Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction

195 Pages·2003·5.725 MB·English

by  Arthur F. Kinney

Shakespeare by Stages
An Historical Introduction
Arthur F. Kinney
Blackwell
Publishing

Shakespeaye by Stages
For Andrew and Diana
Shakespeare by Stages
An Historical Introduction
Arthur F. Kinney
Blackwell
Publishing
Copyright 0 Arthur F. Kinney 2003
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First published 2003
by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, a Blackwell Publishing company
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data bas been applied for.
ISBN 0-631-22468-8 (hbk);I SBN 0-631-22469-6 (pbk)
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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Contents
List of Figures
Preface vi
Acknowledgments vii
xi
1 Stages
1
2 Players
33
3 Playgoers
75
4 Equipment
97
5 Reactions
126
Notes 154
Bibliography 162
Index 168
V
fizgures
Picture research by Charlotte Morris.
Figure 1 London theaters during Shakespeare’s career. 3
Figure 2 The Swan Theatre by Arnoldus Buchelius, after a
drawing by Johannes de Wit, 1596. 5
Figure 3 Jon Greenfield’s plan for the reconstructed
Globe. 9
Figure 4 Inigo Jones’s ground-plan for an indoor
theater, c.1616. 12
Figure 5 Conjectural diagrams of sunlight and
shadow at the Swan Theater. 29
Figure 6 Title-page of Comedies, Histories and
Tragedies, 1623, sig. B2. 35
Figure 7 Will Kempe dancing. 38
Figure 8 Robert Armin from title-page of History of
Two Maids of Moorclack, 1609. 39
Figure 9 John Bulwer, Chirologia, or the
Natural Language of the Hand, 1644. 59
Figure 10 John Bulwer, Chironomia, or the
Art of Manual Rhetoric, 1644. 60
Figure 11 The tiring-room at the Globe. 112
Figure 12 Tilney’s orders to revise the insurrection
scene in The Play of Sir Thomas More. 146
vi
Preface
“People in throngs, of all classes and callings, gathered to see Shake-
speare’s plays,” Alfred Harbage writes:
They came in wherries, on horseback, and on foot, from Cheapside and
White Chapel, Westminster and Newington, Clerkenwell and Shoreditch,
deserting for an interval their workbenches, their accounts, their studies,
their sports, their suits at law, and their suits at court. They preferred the
pleasures of the Globe to the pleasures of Brentford and Ware, and if they
did not pass coldly by the ale-house doors, at least they reserved enough
pennies to pay the gatherers.’
The boisterous excitement Harbage imagined more than a half-century
ago sweeping across all parts of London is confirmed by contemporary
reports and observations. Shakespeare’s Globe was located outside
the city walls in Southwark, but the location was a good one, drawing
on the crowded suburbs, and just upriver from the houses of nobility and
the palace of Westminster and downriver from the royal palaces of
Hampton Court, Greenwich, and Richmond (where performances
could earn a large set fee of i10). Travelling with a sketch book
and taking notes on his trip from Utrecht to London, Johannes de
Witt, famous now for his drawing of the Swan Theater, jotted down in
1596:
There are four amphitheaters in London of notable beauty, which from
their diverse signs bear diverse names. In each of them a different play is
daily exhibited to the populace. The two more magnificent of these are
situated to the southward beyond the Thames, and from the signs sus-
vii