William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

do not include any written after 1609) marks either act or scene divisions. The innovation of act-pauses threw more emphasis on the act as a unit, and made it possible for dramatists to relax their observance of what has come to be known as ‘the law of re-entry’, according to which a character who had left the stage at the end of one scene would not normally make an immediate reappearance at the beginning of the next. Thus, if Shakespeare had been writing The Tempest before 1609, it is unlikely that Prospero and Ariel, having left the stage at the end of Act 4, would have instantly reappeared at the start of Act 5. We attempt to reflect this feature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy by making no special distinction between scene-breaks and act-breaks except in those later plays in which Shakespeare seems to have observed the new convention (and in Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth, since the texts of these plays apparently reflect theatre practice after they were first written, and in The Comedy of Errors, a neo-classically structured play in which the act-divisions appear to be authoritative, and to represent a private performance).
     

    9. A reconstruction of the Blackfriars playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, opened in 2001, and regularly used for performances

     
    Dramatic conventions changed and developed considerably during Shakespeare’s career. Throughout it, they favoured self-evident artifice over naturalism. This is apparent in Shakespeare’s dramatic language, with its soliloquies (sometimes addressed directly to the audience), its long, carefully structured speeches, its elaborate use of simile, metaphor, and rhetorical figures of speech (in prose as well as verse), its rhyme, and its patterned dialogue. It is evident in some aspects of behaviour and characterization: Oberon and Prospero have only to declare themselves invisible to become so; disguises can be instantly donned with an appearance of impenetrability, and as rapidly abandoned; some characters—Rumour at the opening of 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter’s Tale , even the Gardeners in Richard II —clearly serve a symbolic rather than a realistic function: and supernatural manifestations are common. The calculated positioning of characters on the stage may help to make a dramatic point, as in the scene in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.2) in which the disguised Julia overhears her faithless lover’s serenade to her rival, Silvia; or, more complexly, that in Troilus and Cressida (5.2) in which Troilus and Ulysses observe Diomede’s courtship of Cressida while they are themselves observed by the cynical Thersites. Not uncommonly, Shakespeare provokes his spectators into consciousness that they are watching a play, as when Cassius, in Julius Caesar , looks forward to the time when the conspirators’ ‘lofty scene’ will be ‘acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (3.1.112 -14); or, in Troilus and Cressida , when Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus reach out from the past tense of history to the present tense of theatrical performance in a ritualistic anticipation of what their names will come to signify (3.2.169-202).
    Techniques such as these are closely related to the non-illusionistic nature of the Elizabethan stage, in which the mechanics of production were frequently visible. Many scenes take place nowhere in particular. Awareness of place was conveyed through dialogue and action rather than through scenery; location could change even within a scene (as, for example, in 2 Henry IV, where movement of the dying King’s bed across the stage establishes the scene as ‘some other chamber’: 4.3.132). Sometimes Shakespeare uses conflicting reactions to an imagined place as a kind of shorthand guide to character: to the idealistic Gonzalo, Prospero’s island is lush, lusty, and green; to the cynical Antonio, ‘tawny’ (The Tempest , 2.1.57-9): such an effect would have been dulled by scenery which proved one or the