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Katarzyna Gorka
Prof Joseph Safdie
English 215 (Honors)
Shakespeare and The Renaissance Theater
The medieval theater evolved along with changing political and economical conditions. The
Protestant Reformation targeted religious plays, including mystery cycles, purging them of Catholic
contents. Theatrical performances brought together large audiences, who often ate, drunk, and
behaved disorderly. Crowds attracted pickpockets, prostitutes, and beggars, and facilitated the
spread of disease. No wonder that actors were often frowned upon or even seen as a “moral
disease.” By the fifteenth century, artists started to rely on royal and noble patronage. Organized
theater troupes of several men traveled throughout the country, providing entertainment and
enhancing the prestige of the patron. In return, patrons legal protection: unless licensed, traveling
artists would be treated as vagabonds, and severely punished or imprisoned. As a result, the plays
often reflected the tastes and attitudes of noble patrons. Morality plays became more and more
politicized, and religious restrictions were soon followed by political censorship, but the
playwrights learned to escape censure using allegory or placing action in distant historical past.
Dramatic productions were either staged publicly, in the streets, town squares, and innyards,
or privately, in aristocratic mansions. Private performances involved better educated actors and
tended to be more intellectually challenging, while public shows comprised all sorts of
entertainment, including clowns and jugglers, and often employed crude slapstick humor. The first
permanent playhouses of the sixteenth century were also divided into private and public. Private
theaters were probably smaller in capacity, more luxurious, indoor playhouses, while public theaters
were large, open-air, and cheaper. Between 1599 and 1602, there was a conflict between the two,
known as “the war of the theaters,” involving Ben Jonson and his rivals John Marston and Thomas
Dekker. They mocked the style of their opponents in their plays, ascribing bombastic diction,
hypocrisy, and arrogance to the characters representing the other side.
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Pic 1. The Globe Theater, London, England (reconstructed).
Public playhouses, such as those in which Shakespeare’s plays were first staged, were built
on the outskirts of London, where they were subject directly to favorable royal jurisdiction rather
than to opposing municipal authorities. The first permanent public theater, the Red Lion, was
erected in Shakespeare’s lifetime, around 1567. Playhouses varied in shape and size, but usually
they were cylindrical, unroofed structures, seating up to several thousand spectators (Pic. 1). The
stage consisted of a raised platform, roofed with a canopy supported by columns, representing “the
heavens” (Pic. 2). Columns could also represent trees. The stage was surrounded on three sides by
an unroofed pit or “yard,” where less wealthy spectators would be standing and cheering on the
actors, and three stories of roofed “galleries,” featuring more expensive seats. At the back of the
stage there was a “tiring house,” where the actors would wait and change. They would enter the
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stage through one of two doors in the back wall, representing different locations. A trapdoor in the
stage floor was used for special effects, such as smoke, or simply represented hell. A second level, a
balcony, could be used for playing (for example the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet) or seating
spectators. A third level comprised musicians’ gallery. Above it, there was “a hut” storing
equipment and machinery. The tiring house was topped with a flag, signaling performance day
(Ward).
Pic. 2. A diagram of a playhouse in Shakespeare’s times.
Before coming to London in the late 1580s, Shakespeare had never seen a freestanding
playhouse, and it certainly must have impressed him: “any young actor or aspiring playwright up
from the province must have felt on entering a London playhouse that he had died and gone to
theatrical heaven” (Greenblatt 183-4). Theaters still had many ferocious enemies, particularly
among the clergy, who blamed them for pretty much the same reasons that today some criticize
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television: encouraging violence, greed, and immoral behavior. Permanent theaters allowed for
more sophisticated staging and helped actors and playwrights settle down and secure financial and
social stability. Writing became a profession, but not quite like today. Until 1710 there was no
copyright law, and once a writer sold his work, it no longer belonged to him. Theaters had to not
only attract large audiences, but keep them constantly coming back. This meant putting up
enormous number of new plays, as many as five or six plays per week (Greenblatt 188).
Shakespeare was in the right place at the right time.
Pic. 3. The stage of The Globe Theater, London, England (reconstructed).
Drama also changed on the inside. Despite some contemporary voices, the plays gradually
abandoned the Aristotelian unity of action, place, and time. In King Lear, for example, Shakespeare
not only introduces a subplot, the story of Edmund and Edgar, but intertwines the various levels of
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action with cross-references. Even more remarkable change occurred in the construction of dramatic
characters. Renaissance brought about the resurrection of ancient Roman and Greek plays, and
contemporary playwrights, including Shakespeare, heavily borrowed from the classics. Humanism
shifted focus to a specific man rather than a life type, and encouraged interest in human psychology.
Medieval allegorical personifications were gradually replaced with more individualized characters,
often historical or at least given real names. However, the tradition of stock characters was still
alive, as exemplified by a Fool in King Lear. Shakespeare in particular developed the character of a
villain, who in many of his plays is very energetic and effective dramatically. Shakespeare also
frequently surrounded his protagonist with a large group of secondary characters, thus dispersing
interest and creating the impression of complexity, arising expectations and building suspension on
many levels.
Pic. 4. The Elizabethan Theater, Ashland, OR (modeled after The Fortune Theatre of London).
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Despite its evolution, Renaissance theater was not “realistic” at all, but still absolutely
depended on a convention. Female roles were acted out by young boys, one actor often had to play
several roles, the stage was not lighted, and there was hardly any scenery. All of these shortcomings
had to be made up by the audience’s imagination. One thing that actors did have was elaborate
costumes, on which actors spent most of their money. Costumes visually conveyed a significant part
of the story. Some of them were emblematic, and the audience were expected to instantly associate
them with certain characters, such as a king, a fool, or a ghost. They were often “color-coded,”
signifying whether a character was good (wearing white) or evil (wearing black). In King Lear, for
example, there is no need for detailed description of costume, but a short stage direction is enough:
“disguised as a madman,” “dressed like a peasant,” “with drum and colors.” Sometimes the
significance of some particular piece of clothing is explained by the characters themselves, as when
Edgar, seeing Lear “fantastically dressed with wild flowers,” says: “The safer sense will ne’er
accommodate / His master thus” (Shakespeare IV.6.81-82).
According to critics, Shakespeare always imagined his plays staged rather than read: “he
showed little or no personal interest in seeing his plays on the printed page” (Greenblatt 194), and
he wrote them specifically for the stage. Shakespeare was also an actor, and one of his advantages
over his rival playwrights was that he “wrote for the theater not as a poet, . . . but as a player”
(Greenblatt 210). That is not to say, of course, that his plays lack his poetical genius, but rather that
the power of his plays lies in the complex picture of every scene, actors constantly entering and
exiting the stage, and at least a part of the audience actively participating in the spectacle. But we
must keep in mind that the theater for which he wrote significantly differed from today live theaters,
and take it into consideration reading and interpreting his plays.
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Works Cited
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen
Greenblatt and Meyer H. Abrams. Vol. B. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Ward, Adolphus, William Trent, et al. (eds) The Cambridge History of English and American
Literature. Vol. VI. The Drama to 1642. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21; New
York: Bartleby.com, 2000 <www.bartleby.com/cambridge/>. 26 October 2006.