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January
Shakespeare
on stage: a
consideration
of the dramatic
context
by Dr Joana Soliva
Issue 8
When students call a Shakespeare play a ‘poem’ or a
‘novel’, they’re not simply making a silly mistake;
they’re highlighting a more serious problem caused by
studying drama in a classroom setting. Classroom work
involves reading the play, discussing the language
features, considering interpretations and looking for
ways in which the contexts influence the writing and the
reception of the text. The text remains a printed text
when, in fact, it is the most dynamic form of literature,
embodied and physical, powerfully remade in every
new space and by every new actor. The physical
dimension of plays is sometimes described in stage
directions. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams give
detailed and specific instructions about the intended
performance of their modern tragedies. Shakespeare,
by contrast, gives virtually nothing, making it very
difficult for A-level students to consider the dramatic
context (the performance context) without reading
secondary material.
Metatheatrical references
Shakespeare himself never seemed to forget about the
dramatic context of his plays. His work is peppered with
references to the theatrical experience, often as a
metaphor for life and reality:
All the world’s a stage (As You Like It, II vii)
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. (The Tempest, IV i)
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. (Macbeth, V v)
Perhaps this was the inevitable result of being an
actor and part of a syndicate which owned shares in a
successful playhouse where his company, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men (later called the King’s Men), were
exclusively based. Many of his plays were bespoke
creations for performance at the Globe theatre, a
huge outdoor amphitheatre-style space. When the
acting company acquired the Blackfriars Theatre, a
smaller indoor space, he wrote in the expectation that
his plays would be performed at both these locations,
depending on the season.
It could be more than this, however, as such
metatheatrical references foreground the fictional
nature of the audience’s experience and blur the lines
between the play and reality. Hamlet, with its extremely
self-conscious tragic hero, is full of such moments:
I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all
my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and
indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile
promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air,
look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it
appears no other thing to me than a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours. (Hamlet, II ii)
Many critics feel this description of Hamlet’s feelings
could have been acted to refer specifically to the
physical features of the Globe theatre, making the
audience share directly in the experience and crossing
the line between art and reality.
So, if Shakespeare and his audience
were so keenly aware of the dramatic
context, the physical dimension of
the plays, how come we mostly
ignore it when we’re studying his
work? The answer may lie in a
general decline in theatregoing
in our modern culture. Even when
we do attend plays, however, the
experience is considerably different
from that in Elizabethan and
Jacobean times.
Task: Consider the genre of
tragedy. If Shakespeare
blurs the line between the
play and reality, what
implications does that
have for the impact of
the tragedy on its
audience?
The physical space of the theatre
At the Globe, plays were usually performed in the
afternoon, in full daylight and, ideally, good weather.
Night-time scenes were, therefore, dependent on the
imagination of the audience. The witches’ scenes in
Macbeth, the late-night revelry in Othello, the terrifying
night-time visits of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, all these
were suggested by the skills of both the actors and the
audience. Intense soliloquising by tortured souls was
watched with a clear view of a sea of faces on the
other side of the jutting ‘apron stage’. Even in the
candlelit indoor theatres, the presence of the audience
was constantly evident. Not only this, but the
audiences weren’t generally as quiet and restrained
as modern audiences. The crowds at the outdoor
playhouses, of up to 3000 people, might shout out,
jeer, cheer, or start talking to each other. Working in
these conditions must have been a demanding job
and writing to capture the attention of a very diverse
audience must have been a challenge.
It might be useful to remember the nature of
Shakespeare’s original audiences when we’re
considering interpretations of the texts. Some of the
audience were high-ranking, well-educated and even
literary figures of the day, sitting in the tiered seats
and in private boxes. Many were the ‘groundlings’
(sometimes known as ‘stinkards’), paying a penny to
enter, standing to watch in the ‘pit’ around the stage,
illiterate but far from insensitive to the effects of
Shakespeare’s language. Men and women of all
ages flocked to the theatre. The audience was
representative of Shakespeare’s contemporary society,
a heterogeneous group who would receive the plays
in a broad spectrum of ways. One might argue that
Shakespeare exploited this, in making his language
syntactically ambiguous and polysemic (‘I am not what
I am’). His work resists the single, authoritative
interpretation, and the dramatic form furthermore
enables him very effectively to conceal his own
opinions and attitudes, instead exploring the issues
of his plays by means of a number of characters’
perspectives. He is sometimes interpreted as offering
radical and transgressive ideas, challenging social
norms and the dominant ideologies of his time. If he
did this, he had to be careful, as the Master of Revels
had the power to censor and even prohibit plays
from being acted. There were plenty of people in
Shakespeare’s time who attacked the theatres for
promoting debauchery and destabilising social rules,
not to mention spreading disease and plagues.
Task: Consider the tragedy you have studied.
How do different characters demonstrate different
perspectives on a single issue?
Conventions of drama
Dramatic form, something we should be paying
attention to in addressing Assessment Objective 2, is
closely connected with the text's dramatic context. The
technique of using soliloquies and asides is a good
example – this was a convention of dramatic texts. The
audience understood this was a way for them to gain
access to the interior experience of a character:
•
Hamlet reveals his confusion, guilt, self-doubt and
agonised paralysis in the face of horror
•
Othello’s first soliloquy, in Act III, demonstrates the
pain of uncertainty
•
Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’ is clearly implied in his
first aside.
However, the nature of the apron stage was such that
these soliloquies actively involved the audience. They
even made the audience accomplices (compare this
with the effects achieved by Browning in the poetic
form of the dramatic monologue), creating a close
relationship between the audience and a character
who is increasingly isolated from others in the play:
•
Macbeth speaks of his bloodthirsty plans and his
ruthless desire for power and the audience is drawn
to collude with him
•
Iago, whose soliloquies have drawn the audience
towards him from the first act, straddles the fictional
boundaries of the play, speaking as if the audience
are in Venice and Cyprus and as if they already
share his view and condone his actions.
In this way, Shakespeare exploits the dramatic context
that he knew would exist for his plays, testing the
audience’s sympathy for ‘evil’ characters and creating a
morally ambiguous world for his audience to explore.
Just as the audience recognised and understood the
conventions of soliloquies, they also appreciated the
aural effects. Shakespeare’s plays are sometimes
January
described as ‘verse’ and indeed share many features
with poetry. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic
pentameter) was a convention for dramatic texts, often
associated with high-ranking characters, while prose
was spoken by lower-class characters. Merely
identifying this feature will not gain much reward at
A-level. Look, rather, for the effects achieved,
especially if Shakespeare ‘breaks the rules’, such
as the:
• use of dangerous-sounding trochaic rhythms in the
witches’ speeches in Macbeth
• impassioned outbursts of Othello
• riddling talk of Hamlet, descending perhaps into
madness.
led to the destruction of the entire playhouse in 1613),
staged battles and copious amounts of fake blood.
His audience were much more sensitive to
phonological devices than modern audiences are,
especially a reading audience. They would have
immediately recognised the connections made by
using verbal echoes, the sense of finality or
completeness achieved by using rhyming couplets
and the implications of wordplay.
All actors were male, with the senior actors taking single
main parts, lesser actors taking multiple parts, and boys
used for female parts. Again, this may make us pause
in our interpretations of Shakespeare’s presentation of
women such as Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia
and so on. There is a gender imbalance in the ‘dramatis
personae’ of every Shakespeare play, but this must
reflect the fact he was writing for his own company.
He knew exactly who would be playing every part he
created and he knew there were only two or three
people to take the female parts. This doesn’t alter the
nature of those select characters, of course, and we
can still examine the limitations of Desdemona from a
feminist perspective if we wish.
Task: Choose an important soliloquy from the
tragedy you have studied. Write a close analysis of
it, considering the different approaches discussed
above.
Acting styles and challenges
The actors working with Shakespeare’s texts were
surrounded on all sides by the audience, in some
performances, indeed, they were even on the stage
itself. These actors might not have attempted realism
in the way that modern actors do, but they did use their
voices, their postures, gestures and positioning on the
stage to convey the action. They worked with minimal
scenery and few props, such as swords, letters,
crowns, skulls, flowers and so on.
In Macbeth, the witches provided a special spectacle,
being represented on stage during a time of increasing
hysteria about witchcraft (the play was possibly
commissioned for James I, the Royal Witch-Hunter).
The witches may have flown away at the end of the
first scene, using stage machinery, and probably
disappeared by means of a trapdoor in the stage in
the third scene. For the audience, however, the very
presence of the witches might have been unsettling.
This fear might have been magnified in Act IV scene i
as an incantation is performed, with the danger that this
may have become reality.
Task: Consider a production of your play that you
have seen (either in the theatre or on film). Choose
one short scene and consider the choices the
director and actors have made. How have the
director and actors influenced the audience’s
interpretation of the scene?
In Othello, the bed which dominates the ending of the
play would have been the only large object on the
stage, focussing attention on it as a symbolic as well as
realistic object. Similarly, the handkerchief would acquire
disproportionate significance on a stage stripped of
other material distractions. On the other hand, the sheer
spectacle of characters such as Othello, played in great
finery by the white celebrity actor Richard Burbage, must
have distracted the audience somewhat from the
weightier issues of the play.
Audiences were known to enjoy seeing the costumes
worn by the actors as well as the opportunity to view
rich members of the audience in their sumptuous
attire. Other spectacular elements included the firing of
cannons (with rather terrifying results as one stray shot
Drawing of the Blackfriars Theatre by J H Farrar
January
Manipulating the audience
Sometimes, it seems that Shakespeare wants his
audiences to reflect on their own role in creating the
meanings of his plays. Among his repertoire of
dramatic devices are plays within plays, dumbshows,
masques and countless scenes where characters
eavesdrop or spy on other characters:
•
Iago maliciously engineers a scene between
Cassio and Bianca which seals Desdemona’s fate.
He watches this scene with Othello and the
audience can understand how ‘occular proof’ is
really a matter of interpretation and prejudice.
•
Hamlet produces a dumbshow intended to ‘catch
the conscience of the king’, wherein we watch
Hamlet watching Claudius, who in turn is watching
a reconstruction of his own evil act, the murder of
old Hamlet. The audience sees the power of art to
reflect and comment on reality, as the King makes
a futile attempt to escape the truth.
In summary, the theatrical spaces of the Elizabethan
and Jacobean times promoted a strong awareness of
the plays as artificial and temporary constructs. They
also foregrounded the degree to which audiences
participated in the creation of meanings. Shakespeare
wrote for these conditions, answering a huge demand
for entertainment of this kind. He managed brilliantly
to entertain, of course, but he also used his work to
explore some enduringly thorny issues. The dramatic
context particularly prompted a consideration of the
relationship between the actors and the audience, and
between art and reality.
The famous sketch of the Swan Theatre in 1596.
Find out more:
•
It’s astonishing what you will learn from marking out a space like the stage of the original Globe –
somewhere in the region of 43 feet by 27 feet – and trying out a few scenes
•
Visit the reconstructed Globe in London – ideally, attend a play there in summer
•
Cambridge University hosts a couple of interesting, animated, interactive pages on the Globe at
http://aspirations.english.cam.ac.uk/converse/gcse/shakespeare.acds
•
Aimed at A-level students, the free resources at ‘crossref-it’ contain notes on the staging of Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama: http://crossref-it.info/articles/150/Elizabethan-and-Jacobean-theatre-design
•
Read Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
3rd edition, 1992)
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