The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 25.127 Wednesday, 12 March 2014
From: Gabriel Egan <
Date: March 11, 2014 at 7:02:17 PM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Balcony Scene
Laurie Johnson and I agree on this:
> If we want evidence for there being a balcony
> at The Globe, it needs to come from somewhere
> other than the text of R&J.
Indeed. The best textual evidence for the features of the Globe are the needs of the plays written for the Chamberlain’s/King’s men when they had only the Globe to play in and that were either i) published in that same Globe-only period or else ii) published later from a manuscript that can reasonably be dated to the Globe-only period.
In the 17 years since I took a stab at creating such a list for my PhD thesis, the collective agreement about how we date the manuscript underlying a printed book has rather broken down, and some people would argue that it is hopeless to try. But in case it’s of interest, here are the 9 plays and their editions that I concluded in 1997 are our best guide to the design of the Globe:
1. Jonson Every Man out of His Humour, Q (1600)
2. Shakespeare Henry 5, Q1 (1600) F (1623)
3. Shakespeare Hamlet, Q2 (1604-5)
4. Shakespeare King Lear, Q1 (1607-8)
5. Jonson Volpone, Q (1607)
6. Anon. A Yorkshire Tragedy, Q (1608)
7. Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra, F (1623)
8. Wilkins The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, Q (1607)
9. Shakespeare Timon of Athens, F (1623)
The thesis with the full argument about how the various candidate lists are whittled down to these 9 is freely available via the British Library’s EThoS digitization of all UK research degree theses. Among the conclusions that can be drawn from these plays is that the 1599 Globe did not have a descent machine: it was installed after the King’s Men acquired the Blackfriars and as part of the regularization of practices at the two theatres. (A similarly derived list of Blackfriars-only plays contains at least one that needs a descent machine, so the Blackfriars had one.)
On the question of a stage-balcony at the Globe, I should think that the need for an elevated playing space in Henry 5 and Antony and Cleopatra makes it pretty certain that the Globe had either a stage-balcony or a portable structure that served the same function.
Gabriel Egan