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    Shakespearean Stage

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    Boopathi S
    The Shakespearean stage encouraged imagination rather than realistic sets. The empty performance space could represent any location through language alone. While some practical considerations were made, like removing bodies between scenes, the stage remained flexible rather than being framed by a proscenium arch like modern theatres. Elements like the gallery or a bed were simply dressed up verbally, with the audience completing the setting in their minds. Surprises could also be hidden on the rear stage until revealed.

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    Shakespearean Stage

    Uploaded by

    Boopathi S
    45 views2 pages
    The Shakespearean stage encouraged imagination rather than realistic sets. The empty performance space could represent any location through language alone. While some practical considerations were made, like removing bodies between scenes, the stage remained flexible rather than being framed by a proscenium arch like modern theatres. Elements like the gallery or a bed were simply dressed up verbally, with the audience completing the setting in their minds. Surprises could also be hidden on the rear stage until revealed.

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    The Shakespearean stage encouraged imagination rather than realistic sets. The empty performance space could represent any location through language alone. While some practical considerations were made, like removing bodies between scenes, the stage remained flexible rather than being framed by a proscenium arch like modern theatres. Elements like the gallery or a bed were simply dressed up verbally, with the audience completing the setting in their minds. Surprises could also be hidden on the rear stage until revealed.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    45 views2 pages

    Shakespearean Stage

    Uploaded by

    Boopathi S
    The Shakespearean stage encouraged imagination rather than realistic sets. The empty performance space could represent any location through language alone. While some practical considerations were made, like removing bodies between scenes, the stage remained flexible rather than being framed by a proscenium arch like modern theatres. Elements like the gallery or a bed were simply dressed up verbally, with the audience completing the setting in their minds. Surprises could also be hidden on the rear stage until revealed.

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    Shakespearean Stage

    Very often, these days, when you attend the theatre you’ll be sitting, facing the stage
    square on. It will usually have a proscenium arch that frames it like a painting so the
    action presents itself to you as a moving picture. Modern audiences have a taste for
    realism so the sets represent the kind of scenes we are used to in our real-world life. A
    scene may take place in a dining room, for example, and will be set up and decorated as a
    dining room, with chairs, table, real food and so on. The next scene may take place in a
    forest, and there may be trees, and lights representing the sun filtering through leaves.
    Perhaps the next scene takes place in a bedroom and it will be a recognisable bedroom.
    There will be windows, doors to balconies, fireplaces, doors and so on. At the end of a
    scene, there will usually be a blackout, during which the actors can leave silently and the
    set can be changed.

    All that would have been nonsense to Shakespeare’s audiences. The playwright – and all
    the other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights – wrote in a way that encouraged the
    audience to imagine the sets. Sets used in the modern way I have described makes the
    stage inflexible, whereas the Elizabethan stage was completely flexible. The empty space,
    that was extended out into the audience and could be viewed from three sides, could be a
    small prison cell, a battlefield, a royal court, a crowded city street, an ocean, and any
    other place, in rapid succession, without changing a thing.

    There were some concessions to realism in Elizabethan plays, though, and we can see
    how Shakespeare had some practical staging considerations in mind as he wrote his
    plays. For example, when Hal kills Hotspur and goes off, leaving the body on the ground,
    Shakespeare has Falstaff find it and decide to claim that he has killed him. Falstaff carries
    the body off the stage. When Hamlet kills Polonius, he drags the body off, allowing the
    next scene to take place somewhere else, without the dead Polonius lying in the wrong
    place. Those playwrights always contrived ‘realistic’ ways to remove bodies. In the
    modern version, the dead body just gets up and walks away during the blackout.

    There were certain design aspects of the Elizabethan stage that offered some realism as
    well. The upper gallery could be a tower, a battlement, a bedroom window, a hilltop or,
    most famously in Romeo and Juliet, a balcony. But it was just a gallery, always the same:
    the playwright used language to dress it up as a battlement or a hillside and the
    audience’s imagination would complete the illusion.
    It was occasionally necessary to have a piece of furniture in a scene – for example, the
    very important bed on which Othello murders Desdemona. In that case the bed would be
    on the rear stage, concealed by a curtain until the time came to act out the scene. The rear
    stage could also be used to do such things as reveal a surprise, both to the audience and
    one or more of the characters. In A Winter’s Tale when the statue of Hermione comes to
    life the actor has been waiting patiently on the rear stage for the curtain to be drawn,
    revealing him (it would be a boy) as a statue that is going to come to life.

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