30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Read Online Free PDF Page B

the play exposed the emotional workings of political hierarchies not religious or racial politics.
    Does this indicate that Shakespeare's plays are above political incorrectness? or that it is we who are able to make them so? It is impossible to say decisively. But as Myth 22 argues, part of their enduring appeal on stage and to readers is their ability to speak to different periods and mean different things at different times. Shakespeare is both the Elizabethans' contemporary and ours.
    Notes
    1  Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 76–8.
    2  Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate : Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), p. 108.
    3  John Fletcher, The Woman's Prize; or The Tamer Tamed , ed. Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
    4  Jean Howard, “ Othello as an Adventure Play,” in Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (eds.), Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's “Othello” (New York: MLA, 2005), pp. 90–9.

Myth 8
Shakespeare's plays had no scenery
    Scenery as we know it—painted flats that fly in from above or slide in from the wings to change the scene—is a product of the proscenium stage. Shakespeare's actors performed on a thrust stage. As the name implies, it thrust forward into the auditorium; with the audience on three sides, it had no place for wings. The proscenium was a seventeenth-century import from France: the exiled Cavaliers had enjoyed the theater styles of the French court during the Interregnum, and when they returned to England in the Restoration they brought with them French theater practices. All ties with Elizabethan theater practice were decisively severed. Whereas Shakespeare's theater was demographically diverse (see Myth 13), Restoration theater was bourgeois. Whereas Elizabethan female roles were played by boys, the Restoration theater introduced actresses. And whereas Shakespearean drama was played outdoors in an amphitheater (except from 1608 onwards when the King's Men alternated seasons between the indoor Blackfriars and the outdoor Globe), Restoration drama was played indoors on a proscenium. Consequently, Shakespeare's plays were adapted to suit the new Restoration aesthetic and staging styles.
    If scenery is a product of the seventeenth century, stage directions that indicate where a scene takes place are a product of the eighteenth century. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe produced the first scholarly edition of Shakespeare's works, complete with an introductory essay about Shakespeare's life and career. This prompted a flurry of editions: by Alexander Pope in 1725, Lewis Theobald in 1726 and 1734, Thomas Hanmer in 1743–4, and William Warburton in 1747. These editors introduced many of the stage directions that remain in Shakespeare editions today. But their stages were large, as were their theater companies, and do not reflect Elizabethan practice. In Rowe's Measure for Measure Act 1, scene 1 takes place in “A palace”; scene 2 in “The street”; scene 3 in “A monastery”; and scene 4 in “A nunnery.” By the nineteenth century we can find editions of As You Like It that specify Scene: The forest ; Scene: Another part of the forest . But Shakespeare's plays do not take place in a palace or a forest; they take place on a bare stage. The introduction of scenery necessitated the introduction of stage directions that specified changes of scene.
    Although the Elizabethan theater did not have scenery as we understand it, it had many ways of setting the scene. The theater manager Philip Henslowe includes in his 1598 inventory of properties “the city of Rome” (presumably for Mephistopheles' and Faustus's visit in Marlowe's Dr Faustus ); another equally ambitious prop—“the cloth of the Sun and Moon”—indicates how these background scenes were presented: on painted backcloths. But backcloths