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One of the most famous theaters of all time is the Globe Theatre. It was one of several Shakespeare worked in during his career, and many of the greatest plays of English literature were performed there. Built in 1599 for L600 just across the River Thames from London, it burned down in 1613 when a spark from one of the cannons in a battle scene in Shakespeare\'s Henry VIII set fire to the thatched roof. The theater was quickly rebuilt and survived until 1644. No one knows exactly what the Globe looked like but some scholarly detective work has given us a fairly good idea. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has a full scale re-creation of the Globe.
When it was built, the Globe was the latest thing in theater design. It was a three-story octagon, with covered galleries surrounding an open yard some 50 feet across. Three sides of the octagon were devoted to the stage and backstage areas. The main stage was a raised platform that jutted into the center of the yard, or pit. Behind the stage was the tiring house--the backstage area where the actors dressed and waited for their cues. This area was flanked by two doors and contained an inner stage, with a curtain that was used when the script called for a scene to be discovered. (Some scholars think the inner stage was actually a tent or pavilion that could be moved about the stage.) Above the inner stage was the upper stage, a curtained balcony that could serve as the battlements in Hamlet or for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Most of the action of the play took place on the main and upper stages.
The third story held the musicians\' gallery and machinery for sound effects and pyrotechnics. Above all was a turret from which a flag was flown to announce, \"Performance today.\" A roof (the shadow) covered much of the stage and not only protected the players from sudden showers but also contained machinery needed for special effects. More machinery was under the stage, where several trapdoors permitted the sudden appearance in a play of ghosts and allowed actors to leap into rivers or graves, as the script required.
For a penny (a day\'s wages for an apprentice), you could stand with the \"groundlings\" in the yard to watch the play; another penny would buy you a seat in the upper galleries, and a third would get you a cushioned seat in the lower gallery--the best seats in the house. The audience would be a mixed crowd--sedate scholars, gallant courtiers, and respectable merchants and their families in the galleries; rowdy apprentices and young men looking for excitement in the yard; and pickpockets and prostitutes taking advantage of the crowds to ply their trades. And crowds there would be--the Globe could probably hold 2000 to 3000 people, and even an ordinary performance would attract a crowd of 1200.
The play would be performed in broad daylight during the warmer months. In colder weather, Shakespeare\'s troupe appeared indoors at Court or in one of London\'s private theaters. There was no scenery as we know it, but there are indications that the Elizabethans used simple set pieces such as trees, bowers, or battle tents to indicate location. Any props needed were readied in the tiring house by the book keeper (we\'d call him the stage manager) and carried on and off by actors. If time or location were important, the characters usually said something about it. Trumpet flourishes told the audience an important character was about to enter, rather like a modern spotlight, and a scene ended when all the characters left the stage. (Bodies of dead characters were carried off stage.) Little attention was paid to historical accuracy in plays such as Julius Caesar or Macbeth, and actors wore contemporary clothing. One major difference from the modern theater was that all female parts were played by young boys, Elizabethan custom did not permit women to act.
If the scenery was minimal, the performance made up for it in costumes and spectacle. English actors were famous throughout Europe for their skill as dancers, and some performances ended with a dance (or jig). Blood, in the form of animal blood or red paint, was lavished about in the tragedies; ghosts made sudden appearances amidst swirling fog; thunder was simulated by rolling a cannon ball along the wooden floor of the turret or by rattling a metal sheet. The costumes were gorgeous--and expensive! One \"robe of estate\" alone cost L19, a year\'s wages for a skilled workman of the time. But the costumes were a large part of the spectacle that the audience came to see, and they had to look impressive in broad daylight, with the audience right up close.
You\'ve learned some of the conventions of the Globe Theatre, a theater much simpler than many of ours but nevertheless offering Shakespeare a wide range of possibilities for staging his plays. Now let\'s see how specific parts of A Midsummer Night\'s Dream might have been presented at the Globe.
A Midsummer Night\'s Dream is unusual in that it takes almost no advantage of the multiple stages available to Shakespeare at the Globe. This may well be because the play was originally written to be performed privately as part of the celebrations of a particular wedding, and moved to the public theater later. Almost all the action takes place in the woods near Athens, and all of it could be performed on the main stage. The setting is, however, one of the most popular for Elizabethan plays--a woods. There may have been some standard props brought in to suggest a forest scene, or the actors may just have treated the pillars as if they were trees.
You can see how the absence of scenery and lighting affects the play, though. The characters are constantly mentioning that now it is nighttime and that they are in the woods. If they didn\'t say so, how could the audience know? (In this play, nighttime is particularly important for many of the scenes, because that is when the fairies are in charge.)
The ending of the play is also typically Elizabethan. Since there was no curtain to fall, there were different conventions: tragedies frequently ended with a funeral march and bodies being carried off the stage, while comedies ended the way A Midsummer Night\'s Dream does, with music and a dance.
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