Plays were acted in
the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or "Rome," or
whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude appliances
must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight battlements of
Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The dramatists had to
throw themselves upon the imagination of their public, and it says much
for the imaginative temper of the public of that day, that it responded
to the appeal. It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals
of space and time, and "with aid of some few foot and half-foot words,
fight over York and Lancaster's long jars." Pedantry undertook, even at
the very beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, to shackle it with the
so-called rules of Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place, to
make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from
tragedy. But the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer
sympathies of the audience, and they decided for feedom and action,
rather than restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of
Shakspere and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in
London in full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred
and fifty thousand inhabitants.
Fresh plays were produced every year.
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