Staging at the Globe, 1599-1613

Abstract

OW many entrances had the Globe stage? Was the curtained enclosure a recess, a booth, a mansion, or a property? Was the upper level a gallery, a tarras, a chamber, or a window? Fifty years ago we might have given confident answers to these fundamental questions; but the more we have learned about the Elizabethan playhouse, the less sure we seem to be. It is my purpose in this paper to explore a way out of the present position of scholarly stalemate by outlining certain principles, about which some general agreement may be achieved, and then applying them to a reexamination of the basic problems. As a first principle, I would suggest that, as far as possible, each investigation should be limited to the plays of one theatre at a time. Since other evidence is so scanty, we are forced to rely a great deal upon the internal evidence of the plays; but we ought not to assume that all plays, or even all the plays of one playwright, are of equal value. Many plays were produced in several different theatres, and there is no way of discovering which pieces of internal evidence apply to which playhouse. There were wide divergences between house and house. Some theatres were circular, some rectagonal, some octagonal; some had fixed stages, others had stages removeable for animal shows; some were adapted from innyards, others from archery butts or tennis courts; some housed only a few hundred spectators, while others held nearly three thousand; and the private houses were artificially lit, while the public houses were open to the sun. Different physical environments created different staging conditions and practices. For my own purposes I have selected the first Globe (I599I6I3). We cannot have a complete list of the plays produced there, or in any theatre. There are relatively few plays which we can certainly identify as Globe plays, and even these exist only in corrupt texts. I make use of terms like corruption in a different sense from the bibliographers: a bad Quarto, in their sense, may be a text for the historian of the stage, if it reflects accurately the staging practices of only one theatre. Unfortunately, very few texts are really good; the best that we can do is to identify texts which embody the staging practices of only the one public playhouse, plays which, for instance, were played at the Globe but never at the Fortune or the Swan. Even these texts will be corrupted by directions deriving from performances in other theatres where the King's Men regularly appeared. Shakespeare's company, like the others, took their plays to Court or on tour in the provinces; after i609 they occupied a private theatre, the Blackfriars; in i6I4 the Globe was rebuilt after the fire in the previous year. Even good texts, then, to an important extent are impure. But neither Shakespeare nor any other Globe dramatist is likely to have written for his company