Symbolic Staging in Shakespeare and Its Importance to the Classroom

Abstract

Symbolic Staging in Shakespeare and Its Importance to the Classroom Charles R. Forker Indiana University For years it was customary to introduce students to Shakespeare with some discussion of the dramatist's interlocking functions as actor, playwright, and theatrical shareholder and, hence, to place considerable emphasis on the practicalconditions of production at the Globeand Blackfriars. Such mattersas the design and size of the theatres, the spatial relationships and opportunities of the stage, and the fluidity of action and locale were considered. Usually the teacher stressed such conventions as the use of boy actors for female roles, asides and soliloquies, the verbal creation of atmosphere on a daylight stage, and the symbolic use of costumes, curtains, furniture, properties, and even the actors themselves (as when a few players must represent a mob or an army). There has lately been a drift away from such preoccupations. In many colleges and universities, an emphasis on Shakespeare's modernity or contemporary relevance and, in consequence, on various revisionist schools of critical theory (structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, linguistic, semiological, response oriented, to name only a few) has tended to displace the time-honored concern with the features and conditions of the Renaissance stage. The thesis of this essay is that such "old-fashioned historicism" (as it is sometimes now called) remains invaluable, not primarily for antiquarian reasons, but because a student's consciousness of Elizabethan theatrical circumstances frequently aids and enriches his capacity to enjoy and interpret Shakespeare's art. If students lose the sense of what the Elizabethan theatre really was like, they necessarily forfeit an important range of meanings and significances. Here I can touch on only a few of the many ways in which such awareness can be fruitful. I shall therefore concentrate principally on Shakespeare's symbolic use of stage space and conclude with brief mention oftwo other matters — his skillful way with boy actors and with symbolic properties. I am arguing, in brief, for the importance to teaching of such research on Elizabethan playhouses as that of Walter Hodges and Richard Hosley and for an ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW imaginatively visual approach to the understanding of Shakespeare such as John Styan has demonstrated.1 It is well known that Shakespeare's Globe (as its name implies) sometimes suggested cosmic relationships by means of its very shape. The "wooden O"2 enclosed something like a cross-section of society and promoted a simultaneous sense of diversity and unity. The platform where most of the action took place corresponded microcosmically to the sphere of earthly experience, but the audience could be made aware of regions (and, hence, of influences) both above and below. Hamlet is caught up in a philosophical tension between "this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" (the "heavens" covering part of the acting space) and "this quintessence of dust" (the grave represented at Ophelia's funeral by the open trapdoor [II.ii.301309 ]). In the graveyard scene the trap becomes a locus for the ironic interaction between the living and the dead, an important theme from the beginning. First the gravediggers, professional dealers in bones and skulls, occupy the space; paradoxically they project a spirit of cheerful and witty vitality that links them to the jester whose remains they have just disturbed. Then Ophelia's corpse displaces them, enforcing the grimmer truth that Hamlet's former beloved already goes the way of Yorick. Finally, Hamlet quarrels with Laertes, and their physical tussle in the grave not only prefigures the duel in which they will destroy each other but also reminds us still more forcefully of the common dissolution to which Death, the great leveller, reduces Alexander and Yorick, emperor and clown, hero and villain alike. Shakespeare's theatre reflected the notion that life is susceptible of invasion by presences from or in touch with other worlds. In Cymbeline Jupiter descends by machine from the "hut" above the stage; a deity suddenly enters nature to resolve conflict by supernatural agency. The Tempest presents Prospero, "invisible" and God-like, "on the top" (III.iii.17), to supervise the appearing and disappearing visions by which he 1.See especially C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored: A Study...