Shakespeare in retrospect - Part II

Elmo FERNANDO

Continued from last week

Shakespeare’s genius as an actor, consequently is revealed by the amazing responses of the Elizabethan audiences at the time. He emerges first as an actor himself and he shared the accumulated traditions and experience of some 300 years of stagecraft. Drama has been an ancient art in England.

The innumerable resources of the vast provincial towns progressed in the middle ages not solely to present elaborate productions of miracle plays but also to literary drama, further they had fostered the noble concepts of drama.

The nucleus for drama was born in the conclaves of the nobility who maintained small groups of entertainers who came from the epic singers and jesters of earlier days.

Such organizations may be seen today in native states in India, most of these actors were skilled fences, swordsmen, wrestlers, dancers, musicians and singers. Some of them were members of such early English companies of actors and the Elizabethan stage inherited their traditions.

Sir Thomas More gives a picture of such a group of actors called ‘ Cardinal Wolsey’s Men’ whose gracious performance in More’s residence in London early about 1529 under the Tudor period. The theatres in London evolved in the form of inn-yards adapted with a stage.

Most of these theatres were owned by investors like Francis Langley, who built the Swan or Philip Henslowe who built the Rose and the Fortune. The companies which dealt with Henslowe’s son-in-law and the Admiral’s men made a fortune of his acting.

Such was the case at Henslowe’s theatres that Christopher Marlowe’s great plays were staged. Here it must be mentioned, the famous Edward Alleyn playing the heroes Faustus or Tumburlaine. The acting of plays seems to have been a regular feature of Tudor education both in

schools and in universities.

The Elizabethan Stage

The history of the Elizabethan stage evolves two main threads in its performing capacity. First we are confronted with the basic mother-wit stage of the early professional players using their hall or inn-yard stage practising the art of improvisation with such properties and costumes as they could carry about with them without all attempt at scenic illusion or localisation with such properties and costumes as they could carry about with them, however without any attempt at scenic illusion or localisation of their scenes.

Secondly, we note the elaborate stage of the Court, the universities with their academic drama and the Inns of Court.

Herein, we find clear traces of the kind of staging that was practised by the Italian Renaissance Theatre which used structural ‘houses’ and painted back-cloths in perspective as a united setting for its plugs, the action being confined to the limited locality represented.

This method of staging was, however, modified by the needs of such romantic plays as the Court rejoiced in early in Elizabeth’s reign with their wider range of locality.

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