Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 61

This Wide and Universall Theatre

And so the new Globe arose.  It was considered at the time to be the most grandest of London theatres.  Its name implies that the theatre of the world itself.  It was the stage in which Othello and King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, were first performed.  It has been suggested that Peter Streete, carpenter and builder, followed the precepts of Vitruvius (a Roman author, architect and military engineer).  Though Vitruvius’ book Architectura was available, Streete probably based the construction of the theatre on the animal baiting ring, though it has been consistently interpreted as a copy of the amphitheatre of the antique world, or the holier circles of primaeval Britain.  It even bears a passing resemblance to the magician’s circle in which visions might appear.  But no wooden building in the sixteenth century could be truly circular and was, in fact, polygonal in shape.

The Globe’s structure was of timber, made up of prefabricated oak posts, infilled with wattle-and-daub and with a finished exterior of white plaster and a roof made of thatch.  The playhouse was a hundred feet in diameter and held some thirty-three hundred people.  The two lower galleries held one thousand people each and was tightly packed with Elizabethan bodies.  It also had some elements of the funfair.

It has been supposed that the Globe had a “sign” for ready identification above the principal entrance.  It would have been normal in Elizabethan London for such a sign to exist, and stray references suggest it may have been an image of Hercules holding a globe on his shoulders.  The Shakespearian scholar, Edmond Malone, has stated that the playhouse also would have displayed a motto in its entrance or within its interior “Totus mundus agit histionem,” which translates into “The whole world plays the actor”.  The interior would have been colourful if not gaudy, with classical motifs and statuary prominent among the paintings and decorations.  Nothing was too extravagant or too elaborate.  The colours were vivid, and much gilt and gold, and the general effect was one of elaborate splendour.  It vied with the court as the central point of ritual and display.

The stage itself was just under fifty feet in width.  When an actor stepped forward to the front of the stage his face would have been significantly lightened.  It had two exits/entrances and between then was the curtained discovery space in which characters might be asleep, dead or used as a tomb or a study.  Jutting out upon the stage itself was a canopy held up by two wooden pillars known as the “heavens” and decorated with stars and planets against a celestial blue background.  The pillars are also supposed to have defined “front stage” and “backstage”.

The Elizabethan stage was not self-conscious about its procedures, the mechanics of stage “business”, and of course neither were the plays themselves.  There was no appetite for realism, or naturalism, in any of its current sense.

The drama of the Globe was largely built upon a succession of scenes.  The sequence of scenes conforms to the English love of interdependent units, a series of variations upon a theme that encourages variety rather than concentration and heterogeneity rather than intensity.  That is why a new entrance was always significant, and why it is heavily emphasised in the stage directions.

The actor would come forward and then deliver his lines to the audience.  He did not enter a particular location; he entered in order to address or confront another actor.    There were set patterns for scenes of greeting and of parting; there were stage conventions for kneeling and embracing.  There was no doubt also accepted theatrical codes for asides and soliloquies. At the close of the performance, the highest ranking character left on stage delivered the final lines.  The audience loved processions and marches and dumb-shows; it loved colours and displays.

It was a general setting, a blank space that actor and playwright could manipulate with perfect imaginative freedom.  It has been suggested by some theatrical historian that place cards were set up to inform the audience of a particular setting, but it was probably enough for an actor to announce his location.  The green garment of the forester would signify a wood, a set of gaoler’s keys a prison.  Costume was a most important theatrical device.  In a visual culture it was the key to all levels of society and all forms of occupations, Elizabethan actors, and audiences, also delighted in disguise as a plot device.  More was spent on costumes than on texts or actor’s salaries.  A good wardrobe master kept cast-offs and oddments of clothes.  There is a reason to believe that the companies sometimes received the remnants of a nobleman’s wardrobe of worn out clothes and garments that had gone out of fashion.  Clothes also identified the identity of the characters.  There conventional costumes for the Jew and the Italian, the doctor and the merchant.  Virgins wore white and doctors were dressed in scarlet.  Female characters sometimes wore masks, as an overtly theatrical way of disguising their fundamentally male identity.  In that sense, the Elizabethan theatre has affiliations with classical Greek and Japanese drama.

There no scenery as such but sometimes on occasions painted cloths were used.  They weren’t naturalistic but designed to convey an atmosphere or suggest a theme.  When romances were to be played there were cloths painted with cupids and tragedies the stage was hung in black draperies.

There were a few stage properties for such productions, notably bed or tables and chairs.  However, it has been calculated that eighty per cent of Shakespearian scenes written for the Globe needed no props at all.  Shakespeare was content with a bare space in which to create his dramatic narratives.  It is a very clear indication of his bounding imaginative energy.