[8] Surely every company that plays Shakespeare should include a boy. There would then be no excuse for giving to a woman such parts as Ariel and Brutus’s boy Lucius.
[9] This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous speech of Cleopatra’s—a speech, too, which is strictly in character. But, as to this matter and the other considerations put forward above, I must add that, while my impression is that what has been said of Shakespeare holds of most of the contemporary dramatists, I have not verified it by a research. A student looking for a subject for his thesis might well undertake such a research.
[10] When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into details, having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an examination of Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I have been unable to study all that has since been written on the Elizabethan stage. The reader who is interested in the subject should refer in the first instance to an excellent article by Mr. Archer in the Quarterly Review for April, 1908.
[11] This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it will be remembered, had seats in the area (there called the pit), was completely roofed, and could be darkened.
[12] ‘The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their charge with snores,’ says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no doubt the tiring-house doors were open.
[13] This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that Juliet’s bedroom was, in one scene, the upper stage, and, in another, the back stage; but the Elizabethans, I believe, would make no difficulty about that.
[14] Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the backstage, as well as its front, could be open; otherwise many of the spectators could not have seen what took place there. But it is not necessary, so far as I remember, to suppose that the sides could be closed by curtains. The Elizabethans probably would not have been troubled by seeing dead bodies get up and go into the tiring-house when a play or even a scene was over.
[15] Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only announced the general place of the action throughout the play: e.g. Denmark, or, a little more fully, Verona, Mantua.
[16] It is possibly significant that Macbeth and the Tempest, plays containing more ‘shews’ than most, are exceptionally short.
[17] It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an edition like the Globe, and then to multiply the time taken by the number of columns in the play.