Shakespeare's Industrious Scenes

Abstract

Is it mere chance that in the Folio the words Theater and Scenes alone are capitalized? Probably. Yet this capitalization fortuitously reminds us, if we need reminding, that the Elizabethan theatre was a theatre of scenes, and moreover, industrious scenes-industrious not only in the sense of laborious implied by Philip's lines, but also in that commonly understood Elizabethan sense of showing intelligent or skillful work (OED). That Shakespeare's scenes are industrious in this latter sense is self-evident. How they are industrious is less easy to specify. Until quite recently, when Emrys Jones stressed the importance of scenic form in Shakespeare,2 the study of Shakespeare's art of construction has been the study of his art of constructing plots. From R. G. Moulton's attempt in 1885 to demonstrate Shakespeare's pyramidal arrangement, through T. W. Baldwin's massive exposition in 1947 of Shakespeare's five-act structure, to Wolfgang Clemen's masterly analysis in 1972 of Shakespeare's art of preparation,3 we have concentrated primarily on story continuity and scene juxtaposition in our examination of Shakespeare's dramatic structure. Articles on the design of this play or the structure of that, while they may touch on individual scenes, ply most assiduously the comparison of speech to speech or image to image in order to show how one feature of a play is organically connected to another. Undoubtedly,