Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 9781350013889, 9781350013858, 9781350013865

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Playing Indoors

RELATED TITLES Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences Edited by Fiona Banks Stage Directions and the Shakespearean Theatre Edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage Farah Karim-Cooper Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance Edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern Shakespeare in the Theatre: American Shakespeare Center Paul Menzer Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe Stephen Purcell

Playing Indoors Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Will Tosh

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc © Will Tosh, 2018 Will Tosh has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-01388-9 ePDF: 978-1-350-01386-5 eBook: 978-1-350-01387-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: The Broken Heart, Marc Brenner, courtesy of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Featuring Amy Morgan, Owen Teale and Sanchia McCormack Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For FKC

CONTENTS Plates  ix Acknowledgements  xi Note on Texts and Editions  xiv Prologue  xv

PART ONE   Playhouse in Context  1 1 Origins 3 2 Reception 19 PART TWO   Playhouse at Work  43 3 ‘Fair Lightsome Lodgings’: Initial Responses to the Space  45 4 ‘Full and Significant Action’: Technique and Craft  71 5 ‘This Darkness Suits You Well’: Acting by Candlelight  91 6 ‘You Can’t Help But Be Involved’: Audiences in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse  119

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PART THREE  Playhouse and Research in Action  141 7 Stagecraft in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse  143 8 Music and Lighting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse  169 Epilogue  195 Appendix 1  200 Appendix 2  210 Notes  213 Bibliography  237 Index  257

PL ATES 1 The interior of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, showing the painted ceiling and ornate scenic façade (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Pete Le May) 2 Architectural drawings 7b and 7c for an indoor playhouse, believed to be by John Webb, late 1660s (reproduced by kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford) 3 Ferdinand (David Dawson) and the Duchess (Gemma Arterton) in The Duchess of Malfi (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Mark Douet) 4 The cast of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner) 5 Giovanni (Max Bennett) and the Friar (Michael Gould) dispute in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Simon Kane)

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6 Beatrice-Joanna (Hattie Morahan) in The Changeling (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner) 7 Alsemero (Simon Harrison) and Diaphanta (Thalissa Teixeira), and the pen-like piece of set used to confine action to the central portion of the stage in The Changeling (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner) 8 Orgilus (Brian Ferguson) in The Broken Heart, flanked by lowered candelabra (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner) 9 Cymbeline’s Queen (Pauline McLynn) lights her face with a ‘vanity candle’ (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner) 10 Ariel (Pippa Nixon) descends from the ceiling in The Tempest (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS More than most, this book has been a collective effort. At Bloomsbury, grateful thanks are due to Margaret Bartley and Susan Furber, who have been necessarily exacting and endlessly patient. The proposal and manuscript benefitted enormously from the advice of four readers. I thank those (mostly) anonymous critics for their guidance, and take full responsibility for the errors that remain. Irene Martinez Costa designed a simply ravishing cover. I am grateful to the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford for permission to reproduce the designs for a late-seventeenth-century indoor theatre. Shakespeare’s Globe was open-handed with its production photography. The Globe made possible the project that resulted in this book, and I thank Neil Constable, Patrick Spottiswoode, the executive team and the board for their commitment to research. Present and former colleagues in Globe Education supported my work in countless ways. Thanks to Paul Shuter and Madeline Knights, and to Fiona Banks, Shauna Barrett, Laura Behrend, Mathilde Blum, Rebecca Casey, Colette Cavanagh, Georghia Ellinas, Ruth Frendo, Jacqueline Grainger, Emma Hayes, Isabelle Hetherington, Rona Kelly, Victoria Lane, Joanne Luck, Esther Mackay, Elspeth North, Olivia O’Neill, Savitri Patel, Jo Philpotts, Sophia Rahim, Craig Ritchie and Hannah Smith. I’ve been lucky to have had the help of a fluctuating army of research assistants, who conducted interviews, hunted for references and helped me run workshops with dedication and professionalism. I thank Nash Ahmed, Hailey Bachrach, Olivia Bascombe, Jakub Boguszak, Lucy Brown, Sophie Clarke, Rebecca Clossick, Robin Craig, Nuria Gisbert, Lara Good, Robbie Hand, Kelsey Jacobson, John King, Heidi Pontet,

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Sam Plumb, Jennifer Reid, Sara Reimers, Nina Romancikova, Jennifer Taylor, Michael Willis and Margaret Zwiebach. I owe a debt of gratitude to Joy Cooper, who transcribed many of the interviews. Fellow scholars Malcolm Cocks, Miranda Fay Thomas and Neil Vallelly enriched the work of Team Research. Jennifer Edwards has been truly smashing. Other members of staff at Shakespeare’s Globe helped to make this project problem free. Thanks to Claudia Conway, Imogen Greenberg, Emma Pizzey, Mark Sullivan, Cathy Thomas and Hannah Yates. I’m indebted to the Theatre department for their help: Tom Bird, Tony Forrester, Claire Godden, Jessica Lusk, James Maloney, Marion Marrs, Harry Niland, Fay Powell-Thomas, Paul Russell, Rosie Townshend and Paul Wills. Since 2016, a new generation of directors led by Emma Rice has approached the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in unexpected ways: thanks to Emma, as well as Caroline Byrne, Ellen McDougall, Annie Ryan and Keziah Serreau. There would have been no book at all without the willingness of theatre artists to talk about their experiences, and for their curiosity and generosity I thank Gemma Arterton, Eileen Atkins, Emily Barber, Max Bennett, Stefano Braschi, Giles Cooper, Philip Cumbus, Matt Doherty, Noma Dumezweni, Peter Hamilton Dyer, Jonathan Fensom, Brian Ferguson, Trevor Fox, James Garnon, Michael Gould, Alice Haig, Dennis Herdman, Kasper Holten, Michael Longhurst, Sarah MacRae, Pauline McLynn, Hannah McPake, Hattie Morahan, Jonathan Munby, Matthew Needham, Dean Nolan, Brendan O’Hea, Edward Peel, Tika Peucelle, Pearce Quigley, Daniel Rabin, Paul Rider, Sid Sagar, Jethro Skinner, Caroline Steinbeis, Thalissa Teixeira, Adele Thomas, Alex Waldmann and Sam Yates. Thanks to Globe stewards Helen Huson and Terry Pope, and the many audience members who gave up their time after the show to speak to Team Research. Anyone who has experienced archival pains will understand the hopeless fantasy of comprehensiveness, and I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to speak on tape to more cast members, creative team and crew. Many people shaped the work of the new playhouse,

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and for productive but unrecorded conversations I thank Lucy Bailey, Bill Barclay, Giles Block, Claire van Kampen, Richard Kent, Glynn MacDonald, Blanche McIntyre, Martin McKellan, Mark Rylance, Dickon Tyrrell and Siân Williams. One of the lacunae in this book is a consideration of contemporary music practice in the SWP, and I thank the musicians who contribute so much to performance in the indoor space. I began work on Playing Indoors as a practice-as-research naïf and wiser heads helped me to start thinking about the playhouse in a scholarly way. I am grateful to Philip Bird, Claire van Kampen, Simon Smith, James Wallace and Martin White for their help in developing the Research in Action format. Scholars beyond the Globe were generous with their time and knowledge. I’m indebted to Sarah Dustagheer, Bridget Escolme, Andrew Gurr, Peter Holland, Gwilym Jones, Andy Kesson, Sarah Lewis, Laurie Maguire, Gordon McMullan, Paul Menzer, Lucy Munro, Tiffany Stern, Emma Whipday and Penelope Woods. Two individuals at the Globe deserve particular mention. Dominic Dromgoole supported this research project at every step of the way, and was ceaselessly generous with his time. Farah Karim-Cooper, the dedicatee of this book, has been my mentor, champion and friend throughout, and is an inspiration for scholars at the intersection of practice, research and the creative arts. Final thanks are due to my family of Toshes, Clarkes, Taylors and Tordays and, always, Piers.

NOTE ON TEXTS AND EDITIONS All references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from the most recent Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare single-volume edition. Where a non-Shakespeare play is available as an Arden Early Modern Drama volume, I have used it. The critical editions from which I have taken act and scene divisions, lineation and punctuation are listed in the bibliography. Following Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare practice, I have modernized spelling and punctuation when quoting from early modern texts. The exception to this is in citing the titles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed books, which I leave as they appear (although I have regularized the use of u/v and i/j).

PROLOGUE One version of the story – the tidy one – begins in 1594. For as long as William Shakespeare and his fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had performed under that name, they had been on the lookout for an indoor London venue, somewhere to use as an inner-city theatre during the winter months when their usual home, the roofless theatre in suburban Shoreditch, was a muddy walk too far for their London audiences. In 1594, they had their hopes set on a chamber in the Cross Keys inn on Gracechurch Street. By 1596, with the lease on the land upon which the Theatre stood about to expire, the company’s financial manager James Burbage had come up with an altogether more ambitious plan: to purchase and fit out as a playhouse a hall in the former Blackfriars monastery in the south-western corner of the city. There was a precedent of sorts for the move. The Blackfriars precinct had already in the 1580s played host to a small indoor theatre, a bijou space where children of the Chapel Royal performed plays for a paying audience. Another company of boys could be seen at a little venue within St Paul’s Cathedral, a few hundred yards to the east – Paul’s playhouse was to have a second wave of popularity at the turn of the century. But Burbage’s plan for the second Blackfriars was different: a major candle-lit playhouse, fully adapted to theatrical use, with space for between five hundred and a thousand spectators, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – an adult, professional, commercially-run company – would perform six days a week and throughout as much of the year as possible. Burbage invested six hundred pounds in his company’s new home, constructing within the Upper Frater of the old monastery a state-of-the-art theatre designed for the Lord Chamberlain’s

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Men’s current and future repertory. It was not to be. The residents of the Blackfriars district – some of them well-off and well-connected – petitioned the Privy Council to have the company barred from using their newly-acquired property as a public theatre. The new Blackfriars playhouse was shut up; old James Burbage died in debt; the Lord Chamberlain’s Men eventually built themselves a home on Bankside in 1599: the outdoor Globe. It was not until late in 1609 that Shakespeare and his fellows finally got their hands on their splendid indoor playhouse in the Blackfriars.1 Shakespeare studies is a discipline with powerfully Whiggish tendencies when it comes to stories that revolve around its central literary star, and the argument that the indoor playhouse associated with Shakespeare’s later career was conceived for his use in the mid-1590s is persuasive. But the lines connecting the Blackfriars, the Globe and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) are not quite as straight as the narrative above suggests. As Holger Schott Syme has recently pointed out, the purpose of James Burbage’s investment in 1596 is not clear: although it is reasonable to suppose that he intended the new playhouse to be a home for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, it is just as plausible that he ‘might have been trying to expand his activities as a theatre owner’ and imagined leasing the Blackfriars to another company.2 The first years of the Blackfriars as a working theatre passed without the artistic involvement of Shakespeare or his theatre company: the Children of the Chapel and their adult managers occupied it from 1600 to 1608 (paying rent to their landlords, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, soon promoted to the status of King’s Men). The Children of the Chapel, later also to receive and then lose royal honour as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, brought the fashion for artful boy player performance back to late Elizabethan and Jacobean London. The plays they performed at the Blackfriars were artful, too: the satires of John Marston, Ben Jonson’s comedies, John Fletcher’s tragicomedy (an avantgarde form in the early 1600s).3 The Blackfriars developed its loyal audience and its institutional habits of spectatorship in the

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years before Shakespeare’s company moved in, an occupation that came about when the children were banned from operation due to a politically-insensitive play and gave up their lease.4 Shakespeare’s company took possession of the Blackfriars in about 1609, ignoring the neighbourhood complaints that were to continue up to the closing of the theatres in 1642, and instituted a novel form of dual-playhouse operation: from then on, they would perform at the summer in the Globe, and during the winter in the Blackfriars. Shakespeare’s final plays – Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio – were written with a view to performance at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. His back catalogue, most of which remained in the King’s Men’s repertory for the next thirty years, found new life on the indoor stage. The Blackfriars, whether a long-desired indoor home for Shakespeare and his fellows or a development of the company’s Jacobean years, was the playwright’s final workplace, and became the most important of the seventeenthcentury playhouses. The greatest dramatists of Jacobean and Caroline London – John Webster, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Philip Massinger, Richard Brome, William Davenant – wrote for its stage. The Blackfriars was the model for two other successful indoor playhouses, the Cockpit (also known as the Phoenix) and the Salisbury Court, and it helped to set the pattern for the theatres of post-Restoration London. The Blackfriars, and the form of indoor theatricality it represented, was the crucial link between the traditions of Elizabethan popular drama and the theatrical culture of the eighteenth century from which many conventions of modern drama descended. The story of indoor Shakespeare has a complicated beginning, but this is not a book about Shakespeare’s Blackfriars. It is a book about another long-deferred indoor theatre with a complex relationship to Shakespeare’s dramatic heritage and the theatrical culture of early modern England: the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) at Shakespeare’s Globe in today’s London, which opened in January 2014 after a swift construction

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period and a very protracted interval of discussion, research and development (see Plate 1). Built within a red brick shell, it is a compact chamber of new oak and pine that can hold 340 people, most sat on benches arranged in the pit and two levels of galleries that embrace the stage in a polygonal horseshoe, and up to fifty standing in the gods. Boxes to left and right directly abut the stage; actors are never more than a few steps away from being able to physically touch their audience. During performances, the space is lit by more than a hundred beeswax candles that hang in candelabra (‘branches’) affixed to the ceiling, or gleam from sconces (‘wallers’) attached to the carved gallery columns. The frons scenae (scenic stage façade) with its three doorways is richly painted in sable and gold; the ceiling is a celestial fantasy of clouds, putti and a presiding figure of the goddess Luna. Above the stage is a gallery for musicians, actors and additional audience members; behind the frons is a small two-storey tiring house, bare and dark after the jewel-like splendour of the theatre itself. Striking effects are possible with the attic winch for aerial descents and ascents, and the stage trap that leads to a deep substage cavity. When the candles are lit, the space smells of beeswax and timber. The SWP is not a reconstruction of the Blackfriars, or of any single theatre, but a self-styled ‘archetype’ of the indoor playhouses of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline London. While the big purpose-built amphitheatres such as the Curtain, the Globe, and the Rose left an archaeological footprint on modern London, the Blackfriars and the other indoor spaces trod infinitely more lightly. Retrofitted into an existing structure that was destroyed long ago, and the site multiply razed by fire, redevelopment and wartime blitz, no trace of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars survives. With little known for certain about the space other than its width and length, to accurately reconstruct the Blackfriars is even more of an exercise in guesswork than the reconstructed Globe – and one persuasively attempted already by the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) in Staunton, Virginia, where the rebuilt Blackfriars has thrived since 2001. The indoor playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe takes a different

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approach. Inspired by a set of plans for a small indoor theatre drawn up by an ageing royalist architect in the 1660s, the SWP is a building based upon our collective knowledge about seventeenth-century indoor theatres – with all the scope for disagreement and compromise that such collective knowledge entails. It is a ‘new’ design, by reconstruction architect Jon Greenfield and architects at the London firm Allies & Morrison, drawing on research about the building styles, decorative schemes and theatrical fashions of Jacobean England (the imagined date of origin for the playhouse was held to be 1616). With the scholarly preparatory work coordinated by the Globe’s Architecture Research Group (ARG), the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is itself an arts and humanities research project of considerable scale (the course of which is recorded in Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah KarimCooper). Like the Globe, the SWP is a carefully crafted timberframe structure built using early-modern techniques by the specialist firm McCurdy & Co. Unlike the Globe, the playhouse is not a replica of a building that ever existed in Shakespeare’s London, but it is a theatre that he and his contemporaries would have recognized as one of a type. The candlelit space echoes the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, the Salisbury Court and other indoor venues, theatrical and non-theatrical, and it has the potential to illuminate more aspects of early modern indoor performance than a reconstruction of a single venue. It is also a more contested, complicated structure than the outside Globe, which has a genealogical connection to its historic antecedent. In some ways, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse raises more questions than it answers – but it poses questions we had not previously thought to ponder. Once the construction of the playhouse was complete, artists and audiences moved in, and the next stage of research began: the exploration of how the architecture of the space shapes the work of theatre in practice. Since the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe and the Staunton Blackfriars, newly-built ‘Renaissance’ playing venues have emerged as sites of significant critical

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enquiry, crucial to the still developing fields of early modern performance studies and practice-based research into early modern drama.5 Spaces such as these prompt questions, enable discoveries and provoke further research: they suggest a great deal about early modern performance practice, and tell us almost as much about our present-day relationship with early modern drama. The fact that the SWP is neither a surviving early modern building nor a reconstruction of a specific historical theatre means that it engages in the processes of recovery and discovery in particular ways. As a neo-Jacobean venue, it casts light on the given architectural circumstances of London’s early modern indoor theatres and allows us to explore the meaning-making potential of spatial intimacy, candlelight, and the acoustics produced by a small timber-clad chamber. And as a new playhouse of a design almost without parallel in the United Kingdom, it allows today’s actors and creative artists to find their own way towards a theatre practice that arises out of comparable architectural and environmental circumstances to those experienced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Playing Indoors records discoveries made on both of these fronts. The book represents the output of a project instituted in January 2014 and funded by Shakespeare’s Globe to analyse the performance and reception of early modern drama in the SWP. Focusing on the experience of modern artists and audience members in the space, and responding to a number of specific questions about performance in the small candlelit playhouses of early modern London, Playing Indoors examines the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as both a modern and a consciously historicized space. It aims to capture the experiences of those who know the new playhouse best – its actors, creative artists, technicians, front of house staff and spectators – and present their collective observations as testaments to the processes of discovery that constituted the SWP’s first seasons of intimate candle-lit playing. The views expressed by the respondents represent the institutional memory of the playhouse’s earliest years, and are intended to be the starting-point for further

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research into the experience of twenty-first-century people in a performance space that evocatively recalls the Jacobean past. As readers will discover, the book puts over a simple but insistent argument: the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, despite its intimate scale, offers an astonishingly broad range of spectatorial vantage points which differ markedly from the experience of watching a play in a more familiar theatre. The ‘ideal spectator’ is a disarmingly exploded figure in the SWP, watching and listening from above, the sides, below and even behind, interpreting the play in a multitude of different ways. Faced with such a performance panopticon, today’s artists must adapt their craft to take account of this surroundsense environment, and the techniques demanded by the playhouse can run counter to the habits of modern naturalist performance. As a distinct but complementary endeavour, the book also asks questions about particular cruxes of early modern indoor performance that have been illuminated by experiments in the first candle-lit theatre in London for several centuries. What is the relationship in this space between performer and spectator, and among performer, spectator and architecture? How effective is the design – with its intimate dimensions, side-stage audience boxes and loftily vertical galleries – in the presentation of drama? How can candles, hand-held lighting props and seventeenth-century lighting designs and lighting technologies be used in performance to enhance the impact of early modern drama? What are the acoustic effects of early music within the unique architectural soundscape of the playhouse and can we use performance in the space to develop an understanding of indoor theatre musical practices? This book details the workshops and experiments that have been conducted by Shakespeare’s Globe faculty and research fellows in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to address those questions. Research constituted by performance in reconstructed spaces has a long history, stretching back to the nineteenthcentury experiments in Tudor staging by the actor-manager William Poel.6 The late-twentieth-century flourishing of

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Tudor revivalism that saw the (re-)construction of the Globe in London and the Blackfriars in Staunton coincided with the development of more sophisticated ‘research in practice’ methodologies drawn from performance studies, theatre practice and – especially in the field of audience research – social anthropology, enabling the emergence of a distinct subfield of early modern performance-led research that utilizes historic or reconstructed buildings. The approach is sustained by the recognition of ‘performance as a source of knowledge’, as Sarah Dustagheer, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft put it in a recent survey of the field, but it relies on a historicallyminded engagement with the original conditions of early modern stagecraft.7 Early modern dramatic research in practice combines an appreciation of theatrical experimentation (which lends it a quasi-scientific and craft-based language of the ‘lab’ and the ‘workshop’ that has sometimes been misinterpreted as empiricism) with a historicist caution that what we perform and receive today is not indicative, in and of itself, of practice and reception four centuries ago.8 In the synthesis, evaluation and analysis of modern practice and historical evidence lie the insights that have been enabled by theatre reconstructions like the Globe. During the past two decades scholars have drawn persuasive inferences about early modern theatre practice from work produced at today’s Globe and Blackfriars and from applied experimentation in the spaces; others have usefully critiqued the cultural and political labour performed by the reconstructed theatres and the organizations that manage them.9 More recently, Stephen Purcell and Penelope Woods have drawn on Globe performances – and the special conditions of what W. B. Worthen has called ‘Globe performativity’ – to consider the nature of spectatorship in reconstructed theatres.10 In my study of the first years of theatrical performance at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, my use of workshop experiments and my reflection on the nature and purpose of the new ‘Jacobean’ playhouse I engage with all three of these strands. I adopt a consciously varied methodology – encompassing critical analysis of the SWP’s origin and identity, artist and audience

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testimony, and discoveries arising from practice-as-research experiments – to explore the specific nature of ‘playhouse performativity’, a set of modern practices and responses that we can also use to think critically and imaginatively about theatrical conditions in early modern London. When it comes to the observations and recollections of the playhouse’s first users, I use an approach that differs somewhat from conventional performance studies or theatre history methods. It is difficult to capture, in print, an experience of performance (either that of the actor or the spectator). In Playing Indoors I attempt to resolve this difficulty by drawing on the methodologies of archival research to create an edited discourse from the recorded observations of my respondents – a virtual round-table discussion, as it were – about the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Readers will find in Chapters 3–6 a number of different voices, a deliberate attempt to create polyvocality in a singly-authored book. As with any piece of archival history, however, my processes of testimony selection are partial and particular to my purposes: this can only be an account of the first years of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, not the account.

The seasons, the people, and the shape of the book Playing Indoors examines the early modern plays staged during the first three theatrical seasons at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, with a deliberate focus on the non-Shakespearean drama of the first two: the short opening season of January to April 2014, and the first full-length winter season from October 2014 to April 2015. The book’s central concern is therefore the five major non-Shakespearean dramas staged as full runs by the Globe’s professional adult companies. The playhouse opened with John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614), directed by former Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. One of the most familiar plays in the Jacobean canon, it concerns

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the vicious revenge taken upon the virtuous Duchess by her brothers for a love-match she contracts with her household steward. Malfi was followed by Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), directed by Adele Thomas, a wildly unconventional comedy that sees a theatregoing couple and their young apprentice attend a performance of the city comedy ‘The London Merchant’ which they proceed to reshape and redirect into a quixotic adventure of knight-errantry. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (early 1630s) by John Ford, directed by Michael Longhurst, is an ethically-ambivalent study of brothersister incest, set in the amoral Italianate world beloved of the Caroline stage. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), directed by Dominic Dromgoole, features a twin narrative: in one story, Beatrice-Joanna persuades her father’s servant to kill an unwanted suitor, but the act has a terrible sequel; in the complementary narrative, young wife Isabella is ‘tested’ by her jealous husband, an ageing keeper of a lunatic asylum. John Ford’s Sparta-set The Broken Heart (late 1620s), directed by Caroline Steinbeis, concerns the personal and political consequences of an enforced marriage, and the relative merits of responding with either stoic fortitude or retribution. Although not produced under the material and artistic conditions of Original Practices (a term I discuss in more detail in Chapter 1), Dromgoole’s Malfi and The Changeling were designed by Jonathan Fensom to reflect the period (early and late Jacobean respectively). ’Tis Pity (designed by Alex Lowde) combined Renaissance lines with modern fabrics and styles, and The Broken Heart (Max Jones) mixed seventeenthcentury and neo-classical designs in an aesthetic perhaps best described as Stuart steampunk. Hannah Clark, designer of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, gave the production a festively anarchic Jacobeanism. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s early modern programme in its first years was more extensive than the scope of a single book permits. Eileen Atkins was one of the first actors to experience the space with her one-woman show about the performances of nineteenth-century Shakespearean Ellen Terry,

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and she shares her observations about working in the new theatre. Shakespeare’s late quartet Pericles (co-written with George Wilkes; directed by Dominic Dromgoole), Cymbeline (Sam Yates), The Winter’s Tale (Michael Longhurst) and The Tempest (Dominic Dromgoole), all written between 1607 and 1611, formed the playhouse’s thematically-cohesive third season (October 2015 to April 2016), which is covered to a lesser extent in this volume. Francesco Cavalli’s L’Ormindo (1644) and Luigi Rossi’s Orpheus (1647), produced by the Royal Opera, brought baroque music into a proto-‘baroque’ space, and Kasper Holten, director of opera for the Royal Opera House and director of L’Ormindo, reflects on his experiences. During the summer of 2014 and 2015, several Globe shows and touring productions made brief landfall in the playhouse as part of an experimental Outside In series in which Globe companies were given a restricted rehearsal period to re-block the production for the inside space and accustom themselves to candle-lit performance. Although each show received just one or two performances in the playhouse, the minimal rehearsal time echoed early modern staging habits and simulated the adaptations that the King’s Men would have made to their existing Globe repertory when they took over the Blackfriars. Playing Indoors considers the Outside In performances in the playhouse of Julius Caesar (directed for the Globe in 2014 by Dominic Dromgoole), Antony and Cleopatra (directed for the Globe in 2014 by Jonathan Munby) and As You Like It (directed for the Globe in 2015 by Blanche McIntyre). John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603) and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage (late 1580s), performed by a specially-trained company of Globe Young Players and directed by Caitlin McLeod and Jacqui Somerville respectively, recalled the boy companies that occupied the first Blackfriars and Paul’s, and the second Blackfriars for its first eight years. These short-run productions did not allow for extensive onthe-ground research, but gave a suggestive glimpse of a longgone aspect of early modern theatre culture (as did visiting productions of John Lyly’s Galatea and John Ford’s The Lady’s

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Trial by Edwards Boys, a company of pupils based at Stratfordupon-Avon’s King Edward VI School under the directorship of their teacher, deputy head Perry Mills). Globe Education’s long-running series of script-in-hand performances of neglected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays, Read Not Dead, took up home in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from summer 2014. At the time of writing, sixteen early modern plays have received readings in the playhouse including Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies, Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and John Ford’s The Queen, The Lover’s Melancholy, Perkin Warbeck and The Fancies Chaste and Noble (more will have been added to the list by the time this book comes out). These events added to the chorus of Renaissance voices offered at the Globe in the new theatre’s first seasons. Along with the drama of the English Renaissance, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has also hosted to a range of concerts, recitals, lectures, workshops, Globe Education events and lyrical new dramatic work by writers including Claire van Kampen and Jessica Swale. The playhouse’s particular hospitality to music in all its forms has been a delightful discovery, but is the subject for another volume. Investigative experiments – Research in Action workshops – took place throughout summers 2014 and 2015 (and have become an established part of Globe Education’s calendar of research events). These public experiments using a small cast of actors and selected scenes from early modern plays allowed us to explore specific questions of early modern indoor dramaturgy, stagecraft and technology. Coordinated by me with the help of several colleagues on the Architecture Research Group (who generously allowed me to piggy-back on their existing research interests), the workshops enabled a more historically-focussed investigation of the playhouse’s capacities than is possible under the conditions of commercial theatre production. Two workshops co-coordinated and directed by actor and Globe Higher Education consultant Philip Bird explored the aside (lines delivered to the audience out of the hearing of the other characters on stage), and the use of the discovery space; a

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further workshop explored the staging of outdoor scenes, with scenes directed by Blanche McIntyre. Globe Senior Research Fellow Martin White helped us to investigate the plausibility and likelihood of candle lighting effects in an early modern performance context; and two workshops examined music in the playhouse, one coordinated by Claire van Kampen, founding Director of Music at the Globe, Globe Associate for Early Music and Globe Senior Research Fellow, and the other co-coordinated by Shakespeare scholar and advisor during the construction of the SWP, Simon Smith. Playing Indoors brings together an analysis of these experiments with a critical account of the testimonies of the actors, directors, designers and audience members of early modern plays that received a full theatrical run in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Readers will meet a variety of people within this book’s pages, and should consult ‘Appendix 1: Who’s who?’ for cast and crew information about and run dates for all the productions and workshops discussed in the forthcoming chapters. A full list of the interviews conducted for this book is to be found in the first section of the bibliography, where each respondent has an entry under her or his surname. To minimize repetitious referencing, I have only footnoted quotations from interviews with actors and creative professionals when it is not clear from the context who (or which specific interview) is being cited; readers can simply look up the name of the respondent in the section of the bibliography labelled ‘Indoor Performance Practice Project, 2014–16, archive of interview transcriptions’. I have however footnoted and referenced citations from interviews with audience members, which are recorded by first name only to maintain the respondent anonymity offered to members of the public who agreed to participate in the project. Appendix 2 includes the scripted questions followed during face-to-face interviews with SWP actors and spectators, and the questionnaires completed by audience members during some of the Research in Action workshops. The audio files, transcriptions and questionnaire data are stored in the Library and Archive at Shakespeare’s

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Globe, and are available for consultation as, indeed, are video recordings of the productions and workshops discussed in these pages. The book starts with a consideration of how the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse came to occupy its position in modern London. It then moves on to the testimonial-driven exploration of the experience of today’s actors and audience members in the space, and offers a reflection on the points of overlap with the conditions of early modern stage practice. The last section is a historically-focused analysis of certain questions about early modern stage craft. Chapter 1, ‘Origins’, tells the story of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s development at Shakespeare’s Globe, and considers in greater detail its nature as a theatrical archetype. It offers a critical overview of scholarship on the Globe and on reconstructed playhouses more generally. Chapter 2, ‘Reception’, addresses some of the cultural work performed by an indoor ‘Jacobean’ theatre. How does the playhouse engage with or challenge popular conceptions of the ‘Jacobean’, and what does it mean for Shakespeare’s Globe – home of popular and populist Shakespeare – to expand into the smaller, more exclusive space? The chapters of Part Two are structured around the experience of the actors and audience members who experienced the playhouse in its first years. In Chapter 3, creative artists discuss their relationship with the distinctive architecture of the SWP, and consider the impact of its appearance and intimate size on performance and spectatorship. In Chapter 4, they reveal their practices and habits of performance, and discuss the demands the space makes on their skills, voices and bodies. Chapter 5 concerns the unique candlelit conditions of the SWP. How do modern actors accustom themselves to holding candles, lanterns and torches as necessary light sources? How do directors use the suspended candelabra as a lighting ‘rig’? Can directors use modern techniques of narrative-driven lighting design in a candlelit playhouse? What impact do the candles have on the look and feel of the SWP, and what is the effect of absolute darkness? In Chapter 6, audience

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members reflect on the experience of being a spectator in the playhouse, a space that can conjure associations that are by turns warmly domestic and disturbingly claustrophobic. What can the different experiences of audience members sitting in the pit, the lower gallery and the upper gallery tell us about the spectatorial ecology of early modern indoor playhouses? Part Three sees a shift in approach once more, as the focus of the book moves to consider the applied experiments and workshops held in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse over the course of its first two years. Chapter 7 tries to answer some questions about early modern performance practice in compact indoor theatres: to what extent can the small stage provide distinct playing areas for crowded scenes featuring eavesdropping, or a significant number of asides? How effective is the SWP in the presentation of scenes set in the open air? Is the discovery space – the recessed area behind the central frons scenae doors – a feasible playing area given it is out of the eye-line of many audience members? Chapter 8 investigates the sound and lighting effects that were achievable in early modern indoor playhouses. With musical performance possible on, above, behind and below the stage, how did playwrights make use of the acoustic capacities of indoor playhouses? What impact did the musical act breaks, during which candles were tended and trimmed, have on the dramatic structure of early modern drama? To what extent did sixteenthand seventeenth-century theatre-makers attempt ambitious lighting effects such as slow fades and sudden illumination? In theatres that lacked extensive group or technical rehearsal, how feasible were coups de théâtre such as these, and how should we interpret stage directions that appear to call for them? Playing Indoors offers a range of chapters that take a contemporary and a historical approach to performance in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, blending together a consideration of modern performance, testimonial recollection, historicized experiment and a literary-critical mode of recording and analysis. It seeks to capture the experiences of modern actors

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in a historicized playhouse and explore specific questions related to early modern indoor stagecraft. The two approaches are intended to complement each other, as today’s actors make discoveries about intimate candlelit performance that enrich our understanding of the early modern dramatic canon, and scholarly experiments in the SWP inform the practice of modern creative artists. More than anything, this book honours Dominic Dromgoole’s commitment in the first two years of SWP practice to ‘let the space teach [us]’ about its capacities, potential and preferences.11 The lessons we have learnt in the playhouse’s first years are the subject of the following pages.

PART ONE

Playhouse in Context

1 Origins

In a review of the first productions in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for Shakespeare Quarterly, Bridget Escolme referred to the rhetorical question posed in the introductory essay printed in all that season’s programmes, ‘What might this theatre tell us?’, and offered her own observation: ‘Audiences have waited years to find out.’1 This sense of informed anticipation, on the part of audiences and scholars alike, distinguishes the reception of the playhouse from its sibling (or parent; the figurative relationship is complex) the Globe nearly two decades previously. The playhouse emerged in 2014 into a very different cultural, critical and academic atmosphere than that which obtained when the Globe first received attention, initially as an intended ambition in the 1970s, then as an on-going construction project in the 1980s, and finally as a working theatre in the late 1990s. This chapter starts with an overview of the critical heritage of Shakespeare’s Globe specifically, and the development of reconstructed historic playhouses more generally. It then reveals in some depth the discoveries, debates and decisions that led the management and trustees of Shakespeare’s Globe to adopt the plan for an archetypal Jacobean theatre, rather than a reconstruction of the Blackfriars per se.

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Practice, research and Shakespeare’s Globe Shakespeare’s Globe, twenty years old as a fully working theatre in the year that this book was in production, has been discussed and critiqued in a large number of articles and scholarly monographs. The slow realization of founder Sam Wanamaker’s project to reconstruct Shakespeare’s amphitheatre, and the construction delays caused by periodic stalled funding, meant that several major publications were in the press or had been released by the time the Globe opened for its first complete season in 1997. New Issues in the Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Theatre (1990), the proceedings of a conference of theatre historians dedicated to unpicking the results of the excavations during the 1980s of the Rose and Globe sites and exploring their implications for the planned reconstruction on Bankside, included among its contributions suggestions from scholars for how the new theatre should be used as a laboratory or test-site for theories about early modern performance. Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe (1989) was an account by the two theatre historians most closely associated with the project of the history of the early modern playhouses, and the purpose and principles behind the modern reconstruction. Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (1997), edited by J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, gathered together much of the research that had gone into the design of the Globe theatre. Barry Day’s This Wooden O: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn (1996) told the story of Sam Wanamaker’s longpursued – and in the event posthumous – achievement from a more personal perspective.2 The Globe received scorching critique in its early years, the substance of which I take up in the next chapter, but even among its supporters the work of the theatre was not universally praised. The first seasons generated a special issue of Shakespeare Survey, and academic reviews and critiques in numerous periodicals: frequent objections from scholarly critics included the irredeemably modern

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form of dramatic performance practiced by the actors, and the seemingly excessive sway wielded by the large groundling audience.3 Book-length studies continued to appear after the Globe’s opening in 1997. Pauline Kiernan’s Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (1999) was the result of her three years as an onthe-ground academic observer, and her monograph – the first devoted to practice at the Globe – focussed on the rehearsal for and performance of Henry V (directed by Richard Olivier in 1997), an early experiment in what would become Original Practices conventions.4 The next substantial study of Globe practice was published in 2006, when Rob Conkie offered an analysis of the organization’s first five years. The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity explored the cultural and political implications of the pursuit of ‘authentic’ productions, and traced the Globe’s gradual rejection of a rhetoric of authenticity and its embrace of the artistic concept of Original Practices (OP) alongside modernist experimentation. Associated with the artistic directorship of Mark Rylance, the music of Claire van Kampen and the clothing of Jenny Tiramani, Original Practices denotes a particular artistic mode that attempts to replicate, with as much research-informed knowledge as possible, the material playing conditions of early modern playhouses in terms of set, music, clothing and comportment. Conkie’s book also revealed the sometimes less-than-harmonious relationship between the theatrical and the academic wings of the Globe as the initial concept of a playhouse laboratory for scholarly experiment came up against – and clashed with – the realities of running a commercially viable theatre.5 Although scholarly intentions for the Globe were not quite so unworldly as is sometimes assumed – as early as 1995 Andrew Gurr acknowledged that ‘off season’ would be the proper time for applied experimentation in the space, and predicted that other concerns would take priority during the summer season – the hope among the theatre’s early academic supporters was that the creators of the artistic programme at the Globe would regard themselves as duty-bound to respond

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to the research challenges posed by their colleagues.6 This did not happen, and the disappointment of those hopes says something about scholarly misapprehension of the theatrical artistic process, as it does about theatre artists’ disinclination to create work in consultation with those perceived as nonartists.7 This is not to say that research of academic significance was not produced: as the Globe’s own Research Bulletins, and scores of academic articles drawing on the evidence of Globe productions and Globe Education workshops and experiments testifies, the early years of the Globe were an eye-opening period from the point of view of early modern theatrical practice.8 The approach during this period was documented, interrogated and analysed in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper’s edited collection, Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008), a volume that sought both to share the discoveries arising out of Mark Rylance’s tenure as artistic director and to ‘re-establish a dialogue between scholar and practitioner’ as the Globe took a new direction under its second artistic director Dominic Dromgoole.9 As Karim-Cooper explained, after her appointment in 2004 to the post of Globe researcher, and subsequently head of higher education and research, the organization pursued a different course in relation to its scholarly remit. Research became a constituent aspect of the Education department, but Karim-Cooper resituated the habits of research as part of the process of theatre-making at the Globe. Her team provided dramaturgical support to directors, designers and casts, and she expected (and received) support from the Theatre department for the research objectives of her own division.10 Karim-Cooper’s The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (2016) demonstrated the sort of practice-informed scholarship which academics at and associated with the Globe have pursued in recent years. In a book about the cultural and communicative place of the hand in early modern English culture, KarimCooper drew on the experience of modern practitioners in

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the Globe today to illuminate the ways in which stage gesture and the spectacle of severed hands made dramatic meaning in the works of Shakespeare. Karim-Cooper’s concern was not that the productions she analysed were aiming at a form of performance ‘authenticity’ that reproduced the working habits of early modern actors, but that the meaning produced by a human body on a stage under shared light and in front of a large, partly standing, audience could be read back into the work itself, and conditions of original staging inferred from such readings. Indeed, although Dominic Dromgoole’s 2012 Henry IV Part 1, which Karim-Cooper considered in relation to actor Roger Allam’s use of gesture as Falstaff, was ‘Renaissance’ in design while by no means ‘Renaissance style’ (let alone OP) in its staging, Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus (a production of 2006 restaged in 2014 and considered by Karim-Cooper for its presentation of dismemberment) took a radical approach to the space, covering the Globe with a fabric-mesh roof and setting some of the action on mobile scaffolding towers which were pushed through the yard.11 Karim-Cooper’s work has shown that a stable set of spatial, lighting and acoustic conditions in the Globe can allow for sophisticated practiceand performance-informed research that focuses on modern work that is very far from ‘authentic’ in its approach. At the same time, academics, students and practitioners working on Globe Education projects – the Read Not Dead rehearsed reading series of early modern plays; experimental workshops in the Globe and now the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse; regular symposia and conferences – have continued the tradition of pure and applied research that furthers the investigation into early modern playing conditions. As the Globe developed its own theatrical identity under Rylance and Dromgoole – both of whom pursued a production house-style that mixed some conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean amphitheatre performance with others drawn from modern naturalist theatre – the summer seasons became less an opportunity to discover how Shakespeare’s company ‘did it back then’ and more a chance to explore the connection

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between performer and spectator offered by the unique space.12 As Andrew Gurr put it in his Forward to Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ‘[t]he effect on actors and audience of open-air playing, where large crowds make themselves into visible and active participants in the event, has been the biggest revelation of the whole project so far’.13 The Globe cannot, and has never set out to, replicate a 1599 audience, in composition, mentality or world-view, but it can create the context for a set of researches into the intimate exchanges of performance and reception, a subject that has flourished as an aspect of performance studies in the two decades that the Globe has been in operation. Christie Carson, Sarah Werner, Penelope Woods, Amy Kenny and Stephen Purcell have explored the ways in which audience response to the Globe can only be understood by a simultaneous consideration of the historicity enacted by the space, and the cultural and political circumstances of the present brought in by the makers of the theatre and the spectators at the event.14 In the course of its first two decades, then, Shakespeare’s Globe fashioned a scholarly identity as a centre for research into theatre history and practice, as well as the study of modern theatre practice and audience response. This scope is indicated by the subjects pursued by the four doctoral students who have been co-supervised by Karim-Cooper since 2008, whose subjects encompassed the King’s Men’s repertory in the years after their acquisition of the Blackfriars; the contemporary experience of spectating at the modern Globe; the gender politics of shaming gestures on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage; and the impact of light on the early modern theatrical experience.15 Over the same period, scholars from a range of disciplines have drawn on Globe practice to illuminate their work on early modern literature and culture. Scholarship arising from and responding to theatrical reconstructions has also been furthered by the ASC’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, constructed in 2001, as well as new reconstructed Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses in Poland, New Zealand and a number of sites,

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many attached to universities or summer camps, elsewhere in the United States.16 Some reconstructions have attracted more controversy than others, and the premise of theatrical reconstruction has been usefully critiqued as overly concerned with the build at the expense of the imaginatively created, but what Paul Menzer has called ‘the greatest building boom of Elizabethan playhouses since the building boom of Elizabethan playhouses’ has helped practice-informed scholarship to establish a significant position in the study of Shakespeare, early modern stage culture and performance studies.17

From Inigo Jones Theatre to Sam Wanamaker Playhouse In his account of ‘Research and the Globe’ in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Martin White looked ahead to what was then the next stage of the Globe project: the construction of an indoor playhouse ‘to stand alongside’ the outdoor space, which would allow ‘the exploration of all the performance practice issues undertaken at the Globe’ but in the very different environment of a small, indoor, candlelit playhouse.18 As White’s anticipation suggests, the indoor playhouse project was a long-held ambition at the Globe. The plan to build a second theatre had been part of founder Sam Wanamaker’s objective, and the survival in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, of what was taken to be a pair of early-seventeenth-century architectural sketches (catalogued 7b and 7c; see Plate 2) for a small indoor playhouse, first discussed at length by theatre historian Donald Rowan in 1969, seemed to offer a convenient and intellectually-coherent solution to the problem that little is known for sure about the interior of Shakespeare’s own Blackfriars playhouse beyond its dimensions: based on the Worcester College drawings, Shakespeare’s Globe’s future indoor playhouse would not be a reconstruction of the Blackfriars as such, but it would

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nonetheless accurately reflect the design for a contemporaneous indoor theatre.19 The drawings depicted a compact horseshoeshaped playhouse, with elegantly curved galleries, side-stage boxes and a Palladian-influenced frons scenae. Rowan’s conclusion was that the designs represented a never-realized project from the years before the closure of the theatres in 1642. The building that now houses the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was therefore constructed at the same time as the rest of the Globe site according to the design of the Worcester College drawings, its half-metre-thick walls sturdily built from handmade bricks and dressed with Portland stone, and named in honour of the early modern designer and architect who was believed to be the author of the plans: Inigo Jones. For some years after 1997, the brick Inigo Jones (or IJ) building did stand-in duty as offices, workshop rooms and teaching space, in anticipation of the time when the Globe would have enough money in hand to convert it into the Inigo Jones Theatre in the style indicated in the drawings, a playhouse whose provenance situated it in the same theatrical context as that of William Shakespeare. Despite Rowan’s doubt that the Worcester College plans related to any of the major indoor commercial playhouses of early modern London, other historians including John Orrell and Iain Mackintosh had argued that the elevations depicted Christopher Beeston’s Cockpit (later Phoenix) in Drury Lane, built in 1616.20 This resonant date, the year of Shakespeare’s death, gave a pleasing sense of both closure and continuity to the planned indoor playhouse at the Globe: the Inigo Jones Theatre, modelled on the Cockpit, would pick up where Shakespeare left off. The Worcester College drawings had always been dated with a degree of circumspection, and the Globe’s intended Inigo Jones Theatre was dealt a blow with architectural historian Gordon Higgott’s assertion in 2005 that the plans were younger than had previously been thought, and were unlikely to be the work of Jones – an attribution that had relied on circumstantial evidence. Although the drawings depicted a playhouse that was pre-Civil War in terms of its theatrical spirit, with a large portion

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of the audience seating arranged to the side of the stage and no obvious facility for moveable scenes, Higgott demonstrated persuasively that their date of composition was post-1660, and their author was Jones’s one-time pupil and assistant, John Webb. Most probably, wrote Higgott, ‘they are designs prepared by Webb for [William] Davenant in the spring or summer of 1660, when the playwright was laying plans for a new theatre company’ in Charles II’s London.21 The penmanship and ink shading associated the designs with Webb’s later career, and the neoclassical decorative elements indicated an era well after Shakespeare’s death. The plans were not therefore associated with the Cockpit/Phoenix, and they did not depict a playhouse that had been conceived or built within the working life of the King’s Men, let alone Shakespeare himself. Considered strictly chronologically, the Worcester College drawings were a design for a Restoration theatre, not a Shakespearean one. Plans for the Inigo Jones Theatre went into temporary stasis and the IJ building continued its existence as a support wing. The indoor theatre project was revived as a feasible prospect in 2009, with the aim of constructing what an internal Globe memo outlining the principles of construction described as a ‘working model of an indoor theatre that Shakespeare himself would recognise as the type of space he imagined when writing, and knew when playing or attending plays’.22 Over the next two years, the Globe’s Architecture Research Group (ARG), the organization’s steering committee on matters relating to playhouse architecture, examined the options available in light of the revised provenance of the Worcester College drawings, and the already-constructed IJ masonry shell (a process detailed in architect Jon Greenfield’s essay, ‘Practical evidence for a reimagined indoor Jacobean theatre’, with assistance from Peter McCurdy, in Moving Shakespeare Indoors).23 In 1989 John Orrell had described the projected indoor playhouse as a space that would provide ‘some representation of the Blackfriars side of Shakespeare’s working world’, and it was clear to members of the ARG that while the Globe amphitheatre constituted a partial (although

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vital) representation of Shakespeare’s workplace, the indoor playhouse was still required to complete the picture (at least in terms of purpose-built venues: Shakespeare was also familiar with a wide range of multi-purpose playing spaces such as halls, taverns and inn yards).24 Initially, the ARG members considered two options: first, cleaving as far as possible to the original Worcester College drawings; second, devising a hybrid reconstruction of a rebuilt Blackfriars playhouse within the smaller IJ building footprint.25 Both choices presented challenges. To build to a design based wholly on the Worcester College drawings would be to introduce a Restoration playhouse into a centre dedicated to theatre in the age of Shakespeare, and run the risk of artistic and scholarly incoherence. Moreover, the plans themselves were in a sketchy, preliminary form (analogous, as Greenfield pointed out, to Royal Institute of British Architects Design Stage C ‘Concept’ drawings, rather than Design Stage E ‘Technical design’ drawings), and included several structural inconsistencies, not least ‘large articulations of masonry’ cutting through the galleries and completely obscuring the view of the stage from the benches on either side of the lower gallery.26 However, to construct a Blackfriars within the IJ frame was an even more problematic proposition. The upper frater of the Blackfriars monastery, into which Shakespeare’s theatre was built, had been a considerably larger space than the existing IJ building. Rationalizing the contradictory dimensions would be expensive and complicated. The process would almost certainly require at least partial demolition of the IJ shell, and the total rebuilding of the roof in accordance with the Blackfriars’s medieval hammer beam or aisle construction.27 More fundamentally, reliable evidence for the internal arrangements of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars, from the auditorium fit-out and the decorative scheme to, indeed, the design of the roof (hammer beam or aisle?), is sparse: any reconstructed Blackfriars at Shakespeare’s Globe, notwithstanding its somewhat perverse situation within the shell of the IJ, would by necessity be a much more vexed ‘best

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guess’ than the Globe, which, while somewhat speculative, is supported by sound archaeological evidence and other reliable indications of its interior arrangements. At a meeting of the ARG in September 2010, the members voted to recommend that the Globe proceed with the plan to build the Worcester College plans ‘under Jacobean principles’.28 Although some members of the group favoured levelling the IJ building and starting afresh with a Blackfriars-sized space, the cost and disruption to Globe operations would have been prohibitive (and the evidence for the interior arrangements of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars too partial to allow for a reconstruction that would offer a similar degree of accuracy to that claimed by the outdoor Globe). The Worcester College plans are the oldest drawings of an English indoor theatre in existence, and it can be argued that they accurately represent a form of theatre design well-known in pre-Civil War London. By the end of 2011, it had become apparent that the Worcester College drawings, whatever era of theatrical architecture they represented, did not constitute a ‘build ready’ blueprint.29 Their anomalies and kinks were not aspects particular to its design and therefore worth preserving, but manifestations of the fact that they are unfinished architectural sketches. It was at this point that the ARG settled on a third way: the group reconceived the indoor playhouse project as one dedicated to constructing an archetypal Jacobean indoor theatre of the type that would have been immediately recognizable to Shakespeare. The design brief was now to ‘create a simulacrum, an archetype of an indoor Jacobean playhouse’.30 As too little is known about the major indoor Jacobean and Caroline playhouses to attempt a faithful reconstruction of any one theatre, ‘archetype’ may seem a surprising term (the Baudrillardian echoes in ‘simulacrum’, with its associations of the counterfeit and pastiche, are probably accidental): the first definition of ‘archetype’ offered by the OED is ‘[t]he original pattern or model from which copies are made; a prototype’. But the second definition, drawn from comparative anatomy, is more pertinent: the ‘assumed ideal pattern of the fundamental

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structure’ of a body or object.31 This was the archetypicality that the members of the ARG supported: the significant design features of the new indoor theatre – the galleries, the pit, the side-stage boxes, the small stage, the frons scenae with three doors, the candles – are supported by evidence from at least one of the three main indoor London theatres of the first half of the seventeenth century: the Blackfriars, the Cockpit and the Salisbury Court (only the first of which was known to Shakespeare). The projected playhouse was to echo all of these spaces, although its aesthetic focus would where possible remain the Blackfriars. The Worcester College plans, produced in the 1660s by a man who received his training from Inigo Jones, were indebted to early-seventeenth-century theatre design, and offered a ‘spatial map’ for the new space, providing ‘valuable evidence of the size, shape and interrelationship of features characteristic of an early-seventeenth-century indoor playhouse’.32 If the ‘arrangement of the space’ was to be provided by the Worcester College drawings, the ‘look and feel’ of the interior would be devised according to surviving accounts of the Blackfriars, evidence drawn from plays written for that indoor playhouse, and contemporaneous examples of Jacobean buildings and the documents that relate to them. The resulting theatre would not be a replica of a specific venue, but a composite structure that evoked a version of the playhouse occupied by Shakespeare’s company in the years after 1609, and echoed the style of indoor theatres familiar to early modern Londoners from the 1570s to the 1640s. The plan for the Globe’s ‘Indoor Jacobean Theatre’ (a working project title that conveniently retained the IJ acronym) required the ARG to undertake and commission extensive research to examine extant Jacobean domestic and civic architecture; to establish a design concept for the interior decorative scheme; to scour archives for evidence of indoor playhouse construction; and to work through the English early modern dramatic canon for in-play hints as to the features of early modern indoor playhouses. Greenfield ‘Jacobeanized’ the interior to lodge the playhouse in the structural and decorative

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world of 1616 (whence the Worcester College drawings were once believed to have originated): rather than neoclassical curves, the new indoor theatre would have a polygonal structural geometry, and elements such as the ceiling, columns, arcades, handrails, balusters, balustrades and panelling were drawn from extant or documented Jacobean buildings. Timber construction specialists McCurdy & Co used early modern woodworking techniques to assemble the sections of the oak frame off-site, which were then installed within the IJ brick shell (the IJ building had been built slightly larger than denoted in the Worcester College drawings to allow for a modern wraparound access corridor and fire escape routes). Martin White, a Globe Senior Research Fellow with a particular expertise in early modern theatre lighting, worked with Globe production manager and the indoor theatre project coordinator Paul Russell to design the rigged candelabra, wall-mounted sconces and various hand-held light sources. Building the playhouse and remodelling the main foyer cost in excess of £7 million. The money was raised through the Globe’s own efforts, some coming from the organization’s own reserves, but most from private donation. The biggest single gift, from an anonymous donor, came with a proviso: the new theatre should be named after the founder of Shakespeare’s Globe. The condition solved the problem of what to call the new playhouse: it was manifestly not the ‘Inigo Jones Theatre’, and although the ‘Indoor Jacobean Theatre’ had been the project’s working title, as a venue name it lacked spark and was misleadingly period-specific: 1616 was the design watchword for the space, but it was always intended to stage work from the Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline and other eras, including the present day. The stipulated name honoured the memory of the project’s instigator, and made overt the indoor theatre’s ontological difference from the outdoor Globe: while the Globe is a reconstruction of a building that existed, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is based on a historic plan for a type of early modern theatre, bearing a modern name to denote its distinction from other replica playhouses.

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The SWP’s origin story is therefore very different to the Globe’s, despite the fact that the two theatres share a provenance and a parentage. The playhouse is not a replica of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars (a late-Elizabethan adaptation of a medieval monastic building) but an archetypal space that models the indoor theatres of the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries. The planning, design and construction of the indoor playhouse was a complex process that drew on academic expertise from a wide range of fields. Scholarly navigation was provided by the chair and members of the Globe’s ARG, whose membership comprises theatre historians, literary scholars, theatre practitioners, art historians, architects and Globe staff. The prime output of the project was of course the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse itself, but the preparatory work also generated Moving Shakespeare Indoors, a collection of essays that collated the literary, archival and architectural evidence used in the playhouse’s design. The historical and literary articles on the culture and repertory of the Blackfriars, Cockpit and Salisbury Court theatres (by John Astington, Sarah Dustagheer, Mariko Ichikawa, Farah Karim-Cooper, Tiffany Stern and others) positioned the volume as a substantial contribution to the small field of early modern indoor playhouse studies, a discipline which has seen some notable additions since Irwin Smith’s study of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse in 1964 (including Richard Hosley’s essay for The Elizabethan Theatre, ‘A Reconstruction of the Second Blackfriars’; Keith Sturgess’s Jacobean Private Theatres; Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory by Lucy Munro; and the contributions anthologized by Herbert Berry, Glynne Wickham, William Ingram and Richard Dutton).33 Paul Menzer’s edited collection, Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, part of the scholarly response to the ASC’s playhouse modelled on the Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia, was the first volume to explicitly consider what was then a neglected subject in early modern drama studies: the effect on Shakespearean and King’s Men dramaturgy of the move indoors. ‘Did the Blackfriars have its own repertory? How did indoor and outdoor playing

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styles differ? What was the place of the Blackfriars in the urban economy? What qualities did the Blackfriars share with the long tradition of great-hall performances?’34 Inside Shakespeare and Moving Shakespeare Indoors have gone some way to mitigate the lack of attention hitherto paid to these questions, and this book continues and extends attention to the culture of indoor early modern theatre with a new focus on the craft of contemporary performance, spectatorship and applied experimentation. Like Menzer’s most recent book on the reconstructed Blackfriars, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, Playing Indoors considers present practice as much as it does historic performance, alert to the ways that the labour of modern performers can challenge received ideas and prompt new questions about the theatres of the past.35 But before we address contemporary practice in the new playhouse, we need to think about the way the SWP was greeted by the press and public, and the nature of the new theatre’s engagement with the concerns of early modern drama today.

2 Reception

The following chapter provides a consideration of the way in which the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was received in the press and in the academy. I suggest a range of reasons for its broadly positive reception (in contrast to the way in which the Globe was greeted nearly two decades previously) but my central argument revolves around the definitions current in broader culture of the term ‘Jacobean’, and the associations – artistic, periodic, psychological and erotic – that the word connotes. I argue that the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and the early modern drama staged in it engage with an understanding of the past which is considerably darker than the imagined Tudor world conjured up by the Globe, an engagement with consequences for the way the space is understood by spectators and creative artists. The opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the start of 2014 was marked by little of the journalistic scepticism that attended the launch of the outside amphitheatre in 1996–7. The foregoing work of the Globe gave the new indoor theatre an immediate artistic hinterland. Globe productions have not always been uniformly praised, but the years leading up to 2014 had been good to Shakespeare’s Globe, criticallyspeaking, with well-received summer seasons, large-scale tours and ambitious events such as the Globe-to-Globe international festival (mounted as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad). The

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concurrent success in New York City during the playhouse’s opening weeks of the Broadway transfers of Twelfth Night and Richard III (Original Practices productions staged at the Belasco Theatre, directed by Tim Carroll) meant that the Globe’s star was riding high. This context of achievement was remarked on by commentators – ‘[t]he second venue builds on the outdoor success of the Globe’, wrote Matt Wolf in The Telegraph – as was the project’s long-deferred realization of the dream of the organization’s founder, the late Sam Wanamaker.1 The SWP’s apparent teleological inevitability was noted by The Guardian’s Michael Billington, not usually the Globe’s most ardent fan: ‘the extraordinary thing about the new indoor Jacobean theatre that is part of Shakespeare’s Globe, is that it feels as if it’s always been there and was just waiting to be uncovered’.2 A similar vote of confidence was offered by Andrew Preston in The Daily Mail, who wrote that ‘[t]he Bard would feel right at home in Britain’s newest theatre’.3 The tone of media comment in the months and weeks leading up to the opening was almost wholly positive, and the evocative space garnered generally excellent notices in the reviews of early productions whatever the feelings of theatre critics about the individual shows themselves (there were one or two trenchantly negative accounts of the seating and sightlines).4 Despite the novelty of a candlelit ‘Jacobean’ interior, the addition of the playhouse to Shakespeare’s Globe’s estate conformed to a familiar pattern in British theatre culture: the development of a smaller ‘studio’ venue to complement the ‘main house’. Both terms were consciously avoided within the Globe, as the implicit hierarchy in designating one space a ‘main house’ and the other a ‘studio’ was not considered appropriate for a pair of theatres which do not run concurrent seasons. At the Globe, the two theatre spaces each have a winter and a summer season, one for theatre and one for education projects: the SWP’s theatre season runs from October to April, and the Globe’s from April to October. But for critics and audience members alike, the precedent of spaces such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Other Place and the Swan provided some elements of the script

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that was used to welcome the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: an intimate, artistically adventurous space alongside a bigger, apparently more mainstream venue.5 Michael Caines, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, looked forward to the ‘kind of programme that the adjacent open-air space could hardly accommodate nowadays, with its duty to fill the house at the height of every tourist-thronged summer’.6 As we will see, in its first seasons the SWP did indeed offer an artistic programme that was noticeably more high-brow than that of the Globe. The playhouse was therefore an unusual innovation in that it represented an entirely unfamiliar type of historical theatre, but arrived in recognizable fashion as a newly-built ‘studio’ adjunct to an established cultural venue.

Not-Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s Globe The SWP’s warm critical reception tells us something about the cultural dominance of Shakespeare in the UK and abroad, and the countervailing identification of non-Shakespearean early modern drama with more elite artistic contexts. The story of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s arrival on London’s theatre scene can be usefully contrasted with the opening of the Globe nearly twenty years earlier. Part of the controversy surrounding the Globe in its early years emerged from a particular mix of cultural, political and social anxieties about Shakespeare, popular culture, the corporatization of London, and Britain’s changing place in the world at the end of the twentieth century.7 Many people greeted the opening of the Globe with enthusiasm and pleasure, but it was also the occasion for a vigorous debate about the place of heritage and nostalgia in Britain’s artistic and cultural landscape. As soon as the project was mooted, critics objected that constructing a replica of a 400-year-old theatre to honour Shakespeare and the era of cultural achievement from which he emerged

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smacked of veneration and commercialization. The concept of ‘Bardolatry’ has been a familiar one since George Bernard Shaw gave it a name at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the 1990s Terence Hawkes coined a new term for the material exploitation of Shakespeare fandom (‘Bardbiz’): the Globe appeared to its early detractors to encapsulate both in an uncomfortable way.8 John Drakakis wrote in 1988 (before the theatre had been finished) that the new Shakespeare’s Globe site performed an ‘apotheosis’ of the English bourgeois habit of deifying the cultural productions of its esteemed historical eras, then putting those productions to reactionary political work and monetizing that deployment.9 The long debates about the inclusion of Shakespeare in the new British national school curriculum (a 1980s Conservative government innovation) had also sparked anxiety that the works of Shakespeare were being used to lodge an increasingly multicultural and devolved national identity in an imagined conservative past, a fear that a meticulously recreated Globe theatre from the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’ seemed to some to do little to assuage.10 For others, the Globe encapsulated the romanticism and nostalgia of the expanding ‘heritage’ sector, a cultural industry concerned with purveying partial and selective accounts of Britain’s history.11 Throughout the 1980s, left-wing critics and historians argued against representations of the past that were perceived to underpin a neo-conservative ideology of gritty self-reliance and national military strength: Simon Barker suggested in 1984 that Shakespeare studies was particularly vulnerable to right-wing interpretations given the left’s preference for researching later historical eras (an observation which is probably not so germane to the 2010s).12 Sceptics noted that the Globe was being reconstructed amid fanfare in a deprived south London constituency, and drew attention to the inequalities of financial, cultural and social capital between the backers of Shakespeare’s Globe and the residents and workers of Southwark, who were presumed to be uninterested in the attractions it would offer.13 The project received criticism for its apparent participation in a Thatcherite politics of top-down

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urban regeneration at a time when other areas of London (such as the former docks to the east of the Globe) were undergoing contentious redevelopment. The Globe’s engagement with sixteenth-century construction techniques and its promise of ‘authentic’ stagings of Shakespeare seemed to dubious observers to situate it ‘on a continuum of familiar history-performance venues’ such as tourist sites like the Ironbridge Gorge Museum and the Beamish Open-Air Museum in the United Kingdom, or Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg in the United States.14 At these attractions, ‘living history’ interpreters adopt the clothing, manners and speech of individuals from the past, and engage with visitors while practicing a bygone craft. In the years before the Globe opened as a functioning theatre, the context in which it intended to operate was understood with reference to ‘edutainment’ venues such as these: surprisingly few early critics thought about the Globe in the context of other Shakespeare theatres.15 And once it had opened, the enthusiasm, demographic range and multinationality of the Globe’s audiences marked it out as something distinct from theatre as traditionally experienced. The fact that tourists, students and school groups were attracted by the affordable yard tickets was taken as a sign that the organization had ‘turned Shakespeare’s distance and strangeness into one of the most familiar of touristic commodities, the easy delights of the heritage museum and historical theme park’, as Dennis Kennedy put it.16 The Globe appeared to some onlookers to commit the cardinal cultural sins of simultaneously commercializing and infantilizing the works of Shakespeare. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse emerged into a very different world, both in terms of the Globe’s reputation and the cultural status of Shakespearean and early modern drama. If the critical heritage of Shakespeare’s Globe was affected by those early assessments, it has subsequently acquired theatrical and scholarly respectability in the press and in academia. Although its complex identity as an experimental theatre, a research centre, an act of architectural reconstruction and an education charity continues to pose a challenge to commentators twenty years

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after it opened, the Globe has secured its position as one of the world’s leading producers of Shakespeare, and the undisputed London centre for the performance of early modern drama. The artistic move away from concept-driven theatre in the 1990s and 2000s – exemplified by the remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as a text-friendly thrust space not dissimilar to the Globe – brought with it an increasing interest in productions that had a ‘greater affinity’ with the practices of Shakespeare’s own period, as Abigail Rokison puts it.17 But even as the Globe was shaking off an association with touristic banality and acquiring its reputation as a worthwhile theatrical endeavour, the Anglophone cultural landscape was changing to make room for a Shakespeare that was considerably more populist, global and accessible than it had been throughout the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the things that made the Globe unusual in 1997 – its keenness to engage modern minds in an imaginative return to the past; its desire to celebrate Shakespeare as an icon of world cultural heritage; its conscious attempt to extend the appeal of Shakespeare to a young and international audience – are now established facts of the worldwide Shakespeare sector, a ‘global industry of remarkable energy and profit’ in Susan Bennett’s words.18 More pertinently, an engagement with the past has become the stock-in-trade of large swathes of British culture: if ‘heritage’ was a dirty word among sections of the British cultural establishment in the early 1990s, the twenty-first century has seen that previously denigrated concept take centre stage. As Raphael Samuel noted in 1994, in a sympathetic analysis of the UK’s heritage craze, we live in an ‘expanding historical culture’. The ‘spectacle of the past’, he wrote, ‘excites the kind of attention which earlier epochs attached to the new’.19 In the years after the Globe’s opening, the historical imaginary took firm – some might say overweening – hold of British culture in books, on stage and on screen. Along with certain other standout periods (Jane Austen’s Regency England, Victorian Britain, Downton Abbey flapper glamour and the Second World War), the Tudor

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age has become ever more popular since the history and culture of that era found its way onto the national curriculum. Younger cultural consumers are fed with stories of the Terrible Tudors in the Horrible Histories books and television series; their parents enjoy Showtime’s The Tudors or Hilary Mantel’s prizewinning novels about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and the forthcoming The Mirror and the Light (along with the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptations, and lavish BBC serials, based on them). Costume drama and the historical novel have become the most bankable forms of fiction in the British publishing, television and film industries, especially those fictions aimed at the international market, and ‘Shakespeare’s England’ – a flexible period identifier that merges the Tudor and Stuart reigns – is a popular setting.20 At the same time, the transformation of William Shakespeare into a global cultural brand has continued apace. If Shakespeare’s Globe was once castigated for including a gift-shop among its visitor services,21 other major theatres have since followed suit. The National Theatre and the RSC now sell a considerable range of memorabilia (T-shirts, mugs, toys) to help sustain their financial bottom-line. The availability – although not in the Globe shop – of ‘The Bard is my bag’ canvas totes and Lady Macbeth guest soap (‘try it in the Macbath!’) is an indication of the on-going commodification of Shakespeare, a development in which the Globe has been complicit but for which it is by no means solely responsible.22 That brand strength has made Shakespeare an attractive target for producers of entertainment aimed at the teenage and young adult market. Since Baz Luhrmann’s Miami-noir Romeo + Juliet (1996), Hollywood has produced numerous youth-focussed retellings of Shakespeare narratives: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew; O (2001), a high-schoolset Othello; and She’s The Man (2006), a take on Twelfth Night. The success of these films, and other forms of appropriation such as the movie Shakespeare in Love (1999), adapted in 2014 as a stage play, have led since the 1990s to a worldwide audience who sustain a multi-layered relationship with Shakespeare,

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one which Emma French has termed ‘tripartite’: our frame of reference comprehends the Shakespeare ‘brand’, the body of his plays, and the man himself.23 French’s tripartitism was echoed by Bruce Smith in his Phenomenal Shakespeare when he posited a multifaceted contemporary Shakespeare that included The Historical William Shakespeare, or THWS, the Collected Works of William Shakespeare (CWWS), William Shakespeare as Author (WSA) and William Shakespeare as Cultural Icon (WSCI).24 The Globe’s early detractors were bothered that visitors were drawn by precisely this sort of layered ‘brand recognition’ rather than informed engagement with Shakespeare’s works. The prejudice behind those concerns has been challenged elsewhere, but it is perhaps a satisfying irony that while Shakespeare’s Globe was never interested in ‘Disneyfying’ the appreciation of Shakespeare, the wider world has nonetheless been keen to embrace a commodified, branded version of the man and his plays (the poems rarely get a look in).25 This shift has surely helped the Globe maintain its popularity, but it has also removed the sting from the charges of populism and commodification levelled at the institution in its early years, and rendered such accusations moot in the case of the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: in the current cultural landscape, Shakespeare’s Globe is actually rather restrained in its commercialization of early modern drama and culture.26 By 2014, then, the Globe was taken seriously as a theatre and as a research centre, and the arrival of its second theatrical space – with a new focus on indoor, candlelit performance – was widely understood as a logical and worthwhile endeavour. Given the cultural dominance of Shakespeare, moreover, it was regarded as a significant point in its favour that the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse presented itself as literally and figuratively Shakespeare-adjacent: physically next door to the iconic Globe, and dedicated for its first years to staging works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries (as well as new work, opera and concerts). January 2014 saw the start of two years of Shakespeare commemorations, as the 450th anniversary of the playwright’s birth merged into the 400th anniversary

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of his death in 2016.27 Shakespeare’s Globe marked the twoyear fiesta with an unprecedentedly comprehensive tour of Hamlet to almost every country in the world, and other major cultural organizations such as the BBC, the British Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum launched or revealed plans for extensive Shakespeare celebrations.28 In a period dense with Shakespeare jubilation, the playhouse’s championing of writers such as John Webster, Francis Beaumont and John Ford was refreshing, and taken as a sign of cultural seriousness. Writing in The Guardian, the critic Mark Lawson called the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse an ‘interesting development’ in the field of historically-informed performance, a project which he linked to the comparable approach in classical music in which musicians play upon period instruments to recover ‘the textures and sonorities that the original composer and audiences would probably have heard’.29 Lawson’s reference to the rarefied world of period music indicates the context in which early press commentators considered the new playhouse: as part of the high-brow, even somewhat recondite, cultural tapestry of London. The programme announced for the playhouse’s first short season was sophisticated – The Duchess of Malfi, Eileen Atkins’s one-woman show based on the performances of nineteenth-century Shakespearean Ellen Terry, the experimental comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle, John Marston’s little-performed The Malcontent and the Royal Opera’s production of Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, along with leftfield comics Rubberbandits, and recitals by harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock, classical guitarist John Williams, and vocal ensemble I Fagiolini – and the top ticket price of £60 (considerably more for the opera) marked the indoor space as socially distinct from the outdoor Globe, where 600 tickets per show are available to standing spectators for £5. The respect with which the playhouse was greeted arose in part from the cultural and financial elitism inherent in its programming and ticket pricing. (Less well-covered by the press was the extensive series of free or affordable education

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events in the spring and summer of 2014 that opened the playhouse up to students, adult learners and Southwark schoolchildren.)

Jacobean noir The positive tone of early press comment can also be explained by the ease with which the media appeared to grasp the purpose and ambitions of the new playhouse. The briefings put out by Shakespeare’s Globe and the PR company tasked with managing the playhouse’s launch were able to draw on the popular currency of the term ‘Jacobean’ which, regardless of the space’s donor-stipulated name, remained the aesthetic watchword throughout the theatre’s design, construction and promotion. Contrasting and overlapping with other period identifiers such as ‘Elizabethan’, ‘Tudor’, ‘Stuart’ and ‘Shakespearean’, ‘Jacobean’ carries particular temporal, cultural and aesthetic weight that takes it beyond historicity, a currency that it has enjoyed in the UK since the aftermath of the Second World War.30 As has been observed many times, the drama of the late-Elizabethan, Jacobean and early Caroline ages came to speak to post-war British society in unsettling and powerful ways: the horrors of the mid-twentieth century enabled modern audiences to confront the literary violence they found in such plays in ways they had not been able to before; the sexual revolutions of wartime, the 1960s and later encouraged a more candid examination of the gender politics of the early modern dramatic canon (for the remainder of this chapter, I will use the term ‘Jacobean’ – sometimes in inverted commas, and sometimes not – in the way it is generally used in non-academic contexts, to mean the era encompassing the last years of Elizabeth, the reign of James I and the first years of Charles I).31 The manner in which Jacobean horror made itself relevant to modern sensibilities is captured in Michael Blakemore’s backstage novel Next Season (1969), set during the

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late 1950s in the fictional Festival Playhouse of ‘Braddington Spa’ in Yorkshire. The play in production is The Duchess of Malfi, which is shaping up to be a dud (‘a beastly depressing thing’ says one character) until the dress rehearsal when the protagonist Sam Beresford watches the madmen scene (Act 4 Scene 1) from the stalls. Directed to appear in tattered clothing and shaven heads, the madmen dragged with them terrible associations. For a moment Sam had seen barbed wire and a hill of bodies come to dreadful life again under the thrust of a bulldozer … No conscious effort had been made to impose the twentieth century upon this old play, but their own time had had its say, nonetheless, in one shocking uncanny moment.32 The themes in The Duchess of Malfi helped mid-twentiethcentury British writers to bring an air of moral ambiguity to the inter-war and post-war worlds. In Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (the fifth book in the twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time sequence, published in 1960 and set in the early 1930s although narrated from the perspective of wartime London), Webster’s play functions as Powell’s dramatic means of entry into ‘life’s grotesque aspects’ as the novel shifts focus to the sexually-ambiguous media magnate Sir Magnus Donners and his demi-monde social circle (‘Webster is always a favourite of mine’, the mercurial composer Hugh Moreland tells the narrator).33 The essayist Elizabeth Wilson has analysed the post-war shift undertaken by the regnal descriptor ‘Jacobean’, formerly associated in aesthetic contexts merely with heavy oak furniture. It quickly became a term denoting darkness of a different sort, as those in the vanguard of the sexual revolution sought precedents in Jacobean drama for the changes then in progress: Already in the 1950s a vogue for Jacobean tragedy had foreshadowed [the] attraction towards a rawer, uglier sex. That strange group of plays, written in a few years around

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1600 – at the very beginning of the modern period – did indeed seem modern, filled with psychopathic violence and deviant desires.34 As Susan Bennett argued twenty years ago, the twentieth-century ‘rediscovery’ of the non-Shakespearean early modern dramatic canon was aided by a perception that many of the works concerned themselves with failings familiar to the contemporary present: moral decay, materialist excess, violence and above all a ‘clamant partnering of politics and sex’ – something we might consider a ‘leitmotif of our time’. ‘Jacobean’ became unmoored from its precise definition and was repurposed as an aesthetic term signifying violence, sex and corruption that could be applied to any work from the pre-civil war Stuart era, or indeed any modern text that carried a ‘sentiment’ deemed Jacobean in spirit. As Bennett argued, the pay-off for this expanded definition was a collapse in the oppositional and transgressive power of the Jacobean canon itself, and its replacement by a shallower interpretation of non-Shakespearean drama which purveyed an etiolated form of ‘radical chic’.35 So although popular knowledge about London’s early modern indoor playhouses is slight, the idea of the ‘Jacobean’ in the cultural imagination is clear. Even without expertise in theatre architecture and candle technology, critics were quick to note what they regarded as the aptness of an atmospheric candlelit venue for plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Newspaper features printed before the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s official opening picked up on the arrestingly intimate scale with phrases that gestured towards the space’s sensual, alluring qualities: ‘I don’t necessarily get turned on by theatrical architecture, but, honestly, it’s quite a thrill’, admitted Dominic Maxwell. ‘It feels small enough to let you reach out and shake hands with everyone in the front row.’36 Reviewers of the opening production The Duchess of Malfi – a play which, Susan Bennett has argued, satisfies more than any other well-known early modern drama contemporary expectations of the Jacobean37 – allowed assessment of the

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text’s sensational elements to colour descriptions of the venue: The Guardian’s Michael Billington admired the ‘darkling space’ and noted ‘something rich, strange and conspiratorial about the use of naked candelabra’, while his colleague at The Observer Susannah Clapp found herself drawn to the candles as they ‘slowly spin around to the music of recorders, lutes and bass viol as if executing their own danse macabre’.38 Michael Coveney judged the playhouse ‘almost indecently intimate’, and Sam Marlowe in the daily free paper Metro wrote that ‘it’s a thrill just stepping through the doors … it’s intimate and fantastically atmospheric, the scent of hot wax and expectation charging the air … it’s a setting where shadows and darkness seductively play their part’.39 Reviewers regarded the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as an architectural manifestation of established tropes about Jacobean sensationalism, with the chiming keynotes of sex and violence. ‘If ever a play was made for the stage of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, wrote Tim Walker of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (a Caroline-era play that can be counted as ‘Jacobean’ only by means of Bennett’s periodic sleight of hand), ‘it has to be Ford’s dark and dangerous masterpiece. This place of shadows, flickering candles and hushed voices invests it with an unmistakable aura of evil.’40 ‘Where better than this murky mock-Jacobean playhouse for this murky Jacobean tragedy’, asked Maxwell in his review of The Changeling.41 The ‘seductive chamber theatre … already seems a natural home for blood-soaked tragedy’, agreed Billington.42 Reviewers have in general been much readier to associate the playhouse with tragic noir than with the era’s other notable dramatic genre, city comedy. The Knight of the Burning Pestle occasioned widespread surprise that ‘the candlelit venue can accommodate knockabout theatrics just as fully as it can sotto voce villainy’.43 It says something about the power of the playhouse’s insistently evocative atmosphere that Adele Thomas’s Pestle, despite its springtime themes (Rafe appears in Act 4 dressed as the Lord of the May), was re-conceived as a Christmas show when it was included in the 2014–15 winter season: marketed by the Globe as a ‘festive treat’, the

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production made much of the ‘glorious candlelight of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’ and the opportunity the show’s unusual four-interval structure afforded spectators to consume mince pies and mulled wine44 (see Plate 4). The candles and the beautiful interior are wholly unignorable, and so is the ambience they produce. If the flickering light and shadow in the SWP do not seem a natural fit for knockabout comedy, then those same potentially sinister aesthetic conditions must be repurposed to denote instead celebration, festive license and a sort of theatrical hygge (the untranslatable Danish notion of domestic cosiness). From the point of view of Shakespeare’s Globe as a commercial theatrical organization, the perceived congruence of dramatic genre and architectural style is beneficial. Selling the works of lesser-known early modern dramatists is culturally credit-worthy but not usually profitable, and the fact that the playhouse was immediately regarded as the ‘natural home’ of Jacobean tragedy was something of a relief to the theatre’s managers. If the outdoor Globe taps into a ‘cultural nostalgia’ for a particularly valorized Elizabethan past, with all the advantages and hazards that such nostalgic yearning brings with it, the indoor theatre does not benefit from precisely the same associations.45 Productions in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse draw on a different set of assumptions about the darker post-Elizabethan era, and the popularity of Jacobean sensationalism goes some way to mitigate the marketing problems posed by seasons of work by early modern dramatists who are not Shakespeare. The Globe’s promotional material for The Duchess of Malfi, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Changeling used sexuality, shock and intimacy as central themes in imagery and copy. Malfi was described on the Globe’s website as featuring a ‘thrilling combination of brilliant coups de théâtre, horrific set-pieces and vivid characters’,46 and The Changeling and ’Tis Pity were trailed with intimately-shot posters that highlighted the vulnerability of the leading characters. Hattie Morahan as The Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna was photographed dressed

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in a nightgown, standing with her body turned away from the camera but looking over her shoulder at the viewer, as if caught in a clandestine activity. The website copy promised ‘ferocious’ and ‘wild’ writing, as well as a range of concepts associated with lurid Jacobean drama: ‘ghosts, dumb shows, scenes of Bedlam, and [an] atmosphere of depraved violence’.47 The sibling lovers of ’Tis Pity were photographed in a close-up topless embrace, an image deemed sufficiently provocative to have the poster banned from the Tube by Transport for London on the grounds of its implied sexual content – a decision that generated valuable publicity.48 It was not just production marketing that purveyed a readilyfamiliar aesthetic interpretation of Jacobean sensationalism. The interior decoration of the playhouse itself, and in particular the dark frons scenae with its flashes of gold leaf, suggest a suitable setting for dark misdeeds. Dominic Dromgoole lobbied for the chosen design, urging the ARG to reject an alternative, much brighter, colour palette for the façade. Speaking in 2014, he argued that the rear of the stage ‘needs a sort of gravity and magnetism to pull you in’ rather than what he termed a ‘spurious brightness’: the richly-painted wood drew the eye where a lighter or more polychromatic design would, he believed, be distracting.49 The dark frons has precedent in extant Jacobean oak hall screens, and in sable-coloured decorative fire surrounds (architectural forms used as models for theatrical façades, of which none survive),50 but Dromgoole conceded in a subsequent interview that his selection had been overly-determined by what he thought was tonally ‘right’ for his opening show The Duchess of Malfi, that most ‘Jacobean’ of Jacobean tragedies. By the end of the 2015–16 winter season, Dromgoole acknowledged that the frons was too dark (at the time of writing the design of the façade is under review by the ARG).51 But the darkly glittering interior certainly satisfied popular expectations of what a Jacobean playhouse ‘should’ look like, and spectators at Malfi, The Changeling, ’Tis Pity (not, of course, a Jacobean play) and The Broken Heart noted the suitability of the venue for such ‘revengeful and gory’ stories.52

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From an artistic, critical and scholarly standpoint, the figuring of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as a brick-andtimber symbol of a dark and deviant past, a ‘glowing coffer’ that provides a ‘mirror of the labyrinthine, claustrophobic drama’ of the decadent Jacobean era, as one theatre reviewer put it, is more questionable.53 Criticism of the Jacobean corpus has stressed the ways in which the plays challenge early modern hierarchies and explore alternative social and sexual identities, and radical theatre-makers have certainly drawn on this work in an attempt to make their productions speak to contemporary concerns about political corruption, social inequalities and other abuses of power. Whether this has influenced the dominant discourse surrounding ‘Jacobean tragedy’ is another matter: as Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince observed, politically-aware interpretations of early modern works are not necessarily received as such by audiences and critics, who prefer to situate their responses within the ‘decades-old critical formulations … [of] decadence, violence and sensationalism’ – the ‘radical chic’ of Susan Bennett’s analysis. And as often as not, argue Aebischer and Prince, the contemporary Anglophone ‘theatrical stance’ is apolitical when applied to early modern drama – directors instead have a habit of acquiescing in the familiar associations of seventeenth-century tragedy with sex and cruelty.54 The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in its design and in the way that its productions are marketed, does not seem to move those critical formulations on. Roberta Barker has explored the ways in which such modern Jacobean performance practices ‘foreground the psychological travails of suffering women within patriarchal contexts while inviting viewers to goggle with equal parts horror and titillation at the misdemeanours of their reprehensibly sexist but fascinatingly deranged tormentors’. This habit is undoubtedly popular but politically unsettling: it risks encouraging the perpetuation of ‘constructions of women as sexually longing victims and men as sexually troubled victimisers’.55 It is hard to engage with and challenge the gender, race and sexual politics of a literary

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canon that relies for its modern popularity on the pleasurable stimulation produced by moral outrage. Barker and David Nicol have argued elsewhere that contemporary performance traditions that have inhered around the character of BeatriceJoanna in The Changeling, for example, have had a negative impact on the way the play is understood both critically and popularly: it is common performance practice to suggest that the anti-heroine is motivated by repressed desire for her rapist, a reading that does not seem of a piece with what Middleton and Rowley intended, and has alarming implications for gender politics in the present day.56 It is here that the critical heritage of early modern drama, and the significance of contemporary cultural politics and architectural determinism coalesce. What does it mean for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to align itself with an uncritical popular enthusiasm for early modern dramatic sensationalism? Certainly, it is not problem-free. A performance space, and a style of playing, that supports populist ideas about the ‘Jacobean’ risks reifying reductive interpretations of the era’s plays’ complex presentations of gender relations and sexual violence. Owen Hatherley has written in a different context about the uncomfortable implications of the nostalgic cooption of a past era’s aesthetic, cultural and political signifiers: as he observed of the contemporary popularity among a certain constituency of urban hipster for 1940s clothing and memorabilia, such styling created the impression that ‘everyone had decided to live in their own customised preliberation era’. There was something unsettling, he suggested, in the willingness of politically-enlightened modern people to ‘perform [the] aesthetics’ of an earlier period despite their opposition to many of that period’s sexual, social and identitarian principles.57 Something similar may be said of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and the Globe, two venues which have anxious relationships with the past. While the Globe has to fight against a nostalgic sensibility driven by conservative impulses within the wider arts and culture sector, and within the Shakespeare industry more specifically, the SWP has found

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its own problematic period identifier in the aesthetic symbols of lurid Jacobeanism, or ‘Jacobean noir’. Such a conclusion is certainly supported by the press response to the first two seasons of early modern plays, and the modes of promotion chosen by the marketing department at Shakespeare’s Globe, but it does not necessarily reflect the intentions of artists who have worked in the space. Former artistic director Dominic Dromgoole described his programming policy in the first two years as one that was ‘reactive’ to the space, not reflective of wider (pre)conceptions of what it ought to be: ‘You’re not teaching a space, you’re trying to let a space teach you. So rather than us saying “this space has got to do this for us”, you’ve got to say “how do we respond to this room?”’ He opened with The Duchess of Malfi because he regarded it as ‘so physically and plastically appropriate for the space’, but then deliberately went ‘as far away from that as it’s possible to go’ with Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle: ‘because it’s so bright and so lunatic and so free, I thought its extreme messiness was a great way of testing what the room could take’.58 A year later, Dromgoole reiterated his intention to ‘loosen up the potential of the place in people’s imagination’ and ‘to continue to provide a context for Shakespeare’, a writer who for the first two seasons was relegated to a distinctly supporting role in the playhouse’s line-up. The main artistic aim of the playhouse in its first years was to widen public appreciation of the theatrical context from which Shakespeare emerged, a policy that encouraged interpretations of early modern texts which do not re-inscribe received views about Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline dramas. Dromgoole’s The Changeling is a case in point: as he observes, the central act of abuse at the heart of the play comes about through Beatrice-Joanna’s strength, which De Flores finds ‘terrifying’: ‘in The Changeling, the most vital person there, the most brilliant and the most magnetic person there, is a woman’. De Flores attacks her for the same reason that he might ‘cut a poppy or kill a peacock, because [he feels] inadequate’.59 The actor Hattie Morahan,

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cast as a somewhat older and more assured Beatrice-Joanna, similarly noted the character’s ‘survivor mentality. She refuses to take her fate lying down’.60 These sentiments suggest that the creative sensibilities behind this production cleaved rather closer than most to Barker and Nicol’s ideal of a performance which would present Beatrice-Joanna as a woman who is well aware of her lusts (she directs them towards Alsemero), not a women supine before her repressed desire for De Flores. Nonetheless, the programming of the first seasons did not go very far in challenging established notions about the provocative early modern dramatic canon – The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling and ’Tis Pity are a much-performed trio, and The Broken Heart, while little known, fits the pattern of anguished sex tragedy. This reflects pragmatic commercial considerations, and as Dromgoole asserts, the productions themselves were in many cases subtly radical in their interpretations of these classics. And although the generic range was expanded with The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Malcontent, comedy – also a form typical of Jacobean drama – has not taken root with the vigour of tragedy; Eoin Price observed in a blog titled ‘Sad tales for winter’ that it was perhaps surprising that the Globe had not responded to the popularity of Pestle with more comic works in the playhouse.61 The early modern dramas staged so far have certainly had their share of ‘horrid laughter’, in Nicholas Brooke’s venerable phrase, but only Pestle was an out-and-out comedy (newly-written comic works and rehearsed readings of early modern comedies have however been a major part of the playhouse’s repertory).62 The habit of skewing tragic with the SWP’s early modern programming showed no sign of abating under the Globe’s third artistic director Emma Rice, with her 2016–17 winter season marketed under the tagline ‘Wonder Noir’ and featuring productions of Webster’s The White Devil and Shakespeare’s Othello (directors Annie Ryan and Ellen McDougall both emphasized the space’s gloom by painting the floor the same sable colour as the frons scenae, and favouring lower light levels throughout). Rice’s first playhouse season opened with

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an adaptation of John Milton’s unsettling masque Comus, directed by Lucy Bailey, which while not tragic in form or Jacobean in provenance, certainly ticked the right boxes in its themes of sexual license and assailed chastity. Whatever the revisionist interpretations of the early modern dramatic canon offered by the work that it hosts, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has carved out an artistic and commercial identity that makes shrewd use of our assumptions about the dark Jacobean world. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is therefore a space which in commercial contexts satisfies popular (mis)conceptions about the Jacobean past, but which also claims to purvey a critical and progressive interpretation of the dramas of the late Elizabethan and Stuart eras. The combination is a curious one, but oddly appropriate for Shakespeare’s Globe’s second venue – the outdoor space has its own historicized crosses to bear. As Farah Karim-Cooper has put it, ‘the conceptualisation of periodicity at the Globe has, since its opening, been fraught with complexity, essentialism and nostalgia’. The playhouse offers a new sort of ‘cultural encounter with the past’, but one that resists the nostalgic playfulness of the big amphitheatre.63 Marvin Carlson described theatres as ‘among the most haunted of human cultural structures’, and if the Globe is attended by the benign ghosts of an imagined Elizabethan Golden Age, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s spectres are more frightening.64 Audience members at performances of The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling spoke of their awareness of the significant distance between the world depicted on stage and modern society: Roz: ‘I was rather relieved that I wasn’t part of that early audience, because if I were, the circumstances of the play would be the sort of thing that might be going on around me, which wouldn’t be a terribly nice way to be living.’65 (The Changeling) Heather: ‘[The space] helps you think about the values at that time and what the play is all about.’66 (The Duchess of Malfi)

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Tony: ‘It’s a place you can empathise with, if you want to empathise with an audience of the past.’67 (The Changeling) Phil (The Changeling) recalled feeling conscious of his discomfort during a ‘less than politically correct play’, and aware of his own ‘awkwardness as a spectator’, a selfconsciousness that other spectators reported and associated with the enclosed, ‘tomb-like’ space.68 Asked to describe the playhouse in three words, Olivia (The Changeling) chose ‘intimate, atmospheric, closeted’ – and added ‘it’s like you’ll be shut into this different world’.69 Spectators at these two revenge tragedies found the fictional worlds unsettling: Ferdinand’s mania, the death of the Duchess and her children (Malfi), the obsession with virginity and the bloody murders (The Changeling) were especially troubling. But the disturbing elements were also alarmingly proximate in the intimate space, and displayed in candle-lit conditions that every respondent judged beautiful or enchanting. For some in the audience, this combination of historicity, fictionality, intimacy and lush material reality (the clothes, the candles, the smells, the music) was disconcerting. Liz Schafer observed that the playhouse enabled Dromgoole to tell the story of the Duchess’s punishment ‘with excruciating precision’, and produce a ‘slow-moving snuff movie’ in which those in the front rows witnessed the final scenes of carnage in ‘pornographic close-up’. ‘Is it entertainment/high art/deliciously Jacobean to have a ringside seat at a realistic enactment of a woman being executed?’ she asked.70 Schafer’s question gets to the heart of the playhouse’s engagement with, and challenge to, the expected effects of historical recreation, especially given the precedent of the Globe. Much as the outside space strives to avoid a thoughtless nostalgicism, it undoubtedly benefits from an urge on the part of its audience to make a connection, en masse, with a romanticized past. The Globe’s first artistic director, Mark Rylance, expressed his hope that audiences would ‘meet

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Shakespeare in this space’, and the postmodern craze for heritage experience has helped make the amphitheatre a success.71 The playhouse creates very different effects. It is a much less democratic space – as Bridget Escolme has noted, it promotes a ‘divided, stratified intimacy, not a cheery communality’ – and both performers and audience members have remarked on its insistent hierarchies (as we will see in subsequent chapters).72 It is also somewhat confrontational: watching the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, spectators are thrust towards a historical past that appears shot through with questionable values, or outright horrors. Contemporary audience members are trained nowadays to appreciate performances that collapse the distinction between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and celebrate the humane sameness that is perceived to exist in the historical past, an aim with which the academic community understandably takes issue.73 Spectators in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse experience an environment that challenges this model, but contemporary culture lacks a language to articulate the feeling of dislocation that comes from the intrusion of a disturbing past into the present day. As Fred Davis observed in his ‘sociology of nostalgia’, there exists in English no antonym for the word ‘nostalgia’, no term ‘to describe feelings of rejection or revulsion toward one’s past or some segment thereof’.74 The closest equivalent is to be found in performance theory: the alienation or estrangement effect described in the 1930s by Bertolt Brecht by which an audience is induced to feel conscious antipathy towards characters and actions on stage.75 Kasper Holten, director of the first season’s opera L’Ormindo, used the term ‘post-Brechtian’ to describe the way the playhouse collapses the distance between spectators and performers, but the SWP is post-Brechtian in a more straightforwardly Brechtian way: as much as it is a ‘time machine’ we can use to travel back to a past era, it is an alienation engine that compels us to question the world we find there.76 This chapter has considered the way the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse presents the works of the early modern dramatic canon in a context of established tropes about Jacobean

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sensationalism. It has focussed on the dark and sometimes challenging tragedies of the era because those plays constituted the majority of the Renaissance dramatic works programmed in the first two seasons, and the provocative themes of the plays – sexual obsession, violence, a preoccupation with female chastity – have come to determine the keynotes of the playhouse as a venue for early modern drama. The four late Shakespeare plays staged in the 2015–16 season contributed to this process of identity-shaping even as they pushed at the edges of a tragic shape: Dromgoole’s Pericles (not a play written with a specific view to indoor performance) opened with the revelation of Antiochus’s sexual abuse of his daughter staged in near-darkness, the performers picked out by single candles – two fixed in punishing manacles to the wrists of Antiochus’s daughter; Sam Yates’s Cymbeline used the domestic dimensions of the playhouse to good effect when staging Iachimo’s invasion of the sleeping Innogen’s bedchamber; Michael Longhurst’s The Winter’s Tale was dominated by the outlandish cruelty of Leontes’ treatment of Hermione in the first three acts of the play. All three productions ultimately took much happier paths, comprising with Dromgoole’s The Tempest a season of Shakespeare tragicomedy in which Jacobean gruesomeness mingled with the sense of renewal characteristic of the genre. But with The Winter’s Tale in particular, the SWP showed off Shakespeare’s engagement with the sensational drama of his Jacobean contemporaries. The play appeared in the candle-lit space as a Jacobean sex-tragedy that is harvested before it is fully ripe, and then placed in the Bohemian sunshine to sweeten – a rich mixture of punishment, suffering, repentance and renewal, but not one that has had all trace of pain removed: we can never forget the death of Mamillius, the viciousness of Leontes’ punishment of Hermione, his exposure of the infant Perdita and his abuse of Paulina. An examination of the work of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse through the lens of Jacobean horror is unquestionably partial, and there is much more to be said about the playhouse’s hospitality to

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comedy, satire and romance. But as we consider the responses of the first generation of actors and audience members to experience the space, it will become clear that these preconceptions about the period have helped to determine the way the playhouse is understood by theatregoers and theatre professionals alike.

PART TWO

Playhouse at Work

3 ‘Fair Lightsome Lodgings’: Initial Responses to the Space

In Part Two, we move our attention to the observations and reflections of the creative artists and audience members who experienced the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in its first three seasons. In a sense the mode of the book shifts, too. If Part One considered the cultural and intellectual work performed by the SWP in today’s London, the following chapters take an approach that is closer to reportage as I attempt to capture the experience of performing and spectating in the indoor playhouse. This is not to deny the processes of interpretation that have gone into my selection, presentation and comparison of different individuals’ views, expressed on various occasions across a two-year period, but my aim has been to produce a user-led oral history of the playhouse’s early years. However, the book’s argument remains consistent: readers will discover throughout these accounts that the SWP is characterized by a multiplicity of spectator and performer responses, a variety with implications for the ways in which the early modern dramas staged in it are understood. The artists who first worked in the space reacted strongly to the ornate interior, and found the pressingly intimate presence of the audience a

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provocative challenge to modern naturalist acting techniques. The requirement to act ‘in the round’ and give due attention to audience in front, beside, below, above and sometimes behind the stage prompted new ways of thinking about the familiar characters of the early modern dramatic canon; the radically non-unitary spectator responses encouraged performers to consider their characters’ moral reputations more critically and more flexibly than in a ‘conventional’ theatre. We captured the responses in a series of interviews with actors, directors, a designer, audience members and Globe front-of-house staff between January 2014 and April 2016. We spoke to audience members in the minutes after the show, as they left the theatre, and to actors towards the end of the run of their productions. The members of the Globe research team conducting the interviews had a list of questions (see Appendix 2), but the interviews were intended to run as conversations, with respondents encouraged to talk around and beyond the prompts about the way they understood the space and the work. We asked actors about the specific skills that the playhouse demands in terms of technical performance, and about how the space differs from or resembles the Globe or more conventional playing spaces. They reflected on performing under candlelight, and thought about the role played by the audience. All the respondents offered a series of more subjective remarks about performance, the relationship between playhouse and performer, and the complex ways the audience makes itself known in the space. ‘Subjectivity’ is the prevailing mood here: artists and spectators responded as individuals, and I have kept to a minimum any attempt to make singular observations stand for the opinions of a group. As a collective account, however, the following testimonies tell a story about the way Globe artists developed a specifically ‘playhouse performativity’ and discovered the destabilising potential of their new indoor space. I have brought together the material in four themed chapters that explore the nature of the space itself; the specific skills required of actors to perform in the playhouse; the impact

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of the candlelight; and the significance of the SWP audience. Inevitably the topics overlap with one another: as actors discussed the nature of the architecture, they talked about the ways in which their performances responded to it; the candles were an ever-present aspect of discussion about the playhouse; the voices of the audience are heard throughout, and not just in Chapter 6. But my aim has been to put in conversation with one another respondents who may have been interviewed months or years apart: to create a retrospective round-table discussion among as many of the playhouse’s first users as possible. In her work on modern Globe audiences, Penelope Woods expanded the range of voices ‘whose opinions constitute discourse around performance’ to encompass actors and audience members, and this is an approach I follow here.1 Enabling artists to account for their own experience forms the basis of much of Shakespeare’s Globe’s research methodology. The end of season research interview, in which Globe cast members are urged to discuss their own work as experimental performers in the outside amphitheatre, has become an established part of an actor’s time with the organization, and the interviews form a collection which goes back well over a decade (many actors have given interviews year after year, charting their changing relationship with the Globe). The Globe’s unusually thorough habits of institutional autobiography have informed my methods in this book, and in my focus on personal remarks, observations and memories I am following Paul Menzer’s advice in his Anecdotal Shakespeare to consider the ‘abiding concerns of actors and audiences’ when telling the story of the production of Renaissance drama. As he puts it, ‘the life of the live lives in its recollection’, and the lived experience of the SWP’s performers and spectators gives us crucial insight into the way the playhouse casts new light on the indoor dramas of the early seventeenth century. For Menzer, the modern theatrical anecdote is a ‘brief, capricious, ribald, trivial, pungent, piquant, witty, gossamer genre’ with just ‘enough hold on the facts to avoid turning into a baldfaced fable’.2 Most of the anecdotes in these pages are brief,

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some are piquant and witty, and a few are probably trivial, but the majority are distinguished from Menzer’s definition of backstage gossip and nudge closer to the original meaning of the word, ‘things unpublished’: what follows is the secret history of the first years of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, told by the people who made it.3 It is not, however, an unvarnished story. Oral history techniques generate copious quantities of raw material – gigabytes of audio data and transcriptions totalling many thousands of words. This book has taken on the contours of an archival investigation, in an archive that we at the Globe have built ourselves. And archival study requires the writer to make many choices about how the material at hand is to be used. As the French historian Arlette Farge wrote of her labours in the Parisian police archive, wading through an undigested sea of records can feel ‘excessive and overwhelming, like a spring tide, an avalanche, or a flood’.4 Social historian Carolyn Steedman explains that archival material must be ‘gutted’ by scholars to make it speak: it needs to be ‘read, and used, and narrativized’.5 The proprietorial language of traditional archival scholarship feels the wrong fit for a project built from the insights of living people given freely and in good faith. Gutting and cutting their words risks misrepresenting their views, and compelling individuals with disparate opinions to take a share in shoring up arguments with which they might not agree. So although I have had to make my material speak by cutting and arranging, I have tried as much as I can to allow the opinions of my subjects to shape the argument and narrative of the next four chapters. I am not naïve enough to think that it is possible to discount my ‘outer frame’ as Susan Bennett terms it6 – those personal, social and professional factors likely to determine the ways I interpret the voices and actions of others – but I have generally resisted the temptation to decipher or gloss (I will not tell you what I think my subjects are ‘really’ saying, and nor will I translate their words into the language of theoretical scholarship). Mostly this is because my respondents do a much better job than me of explaining what they think,

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but it is also because my own position as an embedded scholar, employed by the organization I study, makes a protestation of disinterested objectivity unconvincing. I worked on several of the plays discussed here, providing dramaturgical support to the directors, delivering lectures to the casts, and writing essays for the programmes. Although I have not set out to analyse the productions or the performances from the perspective of theatrical criticism, it would also be inappropriate to tug the testimonies of my respondents in a predetermined direction. For the next four chapters, then, it is the artists and audience members who are as far as possible in the driving seat. The result is partly a users’ guide to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and partly a conversation that connects contemporary theatre practice and theatre history. The parallels between the present and the past are suggestive rather than absolute: by recording the discoveries made by modern artists and audience members in a space built to echo the indoor playhouses of Jacobean London, we can expect to find new ways to think about the early modern dramatic canon, and discover new questions to ask about performance and spectatorship in a small candle-lit theatre. Farah Karim-Cooper has written about the care that must be taken in the use of modern actors’ testimony to shed light on the history of theatre practice. We ‘should not rely on the spatial instincts of current actors/directors alone’ when trying to recover how early modern actors might have responded to a theatrical space, she cautions. It is axiomatic that the choices made by today’s artists arise out of a wholly modern approach to theatricality. But the process of (re)discovery undertaken by an artistic community in a reconstructed or archetypal theatrical space offers an invaluable opportunity to ‘unlock hidden potentials for interpretation of the plays performed’ in such a space, and to think in new ways about the effect of architecture, décor and lighting on the experience of performance and playgoing.7 We begin with an investigation of the way in which performers and directors responded to the sheer fact of the room – the given architectural circumstances of the Sam

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Wanamaker Playhouse. Actors and audience members noticed the strong identity of the playhouse: its resemblance to an elite early modern domestic interior, and its striking beauty. They were taken aback by its unfamiliar proportions (lofty galleries, compressed stage, small tiring house) and excited by the prospect of performance in the pit, galleries and access corridors.

Feeling at home Few of us live in galleried candlelit halls, but many artists noted the domestic quality of the playhouse. ‘It feels’, said James Garnon (the Cardinal in Malfi), ‘like such a room’. Many modern actors, especially those schooled in studiosized performance, are inclined to regard their playing spaces as human-scale ‘rooms’ rather than public auditoria, but the domesticity of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was articulated in specific ways. For Max Bennett (Giovanni in ’Tis Pity), the homeliness was both familial (‘it’s like someone’s living room’) and intimate, even sensual (‘it feels like a bedroom’). Philip Cumbus (Vasquez), appearing in the second season production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, appreciated that the dents and scratches the SWP had received with use made it look ‘more like a normal room now’; he had felt less comfortable in a ‘pristine’ piece of architectural extravagance. Cumbus’s preference for a lived-in, homely aesthetic was echoed by other respondents who interpreted performance and spectatorship in the SWP as a series of hospitable transactions, in which the actors performed for the audience in a domestic setting that was, flexibly, the actors’ or the spectators’ natural habitat. Trevor Fox (Pisanio in Cymbeline and Stephano in The Tempest) described it as ‘like putting on a show in somebody’s bedroom’, and Tika Peucelle (Helen in Cymbeline and Iris in The Tempest) regarded the ‘atmosphere of closeness’ as a consequence of the architecture and candlelight that

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attracted spectators like an invitation into someone’s home. The resulting experience was held to be communitarian (Fox: ‘you do feel part of a community’) and egalitarian. As Hattie Morahan (Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling) said, ‘we’re all in the same room’, a ‘democratic’ environment in which the shared lighting played a significant role. Director of The Knight of the Burning Pestle Adele Thomas praised what she described as ‘a kind of democracy of lighting’ which created a ‘warm, inviting, welcoming … state that everyone can be seen in’. For the actors, much of the pleasure of performing in the SWP derived from this appealing sense of homeliness. It was pleasant to work in a space in which disparate individuals in the audience were encouraged to make themselves at home and form a community of engaged listeners and watchers. As we will see in Chapter 6, this commonality was often welcomed by audience members in the high-profile seats who were able to benefit from it – ‘you’re not so much of an onlooker’, said one audience member, ‘you almost become part of the play’8 – but it was a decidedly mixed blessing during distressing scenes in the darker productions, when spectators could feel uncomfortably complicit in the activities of the characters on stage (audience members in lower-profile seats and standing positions at the rear of the upper gallery felt a good deal less involved in the domestic intimacy in the first place). The size and style of the SWP lent interior scenes a sense of verisimilitude that was reported by performers and spectators. Early modern plays concern themselves more often than not with the doings of the social elite, and the playhouse’s carvings, gilded woodwork and candelabra provided a plausible setting for dramas set in royal courts, aristocratic mansions and wealthy homes: when Alex Waldmann’s Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi referred to ‘fair lightsome lodgings’ (1.2.333), he gestured to the branches of candles and the painted walls with the same ironic awareness of environment that a Globe performer might invoke real-life clouds or rain. Sam Yates, director of Cymbeline, observed that the effectiveness of the play’s bedroom scene – in which Innogen, asleep in bed, has

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her privacy penetrated by the villainous Iachimo, who has concealed himself within a trunk – was considerably enhanced by the domestic scale of the playing space, and by the apparent congruence of Iachimo’s descriptive itemization of Innogen’s room with the actual appearance of the playhouse. Iachimo, after his emergence from the trunk, stands upon the stage ‘to note the chamber’ and ‘write it all down’, capturing the details of the window, the décor and the furniture to subsequently relay to Innogen’s absent husband Posthumus and make him believe that his wife has been seduced (2.2.24). Whether Iachimo’s subsequent description of the bedchamber – ‘hang’d with tapestry of silk and silver, the story/Proud Cleopatra’, ‘the chimney-piece/Chaste Dian bathing’, ‘[t]he roof o’th’chamber / With golden cherubins … fretted’ (2.4.68–70, 81–2, 87–8) – bore close resemblance to the Blackfriars playhouse, the likely location for the play’s first staging, is less important than the fact that Shakespeare’s Blackfriars (like the SWP) aspired to the sort of high-end interior decoration that Iachimo describes. The moment is therefore one which blurs the distinction between fictive and real, an engrossing effect made more so by the fact that Iachimo notes down the (potentially verisimilar) details of Innogen’s bedchamber and recites them from the same stage moments later in 2.4, when the action of the play has shifted from the ancient British court to imperial Rome. The decorative features that he has noted, or their equivalents, are still very much in view, bringing Innogen’s bedroom to view before the eyes of the enraged and jealous Posthumus. The bedroom scene made a particular impact in Yates’s Cymbeline because it featured the production’s only use of domestic furniture. His was an especially fleet and stripped-back staging, without tables, chairs or extraneous properties other than troughs of candles to provide additional illumination. The bed and trunk – both of course essential to the plot and impossible to do without – were the only items of set to be manoeuvred into view by stage management, a cumbersome process compared to the speedy pace of other scene-changes that drew attention to the objects’ significance and imbued

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the start of the scene with a sense of anticipation. As Dominic Dromgoole pointed out after the first season (interview 1), ‘domestic objects take on a life [in the SWP] that they don’t have in the Globe’ – while on the bigger stage a chair ‘gets lost’, the same chair on the indoor stage is ‘a resonant object’, an unavoidably material thing whose presence contributes to the mis en scène whether anyone wants it to or not. If the SWP as a bare architectural space has a quality of domestic interiority, any additional furniture on the stage simply reinforces that association. The ‘homeliness’ observed by actors who experienced the space in productions such as Malfi, ’Tis Pity and Changeling – plays that are very far from thematically ‘homely’ in and of themselves – arose out of the SWP’s insistent interiority. Verisimilar interiority became something to work against when a scene was imagined to take place in the open air. Dromgoole recalled a ‘crucial moment’ in Malfi in which he struggled to establish a convincing sense of place: the final scene of Act 3, after the Duchess and her family have been banished, and their party is overtaken on the road by Bosola and Ferdinand’s henchmen: duchess Banished Ancona? antonio Yes. You see what power Lightens in great men’s breath. duchess Is all our train Shrunk to this poor remainder? antonio These poor men, Which have got little in your service, vow To take your fortune; but your wiser buntings, Now they are fledged, are gone. duchess They have done wisely. …

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cariola Look, madam, what a troop of armed men Make toward us! (3.5.1–6, 92–3) Despite the effect of costuming and the provision of two baggage-toting company members to swell the Duchess’s train (stage managers Olly Clarke and Adam Moore), Dromgoole felt that it was still a struggle to visualize them in an appropriately distressed state, ‘slightly bedraggled in a field’. In this scene the SWP’s candles and elite-domestic architecture were regarded as a drag on dramatic verisimilitude, which here seemed to require spectators to imagine a muddy path some way out of Ancona. Whether audiences notice or worry about these moments of incongruity is another matter. Patrons attending a Research in Action workshop the following year on the staging of exterior scenes indoors (see Chapter 7) were untroubled by instances such as these, and expressed themselves confident that a dramatist would produce whatever sense of location was needed through language. Nor was it wholly clear that the SWP’s design was necessarily a hindrance to creating a strong sense of the outside world: one upper-gallery spectator at the Research in Action workshop observed that the candelabra hanging below her eye-line reminded her of the tree canopy of a forest. The SWP’s striking similarity to an early modern domestic interior may not have a corresponding negative impact on its ability to host fictions set in quite different environments. The SWP’s assertive spatial identity was a novelty for other directors, especially those accustomed to the use of aesthetic set design as part of their creative approach. Michael Longhurst, director of ’Tis Pity and the following season’s The Winter’s Tale, was tempted initially to ‘push against’ the space and resist its ‘predetermined’ appearance. As he put it, having to ‘concede the aesthetic of the world’ was for him an unusual compromise, a sentiment shared by director Caroline Steinbeis (The Broken Heart) who also spoke of her efforts

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to ‘push against’ the SWP’s given architectural circumstances. Both directors came to the conclusion that ‘the space teaches you how it wants to be used’ (Steinbeis), although they made their peace with it in different ways. Longhurst’s initial plan for ’Tis Pity had entailed a striking design of reflective golden tiles on the SWP stage, but he subsequently decided that the existing architecture made enough of a thematic statement. Longhurst’s technique, in other words, was to accept the interior of the SWP as if it were the design for his show (‘having the architecture working with the play was amazing’, he admitted of his experience with ’Tis Pity), a decision that worked well with the darkness and claustrophobia of Ford’s tragedy and the first three acts of The Winter’s Tale. Act 4 of Shakespeare’s romance, set outdoors during a sheep-shearing festival, posed more of a challenge, and Longhurst’s designer Richard Kent chose to use a greater range of design elements to convey rural Bohemia, including vines, suspended ropes of leafy bunting and a hanging wicker-work lantern. Caroline Steinbeis was concerned with the physical potential of the playhouse structure as a whole, and came to The Broken Heart ‘with a real hunger to find different ways of using the space’, including extensive performance in the wrap-around access corridors and upper gallery. Her approach was informed by postmodern theatre practices that, reacting against the conventionalities of naturalist theatre, encourage an unpredictable and provocative relationship between performer and spectator. The SWP, built to a design predating the large proscenium arch venues against which the theatrical avant-garde rebelled, proved unyielding, and Steinbeis changed her mind: having planned to stage an early exchange between Orgilus and Tecnicus (1.3.1–33) as a swift-moving dialogue in the lower wrap-around access corridor, she relocated it to the main stage and pit when it became clear that the acoustics of the building did not support the use of the corridor as a significant performance space. Previous directors such as Adele Thomas (Pestle) had used the space as a location for energetic physical comedy rather than plot-heavy scenes. As key narrative points were revealed in this

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important exchange, Steinbeis felt she had no choice but to give in to the physical and acoustic constraints of the building. ‘I have a very ambivalent feeling about it,’ she said, ‘because in many ways I felt “told” by the space’. She found that in this instance, artistic authority was vested in the space rather than the director (although she successfully used the access corridor and the upper-gallery for other scenes), an unusual situation for a modern director in a purpose-built theatre. Steinbeis’s conclusion after her tussles with the SWP was that a director in the space ‘needs to accept that [she is] making [work] site-specifically’ – a mode of modern theatre practice that requires a different set of skills to drama produced in conventional venues. The ‘site’ presents itself to directors as a lofty candlelit hall, naturally suited to the courtly tragedies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama. A challenge for modern directors is to accept that the space can also function as a non-verisimilar blank canvas. It is one of the paradoxes of the SWP that its architecture contributes to the world of the play when the aesthetics of the fictional space and the performance space overlap (for example in scenes set in palaces, homes, chapels and law-courts), but has the simultaneous capacity to render itself aesthetically inconsequential when the drama demands a radically different setting (a forest, a seashore, a battlefield). One imaginative setting was, however, an easy leap for actors in the SWP: the shipboard scenes of the third season’s Pericles and The Tempest worked surprisingly well in the space, the wooden interior and arrangement of stage, lower gallery balustrade and musicians’ gallery resembling a deck, ship’s rail and poop.

The impact of beauty The SWP’s evocative appearance had early reviewers reaching for bejewelled figures of speech: it was an ‘exquisite little jewel box or dolls’ house’, as ‘bright and trim as a casket’.9 Spectators,

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too, were struck by the beauty, and part of the constellation of sensations that SWP performers learnt to expect at the start of a show was an awareness that the audience was still acclimatizing to the richness of the room. Edward Peel (Florio in ’Tis Pity) was enthusiastic: ‘the theatre captivates them before we even start the play’, he said, praising ‘the wood, the painting [and] the music’ for creating a ‘joyful space’. Eileen Atkins was similarly enamoured, suggesting that the playhouse ‘mak[es] people feel good just sitting there’. She detected a feeling of contentment that arose not from physical ease (‘I know that it’s not as comfortable at the back’), but from being in a bewitchingly pretty room. But Max Bennett acknowledged the potentially competing tug of the playhouse’s physical charms. As Giovanni in ’Tis Pity, he and Michael Gould’s Friar opened the show, and Bennett was aware that a portion of the audience were still ‘just looking at how beautiful the theatre is’. His fellow company member Alice Haig (Philotis) said something similar, remarking that the novelty of the playhouse ensured that some patrons found the building as much of an attraction as the production. For some performers and spectators, the bijou splendour of the playhouse occasioned a tentativeness of response. Matt Doherty sensed that audience members felt the need to be on their best behaviour, to ‘appreciate’ rather than ‘participate’ (‘I think it’s a privilege to come here’ said one spectator at The Duchess of Malfi).10 Doherty’s observation probably says as much about the nature of the productions with which he was involved (the tragedies The Changeling and Julius Caesar, staged indoors as part of the Outside In series), but may have a bearing on other performers’ experience of certain audience members’ reluctance to engage in direct address (see Chapter 6). The very things that constituted the SWP’s beauty – the architecture, the candles, the intimate scale – were inhibiting factors for actors used to an unrestricted physicality. Fear of injury, to body or playhouse, was a restraining force. Alex Waldmann described the space as a ‘living health hazard: it’s all corners and edges and you feel like it’s an accident waiting to happen’. The wooden stage was slippery, especially when

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slicked with candle wax or the quantities of stage blood favoured by directors Longhurst and Dromgoole in ’Tis Pity and The Changeling. Most actors with fast entrances experienced at least one alarming skid or a full-on tumble. Philip Cumbus was surprised to find himself ‘not as sure-footed as I feel on the Globe [stage]’. Pearce Quigley (Lollio in The Changeling), too, ‘walk[ed] gingerly’. For Quigley, remaining alert to the potential hazards was ‘constraining’, leading him to conclude ‘it’s a difficult space to play: it’s like there’s a cover on it’. Playing a scene on the empty Globe stage as a warm-up before performing in the SWP, as Quigley liked to do with his Changeling scene partner Phil Whitchurch (Alibius), felt ‘like taking the lid off’: a release of energy and freedom in advance of the more pressurized environment of the playhouse. But if artists acknowledged that the SWP was a ‘more controlled environment’ than the open-air Globe (a phrase used by both James Garnon and Sarah MacRae), part of the responsibility lay with an artistic programming policy in the first two years that favoured the taut tragedies and thrillers for which Jacobean drama – loosely defined – is so well known (as discussed in Chapter 2). Given those plays’ thematic darkness and irresistible suitability for performance in shadowy gloom, directors such as Dromgoole, Longhurst and Steinbeis chose to work with the lighting capabilities of the SWP in an ambitious and mostly modern way. Lighting state changes, blackouts, near-blackouts and hand-held candles abounded, striking effects to be sure but also moments of theatrical stage management that required the concerted efforts of the director, the designer, actors and crew. Raising or lowering the candelabra was a complex process that involved coordinated action by at least two members of the stage management team, who worked the pulley system in the tiring house (the pulleys are not counterweighted, meaning the stage crew must take the full weight of the candelabra, and need to practise to ensure a smooth and well-timed operation). The process of snuffing and relighting the candles therefore became a choreographed routine performed by cast and crew. Actors

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working on a dimly-lit stage with hand-held candelabra had to take care not to blow out their candles, or spill hot wax onto their own or other people’s bodies. Philip Cumbus spoke with feeling about the hazards of hand-held candles, and the drips of wax that provided a ‘little burn that keeps you on your toes’. These are unusual considerations for theatre artists, and bred a degree of physical caution in the companies who first experienced the SWP. Dromgoole was sufficiently sympathetic to his first cast’s concerns to direct in Malfi a show that was reassuringly stable, and more ‘well-boiled’ than he would usually countenance (‘possibly I over-boiled it’). As he put it regarding his and his company’s challenge with Malfi, the opening production in the SWP, ‘you’re walking into a territory that no one’s walked into before and so you need to be very secure about how you walk’ (interview 1). Directors who felt less beholden to the candles were able to respond to the space with a greater degree of physical ease: fewer lighting state changes meant a fleeter production and a more sure-footed company who related to the space in a less deferential way. Adele Thomas realized this with The Knight of the Burning Pestle (the second full-run production in the SWP, and revived at the end of the year as a Christmas show). Deciding that Pestle’s hectic pace ruled out many of the lighting effects trialled successfully in Dromgoole’s Malfi, and instinctively wary of staging a comedy in a dimly lit room, she kept the candelabra lit and stationary for most of the production and focused instead on her cast’s dynamic relationship with the room: We spent a lot of time workshopping the ‘how’? How can we jump up there? How can we be up there and in less than a minute be down there? How can we fall off that? How can we roll off that? Where can we go? How can we smash through the pristine beauty of that space? She encouraged her actors to experiment with unusual entrances and exits (through the side-stage boxes, into the upper gallery, down from the ceiling trap) and regard the SWP

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as a ‘climbing-frame’, giving the production a physical language of energetic playfulness that suited the meta-theatrical nature of Beaumont’s comedy and, by working against the reverential associations of the space’s candle-lit beauty, encouraged a more relaxed intimacy between spectator and performer.

Verticality Actors on the Globe stage typically characterize the view into the yard as one dominated by a ‘sea’ of faces, the ground-level sweep of hundreds of bodies standing near the stage making more of a visual impact than the benches-full of people seated in the galleries.11 None of the SWP performers interviewed for this book used that metaphor to describe the view of the audience.12 The playhouse, considerably smaller than the outside venue, has a far greater proportion of its total volume crammed with people, and the serried ranks of faces are considerably nearer to the stage. Gemma Arterton (the Duchess in Malfi) observed that ‘there are people at every sort of angle’ in the SWP, a panopticonical space in which performers are under constant surveillance. Pauline McLynn (Nell in Pestle), situated for most of Pestle in the pit, spoke of her impression of ‘people in tiers – layers upon layers of people’, an architectural image echoed by Cymbeline’s Emily Barber (Innogen): the audience appeared as ‘a wall of faces, like a Coliseum’. Jethro Skinner (Grimaldi), in describing the mood of ’Tis Pity’s Parma, characterized it as ‘a busy town on top of itself’ with ‘everyone watching, everyone aware of what’s going on’, a vivid image that drew on the verticality of the playhouse as much as the thematic claustrophobia of the play. The SWP is surprisingly lofty. The faces with which an actor is confronted stretch upwards; audience members loom over the performers (Michael Gould was ‘blown away by the wall of humanity that I was confronted with’ on the first night of ’Tis Pity). Paul Rider captured the challenge of holding an

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audience’s attention when a portion of that audience is directly overhead: ‘the difference [in eye-line angle] between playing to the upper gallery and the pit is quite pronounced. When your character is on stage a lot on his own you feel inclined to share your performance around to everyone, so you do feel like you’re performing at the bottom of a cliff’. Rider, who was speaking primarily about his comic role as Merrythought in Pestle, had a particular challenge in that his part demanded active audience engagement in spoken text and song. His labour of performance was such that he developed a stiff neck from throwing his head back sufficiently far to lock eyes with people in the back rows of the upper gallery. Hattie Morahan, playing Beatrice-Joanna in the much less sunny The Changeling, acknowledged the need to engage with patrons in the upper gallery, but was cautious of her performance appearing self-consciously theatrical if she constantly craned her eyes upwards: ‘if you want to take in the audience, there’s a lot of places to look – you have to glance very high, and occasionally you do think, I don’t want to do too much head wagging to take everyone in’. In this, and in so many other aspects of performance in a historical theatre, contemporary requirements of dramatic naturalism came into conflict with the performance demands imposed by the space itself. Morahan was perceptive about the effect that a wall of very visible faces had on her own conception of BeatriceJoanna’s life within the castle of Alicante. ‘You might have a vision of what kind of room you’re in,’ she said, referring to habits of imaginative environment creation encouraged by modern realist acting techniques, ‘and then you look out and you’ve got fifty faces staring at you.’ Suddenly, the situation is not simply Beatrice-Joanna’s alone, or indeed a matter for the citizens of early modern Alicante: ‘in a moment, you’re going to have to look them in the eye and address them’. The audience in the playhouse becomes part of the action that the actor has expended such energy in bringing to life. ‘Deceptive’ was a keyword in actors’ responses to the architecture of the SWP. The playhouse’s intimate dimensions seemed at first to encourage a casual confidence that

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performance in the space would be straightforward. But Brian Ferguson (Antonio in The Changeling, Orgilus in The Broken Heart) was very conscious that while the room looked cosy from the stage, ‘when you’re up in the gallery it feels like you’re pretty far away’ from the action. Peter Hamilton Dyer (Jasperino in The Changeling, Tecnicus in The Broken Heart) found it ‘much harder to play than [it] looks’: ‘it’s so beautiful, it feels as if it ought to be easy. [But] its proportions are quite oddly balanced. The pit is very deep, plunging off from the front of the stage without actually going back very far.’ Actors had to remain conscious of this plunge-pool of spectators at their feet, even as they acknowledged the audience behind, in front of and above them. The challenging viewing angles from certain positions in the upper gallery caused consternation among playhouse performers. Most expressed concern that some people were missing parts of the story. As Hattie Morahan explained, ‘you want to include everyone, you don’t want people to feel utterly left out’. Actors were particularly sensitive to the potentially restricted view of those sitting or standing in the upper galleries because many of their colleagues and friends had seen shows from those inexpensive positions, and they received direct feedback of the experience. Alex Waldmann discovered that some of the upper gallery audience for Pestle had had a hard time of it: ‘I’ve heard from friends who saw only twenty-five per cent of the action on stage. There are some people who go through the entire show barely able to see Phil [Daniels] or Pauline [McLynn; the citizens George and Nell, positioned for most of the performance in the pit].’ Sarah MacRae (Luce in Pestle and Cariola in Malfi) agreed. The design, she argued, makes it difficult for patrons in the upper galleries, especially for a comic show like Pestle: those audience members miss a lot of the humour, left as they are looking at ‘lots of tops of heads’, and ‘people laughing at things they haven’t seen’ (interview 1). Commenting a year later, after her experience in The Changeling (Isabella) and The Broken Heart (Calantha), MacRae was conscious that

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‘it’s probably our peers who are going to pay for the ten pound tickets, and you want to give them a really good show’ (interview 2). Audience members who saw productions from the standing positions in the upper gallery certainly noticed the disadvantages of their position, although most were philosophical about the trade-off between ticket price and view: ‘I was fully prepared to not see anything’; ‘I’ve never had that much limited space in a theatre before’; ‘it was just really cramped. I mean you couldn’t even stretch your leg. It felt like a prison to me’; ‘I thought I’d feel worse’ were some opinions gathered after a performance of Pestle.13 The worry that upper gallery spectators would see only a parade of ‘tops of heads’, and receive a fraction of the performance, remained constant throughout the SWP’s first three seasons. Jethro Skinner bluntly acknowledged that standees were stuck with both ‘discomfort and a bad view’, and Brian Ferguson admitted that it was easy, in the heat of performance, to forget the third of the audience situated upstairs. Actors and directors came up with an extensive repertoire of performance techniques to mitigate these limitations (see Chapter 4), but artists also came to realize that the SWP was a space in which the architecture worked against the idea of universal unimpeded views. Pillars obscure the sightlines for patrons sitting in the lower gallery, too. The musicians’ gallery is out of sight to those on the rear benches of the lower side-stage boxes. Even the ‘sweet spots’ on the stage – the central third, or ‘runway’ from the middle of the discovery space to down-stage-centre – do not offer a perfect view to everyone. In a performance space in which audience experience is decidedly non-unitary, the ‘favoured’ perspective was not always obtained from traditionally ‘good’ seats. It became apparent that certain ways of using the SWP worked particularly well when experienced from the upper galleries. Flight, for instance, gave performers the opportunity to engage directly with patrons above: descending from the ceiling trap on a wire as Iris in Dromgoole’s Tempest (4.1) enabled Tika Peucelle to look standing patrons square in the face

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(see Plate 10, showing Pippa Nixon as Ariel, for an example of a flying entrance). Dance was another way to positively emphasize the striking verticality of the SWP. Michaela Meazza, movement director for Sam Yates’s Cymbeline, choreographed the final jig so as to be appreciated best from above: the delicacy of the patterns that the dancers traced on the stage floor carried meaning and significance that was, refreshingly, clear only to those in the upper galleries. Meazza had followed the example of the dance masters responsible for elaborate early modern masques, who regarded the intricate geometrical shapes formed by troops of dynamic bodies as an expression of the order and beauty of dance. Even asides or direct audience address could be more effective when directed upwards. Peter Hamilton Dyer suggested that while the lower galleries and the pit seemed the most obvious locations to target audience address, he liked to speak to those in the upper galleries, despite the extra stretch: his logic was that as the pit- and lower gallery-dwellers enjoyed proximity to the stage and a better view, they would not feel left out if not spoken to directly. By contrast, those above felt doubly excluded if an actor on the stage below confined eyecontact and conversation to those seated on the same level. Royal Opera’s Kasper Holten encouraged his performers to do something similar: he asked them to deliberately engage with audiences on the opposite side of the space rather than those who were close at hand. The sense that standing or sitting in the upper reaches of the space offered advantages as well as drawbacks generated a mood of cohesion among some spectators, as we will see in Chapter 6. One conversation between audience members after The Changeling addressed the still-evolving issue of what to term the standing cohort at the playhouse: at the Globe, said one spectator, ‘we’re groundlings and proud of it’. At the SWP, ‘there must be a word for it when you’re a groundling but you’re standing [in the gallery]’. ‘What’s the word we found for ourselves? We’re not groundling but standing up in the gods.’ ‘Standlings.’14

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Making it work on the stage and elsewhere Performing in parts of the SWP other than the main stage generated a mixed response, with some non-standard performance spaces proving popular with actors, while others posed serious difficulties. The musicians’ gallery, used variously as a space for the band, additional audience seating and an upperlevel stage, was an evocative and striking position and gave actors the opportunity to converse eye-to-eye with patrons sitting in the upper gallery. Alex Waldmann as Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi stood between the gallery’s decorative caryatids while he recounted to Paul Rider’s Delio his characterization of the Aragonian brethren and their sister, who appeared on the stage on cue: delio Now, sir, your promise: what’s that Cardinal? I mean his temper. They say he’s a brave fellow – Will play his five thousand crowns at tennis, dance, Court ladies – and one that hath fought single combats. antonio Some such flashes superficially hang upon him, for form. But observe his inward character: he is a melancholy churchman. … delio … What’s his brother? antonio The duke there? A most perverse and turbulent nature. What appears in him mirth is merely outside. … But for their sister, the right noble Duchess, You never fixed your eye on three fair medals Cast in one figure of so different temper. (1.2.69–75, 86–8, 105–7)

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That Waldmann was able to lock eyes with neighbouring spectators above, while the subjects of his confidences went about their business under the glare of the candelabra below, lent a powerful atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue to the start of the play. But if the musicians’ gallery was an ideal place for whispered intelligence, it was not necessarily a position from which to dominate the room. Peter Hamilton Dyer had anticipated that the gallery would offer ‘full command of the theatre’ but it ‘just doesn’t have that weight of place’. Dyer put this down to the proportions of the stage and gallery: positioned on the upper level, an actor is too far above a stage that is not sufficiently deep to allow those positioned below easily to look up. ‘You’re lifted just too far to be able to feel as though you’re in control of the whole house.’ An actor in the musicians’ gallery is also invisible to audience members seated on the rear benches of the lower gallery, whose view is impeded by the overhanging gallery roof. Dennis Herdman got round this architectural hindrance when he appeared on the gallery as the splendidly bedecked Pomponia, princess of Cracovia, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Reaching hopelessly after a departing Rafe (‘Thou kill’st my heart in parting thus away!’, 4.2.71), Herdman leant bodily over the rail, opening up as performance space the ‘dead air’ above the stage. Herdman felt pleasingly connected to the upper reaches of the room. Initially worried that he might feel ‘slightly out of the way’ in the gallery, he ‘realise[d] how many people are upstairs and [felt] like the king of the castle’. While the gallery was felt to offer a playing space that was less authoritative than anticipated, the pit was an unexpectedly pleasing location. Herdman was surprised at how ‘powerful’ the pit felt. Thalissa Teixeira (Diaphanta in The Changeling, Euphrania in The Broken Heart) pointed out that the candelabra do not block an actor’s view from the pit, ensuring that it is one of the few places where a performer can see almost everybody in the room. The actors who enjoyed performance in the pit did not necessarily extend deference

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to audience members seated there too. Teixeira noted that the pit-sitters, arranged at an actor’s feet, were easy targets for sardonic asides: ‘there’s a bit when Diaphanta says “I scorn small fools” [4.1.130] and I always throw it down to the bottom of the pit, because I feel like the small fools would be down there’. Working out how – and if – to apply principles of staging and blocking learnt on the Globe stage to the SWP occupied many performers. Philip Cumbus regarded the energy of a playhouse performance as a boiled down or refined version of Globe performativity, a view shared by Trevor Fox (the SWP is ‘different in size, but similar in geography’ to the Globe) and James Garnon (‘it’s the same game, just on a different scale’). Michael Gould observed that ‘the diagonal principle still works in the same way that it works in the outdoor space’, referring to the technique of sharply-angled blocking that works well on a thrust stage, but found that unlike in the Globe, he was conscious of the physical space his body occupied. He worried that he might pose a ‘bulky hazard’ in crowded moments; while scenes with two or three performers could afford to be ‘fluid’ and ‘look[ed] after themselves’, it was all too easy to create major sightline blockages for patrons sitting in the side-stage boxes when the stage was full. Crowd scenes were a constant headache: Trevor Fox was amazed that they managed to fit ‘twelve or fourteen people on that stage’ for the final scene of Cymbeline, although Sarah MacRae confessed that The Broken Heart company struggled with the logistics of the overpopulated court scenes. ‘Where are we going to put everybody?’ she asked (interview 2). The size of the SWP stage – at 6.3 metres wide by 4.5 metres deep (20 feet by 15 feet), smaller by some measure than the Blackfriars, which was constructed within a shell some 14 metres (46 feet) wide – was an issue, especially for productions of plays originally associated with the Blackfriars. Ford’s The Broken Heart (Blackfriars, late 1620s or early 1630s) features a number of sequences in which asides or exchanges out of the hearing of others on stage are a crucial part of the stage action (for instance Orgilus’s commentary on Prophilus’s

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and Euphrania’s courtship, 1.3.50–102; and 5.2.13–19, the revelations to Calantha of the series of deaths with which the play culminates). Sarah MacRae and Thalissa Teixeira noted that these moments were a challenge to stage in a plausible way in the SWP, where the people on the stage appeared to occupy the same notional space and there was a finite number of ways to denote that a certain group was otherwise occupied and unaware of the conversation of another group (see Chapter 7 for more on the staging of asides). MacRae and Teixera compared their difficulty with The Broken Heart to the more successful ‘fast cutting’ between short aside and main dialogue in The Changeling, which was written for the smaller Cockpit theatre in 1622. Alsemero’s and Beatrice-Joanna’s snappy asides in 1.1 (‘He means to feast me, and poisons me beforehand’ (211); ‘Not this serpent gone yet?’ (229)), and those of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores in 2.1, are examples of the smooth incorporation of short ‘aside’ material and more public speech. It may be the case that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley deliberately avoided ponderous asides in the full knowledge that a smaller stage made such moments difficult to realize. The first artists to work in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse had a range of immediate responses, many of them dominated by the architecture and aesthetics of the space. While for some the layout, look and feel of the SWP associated it with the Globe, for other performers the indoor theatre’s intimate dimensions demanded a wholly new response. The SWP’s strong visual identity as an elite early modern interior, and its vertical galleries from which audience members watched the action below, enhanced a mood of claustrophobia suitable to the darker tragedies. But those same design features also posed challenges, not least to modern naturalistic acting techniques (as Hattie Morahan found, throwing back one’s head to involve the patrons sitting directly above might have satisfied their desire to engage the performer in eye-contact, but made it harder for that actor to deliver a plausibly ‘realistic’ performance). Directors and performers were surprised by the insistent (even wilful) identity of the playhouse, and responded to its architectural determinism

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with a directorial approach drawn from traditions of site-specific theatre, in which the nature and aesthetics of a space help to shape the processes of artistic creation. But what else did the new playhouse demand in terms of theatrical technique and craft? The labour of performance in the SWP is the subject of the next chapter.

4 ‘Full and Significant Action’: Technique and Craft

Designer Jonathan Fensom recalled a moment that captured for him the unselfconscious theatricality of performance in the SWP. In Dominic Dromgoole’s third season production of Shakespeare’s Pericles the hero, asleep aboard a ship, is visited by the goddess Diana who descends from above amid eerie music. As Fensom describes it, ‘he wakes up and sees Diana. You’ve got a member of the band with a wine glass making this sound, you see this woman hanging on a wire and you are transported somewhere else – and yet there’s no electric light, no artificial sound, no help. But we can create something that is ethereal’. Surely, said Fensom, ‘that’s what acting should be’: an unmediated yet magical stimulation of the audience’s senses. This chapter explores the various ways in which theatre artists used their voices, bodies and gestural range to best effect in the indoor playhouse, and reveals the techniques they developed to connect with members of the audience sitting or standing in hard-to-reach positions. The chapter also considers the experiences of artists involved in the ‘Outside In’ seasons of 2014 and 2015, during which Globe summer shows were decanted into the SWP for one or two performances. Dominic

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Dromgoole’s Julius Caesar (2014) and Measure for Measure (2015), along with Jonathan Munby’s Antony and Cleopatra (2014), Blanche McIntyre’s As You Like It (2015), Munby’s The Merchant of Venice (2015) and James Dacre’s touring King John (2015) received a small number of public showings. The companies were granted minimal rehearsal time to re-block the show, in an attempt to replicate the flexible performance practices of early modern theatre companies who worked in a variety of purpose-built and multi-purpose spaces. The result, according to Dromgoole, was the ‘discovery of another way of playing’ the SWP, and a realization that ‘form governs insight’: the different circumstances of SWP performance allowed a ‘fresh collection of insights into character and dynamics’.

Voice Eileen Atkins was enthusiastic about the acoustic of the SWP, and briskly unsympathetic to potential complaints: ‘anybody who has a problem in that theatre vocally should go to voice lessons’ was her conclusion. Many actors agreed with her. Noma Dumezweni (Hippolita in ’Tis Pity) found the acoustic ‘a joy – you can whisper and you will be heard’. Stefano Braschi (Soranzo in ’Tis Pity) thought that the SWP ‘favours the actor’ and put it down to the young oak, which he regarded as a good reflector of sound (something also noted by Atkins). Dennis Herdman appreciated the vocal range that the SWP seemed to support, from room-filling cries to an intimate murmur: ‘it feels like it can take a bellow, and it can withstand a whisper’. The space was happiest, however, as a ‘talking room’ (a phrase used by Dominic Dromgoole as remembered by Peter Hamilton Dyer). Dromgoole regarded the ‘ease of language’ as the ‘real achievement of the space’. ‘In Malfi’, he said, ‘the language just sang, and so many details were just going pop, pop, pop through the evening, which made for a very rich overall experience’ (interview 1).

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Eileen Atkins regarded the clear acoustic of the space as a key element in this linguistic clarity. ‘Everyone told me they heard every word, and there’s an awful lot to be said for hearing: people don’t hear Shakespeare or Webster or these classical plays, and they think they don’t understand because they’ve missed some words.’ The SWP’s crisp acoustic was particularly noticeable during performances of shows directed for the Globe and brought temporarily inside as part of the ‘Outside In’ series. In Dromgoole’s Julius Caesar, wit and wordplay that had been somewhat bleached out in the Globe came into sudden focus. Every word was ringingly audible, not least Antony’s repeated invocation of Brutus’s name during his speech to the citizens of Rome after Caesar’s assassination. The scene’s key sentence emerged as Antony’s rallying cry that judgement is ‘fled to brutish beasts / And men have lost their reason’ (3.2.105–6, emphasis added). It was a cunning play on his antagonist’s name, and when a few moments later Antony admitted that he is ‘no orator, as Brutus is’ (210), his tactical self-deprecation appeared as an even more outrageous piece of mob-management than it had been in the Globe. The sudden move from a large open-air venue to what is in effect a chamber theatre forced actors involved in the Outside In productions to rapidly adapt their performances. The first thing director Jonathan Munby noticed when he watched the cast of Antony and Cleopatra perform in the SWP for the first time was ‘how loud it all felt in the intimacy of the indoor playhouse. It took several scenes for the actors to readjust to the new space. They were used to playing to 1,500 people in the Globe, and their vocal energy matched. What they needed to do instantly was turn the volume down’. Performances had to be adjusted in other ways: ‘certain acting choices also felt too loud and demonstrative for the new space, and needed to be reined in: playing the SWP is like acting in close up’. Actors needed to find, concluded Munby, a ‘new register of performance’ in order to play the space, a process he termed ‘recalibration’.1

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The playhouse’s special hospitality to language had some unexpected effects. As Dromgoole pointed out, modern theatregoers are not accustomed to this degree of linguistic intensity. Echoing Eileen Atkins’s observation that many modern theatregoers simply do not hear much of the dialogue, he argued that audiences watching an early modern play in a traditional proscenium arch space ‘lose fifty per cent of the evening’, and are obliged to clutch at the occasional ‘big moments’ of clarity. Those moments then light the way through the rest of the play: ‘you sort of flush the understanding of those big moments into all the surrounding area and you sort of think you’ve understood the evening’. He suggested the SWP, by contrast, is ‘deranging’ for an audience, because it refuses to offer a ‘hierarchy of important moments’. Every scene is comprehensible, and therefore presents itself as important. For an audience, processing such a lavish spread can be overwhelming. The pay-off in terms of dramatic effectiveness and audience experience is significant, but ‘it will take people a while to get it’ (interview 1). Good acoustics work both ways. Gemma Arterton regarded the SWP as a ‘very sensitive space’ and described her amusement when, lying on the stage as dead after the Duchess’s murder, she became aware of an audience member’s tortured attempt to consume a sweet during Sean Gilder’s (Bosola) speeches (Malfi, 4.2.325–64): ‘you could tell’, said Arterton, ‘that she really wanted to eat this sweet’ – and the noises she was making were being magnified enormously in the auditorium. Arterton suggested that whereas performers at the Globe have to be aware of external sounds (aeroplanes, helicopters, sirens), the SWP amplifies what is happening inside, and interruptions such as telephones or fidgeting are therefore more noticeable (Dromgoole remarked that disturbances or noises off ‘just ping’). Despite the sound-proofing, occasional noises from the foyer, or the sound of the doors being opened and closed, were noticed by the actors: Alex Waldmann commented that so great was the potential for hushed attention in the playhouse, that external interruptions were consequently more damaging in Malfi than in the comic Pestle: ‘as soon as something came in

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from outside the spell was broken’. For James Garnon, however, these distractions need not be fatal: because the space demands a non-naturalistic performance style, beeping phones can be acknowledged and even incorporated into performance as an ad-lib in a way that is impossible in a conventional theatre. Matthew Needham (Rafe in Pestle) remembered that Alex Waldmann and Samuel Hargreaves (Boy) did just that when a ringing phone interrupted a scene in Pestle – a generally noisier play than Malfi: ‘Alex said “What noise is that?” and Sam went “’Tis a demon”. You just go with it really’. The sensitive acoustic led Daniel Rabin (Richardetto in ’Tis Pity) to conclude that it was possible to over-pitch in the space, so he ‘brought [the scale of his performance] down quite considerably’. Several actors identified a reverberative ‘hot spot’ in the downstage centre of the stage, which appealed to Max Bennett: ‘sometimes you get an echo, you get a kind of feedback. That’s the spot you want to speak from’. Michael Gould disagreed: the slight echo rather put him off his stride. Director Sam Yates noticed a curious acoustic consequence of a crowded stage. During the populous final scene of Cymbeline, actors found they had to make more of an effort with vocal clarity to ensure that spectators knew who was speaking. ‘It’s a visual thing’, said Yates. In the long 5.5, eleven named characters (and various lords, ladies, prisoners and soldiers) respond to some twenty-four separate revelations and plot-twists. The audience was confronted with ‘a lot of ingredients’ on a relatively small stage, and at each moment had to work that bit harder to decide which ingredient to follow. Yates encouraged his cast to be more decisive in the way they claimed stage attention during this scene, delineating complex switches of dramatic focus with subtle vocal and physical gestures of assertiveness (what he jokingly referred to as ‘it’s me now’ moments). Actors who performed in parts of the playhouse beyond the stage had other difficulties. Pauline McLynn, who gave most of her performance as Nell the Citizen’s wife in Pestle from the pit, noted that the space can ‘swallow’ sound. Without the frons scenae to bounce back her voice, some of it vanished upwards

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and was lost. Thalissa Teixeira struggled with the challenging acoustic of the wrap-around access corridor in her scene with Tom Stuart in The Broken Heart (1.3). As Euphrania and Prophilus, the pair played a love scene while moving around the back of the auditorium, appearing at intervals in the lower gallery doorways. Making themselves heard and understood to audience members sitting or standing in the upper gallery was not straightforward. The access corridor worked much more successfully as a location for non-spoken sounds, particularly cries of distressed mariners in The Winter’s Tale (3.3) and the surround-sound rumble of thunder in Cymbeline during Jupiter’s spectacular descent in 5.5 (produced by rolling a truckle of thunder-balls around the corridor). Gemma Arterton’s haunting echo in The Duchess of Malfi (5.3), delivered as she walked slowly along the lower gallery access corridor, was also effective, not least because the echo (which she pitched relatively loudly) repeated words already spoken on stage. The interior of the tiring house, by contrast, offered minimal acoustic muffling. ‘Backstage is practically onstage,’ said Arterton, and performers had to take great pains to make as little unintentional noise as possible behind the frons scenae. Even with the doors closed, the tiring house functioned as performance space from an acoustic point of view. In Pestle, Hannah McPake as Mistress Merrythought and Giles Cooper as her son Michael had little difficulty delivering lines from behind the frons scenae in 5.3, when they appealed to Merrythought from ‘within’ to let them back into their home. In The Changeling, the tiring house was the location for a series of evocative noises, musical strains and live effects including the cries of inmates of Alibius’s asylum, stretches of musical underscoring and the crackling sound of the fire that consumes Diaphanta’s chamber in 5.1. Most actors found that their existing repertoire of vocal skills served them well in the SWP, and were keen to stress that despite the small size, the playhouse required technique. Gemma Arterton appreciated that she did not need to ‘send [the voice] out much’ and she avoided vocal strain, but cautioned that the space needed vocal ‘muscularity’ – ‘you can’t just chat [the

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text] away’. Emily Barber made a similar distinction, pointing out that an actor needed to ‘project’ but not ‘push’ the voice, and Alex Waldmann warned against complacency: it was not the case, he found, that a whisper was always audible in the playhouse. The SWP required more vocal energy than its size suggested because, as Hannah McPake put it, an actor had to ‘point in so many directions’ with her voice. As some patrons in the back rows did not get the best view, performers ‘had to make sure that every single word is clear’. Peter Hamilton Dyer recalled Dominic Dromgoole’s words of advice: he had told his company that ‘this space will lure you into a sense that it’s very intimate and that you can be very small’. But what the space actually wanted was ‘for you to nail people into their seats with your intention’. Dromgoole’s advice was a modern reinterpretation of John Webster’s characterization of the skills of ‘An Excellent Actor’ who ‘by a full and significant action of the body … charms our attention’. This was a seduction that aimed to wholly capture the attention of the surrounding audience: ‘sit in a full Theatre’, Webster remarked, ‘and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears whiles the Actor is the Centre’.2 The rich acoustic makes the SWP especially suited to music and song, and the playhouse has a parallel career as concert venue (the playhouse’s acoustic flexibility is explored in more detail in Chapter 8). Gemma Arterton suggested that the playhouse ‘likes voice – I was worried because I have to sing and I have a lot of vocal changes, but it’s been really easy for me vocally’. But the playhouse is not designed in a way that accords with contemporary ideas about song and accompaniment. The distance between the musicians’ gallery and the main stage was an issue of concern during the opera L’Ormindo and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a play with a number of songs and musical interludes. The fact that the musicians’ section was behind and above the performers on the stage below meant that the conductor or musical leader was not able to set the pace in the way he or she might usually expect. As Kasper Holten explains, Christian Curnyn, the conductor of the orchestra in

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L’Ormindo, was obliged to accept some ‘musical compromises’ in locating himself and his musicians in the upper gallery (there had been an initial plan, soon abandoned, to place them in the pit). In consequence, he was not able always to lead, ‘so he sometimes felt that the singers dragged the pace a bit’. But if this was a compromise, there was ‘just no question that it was the right choice [to situate the orchestra above]’ – isolating the audience from the action by taking over the pit for the orchestra would have done much more damage to the energy in the room. In Pestle, Sam Hargreaves and Paul Rider – the two main singers – explained that as often as not, they needed a sight cue rather than an audio cue in order to come in on time: particularly for Hargreaves, whose musical numbers took place during the ‘interludes’ when chatter and noises in the auditorium posed a distraction, overt visual cueing was essential: ‘they [the musicians] will come forward and lean right over the balcony’.

Physicality The dimensions of the SWP had an impact on actors’ physicalities in a range of sometimes contrasting ways. Paul Rider found himself simplifying the gestures he used, reducing the number and making them ‘more pertinent’ to a space in which the audience was rarely out of touching distance. As Max Bennett said, ‘it’s not a very big stage so everything reads’. Actors accustomed to the Globe were inclined to rein in their gestural scope. ‘It’s all about economy in the smaller space,’ said Brendan O’Hea, who dialled back his comic performance as Lucio in Measure for Measure when Dromgoole’s 2015 Globe production decanted into the SWP for a handful of Outside In performances (he was familiar with the space from his roles as Pescara in Malfi and the Host in Pestle). In some senses, then, the space inclined actors to adopt a mode of physical naturalism, but they also discovered that a smaller-scale performance did

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not necessarily reach as far as the upper gallery. Michael Gould instead spoke of the need for an expressiveness born of the verticality of the room: ‘you feel like you have to get your head up, and that opens up your heart and chest and lungs to a certain extent’. Despite the small size of the playhouse, the building’s height and the position of the galleries meant that a performance needed to be expansive, clear and confident if it was to be readily received by everyone in the house. As noted in the previous chapter, the verticality of the space was a significant factor in performers’ early responses to the space. Peter Hamilton Dyer reflected on the particularity of an intimate space that nonetheless called for an assertively front-footed physicality: ‘it’s an act of will to pick yourself up, and throw [the performance] up – it’s a daring thing to do. It’s a greater challenge for an actor to stand up and look up, particularly when you’ve got the lure [of an appreciative audience in the lower gallery and pit] right in front of you’. For Dyer, the risk was that the intimacy encouraged a spurious sort of naturalism, a studio-theatre realism with which most modern actors are very familiar. In fact, the playhouse demanded a version of the non-naturalistic mode required by the Globe, in which the drama is carried by the vivid clarity of gesture and language. What Hattie Morahan called the ‘luxury’ of the scale of the SWP was its ability to host performances that meet one of a modern actor’s main criteria for authenticity and effectiveness: that stage dialogue should in all respects resemble a conversation between individuals, that the characters on stage are ‘just talking’ to one another. Although performers appreciated the fact that the space enabled a wide range of playing styles (Max Bennett: ‘it can take massive grandeur of thought and passion and ideas, and it can also take very intimate playing’; Alice Haig: the space is ‘amazingly tolerant’ of various modes, ‘massive’ and ‘quite small and subtle’) the most pleasing aspect for many actors was the playhouse’s human scale. Paul Rider explained that while at the Globe actors enjoyed sharing performance in an unusually open way with audience members, especially

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those standing close to the stage, in the SWP it was possible to ‘talk to one or two people’ relatively conversationally, and be confident that the majority of the people in the house will hear. Max Bennett said something similar in relation to direct audience address: in the SWP, an actor can ‘pick out a face [in the audience] and give [that person] the thought, whether it’s a one-line or a three-line thought: somehow everybody seems to have access to it’. This sense of accessibility supported a perception among artists that that SWP allowed an exceptional level of ‘speed of thought’ (a phrase used by director Sam Yates and actor Brendan O’Hea): actors felt confident that the progress of their characters’ cognition would be clear to the audience. As director Jonathan Munby noted when his Globe production of Antony and Cleopatra was brought into the SWP for a single performance, ‘the new intimacy forced a level of reconnection’ among his cast and the ‘actors found themselves in a situation not unlike being back in the rehearsal room. Moments that were perhaps lost in the vastness in the Globe were rediscovered and relationships between characters reignited’. 3 Observations like these align performance in the SWP with the practice of film or television acting, in which the intimacy of a camera close-up is understood to capture the thoughts and emotions on the face of the actor. Several playhouse performers used a televisual or filmic frame of reference. Gemma Arterton found the process of performance in the SWP ‘almost like [acting] in a film’. Sam Hargreaves and Sean Gilder agreed, and Brendan O’Hea pointed out that while the playhouse demanded ‘theatre technique vocally’, it wanted ‘film acting physically’. Other performers cautioned against succumbing to the lure of a filmic naturalism. Brian Ferguson felt it was important ‘not to be drawn into a TV or studio [theatre] performance. [The SWP] actually wants strong intentions, decisiveness and a kind of bold performance’ that reaches out to the theatre audience including and beyond those sitting within reach of the actor. As Philip Cumbus remarked, because the space is so ‘invitingly intense’, it can be hard for

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actors to remind themselves to keep audience members in every portion of the house involved. The energy of the space, Cumbus said, ‘pulls inwards’, a dynamic he contrasted with the outside Globe, which encourages an actor to ‘draw out’ his or her performance energy. Sarah MacRae used a similar image, describing the SWP as a ‘pressure cooker’ (interview 2). Michael Gould reflected on this quality in terms that questioned the modern respect for performances or theatrical spaces deemed ‘intense’. He admitted that ‘compression’ of performance into the confines of the SWP would be expected to lead to a greater and beneficial intensity of performance, but that it was not an automatic response: it required considerable adaptation and technical flexibility from performers to find a language of performance that suited the intimate but challenging space.

Addressing the upper gallery The SWP is not unique in having challenging viewing angles. ‘Getting your face up’ so it can be seen by patrons in the gods is an important skill that actors have had to master in many types of theatre (Eileen Atkins remembered receiving a piece of advice from Laurence Olivier early in her career: ‘you must never forget the gallery’, she was told). But the plunging vertical galleries that stand flush with the edge of the stage create particular challenges for actors and audience members in the SWP. Sarah MacRae, one of the most experienced SWP performers with four productions under her belt, acknowledged the issue: ‘It is quite a difficult space. I feel like every show I do in there I’m aware that there are people who are struggling to catch bits of the show. It’s frustrating because you can hear that you’re losing them, up top and on the sides, and there’s nothing an actor can do to get round it’ (interview 2). Spectators positioned in the upper side-stage galleries are unable to see the portion of stage nearest to them; depending

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on a spectator’s position, height and ability to lean forward, up to a third or two-fifths of the stage might be out of sight. One group of respondents after a performance of Pestle articulated the frustrations of such restricted viewing: ‘We missed quite a bit of the action’; ‘It felt like the action was on our side of the stage more than the other side’; ‘It wasn’t equally distributed’; ‘On quite a few occasions, you’d hear the audience laugh a lot and we’d missed it.’4 Inevitably, audiences had an excellent recollection of feeling slighted when it came to their ‘share’ of the view, but were less likely to remember noting with equal clarity those times when they were able to see well. Artists responded to this challenge with stage dynamism, ensuring that performers remained ‘on the move a lot more often than in a pros[cenium] arch theatre’ (Noma Dumezweni). This sort of flexible, fast-paced stage choreography was not necessarily blocked in advance, instead relying on actorly instincts (an expectation of mobility that Gemma Arterton found ‘freeing’, despite some initial scepticism). While the Globe’s pillared stage lends itself to figure-of-eight travel, the SWP’s movement dynamic is side-toside, a subtle see-sawing of stage-left and stage-right to ensure that upper-gallery patrons get a fair share of the action. Kasper Holten, director of the Royal Opera’s L’Ormindo, laid down as one of his ‘ground rules’ that if a performer can cross the stage, then they should. In particular, he attempted to ensure that characters making an entrance through one of the stage doors found a way to introduce themselves to whichever side had a disadvantaged view. For the entrance of Lady Luck in Act 3, Holten had soprano Joélle Harvey come on through the stageright door, then return to the tiring house, cross backstage, and re-enter through the stage-left door. That way, ‘when she sings stage-left, the people [above] who can’t see her will know who that character is’. Holten kept the experience of upper-gallery patrons consistently in mind. He encouraged his cast on their first entrance to find a way to ‘look up to introduce themselves to the people upstairs, to say as it were, “this is me, here I am,

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I have arrived”’. As he told his company, it was important that ‘everybody gets to see your face; everybody feels that there has been eye contact’. Holten’s cast was helped by L’Ormindo’s comic mode; Giles Cooper similarly discovered that it was easier to ‘throw’ lines into the upper gallery in the light-hearted Pestle than the dark, more ‘interior’ Malfi. But it was by no means impossible for performers in darker plays to consciously engage with audience members in the upper gallery, especially if a character had plenty of text to play with. ’Tis Pity’s Max Bennett developed a ‘pattern’ with the delivery of certain of his speeches, particularly those that felt to him like conversations with the audience: ‘I’ll always give that section of the speech to that part [of the house], and [another] to that [section].’ He was thinking ‘purely technically’ and it was a matter of ‘making sure everybody had access to a bit of it’. Brendan O’Hea described this sort of craft-driven audienceconsciousness as ‘plate spinning’, an occasionally hectic effort to keep each segment of the audience engaged. ‘You think, I’ve warmed up that part of the house, then you’ve got to play somewhere higher up, somewhere to the left, somewhere to the right.’ Considered in this way, an audience demanded constant attention (and O’Hea’s ‘plate spinning’ image suggests that sometimes a performer’s focus inevitably flagged, with shattering consequences). Directors found ways to work around the unforgiving viewing angles by privileging where possible the central portion of the stage. For The Changeling, Dominic Dromgoole and his designer Jonathan Fensom developed a square penlike structure that could be swiftly assembled in the middle of the stage during scene changes (the structure appeared twice during the production, in 2.2 and 3.4). Providing additional illumination in the form of four candle sconces at the corners of the structure, the pen resembled a ‘low, little altar screen’ (Fensom) – appropriate given the other touches of religious iconography used to dress the set in this production – and was intended to represent the private space in the Alicante castle where Beatrice-Joanna meets in secret with Alsemero

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and De Flores. This design conceit had the advantage of confining the performers to the middle portion of the stage, where everyone in the house could see them; the extra candle sconces mitigated the effect of the lower light levels in the centre of the stage, beyond the reach of the light cast from the sconces affixed to the gallery pillars (see Plate 7). Dromgoole admitted that while there was a good thematic and artistic reason for this design element (it was an innovation which allowed the company to ‘explore the density of the playing space’ by staging the tense central scenes between Beatrice-Joanna, her lover and her antagonist in a restricted environment), his principle motivation was visibility: ‘mainly, it’s about being seen’, he said. Dromgoole’s work with Fensom after Malfi (The Changeling, Pericles and The Tempest) was characterized by the provision of significant set elements that lodged the action of key scenes in the central, wholly visible portion of the room. In Pericles, the hero endured the seastorm that sundered him from his dying wife Thaisa and baby daughter Marina while balancing on a wobbling ship’s plank, thrust into the middle of the pit from the front of the stage (3.1); in The Tempest, the wildness of the enchanted island was denoted by a small trucked piece of scenery resembling a hillock that could be moved around by company members dressed as spirits, but was typically placed centre stage and stood upon, lounged across and clambered over by the cast (those standing upright were raised about half a metre towards the candles, which also improved illumination in the under-lit central third). Other directors found that the architecture of the room inevitably nudged important moments into the middle of the stage. In Michael Longhurst’s ’Tis Pity, Annabella (Fiona Button) and Giovanni (Max Bennett) made an entrance in two crucial scenes lying upon a bed thrust through the discovery space doorway, from which central semi-recumbent position they proceeded to play most of the rest of the scene. The first of these entrances, after the twins’ sexual consummation at the beginning of 2.1, was a directorial innovation (the 1633 quarto

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states with erotic subtext that the enter ‘as from their chamber’ but does not specify a bed), while the second, 5.5, was textual (‘Enter Giovanni and Annabella, lying on a bed’): it was on this bed that Giovanni killed his sister, the item of furniture here serving a similar focusing purpose to Dromgoole and Fensom’s metal pen in The Changeling.5 The bedposts, too, were equipped with candle sconces to cast extra light onto the under-lit central portion of the stage. Performers had ambivalent feelings about the tidal pull of the middle of the stage. Michael Gould spoke of ‘trying to go into the centre’ on the assumption that it was the most visible part of the house, while harbouring doubts that ‘there are still people whose views are impaired by the verticality of the space’. Dominic Dromgoole characterized the challenging inter-relationship of visibility, light and audience engagement as the SWP’s ‘huge Rubik’s Cube problem’, referring to the notoriously difficult three-dimensional puzzle game (interview 1). As he put it, the two things an actor most wants are to be in the light and to have simple and direct contact with the audience. On the Globe stage, the favoured position – the ‘magic spot’ – is downstage centre where a performer can be seen by almost everyone, and can even reach out and touch someone standing in the yard. But the ‘geometry’ of the SWP is such that while an actor must stand in the central third portion of the stage to be seen by those in the gallery above, this also happens to be the most ill-lit section of the space, and unless the actor is standing on the very front of the stage, it is also the area from which it is hardest to reach out, touch and engage with the audience. Aligning the competing factors of visibility, illumination and audience proximity was the Rubik’s Cube conundrum of the SWP. Brendan O’Hea’s plate-spinning analogy quoted above suggests how complicated it was for performers to satisfy all of these factors at once, and how hard it was to remain connected to the story and world of the play while ensuring that that the technical requirements of the room were met. James Garnon favoured a more laissez-faire approach to the challenges of the space. ‘You can’t try to make

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people see you by putting all the action in the middle of the stage,’ he concluded: aiming for comprehensive visibility was a fool’s errand in a theatre that was as much a ‘listening space’ as a ‘viewing space’. He advocated ‘being in the room, and not trying to play it’, an approach to performance that drew on modern theories of naturalist, place-realist acting while acknowledging the architectural particularities (for good and ill) of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Palimpsest Directors who worked in the SWP in the first seasons were confronted with a space that was in some respects disarmingly unfamiliar. The viewing angles, the lighting technologies and the acoustic posed challenges, and artists looked to one another’s work for inspiration. Adele Thomas cheerfully admitted that ‘some of our visual and aesthetic choices were based on deliberately nicking imagery off other plays’, an approach inspired by Francis Beaumont’s dramaturgy in Pestle, itself a satirical palimpsest of other early modern dramas. In Thomas’s case, as only the second director to work with a full cast in the space, her chief source for creative theft was Dromgoole’s Malfi, from which she poached (and then burlesqued) the graceful pre-show lighting of the candles, and the sinister arrival of a character’s coffin (4.2 in Malfi; 4.3 in Pestle). She also lifted visual imagery from previous Globe shows: Rafe’s emergence as a military hero (5.2) is an evident echo of Shakespeare’s Henry V, so Matthew Needham was given the same tabard worn by actor Jamie Parker in Dromgoole’s 2012 Globe production. The notional idea, appropriate to the complex metatheatrical world of Beaumont’s play as much as the production’s origin at today’s Shakespeare’s Globe, was that Rafe would have ‘rummaged through the costumes’ of the theatre company putting on ‘The London Prodigal’ to find a suitable outfit.

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Kasper Holten also used an unselfconscious language of artistic theft to describe his relationship to the space and its heritage of work (which for him comprised Malfi, Pestle and Eileen Atkins’s one woman show). The ‘death scene’ in L’Ormindo was as he put it ‘obviously stolen from Dominic’, although the effects were different in each show: while in Dromgoole’s production the Duchess was strangled on a dimlylit stage after enduring psychological torment in pitch darkness (4.1), Holten’s lovers Ormindo and Erisbe slipped into a deathlike sleep after drinking what they believed to be poison, as a sinister black-clad figure moved slowly among the lowered candelabra, snuffing out the lights during the couple’s duet (Act 3). Each production drew figurative meaning from either stage darkness or the conspicuous removal of light, and these moments happened in a structurally similar point (during the last third of the action), but the impact can hardly be considered to have been identical. Nonetheless Holten had a strong sense that his production was quoting Dromgoole’s, perhaps because removing light in the SWP required a set of actions that were read as spatially, dynamically and sensuously similar by spectators: the candelabra were lowered, performers or stage crew extinguished one candle after another with a long-handled snuffer, the room filled with the smell of the snuffed wicks, and pinpricks of glowing red light remained at the tips of the candles before fading to complete darkness over the course of the ensuing seconds. This performance of darkening struck modern observers as rich and compelling, unused as most of us are to extensive candle-light and the practices that candle technologies require. Holten interpreted his artistic use of darkness in L’Ormindo as an overt homage to Dromgoole’s Malfi (which was in performance during Holten’s rehearsal period) because these stage practices seemed to him more noticeable than the impact of the darkness itself. The visible human labour required to produce the SWP’s stage effects – such as lighting changes, the use of the stage trap or the ceiling hatch and flying winch, entry through the pit or side stage boxes, or performance in the galleries – necessitated directorial

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innovation and creativity to make the realization of these effects plausible and theatrically slick. Early directors therefore had the opportunity to place their artistic stamp on the space in a way that was noticed by those who came later. Lowering the candelabra to extinguish the lights was not simply understood as the means by which light was reduced in the SWP; it was to some extent seen by Holten as Dromgoole’s proprietorial piece of stagecraft. Holten suggested that later SWP directors might have a ‘difficult time’ because the first directors will have ‘used all the tricks’. Will future productions, Holten wondered, end up seeming ‘very alike’ in their use of stage business? This seems unlikely, not least because performers and spectators have become more accustomed to the SWP’s stage practices and no longer associate them with a particular director or show. Michael Longhurst’s ’Tis Pity, staged the year after L’Ormindo, repeated the slow snuffing of the lowered candelabra to increase the tension and menace of a scene (3.6) without feeling artistically beholden to Holten. Moreover, directors have been keen to embrace new ways of using the space in ways that both honour and challenge early modern practice (particular in the 2016–17 Wonder Noir season). But it is true that certain elements of the playhouse’s technologies resist innovation. The candelabra should be hung eight feet (2.4 metres) from the stage, as this provides the optimum level of light on actors’ faces while keeping a clear gap between the tops of heads and the base of the candelabra. Sam Yates experimented with a lower hang for Cymbeline, partly to reduce candle dazzle for the upper gallery spectators, but found that it compressed the stage picture and disadvantaged other members of the audience: ‘then of course I went back to the position that had been established, and you just have to embrace that’. Adele Thomas’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle featured an aspect of early modern indoor performance that has not so far been repeated by other directors in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: the observation of the act breaks (known simply as ‘the act’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). These intervals, historically necessary to allow stage hands to trim

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the candle wicks and regulate the rate at which they burned, were covered by music, and gave the rhythm of performance in the indoor theatres a different tempo to that of the outdoor amphitheatres, where the action ran on unimpeded. Occasionally, dramatists used the act break time to theatrical effect: Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling requires De Flores to hide a ‘naked rapier’ in the break between Acts 2 and 3, an instruction which Dromgoole’s production did not follow, adhering as it did to a modern one-interval structure.6 Thomas’s Pestle did however make use of the act time in a dramatically significant way: in Francis Beaumont’s unusual meta-theatrical comedy, the citizen playgoers George and Nell talk to each other, the Boy, the musicians and the audience in all four act breaks (other dramatists used the act time for dramatic performance, too – see Chapter 8 for an exploration of John Marston’s practice). In Thomas’s production, the act time was reimagined as a short comic interlude during which the electric houselights were raised and stewards served refreshments. As well as the citizens’ exchanges, which are a textual feature of the play’s 1613 quarto, Thomas’s production used the interludes to flesh out the characters of Rafe’s sullen companions, Tim and George, here reimagined as reluctant stage hands who gradually learn to relish their new-found roles as supporting players in a story of knight-errantry.7 As Dean Nolan (George) put it, the interludes ‘tell their own story’ about these characters, providing another layer of narrative in an already richly complex play. But the interludes also served an important function as tonal signifiers, licensing the audience to regard the boundary between performance and spectatorship as comically porous. In a production that followed the intense The Duchess of Malfi, and echoed some of its staging decisions, the interludes were crucial in distinguishing the style of the farce from the seriousness of Malfi. Actors working in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in its first three seasons developed a repertoire of techniques (some shared, some personal) as part of their response to the room. The playhouse’s astonishing hospitality to language was a surprise,

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producing a space in which the linguistic intensity of early modern drama was far less of a hindrance to comprehension by today’s spectators than it can be in other venues. The smaller dimensions of the SWP encouraged actors to focus on the scale of their gestures and physicality, and experiment with more contained styles of performance. While some likened this to a ‘televisual’ performativity, others cautioned that the playhouse resisted modern stage realism and noted the determinedly nonnaturalistic requirements of a performance if it is to be seen and heard by spectators in the upper galleries. Some principles and ‘ground rules’ were established: the playhouse responds to an enormous variety of vocal styles, but it demands control and technique if actors are to be audible; the central portion of the stage is the most visible area, but also the most underlit; action must oscillate between the two sides of the stage to give spectators throughout the house a fair view. Directors in the first two seasons engaged enthusiastically with each other’s work, but also expressed concern that the playhouse’s technology resisted innovation: certain habits were taken up by directors who followed Dromgoole’s opening show with the sense that they were benefitting from an artistic or technical bequest, passed down by the director who first created work for the space. But as Thomas’s observance of the act-breaks in Pestle demonstrated, the SWP has considerable untapped potential as a space for devising new or historically-informed artistic practices. Without question, the aspect of the playhouse which had the greatest impact on the craft of its artists, and made the biggest impression on spectators, was the nature of the lighting – to which we now turn.

5 ‘This Darkness Suits You Well’: Acting by Candlelight

Duke Ferdinand’s comment to his imprisoned sister in The Duchess of Malfi (4.1.30), included in the chapter title above, captures one of the most striking effects possible in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: a darkness truer than that achieved in most other modern performance venues. But light in the playhouse is also adaptable in unusual and unfamiliar ways. Actor Thalissa Teixeira noted that unlike in conventionallylit theatres, where light tends to be directed at the stage, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse the light changes ‘around you’. ‘Everything changes in the shadows,’ she said, ‘which brings people into the same atmosphere’. The non-directional artificial light, like the shared daylight at the Globe, radically unifies performers and spectators in a single space. But unlike the Globe, where performances usually take place under daylight or an artificial wash, the candlelight in the SWP is flexible, and provides a powerful tool for the creation of space, mood and atmosphere. The SWP is equipped with six candelabra suspended over the stage by a system of ropes and pulleys. Each candelabrum holds twelve wax candles (25 cm high and 2 cm wide at

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the base). To provide optimum light on actors’ faces, the candelabra need to hang at 2.5 metres above the stage.1 They can be winched much lower for trimming by stage crew (the technician in charge of candle maintenance at the SWP is known as the candleician), or higher to keep them out of the eye-line of spectators in the upper gallery. Supplementing the candelabra ‘rig’ are twenty-four smaller candles, placed in brass reflectors attached to the pillars that run round the lower gallery to cast additional light on to actors’ faces.2 Hand-held lights provide illumination, and help to establish a sense of location or mood: torches and lanterns signify that the holder is out-of-doors; a ‘dark lantern’, which is equipped with a shutter to block the light without extinguishing the candle, had an association with illicit activity and suggested to early modern spectators that the user was up to no good; candles, candle-torches and tapers (thin strips of rope soaked in wax or tallow) imply an interior scene. Ambient electric ‘daylight’ from the wrap-around access corridor augments the candles when needed, although this can be turned off or blocked by shutters to create a wholly candlelit space (since 2016, thick glazing in the SWP interior windows has reduced the amount of electric light in the theatre). This chapter explores the artistic effects enabled by the lighting technologies, from hand-held torches to the full candle rig. It analyses the practical, artistic and emotional impact of the candlelight on performers and audience members, and considers the powerful effect of absolute darkness in the intimate indoor venue.

Holding fire: Candlesticks, torches, lanterns Designer Jonathan Fensom observed that a wash of full candlelight in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is surprisingly ‘general’. The differences in illumination among the various parts of the stage are subtle: the central strip is less well-

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lit than the sides, but an audience does not necessarily note those distinctions immediately. The impression is instead of a relatively uniform level of brightness, and one that from a modern designer’s perspective is somewhat flat. Fensom noted with irony that candles are most frequently used in a modern theatrical mis-en-scène to pull focus to a particular part of the stage, or provide an identifiable point of light within an otherwise evenly-lit space: in the SWP, the profusion of suspended candles served to lessen the focussing impact of a single flame. However, hand-held candles nonetheless do an important job in the SWP, providing a ‘reference point’ on a fully-lit stage, or additional illumination when the suspended candelabra were extinguished or raised to the ceiling. All of the early productions in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse experimented with reduced lighting levels, and unless real obscurity was crucial to the ambience of a scene (as in Malfi 4.1, Act 3 of L’Ormindo and ’Tis Pity 3.7, discussed below), directors tended to mitigate deliberately dim stage lighting with the use of hand-held tapers, candlesticks (one candle), candle-branches (four or five candles), lanterns (a candle within a metal and glass casket), torches and candletorches (a stave supporting two or three candles with a brass reflector) which performers used to light their own and their fellow actors’ faces.3 Placed upon the stage, lit candlesticks provided necessary up-lighting for performers seated on the floor or lying down, beyond the glow of the suspended candelabra (see Plate 3). When held, these properties posed something of a challenge to actors unused to the need for self-lighting, or the encumbrance of a lit candle – which had to stay upright while carried, stay lit while it was spoken over, and stay away at all times from clothing, hair and bits of set. Hattie Morahan used the term ‘analogue’ to describe what she perceived as the absence of trickery about hand-held candles. For her, their unpredictability symbolized live theatre even as it required performers to be on their toes: the candle ‘could go out at any moment, someone’s hair could catch light’. Morahan

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experienced a panic-stricken moment during a preview of The Changeling when she was about to make her entrance from the tiring house onto a completely dark stage in 5.1 (see Plate 6). The single candle that was intended to light her face flickered out; she had a few seconds of wondering if she would be required to play her whole scene in a blackout before deputy stage manager Emily Peake was able to relight her candle. Self-extinguished flames were a constant hazard as actors moved quickly around the stage or spoke plosively over their candles, although unless the house was otherwise completely dark, as in Morahan’s experience, the extinguished candles did not severely impede visibility. But they sometimes stretched dramatic credibility. Brendan O’Hea noticed that twenty-first-century actors did not always remember that their candles were necessary light sources rather than theatrical props. If a light accidentally went out, O’Hea observed, performers (he included himself) would sometimes continue to hold it near their face. As he tactfully put it, ‘the message hasn’t got to your hand to put the lantern down’. Considered as stage props, candles were regarded as a boon by many performers. Alex Waldmann discovered that they ‘solved the age-old problem of not knowing what to do with your hands’. For Stefano Braschi, they were ‘God’s gift to actors’, even more suitable for stage business than the old favourite, now seldom seen, the cigarette. The ‘liveness’ of candle-light made the candlesticks and candle-branches an attractive addition to a performer’s physical vocabulary. Braschi spoke of his ‘pleasure’ in the candles, and appreciated the way he could create movement in the light by swivelling his wrist like a tennis player moving from forehand to backhand position. Philip Cumbus also enjoyed spinning his candle-branch, a habit that became a form of gestural punctuation at the end of a witticism or ironic line: ‘there’s something cheeky about it’. The sense that the candle-branch or candlestick was an extension of the performer’s body was echoed by Braschi who explained that although his initial response was to chafe at the restriction imposed by holding a candle, ‘you end up thinking, well, I have two hands and one of them has a beautiful flameencrusted prop on it, and I can use that’.

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Despite their gestural potential, some actors and creatives regarded the hand-held candles as a physical hindrance. Max Bennett spoke of feeling uncomfortably ‘rooted’ when he first started performing 1.1 and 2.5 in ’Tis Pity with a lit candelabra in technical and dress rehearsals (see Plate 5). He felt his physical expressiveness was constrained by the burning candles. In these scenes, Giovanni disputes with the Friar over the ethics of his incestuous relationship, and in doing justice to Giovanni’s complex logic, Bennett felt he needed to be hands-free. As Michael Gould (the Friar) noted, ‘it’s quite nice to have both your hands available’ when positing a set of antithetical ideas, and Giovanni’s lines in these scenes are built around sets of paired or grouped concepts: giovanni Gentle Father, To you I have unclasped my burdened soul, Emptied the storehouse of my thoughts and heart. … Shall a peevish sound, A customary form, from man to man, Of brother and of sister, be a bar ’Twixt my perpetual happiness and me? Say that we had one father, say one womb (Curse to my joys) gave both us life and birth; Are we not therefore each to other bound So much the more by nature; by the links Of blood, of reason? Nay, if you will have’t, Even of religion, to be ever one: One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all? (1.1.12–14, 24–34) For both actors, finding a way around this obstacle and ‘reembrac[ing] the scene’ (in Gould’s words) as one in which the actors were equipped with candelabra was a performance challenge. Others struggled with the affront to realism that

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came with the requirement to light themselves during a scene. Jethro Skinner spoke of his ‘serious fakery issues’ in having to hold a candle to his face in order to be seen: ‘one arm is doing something that I would never do in real life’, he explained. Michael Gould said that he had to find a way to incorporate the ‘logic of the light’ into his performance that did not dent his ‘immersion in the scene or the character’. While theatrical naturalism might dictate that a character would light what he or she needed to see (a realist logic that situates itself in the world of the play), more commonly an actor was tasked with lighting him or herself for the benefit of the audience (a storytelling logic that acknowledges the reality of staged performance in a dim environment before a group of paying spectators). Director Michael Longhurst appreciated that modern actors trained in emotionally realist techniques had valid reasons to feel constrained, and he used the principles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century acting theories to help his actors overcome these difficulties. Drawing on Stanislavskian techniques of objective-driven performance, he encouraged his cast to think about their characters’ intentions behind the use of hand-held candles. Considered in such a way, it becomes clear that the individuals in ’Tis Pity need to have their voices heard and their stories understood by other people in their world: ‘if you want your scene partner to understand what you’re saying, they need to see your face’, he said. Although holding a candle might seem unnatural, ‘it’s actually the most natural thing in the world to use a candle in a space that’s not properly lit’. As Max Bennett put it, ‘it’s part of your intention that you need them [the other characters] to hear this, so you light your face’. Jethro Skinner put it even more bluntly: ‘I need you to see what’s going on in my face for me to be able to get what I want from you.’ Sam Yates, director of Cymbeline, saw a different sort of theatrical value in hand-held candles. Choosing to use very few in his fast-paced production, he nonetheless equipped Pauline McLynn’s Queen with a copper-screened candle that she held to her face to create a glow. This became known as the

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preening Queen’s ‘vanity candle’, a personal prop that carried meaning about the character’s priorities and intentions (see Plate 9). When performing in low light, actors were also obliged to light their fellow cast members. This posed fewer challenges from a realist performance point of view. Alice Haig found it a simple matter to ‘find a reason to light someone else: to see their expression’. But the ethics of when and how to light another person in the scene were not always so straightforward. As performers, members of the company felt that they had a professional duty to light their fellow actors. Alex Waldmann stressed the importance of actorly courtesy in not hogging one’s own light. ‘Any company wants to be generous,’ he said, adding that sharing the candle light fostered a ‘spirit of togetherness’. Edward Peel explained that those holding illuminated candelabra often got into the habit of ‘passing’ the light among speakers, aiming the candelabra towards whichever person in the scene was talking. This was a technique that needed to be performed with care in case it looked stagey or rehearsed. Such generosity was also found to be inappropriate in scenes in which characters were antagonistic towards each other; to grant light to an interlocutor suggests a positive relationship between the people on stage. Noma Dumezweni explained how she was able to use the ethics behind the donation or retention of light to good effect. With lightsharing established as an aspect of courteous behaviour (both in the world of the play, and in terms of performance), Dumezweni’s wicked character Hippolita marked herself out as different by refusing to do so. In 3.8, just after the murder in darkness of Bergetto, Dumezweni played a scene with Philip Cumbus as Vasquez, Hippolita’s duplicitous ally and would-be lover. She held a candlestick which she was disinclined to share. ‘Philip Cumbus understands that he has to fight for that light,’ explained Dumezweni – a battle that is appropriate for the warring but attracted characters of Hippolita and Vasquez.

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The candles as ‘lighting rig’ Some directors and designers experimented with other ways to light the space. Adele Thomas was the only director of an early modern drama in the SWP to use main-house electric lighting, bringing up some of the lamps concealed under the pit benches during the citizens’ interactions: as Phil Daniels and Pauline McLynn were placed in the pit there was no conceivable way to light them with handheld or rigged candles without a risk to other audience members. In the 1607 Children of the Revels production at Blackfriars, the youngsters playing the citizen George and his wife Nell would have been sat for most of the performance on stools on the side of the stage, as well-lit as the other actors (and the other high-paying patrons who had chosen such visible seats). Thomas also kept the shutters open, and the artificial corridor lighting on and high, for most of the performance, conscious of the theatrical rule of thumb that comedy should be performed in as bright a lighting state as possible. Like other directors in the first seasons, Thomas manipulated the playhouse’s lighting capacities for aesthetic and dramaturgical reasons, closing the shutters for the burlesque-horror of the giant Barbaroso sequence (3.4) and Jasper’s apparent encoffinment and subsequent haunting of Venturewell (4.3 and 5.1). Given the pronounced tilt of the first two years of programming towards tragedy, other directors came to prefer the claustrophobic feel of an enclosed, purely candle-lit space, and the corridor lighting – designed to simulate the daylight that augmented performance at the Blackfriars and other indoor venues – produced an unwelcomely strident effect. Designer Jonathan Fensom, well aware of the historical precedent behind the provision of ‘windows’, both in terms of what is known about the Blackfriars and the somewhat ambiguous details of the Worcester College designs, nonetheless regarded the shutters and the faux-daylight in the access corridor as a ‘safety measure’ born of the anxiety that the candles alone would not be sufficient. In performance, he found the effect of

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electric light from behind and from the sides of the auditorium ‘incredibly distracting’ when used in conjunction with candles. Even dim electric light is many times brighter than candlelight, and having a stronger source of light beyond the limits of the playing space did nothing to help the audience focus on the stage. During 2016, the gallery windows were glazed with thick mullioned panes, and the access corridor walls repainted in grey (a colour closer to the drably dun tones of an overcast early modern London), which significantly reduced the glare of electric light. If the access corridor lighting was intrusive, some creatives felt the lack of directional light from below. ‘What we all hanker after is footlights,’ admitted Fensom: the candelabra cast a downward light on actors’ heads and upper bodies, but without a light source at or near floor level, faces appear dimmer than they would on an electrically-lit stage. Candles affixed to head-height sconces (‘wallers’) and hand-held candelabra helped to mitigate this problem; directors often equipped their actors with hand-held candles even when the stage was fully lit in order to boost light upwards onto faces. Sam Yates made use of low troughs filled with thick church candles, arranged along the downstage edge, to cast light onto the faces of his cast. This extra illumination helped, and although Yates admitted they were an anachronistic element (both the technology and the term ‘footlight’ date from the eighteenth century) the troughs gave an additional flexibility to the lighting state: they could be removed or replaced in seconds, speedily changing the intensity of light on the stage. By these means, Yates was able to significantly reduce the number of candelabra movements in Cymbeline (which he limited to five, all in the second half of the production). For some modern directors and designers, even those accustomed to producing work in the shared light of the Globe, the particular nature of the SWP’s lighting technology had them yearning for modern solutions. While the Globe can be understood in terms of its technological lack (when performances take place during the day or under a general

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wash of electric light, lighting cues are simply not available), directors approached the SWP as a space that offered the possibility of lighting state changes to suit the mood of the play or to indicate shifts of place or tone. If at first this seemed to bring the SWP more in line with conventional modern theatres, directors soon found that the space could not be understood so easily. The light in the SWP cannot be controlled at will, or at a distance; each candle must be lit, extinguished and re-lit by hand, in the full view of the audience, either by actors who perform those tasks within the fictional world of the play, or by stage management who do so as unobtrusively as possible. The modern conventions of theatre lighting – reliant on the ability to instantly vary colour, intensity, warmth and direction to create a sense of place or mood – cannot be applied in the SWP. When Caroline Steinbeis and The Broken Heart designer Max Jones were invited to watch shows in the first two seasons of SWP productions, they were puzzled that directors did not make more creative use of the candlelight. As Steinbeis remembered, she and Jones had ‘the best intentions’ to be different. Dominic Dromgoole had observed after the first season that ‘the theatre is at its most dramatically effective when lit by only one or two candles’, and Steinbeis was keen to work with the concept of the blackout, and the single flame, to create striking stage pictures in The Broken Heart. Until well into the preview performances, the cast and crew took the time to extinguish virtually all the light in the room between Acts 1 and 2, just before the first scene in Bassanes’s house. Encouraged by the text of the play – in which Bassanes pledges to ‘have that window next the street dammed up’ (2.1.1) and the waiting-woman Grausis refers to the house as a ‘prison’ (2.1.109) – Steinbeis was determined to reflect Penthea’s experience of a cruel forced marriage with an aesthetic of claustrophobic darkness. The effect was beautiful and wholly appropriate to the play, but the act of creating a near-blackout was as she put it ‘a complete mess’: requiring minutes to quench the necessary candles, it took pace out of the show at a crucial point early on in the action. Steinbeis recalls an intense sense

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of frustration: ‘I thought, I want to make this work. I refuse to be told by a bunch of candles that I can’t.’ In the end, Steinbeis decided she could not countenance the lag in pace that the blackout created, and by press night she had compromised with the ‘simple solution’ of flying the lit candelabra up to the ceiling to greatly reduce the amount of light on the stage during 2.1. This technique ‘aided the flow of the storytelling’, but the effect of a darkened, repressive domestic space was not so pronounced. Steinbeis concluded – with some regret – that ‘you can’t have blackouts just when you want them’ in the SWP: the structure of the play determines whether a significant change in lighting state can be incorporated into the action. For a blackout or a dark scene to be feasible, the scene in question must be so situated as to allow the candles to be extinguished (and subsequently relit) without a lengthy interruption. In an early modern playhouse, with short intermissions between each act, it might have been possible for Steinbeis’s vision for 2.1 of The Broken Heart to be realized: the lights could have been quenched in the break between Acts 1 and 2. There would have remained, however, the problem of swiftly relighting the candles, necessary in The Broken Heart for the following scene set in the Spartan royal court, and it is a matter of debate in theatre scholarship as to whether early modern practitioners made regular use of the act breaks for aesthetic lighting changes of this sort.4 In the context of modern performance in the SWP, with the action flowing smoothly until the interval, directors need to give careful thought to the timing of dark scenes, and the means by which (or whether) the playhouse’s candles are put out and relit. In Dromgoole’s The Duchess of Malfi the famous dark scene (4.1), in which the heroine is tormented with a wax hand she takes to be a grisly token from her dead husband’s body, took place immediately after the interval, and patrons returned to their seats in a house already darkened. The candles were relit at the end of 4.1 by the cast and stage crew, in a piece of business covered by music and song. Situating a dark scene either at the start of the show or after the interval avoids the necessity of quenching

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the candles during dramatic action. Dromgoole used such an approach at the start of his production of The Changeling, opening the play in darkness and obliging theatregoers to find their seats in the gloom (helped by stewards with anachronistic electric head-torches). The lighting of the candles, covered by music, marked the transition from the balletic opening movement piece (discussed below) to the beginning of 1.1. At a later point in the play (4.3 into 5.1) the theatre was again plunged into pitch darkness when the actors performing as mentally ill patients in an asylum seized the candelabra – lowered to waist-height – and hectically blew out the lights (some people in the audience experienced a momentary flicker of alarm, surely intended, that the candelabra were about to be loosed to swing back wildly over the heads of the patrons in the pit). Dromgoole’s Pericles included the same effect: as part of the production’s pre-set, the company assembled to sing, and chat with each other and the audience, before pulling the candelabra into the centre of the stage and blowing out the candles. The first scene proper – the disturbing exchange in Antioch featuring Pericles, Antiochus and his abused daughter – then followed in near darkness. Michael Longhurst discovered that ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore included an unusual in-built opportunity for absolute darkness. In 3.7, Annabella’s comic suitor Bergetto is slain in the street, his assailant Grimaldi mistaking him for Soranzo in the darkness. The effect of this scene – in which the bumbling comedy of mistaken identity is followed by the shock of a popular character’s unnecessary and violent death – has been discussed at length by Martin White, but its present relevance is due to its position in the play.5 As the scene takes place at the end of the third act, the extinguishing of the candles cannot be covered by an interval or an act break, but Longhurst was able to use the repeated references to darkness and gloom in the foregoing scenes to gradually reduce the light levels throughout the act. In the immediately preceding scene (3.6), the Friar takes Annabella to task for her incestuous affair with her brother in an intense and powerful exchange lit, as the

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quarto text tells us, by ‘wax lights’.6 In Longhurst’s staging, the Friar confronted Annabella in her own bedchamber: the bed held candles burning in sconces affixed to the bedposts, and the main rig candelabra had been lowered to waist height. Shadowy figures slowly extinguished the candles throughout the scene save for a single four-flame branch which lit the faces of the performers; this branch and the bed were removed at the end of the scene, leaving the stage in near-darkness in readiness for Bergetto’s murder (on his entrance, Bergetto gigglingly blew out the last remaining candle burning in the upstage left sconce). The artistic approach here was, as Michael Gould put it, to adopt a ‘modern principle of using lighting to focus [the] scene’, in this case utilizing the resources of the SWP to create the effect of a spot-lit pool of light just bright enough to light Gould (the Friar) and Fiona Button (Annabella). In this instance, director Longhurst’s modern sensibility meshed fortuitously with the play’s early modern dramatic structure: as Martin White has argued, ’Tis Pity seems to be a play (one of a comparatively small number from the early modern period) in which the author has taken pains to incorporate the opportunity for lighting effects. Ford seeds the middle scenes of Act 3 with a language of obscurity and darkness – 3.5 contains references to ‘this very night’ (8), ‘this night’ (13), ‘a night’ (14) and ‘tonight’ (29) – encouraging a gradual reduction in playhouse illumination in preparation for the central, shocking act of violence that gains such power from being enacted in the dark. Ford’s dramaturgical provision of a ‘slow fade’ is a rarity. The majority of early modern dramatic texts were written to be performed in a shared-light environment, whether day-lit or candlelit. Directors and designers found themselves grappling with the capacities and restrictions of the SWP in their desire to create striking candle effects. The room, which can be made to dazzle with a full rig of over 100 candles or captivate with a single burning taper in an otherwise pitch-dark house, does not provide these effects for free: directors pay for their lighting state changes with company labour and extra minutes on a

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show’s running time. Perhaps the most successful approach taken by the first directors in the SWP was to incorporate candle-management into the staged action. Kasper Holten, director of the opera L’Ormindo, used the slow extinguishing of the lights on the lowered candelabra by a black-cowled figure as a striking visual metaphor for the (apparent) death of two central characters, who sang a touching duet as they gradually lost consciousness in the increasing gloom. Directors and designers had to be careful that changes to light levels that were supposed to connote a certain mood or emotion did not have an unintentional effect in other parts of the playhouse. Sarah MacRae (interview 2) pointed out that raising the candelabra to the ceiling to reduce the light on the stage works to suggest darkness to those who are sitting in the pit or lower gallery, but it ‘floods the top half [of the room] with light’. It was not always possible for creatives to realize a design vision. Jonathon Fensom recalled a frustrated plan during the shipboard storm in Pericles (3.1), when the hero stood upon a plank jutting from the stage into the pit, raging at the tempest. ‘I said to Dominic, I can’t see him’, said Fensom. ‘I was hoping to have somebody with some sort of swaying lantern standing in front of him, as if it was the lantern on the front of a ship. I think the only reason we didn’t was because we didn’t have anybody available’ – the whole cast and crew was otherwise engaged in creating the busy mis-en-scène of the storm. For Fensom, this gets to the heart of the artistic radicalism of the SWP: the admittedly ‘huge’ limitations of the playhouse from a modern artist’s perspective require him or her to be ‘incredibly creative’ while still responding to the nature of the space. ‘You learn’, he said, ‘from the limitations’. A seventh candelabrum hung downstage centre for Malfi, a result of lighting experiments during autumn and winter 2013, was an example of a misguided attempt to work against the nature of the space (it was removed for subsequent productions). Dromgoole worried during the tests that there was insufficient light on the downstage portion of the stage, but it became clear that this should be regarded

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as a clue to blocking rather than a lighting challenge to be overcome: if ‘there isn’t [enough light in that portion of the stage]’, suggested Fensom, ‘just don’t stand people there’. As actor Brian Fergusson put it, theatre makers need to ‘allow the candles their influence … You cannot fight the space’. That the best results resulted from approaching the SWP on its own terms became an article of faith among creatives and actors. ‘The space teaches you how it wants to be used,’ said Caroline Steinbeis. Michael Longhurst explained that the candelabra were not simply a light source: a director was ‘missing a trick’ if he or she failed to also consider them as architectural elements in their own right, particularly as their movement up or down can help to denote theatrical space (see Plate 8). But the suspended candelabra were not to be treated as a lighting rig to be brought into action at every scene change. A ‘scene by scene’ lighting change, with the candles raised or lowered at every transition in the action, would be distracting and would render the action of the play intolerably slow. Instead, directors made their peace with the quality, intensity and feel of a steadily candle-lit space. Interviewed at the end of the second season, Dominic Dromgoole explained that he and his fellow directors had acquired greater ‘assurance’ in the use of the candles in the SWP, and the low but redolent light they produced. ‘We’re learning that the eye gets used to it and actually starts enjoying it. You can read tone and you can read nuance and you can read small effects of expression in that steady light.’ Dromgoole regarded what he termed the ‘freneticism’ of the lighting plot in Malfi – ‘open shutters, close shutters, raise candelabra, drop candelabra!’ – as an anxious response to the perceived shortcomings of a candlelit space. In an interview conducted at the end of the first theatrical season, he admitted that ‘we’re still probably excessively neurotic about [the lighting]’ and spoke of his excitement at the realization that the playhouse worked well in what we would generally consider dim lighting. Although the tactic with both Malfi and Pestle had been to open the play with as much light as possible (to forestall anticipated audience concern about gloom), he looked

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forward to abandoning this safety principle in later shows. His subsequent work in the playhouse bore out this intention: performances of The Changeling, Pericles and The Tempest all began in notably low-lighting states. Dromgoole’s second SWP production, The Changeling, made use of his experience over the course of the playhouse’s first year of operation. He and Fensom worked together to develop a less complicated lighting plot than Malfi with fewer candelabra movements, and fewer compensatory handheld candle-branches. He still incorporated several striking moments of near-darkness, including 5.1, set in Alicante castle in the dead of night during which Beatrice-Joanna contemplates the bed-trick being performed by her maid Diaphanta on an unsuspecting Alsemero. Hattie Morahan’s Beatrice-Joanna held a single candle, the corona of light being just sufficient to illuminate herself and Trystan Gravelle’s De Flores and not quite enough to light the ghost of Alonso, a gruesomely made-up Tom Stuart who moved slowly across the shadowy stage. Dromgoole’s preparation for the play had included research into early modern theories of light and seeing, and he adopted the Renaissance understanding of sight as a morallyambiguous, penetrative sense as a leitmotif for his production. He and his cast were particularly taken with the Galenic theory that the seeing eye emits a substance called pneuma, an invisible optical agent that is cast by the viewer upon the object that he or she sees, and noted the repeated references to vision in the first scene of The Changeling (1.1.1, and lines 19, 72–9, 84, 94, 104, 114 and 131).7 As Dromgoole recalled (interview 2), ‘we all became slightly obsessed about it in the course of the first few weeks of rehearsal’. Beatrice-Joanna’s analysis of sight and judgment became a determining theme in staging the opening of the play: Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments, And should give certain judgment what they see. But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders

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Of common things which, when our judgments find, They can then check the eyes and call them blind. (1.1.72–6) Picking up on this element in the text, Dromgoole and his choreographer Siân Williams developed a movement piece as a prelude to the first scene to stage Alsemero’s first sight of Beatrice-Joanna at prayer (‘’Twas in the temple where I first beheld her’ are the first words of the play). In near-darkness and accompanied by Claire van Kampen’s unsettling string score, the company performed the dance while illuminating just their eyes with hand-held dark lanterns that had been specifically designed by prop maker Penny Spedding in consultation with Globe production manager Paul Wills and theatre lighting historian Martin White. Containing a lens and a shutter, these lanterns allowed the actors to open or close the aperture with their thumbs, and cast a thin strip of focussed candlelight onto their brows. At the end of the ‘eye ballet’, as it became known, the company used their dark lanterns to concentrate the light on Beatrice-Joanna at her devotions, while Alsemero looked on, rapt at the sight of a figure bathed in (heavenly or devilish?) light. For Dromgoole, this choreographic piece emphasized the argument of the play that ‘dangerous’ love (or at least sudden erotic attraction) arises out of ‘activity … between one eye and another … We wanted to play that, and use a very dim space just to show eyes, and show people locking onto each other and interacting with each other’.

Pitfalls and practicalities The actors working in the candlelit room developed their own practices and habits of candle management. They grew accustomed to doing without hairspray and hair gel (stage management call-sheets for the SWP generally include a

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reminder, in bold font, to avoid applying such inflammable products), and learnt to keep half an eye out for colleagues who were straying too close to lit head-height sconces. Noma Dumezweni recalled an occasion during the technical rehearsals for ’Tis Pity when an actor, off-duty, lent too far towards a candle and his ruff began smouldering (it was swiftly extinguished). ‘From that moment no one has been complacent,’ she stressed, explaining that the cast had developed an actors’ early warning system: if during performance someone edged too close to a lit flame, another person on stage would say – extra-textually – that character’s name out loud. The actor could move away, and audiences would be none the wiser.8 Responsibility for handheld candle-branches also brought with it some unfamiliar concerns. Performers soon realized that their candles required ‘candle care’. ‘You’ve got to look after your wick,’ noted Edward Peel, with a cocked eyebrow at the double entendre, explaining that a well-trimmed wick cast a steadier and stronger glow. Actors developed idiosyncratic preferences. Philip Cumbus’s explanation for why he liked his candles ‘short and stubby’ revealed a combination of concern for actorly practicality and dramatic verisimilitude: ‘they look like they’ve been used over the course of a day, and they go out less easily when they’re shorter’. Performers found themselves noticing unexpected things about the candlelit room. Giles Cooper found the air drier than in other theatres, and it sometimes made his eyes water (which was most useful for those actors who had to cry on cue, he noted pragmatically). Sam Hargreaves became sensitive to the slight changes in luminosity he noticed when burntdown candles were replaced with fresh ones, as happened routinely during the Pestle act-break interludes. The fresh candles sometimes crackled (‘like Rice Krispies’) during the solemn scene in which Hargreaves as the Boy brought news of Jasper’s supposed death to Venturewell (4.3), lending the scene an additional air of intimacy and expectation. Francis

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Beaumont, in a verse preface to his friend John Fletcher’s Blackfriars tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), had poured scorn on unthinking spectators who judged a new play on the basis of whether ‘the wax lights be new that day’, but Hargreaves’ observation does suggest that the freshness or otherwise of the candles had an impact on the ambience of the space.9 The physiological impact of the candles on spectators intrigued Dominic Dromgoole, who worried initially that the atmosphere of the playhouse would ‘become thick and miasmic in the wrong way; that it would give you a headache and it would be like fighting against something gelatinous. Actually it becomes rather gloriously liquid … a rather lovely aqueous thing’ (interview 1). Nonetheless several performers admitted to finding the candlelight ‘lulling’ or ‘lethargic’ and warned against their potentially ‘soporific’ effect.10 Sarah MacRae concluded that outdoor scenes were simply harder to realize on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse stage than those set indoors, and at times wished for the ability to snap between lighting states as a way of jolting an audience back to attention (interview 1). Inevitably, the candles frustrated some spectators, especially those who were seated or stood in the upper gallery. As one audience member at a performance of The Winter’s Tale complained, ‘we missed some of the action because of those wretched candles … I know that it adds to the atmosphere, but they did get in the way. A whole lot of stuff we just didn’t see at all’.11 These spectators were by no means the first to complain about theatrical candles. In the late 1660s the diarist Samuel Pepys, a regular theatregoer who developed weak eyesight, found to his grief that ‘it is great trouble that I now see a play, because of my eyes, and the light of the candles making it very troublesome to me’.12 The candles also offered a source of meta-theatrical (or even un-theatrical) excitement because performers were aware of audience anxiety about the possibility of costumes and hair catching on naked flames. In some ways, this

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unexpected intrusion of practical reality is comparable with the excitable flicker detectable in the Globe when a performer acknowledges a real-world interruption such as a pigeon or a passing aeroplane. In the SWP, the un-fictionality of fire has historical resonance: scholars of theatrical special effects posit that one of the appealing features of fireworks and crackers on the early modern stage was their unpredictability, fizzing and spitting in all directions and breaking any sort of divide between the imagined world of the play and the real playhouse.13 This meta-theatrical kick lives anew in the SWP, where the performances seem wilfully to transgress modern concerns for health and safety regulations. James Garnon laconically observed of the playhouse that ‘the sheer amount of fire in a wooden room is interesting’ and performers during the first season detected some anxious audience responses to the unpredictable candlelight. Alex Waldmann could tell that spectators felt on edge when ‘they saw those big flowing dresses getting close to the candles’, but Gemma Arterton enjoyed toying with those expectations and anxieties: ‘it becomes quite a thrill because you become so used to the space. You know your limits. You know that if you come that close to the candle you’re not going to get burnt, but if you go a little bit further you will’. The knowledge was ‘nice to play with’: ‘there’s one scene where I know there’s a candle [on a particular spot] and I walk backwards. I know exactly where to go, but I like the idea of the audience going “Oh God!” because it keeps it active and real and alive’. Several performers offered anecdotes of knocked-over candelabra or dropped candlesticks which immediately became the most fascinating thing in the room (Michael Longhurst warned his casts to beware the ‘upstaging candle’).14 Arterton recalled a moment when a candlewick fell, still burning, from a candelabrum above and remained alight on a wooden table. Nothing untoward happened, but ‘the audience was fixated on that burning candle’ – neither she nor the other actors could do anything to pull focus back to the play.

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Look and feel Actors and audience members responded to the look and feel of the candles in a richly varied set of ways. Impressions were multisensory: spectators spoke of their pleasure in the ‘smell [of] the candles; you can smell the woodwork’.15 Actor Sarah MacRae (interview 1) enjoyed the scent of the candles, too, but primarily because it brought her the satisfying reminder that ‘I’m at work now’, an association with quotidian activity that perhaps more closely resembles an early modern response to a candle-rich space than a contemporary appreciation of candles for their festive qualities. The celebratory or romantic signification of candlelight is after all wholly modern: the historian Raphael Samuel reminds us that candles have only held their romantic associations since the ‘retro-chic’ craze of the late 1970s, when restaurants started placing candlesticks on tables set for two.16 Only recently have candles come to be regarded as anything other than a practical light source. It was not just MacRae to whom the space very quickly came to seem familiar and unexceptional despite its unconventional lighting. Dennis Herdman admitted that although his initial response to the notion of candle-lit performance was a sceptical one, picturing ‘characters from the period wandering around in a nightgown carrying a little candelabra’, he was surprised to discover how ‘natural’ the lighting soon came to feel. ‘You’d imagine with scores of candles all around the place it might get a little bit [precious],’ he suggested, but the space avoided affectation because the candles precluded a ‘fussy’ lighting plot. As James Garnon put it, ‘the room is candlelit and [that is] our source of light. It’s un-theatrical in that sense. It’s not like a lit show. We are using our own sources of light: candles that the servants are putting up and down’. This was an ‘untheatricality’ that had a paradoxically beneficial effect on the dramatic effectiveness of the space.

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The candles lent great situational verisimilitude to the courtly settings of many of the early modern dramas (The Changeling’s Matt Doherty observed that ‘when [the candles] are all lit you can imagine a wonderful castle in Alicante in the seventeenth century’), and enhanced the realism of moments of darkness or obscurity. Brendan O’Hea recalled the impact of 2.3 in The Duchess of Malfi, a night-time scene during which Bosola discovers that the Duchess has secretly given birth. The candelabra were partly extinguished and raised to the ceiling, and Sean Gilder’s Bosola began the scene alone on the stage with a hand-held branch of candles. Alex Waldmann’s Antonio entered, at which point Gilder put the candlebranch behind him and turned slightly away. He presented an indistinct, vaguely threatening dark shape, justifying Antonio’s exclamation and anxious series of questions: ‘I heard some noise. Who’s there? What art thou? Speak!’ (2.3.10) Moments later in the same scene, Antonio let fall his child’s nativity, an important document that Bosola later noticed lying in the shadows when light from his lantern fell upon the paper. As O’Hea observed, ‘we discover the [nativity] at the same time as the character does’, a narrative of not-seeing and revelation that worked in a different way when performed under shadowy candle-light than it would have done if staged in the daylit Globe theatre (on which historical stage The Duchess of Malfi also appeared in the early seventeenth century). The sense that the candles were simultaneously unfamiliar, exotic and constitutive of a heightened theatrical realism was noted by an audience member at a performance of Malfi, who found the lighting both ‘really dramatic’ and ‘a bit more realistic’ than that found in a conventional modern theatre.17 Performers, creatives and audience members responded keenly to the beauty of the candlelight. Long-serving Shakespeare’s Globe steward Helen Huson remarked on the consistency of response among early visitors to the playhouse: ‘every time someone goes in for the first time, they go, “oh my God, it’s beautiful in here!” You get exclamations every time someone walks through that door’. The candlelit

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room presented a range of striking visual states that were appreciated by audience members, from the ‘golden light’ of a fully illuminated house to the Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro created by a single burning candle on an otherwise dark stage.18 The interplay of candlelight, candelabra movement and stage action offered a wholly new aesthetic experience for both spectators and performers. ’Tis Pity’s Philip Cumbus enjoyed watching the moment at the start of 5.2 when Stefano Braschi’s Soranzo ‘walks on as the candelabra come down. I’m at the back waiting for them to settle, and it just looks so beautiful’. Cumbus’s appreciation of the moment is suggestive of the anticipatory pleasure generated during scene changes by the candles-in-motion, as their graceful rise or fall and slow spin cue the business of the scene. Alex Waldmann found that members of the audience became ‘transfixed’ by the movement of the candelabra. Pauline McLynn, who spent most of Pestle experiencing a spectator’s-eye view of the playhouse from her position in the pit, appreciated that the ‘shimmering’ and ‘jewel-like’ room glowed with an aesthetically kind light, an observation supported by ’Tis Pity’s Stefano Braschi who said of the candlelight, ‘it’s passionate, it’s sensual, it’s sexy’. Michael Longhurst agreed: ‘everyone looks fabulous in candlelight – fact’. The flattering effect of the candlelight was set off by the fabrics favoured by designer Jonathan Fensom, who for Malfi, The Changeling, Pericles and The Tempest chose where possible brightly-coloured cloth with iridescence in the weave such as silk, damask and velvet. Jewellery and luxuriously wide cuffs and collars helped to ‘give a bit of depth’ and delineate form. The candles provide a workable wash the brightness of which took many creatives by surprise, but the light levels in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse are nonetheless lower than in conventional theatres. When some or most of the candles are extinguished, the gloom can be profound. Gemma Arterton as the Duchess in Malfi relished the mood with which this shadowiness imbued the play: ‘it aided the piece so much because you did feel as if you were trapped, or in a very bizarre

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world … Even on a matinee day, you feel like you’re in the deepest depths of the night, in Italy’. In comparison with the atmosphere of the Globe, Arterton concluded, the SWP is ‘honed in’ – focused, interior, pressurized. ’Tis Pity’s Alice Haig concurred. ‘[The candles] give you an atmosphere immediately.’ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore was designed in an eclectic style with some modernist elements to the clothing and set, but the candlelight ensured that the play’s setting ‘still feels like a world that’s archaic’. The candles also tapped into powerful emotions that twenty-first-century people associate with flickering flame. Cymbeline director Sam Yates described the play of light and shadow on wood as the space’s ‘silent dynamic’, an energizing quality that gave warmth and sensuality to the new timber room. For James Garnon, this romance was part of the psychological ‘baggage that we bring to candlelight’ – we find it sexy and alluring, which was not the automatic association for early modern people reliant on candles for all after-dark illumination (although a profusion of candles would for some early modern spectators have suggested the glamour and excess of aristocratic or courtly entertainments). The flames seemed wholly appropriate for a space dedicated to storytelling. Eileen Atkins was struck by the sensation of performing under candlelight, which she equated with telling stories around ‘a bonfire at night’.19 Not all the associations stimulated by the candles were positive. Edward Peel noted that the act of peering through the candelabra from above felt intrusive. The space is designed, he said, to fashion spectators as eavesdroppers. ‘People feel really voyeuristic,’ said Max Bennett, a performer who experienced with Fiona Button the novelty of appearing on the playhouse stage in a state of semi-nudity. Audience members certainly noticed the alluringly prurient aspects of spectating in the SWP (one respondent at a Research in Action workshop described watching from above as ‘like looking through a hole in the door’),20 but for many the emotions generated were more ambivalent. A spectator at Malfi felt ‘entombed’ and spoke of the disturbing effects of the gloom, the candles, the intimate

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scale and the tone of the play.21 Some performers picked up on the sense of sacrality created by the space, although without the morbid associations of entombment. Alex Waldmann described it as a ‘sacred candlelit space’, particularly suitable for the darker themes of Malfi, and Michael Longhurst was grateful that the playhouse’s natural ‘chapel-like’ architecture created an unsettling sense of religiosity perfectly suited to the world of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. The playhouse taps into a specifically modern sacralization of theatre as virtuous high art, too – one audience member spoke of the space’s resemblance to the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, with its frescos and painted ceiling by Michelangelo,22 while another spectator was reminded of a very different denominational context, an ‘old nonconformist chapel’.23 The ‘very Christian vibes’24 detected by some audience members established expectations of drama in which seriousness, reverence and even ethical probity were keynotes – expectations which were usually undercut by the works themselves. It was not just the themes in disturbing tragedies such as Malfi and ’Tis Pity that contrasted fruitfully with the sacrality of the room. Adele Thomas’s raucous comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle brought what the director described as a ‘slightly rock and roll sense’ into the playhouse, a space she recognized as ‘church-like’. Actor Hannah McPake ‘love[d] the fact that we’re not being reverent’, and Alex Waldmann appreciated the ‘bells-and-whistles irreverent chaos’ of the production after the ‘atmospheric’ Malfi. Thomas deliberately engaged with and challenged audience expectations in the opening moments of Pestle, aiming to quote but then comically ‘undo’ many of the conventions established by Malfi (see Chapter 4). Imitating the graceful lighting of the candles at the start of Dromgoole’s Malfi, Thomas’s production began with a burlesque of this process in which two incompetent stagehands bungled the operation and set a pair of breeches on fire (a gag which also responded parodically to anxious queries from patrons about the likelihood of fire in a wooden candlelit room). Pestle continued to echo Malfi in its use of the wrap-

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around access corridor (for a sprawling fight between Rafe and Jasper in Pestle 2.4, rather than the Duchess’s haunting echo in Malfi 5.3) and in the sinister arrival of a coffin borne by robed henchmen (Pestle 4.3 and Malfi 4.2). The boisterousness of Pestle was all the greater for being the second full-scale production in the new playhouse, as Thomas was able to riff on patterns of staging and spectatorship that had been established by Malfi (and to an extent Eileen Atkins’s one-woman show), but the transgressive effect of the comedy also arose out of its challenge to popular preconceptions about ‘Jacobean drama’: audience members were happily taken aback to find knockabout farce in a beautiful space dedicated to what is generally taken to be a dark and provocative dramatic canon. The production asked audience members to revise their expectation of what Jacobean drama is, and what a space like the playhouse is for. As actor Hattie Morahan said of seeing Pestle, ‘something about this space made me feel that the audience are hungry for the comedic’. It was a response she remembered during The Changeling, a play with its own challenging combination of ‘death and horror and suspense and comedy’.

Absolute darkness Michael Longhurst observed that a true blackout is rare in conventional theatres in which illuminated exit signs and other intrusions prevent a truly dark state.25 In this, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse offers a technical capacity that is beyond most modern venues, with the added effect that as the blackout is achieved by extinguishing candles, ‘you can’t get back to a lit state very easily’: audiences do not have the comforting security of knowing someone is going to flick a switch and flood the room with light. The pitch dark scenes in The Duchess of Malfi (4.1) and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (3.7), both discussed above, had a powerful effect on audience members. ‘There’s always a gasp when the last

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light goes out,’ said Jethro Skinner, ‘because it’s a reminder how infrequently we’re ever in darkness with a large room full of strangers’ (steward Helen Huson called the audible reaction from the audience ‘a little hysterical titter’). Edward Peel enjoyed the detectable anxiety: ‘you can feel the audience going, “oh, what’s going on?”’ Spectators described the effect of being in a totally dark space as ‘disorienting’ and ‘menacing’. The dread was palpable: ‘You no longer had control of the space … You couldn’t see what was going on.’ The respondent expected ‘something bad to happen’ in the darkness.26 Sometimes unexpected things did happen. Max Bennett recalled a moment during the total blackout in ’Tis Pity when an audience member took the opportunity to whisper ‘shut the fuck up’ to a party of schoolchildren, who had been slightly disruptive. The frustrated patron had made their views known in the ‘anonymity’ of the darkness, despite choosing a ‘really poignant moment just as Bergetto was dying’. Absolute darkness could not, however, always be guaranteed. In The Changeling, 5.1 was usually performed with the stage in total darkness save for a single candle carried by Hattie Morahan to illuminate her face, a lighting effect that suggested Beatrice-Joanna’s isolation at this stage in the drama. The candles were blown out by the inhabitants of Alibius’s asylum in the previous scene, but ‘there was one night when … one of them was left lit by mistake, and it was sort of disappointing because part of the thrill for audiences is that [the theatre] goes completely black’. Audiences at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse were attracted by numerous aspects of the new theatre, not least the candlelight and the unfamiliar effects that it was able to produce. The lighting technologies in the SWP challenge the aesthetics of candlelight that have developed since the 1970s, undercutting a modern association of candles with romance, festivity and homeliness: it was not just that candles were used to light the ethically unsettling tragedies of the Jacobean and Caroline stage, but that candlelight and darkness licensed behaviour in audience members that was atypical of modern theatrical

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environments. The requirement that actors light themselves and their fellow performers posed a challenge to modern naturalistic acting techniques, but also presented opportunities for the performance of intimacy, alliance and antagonism: the ethics of light donation or retention were readily understood by both performers and spectators. An array of lit candles aided verisimilitude in scenes set indoors; a dimly-lit stage helped create an atmosphere of menace, obscurity or confusion. But the SWP does not permit lighting effects on-demand: the labour required to extinguish and relight candles is time-consuming and disrupts the flow of the dramatic action unless changes to the lighting state are ‘written into’ the play. The ways in which the candle technologies of a theatre like the SWP might have operated in an early modern context are explored in more detail in Chapter 8, but for today’s theatre artists the candlelight was a challenge to received modes of dramatic storytelling: as designer Jonathan Fensom put it, the ‘limitations’ of the candles demanded that directors and designers found radically creative solutions to the staging conundrums they faced.

6 ‘You Can’t Help But Be Involved’: Audiences in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

A spectator, writes performance theorist Dennis Kennedy, is a ‘corporeal presence but a slippery concept’.1 The slipperiness extends to terminology: is ‘the audience’ to be regarded as a collective entity, or a disparate group of individuated ‘spectators’? Do the different etymologies of ‘audience’ and ‘spectator’, originating in the actions of hearing and seeing, have a bearing on the way the words are used in drama theory today?2 To what extent – if at all – can the experiences of modern theatrical audiences inform our understanding of how early modern drama was received in its own time? In this book, and particularly in the chapter that follows, I do not ask my terminology to bear minute distinctions: I use the various terms for theatrical onlooker as synonyms, as they are mostly used by theatrical practitioners. I write of audiences, members of the audience, spectators and ‘people in the room’, although context sometimes determines whether the response under discussion is aural, visual, haptic, olfactory or any other combination of the senses. I also take my cue from Sarah Werner and Jeremy

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Lopez, who have argued for the utility of present-day audience responses when we consider the reception of early modern drama. ‘Whether they are the same or not,’ writes Werner, ‘both audiences are responding to a script that is approximately the same and both audiences watch their own contemporaries performing that script on stage’.3 The ‘continuing vitality of theatrical tradition’, in Lopez’s words, provides a potential interpretive bridge between then and now when we think about plays in performance.4 In a historicized space like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an audience engages with early modern drama in a more complex way: as Farah Karim-Cooper noted in relation to Original Practices work at the Globe, historicallyminded performance ‘forces a modern audience to confront the past through a renegotiation of current theatrical conventions’.5 The following contributions from spectators and artists perform a set of renegotiations: of respondents’ conceptions about ‘Jacobean tragedy’, of their relationship to ‘historic’ interiors, of their position in the hierarchy of the room, and of their feelings about direct audience address. Audiences in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse discovered a provocative and distinctly non-unitary space in which the emotional stimulation of performance was both enticing and discomfiting.

Insistent intimacy Spectators were primed by media coverage of the new theatre, and by their expectations of early modern drama, to experience the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as an imaginative return to the past (as discussed in Chapter 2). Joanna, watching The Duchess of Malfi, was prepared to ‘suspend my disbelief at the door’ and ‘enter into the spirit’ of the world of the play, a commitment to engagement shared by Heather at the same performance: ‘you become part of it; you’re not so much of an onlooker … You almost become part of the play’. For Heather, the participatoriness was historical in spirit: the SWP ‘takes

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you back’ and ‘helps you think about the values at that time’.6 Particularly for audience members in the pit and lower gallery, the intimate proximity of the action was striking. It was ‘one of the most interactive experiences I’ve had’, said Grace, sitting during Malfi in the pit: ‘I’d hear a noise behind me and suddenly turn around and see people walking down the aisle right next to me. It gave me such an opportunity to watch their faces and their body language.’7 Playhouse steward Terry Pope, who watched every early modern play many times over during the SWP’s first seasons, spoke of being ‘overwhelmed’ when he first saw Malfi from the stewards’ seat in the pit: ‘you’re right by the steps and you’ve got actors going up and down, literally brushing you as they go by. I’d never been that close to a performance before’. (Audience member Grace was thrilled, if that is the right word, that Ferdinand’s spit ‘would fly out and land on the ground right in front of me’.) Sensory stimulation in the SWP is lavish, from the sights and sounds of performance to the smell of the candlewax and the feel of the wood and even the actors’ clothes as they pressed past spectators in the auditorium. ‘Everything in there has got a very old texture to it,’ said Terry Pope. Hristomir Stanev describes the richly stimulating early modern playhouse as a container for an ‘experiential flux of bodies, objects, and practices on and off stage’, and the SWP recovers a version of this sensory overload.8 One result of such multi-sensory intimacy was that spectators felt an emotional connection with both the dramatic fiction and the business of performance. Heather described her feelings towards the actors on stage as a ‘sort of warmness’, very different as she saw it from her usual response to performers behind a proscenium arch.9 Eileen Atkins, speaking of her experience as an audience member while watching Malfi, remembered thinking that she had ‘never liked so many actors in a play before’. She felt great sympathetic affection for the people on stage – Dromgoole’s cast as much as Webster’s characters – as they performed the labour of the Jacobean tragedy: ‘you’re sitting in a room with them while they go through it’. Atkins reported an analogous

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feeling when she performed on the SWP stage. ‘I have never felt such closeness with an audience – I felt embraced every time I went on, and that was very reassuring,’ she said. Several actors understood their sense of connection with the audience to arise out of the highly visible nature of the audience’s responses. Actor Matthew Needham found the audience’s presence ‘strengthening’ and ‘empowering’ because ‘you’re not just on stage in a sea of black’, as is the case when an actor looks out into the auditorium of an electrically-lit theatre (’Tis Pity’s Stefano Braschi similarly distinguished the SWP from proscenium arch spaces which can be ‘cold and intimidating’ for an actor, isolated from the audience behind dazzling theatre lights). Noma Dumezweni explained that a large part of the pleasure in performing in the SWP lay in the shared candlelight: actors ‘want you [the audience] to enjoy yourself, [we want] to entertain you’, and in the playhouse it is readily apparent to everyone if the actors are doing their job. For an actor to see a spectator demonstrably engaged in the play was ‘fantastic, a joyous thing’ (conversely, ‘when I do an aside and someone’s looking away, my God, I’m crushed for the rest of the scene – that means I haven’t held [the spectator’s attention]’). Dumezweni was not the only creative artist to interpret the emotional warmth of the SWP as the outcome of a successful transaction between performer and spectator. Designer Jonathan Fensom concluded that the SWP’s openness about its own theatricality was the root of its charm: it is a ‘funny little candlelit theatre’ that does not pretend to be anything else; it does not present a changing set from show to show. Audience members see how the candlelight is manipulated to take the playhouse from brightness to darkness, and how properties are brought on or removed from the stage. Very little about the SWP’s theatrical technology is hidden (director Adele Thomas described the playhouse as ‘uniquely enclosed’ while being simultaneously ‘uniquely open’ – ‘you can see the mechanics’) and the practical candour of the space was thought by performers to encourage a warm-hearted engagement with spectators.

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In fact audiences responded to the intimacy of the room in a variety of ways, not all of them entirely comfortable. As Penelope Woods demonstrates, the word intimacy and its cognates have a number of meanings. Broadly, we use the adjective intimate to connote on the one hand an environment that is hospitable, informal, warm and familial (‘an intimate venue’), and on the other hand a form of relationship that is personal, extremely close and sometimes sexual, as the Latin root intimare, to press or impress, suggests (the English verb meaning ‘to make known’ also comes from this root).10 The definitions are probably never entirely distinct in our minds, and the SWP seems to encompass more than one: when it is described as ‘intimate’, the word pertains to the dimensions of the room as well as the potentially pressing proximity of performers and audience. The SWP has a dual nature: it is a space that suggests welcoming domesticity as well as shuttered privacy, open-hearted involvement and voyeuristic looking-on. Woods has argued that Shakespeare’s Blackfriars playhouse was a ‘social space permeated with erotic possibility’, and seventeenth-century anecdotes support the view that the indoor playhouses were venues in which the physical crush and the potential for erotic encounter were regarded as axiomatic: in The Art of Living in London (1642) Henry Peacham recounts a jest in which a woman citizen is robbed while sitting at the play ‘in a box amongst some gallants and gallant wenches’. Asked by her husband where she had kept her valuables, she tells him ‘under my petticoat, between that and my smock’. ‘What,’ asks the husband, ‘did you feel nobody’s hand there?’ ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘I felt one’s hand there, but I did not think he had come for that.’11 Twenty-first-century spectators locate the sensual quality of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in its identity as a home for Jacobean drama – a genre popularly associated with sexual themes – rather than as a destination for erotic adventure, and the pressing physical reality of the space took some audience members aback. For these people, the space could be rather too intimate, and their experience was overwhelming. It was ‘such a strange world to feel that

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you’re actually inside of’, said Hugh after watching ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. ‘It’s quite frightening on the one hand and … stimulating on the other.’12 The interplay of desire and violence in the four tragedies was unsettling: the ‘hollow universe’ of Ford’s play left spectator Sue disturbed, she said, in a way ‘you don’t quite get with Shakespeare’.13 Dark themes or incidents made an impact: the death of the Duchess’s children in The Duchess of Malfi (4.1) was ‘hard to take’,14 as was Bergetto’s murder in ’Tis Pity (3.7), a painful end in which the killing blow was struck in pitch dark, and James Garnon’s hapless suitor died in barely-lit, fearful confusion. ‘I’ve never been so affected by a fool’s death,’ said Hugh.15 ‘It’s so awful,’ agreed Sue.16 During one performance, a spectator in the lower gallery made her distress very clear when she said, as the lantern was brought on to illuminate Bergetto’s appalling wound, ‘Oh, but he’s so nice.’ When signalled to be quiet she repeated loudly and insistently: ‘But he is.’ At that moment, the spectator’s shock at Bergetto’s killing overrode her adherence to modern theatrical etiquette.17 Bruce R. Smith writes of the ‘pleasurable twinge of watching and hearing characters suffer on stage’, but for some SWP audiences the experience went beyond the pleasurable.18 Hattie Morahan observed approvingly that ‘the audience’s presence is incredibly powerful within [the playhouse] – somehow they’re respected not just as bystanders but as part of the actual [work]’. Morahan detected an involvement and complicity in the attention paid by the audience, a reaction which David Bergeron has identified in a different context as a ‘charismatic response’.19 But given the subject matter of The Changeling, in which Morahan starred as the amoral Beatrice-Joanna, for the audience to be drawn so actively into Middleton and Rowley’s world was not an unmitigated good. Spectator Tony, after a performance of The Changeling, described the SWP as a ‘place that encourages empathy’ with the travails of the characters in stage, but suggested his discomfort with the nature of the play by adding, ‘if you want to try and empathise’.20 Sue registered the compulsive

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quality of spectatorship in the SWP after a performance of ’Tis Pity: ‘you can’t help but be involved, can you? … It’s very hard not to be involved’.21 Morahan sensed that an expectation of audience complicity seemed to be written into the drama. Beatrice-Joanna ‘unquestioningly assumes that her audience – or whoever she’s talking to – is somehow on her side, or understands what she feels, or empathises with her predicament’, however appallingly she has behaved or however much the reality of the world of the play does not accord with her view of things. Although it was ‘very pleasurable’ for Morahan as an actor to discover the ways in which during her performance as Beatrice-Joanna she might ‘enrol the audience in her plan’, it was sometimes an unsettling experience for spectators to feel that their complicity was being co-opted in this way.22 Bridget Escolme has written persuasively about the performance objective sustained by modern Shakespearean actors: their desire for the audience to ‘listen to them, notice them, approve their performance, ignore others on stage for their sake’. Playhouse spectators were sometimes reluctant to grant such approval.23 As Jethro Skinner (Grimaldi in ’Tis Pity) found when putting asides to the audience, some of the questions that his lines contained (and the answers the asides presumed) were disturbing: ‘[the audience] don’t want to agree. I’m saying, “doesn’t it make sense that I have to kill Soranzo?” But they don’t want to agree with that’. Max Bennett made a similar point about the shock of Giovanni’s incestuous relationship with Annabella, explored in detail and with sympathy in Ford’s ’Tis Pity. During 2.1, a key scene after the couple have consummated their relationship, staged in Longhurst’s production with the lovers naked in bed, Bennett sensed the temperature of the room change as the audience was made to ‘feel part of some sort of transgression’ in being present during an illicit meeting. Bennett imagined a spectator’s line of thought: ‘Oh my God, they’ve just done that and they’re brother and sister and we’re here.’ For others, discomfort co-existed with prurience. Spectators in the upper

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galleries, some of whom had a restricted view of the couple on the bed below, were frequently observed standing up in their seats (or craning sideways if already standing) during this scene, the unanticipated stage nudity acting as a prompt to behave in ways that breached modern theatrical decorum (in 1598 the anti-theatrical polemicist Stephen Gosson deplored the habit in ‘public theatres, when any notable show passeth over the stage’, for the people to rise in their seats, ‘and stand upright with delight and eagerness to view it well’).24 The SWP’s insistent intimacy meant that audience members who did not wish to be included had a potentially difficult time. ’Tis Pity’s Philip Cumbus noticed one spectator in the pit who, from the moment Giovanni entered in the final scene bearing Annabella’s heart upon his dagger, simply covered her face with her programme and refused to watch. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, theatregoers, particularly women, who wished to ‘[take] themselves out of the equation of ethical and social face-to-face encounter’, as Penelope Woods puts it, had the option of masking themselves with a fan, or even sitting behind lattice-work screens.25 Twenty-first-century audiences are generally more obedient (as well as long-suffering), and for a spectator to shield herself with a programme was regarded as exceptional. A more common response to the unsettling themes explored in Malfi, ’Tis Pity, The Changeling and The Broken Heart was laughter, a seemingly inappropriate reaction that initially left performers nonplussed. Gemma Arterton, who played the assailed heroine in the opening production of The Duchess of Malfi, was ‘very shocked’ during the first week of performances at how much laughter the play generated. She questioned at first whether the audience had understood the horrific elements of the story. The Duchess’s fleeting revival after she is strangled, and Bosola’s comment once she dies – ‘Oh, she’s gone again’ (4.3.343) – produced laughter that was a challenge for the actors to ride out. Arterton concluded that the laughter registered ‘uneasiness’ rather than amusement, an unease that presumably arose from the laugher’s recognition

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of the distance between modern sentiments and practices (of drama, stagecraft and ethics) and those of the seventeenth century. Playhouse audiences also laughed at things presented in the plays as funny which are no longer generally considered so (for instance, the antics of the asylum patients in The Changeling), as well as at uncontentiously humorous lines or incidents. The source of apparent amusement in the four tragedies was unstable, a disorienting experience for many performers and an upsetting one for some audience members.26 What Jeremy Lopez has called an audience’s ‘sardonic tendency’ is triggered in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by a range of potential stimuli, many of them considerably remote from the witty.27 In this, uneasy laughter in the playhouse resembles its equivalent at the Globe, where disquieting moments can provoke both anxious titters (by which a modern audience registers its discomfort with early modern politics and culture) and uninhibited laughter (suggesting an audience has failed to notice, or remains unaffected by, contentious early modern sentiments).28

Talking to the audience Even before the first performances in the SWP, Dominic Dromgoole had encouraged his cast to ‘look people in the eye’ and deliver whole thoughts to individual audience members, rather than ‘scan around’ the auditorium in a generalized way and address the room as a whole.29 The instruction to ‘connect with people, [to] make sure you bring them into the world of the play’ helps to explain how powerful (and occasionally unnerving) some spectators found their immersion in the ethics and values of early modern drama. Actors in the SWP make eye contact with, talk to, touch and occasionally manhandle members of the audience (those sitting in the sidestage boxes routinely have to make way for actors clambering through to get onto or off the stage). This direction of

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communication in the modern space marks it as distinct from early modern practice. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playhouses were also known for potentially disruptive contact between performers and spectators, but it was not usually the actors who instigated such disturbances. Playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Horn Book (1609) describes a stereotypical gallant’s behaviour in a playhouse when he attends a Children of the Revels production: sitting on a stool on the stage, he can pass comment on the play and the performances, and interfere – in more ways than one – with the action and the young actors: ‘you may (with small cost) purchase the dear acquaintance of the boys; have a good stool for sixpence; at any time know what particular part any of the infants present; get your match lighted; [and] examine the play-suits’ lace’.30 In the SWP, it is the actors who are likely to reach over and laconically finger an audience member’s collar, an ‘interactivity’ particularly noted by audience members at the raucous The Knight of the Burning Pestle and during comic sequences in other productions.31 In today’s SWP, of course, the nearest audience members are seated in the side stage boxes or the lower gallery rather than on stools upon the stage, but actors also roved around the auditorium in their attempt to engage with the audience. In The Changeling, Brian Ferguson as the feigning asylum patient Tony came down into the pit to hide from his keeper Lollio at the end of 1.2, a piece of stage business that only developed during the technical rehearsal and evolved throughout the run; eventually, he progressed to sitting on an audience member’s lap, sometimes kissing them in the process. Ferguson was gratified at the effect this produced, which he interpreted as being wholly of a piece with the authors’ intentions: ‘I feel like we uncovered something that was there when this play hit this space,’ he explained, noting that the comic ‘asylum plot’ scenes in The Changeling – often disliked, misunderstood or simply cut from modern productions of the play – worked particularly well in the SWP. Ferguson’s business was popular

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with audiences, too, although it was remarked on by those who had enjoyed the social interaction from a distance, as it were, rather than as targets. Student Gabby was amused that ‘the woman he kissed was a professor of mine’, relishing the comic acknowledgment of the audience but perhaps relieved that she was not herself the subject of Ferguson’s joke.32 Not every show employed this sort of overt audience interaction but as Hattie Morahan advised, ‘you ignore the audience at your peril’ in the SWP. Pauline McLynn, whose role as one of the citizen theatregoers in Pestle required constant acknowledgment of and engagement with the audience, came to realize that the people watching the show had understood that they were allowed to ‘make their own mark on the play’, a freedom that led to McLynn and Phil Daniels occasionally being reprimanded by other spectators for their (scripted and intentional) ‘disruptions’ to the action of ‘The London Merchant’, the imaginary city comedy overtaken by The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Given that both performers (familiar faces in any case to most theatregoers from appearances on television and film) were in full Jacobean costume and could hardly be mistaken for truly disruptive spectators, such moments felt surreal to the actors, but they suggest the extent to which audience members, particularly those in close proximity to the action on stage, had understood the dynamics of the play and the playhouse, and the license these dynamics gave them to talk back (the feelings of spectators seated or standing in the upper gallery were somewhat different, as we will see). The conspicuousness granted to McLynn and Daniels by their celebrity perhaps echoes the effect created in the first performance of the play by the Children of the Revels at Blackfriars in 1607, when the citizen couple would have been played by two adolescent boys. For actors accustomed to Globe-style interactivity, the relationship with the audience in the SWP was however noticeably different. The sheer density of people in a much smaller space means that the audience in the SWP is unavoidably on show: almost every spectator’s view includes

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a good segment of pit, gallery or side-stage box along with the stage (and for some spectators, the view of other audience members is substantially better than their view of the stage). Audience demographics are noticeable in the SWP in a way that they are not in the Globe, an individuating factor that has implications for performers. James Garnon described the differences he detected playing Jaques in Blanche McIntyre’s Globe production of As You Like It when it came inside for two Outside In performances in summer 2015. Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech in 2.7 works particularly well in a large and crowded theatre in which the performer has a good chance of spotting spectators who more or less resemble the figures Jaques describes as representing the ‘seven ages’ of man: At first the infant Mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then the soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like a pard, Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon, With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again towards a childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history,

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Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (2.7.139–66) Garnon would often ‘use’ the audience in the Globe, ‘gesturing to a baby if there was one, or a child, or someone with “spectacles on nose” for the pantaloon’. And although it was satisfying if Garnon could find someone in the crowd who was appropriately ‘cast’, it did not much matter one way or the other – most audience members could not see who he was gesturing at, but understood that Garnon was drawing parallels between the descriptions in the speech and the range of people watching the play. When he tried the same thing in the SWP, the response was not so positive: ‘the audience – and I – looked to see how well the person fitted the description and invariably found the comparison wanting’.33 It was not just that Garnon had less chance of picking out a representative of each of the ‘seven ages’ from the smaller crowd in the playhouse, but that a much higher proportion of the audience were able to see precisely whom he had singled out. The essentialist sentiment that audiences read into the speech in the Globe – that our experience of ageing is substantially the same as Shakespeare’s – was challenged in the SWP, where the differences between Shakespeare’s early modern conception of the stages of life and our own were made clear. Watching a play in the SWP is exposing for some audience members. Those seated in the pit, lower gallery and front rows of the upper gallery constitute part of the stage picture, and can be drawn – willingly or not – into the action of the play (John Stephens’s satirical profile of an actor in his Essays and Characters, Ironical and Instructive (1615) suggests that this is not just a modern habit: Jacobean performers were known for lobbing ‘saucy rude jests’ against lawyers, fine courtiers, rich citizens, fine ladies and ‘honest justice[s]’, most or all of whom were presumably in the audience at theatres like the Blackfriars).34 Actors found that their attempts to engage spectators with eye contact, direct address or touch

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were not always welcomed or reciprocated, and the effect of rejection was felt more keenly in the intimate SWP than in the Globe. Eileen Atkins was philosophical when a woman in the audience refused to meet her eye (‘I thought, well I won’t do it to you anymore – I’m not a forcer in the theatre’), but it was disconcerting for performers if spectators looked away during an aside or direct address.35 Actors developed techniques to assess whether spectators were likely to be receptive. Max Bennett explained that ‘you can almost feel [the audience] lean in or out, engaged or not engaged’, and Hattie Morahan noted that those spectators keen to be spoken to ‘pull[ed] the right face’, a performance of willingness that complicates the binary division of active actor and passive watcher (Pauline Kiernan, in her study of modern Globe practice, landed on the term ‘audience performance’ rather than ‘audience participation’ for the sort of spectator involvement solicited by Globe actors).36 Director Caroline Steinbeis described a holistic form of analysis that assessed a range of aural clues including ‘in-breaths, or shifts in seats or coughing’ to determine the attentiveness of the audience. The architecture of the playhouse worked to create alertness in its spectators – as designer Jonathan Fensom put it, the SWP is a ‘lean-in space’, unlike the nineteenth-century tradition of ‘fold your arms, lean back’ auditoria – but performers also noted that the genre of work had an impact on the way audience members comported themselves. Paul Rider, who appeared in the first two large-scale productions in 2014, observed a distinction in the body language of audience members in the front row of the galleries in The Duchess of Malfi and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. During Webster’s tragedy, the spectators tended to be somewhat contained, and kept their bodies within the bounds of the gallery. In the comic Pestle, they were much more likely to lean over the balustrade, willingly placing themselves in the performance zone. Actors also suggested a sociological, or class-based, reason for the reticence they sometimes observed in playhouse spectators. In the SWP, the ticket price broadly reflects conventional modern practice: the seats nearest the stage are

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costlier, those further away are cheaper (and the standing positions in the upper gallery are affordably priced at £10). Modern theatre pricing evolved from the economics of early modern indoor theatres, which were different to those that obtained in the outdoor amphitheatres where the spectators who had paid least – the groundlings – were closest to the stage. What impact these different circumstances would have had in early modern London is hard to recover, but the first performers in today’s SWP had no doubt that the age, social class and wealth of spectators in the pit, side-stage boxes and lower gallery made for a more reserved atmosphere than the Globe, where the audience nearest the stage tended to be more youthful and eager for involvement. Actor Alice Haig put it succinctly: one finds a ‘very different sort of people in [the SWP] pit than in the Globe [yard]’. Malfi’s Gemma Arterton (who also appeared on the Globe stage in Dromgoole’s 2007 Love’s Labours Lost) detected ‘a sort of distance’ among the spectators closest to her, who would sometimes engage her in eye contact, and sometimes not. Arterton and her fellow cast members had expected the pit audience to be ‘up for it’ in the way the yard crowd are in the Globe, but as she came to realize the demographic of the pit sitters skewed towards wealthier theatregoers whom she presumed to be unaccustomed to more confrontational styles of performance. Arterton recalled that when Paul Rider, playing one of the ‘madmen’ in 4.1, ventured into the pit, many of the spectators whom he addressed ‘clammed up’ (Brian Ferguson’s version of this manoeuvre the following year in The Changeling – see above – may owe its success to better public awareness of the interactive style of performance likely to be found in the SWP).

Preferential treatment? Actor Giles Cooper experienced an odd moment of social awkwardness during a performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle more analogous to the accidental interactions

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between strangers in the public sphere than between actor and spectator in a playhouse: ‘I put my hand down on the side [of the lower gallery] and I [accidentally] touched an audience member’s hand. So I said, “I’m so sorry”, and he went “mmm”’. The exchange was surprising not just because it took place out of the context of Cooper’s role as milksop younger son Michael Merrythought, but because it made Cooper reflect that members of the audience within touching distance of the cast experienced a different sort of connection with the actors than those further away or higher up. Audience experience is not unitary in the SWP, and unlike in the radically-democratic Globe, the diversity of spectator experience in the indoor venue maps onto the spatial economics of the playhouse in the conservative ways familiar to modern theatregoers: those who have paid the most enjoy a more intimate, up-close and privileged interaction. This is not an absolute distinction. Pillars and actors’ bodies pose an obstruction to everyone regardless of their seat. Spectators in the front rows of the upper gallery facing the stage have an excellent end-on view, although they are furthest from the stage. There are advantages to sitting or standing in the upper side-stage galleries in the SWP – the action of looking through the illuminated candelabra generates an appealing voyeuristic thrill, suitable for the claustrophobic tragedies for which the Jacobean canon is notorious. But the fact remains that spectators in parts of the upper galleries can feel distanced from the action on stage, are granted less eye contact by performers, and must make do with a partial view. Dominic Dromgoole was candid about these challenges in an interview with The Stage newspaper in April 2014, admitting that the viewing angles from the restricted positions are ‘shit’, and it is evident that some visitors felt put out by the ‘cramped’ conditions in sections of the upper gallery: it ‘feels like those are just the cheap places to be, the cheapest tickets and that’s pretty much it’, said one spectator.37 SWP steward Terry Pope noted that ‘you don’t get people laughing so much upstairs, … especially with visual gags because they [the audience] can’t see them’.

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Audience members were conscious that some of their number had a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ view than themselves, and aware that certain areas of the playhouse – the pit, the sidestage boxes – carried a ‘prestige’ that brought ‘implied status’ to the people sitting there, as actor Paul Rider put it (although pit-sitters were also vulnerable to mild humiliation by actors, or enforced audience interaction). Actors spoke of a ‘class divide’ in the SWP that was different to the democratic atmosphere in the Globe, and the higher ticket prices in the indoor space prompted concern that it was less accessible than its partner venue.38 As Jethro Skinner put it, ‘I miss having my poorer friends watching.’ In fact, the SWP’s ticket price range of £10–£48 for the Globe-produced early modern dramas was not very different to that of similar-sized London theatres such as the Donmar Warehouse, which sold tickets ranging from £10 to £37.50 during the spring 2014 season, and Shakespeare’s Globe instituted a ticket price adjustment between the first and second indoor seasons to make many of the upper gallery seats cheaper while increasing the price of the seats in the pit. But the small scale of the playhouse, the beauty of the interior and the hand-crafted fixtures created an air of exclusivity much commented on by visitors. ‘I think it’s a privilege to come here,’ said Heather.39 ‘I feel very privileged when I’m in there, especially as [part of] a small audience,’ agreed Tony.40 One audience member reflected that the rarefied atmosphere might be intimidating to some theatregoers,41 but a young spectator, attending ’Tis Pity with a group of student friends, appreciated that the middle-aged demographic of the audience helped maintain the ethical seriousness of potentially lurid elements in the play: ‘the sex scene [sic; 2.1] was a bit, “oof! O-kay!” … But there were a lot of elderly people and they were past that, so you know: let’s all be mature. If it was a younger audience everyone would just giggle’.42 Audiences acquiesced in a range of respectful behaviours in the SWP, from consideration for their neighbours on the narrow benches to diligent silencing of mobile phones. Spectators responded to a sense of propriety seemingly

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generated by the room: ‘I suppose it makes me concentrate,’ said Pam after a performance of Malfi.43 Dominic Dromgoole had initially worried about ‘restlessness and anger’ from audience members in uncomfortable seats or in the standing positions. But the ‘standees especially are so astonishingly well-mannered’. Dromgoole too put this down to the qualities of the playhouse: ‘there’s sufficient authority in the room to say “sit and listen” or “stand and listen”’ (interview 1). Unlike the Globe, where the large standing audience has been accused of, and celebrated for, ‘hijacking’ performances, the architecture and mood of the SWP fashion its audience members as respectful responders.44 Although the playhouse is ‘policed’ by stewards who insist on certain modes of behaviour (no photography, no sitting in the standing sections), the range of potential misbehaviour is smaller indoors than it is in the Globe – stewards do not have to scold patrons for putting up umbrellas, settling down with a picnic or perching on collapsible stools. Dromgoole argues that the forces of control exerted by the playhouse arise primarily from the cultural and social weight of the building itself, the associations carried by early modern drama, and the insistently ‘appropriate’ behaviour modelled by mostly experienced, well-off theatregoers. Even the anarchy of The Knight of the Burning Pestle was relatively self-conscious, and usually produced on cue in response to the disruptive citizens George and Nell (Phil Daniels and Pauline McLynn). As Alex Waldmann (Jasper) put it, the audience sensed they had been granted ‘permission’ to behave with a degree of giddiness not customary in the theatre, but the misrule was granted by license from above, not initiated from below.45 Dominic Dromgoole’s identification of the SWP’s ‘authority’ over spectators, and the range of obedient behaviours the room seems in some circumstances to encourage, support a reading of the playhouse as a less democratic space than the Globe, a ‘divided, stratified’ theatre (as Bridget Escolme put it) that discriminates between groups of spectators.46 Those who watched Pestle from the upper gallery standing positions felt

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far less involved in the appealing mayhem than those in the pit and lower gallery. But this is not the whole story. Audience members throughout the auditorium were more likely to speak of the commonality of audience experience than its variety, and praised the sensation of ‘togetherness’ that watching a show provoked. The intimacy and warmth of the candlelight ‘makes you feel like you’re there together’, said Joanna.47 What Susan Bennett calls ‘confirmation’ among audience members – the sense that others were responding in a similar way – reinforced spectators’ reactions to the drama on stage.48 ‘You feel like you can communicate with everyone around you,’ said one spectator who watched the show from the upper gallery: ‘you were aware of looking at everyone’s reaction. When I found something exciting I’d look at them to see if their reactions were the same as me’.49 Audience member Grace ‘had a friend sitting right across the aisle from me [in the pit] so every now and then I couldn’t help exchang[ing] a knowing look with her’.50 The shared light and horseshoe-shape of the space is crucial: spectators can see the reactions of most of their fellows as clearly as they can see the performances of the cast. Audience members are very visibly part of a group, which for some fosters a community-mindedness. Kasper Holten, director of the opera L’Ormindo, described a sense of spectatorial fellow-feeling for people seated or standing in the upper gallery. While watching Malfi, Pestle or his own productions, if I sat in the pit or the lower gallery, and [the performers] didn’t look up I’d feel concerned for the people up there. I started to feel that they were bored, and I wanted to say to the actors, ‘don’t look at me again, look at this woman, she hasn’t seen your eyes all evening’. It makes me feel uneasy if other people are missing out. Holten was certainly conscious of his privileged position in the pit or lower gallery, but whatever the differences in seat price and sightlines, the playhouse complicates a straightforward

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distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seats. Everyone in the playhouse who has a seat sits on the same punitive benches. If those in the front rows are closer to the action, then the lucky spectators in the rearmost rows get the privilege of a back rest. Standees do not get a seat, but they can lean on the metal railings, which is a respite those sitting upright and unsupported in the lower gallery might envy. By no means every spectator reported warmly communitarian feelings about their experience in the SWP (we have already heard from a standee who felt that ‘those are just the cheap places to be’)51 but for some the shared excitement of the performance and the shared discomfort of the seating – ‘unfortunately you’ve got to suffer that as part of the experience’52 – encouraged the sense that ‘there’s not much differentiation between the seats in the audience’.53 Despite the evident diversity of spectator experience in the playhouse, there is a strong current of team spirit among the audience. Throughout this chapter, and the chapters that preceded it, I have weaved in occasional references to the habits and practices of early modern theatre as we understand them, quoting from Renaissance satires, anti-theatrical treatises and jest-books as well as seventeenth-century drama. This has not been to suggest an uncomplicated comparison between the present day and Jacobean London. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is developing an identity as a theatre that is only partially historic; like the rebuilt Globe, it is primarily a working venue in which modern artists and audience members fashion a modus operandi that draws on historic practice but is not beholden to it. The nature of performance and spectatorship in the SWP, a wholly unique candlelit theatrical space, is of interest on its own terms. As it has appeared in this chapter, spectatorship in the playhouse is a multisensory experience, in which stimulation can be overwhelming. The destabilising effects of insistent intimacy, candlelight or absolute darkness, the smell of smoke and candle wax, and the sometimes unsettling themes of early modern drama produced on its stage could provoke in spectators behaviour that challenged accepted theatre etiquette.

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Spectatorship in the SWP is also exceptionally non-unitary: very different experiences are to be had in the pit, lower and upper galleries and musicians’ gallery, but these experiences do not map onto a familiar modern hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seats. For some spectators in the prestige seats closest to the stage, involvement in the dramatic action was distressing; other spectators in the loftier, less expensive upper gallery positions regarded their view from the ‘eaves’ of the space as more privileged, and more appropriate to the themes of ‘Jacobean’ drama, than the seats below. Many spectators were aware of stratification along financial or social lines among spectators, and contrasted this with the democratic commonality of the Globe, but other members of the audience detected a sense of community spirit in the playhouse. The different ways in which spectators throughout the house interpreted the onstage action is one of the topics of the next chapter. In Part Three the methodology of the book shifts for a second time, as we consider the outcomes of applied research experiments into recovered or conjectured early modern stagecraft conducted in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

PART THREE

Playhouse and Research in Action

7 Stagecraft in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

This chapter, and the chapter that follows it, record the discoveries made during a series of public Research in Action workshops in the summers of 2014 and 2015. If the fully-staged commercial Globe theatre productions in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse offered an opportunity to experience the drama of the early seventeenth century in the sort of indoor candlelit space for which much of it was written, the workshops allowed Globe researchers to ask specific questions about early modern indoor performance in relation to staging conventions, actoraudience relationships, lighting effects and music. The format for these workshops was simple and consistent: a group of professional Globe actors and a director worked with scholarpractitioners in the playhouse in the course of a day on a series of research questions arising from staging cruxes in specific early modern plays. During the public evening event, the same material was explored in front of an audience of interested but non-expert theatregoers, whose observations and responses were actively sought. Coordinated by me and members of the Globe Architecture Research Group including Philip Bird, Claire van Kampen and Martin White, the workshops explored scenes and sequences from a range of early modern drama known or presumed to have been performed indoors. During

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the workshops, members of the audience were encouraged to move about the auditorium, experiencing the action from different seats including those in the pit, galleries, side-stage boxes and musicians’ gallery. The audience gave feedback in writing and in person, the transcription of which forms part of the Indoor Performance Practice Project archive held by Shakespeare’s Globe and excerpted here. The workshops were filmed, and recordings are also available to view at the Globe library and archive. The purpose of the workshop format was to encourage the performers to respond to their own actorly instincts and the suggestions of the audience. Running scenes or sections of scenes multiple times, scholars and actors explored different staging solutions and responded to the observations of anyone in the room who wanted to contribute. The aim was not to prove that early modern theatre makers used their indoor playhouses in the way modern actors respond to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, but to expand our understanding of the possibilities of indoor performance by following the hints and implications embedded in dramatic texts in a space modelled on early modern candlelit theatres. Building on the broad definition of practice-as-research offered by Baz Kershaw – ‘the use of creative processes as research methods’1 – the workshops incorporated artists’ and spectators’ voices into the process of textual close reading, twining together the scholar’s ‘slow reading’ with the unstoppable ‘reading’ of an actor’s performance, and subjecting both to public debate. As designer Jonathan Fensom put it, the SWP is a ‘lean-in space’ (see Chapter 6): the proximity between stage and auditorium and the shared light encourages discussion between performer(s) and audience. The Research in Action workshops that this book records are theatrical ‘essays’ in the old-fashioned meaning of the term – trials of performance, staging, dramaturgy and technology that challenge our thinking about early modern indoor performance. This chapter focuses on the experiments conducted to investigate how the historical features of the

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playhouse contribute to an understanding of indoor seventeenthcentury performance practices, and to our appreciation of the relationships between performer, audience and architecture. How do asides – brief comments or questions delivered to the audience, but ‘unheard’ by other characters on stage – work in a small indoor theatre with complicated viewing angles? How are scenes of eavesdropping or concealment staged in a playing space with few places to hide? In a theatre with such a strong sense of its own interiority, how are scenes set in the outside world given a sense of location? And to what extent is the discovery space – the interior of the tiring house just within the central frons scenae doorway – a valid site of performance when it is out of view to a large proportion of the audience?

The ‘aside’ on a crowded stage: The Queen and Concubine Workshop coordinated by Philip Bird and Will Tosh Written in around 1635 for the small Salisbury Court playhouse, Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine concerns Gonzago, King of Sicily.2 At the start of what the earliest printed edition presents as Act 1 Scenes 2 and 3 (which the Richard Brome Online text maintains as contiguous parts of Act 1 Scene 1), Queen Eulalia and her son impatiently await the king’s arrival, attended by members of the court.3 Also present is Alinda, Sforza’s daughter. Raised in obscurity, she has been brought against her father’s wishes to the court as a lady-in-waiting to the queen. When the king arrives, it is clear that all is not well: he envies General Sforza’s military glory, and is jealous of the favour shown to the general by the queen (‘are you one of his great admirers too?’ (1.1.159) the king mutters in aside). But then he notices the beautiful Alinda (‘I like her strangely’,

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1.1.249), and begins his seduction, kissing her in full view of the court and her outraged father. In a scene crowded with people, numerous strands must be maintained: the public return of a king and the official speeches such a moment demands; two simultaneous semi-confidential conversations among small groups of characters; private exchanges between Sforza and his daughter; and the asides by two characters including the king as he reveals his suspicions of Sforza. Bernard Beckerman has distinguished between ‘conversational’ asides, in which dialogue is exchanged between certain individuals on stage but unheard by other characters, and the ‘solo aside’, a moment of direct audience address in which a character breaks what is now called the fourth wall and speaks to members of the audience.4 The two forms of aside pose different challenges today (we do not know if early modern performers necessarily regarded such distinctions as meaningful): in the conversational aside, actors must ensure that the arrangement of bodies on stage allows for a dialogue to be shared by some characters but plausibly ‘unheard’ by others; in a solo aside, a performer must signal that ‘verisimilitude is suspended’, in Jerzy Limon’s phrase, and the performer is momentarily speaking to the theatrical audience rather than the inhabitants of the world of the play.5 Although the quarto text of The Queen and Concubine marks only one ‘aside’ in this early sequence as a stage direction (the king’s truculent comment that his wife’s expression of sadness for his time away from court was intended for the general: ‘Sforza’s absence, I fear you mean’, 1.1.240), Brome’s busy opening scene is evidently a series of exchanges in which the spoken text is variously broadcast to the assembled courtiers, uttered in private dialogue and expressed as aside (or short soliloquy) intended for the ears of the theatre audience. As many as nine named characters and un-numbered attendants and soldiers crowd the stage, and the characters’ dynamism (amid comings-and-goings, the quarto tells us in a stage direction that the king ‘goes to the queen’, 1.1.221) suggests that this was not a scene of static courtliness involving a throne or a chair of state. For the purposes of the Research in Action workshop, it was

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assumed that all performers remained standing, with the changes in mood, focus and audibility indicated by physical motion, eyecontact and tone of voice. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse stage, like that of the historical Salisbury Court, the Cockpit/Phoenix and to an extent the Blackfriars, lacks the expansive breadth of the Globe’s. It is harder (although not impossible) to divide the indoor playing space into zones of action, particularly in contexts in which one group of characters is supposed to be out of the hearing of another. In Dominic Dromgoole’s 2014 The Duchess of Malfi, the early scene in which Antonio and Delio discuss the foibles and attractions of the assembled courtiers was split between the musicians’ gallery and the main stage: the two men were placed above as they passed comment on the rest, well out of the eye-line and plausibly out of the ear-shot of those below (1.2.69–127). The Queen and Concubine forbids this staging, as all the principle characters manifestly inhabit the same space within the Sicilian court and involve themselves in each other’s conversations at different times. The challenge for the actors in this scene is therefore to arrange themselves in a way that makes it clear who can hear whom, without irrevocably blocking the view of the audience members sitting in the side-stage boxes, and to find a way of delivering an aside that is identifiable as such to as many people in the audience as possible. In conventional proscenium-arch theatres, actors frequently deliver asides from a downstage position where they are close to the audience. Every spectator is therefore able to observe the changes in physicality, gesture and eye-contact that indicate the aside is audible to the audience but not ‘heard’ by the other characters on stage. This is not always the case in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: unless a performer is standing in the central strip of the stage and well downstage of the frons scenae, she or he is out of view of at least some spectators in the upper galleries. Furthermore, an actor who chooses to deliver an aside in a literal-minded way – approaching those sitting in the side-stage boxes and speaking directly to them – will be rendered invisible to the scores of spectators sitting

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directly above, who can only see the central and farthest portions of the stage. That the boxes (and, at the Blackfriars, the on-stage stools) were the preserve of wealthy and elite spectators makes it a plausible supposition that performers were inclined to deliver asides to these privileged playgoers, to the potential disadvantage of those sitting above who may not detect that the line is intended to be heard only by the theatre audience – Andrew Gurr argues that performers delivering asides ‘prowled around the flanks’ of the stage, commenting on the words or actions of those in the middle.6 In strongly vertical space like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, what are the implications of such a staging? What is the effect of an aside delivered out of the sight of some members of the audience? Can spectators detect that a line is supposed to go unheard by others on stage without the physical clues provided by visible performance? In addition, how should the large number of performers move around the small indoor stage in a way that makes shifts in focus, intention and audibility apparent, while minimizing congestion and the spatial absurdities of lines that are ‘not heard’ by characters who are nonetheless very close to the speaker? Other than some challenges of blocking and stage geometry worked out in rehearsal, the scene in fact presented few problems in the workshop, and impressed the audience (the majority of whom did not know the play) with its drama and clarity. During the most crowded portion of the scene the courtiers arranged themselves around the king, choosing to stand upstage near the frons scenae and in front of the sidestage pillars, thereby reducing the chances that those in the side-stage boxes would have their view seriously obstructed. The only character to have an aside apart from the king – the Polonius-like courtier Horatio – delivered his line on exit to the side-stage box nearest the door, a performance choice that left him invisible to those above but caused no damage whatsoever to the clarity of the line, which was readily audible throughout the house (the change in tone of voice and syntax made it clear that this was not a comment for public consumption – Horatio

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mentions the king’s ‘un-to-be-examined hasty humours, … and a devilish gift / He has in venery’ (1.1.222–4), hardly the language of public court diplomacy). As one spectator in the upper gallery concluded, performers need not ‘obsess about always being in sight except for crucial visual action’: the story of the text as variously audible/inaudible/aside in relation to other characters on stage was evident to audience members even if they did not have an unimpeded view of the action.7 Jeremy Lopez has argued that early modern audiences enjoyed the heightened theatricality that came with the stylized performance of asides (the ‘awareness that they were, or had the capacity to be, paying attention to all the right things’), and today’s spectators in the SWP also responded well to a relatively complex stage spatial logic.8 The actor playing the king therefore had the freedom to range downstage and make eye-contact with audience members in the galleries and sidestage boxes, and he generally sent his asides up and out into the main body of the house. This was a popular performance choice with the workshop audience in the upper gallery, two of whom found ‘the king’s asides still v[ery] engaging despite [the] distance’ and felt ‘much more involved than I had expected’.9 The choice to send asides out into the auditorium was a popular one outside of the workshop context, too. Actor Max Bennett, Giovanni in Michael Longhurst’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, spoke of ‘putting up thoughts for asides’: it was important, he argued, not just to flick an aside to whoever is closest but to ‘give an aside to someone really very far way’. It helps to ‘demarcate it as an aside’ and ensure that ‘everybody gets access to it’. The SWP supports a range of aside styles: audience members expressed satisfaction with asides that were ‘flicked’ to a nearby spectator as well as those that were delivered to the house in general. Despite the somewhat cramped conditions, the complex space of the Sicilian court was readily understandable along both stage-left/stage-right and upstage/downstage axes. Sforza, who must berate his daughter for her unseemly grandness, can do so downstage away from the ears of the other characters.

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Two simultaneous conversations – one between the courtiers Lodovico and Flavello, and one among the king, the queen and prince Gonzago – can occur on either side of the stage (although one audience member sitting in a side-stage box objected to the somewhat stagey ‘muting’ of each conversation as dramatic attention shifted away: ‘feels weird when actors pretend to have side conversations … [it] would feel nice … [to] be the only ones to actually hear these conversations!’).10 While there was a degree of energetic confusion in the number of asides and distinct conversations happening in different parts of the small stage, it became clear that the performers’ ability to switch modes – declamatory to dialogue to private conversation to aside – was fluid and confident. The intimate space in fact greatly enhanced the mood of the scene, as the claustrophobia of the Sicilian court was brought to life in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the audience induced to act as witnesses for a series of disturbing exchanges.

The pillar-less gull: Eavesdropping in Much Ado About Nothing Workshop coordinated by Philip Bird and Will Tosh If the opening scene of The Queen and Concubine examined the playing of asides in a stage crowded with people, this workshop experiment considered what happens when a scene written for the spatial characteristics of a large amphitheatre is performed in the more constrained environment of the indoor playhouse. Here, the focus was Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (written around 1598 for the Curtain; almost certainly performed at the Globe; first published in quarto in 1600; shown at Court; reprinted in the folio in 1623 and enduringly popular as a King’s Men play well into their tenure

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at Blackfriars). What is designated Act 2 Scene 3 by modern editors sees Benedick gulled by his friends Claudio, Don Pedro and Leonato into thinking that Beatrice is in love with him. The three friends have a conversation about Beatrice’s supposed infatuation, well aware that Benedick has concealed himself ‘in the arbour’ to hear their discussion. Benedick expresses his astonishment in aside to the audience; the three friends also deliver various lines to one another that are not heard by Benedick as they comment on the success of the trick, as well as lines that are fully intended for his hearing. The comedy of the fast-paced scene lies in the rich mix of seeing/not-seeing/ pretending-not-to-see and hearing/not-hearing/pretending-notto-hear performed by the trickers and the tricked. At a theatre like the Globe, the large stage pillars provide a helpful hiding place and focus of stage dynamism (although recent evidence from excavations of the Curtain site suggest its stage may not have been pillared). Globe productions have demonstrated that Benedick can hide behind a pillar, maintaining contact with a large portion of the audience, or dash between pillars behind the backs of his friends. Importantly, Benedick can plausibly be considered to have ‘hid himself’ (2.3.38), as Don Pedro puts it, while still having a degree of freedom to range across the stage, remain in view to most of the audience and engage them in direct address. In a smaller indoor theatre like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse or the Blackfriars, where there are no pillars to hide behind, an actor’s choices are more limited. He must still hide himself somewhere, and if possible maintain direct contact with the audience, but the available playing space offers little cover. The other characters on stage (the three friends, and the singer Balthasar) must arrange themselves in such a way that they are not permanently blocking Benedick from the view of the main body of the auditorium. For the purpose of this workshop, six stools were set at each side of the stage to replicate the on-stage seating at the Blackfriars, where Much Ado was performed after 1609. Inevitably, this reduced yet further the space available to the actors, but provided – as we will see – an alternative hiding place for Benedick.

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The focus of the experiment was therefore the location(s) in which Benedick chose to hide during the gulling by his friends: he started the scene on the main stage, and removed himself once Don Pedro, Claudio and Leonato approached. The actors were given free choice to go anywhere within the playhouse, and the scene was played several times in different configurations. Benedick’s first choice was to move to the musicians’ gallery above (up a tree, as it were): it is distinct from the main stage, and offered him the freedom to address a large number of spectators, particularly those in the upper galleries. Meanwhile, his friends below were able to use the full stage without fear that they would accidentally ‘see’ Benedick. But it was a difficult staging to effect given the text: from his exit on the line ‘Ha! The Prince and Monsieur Love. I will hide me in the arbour’ (2.3.33–4), Benedick has just three lines of dialogue to leave the stage, climb the tiring house staircase and re-enter in the musicians’ gallery in time for Don Pedro’s ‘See you where Benedick hath hid himself?’ (38). During the workshop, our Benedick managed it, but only just (and with a noticeable clatter as he dashed upstairs). The audience members sat in the musicians’ gallery adored this staging (one respondent ‘felt privileged’ to be so close to the actor playing Benedick), but other audience members pointed out a flaw: with the action now taking place on two levels, it was not possible to keep the gullers and the tricked Benedick in the same field of view. The staging required ‘lots of head movement to follow Benedick when he was “up”’, said one spectator. It was ‘impossible to take in the full stage and the balcony’.11 Much of the enjoyment in the scene arises from reaction (Benedick’s amazement; the gullers’ amusement), but in these circumstances the pleasure of seeing both the trick and its effects was removed. Benedick’s next choice was to hide himself in plain sight amongst the stool sitters on the stage, on the principle that an early modern Benedick would have been dressed in the same sort of clothing as the well-to-do theatregoers on stage, and could ‘camouflage’ himself as an audience member by claiming an empty stool. Those sitting on the stools reported

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their pleasure at the ‘energy’ of this performance, and enjoyed being ‘so close to the action’, but one spectator in a sidestage box was not pleased with the staging: ‘stools on stage completely blocks view from front row in boxes’.12 Benedick attempted various iterations of this idea, from clambering over the balustrade into a side-stage box, to hoisting an audience member off his stool, sitting down on it, and yanking the hapless audience member onto his knee (which while very funny was highly implausible from a historical point of view). He also tried hiding on the floor of the pit, directly under the front of the stage, a decision which proved the most popular staging among the audience members: the floor of the pit is one of the most visible parts of the entire space, and a high proportion of spectators could see Benedick’s comic reactions. Auditorium-invasion of this sort is very appealing to modern playhouse directors, who use the pit steps as an entrance onto the stage, and enjoy spilling action into the side-stage boxes. But evidence suggests the boxes of the Blackfriars were expensive, private places, to which spectators gained access with a key, and were therefore unlikely to have been available as a performance space for actors.13 The use of non-stage areas of the playhouse today seems to rely on a very modern metatheatrical glee in seeing an actor break the fourth wall. Such practices are unlikely to reflect early modern theatrical habits. Our Benedick was given freedom to choose his hiding places, and he did not opt to play the scene from what might be regarded as the inevitable positions: the frons scenae doorways, and the tiring house beyond, where he could lurk, emerging at intervals to respond to his friends’ comments or deliver lines to the audience. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an ‘arbour’ usually meant a natural or artificial covered area within a garden; in a more gruesome context, the title page of the 1615 quarto of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy showing the murder of Horatio gives an indication of what an arched trellised arbour might have looked like in a theatrical setting.14 The central or side doorways of a theatre like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse would serve to indicate

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such a location (and it is possible a piece of scenery or a prop tree was used as well). But as an earlier workshop experiment of this scene demonstrated (during Globe Education’s 2008 ‘Outside In/Inside Out’ conference co-organized with the American Shakespeare Center and devised by Philip Bird and Andrew Gurr), confining Benedick to the upstage doorways made his delivery of comic asides problematic, as he either had to throw them ‘over the heads’ of his gullers downstage, or restrict himself to addressing the audience members sitting on the stage stools or in the side-stage boxes. An additional issue, one that became clear as a consequence of the first season of performance in the playhouse, is that the space within and behind the doorways offers very limited spectatorial scope: a figure hovering within or just beyond the doorways is invisible to the large fraction of audience members who do not enjoy an end-on view, and it would seem imperative that Benedick has a clear aural and visual connection with the audience in this scene. In a 2015 Globe small-scale tour of Much Ado directed by Max Webster, which was performed in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as part of the touring schedule, this scene was played with Benedick hiding alternately behind items of set including suitcases, crates and a barrel, in the frons scenae doorways, behind the frons and within a side-stage box; the majority of his communication with the audience was directed at those sitting to the side of the stage. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse stage is considerably smaller than that of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars, even allowing for the space presumed to have been occupied by the Blackfriars’ stoolsitters. It may well be the case that the physical comedy of the gulling scene had greater room to breathe on the Blackfriars stage than it does in the modern indoor theatre. Nonetheless, the experiment suggested some of the difficulties of staging that may have arisen as plays written for one sort of space were transposed to another in the early seventeenth century. None are insuperable: competent actors will find ways to make the gulling scene a success in any sort of playing space. But it is worth noting that the staging solutions discussed here all

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present problems to be overcome in terms of the arrangement of bodies on stage, and the maintenance of a strong connection between the gulled Benedick and the watching audience.

The great outdoors in The Witch of Edmonton and As You Like It Workshop coordinated by Will Tosh with scenes directed by Blanche McIntyre The ado about Benedict’s ‘arbour’ reminds us that although the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s striking architecture makes it an ideal fit for palace-set dramas, it lends itself less immediately to scenes that are imagined to take place out of doors. The research questions behind this workshop emerged from Dominic Dromgoole’s reflection about The Duchess of Malfi: the scene in which it was hardest to establish a sense of location, he concluded, was 3.5, when the Duchess and her family are apprehended on the road out of Ancona. What must performers do to impart a sense of location on the candlelit stage when the scene is set outdoors, on the road or in the wilderness? In The Witch of Edmonton by a consortium of dramatists including Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford, written in 1621 for the indoor Cockpit/Phoenix but not published until 1658 (possibly in altered form), the bigamous Frank Thorney kills his second wife Susan in a deserted spot near the Middlesex village of Edmonton (3.3). The location is established in the previous scene as a point towards a ‘hills top’, through ‘one pasture more’ as far as ‘yon knot of trees’ (3.2.105, 126, 127), but during the exchange between Frank and Susan which culminates in her death, neither character makes mention of the setting (the sole reference to topography is Frank’s decision after the murder to bind ‘[him]self to

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this tree’ (3.3.71) to make the crime look like an assault by highwaymen).15 Unlike other dramatic moments of assault in which a forest setting is described in vivid and oppressive terms (we might think of Tamora’s disturbing account of the wood in which Lavinia and Bassianus are attacked in Titus Andronicus, 2.2.91–108), Frank’s murder of Susan takes place without the textual addition of an apostrophized gloomy forest. If the creepily Ovidian woods of Titus Andronicus or A Midsummer Night’s Dream find their origin in classical literature, The Witch of Edmonton’s deserted crime scene would have seemed mundane and familiar to an early modern audience. But as it is not described in the language of on-stage characters, to what extent can it be made manifest beneath the candelabra on an indoor empty stage? The impact of the scene in the workshop performance (which many in the audience found uncomfortable) arose from the fact that Frank is inspired, possibly demonically, to commit his act of homicide in a space which is devoid of societal constraint – there is no one nearby to stop him. The main motivating factors in Frank’s crime to rid himself of his second wife are convenience and privacy: murder seems both opportune and unlikely to be detected. While a modern audience may assume that privacy is obtained behind closed doors and to be in the open air means to be open to public view, early modern people made different assumptions about the relative levels of privacy offered by indoor and outdoor spaces. Most homes were notably un-private, as we understand the concept today: bedchambers were shared with bedfellows, spouses and servants; lives were lived in porous contact with neighbours and family members.16 The ‘desert’ (woods, fields and heaths) was where a person went to obtain the privacy that the home did not provide: in the seventeenth century, the logical place to seek privacy was out of doors. The workshop revealed to the actors and the audience that the sense of place in this outdoors scene was not carried in descriptive language itself but in the intimacy of the dialogue between Frank and Susan, a fully private exchange between

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husband and wife, the lethal end of which became distressingly clear. The actors performing Frank and Susan pointed out that in terms of the dialogic form, the scene is insistently téte-a-téte: neither actor found an opportunity to involve the audience in direct address or aside until after Susan had died and Frank shared in monologue his plan to cover up the murder. Despite the architecture, palatial décor and candles, then, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse can harbour a sense of deserted outsideness, but one that is, in this instance, created dramatically through the staging of a dangerously private moment. Shakespeare’s As You Like It complemented The Witch of Edmonton for this workshop, as the play’s first forest-set scene (2.1) takes a somewhat different approach to establishing location. The play was written around 1599, the year the Lord Chamberlain’s Men moved into the roofless Globe, but not published until its inclusion in the folio in 1623. Probably coincidentally, it is also a deeply outdoorsy play. Once the action shifts to the forest of Arden, the remainder is almost wholly al fresco (other than two fleeting returns to the usurping duke’s palace). In his first speech, the exiled senior duke greets his fellow courtiers and foresters with an exhortation to welcome the nip of the weather as a sign of their freedom from court sycophancy: Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, The seasons’ difference – as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which when it bites and blows upon my body Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say: ‘This is no flattery. These are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ (2.1.1–11)

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In modern Globe performances, lines like these are liable to be charged with the sort of meteorological irony noted by director Tim Carroll: if a performer on the roofless Globe stage were to refer to icy wind while the theatre is lit by blazing sunshine, audiences are likely to chuckle at the irony. If a performer mentions the cold on a chilly day, the laughter is generally all the louder at the congruence of dramatic fiction and present reality.17 What, then, are the differences in performance labour and audience reaction during indoor performance? In those circumstances, in what relationship are the remembered ‘painted pomp’ of the distant court (no doubt similar to the look and feel of the indoor playhouse itself) and the icy bite of the winter wind, referred to by the duke but certainly not felt – whatever the weather – by anyone in the theatre? As You Like It is a play with almost no extant performance history before the Restoration, and while it is probably safe to assume that the play appeared on stage at the Blackfriars during the King’s Men’s tenancy of the indoor playhouse, there is no direct evidence one way or the other. It did, however, appear in full at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in the summer of 2015 as part of the Outside In series, when the summer Globe production directed by Blanche McIntyre received two indoor performances. McIntyre, co-coordinator of this workshop, was able to revisit this early scene, and questioned the degree of work required on the part of the actor playing the duke to produce the impression of the forest by means of his language (an actorly labour that runs parallel with the duke’s character-driven labour of bucking up his fellow exiles who do not, perhaps, feel as sanguine as the duke about their current situation). How much cognitive work in imagining the forest is the indoor audience expected to do at this point, as the action makes a decisive move from palace to woodland? In performance, the audience and the workshop cast questioned the extent to which the candle-lit, highly decorated interior of the playhouse undercut the duke’s approving references throughout the speech to woods, trees, ‘running

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brooks’ and stones. Given that the duke’s lines may be read disingenuously – perhaps he does not feel the cold because he has a fleet of courtiers and servants to heat, feed and clothe him – might their delivery in such an ornate space create the impression that he does not mean his paean to rural living? The audience response was mixed in this point: while some spectators felt that the workshop setting and the lack of appropriate costume made it harder to imagine the woods, others thought the location was created very effectively through language and poetry. A respondent sitting in the upper gallery noted that the illuminated candelabra cast shadows onto the stage below that reminded her of the shade of a woodland canopy. Another respondent suggested that the playhouse architecture lent itself to an imagined space in which ‘back there’ (the architecturally ornate frons scenae) was the city, whereas ‘out there’ (the wooden galleries and pillared auditorium) was the forest: the duke was therefore able to make an effective spatial distinction between the deprecated world of the court behind him (embodied in the frons) and the admired world of the forest (the galleries, pillars and heads of the audience in front of him). The company of the Globe As You Like It made a similar choice when they brought their production indoors in summer 2015, gesturally situating the much-discussed forest in the auditorium: actors could look at, nod to or point at the wooden gallery pillars when they mentioned trees (although in these performances Orlando chose in 3.2 to pin his love letters to the frons scenae pilasters rather than the gallery pillars). Both The Witch of Edmonton and As You Like It suggested that the ornate interior of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse creates, contrasts with and comments on dramatic location in numerous ways. The early modern indoor stage was a flexible but far from neutral playing space, and these workshops explored some of the ways in which the design of the playhouse made itself felt. We saw in The Witch of Edmonton that far from hindering the presentation of outside scenes, the intimate space encourages the creation of an inter-personal

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privacy that speaks to a particularly early modern conception of desertedness. Although the indoor staging of As You Like It provoked new questions about the ingenuousness of the exiled Duke, it was clear that the design of the playhouse permits a form of ‘space realist’ staging in which the architectural features of the room (pillars, candelabra, frons scenae) contribute to the establishing of outside environments.

Discovering The Winter’s Tale and Love’s Sacrifice Workshop coordinated by Philip Bird and Will Tosh This workshop continued the investigation of the playhouse’s spatial possibilities by focusing on the backstage area behind the central stage doorway known today as the discovery space, a part of the early modern playhouse about which scholars have strong views – the utility of the term, and indeed the existence in historical theatres of such a space at all, are debated.18 But a central doorway (and, by extension, a space behind it) is clearly shown on the Worcester College drawings, a design that in other respects conforms closely to what we know about the shape of pre-Civil War English theatres, and so the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, like the Globe, is equipped with a pair of central double doors. The doorway and space behind seem custom designed for dramatically-effective scenes of revelation, but the experience of audience members in the playhouse (and indeed in the Globe) has demonstrated that it is only a portion of the audience that can see the interior of the discovery space, and not the portion traditionally understood as the most privileged: those in the pricey side-stage boxes can see barely anything behind the line of the frons. It was noticeable during the opening production of The Duchess of

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Malfi that an arresting pre-set sequence during which members of the Malfi court gathered in the discovery space to enjoy a banquet of fruit and wine, evocatively lit by a branch of candles on the central table, went unnoticed by everyone who did not see the action end-on. How eager were early modern theatre-makers to make use of an aspect of stage architecture that seemed to promise poor entertainment for their wealthiest patrons? In what terms do early modern plays, especially those written for indoor performance, imply that action takes place in the discovery space, and what is the effect on an audience that either can or cannot see such action in an intimate indoor playhouse? To what extent is an insistence on seeing the dramatic action a modern development, and can we conclude that early modern audience members were content to hear but not see significant moments on stage? For this workshop, the central stage doors were pinned back and the doorway hung with a thick floor-length curtain in one piece. Evidence points to the use of hanging cloths and drapes on early modern stages, although this is not uncontested, and a curtain made for a more satisfactory ‘reveal’ when pulled aside (a respondent noted the enjoyably revelatory sound made by the curtain’s swish).19 In 5.3 of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the repentant king Leontes, his newly-discovered daughter Perdita and members of the court are shown a statue of the long-dead queen Hermione, commissioned as a memorial by the queen’s former confidante Paulina. Once the courtiers have gathered, Paulina reveals the statue (‘Behold, and say ’tis well,’ 5.3.20) by sweeping aside a curtain. Before their eyes, and amid much wonder, the statue comes to life, descends from its podium, and the nowliving Hermione is reunited with her husband and daughter. The precise manner of Paulina’s exposure of the statue, and the location of Hermione’s revivification, were the subjects of the workshop. Hermione is included in the general entrance at the start of the scene in the folio (the earliest edition of the play) where her entry ‘like a statue’ is listed among the other

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characters, but she is not visible for the first twenty lines of the scene: Leontes tells Paulina that ‘we saw not / That which my daughter came to look upon, / The statue of her mother’ (12– 14). Paulina’s ‘Behold’ is evidently the cue, as her following line makes it clear that the assembled courtiers have seen the astonishing statue: ‘I like your silence; it the more shows off / Your wonder’ (21–2). That she must have drawn aside a curtain is made plain by her later offer to ‘draw the curtain’ (68) to hide the statue, and Leontes’s urgent instruction ‘Do not draw the curtain’ (59) when she gestures to do so. In the first experiment, this scene was staged with Hermione’s transformation from statue to living woman taking place within the discovery space – Paulina simply drew the curtain to reveal Hermione stood as a statue on a low dais (this was also the approach taken by director Michael Longhurst in his 2016 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse production of the play). The obvious advantage to the staging was that Paulina’s and Leontes’s numerous references to drawing the curtain made perfect sense, as it would have been an easy matter to switch the curtain back across the entire discovery space, but audience members in the side-stage boxes, the upper side galleries and the musicians’ gallery saw nothing of the statue (or the magical transformation that followed). A respondent in the musicians’ gallery felt ‘slightly removed because [I] could not see the statue of Hermione’; another in the side-stage box felt ‘left out: I came to see the performance, not to hear it’. But these were not uniform experiences: the respondent who felt ‘slightly removed’ in the musician’s gallery nonetheless had a ‘more fruitful experience’ because ‘I had to make a lot more effort to imagine [it]’.20 The text of the scene helped here: Hermione’s statue – its lifelike colouration, posture and features – is richly described by Leontes and Paulina, and the magical transformation is similarly glossed: ‘Descend’, ‘Approach’, ‘You perceive she stirs’, ‘She embraces him’, ‘She hangs about his neck’ (99, 103, 111, 112). The upstage focus of the scene was also dramatically strong, and created an unexpected effect: many of the spectators in the musicians’ gallery and the boxes had a privileged view of

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the faces of the other actors as they stood staring towards the statue in wonder. In particular, the expressions of Leontes and Perdita as Hermione came to life were regarded as exceptionally dramatically rewarding. As one respondent in a side-stage box remarked, ‘I couldn’t see the statue so I looked at the faces of the other actors.’ By contrast, spectators in the pit and the main end-on galleries enjoyed the ‘pictorial’ effect of seeing Hermione framed in the discovery space doorway, but endured quite a lot of backs of heads and occasional blocking problems (‘discovery space completely obscured by Polixenes’s back’ was one aggrieved note).21 Would positioning Hermione’s statue downstage centre resolve some of the sightline problems reported by audiences sitting to the side and above the discovery space? In the next experiment, once Paulina had pulled back the curtain, the statue dais was wheeled into the main body of the stage, the actor playing Hermione staying admirably still. The cast now had to play around an obstruction, although this allowed Leontes to find new and expressive meaning in his proximity or distance from the statue. The frequent references to drawing a curtain jarred, although there is no reason why the piece of set upon which Hermione was placed could not be equipped with a wraparound curtain, or that the lines that made reference to ‘drawing the curtain’ were accompanied by gestures to an attendant to pull the dais back into the discovery space. In Hermione’s new central position, the magical transformation was visible to almost everyone in the playhouse. As one spectator reported, the ‘reveal of the statue … was stronger in the middle of the stage because it gave the actors a lot more to play with’.22 But this was not a universally popular staging. Some spectators felt that the jerky move out front had made the actor’s performance of the statue more obvious (‘when Hermione was rolled out from the discovery space, I could see the actress blink when she was close’).23 Another respondent spoke of ‘fixating’ on Hermione once she was placed in the middle of the stage: the player’s action of coming to life had become more important now she was wholly visible. For

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some spectators, scrutinizing an actor holding a statue pose for several minutes ‘ruin[ed] the believability of the scene’, and prevented them from giving due attention to the other characters on stage.24 Even those spectators who had had a ‘poor’ view from the upper or side galleries the first time round did not necessarily favour the second staging: they lost their wholly privileged view of the other faces, as the actors now moved more consistently around the stage, and the spectators still did not see Hermione’s face as she came back to life because she was positioned facing out towards the main body of the auditorium. One respondent interpreted the different staging options through their effect on the character of Paulina: once the statue was placed in the centre of the stage, she lost her ability to threaten Leontes’s access to the statue by moving to draw the curtain, and became angrier than she had been when Hermione was set within the discovery space doors. Most audience members in fact preferred a staging in which Hermione was partly obscured in the discovery space, as the shadow of the upstage area reduced the visibility of the actor’s small movements or blinks. The choice for the workshop audience seemed to be for a staging that deliberately limited visibility for a large fraction of those in the playhouse, although there was also appetite for a compromise staging in which Hermione was brought onto the stage a little way, but remained more or less framed in the discovery space. John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, first published in 1633 and probably written not long before for the Cockpit/Phoenix, features a revealing stage direction at the start of what modern editors mark as 2.5 (the final scene before the act break). Bianca comes to the bedchamber of her husband’s best friend Fernando, and contemplates the prospect of infidelity. The key question for this experiment was the manner of Bianca’s entrance, and the nature of the scene’s set, as indicated by the stage direction ‘Enter Bianca, her hair loose, in her night-mantle. She draws a curtain, and Fernando is discovered in bed, sleeping; she sets down the candle, and goes to the bedside.’25 As the scene begins,

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Bianca tells Fernando to ‘sit up and wonder’, and then ‘sit up and listen’ as she confesses her feelings for him. Explaining that she has ‘adventure[d] to [his] bed’, she asks him to ‘hear me out’ while she offers her ‘body up to [his] embraces’.26 The implication of the stage direction and the dialogue is that Fernando is revealed when Bianca pulls aside the discovery space curtain, and remains sitting up in bed while Bianca talks to him, perhaps rising mid-way through the scene to be standing when the two kiss. Is this, then, a scene resembling the discovery of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, in which a key part of the action may take place within the discovery space, out of the view of many people in the auditorium? Is Bianca expected to share the discovery space with Fernando, staying by his bedside as the stage direction suggests, or should she claim the main stage while he listens from the recessed area? For the purposes of the workshop, Fernando was set supine on a couch rather than a full-sized bed, positioned just behind the curtain across the breadth of the discovery space doorway. As Bianca pulled back the curtain, Fernando’s sleeping body was discovered from head to toe, creating an erotic moment of revelation. The actor playing Fernando did not find a plausible point to get out of bed until fifty lines into the scene, giving Bianca much greater freedom of movement and ownership of the stage. She was able to find significance in the moments she chose to draw close, or step away to address Fernando with more distance, as the character wrestled with the morality of her potential adultery. The staging emphasized Bianca’s initiatory role in the scene, as a woman making a sexual advance on a man, and her language also served to convey to those in less visually privileged seats the nature of Fernando’s reaction: ‘with Fernando in the discovery space’, observed one spectator in a side-stage box, ‘my attention was almost wholly on Bianca – her words constructed my image of him’.27 As in The Winter’s Tale, the gravitational pull of a character isolated upstage had an interesting dramatic effect: Bianca delivered most – but not all – of her speeches towards Fernando, thereby privileging audience members who would otherwise see backs

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of heads or side-on faces. Given that Bianca has the greater share of lines in this scene, and the narrative unfolds from her point of view, the scene was understood by the workshop audience as eroticized gazing in which the object is (unusually for early modern drama) male rather than female: we are encouraged to see the attractive Fernando through Bianca’s aroused but anxious eyes. The play’s ‘focal love triangle’, in the words of Dorothy Farr, is calibrated along female lines.28 As one respondent observed, ‘the blocking keeps the focus on the female conflict rather than the male reaction’, and the distance between the two potential lovers, with one confined to the discovery space and the other keeping for the most part to the downstage portion of the stage, emphasized the problematic nature of their relationship (which the characters do not, in the event, consummate).29 One of the workshop spectators concluded that watching action on the playhouse stage entailed ‘being prepared not to see everything’, and the partial, non-unitary nature of the stage spectacle in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was made very clear in the sessions on stagecraft.30 Audience members watched different performers depending on their position in the auditorium, and they saw different moments of action depending on their seat and the location of the performer(s). Things discovered in the discovery space are revealed to the audience in a series of ways: firstly to those spectators who can see into the space without obstruction, and subsequently to other members of the audience who ‘read’ the revelation in the faces of other performers and in the response of other spectators. Audience preference was not in this workshop always for full disclosure: that Hermione’s magical transformation within the discovery space was hidden to many in the auditorium was regarded by some spectators as theatrically beneficial, as the wonder of the moment was carried by the reactions of other actors on stage (particularly the performer playing Perdita, who is an otherwise mute observer of the transformation) rather than the process of revivification performed by the actor playing Hermione. The labour of performance can appear

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highly distributed in the SWP, as leading actors, supporting performers and even members of the audience share the duty of conveying the emotional impact of a scene. The Research in Action workshops recorded in this chapter have posited an early modern indoor playhouse that was imaginatively flexible but not self-effacing, bringing its own identity to bear on the way in which fictional space was produced on stage. If the indoor stages were generally smaller than those of the outdoor amphitheatres, modern audience experience in the SWP suggests that spectators would have had little difficulty in following the complex spatial logic demanded by scenes featuring multiple and overlapping conversations between different groups of people: the example of The Queen and Concubine shows that a scene rich in asides can work well in a space in which a portion of the audience are unable to see the visual clues offered in performance to denote that a speech is ‘unheard’ by others on stage. But the size and shape of the stage affects the performance of asides, as we found in the workshop experiment into Much Ado and as performers Sarah MacRae and Thalissa Teixeira posited after their experience in The Changeling (written for the Cockpit/Phoenix) and The Broken Heart (Blackfriars) (see Chapter 3). The arrangement of the stage and galleries strongly works against the idea of a consistent spectator experience. The exploration of The Winter’s Tale and Love’s Sacrifice suggests not only that early modern dramas were written with an awareness that key moments on stage would be received in various ways, but that intimate indoor theatres facilitated a sort of emotional ‘performance’ by watching audience members that supported the artistic performance by the actors on stage.

8 Music and Lighting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

How did early modern dramatists and actors make use of the lighting and acoustic effects possible in their indoor playhouses? Performance of early modern drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse today draws our attention to the significance of candlelight and music indoors, but to what extent did sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theatre professionals use the resources of their theatres in the same way? This chapter explores the investigative workshops conducted in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to address these questions.1

‘Infernal music’ in Sophonisba Workshop coordinated by Claire van Kampen and Simon Smith with Will Tosh The timber interior of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse generates an architectural soundscape that, while not a direct equivalent of the sonic environment of a specific historic theatre, provides

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a model for the sorts of acoustic spaces familiar to early modern dramatists. What acoustic and musical effects are possible in a small timber playhouse? What is the interaction and interrelation of musician, actor and space, and the relationship between music and dramatic action in early modern drama? Claire van Kampen reminds us that the location of musicians in the Globe, just like the position of music within plays, had ‘iconographic and classical significance’ for early modern dramatists and spectators. How might this be explored indoors? More specifically, how might the different parts of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – on, above, behind and below the stage, as well as ‘afar off’ – be utilized to create a range of music and acoustic effects? In John Marston’s Sophonisba, or, The Wonder of Women (1605–6), written for the Children of the Revels at Blackfriars in the years before the King’s Men reclaimed the playhouse, the final scene of the fourth act demands a sophisticated interplay between the musical and dramatic performances.2 The depraved King Syphax appeals to the enchantress Erictho for help to enforce the virtuous Sophonisba to his sexual will. Erictho explains that he will know her charm has been successful when he hears music and ‘sweet sounds’ (4.1.180). The quarto text calls for a number of sound cues in the remainder of the scene, as Erictho’s machinations are accompanied by ‘infernal music’ (191, stage direction) while she conjures, followed by a ‘short song to soft music above’ (211, stage direction) to suggest the arrival of Sophonisba. Syphax ‘hasteneth within the Canopy as to Sophonisba’s bed’, at which point ‘a bass lute and a treble viol play for the Act’ (219, stage direction, and 5.1.0, stage direction).3 The audience is to understand that Syphax and the figure whom he takes to be Sophonisba are having sex during the musically accompanied act-break; at the start of the fifth act Syphax draws back the curtains to discover he has in fact slept with the witch Erictho, who gloats over her trick. Marston calls for a subtle musical accompaniment during Syphax’s and Erictho’s scene together that starts and stops at

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dramatically significant moments, and emanates from specific parts of the theatre. The ‘infernal’ and magical nature of some of the music strongly implies that the source was intended to be invisible – either behind the frons scenae (as is specified when the direction calls for ‘a treble viol and a bass lute [to] play softly within the canopy’, 201, stage direction) or below the stage, an established location in early modern theatrical contexts for hellish activity. How, then, in a theatre culture that allowed for very little rehearsal, are we to imagine that actors and musicians arranged the cueing of these moments? To what extent can actors and musicians quickly develop practical ways to cue themselves? How much more difficult is the interweaving of action and music when musicians are placed in hidden or hard to access parts of the playhouse that preclude visual cues? The five musicians, working with the instruments of an early modern consort that included hautboys, sackbut, viol, lute and recorders, and two actors spent three hours working together under direction to establish a workable set of conventions, a task made more complicated by the sophisticated sound effects required in the scene. The first exchange between Syphax and Erictho is complex. As Syphax speaks in soliloquy, Erictho enters silently while Syphax describes her disturbing activities. The quarto prints a stage direction for this action mid-way through Syphax’s speech, just after he has spoken the lines ‘Forsaken graves and tombs, the ghosts forced out, / She joys to inhabit’: ‘Infernal music plays softly whilst Erictho enters and when she speaks ceaseth’ (101, stage direction). Syphax continues to speak until he is cut off by Erictho herself: syphax To her first sound, the gods yield any harm, As trembling once to hear a second charm. She is –

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erictho Here, Syphax, here! (4.1.123–26) Syphax’s line ‘Forsaken graves and tombs, the ghosts forced out, / She joys to inhabit’ therefore cues both the entrance of Erictho and the ‘infernal music’ that accompanies her arrival; Erictho’s line ‘Here, Syphax, here’ is the cue for the musicians to stop (‘and when she speaks ceaseth’). Using extracts from music composed for seventeenth-century court masques, the workshop musicians providing the infernal music (playing hautboys and sackbut) established themselves in the area below the playhouse stage (the substage), where they could not see Erictho’s entrance and had to rely on other cues. The musicians found it very difficult to hear the text cues, and the actors developed assertive but unsubtle ways to alert the musicians below the stage. It was not that voices are necessarily too muffled to be discernible, but that everything is audible in the substage area, from footsteps and creaks to the audience above, and it was difficult for the musicians to distinguish the specific sound of a line of verse. Syphax therefore combined his spoken cue line with a loud thump on the stage, and Erictho pitched the line ‘Here, Syphax, here’ as loudly as possible (which the text seemed in fact to suggest) so the musicians would know when to stop. By these means, the infernal music rose from below to underscore Syphax’s unsettling account of Erictho, as the enchantress lurked upstage. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse cannot precisely recreate the acoustic of the Blackfriars or other Jacobean playhouses, and it has a far deeper substage area than the historical London theatres it resembles, but this experiment indicated that it was not always a simple matter in early modern theatres to unify music and dramatic performance as part of a cohesive theatrical presentation. It is relevant given this discovery that Sophonisba was written for a boys’ company, the repertories of which were generally far richer in music and song than those of their adult colleagues in professional

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companies, and who appear typically to have had rather more rehearsal time. The musicality of the boy companies by the Jacobean years has however been called into question: Lucy Munro argues that the Children of the Revels was ‘increasingly estranged from the choir schools’ and probably had less access to trained voices.4 Another revelation in the course of this workshop was the pleasing effect of music emanating from unseen parts of the playhouse. A modern audience is accustomed to electronically reproduced music, but for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people, ‘unseen’ music was an unusual experience.5 It has recently been argued that music in the indoor playhouse was more mobile than has often been assumed, but in Sophonisba Marston stretches the capacities of his playhouse to place music in a variety of different, mostly hidden, locations.6 As Erictho begins the process of casting her spells, the stage direction calls for ‘Infernal music softly’, which Syphax registers with: Hark! Hark! Now rise infernal tones, The deep fetched groans Of labouring spirits that attend Erictho (4.1.192–95) Several lines later, a further stage direction reveals that the music has changed and possibly shifted location: ‘A treble viol and a bass lute play softly within the canopy’ (in the discovery space behind the frons scenae). Syphax interprets this as the sign that Erictho’s magic has worked: Hark! Hark! Now softer melody strikes mute Disquiet Nature. O thou power of sound, How thou dost melt me. Hark, now even Heaven Gives up his soul amongst us. (4.1.202–5)

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Moments later, there is another change: ‘A short song to soft music above’ (SD). ‘Now nuptial hymns enforced spirits sing’ (212), notes Syphax. At the next stage direction ‘Cantant’, Syphax exclaims ‘Now hell and heaven rings / With music spite of Phoebus. Peace!’ (213–14). At this point, the music ceases, and Erictho enters ‘in the shape of Sophonisba, her face veiled’ to perform her trick on Syphax (214, stage direction). The text suggests that the musical accompaniment to this scene is essential to the dramatic effect, as the different instruments, styles and locations of the music indicate to Syphax the progress of Erictho’s enchantments. Syphax’s reference to the ‘ris[ing]’ of ‘deep fetched’ ‘infernal tones’ lends credence to the idea that infernal music was performed below the stage, and if this were the case in the Blackfriars in 1605–6, Marston is here creating a dazzling effect of music emerging multi-directionally from below, behind and above the stage (‘Now hell and heaven rings / With music spite of Phoebus’). For the purposes of the workshop, the ‘infernal music’ died away as the viol and lute started behind the frons (although the text suggests that the music might have continued to create a cacophonic ‘ring’); the ‘softer melody’ superseded the ‘infernal tones’, and as staged in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the fading of the music from below overlapping the first strains of the music within was an exquisite effect: the source of the sound magically seemed to shift. Our singer similarly delivered the ‘short song to soft music above’ from the musicians’ gallery, while her accompanist (on lute) played in the discovery space. Both found it hard to remain in time and harmony without visual contact, but it seemed from the point of view of the watching and listening audience to be relatively effortless, and again created the effect of a magically accompanied song. Even for a modern audience, used to electronically-manipulated music, the other-worldly quality of live music that seemed to move around the interior of the playhouse was powerful.

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‘Under the stage’ and ‘afar off ’ in Antony and Cleopatra Workshop coordinated by Claire van Kampen and Simon Smith with Will Tosh Like Shakespeare’s As You Like It, explored in the Research in Action workshop discussed in Chapter 7, Antony and Cleopatra is a play with almost no extant seventeenthcentury performance history. Written in around 1606 or 1607 while Shakespeare was still writing exclusively for the Globe, it first appears in print in the 1623 Folio, well after his death and his company’s establishment at Blackfriars. Despite the lack of evidence it is unlikely the play was never staged indoors in the seventeenth century, although it is just possible it was reserved for Globe performance once the King’s Men took over the Blackfriars. But as the Outside In performance in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse of Jonathan Munby’s 2014 Globe production of the play indicated, the work is not intrinsically amphitheatrical, for all its scope and scale: as an indoor chamber piece, Antony and Cleopatra works well to emphasize the intimate relationships that motivate the action of the play (Antony and Cleopatra; Antony and Octavius; Antony and Enobarbus; Cleopatra, Charmian and Iras). This experiment continued the investigation of hidden musical effects by exploring the moment in what modern editors mark as Act 4 Scene 3, when a guard of soldiers positioned in each corner of the stage hears the mysterious sound of ‘Music of the hautboys … under the stage’ (4.3.12, stage direction) and interpret the portent as ‘the god Hercules whom Antony loved’ deserting him (4.3.21). The hautboy, a form of early modern oboe, is used in other theatrical contexts to indicate a supernatural event,7 and in this scene the sudden noise initially causes confusion and unease:

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2 soldier Peace! What noise? 1 soldier List, list! 2 soldier Music i’th’air. 3 soldier Under the earth. 4 soldier It signs well, does it not? 3 soldier No. 1 soldier Peace, I say! What should this mean? (4.3.13–20) As staged in the workshop, hautboys played a military march in the substage space, appropriate to the moment of Antony’s abandonment by the warrior-god Hercules.8 Here again, the issue of cueing became crucial – in a night-time, rather quiet scene as the soldiers chat to each other during a sentry watch, the musicians below struggled to hear their cue at the line ‘’Tis a brave army and full of purpose’ (12).9 But the fact that the sentries are confused as to where the sound comes from – ‘i’th’air’, ‘under the earth’ – made complete sense in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The origin of the sound was not immediately apparent, as the wooden interior of the playhouse worked like a resonating chamber to diffuse the sound through the house, creating an appropriately eerie musical effect. Elsewhere in Antony and Cleopatra, off-stage sound effects are used in a different way.10 In 4.9, ‘drums afar off’ (4.9.36, stage direction) mark the preparations for a land

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battle (‘Hark! The drums / Demurely wake the sleepers’, 4.9.36–7) and in 4.12, ‘Alarum afar off, as at a sea fight’ (4.12.0, stage direction) indicates the unhappy progress of the Battle of Actium. It has traditionally been argued that such militaristic sounds would have been unconscionably loud in a small indoor space, and indeed the ‘drum and trumpet’ style of battle-heavy plays has been regarded as irredeemably amphitheatrical, suitable only for the big outside spaces. As Bruce Smith puts it, ‘brass and percussion seem to have been what these playing places [amphitheatres] were all about’.11 The association of amphitheatre architecture and cacophonous musicality is partly supported by the 1596 petition by Blackfriars residents against James Burbage’s planned indoor playhouse, in which the petitioners railed against the likely disturbance of trumpets and drums. But there is little evidence for their absolute exclusion from indoor playhouses in the seventeenth century.12 The effect of drums ‘afar off’ was produced by placing the drummers under the stage, which created a convincingly distant but not noticeably subterranean sound. The ‘alarum’, performed towards the rear of the tiring house well back from the frons scenae, was a composite sound of drums, trumpets and a thin metal thunder-sheet struck to produce the sound of firing and impacting ordnance. The aim was to create as much noise as possible in the intimate space, to test the idea that indoor playhouses were not hospitable to loud drums and trumpets. As the musicians proved, the sound was big, exciting, resonant and surprisingly controllable: by varying their force and volume, the musicians could create the effect that the battle was raging either more closely or further off. No-one in the workshop audience found the sound overwhelming or uncomfortable, and the resonating capability of the playhouse was widely regarded as bracing and dramatically successful. The theory that drums and trumpets were avoided in indoor playhouses does not seem to be borne out in practice.

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‘Whence is the music?’ Locating sound in The Captain Workshop coordinated by Simon Smith with Will Tosh In Antony and Cleopatra, ‘afar off’ was taken to mean anywhere in the rear recesses of the playhouse that was convenient to place an instrumentalist, and the back of the tiring house or the substage area were found to be the most appropriate places. Music from below was a particularly eerie effect, as the rising sounds were not immediately identifiable as emanating from a specific location. Sarah Dustagheer has noted that the Blackfriars permitted a ‘dispersal’ of sound throughout the auditorium, and links this quality to Shakespeare’s increasing use of musical accompaniment during magical or otherworldly moments such as Posthumus’s vision in Cymbeline (5.5) or Hermione’s revivification in The Winter’s Tale (5.3).13 But to what extent can the audience detect the location of a sound or a piece of music, and does the location make a difference to the way a scene is received by the audience? At the Blackfriars, musicians were typically placed in the gallery above the stage, possibly behind a curtain, although this is a view that has recently been challenged.14 In which case, they may have been habitually unseen when they played during a performance, and if the action of a play called for distant or invisible music, was there any need for the musician(s) to be obscured any further, or moved to a different location? Is music location – ‘within’, ‘above’, ‘afar off’ or even ‘below’ – simply a matter of dramatic conceit which is explicated where necessary by the text of the play? Francis Beaumont’s and John Fletcher’s The Captain, written in the first years of the King’s Men’s occupation of the Blackfriars (sometime before 1612, when the play was performed at court), features a short exchange between the

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characters Fabritio and Jacomo (Act 2 Scene 2 according to the 1647 folio). ‘Music plays’ and Fabritio asks ‘whence is this music?’ ‘From my sister’s chamber,’ replies Jacomo. While Fabritio is charmed by the ‘private music’ of the lutes (‘The touch is excellent; let’s be attentive’), Jacomo is unimpressed (‘What a din it makes’).15 The implication here is that the music comes from within the tiring house, but is Fabritio’s question – ‘Whence is this music?’ – germane to the scene? Is it important that the music comes from an unexpected location, or would the effect be much the same were the instrumentalists to remain in their usual place in the musicians’ gallery? Can an audience distinguish among music played within, above and below? For this experiment, four solo instrumentalists were positioned in different backstage locations typically specified in early modern stage directions: ‘within’, inside the tiring house on stage level behind the frons scenae; ‘above’, to the rear of the musicians’ gallery behind a curtain; ‘below’, in the substage area; and ‘afar off’, on the backstage staircase connecting the stage level to the galleries. Each musician used an extract from the same piece of music (Michael Maier’s Fuga 1 from Atalanta Fugiens (1617)), and although the scene calls for lutes, the musicians played their preferred solo instruments: ‘within’ (sackbut), ‘above’ (recorder), ‘afar off’ (cornet), and ‘below’ (recorder). The short scene was performed four times, and each time a different instrumentalist provided the music from a different location. The audience were not told where the music would be played, and they were polled after each run-through to find out if they could tell where the music had come from. The results demonstrated that the different parts of the playhouse produced varied effects on the thirty-six members of the workshop audience: • ‘Within’ (sackbut): 23 guessed correctly, but 8 guessed ‘above’ and 5 ‘under’. • ‘Above’ (recorder): 26 guessed correctly, but 5 guessed ‘below’, 2 ‘within’ and 3 ‘afar off’.

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• ‘Afar off’ (cornet): 14 guessed correctly, but 11 guessed ‘within’, 8 ‘above’ and 3 below’. • ‘Below’ (recorder): 20 guessed correctly, but 13 guessed ‘afar off’, 2 ‘above’ and 1 ‘within’. In this highly unscientific live poll, ‘above’ and ‘within’ proved to be the easiest locations to identify, but in every case there were members of the audience who were misled. We can to an extent identify reasonably precisely the source of a piece of music, but not without error, and it was a surprise in this experiment that ‘below’ could be so easily mistaken for ‘afar off’. The resonating capability of the wooden playhouse means that sound often fills the space in a non-directional way. The audience in the workshop were significantly influenced by the gestures and eyeline of the actors on stage, and several admitted that they made their decisions partly on the basis of the actors’ performance. In other words, an actor casting an arm or a glance in a particular direction may be able to make the audience believe that a sound is emanating from that place, especially if the location concerned is relatively close to the musicians’ gallery (such as ‘above’ or ‘within’). Whether this casts light on historical practice is open to question, but it suggests that the acoustic properties of early modern indoor theatres allowed for a range of musical effects that derived meaning from the combination of musical performance, playhouse architecture and actorly gesture.

Playing the act in The Malcontent Workshop coordinated by Simon Smith with Will Tosh John Marston’s The Malcontent appeared on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse stage in 2014, performed by the Globe Young Players (a company of twelve- to sixteen-year-olds) and directed by Caitlin McLeod. These youthful actors were a nod

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to The Malcontent’s first life as a play in the repertory of the Children of the Revels at Blackfriars, for whom Marston wrote the play in around 1603 (it then came into the possession of the King’s Men’s, who performed a revised version at the Globe the following year). Unlike Adele Thomas’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which registered the division of the play into five distinct acts with short musical interludes, The Malcontent (like every other early modern play so far to have appeared in a full production on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse stage) was presented in conventional modern form with uninterrupted action other than an interval. This workshop experiment allowed us to explore a feature of Marston’s dramaturgy: his creative use of the act break time to stage significant dramatic action that advances the plot.16 The act divisions are marked in early printed editions of most plays with a history of indoor performance, but the brief pauses between the acts that such notation implies are usually understood to be non-theatrical time, when musicians typically played brief pieces of music to cover a technical interlude when company stagehands tended to the candles. Marston is unusual in his frequent use of the ‘act time’ (in his Sophonisba, discussed above, the disturbing coupling of Syphax and Erictho takes place while the act is playing). In the break between Acts 1 and 2, the first quarto of The Malcontent calls for the following sequence: Enter Mendoza with a sconce to observe Ferneze’s entrance, who, whilst the act is playing, enter unbraced, two pages before him with lights; is met by Maquerelle and conveyed in. The Duchess’s pages sent away.17 This scene direction describes a significant development of the plot. Mendoza – a disaffected courtier to the Duchess Aurelia – has arranged an adulterous liaison between the duchess and the young Ferneze, helped by the duchess’s worldly attendant Maquerelle. The lovers do not suspect that Mendoza has revealed all to the duchess’s husband Pietro, Duke of Genoa, and Mendoza watches the illicit meeting with

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gleeful satisfaction. Once the act break sequence has finished, Mendoza starts the scene: ‘He’s caught! The woodcock’s head is i’th’noose!’ (2.1.1) Mendoza goes on in the first speech of Act 2 to explain that Ferneze has been snared in the sexual honeytrap, and the set-up has also been well explicated in a previous scene between Mendoza and Pietro, but Marston nonetheless calls for a significant piece of stage business to take place in a ‘break’ in the action, while the candles are being tended, and while the musicians are performing.18 This use of the act break raises a range of questions. How long did Marston imagine the first act break to be? Was it intended to last the duration of a single piece of music, or did the musicians simply continue to play for as long as necessary, and stopped when Mendoza started speaking? Did Marston assume that the necessary candle procedures would be complete in the time it took to perform the scripted sequence? If not, how were the actors cued to start the wordless sequence at just the right time to allow Mendoza to begin the scene as soon as Ferneze, Maquerelle and the pages had left the stage? What was the relationship between the music and the action? Was it simply a tune to ‘cover’ a piece of stage business, and unrelated in mood or tone to the action? Or was it imagined to be a form of thematic proto-underscoring, adding to the atmosphere of illicit romance? Was it diegetic (produced within the world of the play and heard as such by the characters in it) or nondiegetic (an effect only ‘audible’ to the audience members, and not produced within the world of the play)? What, in the context of the Blackfriars, was the relationship between the actors on stage and the non-performers whose job it was to lower and trim the candles? The range of questions was too extensive to address in a single experimental workshop, and this Research in Action session focussed on the nature of the musical performances, and the extent to which the audience registered the connection between musical and dramatic performance. Two pieces of music were selected: the anonymous ‘The Batchelar’s Delight’ to be played during a brief act break, and ‘La Coranto’ to

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cue and cover the wordless sequence with Mendoza, Ferneze, Maquerelle and the pages (both pieces are taken from The First Book of Consort Lessons (1599) compiled by Thomas Morley, and were scored for cornets and sackbuts). As performed in the workshop context, the musicians cued the resumption of dramatic action by finishing ‘The Batchelar’s Delight’ and moving on to ‘La Coranto’, which played until Mendoza started speaking. The workshop audience were encouraged to behave during the first piece of music as though this was a complete break in the dramatic action, and then note the point that their focus was drawn back to the play. Audience members noticed the change in music, and this drew their attention back to the stage for the beginning of the second act (although whether this is at all indicative of early modern habits is debatable – several spectators noted that it is standard modern theatrical practice to use music to indicate the start or resumption of dramatic action, and so twenty-first-century theatre-goers are accustomed to such cues). The actor playing Mendoza (a female actor in a male role) remarked that it was pleasing for her to have much of the ‘heavy lifting’ of scene-setting done by the music and the wordless performance that preceded her speech: the ground was broken for her to claim the attention of the audience as soon as it was her cue to speak. Many questions remained at the end of the experiment about the nature of the act break, and Marston’s colonization of it for dramatic purposes. The workshop context only takes us so far in recovering early modern practice. But the exploration of this scene indicates that there remains unrecognized dramatic significance in the relationship between music and dramatic action in the indoor playhouse, particularly at those moments when the two exist in creative tension – when, as here, drama unfolds in the space and time usually occupied by music. We know too little about the nature of the music used during these moments, but we know enough to realize that the sequence between Acts 1 and 2 as described in the first quarto of The Malcontent had a meaning, now lost, that derived from the

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interplay between music, action, audience response and the quotidian playhouse practicalities of candle-maintenance.

Lighting the early modern indoor playhouse The candles constitute the most radical departure from modern theatre practice for the creative artists who work in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the first three seasons of early modern work saw the candle technologies put through their paces, as we have seen in Chapter 5. Modern directors and designers have come increasingly to favour the SWP in its shuttered state with no ‘natural’ electric light from the access corridor, an artistic preference for sinister gloom which is probably at odds with historic practice.19 Evidence suggests that indoor playhouses were lit by a combination of daylight and candlelight, and in a theatre built into a medieval hall like the Blackfriars it may have been impossible to completely shutter the windows, which were likely to have been large and inaccessible. During the winter, the room would no doubt have been dark save for candles by early evening, but it may not have been possible to create a state of true darkness until night had fallen outside. But the fact of candlelight was unquestionably a distinguishing feature of indoor playhouses. The satirist Francis Lenton mocked fashionable city gentlemen for their ‘spangled, rare, perfumed attires’ that ‘glistered’ in ‘the torchy Friars’, drawing attention to the unusual number of candles in the space and the way that audience members took care to take advantage of this light source – wearing clothes that reflected the gleam in alluring ways.20 In an essay on masques – another art form that took place under entirely artificial lighting – the philosopher Francis Bacon advised dancers and guests to think about the colours and fabrics that looked good under candles: he recommended white, carnation-red and sea-green, and costly fabrics shot through with gold and silver thread.21 Later

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in the seventeenth century, a pamphlet that looked back to the pre-Civil War theatre explained that at the smaller indoor theatres, the players ‘acted by candle-light’, unlike the ‘large houses’, which were ‘partly open to the weather’, and where the actors ‘always acted by daylight’.22 It may be the case that the alterations to the fabric of the Blackfriars hall to fit it out as a theatre blocked some or all of the windows; it is also possible that the bodies of spectators pressed against what remained of the glass significantly reduced ambient daylight. Neil Vallelly, in a PhD thesis on the significance of light in the performance of early modern drama, also points out that the impure composition of medieval and early modern window glass let in significantly less light than modern, wholly transparent glass.23 The other major indoor playhouses may have had much meaner windows than the Blackfriars (it is worth noting that the Worcester College drawings, from which the SWP departs quite significantly in this regard, depict a theatre with small windows on the upper floor that would certainly have been partially obscured by the audience). Thomas Dekker in 1606 described the plague-struck city of London looking like a ‘private playhouse, when the windows are clapped down, as if some nocturnal, or dismal tragedy were presently to be acted’, an observation which has been taken to imply not only that some or all indoor (‘private’) playhouses had windows that could be shuttered, but that the decision to block out the light was dependent on the genre or tone of the piece.24 Of course, any play performed in a darkened state by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars would have been staged in full daylight if it remained in the repertory when the company decamped to the Globe every summer: The Duchess of Malfi, which seems to lend itself so readily to performance by candlelight, was performed – so the 1623 quarto tells us – at both the Globe and the Blackfriars.25 Whatever the facts of historic performance, modern directors have embraced the undoubted boost to mood and drama that a wholly candlelit space (with its potential for absolute darkness) creates. The candles are a dynamic light

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source: they flicker, they occasionally fizz and pop; they smell evocatively of beeswax, and when snuffed the smoke from the burning wicks fills the room. When in motion, either moving up and down or spinning slowly on their ropes, the lit candelabra are compellingly graceful. When hung at waist height or lower, the candelabra become ‘set’, part of the world of the play (see Plate 8). In The Duchess of Malfi, Antonio’s comment to the Duchess, on being offered her hand in marriage, that ‘he’s a fool / That, being a-cold, would thrust his hands i’th’fire / To warm them’ (1.2.337–9) was given extra force by having a lowered candle within reach (whether early modern theatre companies would have risked damage to their costumes from fire and sputtering tallow to create this effect is however debatable). Prior work by Martin White established the dramaturgical significance of theatrical darkness in Act 4 Scene 1 of The Duchess of Malfi and Act 3 Scene 7 of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, conclusions readily borne out by the striking effectiveness of those scenes in Dromgoole’s and Michael Longhurst’s productions.26 Every full-scale production in the SWP has been conceived, rehearsed and produced with modern theatrical techniques. Shows are artistically developed over a number of months; directors and designers decide in advance the lighting state they will use for each scene (although these decisions often have to be revised in the light of performance). Companies have a two-day technical rehearsal, and a dress rehearsal, to practise lighting changes and candle effects. None of these practices resemble the habits of early modern professional theatre makers, who typically staged a different play every day and had very limited group rehearsal time to prepare a new work, and no known tradition of technical rehearsal to practise stage effects (although entertainments such as the lavish court masques in which professional actors appeared were certainly rehearsed). To what extent, then, did performance in sixteenthand seventeenth-century indoor commercial playhouses use lighting facilities to affect mood or create artistic effects? How significant a feature of early modern indoor performance were

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lighting state changes or the use of fades, dark scenes or special effects? The experiments that follow were designed to explore the capacities of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in conditions that more closely resembled those prevailing in the 1600s.

‘The day goes back, or else my sense’: A lighting fade in Catiline His Conspiracy Workshop coordinated by Will Tosh and Martin White The Outside In performances of Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and As You Like It demonstrated that modern performances of early modern drama do not need to make extensive use of the candles in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouses. These performances were mounted with very little technical rehearsal time, and so the directors decided to keep lighting state changes to a minimum and bring the indoor performances more in line with the general ‘shared light’ ethos of amphitheatre habits. But some plays written for indoor performance seem to demand the kind of lighting changes that would have been impossible on a day-lit stage. To what extent can special effects be created with the minimal rehearsal time available to early modern theatre companies? In Act 1 of Ben Jonson’s Catiline His Conspiracy, written in 1611 for the King’s Men at the Blackfriars, conspirators planning a coup in republican Rome meet on what is described as a dim and foreboding morning to plot their revolt. But they are soon disturbed by terrifying portents, descriptions of which appear in the characters’ dialogue as well as in the printed stage directions in the 1616 folio edition of Jonson’s works (a first quarto of the play published in 1611 lacks these

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stage directions). At a key moment, the folio stage direction instructs that ‘a darkness comes over the place’ (1.1.312), and characters respond to the eclipse with lines that reinforce this change: ‘the day goes back, / Or else my senses!’ (12–13); ‘darkness grows more and more’ (314). There follows a series of groans ‘under the stage’ (314, stage direction) and then ‘a fiery light appears’ (318, stage direction), described by one character as ‘a bloody arm … that holds a pine / Lighted, above the Capitol’ (320–1).27 The crucial issue at hand in this Research in Action workshop was the nature of the theatrical intervention presupposed by the stage direction: is the cue ‘a darkness comes over the place’ a literal instruction for a change in lighting state to make evident the eclipse described by the characters on stage, or an imaginative cue for the benefit of readers of the play? This is a question to which there is not a received answer, but as the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has the capacity to produce a visual effect that more or less satisfies this stage direction, the workshop experiment started from the supposition that these instructions are to be taken as literally as the playhouse’s resources allow. To what extent, then, and how straightforwardly, can the candles be used to create the effect of a sudden drop in the level of light? The scene was considerably cut and compressed to allow a sequence with eleven named characters to be performed by just four actors. The actors, convenors and stage crew worked together in a brief rehearsal to establish a workable lighting plot. The scene takes place some way into Act 1, the time of which has been established in previous exchanges as the very early morning. Although all the candelabra were kept lit for this experiment, the front two candelabra were raised to the ceiling to create the slightly underlit conditions appropriate to the gloomy mood described by Lentulus: It is, methinks, a morning full of fate. It riseth slowly, as her sullen car Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it. She is not rosy-fingered, but swoll’n black.

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Her face is like a water turned to blood, And her sick head is bound about with clouds, As if she threatened night ere noon of day. (1.1.191–7) The first in-scene lighting change was timed to begin as Catiline sent his servant to bid a priest ‘kill the slave I marked last night’ (307) for augury purposes. At this point, the two middle candelabra were slowly flown up by stage crew operating the pulleys in the tiring house. This had the effect of subtly – but unignorably – changing the mood, and prompted the first observations of disquiet: ‘How is’t, Cethegus?’; ‘Catiline, feel you nothing?’ (309–10).28 This latter line was the cue for the rear two candle-branches to rise, completing the effect of ‘a darkness coming over the place’. Covered by simulated ‘groans under the stage’, our stage manager left his post as one of the two crew at the tiring house pulleys to go quickly up to the backstage stairs to the musicians’ gallery and thrust a flaming torch out over the balustrade for the ‘fiery light’ that appears to the conspirators. A significant discovery of both the short rehearsal session and the workshop itself was that the effects were eminently achievable with very limited preparation. The candles did not need to be extinguished and relit, and the method used to create the effect – winching the candles towards the ceiling – was a routine part of candle operations, as the candles must be frequently raised and lowered for a stage manager to tend to their wicks. The effect itself was, for modern eyes at least, subtle but compelling. The change was especially noticeable on the face of the one performer made up with pearlescent foundation (similar to the white-lead paint used by early modern actors), whose features registered the changing light very effectively, as the gleam gradually left her skin. Members of the audience did not however necessarily respond to the lighting change as indicative of an eclipse. Some spectators reported being ‘entranced’ by the moving candles. Other

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spectators sitting in the upper gallery pointed out that the effect for them was precisely the reverse of that intended: the light grew steadily brighter on them and on the upper gallery level as the candles were raised up. For the performers on stage below, the visible lighting change was a great fillip to performance: it was ‘spooky’ and helped create mood.

A coup de théâtre in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy Workshop coordinated by Will Tosh and Martin White Act 4 Scene 4 of Thomas Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (also known as The Lady’s Tragedy, written in 1611 for the King’s Men and probably performed at the Blackfriars) demands a spectacular moment of theatre magic: the ghost of the heroic Lady, who has taken her own life to prevent sexual assault by the tyrant king, appears to her grieving betrothed Govianus when he comes to pay homage at her tomb. The Lady’s spirit is unquiet, as her body has been stolen by the tyrant’s henchmen and carried off to his palace where it awaits necrophiliac despoliation. The moment of revelation is described as follows in the play’s surviving manuscript (there is no contemporary printed version): ‘On a sudden in a kind of noise like a wind, the doors clattering, the tombstone flies open, and a great light appears in the midst of the tomb; his Lady, as went out, standing just before him all in white, stuck with jewels and a great crucifix on her breast’ (4.4.42, stage direction).29 This scene asks for a moment of stage business in less ambiguous terms than the extract from Jonson’s Catiline: as the instruction comes from a manuscript intended for theatre professionals and the theatre regulator (the manuscript bears evidence of censoring edits by the Master of the Revels), there seems to be no question that the

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stage direction is a guide for the creation of a complex special effect. The issues at hand are: how such an effect was realized in the early modern indoor playhouse; whether such techniques were seen frequently on stage; and the cultural relativism of concepts such as ‘great light’. The decisions we took in this workshop were driven by exigency and practicality. We did not set out to uncover the precise way the King’s Men would have handled this effect in 1611. Instead, we attempted to think creatively and pragmatically given the resources of a candle-lit playhouse in which plays were performed with minimal group rehearsal and almost no known tradition in the commercial urban playhouse of technical rehearsal. What we hoped to uncover was ‘a’ way, not ‘the’ way. We staged the scene in a somewhat dim lighting state, with the two downstage candelabra extinguished and flown up to the ceiling. Govianus was accompanied by a page who held a candle-torch, which he used to light his face when he delivered a mournful song as his master grieved at the tomb. During this song, the four remaining candelabra were raised to the ceiling, casting the stage into shadow. On the cue for noise and light, stage crew in the tiring house made a clatter by opening and closing the stage doors and striking the rear of the frons scenae wall. Other stage crew flung open the central doors. The Lady – standing on a wheeled truck with an array of votive candles arranged at the front, angled so the candles pointed towards her – was slowly pushed onto the stage. The clattering noise persisted to cover her entrance, and during the scene that followed, a low, ghostly sound was produced backstage with a thunder-drum (a modern instrument used to create a consistent acoustic rumble). These practical solutions responded to the stage directions in an oblique rather than literal way. The ‘noise like a wind’ was sacrificed to expediency, and as the workshop was performed in modern dress, we lacked the full impact of the Lady’s striking appearance ‘all in white, stuck with jewels and a great crucifix at her breast’. Debate surrounded the precise meaning of ‘the tombstone flies open’: does this suggest that

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the Lady was to appear from below, through the stage trap, or – as we produced it – through the central stage doors? During the scene, Govianus had mourned at the edge of the stage trap, and on the ghostly Lady’s revelation that she is no longer reposing in the tomb, Govianus lifted the stage trap door to peer within in horror. The Lady’s appearance through the central doors was intended to represent a sudden apparition, rather than her emergence from the tomb as such. Standing still on the truck, she was well lit on an otherwise gloomy stage. Workshop audience members pronounced the effect striking and successful – as the central doorway opened, the tiers of votive candles casting their light onto the Lady created a pronounced glow that satisfied expectations of a sudden ‘great light’. At the heart of this experiment was a question about the culturally-constructed nature of light in the early modern period.30 What an audience might regard as bright (or as a ‘great light’) is not the same for us today as it would be for someone used to sixteenth- or seventeenth-century lighting technologies. Brightness, and the way we understand light itself, are cultural constructions as much as physical facts. What we might consider dazzling artificial light would be unimaginable to an early modern person; what someone from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries considered a brilliantly-lit night-time room would no doubt feel to us festively twinkling but hardly blinding. To throw open a door to a recessed space lavishly lit with candles while the rest of the house is in semi-darkness, as we attempted with our workshop staging of Act 4 Scene 4 of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, establishes a hierarchy of light through relationality: the light within is ‘great’ because it is significantly brighter than the light without. It would not – could not – be a ‘great’ light in absolute terms for an early modern spectator, as there was no available means of producing a light that was anywhere near the luminosity of noon daylight (the brightest – ‘greatest’ – stable lighting state a premodern person could know). The fact that early modern indoor playhouses had the capacity to create dramatic

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meaning from the juxtaposition of contrasting lighting states may go some way towards answering the question of whether or not actors at the Blackfriars, Cockpit/Phoenix and Salisbury Court theatres performed in shuttered conditions, lit only by candlelight, or whether performance usually took place under a mix of candlelight and daylight. It would not, in the end, matter a great deal: the key issue for a scene such as this in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy is the difference between the parts of the playhouse murkily lit by candles and/or fading daylight, and the section of the theatre dazzling lit by an unusual profusion of candles. The experiments recorded in this chapter allow us to make certain deductions about historic practice in early modern indoor theatres. It seems likely that dramatists were alive to the significance of the location of musical performance in the smaller indoor spaces, and created unusual effects by requiring performance behind, under, above and beyond the stage. The convention of musical performance during the act-breaks created opportunities for the creative juxtaposition of music and dramatic performance, and an unusual ‘colonization’ of the act break – non-dramatic space and time – by characters in the drama. Although early modern theatre companies had minimal rehearsal time to practice ambitious lighting effects, the experiments with Catiline and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy demonstrated that the candles can be manipulated very easily to produce striking effects, and the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse helps us remain alert to the significance of relative brightness in the performance of early modern dramas. But what, precisely, light or darkness signify is another matter: what may be irrecoverable is the particular effect of lighting states on the mentalities and emotions of premodern people.

EPILOGUE Playing Indoors is in many ways a companion volume. It follows Moving Shakespeare Indoors, the edited collection that was released to mark the completion of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and it is informed and inspired by Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, a book that explores and critiques the relationship between theatre practice and research at the Globe. Above all, Playing Indoors accompanies the first seasons of work at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, productions that are both fleeting (the shows and workshops have been and gone) and documented (the Globe’s archives contains recordings of all of the work discussed in this book). This book has asked questions about the knowledge we can gain from reflecting on modern artistic practice in a historicized playing space, and examined the challenges posed by practiceas-research when it is used to explore historical performance. I have endeavoured to keep in play the discoveries made by contemporary artists about performance in the new ‘Jacobean’style playhouse, and responses to specific research questions about aspects of early modern indoor staging. Uniting both approaches has been a conviction that creative methods of practical experimentation can yield new and unexpected material for scholars and students of early modern drama. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – one of London’s newest purposebuilt theatres – will not provide objective evidence about the performance practices of long-gone Jacobean players. But it has stimulated new, previously unconsidered, questions about performance, architecture, ambience and audiences in the staging of plays written for the indoor playhouses of late Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline London. Throughout the book, I have borne in mind the methodological parameters for constructing a dialogue

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between a modern actor or audience experience and the historic conditions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance. Practice-as-research as I understand it here – inquisitive performance by modern actors in a consciously-historicized space – requires us to negotiate carefully and ethically between present practice and historical inference, but the results can be enlightening. Playing Indoors covers a limited time span and a relatively small number of productions and experiments in the SWP, and there is more to say, some of which will be covered in work by others that is currently in production.1 I invite readers to take up the questions I have raised: this is the first book dedicated to the new playhouse, but it is certainly not the final word on the subject. And if I seem reluctant to put over a set of absolutes about practice in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, it is because the history of Shakespeare’s Globe has shown that artistic habits in modern historicized playhouses can evolve in unexpected ways. Today’s ‘ground rules’ are not necessarily tomorrow’s. The first two years of work in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse have revealed a space that is more flexible than many practitioners expected. Like the Globe, it combines an insistent architectural identity with an ability to render itself aesthetically inconsequential. In the case of the playhouse, the space presents with unsettling verisimilar accuracy as an elite early modern candlelit interior, but it is just as evocative as a forest, a deserted heath or an enchanted island. If the vertical galleries that rise flush with the stage pose a challenge to performers accustomed to modern naturalistic acting techniques, then the space’s intimate dimensions and precise acoustic lend it a hospitality to language that is thrilling and at times unnerving. The proximity of performer and spectator encourages new ways to think about character: as Hattie Morahan found in her portrayal of The Changeling’s BeatriceJoanna, having hundreds of visible faces silently endorsing her character’s unwise actions made her feel far more sympathetic to the play’s anti-heroine. The playhouse’s lighting technology has undone fifty years of accrued romance and sentimentality

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about candles, and shown them to be an adaptable and thrilling theatrical tool. Perhaps the most significant discovery has been the radically non-unitary experience of spectating in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The insistent hierarchies in the playhouse – audience members are divided among the prestigious pit and lower gallery seats, the more removed seats and standing positions in the upper gallery – produce a variegated spectator response, but unlike in conventional theatres the division is not a simple one of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ views. Spectators in the seats nearest the stage can be made to feel distinctly uncomfortable in their proximity, and those higher up can relish the voyeuristic thrill produced by watching a play through the glimmer of the suspended candelabra. The variety of spectator response in the indoor space has a bearing on the ways in which early modern dramas are understood, and on our assumptions about the location of artistic authority in the early modern playhouse. Some respondents at the Research in Action experiment that explored the final scene of The Winter’s Tale were surprised to find that the most memorable emotional pay-off was not Hermione’s magical revivification itself (for some of them out of sight within the discovery space) but the rewarding expressions on the face of Perdita, turned upstage away from the majority of the audience and silent for most of the scene. The practice of performance in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has given us a new way to think about visibility, silence and dramaturgical significance in this most familiar of Shakespeare’s plays. There is further discussion to be had on a number of topics. The insistent voyeurism of the SWP might recall Peter Stallybrass’s contention that early modern theatregoers were presented with ‘a theatre imagined as a bedroom, a bedroom which spills off the stage and into the lives of players and audience alike’.2 What does it mean for a room to have a sexual charge? Did early modern playgoers regard indoor theatres as sites of potential erotic stimulation; and how can we historicize such effects when today’s audience members articulate their responses with the language of twenty-first-

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century psychology? Perhaps our discovery that the SWP engages innovatively with the social politics of candlelight suggests a future direction of study: the indoor playhouse allows actors to develop rituals of donation or retention of light. The ‘dark scenes’ of Malfi and ’Tis Pity may be just the most overt instances in the early modern canon in which illumination informs (or can inform) dramaturgy; as Noma Dumezweni’s Hippolita found in the necessarily dimly lit scene that followed the dark 3.7 of ’Tis Pity, her need for a handheld light source gave her a wholly new way to enact a game of domination and seduction with Vasquez. This book has shown that the SWP sustains a ‘playhouse performativity’ analogous to the ‘Globe performativity’ identified by W. B. Worthen. As Gordon McMullan defines it, amphitheatrical Globe performativity is a practice that draws on early modern and postmodern habits in ‘uneven, serendipitous and frequently uncomfortable ways’ and the relationship between the (post)modern and the early modern is even more complicated indoors than it is in the outdoor Globe.3 Indoor playhouse performativity is charged with a darker understanding of the ‘Jacobean’ past than the nostalgic yearning that illuminates performance at the Globe, and the stratified audience makes the SWP appear a much less ‘democratic’ space. But relative audience privilege and audience deprivation are not easy to establish in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where elite pit-sitters do not necessarily enjoy their confrontational intimacy with the performance, and spectators above, beyond the candelabra, relish the voyeuristic thrill of eavesdropping (and the ethical reassurance of distance from the often unsettling actions on-stage). Performativity in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is variegated, unsettling, frequently overwhelming and often resistant to modes of analysis drawn from modern politics and practice. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is a place for theatrical innovation, experimentation and research in action, and it sustains them in complementary and sometimes competing ways. Playing Indoors recognizes this complexity. It is a first

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pass at a ‘users’ guide’ for future actors and directors in the SWP who want to discover what their peers found out about the space, and it is also a prompt to scholars to make use of those actors’ discoveries. Few theatres have been as studied and debated as Shakespeare’s Globe. I have no doubt that the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse will prove as artistically challenging, intellectually productive and culturally provocative in the years to come.

APPENDIX 1 Who’s who? Early modern productions in the 2014 theatre season The Duchess of Malfi (9 January–16 February 2014) Director: Dominic Dromgoole Designer: Jonathan Fensom Composer: Claire van Kampen Cast: Gemma Arterton: Duchess Giles Cooper: Silvio David Dawson: Ferdinand John Dougall: Castruccio/Doctor James Garnon: Cardinal Sean Gilder: Bosola Denise Gough: Julia Sarah MacRae: Cariola Brendan O’Hea: Pescara/Roderigo Paul Rider: Delio Dickon Tyrrell: Malateste/Grisolan Alex Waldmann: Antonio Archie Bradfield and George Morris: Child Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins (12 January–23 February 2014) Adapted and performed by Eileen Atkins The Knight of the Burning Pestle (20 February–30 March 2014) Director: Adele Thomas Designer: Hannah Clark Composer: Nigel Hess

APPENDIX 1

Cast: Giles Cooper: Michael Phil Daniels: Citizen (George) John Dougall: Venturewell Samuel Hargreaves: Boy Dennis Herdman: Tim Sarah MacRae: Luce Pauline McLynn: Wife (Nell) Hannah McPake: Mistress Merrythought Matthew Needham: Rafe Dean Nolan: George Brendan O’Hea: Host Paul Rider: Merrythought Dickon Tyrrell: Humphrey Alex Waldmann: Jasper L’Ormindo (25 March–12 April 2014) Director: Kasper Holten Designer: Anja Vang Kragh Conductor: Christian Curnyn Cast: Sam Boden: Ormindo Graeme Broadbent: King Ariadenus Joélle Harvey: Sicle Susanna Hurrell: Erisbe Rachel Kelly: Mirinda James Laing: Nerillo Ed Lyon: Amida Harry Nicoll: Eryka Ashley Riches: Osman The Malcontent (3–19 April 2014) Director: Caitlin McLeod Designer: Angela Davies Composer: Olly Fox Cast: Guy Amos: Mendoza Alexander Clarke: Bilioso Benjamin Clarke: Emilia Martha Lily Dean: Aurelia

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Isaac Deayton: Prepasso/Captain Ed Easton: Ferneze Brogan Gilbert: Bianca Sam Hird: Maquerelle Jasmine Jones: Mercury Ben Lynn: Pietro Joseph Marshall: Malevole Sekela Nancy Ngamilo: Page Freya Parks: Passarello Yasmin Price: Celso Danish Sajjad: Prologue/Equato Amanda Shodeko: Maria Curtis Trynka: Ferrardo Toby Turpin: Page/Epilogue Tamla Tutankhamun: Guerrino

Early modern productions in the 2014– 2015 theatre season ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (23 October–7 December 2014) Director: Michael Longhurst Designer: Alex Lowde Composer: Simon Slater Cast: Max Bennett: Giovanni Stefano Braschi: Soranzo Fiona Button: Annabella Sam Cox: Donado Philip Cumbus: Vasquez Noma Dumezweni: Hippolita James Garnon: Bergetto/Cardinal Michael Gould: Friar Bonaventure Alice Haig: Philotis Dean Nolan: Poggio/Bandit Edward Peel: Florio Daniel Rabin: Richardetto Morag Siller: Putana Jethro Skinner: Grimaldi/Bandit Hannah Hutch and Isla Coulter: Virgins

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle (11 December 2014–11 January 2015) Director: Adele Thomas Designer: Hannah Clark Composer: Nigel Hess Cast: Paul Brendan: Host Giles Cooper: Michael Jolyon Coy: Jasper Phil Daniels: Citizen (George) Louise Ford: Luce Samuel Hargreaves: Boy Dennis Herdman: Tim Pauline McLynn: Wife (Nell) Hannah McPake: Mistress Merrythought Matthew Needham: Rafe Dean Nolan: George Paul Rider: Merrythought David Tarkenter: Venturewell Dickon Tyrrell: Humphrey The Changeling (15 January–1 March 2015) Director: Dominic Dromgoole Designer: Jonathan Fensom Composer: Claire van Kampen Cast: Liam Brennan: Vermandero Matt Doherty: Servant/Madman Peter Hamilton Dyer: Jasperino/Pedro Brian Ferguson: Antonio Trystan Gravelle: De Flores Simon Harrison: Alsemero Joe Jameson: Tomazo Adam Lawrence: Franciscus Sarah MacRae: Isabella Hattie Morahan: Beatrice-Joanna Pearce Quigley: Lollio Tom Stuart: Alonzo Thalissa Teixeira: Diaphanta Phil Whitchurch: Alibius

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L’Ormindo (3 February–5 March 2015) Director: Kasper Holten Designer: Anja Vang Kragh Conductor: Christian Curnyn Cast: Samuel Boden: Ormindo Graeme Broadbent: King Ariadenus Joélle Harvey: Sicle Susanna Hurrell: Erisbe Rachel Kelly: Mirinda James Laing and Rupert Enticknap: Nerillus Ed Lyon: Amidas Harry Nicoll: Eryka Ashley Riches: Osman The Broken Heart (12 March–18 April 2015) Director: Caroline Steinbeis Designer: Max Jones Composer: Simon Slater Cast: Liam Brennan: Crotolon Peter Hamilton Dyer: Tecnicus Brian Ferguson: Orgilus Patrick Godfrey: Amyclas Joe Jameson: Nearchus Adam Lawrence: Amelus/Phulas Sarah MacRae: Calantha Sanchia McCormack: Grausis Amy Morgan: Penthea Tom Stuart: Prophilus Owen Teale: Bassanes Thalissa Teixeira: Euphrania Luke Thompson: Ithocles Phil Whitchurch: Armostes Dido, Queen of Carthage (9–18 April 2015) Director: Jacqui Somerville Designer: Mia Fiodquist Composer: Olly Fox Cast: Guy Amos: Aeneas

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Alexander Clarke: Jupiter/Sergestus Benjamin Clarke: Cupid Martha Lily Dean: Ganymede/Ilioneus Isaac Deayton: Achates Ed Easton: Ascanius/Carthaginian Lord Brogan Gilbert: Nurse/Carthaginian Lady Jasmine Jones: Dido Ben Lynn: Iarbus Joseph Marshall: Cloanthus Sekela Nancy Ngamilo: Anna Yasmin Prince: Juno/Hermes Tamla Tutankhamun: Venus

Early modern productions in the 2015– 2016 theatre season Orpheus (23 October–15 November 2015) Director: Keith Warner Designer: Nicky Shaw Conductor: Christian Curnyn Cast: Louise Alder: Eurydice Mary Bevan and Siobhan Stagg: Orpheus Graeme Broadbent: Satyr/Pluto Jennifer Davis: Euphrosyne/Lachesis Emily Edmonds: Aglaea/Atropos Lauren Fagan: Thalia/Clotho/Hymen Keri Fuge: Cupid Verena Gunz: Aegea Caitlin Hulcup: Aristaeus Sky Ingram: Venus Mark Milhofer: Momus/Alkippe/Jove Philip Smith: Endymion/Charon Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins (11 January–13 February 2016) Adapted and performed by Eileen Atkins Pericles (19 November 2015–21 April 2016) Director: Dominic Dromgoole Designer: Jonathan Fensom

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Composer: Claire van Kampen Cast: Simon Armstrong: Antiochus/Simonides Jessica Baglow: Marina Tia Bannon: Antiochus’s Daughter/Diana Sam Cox: Escanes/Cerimon Steffan Donnelley: Lysimachus James Garnon: Pericles Dennis Herdman: Bolt Tom Kanji: Thaliard Fergal McElherron: Helicanus/Pandar Ryan McKen: Leonine Dorothea Myer-Bennett: Thaisa/Dionyza Daniel Rabin: Cleon Sheila Reid: Gower Kirsty Woodward: Bawd/Lychorida Cymbeline (2 December 2015–21 April 2016) Director: Sam Yates Designer: Richard Kent Composer: Alex Baranowski Cast: Emily Barber: Innogen Calum Callaghan: Cloten Trevor Fox: Pisanio Darren Kuppan: Arviragus Christopher Logan: Cornelius Joseph Marcell: Cymbeline Pauline McLynn: Queen Eugene O’Hare: Iachimo Brendan O’Hea: Belarius Jonjo O’Neill: Posthumus Dharmesh Patel: Soothsayer/Philario Tika Peucelle: Mother/Helen Paul Rider: Caius Lucius Sid Sagar: Guiderius The Winter’s Tale (28 January–22 April 2016) Director: Michael Longhurst Designer: Richard Kent

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Composer: Simon Slater Cast: Simon Armstrong: Polixenes Jessica Baglow: Emilia/Mopsa Tia Bannon: Perdita Sam Cox: Archidamus/Old Shepherd Niamh Cusack: Paulina/Time Steffan Donnelley: Florizel James Garnon: Autolycus Dennis Herdman: Gaoler/Clown Tom Kanji: Cleomenes/Servant John Light: Leontes Fergal McElherron: Camillo/Mariner Ryan McKen: Dion Daniel Rabin: Lord Rachael Stirling: Hermione Kirsty Woodward: Lady in Waiting/Dorcas David Yelland: Antigonus Alfie Lowles and Oliver Whitehouse: Mamillius The Tempest (17 February–22 April 2016) Director: Dominic Dromgoole Designer: Jonathan Fensom Composer: Stephen Warbeck Cast: Fisayo Akinade: Caliban Trevor Fox: Stephano Darren Kuppan: Boatswain/Adrian Christopher Logan: Sebastian Tim McMullan: Prospero Joseph Marcell: Gonzalo Pippa Nixon: Ariel Brendan O’Hea: Antonio Dharmesh Patel: Ferdinand Tika Peucelle: Iris Phoebe Pryce: Miranda Paul Rider: Alonso Dominic Rowan: Trinculo Sid Sagar: Shipmaster/Ceres/Francisco Maisey Bawden, Holly Georgia and Mary Roubos: Nymphs/Spirits

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Research in Action workshops Drama and dramaturgy 1: The aside (25 May 2014) Coordinators: Philip Bird and Will Tosh Scene director: Philip Bird Cast: Guy Amos Tim Frances John Hopkins Frances Marshall Dominic Tighe Hilary Tones Benjamin Whitrow Infernal music in the indoor playhouse (5 June 2014) Coordinators: Claire van Kampen, Simon Smith and Will Tosh Scene director: Claire van Kampen Cast: Dominic Brewer Colin Hurley Musicians: Emily Baines (shawm, recorder, voice) Emilia Benjamin (treble viol) Arngeir Hauksson (theorbo, drum) Tom Lees (sackbut, slide trumpet) Nicholas Perry (shawm, recorder, drum, brass fanfare) Lighting the indoor playhouse (3 July 2014) Coordinators: Will Tosh and Martin White Scene directors: Will Tosh and Martin White Cast: Michael Matus Rhiannon Oliver Dominic Tighe Tim Treloar Drama and dramaturgy 2: The discovery space (21 September 2014) Coordinators: Philip Bird and Will Tosh Scene director: Philip Bird

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Cast: Virginia Denham Tim Frances Dominic Tighe Hilary Tones Bethan Rose Young The great outdoors (4 June 2015) Coordinator: Will Tosh Scene director: Blanche McIntyre Cast: Laura Darrall Tim Frances Hilary Tones Musicality and space (2 July 2015) Coordinators: Simon Smith and Will Tosh Scene director: Simon Smith Cast: Michael Matus Beth Park Musicians: Stephanie Dyer (sackbut) Richard MacKenzie (lute, recorder and voice) Guy Morley (sackbut) Helen Roberts (cornet) Paul Sharp (cornet, natural trumpet)

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APPENDIX 2 Interview scripts and feedback forms SWP performer interview template 1 Can you describe some of the differences between performing at the Globe and the playhouse? In what ways are the spaces similar? 2 What challenges does the playhouse pose to you as a performer in terms of particular demands on your voice, physicality and use of gesture? 3 How have the candles affected your craft and the way you relate to the space, your fellow actors and the audience? What effect does candlelight have on mood and tone? 4 To what extent does the audience participate in the experience of performance in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse?

SWP audience interview template 1 What did you enjoy about your experience today? 2 Have you been to see a show at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse before? 3 What expectations did you have of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse? Have they been met? How did the playhouse differ from your expectations? 4 What three words would you use to describe the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse?

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  5 Where were you positioned? Were you seated or standing?   6 Does the look and feel of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse remind you of anything?   7 What did the candlelight contribute to the performance? How did you feel when the light was entirely extinguished?   8 How does the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse differ to other theatres you’ve attended?   9 Have you attended a show at the Globe? Are you a frequent Globe attender? Do you typically sit or stand? How does seeing a show in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse differ? 10 Were there moments when you felt cut off from the performance in any way? Could you describe them? How did that make you feel? 11 How aware were you of other audience members during the performance? 12 Do you connect this playhouse with history? How did it feel to share the space with both a historical play and a modern twenty-first-century audience? 13 Did you feel unsettled by the performance at any point? If so, why? 14 Can you describe the emotional experience of being a Sam Wanamaker Playhouse audience member?

Research in Action participant feedback forms Drama and dramaturgy 1: The aside (25 May 2014) How would you describe your connection to the actors when you were sitting in: The Pit? The Lower Gallery? The Upper Gallery? The Side-Stage Boxes? The Musicians’ Gallery On-stage stools (circle as appropriate)?

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Drama and dramaturgy 2: The discovery space (21 September 2014) How would you describe your connection to the action in the discovery space when you were sitting in: The Pit The Lower Gallery The Upper Gallery The Side-Stage Boxes The Musicians’ Gallery On-stage stools How would you describe your connection to the action on the main stage when you were sitting in: The Pit The Lower Gallery The Upper Gallery The Side-Stage Boxes The Musicians’ Gallery On-stage stools

NOTES Prologue 1

2

3 4

5

Herbert Berry, ‘The second Blackfriars’, in Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram (eds), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 501–30; Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–12. Holger Schott Syme, ‘The theatre of Shakespeare’s time’, in Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 93–118, 101. Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Sarah Dustagheer, ‘Repertory and the production of theatre space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613’ (PhD thesis, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2011) and Dustagheer, Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Marion O’Connor, ‘Reconstructive Shakespeare: Reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages’, in Sarah Stanton and Stanley Wells (eds), Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76–97; Paul Menzer (ed.), Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006); Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Don Weingust, ‘Early modern theatrical practice in the later modern playhouse: A brief overview’,

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7 8

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in Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko (eds), Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 249–58. Andrew Gurr, ‘Shakespeare’s Globe: A history of reconstruction and some reasons for trying’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27–47. Sarah Dustagheer, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft, ‘(Re) constructed spaces for early modern drama: Research in practice’, Shakespeare Bulletin 35.2 (2017), 173–85. See Paul Menzer, ‘Afterward: Discovery spaces? Research at the Globe and Blackfriars’, in Menzer (ed.), Inside Shakespeare, 223–30 and the rebuttal offered in Farah Karim-Cooper’s ‘Introduction’ to ‘Part Two: Globe Education and Research’ in Karim-Cooper and Carson (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 129–33. See also Robin Nelson, ‘Modes of practice-as-research knowledge and their place in the academy’, in Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini (eds), Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 112–30. For practice-informed discoveries, see for example Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); the essays in Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013). On the cultural impact of reconstructed spaces, see W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79–116; Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Introduction: A kind of history’, in Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 1–9; Christie Carson, ‘Mark Rylance, Henry V and “Original Practices” at Shakespeare’s Globe: History refashioned’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete (eds), Filming and Performing Renaissance History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 127–45.

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10 Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, 25; Stephen Purcell, Shakespeare and Audience in Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Penelope Woods, ‘Globe audiences: Spectatorship and reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’ (PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2012) and Woods, ‘Skilful spectatorship? Doing (or being) audience at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015), 99–113. 11 Dominic Dromgoole, interview 1, 25 February 2014.

Chapter 1   1 Bridget Escolme, ‘The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Malcontent: Shakespeare’s Globe, January–April 2014’, Shakespeare Quarterly 65.2 (2014), 209–18, 209.   2 Franklin J. Hildy (ed.), New Issues in the Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Theatre: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Georgia February 16–18, 1990 (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); Andrew Gurr and John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); Mulryne and Shewring, Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt; Barry Day, This Wooden ‘O’: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn (London: Oberon Books, 1996).   3 Richard Proudfoot, ‘The 1998 Globe season’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 215–28; Lois Potter, ‘Roman actors and Egyptian transvestites’, Shakespeare Quarterly 50.4 (2000), 508–17; Potter, ‘The distracted Globe: Summer 2000’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 124–31.   4 Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).   5 Rob Conkie, The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity (Lewiston and New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 2006), 185–221; for a full discussion of the Original Practices project, see the chapters in Part I of Carson and KarimCooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 29–126.   6 Conkie, Globe Theatre Project, 191.

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  7 Some of these disappointments are probed in Carson and Karim-Cooper’s ‘Introduction’ to their Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 1–12.   8 Projects that drew on or were influenced by the early years of performance in the reconstructed Globe include Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005); David Crystal, Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Studies of Globe stage practice from a theatre history perspective include Yu Jin Ko, ‘A little touch of Harry in the light: Henry V at the new Globe’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 107–19; Gurr and Ichikawa’s Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres; Chantal Schutz, ‘Music at the new Globe’, Early Modern Literary Studies 8 (2001), 1–36; John R. Ford, ‘Estimable wonders and hard constructions: Recognising Twelfth Night at the Globe’, Shakespeare Bulletin 21.3 (2003), 47–60.   9 Carson and Karim-Cooper, ‘Introduction’ to their Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 1–12, 6; Tom Cornford, ‘Reconstructing theatre: The Globe under Dominic Dromgoole’, New Theatre Quarterly 26.4 (2010), 319–28. 10 Karim-Cooper, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Part II: Globe Education and Research’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 129–33, 130–1. 11 Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 88–98, 234–40. 12 Rylance’s tenure is explored in Stephen Purcell, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017). 13 Andrew Gurr, ‘Forward’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, xvii–xx, xviii. 14 Christie Carson, ‘Democratising the audience?’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 115–26; Sarah Werner, ‘Audiences’, in Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (eds), Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 165–79; Woods, ‘Globe audiences’; Amy Kenny, ‘“I

NOTES

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16

17

18 19

20

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hope ’twill make you laugh”: Audience laughter at the Globe theatre’, Theatre Research International 40.1 (2015), 37–49; Purcell, Shakespeare and Audience in Practice. Woods, ‘Globe audiences’; Dustagheer, ‘Repertory and the production of theatre space’; Neil Vallelly, ‘Being-in-light at the early modern and reconstructed theatres’ (PhD thesis, University of Otago and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2015); Miranda Fay Thomas, ‘Shakespeare’s body language: Gesture, shame and gender politics on Elizabethan and Jacobean stages’ (PhD thesis, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2016). Recent work influenced by Globe practice and reconstructed playhouses includes Simon Smith, Jacqueline Watson and Amy Kenny (eds), The Senses in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Jerzy Limon, ‘Elizabethan theatre reconstructions reconsidered: Some theoretical aspects of time-space-audience relationships’, Poetics Today 35.4 (2014), 539–60; Valerie Clayman Pye, ‘Shakespeare’s Globe: Theatre architecture and the performance of authenticity’, Shakespeare 10.4 (2014), 411–27; William Casey Caldwell, ‘The comic structure of the Globe: History, direct address, and the representation of laughter in a reconstructed playhouse’, Shakespeare Bulletin 31.3 (2013), 375–403; Ann Thompson, ‘Staging plays at Shakespeare’s Globe: Then and now’, Alicante Journal of English Studies 25 (2012), 137–49. Paul Menzer, ‘The Spirit of ’76: original practices and revolutionary nostalgia’, in Sarah Werner (ed.), New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 94–108, 97. Martin White, ‘Research and the Globe’, in Carson and KarimCooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 166–74, 173. D. F. Rowan, ‘A neglected Jones/Webb theatre project: BarberSurgeons’ Hall writ large’, New Theatre Magazine 9.3 (1969), 6–15; Rowan, ‘A neglected Jones/Webb theatre project, part II: A theatrical missing link’, in David Galloway (ed.), The Elizabethan Theatre II (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), 60–73. Iain Mackintosh, ‘Inigo Jones – theatre architect’, Tabs 31.3 (1973), 95–105; John Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 39–77.

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21 Gordon Higgott, ‘Reassessing the drawings for the Inigo Jones theatre: A Restoration project by John Webb?’, paper based on a lecture given at Shakespeare’s Globe, 13 February 2005, in Martin White (ed.), ‘The Chamber of Demonstrations: Reconstructing the Jacobean Indoor Playhouse’, http://www. bristol.ac.uk/drama/jacobean/research4.html. 22 Mark Rylance, Claire van Kampen and Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘A principles document [for the ARG] for the construction of an indoor playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe’, August 2009 (Papers of Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Globe Archive, SGT/ ED/RES/2/3). 23 Jon Greenfield (with assistance from Peter McCurdy), ‘Practical evidence for a reimagined indoor Jacobean theatre’, in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, 32–64. 24 John Orrell, ‘The Inigo Jones designs’, in Gurr and Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare’s, 128–9. 25 Minutes of ARG meeting, 25 September 2010; report presented to the ARG, 10 March 2011 (SGT/ED/RES/2/3). 26 Greenfield with McCurdy, ‘Practical evidence’, 38. 27 Oliver Jones, ‘Documentary evidence for an indoor Jacobean theatre’, in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, 65–78. 28 Minutes of ARG meeting, 25 September 2010 (SGT/ED/ RES/2/3). 29 Jon Greenfield, ‘Indoor Jacobean theatre/drawings 7B and 7C geometry’, report presented to ARG, 9 December 2011 (SGT/ ED/RES/2/3). 30 Greenfield with McCurdy, ‘Practical evidence’, 37. 31 ‘Archetype, n.’, 1 and 2b. Oxford English Dictionary online edition. 32 Greenfield with McCurdy, ‘Practical evidence’, 37. 33 Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Design (New York: New York University Press, 1964); Richard Hosley, ‘A reconstruction of the second Blackfriars’, in Galloway (ed.), The Elizabethan Theatre II, 77–88; Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London: Routledge, 1987); Herbert Berry, ‘Playhouses, 1560–1660’, in Wickham, Berry and Ingram (eds), English Professional Theatre, 501–30, 547–63, 623–37, 649–74; Munro, Children of the Queen’s

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Revels; Ralph Alan Cohen, ‘The most convenient place: The Second Blackfriars Theatre and its appeal’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 209–24 and Frances Teague, ‘The Phoenix and the Cockpit-in-Court playhouses’ in Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 209–24, 240–59. See also E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), vol. 2, 472–517; G. E Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–68), vol. 6, 77–86; Reavley Gair, ‘Takeover at Blackfriars: Queen’s Revels to King’s Men’, in C. E. McGee (ed.), Elizabethan Theatre, X (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1988), 37–54; Janette Dillon, ‘The Blackfriars Theatre and the indoor theatres’, in Julie Sanders (ed.), Ben Jonson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 124–33. 34 Paul Menzer and Ralph Alan Cohen, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Inside and Out’, in Menzer (ed.), Inside Shakespeare, 7–16, 8. 35 Paul Menzer, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017).

Chapter 2   1 Matt Wolf, ‘Inside the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, The Daily Telegraph, 14 January 2014; Matt Trueman, ‘Shakespeare’s indoor Globe to glow by candlelight’, The Guardian, 27 November 2012; Matt Wolf, ‘Eileen Atkins helps inaugurate London’s newest playhouse’, New York Times, 28 January 2014.   2 Michael Billington, review of The Duchess of Malfi, The Guardian, 16 January 2014.   3 Andrew Preston, ‘It’ll be all light on the night: It’s candles only at the Bard’s second home … and Bond girl Gemma Arterton wouldn’t have it any other way’, The Daily Mail, 11 January 2014.   4 Simon Edge, review of The Duchess of Malfi, Daily Express, 16 January 2014; Quentin Letts, review of The Changeling, The Daily Mail, 23 January 2015 (‘even my seat was murder!’).

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  5 Alycia Smith-Howard, ‘Knowing her place: Buzz Goodbody and The Other Place’, Early Modern Studies Journal 5 (2013), 77–93; Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 135–42.   6 Michael Caines, ‘From wooden O to U: Inside the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 December 2013. Audience members also picked up on the SWP’s resemblance to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan (exit interviews with Heather and Linda, 6 February 2014; and Sue and Hugh, 13 November 2014).   7 Crystal Bartolovich, ‘Shakespeare’s Globe?’ in Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (eds), Marxist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2001), 178–205.   8 Terence Hawkes, ‘Bardbiz’, London Review of Books, 22 February 1990; Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), 141–53.   9 John Drakakis, ‘Theatre, ideology, and institution: Shakespeare and the roadsweepers’, in Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 24–41, 27. 10 Kate McLuskie, ‘Dancing and thinking: Teaching “Shakespeare” in the twenty-first century’, in G. B. Shand (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 121–41. 11 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), 214, 233. 12 Simon Barker, ‘Images of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a history of the present’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson and Diana Loxley (eds), Confronting the Crisis: War, Politics and Culture in the Eighties (Colchester: University of Essex, 1984), 15–27. 13 Drakakis, ‘Theatre, ideology, and institution’. 14 W. B. Worthen, ‘Reconstructing the Globe, constructing ourselves’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 33–45, 35. 15 Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and cultural tourism’, Theatre Journal 50.2 (1998), 175–88. 16 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 113. For more on the habit of ‘reviewing the Shakespearean audience’ at the Globe, and identifying them as vulgar or uncomprehending,

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see Paul Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe: The reception of Shakespearean space and audience in contemporary reviewing’, in Hodgdon and Worthen (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 359–75. 17 Abigail Rokison, ‘Authenticity in the twenty-first century: Propeller and Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson (eds), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71–90, 71. 18 Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 1. 19 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 25. 20 Jerome de Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (London: Routledge, 2016), 162. 21 Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, 96. 22 Canvas totes were sold by the Booksellers’ Association during 2016 (http://www.thebookseller.com/news/bookshops-bard-mybag-321297); soap available from the Literary Gift Company (https://www.theliterarygiftcompany.com/products/ladymacbeth-soap). 23 Romeo + Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996); 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999); O (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2001); She’s The Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006); Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1999); Shakespeare in Love (Disney Theatrical Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions, dir. Declan Donnellan, designed by Nick Ormerod, 2014); Emma French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), 108. 24 Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010), xi–xviii. 25 Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘The performance of early modern drama at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 53–69. 26 For more on the commodification of contemporary Shakespeare, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Cute Shakespeare?’ Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.3 (2016), 1–12.

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27 Some of the London-based celebrations took place under the banner of the Shakespeare 400 consortium, a group of cultural, creative and educational institutions including the Globe, King’s College London, the British Library, the National Archives, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others (https://shakespeare400.kcl.ac.uk/). 28 Dominic Dromgoole, Hamlet, Globe to Globe: Taking Shakespeare to Every Country in the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2017). 29 Mark Lawson, ‘Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse casts new light on Jacobean staging’, The Guardian, 20 January 2014. 30 Although the non-Shakespearean dramatic canon experienced a boom in popularity after the Second World War, Jem Bloomfield has shown that The Duchess of Malfi and other ‘Elizabethan’ dramas had a tangible ‘oppositional identity’ during the nineteenth century as well (‘Two “Jacobean” Malfis: Controversy and Reception in 1892 and 2010’, Shakespeare Bulletin 31.1 (2013), 29–40). 31 Wendy Griswold, Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre 1576–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 56–80; Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 79–118; Lois Potter, ‘Tragedy and performance’, in Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 102–15. 32 Michael Blakemore, Next Season (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969; reprinted, Applause Books, 1995), 107–8, 126. 33 Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), reprinted as part of A Dance to the Music of Time, 4 vols (London: Mandarin, 1997), vol. 2, 282, 284. 34 Elizabeth Wilson, Hallucinations: Life in the Post-Modern City (London: Radius, 1988), 3. 35 Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 83, 94. 36 Dominic Maxwell, ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks – for Shakespeare’s new baby Globe has a roof’, The Times, 10 December 2013. See also Rowan Moore, ‘Play it again Sam … by candlelight’, The Observer, 12 January 2014. 37 Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 86. See also Roberta Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 56.

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38 Billington, 16 January 2014; Susannah Clapp, review of The Duchess of Malfi, The Observer, 19 January 2014. 39 Michael Coveney, review of The Duchess of Malfi, Whatsonstage.com, 16 January 2014; Sam Marlowe, review of The Duchess of Malfi, Metro, 17 January 2014. 40 Tim Walker, review of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2014. 41 Dominic Maxwell, review of The Changeling, The Times, 21 January 2015. 42 Michael Billington, review of The Changeling, The Guardian, 21 January 2015. 43 Matt Wolf, review of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ArtsDesk.com, 28 February 2014. 44 ‘What’s On’, Shakespeare’s Globe website, http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/sam-wanamakerplayhouse/the-knight-of-the-burning-pestle. 45 Karim-Cooper, ‘The performance of early modern drama at Shakespeare’s Globe’, 59. 46 ‘What’s On’, Shakespeare’s Globe website, http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/sam-wanamakerplayhouse/the-duchess-of-malfi. 47 ‘What’s On’, Shakespeare’s Globe website, http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/sam-wanamakerplayhouse/the-changeling. 48 ‘’Tis pity Globe ad is too racy, say Tube bosses’, Evening Standard, 28 October 2014. 49 Dominic Dromgoole, interview 1, 25 February 2014. 50 Greenfield with McCurdy, ‘Practical evidence’, 60–2. 51 Dominic Dromgoole, interview 3, 19 April 2016. 52 Exit interview with Katherine and Caroline, 13 November 2014. 53 Susannah Clapp, review of The Changeling, The Observer, 25 January 2015. 54 Aebischer and Prince, ‘Introduction’, in their Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 1–16. See also Carol Chillingworth Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stages (London: Routledge, 2001); Barker, Early Modern Tragedy; Kim Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated

224

55

56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

NOTES

Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Roberta Barker, ‘“A freshly creepy reality”: Jacobean tragedy and realist acting on the contemporary stage’, in Aebischer and Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 121–41, 130–1. Roberta Barker and David Nicol, ‘Does Beatrice-Joanna have a subtext? The Changeling on the London stage’, Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (2004), 3.1–43. Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia (London: Verso, 2016), 5. Dominic Dromgoole, interview 1, 25 February 2014. Dominic Dromgoole, interview 2, 20 February 2015. Hattie Morahan, interview, 10 February 2015. Eoin Price, ‘Sad tales for winter’, 12 May 2014, and ‘Comedy canons’, 23 May 2016, ‘Aside Notes’ blog, https://asidenotes. wordpress.com/2014/05/12/sad-tales-for-winter/, https:// asidenotes.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/comedy-canons/. Nicholas Brooke, Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy (London: Open Books, 1979). Karim-Cooper, ‘The performance of early modern drama at Shakespeare’s Globe’, 68. A more sceptical analysis of the Globe’s engagement with history is Catherine Silverstone, ‘Shakespeare live: Reproducing Shakespeare at the “new” Globe Theatre’, Textual Practice 19 (2005), 31–50. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 2. Exit interview with Roz, 19 February 2015. Exit interview with Heather, 6 February 2014. Exit interview with Tony, 19 February 2015. Exit interviews with Phil, 13 February 2015, and Linda, 6 February 2014. Exit interview with Olivia, 13 February 2015. Liz Schafer, review of The Duchess of Malfi, Times Higher Education, 16 January 2014. Karim-Cooper, ‘The performance of early modern drama at Shakespeare’s Globe’, 60.

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72 Bridget Escolme, ‘The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Malcontent: Shakespeare’s Globe, January–April 2014’, 210. 73 David Lowenthal, ‘Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t’, in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (eds), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 18–32, 30. 74 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 14. 75 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Alienation effects in Chinese acting’, in John Willett (ed. and trans.) Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1964), 91–9. 76 Kasper Holten, interview, 7 May 2014. ‘Time machine’ is Andrew Dickson, ‘New Globe playhouse draws us inside Shakespeare’s inner space’, The Guardian, 7 January 2014, and the notion is also suggested by Lucy Mangan’s description of the SWP as an ‘oak-beamed, candlelit simulacrum of a 400 year old theatre, the closest we’ll ever come to time travel’ (‘I’m not sure I’m hooked but my first opera was amazing’, Evening Standard, 12 February 2015).

Chapter 3   1 Woods, ‘Globe audiences’, 8.   2 Paul Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), xi, xiv, 216.   3 ‘Anecdote – n. 1: Secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history’, Oxford English Dictionary, online edition (Ἀνέκδοτα – ‘things unpublished’ – was the original, Greek title of Procopius’ Secret History, a no-holdsbarred history of the reign of Byzantine emperor Justinian).   4 Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas ScottRailton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 4.   5 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68.   6 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1997), 139–40.

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  7 Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘Props’, in Hampton-Reeves and Escolme (eds), Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, 88–101, 89, n.   8 Heather, exit interview, 6 February 2014.   9 Paul Taylor, review of The Duchess of Malfi, The Independent, 16 January 2014; Clapp, review, 19 January 2014. For more on the language used to describe the intimate interior of the SWP, see Sarah Dustagheer, ‘“Intimacy” at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, Shakespeare Bulletin 35.2 (2017), 227–46. 10 Heather, exit interview, 6 February 2014. 11 Robert Shaughnessy, ‘Connecting the Globe: Actors, audience and entrainment’, Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015), 294–305, 300–3. 12 The formulation was however used by SWP actors in other contexts (see Hattie Morahan, ‘Adopt an Actor’ interview, 28 January 2015, Globe Education website: http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/ beatrice-joanna-played-by-hattie-morahan). 13 Verity, Helen and Sara, exit interview, 22 March 2014. 14 Tony and Tony, exit interview, 19 February 2015.

Chapter 4   1 Email correspondence with the author, 23 January 2017.   2 John Webster (?), ‘An Excellent Actor’, in Thomas Overbury et al. (eds), New and Choice Characters, of Several Authors (London: Thomas Creede for Laurence Lisle, 1615), sig. M5v.   3 Email correspondence with the author, 23 January 2017.   4 Verity, Helen and Sara, exit interview, 22 March 2014.   5 John Ford, ’Tis Pitty Shee’s a Whore (London: Nicholas Okes for Richard Collins, 1633), sigs. C3v and I4r.   6 John Marston’s The Malcontent also calls for significant act break performance, discussed in Chapter 8.   7 Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London: [Nicholas Okes] for Walter Burre, 1613), sigs. C4v-D1r, E4r and G4v.

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Chapter 5 1

Martin White, ‘“When torchlight made an artificial noon”: light and darkness in the indoor Jacobean theatre’, in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, 115–36, 124; Robert B. Graves gives a height of ten to twelve feet (Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 192). 2 Observing productions in the second season, Neil Vallelly calculated that the average number of candles used to light a Sam Wanamaker Playhouse performance was 84. He points out, following Martin White’s calculations, that the average number of candles in an early modern indoor playhouse was rather less, at around 55 (‘Being-in-Light’, 133). 3 See Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 205–7; Vallelly, ‘Being-in-Light’, 163–5. 4 While Robert Graves argues that ‘there is no evidence that candles were dimmed or even could be dimmed’ for aesthetic or tonal reasons (Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 175–6, 197), White allows for the strong possibility that theatre companies ‘may have taken the opportunity to alter the playhouse lighting to enhance the mood’, pointing out that moments in plays that seem suitable to such alteration are often ‘clustered to take advantage of points in the action – most notably act breaks’ when the candelabra need to be adjusted (‘When torchlight made an artificial noon’, 134–6). 5 Martin White, Renaissance Drama in Action: An Introduction to Aspects of Theatre Practice and Performance (London: Routledge, 1998), 156–76. 6 Ford, ’Tis Pitty, sig. F3v. 7 Eric F. Langley, ‘Anatomizing the early modern eye: A literary case study’, Renaissance Studies 20.3 (2006), 340–55. 8 This pragmatic solution bears comparison with the practices of company members of Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center during the spring ‘Actors’ Renaissance’ season, when actors prepare productions without a director using cue-script rehearsal techniques. During performance, an actor who requires a line from the prompter says ‘prithee’ – a suitably early modern word that does minimum damage to the flow of the scene.

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  9 Francis Beaumont, ‘To my friend Master John Fletcher, upon his Faithful Shepherdess’, in John Fletcher (ed.), The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London: R. Bonian and H. Walley, 1610), sig. ¶3v. 10 Interviews with: Thalissa Teixeira (14 March 2015), Emily Barber (6 April 2016), Alex Waldmann (20 March 2014). 11 Julian, exit interview, 16 March 2016. 12 Samuel Pepys, 14 April 1669 (Henry B. Wheatley (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1946), vol. 3, 276–77). 13 Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998), 1. 14 Actor Peter Hamilton Dyer recalls an immediate ‘sense of shock’ throughout the audience when a lit candlestick fell off the front of the stage during an early performance of The Changeling (interview 16 April 2015). 15 Elaine, exit interview, 6 February 2014; Phil, exit interview, 13 February 2015. 16 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 60. 17 Joanna, exit interview, 6 February 2014. 18 Ibid.; anon., exit interview, 20 November 2014. 19 The same comparison was offered by Sarah MacRae (interview 1, 20 March 2014), Edward Peel (interview 4 December 2014) and Trevor Fox (interview 24 March 2016). 20 Research in Action Drama and Dramaturgy 1, 25 May 2014: workshop responses (SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1). 21 Linda, exit interview, 6 February 2014. Audience member Olivia spoke of being ‘shut into this slightly different world’, exit interview, 13 February 2015. 22 Gabby, exit interview, 13 February 2015. 23 Phil, exit interview, 13 February 2015. 24 Anon., exit interview, 21 November 2014. 25 This was also noted by spectators (Hugh, exit interview, 13 November 2014). 26 Linda and Heather, exit interview, 6 February 2014.

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Chapter 6   1 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 3.   2 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5; Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill, ‘Introduction: Audience and audiences’, in their Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–17, 2; Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 28–9.   3 Werner, ‘Audiences’, 166.   4 Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14.   5 Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘Cosmetics on the Globe stage’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 66–76, 73.   6 Joanna, exit interview, 6 February 2014; Heather, exit interview, 6 February 2014.   7 Grace, exit interview, 13 February 2014.   8 Hristomir A. Stanev, ‘The city and its theatres: A Jacobean sensory perspective’, in his Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 27–54. See also discussion of the early modern playhouse as ‘haptic and palpative’ in Michael Whitmore, ‘Shakespeare, sensation and Renaissance existentialism’, Criticism 54.3 (2012), 419–26, 421; and the ‘tactile, gustatory, and even sometimes olfactory’ theatrical experiences explored by Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard in ‘Introduction: Imagining audiences’ in their edited collection Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–25, 8.   9 Heather, exit interview, 6 February 2014. 10 Penelope Woods, ‘The audience of the indoor theatre’, in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, 152–67, 159–60. 11 Ibid., 162; Henry Peacham, The Art of Living in London (London: John Gyles, 1642), sig. A4r. 12 Hugh, exit interview, 13 November 2014.

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13 Sue, exit interview, 13 November 2014. 14 Linda, exit interview, 6 February 2014. 15 Hugh, exit interview, 13 November 2014. 16 Sue, exit interview, 13 November 2014. 17 Witnessed by the author, 29 October 2014. 18 Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, xvi. 19 David Bergeron, ‘Charismatic audience: A 1599 pageant’, in Low and Myhill (eds), Imagining the Audience, 135–49, 136. 20 Tony, exit interview, 19 February 2015. 21 Sue, exit interview, 13 November 2014. 22 Phil spoke of his ‘discomfort’ and ‘kind of awkwardness as a spectator’ during the challenging moments of The Changeling, exit interview, 13 February 2015. 23 Escolme, Talking to the Audience, 16. 24 Witnessed by the author, 5 November 2014, 19 November 2014 and 5 December 2014; Stephen Gosson, The Trumpet of War (London: V.S. for I.O, 1598), sig. C7v. 25 Woods, ‘The audience of the indoor theatre’, 161. 26 Anon., exit interview, 20 November 2014. 27 Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response, 15. Sarah Werner analyses uncomfortable moments at the Globe when contemporary productions ‘give license to politics in the audience that is not set free in other venues’, and highlights laughter at gendered violence as the most problematic of audience responses (‘Audiences’, 165–79, 174). 28 Werner, ‘Audiences’; Caldwell, ‘The comic structure of the Globe’, 375–40 3. 29 Recalled by James Garnon (interview 13 February 2014). 30 Thomas Dekker, ‘How a gallant should behave himself in a playhouse’, in his The Guls Horne-booke (London: R.S., 1609), sigs. E2r-E4v, sig. E3r. 31 Grace, exit interview, 13 February 2014; Verity, exit interview, 22 March 2014. 32 Gabby, exit interview, 13 February 2015. 33 Email correspondence with the author, 26 January 2017. 34 John Stephens, Essayes and Characters, Ironicall and Instructive (London: E. Allde for Phillip Knight, 1615), sig. V7r. 35 Actor Michael Gould also found a ‘lot of looking away when I do my aside. It’s quite hard to catch anybody with any sort of eye-contact’ (interview 27 November 2014).

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36 Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe, 28. 37 Ed Frankl, ‘Dominic Dromgoole: “Other countries perform Shakespeare better than us”’, The Stage, 25 April 2014; Sara, exit interview, 22 March 2014. 38 Brendan O’Hea, interview, 12 April 2016. 39 Heather, exit interview, 6 February 2014; Christine also commented on the sense of exclusivity, exit interview, 6 February 2014. 40 Tony, exit interview, 19 February 2015. 41 Glen, exit interview, 22 March 2014. 42 Anon., exit interview, 21 November 2014. 43 Pam, exit interview, 13 February 2014. 44 Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’. 45 Paul Menzer has suggested that the architecture and attendant social practices of early modern theatre enervated the disruptive potential of the watching crowd, fashioning an ‘audience’ from a potential mob (‘Crowd control’, in Low and Myhill (eds), Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 19–36). 46 Escolme, ‘The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Malcontent’, 210. 47 Joanna, exit interview, 6 February 2014. See also anon., 21 November 2014. 48 Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 153. 49 Anon., exit interview, 21 November 2014. 50 Grace, exit interview, 13 February 2014. 51 Sara, exit interview, 22 March 2014. 52 Glen, exit interview, 22 March 2014. 53 Grace, exit interview, 13 February 2014.

Chapter 7   1 Baz Kershaw, ‘Practice-as-research: An introduction’, in Allegue et al. (eds), Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen, 1–16, 2.   2 I am most grateful to Kings-Globe MA student Daniel Rubins, whose excellent essay on the aside in Cymbeline significantly informed this analysis.

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  3 Richard Brome, The Queen and Concubine: A Comedie, in his Five New Playes (London: A. Crook for H. Brome, 1659 [1658?]), sigs. B1r-C1r; Lucy Munro (ed.), The Queen and Concubine (Richard Brome Online, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010: https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/home. jsp).   4 Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe: 1599–1609 (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 186.   5 Jerzy Limon, ‘The fifth wall: Words of silence in Shakespeare’s soliloquies and asides’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 144 (2000), 47–66, 48.   6 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 47.   7 Research in Action Drama and Dramaturgy 1, 25 May 2014: Workshop responses (SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1).   8 Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response, 77.   9 Research in Action Drama and Dramaturgy 1, 25 May 2014: Workshop responses (SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Herbert Berry, ‘The stage and boxes at Blackfriars’, Studies in Philology 63.2 (1966), 163–86. 14 [Thomas Kyd], The Spanish Tragedie: Or, Hieronimo is mad againe (London: W. White for I. White and T. Langley, 1615). 15 Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (London: J. Cottrel for Edward Blackmore, 1658), sigs. E4v-F1r; lineation taken from Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, Lucy Munro (ed.) (London: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2016). 16 Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155. 17 Tim Carroll, ‘Practicing behaviour to his own shadow’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 37–44, 39; Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 9. 18 Richard Hosley, ‘The discovery-space in Shakespeare’s Globe’, Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959), 35–46; Tim Fitzpatrick and Wendy Millyard, ‘Hangings, doors and discoveries: Conflicting

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evidence or problematic assumptions?’, Theatre Notebook 54.1 (2000), 2–23; Frederick Kiefer, ‘Curtains on the Shakespearean stage’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), 151–86. 19 Mariko Ichikawa, ‘“What story is that painted upon the cloth?”: Some descriptions of hangings and their use on the early modern stage’, Theatre Notebook 70.1 (2016), 2–31. 20 Research in Action Drama and Dramaturgy 2, 21 September 2014: Workshop responses (SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1). 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 John Ford, Loves Sacrifice. A Tragedie Received Generally Well (London: I.B. for Hugh Beeston, 1633), sig. F1v. 26 Ibid., sigs. F1v and F2r. 27 Research in Action Drama and Dramaturgy 2, 21 September 2014: Workshop responses (SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1). 28 Dorothy M. Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1979), 58. 29 Research in Action Drama and Dramaturgy 2, 21 September 2014: Workshop responses (SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1). 30 Ibid.

Chapter 8   1 I am grateful to Simon Smith and Neil Vallelly, who both read sections of this chapter in draft form.   2 Sarah Dustagheer, ‘Acoustic and visual practices indoors’, in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, 137–51, 139–40; Simon Smith, ‘Chapter 2: Looking’, in his Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).   3 John Marston, The Wonder of Women or The Tragedie of Sophonisba (London: John Windes, 1606), sigs. E4r-E1v; Sophonisba or The Wonder of Women, in Keith Sturgess (ed.), The Malconent and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 241–94 (lineation taken from this edition).

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  4 Lucy Munro, ‘Music and Sound’, in Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 543–59, 546; Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 50–9.   5 Claire van Kampen, ‘Music and aural texture at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 81.   6 Simon Smith, ‘The many musical performance spaces at Jacobean indoor playhouses’, in Bill Barclay and David Lindley (eds), Shakespeare, Music and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 29–41.   7 For instance, in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Double Marriage (Blackfriars, c.1620) in which an unsettling moment is described in stage direction as ‘Strange music within, hautboys’ (Act 2 Scene 4) (Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (London: Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1647), sig. 5D2v). See van Kampen, ‘Music and aural texture’ for more on the cultural and social significance of particular early modern musical instruments.   8 For more on the association of Antony and Hercules, see Richard Hillman, ‘Antony, Hercules, and Cleopatra: “The Bidding of the Gods” and “the Subtlest Maze of All”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 442–51.   9 Claire van Kampen discusses the problems modern actors face with musical cueing in the outside Globe in ‘Music and aural texture’, 83. 10 Simon Smith, ‘“I see no instruments, nor hands that play”: Antony and Cleopatra and visual musical experience’, in Smith, Watson and Kenny (eds), The Senses in Early Modern England, 167–84. 11 Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 218. 12 See Austern for references to several calls for trumpets in indoor plays (Music in Children’s Drama, 67–8); experience in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, both in full productions and workshop experiments, has demonstrated that trumpets and the somewhat softer cornets are highly suitable for indoor use. 13 Dustagheer, ‘Acoustic and visual practices indoors’, 141–2. 14 The prevailing view is found in Richard Hosley, ‘Was there a music room at Shakespeare’s Globe?’, in Allardyce Nicoll (ed.),

NOTES

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17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

235

Shakespeare Survey 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 113–23; Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 80; Austern, Music in Children’s Drama, 26–9. See Smith, ‘The many musical performance spaces’, 36–41, for a countervailing view. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Captain, in Comedies and Tragedies, sig. GG4r. See also Marston’s colonization of the act time before the fifth act in Parasitaster, or The Fawne, written in 1604 for the Children of the Revels at Blackfriars (London: T.P for W.C, 1606): ‘Whilst the act is a playing, Hercules and Tiberio enters [sic], Tiberio climbs the tree, and is received above by Dulcimel, Philocalia and a priest. Hercules stays beneath’ (sig. H3r). John Marston, The Malcontent (London: V[alentine] S[immes] for William Aspley, [1604]), sig. C3v; The Malcontent, in Sturgess (ed.), The Malconent and Other Plays, 117–76 (lineation taken from this edition). In McLeod’s 2014 staging, the transition between the scenes was covered by music as the previous scene’s furniture was removed. Maquerelle extinguished some of the candles at the back of the stage as Mendoza entered and hid himself by the downstage stair, while Ferneze entered – preened – and exited as invited by Maquerelle through the central doorway. Mendoza was cued to start 2.1 by the ending of the music. Graves argues that a tragic tone was in fact suggested by a profusion of lights, rather than gloom (Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 175–6). Francis Lenton, The Young Gallants Whirligigg, or Youths Reakes (London: M.F. for Robert Bostocke, 1629), sig. C4v. Francis Bacon, ‘Of masques and triumphs’, in Essayes and Counsels (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), sig. Gg1r. James Wright, Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage (London: G. Croom for William Haws, 1699), sig. B4r. Vallelly, ‘Being-in-Light’, 67–9. Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (London: E[dward] A[llde and S. Stafford] for Nathaniel Butter, 1606), sig. D2r.

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NOTES

25 John Webster, The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy – ‘as it was presented privately at the Blackfriars, and publicly at the Globe’ (London: Nicholas Okes for John Waterson, 1623). 26 White, Renaissance Drama in Action, 156–76; ‘When torchlight made an artificial noon’, 132–6; ‘Chamber of Demonstrations’, http://www.bristol.ac.uk/drama/jacobean/research4.html. 27 Ben Jonson, Catiline His Conspiracy in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London: William Stansby, 1616), sigs. 3M3v-3M4r; Inga-Stina Ewbank (ed.), Catiline His Conspiracy in David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson (eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vol. 4, 1–185. 28 Original lines: ‘How is’t, Autronius?’ (309) and ‘Feel you nothing?’ (310). During the workshop, names and speeches were reassigned to fit the smaller cast. 29 Thomas Middleton, The Lady’s Tragedy [‘The Second Maiden’s Tragedy’], Julia Briggs (ed.), in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 833–906. 30 Vallelly, ‘Being-in-light’, 31–55.

Epilogue   1 I am grateful to Pascale Aebischer and Holger Schott Syme for sharing with me work in draft on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.   2 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the body beneath: Speculating on the boy actor’, in Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the English Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 1992), 64–83, 78.   3 Gordon McMullan, ‘Afterward’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 230–3, 233.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Shakespeare’s Globe Archive SGT/ED/RES/2/3 (Papers of Dr Farah Karim-Cooper) Minutes of the Architecture Research Group (ARG).

SGT/ED/RES/2/4/1 (Papers of Dr Will Tosh) Indoor Performance Practice Project, 2014–16, Research in Action results: Drama and Dramaturgy 1, 25 May 2014: Workshop responses. Drama and Dramaturgy 2, 21 September 2014: Workshop responses. Indoor Performance Practice Project, 2014–16, archive of interview transcriptions: Artist interviews Arterton, Gemma. Interviewed at the Globe by Farah Karim-Cooper and Will Tosh, 6 February 2014. Atkins, Eileen. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 28 February 2014. Barber, Emily. Interviewed at the Globe by Sophie Clarke, 6 April 2016. Bennett, Max. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 4 December 2014. Braschi, Stefano. Interviewed with Philip Cumbus at the Globe by Will Tosh, 27 November 2014. Cooper, Giles. Interviewed with Hannah McPake at the Globe by Will Tosh, 22 March 2014.

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Cumbus, Philip. Interviewed with Stefano Braschi at the Globe by Will Tosh, 27 November 2014. Doherty, Matt. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 10 February 2015. Dromgoole, Dominic (interview 1). Interviewed at the Globe by Farah Karim-Cooper and Will Tosh, 25 February 2014. Dromgoole, Dominic (interview 2). Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 20 February 2015. Dromgoole, Dominic (interview 3). Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 19 April 2016. Dumezweni, Noma. Interviewed with Edward Peel at the Globe by Heidi Pontet, 4 December 2014. Dyer, Peter Hamilton. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 16 April 2015. Fensom, Jonathan. Interviewed at his studio by Will Tosh, 22 March 2016. Ferguson, Brian. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 7 April 2015. Fox, Trevor. Interviewed with Sid Sagar at the Globe by Robbie Hand, 24 March 2016. Garnon, James. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 13 February 2014. Gould, Michael. Interviewed with Jethro Skinner at the Globe by Neil Vallelly, 27 November 2014. Haig, Alice. Interviewed with Daniel Rabin at the Globe by Lucy Brown, 4 December 2014. Hargreaves, Sam. Interviewed with Paul Rider at the Globe by Farah Karim-Cooper, 27 March 2014. Herdman, Dennis. Interviewed with Dean Nolan at the Globe by Will Tosh, 27 March 2014. Holten, Kasper. Interviewed at the Royal Opera House by Farah Karim-Cooper and Will Tosh, 7 May 2014. Longhurst, Michael. Interviewed at the Almeida Theatre by Will Tosh, 16 March 2015. MacRae, Sarah (interview 1). Interviewed with Alex Waldmann at the Globe by Sara Reimers, 20 March 2014. MacRae, Sarah (interview 2). Interviewed with Thalissa Teixeira at the Globe by Will Tosh, 14 March 2015. McLynn, Pauline. Interviewed with Matthew Needham at the Globe by Will Tosh, 20 March 2014. McPake, Hannah. Interviewed with Giles Cooper at the Globe by Will Tosh, 22 March 2014.

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Morahan, Hattie. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 10 February 2015. Needham, Matthew. Interviewed with Pauline McLynn at the Globe by Will Tosh, 20 March 2014. Nolan, Dean. Interviewed with Dennis Herdman at the Globe by Will Tosh, 27 March 2014. O’Hea, Brendan. Interviewed at the Globe by Robbie Hand, 12 April 2016. Peel, Edward. Interviewed with Noma Dumezweni at the Globe by Heidi Pontet, 4 December 2014. Peucelle, Tika. Interviewed at the Globe by Robbie Hand, undated April 2016. Quigley, Pearce. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 10 February 2015. Rabin, Daniel. Interviewed with Alice Haig at the Globe by Lucy Brown, 4 December 2014. Steinbeis, Paul. Interviewed with Sam Hargreaves at the Globe by Farah Karim-Cooper, 27 March 2014. Skinner, Jethro. Interviewed with Michael Gould at the Globe by Neil Vallelly, 27 November 2014. Steinbeis, Caroline. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 20 April 2015. Teixeira, Thalissa. Interviewed with Sarah MacRae at the Globe by Will Tosh, 14 March 2015. Thomas, Adele. Interviewed at the Globe by Will Tosh, 20 March 2014. Waldmann, Alex. Interviewed with Sarah MacRae at the Globe by Sara Reimers, 20 March 2014. Yates, Sam. Interviewed at the Royal Academy of Music by Will Tosh, 22 January 2016. Steward interviews Huson, Helen. Interviewed with Terry Pope at the Globe by Will Tosh, 12 September 2016. Pope, Terry. Interviewed with Helen Huson at the Globe by Will Tosh, 12 September 2016. Audience member exit interviews All exit interviews were conducted by members of the Globe Research team and took place in the foyer of Shakespeare’s Globe after a matinee performance. Anon. Interviewed by Neil Vallelly, 20 November 2014 (’Tis Pity).

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Anon. Interviewed by Lucy Brown, 21 November 2014 (’Tis Pity). Carol. Interviewed with Pam by Heidi Pontet, 13 February 2014 (Malfi). Caroline. Interviewed with Katherine by Jennifer Edwards, 13 November 2014 (’Tis Pity). Christine. Interviewed with Elaine by Olivia Bascombe, 6 February 2014 (Malfi). Duncan. Interviewed with Roz by Hailey Bachrach, 19 February 2015 (Changeling). Elaine. Interviewed with Christine by Olivia Bascombe, 6 February 2014 (Malfi). Gabby. Interviewed by Hailey Bachrach, 13 February 2015 (Changeling). Glen. Interviewed by Olivia Bascombe, 22 March 2014 (Pestle). Grace. Interviewed by Olivia Bascombe, 13 February 2014 (Malfi). Heather. Interviewed with Linda by Sara Reimers, 6 February 2014 (Malfi). Helen. Interviewed with Sara and Verity by Kelsey Jacobson, 22 March 2014 (Pestle). Hugh. Interviewed with Sue by Nash Ahmed, 13 November 2014 (’Tis Pity). Joanna. Interviewed by Heidi Pontet, 6 February 2014 (Malfi). Julian. Interviewed with Wendy by Sophie Clarke, 16 March 2016 (Winter’s Tale). Katherine. Interviewed with Caroline by Jennifer Edwards, 13 November 2014 (’Tis Pity). Linda. Interviewed with Heather by Sara Reimers, 6 February 2014 (Malfi). Olivia. Interviewed with Phil by Jennifer Taylor, 13 February 2015 (Changeling). Pam. Interviewed with Carol by Heidi Pontet, 13 February 2014 (Malfi). Phil. Interviewed with Olivia by Jennifer Taylor, 13 February 2015 (Changeling). Roz. Interviewed with Duncan by Hailey Bachrach, 19 February 2015 (Changeling). Sara. Interviewed with Helen and Verity by Kelsey Jacobson, 22 March 2014 (Pestle). Sue. Interviewed with Hugh by Nash Ahmed, 13 November 2014 (’Tis Pity).

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Tony. Interviewed by Jennifer Taylor, 19 February 2015 (Changeling). Verity. Interviewed with Helen and Sara by Kelsey Jacobson, 22 March 2014 (Pestle). Wendy. Interviewed with Julian by Sophie Clarke, 16 March 2016 (Winter’s Tale).

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Vallelly, Neil. ‘Being-in-light at the early modern and reconstructed theatres’ (PhD thesis, University of Otago and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2015). Woods, Penelope. ‘Globe audiences: Spectatorship and reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’ (PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2012).

Online resources Higgott, Gordon. ‘Reassessing the drawings for the Inigo Jones theatre: A Restoration project by John Webb?’, in White (ed.), ‘The Chamber of Demonstrations’. Munro, Lucy (ed.). The Queen and Concubine (Richard Brome Online, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010: https:// www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/home.jsp). Price, Eoin. ‘Aside Notes’ blog: https://asidenotes.wordpress.com. White, Martin (ed.). ‘The Chamber of Demonstrations: Reconstructing the Jacobean Indoor Playhouse’: http://www. bristol.ac.uk/drama/jacobean/research4.html.

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Edge, Simon. Review of The Duchess of Malfi, Daily Express, 16 January 2014. Frankl, Ed. ‘Dominic Dromgoole: “Other countries perform Shakespeare better than us”’, The Stage, 25 April 2014. Hawkes, Terence. ‘Bardbiz’, London Review of Books, 22 February 1990. Lawson, Mark. ‘Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse casts new light on Jacobean staging’, The Guardian, 20 January 2014. Letts, Quentin. Review of The Changeling, The Daily Mail, 23 January 2015. Lucy, Mangan. ‘I’m not sure I’m hooked but my first opera was amazing’, Evening Standard, 12 February 2015. Marlowe, Sam. Review of The Duchess of Malfi, Metro, 17 January 2014. Maxwell, Dominic. ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks – for Shakespeare’s new baby Globe has a roof’, The Times, 10 December 2013. Maxwell, Dominic. Review of The Changeling, The Times, 21 January 2015. Moore, Rowan. ‘Play it again Sam… by candlelight’, The Observer, 12 January 2014. Preston, Andrew. ‘It’ll be all light on the night: It’s candles only at the Bard’s second home... and Bond girl Gemma Arterton wouldn’t have it any other way’, The Daily Mail, 11 January 2014. Schafer, Liz. Review of The Duchess of Malfi, Times Higher Education, 16 January 2014. Taylor, Paul. Review of The Duchess of Malfi, The Independent, 16 January 2014. ‘’Tis pity Globe ad is too racy, say Tube bosses’, Evening Standard, 28 October 2014. Trueman, Matt. ‘Shakespeare’s indoor Globe to glow by candlelight’, The Guardian, 27 November 2012. Walker, Tim. Review of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2014. Wolf, Matt. ‘Inside the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, The Daily Telegraph, 14 January 2014. Wolf, Matt. ‘Eileen Atkins helps inaugurate London’s newest playhouse’, New York Times, 28 January 2014. Wolf, Matt. Review of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ArtsDesk. com, 28 February 2014.

INDEX acoustics xx, xxix, 72–77, 90, 169–170, 172, 180. See also music; voice act breaks 88–89, 101, 181–183 acting techniques 68, 71, 73, 79–81, 86, 89–90 and acoustics 72, 73, 74–77 physicality of 57, 78–79, 90, 147 realism in 61, 68, 86, 95–96, 97, 112, 160 actors health and safety concerns 57–58, 59, 107–108, 109–110 relationship with audience 7–8, 57, 65–67, 79–80, 121–125, 128–132, 197 (see also audience/actor interaction; performance; and under individual names) responses to performance space 45–46, 49–51, 60–62 (see also acting techniques; and under individual actors’ names/ plays) Architecture Research Group (ARG) 11–12, 13, 14, 16 Arterton, Gemma 60, 74, 76–77, 80, 82, 110, 113–114, 126, 133

asides 146–147, 149 Atkins, Eileen xxiv–xxv, 27, 57, 72, 73, 81, 114, 121, 132 audience/actor interaction 60–61, 79–80, 122, 127–129, 132, 133–134, 167. See also under individual plays audiences 119–120, 132 behaviour during performances 57, 74, 117, 124, 135–136 feelings of inclusivity 51, 57, 120, 121–122, 152, 197 relationship with actors during performance 7–8, 57, 65–67, 79–80, 121–125, 128–132, 197 (see also audience/actor interaction) responses to performances 38–39, 112, 116–117, 132, 136–138, 189–190, 197 and restricted viewing 81–82, 83, 90, 109, 126, 134–137, 153, 162, 164 (see also discomfort, feelings of) Barber, Emily 60 Beaumont, Francis xvii, 108–109

258

INDEX

The Captain (with Fletcher) 178–180 The Knight of the Burning Pestle xxiv, 27, 36, 37, 86 act breaks, use of 88–89, 90, 108, 181 audience/actor interaction 61, 128, 129, 132, 133–134 audience experience/ behaviour 62, 75, 82, 136–137 lighting design 31–32, 51, 59, 105, 113 music, use of 77, 78 staging 59–60, 66, 75–76, 115–116 Bennett, Max 50, 75, 78, 79, 80, 83, 96, 114, 117, 132, 149 performances by 57, 84, 95, 125–126 Bennett, Susan 24, 30–31, 34, 48, 137 Billington, Michael 20, 31 Blackfriars Playhouse 52, 174, 178, 184, 185 layout/design, evidence for xviii, 9, 12, 14, 98, 123, 133 original plans (Burbage, 1598) xv–xvii, 177 productions xvi, xvii, 98, 129, 158, 170, 181 (see also under individual entries) Blackfriars Playhouse/American Shakespeare Center (ASC), Staunton, Virginia xviii, xxii, 8, 16

blackouts. See darkness Blakemore, Michael, Next Season 28–29 Braschi, Stefano 72, 94, 113, 122 Brecht, Bertolt 40 Brome, Richard xvii The Queen and Concubine 145–150, 167 Burbage, James xv, xvi, 177 Button, Fiona 84, 103, 114 candelabra xviii, 15, 91–92, 95, 97, 99, 102, 134 use as part of staging 54, 58, 87, 88, 101, 103, 104, 105, 112, 186, 188–189, 191 ‘candle care’ 108, 181, 182, 184 candles/candlelight xx, 30, 31–32, 50–51, 58–59, 84, 86, 91–97, 99, 100–104, 109–115, 122, 184, 193, 196–197. See also candelabra; ‘candle care’ hand-held 30, 92, 93–97, 198 health and safety considerations 107–108, 109–110 lighting/relighting of 58, 86, 93, 101–104, 181 Carroll, Tim 20, 158 Cavalli, Francesco, L’Ormindo xxv, 27, 40, 77–78, 82–83, 87, 104 Children of the Chapel. See Children of the Revels

INDEX

Children of the Revels (previously Children of the Chapel) xvi–xvii, 98, 128, 129, 170, 173, 181 Clark, Hannah xxiv Cockpit xvii, xix, 10, 11, 14, 16, 68, 147, 155, 164, 193 Conkie, Rob 5 Cooper, Giles 76, 83, 108, 133–134 Cumbus, Philip 50, 58, 59, 67, 80–81, 94, 97, 108, 113, 126 Curnyn, Christian 77–78 Daniels, Phil 98, 129 darkness 58, 87, 100–102, 106, 116–117, 188, 198 blackouts 87, 92, 100–101, 116 Davenant, William xvii, 11 Dekker, Thomas 185 The Gull’s Horn Book 128 The Witch of Edmonton (with Rowley and Ford) 155–157, 159–160 discomfort, feelings of (experienced during performance) actors 133–134 audience 38–39, 51, 63, 123–124, 125, 126, 131–132, 197, 198 Doherty, Matt 57 Dromgoole, Dominic xxx, 6, 7, 33, 36, 53, 59, 72, 74, 77, 85, 127, 134, 136 and lighting design 58, 83–84, 87, 100, 102, 105–107, 109

259

Dumezweni, Noma 72, 82, 97, 108, 122, 198 Dyer, Peter Hamilton 62, 64, 66, 77, 79 Escolme, Bridget 3, 40, 125, 136 Fensom, Jonathan xxiv, 71, 83, 84, 92, 93, 98–99, 104, 106, 113 Fergusson, Brian 62, 63, 80, 128–129 Fletcher, John xvi, xvii The Captain (with Beaumont) 178–180 The Faithful Shepherdess 109 Ford, John xvii The Broken Heart xxiv, 33, 55, 67–68, 76, 100–101 Love’s Sacrifice 164–165 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore xxiv, 31, 32, 33, 55, 83, 84–85, 87, 125–126, 135 lighting design 95, 96, 102–103, 113, 114, 115, 117 The Witch of Edmonton 155–157, 159–160 ‘fourth wall’ 146, 153 Fox, Trevor 50, 67 Garnon, James 50, 67, 75, 85–86, 110, 111, 114 performances by 130–131 Gilder, Sean 80, 112 Globe Education events/projects xxvi, 6, 7, 20, 27–28, 154. See also Research in Action workshops

260

INDEX

Globe Theatre. See Shakespeare’s Globe Globe Theatre, Bankside (built 1599) xvi, xvii, xviii, 185 Globe Young Players xxv, 27, 180–181 Gosson, Stephen 126 Gould, Michael 67, 75, 79, 81, 85, 103 Gravelle, Trystan 106 Gurr, Andrew 4, 5, 8, 148, 154 Haig, Alice 57, 79, 97, 114, 133 Hargreaves, Samuel 75, 78, 80, 108 Harvey, Joélle 82 Herdman, Dennis 66, 72, 111 heritage/culture industry 21–22, 24, 25–26, 32, 35, 40 Higgott, Gordon 10–11 Holten, Kasper xxv, 40, 64, 82–83, 87, 88, 104, 137 Huson, Helen 112, 117 indoor theatres, early modern xv, xvii–xix, xx, xxviii, xxix, 9–14, 16–17, 30, 32, 47, 49, 133, 138, 143–144, 161, 167, 172. See also Jacobean drama/theatre; Worcester College drawings; and under individual entries intimacy 31, 40, 50–51, 68, 120, 121–126, 127–128, 150 feelings of discomfort 39, 123–124, 126, 134, 198

and influence on acting techniques 45–46, 50, 57–8, 61–62, 79–81, 196 and lighting effects 114, 137 Jacobean drama/theatre xvii, xviii, xix, xxi, xxviii, 8–9, 13–14, 28, 29–30, 34, 58, 131 modern performance and 34–35, 40–41, 117, 198 and sensationalism 32–33, 35, 41 Jones, Inigo 10 Jones, Max xxiv, 100 Jonson, Ben xvi Catiline His Conspiracy 187–190 Every Man in His Humour xxvi Karim-Cooper, Farah 6–7, 8, 38, 49, 120 Kiernan, Pauline 5, 132 King’s Men xv–xvii, 158, 175, 181, 187, 190 lanterns 30, 92, 93 laughter (during performances) 126–127 Lawson, Mark 27 lighting 58, 91, 184–185, 186–190, 191–192, 193. See also candles/ candlelight; darkness; lanterns; and under individual plays daylight 91, 98, 193 electric 98, 99–100

INDEX

Longhurst, Michael xxiv, xxv, 41, 54–55, 96, 105, 113, 115 Lord Chamberlain’s Men. See King’s Men Lowde, Alex xxiv MacRae, Sarah 62–63, 67, 68, 81, 104, 109, 111 Marlowe, Christopher, Dido Queen of Carthage xxv Marston, John xvi The Malcontent 27, 180–184 Sophonisba 170–174 McIntyre, Blanche xxv, 158 McLeod, Caitlin xxv, 180 McLynn, Pauline 60, 75, 96–97, 98, 113, 129 McPake, Hannah 76, 77, 115 Meazza, Michaela 64 Menzer, Paul 16, 47–48 Middleton, Thomas xvii The Changeling (with William Rowley) xxiv, 31, 32–33, 35, 36–37, 68 actors’ performance experiences 58, 61, 62–63, 66–67, 93–94, 116, 167, 196 audience responses to 38–9, 124, 126, 128–129 lighting design 33, 51, 94, 102, 106–107, 112, 117 staging 53, 58, 76, 83–84, 89, 113, 128–129 The Second Maiden’s Tragedy 190, 191–192

261

Milton, John, Comus 37–38 Morahan, Hattie 36–37, 51, 61, 62, 68, 79, 116, 124–125, 129, 132 performances by 32–33, 93–94, 106, 117, 196 Morley, Thomas, The First Book of Consort Lessons 182–183 Munby, Jonathan xxv, 73, 80 music xxi, 77–78, 170–174, 178–179, 181, 182, 183 unseen 172, 173, 175, 178, 179 naturalism. See performance Needham, Matthew 75, 86, 122 Nolan, Dean 89 nostalgia 35, 38, 39, 40, 198. See also heritage/culture industry nudity (on stage) 114, 126 O’Hea, Brendan 78, 80, 83, 85, 94, 112 Original Practices (OP) 5, 20, 120 Orrell, John 4, 10, 11 ‘Outside In’ series/performances xxv, 57, 71–72, 73, 78, 130–131, 158, 175, 187. See also under individual plays Parker, Jamie 86 Peacham, Henry, The Art of Living in London 123 Peake, Emily 94 Peel, Edward 57, 97, 114, 117 Pepys, Samuel 109

262

INDEX

performance xvi, xxiii, 6–7, 23, 27, 54–55. See also acting techniques; asides; audience/actor interaction; theatre history by candlelight xx, 30, 32, 58–59, 84, 87, 92–97, 110–111, 191–192 dynamism on stage 59, 82, 87, 185–186 naturalistic xxi, 46, 61, 68, 78–79, 86 non-naturalistic 75, 79, 90 TV/film 80, 90 Peucelle, Tika 50–51, 63 Phoenix. See Cockpit Poel, William xxi Pope, Terry 121, 134 Powell, Anthony, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant 29 practice-as-research xxii–xxiii, 144, 195–196. See also Research in Action workshops privilege 57, 64, 135, 198 and views of the performance 134, 137–8, 139, 148, 152, 160–161, 162–163, 164, 165–166 Quigley, Pearce 58 Rabin, Daniel 75 Read Not Dead performance series xxvi, 7 Research in Action workshops 143–145, 167 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 175–177

As You Like It (Shakespeare) 157, 158–159, 160 The Captain (Beaumont/ Fletcher) 178–180 Catiline His Conspiracy (Jonson) 188–190 Love’s Sacrifice (Ford) 164–165 The Malcontent (Marston) 180–184 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 150–155, 167 The Queen and Concubine (Brome) 145–150, 167 The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (Middleton) 191–192 Sophonisba (Marston) 170–174 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 162–164, 167, 197 The Witch of Edmonton (Dekker/Rowley/Ford) 155–157, 159–160 Rice, Emma 37–38 Rider, Paul 60–61, 65, 78, 79–80, 132, 135 Rossi, Luigi, Orpheus xxv Rowan, Donald 9, 10 Rowley, William The Changeling (see Middleton, Thomas) The Witch of Edmonton (with Dekker and Ford) 155–157, 159–160 Rylance, Mark 5, 6, 39–40

INDEX

Salisbury Court xvii, xix, 14, 16, 145, 147, 193 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse xvii–xix, xx–xxi acoustics xx, 72–77, 90, 169–170, 172, 176–177, 180 architecture/design of xviii–xix, 9–16, 40, 49–51, 54–57, 68–69, 84, 86, 196 influencing audience experience 62–63, 81–82, 85, 130, 134– 135, 137, 138–139, 162 informing acting techniques 68, 73, 79–81, 89–90 verticality of 60–61, 64, 79, 85 construction of 10–12, 15 discovery space 160–161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 health hazards/health and safety concerns 57–58, 59, 107–108, 109–110 lighting in 58, 91–109, 112–113, 117–118 (see also candles/candlelight) musicians’ gallery 65–66, 77–78, 152, 162–163 opening/critical reception of 19–21, 26–27, 28, 30–31, 32 pit 66–67, 75–76, 133, 135, 153, 163, 198 productions 32–34, 36–38, 40–41 (see also under individual entries)

263

side-stage boxes xviii, xxi, 63, 67, 127, 128, 130, 133, 135, 147–148, 153, 160, 162–163 spectators’ viewing experiences in xxi, xxix, 38–39, 40, 81–82, 136–139 (see also audiences) staging techniques 52–56, 67, 83–85, 87–88, 147, 151–155 (see also asides) substage area 172–173, 174, 176, 178 upper gallery 78, 81–82, 83, 90, 134, 136–137, 162 Shakespeare’s Globe (1990s) xix, xxii, xxiii, 4–6, 8, 22, 23, 32, 136, 170. See also Sam Wanamaker Playhouse architecture/design of xviii–xix, 23, 151, 158 critical reception of 4–5, 19–20, 21–24 productions xxii, xxv, 6–8, 19–20 (see also under individual entries) and tourism 23, 25, 26, 32, 35 (see also heritage/ culture industry) Shakespeare, William xvi, xvii, 21–22, 25–26 Antony and Cleopatra xxv, 72, 73, 80, 175–177, 187 As You Like It xxv, 72, 130–131, 158–159, 160, 187 Cardenio xvii

264

INDEX

Cymbeline xvii, xxv, 41, 51–52, 64, 67, 75, 76, 88, 96, 99 Hamlet 27 Henry IV Part 3 7 Henry V 5, 86 Henry VIII xvii Julius Caesar xxv, 71–72, 73 King John 72 Measure for Measure 72, 78 Merchant of Venice 72 Much Ado About Nothing 150–155, 167 Pericles xxv, 41, 56, 71, 84, 102, 104, 106 The Tempest xxv, xvii, 41, 56, 63, 84, 106 Titus Andronicus 7 The Two Noble Kinsmen xvii The Winter’s Tale xvii, 41, 55, 76, 162–164, 167, 198 Skinner, Jethro 60, 63, 96, 117, 125, 135 Somerville, Jacqui xxv sound effects 71, 76, 171, 176–177, 190–191. See also music special effects xviii, 191. See also lighting; music; sound effects spectators. See audiences Steinbeis, Caroline xxiv, 55–56, 100–101, 105, 132 Stuart, Tom 76, 106 Teixeira, Thalissa 66, 67, 68, 76, 91 theatre history 4, 6, 8 Thomas, Adele xxiv, 51, 55, 59, 86, 98, 122 ticket pricing 132–3, 135, 148

torches xxviii, 93, 189 tourism 23, 25, 26, 32, 35. See also heritage/culture industry Van Kampen, Claire 5, 107, 143, 170 voice 72, 73, 74–77, 90, 169–170 Waldmann, Alex 57, 62, 74–75, 77, 94, 97, 110, 113, 115 performances by 51, 65–66, 112 Wanamaker, Sam 4, 9, 15, 20 Webb, John 11 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi 25–26, 27, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 36, 72, 91 audience reactions to/ experiences of 38–39, 57, 116–117, 120–121, 124, 126–127, 132 lighting design 59, 86, 87, 101–102, 104–105, 112, 113–114, 116–117, 124, 185–186 staging 51, 53–54, 65–66, 147, 160–161 use of sound/music 74, 76 White, Martin 9, 15, 103, 107, 143, 186 Williams, Siân 107 Wilson, Elizabeth 29 Worcester College drawings (indoor theatre) 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 98, 160, 185 Yates, Sam xxv, 41, 51–52, 75, 88, 96, 99, 114

PL ATE 1  The interior of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, showing the painted ceiling and ornate scenic façade (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Pete Le May)

PL ATE 2  Architectural drawings 7b and 7c for an indoor playhouse, believed to be by John Webb, late 1660s (reproduced by kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford)

PL ATE 3  Ferdinand (David Dawson) and the Duchess (Gemma Arterton) in The Duchess of Malfi (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Mark Douet)

PL ATE 4 The cast of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)

PL ATE 5  Giovanni (Max Bennett) and the Friar (Michael Gould) dispute in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Simon Kane)

PL ATE 6  Beatrice-Joanna (Hattie Morahan) in The Changeling (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)

PL ATE 7 Alsemero (Simon Harrison) and Diaphanta (Thalissa Teixeira), and the pen-like piece of set used to confine action to the central portion of the stage in The Changeling (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)

PL ATE 8 Orgilus (Brian Ferguson) in The Broken Heart, flanked by lowered candelabra (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)

PL ATE 9  Cymbeline’s Queen (Pauline McLynn) lights her face with a ‘vanity candle’ (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)

PL ATE 10 Ariel (Pippa Nixon) descends from the ceiling in The Tempest (© Shakespeare’s Globe, photograph by Marc Brenner)