Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance

Shakespeare and Company

Tim Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317079774
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

PART 1
Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance

Chapter 1
Playwrights Thinking Spatially

Othello.

This fortification, gentlemen, shall we see’t?

(Othello, III, ii, 5)1

This book explores the implications of the hypothesis that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were thoughtful and practical playwrights as well as dramatic poets, concerned with how their plays would look and work in the space and time of performance at the Globe and the other public playhouses. If a particular sort of textual analysis, one that attends to possible performance implications, can establish that early modern playtexts were written to provide the actors with practical information – and were not just providing generic ‘optimal’ projections of performance – then such textual analysis might not only illuminate the plays, but it might also provide invaluable evidence that would lead us to reconsider what we know about the original playhouses and how they were equipped. For instance in Othello, when the eponymous hero invites the Gentlemen to see the ‘fortifications’, we can be sure that this does not imply such fortifications being physically visible onstage. However this reference to an offstage ‘reality’ may serve as more than a mere reinforcement for the audience of the fictional world of the play (in particular the military status of Cyprus); it might serve to locate in the audience’s mind the direction of the city and its fortifications in relation to the ‘here’ of the stage; and it might also then serve a more immediate practical purpose, that of suggesting to the actors the direction of their exit to this military world outside the citadel.

On Your Imaginary Forces Work

This chapter will introduce a strategy for analysing the texts with an eye for their practical and spatial implications in their original performance context.2 It will examine a number of simple examples in which the text seems to betray a playwright thinking spatially, and using the text to project the spatial patterns he wants in performance – structuring the text so that the movement patterns will be clear for the actors and eloquent for the audience. But the suggestion that the playwright is projecting and manipulating performance through his text also implies a certain audience competence, and a playwright who is aware of what his audience might infer: there is no point in using the text to project spatial sign-making strategies in performance unless the audience can read the resulting spatial ‘meaning’ – unless, that is, the audience shares with the actors and playwright a set of spatial conventions with which to make and extract meanings.3 It is important to understand ‘conventions’ not as a set of ossified behavioural practices, but as a set of agreements between participants in a social interaction that are by their very nature being continually questioned, reinforced and negotiated.4 The particular conventions that concern us here constitute a developing competence shared by playwrights, actors and audience in the early modern period about parts of the fictional world that are taken to lie offstage, behind the stage doors which the characters are to use for their entrances and exits. These first examples illustrate a range of means used by the playwright to make the audience work on their ‘imaginary forces’ (as Shakespeare enjoins through the Chorus in Henry V) so as to build a mental picture of this offstage fictional world.

A Parting of the Ways

The playwright concerned in these initial examples is William Shakespeare, and the first is the climax of a long scene from Henry VI part 2. The Queen is bidding farewell to her beloved Suffolk, who has been banished by the King her husband. Fighting to control her own emotions at what is now clearly the end of a long and intense relationship, the Queen brings Suffolk to the realization that he must choose exile over certain death, and the scene ends with Suffolk’s wonderful image of their being torn apart like a ship foundering on the rocks:

Queen.	Now get thee hence, the King, thou know’st, is coming.
	If thou be found by me, thou art but dead.
Suffolk.	If I depart from thee I cannot live,
	And in thy sight to die, what were it else
	But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?
	…
	To die by thee were but to die in jest,
	From thee to die were torture more than death.
	O, let me stay, befall what may befall!
Queen.	Away! Though parting be a fretful corrosive,
	It is applied to a deathful wound.
	To France, sweet Suffolk! Let me hear from thee;
	For wheresoe’er thou art in this world’s globe,
	I’ll have an Iris that shall find thee out.
	Away!
Suffolk.	I go.
Queen.	And take my heart with thee. [She kisseth him.]
Suffolk.	A jewel, lock’d into the woefull’st cask
	That ever did contain a thing of worth.
	Even as a splitted bark, so sunder we:
	This way fall I to death.
Queen.	This way for me. Exeunt [severally]
	(Henry VI part 2, III, ii, 386–90; 400–412)

The final shared or ‘broken’ rhyming couplet is breathtaking in its alliterative and monosyllabic economy, its meaning visually complemented by the exits of the two characters in opposed directions. But as we begin to unpack this example, we quickly realize how complex sign-making and sign-reading is. The dialogue suggests that Shakespeare wants the exit pattern to be a physical representation or sign of the characters’ ‘parting’, and that he intends the actors to leave the stage in different directions. He would only have constructed such a textual pattern, with both characters using the same word ‘this’ to indicate two separate ‘ways’ off the stage, if the stage he was envisaging for that representation had two counterposed exit-points that would enable him to make his meaning both verbally and spatially. It seems clear, therefore, that Shakespeare thinks he has at least two exit doors to play with, and it might also be possible to infer that they are far enough apart, and/or angled in such a way that they can readily stand for exits in radically opposed directions – so this simple example implicates the actual physical resources available on the early modern stages, and the associated question of how focussed the playwrights might have been, as they wrote, on what resources they had to play with.

A further implication of this example is that Shakespeare seems to have believed he had a competent audience: that not only the actors, but also the audience would be able to ‘read’ a counterposed use of the doors as a physical representation of ‘parting’, and were practised at reading movement patterns as fictionally significant – the playwright seems to assume that the audience would infer that the actors leaving the stage in opposite directions stands for the characters parting forever: Suffolk is going in one direction out of the kingdom into exile, the Queen returning to the centre of the kingdom. This is a competence that we would probably take for granted, and that we would probably assume that the original audience would have taken for granted because this exit is based on a commonsense, more or less concrete or iconic (in the Peircian sense5) correspondence between the signifier (two opposed exit points) and the signified (two opposed segments of the fictional world). But it is a competence6 nevertheless: the exit would not be meaningful without it.

Such a competence would have developed quickly in open...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance
• Part 2 Establishing a Sense of Place and Fictional World
• Part 3 A Spatially-based Stage-management and Meaning-making System
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Works Cited
• Index