Just how conventional the entrance might have been can be seen by examining a particular group of entrance announcements. About forty-three entrances in the Shakespearean Globe plays are accompanied by announcements of greater length than the brief, “Who’s there?” These announcements run from two lines to sixteen lines in length. Most of them are short, two to four lines in length, but a few are longer than ten lines. In each of these instances a character or characters on-stage describe or comment upon someone who has just entered. Usually the entrant is aware of the others, but it is understood that he does not hear the description. Modern producers often try to cover these awkward entrances by giving the entrant some motivated business to account for the delay in speaking. But these scenes are frankly demonstrative, for the audience is supposed to be aware of both parties. In Hamlet, Polonius greets Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. Hamlet, without answering, says:
Hark you, Guildenstern—and you too—at each ear a hearer!
That great baby you see there is not yet out of his swaddling clouts.
[II, ii, 398-401]
And so forth for another three and one-half lines. Polonius can “cover up” by waiting upon the prince, or by engaging in character business, but in essence he becomes an inert object for that period.
The longest delay in an entrance, sixteen lines, occurs in Coriolanus (V, iii, 19 ff.) when Coriolanus describes the delegation of Volumnia, Virgilia, young Marcius, and Valeria approaching him. By no means could it require a speech of that length for the actors to reach him, no matter from what part of the stage they may have entered or where he may have been standing. During his speech they become the visible expression of the inner struggle that he is about to undergo. If they move, they must move very slowly; if they stand still, they compose a picture. It is highly unlikely that the Globe company tried to “naturalize” this entrance by giving the entrants business or movement which would divert the attention of the audience from the effect their entrance was having upon Coriolanus.
Essentially the plays were written to enable the actors to enter effectively without the aid of the façade, to play intimately near the audience, and to retire convincingly without loss of attention. When one takes into account the number of processions, salutations, commands, summonses, and expressions of duty introduced to cover and emphasize the entrances, one realizes that continuity from scene to scene was mannered rather than casual, ceremonious rather than personal, conventional rather than spontaneous. The effect was probably not too far removed from the daily social manner of the Elizabethans, but on stage their natural predilection for ceremony may have been more fully systematized.
IV. RECURRENT PATTERNS OF STAGING
The patterns of continuity then do not lie in a play’s use of the stage façade but inhere in a play’s structure. [Chapter Two] traced the principal method of Shakespearean storytelling with its apparent looseness of construction but its actual scheme of central intensification and narrative finale. Within this framework abounds a tremendous variety of scenes which seem to defy classification. Nevertheless, situations and devices do recur in Shakespeare’s plays. It is to those recurrent devices that I now turn, for an examination of their patterns provides the best means of envisioning the staging of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe.