Romeo and Juliet (4 page)

Pronouns:
The greatest change was in pronouns. In Middle English
thou, thy,
and
thee
were used among familiars and in speaking to children and inferiors;
ye, your,
and
you
were used in speaking to superiors (servants to masters, nobles to the king) or to equals with whom the speaker was not familiar. Increasingly the “polite” forms were used in all direct address, regardless of rank, and the accusative
you
displaced the nominative
ye
. Shakespeare sometimes uses
ye
instead of
you,
but even in Shakespeare’s day
ye
was archaic, and it occurs mostly in rhetorical appeals.

Thou, thy,
and
thee
were not completely displaced, however, and Shakespeare occasionally makes significant use of them, sometimes to connote familiarity or intimacy and sometimes to connote contempt. In
Twelfth Night
Sir Toby advises Sir Andrew to insult Cesario by addressing him as
thou:
“If thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss” (3.2.46-47). In
Othello
when Brabantio is addressing an unidentified voice in the dark he says, “What are you?” (1.1.91), but when the voice identifies itself as the foolish suitor Roderigo, Brabantio uses the contemptuous form, saying, “I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors” (93). He uses this form for a while, but later in the scene, when he comes to regard Roderigo as an ally, he shifts back to the polite
you,
beginning in line 163, “What said she to you?” and on to the end of the scene. For reasons not yet satisfactorily explained, Elizabethans used
thou
in addresses to God—“O God, thy arm was here,” the king says in
Henry V
(4.8.108)—and to supernatural characters such as ghosts and witches. A subtle variation occurs in
Hamlet
. When Hamlet first talks with the Ghost in 1.5, he uses
thou,
but when he sees the Ghost in his mother’s room, in 3.4, he uses
you,
presumably because he is now convinced that the Ghost is not a counterfeit but is his father.

Perhaps the most unusual use of pronouns, from our point of view, is the neuter singular. In place of our
its, his
was often used, as in “How far that little candle throws
his
beams.” But the use of a masculine pronoun for a neuter noun came to seem unnatural, and so
it
was used for the possessive as well as the nominative: “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long / That it had it head bit off by it young.” In the late sixteenth century the possessive form
its
developed, apparently by analogy with the
-s
ending used to indicate a genitive noun, as in
book
’s, but
its
was not yet common usage in Shakespeare’s day. He seems to have used
its
only ten times, mostly in his later plays. Other usages, such as “you have seen Cassio and she together” or the substitution of
who
for
whom,
cause little problem even when noticed.

Verbs, Adverbs, and Prepositions:
Verbs cause almost no difficulty: The third person singular present form commonly ends in
-s,
as in modern English (e.g., “He blesses”), but sometimes in
-eth
(Portia explains to Shylock that mercy “blesseth him that gives and him that takes”). Broadly speaking, the
-eth
ending was old-fashioned or dignified or “literary” rather than colloquial, except for the words
doth, hath,
and
saith
. The
-eth
ending (regularly used in the King James Bible, 1611) is very rare in Shakespeare’s dramatic prose, though not surprisingly it occurs twice in the rather formal prose summary of the narrative poem
Lucrece
. Sometimes a plural subject, especially if it has collective force, takes a verb ending in
-s,
as in “My old bones aches.” Some of our strong or irregular preterites (such as
broke
) have a different form in Shakespeare (
brake
); some verbs that now have a weak or regular preterite (such as
helped
) in Shakespeare have a strong or irregular preterite (
holp
). Some adverbs that today end in
-ly
were not inflected: “grievous sick,” “wondrous strange.” Finally, prepositions often are not the ones we expect: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” “I have a king here to my flatterer.”

Again, none of the differences (except meanings that have substantially changed or been lost) will cause much difficulty. But it must be confessed that for some elliptical passages there is no widespread agreement on meaning. Wise editors resist saying more than they know, and when they are uncertain they add a question mark to their gloss.

In Shakespeare’s infancy, Elizabethan actors performed wherever they could—in great halls, at court, in the court-yards of inns. These venues implied not only different audiences but also different playing conditions. The innyards must have made rather unsatisfactory theaters: on some days they were unavailable because carters bringing goods to London used them as depots; when available, they had to be rented from the innkeeper. In 1567, presumably to avoid such difficulties, and also to avoid regulation by the Common Council of London, which was not well disposed toward theatricals, one John Brayne, brother-in-law of the carpenter turned actor James Burbage, built the Red Lion in an eastern suburb of London. We know nothing about its shape or its capacity; we can say only that it may have been the first building in Europe constructed for the purpose of giving plays since the end of antiquity, a thousand years earlier. Even after the building of the Red Lion theatrical activity continued in London in makeshift circumstances, in marketplaces and inns, and always uneasily. In 1574 the Common Council required that plays and playing places in London be licensed because

The Common Council ordered that innkeepers who wished licenses to hold performance put up a bond and make contributions to the poor.

The requirement that plays and innyard theaters be licensed, along with the other drawbacks of playing at inns and presumably along with the success of the Red Lion, led James Burbage to rent a plot of land northeast of the city walls, on property outside the jurisdiction of the city. Here he built England’s second playhouse, called simply the Theatre. About all that is known of its construction is that it was wood. It soon had imitators, the most famous being the Globe (1599), essentially an amphitheater built across the Thames (again outside the city’s jurisdiction), constructed with timbers of the Theatre, which had been dismantled when Burbage’s lease ran out.

Admission to the theater was one penny, which allowed spectators to stand at the sides and front of the stage that jutted into the yard. An additional penny bought a seat in a covered part of the theater, and a third penny bought a more comfortable seat and a better location. It is notoriously difficult to translate prices into today’s money, since some things that are inexpensive today would have been expensive in the past and vice versa—a pipeful of tobacco (imported, of course) cost a lot of money, about three pennies, and an orange (also imported) cost two or three times what a chicken cost—but perhaps we can get some idea of the low cost of the penny admission when we realize that a penny could also buy a pot of ale. An unskilled laborer made about five or sixpence a day, an artisan about twelve pence a day, and the hired actors (as opposed to the sharers in the company, such as Shakespeare) made about ten pence a performance. A printed play cost five or sixpence. Of course a visit to the theater (like a visit to a baseball game today) usually cost more than the admission since the spectator probably would also buy food and drink. Still, the low entrance fee meant that the theater was available to all except the very poorest people, rather as movies and most athletic events are today. Evidence indicates that the audience ranged from apprentices who somehow managed to scrape together the minimum entrance fee and to escape from their masters for a few hours, to prosperous members of the middle class and aristocrats who paid the additional fee for admission to the galleries. The exact proportion of men to women cannot be determined, but women of all classes certainly were present. Theaters were open every afternoon but Sundays for much of the year, except in times of plague, when they were closed because of fear of infection. By the way, no evidence suggests the presence of toilet facilities. Presumably the patrons relieved themselves by making a quick trip to the fields surrounding the playhouses.

There are four important sources of information about the structure of Elizabethan public playhouses—drawings, a contract, recent excavations, and stage directions in the plays. Of drawings, only the so-called de Witt drawing (c. 1596) of the Swan—really his friend Aernout van Buchell’s copy of Johannes de Witt’s drawing—is of much significance. The drawing, the only extant representation of the interior of an Elizabethan theater, shows an amphitheater of three tiers, with a stage jutting from a wall into the yard or center of the building.
The tiers are roofed, and part of the stage is covered by a roof that projects from the rear and is supported at its front on two posts, but the groundlings, who paid a penny to stand in front of the stage or at its sides, were exposed to the sky. (Performances in such a playhouse were held only in the daytime; artificial illumination was not used.) At the rear of the stage are two massive doors; above the stage is a gallery.

The second major source of information, the contract for the Fortune (built in 1600), specifies that although the Globe (built in 1599) is to be the model, the Fortune is to be square, eighty feet outside and fifty-five inside. The stage is to be forty-three feet broad, and is to extend into the middle of the yard, i.e., it is twenty-seven and a half feet deep.

The third source of information, the 1989 excavations of the Rose (built in 1587), indicate that the Rose was fourteen-sided, about seventy-two feet in diameter with an inner yard almost fifty feet in diameter. The stage at the Rose was about sixteen feet deep, thirty-seven feet wide at the rear, and twenty-seven feet wide downstage. The relatively small dimensions and the tapering stage, in contrast to the rectangular stage in the Swan drawing, surprised theater historians and have made them more cautious in generalizing about the Elizabethan theater. Excavations at the Globe have not yielded much information, though some historians believe that the fragmentary evidence suggests a larger theater, perhaps one hundred feet in diameter.

From the fourth chief source, stage directions in the plays, one learns that entrance to the stage was by the doors at the rear (
“Enter one citizen at one door, and another at the other”
). A curtain hanging across the doorway—or a curtain hanging between the two doorways—could provide a place where a character could conceal himself, as Polonius does, when he wishes to overhear the conversation between Hamlet and Gertrude. Similarly, withdrawing a curtain from the doorway could “discover” (reveal) a character or two. Such discovery scenes are very rare in Elizabethan drama, but a good example occurs in
The Tempest
(5.1.171), where a stage direction tells us,
“Here Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess.”
There was also some sort of playing space “aloft” or “above” to represent, for instance, the top of a city’s walls or a room above the street. Doubtless each theater had its own peculiarities, but perhaps we can talk about a “typical” Elizabethan theater if we realize that no theater need exactly fit the description, just as no mother is the average mother with 2.7 children.

This hypothetical theater is wooden, round, or polygonal (in
Henry V
Shakespeare calls it a “wooden
O
”) capable of holding some eight hundred spectators who stood in the yard around the projecting elevated stage—these spectators were the “groundlings”—and some fifteen hundred additional spectators who sat in the three roofed galleries. The stage, protected by a “shadow” or “heavens” or roof, is entered from two doors; behind the doors is the “tiring house” (attiring house, i.e., dressing room), and above the stage is some sort of gallery that may sometimes hold spectators but can be used (for example) as the bedroom from which Romeo—according to a stage direction in one text—“goeth down.” Some evidence suggests that a throne can be lowered onto the platform stage, perhaps from the “shadow”; certainly characters can descend from the stage through a trap or traps into the cellar or “hell.” Sometimes this space beneath the stage accommodates a sound-effects man or musician (in
Antony and Cleopatra “music of the hautboys
[oboes]
is under the stage”
) or an actor (in
Hamlet
the
“Ghost cries under the stage”
). Most characters simply walk on and off through the doors, but because there is no curtain in front of the platform, corpses will have to be carried off (Hamlet obligingly clears the stage of Polonius’s corpse, when he says, “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room”). Other characters may have fallen at the rear, where a curtain on a doorway could be drawn to conceal them.