Some principles of Elizabethan staging

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905. Excerpt: ... SOME PRINCIPLES OF ELIZABETHAN STAGING.1 PART I. There is perhaps no subject connected with Shakespeare on which there is more uncertainty of opinion than on the actual staging of his plays. No one any longer doubts that the public stage consisted of three important parts: a front, uninclosed platform; a rear stage, separated from the front by a curtain; and a balcony or upper stage. A growing feeling exists also that the stage was fairly well-furnished with properties. But the exact relation of one part to another, the precise list of furnishings, and, more important than either of these, the actual customs and methods of play-production, yet remain to be determined. Given such a triple stage, how were plays performed which consisted of a large number of short, rapidly changing scenes, and which demanded, and often were clearly furnished with, numerous and sometimes heavy properties? They could not have been staged according to modern methods, with a complete and harmonious background for each scene. What, then, was the method or methods by which these plays were produced? Practically but one answer has been given--that of Kilian, Genee, etc., in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch;1 of Brandl, in the Introduction to the new Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare; and of Brodmeier, in his recently published dissertation, Die Shakespeare Buhne nach den alien Buhnenanweisungen2 (Weimar, 1904). These writers assume the triple stage; suppose most, if not all, of the properties to have been placed on the rear stage, and by the use of a few of Shakespeare's plays, Brodmeier alone taking account of all, attempt to establish what one may call an alternation staging; that is, that the plays were so constructed that no two differently set scenes on the rear stage ever came directly in s...