by Sir Sidney Lee
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The histrionic and scenic conditions, in which Shakespeare's plays were originally produced, present a further series of disadvantages which, from our modern point of view, render the more amazing the unqualified enthusiasm of the Elizabethan playgoer.
There was no scenery, although there were crude endeavours to create scenic illusion by means of "properties" like rocks, tombs, caves, trees, tables, chairs, and pasteboard dishes of food. There was at the outset no music, save flourishes on trumpets at the opening of the play and between the acts. The scenes within each act were played continuously without pause. The bare boards of the platform-stage, which no proscenium nor curtain darkened, projected so far into the auditorium, that the actors spoke in the very centre of the house. Trap-doors were in use for the entrance of "ghosts" and other mysterious personages. At the back of the stage was a raised platform or balcony, from which often hung loose curtains; through them the actors passed to the forepart of the stage. The balcony was pressed into the service when the text of the play indicated that the speakers were not actually standing on the same level. From the raised platform Juliet addressed Romeo in the balcony scene, and the citizens of Angers in King John held colloquy with the English besiegers. This was, indeed, almost the furthest limit of the Elizabethan stage-manager's notion of scenic realism. The boards, which were bare save for the occasional presence of rough properties, were held to present adequate semblance, as the play demanded, of a king's throne-room, a chapel, a forest, a ship at sea, a mountainous pass, a market-place, a battle-field, or a churchyard.
The costumes had no pretensions to fit the period or place of the action. They were the ordinary dresses of various classes of the day, but were often of rich material, and in the height of the current fashion. False hair and beards, crowns and sceptres, mitres and croziers, armour, helmets, shields, vizors, and weapons of war, hoods, bands, and cassocks, were mainly relied on to indicate among the characters differences of rank or profession.
The foreign observer, Thomas Platter of Basle, was impressed by the splendour of the actors' costumes. He accounted for it in a manner that negatives any suggestion of dramatic propriety:?
"The players wear the most costly and beautiful dresses, for it is the custom in England, that when noblemen or knights die, they leave their finest clothes to their servants, who, since it would not be fitting for them to wear such splendid garments, sell them soon afterwards to the players for a small sum."
The most striking defect in the practice of the Elizabethan playhouse, according to accepted notions, lies in the allotment of the female rôles. It was thought unseemly for women to act at all. Female parts were played by boys or men?a substitution lacking, from the modern point of view, in grace and seemliness. But the standard of propriety in such matters varies from age to age. Shakespeare alludes quite complacently to the appearance of boys and men in women's parts. He makes Rosalind say, laughingly and saucily, to the men of the audience in the epilogue to As You Like It: "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me." "If I were a woman," she says. The jest lies in the fact that the speaker was not a woman but a boy. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in Antony and Cleopatra, (V. ii. 220), laments
the quick comediansThe experiment of entrusting a boy with the part of Ophelia was lately tried in London not unsuccessfully; but it is difficult to realise how a boy or young man could adequately interpret most of Shakespeare's female characters. It seems almost sacrilegious to conceive the part of Cleopatra, the most highly sensitised in its minutest details of all dramatic portrayals of female character,?it seems almost sacrilegious to submit Cleopatra's sublimity of passion to interpretation by an unfledged representative of the other sex. Yet such solecisms were imperative under the theatrical system of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks, but
