Book contents
- Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare
- Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Textual Note
- General Introduction
- Part I Elizabethan Court Theatre
- Part II The Jacobean Tradition
- Part III Reassessing the Stuart Masque
- Part IV The Material Conditions of Performances at Court
- Chapter 13 How Did They Do It? Problems of Staging Plays at Court
- Chapter 14 The Jacobean Banqueting House as a Performance Space
- Chapter 15 Musicians at Court
- Chapter 16 Painted Cloths and the Making of Whitehall’s Playing Space, 1611/1612
- General Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 13 - How Did They Do It? Problems of Staging Plays at Court
from Part IV - The Material Conditions of Performances at Court
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2019
- Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare
- Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Textual Note
- General Introduction
- Part I Elizabethan Court Theatre
- Part II The Jacobean Tradition
- Part III Reassessing the Stuart Masque
- Part IV The Material Conditions of Performances at Court
- Chapter 13 How Did They Do It? Problems of Staging Plays at Court
- Chapter 14 The Jacobean Banqueting House as a Performance Space
- Chapter 15 Musicians at Court
- Chapter 16 Painted Cloths and the Making of Whitehall’s Playing Space, 1611/1612
- General Bibliography
- Index
Summary
William B. Long offers a critique of prevailing assumptions on early modern acting and suggests how professional players transferred plays that originated on large public stages to palace rooms of various sizes. The actors were talented and very competent professionals. Elizabethan schooling was highly dependent upon rote memorization. Small boys had to memorize correctly and extensively, or they would have been caned. Young and adult players must have continued to memorize their lines almost effortlessly because that is the way they were trained. What did these players, accustomed as they were to playing in large public theatres, do when they moved to generally smaller areas allotted them at court? If they wished to avoid ludicrous displays of awkwardness, they adapted. For professional actors who were used to playing in varying venues when they toured provincial towns and cities, a stage platform of a few feet deeper or shallower would not have been of great consequence. Fortunately for us, a number of the rooms of court venues still exist intact. The surviving court playing venues are Hampton Court, St. James’ Windsor, and the Queen’s House Greenwich.
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- Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare , pp. 193 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019