SHAKESPEARE'S THEATER

THE THEATER Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed by male actors. boys also played the female parts. Very few pieces of scenery were used. From 1599 onward, the company performed in the outdoor theater most associated with Shakespeare’s name. Shakespeare had an acting company named Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later as the King’s Men.

BUSINESS ARRANGEMENTS Shakespeare paid for some of the expenses of the play. Shakespeare and his peers didn’t want to be classified as common players. “Common players are a low-status group without patrons or masters”(Mowat).

STAGING AND PERFORMANCE Once a scene was over, the actors all exit from one side, and then have one or two actors go out on the stage for the next scene. Playhouses didn’t use mobile scenery, but there were some items that were always portrayed on screen. Actors work at other levels on the stage.

STAGING AND PERFORMANCE Actors also use ropes and winches to allow them to “descend from, and ascend to the ‘heavens’ over the stage” (Mowat). Roles of women were played by boys – no women were associated with the theatre. There was a myth that women were once on the stage two hundred years earlier. Women returned to the stage in 1960.

LONDON PLAYHOUSES During Shakespeare’s time, the play performances took place in many different locations like, in halls of universities of Cambridge and Oxford, also at the residency of officials and lord. Theaters in London, were built right before Shakespeare started to write his plays around the 1590’s. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Elizabethan Theatre, was regularly used for concerts, plays, etc. The theater where Lord Charmberlains Men staged their plays. Otherwise known as The Theater, is said to have been the first of the London Playhouse’s. it was built by James Burbage, north of London in 1576.

LONDON PLAYHOUSES Other playhouses north of London included the Curtain, the Fortune, the Globe, the Swan, and the Hope. Playhouses were built outside the city of London because many officials didn’t like the performance of drama. Due to difficulties in renewing the lease on the land for The Theatre in 1598, the company took apart the building and built a new theater, the Globe, across the Bankside. The company performed in the outdoor theater, the Globe, from 1599 and on.

INSIDE THE THEATER The public theaters of Shakespeare's time were open-air playhouses. Some were polygonal or roughly circular; the Fortune was square. They were said to hold two or three thousand spectators, who must have squeezed together tightly. Some paid extra to sit or stand in upper-level, roofed galleries all the way around the theater, surrounding an open space.

INSIDE THE THEATER In this central space were the stage and the yard, a roofless area for spectators who paid less and were exposed to the weather. The stage itself was covered by a roof. After about 1608, Shakespeare's plays were also staged indoors at a private theater in Black friars, constructed by James Burbage in a hall of a former Dominican priory or monastic house. The stage, lit by candles, was built across the narrow end of the hall, with boxes flanking it.

WORK CITED Mowat, Barbra, and Paul Werstine. "Shakespeare's Theater-Folger Shakespeare Library." -Folger Shakespeare Library. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr