changes for another cycle of performances. That this was also the method of the Lord Chamberlain’s men is attested to in a letter written by Sir Walter Cope to Sir Robert Cecil in 1604. Upon inquiring for a new play for the Queen, Sir Walter was informed by Richard Burbage that Her Majesty had seen their new plays, “but they have Revyved an olde one Cawled Loved Labore lost.”[16] Whether or not this “olde play” had been presented since its performance at Court in 1597–1598, we do not know. But its description as an old play suggests that it had lain dormant for some time before its revival in 1604.

In the same letter Sir Walter complains of difficulty in finding “players Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs” to perform for the Queen. Yet, according to the formula which appears in the Privy Council minute of February 19, 1598, the Lord Chamberlain’s men were permitted to stage plays so that “they might be the better enhabled and prepared to shew such plaies before her Majestie as they shalbe required at tymes meete and accustomed, to which ende they have bin cheefelie licensed.” Why were they not ready then? Just what was the relationship between the public players and the Court? To what extent did the players prepare their plays specifically for the nobility? More than one scholar has been tempted to demonstrate that particular plays were prepared for the Court or courtly occasions. Usually the demonstration has had to rely on allusions in a script, for external evidence indicates that such a practice was extremely rare.

For example, we can trace the career of Fortunatus with minuteness. Its first performance is recorded in Henslowe’s Diary on February 3, 1596; thereafter it runs through a normal cycle of six performances until May 26th. Between November 9th and November 30th, 1599, Dekker received £6 for rewriting the play. We may presume that it underwent a complete revision since £6 is the usual payment for a new work. On December 1st, he received an additional £1 for altering the work, and on December 12th £2 for “the eande of fortewnatus for the corte.” In addition, sometime between December 6th and 12th £10 were laid out “ffor to by thinges for ffortunatus.” The entries indicate clearly that a revival for the public playhouse had been planned, for which Dekker was commissioned to rewrite the play. The performance at Court could not have been the initial reason for the revival; otherwise the book would not have needed a new ending so soon. After the revision was completed, perhaps even before the Court performance had been spoken for, the play was publicly produced. Yet, when the company was called upon by the Queen in holiday season, it hurriedly had Dekker furbish up a graceful and complimentary conclusion for performance before the Queen on December 27, 1599.

While it is true that the plays chosen for Court performance had been proven in public, it is equally true that the plays were geared to the public. Usually with slight alteration, though occasionally with much, the essentially public play was readied for Queen Elizabeth, and later for King James and his family. The Admiral’s men paid Middleton 5s. for a prologue and epilogue for Friar Bacon “for the corte” on December 14, 1602, surely a small sum to invest in pleasing a sovereign. Of course, for the holidays of 1599–1600, the company had paid Dekker fully £2 for alterations to Phaethon for the Court. An additional pound was laid out for “divers thinges” for the Court. Yet when the play was brought out two years earlier £5 had been spent on its furnishings for public presentation.[17]

Few plays produced by the professional players received their first performances at the Court. Reference to the summary of court performances (Appendix A, chart iii) will show that, of 144 plays presented at Court between 1590 and 1642, only eight seem to have been intended especially and initially for the Court. Two were presented in 1620, five after 1629. Only one comes from the first decade of the seventeenth century.[18]

During the holiday season of 1602–1603 the Lord Admiral’s men gave three plays at Court. Presumably one of these was As Merry As May Be, for on November 9, 1602, John Day was given 40s. “in earneste of a Boocke called mery as may be for the corte” and on November 17th, Day, Smith, and Hathway were paid £6 more. What the occasion was for this extraordinary procedure we cannot now discover. The Admiral’s men were at Court on December 27, 1602, March 6, 1603, and possibly March 8th. On which of these nights As Merry As May Be was played, we do not know. Considering the practice of the Admiral’s men, it is not impossible that, despite the entry by Henslowe, the first performance of As Merry As May Be was at the Fortune.

All other plays, in one way or another, show the marks of public performance. In many instances insufficient evidence prevents us from concluding with any certainty whether or not a Court performance was initially envisioned; so many plays exist only as titles in the warrants. But where evidence appears, it supports the contention that public performance preceded Court performance. In eight cases we have the date of the licensing of a play by Sir Henry Herbert as well as the date of its first Court performance. Naturally, in each case the licensing came first. Herbert’s records give substantial support for the assumption that the plays were acted the day they were licensed.[19] For example, Malone notes against the license for July 29, 1629: “The Northern Lass, which was acted by the King’s Company on the 29th of July, 1629.” Moreover, for The Witts by Davenant we have confirmation of public performance before Court performance. Licensed on January 19, 1634, the King having rejected some of the severities of Herbert’s censoring on the 9th, Mildmay saw it acted at Blackfriars only three days later, on January 22nd. On the 28th it was given at Court.[20]

The type of theatrical presentation especially conceived and executed for a courtly audience was different in tone and character from that of the popular plays. Masques and entertainments, in their symbolic spectacles, learned allusions, and elaborate compliments delighted royalty through novelty and flattery. Interspersed with debate, music, and dance, these forms bore but a cousinly relationship to the drama. Professional writers such as Jonson, who wrote masques, had to alter their methods, for works commissioned for royal pleasure demanded that the poet practice his art with a difference. Sixty years later we find the same dichotomy occurring in the work of Molière.

Being commercial enterprises, the public theaters must have directed their energies to satisfying the customer who paid best. Some simple calculations will demonstrate that the players were dependent far more upon their public than their Court receipts. The involved estimates in determining the basis for the income of the various companies have been undertaken elsewhere and need not be repeated here. Briefly, we can adopt the results of various scholars.[21] From 1594 through 1596 the average number of playing days per year, according to Henslowe’s Diary, was 195⅔ (1594, 206; 1595, 211; 1596, 170). Consequently, about two hundred playing days a year in London may be regarded as average. Baldwin concluded that the return to the actors for a 300-performance year was £1260. On this basis the income for the minimum of 200 playing days a year would come to £840. Harbage concludes that the average daily attendance at the Rose was 1,250 persons. Since he divides the total capacity of 2,494 into 870 persons in the yard at one penny, 1,408 persons in the penny-gallery, and 216 in the two-penny gallery (at two- and three-penny admissions respectively), the average daily attendance in each section yields 436, 705, and 108 persons each by a simple proportionate equation. The average daily income would then be £9.0s.10d., the actors’ share being £7.2s.5d. Consequently, by multiplying this figure by 200 we have the average yearly income for the actors of £1,424.3s.4d. A final estimate, employing Harbage’s attendance figures of 1250 and John Cranford Adams’ arrangement of the Globe playhouse, yields an income to the actors of £8.12s.5d. daily, exclusive of the Lords’ rooms, or £1724.3s.4d. for 200 days. The Lords’ rooms brought them 37s.6d. additional each day, or £375 a year. In estimating income for the Globe company, we must remember that at least five of the sharers of the Chamberlain-King’s men were also housekeepers and derived income from the playhouse directly.

From Elizabeth, and later from James, the Chamberlain-King’s men received £873 between 1599 and 1609, of which amount £70 was for relief of the company during plague time, and £30 for reimbursement for expenses incurred during unusually lengthy travel to and from the Court. Thus the annual average for playing was £77.6s., with the court payments in the later years substantially greater than in the early ones. Grants from Elizabeth never totaled more than 5 per cent of the income the company earned at the Globe.[22] Under James the percentage rose to a high of about fifteen by 1609. The increase in Court support, evident in these figures, ultimately led the Globe company to appeal increasingly to an aristocratic audience. But throughout the decade we are considering, the actors depended on the pence of a large, heterogeneous public more than upon the bounty of their prince.

The players certainly tendered courtesy and respect to the Court, which after all was their main defense against puritanical suppression. No doubt, at the behest of the sovereign, each company eagerly fulfilled the service required of it. The players’ well-being in and about London as well as their prestige depended to a significant extent on their relationship with the prince. Yet the historical, literary, and economic evidence does not support the attempts to demonstrate that such plays as Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Twelfth Night were first presented at Court. For example, Leslie Hotson’s thesis that Twelfth Night was a tribute to the ambassador, Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, has been challenged by Frances Keen who has reexamined the documents.[23] Except for Troilus and Cressida, it is not likely that any Shakespearean play of the Globe decade was given its premiere anywhere else than at the Globe.

I have dealt with the repertory system at length because insufficient attention has been paid to it. In reconstructing the staging of any company, the character of this system cannot be ignored. For the Globe company as well as for the other companies, the staging of plays was conditioned by the irregular alternation of plays, the large number of plays that had to be ready for performance at one time, the rapidity with which new ones were added to the repertory, the probability of revivals, and the reliance upon the public playhouse for theatrical well-being. Allowance for these conditions must be made in any discussion of the play, the stage, and the actor.

Chapter Two
THE DRAMATURGY

Shakespeare’s plays of the Globe years are the highest forms of drama to result from a century of evolution. The long-fought battle between popular and private taste was to go on, finally to the defeat of popular taste in the rise of the private theaters. But in the ten years of the Globe, before the King’s men saw their theatrical future in appealing to a Blackfriars trade, the artistic possibilities of the popular narrative drama were abundantly realized.

As the poet created the play, the actors rehearsed it—or very shortly thereafter. At the Globe playhouse the intimacy between Shakespeare and his colleagues gave unparalleled opportunity for artistic collaboration. Through changes in status and physical surroundings, they maintained warm personal and professional relations. From a common creative act arose the plays that Shakespeare penned and the productions that his friends presented. The record of this partnership is contained in the extant scripts, not merely in stage directions or in dialogue, but in the very substance of the dramatist’s craft, the structure of the incidents.

To know this structure of incidents is no simple matter. Little contemporary Elizabethan theory of the dramatist’s craft exists.[1] Of the few contemporary essays on poesy which treat the drama, Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie (c. 1583), is not only the best known but also the most thorough. In measuring pre-Shakespearean drama by neoclassic standards, Sidney concludes that the early plays lack order. Yet the characteristic that Sidney so roundly condemned is the very one which, as we shall see, was so skillfully mastered by the turn of the century: the narration of an extended history covering much time and many places. By then classicism was no longer a fixed standard. This is nowhere more evident than in the words of Ben Jonson. The most classical of all the Elizabethan playwrights, with the possible exception of Chapman, Jonson contains in his remarks on the drama contradictory tendencies not fully reconciled in theory.

The chorus to Every Man Out of His Humour, a Globe play, provides the clearest expression of his views on the drama. Citing the precedent of the Greek poets, Jonson asserts, through the choral figure of Cordatus, that he does not see why the English poets should not enjoy “the same licence, or free power, to illustrate and heighten our invention as [the Greeks] did; and not bee tyed to those strict and regular formes, which the nicenesse of a few (who are nothing but forme) would thrust upon us” (Chorus, 267-270). Earlier, obliged to explain the absence of the traditional forms of classical drama, Cordatus remarks that there is no necessity to observe them. Yet, in setting the play in England, Cordatus quibbles over the nature of unity of place. He finds it acceptable for the author to have “a whole Iland to run through” but scorns those authors who, in one play, by showing “so many seas, countries, and kingdomes, past over with such admirable dexteritie ... out-run the apprehension of their auditorie” (Chorus, 279-286). Later in the play, despite his previous deprecation of classical authority, Jonson justifies the almost tragic scene of Sordido’s attempted suicide (III, ii) by resorting to the authority of Plautus (III, viii, 88 ff.). At another point he cites Cicero’s definition of comedy to demolish the citadel of romantic comedy (III, vi, 202-207). Throughout, Jonson maintains a double standard, eluding adherence to classical prescription when it suits him to do so, citing classical authority when it supports his practice, but at all times aware that mere imitation is neither possible nor desirable. For, it is significant to note, Jonson does not oppose classical form to no form at all, but “strict and regular” form to personal invention.

Dramatic theory of the Elizabethan period is particularly deceptive because the little that exists is usually classical in vocabulary and orientation. Baldwin has attempted to equate the use of classical terms with the creation of the equivalent form. He cites Jonson’s use of the critical terms epitasis and catastrophe in Every Man Out of His Humour, together with similar evidence from The New Inn, as proof that “Jonson knows and observes ‘the Law of Comedy’ as it has been laid down by the sixteenth century commentators on Terence.” The epitasis is variously defined as “the intension or exaggeration of matters” or “the most busy part of a comedy” or “the progress of the turbations ... the knot of error.”[2] However, these generalizations have little to do with the way in which a play is shaped. For that we must go back to actual models. At once we see that the terms cannot be applied to both Terence and Jonson, and yet mean the same things. The interplay between Simo and Davus in The Woman of Andros, as they attempt to outwit each other, produces a tightly drawn comedy of situation. The display of foolery which infuriates Macilente results in an ambling satirical comedy. Comparison discloses that not only in tone and content but also in function and effect the epitasis or the “busie part of the subject” differs in each case. Clearly, in no substantial way did the Elizabethans derive their dramatic forms from classical tradition.

In the absence of such a tradition and with the lack of a generally accepted alternative, the theory has persisted that Elizabethan drama lacks structural form. “The events ... are produced without any art of connection or care of disposition,” wrote Samuel Johnson of Antony and Cleopatra. Substantially the same charge has been leveled against Shakespeare’s plays in particular and Elizabethan drama in general. The art of Elizabethan drama, it is said, must be sought in the characterization, in the poetic expression, in the myth-making patterns of ideas, but not in the structure of events. In a currently fashionable form, this view is stated quite straightforwardly by M. C. Bradbrook. “The essential structure of Elizabethan drama lies not in the narrative or the characters but in the words.... [The structure] was purely poetic.”[3]

It is true that Elizabethan dramatic structure appears to be irregular in form and haphazard in progression. Conditions of presentation, described in the [previous chapter], indicate that any conscious artistic purpose must have been difficult to pursue. The speed of composition, the prevalence of collaboration, and the absence of formal standards contributed to what might be called pragmatic dramatization. However, pragmatic dramatization did not necessarily prevent the appearance of distinctive dramatic forms. In fact, the winnowing process of the repertory system was evolutionary, ensuring the development of drama in response not to abstract theory but to the deeply ingrained artistic practices of the age.

I. PREMISES FOR A STUDY OF SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMATIC FORM

In her constantly stimulating book Endeavors of Art Madeleine Doran introduces a new and provocative approach to the examination of Elizabethan dramatic structure. Adopting the thesis of Heinrich Wölfflin, expounded in his Principles of Art History, Doran extends it to apply to the literary artist. Wölfflin argues that “the art of one age differs from that of another because the artists have different modes of imaginative beholding ... [As a result], any change in representational content from one period to [another is] less important to the effect of difference than the change in style arising from difference in decorative principle” or way of beholding.[4] Thus, the intent of the art work is less evident in the subject treated than in the arrangement effected. In comparing the “modes of imaginative beholding” in Renaissance and Baroque art, Wölfflin differentiates the two styles in terms of five categories of visual opposites, one of which is diffusion of effect (multiplicity) versus concentration of effect (unity). This category is the one most relevant to a consideration of dramatic literature. By demonstrating that Renaissance art “achieves its unity by making the parts independent as free members [and by relating them through a] coordination of the accents,” Wölfflin reconciles the opposites of multiplicity and unity in a concept of “multiple unity.”[5]

In the Elizabethan age the recurrent and popular expression of this concept is found in the image of art as a “mirror.” Hamlet’s use of this image need not be quoted. Substantially it was anticipated by Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour:

Asper. Well I will scourge those apes;

And to these courteous eyes [of the audience] oppose a mirrour,

As large as is the stage, whereon we act:

Where they shall see the times deformitie

Anatomiz’d in every nerve, and sinnew,

With constant courage, and contempt of feare.

[Chorus, 117-122]

Both uses of the image reveal that the reflection is to be of the times and to be directed at the spectator. That the mirror is inherent in the thinking of the Elizabethan age not only as the purpose but as the method of poetry is expressed even more clearly in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. In objecting to the mingling of the qualities of lightheaded or “phantasticall” men with poets, which “the pride of many Gentlemen and others” insist on to the derision of poetry, Puttenham writes that the poet’s brain “being well affected, [is] not onely nothing disorderly or confused with any monstruous imaginations or conceits, but very formall, and in his much multiformitie uniforme, that is well proportioned, and so passing cleare, that by [the mind], as by a glasse or mirrour, are represented unto the soule all maner of bewtifull visions.” Later: “There be againe of these glasses that shew thinges exceeding faire and comely; others that shew figures monstruous & illfavored.”[6] Here the poet’s mind, utilizing invention and imagination, is a mirror by which the soul receives vision.

The “mirror” had two principal functions in the Elizabethan period. One was to represent experience, in short, to achieve verisimilitude. Miss Doran demonstrates that the Elizabethans did not expect particular realism but universal truths. The other was to bring together many kinds of experience. Jonson clearly means to have the mirror turn this way and that in order to reflect a multiple image of the times. Shakespeare implies that in showing “virtue her own feature, scorn her own image,” the mirror held up to nature reflects the allegorical figure Virtue, at the same time as it reflects her evil sister, Scorn. The actual practices of the plays illustrate that the poets sought to project multiple aspects of a situation—Puttenham’s multiformitie—as it were by a mirror. Consequently, they tended to give equal emphasis to the various elements of the drama, that is, to produce a coordination rather than a subordination of parts. What “coordination of parts” means in dramaturgy may be seen by contrasting the relative dominance and integration of character, plot, language, and theme in classical and Renaissance drama.

In classical and modern “realistic” construction, plot, or the structure of incidents, is dominant. It is an imitation of an action to which character and language are subordinated. Although Francis Fergusson rightly points out the difficulty of defining the word “action,” nevertheless, he makes it clear that Aristotle specifies that plot is the prime embodiment of the action.[7] In this Aristotle describes the actual practice of ancient Greek drama. The incidents embrace the total significance of a play, for if plot, the structure of incidents, imitates the action which is the soul of tragedy, it must also contain the meaning of that action. Through plot the meaning radiates into character and language. Such a pyramid of emphasis, in which certain dramatic elements are subordinated, ensures genuine unity of action. If Greek drama did not always realize such an ideal form, it aspired toward such a realization.

In Renaissance construction, however, with its independent parts and coordinated accents, unity of action is not really possible. The structure of incidents does not implicitly contain the total meaning of the play. Character and thought have degrees of autonomy. They are not subordinate but coordinate with the plot. Therefore, the plot is not the sole source of unity. Instead, unity must arise from the dynamic interaction of the various parts of the drama: story, character, and language. Our task is to discover how this was accomplished.

Two habits of composition characterized the Elizabethan dramatists. First, the poets turned to popular romance and history for the sources of their plots. Baldwin saw one of the major problems of the dramatists to be the shaping of narrative material to dramatic ends, and this he believes was accomplished through the Terentian five-act structure. Both Hardin Craig and Doran regard the romantic story as the formative influence in English drama.[8] Following Manly, Doran sees the miracle play as the main source of the romantic story and, as such, a principal forerunner of the Elizabethan drama. Secondly, in utilizing these materials, “English dramatists almost without exception adopted the sequential method of action, and all the weight of classic drama did not prevail to change their minds about it.”[9] The importance of this factor in the molding of drama is further emphasized in Miss Doran’s suggestion that the source material, or the story, “is often the chief determinant of whether or not a play is well organized.”[10] A glance at the play list of the Globe’s company reveals that with the possible exception of Every Man Out of His Humour and A Larum for London, story plays a decisive part in the flow of the drama. But so was story or fable the groundwork of ancient Greek drama. The differences arise from the ways in which the dramatists of each age treated their stories.

To begin with, the English dramatists retained a very large portion of a given story. They arranged but did not eliminate. In fact, they frequently supplied additional events. In A Larum for London we find scene after scene illustrating the awful fate that befell the people of Antwerp at the hands of the Spanish. A copious montage of horrors passes across the stage. This multiplicity of events is a prime characteristic of this drama. To the Lear story Shakespeare adds the tale of Gloucester, to that of Helena and Bertram the story of Parolles.

Having taken a bustling story as his basis, the poet had to arrange all the events in dramatic order. According to Doran he had to find “a different method from the classical in two central problems of form: how to get concentration, and how to achieve organic structure, that is, how to achieve an action causally connected from beginning to middle to end.”[11] However, Bradbrook has rightly pointed out that in Elizabethan drama “consecutive or causal succession of events is not of the first importance.” With this observation, she dismisses narrative as not being one of the first concerns of the dramatists.[12] Certainly Bradbrook is right about the absence of Aristotelian causality, as the briefest review of most Elizabethan plays will show. The events leading to Cordelia’s death are without cause unless we choose chance as the cause. It is by chance she is captured, it is by chance that Edmund confesses too late.

The issue, however, is joined incorrectly. Organic structure, in this type of drama, is not a product of “causally connected events.” Nor can the absence of such connection minimize the dependence of Elizabethan dramaturgy upon narrative progression. To appreciate this point of view, we must comprehend the difference between how we usually expect a play to be linked causally and how the Elizabethans employed dramatic causation.

I believe that I follow most critics in deriving the concept of dramatic causation from Aristotle’s admonition that “the plot ... must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” The Aristotelian plot is compressive and retrospective. Its method is to submit man to an intolerable pressure until there is a single bursting point that shatters life. A single act, invariably occurring before the play begins, initiates a series of events which, linked together in a probable and necessary sequence, produces the catastrophe, which once again casts back to the original source of momentum. Such linear intensification is promoted by the exertion of tremendous will on the part of the leading characters. Antigone’s willful piety clashes with Creon’s statism, Philoctetes’ desire for revenge and Ulysses’ desire for victory at Troy combine within Neoptolemus in a conflict between honor and duty. All incidents develop out of the wills of the characters. Incident counteracts incident. For example, before Oedipus can fully digest the charge of Tiresias, he accuses Creon of treachery. Creon responds to the charge, but before their conflict can be resolved, Jocasta tries to reconcile them, the very act of which brings Oedipus closer to the awesome truth. Focus is upon the drama mounting to the climax: the scenes leading to Oedipus’ discovery, the struggle leading to Neoptolemus’ decision, or the near disaster leading to the ultimate revelation of Ion’s origin. To sum up, a play linked causally dramatizes all the crucial causes of major actions, maintaining due balance between the force of the motive and the intensity of effect, the action mounting from cause to effect to cause, so that at any point we are aware of what circumstances led to one and only one result. Suspense is a natural corollary of such organization, and concentration of effect is its aim.

It is apparent that the Elizabethan dramatists did not address themselves to the organization of that type of sequence. Very few plays of theirs can be found where closely linked causation produces the denouement. First, the causes for significant changes are frequently assumed or implied and not dramatized. Why Lear divides his kingdom, why Cleopatra flees the battle, why Angelo repents remain unrevealed. Iago promises to show Roderigo “such a necessity in his [Claudio’s] death that you shall think yourself bound to put it on him” (IV, ii, 247-248), and later Roderigo, waiting to assail Claudio, affirms that Iago “hath given me satisfying reasons” (V, i, 9). Between the scenes some justification, unknown to us, was given Roderigo by Iago. The revelation of Lady Macbeth’s haunting nightmares actually serves as a peripeteia which, Aristotle warns, must be “subject always to our rule of probability, or necessity.” But this reversal is not the result of a succession of events leading to a necessary end, unless we regard it as having taken place off-stage. Such an end may be probable, of course, but we are given no insight into the forces that make it probable. Nor apparently did Shakespeare feel it incumbent upon him to show these forces. That we accept the sleep-walking scene is not so much because it is either inevitable or likely, but because of all things in the realm of possibility that could have befallen the woman, her nightmares so perfectly satisfy both our sense of justice and our inclination toward pity at the same time.

Secondly, the causes for significant changes, when dramatized, are not always commensurate with the effects. To make itself felt, a dramatic cause, in the Aristotelian sense, must have sufficient weight to produce the effect it does; a great cause must not produce a puny effort, nor a puny effort a great result. Yet this lack of proportion occurs often in Shakespeare. The ease with which Iago secures Desdemona’s handkerchief from Emilia, though she wonders at the purpose of his request, does not balance the awful consequences. Brutus’ and Cassius’ meager dispute over whether or not to allow Antony to speak at Caesar’s funeral is overshadowed by the fatal results. Here, as elsewhere, the perfunctoriness of the struggle between two antagonists is out of proportion to the effect that follows. The appearance of such imbalance, however, is not the result of ineptitude, but of artistic choice. Interest was not in the conflict leading to a decision, but the effect of the decision itself. The causes of action, therefore, tended to be taken for granted or conveyed with minimum emphasis; in other words, they were not regarded as being of first importance and so did not need to be dramatized with particularity. This attitude contributed largely to the looseness with which parts of a play are joined.

Causation, of course, was not completely abandoned, but it was generalized. Largely it resided in the given circumstances of the initial action, as Lear’s pride leading him to reject Cordelia or Cleopatra’s womanhood causing her to flee. For, within the Elizabethan scheme of man’s relation to his action, tightly linked causation was incomprehensible.

Nor was the alternative to causal succession, episodic structure, “a stringing together of events in mere temporal succession [where] each complication is solved as it arises.”[13] For dramatic causation of the parts, the Elizabethan substituted a rhythmic framework for the whole. The dramatization of a complete story employing many characters meant that within the scope of the narrative lay many plausible events. This gave the poet a wide choice of incidents with which to arrange his plot, the scope of the narrative imparting a limit of its own. Concurrently, the tendency for “mirroring” nature led him to choose scenes which would contrast or echo others or which would illustrate various facets of a single experience.

In such a drama the first scenes perform a vital function. They establish the premises upon which the action will be built. Little exposition is necessary, for not much has happened before the play opens. It is curious to note that almost all the principal characters are in a state of inertia at the beginning of the action. Hamlet, sorely distressed by his mother’s marriage, is not about to act. Rosalind, Cordelia, Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, Brutus, Macbeth, Timon all are uncommitted to anything but the state, happy or troubled, wherein we first see them. Usually some force, either early in the first scenes or just before them, impels the characters to act. This type of opening contributes to the impression, first, that the play is a self-contained microcosm and, second, that the first scenes are illustrations.

Antony and Cleopatra offers a model for such an opening. The comments of Demetrius and Philo provide the frame for the illustration-premise of Antony’s love for Cleopatra and his rejection of Rome. Though the messenger from Rome does propel the action forward, calling Antony to Caesar, his arrival is handled in a ritualistic manner. We might consider this demonstration of the premise as analogous to the statement of a theme in music. Just as a composer announces his musical idea, the Elizabethan dramatist illustrates his dramatic idea, proceeding from it to the variations which occupy the balance of the play.[14]

Stemming from these premises are two lines of progression, one narrative, one dramatic. The first, which is essentially concerned with what happens to the characters, follows a line of development to the very last scene. The second, which involves what the characters undergo, reaches fullness somewhere near the center of the play.

The narrative line, what happens, proceeds linearly to the finale. In Lear, this is concerned with the story of two fathers deceived by certain of their children; through deception they give these children their trust and power; they suffer at their hands; ultimately they are vindicated by their faithful children. All the plots and intrigues are part of the narrative. Not until Edgar fells Edmund are these plots unmasked.

The dramatic line, what the characters undergo, extends to heights of passion at the center of the play and then contracts. This line in Lear is concerned with how a proud man endures curbs on his nature and is reduced to humility. In the first half of the play Lear, asserting his arrogance to the fullest, passes to the limits of madness. In the second, he acquiesces to suffering, one might say, becomes detached from it. Extension and contraction is the pattern, extension of the potentialities of the premises of the action, contraction of the effects after they have reached their fulfillment.

Such parallel development of a play’s action produces contradictory impulses in the drama. On one hand there existed the impulse to complete the story, on the other there persisted the temptation to dilate upon the effect of the action upon the individuals. One reason why modern audiences suffer from “fourth act fatigue” in witnessing a Shakespearean play stems from the fact that their interest in the play is disproportionate. They have a greater interest in the dramatic line than in the narrative. For the Elizabethan audience the interest must have been more evenly balanced. For them the finale, the completion of the narrative line, had as much appeal as the “climax,” the height of the dramatic line.

II. FORM AND FUNCTION IN THE FINALES OF THE GLOBE PLAYS

We find a surprising similarity in the finales. Almost every one of the Globe plays contains a public resolution. Seldom is the conclusion private. The final scene of Every Man Out of His Humour containing the last of Macilente’s purgations is one of the exceptions, as are the conclusions of A Larum for London and in some respects of The Devil’s Charter. In the latter play a spectacular conclusion representing the damnation of Pope Alexander is appended to a grand finale. All the other eleven non-Shakespearean plays terminate in a finale that is ceremonious and public. Of the fifteen Shakespearean plays produced between 1599 and 1609 only Troilus and Cressida clearly dispenses with this type of finale. Thus, of the twenty-nine plays presented by the Globe company, twenty-five have a public accounting for the preceding action.

The importance of ending a play with a public exhibition is demonstrated by the amount of contrivance effected in some plays to ensure a grand finale. In the Fair Maid of Bristow, King Richard suddenly grants Anabell the right to produce a champion for Vallenger. By doing so, however, he permits a last, grand discovery and sacrifice scene to be played. Other examples can be found in Shakespeare’s plays. One of the objections to Measure for Measure has been the forced manner in which the Duke succeeds in bringing the conclusion to public trial. This may equally well be the charge against All’s Well. Yet, whether or not it evolves logically from the preceding action, the great closing scene is a marked formal characteristic of this drama.

Several things may happen in the finale, either separately or jointly. In romance and comedy love triumphs. Any punishment that deserves to be meted out is usually tempered. Angelo “perceives he’s safe” in Measure for Measure and Malvolio will be entreated to a peace. In tragedy justice prevails, even though the hero may die in the process. In comedy, the substance of the finale is the working out of the complications or confusions which impede love, in tragedy, the overcoming of evil forces that destroy a just order. In some instances, notably Measure for Measure, both love and justice triumph.

Common to all the Globe plays are:

(1) a means for bringing about justice or of winning love: the most frequent means are discovery of the identity of disguised persons, trial, execution, repentance, single combat, suicide;

(2) a judge-figure who pronounces judgment: he may either deliver the verdict and/or grant mercy or, after the action has occurred, declare the purport of the action; in finales of combat he may serve as the avenging arm of justice;

(3) a ranking figure who reasserts order: invariably the person of highest authority, in many plays he is identical with the judge-figure. It is a convention of Elizabethan drama that the last lines of a play, excluding epilogues and songs, be spoken by the ranking figure.

In the non-Shakespearean plays, discovery, trial and/or execution, and repentance appear most often. Fair Maid of Bristow employs both discovery and execution, The London Prodigal, discovery and repentance. Excluding Every Man Out of His Humour, all the non-Shakespearean plays have judge-figures. In the Merry Devil it is the father, in Volpone the justices, in Fair Maid of Bristow King Richard, in Miseries of Enforced Marriage, Scarborrow himself.[15]

This figure, sometimes central to the story, sometimes not, usually referees the conflict and, at the conclusion, either passes judgment or grants mercy. In two plays the formal agency for bringing judgment about is indirect. In the brilliant reversal scene in Sejanus judgment is exercised through the absent figure of the Emperor Tiberius. His letter read to the convocation of senators provides the means. In turn, his judgment illustrates the caprice of fortune and the descent of nemesis. The other play, Thomas Lord Cromwell, likewise makes use of an indirect agency as a substitute for the judge: King Henry’s delayed reprieve for Cromwell.

Each of Shakespeare’s plays, excluding Troilus and Cressida, also employs a final scene in which judgment is meted out and/or love is won. The content of the finale may be one or a combination of discovery, single combat, preparation for suicide, trial, and siege.[16] In seven of his Globe plays discovery untangles the knot of error which separated the lovers. Usually reserved for comedy, it is employed to make Othello comprehend the horror of his act. Discovery is also combined with repentance in All’s Well and with trial in Measure for Measure. In Timon the framework of the siege contains a trial.

In his use of formal agents Shakespeare is more subtle than his fellow playwrights. Only six plays contain judge-figures central to the action: the King in All’s Well, the “lords o’ the city” in Coriolanus, Alcibiades in Timon and, in an ingenious use of this device, Hymen in As You Like It, and finally the Dukes in Measure for Measure and Twelfth Night. In describing Shakespeare’s use of the Duke as a type figure, C. B. Watson points out that “at the end of a play the role of the Duke is threefold: he acts to resolve the conflict in the interests of justice; he grants mercy to the offenders; and finally he plays the host at the festivities which are presumably to follow on the successful resolution of the dramatic conflict.”[17]

Into the other eight plays Shakespeare introduced more subtle methods of passing judgment. Two of them show a common pattern. Although a judge-figure is present, the true judgment is made by the hero. Antony is the judge-figure in Julius Caesar, and Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra, but in each case the hero by committing suicide substitutes his or her own judgment for that of other authority. Both Brutus and Cleopatra prepare for self-death elaborately. It becomes a means of warding off ignominy and gaining glory. In Othello suicide serves the same purpose with only this difference, that Othello’s own strong sense of justice makes it unnecessary to have a judge-figure. The ranking figure, in each of these plays, is handled differently. In Julius Caesar, Octavius has this role, in Othello, Lodovico, and in Antony and Cleopatra, Octavius is both judge and ranking figure.

In each of three other plays, Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet, true judgment is rendered through a fateful single combat in which one combatant represents the forces of light, the other of darkness. In Merry Wives we find a double judgment. Mockery is the judgment passed on Falstaff and forgiveness that awarded Fenton and Ann. Like Othello, Pericles lacks a judge-figure during the finale. Instead, the goddess Diana (V, i) has played that role in the act of directing Pericles to the discovery of Thaisa. Thus, in both the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays the same kind of formal conclusion rounds out the story. This particular kind of conclusion reflects the moral ideals of Elizabethan society, the achievement of salvation or order or love through judgment.

Another characteristic of the concluding scene is that it is a narrative conclusion in which the initial situation is brought to a complete close rather than a thematic conclusion in which the implications of the theme are ultimately dramatized. Several elements of the narrative are introduced early in As You Like It. They are Oliver’s alienation of Orlando’s heritage, Duke Frederick’s usurpation of his brother’s throne, and the love of Rosalind and Orlando. The thematic elements are indirectly related to the plot. They make themselves felt obliquely. But they are not embodied in the main action of the finale, nor, being contrasting expressions of the quality of love rather than moral injunctions, can they be so embodied. In fact, the thematic elements are absent from the finale, which is concerned with the tying of many a lover’s knot and the appropriate resignation of Duke Frederick. The same holds true for Hamlet. The true issue, Hamlet’s inability to “set things right,” is resolved when Hamlet comes to a tranquil peace with his soul and accepts the guidance of providence in the scene with Horatio immediately preceding the duel (V, ii). However, the story has to be completed, and ironically Hamlet achieves by chance what he could not gain by design. In only a few plays do the thematic and narrative issues merge in the final moments of the action. Othello of all Shakespeare’s plays offers the finest example of this concurrence, and perhaps because of this fact many critics regard Othello as Shakespeare’s finest piece of dramatic construction. Such regard, however, is founded upon Aristotelian premises. For an Elizabethan the concurrence was incidental.

Particularly vital to our understanding of the conclusion is the place that climax or catastrophe occupies in the last scenes. The finales of Shakespeare’s Globe plays often fail to produce a climactic effect because the completion of the narrative does not arise from the conflicting forces of the theme or action. Instead ceremony frequently serves as a substitute for climax. By the time the last scene began, the Elizabethan audience knew how the story would end. But it satisfied the Elizabethan sense of ritual to see the pageant of the conclusion acted out. The appeal of this pageant is clearly illustrated in Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and As You Like It. In these plays the rendition of judgment through trial or combat or revelation respectively supplied the excitement that a dramatic climax would have afforded. Nor should we underestimate the interest such conclusions held for an Elizabethan audience. Knight, in pointing out that the tragedies reach a climax in Act III, suggests that the “military conflicts [at the end] were probably far more important to an Elizabethan” than to us.[18] But this statement has a wider applicability. Ceremony, such as Orsino’s visit to Olivia or trial-by-combat in Lear or a parley in Timon, is often the frame for the finale. Because ceremony played so vital a role in Elizabethan life, it had an unusually strong appeal for the audience who saw it represented on the stage.

III. THE NATURE AND FORM OF THE “CLIMAX” IN THE GLOBE PLAYS

The impulse to complete the story is satisfied in the finale, as we have seen. The impulse to dilate upon the story achieves maximum expansion in the center of the play. The presence of scenes of extreme complication and intense emotion at this point in the Shakespearean plays has led to the development of the theory of a third act climax. It has been expressed in various ways by various scholars. Knight merely notes this grouping of intensifications. Lawrence, anticipating Baldwin’s thesis of the five-act structure, assumes a third act climax. Baldwin would call it the imitation of the Terentian epitasis, and Moulton speaks of it as the center piece at the point of a regular arch.[19]

Certainly there is marked emotional intensification at the center of a Shakespearean play. However, if we are to call it a climax, we must redefine our term, taking care that it not be confused with the climax in classical or modern drama. There the climax is taken to be a single point of extreme intensity where the conflicting forces come to a final, irreconcilable opposition. At that point a dramatic explosion, leading to the denouement, is the direct outcome of the climactic release. Hedda Gabler has schemed to accomplish the glorious ruination of Lövborg. At the very moment when she expects to exult, she discovers that she has failed. The climax occurs when she learns that instead of controlling others, she herself is controlled. The denouement, her death, is a direct consequence. Causally-linked drama, by its very nature, drives to a “highest” point. In Greek drama it is usually a moment of recognition and/or reversal. That is why we must be cautious of speaking of a climax in Shakespearean drama.

If we endeavor to isolate such a climax in Elizabethan tragedy, we run into many difficulties. For example, is the play-within-the-play scene, the prayer scene, or the closet scene the climax of Hamlet? All contain some reversal; all are highly intense; we are emotionally swept along by them, caught up in the melodrama of Hamlet’s device, in his mad exultation at its effect upon Claudius, in the pathos of Claudius’ contrition, and in the tortured uncertainty of Gertrude. But none of these scenes alone reveals a point of climax. If there is either recognition or reversal, it arises from accumulation of effect.

A more extended example of this diffusion of climax can be found in Lear. Commencing with the famous “Blow, winds” speech, there are four painfully intense scenes: three of Lear on the heath, one of the blinding of Gloucester, interspersed by two brief scenes leading to that cruel act. The Lear and Gloucester scenes alternate. In some ways the emotional hysteria of Lear’s

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples,

drown’d the cocks!

[III, ii, 1-3]

is the most intense moment, and yet the dramatic intensification brought about by weaving together the trials of Lear and those of poor Tom has yet to occur. Moulton regards the meeting of those two as the climax.[20] But in which scene? The first outside the hovel, or the second in the shelter, where Lear arraigns his false daughters? Granville-Barker selects an exact moment for the climax, in the second of the storm scenes “when the proud old king kneels humbly and alone in his wretchedness to pray. This is the argument’s absolute height.”[21] Must, as Granville-Barker goes on to suggest, the tension relax then during the two scenes Lear plays with mad Tom? The reading of the storm scenes should make it obvious that instead of a point of intensity with subsequent slackening, we have a succession of states of intense emotional experience: Lear’s self-identification with raging nature, Lear’s pathetic lucidity and new-forged humility, Lear’s ultimate madness during a fantastic trial. Each high point subsides before the next bursts forth, not like a solitary cannon shot but like the ebb and flow of the pounding sea. The truth seems to be that we find not a climactic point in the center of a Shakespearean play, but a climactic plateau, a “coordination of intense moments” sustained for a surprisingly extended period.

Othello alone of the tragedies does not have that complete relaxation of intensity after the central “plateau.” But here it is a matter of degree, for though the wringing of Othello’s heart by Iago effects the maximum reversal of attitude, Othello continues to oscillate between doubt of and belief in Desdemona’s guilt. Thereafter, while intensity mounts to Desdemona’s death, the tone changes. Instead of the struggle of the giant to break the bonds of his strangling jealousy, we find a painful pathos arising from the gap between Othello’s misconception and Desdemona’s innocence.

Those plays in which the climactic plateau is most easily perceived, in addition to Lear and Hamlet, are Twelfth Night, III, i-iv; Troilus and Cressida, IV, iv, v; V, i;[22] Macbeth, III, iv; IV, i; and Antony and Cleopatra, III, xi-xiii. Both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus have intense centers of action in the third act. In these plays, however, the crucial scenes seem to take on the nature of a climax in the Greek sense. Antony’s speech and the banishment of Coriolanus are points of reversal. A closer examination, however, reveals that these peaks are blunted. Antony does not seem to wish to let the mob depart. There are several moments when he rouses them to action, only to pull them back for further inspiration. The climax of Coriolanus is muted even more because Coriolanus and his friends struggle with the tribunes over the same issues twice (III, i, iii). The final banishment merely brings to an end a conclusion already foregone. In each scene Coriolanus’ patrician pride causes him to defy both friend and enemy. These last two plays contract the plateau only in degree, Julius Caesar moving furthest toward a single moment of intensity. Generally in Shakespeare we will find the centers of action dispersed rather than concentrated, sustained rather than released.

As we might expect, a change in the duration and level of the climax produces a change in its nature. Lines of action leading to crisis are foreshortened, thereby throwing fuller emphasis on the response of the character, often expressed in lyrical ecstasy.

The center of intensity in Lear demonstrates this qualitative change. The impellent occasion for the storm scenes occurs in Act II, scene iv. Goneril and Regan’s determination to divest him of his royal position is brought home to Lear. He rushes into the raging storm after the words:

You think I’ll weep:

No, I’ll not weep.

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

[II, iv, 285-289]

His heart and mind have been shaken by rejection, but this is only the prelude to madness. The succeeding scenes on the heath (III, ii, iv, vi) are a prolonged reaction to the rejection. Lear does not mount steadily to another stage of madness, but reveals multiple effects of this madness: rage, bewilderment, fantasy, vengefulness, helplessness. Instead of self-realization at the climax, we find passionate release. Lear exceeds the limit of emotional endurance; he can go no further in anguish. That is the reason why he disappears from the play for the succeeding six scenes (III, vii; IV, i-v).[23] During this absence Gloucester loses his sight, the disguised Edgar comes to nurse his father, Goneril and Regan separately conspire to satisfy their passions for Edmund, and the British and French armies prepare to do battle. After the climactic plateau comes story progression.

The distinctness of this central climactic grouping is less clear in the non-Shakespearean plays, but the elements are there, if only in rudimentary form. Even where the “plateau” is not sustained, the intensification of action and the change of direction in the middle of a play are present. Perhaps the clearest and most consistent evidence of this is the split structure of many plays, that is, the progression of the story in one direction, followed by a full or partial shift of direction after the first half. A Larum for London, a not particularly well constructed play, is composed of such interlocked halves. The first half deals with the Spanish conquest of Antwerp through the improvidence and selfishness of the city’s burghers (scenes i-vii). At this climactic point the Spaniards revel in their triumph as the Duke d’Alva parcels the town among the conquering leaders. The second half concerns the hopeless, yet valiant struggle of a lame soldier to fight for the town (scenes viii-xv). This same type of division is reflected in The London Prodigal. Scenes i-viii relate the trick by which Flowerdale gains the hand of Luce; scenes ix-xii depict his descent into the depths of prodigality before he is finally redeemed. Here, however, the climactic scene (scene viii) involves more anticipation than response though there are three relatively equal heights of intensity: the father’s rejection of the daughter who remains faithful to her husband the prodigal, the daughter’s plea for her husband’s freedom from arrest, and the prodigal’s abuse of his wife. Among the other plays which display the split structure are Thomas Lord Cromwell and, in part, The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Of all the non-Shakespearean plays, Jonson’s Sejanus comes closest to duplicating Shakespeare’s use of the climactic plateau. The rise of Sejanus is steady. He encompasses the death of Drusus, he effects the destruction of his opponents, and finally he attempts the conquest of Tiberius himself by seeking permission to marry Livia of the imperial house. Blocked in this, he urges Tiberius’ departure from Rome, and in a closing soliloquy, seeing himself conqueror of those who hate him, exults:

For when they see me arbiter of all,

They must observe: or else, with Caesar fall.

[III, 621-622]

Sejanus shows excessive pride in his own power, a joyous release of self-esteem. After this speech he disappears from the play until the opening of the fifth act. Meanwhile, Tiberius secretly turns to Marco as a supplementary and independent agent, thus effecting a change of direction in the play. Just when Sejanus expects to “draw all dispatches through my private hands,” Tiberius crosses him. Jonson, following the classical models more closely than Shakespeare, has his greatest climax fall during the last scene. Nevertheless, clear traces of a “center of action” can be found.

The architectonic superiority of Shakespeare can be seen in the way he raises his entire center of action to a markedly intensified level. Potential climactic “plateaus” can be found in all the Globe plays cited, but some are underdeveloped and do not reach the rich florescence that makes the center of a Shakespearean play such an overwhelming dramatic experience. Perhaps the absence of superior poetic powers prevented the minor playwrights from realizing the full possibilities of this form. Nevertheless, despite the gap between the levels of their achievements, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights of the Globe generally built their plays along the same structural lines.

IV. STRUCTURAL PATTERNS IN THE DRAMATIC NARRATIVE

The absence of linked causation naturally meant that the action was not linear. Incidents leading to the finale or to the climactic plateau did not follow one another in a succession of tightly meshed events but in a series of alternating scenes. To illustrate, between the first expression of Maria’s scheme against Malvolio (II, iii) and the first working of the scheme (II, v) intervenes the lyrical scene between Viola and Orsino (II, iv). Such separation of parts of the story encouraged the independence of one scene from another, the very thing complained of by some scholars. Schücking suggests that Shakespeare shows “a tendency to episodic intensification,” that is, the development of a scene at the expense of the whole.[24] F. L. Lucas expresses the same idea in his introduction to the works of Webster, asserting that the Elizabethan audiences reacted to separate scenes rather than to a whole play. The tendency to which they refer can be found in the three Falstaff-Merry Wives scenes. In the first of the scenes, Falstaff, caught in his love-game, hides in the buck basket, only to be dumped into the Thames. Here we have a complete action. Falstaff makes an advance, and he is repulsed. There is no counteraction on his part. If he were in a Roman comedy, he would have plotted how to punish his offenders or how to encompass the women again, and thus the second scene would have resulted from a counteraction on the part of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. Instead Falstaff is persuaded to repeat the same adventure with similar results. The second scene is not more farcical or more extravagant than the first; it is merely different. In place of intensification we find fresh invention. The third scene again does not grow out of the preceding scene, but out of the husbands’ decision to shame the fat man publicly. All of the Falstaff-Mistress Page-Mistress Ford scenes have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They make themselves felt at the conclusion not by intensification but by accumulation.

Though in other plays of Shakespeare the scenes may be more closely joined, yet there is always a sense of their independence from one another. As I have said, Othello, of all the tragedies, is probably the most closely interwoven in plot. The deception scene (III, iii) is an example of an extended scene tying together several actions. But even in this play, we find an autonomous scene, and that near the end of the play. Half mad, playing the gruesome mockery of a visitor to a brothel, Othello questions first Emilia, then Desdemona (IV, ii). Othello arrives convinced of Desdemona’s guilt; he leaves with the same conviction. It is neither augmented nor dispelled. That the scene does not advance the action in no way detracts from its dramatic effectiveness, but it does reflect on the handling of the story. In the advancement of the classical drama, all scenes are integrated into a single line of action. In the progression of the Shakespearean play, scenes may be regarded as clustering about the story line. If this suggests an image of a grapevine, perhaps it is apt, for the scenes often appear to be hanging from a thread of narrative.

But a scene that may be semiautonomous insofar as the story line is involved may be central insofar as the climactic plateau is concerned. Such is the closet scene in Hamlet. Note how quickly Shakespeare disposes of Polonius. The murder of the old man does advance the plot, of course, for it causes Ophelia’s madness and brings Laertes back from France. But the murder is a minor part of the closet scene. Of its entire 217 lines, the action involving Polonius occupies, both at the beginning and at the end, forty lines (1-33, 211-217). Another eleven lines are occupied with Hamlet’s recollection that he must go to England (199-210). The remaining 166 lines are devoted to the relation of mother and son and the visitation of the ghost. Certainly the scene is dramatic, in fact, one of the most dramatic in all literature. Yet it does not carry the action on to a new stage, but allows Hamlet to express his disapproval and suspicion of his mother. In fact, the central portion of the scene leaves no trace on the plot. Though Gertrude is shaken by Hamlet’s accusations against his uncle and herself, there is no indication that her attitude toward Claudius changes as a result. Nor is Hamlet purged by the meeting. Neither is the decision to send Hamlet to England brought about by it, for the King had determined to send him there immediately after the nunnery scene (III, i, 175-183). The closet scene opens with Polonius’ murder and closes with a return to Hamlet’s responsibility for the act. In between Hamlet relieves his soul of the stifled passion against his mother.

Certainly a drama composed of these semiautonomous scenes loses not unity necessarily, but compression. What it foregoes in that direction it makes up for in extension. Instead of the story eliminating incidents not strictly contributing to a final climax, it serves as a point of departure. When Orestes meets his mother, his behavior must follow the demands of the plot, and Aeschylus allows him only one pitiful question to Pylades: Must he kill his mother? The Elizabethan form permits the full relationship of the mother and son to be explored. Like a mirror the scene casts an additional reflection of the image that is Hamlet. For this advantage of multiplicity of implication the Elizabethan sacrificed concentration of effect. Unable to grasp this shift in emphasis, many critics have treated the lack of concentration in Shakespearean structure as evidence that the poet did not know how to construct plays. As we saw, Dr. Johnson dismissed the construction of Antony and Cleopatra with the comment that the events “are produced without any art of connection or care of disposition.” Schücking, about a hundred and fifty years later, dismisses Shakespeare’s structural practices as primitive. The conclusion is the same though the reasons may differ. But until we can meet Elizabethan structure on its own terms, we really do not know what its failures were. When we deprecate the skill of the playwrights, let us remember that the University Wits, men trained in the Terentian, Plautine, and Senecan manner, were the ones who developed the popular Elizabethan mode. The fate that awaited them if they did not adhere to it is keenly illustrated by Kyd’s failure as a classicist.

Within the general form of extension and contraction, extension to a climactic plateau, contraction to a ceremonious finale, appear variant structural patterns. To reduce the total structural pattern of Elizabethan drama to a single form, or even to two or three forms, is virtually impossible. The age was multiple in its artistic means. Yet the inability to do this does not mean that no structural form existed, but that many existed. Not only was there structural variety in the works of different men, but there were differences within the work of one man. Nevertheless, certain dominant patterns emerge, and while the following descriptions are not exhaustive, they include a large proportion of the Globe plays.

Three structural patterns recur frequently in the Globe plays: the episodic, the “river,” and the “mirror” patterns. In a crude form the episodic pattern can be found in the early Shakespearean histories. There its basic nature can be anatomized. On the thread either of a historical or of a biographical sequence a series of events is arranged in succession. The most marked characteristic of this form is that one event or incident is completed before another one is begun. Among the Globe plays of our period Thomas Lord Cromwell is a typical example of this type. Cromwell passes through a series of events complete in themselves: his kindness to a distraught woman in Antwerp, his succor of an Italian merchant, his success in freeing the Earl of Bedford from capture, his service to Wolsey, and his downfall at the hands of Gardiner. Although the Earl of Bedford reappears during Cromwell’s conflict with Gardiner, and remembering his rescue, endeavors to help Cromwell, the two sections of the play are not really joined. In this play, despite the fact that Cromwell himself provides the mechanical unity that binds the play, the dramatic unity, if there is any, is multiple. The various scenes reflect Cromwell’s virtues of honesty, humanity, and loyalty, thus giving a thematic wholeness to the entire play.

Since Aristotle penned his notes called Poetics, the episodic play has been in disrepute. Today it is difficult to imagine that it could rise to dramatic heights. Yet if we closely examine the structure of such a play as Macbeth, we shall realize that it is episodic in form. Of course, there are vital alterations in that form. Primarily, there is preparation for on-coming events. Instead of one event being completed before another one is initiated, we find that brief scenes are planted earlier to make the development plausible. The potential danger of Banquo to Macbeth’s ambitions is established by the witches. It is touched on before the murder of Duncan, but it is not woven into the fabric of the action at that time. At first, the overwhelming emphasis is upon the triangle of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the crown. Once Duncan is disposed of, the Banquo action comes into prominence, and full attention is devoted to it. Early hints of Macduff’s defection are introduced, but not until Banquo is dead does the play really concentrate on Macduff. For Macbeth’s second meeting with the witches there is almost no preparation. Until the end of the banquet scene, we do not even know he is aware of their abode. Until this moment, although the play reveals an episodic structure, it is more tightly knit than most of Shakespeare’s other works. After the visit of Macbeth to the witches’ hovel, the episodic pattern becomes more distinct. The conception of Macbeth as a character accents the episodic quality. He struggles only to reach the immediate goal; there is no ultimate point in the universe toward which he moves. Sejanus, in comparison, reduces the episodic quality of his drama because his eyes are always upon becoming Caesar, the symbol of a god on earth. Immediate intrigues are but part of the larger aim. For this concentration Jonson lost the opportunity for those very magnificent scenes which make Macbeth a great play. Among other of Shakespeare’s plays of this period which employ the episodic pattern are Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar. What strikes many critics as a lack of unity in Hamlet is its particular pattern. Once the conditions imposed on Hamlet by the Ghost are revealed, we witness the following sequence: the place of love in Hamlet’s mind, the testing of Claudius at the play, the relation of mother and son. Each event is prepared for, but each in turn gains full emphasis. Nor does one event bear causative relationship to another. Though Claudius is suspicious of Hamlet at the conclusion of the nunnery scene, he indicates no unusual watchfulness over Hamlet during the play-within-the-play scene. It is as though the conflict of the previous scene has been resolved with Claudius’ determination to send Hamlet to England. As a point in the story this idea is established and comes into the play when needed at the end of the closet scene. And, of course, the closet scene is not a dramatic result of the play scene. The idea that Hamlet be summoned to his mother is advanced by Polonius earlier, and whether or not Hamlet had offended the King, the meeting would have taken place. Here, then, is a skillful manipulation of the structural characteristics of the episodic pattern.

The second pattern I have named the “river” pattern. I use the term because its dramatic action resembles the flow of various tributaries into a single stream. Perhaps the best example of this type of structure can be found in Twelfth Night. Two streams of action are of almost equal breadth and depth; the third is merely a trickle until it joins the main flow. One main stream we may call the Orsino-Olivia-Viola action. The other is the Toby-Andrew-Malvolio action. The minor stream is the Antonio-Sebastian sequence. The principal determinant of such a structure is the length of time during which each action remains independent of the others. The first two actions remain completely independent through Acts I and II. A slight link is provided in Act III, scene i, when Malvolio courts Olivia. The full merging of the two actions takes place in Act III, scene iv. Meanwhile, the Antonio-Sebastian thread was introduced into the story in Act II, scene i, and in Act III, scene iii, and partly integrated with the main action in Act III, scene iv. In the fourth act the development of the two main threads remains suspended, Viola disappearing from the stage to enable the Sebastian element to be more fully integrated with the Olivia-Orsino-Viola triangle. Finally, in the fifth act, every element is brought together, including the Malvolio sequence, even though this necessitates the unprepared revelation that Viola’s womanly garments are in the hands of a captain who “upon some action/Is now in durance, at Malvolio’s suit” (V, i, 282-283).

Although this form is not as prevalent as either the episodic or the “mirror,” it can be found in a number of Globe plays, for example, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and partly in All’s Well. Twelfth Night remains, however, its model.

Last of the three dominant forms and the most popular one is the “mirror” pattern. Usually it consists of two stories, almost equal in emphasis. Both are introduced independently and maintain a large degree of independence throughout the play, sometimes never fully coming into plot relation with each other. Their fundamental connection derives from a similarity of theme and story development. Through sharp comparison or contrast one story casts reflections upon the other as though one were the image in the mirror and one the reality. The distinctness of each story is sometimes obscured by the fact that the same individual may appear in both stories and yet maintain independence of action in each case, at least early in the play. For example, through the first two acts Gloucester functions independently in each of the two stories in Lear.

Fair Maid of Bristow, among the works of the Globe repertory, is an excellent example of this pattern. In fact, here we have striking evidence of the structural care with which a minor play could be organized, despite Bradbrook’s assertion that structure is possible only through “literary means.” This play follows the mirror pattern almost slavishly. In the first scene Challener shows his beloved Anabell to Vallenger who falls in love with her. The two men come to blows over the girl. Challener wounds Vallenger and then flees while Vallenger is taken into Anabell’s house by her father. In the second scene Harbart tries to persuade Sentloe not to remain with the courtesan, Florence. But Sentloe, blind to her fickleness and confident of her devotion, rejects Harbart. Harbart vows to follow Sentloe in disguise. In the third scene Vallenger gains the promise of Anabell’s hand. In the fourth scene Challener, learning of the impending marriage, returns to Bristow in the disguise of an Italian doctor. In the fifth scene Sentloe engages Blunt alias Harbart as a servingman, and Sentloe and Florence are invited to Anabell’s wedding. At this point in the play we can identify two parallel centers of action. Each contains a “loving” couple, and a friend in disguise. In one Challener hates Vallenger and loves Anabell; in the other Harbart hates Florence and loves Sentloe.

Scene vi (nearly the middle of the play, since there are fourteen scenes in all) dramatizes the first blending of the two actions. Immediately after his marriage, Vallenger falls in love with Florence and suborns the doctor to poison Sentloe and Anabell. Later, in scene vii, Florence seduces Blunt to slay Sentloe. In each case the sworn protector is asked to commit the murder. In scene vii we have a typical “digression,” a comic courting scene of two servants. The theme, however, is faithfulness. Douse, the maid, asks whether Frog, after their marriage, “will ... not prove unkind?” Frog, in comic doggerel, vows, among other things, that only “when Lawiers have no tongues at all” will he prove unkind. The idea contrasts with the succeeding scenes in which Vallenger proves unkind to Anabell, only to have Florence subsequently prove unkind to him. The two stories are more tightly joined when Blunt contrives to have Vallenger arrested for the “death” of Sentloe. The rest of the play proceeds by contrasting action. Anabell seeks to save the life of Vallenger and Blunt seeks to have Florence held responsible for her part in Sentloe’s “death.” The finale is brought about when King Richard, the judge-figure, permits a champion to appear for the condemned Vallenger. The final contrast comes when Anabell assumes a disguise to free Vallenger, and Challener throws off his disguise for the same purpose. Only when Florence is moved to contrition by the nobility of Anabell and Challener, does Blunt unveil the still-living Sentloe, thus assuring a happy conclusion. Throughout, one line of development balances the other, and though the symmetry is not perfect, as it is rarely perfect in any Elizabethan play, the basic situations contrast with one another. Obviously the author had taken some care in organizing the plot. The disguises are well worked out, as are the balancing and interweaving of the two stories. Further evidence of the care in plotting can be seen in the foreshadowing of King Richard’s appearance in the plot when Harbart, in scene ii, urges Sentloe to abandon Florence and join Richard in the Holy Land. Richard’s first words are a blessing for being permitted by God to return home. Both in the larger construction and in smaller details the anonymous poet formed his work with care. What the play lacks is not organization of the story but strength of characterization, richness of poetic texture, and fresh outlook upon the prodigal son theme.

Among Shakespeare’s plays of the Globe period this pattern frequently appears. As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and, in some respects, Antony and Cleopatra reveal such a form. In As You Like It, Lear, and Troilus and Cressida, it is particularly well defined. Although this type of organization is best adapted to plays with double plots, it is only a little less effective in other plots. As You Like It, while it possesses rudimentary double plots in the Orlando-Oliver story and the Duke Frederick-Rosalind story, relies principally upon the balance of love relationships that grow in the Forest of Arden. Lear, on the other hand, contains a full double plot. The parallel of the two stories with the balance of cruelty of father-to-daughter and son-to-father is too well known to need repetition here. It is sufficient to point out that in situation after situation one story highlights and reflects the other. The stories join in the storm scenes, separate, join again when blind Gloucester meets mad Lear, separate, and join again when Edgar’s defeat of Edmund leads to the disclosure of the plot against Lear and Cordelia. If the form does not appear to be as mechanical as I have described it and if much of the cross-reflection is implicit in the poetry and characterization, this is attributable to Shakespeare’s genius, not to the absence of structural underpinning.

V. SCENE STRUCTURE IN SHAKESPEARE

In an earlier part of this chapter I emphasized the importance of the separate scenes as distinct units. At this point I should like to draw attention to certain characteristics of the scenes. Usually a portion of one action or story is not followed by an advance or counteraction, but by a new line of development, often containing completely different characters. This we take for granted in Elizabethan drama. The absence of liaison is emphasized by the way in which scenes are arranged. Some scenes, such as the one which Hamlet brings to a close with the cry

The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

[II, ii, 632-633]

conclude with a strong emotional lift at the same time as they thrust the interest forward. Some scenes, which I shall call “leading” scenes, produce a forceful dramatic or theatrical pointing. The brief scene in which Artimedorus prepares to give Caesar a petition warning him of the conspirators is such a scene; so is the one in which Duke Frederick thrusts Oliver out of doors until he can produce Celia. These “leading” scenes are usually brief and drive the story forward with great energy. But most scenes in Shakespeare contain an anticlimactic conclusion: they are rounded off, relaxed, brought to a subdued end. Here we must distinguish between dramatic force and story development. It is the dramatic force that is softened at the same time that the story line is brought to the fore. Upon Viola’s first visit Olivia falls in love with the “youth” (I, v). She sends a ring after “him” through Malvolio, then closes the scene with four lines:

I do I know not what, and fear to find

Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.

Fate, show thy force! Ourselves we do not owe.

What is decreed must be—and be this so!

[327-330]

Yet compare this with her feeling before she sends Malvolio off:

How now?

Even so quickly may one catch the plague?

Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections

With an invisible and subtle stealth

To creep in at mine eyes.

[313-317]

Clearly there is a diminution of intensity toward the end. The same thing occurs in the center of the play (III, iv). Viola denies knowing Antonio, but after his arrest she realizes that he has confused her with Sebastian. The scene does not end on that uplift of discovery. Viola goes off in delight; Toby sends Andrew after to beat the page. Fabian and Toby remain for a moment:

Fabian. Come, let’s see the event.

Toby. I dare lay any money ’twill be nothing yet.

[III, iv, 430-431]

The final remark is almost desultory. By gradual stages the emotional pitch of the scene is lowered. Shakespeare could easily have given Toby a final line that would have carried the play forward with more vigor. But this was not the way of Shakespeare or, for that matter, of his colleagues.

The falling off of intensity toward the end of a scene is even more marked in the tragedies. In sequence the arrangement of the subdued and pointed endings of scenes helps determine the rhythm of the play. For example, the “plateau” in Hamlet is unified by the way in which the endings of the play-within-the-play scene and the prayer scene point forward, not only in story but in emotional level, each one concluding with Hamlet passionately wrought. Another variation, vital to the rhythm of performance, occurs in the “climactic plateau” of Lear. The first storm scene (III, ii) with Lear ends subdued. It is followed by a “leading” scene of only twenty-six lines in which Edmund decides to betray his father. The next storm scene (III, iv) also ends subdued after Lear’s meeting with poor Tom. Another leading scene, again of twenty-six lines, drives forward with Edmund’s betrayal of Gloucester to Cornwall who orders him to “seek out” his father. The last storm scene (III, vi) concludes with Edgar’s realization of the similarity of his plight to that of Lear. Though the end is keyed low, the note struck is ominous. The very next scene rises to a pitch of frenzy in the blinding of Gloucester. In the Folio it concludes abruptly with Cornwall’s order to drive out Gloucester, but the Quarto has a dialogue between two servants which, serving to round out the action, seems more typical of Shakespeare.

Within the framework of an Elizabethan scene, perhaps the most marked characteristic is the placement of emphasis not on the growth of action but on the character’s response to crisis. This, as we noted before, was a distinguishing feature of the climactic plateau. Anticipation means little to the Elizabethan dramatist. This is no more clearly seen than in the handling of the individual scenes. Even where suspense is inevitable, it is muted. The Revenger’s Tragedy contains a scene (III, v) in which Vindice, at long last, plans to take revenge upon the lascivious old Duke who murdered his beloved. The trap is set, the Duke is near. Vindice strains forward,

So, so; now nine years’ vengeance crowd into a minute.

[III, v, 124]

The Duke dismisses his train; the trap in the guise of a “lady,” actually a poisoned manikin, is sprung; the Duke kisses “her” and falls. All this occupies twenty-five lines. In this it reminds us of the closet scene. Once the Duke is poisoned, Vindice and his brother, Hippolito, triumph over the dying man; they reveal the trap and then Vindice unmasks himself. To top these horrors Vindice discloses to the Duke that his bastard son “rides a-hunting in [his] brow,” and moreover that the son and the Duchess are about to hold a rendezvous at the very spot:

[Your] eyes shall see the incest of their lips.

[III, v, 192]

They arrive. The father-husband watches their love-making, hears their mockery of him, and, immediately after their departure, dies. All this takes eighty-three lines. In the structure of the scene, intensification comes from double response: the horror and pain of the Duke and the diabolical delight of the revengers as they witness his pain.

Elizabethan scenes are not unique merely because they give more time to response to a situation rather than to its development. Their uniqueness comes from the fact that the full intensity and implication of the theme is realized not in the accomplishment of the event but in the effects it produces. After Caesar is assassinated, Antony comes to terms with the conspirators. Dramatic though his meeting with them is, the most intense moments are not where Antony composes his differences with Brutus and Cassius, but where he views the body of Caesar. The most compelling section of the scene is Antony’s soliloquy where he envisions the ravages of war which will plague the earth as revenge for the foul deed. A glance at the proportion of lines devoted to the various parts of the scene indicates where Shakespeare placed his emphasis. Seventy-seven lines are devoted to all the tension leading to the assassination, 220 to the reactions and realignments that are its results. Ultimately we find Shakespeare dispensing completely with showing the act of murder and concentrating wholly on the psychological and philosophical responses, as in Macbeth.

VI. DRAMATIC UNITY IN THE GLOBE PLAYS

The repetition of dramatic forms in the Globe plays shows that there is a structural foundation for the concept of multiple unity, that unity can be found not in compression of action but in its extension. The story line links the experiences but is not identical with them. Rather the events frequently are extensions of the implications of the story exactly as the shattering of glass may be the effect of an explosion. Consequently, as the scenes seek to reach beyond the limits of the subject, it becomes requisite that means be discovered to set limits to the extension of story and theme. The Elizabethans were well aware that the dimensions of the plays threatened to overwhelm the audience. This is the essence of serious charges by Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson against the popular drama. In this they may well have been following Aristotle who introduced into his definition of tragedy the concept of “magnitude.” A work of art must be able to be perceived as a totality by the audience. Here, of course, we have the true determinant of unity. Training in witnessing the extended sequences of miracle plays or in listening to Sunday sermons must have contributed to a broadness of perception. Nevertheless, a major problem of the Elizabethan playwright was to observe a proper magnitude, to keep within the bounds that his plays always threatened to break. To aid him in maintaining proper magnitude he had several means at his disposal.

One of these means is the story itself; it is always brought to a conclusion. Another means, and one I have not discussed, was the concentration on character. The fact that the story is happening to Hamlet or Vindice or Sejanus is in itself a unifying factor. But I shall discuss the relevance of character to the play in the [chapter on Elizabethan acting]. Three other means contributed to keeping the play within perceptible bounds.

The first of these, unity through poetic diction, has been amply treated by present-day critics. Both Stoll and G. Wilson Knight have written of Shakespeare’s plays as metaphorical forms.[25] Bradbrook sees the only unity as a poetic unity. Yet verbal expression is but one element of structural multiple unity. There is a close link between the dramatic form of the climactic plateau and the poetic expression, for the second requires the first. Where the playwright fails as a poet, the climactic extensions result in rant and sentimentality. But it is this form that enables the poetry to range freely, or perhaps we may consider that the same compulsion which drove the Elizabethans to copious, lyrical expression caused them to develop this particular dramatic form.

The second means relevant to multiple unity has been the subject of this chapter, precisely the arrangement of scenes about the story line. Some of the scenes that a playwright chooses to dramatize are those primarily concerned with propelling the play, such as the play-within-the-play scene in Hamlet. Some scenes develop traits of a character, as in the scene of Portia’s plea to Brutus for confidence. But a central, repeating element within the rhythmic pattern of extension-contraction is the arrangement of scenes or incidents in a combination of contrasting and comparable circumstances. Whether the scenes used are central or peripheral to the story, they repeatedly gain illumination through mirroring similar situations. Hamlet unable to avenge his father is contrasted with Laertes too ready to avenge his father, Hamlet mad is contrasted with Ophelia mad, Rosalind’s mocking love-play is heightened by comparison with Phebe and Silvius as well as with the earthy affection of Touchstone and Audrey, while Touchstone’s professional mockery of the pastoral life casts light upon Jaques’ melancholy. One could go on endlessly pointing out the contrast of situation with situation. Frequently we encounter scenes whose only relationship to the story is to provide dramatic contrast. I have cited the scene in Fair Maid of Bristow in which the servants woo each other. The Porter’s scene in Macbeth, about which there has been “much throwing about of brains,” is an example. Another is the scene where Ventidius refuses to outshine Antony, another the lynching of Cinna the poet or the valor of Lucilius (Julius Caesar, V, iv). Great events produce many ripples. These ripples, which found expression in the Greek choral odes, the Elizabethans sought to dramatize.

Contrast in the Globe plays, it is essential to note, is a contrast of situations, not a contrast of characters. It is true that Hamlet is contrasted with Laertes as well as Fortinbras, but the character contrast is effected by the participation of each in distinct though related incidents. In Fair Maid of Bristow Challener’s conflict with Vallenger is contrasted with Harbart’s relationship to Sentloe. Vallenger’s asking the disguised Challener to murder Sentloe and Anabell parallels Florence’s attempt to seduce Blunt alias Harbart to murder Sentloe. Modern drama like classic drama, however, contrasts characters caught within a single situation. Antigone and Ismene face the same dramatic circumstance; so do Electra and Chrysothemis. Character contrast is achieved through the different ways in which each person reacts to the same crisis. Lövborg and Tesman are sharply differentiated: in their reactions to the same appointment, their manner of loving, the kinds of books they write. The same holds true for Stanley and Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, or even for Stella and Blanche. But in Shakespearean drama not only is light thrown on the comparison of situations, but at times the characters are aware of this inter-reflection. At the end of the last storm scene in Lear, Act III, scene vi, Edgar has a speech which appears only in the Quarto. After witnessing the sorrow of Lear, he soliloquizes:

When we our betters see bearing our woes,

We scarcely think our miseries our foes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How light and portable my pain seems now,

When that which makes me bend makes the King bow,

He childed as I fathered!

[108-116]

Certainly the Elizabethans felt that one event mirrored another, and probably that together they mirrored the common meaning of both events. This interconnection of reflected incidents contributed metaphorically to a unified impression.

The final means of achieving unity is the most difficult to define, the method of handling theme. For that reason let us turn to a play where the theme is clearly expounded. A Larum for London has a simple, obvious point to make: the English people will be destroyed by external enemies (the Spanish) and internal treachery unless they become aware of their dangers, forego their desire for personal profit at the expense of the defense of the commonwealth, and rally the faithful honest citizens and soldiers to their support. The point is made through dramatizing the siege of Antwerp. The scenes that are introduced arise from the initial force that propels the story: the determination of the Spanish to take advantage of the improvidence of the citizens of Antwerp. Individual scenes, however, are not causally linked. Rather they are chosen because they reflect and illustrate the basic theme. A burgher, formerly unkind to the hero, is rescued by him. This is the only scene in which the burgher appears. The play is episodic in structure but unified in theme. But the unity is a multiple one. Instead of employing the story of one family and one incident to illustrate the ravages of war, as Gorki did in Yegor Bulichev and Others, this play uses a multiple reflection of its theme in a number of independent scenes, each having equal emphasis. Thus the single theme is given multiple dramatization.

The weaker plays of the Globe reveal obvious ways of treating a theme. Dramas of the prodigal son reiterate their morality ad infinitum, providing multiple reflections of fall and redemption. The otherwise haphazardly constructed play, The Devil’s Charter, is bound together by the theme of Man’s soul sold to the devil and the final retribution that befalls him. Jonson’s predilection for purging mankind with a pill of satire imposes thematic unity on disparate incidents in Every Man Out of His Humour. But in his other plays as well as in the plays of Shakespeare there is a more subtle interweaving of structure and theme. At the core of each play there seems to be a point of reference of which the individual scenes are reflections. Though a play moves temporally toward a conclusion, each scene may like a glass be turned toward a central referent. G. Wilson Knight has expressed fundamentally the same idea.[26] Unfortunately, he divorces this concept from the dramatic organism, with the result that his projected productions of Shakespeare’s plays seem like academic and sophomoric, if not fantastic, exercises. But Shakespeare seems to have avoided, at least in his later plays, so schematic an illustration of theme as in Richard III. Instead, he allows the theme to permeate the characters, situations, and poetry. He concentrates on the dramatic situations and on the characters, allowing the theme to be struck off indirectly like spark from flint. That is perhaps the reason that it is so difficult to reduce the theme of any Shakespearean play to a concise statement. Macbeth certainly deals with the theme of the source and effects of evil, yet no single statement of this idea is sufficient, because Shakespeare dramatizes various aspects of this subject. Since, to the Elizabethan, the world was a manifold manifestation of a God whom he was unable to compress into one idea or image, in a similar way the Shakespearean play was a manifold reflection of a theme irreducible and unseen. Yet every element in a great Shakespearean play—character, structure, speech—individually and collectively, is brought into an artistic unity through a structural and poetic expression of an unseen referent at its center.

Chapter Three
THE STAGE

Two boards and a passion! Perhaps these words sum up all that was essential to the Shakespearean theater. Heightening of passion coincided with the “climax,” and as for the Elizabethan stage, it was, as G. F. Reynolds remarked, a platform “upon which the story of the play was acted.”[1] And so it was, a flat expanse of boards, somewhat exposed to the weather, roughly eleven hundred square feet.

The story that was acted may be best described as romantic, not because it dealt with romance, although it often did, but because it was centrifugal in impulse, ever threatening to veer from its path. Whatever direct progression narrative possessed in the medieval drama, whether moving from Adam’s sin to Christ’s judgment or from Everyman’s ignorance to his salvation, such progression no longer existed in the Elizabethan age. Instead, the unfolding of the drama took place in a world half of man, and therefore unpredictable, half of God, and therefore moral, and was composed half of history, half of legend; half remote fantasy, half immediate reality. Such a world was wide indeed, and the poet-playwright, its creator, was shackled by neither time nor place. What he demanded of a stage was space for the unimpeded flow of scene after scene, for the instantaneous creation of any place in this world or the next. Even when a ghost in mufti made his way out the stage door in broad daylight, the poet insisted he vanished—yes, even into thin air.

Between the poet’s insistence and the stage’s realization lies the entire secret of Elizabethan staging. About the stage’s realization there is some evidence and little knowledge. Stage directions, a much-debated sketch of a playhouse, a tantalizing incomplete building contract, other assorted fragments, invite the scholar to tilt at theory. About the poet’s insistence there can be little question. Texts of play after play document the demands that the writers made upon the “unworthy scaffold.” Prudence suggests, therefore, that we proceed from play to stage, discovering first what those demands were and then, if we can, how they were satisfied. To understand what the demands were in respect to the environment of an action, it is necessary to consider the following questions: how exactly was a scene located, how consistently was the location maintained, and how relevant was the location to the dramatic impact of the scene?

I. LOCALIZATION IN SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE PLAYS

In Shakespeare’s Globe plays many scenes are given an exact setting. By exact I wish to convey the notion that the action is supposed to occur in or at a particular place, such as a room, hall, gateway, garden, bridge, and that this place remains consistent throughout the scene. For example, in the scene where Martius, yet to win his name of Coriolanus, assaults the gates of Corioles (I, iv), the location is specific, consistent, and dramatically relevant. At one point in the same play Coriolanus prepares to enter the house of his enemy, Aufidius. The scene (IV, iv) takes place before Aufidius’ door. Here exactness of location intensifies dramatic suspense because, as we watch Coriolanus pass through the doorway, we know he is putting himself at the mercy of his greatest antagonist. Many examples of such types of placement come to mind: Brutus’ orchard, Gertrude’s closet, Timon’s cave, etc. Such scenes have come to be called “localized.”

Usually the opposite of the “localized” setting is the “unlocalized.” In this type of setting no impression of place is projected. Location is irrelevant to the progression of the scenes. Clear-cut instances of this occur in Macbeth, II, iv, and III, vi. In the first of these scenes Ross and an old man comment on the unnatural state of the world, then Macduff brings them news of Duncan’s burial and Macbeth’s election to the throne. In the second scene, Lennox and a gentleman comment upon the web of tyranny and the hope that lies in England with Malcolm. Aside from the section containing Macduff’s news, neither of these scenes contributes to the flow of the narrative. Rather they are comments upon the action and essentially perform a choral function.

That these two types of scenes are present in Elizabethan plays has long been recognized. Some scholars, such as V. E. Albright, E. K. Chambers, and J. C. Adams, have tended to divide all scenes of a play into one or the other type, the localized, usually interior and more or less realistic, the unlocalized, exterior, neutral, and somewhat less realistic. This division, according to Albright, derives from the sedes and platea of the medieval stage.[2] What had been physically separate areas earlier became united on one stage in the Tudor period. But, the argument runs, the Elizabethan dramatists continued to juxtapose the two types of scenes, stringing them in a more or less alternating order along the thread of narrative.

To what extent can this dichotomy be supported by the evidence from the Globe? Naturally there is no sharp distinction between these two types of localization. The differentiation depends upon the sequence a scene assumes in the narrative. Consequently, there are scenes which clearly fit into one or the other category. But even if all the localized and unlocalized scenes are counted, the total amounts to only 136. Since there are 345 scenes in my enumeration of the fifteen Shakespearean Globe plays, 209 remain to be accounted for.[3]

Is it true, as William Archer, Harley Granville-Barker, and George F. Reynolds have pointed out, that much localization was vague, that place faded elusively like a mirage before a traveler, and that often the Elizabethans treated the stage as stage? “Scene after scene,” asserts Granville-Barker, “might pass with the actors moving to all intents merely in the ambit of the play’s story and of their own emotions: unless, the spell broken, they were suddenly and incongruously seen to be upon a stage.”[4] Many a scene gives just such an impression, and yet, in almost every scene that is not unlocalized, the characters do not actually act in a dislocated void but are known to be in some more or less specific region. Even when attention is directly called to the stage-as-stage, stage-as-fictional-world still remains. In such moments the audience experiences a double image.

It is a commonplace that the public stages of the Elizabethan period contained “Asia of the one side, and Affricke of the other.” Though contemptuous in intent, in effect this phrase of Sidney’s isolates one of the characteristics of Elizabethan scene setting. Perhaps, as some scholars have thought, the Elizabethans utilized place cards to inform the audience of the general location of a scene. But whether they did or not, they were in the habit of specifying a place at large but not a particular section of it. In such cases the stage stands for rather than represents the fictional locale, the confines of which cannot be reasonably encompassed within the limits of the stage. In this type of locale, placement is general rather than precise—for example, the city of Troy in Troilus and Cressida, not a particular part of it. Rome as a whole rather than some portion of it is often the setting in Coriolanus (I, i; IV, ii; IV, vi). Free movement within such a locale occurs readily as in Julius Caesar (III, i), where action takes place first in the street and then in the Capitol. Sequences of action which would be incongruous in a localized setting assume dramatic power in a generalized setting. In the very same place, Othello’s castle, occur the private conflict of Othello and Desdemona and the public encounter of Cassio and Bianca (III, iv). Actually, in this type of setting, dramatic impact proceeds from the general rather than the specific nature of the locale. Without a doubt we know when the scene is Rome and when Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra. Dramatically that is all we need to know. To endeavor to isolate the whereabouts of Octavius’ meeting with Antony (II, ii) would reduce the stature of that meeting. All of Rome is their stage just as in medieval practice all of paradise might be the setting for Adam and Eve. Among the 345 scenes of Shakespeare’s Globe plays, 142 are clearly of this sort and 67 tend toward this sort, accounting together for fully 60 per cent of the scenes.

A. H. Thorndike described three types of localization too: the definitely localized, the vaguely localized, and the unlocalized.[5] At first my analysis may seem to repeat his. However, there is a fundamental difference. The generalized locale is not vague; it is extensive, it is symbolic, and dramatically it is concrete. The audience is not expected to identify the stage with a particular location but to understand that it functions as a token of Troy or the Danish palace or the Forest of Arden. Regularly editors have been reducing the generalized location to a localized setting congruent with realistic dimensions. This practice merely betrays the scope of Elizabethan drama. The real distinction between scene loci was not, as others have assumed, a separation of interior from exterior or realistic from conventional but a gradation from the unlocalized through the generalized to the localized setting.

Before investigating whether or not the Globe stage utilized stage decor to set these scenes, it is advisable to consider to what degree and by what methods location was conveyed by the playwright himself. It might be well to state at the outset that in extremely few cases is place projected through properties or other decor. Of all the scenes in Shakespeare’s Globe plays I count only seventeen in which this occurs, a mere 5 per cent. The most frequently recurring methods used by Shakespeare to indicate location are by announcement: a character tells us where he is (“This is the forest of Arden,” As You Like It, II, iv); by foreshadowing a location: a character in one scene tells us where he or others will be next (“To the Monument,” Antony and Cleopatra, IV, xiv); and by identifying a character with a place (early in All’s Well, the Countess becomes identified with Rossillion; whenever she appears thereafter, the scene, we know, is Rossillion). Some of these methods are used in combination. For example, we learn in the second scene of Othello that the Duke is in council, to whose presence Othello, Brabantio, and others are summoned. This is foreshadowing. In the next scene when we see a meeting in progress between the Duke and Senators, we can guess we are at the council, and when Othello and Brabantio enter shortly, we are sure of it. Of course, there are other methods employed to indicate place, but these three are the principal ones. Announcements help to locate 129 of the scenes (37.3 per cent), presence of characters, 128 of the scenes (37.1 per cent), and foreshadowing, 61 of the scenes (17.7 per cent).

Though the chorus is used only occasionally to indicate place, it tells us most about Elizabethan playwrights’ attitudes toward setting the scenes. Fortunately, the Globe plays include two examples of this technique, one from the beginning and one from the end of the decade. In Every Man Out of His Humour Ben Jonson introduces three choral figures, Asper, Mitis, and Cordatus. At the end of the induction Asper leaves the stage to assume the role of Macilente; Mitis and Cordatus remain to comment upon the action. Cordatus, who knows the play, is able to inform Mitis where the action takes place. For some scenes he indicates a generalized locale. “The Scene is the country still,” he remarks to Mitis (Chorus to II, i) or “Onely transferre your thoughts to the city, with the Scene; where, suppose they speake” (Chorus to II, iv). Sometimes he is more specific. Upon the entrance of Cavaliere Shift (III, i), Mitis asks,

What new Mute is this, that walkes so suspiciously?

CORD. O, mary this is one, for whose better illustration;

we must desire you to presuppose the stage, the

middle isle in Paules; and that, the west end of it.

At one time, where the presence of characters identifies the location, Cordatus queries Mitis, “You understand where the Scene is?” (Chorus to IV, i). Jonson, desirous of specifying particular London sites despite the fiction of Italian-named characters, is experimenting along the lines of Shakespeare who shortly before tried a similar method in Henry V. Shakespeare returned to this device in Pericles. Gower, the chorus, relates portions of Pericles’ adventures directly and in accompaniment to several dumb shows. In passing he often sets the locale. The first scene, he tells us, is “this Antioch ... this city” (17-18). Preparatory to the commencement of III, i, Gower asks the audience,

In your imagination hold

This stage the ship, upon whose deck

The sea-tost Pericles appears to speak

Imagine! Suppose! Both Jonson and Shakespeare call upon the audience to visualize the place of action. Clearly neither conventional nor realistic setting is introduced. Only words, in these instances delivered directly, in most instances conveyed in the midst of dramatic action, are the means for informing the audience where the scene takes place.

II. THE PARTS OF THE STAGE

What the Choruses make evident is that the stage was not altered for individual scenes. As a consequence, the stage structure itself, not scenery, served as the frame for the action. What this structure was and how it was used has been debated for years, and yet despite the lively and continuous debate, there actually exists a broad band of agreement About the size of the stage, for instance, there is little dispute. It is deduced from the Fortune contract. Without a doubt the platform, one side of which was attached to the stage wall or façade, was large, probably about 25 by 45 feet, and bare. Whether or not the supporting trestles were seen by the audience, as Hodges claims, matters little in a consideration of the use of the stage. What is important is that the stage extended to the middle of the yard, that consequently a large portion of the audience stood or sat on either side of the actors, and that the actors had to master the techniques of playing on this open stage. Some disagreement exists concerning the shape of the stage which, according to John C. Adams, was not rectangular but tapered inward toward the front. However, the weight of the evidence is against this theory, and most scholars are inclined to accept the rectangular shape.

Upon what other points is there general agreement? For one, that there were two pillars, located halfway between the stage wall and the front edge of the platform, which supported a shadow or cover over part of the stage. For another, that at platform level the stage wall contained two doors at least and probably a third entry or enclosed space and on an upper level, some sort of acting area. Where there are disputes, they arise over three matters: (1) what details complete this generally accepted scheme, (2) how the parts of the stage were employed, and (3) what temporary structures, if any, supplemented the basic façade. To examine these issues, it will be necessary to review each part of the stage in the light of the Globe repertory.

The Globe plays confirm the presence of at least two entrance doors at some distance from each other. On several occasions there is need for two characters to enter simultaneously from separate entrances and after some conversation come together. For the existence of a third entry the Globe plays offer no conclusive proof. No stage direction specifying an entry from a middle door, such as can be found in non-Globe plays, appears. However, certain scenes do suggest the use of a third entrance. In Macbeth (V, vii) Malcolm, who has presumably come through one door (A), is invited into the castle of Dunsinane by Siward. At his exit (through B presumably) Macbeth enters. Either he can come from the door (A) through which Malcolm entered, which is dramatically unconvincing, or from the door (B) of Dunsinane, which is awkward, or from a third entrance, evidence for which is not conclusive. Still, another sort of evidence does occur, which supports the idea of a third entry. In all cases, save one, where simultaneous entrances take place, the stage direction either reads “Enter A at one door, and enter B at another” or “at another door” or “Enter A and B severally,” or “at several doors.” In all the Globe plays, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, there are twenty-two instances of such stage directions.[6] The only exception is Pericles (IV, iv), “Enter Pericles at one doore, with all his trayne, Cleon and Dioniza at the other. Cleon shewes Pericles the tombe, whereat, Pericles makes lamentatton [sic].” The explanation for the article, “the” other door, if a third did exist, may be that the third entry was used to display the tomb. The presence of a word such as “another” in all other stage directions implies that when one door was used, more than one other entrance remained, and that, therefore, a third mode of entry was regularly employed on the Globe stage.

Regarding the position of the main entrance doors on either side of the stage, the Globe plays are equally unhelpful. Authority for oblique doors partly facing each other rests on three items of evidence that have been set forth. (1) The phrase “Enter A and B at opposite doors,” which appears in some of the Jacobean plays, proves, according to W. J. Lawrence, that the doors faced each other.[7] (2) Certain plays need facing doors in the action.[8] (3) The historical development of the playhouses explains the genesis of the oblique doors.[9] Concerning the first item, I need only point out that in no stage direction in the Globe plays does the phrase “at opposite doors” appear. Nor does it appear in any pre-Globe Shakespearean play. The second item invites subjective judgment. Lawrence insists that the last scene of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, a Globe play, could not be played unless the doors were oblique. However, cross-observation in that scene concerns the exchange of signs over the doors to two inns in Waltham.

Sir Arthur. Mine host, mine host, we lay all night at

the George in Waltham, but whether the

George be your fee-simple or no, tis a doubtfull

question, looke upon your signe.

Host. Body of Saint George, this is mine overthwart

neighbour hath done this to seduce

my blind customers.

[Sig. F2^r]