Shakespeare and the Stage / With a Complete List of Theatrical Terms Used by Shakespeare in His Plays and Poems, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, & Explanatory Notes

by Maurice Jonas

III, 3, 275.

PLAYER. SCAFFOLDAGE.

And like a strutting player, whose conceit

Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich

To hear the wooden dialogue and sound

’Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage.

Such to be pitied and o’er wrested seeming

He acts thy greatness in.

Good all round acting in Shakespeare’s time was not the order of the day, as practised in ours. One or two stars, and the rest nowhere. Thus Shakespeare compares the strutting actor to the wooden boards on which he treads, making up in martial gait and heavy tread what he lacks in spiritual fire. The scaffoldage refers to the wooden platform on which plays were enacted. A hamstring is one of the tendons which form the sides of the ham or space at the back of the knee.