The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1749 Friday, 14 October 2005
[1] From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:02:46 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
[2] From: Philip Eagle <
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Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:18:12 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
[3] From: Holger Schott Syme <
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Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 23:05:49 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:02:46 -0400
Subject: 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
Alan Jones asks
>Can anyone who has attended a performance in the New Globe
>tell us how audible and disturbing they found the church bells
>and other local noise such as traffic? Aircraft, obviously and
>horribly: but I wonder whether much else at a lesser height
>penetrates the walls.
I have attended both day and evening performances since the official
opening. I have not noticed any ambient sounds except for the
helicopters (which are horridly annoying) and other aircraft. Do not
recall ever hearing a church bell.
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Philip Eagle <
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Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:18:12 -0400
Subject: 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
After attending many performances at the Southwark Globe I can say that
there is no problem with traffic noise as the theatre is not close to
any busy road and shielded by surrounding buildings on the land side.
Loud music, horns and engines from river boats, though, are occasionally
audible inside the theatre to a disruptive degree.
As is, on occasion, the conversation of bored school kids who have fled
to the surrounding piazza.
Philip Eagle
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Holger Schott Syme <
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Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 23:05:49 -0400
Subject: 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
Comment: RE: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells
I've spent considerably less time than Michael Egan thinking about the
play he refers to as _1 Richard II_ and I got to know (and like) as
_Woodstock_, so I can't claim his depth of knowledge or persuasion;
having said that, from all we know about touring, a play conceived
exclusively for outdoor performance seems "wildly unlikely" or at least
extremely unusual in the mid-1590s.
If Egan is right that the play was written for the provinces while the
theatres in London were closed because of the plague, does he assume
that Shakespeare (to humour him) _anticipated_ the prolonged closure of
the theatres? How could he have done that? And if he didn't, why on
earth would he write a play that would have been unstageable at the
Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, or wherever Pembroke's Men thought
they'd play once theatres reopened?
Andrew Gurr (and many other theatre historians) has argued that most
plays up to 1594 would have been conceived as touring plays-because
touring was what companies _did_. How could Pembroke's Men predict what
sorts of venues would be open to them in any given town? Would they only
perform _Woodstock_ in places where large innyards that also offered
easy access for horses were available, whereas towns that opened their
guildhalls to them did not get to see that play (a play which thanks to
its novelty must surely have been an attractive commodity)? As Gurr has
suggested, touring brought with it a preference for _indoor_ venues that
made the outdoor theatres in London somewhat unattractive; he rightly
points out that Burbage's initial instinct was to replace the Theatre
with an indoor playing space (the Blackfriars) when the lease was about
to expire in 1596.
From all we know, then, we ought to assume that players (and
playwrights) had to produce plays with a wide variety of venues in mind,
even as they displayed a preference for indoor stages. The list of
outdoor spaces Egan imagines (and I quote from his informative and
useful website: "market squares, tavern yards, streets, village greens,
even vacant fields") is largely anachronistic. We have very little
evidence for the staging of plays by professional troupes in open spaces
after the 1570s-for obvious economical reasons (how do you charge
admission in a market square or an open field?). Inns, both their
outdoor yards and indoor spaces, became the main venue when the players
weren't allowed into the guildhall, and remained highly desirable as
performance sites even after companies established permanent homes in
London.
The point of all this is that it would have been economically bizarre to
conceive a play in such a way that it required not merely a very
specific kind of stage, but more importantly, the most problematic kind;
a kind that would have made production in London and (perhaps crucially)
at court particularly difficult if not impossible. The idea is made even
more unconvincing by Egan's insistence on the pageantry of the play:
_Woodstock_ would have required a massive cast for a touring company,
large props, and an unusual number of beautiful costumes; it would thus
have been a major financial investment, and one would expect it to be
designed for performance in the widest possible variety of sites and
circumstances. To limit artificially the range of venues for such an
enterprise would have made no economical sense whatsoever, and making
money was a playing company's main objective.
All of the above in turn suggests to me that the horse, just like the
bear, probably wasn't a live animal. The scene doesn't really require
the horse to come on stage at all-the "spruce courtier a horsebacke"
could dismount before he comes on, and I can imagine a staging of the
scene with simply a horse's head and front legs sticking out from either
door or from behind a central curtain; there are many, many far more
baffling scenes in early modern drama. The play certainly does not
require a live horse for Woodstock's conversation with the animal to
work dramatically-that is entirely the actor's responsibility.
The general point about venues also raises questions for Steve, but I
suppose most of the plays he references are from the late 1590s, when
the Chamberlain's Men had found a permanent home and Shakespeare could
rely on a more or less stable environment. I do want to reiterate,
though, that Michael Egan's point about _Macbeth_ has very little to do
with early modern staging methods or conditions, and I think it is
revealing that he doesn't address my objections to it at all. I might
also add that the notion of a space "spookily lit by candlelight" is a
little hard to maintain given a culture where candles were the main
source of night-time illumination-the idea of candlelight as "spooky"
strikes me as a distinctly modern perception (but I'd be happy to be
corrected on that one-perhaps a single ["brief"?] candle produced a more
frightening atmosphere than whole candelabra-full?).
I remain happily stuck in my own paradigm (which, I'd like to note, was
formed on the basis of research conducted in the last 10 years-I wonder
whose paradigm is shifting more "glacially" here...)
Holger
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