The Elizabethan Age: London, Arts, Stagecraft

London in the later sixteenth century was a thriving and turbulent city with a population of 300,000. It was a city with expanding suburbs, which made it something of a metropolis with an expansive country feeling, drawing on both worlds. At that time, with Paris and Naples, London was one of the three most important cities of the Western World. With London the political and commercial center of the country, England became, under Queen Elizabeth I, a more unified nation. London's culture was alive with ideas that would lead to a proliferation of artistic achievement in the Elizabethan Age. In terms of the English language, this era saw astonishing advances - during this period hundreds of new English words were coined, many by Shakespeare.

During Elizabeth's reign, England experienced a great flowering of the arts. London was the center of literary activity. During the last decade of the sixteenth century, the sonnet became the reigning literary form, its popularity unrivalled. Poets vied with one another to see who could write the most memorable, intricate, and elegant sonnets. Poets wrote extended series of linked sonnet sequences, notably Shakespeare's monumental 154 sonnets.

Drama was even more popular and virtuosic during Elizabeth's reign and for a longer period. Playwrights plied their trade writing, producing, and sometimes action in the plays they wrote. Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, among dozens of other dramatists, vied with Shakespeare for honor on the stage.

Complementing the outpouring of poetry and drama came a stream of new musical compositions - madrigals and motets, musical works sacred and secular, created by composers such as Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Morley. While the pens of poets, playwrights, and composers were flowing, so too were the brushes of painters. Prominent among them was the portrait painter Nicholas Hilliard, whose fame in England paralleled that of Holbein in Germany. Like Holbein, Hilliard painted aristocrats and royalty, King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, most notable, among them.

Painting and music tended to be patronized by the wealthy few, and the artists needed such patronage to survive. On the other hand, literature, especially drama, began to attract a wider audience, supporting the rise of the drama was a growing mercantile class and broader populace hungry for entertainment both highbrow and lowbrow. One reason for Shakespeare's immense popularity in his time (and in ours) was his ability to entertain audiences from a broad range of social classes, from lower-class groundlings, who stood in the open air to view his plays, to upper-class courtiers, who, portrayed in the plays, often attended them.

The drama of Shakespeare's time, the Elizabethan Age, shares some features with Greek drama. Like the Greek dramatists, Elizabethan playwrights wrote both comedies and tragedies, but the Elizabethans extended the possibilities of each genre. They wrote domestic tragedies, tragedies of character, the revenge tragedies; they contributed comedies of manners and comedies of humor to the earlier romantic and satiric comedies. In Greek and Elizabethan Theater, props were few, scenery was simple, and dialogue often indicated changes of locale and time. Elizabethan plays were typically written in verse rather than prose.

An Elizabethan playhouse such as the Globe, where many of Shakespeare's plays were staged, had a much smaller seating capacity than the large Greek amphitheaters, which could seat thousands. The Globe could accommodate about 2,300 people, including roughly 800 groundlings who, exposed to the elements, stood around the stage. The stage itself projected from an inside wall into their midst. More prosperous spectators sat in one of the three stories that early encircled the stage. The vastly smaller size and seating capacity of the Elizabethan theater and the projection of its stage made for a greater intimacy between actors and audience. Though actors still had to project their voices and exaggerate their gestures, they could be heard and seen without the aid of large megaphonic masks and elevated shoes. Elizabethan actors could modulate their voices and vary their pitch, stress, and intonation in ways not suited to the Greek stage. They could also make greater and more subtle use of facial expression and of gesture to enforce greater verbal and vocal flexibility.

In addition to greater intimacy, the Elizabethan stage also offered more versatility than its Greek counterpart. Although the Greek skene building could be used for scenes occurring above the ground, such as a god descending in a machine, the Greek stage was really a single-level acting area. Not so the Elizabethan stage, which contained a second-level balcony. Besides its balcony, Shakespeare's stage had doors at the back for entrances and exits, a curtained alcove, and a stage floor trapdoor, from which the Ghost ascends in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Such a stage was suitable for rapidly shifting scenes and continuous action. Thus, Elizabethan stage conventions did not include divisions between scenes in Greek drama. The act and scene divisions that appear in Othello and Hamlet were devised by modern editors.

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