The final means of achieving unity is the most difficult to define, the method of handling theme. For that reason let us turn to a play where the theme is clearly expounded. A Larum for London has a simple, obvious point to make: the English people will be destroyed by external enemies (the Spanish) and internal treachery unless they become aware of their dangers, forego their desire for personal profit at the expense of the defense of the commonwealth, and rally the faithful honest citizens and soldiers to their support. The point is made through dramatizing the siege of Antwerp. The scenes that are introduced arise from the initial force that propels the story: the determination of the Spanish to take advantage of the improvidence of the citizens of Antwerp. Individual scenes, however, are not causally linked. Rather they are chosen because they reflect and illustrate the basic theme. A burgher, formerly unkind to the hero, is rescued by him. This is the only scene in which the burgher appears. The play is episodic in structure but unified in theme. But the unity is a multiple one. Instead of employing the story of one family and one incident to illustrate the ravages of war, as Gorki did in Yegor Bulichev and Others, this play uses a multiple reflection of its theme in a number of independent scenes, each having equal emphasis. Thus the single theme is given multiple dramatization.
The weaker plays of the Globe reveal obvious ways of treating a theme. Dramas of the prodigal son reiterate their morality ad infinitum, providing multiple reflections of fall and redemption. The otherwise haphazardly constructed play, The Devil’s Charter, is bound together by the theme of Man’s soul sold to the devil and the final retribution that befalls him. Jonson’s predilection for purging mankind with a pill of satire imposes thematic unity on disparate incidents in Every Man Out of His Humour. But in his other plays as well as in the plays of Shakespeare there is a more subtle interweaving of structure and theme. At the core of each play there seems to be a point of reference of which the individual scenes are reflections. Though a play moves temporally toward a conclusion, each scene may like a glass be turned toward a central referent. G. Wilson Knight has expressed fundamentally the same idea.[26] Unfortunately, he divorces this concept from the dramatic organism, with the result that his projected productions of Shakespeare’s plays seem like academic and sophomoric, if not fantastic, exercises. But Shakespeare seems to have avoided, at least in his later plays, so schematic an illustration of theme as in Richard III. Instead, he allows the theme to permeate the characters, situations, and poetry. He concentrates on the dramatic situations and on the characters, allowing the theme to be struck off indirectly like spark from flint. That is perhaps the reason that it is so difficult to reduce the theme of any Shakespearean play to a concise statement. Macbeth certainly deals with the theme of the source and effects of evil, yet no single statement of this idea is sufficient, because Shakespeare dramatizes various aspects of this subject. Since, to the Elizabethan, the world was a manifold manifestation of a God whom he was unable to compress into one idea or image, in a similar way the Shakespearean play was a manifold reflection of a theme irreducible and unseen. Yet every element in a great Shakespearean play—character, structure, speech—individually and collectively, is brought into an artistic unity through a structural and poetic expression of an unseen referent at its center.
Chapter Three
THE STAGE
Two boards and a passion! Perhaps these words sum up all that was essential to the Shakespearean theater. Heightening of passion coincided with the “climax,” and as for the Elizabethan stage, it was, as G. F. Reynolds remarked, a platform “upon which the story of the play was acted.”[1] And so it was, a flat expanse of boards, somewhat exposed to the weather, roughly eleven hundred square feet.
The story that was acted may be best described as romantic, not because it dealt with romance, although it often did, but because it was centrifugal in impulse, ever threatening to veer from its path. Whatever direct progression narrative possessed in the medieval drama, whether moving from Adam’s sin to Christ’s judgment or from Everyman’s ignorance to his salvation, such progression no longer existed in the Elizabethan age. Instead, the unfolding of the drama took place in a world half of man, and therefore unpredictable, half of God, and therefore moral, and was composed half of history, half of legend; half remote fantasy, half immediate reality. Such a world was wide indeed, and the poet-playwright, its creator, was shackled by neither time nor place. What he demanded of a stage was space for the unimpeded flow of scene after scene, for the instantaneous creation of any place in this world or the next. Even when a ghost in mufti made his way out the stage door in broad daylight, the poet insisted he vanished—yes, even into thin air.
Between the poet’s insistence and the stage’s realization lies the entire secret of Elizabethan staging. About the stage’s realization there is some evidence and little knowledge. Stage directions, a much-debated sketch of a playhouse, a tantalizing incomplete building contract, other assorted fragments, invite the scholar to tilt at theory. About the poet’s insistence there can be little question. Texts of play after play document the demands that the writers made upon the “unworthy scaffold.” Prudence suggests, therefore, that we proceed from play to stage, discovering first what those demands were and then, if we can, how they were satisfied. To understand what the demands were in respect to the environment of an action, it is necessary to consider the following questions: how exactly was a scene located, how consistently was the location maintained, and how relevant was the location to the dramatic impact of the scene?
I. LOCALIZATION IN SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE PLAYS
In Shakespeare’s Globe plays many scenes are given an exact setting. By exact I wish to convey the notion that the action is supposed to occur in or at a particular place, such as a room, hall, gateway, garden, bridge, and that this place remains consistent throughout the scene. For example, in the scene where Martius, yet to win his name of Coriolanus, assaults the gates of Corioles (I, iv), the location is specific, consistent, and dramatically relevant. At one point in the same play Coriolanus prepares to enter the house of his enemy, Aufidius. The scene (IV, iv) takes place before Aufidius’ door. Here exactness of location intensifies dramatic suspense because, as we watch Coriolanus pass through the doorway, we know he is putting himself at the mercy of his greatest antagonist. Many examples of such types of placement come to mind: Brutus’ orchard, Gertrude’s closet, Timon’s cave, etc. Such scenes have come to be called “localized.”
Usually the opposite of the “localized” setting is the “unlocalized.” In this type of setting no impression of place is projected. Location is irrelevant to the progression of the scenes. Clear-cut instances of this occur in Macbeth, II, iv, and III, vi. In the first of these scenes Ross and an old man comment on the unnatural state of the world, then Macduff brings them news of Duncan’s burial and Macbeth’s election to the throne. In the second scene, Lennox and a gentleman comment upon the web of tyranny and the hope that lies in England with Malcolm. Aside from the section containing Macduff’s news, neither of these scenes contributes to the flow of the narrative. Rather they are comments upon the action and essentially perform a choral function.