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One of the distinguishing characteristics of Elizabethan drama is the requirement of numerous plays that action be performed in a production-area somewhere above the stage. I believe we shall not be far from the mark if, without denying the possibility of alternative arrangements, we take this raised production-area to have been, at least in the public theatres of Shakespeare’s time, a gallery over the stage generally similar to the one depicted by Arend van Buchell in his well-known drawing of the interior of the Swan Playhouse, based on an original made by Johannes de Witt around 1596. It must be emphasized, however, that the gallery shown in the Swan drawing is not an “upper stage” in the usual sense of that rather inappropriate and in some respects misleading term, for it has neither curtains nor balustrade and is probably divided into boxes each about seven feet wide. Although it is impossible to say exactly how many public theatres of Shakespeare’s time had a gallery over the stage comparable to the one at the Swan, there is minimal evidence that some of them, notably the Rose, the first Globe, and the Red Bull, probably had a generally similar gallery. Moreover, it is at least possible that they all had such a gallery, those at any rate that had two-storey tiring-houses, for the apparently widespread and certainly long-lived custom of sitting “over the stage i’ the Lords roome” (as Jonson refers to it in 1599) suggests that it would have been an act of economic naïveté on the part of house-keepers (because of the consequent loss of revenue) to use the upper storey of a public-theatre tiring-house for any other general purpose than as a spectators’ gallery which, when occasionally required, might function secondarily and simultaneously as a raised production-area.
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