SEMINER ON

ELIZABETHAN
THATRE

Submitted By
Name: Tanusree Ghosh (Dutta)
Method: English
College Roll No. : 06

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It is quite impossible to complete any

piece of study without the help of
others. I am beholden to many learned
and knowledgeable persons and well
wishers for the completion of study
through their sincere cooperation. I
deem
it
a
great
pleasure
to
acknowledge them.
First of all I want to convey my sense
of gratitude from the core of my heart
to my guide, respected Dr. Jahidul
Sarkar, Principal of M.R. College of
Education,
B.Ed,
and
Dr.
D.K.
Bhattacharjee, OSD, of M.R. College of
Education, B.Ed for this help in
expanding
my
knowledge,
their
fruitful, sincere guidance as well as
their
affectionate,
valuable
suggestions through out session.
I
am
extremely
grateful
and
profoundly obliged to acknowledge
Moumita Roy, Lecturer, of M.R. College
of Education, B.Ed. for their endless
encouragement, keen help, and ocean
of enthusiasm to select the topic and
as well as concept planning from time
to time during this session.
I am also grateful to all of my friends
who were always inspiration for me.

INTRODUCTION
Theater had an unsavoury reputation. London
authorities refused to allow plays within the city,
so theatres opened across the Thames in
Southwark, outside the authority of the city
administration.
The first proper theatre as we know it was built
at Shoreditch in 1576. Before this time plays were
performed in the courtyard of inns, or sometimes
in the houses of noblemen. A noble had to be
careful about which play he allowed to be
performed within his home, however. Anything
that was controversial or political was likely to
get him into trouble.
More theaters began opening in the London
area, including the Rose Theater in 1587, the
Hope Theater in 1613 and the most famous, the
Globe Theater in 1599.

INTRODUCTION
Although Shakespeare's plays were performed
at other venues during his career, the Globe
Theatre in the Southwark district of London was
the venue at which Shakespeare's best known
stage works (including his four great tragedies)
were first produced. The Globe was built by one
of Shakespeare's associates, Cuthbert Burbage,
the brother of the most famous Shakespearean
actor of the Elizabethan Age, Richard Burbage.
Five years prior to the Globe's opening,
Shakespeare became one of the share-owning
partners in a theater company organized under
the sponsorship of the Lord Chamberlain, the
head of Queen Elizabeth I's royal household.

THE TIME AND ERA

The Elizabethan era was from 1558 to 1603 and
was a time where the people were very violent
and enjoyed blood and guts. one of the most
popular attractions in Shakespeare's London was
animal baiting. This was where people would
watch animals fighting against each other while
the audience gambles on who would win.
Theaters had to fight hard for customers who
were tempted by a whole range of ways to spend
their time. It was also difficult because the animal
baiting rings were right next to the Globe
Theater.
Shakespeare's plays had to compete like these
for an audience who loved blood and violence,
this very much influenced the plays that he
wrote.

STAGE SPACE
The Globe Theater has a open arena design and
structure. It has a central yard, open to the sky,
where people would have to stand and watch, if it
rained those members of the audience and the
actors would get wet. It had a raised stage at one
end and was surrounded by three tiers covered
galleries which balconies overlooking the back of
the stage, where people could sit and not be
affected by the weather. The stage was projected
halfway into the yard.
The theater is up to 100 feet in diameter and it
took 6 months to build the structure of it. The
Globe was made out of timber, nail, stone, plaster
and thatched roofs, which was later changed to
tiled roofs.
There was a cannon above the stage that was
fired to signal that the play was about to begin.
The Globe had a bare stage that sloped down
slightly towards the audience. Unlike some
modern theatres, the stage wasn't hidden behind
a curtain.
The stage was big enough for several actors to
be onstage at once and it was very close to the
audience. The groundings in the yard surrounded
the stage on three sides, and they could get close
enough to the stage to touch it, or even touch the
actors.

ACTING STYLE
Although it is difficult to know the exact way in
which actors performed on stage at the Globe. We
do know that the acting style change through
time and in Shakespeare's day, actors seem to
have performed with many more over the top
gestures then modern actors use.
We know about these extravagant gestures and
the generally exaggerated style of acting because
lots of play writers make fun of it.
Like
today,
there
were
well-established
conventions for what certain gestures meant and
we can also see this on portraits of the period.
One of the most famous criticisms of this style
of acting can be found in Hamlet. When Hamlet
invites a group of travelling players to perform a
play in front of his mother and uncle, but asks
them no to follow the more exaggerated style.
If the audience was bored, did not like they
story or a character, they would throw food at the
actors. The actors would have to stay focused and
not be distracted by the untamed crowd.
All actors in Shakespeare's time were men.
Women were forbidden to act on the public stage
and so any female characters in Shakespeare's
plays would have been performed by boys whose
voices hadn't broken.

AUDIENCE
In the Globe Theater, there was a 1500 plus
audience capacity and up to 3000 people would
flock to the theater and its grounds.
The poorer members of the audience stood in the
central yard, which was open to the sky, so if it
rained, they got rained on. Because they were
standing on the ground, they were known as the
'Groundlings' or 'Stinkards', because they smelt so
bad. The groundings had a reputation for being
rowdy. They would shout and cheer throughout the
play and often threw things at the actors.
The rich members of the audience sat in the
covered galleries which surrounded the yard. The
rich would sit in comfort and were safe from the
weather.
If the audience didn't like what they were seeing
on stage, they would shout insults or throw food
and empty beer bottles at the actors.
In spite of this bad reputation, the theater was a
place where people from many different profession,
social classes and backgrounds mixed together.
The groundlings were never far away from the
people in the galleries, and plays of the times often
mocked any snobbish citizens who believed that
their seats in the galleries made them better than
the people down in the yard. At the end of the play,
many of the spectators coming down from the
expensive seats would mingle with the groundlings
The grounds of the Globe were bustling with
people and potential audience. There were stalls
selling merchandise and refreshments, which
attracted non playgoers to the market.
There were no toilets so people had to relieve
themselves outside or if they were standing in the
yard, right then and there.
Plays began at 2pm and went on till about 4 or

AUDIENCE
Plays also clashed with afternoon church
services, which also began at 2. So many people
would go skip church to go to the theater, and the
shouts from the audience disturbed the service.
this was once of the reasons why Puritans and cit
authorities saw plays and theaters as immoral.
People would go to the Globe with clear
expectations about what they were going to see.
The plays were advertised on sheets of paper
called playbills which were put up around the
streets.
Many plays followed very typical patterns, and
people who liked a particular kind of play would
be able to choose what they would enjoy seeing.
Most of the popular plays involved revenge and
bloody murders because that was what people in
those days enjoyed watching. The plays would
often have what they were about in their title, so
that the audience would know what they would
be seeing from just the name of the play.
If the audience didn't like the play that was
being performed, they would shout and stamp
until the actors acted something else instead.

ENTRANCES AND
EXITS
There were two doors at the back of the stage
at the Globe, which the actors could use to come
on
and
off
stage.
Sometimes these doors might have been used to
represent different locations, wood signs would
have been hung above the doors saying what
places they represented.
There also seems to have another space or door
at the back of the stage, although nobody is sure
exactly what this would have looked like. It was
used when a character had to be suddenly
revealed or exposed as it was known. This place
was called the discovery space.

PROPS, SET AND

COSTUME
In Shakespeare's time, people were very
conscious of the latest fashions, and also of the
social conventions behind clothes. So costumes
were an important way for the actors on
Shakespeare's plays to convey information about
the characters that they were playing.
Some actors would play two different characters
in the plays so they would use costumed to
distinguish between the different characters.
There were also other ways of using costumes
to say things about characters. The colour of their
clothes was symbolically important. For example
black would be seen as a dark, evil or mourning
character. White was associated with purity and
yellow was a colour associated with lovers.
Costumes were not used realistically in
Shakespeare's theatre. Actors playing lords or
layers or soldiers or servants, for example, would
have worn costumes that would have made their
status instantly recognizable. Costumes would
also be used to portray the characters'
nationality.

PROPS, SET AND

COSTUME
Shakespeare's plays were performed on a bare
stage, with no scenery. sometimes the scene
would use sound effects or the characters might
wear costumes which revealed their nationality.
Sometimes the location might be signalled by
the actors' skills. Because in all of Shakespeare's
plays, only men acted, men had to dress up as
woman for the woman roles. Like costumes, props
were important assets for the theater companies.
Most of the props that the companies possessed
were small, portable objects, that were easy to
store and could be carried on stage by the actors
as the companies didn't want to hire stagehands.
So a company might have a lot of swords,
shields, pieces or armor, and so on which would
be useful for a wide variety of plays. But the
company might also have a few larger props and
that might be specific to just one or two of the
plays. But their selection of props would have
been fairly limited.

LIGHTING AND STAGE

EFFECTS
Lots of plays form Shakespeare's time call for
'noises off', or form backstage there would be
sounds of battle, shouts, gunshots, horses, music
and birds.
There was a cannon above the stage that was
fired to signal that the play was about to begin.
The cannon was only one of the special effects
that were used in the Elizabethan theater.
fireworks were used in a number of plays, but
these fireworks were notoriously foul-smelling
and even in the Globe, with its open roof, they
would have been terribly noisy. Towards the end
of Shakespeare's career and later in the 17th
century, more and more plays were performed in
indoor theaters, which would have been more
difficult to let of explosions, so they used quieter
sound effects.
There was no artificial lighting in the Globe, all
the light came from sunlight. in order to make
best use of the available light, plays would have
to begin in the early afternoon.

CONCLUSION
The history of the theater is fascinating. How
plays were first produced in the yards of inns the Inn-yards. The very first theater and the
development
of
the
amphitheatre!
The
Elizabethan Entrepreneurs ( the men with the
ideas and the money!). The building, design and
construction of a London Elizabethan Theatre, the
plays, the playwrights, the politics and the
propaganda all play an important part in the
history of the Elizabethan Theatre.

WEBLIOGRAPHY
http://elizabethantheater.wikispaces.com/Introduction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Renaissa
nce_theatre
http://shakespearean.org.uk/elizthea1.htm
http://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/brow
se?browseId=248012

TTH
HAAN
NKKYYO
OUU
!!