Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-g78kv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-28T07:32:32.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Shakespeare's Exploitation of a Two-Door Stage: Macbeth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Tim Fitzpatrick
Tim Fitzpatrick
Affiliation:
Tim Fitzpatrick is Professor of Performance Studies, University of Sydney.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is my contention that Shakespeare intended his plays to be performed using only two doors for entrances and exits. In the rapid repertory system of the Globe, stage-management was essential, but there is evidence that it was not based on the arbitrary, mechanical rule-of-thumb previously suggested. Analysis of the entrance and exit patterns in Macbeth shows that there was an organizing system in force, but that it depended on, and in turn reinforced, the spatial logic of the play.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1995 , pp. 207 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. See Beckerman, Bernard, ‘Theatrical Plots and Elizabethan Stage Practice’, in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition, eds. Elton, W. R. and William, B. Long (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 109–24.Google Scholar In contrast Bradley, David, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the play for the stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32–3Google Scholar, argues from an implicit spatial logic, and Mariko Ichikawa, in an unpublished article (‘Entrances and exits in Shakespeare's plays: The usage of the upstage doors’), modifies Beckerman's rule by means of a series of necessary exceptions based on spatial logic similar to that argued here. A preliminary articulation of this theory appeared in Peat, D. & Fitzpatrick, T., ‘Macbeth in Performance’, Sydney Studies in English, 8: 1982–3.Google Scholar

2. Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, chapter 4.

3. Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, ed., Kenneth, Muir, (London: Methuen, 1951).Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. xxvii.

5. Ibid., pp. xxviii-xxxiv.

6. Bradley, From Text to Performance, p. 24.

7. Ibid., p, 23. Bradley is thinking of this pattern when he makes reference to the entrances and exits making the characters seem ‘like the figures on a German town-hall clock’.

8. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, pp. 146–51.

9. Greg, Walter, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando Furioso, (London: The Malone Society, 1922), pp. 21–2Google Scholar, and Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1931]), I, pp. 70ff.Google Scholar

10. Bradley, From Text to Performance, p. 25, articulates the scholarly suspicion that there must have been some default setting or rule of thumb for the actors, asking whether it is possible there might have been ‘regular conventions of entrances, exits… so well understood that they needed only the barest recording?’

11. The sense of the stage space being interstitial or intermediate is captured in Bradley's summary: ‘Plays continued to be constructed on the principle of the alternation of groups of characters entering and leaving the stage to play episodes of no great length, and creating by their movement an illusion of a world, just outside the range of the audience's vision, in which time and place flowed with imaginative freedom at the bidding of the spoken word’ (From Text to Performance, p. 21). He also argues eloquently (p. 34) for the ramifications of a two-door pattern for a dramaturgical structure based on ‘the alternation and linear suppression of groups of characters’ which creates for the audience an impression of continuity, with one scene flowing into the next as the stage is emptied via one door and refilled via the other.

12.. The accompanying analysis of Macbeth shows that 22 of its 29 scenes are triangulated; the corresponding figures for the other plays examined are: The Taming of the Shrew (13/14), Othello (15/15), Romeo and Juliet (21/23), Much Ado about Nothing (16/17) and The Winter's Tale (12/15).