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

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The "quaint device", from what I've read:

You have a table, with a fake banquet built into the tabletop as a single piece. The entire tabletop spins, flipping upside down, with the reverse side being an empty table. You can make the food appear and disappear at will by spinning the tabletop around.

Stage fencing masters could also work as real martial arts instructors, too. The sword-swap in the Hamlet/Laertes fight requires a pretty well-known disarm counter to work: you lock and grapple blades, then twist it out of your opponent's hand -- but it leaves your own blade vulnerable to a similar twist if the opponent knows how to do it, but at least you've got your grappled sword in a good position to wield it, and vice-versa. It's actually a pretty slick exchange done well.

Shakespeare's company could be stripped to 13 actors for his touring crew, but usually had a few more than that. For crowd scenes, they likely dropped costumes on their stagehands, money collectors, and possibly even locals. Say, maybe, twenty-plus bodies?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's the information I was hoping someone would come up with.

Twenty people on a small stage is quite a crowd.