Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres

Abstract

Abstract Shakespeare and his fellow-playwrights wrote their scripts for stages and audiences that were very different from what we are used to now. As writers for those remote stages they saw their scripts not as words to be read on the page but to be spoken, delivered as a means of telling a story through dialogue and action. What they expected from the forms of’ action’ , the process of acting out the narrative, was embodied in the scripts they wrote for the playing companies. Whereas a modern audience at a cinema could expect a gesture to ‘ yonder mountain’ to be accompanied by a picture of the real thing, Elizabethans would see the speaker’ s gesture as an indication of where it was assumed to be, but would also know that the reference directed them to imagine some thing that was not there. Piecing out, as the Prologue to Henry V suggests, the deficiencies of the stage setting (‘ our imperfections’ )

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