Shakespeare frequently has several more or less fully developed actions, or stories, in the same play, especially in his comedies. Sometimes in a minor story the initial step and the resolving incident of that separate action are distinctly marked. In such a play it is only the main action of which I am speaking. The reader must not suppose for a moment that these divisions of the action are as distinct as they have seemed in this discussion. Shakespeare skillfully prepares his readers for every important development that is to come. Though we may be somewhat surprised now and then at the exact turn which the action takes, yet in the case of an attentive spectator the great dramatist appeals much more to expectation than to surprise. We are led to anticipate each succeeding stage of the action before it begins, perhaps even to see that it is a necessary consequence of what has preceded. It is especially true of the tragedies that the characters and circumstances are so put before us early in the play as to indicate in a general way what the outcome is to be; and then the mighty masterpiece moves steadily on to its inevitable end. IV. THE STAGE OF SHAKESPEARE'S DAY AND SOME MODERN ADAPTATIONS Before theaters existed in England companies of actors presented plays in the enclosed four-sided yards of inns. A platform was built inside the great gateway by which the yard was entered, and spectators beheld the performance from the yard and the inner balconies. In many ways the first theaters copied these inn-yards. The first London theaters had to be built outside the city limits because of the opposition of the Puritan city government. The first playhouse erected was The Theater, built in 1576, in Shoreditch, just north of the eastern portion of the city. Very soon after, The Curtain was built near to The Theater. The next playhouses were built south of the river Thames. The Rose, on the Bankside, was completed at least as early as 1592, and The Swan, near by, a very few years later. The Blackfriars Theater, built in 1596, was located within the city limits, at the southwest. The property had formerly belonged to the "black friars," and seems to have been free in a measure from the control of the city authorities. In 1599 The Theater was torn down, and the timbers were used in erecting The Globe, on the Bankside. The Fortune was erected in 1600, on the northern edge of the western portion of the city. Thus there were certainly as many as six theaters in existence at the close of 1600. Before 1888 our knowledge of the interior arrangement of an English theater during the lifetime of Shakespeare was very vague. In that year a German scholar named Gaedertz published a facsimile of a pen-and-ink drawing of the interior of the famous Swan theater. This drawing was made by a Dutchman named John de Witt, who was visiting in London, and it is thought to belong to about the year 1596. The drawing of De Witt is reproduced here. It will be seen that the theater is either oval or circular in shape; that the body of the house and the front of the stage are open to the sky; and that the back of the stage and the three galleries, which rise one above the other on the outside of the theater, are roofed over. These galleries are divided into private boxes. The spectators in the pit, or yard, in front of the stage stood while witnessing the performance. A roof covers the rear portion of the stage. Perched up on top of this roof is a small tower room, which is the loftiest portion of the entire theater. In the drawing of De Witt a flag having on it the figure of a "swan" is flying from this tower, and a trumpeter is sounding a blast in order to announce that a play is about to begin. There was no curtain before the front stage. Every character in a front scene must enter and go off before our eyes. If any had been slain they must be carried off. When Falstaff bears away on his back the dead Hotspur, in order to boast of having killed him, in 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare skillfully brings into the substance of his play the necessary clearing of the stage. At the close of many of the tragedies the characters themselves give directions for carrying off the dead. The front stage usually had little or no scenery. It could represent any open place. As soon as one scene was completed by the going off of the characters a new set of persons could at once enter, and the audience would imagine any desired change of scene, provided only that the action was still in the open air. Thus the many short scenes in the first part of Coriolanus, in which bands of Roman and Volscian warriors come before us alternately, were presented with a simplicity, rapidity, and effectiveness that our stage knows nothing of. Our editors of Shakespeare are sometimes too anxious to give an exact location to each of these front scenes. The audience understood them to be enacted "in an open place," or simply "out of doors." The special use of the back stage was to represent a room in a palace or princely house. Upon this portion of the stage, use was made of a few appropriate articles of furniture and other "properties." The walls were sometimes hung with arras, behind which Falstaff ensconces himself on one occasion and Polonius on another. In Romeo and Juliet the back stage represents the great reception hall of Capulet. In Act V it was transformed into the tomb of the Capulets. Domestic scenes were acted upon this back stage. Here appeared Lady Percy, Calpurnia, both Portias, and all the other noble women of Shakespeare, closing with Imogen, Hermione, and Queen Katharine. This English type of stage was carried to Ger |