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

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's good. I think you're onto something there.