was no ‘set’ of scenery to be changed, though there were rich costumes. As one
scene ended, another began as an actor entered saying ‘This castle has a pleasant
seat’ or ‘Is this a dagger that I see before me?’, so that the audience would know
what to imagine. It did not ‘suspend disbelief ’ within a darkened theatre: it collab-
orated in daylight make-believe. Plays did not pretend to be real: the sultry, mature
Cleopatra was played by a boy, as were all women. Verse is itself a convention, as
are the soliloquy and the aside. So is invisibility: in broad daylight an actor would
whisper ‘I am invisible’. He was not invisible to the ‘groundlings’, who stood on the
ground at his feet, very visible, audible and inhalable, crowding round the stage.
Each of those who paid one penny to stand cannot have heard or grasped every
flying word. But high-sounding and patterned language appealed in itself; crowds
flocked to hear ornate sermons. The Globe could hold a sizeable fraction of
Londoners free to attend. They participated vociferously, as at a provincial Italian
opera, a Spanish bull-fight, a British pantomime, an American ball-game. The
cultural mix meant that popular vigour and crudity rubbed shoulders with poetry
and intelligence.
Shakespeare came in on a rising tide. After 1594 Marlowe and Kyd were dead, and
he was the leading playwright, sharing in the profits of his Company. He began with
the sexual knockabout ofThe Taming of the Shrew, the classical atrocities ofTitus
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 113Drawing of the Swan Theatre, London: a copy of a
drawing of c.1596 by Johannes de Witt, a Dutch visitor to
London.
tectum roof
porticus gallery
sedilia seats
ingressus entry
mimorum ædes the house of the actors
proscænium fore-stage
planities sive arena flat space or arena.
orchestra place for the musicians