Read Ebook: Shakespeare at the Globe 1599-1609 by Beckerman Bernard

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Secondly, the causes for significant changes, when dramatized, are not always commensurate with the effects. To make itself felt, a dramatic cause, in the Aristotelian sense, must have sufficient weight to produce the effect it does; a great cause must not produce a puny effort, nor a puny effort a great result. Yet this lack of proportion occurs often in Shakespeare. The ease with which Iago secures Desdemona's handkerchief from Emilia, though she wonders at the purpose of his request, does not balance the awful consequences. Brutus' and Cassius' meager dispute over whether or not to allow Antony to speak at Caesar's funeral is overshadowed by the fatal results. Here, as elsewhere, the perfunctoriness of the struggle between two antagonists is out of proportion to the effect that follows. The appearance of such imbalance, however, is not the result of ineptitude, but of artistic choice. Interest was not in the conflict leading to a decision, but the effect of the decision itself. The causes of action, therefore, tended to be taken for granted or conveyed with minimum emphasis; in other words, they were not regarded as being of first importance and so did not need to be dramatized with particularity. This attitude contributed largely to the looseness with which parts of a play are joined.

Causation, of course, was not completely abandoned, but it was generalized. Largely it resided in the given circumstances of the initial action, as Lear's pride leading him to reject Cordelia or Cleopatra's womanhood causing her to flee. For, within the Elizabethan scheme of man's relation to his action, tightly linked causation was incomprehensible.

Nor was the alternative to causal succession, episodic structure, "a stringing together of events in mere temporal succession each complication is solved as it arises." For dramatic causation of the parts, the Elizabethan substituted a rhythmic framework for the whole. The dramatization of a complete story employing many characters meant that within the scope of the narrative lay many plausible events. This gave the poet a wide choice of incidents with which to arrange his plot, the scope of the narrative imparting a limit of its own. Concurrently, the tendency for "mirroring" nature led him to choose scenes which would contrast or echo others or which would illustrate various facets of a single experience.

Such parallel development of a play's action produces contradictory impulses in the drama. On one hand there existed the impulse to complete the story, on the other there persisted the temptation to dilate upon the effect of the action upon the individuals. One reason why modern audiences suffer from "fourth act fatigue" in witnessing a Shakespearean play stems from the fact that their interest in the play is disproportionate. They have a greater interest in the dramatic line than in the narrative. For the Elizabethan audience the interest must have been more evenly balanced. For them the finale, the completion of the narrative line, had as much appeal as the "climax," the height of the dramatic line.

Common to all the Globe plays are:

a means for bringing about justice or of winning love: the most frequent means are discovery of the identity of disguised persons, trial, execution, repentance, single combat, suicide;

a judge-figure who pronounces judgment: he may either deliver the verdict and/or grant mercy or, after the action has occurred, declare the purport of the action; in finales of combat he may serve as the avenging arm of justice;

a ranking figure who reasserts order: invariably the person of highest authority, in many plays he is identical with the judge-figure. It is a convention of Elizabethan drama that the last lines of a play, excluding epilogues and songs, be spoken by the ranking figure.

The impulse to complete the story is satisfied in the finale, as we have seen. The impulse to dilate upon the story achieves maximum expansion in the center of the play. The presence of scenes of extreme complication and intense emotion at this point in the Shakespearean plays has led to the development of the theory of a third act climax. It has been expressed in various ways by various scholars. Knight merely notes this grouping of intensifications. Lawrence, anticipating Baldwin's thesis of the five-act structure, assumes a third act climax. Baldwin would call it the imitation of the Terentian epitasis, and Moulton speaks of it as the center piece at the point of a regular arch.

Certainly there is marked emotional intensification at the center of a Shakespearean play. However, if we are to call it a climax, we must redefine our term, taking care that it not be confused with the climax in classical or modern drama. There the climax is taken to be a single point of extreme intensity where the conflicting forces come to a final, irreconcilable opposition. At that point a dramatic explosion, leading to the denouement, is the direct outcome of the climactic release. Hedda Gabler has schemed to accomplish the glorious ruination of L?vborg. At the very moment when she expects to exult, she discovers that she has failed. The climax occurs when she learns that instead of controlling others, she herself is controlled. The denouement, her death, is a direct consequence. Causally-linked drama, by its very nature, drives to a "highest" point. In Greek drama it is usually a moment of recognition and/or reversal. That is why we must be cautious of speaking of a climax in Shakespearean drama.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

is the most intense moment, and yet the dramatic intensification brought about by weaving together the trials of Lear and those of poor Tom has yet to occur. Moulton regards the meeting of those two as the climax. But in which scene? The first outside the hovel, or the second in the shelter, where Lear arraigns his false daughters? Granville-Barker selects an exact moment for the climax, in the second of the storm scenes "when the proud old king kneels humbly and alone in his wretchedness to pray. This is the argument's absolute height." Must, as Granville-Barker goes on to suggest, the tension relax then during the two scenes Lear plays with mad Tom? The reading of the storm scenes should make it obvious that instead of a point of intensity with subsequent slackening, we have a succession of states of intense emotional experience: Lear's self-identification with raging nature, Lear's pathetic lucidity and new-forged humility, Lear's ultimate madness during a fantastic trial. Each high point subsides before the next bursts forth, not like a solitary cannon shot but like the ebb and flow of the pounding sea. The truth seems to be that we find not a climactic point in the center of a Shakespearean play, but a climactic plateau, a "coordination of intense moments" sustained for a surprisingly extended period.

As we might expect, a change in the duration and level of the climax produces a change in its nature. Lines of action leading to crisis are foreshortened, thereby throwing fuller emphasis on the response of the character, often expressed in lyrical ecstasy.

You think I'll weep: No, I'll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

For when they see me arbiter of all, They must observe: or else, with Caesar fall.

Sejanus shows excessive pride in his own power, a joyous release of self-esteem. After this speech he disappears from the play until the opening of the fifth act. Meanwhile, Tiberius secretly turns to Marco as a supplementary and independent agent, thus effecting a change of direction in the play. Just when Sejanus expects to "draw all dispatches through my private hands," Tiberius crosses him. Jonson, following the classical models more closely than Shakespeare, has his greatest climax fall during the last scene. Nevertheless, clear traces of a "center of action" can be found.

The architectonic superiority of Shakespeare can be seen in the way he raises his entire center of action to a markedly intensified level. Potential climactic "plateaus" can be found in all the Globe plays cited, but some are underdeveloped and do not reach the rich florescence that makes the center of a Shakespearean play such an overwhelming dramatic experience. Perhaps the absence of superior poetic powers prevented the minor playwrights from realizing the full possibilities of this form. Nevertheless, despite the gap between the levels of their achievements, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights of the Globe generally built their plays along the same structural lines.

The absence of linked causation naturally meant that the action was not linear. Incidents leading to the finale or to the climactic plateau did not follow one another in a succession of tightly meshed events but in a series of alternating scenes. To illustrate, between the first expression of Maria's scheme against Malvolio and the first working of the scheme intervenes the lyrical scene between Viola and Orsino . Such separation of parts of the story encouraged the independence of one scene from another, the very thing complained of by some scholars. Sch?cking suggests that Shakespeare shows "a tendency to episodic intensification," that is, the development of a scene at the expense of the whole. F. L. Lucas expresses the same idea in his introduction to the works of Webster, asserting that the Elizabethan audiences reacted to separate scenes rather than to a whole play. The tendency to which they refer can be found in the three Falstaff-Merry Wives scenes. In the first of the scenes, Falstaff, caught in his love-game, hides in the buck basket, only to be dumped into the Thames. Here we have a complete action. Falstaff makes an advance, and he is repulsed. There is no counteraction on his part. If he were in a Roman comedy, he would have plotted how to punish his offenders or how to encompass the women again, and thus the second scene would have resulted from a counteraction on the part of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. Instead Falstaff is persuaded to repeat the same adventure with similar results. The second scene is not more farcical or more extravagant than the first; it is merely different. In place of intensification we find fresh invention. The third scene again does not grow out of the preceding scene, but out of the husbands' decision to shame the fat man publicly. All of the Falstaff-Mistress Page-Mistress Ford scenes have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They make themselves felt at the conclusion not by intensification but by accumulation.

Within the general form of extension and contraction, extension to a climactic plateau, contraction to a ceremonious finale, appear variant structural patterns. To reduce the total structural pattern of Elizabethan drama to a single form, or even to two or three forms, is virtually impossible. The age was multiple in its artistic means. Yet the inability to do this does not mean that no structural form existed, but that many existed. Not only was there structural variety in the works of different men, but there were differences within the work of one man. Nevertheless, certain dominant patterns emerge, and while the following descriptions are not exhaustive, they include a large proportion of the Globe plays.

In an earlier part of this chapter I emphasized the importance of the separate scenes as distinct units. At this point I should like to draw attention to certain characteristics of the scenes. Usually a portion of one action or story is not followed by an advance or counteraction, but by a new line of development, often containing completely different characters. This we take for granted in Elizabethan drama. The absence of liaison is emphasized by the way in which scenes are arranged. Some scenes, such as the one which Hamlet brings to a close with the cry

The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

conclude with a strong emotional lift at the same time as they thrust the interest forward. Some scenes, which I shall call "leading" scenes, produce a forceful dramatic or theatrical pointing. The brief scene in which Artimedorus prepares to give Caesar a petition warning him of the conspirators is such a scene; so is the one in which Duke Frederick thrusts Oliver out of doors until he can produce Celia. These "leading" scenes are usually brief and drive the story forward with great energy. But most scenes in Shakespeare contain an anticlimactic conclusion: they are rounded off, relaxed, brought to a subdued end. Here we must distinguish between dramatic force and story development. It is the dramatic force that is softened at the same time that the story line is brought to the fore. Upon Viola's first visit Olivia falls in love with the "youth" . She sends a ring after "him" through Malvolio, then closes the scene with four lines:

I do I know not what, and fear to find Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind. Fate, show thy force! Ourselves we do not owe. What is decreed must be--and be this so!

Yet compare this with her feeling before she sends Malvolio off:

How now? Even so quickly may one catch the plague? Methinks I feel this youth's perfections With an invisible and subtle stealth To creep in at mine eyes.

Clearly there is a diminution of intensity toward the end. The same thing occurs in the center of the play . Viola denies knowing Antonio, but after his arrest she realizes that he has confused her with Sebastian. The scene does not end on that uplift of discovery. Viola goes off in delight; Toby sends Andrew after to beat the page. Fabian and Toby remain for a moment:

FABIAN. Come, let's see the event. TOBY. I dare lay any money 'twill be nothing yet.

So, so; now nine years' vengeance crowd into a minute.

The Duke dismisses his train; the trap in the guise of a "lady," actually a poisoned manikin, is sprung; the Duke kisses "her" and falls. All this occupies twenty-five lines. In this it reminds us of the closet scene. Once the Duke is poisoned, Vindice and his brother, Hippolito, triumph over the dying man; they reveal the trap and then Vindice unmasks himself. To top these horrors Vindice discloses to the Duke that his bastard son "rides a-hunting in brow," and moreover that the son and the Duchess are about to hold a rendezvous at the very spot:

eyes shall see the incest of their lips.

They arrive. The father-husband watches their love-making, hears their mockery of him, and, immediately after their departure, dies. All this takes eighty-three lines. In the structure of the scene, intensification comes from double response: the horror and pain of the Duke and the diabolical delight of the revengers as they witness his pain.

The repetition of dramatic forms in the Globe plays shows that there is a structural foundation for the concept of multiple unity, that unity can be found not in compression of action but in its extension. The story line links the experiences but is not identical with them. Rather the events frequently are extensions of the implications of the story exactly as the shattering of glass may be the effect of an explosion. Consequently, as the scenes seek to reach beyond the limits of the subject, it becomes requisite that means be discovered to set limits to the extension of story and theme. The Elizabethans were well aware that the dimensions of the plays threatened to overwhelm the audience. This is the essence of serious charges by Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson against the popular drama. In this they may well have been following Aristotle who introduced into his definition of tragedy the concept of "magnitude." A work of art must be able to be perceived as a totality by the audience. Here, of course, we have the true determinant of unity. Training in witnessing the extended sequences of miracle plays or in listening to Sunday sermons must have contributed to a broadness of perception. Nevertheless, a major problem of the Elizabethan playwright was to observe a proper magnitude, to keep within the bounds that his plays always threatened to break. To aid him in maintaining proper magnitude he had several means at his disposal.

One of these means is the story itself; it is always brought to a conclusion. Another means, and one I have not discussed, was the concentration on character. The fact that the story is happening to Hamlet or Vindice or Sejanus is in itself a unifying factor. But I shall discuss the relevance of character to the play in the chapter on Elizabethan acting. Three other means contributed to keeping the play within perceptible bounds.

The first of these, unity through poetic diction, has been amply treated by present-day critics. Both Stoll and G. Wilson Knight have written of Shakespeare's plays as metaphorical forms. Bradbrook sees the only unity as a poetic unity. Yet verbal expression is but one element of structural multiple unity. There is a close link between the dramatic form of the climactic plateau and the poetic expression, for the second requires the first. Where the playwright fails as a poet, the climactic extensions result in rant and sentimentality. But it is this form that enables the poetry to range freely, or perhaps we may consider that the same compulsion which drove the Elizabethans to copious, lyrical expression caused them to develop this particular dramatic form.

Certainly the Elizabethans felt that one event mirrored another, and probably that together they mirrored the common meaning of both events. This interconnection of reflected incidents contributed metaphorically to a unified impression.

THE STAGE

Two boards and a passion! Perhaps these words sum up all that was essential to the Shakespearean theater. Heightening of passion coincided with the "climax," and as for the Elizabethan stage, it was, as G. F. Reynolds remarked, a platform "upon which the story of the play was acted." And so it was, a flat expanse of boards, somewhat exposed to the weather, roughly eleven hundred square feet.

The story that was acted may be best described as romantic, not because it dealt with romance, although it often did, but because it was centrifugal in impulse, ever threatening to veer from its path. Whatever direct progression narrative possessed in the medieval drama, whether moving from Adam's sin to Christ's judgment or from Everyman's ignorance to his salvation, such progression no longer existed in the Elizabethan age. Instead, the unfolding of the drama took place in a world half of man, and therefore unpredictable, half of God, and therefore moral, and was composed half of history, half of legend; half remote fantasy, half immediate reality. Such a world was wide indeed, and the poet-playwright, its creator, was shackled by neither time nor place. What he demanded of a stage was space for the unimpeded flow of scene after scene, for the instantaneous creation of any place in this world or the next. Even when a ghost in mufti made his way out the stage door in broad daylight, the poet insisted he vanished--yes, even into thin air.

Between the poet's insistence and the stage's realization lies the entire secret of Elizabethan staging. About the stage's realization there is some evidence and little knowledge. Stage directions, a much-debated sketch of a playhouse, a tantalizing incomplete building contract, other assorted fragments, invite the scholar to tilt at theory. About the poet's insistence there can be little question. Texts of play after play document the demands that the writers made upon the "unworthy scaffold." Prudence suggests, therefore, that we proceed from play to stage, discovering first what those demands were and then, if we can, how they were satisfied. To understand what the demands were in respect to the environment of an action, it is necessary to consider the following questions: how exactly was a scene located, how consistently was the location maintained, and how relevant was the location to the dramatic impact of the scene?

To what extent can this dichotomy be supported by the evidence from the Globe? Naturally there is no sharp distinction between these two types of localization. The differentiation depends upon the sequence a scene assumes in the narrative. Consequently, there are scenes which clearly fit into one or the other category. But even if all the localized and unlocalized scenes are counted, the total amounts to only 136. Since there are 345 scenes in my enumeration of the fifteen Shakespearean Globe plays, 209 remain to be accounted for.

Is it true, as William Archer, Harley Granville-Barker, and George F. Reynolds have pointed out, that much localization was vague, that place faded elusively like a mirage before a traveler, and that often the Elizabethans treated the stage as stage? "Scene after scene," asserts Granville-Barker, "might pass with the actors moving to all intents merely in the ambit of the play's story and of their own emotions: unless, the spell broken, they were suddenly and incongruously seen to be upon a stage." Many a scene gives just such an impression, and yet, in almost every scene that is not unlocalized, the characters do not actually act in a dislocated void but are known to be in some more or less specific region. Even when attention is directly called to the stage-as-stage, stage-as-fictional-world still remains. In such moments the audience experiences a double image.

In your imagination hold This stage the ship, upon whose deck The sea-tost Pericles appears to speak

Imagine! Suppose! Both Jonson and Shakespeare call upon the audience to visualize the place of action. Clearly neither conventional nor realistic setting is introduced. Only words, in these instances delivered directly, in most instances conveyed in the midst of dramatic action, are the means for informing the audience where the scene takes place.

What the Choruses make evident is that the stage was not altered for individual scenes. As a consequence, the stage structure itself, not scenery, served as the frame for the action. What this structure was and how it was used has been debated for years, and yet despite the lively and continuous debate, there actually exists a broad band of agreement About the size of the stage, for instance, there is little dispute. It is deduced from the Fortune contract. Without a doubt the platform, one side of which was attached to the stage wall or fa?ade, was large, probably about 25 by 45 feet, and bare. Whether or not the supporting trestles were seen by the audience, as Hodges claims, matters little in a consideration of the use of the stage. What is important is that the stage extended to the middle of the yard, that consequently a large portion of the audience stood or sat on either side of the actors, and that the actors had to master the techniques of playing on this open stage. Some disagreement exists concerning the shape of the stage which, according to John C. Adams, was not rectangular but tapered inward toward the front. However, the weight of the evidence is against this theory, and most scholars are inclined to accept the rectangular shape.

Upon what other points is there general agreement? For one, that there were two pillars, located halfway between the stage wall and the front edge of the platform, which supported a shadow or cover over part of the stage. For another, that at platform level the stage wall contained two doors at least and probably a third entry or enclosed space and on an upper level, some sort of acting area. Where there are disputes, they arise over three matters: what details complete this generally accepted scheme, how the parts of the stage were employed, and what temporary structures, if any, supplemented the basic fa?ade. To examine these issues, it will be necessary to review each part of the stage in the light of the Globe repertory.

SIR ARTHUR. Mine host, mine host, we lay all night at the George in Waltham, but whether the George be your fee-simple or no, tis a doubtfull question, looke upon your signe.

HOST. Body of Saint George, this is mine overthwart neighbour hath done this to seduce my blind customers.

Signs extending over a door would be readily seen from the opposite end of the stage whether or not the doors were oblique. What this interpretation comes down to is that insistence on opposite doors reveals a realistic conception of staging. Out of oblique doors characters emerge already facing each other or the action. They can respond "naturally" and "realistically." But, if the doors are flush with the fa?ade, an "unnatural" formal entrance results.

The last argument for oblique doors is historical. Lawrence claims that they were introduced into the Globe from the second Blackfriars theater . Adams argues that they were developed when the Theatre's frame was adapted for the Globe. Neither offers sufficiently convincing proof to counter-balance the evidence of the Swan drawing which clearly shows flush doors. Therefore, though either oblique or flush doors could accommodate the Globe plays, flush doors were more likely to have been employed.

The critical part of any study of an Elizabethan playhouse concerns the "third entry," "the place in the middle," "the booth," "the inner stage," "the discovery-space." The abundance of terms testifies to the uncertainty concerning this area. Every aspect of it is open to controversy: function, dimensions in all directions, the presence of curtains, and location. But that there is some space between the stage doors, capable of being enclosed or secluded, is granted by all scholars. Objection has been raised to calling this area an "inner stage," first because the term never appeared in Elizabethan texts, and secondly because it suggests a purpose that it did not have, namely, to house entire scenes. Increasingly the term "discovery-space" has been utilized, notably by Richard Hosley, but this has the disadvantage of suggesting too limited a function for the space. Since the area we are concerned with, whether recessed or not, had to be enclosed, almost certainly by curtains, I have chosen to refer to the "enclosure" of the Globe stage.

Any investigation of the enclosure is obliged to include an investigation of Elizabethan stage properties. For a long time it was suggested that a principal purpose of the enclosure was to mask the placement of furniture and other properties. While it is becoming increasingly evident that we must regard such a presumption with skepticism, nevertheless, the presence of a property has so often been cited as evidence for the use of an enclosure that it is necessary to review the handling of stage properties at the Globe before considering the enclosure directly. Aside from their connection with the problem of the enclosure, furthermore, stage properties deserve attention, for their appearance in a play can be more readily ascertained than any other element of production and as a result can provide clues to the methods of staging.

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