6
“The Great Globe Itself”
Far and away the most revealing document about the physical characteristics of the Globe1 is the contract which Henslowe and Alleyn drew up with Peter Street for the construction of their new Fortune playhouse, dated January 8, 1600. Street was the master carpenter who had erected the Globe for the Burbage consortium and it is clear that he had done a sufficiently impressive job that it was to be used in almost every respect as a model for the Fortune. Leaving aside some of the legal preamble, and some of the terms and conditions to which Street was required to submit, it reads:
The frame of the said house [is] to be set square and to contain fourscore foot of lawful assize every way square without and fifty‐five foot of like assize square every way within, with a good sure and strong foundation of piles, brick, lime and sand both without & within to be wrought one foot of assize at the least above the ground. And the said frame to contain three storeys in height. The first or lower storey to contain twelve foot of lawful assize in height. The second storey eleven foot of lawful assize in height. And the third or upper storey to contain nine foot of lawful assize in height, all which stories shall contain twelve foot and a half of lawful assize in breadth throughout, besides a jutty forwards in either of the said two upper storeys of ten inches of lawful assize, with four convenient divisions for gentlemen’s rooms and other sufficient and convenient divisions for two penny rooms with necessary seats to be placed and sett as well in those rooms as throughout all the rest of the galleries of the said house and with suchlike stairs, conveyances & divisions without & within as are made & contrived in and to the late erected playhouse on the Bank in the said parish of Saint Saviour’s called the Globe; with a stage and tiring house to be made, erected & set up within the said frame, with a shadow or cover over the said stage. … And which stage shall contain in length forty and three foot of lawful assize and in breadth to extend to the middle of the yard of the said house. The same stage to be paled in below with good strong and sufficient new oaken boards. And likewise the lower storey of the said frame withinside, and the same lower storey to be also laid over and fenced with strong iron pikes. And the said stage to be in all other proportions contrived and fashioned like unto the stage of the said playhouse called the Globe; with convenient windows and lights glazed to the said tiring house; and the said frame, stage and staircases to be covered with tile and to have a sufficient gutter of lead to carry & convey the water from the covering of the said stage to fall backwards; and also all the said frame and the staircases thereof to be sufficiently enclosed without with lath, lime & hair [i.e. plaster], and the gentlemen’s rooms and two penny rooms to be sealed with lath, lime & hair, and all the floors of the said galleries, storeys and stage to be boarded with good & sufficient new deal boards, of the whole thickness where need shall be; and the said house and other things beforementioned to be made & done to be in all other contrivitions [contrivances?], conveyances, fashions, thing and things effected, finished and done according to the manner and fashion of the said house called the Globe, saving only that all the principal and main posts of the said frame and stage forward shall be square and wrought pilasterwise [in the manner of pilasters, square or rectangular wooden pillars projecting from a wall, usually with bases and capitals], with carved proportions called satyrs to be placed & set on the top of every of the same posts; and saving also that the said Peter Street shall not be charged with any manner of painting in or about the said frame house or stage, or any part thereof, nor rendering the walls within, nor sealing any more or other rooms than the gentlemen’s rooms, two penny rooms and stage before remembered … And saving that the said Peter Street shall … also make all the said frame in every point for scantlings [builders’ regulated measures] larger and bigger in assize than the scantlings of the timber of the said new erected house called the Globe. (ES 2: 436–9)2
Street was to be paid £440, and the work was to be completed by July 25, some twenty‐eight weeks from the date of the contract. If the construction of the Globe followed the same schedule, and commenced when the lease was signed, it should have been finished by the first week of September.
The most obvious difference between the Globe and the Fortune is that the latter was to be square, outside and in (as now know, somewhat like the Curtain: p. 198), whereas the Globe was polygonal in structure, possibly finished off with plaster to appear circular. The recent excavations of the Globe, though much less extensive than those of the Rose, have shown that it was indeed larger than that playhouse, or indeed than the Theatre and the Curtain. Whereas they were all about 72 ft (21.95 m) in diameter, the Globe either had sixteen sides and was 84 ft 6 in (25.76 m) in diameter or eighteen sides and was 95 ft (28.96 m) in diameter (Bowsher and Miller, 2009, 89–102; Bowsher 2012, 89–96).3 The specifications for the Fortune might incline us towards the former: 80 ft (24.38 m) square on the outside and 55 ft (16.76 m) square on the inside, the latter figure being arrived at by allowing for galleries on all sides 12½ ft (3.81 m) deep.
On the face of it the Globe’s layout would give better sightlines, especially to those in the three storeys of two penny rooms, but perhaps Street was meant to adjust the groundplan in places to allow for this. Alleyn, of all people, must have known what he was asking for. The foundation was to be of brick and piles, the framework of wood, which would be boarded within, the whole being coated with plaster. There were to be three galleries, rising to a height of 32 ft (9.75 m); their roof was to be tiled. (In what was probably a cost‐cutting decision – which proved to be singularly unfortunate – the Globe was thatched with reeds.) Also to be tiled were a “shadow or cover” over the stage, the “heavens,” and the staircases. Here modeling it on the Globe works to our disadvantage, since Henslowe and Alleyn could assume Street knew what was expected – including any special provision in “the heavens” to fit descent machinery, and indeed the number of staircases. There are indications elsewhere that there would be two of them. That is the number specified in the 1613 contract for the Hope theatre (ES 2: 466–8), in which the Swan is several times mentioned as a model – as it may well have been for the Globe. And when the Globe burned down that year, it was noted that there were only “two narrow doors” by which to escape (Gurr, 2009, 203–4).
The Galleries
The fact that the staircases needed to be tiled and enclosed with plaster confirms that they were on the outside of the building. How, precisely, they afforded access to the various parts of the playhouse is a matter for some conjecture. It was, presumably, possible to pay a penny and pass without climbing through to the pit, a place for open standing, with no shelter from the elements. It might equally be possible to gain access to the stairs and move up, paying either a total two pence for access to the “two penny rooms” or three pence for the even more comfortable “gentlemen’s rooms.” What is least clear is the status of and access to the lowest of the three storeys of galleries. The Fortune contract is quite explicit that only the “gentlemen’s rooms” and the “two penny rooms” are to be sealed with “lath, lime and hair” – presumably leaving parts of the galleries, both there and by implication at the Globe, less comfortably furnished and possibly without seating.
Indeed, Dekker, in the epilogue to Satiromastix (performed at the Globe in 1601) is quite explicit that some of the galleries were used for standing rather than sitting, though he does not specify which they were. His Tucca calls on one section of the audience to “bear witness, all you gentle‐folks (that walk i’the galleries)” and finally bids them “Good night, my two penny tenants. Good night” (Epilogus 5–6, 31–4). This seems to suggest that a second penny at the Globe at that date got you entry to covered space where you might walk, though it might not guarantee you seating. If so, it differed from the Fortune, the contract for which explicitly requires seating throughout the galleries: “with necessary seats to be placed and set as well in those rooms [i.e. the gentlemen’s and two penny rooms] as throughout all the rest of the galleries of the said house.” Dekker does, however, confirm in the same play that there was seating in some Globe galleries, since Horace is told that henceforth he “shall not sit in a gallery, when your comedies and interludes have entered their actions and there make vile and bad faces at every line” (5.2.298–300).
As recently as 1596, William Lambarde had suggested that the best accommodation at the Theatre only afforded “a quiet standing,” with no mention at all of seating. The 1600 Fortune contract is the first document to specify seating in all the galleries, though it seems also implicit in Platter’s account of payment penny‐by‐penny. Between the refurbishment of the Rose in 1592 (see p. 62), the building of the Swan in 1595, the Globe in 1599, and the Fortune in 1600, there seems to have been a competitive drive for each new building to be grander and better fitted than its predecessor – we see it explicitly in the Fortune contract’s stipulation that it shall mostly be like the Globe, but with tiled roofs and “scantlings … larger and bigger in assize than the scantlings of the timber of the said new erected house called the Globe.” (And did the Globe have any equivalents of the satyrs adorning the main posts of the stage?)
Possibly the Globe was caught betwixt and between in respect of the accommodations on offer, retaining standing in some galleries but not others. If so, the likeliest candidates for covered standing room would include (if they were not indeed restricted to) the lowest level of them. The Van Buchell drawing of the Swan shows two sets of steps from the pit to the lowest gallery, one clearly‐marked “ingressus” (see Frontispiece). The affinity of the pit with the lowest gallery might have made them extensions of one another, with the audience standing in both but perhaps being prepared at times to pay an extra penny for protection from the elements. This would, however, have created an oddity when first entering the playhouse: having to choose between paying two pennies for covered standing – or exactly the same amount for the seated comfort of a “two penny room.” Why not take the comfort?
There are, however, other possibilities. One is that there was seating in all the galleries, but that some people chose to stand and walk about some of the time rather than to sit. In the Fortune, the galleries other than the gentlemen’s and the two penny rooms were not partitioned, so that it would have been possible to walk around three‐quarters of the inner circumference of the playhouse, seeing the stage – and the audience – from various perspectives. In that scenario the two options simply catered to different tastes – the one to gregarious types (on the whole, perhaps more likely to be young men) who welcomed the opportunity to walk about and socialize in the lower gallery. Tucca’s salute to his “two‐penny tenants” that “walk in the galleries” suggests that it was, to say the least, a distinctive section of the audience, one that perhaps kept the players on their toes. The other option catered to those (including, we might suppose, well‐bred young ladies) who preferred both comfort and private space to themselves.
Each of these scenarios does rather suggest that the entrances to the Globe dictated what was essentially a two‐tier system, lower and upper, each of which offered a basic facility and an enhanced one – on the one hand, pit and “standing gallery,” or on the other two penny rooms and gentlemen’s rooms. Andrew Gurr sees in all this a marked social stratification of the audience in a “vertical divide” throughout the theatre: “the lowest of the three tiers of gallery was associated by its ingressi with the lowly in the yard, whereas the upper levels welcomed the gentry and richer citizens with their cushions” (2009, 205). The lords’ rooms offered another level of distinction altogether.
Lords’ Rooms
The size and facilities of the tiring house are even more of an enigma than the disposition of the audience; all the Fortune contract tells us about it is that its windows were glazed. We do not know its depth, though it presumably extended back into the gallery space behind the stage, minimizing the amount of actual stage space it took up. Nor do we know how many windows there were, or how the rooms behind them were divided or what each was used for. But there is a strong presumption (“as seems almost certain,” is how E. K. Chambers puts it: ES, 3:118–19) that they included a lords’ room, or multiple lords’ rooms, for the wealthiest members of the audience, overlooking the stage.
We first hear of such a room when Henslowe repaired the Rose in 1592, paying out 10s “for sealing the room over the tirehouse” and 13s “for sealing my lord’s room” (ES, 2: 535). Henslowe’s latter phrasing suggests that at least one of these rooms was meant for the lord who was patron of the company playing at the theatre, so this may have been an innovation when specific companies became identified with particular theatres, as Lord Strange’s Men were then becoming identified with the Rose. But Thomas Dekker’s reference to “the lords’ room” in The Gull’s Hornbook (1609) suggests that they were – at least by then – more generally available to gallants willing to pay the price, perhaps as much as sixpence, six times what people in the pit paid, if not a shilling (ES, 4: 366; see p. 293). This squares with the evidence from Jonson’s first Globe play, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), which describes a character boasting of familiarity with aristocrats “as if he had … ta’en tobacco with them over the stage i’the lords’ room” (2012i, 2.2.234–6).
This almost certainly means that those buying such seating must have entered through a privileged doorway at the rear of the tiring house.4 Even more decisively than those who used the staircases, they would not have to mingle with the lower orders – but would rub shoulders with the actors themselves and the playhouse personnel, a familiarity between the social élite and stars of the stage which persists to this day. As Richard Hosley puts it:
In addition to the pleasures of seeing and being seen, hob‐nobbing with the players (what we should call “going back stage”) may also have been an attraction of sitting in the Lords’ room, for one must have reached it by a stairway within the tiring‐house. (On “going back stage” compare Gossip Mirth, a “presenter” sitting upon the stage in Jonson’s Staple of News, 1626: “I was i’ the Tiring‐house a while to see the Actors drest.”) And still another attraction of sitting in the Lords’ room may have been, as Lawrence suggests, that one entered the theatre by a door leading from the street directly into the tiring‐house, thus escaping contact with the mob.
(1957, 25; citing Lawrence, 1912, 33)
Earlier playhouses like the Theatre and the Curtain may not have had such a facility. But these rooms seem to be what are indicated in the De Witt / van Buchell drawing of the Swan, a gallery or row of boxes above door height in the face of the tiring house.5 There indeed people “not only see everything well, but can be seen,” as Thomas Platter put it (though he was talking about the gentlemen’s rooms: see p. 159–60). This arrangement thus preserved, after a fashion, the social decorum we observed at performances in colleges and country houses, where the seating of the élite took distinct precedence over the convenience of the players. The rest of the audience could hardly see the action of the play without also seeing those in these rooms – as well as those only marginally socially inferior, occupying the “gentlemen’s rooms,” which seem to have been situated at stage‐level, to its right and left. This would have been especially the case for action on the upper stage, such as when “They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra” (4.15.38SD) – Antony and Cleopatra (circa 1606–8) is certainly a Globe play.
This presumably means that some of the space either within or adjacent to the lords’ rooms could be used for playing when a show called for it. In the 1597 first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, which presumably describes staging at the Theatre, a stage direction reads “Enter Romeo and Juliet at the window” (3.5.0) which may suggest that, there at least, the upper tier in the tiring house contained a number of discrete rooms with glazed windows, which could be opened for playing as necessary – rather than an open gallery. This would make it relatively easy to limit the number of rooms available for audience use when an upper space was required for playing. As Richard Hosley argued: “the gallery over the stage was also used as a box or boxes for audience” but after showing that barely half of all Globe plays called for such a use, he concluded that it “functioned primarily and constantly as a Lords’ room, and only secondarily, occasionally, and then for relatively short periods as a raised production area; and that during such periods it exercised both functions simultaneously” (1957, 23, 31).
There could be no stronger testament to the difference beween Elizabethan and modern attitudes to the social location of theatre, and the placement within it of its audiences, than this statement that appears in the Glossary section of the “Shakespeare’s Globe” web site: “Lords’ Rooms: located on the upper stage gallery, to the left and right of the musicians’ gallery; these were the most expensive seats in Shakespeare’s playhouse. Today, no one sits in the Lords’ Rooms, as they are used for stage action, but the name has remained.” (http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discovery‐space/adopt‐an‐actor/glossary: accessed 28 November 2016).
There remains, however, much that the Fortune contract does not tell us. Despite its careful detail about the main structure, it tells us remarkably little about the stage proper; it does not specify its height; the number or location of doors; whether or not there was a discovery space or trapdoors. Presumably Street would remember all of these from the Globe. It also says nothing about painting the building (though it specifies carved satyrs as decorations), because this was expressly not left to Street and his team but doubtless left to skilled professional painters. We recall Heywood’s description of the “heavens” in Rome’s Campus Martius (p. 98) and even in the much more limited space of the Globe, we must assume that they went for something in rich, glowing colors. The pillars holding up the heavens doubtless emulated the Swan in being painted to look like marble. Hamlet/Burbage presumably gestured to the heavens themselves, decorated with stars, planets and zodiacs, when he spoke of “this brave o’erhanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire” (2.2.291–2).
From other sources, we can put together the following: the only contemporary record that specifies the height of a stage is the litigation over Brayne’s Red Lion, where the stage was 5 ft (1.52 m) from the floor. This seems high, but it would certainly ensure everyone in the pit a clear view (though they might acquire a crick in the neck). It would also prevent persons in the pit from getting up on to the stage, probably a necessary precaution. The invasion of the stage by the Citizen, his Wife and Rafe in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (a Blackfriars play) is not something a company would want to contemplate in reality.
Stage Directions
On many of the other issues we see darkly because a good proportion of the plays we presume to have premiered at the Globe – including those by Shakespeare from circa 1599 (As You Like It, Julius Caesar) to 1609 (Pericles, Coriolanus), and three by Jonson (Every Man Out of His Humour, 1599; Sejanus, 1603; and Volpone, 1606) – are strikingly thin in their stage directions and rarely call upon particularly outlandish stage facilities. It is difficult even to state categorically how many doors there were on the stage: certainly two, but we cannot rule out more. The earlier (1608) text of King Lear, for example, gives us instances of “Enter Edmund, the bastard, and Curran meeting” (Scene 6.0 SD), which strongly suggests entrance by different doors; the next scene has “Enter the Earl of Kent, disguised at one door, and Oswald the steward, at another door” (7.0 SD); Scene 8 begins “Storm. Enter the Duke [sic] of Kent disguised, and First Gentleman, at several doors” (8.0 SD). “Another” door can be one of multiple, and “several” here clearly means “separate,” without committing to how many other doors there might be – possibly only one. The folio version of the play is no more helpful; it has “severally” in all three of these examples. We do indeed finally find something that looks categorical in Pericles: “Enter Pericles at one door with all his train; Cleon and Dionysus at the other” (4.4.22 SD). But the text has already used the “at one door … at another door” formula twice (Act 2 Chorus, 16 SD) so it is difficult to be sure. Is it possible that the option of using the discovery space as an entrance on occasions led to the common use of this evasive phrasing (see p. 200)?
Rather than squeezing the details out painstakingly in this manner I shall go to the other extreme and examine the play from Shakespeare’s Globe years with by far the most detailed stage directions. This is The Devil’s Charter by Barnabe Barnes. Barnes was not a professional dramatist, but a poet, pamphleteer and hanger‐on at court, who in 1598 was tried in the Star Chamber for trying to poison someone. We have no way of knowing how he came to write for the King’s Men, much less how the play came to be performed at court, but it was, and in the same Revels season as King Lear (1606), as the title‐page tells us: “THE DEVIL’s CHARTER: A tragedy containing the Life and Death of Pope ALEXANDER the Sixth. / As it was played before the King’s Majesty, upon Candlemas night [February 2] last by his Majesty’s Servants.” There is thus the possibility that some features were only performed at court. Moreover, the title‐page continues: “But more exactly reviewed, corrected, and augmented since by the author, for the more pleasure and profit of the reader.” So there is a risk it also contains items never staged at all (which is also true, notably, of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi).
Yet nothing Barnes includes is inherently impossible or even improbable at the Globe, judging by what we know went on in other playhouses. It is only extreme in its specificity of detail by the standards of Shakespeare and Jonson, and we might say that it represents what a dramatist thought imaginatively possible in this playhouse. It gives perhaps the most vivid sustained description of any early modern play in performance, and demands attention even if some of it was not actually staged. Alexander VI was the most notorious of the Borgia Popes, and father of Caesar and Lucretia Borgia, whose evil deeds had been inflated to legendary proportions. Barnes makes of their lives a cross between Marlowe’s Dr Faustus – Alexander makes a “charter” with the devil, and there are repeated scenes of devils and magic – and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy: lust, ghoulish murder, mayhem. The Revenger’s Tragedy was itself a Globe play and had probably premiered the year before.
The Devil’s Charter begins with the Prologue who
with a silver rod moveth the air three times./ Enter, At one door betwixt two other Cardinals, Roderigo [the future Pope Alexander] in his purple habit close in conference with them, one of which he guideth to a tent, where a table is furnished with divers bags of money, which that Cardinal beareth away: and to another tent the other Cardinal, where he delivereth him a great quantity of rich plate, embraces, with joining of hands.Exeunt Cardinal. Manet Roderigo
To whom from another place a monk with a magical book and rod, in private whispering with Roderick, whom the Monk draweth to a chair on midst of the stage which he circleth, and before it another circle, into which (after semblance of reading with exorcisms) appear exhalations of lightning and sulphurous smoke in midst whereof a Devil in most ugly shape from which Roderigo turneth his face. He being conjured down after more thunder and fire, ascends another devil like a sergeant with a mace under his girdle: Roderigo disliketh. He descendeth. After more thunder and fearful fire, ascend [another devil] in robes pontifical with a triple crown on his head, and cross keys in his hand: a devil him ensuing in black robes like a Pronotary, a cornered cap on his head, a box of lancets at his girdle, a little piece of fine parchment in his hand, who being brought unto Alexander, he willingly receiveth him; to whom he delivereth the writing; which seeming to read, presently the Pronotary strippeth up Alexander’s sleeve and letteth his arm‐blood in a saucer, and having taken a piece from the Pronotary subscribeth to the parchment; delivereth it. The remainder of the blood, the other devil seemeth to sup up; and from him disrobed is put [on Alexander]the rich cap and the tunicle, and the triple crown set upon Alexander’s head, the cross‐keys delivered into his hands; and withal a magical book. This done, with thunder and lightning the devils descend: Alexander advanceth himself, and departeth.12
So, in a sequence rich in both Catholic pageantry (the Cardinals’ “purple” robes, the Pope’s Triple Crown and keys of St Peter) and black magic (blood, the circles on the floor), the Globe’s back‐stage staff went to town with lightning (a squib, or firework – gunpowder crammed in a tube) and thunder (a cannonball, possibly stone, rolled along the ground backstage: see p. 305). In the prologue to the 1616 version of Every Man in His Humour Jonson scorns to use such devices: “Nor nimble squib is seen, to make afeard / The gentlewomen, nor rolled bullet heard / To say, it thunders, nor tempestuous drum / Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come” (2012 h, 17–20). But Barnes had no such aesthetic qualms. He also called on “sulphurous smoke” (playing on the audience’s sense of smell) and fire, and a simulation of running blood, drawn with lancets, a popular effect.
We do not know precisely what stage devils looked like, though Middleton in The Black Book says of “a villainous lieutenant” that “He had a head of hair like one of my devils in Doctor Faustus when the old Theatre cracked and frighted the audience” (2007a, lines 153, 156–7). There are several allusions to devils being satyr‐like, with the lower limbs of goats, as when Othello sees Iago as a revealed villain: “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable” (5.2.294). In Othello all the devils are far too human, with no cloven heels, but that may not have been the case for Barnes, who is drawing on older, medieval traditions. And we notice that his devils ascend and descend, making full use of one or more trapdoors. It is not clear if they used steps of some design or, as some (probably fancifully) have supposed, mechanisms with mechanical counter‐weights. But evidently the effect was meant to be spooky. The space below the stage was commonly known as “hell,” and one reason for having the stage 5 ft off the ground would be to allow movement down there without too much impediment (ES, 2: 528 n. 3). Sealing off the front of the stage – apparently unlike the Swan (see p. Frontispiece) – as the Fortune contract prescribed (“paled in below with good, strong and sufficient new oaken boards”) of course kept such activity secret.
The opening is by no means the last we see of black magic in the play. In Act 4 Scene 1, for instance, Alexander conjures devils to discover who has committed recent murders, and finds that it is his own children:
After Bernardo had censed he bringeth in coals, and Alexander fashioneth out his circle then taketh his rod … standing without the circle he waveth his rod to the East.
- And calleth upon VIONATRABA.
- To the West. SUSERATOS.
- To the North. AQVIEL.
- To the South. MACHASÄEL.
Conjuro, et confirmo super vos in nomine. Eye, eye, eye; haste up & ascend per nomen ya, ya, ya; he, he, he; va; hy, hy; ha, ha, ha; va, va, va; an, an, an.
Fiery exhalations, lightning, thunder. Ascend a [devil like a] King, with a red face, crowned imperial, riding upon a lion, or dragon: Alexander putteth on more perfume … (612)
It is the mix as before, with lightning and thunder and incantations; to which is added the scary spectacle of a king riding a lion or dragon (presumably an actor riding on the backs of two or more others, draped in a suitable costume). The use of strong smell is increased, with Alexander’s servant burning incense in a censer, and Alexander seeking to protect himself from noxious fumes with perfume, which he tells us is “red sandal[wood].”13
At Alexander’s command: “The devil descendeth with thunder and lightning, and after more exhalations ascends another all in armour.” One of the devils “goeth to one door of the stage, from whence he bringeth the Ghost of Candy, ghastly haunted by Caesar pursuing and stabbing it; these vanish in at another door.” So Alexander learns that Caesar has killed his own elder brother. Another devil “bringeth from the same door the Ghost of Gismond Viselli, his wounds gaping, and after him Lucrece undressed, holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding bosom: they vanish” (all 63). So he learns that Lucretia has murdered her own husband.
Lucretia’s “undressed” belongs to the convention of people wearing nightclothes to betoken night‐time; when the actual murder took place in Act 1 Scene 5 – as distinct from this ghostly recapitulation – the directions read “Enter Lucretia alone in her nightgown, untired, bringing in a chair, which she planteth on the stage” (22), while shortly afterwards, “Enter Gismond di Viselli, untrussed, in his nightcap, tying his points” (23). “Untired” may simply mean “in a state of undress,” though it could also relate to having no hair‐pieces attached (see p. 167ff); “untrussed” means with his clothes unfastened, while “points” were laces or cords which held doublets to hose in the days before buttons were widely used.14 The most famous – but in some ways least typical – example of this night‐time convention is recorded in the first quarto version (only) of Hamlet, when the ghost of the old king comes to Hamlet in his mother’s study: “Enter the ghost in his night gown.” We may note that Lucretia’s “bringing in a chair” is in preparation for tying Gismond to it while she stabs him; she carefully “conveyeth away the chair” when the deed is done – small but important attentions to stage management.
Conventions relating to night‐time were important because, performing in daytime, there was no way of altering the light to show the hour. Barnes enterprisingly uses two of these in the scene (Act 3 Scene 5) where Caesar Borgia murders his brother, Candy. One is the use of a clock – doubtless the same we have encountered before in Every Man In His Humour and Julius Caesar. Caesar’s accomplice knows his hour is come when “The clock strikes eleven” (56) and the suspension of disbelief is carried forward by the use of a lit torch, indicating the outdoors: “Enter a Page with a torch, Duke of Candy and Caesar Borgia disguised.” (Note, among properties listed by Henslowe, “4 torchbearers” suits,” p. 170.) After “the boy putteth out the torch,” Candy verbally keeps up the illusion going: “’Tis very dark” (57).15
This sequence, incidentally, draws attention to what must have been a very common piece of stage business, though rarely recorded. Caesar’s accomplice says “Here will I stand till the alarum call,” to which a stage direction adds: “He stands behind the post.” This will have been one of the two posts that held up the “heavens” over the stage, as at the Swan (see Frontispiece). We assume that most of the playhouses after the refurbishment of the Rose in 1592 will have had both a “heavens” and its posts, though the Hope contract expressly requires that there should be no posts. It was to double as a bear‐baiting arena, so it was essential that the stage be removable in its entirety; the joints and underpinnings of its “heavens” must have been significantly reinforced. Where, like the Globe, there were posts we must assume that they sometimes irritatingly obscured sightlines. But they must also have been very convenient for the actors in moments like this, where a character wanted to remain hidden. Although it is entirely possible that a property was brought on to serve as the “boxtree” behind which Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian hide to spy on Malvolio reading Maria’s letter in Twelfth Night (2.5.15ff), one of the posts would certainly serve quite adequately. They may also very well have served as the trees to which Orlando attaches his poems about Rosalind in the Forest of Arden (As You Like It, 3.4). The Admiral’s Men did have among their properties “1 bay tree,” “1 tree of golden apples” and “1 Tantalus tree” but these seem to have been items for particular productions, as the tree of golden apples was for Fortunatus (Henslowe, 319–20). In most contexts the posts would have served.
After the prologue and its dumb show, the regular action of The Devil’s Charter starts with the following direction: “Enter marching after drums & trumpets at two several places, King Charles of France, Gilbert Mompanseir, Cardinal of Saint Peter ad Vincula: soldiers. Encountering them Lodowick Sforza [and] Charles Balbiano. The King of France and Lodowike embrace” (7). Here again, two points of entry, but this does not preclude there being more. This is the first of twenty‐two references to drums in the text and stage directions, and sixteen references to trumpets. The action was kept at a high aural level throughout. For example, towards the end of Act 2 there is a dumb‐show in which the drums play continuously, while the trumpet gives way to a fife or high‐pitched flute:
Drums and Trumpets. Charles and his company make a guard … Alexander being set in state, Caesar Borgia, and Caraffa advance to fetch King Charles, who being presented unto the Pope, kisseth his foot, & then advancing two degrees higher, kisseth his cheek: then Charles bringeth [Cardinal] S. Peter ad Vincula, and Ascanio, which with all reverence kiss his feet, one of them humbly delivering up his cross‐keys, which he receiveth, blessing them and the rest of Charles his company: The drum and fife still sounding. (40)
Just as Barnes makes full use of the trapdoor(s), he also takes several opportunities to put the action on the upper stage. Much of Act 2 Scene 1, for example, takes place with Alexander on the battlements of Castell Angello, in diplomatic wrangling with the French king below. This begins:
Sounddrums, answer trumpet.
[Enter] Alexander upon the walls in his pontificals, betwixt Caesar Borgia and Caraffa (Cardinals); before him the Duke of Candy, bearing a sword; after them Piccolomini [and] Gasper de Foix. (33)
And continues:
Sounddrums and trumpets.
[Exit] Alexander with his company off the walls, ordnance going off. After a little skirmish within, he summons from the Castell with a trumpet; answer to it below. Enter Alexander upon the walls as before. (36)
Similarly in Act 4 Scene 4, in a military standoff between Caesar (with Barbarossa) and the Countess Katharine, a good deal of the action happens with her on the battlements and them down below:
Sound drum, answer trumpet.
Enter upon the walls Countess Katharine, Julio Sforza, Ensign, Soldiers.
Drums, Trumpets. (76)
Later we get:
A charge with a peal of ordnance: Caesar, after two retreats, entereth by scalado; her ensign‐bearer slain, Katharine recovereth her ensign, & fighteth with it in her hand. Here she sheweth excellent magnanimity. Caesar the third time repulsed, at length entereth by scalado, surpriseth her, bringeth her down with some prisoners.
Sound drums and trumpets. (81)
These directions call for up to six persons on the upper stage, which speaks to there more likely being an open balcony than rooms with separate windows. The level of action in the last direction speaks to the same point. Countess Katharine could hardly show “excellent magnanimity” [great courage] from the depth of a room; nor is it likely that Caesar Borgia could storm her battlement using scaling‐ladders without having reasonably free access at the top. Antony and Cleopatra also bears this out. Act 4 Scene 15 begins “Enter Cleopatra and her maids aloft, with Charmian and Iras” and subsequently “They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra” (38 SD). So there seem to be four or five boys aloft, even before they begin the inevitably clumsy business of heaving Antony up to join them. Such a space must inevitably have eaten into what was available for the lords’ rooms (see p. 235). Possibly when a play involved activity on this scale on the upper stage the audience would not be able to use the lords’ rooms, or at least be restricted to limited numbers of them.
These two sequences of The Devil’s Charter also remind us that firearms were very much a feature of the show. Both involve peals of ordnance, loud discharges of cannon, which were loaded with powder and wadding, but not shot. (In A Larum for London a direction reads: “The piece discharges. A great screeke heard within.”) These were doubtless the “chambers” (cannon) which, when fired during a performance of Henry VIII in 1613, set fire to the thatched roof and burned the house to the ground; the cannon, which would have been too cumbersome to maneuvre on stage, were kept high up above the stage roof or “heavens,” adjacent to the platform from which trumpeters gave the three “soundings” (see p. 110). That’s why the cannon wadding got into the thatch. Alexander at one point enters “with a linstock in his hand”(30), the forked stick which gunners carried from which they could draw fire for their guns. Shortly thereafter “Piccolomini, Gasper de Foix [enter], with small shot” (31), a generic term for gunners who used small arms, like arquebuses. They were presumably armed with their pieces. Most of the male gentry in the play, except the churchmen, would have worn swords – and the fighting cardinal, Caesar Borgia, would have broken that rule too; his sister, Lucretia, uses a knife to kill her husband (“Three stabs together” (25)). The tiring house must have carried a formidable armoury.
The Devil’s Charter also (to my mind) settles any doubt about the presence of a discovery space at the Globe, and gives more detailed indications of how it was used than usual. Here it mainly represents Alexander’s study; the only exception seems to be in Act 4 Scene 4 where Caesar, having defeated Katharine, “discovereth his tent where her two sons were at cards” (82). We first see it used as the study in Act 1 Scene 4, which opens with “Alexander in his study with books, coffers, his triple crown upon a cushion before him” (15). He is subsequently joined by his sons, Candy and Caesar, and talks at length with them; nothing indicates that he leaves his study at all, but subsequent examples make it likely. For example, Act 4 Scene 1 begins with “Alexander in his study beholding a magical glass with other observations.” After brief reflections, “Alexander cometh upon the stage out of his study with a book in his hand” (60). We then have the long black magic sequence we have already observed, and at the end of the scene “Exit Alexander into the study” (65). Similarly Act 4 Scene 5 opens with “Enter Alexander out of his study” (83). He confers with his trusted servant, Bernardo, about getting Astor and Philippo Manfredi drowsy with doped wine and then “Exit Alexander into his study” (84). Bernado “Knocketh at the study” (86) to confirm they are asleep, Alexander answering from within. Then “[Enter] Alexander upon the stage in his cassock and nightcap with a box under each arm.” The “upon the stage” suggests that this is once again from the study, a different status of entry from that through the all‐purpose doors. He then places “aspics,” poisonous asps, on both their breasts and they die. Finally he has a simple exit, but almost certainly back into the study (88).
There is one variation, when at the beginning of Act 3 Scene 2 the direction reads “Alexander out of a casement” (43), presumably one of the “convenient windows and lights glazed to the said tiring house” specified in the Fortune document. This is when he expresses his passion for Astor Manfredi, a delicate subject and probably safer staged with distance between the characters. But otherwise the study is consistently the center of Alexander’s machinations, the heart of his web; but for action or interactions with other people he repeatedly emerges “upon the stage.” This suggests that the discovery space was quite small and that sightlines into it were limited. It is a place where Countess Katharine’s two sons can literally be “discovered” or where Alexander on his own can be seen, possibly seated, and surrounded by symbolically potent aids: “books, coffers, his triple crown upon a cushion before him” (15), “a magical glass with other observations” (60), and the boxes with the deadly snakes. No heavy action takes place there, or interactions between characters. It was presumably quite a shallow alcove, probably created by a wooden framework draped with sheets or arrases – more for brief visual effects than for conducting the business of the plot. We must assume that it could be accessed from within the tiring house, so that actors and properties could be positioned there while a performance was taking place. Though there is no evidence for this, it is not impossible that some limited form of lighting was used to enhance those effects. Given the geographical axis of the playhouse, with the rear of the stage facing due south at midsummer, the area under the “heavens” was always likely to be in shade.
The final scene opens with “Alexander unbraced betwixt two cardinals in his study, looking upon a book, whilst a groom draweth the curtain” (104) – the curtain or arras across the face of the back of the stage, concealing the discovery space. Alexander’s loose clothing betokens his sorry state, in contrast to his earlier pontificals; he needs the cardinals to help move him around. Yet again he comes out of the study for the main business of the scene: “They place him in a chair upon the stage; a groom setteth a table before him” (105). In an ironical twist, the discovery space serves one last turn: “Alexander draweth the curtain of his study, where he discovereth the devil sitting in his pontificals. Alexander crosseth himself, starting at the sight” (106).
The music of the play is heavily dominated by the drums and trumpets, but there are calls for some other tones. As the Manfredi brothers are being put to sleep, they ask “good Barnardo” to “let it be thy labour … / To call for music.” Philippo says “Let’s hear this music” (85) and later “More music there”: “After one strain of music they fall asleep” (86). This was presumably from stringed or woodwind instruments. One wonders if Barnes had already seen King Lear when he scripted this: it essentially inverts 4.7 of Shakespeare’s play (Scene 21 in the quarto version), where Cordelia and her allies play soft music while Lear awakes from his madness; “Louder the music there,” the Gentleman calls, as he begins to stir (line 26). There are, as it happens, interesting differences in the two versions of the scene in King Lear that may speak to Shakespeare’s modest use of discovery spaces. Not only is it a “Doctor” rather than a “Gentleman” who assists Cordelia in the 1608 quarto version, but there are changes in the staging. At the call for louder music, the quarto text reads “King Lear is asleep,” which reads very much like a discovery direction, with the curtain being pulled back to reveal him. If so the long conversation between Cordelia and Lear which follows was scripted to take place in the mouth of the discovery space. The folio text, presumably scripted later, has a direction: “Enter Lear in a chair carried by servants” (21 SD). There is no indication that the discovery space is used at all. Possibly experience showed that the scene was more effective if Lear was semi‐upright and clearly visible on the stage.
This is not to say that Shakespeare never used the discovery space at the Globe, but that he used it sparingly and always with consideration of the sightlines, minimizing what went on behind the entrance. In Troilus and Cressida, for example, it likely serves as the tent in which Achilles famously sulks. A stage direction tells us “Achilles and Patroclus stand in their tent” (3.3.37 SD). There is no other indication of an entry for them, so it is likely that they draw back the curtain and emerge. Ulysses says “Achilles stands i’th’entrance of his tent” (38) – visibly outside the space itself. It is also likely that, at the end of the scene, they withdraw into the space again (there is no scripted exit for them at all, in either the quarto or the folio text).
To return briefly to what Barnes may have learned from Shakespeare’s example. In both versions of King Lear music helps restore Lear to sanity; in The Devil’s Charter it consigns the boys to death, an ironic twist on the usual associations of music and harmony. (One also wonders if Barnes had had the opportunity to see Antony and Cleopatra when he wrote, since the use of asps seems very pointed, and the text freely makes comparisons with Cleopatra’s death.) There is also further evidence of sophisticated musical stagecraft: at the end of the penultimate scene, anticipating their final triumph over Alexander, the devils resolve “Then let us for his sake a hornpipe tread. They dance an antic” (104). The hornpipe was traditionally danced to woodwind music, such as might be produced by the hautboys, ancestors of the modern oboe, which feature commonly in texts of Shakespeare’s later plays, or later versions of early ones. In the folio text of Hamlet, for example, the “Hautboys play” at the beginning of the dumb show (3.2.135).16 In Macbeth hautboys and torches usher in two successive scenes, 1.6 and 1.7 – where Duncan arrives at Macbeth’s castle, and where Lady Macbeth steels her husband’s heart to murdering the king. Later, in the last appearance of the witches, as they prepare the “show of eight kings,” the text calls for “Hautboys” (4.1.105 SD). Perhaps most poignant of all is the brief scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where for some anonymous Roman soldiers “Music of hautboys is under the stage” (4.3.12 SD). It may not be accidental that all of these instances are in fact ominous. The “hornpipe” of the devils in The Devil’s Charter is no less so. The “antic” that they dance would be a grotesque, bizarre or ludicrous action, of a kind that Jonson often built into his court entertainments, such as the 1609 Masque of Queens, as an antithesis to true order. The King’s Men performed the speaking and comic roles in such productions and may well have borrowed something suitable here from their court experience – as the “dance of twelve satyrs” in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.342 SD) was certainly borrowed from Jonson’s 1611 masque, Oberon (see p. 313).
The last, ironic musical twist in the play heralds Alexander’s demise: “sound a horn within. Enter a devil, like a post.” Such messengers often announce themselves with horns. But the message here is a summons to hell: “The devil windeth his horn in his ear and there [three?] more devils enter, with a noise, encompassing him. Alexander starteth” (112). The posthorn is thus the final instrument we hear in the play, if not quite the final noise: “Thunder and lightning, with fearful noise. The devils thrust him down, and go, triumphing” (113). There is, then, a good deal of music in the play, helping to maintain its fevered pitch. But it is in a limited range: drums, trumpets, fife, hautboys, horn, punctuated with the percussion of squibs and rolled cannonballs. There is little call for stringed instruments. That is not untypical in a play which is a history of sorts. Lutes and viols would be much more in evidence in comedies and romances (as, for example, in the music Orsino calls for at the beginning of Twelfth Night).
Barnes has thus used a very wide range of the playhouse’s facilities: the upper stage (at one point repeatedly assailed by scaling‐ladders), the traps, the discovery space, pyrotechnics, sound effects, one of the posts supporting the “heavens,” potent smells, lavish costumes, grotesque figures. The Devil’s Charter may not be great drama, but it has unmistakable energy. And – even if the text was not staged in its entirety – it is so consistent and repetitive that there is no reason to doubt that most of it reflects the Globe’s actual resources.
We may pause to note two things Barnes does not call for. One is that he does not call for any descents from the “heavens.” This is understandable, in that such entries were normally reserved for deities, and this is a play concerned with devils rather than gods. Yet, given Barnes’s liberal use of just about everything else, it was surely not beyond him to call on such machinery – if it was available. This was another stage device that Jonson scorned – no “creaking throne comes down, the boys to please” (prologue to Every Man In His Humour, 16) – so its absence in his Globe plays is not significant. But even Shakespeare seems to avoid it there. Hymen in As You Like It might well have made a descent, but apparently entered on foot, alongside Rosalind and Celia (5.4.106 SD). Even in Pericles – a play which offers a foretaste of the kinds of romances which would often use descents at the Blackfriars – it is far from clear that Shakespeare made use of it. The one possible exception is in the vision of Diana that comes to Pericles, which is often staged these days on high. But the text says merely “Diana,” which might mean any number of things (5.1.242 SD). It is a serious question whether the Globe that Shakespeare used had descent machinery at all.17
Barnes’s second apparent omission is in not specifying a “hell‐mouth” for Alexander’s final exit. Of course, “thrust down” makes it perfectly apparent where he is going, but there is no indication of that legacy of the medieval stage, a vivid representation of the ghoulish jaws of hell through which the sinner will pass. We know that the Admiral’s Men possessed “1 hell mouth,” from an inventory of their properties taken on March 10, 1598 (Henslowe, 319). Of all their extant plays the one that would seem most suited to its use is Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, but interestingly the 1604 version of the play gives no indication of it, the final direction being merely “They [the devils] exeunt with him [Faustus]” (1995, 5.2.115 SD).
The 1616 version, which most scholars now regard as based on a 1602 revision of Marlowe’s text – and so definitely a Fortune play, rather than a Rose one – is notably more explicit (see Marlowe 1995, xvi; Henslowe, 206). As the end approaches, the Good and Bad Angel pay one last visit, and we read “Music while the throne descends,” bearing them (5.2.104 SD); the Good Angel abjures Faustus to “behold / In what resplendent glory thou hadst set / In yonder throne, like those bright shining saints, / And triumphed over hell” if he had followed God’s way (109–12). And shortly thereafter “Hell is discovered” (114 SD). Was this the “hell‐mouth”? It seems quite possible, though it is apparently placed, not over a trapdoor but in the discovery space, where it can suddenly be revealed. Presumably it had been enhanced with images of suffering sinners, to contrast with “those bright shining saints.” Thus the final exeunt probably took Faustus and the devils, not down through a trapdoor, but back into the discovery space where we had first seen him “in his study” at the beginning of the play. So the 1616 Dr Faustus uses both a descent and a hell‐mouth at its climax, whereas The Devil’s Charter calls for neither. We can hardly call Barnes’s play reserved or understated in its stagecraft, yet these differences may point to some differences of general artistic policy between the Fortune and the Globe – or to differences in their facilities. The plays of Shakespeare and Jonson at the latter, in particular, seem distinctly restrained, and more focused on the spoken word, than what we know of the Admiral’s (later Prince Henry’s) Men’s repertory.
The small sampling of Globe plays we know of other than by Shakespeare and Jonson does tend to bear this out. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, for eample, does start as if it intends to emulate The Devil’s Charter, or indeed Dr Faustus. The Prologue introduces us to Peter Fabel, the “merry devil,” when he “draw[s] the curtains,” revealing the discovery space:
Behold him here, laid on his restless couch,
His fatal chime prepared at his head,
His chamber guarded with these sable slights [black arts],
And by him stands that necromantic chair …
The space is evidently just deep enough for Fabel’s couch and necromantic chair, and decorated with signs of black magic. There is also the clock we have traced from Every Man In His Humour onwards ‐‐ and the action of the play begins dramatically with its chimes (see p. 200). But having led us to expect a re‐run of The Devil’s Charter the play entirely abandons this mode, discovery space and all. It makes no further special calls on the theatre’s resources.
Thomas, Lord Cromwell (pub. 1602) makes more consistent use of the discovery space, notably in two scenes apparently meant to mirror one another. In the first we find “Cromwell in his study with bags of money before him, casting his account.” The scene opens out for him to talk at some length with a post and then Mistress Banister. While it is conceivable that all this happens in the space, it makes more stage sense that, like Pope Alexander, he would hold the conversations on the main stage. Later we find “Gardiner in his study.” The Bishop, plotting against Cromwell, is shown in this equal position of power; he then talks to witnesses from the nobility, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Bedford, which again makes more sense if it happens on the main stage.
Between these two scenes there is a comic scene that speaks to both of them. The clown, Hodge, occupies Cromwell’s study (“Hodge sits in the study”). He is disguised as the Earl of Bedford (“in his cloak and his hat”), in a plot to secrete the real earl out of the country. Cromwell negotiates with the authorities then slips away with the earl (disguised as the clown), and Hodge distracts them long enough for the scheme to work. At one point the Governor orders: “Go draw the curtains, let us see the earl. / Oh, he is writing, stand apart awhile.” The point is that the discovery space represents power in the play: whoever possesses it is dominant. Cromwell holds it in the first half of the play, and Gardiner towards the end, as Cromwell falls. Hodge’s brief, comic reign in there is a marker of the scales beginning to tip against Cromwell. It is effective stagecraft which, however, calls upon few resources. Again, there is no evidence of extensive action in the discovery space. It only has to accommodate a desk. Its symbolic role is what matters most, and to that end the company may have lined its interior with the most impressive hangings they had to signify the authority of whoever possessed it.
The play also introduces us to an important prop, which the company recycled from production to production: a severed head (“Enter one with Cromwell’s head”), presumably dripping with blood. Seasoned members of the audience would perhaps remember it as the head of Cade in 2 Henry VI, of the conveniently dead pirate, Ragozine (substituting for Claudio) in Measure for Measure, and of the youngest son of the Duchess in The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose “yet bleeding head” is presented to his deluded brothers (3.6.33). They would see it again as Macbeth’s head, and Cloten’s in Cymbeline. Presumably the make‐up team backstage (the tiremen or women?) fitted it with a wig and facial hair to suit each occasion.
Middleton’s use of his staging opportunities elsewhere in The Revenger’s Tragedy is characteristically adept.18 There is one certain and one likely use of the discovery space. The former reads:
Enter the discontented Lord Antonio, whose wife the Duchess’s youngest son ravished. He discovering the body of her dead to certain Lords; and Hippolito.
L. Antonio:
Draw nearer, lords and be sad witnesses
Of a fair comely building newly fallen,
Being falsely undermined: violent rape
Has played a glorious act. Behold, my lords,
A sight that strikes man out of me.
(2007e,1.4.0 SD‐5)
The tableau of the raped and dead woman becomes an opportunity for sententious moralizing. The next likely use of the space is nicely ironic, if I am right: “Enter in prison Junior Brother.” The formula “Enter in” some kind of confined space, like a study or a prison cell, seems generally to betoken a discovery. Junior Brother is “the Duchess’s youngest son,” who raped the woman we last saw in the discovery space, so this would be a very fitting twist – especially since, by yet another mordant twist in the plot, he will shortly be escorted out (by mistake) to execution. Neither scene uses much depth in the space: the first is still tableau; the second presumably keeps Junior at his cell bars while he talks to his gaolers.
Close to the end of the play Middleton stages a good deal of pageantry and a spectacular effect: “In a dumb show, the possessing [coronation] of the young Duke, with all his Nobles. Then sounding music. A furnished table is brought forth. Then enters the Duke and his Nobles to the banquet. A blazing‐star appeareth” (5.3.0 SD). It is uncertain how the blazing star (usually an omen of régime change) was effected. It was either a very elaborate firework, or a painted banner that could be pulled quickly across the stage under the “heavens.” This is the only surving example of a blazing star used at the Globe, though it was evidently in common use, since we find the same effect as early as The Battle of Alcazar (circa 1589) for the Admiral’s Men and as late as 1622 in Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin with Prince Charles’s Men, then at the Curtain (Herbert, 136). Here the star precipitates the climax of the play which, like many revenge plays, ends with theatricals gone awry – a masque, in which the masked dancing offers every opportunity for plots to unfold and fold in again upon themselves.
The London Prodigal (1605), a citizen comedy, calls for no elaborate staging or effects whatsoever. There is no recorded use of upper stage, trap, or discovery space. The only demands on properties are for a torch and rapiers, and costumes had to cover one simple disguise: “Enter … Luce like a Dutch Frau.” The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607) is an interesting case, since there is evidence that Shakespeare knew its author, George Wilkins – an innkeeper and pimp – outside the theatre; it seems reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare may have had some hand in involving Wilkins in writing plays and guiding him on what the players could handle (C. Nicholl, 2008, 208–11, 220–6). It is likely that he collaborated with him in Pericles (Jackson, 2003). The Miseries is another play that calls for very little in the way of special stagecraft, beyond a couple of instances of swordplay, throwing wine in a drawer’s face, and some business with letters. It calls twice for brief business above, and draws particular attention to the upper stage. A character below heavy‐handedly points it out: “We cannot mistake it, for here’s the sign of the Wolf and the bay window.”
Even the perennially popular romance, Mucedorus, calls for nothing more sophisticated than a bear suit (with a detachable head), a pot, a few swords, “a wild man” and a hermit disguise for Mucedorus himself. The revision of the play for a performance at court circa 1610 – sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare – might have offered the opportunity to open the old‐fashioned fantasy of the play to the Globe’s extensive resources; but the revised text adds nothing more challenging than a blast of trumpets (see Bate and Rasmussen 2013, 503–7). This differentiates it from the later generation of romances, where descents and discoveries are quite common, when the King’s Men had use of the Blackfriars theatre.
Shakespeare only once scripted a live animal in one of his plays. The dog, Crab, accompanies the clown, Launce, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.19 We do not know if this was ever performed by the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, but the fact that he did not repeat the experiment perhaps tells us how successful he felt it had been.20 Other playwrights, however, did bring animals on to the Globe stage. In Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour the “humorous” knight, Puntarvolo, is accompanied throughout by a greyhound, under the control of his servants; in the latter half of the play he also has a cat with him, to accompany him (because his wife refuses to go) on his planned journey to Constantinople. In his edition of the play, Randall Martin judges that while the dog is certainly a live greyhound, the cat (which is kept in a bag) “is not a live animal,” though it doubtless affords many opportunities for unscripted comedy (2012i, 1: 252). The Merry Devil of Edmonton directs “Enter Brian with his man and his hound,” not impossibly the same as Puntarvolo’s greyhound, though this was eight or nine years later.21
In this survey of Globe plays and the theatrical resources they call upon I have deliberately focused more on works that are not by Shakespeare, partly because his plays for the Globe make surprisingly few demands on its resources but also in the expectation that readers will in many cases be able to draw their own comparisons. The Devil’s Charter is truly exceptional in calling upon so many features of the stage, which it is helpful to know that the company could draw on if they wished (virtually everything we know of in the era, except for descent machinery). But most of the other plays are remarkably modest in the demands they make. Only a few of them use the discovery space, though they do so imaginatively. Even the upper stage is relatively rarely called upon, and often then only briefly, as when Brabantio is called from his bed in the first scene of Othello or Celia appears at her window to throw down her handkerchief to Volpone disguised as a mountebank (Volpone, 2012p, 2.2); either of these could be staged using only a small portion of the lords’ rooms. And the trap is almost never used: Hamlet’s gravedigger scene is the great exception, and possibly Timon’s digging in the woods, where he finds gold (Timon of Athens, 4.3), though there is no clear direction to this effect. The Devil’s Charter is certainly eccentric in that, as in the use of fireworks. We do have to bear in mind, of course, that many of the plays premiered at other playhouses we have considered would have been revived at the Globe – bodies in Titus would continue to fall into the pit, Richard II would have still have appeared on the battlements, Juliet would continue to appear at her window.22
One thing easily forgotten in reading the texts of these plays is just how much color would have been on stage at some point in all of these performances. As we have noted, the woodwork of the stage and the “heavens” was splendidly painted, while there were arrases on the tiring house wall. But, as we saw with Henslowe, the players also spent a fortune on acquiring fine costumes (see p. 170ff). This was an issue for Sir Henry Wotton, who memorably commented on the splendor of the costumes in his letter describing the burning down of the Globe in 1613, while Henry VIII was in progress: “the knights of the order with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous” (Schoenbaum, 1985, 276). He perhaps felt the fire was fitting retribution.
Playhouse of the Spoken Word
But, at its core, the Globe was a playhouse of the spoken word, catering first to hearing (audience) and secondly to eyes (spectators). The trio of Shakespeare, Burbage, and Armin virtually assured that. So what kind of acting did this iconic theatre, the Globe, produce or encourage? This has long been a very contentious issue. It is not that we have no evidence, but that the evidence is susceptible to various forms of construction. The argument is sometimes framed in distinctions between “presentational” and “representational” acting, otherwise expressed as between “formal” and “naturalistic” (Thompson, 1997, 329ff). What is fundamentally at issue is whether Elizabethan actors were trained in a rigid set of conventions and gestures whereby they formally “presented” emotional states and appropriate social behavior to their audiences, or whether they naturalistically inhabited the mindset and personal histories of individuals, to “represent” people in their living complexity. As Marvin Rosenberg provocatively framed the argument, were they men or marionettes (1968)?
In many respects it is easier to argue the case that they were marionettes. Most of the “characters” in Elizabethan drama were defined socially by the clothing they wore before they even spoke – servants, lords and ladies, soldiers, priests – which is why costumes were always so important to the players. And in a repertory system which demanded a different play virtually every afternoon, a completely new play approximately every three weeks, lines learned separately in individual “parts,” and precious little time to rehearse together – it is tempting to suppose that this must have relied on “presentational,” formalistic acting and typecasting: something mechanical and familiar that ran within predictable parameters.
And the case for this seems, on the face of it, to be reinforced by the metatheatricality of Elizabethan plays, with their prologues and choruses, their dumb shows, clowns who wander “out of character,” plays‐within‐plays, references to “this wooden O” or “this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” and actors who directly address the audience, denying the illusion of a dividing line between the staged event and the wider theatrical experience. Shakespeare’s audiences were never allowed to forget that they were watching – or, more to the point part of – a fictive experience in which Burbage is always Burbage, “presenting” Hamlet, Othello or Lear, not incarnating them. Our examination of Lady Mary Wroth’s depictions of boy actors tended towards this same conclusion (p. 187–8).
A passage often cited in the debate is this by Buckingham in Richard III:
Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw;
Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks
Are at my service, like enforced smiles;
And both are ready in their offices,
At any time, to grace my stratagems.
(3.5.5–11)23
Is the actor playing Buckingham slyly imitating Burbage here, who was playing Richard III – the person to whom the speech was delivered? Does this not suggest that there were a set of poses and mannerisms that in effect constituted “the deep tragedian,” reducing his individual interpretation of a role to a set of pre‐scripted gestures?
The most developed argument along these lines was that advanced by B. L. Joseph, an extreme formalist, in his Elizabethan Acting (1951).24 He saw the acting of the period as an extension of rhetoric and oratory, key classroom skills in a humanist education, where command over language was an essential attribute of the ruling classes: “That what is applied to acting in oratory also applied to acting on the stage is evident in the description of [the ‘character of’] An Excellent Actor … ‘Whatsoever is commendable to the grave Orator, is exquisitely perfect in him’” (p. 1).25 He also cites Richard Flecknoe’s claim in the preface to Love’s Kingdom that Burbage “had all the parts of an excellent orator” (102). He supports this thesis by reference to John Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia, published together in 1644 as a manual of rhetorical delivery. The full title of these works explains their main arguments, based on empirical study of body movement in communication: Chirologia: or the natural language of the hand. Composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: or, the art of manual rhetoric. Consisting of the natural expressions, digested by art in the hand, as the chiefest instrument of eloquence. They contain pictures showing how hand, arm, and fingers might consistently and effectively be used in speech. Acting is thus reduced to a stylized eloquence, a mechanical use of predictable gestures, such as those proposed in the preface to the anonymous Caroline play, The Cyprian Conqueror: “The other part of the action is in gesture, which must be various as required; in a sorrowful part, the head must hang down; in a proud, the head must be lofty; in an amorous, closed eyes, hanging down looks, and crossed arms; in a hasty, fumbling and scratching the head etc.” (cited in Plett, 2004, 441).
Others, however, turn such arguments on their head and argue that paradoxically the self‐referentiality of Elizabethan drama creates the perfect conditions for what Coleridge dubbed “the willing suspension of disbelief”: the audience, literally all around the players, is taken so far with them through the looking glass as to experience their acting as an authentic “representation” of reality. When we hear “This is Illyria, lady” we are right there with Viola, and have already even forgotten – or rendered irrelevant – the fact that “she” is a boy. We meet the actors more than half way in their attempts to represent their characters’ realities.
So Marvin Rosenberg enjoyed himself demolishing Joseph’s argument, quoting further from Flecknoe, where he says “Burbage was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself in to his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring‐house) assumed himself again until the play was done” (103). This sounds something akin to the teaching of Stanislavski or even Method acting, which in the terms of this argument would be an extreme version of “representational” acting, identifying entirely with the thing itself.26 The Cyprian Conqueror looks as though it was written by an amateur, who may not have understood professional acting. Indeed, if we look back to the Buckingham speech at the head of this train of argument, we may ask ourselves just how “presentational” it is. Given the levels of irony and duplicity involved in this conversation between King Richard and his supposed ally, may this not be a “representational” account of “presentational” acting, which “Buckingham” is far too sophisticated actually to engage in – a double bluff? Of course, in the long run, “Richard” proves the better actor of the two, so the point is moot.
Peter Thompson is surely right to advise us against “any assumption that there was a single, uniform acting style on the Elizabethan stage. On the contrary, the professional stage accommodated a range of styles. Like all popular entertainment, it was not purist but eclectic” (334). The very mixed styles of the plays we have reviewed surely bear this out. This would in part be because theatre was evolving, and at a great pace. Acting styles were in flux; indeed, one way of reading Buckingham’s speech is to see it as a recitation of old‐fashioned expectations about acting, which are contradicted by the presence of new‐style acting in the person of Richard III. When Falstaff is to play King Henry he demands “Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I have wept; for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses” vein” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.380–3). He paradoxically intends to be more convincing by playing in a style from the 1560s – which, however, was evidently still familiar to everyone thirty years later. Its essence is perhaps best conveyed by a stage direction in the old play when King Cambyses is mortally wounded: “Here let him quake and stir.” When Hamlet warns the actors against over‐acting, we all know that he is steering them away from an old, Cambyses‐like style of acting: “a robustious periwig‐pated fellow tear[ing] a passion to tatters … It out‐Herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it” (3.2. 8–14). Nevertheless they continue to use the dumb‐show, with its dated and stylized conventions of enacting the “plot” of the play wordlessly prior to presenting the spoken version.
It is too simplistic to suppose that Elizabethan acting in general had renounced the old excesses and conventions in favor of Hamlet’s own preferences: “suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (17–24). This is suspect as a generalized statement of Shakespeare’s ideal or intention precisely because it speaks so exactly to Hamlet’s own condition, a man continually failing to suit his actions to his words. It may be a kind of wish fulfilment, likely to be achieved only sporadically at best while many players hung on to older or less challenging ways, and indeed when playwrights scripted them characters built on old foundations, as Falstaff is built upon the Vice as well as Cambyes (see p. 43).
Yet Peter Thompson spells out the potential in such construction:
the blending of Vice and human protagonist is at its most vivid in Richard III. It is my contention that the reference was metatheatrically reinforced when Richard III was first performed. Only five years dead, Tarlton was not forgotten. Most of the audience would have seen him, hunchbacked and outstandingly ugly, easily imitated by a shape‐shifting actor like, say, Burbage. This, surely, is the man who strides across the platform stage at the explosive opening of Richard III to declare himself a Vice [he quotes Richard III, 1.1.18–30, concluding “I am determined to prove a villain”]. It is a fraught moment in the playhouse. Burbage as Tarlton as future king as Vice/Clown: the new drama encasing the old. The player is addressing the audience directly, partly as Burbage, partly as Tarlton, and only partly as the Duke of Gloucester. (335)
It was indeed in the great tragedians of the day that commentators saw what modern scholars have interpreted as something different, something perhaps akin to “representational” acting, or naturalism. Jonson tried to pin what was so special about Alleyn in saying “others speak, but only thou dost act” (Epigrams 59, line 10), as if (perhaps) he transcended mere oratory and took on a three‐dimensional reality. Others might, however, conclude that Jonson is saying Alleyn’s skill lay in infusing his delivery with the energeia which Aristotle had insisted was essential for moving the emotions of listeners. The evidence is never clear cut.
Whatever exactly prompted the departure of Kemp from the Chamberlain’s Men as they entered the Globe, the moment seems symbolically apt. Clowns like Kemp built on old routines to cultivate a persona which transcended any particular play. They were only actors by special definition – always more Kemp than Bottom or Dogberry. But the stage was passing to “new” actors, like Alleyn and Burbage. And in recruiting Armin to replace Kemp, the Chamberlain’s/ King’s Men recruited a comedian whose style would complement that of Burbage, not be (as some might conclude) at odds with it: Hamlet and the gravedigger, Lear and his fool, and (as some of us believe) Othello and Iago (see, p. 276 Note 30). Eventually Alleyn and Burbage would be replaced by a new generation in the same tradition, like Nathan Field (Figure 6.2), and the King’s Men’s great trio of the 1630s, John Lowin, Joseph Taylor, and Eliart (or Eyllaerdt) Swanston. But the tradition essentially ended with them, since the proscenium stage of the Restoration called for a completely different set of acting conventions. We can do our best to rebuild the physical Globe, but we can never recreate the social, aesthetic, and material conditions that produced precisely that style of acting.
Figure 6.2 Portrait of Nathan Field.
Source: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.
Jacalyn Royce has most fully argued the case for the Theatre/Globe being the true making of Burbage (Figure 6.3), their proportions, size of stage and intimate relationship with the audience being what allowed this new style of acting.27 She focuses on a different sequence in the “character” of An Excellent Actor: “what we see him personate, we think truly done before us” (N2r). There are good grounds for supposing that Webster was specifically thinking of Burbage here, since he speaks of the actor being “much affected to painting,” and there are several contemporary references to his being a skilled “limner,” including payments of 44s. by the Earl of Rutland to both Shakespeare “about my lord’s impresa” and to Burbage “for painting and making it.”28 Only the year before, Webster had written the role of Duke Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi for Burbage, so he knew better than most what he was talking about.
Figure 6.3 Portrait of Richard Burbage. Source: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Archives.
Royce takes “personate” here to be the key term, a synonym for what we have been calling “representational” or naturalistic acting. She argues that the “stability provided by James Burbage’s Theatre precipitated a change in working conditions that revolutionized theatrical methods, particularly the methods of the company that called the Theatre its home. Staying in London presented conditions that made the shift to naturalistic acting possible,” adding that “Shakespeare’s dialogue provides much evidence of plausible body language and gesture, capitalizing on the visibility of the actor’s body in the Globe’s performance space.” She concludes: “The Globe theater enabled actors to achieve an unprecedented level of physical verisimilitude by providing a new possibility for ‘truth’ in the visibility – or visible body – of a character” (484, 490, 495).
We can add a tiny detail which bears out the cases of both Thompson and Royce. Richard III was the role that made Burbage a star. In The Letting of Humour’s Blood Samuel Rowlands, almost certainly thinking of that performance, describes gallants who would “like Richard the usurper, swagger, / That had his hand continual on his dagger” (1600, A2). Shakespeare had built his character of Richard from the brilliant if biased account by Sir Thomas More, which is embedded in the Chronicles of both Edward Halle and Raphael Holinshed: “when he stood musing, he would bite and chew busily his nether lip; as who said, that his fierce nature in his cruel body always chafed, stirred, and was ever unquiet: beside that, the dagger that he wore he would, when he studied, with his hand pluck up and down in the sheath to the midst, never drawing it fully out” (Bullough, 1957–75, 3: 300). Rowlands’ gallants were evidently imitating Burbage in the role. But nothing in the text of the play tells us that he did this with his dagger, even though the dagger is indeed mentioned (3.1.110). Shakespeare must have communicated the detail to Burbage in rehearsal, helping to turn this frame‐breaking role into a memorable – indeed a star‐making – piece of naturalistic acting.
It is perhaps sensible to put all this in perspective by heeding the final sentence of An Excellent Actor: “But to conclude, I value a worthy actor by the corruption of some few of the quality, as I would do gold in the ore; I should not mind the dross, but the purity of the metal” (see p. 180 on “the quality”). There was only one Burbage and it was Shakespeare’s rare good fortune to work in harness with him for at least twenty years. It is difficult to believe that they did not inspire and reinforce each other’s strengths. Shakespeare left gold rings in his will to Burbage, Heminge, and Condell – the last survivors of the old team. Burbage outlived him by only three years. His passing elicited much comment, notably the Earl of Pembroke’s touching grief: the Lord Chamberlain and richest man in England declined to attend the performance of Pericles we mentioned earlier, “which I being tender‐hearted could not endure to see so soon after the death of my old acquaintance Burbage” (ES, 2: 308; see p. 122).
A Funeral Elegy for Richard Burbage, March 1619 was sadly corrupted by forgery in the nineteenth century. Some versions are palpably false, crediting him with roles such as Frankford in A Woman Killed With Kindness (Heywood) and Brachiano in The White Devil (Webster), which were never in the King’s Men’s repertory. This must also cast doubts on suggestions that he played “young Romeo” and “the red‐haired Jew,” for which we have no further sanction. The version printed in English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, however, appears to be authentic (its invocation to a limner – a painter – once more rings true) and it pays sufficient tribute:
Some skillful limner help me; if not so,
Some sad tragedian help t’express my woe.
But O he’s gone, that could both best; both limn
And act my grief …
He’s gone, and with him what a world are dead,
Which he reviv’d, to be revived so.
No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo.
Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside
That lived in him, have now forever died.
Oft have I seen him leap into the grave,
Suiting the person, which he seem’d to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there I would have sworn he meant to die …
(1–4, 12–20)29
A more pithy epitaph said only “Exit Burbage.”
Robert Armin
We may perhaps link something of Burbage’s success with what seem to have been deliberate changes in artistic policy which accompanied the move to the new Globe. The first is the choice of Robert Armin to replace Will Kemp; the second is the change in Shakespeare’s choice of material for his plays. Armin was already a well‐established comedian, having served for some years with Lord Chandos’s Men. Although he too claimed to be a “son” of Tarlton, he was a very different style of comedian. He was a small man, probably never robust enough for dancing a jig, and he cultivated the role not of a rustic buffoon but of a droll and wily fool (see Figure 6.4).
Figure 6.4 The image of Robert Armin on the title‐page of The History of the Two Maids of Moreclacke. Source: STC 773 Copy 1, Folger Shakespeare Library.
David Wiles spells out the differences:
Kemp, the “Lord of Misrule,” was allowed to develop an alternative order, unromantic, libidinal and egalitarian – an alternative to the dominant order of the gentry. Armin, however, played the fool’s part. Just as the fool stayed outside of the ordered formation of the morris … so Armin’s stage fools remained perpetual outsiders. Just as the morris fool beat the dancers and watchers with his bladder, so Armin railed at the fools of the world. Kemp’s art lay in convincing the spectators that he was their elected representative, chosen in order to play out their most mischievous fantasies, because he was one of their number. Armin’s art lay in being different, so that through parodying normal men he could point up the follies of normal men. (1987, 163)
If Kemp was Bottom, Peter, Dogberry, Armin was (almost certainly) Touchstone, Feste, Lavatch, Hamlet’s gravedigger, Thersites, Lear’s Fool, Macbeth’s devil‐porter, Autolycus, Trinculo, and probably other outsiders like Cloten and even Iago.30
If Hamlet’s rebuke to unruly clowns is partly aimed at Kemp, it is reasonable to suppose that Viola’s praise of Feste in Twelfth Night might be applied to Armin:
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
And like the haggard [untrained hawk], check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man’s art.
(3.1.60–6)
Armin was also apparently an accomplished singer: his singing in Twelfth Night entertains Orsino (“Come away, come away, death”) even as it mocks his self‐absorption, and delights Sir Andrew (“What is love,’ tis not hereafter”) even as it points out the folly of his wooing Olivia. And the song he sings at the end – “When that I was and a little tiny boy” – pours cold water over the whole romantic fantasy that the audience has sanctioned (“For the rain it raineth every day” – a refrain that echoes even more painfully again amid the storm in King Lear: 3.2.74–7).
Shakespeare had always contrived to keep Kemp’s roles thematically linked to the rest of the play, but usually in setpiece moments where he could pursue his clowning without seriously disrupting the action. Armin’s roles tend to be more structurally integrated with the wider play – an arrangement which his recurrent casting as a retained household “fool” greatly facilitates. It gives him the freedom to speak uncomfortable truths, becoming – as Goneril complains of Lear’s companion – his “all‐licensed fool” (1.4.198). It is difficult to believe that he did not collaborate with Shakespeare in planning such roles. He was himself the author of a comedy, Two Maids of More‐Clacke (pr. 1609) and two witty collections, Fool Upon Fool (1600, reissued as A Nest of Ninnies) and Quips upon Questions. He took the art of fooling seriously and in a way that surely complemented Burbage’s skills.
If the pivotal role of principal comedian changed at the Globe, so too did the direction in which Shakespeare, as the company’s “ordinary poet,” steered their repertory – or, at least, such of their repertory as we can discern (see Appendix). His early career had been firmly based on two staples: chronicle English histories and (broadly) festive comedies. With Henry V (probably at the Curtain) he wrote the last of the eight English history plays which, although not written in sequence, traced between them the narrative of England through a tempestuous century from the deposition of Richard II to the death of Richard III and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty.31 But Shakespeare never wrote an English history for the Globe. Late in his career he wrote the stylistically very different Henry VIII (known, before the first folio tidied it into the histories, as All Is True), and a performance of that would burn the Globe to the ground. But there are good reasons for thinking that he wrote Henry VIII with the Blackfriars primarily in mind (see p. 304).
The earliest play we can locate at the Globe with reasonable certainty is Julius Caesar, and this flags what was to replace the English histories. Thomas Platter once more records:
After dinner on the 21st of September [1599], at about two o’clock, I went with my companions over the water, and in the strewn roof‐house saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar with at least fifteen persons very well acted. At the end of the comedy they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance. Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other. (ES, 2: 365)32
Platter took a boat over the Thames, as gentlemen commonly would, so this was clearly the Bankside. It could just be the Rose, but other evidence dates Julius Caesar around this time, so there are good grounds for assuming it is the Globe. As we have noted elsewhere, Platter goes on to generalize the point that plays started at 2 p.m. (see p. 267). Here he fixes that time for a specific performance at the Globe. This was around the autumnal equinox, so assuming a show running between two and three hours (including the dancing) everyone could still get back to the City comfortably before dark. It would have been difficult to start much earlier, however, because dinner was the main meal of the day and usually started around noon. The actors were trapped between the audience’s eating schedule and the limits of daylight. As the audience made their way towards the playhouse they would have heard the trumpeter high up above the tiring house deliver three “soundings” which marked the beginning of the show (p. 78–80). It was by now a familiar convention. Jonson, an inveterate experimenter with the conventions, started the Induction of Every Man Out of His Humour – at the Globe that same autumn – at the second sounding, while the third marked the Prologue. In the printed text of Satiromastix, Dekker also jokingly alludes to the convention, entreating the reader to check the errata before commencing on the play “Instead of the trumpets sounding thrice, before the play begins” (1: 306).
Platter also identifies “at least fifteen persons” on stage. Julius Caesar has well over forty speaking parts (some, admittedly, very brief) so this must have meant a lot of doubling – requiring a very well‐oiled arrangement for costumes changes in the tiring house – for those who were not in the main roles. Assuming there were by now nine sharers, this perhaps implies three boys to play the women (and probably Brutus’s servant, Lucius) plus three hired actors. It would not be surprising if this was a production that occasionally required other company personnel, like the gatherers, to make up numbers in the most crowded scenes, such as the opening where the tradesmen mill about on the feast of Lupercal, or the people listen to the funeral orations, or the battle of Philippi. Still, Platter was obviously impressed to see as many as fifteen persons involved in such entertainment. Sadly, he does not comment on other aspects of the play, such as the costumes. Other evidence suggests that there might be an eclectic mix of historically appropriate clothing with modern items, which would echo the play’s famous anachronisms, such as the “sweaty nightcaps” ancient Roman plebeians are supposed to have worn (1.2.245–6) and a clock striking (2.1.192.1). These are often quoted as evidence of Shakespeare’s indifference to such niceties, by contrast to Jonson’s punctilious accuracy in his two Globe tragedies, Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). But such anacronisms might have alerted an audience to parallels between historical times and their own, never more relevant than in a play about resonant régime‐change at a time when the sands of the Tudor régime were inexorably running out.
We also wish Platter had been more forthcoming about “the strewn roof‐house” from which he watched the performance. In his penny‐by‐penny account of entry he never mentions the lords’ rooms, so this is presumably not those. It is most likely one of the well‐appointed “gentlemen’s rooms” – strewn, presumably, with new rushes to keep it fresh. And since he describes it as a “roof‐house” we might infer that it was in the highest galleries, almost certainly above the side of the stage. The drawing of the Swan actually places the “orchestra” – seating for the wealthiest spectators – on the lowest level and immediately adjacent to the stage (see p. Frontispiece). But we have to be wary of treating the drawing as gospel, and besides the Globe was not bound to imitate the Swan in all particulars. The third tier galleries doubtless gave a commanding view, almost on a par with that from the lords’ rooms. Finally, we note that, though the production had no time for “jigging fools,” the performance – like the one he saw at the Curtain – still ended with a dance. Platter describes its “extreme elegance” and praises the “wonderful combination” of the dancers, rather than raucous or lewd clowning. It remains, however, a measure of the difference between then and now that a play like Julius Caesar should end with any kind of dance at all. But this was obviously the expectation for plays both comic and serious. 2 Henry IV ends with an Epilogue spoken by a dancer: “My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night” (30–2).
Shakespeare had written two early tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, but Julius Caesar was a mark of intensified concentration on the genre. The first version of his Hamlet, as we have seen, was apparently written circa 1600, and then revised (I would argue) circa 1603/4, and again sometime later (probably circa 1606/8: see Knutson, 1995). Othello was written between 1602 and 1604; King Lear 1605–6; Macbeth 1606; Antony and Cleopatra 1606–7; and Coriolanus circa 1607 (with Timon of Athens variously assigned between 1604 and 1608). People have wondered about the emotional and imaginative pressure behind this output, but there must also have been a commercial agenda: tragedies worked for the audience at the Globe, and for Burbage and Armin, or Shakespeare would not have kept writing them. This seems to have been a calculation that the company made, even as they moved there.
At the same time, something happened to Shakespearean comedy at the Globe. This was less immediate. Armin must certainly have performed in As You Like It in 1599/1600, since Touchstone is a pun on his status as a time‐served freeman of the Goldsmith’s company: a touchstone is a smooth, fine‐grained, dark variety of quartz or jasper, used for testing the quality of gold and silver alloys by the color of the mark left from rubbing them on it. By analogy the fool rubs up against the people in the Forest of Arden, testing their quality. The role of Feste in Twelfth Night could hardly have been written for anyone other than Armin; and John Manningham, a student at the Middle Temple, saw the play performed there in February 1602, so we deduce it was written a little earlier than that. But these are the last two of what are often called Shakespeare’s “festive” comedies, following a formula of social unrest or inversion, disguise or cross‐dressing (especially in these last two), and processes of self‐discovery which finally results in marriages and social reintegration. That gives way in All’s Well that Ends Well (circa1602) and Measure for Measure (1603/4) to a much more skeptical comedy, whose use of bed‐tricks (among other things) to effect the outcomes makes for difficult or unsatisfactory resolutions – hence the modern label of “problem” comedies. Troilus and Cressida, a mordantly anti‐heroic version of the Trojan wars, also belongs to this period.33 Here again, it is unlikely that these changes were not significantly driven by the company’s expectations of what would appeal to their audiences on the Bankside.
But the landscape of the company’s competition changed dramatically in the space of a year. On the one hand, Henslowe and Alleyn apparently appreciated that the challenge which the Globe represented was too much for the Admiral’s Men – the Globe was hard by the Rose, which was moreover sinking into the marsh land on which it had been built. They resolved as soon as possible to build anew themselves, calculating that the Fortune had better chances of success if it was built on the other side of London; they too may have had thoughts about reshaping their repertory. The Rose did not immediately close down; Worcester’s Men are used it occasionally, but we hear of no plays there after 1603. With the Swan also apparently largely inactive, the Chamberlain’s Men perhaps unexpectedly faced no further significant competition on the Bankside until the Hope was built in 1614.
But the reopening of the boy companies certainly gave them something to think about. Paul’s boys were always much the smaller operation of the two boy companies; though they clearly offered novelty when they opened their doors, it is unlikely that they offered serious commercial competition to the Globe. John Marston was their driving force in the early years, and Shakespeare clearly paid serious attention to the kinds of plays he was producing – and Marston repaid the compliment. Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599), for example, is a romantic comedy of the type Shakespeare had been master of for years; but Marston introduces elements of burlesque and parody which give it a very different tone. And its sequel, Antonio’s Revenge (1600), unpredictably leaps genre barriers and becomes a revenge tragedy, whose precise relationship to Hamlet scholars have been debating for years, never entirely sure who is indebted to whom. Marston’s The Malcontent (1603/4), first written for the Blackfriars, is also very clearly inspired by Hamlet, in such original ways that Shakespeare’s company found a way to include it in their own repertoire, as we shall see (see p. 281ff).
The Children of the Queen’s Chapel, who gallingly had occupied the Burbages’ Blackfriars property, were always significant competition for the Chamberlain’s Men. At least in their early days they only performed once a week, and in a playhouse which perhaps held an audience of 600, one‐fifth of the 3,000 which it was said the Globe could accommodate.34 But those 600 were all willing to pay at least 6d. for a seat and the comfort of indoor accommodation, the cost of the exclusive lords’ rooms at the Globe (at least in its early years). And both the boys’ theatres were within the City walls, easily accessible by its wealthier inhabitants, especially during the worst of the winter weather. Such competition clearly threatened to starve the Globe of its highest‐paying customers. Shakespeare’s company obviously looked to develop a business plan to meet that threat.
As if this were not enough, the Privy Council privileges which had seemed so clear in 1598 became somewhat less so as time passed. On paper all seemed well. In June 1600 the Privy Council issued a very explicit order restricting the number of (adult) playhouses to two, one in Middlesex for the Admiral’s Men (the Fortune, once it was complete) and one on the Bankside in Surrey for the Chamberlain’s Men (the Globe). The Curtain, which the Admiral’s Men had apparently been using, was to be torn down once the Fortune was in use. Playing at any “common inn” was forbidden, and the number of performances was restricted to two per company per week, and none on Sundays, in Lent or in time of plague.
But it is unclear if any of these provisions, other than the plague restriction, was ever enacted. As the Privy Council must well have known, there was already a new playhouse, the Boar’s Head, a converted tavern, on the east side of the City and just beyond the City’s jurisdiction, in Whitechapel (Berry, 1986). Since the previous summer it had been occupied by a company under the patronage of the sixth Earl of Derby, and Derby’s influence as one of the great northern magnates had secured them a performance at court this past February – the first breach in the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s Men’s duopoly there since 1594. They returned again the following Revels season, but then left London. They were immediately replaced in both venues, however, by a troupe which was formally a merger of companies patronized by the Earls of Worcester and of Oxford, but went under the former’s name. Worcester was now Master of the Horse to the Queen – a position as prestigious as those of the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral – and a member of the Privy Council. Oxford was the seventeenth earl of that title, which carried enormous prestige. With such combined influence, their company breached the duopoly permanently.
The War of the Theatres
The move to the Globe thus coincided with a whole new, and possibly unanticipated, London theatrical marketplace. A much‐mythologized symptom of this, in the early years of the new century, was the so‐called War of the Theatres, in which a number of dramatists – notably Jonson, Marston, Chapman, and Dekker – traded boasts and insults in their plays. Scholars used to expend a lot of ink tracking these insults and the supposed personal rancour behind them. It is now more common to see the whole thing as a commercial publicity exercise, though informed by a keen sensitivity to new styles and experimentation, in which the boy companies sought to establish niche places within this new theatrical economy (see, in particular, Knutson, 2001; Bednarz, 2001; Steggle, 1998). It succeeded as well as it did not least because Jonson invested his considerable ego in championing the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars, who staged his next two plays.
Whether Shakespeare joined him and the others in this is something of a moot point. In The Second Part of the Return to Parnassus, a student satirical play written for festivities at St John’s College, Cambridge (circa 1601/2), “Dick Burbage” and “Will Kemp” purportedly appear as themselves, and the latter says “Why here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit” (Anon, 1949, 4.3.1769–73). How much students at Cambridge really knew about London theatre is not easy to determine. But the reference to “Horace giving the poets a pill” is apt enough, referring to a scene in Jonson’s Poetaster (5.3), one of the central texts in the “War,” in which the urbane Roman satirist administered pills to thinly disguised versions of Marston and Dekker, to make them belch up their turgid language. What “purge,” if any, Shakespeare may have administered to Jonson has been a matter of much unresolved debate.
But the sense of a celebrity culture reflected in the student play (where Burbage, Kemp, Shakespeare and Jonson are all familiar names – though the authors seem not to know that Kemp and Shakespeare have parted company) does make it the more likely that London audiences entered into the spirit of these authorial and company antagonisms, and this may have boosted attendances for all concerned. An illuminating sidelight on the whole affair is cast by Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, or, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet, which tells us on its title‐page that “it hath been presented publicly by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his Servants, and in private by the Children of Paul’s.” This was a unique collaboration / cross‐over, which must have been very different in style and resonance as presented in the two houses. But it makes sense. The Blackfriars operation was a threat to both of these companies, who were not really a threat to each other. Dekker at this date usually wrote for the Admiral’s Men. But he had been one of Jonson’s clear targets in Poetaster, and to an extent the satire of that play is aimed at both of the duopoly companies.
Satiromastix, staged later in 1601, is a clear riposte – the poet whose “humour” is to be “untrussed” is “Horace,” a thinly veiled Jonson. But in addition to the ad hominem (but actually quite humorous) attacks on Dekker and Marston, Poetaster contains much darker satire, aimed at various constituencies. One of these is the adult players, Histrio and Aesop, who are associated with “your Globes and your triumphs” (3.4.163) and so, inevitably, with the Chamberlain’s Men. They act as informers for the asinine magistrate, Asinius Lupus, and for this Aesop is promised “a monopoly of playing confirmed to thee and thy covey under the emperor’s broad seal” (5. 3.103–4). Even the ultra‐cautious E. K. Chambers is led to wonder whether this can be an allusion to the part Augustine Phillips played in speaking to the authorities about the Richard II performance given on the eve of the Essex rebellion (ES, 1: 385n: see p. 153). Is the suggestion that the Chamberlain’s Men have secured their privileged playing position by acting as informers to the government?
If so, Jonson must certainly also have had in mind his own experience in respect of The Isle of Dogs (see p. 221). He later told of how, when he was imprisoned for it, “his judges could get nothing of him to all his demands but ‘ay’ and ‘no.’ They placed two damned villains to catch advantage of him, with him, but he was advertised by his keeper” (Jonson 2012 k, lines 194–6). One agenda in the Isle of Dogs affair was clearly to preserve the Privy Council’s privileges for its chosen acting companies. Government informers and the preservation of the “duopoly” would naturally go together in Jonson’s mind. The whole arrangement rankled deeply with him – and doubtless with others outside the charmed circle – whose opportunities to perform in London were seriously circumscribed. The timely reappearance of the boy companies must have seemed a godsend to Jonson.
Dekker turns all of Jonson’s self‐righteous indignation back on itself. He has Tucca remind Horace / Jonson of his humble beginnings as a player and what has made him the scornful poet he is today:
I ha’ seen thy shoulders lapped in a player’s old cast cloak, like a sly knave as thou art: and when thou ranst mad for the death of Horatio, thou borrowedst a gown of Roscius the stager, (that honest Nicodemus) and sent’st it home lousy, didst not? (1.2.354–8)
thou put’st up a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon’t. Thou hast forgot how thou amblest (in leather pilch) by a play‐wagon, in the highway, and took’st mad Jeronimo’s part, to get service among the mimics. And when the stagerites banished thee into the Isle of Dogs, thou turn’dst ban‐dog (villainous guy) and ever since bitest; therefore I ask if th’ast been at Paris‐garden, because thou hast such a good mouth. Thou bait’st well; read, lege, save thy self and read. (4.1.128–36)
Dekker’s review of Jonson’s humble beginnings as an actor casts an interesting light on the profession. He had evidently been a player in an itinerant troupe, without a London base, and was remembered for playing Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, though he was only a journeyman or hireling, not a sharer; he had worn a distinctive rough leather outer‐garment (“pilch”), the mark of a laborer – perhaps sneering at his former trade as a bricklayer. If there is any truth in the tale of the borrowed cloak, returned infected with lice, “Roscius” would have to one of the very finest actors – perhaps Alleyn or Burbage.
Dekker traces Jonson’s current pretensions as a satirist “ban‐dog” (attack‐dog, such as would be used for bear‐baiting in Paris Garden) specifically to the Isle of Dogs business. He turns the knife savagely in the exhortation to “read, lege, save thy self and read” – the touch of Latin making it clear that he is recalling the reading of “neck‐verse” by which Jonson escaped hanging for the death of Gabriel Spencer (p. 39). And he rubs salt in this wound again later, referring to his “white neck‐verse” and pronouncing a death sentence on him: “that presently he be had from hence, to his place of execution, and there be stabbed, stabbed, stabbed. (He stabs at him)” (4.3.105‐6, 27–9). A man who has killed a fellow‐actor should perhaps think twice before criticizing others of “the quality.” If the “War of the Theaters” was at heart a publicity exercise among rivals finding their feet in the new marketplace, it was nevertheless fueled by genuine anxieties and antagonisms.