Directions: When you comment, please put your first name and initial of your last name and period number. You will then need to write 3 details, 2 unanswered questions and 1 short summary. 


Taken from http://www.folger.edu/Content/Discover-Shakespeare/Shakespeares-Theater/


Following the common practice of the day, William Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed solely by male actors; boys played the female parts. There was no curtain, and only a few necessary pieces of scenery, such as a throne or a rock. Shakespeare’s acting company, known first as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later as the King’s Men, put on plays in any number of places—from the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I to churches and guildhalls in the countryside. The company most frequently performed in its own theaters.

The original theater in which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men staged their plays was known simply as The Theatre; it is believed to have been the first London playhouse. From 1599 onward, the company performed in the outdoor theater most associated with Shakespeare’s name—the Globe. Later, they also staged plays at a private indoor theater, the Blackfriars, while continuing to operate the Globe.

The Folger Shakespeare Library houses an intimate indoor stage called the Elizabethan Theatre, which is regularly used for plays, concerts, readings, and educational programs. The space is not intended to duplicate any particular theater of Shakespeare’s day. Instead, its rafters, multiple levels, and plaster-and-timber walls evoke the London innyards where plays were also sometimes staged. Overhead, a floating cloth suggests the open sky.

London Playhouses and Other Sites

The actors of Shakespeare's time performed plays in many locations: the great halls of royal residences, the halls at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and at the Inns of Court, and the private houses of great lords and civic officials. Sometimes acting companies toured the provinces, where plays might be staged in churches (until around 1600) or guildhalls. London inns were important playing places until the 1590s. 

London theaters began to be built just before Shakespeare wrote his first plays in the 1590s. They included outdoor, public playhouses and indoor, private theaters for much smaller audiences. The Theatre, usually considered the first London public playhouse, was built north of London in 1576 by James Burbage, the father of the famous actor Richard Burbage, who was in Shakespeare's company. 

Other public playhouses included the Curtain and the Fortune, also north of London, and the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, and the Hope, all on the Bankside just across the Thames south of London. Playhouses were built outside the city of London because many civic officials were hostile to the performance of drama. 

In 1598, Shakespeare's acting company was threatened by difficulties in renewing the lease on the land occupied by the Theatre, its first theater. The company dismantled the building and transported its timbers across the Thames to the Bankside, where the timbers were used to build a new theater, the Globe. The company began playing at the Globe in 1599. The Globe burned down in 1613, but was immediately rebuilt. Archaeologists have excavated portions of this second Globe and of the Rose. 


Inside the Theaters

The public theaters of Shakespeare's time were open-air playhouses. Some were polygonal or roughly circular; the Fortune was square. They were said to hold two or three thousand spectators, who must have squeezed together tightly. Some paid extra to sit or stand in upper-level, roofed galleries all the way around the theater, surrounding an open space. 

In this central space were the stage, perhaps the tiring house (dressing rooms), and the yard, a roofless area for spectators who paid less and were exposed to the weather. There they stood on a floor, made either of mortar or a softer surface of ash mixed with hazelnut shells. The stage itself was covered by a roof. A copy of a sketch of the Swan depicts its stage as a large rectangular platform thrusting into the yard. Excavation of the Rose has revealed a much shallower design. Stages in other playhouses may have differed from either one. 

After about 1608, Shakespeare's plays were also staged indoors at a private theater in Blackfriars, constructed by James Burbage in a hall of a former Dominican priory or monastic house. The stage, lit by candles, was built across the narrow end of the hall, with boxes flanking it. 

There was seating room, but no standing, in the rest of the hall; this limited attendance to less than a thousand, a fraction of the Globe audience. Admission was correspondingly more expensive. The boxes flanking the stage at Blackfriars were five times the price of the Globe's best seats. Spectators who particularly wished to display themselves paid even more to sit on stools on the stage. 

Staging and Performance

The stages of Shakespeare's time were not separated from the audience by a curtain that could be dropped between scenes and acts. Playwrights signaled in other ways that one scene had ended and the next had begun. The customary way was to have everyone onstage exit at the end of one scene and to have one or more other characters enter for the next. Occasionally, when characters remained onstage in two consecutive scenes, dialogue or stage action could indicate a change of time or location. Playhouses did not use movable scenery to set the scene, but the stage was not always completely bare. Stage properties included tombs, thrones, beds, rocks, and the like. 

The actors also worked at other levels than the stage. They might emerge from below through a trapdoor, for example, or retire behind nearby hangings. When an actor appeared "above," he probably climbed the stairs to the gallery at the back of the stage and temporarily shared it with the spectators. Ropes and winches also allowed actors to descend from, and reascend to, the "heavens" over the stage. 

Perhaps the greatest difference in dramatic performance was that the roles of women were played by boys; there were no women in the acting companies, only in the audience. It had not always been so. Records indicate women were sometimes on the English stage two hundred years earlier. Women returned to the public stage several decades later, with the reopening of the theaters in 1660 at the restoration of Charles II. Especially in the early 1600s, children's companies exclusively of boy actors competed intensely with the companies of adult actors like the one to which Shakespeare belonged and for which he wrote. In the long run, however, the adult actors prevailed. 

Taken from PBS "In Search of Shakespeare"
http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/locations/location154.html
Shakespeare's London
The River Thames, London

Shakespeare's London was a very small world, and the theatrical world within that even smaller. Everyone knew everyone.

Physically the city was growing beyond its original fortifications – during Elizabeth's reign the population would grow to around 200,000 - and was increasingly becoming a place of interest for visitors from abroad.

London's prosperity was linked to the River Thames. The Thames was a harbor, a source of food – including the oysters that in Elizabethan days were considered a poor man's dish – a transport route for goods inland and out, London's principle source of water and also its sewer. At that time no embankments existed and so the river would routinely flood during the spring – a fact of life that would later inform the reconstruction of The Globe theatre in 1598-9.

The Thames would from time to time freeze over in winter – as in 1607 - creating an impromptu skating rink and talking point for the locals, where Londoners would promenade and browse market stalls.

If one were to close one's eyes somewhere near the Thames back in the 1500s (and not wake up minus your purse and with a nasty headache) the sounds you would hear – the gentle wash of boats breaking upon the shore, the banter and bustle of commerce etc - might be more familiar from present day Venice than modern day London.

This was a city without street lamps or a patrolling police force promising to "protect and serve." The well-to-do areas like Blackfriars could be dangerous enough on a dark of night. Areas beyond the city walls like Shoreditch were where the low life and more criminally inclined were more densely concentrated, attracted by the huge numbers of reveling theatregoers. This is the world so evocatively created in Shakespeare's "Henry IV" Parts 1 & 2. This is Cheapside, the netherworld of one of Shakespeare's best-known characters, Sir John Falstaff.

The Melting Pot
London was becoming more ethnically mixed. The Jewish community centered at that time on Houndsditch at the end of Bishopsgate, and there were probably several thousand black people in the city – a significant minority of often highly treasured workers, and servants as well as musicians, dancers and entertainers.

The uneasy mix of cultures, and the heightened English fear of things unfamiliar and foreign, would come to a head in 1601 when the increase in the numbers of black people began to result in bad feeling and prejudice from the locals. These people were generally slaves liberated from Spanish galleys (refugees and asylum seekers in our modern day parlance). In 1601 the black population was officially designated a nuisance and there were even moves to have all black people deported.

Earlier in 1600 an embassy from Morocco had arrived in London for a short stay. The Ambassador's Moorish ways must have been just as perplexing and intriguing to the locals as the English climate, diet and local drinking songs were to the Moroccans.

Such events and their repercussions upon society as always would find themselves into Shakespeare's work, in this case "Othello," which was written around 1602.

Around this time the streets of London were also filling up with maimed veterans from the war in Ireland, forced to beg for a living around the fleshpots and theatres of the city.

Bright Lights
Mass entertainment might have started with the Greeks but it was no less popular with the Elizabethans. The area around Southwark, close to Bankside where Shakespeare would finally site The Globe, might be thought of as a kind of Elizabethan Mall or multiplex. Here, out of the jurisdiction of the city, could be found contemporary entertainment red in tooth and claw. Only recently archaeologists have discovered the remains of bear pits where bears and mastiffs would do battle to the death, and a thick layer of discarded hazelnut shells – the Elizabethan's equivalent of popcorn. Bullbaiting would also have taken place here, while the inns and brothels hereabouts were plentiful and rowdy.

The contrast between the rural and urban existence is key to much of Shakespeare's works. The clear divisions that he saw around him every day – the city and the land, the Catholic and the Protestant - and which he found himself for the most part sandwiched in between will manifest themselves in his works time and time again.