The Actor at the Foot of Shakespeare’s Platform

Summary

In the original staging of Shakespeare’s plays for the public theatre, one factor that can be reckoned with is a wide and deep platform—the contract for the Fortune requires that its stage shall “containe in length Fortie and Three foote of lawfull assize and in breadth to extende to the middle of the yarde”. This remarkable platform allowed the actor freedom to act either remotely upstage or intimately on the perimeter with his feet among the spectators. If we argue from an upstage entrance and this special feature of depth, from the logic of acting and the modulations of a scene, it is not only possible to consider the actor’s position on the stage relative to the audience, but we can gain a little more insight into the Elizabethan kind of theatrical vitality.

How did this actors' freedom help to shape a scene in Shakespeare? As might be expected, we find an urgent hint thrown out by Granville-Barker. Discussing soliloquy in the introduction to his Prefaces, and writing with his customary feeling for the actor in relation to the audience, he said, "Soliloquy becomes the means by which [Shakespeare] brings us not only to a knowledge of the more secret thoughts of his characters, but into the closest emotional touch with them too Time and again he may be feeling his way through a scene for a grip on his audience, and it is the soliloquy ending it that will give him—and his actor—the stranglehold..." (my italics).