Jacobean Stagecraft- Notes And Queries

[poliphilo]

1. An Elizabethan audience would have been full of people who carried weapons and knew how to use them. I assume the fighting on stage would have had to have been fairly realistic to please them.  

2. How many bodies could Shakespeare muster to form his armies and mobs?

3. The Tempest has a scene in which a banquet is made to vanish "with a quaint device". I'd love to know how that was done. Slightly later a bunch of nymphs and reapers perform a dance and then "to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish". "Heavily vanish": what on earth does that mean?

Comments

[tispity.livejournal.com]

I think the Tempest was performed at an indoor theatre like Blackfriars, rather than outdoors at the Globe. Indoor theatres were much more geared to 'special effects' both trapdoors and things like levers to raise chairs (as in the Hecate scenes in Macbeth which were added later, largely to make use of this stuff, when the play transferred to an indoor theatre) so I'd guess 'heavily vanish' does refer to a downwards trapdoor (as opposed to the actors being raised up and away).

As for mobs and armies, I believe the answer is 'not many' it was more about a few actors and then creating the effect of more using drums etc than having a lot of people on stage. Lots of plays use the audience to good effect for crowd scenes, though, and have actors emerge from the audience so that the crowd becomes part of the effect.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think your guess that "heavily" means "downwards" is probably spot on.

So, we conjure up a host with noise not numbers. That makes sense. I like the idea that they made use of the audience.