The Plays of Shakespeare

It is a singularity in the nature of the English that they are strangely addicted to all kinds of pleasure, above all other nations. The city of London alone hath four or five companies of players with their particular theaters capable of [holding] many thousands [of spectators], wherein they all play every day of the week but Sunday…

— Elizabethan traveler Fynes Moryson

The contrast between the plays of William Shakespeare as they were seen during his own time and as they are seen today is hilariously stark. Our well-nigh universally anointed greatest writer in the history of the English language, whose works have been subjected to microscopic inspection by generations of chin-stroking intellectuals and foisted upon hundreds of millions of reluctant schoolchildren as the equivalent of vegetables for the mind and soul, was widely regarded as the very definition of an ephemeral, not to say vaguely debased, popular entertainer while he was alive. The theater where most of his best plays were enacted for the first time was located in Southwark, across the River Thames and outside the walls of the respectable City of London, because that was the only place that would have it. Southwark was where London went to let its hair down, much to the chagrin of the scolds, the prudes, and the religious fanatics; it might have been called the Red Light District, if only electricity had been invented. The staid hallways of academia this was not.

In addition to bars and brothels, the theaters of Southwark stood next to and competed with bear- and bull-baiting, cock-fighting, and related “sporting” events. Such lowest-common-denominator entertainments served as the counter-programming to Shakespeare’s plumbing of the more sublime depths of our humanity, demonstrating that, if we are the only animal capable of selfless acts of loving compassion and personal sacrifice, we are also the only one that revels in cruelty simply for the sake of it. Truly, the ineffable and the bestial stood cheek by jowl in Southwark.

How ironic it is to consider, then, that the unruly world of the theater that Shakespeare knew had actually sprung out of the English religious tradition. The acting troupes of the late sixteenth century were the direct heirs of earlier ones who had wandered the countryside in Medieval times, reenacting the tales of the Bible during an era when any form of secular theater was condemned as a matter of course as an instrument of Satan. Through most of the Middle Ages, English plays were highly formalized, almost more like lectures than dramas, consisting of lots of abstract speechifying in Latin, a language which the vast majority of their audiences couldn’t even understand.

By the time of the Wars of the Roses, however, the performers were being allowed to stretch out a bit. The props and costumes grew more elaborate and the language shifted from Latin to English, at the same time that the focus shifted from merely reiterating the words of the Bible to reenacting its scenes in a dramatic and moving way, the better to bring them home to the crowds of largely illiterate peasants. These performances became known as mystery plays, or sometimes passion plays, after their favorite subject of all, the final passion of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The ascent of Elizabeth Tudor to the throne in 1558 marked the onset of the most secular age of English history in a millennium. The burgeoning art of theatrical performance mirrored this development. Playwrights were now permitted and motivated to tell stories that were not found in the Bible, that might have no explicitly pedagogical or moral function whatsoever. At the same time, an undreamt-of cornucopia of ancient texts was reaching England from Italy and other places on the European continent, which had themselves recovered them from the great libraries of Islam. The raw materials of drama were suddenly everywhere. Almost overnight, the English theater scene went from being entirely devoted to re-creating the Bible to being capable of producing a playwright like Shakespeare, who found his inspiration just about everywhere but the good book. (None of Shakespeare’s 37 canonical plays involves any of the characters or incidents from the Bible, making it just about the only book available to him that he didn’t plunder for material at one time or other.) For better or for worse, the art form’s degree of respectability, which was never all that high in the first place, declined further as it became more secular, until it was considered of a piece with the other amusements of districts like Southwark.

When Shakespeare was a boy in Stratford-upon-Avon, the business of putting on plays was still a peripatetic endeavor, with horse carts in village squares and inn yards serving as its stages. In 1576, however, a successful actor named James Burbage opened what may have been the first permanent, dedicated playhouse ever to be established in England. Called simply The Theatre, it stood on the other side of the City of London from the future theatrical hub of Southwark: to be specific, in Shoreditch, a part of the modern borough of Hackney. At that time, this sleepy exurb was the only place where Burbage could secure permission to build from the extremely skeptical London authorities. Running a theater was destined to remain a delicate dance with the powers that were in the capital, a matter of constantly greasing the palms and flattering the egos of those who could put one out of business or make one’s reputation with countervailing strokes of a mercurial pen. It did help that Queen Elizabeth was herself a fan of plays, so much so that she often had the troupes perform for her court, but even her influence over the local government wasn’t limitless. Sponsors from the ranks of the lower nobility were essential, and expected to be rewarded and celebrated for their patronage every bit as much as a modern-day mega-corp that puts its name on an arena.

When The Theatre proved a success despite the challenges, several more like it opened, initially clustering around it there in Shoreditch. From nothing, a thriving scene sprang up in a remarkably short time, for it turned out that not having to perform from atop a horse cart increased the art’s scope of possibility enormously. London theater’s leading light just before Shakespeare arrived was a flamboyant young fellow named Christopher Marlowe, who seemed determined to confirm every one of the fuddy-duddies’ prejudices against players and their plays. The enfant terrible of his age, Marlowe’s personal life was unabashedly wild and dangerous in a way that Shakespeare’s would never be. Marlow himself was a mirror image of his transgressive, violent plays; he was said to be an atheist if not a devil-worshiper, to enjoy sex with men as well as women. When he died in 1593 at the age of just 29, under mysterious circumstances that are still debated to this day, it came as a shock but not a surprise. His demise cleared the way for Shakespeare, riding high off the early reception of his Wars of the Roses plays, to inherit the mantle of London’s most influential and prominent playwright of all, a status he would more or less retain for the next twenty years.

As a shareholder of the acting troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which included the scene’s founding father Richard Burbage, Shakespeare saw his plays presented at The Theatre and at another Shoreditch playhouse called the Curtain. It wasn’t until 1599 that he and his fellow shareholders built the Globe, that most legendary theater in all of human history, on the southern side of the Thames in Southwark, as part of a general shift on the part of the whole scene toward that more accessible adult playground. In fact, they created the Globe by literally taking The Theatre apart, plank by plank, carrying it across London Bridge, and rebuilding it on the other side.

We’ll take a closer look at Shakespeare’s Globe and the replica of it that stands in roughly the same spot today in a future article. For now, though, let’s talk about Elizabethan theater more generally. What was it like to attend a play, and what was it like to put one on?

With only rare exceptions, such as plays that were presented for the queen herself at her court, all Elizabethan theatrical performances were matinees, with a starting time of around two in the afternoon. The reason why is perfectly logical when you stop to think about it. The people of this time period had no electrical lights to hand, nor even gas-powered ones; their only source of artificial illumination was the open flame. In addition to being less than ideal for lighting a stage, bringing burning torches or candles inside a crowded structure like a theater was inadvisable for other reasons. Indeed, humanity has arguably never devised a more perfect firetrap than the typical Elizabethan theater, with its untreated wood everywhere, its dry straw strewn across the floor and on its partial roof, and its single narrow public entryway devised for the purpose of keeping non-paying patrons out. It’s little surprise that the life of many such theaters, the original Globe included, ended in some inferno or other.

In the absence of a Time Out London, one could learn about what plays were being put on where on any given afternoon by consulting the playbills that could be found tacked up in many public gathering places. Or — and, I have to suspect, more commonly for the many illiterate Londoners who attended the plays — one could just turn up in Shoreditch or later Southwark and see which theaters had hoisted the English flag from their pinnacles, their way of signaling that there was a performance on that day.

An Elizabethan theater was not round, as it might appear from a distance, but rather a many-sided open-topped polygon. It was generally a sizable structure by the standards of its time: a large one might be 30 meters in diameter and 10 meters high. Yet a theater tended not to be an overly fine or fussy example of construction engineering. Most of them were slapped together in fairly short order using crude timbers and pegs, a reflection of the fleeting cultural moment that had spawned them and that would all too soon sweep them away again.

Inside, a theater consisted of an open space called the pit or yard, encircled by three tiers of gallery seating that were, unlike the pit, sheltered from rain and sun by an awning. A stage built at about shoulder height jutted into the pit from one side, filling almost half of its total area.

A punter could take in a play from ground level with the other “groundlings,” as they were known, for a single penny. A seat in the gallery, on the other hand, might cost three, four, or five times more than a space in the pit, depending on its position and its height above the ground. (Higher seating was naturally more prestigious and more expensive.) All told, as many as 2500 groundlings and their betters could be packed inside the bigger theaters such as the Globe.

These were some of the few places in England where the various social classes could be seen gathered together, even if the final effect was less a tribute to egalitarianism that it was a sort of living diagram of the English social hierarchy, from bottom to top. It was said that some of the groundlings forewent food to bring some entertainment into their difficult lives; one contemporary playgoer wrote of the many “pinched, needy creatures that live of alms, with scarce clothes for their backs or food for their bellies” that were to be seen in the pit. From such depths, the ladder of life rose to dusty laborers, to middle-class shop owners, and finally to the preening aristocrats.

While they watched the show, those punters who could afford to do so munched oranges, apples, and roasted hazelnuts and chestnuts that were sold by vendors who circulated through their ranks. (Just as in a modern movie house or sports arena, the proprietors of the theaters forbid their customers to bring their own snacks, so that they could sell them food at an inflated price once they were inside.) The majority of playgoers were surely male, but a considerable number of women probably attended as well. The crowds were boisterous, always ready to cheer on a good play and to jeer a bad or boring one as they swigged from the mugs of ale they had also purchased from the vendors.

In fact, most Londoners, regardless of their social class, drank little else but beer, whose fermentation process killed most of the germs that infested the city’s water supply. As a result, most people — even children — were just a little bit drunk pretty much all the time. Small wonder that the theatrical audiences weren’t above throwing orange peels and other, still less appetizing things at the actors if the play was really substandard. Along with alcohol, the spectators indulged in another vice that is all too familiar to us moderns increasingly as Shakespeare’s career  wore on: that of smoking, thanks to the tobacco that was reaching Europe in ever greater quantities from the New World. On the whole, the atmosphere must have smacked more of a rowdy rock concert than a modern play on the West End or Broadway.

The stage of the theater was an unassuming wooden platform, with a column on its either side to support an awning that extended most of the way over it. It had two balconies, one under and one over the awning, and a trapdoor at ground level. The uppermost balcony was colloquially known as “Heaven,” and was often used by actors representing gods or other elevated beings; the space beneath the trapdoor was known as “Hell,” and might stand in for a grave or a dungeon cell. Behind the stage’s rear façade was the “tiring” room, the Elizabethan name for a dressing room. (Think “attire.”) It was here, in a cramped horizontal and vertical warren with portals leading unto Heaven and Hell and well as the main stage, that the actors prepared themselves and waited for their scenes.

The acting troupes were adept at making their small set of affordances — two balconies, trapdoor, and the main floor of the stage itself — stand in for a wide range of environments, all while almost never making use of the sorts of static scenery which we expect to see on the stage of a modern play. When necessary, curtains might be used to carve out “discovery rooms,” semi-enclosed spaces on the stage that could house soliloquizers or eavesdroppers on the main action. Much of the rest of the scene-setting, of course, was done with words. Yet it would be a mistake to believe that Elizabethan theater was simply an exercise in recitation. On the contrary, and despite the lack of onstage scenery, it was the multimedia spectacle of its day.

If the art of the theatrical set-builder was as-yet unknown, that of the costumer was already in full flower. As its surviving painted portraits well attest, this was an age that didn’t shirk from dandyism and ostentatious display, and the garb of its actors reflected this. The colorful costumes had a practical purpose as well, of making the actors stand out distinctly from the drab wood of the stage and the façade, even for those audience members relegated to the very back of the pit. The costumes made it possible to tell a doctor from a merchant, a king from a craftsman, a queen from her lady-in-waiting, at a single glance from any part of the theater. Wardrobe was made especially important by the fact that most plays had more roles than they had actors, meaning that the same man might play two, three, or even more different characters in the course of an afternoon, distinguished only by the clothing he wore and any tics or idiosyncrasies he could find a way to put on along with a new outfit. It seems safe to say that everything that happened onstage was a little exaggerated, a little splashier than it might have been in real life.

The most bizarre of all aspects of Elizabethan acting to our sensibilities is that all of the female roles were played by males. The troupes enlisted boys for this purpose, taking advantage of their slighter frames and higher voices. Audiences got a huge kick out of it, and Shakespeare was by no means above pandering to their desires — thus the number of men he has dressing up as women and vice versa within his plays, creating Russian dolls of bent genders. People loved that sort of thing.

Many plays included stunts and special effects. Actors might descend from Heaven to ground level, or fly up in the other direction, using ingeniously designed harnesses. They hid under their costumes bladders of pig’s blood which burst into crimson showers during sword fights — the latter being another thing audiences could never get enough of. Animal entrails were used in imaginatively grisly ways in plays like the notoriously violent Titus Andronicus.

The audio component was not neglected either. A group of musicians equipped with fiddles, violas, lutes, drums, trumpets, and sackbuts (a kind of primitive trombone) were secreted away behind or above the stage. These provided a semi-improvised soundtrack whose purpose and nature would be familiar to any modern moviegoer. Sometimes, especially in the comedies, diegetic songs and dances might be written into the script. More often, the musicians commented on the action and set the mood with their instruments: a royal flourish to announce the entrance of a king, a dramatic musical stab to accompany an onstage one, toots and raspberries to punctuate jokes and pratfalls. Non-musical sound effects were created in a variety of clever ways by hidden stagehands: for example, cannonballs could be rolled around in the tiring room to make a noise uncannily like thunder. Sometimes the productions went so far as to discharge real guns and cannons. (An unfortunate accident with one of the latter burned down the original Globe in 1613 during a performance of Shakespeare’s very last play, as if to officially mark the end of his career.)

The troupes who presented the plays were self-contained units unto themselves. Specialization was mostly a foreign concept in their ranks. Any member might be a playwright, an actor, or a stagehand — or all three — on any given performance. A troupe might start out renting the stage of an existing theater, but the ultimate sign of success was to build one of its own in which to take up permanent residency.

Despite the general aversion to specialization, there were at least a couple of relatively well-defined backstage roles. The nearest equivalent to a modern theatrical producer — the man in charge of logistics and the all-important budget — was known as the manager. The closest equivalent to a director was a fellow called the bookkeeper, who may or may not also be the author of the play being presented. He was responsible for following along in the script as the performance took place and keeping the proceedings on track. If someone forgot his lines, he could prompt him from behind the tiring room’s curtain. Yet there is little sign that he was regarded as the “man in charge” of the performance in any holistic sense. His special status arose partially from the fact that he might be the only member of a troupe entrusted with a complete copy of a play’s script — for if such a thing got into the wrong hands, another company might upstage yours by putting on your own play before you could!

The egalitarian quality of life backstage didn’t mean that there were no onstage celebrities. Just as in Hollywood the stars who appear in the movies have long occluded the directors and screenwriters who conceive them, the most prominent Elizabethan actors could easily overshadow the authors of the plots and characters they brought to life. The scene had its fair share of handsome leading men, among them Shakespeare’s pioneering colleague Richard Burbage. But, predictably enough, Londoners appear to have adored the comic actors — known as the “fools” in the parlance of the time — most of all. During Shakespeare’s early years in London, the most popular actor of all in his troupe was probably Will Kempe, a great jovial sloven of a man, the John Candy of his day, who by all indications came to a similarly untimely end when his appetites finally got the best of him.

The fact is that the most revered plays of Shakespeare today were seldom the most popular back in his day. Audiences favored the patriotic bombast of the Wars of the Roses tetralogy and the slapstick silliness of some of the comedies over deeper probings of the human psyche; Shakespeare’s overall popularity may well have peaked quite early in his career, then actually declined somewhat as his works grew subtler. Even later on, he felt the need to balance and leaven his sublimity with the more, shall we say, straightforward entertainment to which many in his audience responded best. Thus even his moodiest tragedies include comic interludes for the benefit of what his fellow playwright Ben Jonson called the “rude barbarous crew” in the pit.

If there is one quality that distinguished Elizabethan theater above all others — one quality that set it apart from our own theatrical and cinematic productions — it was that of speed. Everything happened at an absurdly accelerated pace by comparison with our expectations. Shakespeare’s prodigious written output of roughly two plays per year wasn’t that unusual for the scene. His colleagues who enacted them had very little time to learn by heart these lengthy scripts that often gave thousands of words of dialog and soliloquizing to their most important characters. It seems the actors must have spoken their lines at an accelerated tempo as well; most modern productions of Shakespeare’s plays cut the scripts down by anywhere from a quarter to a half just to be able to put them on in a reasonable span of time. It’s enough to give the lie to our cherished notion that everything happened slower in the past, at the same time that it reveals some of what the human mind has become less good at over the centuries. Theater historian Scott McMillan has mused at how “the memories of Elizabethan actors are among the unexplained phenomena of human history. These were not short plays; the dialogue was among the most complex poetry ever written for the stage; there was nothing but candlelight to work from [when memorizing] at night; you could not know what the other roles consisted of while you learned yours; and on Sundays the preacher would be telling everyone you were doing something immoral.” Of course, we cannot say how well the actors intoned the intricate verse of Shakespeare and others. But it does seem hard to believe that he would have kept writing it for so many years if he was forced to listen to it getting butchered every night.

Regardless, we would probably be more than a little nonplussed if we could climb into a time machine and go back to attend a play in Elizabethan London. All signs are that the acting was far more stylized and less naturalistic than our own, in addition to being more rapid-paced. “There were no doubt well-worn gestures for contempt, rage, pity, remorse, and all the other emotions, which the audience would quickly accept as symbols,” conjectures the Canadian novelist and Shakespeare superfan Robertson Davies. The sentiments and poetry of a playwright like Shakespeare are sometimes profound and subtle, but their delivery must surely have been less so under circumstances such as these. A rowdy theater demanded broad gestures and loud voices that carried without benefit of amplification; elocution and sheer volume must have been at least as important as empathy in an actor. Did this mean that the actors failed to do Shakespeare’s plays justice in the way that we have grown to expect? Probably. Did it mean that much of what Shakespeare had to say flew right over his audiences’ heads? Almost certainly. But so be it.

To quote L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” However much they might disappoint or confuse us if we could only witness them, the plays clearly struck a chord with their audiences at the turn of the seventeenth century, such that Elizabethans from all walks of life came back to the theaters again and again, choosing to watch actors speaking and pantomiming on a stage over the other pleasures that were on offer in the fleshpots of London. People have continued to attend the plays of Shakespeare ever since, through almost inconceivable changes in tastes, lifestyles, contexts, and values. That his works can be massaged and adapted by every generation to suit itself is just one more testament to his genius.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)