The Best Actors in the World: Shakespeare and His Acting Company (Contributions in Drama and Theatre

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In Shakespeare's time, a stage wasn't just one type of space; plays had to be versatile.

Folger Consort

The same play might be produced in an outdoor playhouse, an indoor theater, a royal palace—or, for a company on tour, the courtyard of an inn. In any of these settings, men and boys played all the characters, male and female; acting in Renaissance England was an exclusively male profession. Audiences had their favorite performers, looked forward to hearing music with the productions, and relished the luxurious costumes of the leading characters. The stage itself was relatively bare.

For the most part, playwrights used vivid words instead of scenery to picture the scene onstage.

The Theatre was among the first playhouses in England since Roman times. Like the many other playhouses that followed, it was a multi-sided structure with a central, uncovered "yard" surrounded by three tiers of covered seating and a bare, raised stage at one end of the yard.

Spectators could pay for seating at multiple price levels; those with the cheapest tickets simply stood for the length of the plays. Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was one of several to perform at the Theatre, appearing there by about A few years later, the Burbages lost their lease on the Theatre site and began construction of a new, larger playhouse, the Globe, just south of the Thames.

To pay for it, they shared the lease with the five partners called actor-sharers in the Lord Chamberlain's company, including Shakespeare. The Globe, which opened in , became the playhouse where audiences first saw some of Shakespeare's best-known plays. A new, second Globe was quickly built on the same site, opening in Large open playhouses like the Globe are marvelous in the right weather, but indoor theaters can operate year-round, out of the sun, wind, and rain.

It was almost impossible not to see the other half of the audience standing behind the players. Consequently, much of the staging was metatheatrical, conceding the illusory nature of the game of playing and making little pretense of stage realism.

The Globe was pulled down in , two years after the Puritans closed all theatres, to make way for tenement dwellings. In the American actor Sam Wanamaker , who was driven by the notion of reconstructing a replica of the Globe, established the Shakespeare Globe Playhouse Trust. Seventeen years later a groundbreaking ceremony was held on a Bankside site near that of the original Globe, and in the foundations of the original building were discovered buried beneath a historic 19th-century building.

Although only a small percentage of the original theatre could be examined, the discovery of these foundations enabled scholars to make certain design adjustments.

Shakespeare's Theatre - Essential Information on Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, Blackfriars theater

They changed the planned 24 sides to 20, for instance, and, using the angles revealed by the archaeologists, they made the whole polygon 99 feet 30 metres in outside diameter. By referring to a number of extant Elizabethan buildings for clues to the structure, style, interior, and roofing, scholars and architects completed the design of the Globe Theatre reconstruction.

Using traditional methods and materials, with only a few concessions to modern fire regulations and the like, builders completed work on the new theatre in the mids. It is now part of a larger complex of buildings known as the International Shakespeare Globe Centre. The new theatre is not a perfect replica of the original building. It is made, for example, from new green oak, like the Fortune, not from the year-old timbers of a dismantled building, like the original Globe. Its design is still speculative in key areas, such as its size, the shape of the stage, and the decorations.

In addition, certain compromises had to be made to satisfy the constraints of fire-safety regulations.

These entailed making the stairways and access doors wider, increasing the number of entrances to the yard, positioning sprinkler valves in the ridging of the thatched gallery roofing, and including conduits for electrical wiring. These provisos—and a restriction on the size of the audience at any performance to a maximum of 1,, roughly half the number that attended the original Globe—have secured the right for the new Globe to be used once again as a theatre.

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The second best playhouse

Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: It was the first permanent building designed expressly for dramatic performances to be constructed in Europe since late antiquity; the civic authorities of London, already unhappy with playing in the streets….

It, too, is a history play in a sense, dealing with a non-Christian civilization existing 16 centuries before Shakespeare wrote his plays. The Elizabethan stage theatre design In theatre design: Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.

Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. Restoration writers obliged them by adapting Shakespeare's plays freely. Writers such as William Davenant and Nahum Tate rewrote some of Shakespeare's plays to suit the tastes of the day, which favoured the courtly comedy of Beaumont and Fletcher and the neo-classical rules of drama.

According to Stanley Wells, Tate's version "supplanted Shakespeare's play in every performance given from to ," [24] when William Charles Macready played Lear from a shortened and rearranged version of Shakespeare's text. Tate's Lear remains famous as an example of an ill-conceived adaptation arising from insensitivity to Shakespeare's tragic vision.

Tate's genius was not in language - many of his interpolated lines don't even scan - but in structure; his Lear begins brilliantly with the Edmund the Bastard's first attention-grabbing speech, and ends with Lear's heroic saving of Cordelia in the prison and a restoration of justice to the throne.

Globe Theatre

Tate's worldview, and that of the theatrical world that embraced and demanded his "happy ending" versions of the Bard's tragic works such as King Lear and Romeo and Juliet for over a century, arose from a profoundly different sense of morality in society and of the role that theatre and art should play within that society.

Tate's versions of Shakespeare see the responsibility of theatre as a transformative agent for positive change by holding a moral mirror up to our baser instincts. Tate's versions of what we now consider some of the Bard's greatest works dominated the stage throughout the 18th century precisely because the Ages of Enlightenment and Reason found Shakespeare's "tragic vision" immoral, and his tragic works unstageable.

The result is a snapshot of Restoration comic tastes. Beatrice and Benedick are brought in to parallel Claudio and Hero; the emphasis throughout is on witty conversation, and Shakespeare's thematic focus on lust is steadily downplayed. The play ends with three marriages: Davenant wrote many of the bridging scenes and recast much of Shakespeare's verse as heroic couplets.

A final feature of Restoration stagecraft impacted productions of Shakespeare. The taste for opera that the exiles had developed in France made its mark on Shakespeare as well.

Shakespeare's Theater

Davenant and John Dryden worked The Tempest into an opera, The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island ; their work featured a sister for Miranda, a man, Hippolito, who has never seen a woman, and another paired marriage at the end. It also featured many songs, a spectacular shipwreck scene, and a masque of flying cupids. However ill-guided such revisions may seem now, they made sense to the period's dramatists and audiences. The dramatists approached Shakespeare not as bardolators , but as theater professionals. Unlike Beaumont and Fletcher, whose "plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage", according to Dryden in , "two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's", [28] Shakespeare appeared to them to have become dated.

Yet almost universally, they saw him as worth updating. Though most of these revised pieces failed on stage, many remained current on stage for decades; Thomas Otway 's Roman adaptation of Romeo and Juliet , for example, seems to have driven Shakespeare's original from the stage between and It was in large part the revised Shakespeare that took the lead place in the repertory in the early 18th century, while Beaumont and Fletcher 's share steadily declined.

The 18th century witnessed three major changes in the production of Shakespeare's plays. In England, the development of the star system transformed both acting and production; at the end of the century, the Romantic revolution touched acting as it touched all the arts. At the same time, actors and producers began to return to Shakespeare's texts, slowly weeding out the Restoration revisions. Finally, by the end of the century Shakespeare's plays had been established as part of the repertory outside of Great Britain: In the 18th century, Shakespeare dominated the London stage, while Shakespeare productions turned increasingly into the creation of star turns for star actors.

After the Licensing Act of , one fourth of the plays performed were by Shakespeare, and on at least two occasions rival London playhouses staged the very same Shakespeare play at the same time Romeo and Juliet in and King Lear the next year and still commanded audiences. This occasion was a striking example of the growing prominence of Shakespeare stars in the theatrical culture, the big attraction being the competition and rivalry between the male leads at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Spranger Barry and David Garrick.

Some of Shakespeare's work was performed in continental Europe even during his lifetime; Ludwig Tieck pointed out German versions of Hamlet and other plays, of uncertain provenance, but certainly quite old. Goethe organised a Shakespeare jubilee in Frankfurt in , stating that the dramatist had shown that the Aristotelian unities were "as oppressive as a prison" and were "burdensome fetters on our imagination". Herder likewise proclaimed that reading Shakespeare's work opens "leaves from the book of events, of providence, of the world, blowing in the sands of time. Theatres and theatrical scenery became ever more elaborate in the 19th century, and the acting editions used were progressively cut and restructured to emphasize more and more the soliloquies and the stars, at the expense of pace and action.

The platform, or apron, stage, on which actors of the 17th century would come forward for audience contact, was gone, and the actors stayed permanently behind the fourth wall or proscenium arch , further separated from the audience by the orchestra see image at right. Towards the end of the century, William Poel led a reaction against this heavy style. Through the 19th century, a roll call of legendary actors' names all but drown out the plays in which they appear: To be a star of the legitimate drama came to mean being first and foremost a "great Shakespeare actor", with a famous interpretation of, for men, Hamlet, and for women, Lady Macbeth, and especially with a striking delivery of the great soliloquies.

The acme of spectacle, star, and soliloquy of Shakespeare performance came with the reign of actor-manager Henry Irving and his co-star Ellen Terry in their elaborately staged productions, often with orchestral incidental music , at the Lyceum Theatre, London from to At the same time, a revolutionary return to the roots of Shakespeare's original texts, and to the platform stage, absence of scenery, and fluid scene changes of the Elizabethan theatre, was being effected by William Poel 's Elizabethan Stage Society.

The 20th century also saw a multiplicity of visual interpretations of Shakespeare 's plays. Gordon Craig 's design for Hamlet in was groundbreaking in its Cubist influence.

FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

Craig defined space with simple flats: Though the construction of these flats was not original, its application to Shakespeare was completely new. The flats could be aligned in many configurations and provided a technique of simulating architectural or abstract lithic structures out of supplies and methods common to any theater in Europe or the Americas. The second major shift of 20th-century scenography of Shakespeare was in Barry Vincent Jackson 's production of Cymbeline at the Birmingham Rep.

This production was groundbreaking because it reintroduced the idea of modern dress back into Shakespeare. It was not the first modern-dress production since there were a few minor examples before World War I , but Cymbeline was the first to call attention to the device in a blatant way. Iachimo was costumed in evening dress for the wager, the court was in military uniforms, and the disguised Imogen in knickerbockers and cap. It was for this production that critics invented the catch phrase "Shakespeare in plus-fours". Ayliff , two years later staged Hamlet in modern dress.

These productions paved the way for the modern-dress Shakespearean productions that we are familiar with today. The production became known as the Voodoo Macbeth , as Welles changed the setting to a 19th-century Haiti run by an evil king thoroughly controlled by African magic. Other notable productions of the 20th century that follow this trend of relocating Shakespeare's plays are H.

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