It’s certainly true that large properties and set pieces on the early modern stage were few and far between. Special structures like hell-mouths and burning cities were occasionally used; but it’s very unlikely that scenes like those set in As You Like It’s Forest of Arden would have been littered with fake trees. The less furniture, the more fluid the performance – a rule of thumb which would certainly have made staging a play like Antony and Cleopatra, with all its back-and-forth between Rome, Egypt, and the sea, all the easier.

When it comes to the use of the stage doors, those arguing for two or three openings in the wall at the back of the stage frequently rely on their own sense of what works ‘best’, be it from a theatrical or pragmatic point of view (see Thomson 2018, 217–19).

Welcome to Shakespeare’s Stages, a resource designed to introduce you to the key features of the theatrical spaces for which Shakespeare wrote his plays, in which he worked as an actor, and in which he had a financial stake. Like Shakespeare’s narrative sources, the members of his acting company, and the political climate of early modern England, these spaces had a powerful shaping influence on the conception, dramatic design, and performance of Shakespeare’s plays.

In choosing to construct a rectangular stage, the Globe reconstruction team consciously disregarded another form of evidence that had long been available to them: the excavations of more than half of the foundations of the Rose playhouse, which stood on the Bankside from 1587 and could well have provided a model for the original Globe.

Although plays regularly transferred between playhouses once the King’s Men took over the Blackfriars in 1609, the soundscapes of the two types of venue were rather different.

It isn’t quite true to say that the stages and theatres within which Shakespeare worked were entirely devoid of decoration, however compelling the notion of the ‘bare stage’. We know from the contract for the building of the Fortune, which closely followed the Globe, that the playhouse’s interior woodwork was expected to be carved and painted – in some cases to appear like more expensive materials such as marble, in others to represent mythological figures like satyrs and nymphs (Gurr 2009, 151; Gurr 2011, 193–4).

The decorative potential of an early modern playhouse depended considerably on whether it was an outdoor or indoor venue. Once the King’s Men started alternating between the outdoor Globe and indoor Blackfriars from 1609, they were able regularly to introduce a new technology to their roster of performance effects: candlelight.

While a trip to a bar or pub might not conjure up the image of a whole night’s theatrical entertainment for us, for the average Londoner in Shakespeare’s time it often did exactly that. Several large inns located within the City itself, whose yards probably looked a little something like the illustration depicted in Figure 6.1, are known to have hosted all manner of entertainments, including plays performed by Shakespeare’s company and others.

Despite persistent reference to the ‘all-male stage’, women comprised a significant portion of the audience at both types of playhouse. We have records of playhouse attendance by a queen, along with two countesses, four other women aristocrats, two ambassadors’ wives, and ten ladies (Gurr 1996, 61). This likely incomplete roll-call sheds interesting interpretive light on the potential reception of the sexual politics in several of Shakespeare’s plays, not least The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, and Measure for Measure.

As Tim Fitzpatrick, a leading proponent of the two-door theory, has shown in a book-length study of early modern players’ use of stage space, even the three stage directions cited by Gurr and Ichikawa which seem to call unproblematically for three doors can be read in the opposite direction: as demands for a third opening to be created onstage for one-off use – by hanging up a set of curtains across the back of the stage, for instance (Fitzpatrick 2011, 64).

At the Blackfriars, the general layout of the auditorium was broadly similar to that of the Globe, though it isn’t as clear whether there were two levels of galleries or three (current scholarship favours a three-gallery structure like the Globe’s – see O. Jones 2014, 68; Cohen 2011, 213).