ACTING at the new Globe in broad daylight shows what an anachronism the modern tradition of stage realism is on such a stage. The inherent and manifest artifice of playing in such a venue makes attempts at realistic and psychologically plausible acting ineffective, and certainly misconceived. The original staging at the Globe was more openly unrealistic than modern conditioning can admit. Shakespearean expectations in staging and viewing plays differed from ours more widely and deeply than we now recognise. One of the fitter words for the early concept of acting might be anti-realism. It is evidenced in all the Shakespearean plays wherever you look for it. We talk now about the danger on stage of breaking the illusion. Setting up any kind of illusion was a concept the Elizabethans were extremely wary of.

Anti-realism in Shakespeare’s time was not just a matter of the acting traditions inherent in such standard features as soliloquies, where someone talks out loud to himself so that the visibly present audience can hear his thoughts. That was an obvious enough anti-realist convention. Writers who set down stage directions such as ‘Blanch speaketh this secretly at one end of the stage’ (Fair Em, 235), or the direction for Kate in her first scene in the alternative version of The Taming of the Shrew, ‘She turnes aside and speakes’ (The Taming of A Shrew, 274), were using a tradition generated by a period concerned to make its illusions self-evidently illusory. Dialogue set in verse was another. These anti-realist traditions were employed quite deliberately and knowingly. They had pervasive effects in all areas of playwriting. Their origins were a part of what might be identified as a persistent fear of playing.

Fear of ‘play’, the opposite to work, was not the only consequence of Weber’s Protestant work-ethic that developed with the Reformation. The hatred of plays and playgoing that boiled out of the English churches from the 1570s onwards was far more positive and much more considered than we usually think it now. It was certainly more than a knee-jerk reaction by Puritans to the idea of ordinary people enjoying themselves. Behind the churchmen’s diatribes sat a real fear of illusion, and a revulsion against the deliberate dishonesty it was based on.