Pour in, pour in; his ambition is dry.
[II, iii, 210-234]
This scene is a charade, not a realistic dramatic situation. Ajax talks at times as though no one else were present. Perhaps he turns away, but there is no need. It is far more likely that Nestor and Ulysses stand on one side, since they converse together and Nestor urges Ulysses on at the end, and Agamemnon and Diomedes on the other side. Ajax remains between them. There is no evidence for this arrangement, but it accords with the tendency toward symmetrical design previously discussed.
Within the limitations of the evidence, two apparently contradictory methods of staging emerge. The method of the conversational aside seems realistic, the method of the solo aside conventional. Does this mean that the Globe company practiced a mixed style of staging? I do not believe so. Although the conversational aside appears to strive for credibility in staging, it does not try to make the motivation for separating the speaker and nonspeaker credible. When Banquo calls to Angus and Ross, “Cousins, a word, I pray,” he has no reason to do so other than to leave Macbeth free to speak. His comments upon Macbeth’s reception of the new honors are hardly the reasons. Similarly, the phrase with which Hamlet draws Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to him, “at each ear a hearer,” does not lead to a realistic scene, for Hamlet, speaking aside to them, mocks Polonius who stands before Hamlet but is not supposed to hear him. There is a genuine difference in the methods of staging the two types of asides, but its purpose, I suggest, was to differentiate the kinds of asides and to preserve a clear story line. In the conversational aside the speakers draw apart, for they have to indicate which actors are supposed to hear the conversation. In the solo aside the speaker remains where he is, for his delivery indicates that no one else hears him. Both were devices, equally conventional in form, and yet regularly staged in variant methods to further the narrative.
Closely allied to the aside in structure is the type of scene that I shall call the “observation” scene. In the observation scene one or more characters on-stage, unseen whether hidden or not, observe and usually overhear other characters on-stage. In the course of the observation the observer or observers may or may not comment. In essence, the situation is contrived, although the scene in which no comments are made is more plausible than that in which comments, unheard by the observed, are uttered. But the asides have already demonstrated the basic conventionality of Elizabethan theatrical devices. The observation scene is of the same nature.
The observation scenes can be most easily studied by dividing them into those in which the observers speak and those in which they do not. Where the observers do not speak, the problem of placement is greatly simplified. In several cases, for example, the observers actually go off-stage. The location of the exit used in such cases is revealed in Hamlet. Before going to the Queen, Polonius tells the King,
Behind the arras I’ll convey myself
To hear the process.
[III, iii, 28-29]
As he and the Queen await Hamlet in her closet, he presumably indicates the same place when he tells her,