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This is the site of the Rose Theater in London, where William Shakespeare premiered some of his early works like Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part One. And where those plays did so well that Shakespeare and his company set up their own copycat theater, literally next door, called the Globe. And the Globe did so well that it kind of put the Rose out of business.
Theater is a harsh climate, but like notorious clouds in the Antarctic, Shakespeare rises to the stratosphere. Many consider him the greatest writer in the English language. He is the most performed playwright in the world, and his plays have been translated into every major language. You can even find Hamlet in Klingon. You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read it in the original Klingon.
Unlike many artists we revere now, his work actually was recognized in its day, like not so much as it is now. Of course, plays were thought of as a pretty insubstantial, flimsy art form, but he made good money, and he was praised by his contemporaries. His colleague Ben Jonson said he was "not of an age, but for all time." That's a really nice compliment. No props for Ben Jonson for coming up with that one. The man might kill you in a duel, but he knows how to write a good compliment. "For all time, he may be."
But the plays that he wrote were designed for a theater that works very differently to how ours work today. In this video, we're going to look at how the theater worked in Shakespeare's day, how acting companies worked, and why we can't put on plays the same way that Shakespeare did anymore.
These days, the Rose Theater is almost entirely gone, save for some archaeological remains underneath this office block. But if we were here in its heyday in 1599, we would see a big, wooden, donut-shaped building with a thatched roof and people flocking to it from all over London. The theater is way more popular in 1599 than it is now. A third of all Londoners see a play once a month, and it's popular with people from all over the social spectrum, from the poor all the way up to the Queen herself. So it's going to be busy.
Plays are going to be in the afternoon rather than in the evening like today, and the reason why is one of our first big differences between theater now and then, and one that causes a huge cascade of unexpected changes. There is no artificial lighting. This entire theater is open-air. The stage is in the hole of the donut, with the seating in the bread. So you can't have the plays at night. It's got to be during the day.
You get up to the main gate and you hand over a penny, which gets you into the whole of the donut, the standing room around the stage. This is the best view in the house, and to this day, if you can manage to stand for a whole Shakespeare play, I thoroughly recommend doing this at the Globe. It's also really cheap, right? These days, we consider theater like quite an expensive thing to do, but a penny is within the reach of most Londoners. When the recreation of the Globe opened in 1997, they figured out what a penny would be with inflation and they calculated it as five pounds in 1997. And so they set their standing room tickets at five pounds, and they have not changed the price since. That has not risen with inflation. They sell hundreds of tickets for five pounds every night, and they are successful. If theaters tell you they have to raise prices, they're lying to you. The Globe does it. The Globe does it. How they haven't shamed every other theater in the West End into lowering their prices is beyond me.
If you want to get a seat, you go into the bread of the donut, where there's another attendant who will take a second penny from you. If you want to get into the top row, there's another attendant who will take a third penny. And the best seat in the house is the box directly over the stage. You can't see anything, but everyone else can see you and your fancy gown and how much you must have paid for this box. So this is another difference between theater then and now. These days, we expect to be able to see the play, you know, as much as possible. You usually get a discount if your seat has something blocking the view. But if you go to a recreated Shakespearean theater like the Globe or the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, you'll find out that the view is often rubbish. And that's because in Shakespeare's day, you don't go to see a play, you go to hear a play. That's why it's called an audience, from the same root as the word audio.
You might have heard that Shakespeare's audiences have a chat during the performance or even yell at the actors, and that's true. But it's not because people were more rude back then or whatever. It's also because light bulbs haven't been invented yet. So to explain, these days, if you go to the theater, you get your revels, you get your plastic cup of wine, you go and find your seats, you read your program, you chat to the person next to you, you take pictures of the stage until the house lights go down. And when the lights go down, then you know to be quiet because the show is starting. And you sit there quiet in the darkness while people are lit up in this little box in front of you, so you know who to look at and which ones are important. But if the house lights never go down, then you never shut up. Without a dark auditorium and a lit stage, there's less differentiation between you and the actors, and it feels more natural to have a chat. The atmosphere is less like a modern theater performance, and it's more like a modern rock concert. You cheer the good bits, you boo the bad guy, you sing along with the songs, and in a slow scene, you might have a chat with your neighbor. This is a social occasion, and you've come here to have fun with your friends. But at the end of the day, you have paid for your tickets, and these actors are famous. So when the star Richard Burbage comes on to deliver his big soliloquy, you are gonna shut up and listen.
Another difference: no interval, which means you gotta hold it for the entire play, which is going to be extra tricky because there are people among the audience selling beer and snacks, like at a baseball game. Or at least the baseball games I've seen on The Simpsons. Obviously, I've never been to a baseball game. I have no idea. Do people sell beer in, like, in the cartoons now? If you really, really need to go, that's tough. There aren't any toilets in the rows anyway, so maybe you'll find yourself a quiet corner. You know, the floor isn't paved, so it'll soak in eventually. Ladies, you might think this doesn't apply to you, but something else that hasn't been invented yet is knickers. So you can just lift up your skirts and go. Like, it might smell pretty bad, but on the other hand, no cue for the ladies. It really was a more civilized time, wasn't it?
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Something else that we don't have yet is a curtain. Now, obviously, they've invented curtains, but they're not using them on stage yet, and this also has a huge effect on the performance. Think of a play like Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, where there's a lot of dead bodies on stage at the end. So no curtain comes in to cover them up, and there's no blackout. Remember, because there's no artificial lighting. So at some point, these actors are just gonna have to stand up in full view of everyone and leave the stage. So instead, the actors employ the time-honored technique of lamp-shading the awkwardness. So instead of getting up quietly and slinking off, the band strikes up, and everybody gets up and has a jig.
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So yes, the Romeo and Juliet in Hot Fuzz is historically accurate. This sounds very weird, but it signals to the audience, "Oh yeah, these aren't the characters anymore," and it sends everyone home on a high. This is such a good theatrical device that to this day, all sorts of shows which are not musicals have a musical number at the end. Movies have music over their credits for this reason. Shrek ends with a dance party for this reason. I'm not saying they copied it from Shakespeare specifically, I'm just saying Shakespeare did it too for a very good reason.
And things are pretty different for the actors too. If you're one of the performers, then you are a man or a boy. No women allowed on stage. As far as I can tell, there's no law against it, but it was just thought to be completely beyond the pale. A theater is not considered a classy place in Shakespeare's day, and there are even accounts of some women feeling like they had to go to the theater in disguise just to sit in the audience. So you don't want to be going up on stage. All the female characters are played by men and boys, and they have to be taught to move like a woman, to look after a long wig, and to drag their skirts properly, which is where we get the term "drag queen" from.
Something else the actors don't have is a script. Well, how can Shakespeare be so famous for being a writer if his plays didn't have a script? It's not that scripts weren't invented yet. He did have scripts, but that doesn't mean the actors get to see it. And this is because of two more things that have not been invented yet. The first one is a photocopier or a typewriter. If you've got 12 actors in your play and you want them all to have a script, you're gonna have to write that out by hand 12 times. Not fun.
But Shakespeare doesn't want all his actors to have a script because of copyright. There is no copyright in Shakespeare's day. So the only thing stopping all his business rivals from putting on their own line-for-line recreation of King Lear is that they don't have a script to do it from. And so Shakespeare absolutely does not want anyone to get their hands on one. He does not trust his bit-part actors not to immediately turn around and sell their scripts to the theater over the road. He does not publish his own plays. Instead, what you get as an actor in Shakespeare's troop is what's called a "cue script." Now, there aren't many of these left anymore, but here is an example. It's really short compared to a whole script. All you get is your lines and the three words before you speak. So you've got to be on your toes.
Backstage, there'll be a list of who's in which scenes, so you know if you've got time for a cuppa. Except tea isn't popular in Britain yet either, so you don't even get the basic pleasure of mashed leaf water. They hadn't even invented Lewis Hamilton flavored Monster yet. And you're gonna need something because theaters put on a huge number of plays by modern standards. Instead of doing one play every night for a few months and then another one, the Globe and the Rose put on a different play every day. Popular plays might come back every week or two, but as a rule, the program changes at a rate that seems impossible to us today. On average, you only get to do a play 12 times, spread out over the course of two years, before it's passé. And that means you've got to keep like a dozen plays in your head at any one time. And not only that, but you've got to remember them for really long stretches. There might be weeks or months in between performances of each play.
So not having light bulbs doesn't just have the knock-on effect of making you perform in the afternoon, because that knock-on effect has more knock-on effects. You're performing in the afternoon, and it's dark in the evening, so your only rehearsal time is the morning. And remember, you're doing a different play every day. So in terms of rehearsal, there isn't time to run the play over and over like today and dig deep into the character. You meet up with the other actors, you work out which entrances and exits you're using, you go over your dances, your fights, and you make sure you've got the costumes and props you need. And that's about it. That's all you've got time for.
This is probably part of the reason that Shakespeare hardly ever writes stage directions, because that'd just be something else that the actors have to rehearse, and there isn't time. Instead, every time he needs someone to do something on stage, he simply has a character say that out loud. "Never shake thy gory locks at me." "She swoons to see them bleed." "I'll bind it with my shirt." Actually, once you notice this, it's all over. Shakespeare. The plays also didn't have much in terms of set, and obviously, they couldn't change the lighting. So whenever they change scene or it's supposed to be dark, a character has to literally announce, "Well, here we are in Venice. Wow, it sure is dark tonight." "Well, this is the Forest of Arden. Give me thy torch, boy." "Hence, and stand aloof, yet put it out, for I would not be seen." So just in case you do forget your lines, there is one person on stage with the whole script: the book holder. And they were literally sit in the corner and help you out if you forget something. Which I'm sure is fine in a broad comedy, but it's gonna be kind of awkward in, like, a serious love scene. Or if Horatio is like, "Good night, sweet prince." "Line!" "I thought you were doing a dramatic pause." Well, it's not very dramatic now, is it, Terry?
So my first thought when I was reading about this way of rehearsing was, this sounds really cool. I would love to see a production where someone recreates it. And someone has tried. The Original Shakespeare Company, not Shakespeare's original company, a company called The Original Shakespeare Company did have a go at performing several Shakespeare plays with the original rehearsal process. And from the sounds of it, they had some great moments on stage. And one of the members talks about doing King John, which is not a well-known Shakespeare play, and even the actors did not know the plot. And there's a character in King John who's illegitimate, he doesn't know who his father is, and they hadn't had time to rehearse that scene. So on the day, the actor did not know who his father was supposed to be. And so when he found out, it was like a genuine moment of surprise.
But it also seems like it was not financially viable, especially the bit about doing a different play every night. But if you did a proper long run, then the first few shows where the actors really are just winging it, those are the ones that people would want to see. If you go and see it four months into the run, it'll have lost all of its spontaneity. A modern audience also isn't gonna put up with seats where you can't see what's happening, even if you explain to them, "Well, technically, it's actually historically accurate that you can't see." And even if you ask the audience to chat during the show, they're gonna be too polite. You're not gonna sell a show that only runs in the afternoon. And if you don't give them their interval, modern audiences will riot. Can you imagine a theater that had no toilets? But if anyone wants to give the original rehearsal style a try again, give me a call. I'd be an amazing book holder.
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