by Ben Crystal
In our time, unless you make an incredible effort, it’s impossible to turn a corner without seeing a photograph or the printed word – our streets and homes are littered with them. But very few Elizabethans would have been able to afford the equivalent distractions for their homes – tapestries, sculptures, woodcuttings or paintings – and as only 20 per cent of them could read, few might discover the images printed in books.
Our love for images has become insatiable, and in our media-rich 21st-century world we’re quite used to seeing people dressed up, pretending to be someone they’re not. Our ability to believe in something fictional – our suspension of disbelief – has been working well since childhood, thanks to the marvels of TV and film.
From the age of four, we all know that everyone on screen is pretending; that the spaceship is a model, that the dinosaur is CGI. And we love the double-think; the mental game we play with ourselves, wondering how they do it, while at the same time feeling a quickening of the pulse and a tightening of the throat as the tension mounts.
playwright Mark Ravenhill, writing in The Guardian, November 2006
The greatest effort is made (and millions of dollars are spent) to bring the unbelievable before our eyes – all is provided for us, either on screen and the internet, or with painted backdrops, from the canals of Venice to life on Mars in the 23rd century. Elizabethans would have had to imagine the magician Prospero’s island in The Tempest. We can digitally create one that we know is fake, but are willing to believe in anyway (as long as it meets our increasingly high standards). The point is that while our suspension of disbelief is working well, our imaginations have become lazy. Unless we’re reading a novel, our imaginations might as well be surgically removed these days. But who needs to read the book, when the film comes out next year?
To help our increasingly busy minds, most theatres and cinemas drop the lights when the show starts. In theatres this really is a relatively recent phenomenon – about 200 years ago, the audiences in indoor theatres would be as well lit as the actors. But now, for the most part, we sit in a dark room, and the only source of light – and so the only real focus – is the play or film.
Perhaps this is more useful to a modern audience, as the forced focus makes it easier to forget our knowledge of celebrity casting and computer-generated images, and lets us slip into the fabricated world more quickly; but a glance at a fire exit light or a ring of a mobile phone will bring us out of it just as rapidly.
Visit the Globe today, where the actors and audience are equally lit, where helicopters regularly fly overhead, and it can be hard to forget the modern world. But then why go to the theatre and imagine a boat sailing across a sea, when we can go to the cinema and see it ‘for real’?
Lazy imaginations make producing 400-year-old plays that much harder, because who, in this day and age, is afraid of witches any more?
We’re a tougher, more critical audience to win over, needing better tricks and more believable effects to dupe us.
* * *
Believable?
During the American Civil War (1861–65) a soldier watching a performance of Othello was so taken in by the actor playing the dishonest Iago that he stood up from his seat, drew his pistol and shot the actor dead.
* * *
So without the internet, films, television, magazines, and everything else we have at our fingertips available to them, Shakespeare’s audience had an exceptionally open and hungry imagination. They were an audience that would love fabulous, exotic worlds being weaved before them, worlds they’d never experience, people wearing clothes they’d never wear, saying things they themselves would perhaps never get to say.
So that’s what Shakespeare gave them.
He’d hear stories of far-off lands, and write plays about them. Imagine! A city of canals …
Like his contemporaries, he would rewrite classic stories that everyone knew. Imagine! Seeing the Battle of Agincourt, the fall of Troy and the beauty of Helen, stories you’ve known backwards since you were a child …
Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege
(Henry V, Act 3, line 25 of the Chorus)
Just use your imagination, he says, and see the battle before you.
There had to be a balance, though, if your audience believed so wholly in what they saw: some things reminding you it’s not real, and some keeping you firmly in the bubble of the world being weaved before you. It had to be entertaining and believable and yet clearly not real: you didn’t want your audience starting to riot whenever a character was killed.
Even we can still have problems remembering what’s real and what’s not: when actors have been playing the same parts for years, the line between the actor and the part they play often seems to become blurred. How different are the actors in Friends from the characters they play? An actor friend of mine played a villain in Dream Team (a football soap on satellite TV), and was regularly shouted at by random members of the public. They thought that because his character was a bad guy, then he must be too.
That blurring of lines comes much closer to the way Elizabethans would have seen the action on stage 400 years ago. Their ability to wholly believe in what they were watching would have been far greater than ours is now. Very little would have been handed to them, in a visual sense. Little or no set, sound effects, or lighting to help their imaginations along. You had to work with what was in front of you, because that’s all there was – so if you saw it with your own eyes it must be true. If you saw someone die on stage, then that person was dead!
Theatres in Shakespeare’s time were a tough place to hold an audience’s attention, even ones with vital, active imaginations. They were rowdy, drunken places, and were used only in broad daylight (indoor theatres could use candles, but they gave poor light and were expensive), so no darkened room with a lit stage to draw the focus.
But still, within these raucous, wooden spaces, filled with beer sellers and prostitutes, lords and commoners, magical, fantastical worlds were being weaved.
Scene 2
The Globe, Bankside, 17th century
THE STAGE
The space that Shakespeare’s plays were performed in is important. Now we have the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London, we can get as close as possible to Shakespeare’s working home, and the birthplace of these seemingly inaccessible plays.
Some consider the Globe to be nothing more than a tourist spot. It’s not. We’ve learnt so much about how to perform Shakespeare’s plays in the reconstructed Globe in the last ten years, finally getting to act them in the type of space they were originally written for.
The bulk of the plays were presented in the Globe Theatre: a round, wooden building, with an open roof. I’m going to use the Globe as the main example, as it was also the theatre Shakespeare had a financial stake in. There were a number of other outdoor theatres, and quite a few indoor theatres too, not to mention non-theatrical spaces like the Middle Temple and the Court, but the Globe (and its modern counterpart) is the most accessible of the original playing spaces.
At the Globe, a very large part of the audience would be standing almost entirely around the stage in the yard. There were three galleries above the yard, and the people in the galleries would be sitting – if you imagine a clock face, from 8 o’clock through 4 o’clock – with the actors standing at the centre.
A view from the audience to the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, by Jim Alexander.
The stage would be raised up from the ground, perhaps to waist height, perhaps higher (we don’t know for sure), so the actors were clearly separated from the audience.
There would have been a roof over the stage, supported by two pillars; a balcony above the stage, and doors at the back for exits and entrances.
As the plays would have been performed during the afternoon (there being no practical way to light the theatre at night), the actors would have seen every member of the audience.
That’s such an important point that
I want to switch perspective for a second. I’ve acted at the reconstructed Globe in London, and you quickly discover how much of a thrill it is to see the faces of 1,500 people while acting Shakespeare. It means you can speak these personal, passionate speeches directly to one person, if you want. And another part of the speech to a completely different person.
But the magic begins to really spark when the people sitting or standing around the person you’re looking at think you’re looking directly at them too, and so in groups of twenty or so at a time, parts of the audience feel as if a moment of the play is for them and them alone.
Is this unusual? Well, actually, yes it is, when you think that for the last couple of hundred years Shakespeare’s lines have mostly been delivered by actors to audiences sitting in the dark, and as far as the actor is concerned there could be 500 people watching or there could be five.
At the Globe an actor can see if the audience are enjoying themselves, if they’re cold, wet, happy or sad, bored or laughing, talking, crying or on their mobile phones, and this brings a connection between you that can’t be found anywhere else.
* * *
The audience can affect the actors, too…
In a recent production of The Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the actors playing Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse sat at one of the pillars and chatted (in Act 2, Scene 2).
When Dromio says ‘There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature’, he saw a bald man in the audience and pointed at him. The audience fell about. Then, a little later, Dromio says ‘There’s many a man who has more hair than wit’, so the actor pointed to a particularly hairy man, and again the audience fell about.
Act or watch Shakespeare in as original a setting as possible, like at the Globe, and every show will make you reconsider and find a new meaning to lines you thought you’d always totally understood.
* * *
This actor–audience joint experience would have been going on (mobile phones aside) in a very similar way in Shakespeare’s time, if not more so. When Henry V was performed at the reconstructed Globe, the audience began to cheer the English army, and boo the French; and in most shows there, audiences clap along with the rhythm of the songs and dances, though it can be slightly hesitant, as we modern audiences are so used to sitting quietly and behaving.
Modern audiences heckle comedians in stand-up shows, where there is less etiquette in behaving. Globe audiences sometimes heckle the actors, too, when they’re feeling brave. The Elizabethans would have had no reason, no etiquette, to stop them from heckling, shouting, throwing things at the actors, either in appreciation or disapproval.
Back to the stage. We know there probably wouldn’t have been a set, as we would think of it – no flat pieces of wood with pictures of rooms, or countryside background drawn on, to establish ‘where’ a particular scene is set – the words would do that, with the actors bringing on odd pieces (flasks, weapons or cushions) to help place the scenes. The theatre, in all its massive glory, was the set.
So irrespective of whether the theatre was gaily coloured or not, what we have is a very simple open space, in a big, grand, solid wooden building – and this was the bare minimum needed to tell Shakespeare’s stories.
The single biggest clue we have about the inside of the space is from the opening Chorus speech from Henry V – though, as I’ve already said in relation to the man himself, taking historical fact from Shakespeare’s writing is a dangerous path to wander down, and should be issued with a pinch of salt:
But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraisèd spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
He’s saying: ‘Excuse, everyone, these awful actors who dare to perform such a wonderful spectacle in this terrible space (scaffold). Can this tiny place (cockpit) hold the enormous countryside of France? Or the ferocious soldiers (casques) who fought at the battle of Agincourt? Do forgive us, because one poor actor is going to represent a million. And let us, most unworthy nothings (ciphers), work on your imagination …’
In this awful space, this ‘wooden O’ shape, let us help your imaginations: the implication is that there’s nothing else, no legions of soldiers, no pictures of trees, no set to help your imagination create the scenes before you, nothing other than the actors.
People were said to go and hear, or audit, a play (hence audience), not to go and see a play. In fact, because of the pillars supporting the roof over the stage, it’s unlikely that any one member of the audience could see everything that happened all of the time on stage. At the reconstructed Globe this is absolutely the case – there’s no one point when you act on the stage where you can be seen by all the audience, so the pillars make you, ask you, almost beg you to walk around them so all the audience get at least a glimpse of you.
The rowdy audience of Shakespeare’s time may have made it hard for the actors to be heard too, but the omni-presence of the pillars does imply that seeing what was happening was not as important as hearing what was being said.
The words, said aloud and spoken with feeling, conjured fantasies and images, ships and storms, houses and forests out of the air and into the greedy minds of the audience.
* * *
The Chorus
The character of the Chorus is similar to a narrator, who speaks directly to the audience. He often sets the scene, tells the audience if the action has moved to a different country, or describes moments that have taken place that they’re not going to see. At the end of Henry V, the Chorus apologises for the poor quality of the writing – with rough and all-unable pen – and it was quite normal for him to apologise so profusely, very much a case of false modesty; so his apology for the poor state of the theatre in the opening of Henry V could equally just be mock humility.
* * *
* * *
Did Elizabethan actors rehearse?
There’s a very good chance they didn’t – mainly due to a lack of time. The theatre manager Philip Henslowe records in his diary that there would have been a performance of a new play most days of the week, and, as we’ve seen, the same play was rarely performed twice in one week. This means that Shakespeare’s actors would probably have had 20–30 plays rattling around their heads at any one time.
At one point Henslowe noted that there were 23 plays being performed by the same group of actors. With all that learning of lines, would there have been time to rehearse?
Here’s an idea of A Day in the Life of an Elizabethan Actor …
Wake at dawn, eat breakfast, get to the theatre;
Learn and run through any fights or dances needed. Check you have all your props and costume;
Perform around 2 o’clock in the afternoon;
Get your role and scroll for the play to be performed tomorrow;
Find your props and costume for that play, and learn (or finish off learning) your scroll. Ensure that this is done by nightfall, because the poor-quality smoky candles afforded by actors would make it difficult or impossible to do any reading at home;
Visit an ale tavern (some things don’t change);
To bed, then the same again.
If they didn’t rehearse, then they didn’t have a director – though we’ll see how Shakespeare managed to direct them himself through the lines he gave them, in Act 5.
* * *
THE COSTUMES
Let’s recap for a moment.
We have the plays, being spoken in an uncluttered (because of the lack of set) but rather unique space. There’s a fair degree of distractio
n, with the crowd talking and jeering, which means there’s not a great deal to help us into this imagined world. Still, all our imaginative energy is focused on this raised platform, and on these actors telling us a story.
Keeping our distracted minds on the stage and on the story would have been tricky for any actor, but they would have had a little help: one thing we know for sure is that a great deal of money was spent on their costumes.
* * *
How much did a costume cost?
Thanks to the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe (c. 1550–1616), we have an idea of how much money was put towards the costumes.
He notes that he bought ‘a black velvet cloak with sleeves embroidered all with silver and gold’ for £20 10s 6d.
That would be equivalent to £2,692 today, or 1,642 Elizabethan loaves of bread, or more than a third of the price Shakespeare paid for the finest house in Stratford …
* * *
So actors dress in the most fantastic costumes money can buy to look fabulous, give the audience something pretty to look at, and, after all, show they’re playing a character: if the actors were to dress the same way as ordinary folk, how would we know when they were being them, and when they were being the character – like a murderer? If I’m wandering down an Elizabethan backstreet after I’ve seen the play Macbeth, and I see the actor who played the Second Murderer walking towards me and he’s wearing the same clothes as he was on stage, does that mean he’s actually a killer, and I should turn and walk the other way in case he kills me?
Or, turn the tables: an actor who played the villain leaves the theatre still in his costume, and is attacked by a mob who wanted the hero to win. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine, especially after hearing the 19th-century anecdote of the soldier shooting the actor playing Iago. My friend from Dream Team experienced something akin to that inability to separate truth from fiction, and the media practically encourages it – soap opera actors feature on the cover of TV magazines, and underneath their pictures the headlines usually refer to them using their character names rather than their real names, further blurring the line between real life and drama.