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

Come, come. This won't do.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

I really must urge another point. Iris has summoned the nymphs and the corydonic, rustic reapers to dance to celebrate a contract of true love, and 'make holiday'; and they vanish when Prospero, starling, speaks hsi aside, to recall to his mind that Caliban has plotted against his life and the crisis of the conspiracy is at hand. Thus the rustic dance, the antic hay, is interrupted, amidst confusion and ominous noises, by Prospero's sudden start and the imminence of conflict: wherefore the celebrants depart 'heavily', or in more modern terms, sadly, heavy-heartedly, and with dragging, disgruntled step. That is the more likely 17th C meaning of the term, I submit.

Re: Come, come. This won't do.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I take your point, but the word is "vanish"- which implies some kind of stage magic. And it's reinforced by Prospero's telling us that they have "melted into air". These dancers are spirits not flesh and blood, so vanishing is an appropriate way for them to leave. The stage directions are original, I believe, and represent- even if they're not Shakespeare's own words- the way things were managed in an early production- probably at The Blackfriars where they had state-of-the-art stage machinery to play about with.

There are other so-called "vanishings" in the Tempest- including that of a banquet "with a quaint device". It seems to me they'd developed a way of making things disappear in full view of the audience and were having fun with it.

That there is a distinction between vanishing & exeunt, I don't deny.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

What I do continue to believe is that it's rather more likely that 'heavily' in the directions refers to the players' attitude: that is to say, 'vanish with a quaint device' is a pure technical and mechanic direction, but Ariel's 'vanish[ing] in thunder' does not mean 'by use of a specific rig' and 'heavily vanish' is not prescriptive of which quaint device to use.

But I cd of course be wrong.

Re: That there is a distinction between vanishing & exeunt, I don't deny.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Sadly, there's no way of settling it. If I had a TARDIS my first destination would be Shakespeare's Globe.

Oh, THERE'S a question.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all sure that that shd be my first port of call.

Too many choices, really.

Re: Oh, THERE'S a question.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Agreed, but I can't think of anything I'm more curious about. Not right now, anyway.