Shakespeare's Staging and Properties

How were female characters dragged on by the hair, men beheaded or subject to the strappado, ? How did magic trees rise from a stage trap only five feet high, and banquets disappear? And how could characters set themselves on fire?This is the first full-length study to concentrate on the practical issues of property construction and stage business in Elizabethan Theatre and offers both a guide to students imagining how the plays were performed and a reference work for scholars and practitioners alike.Alongside the extravagant effects popular at The Rose, David Albert Mann shows how the commonplace hand property was one of the few performance aids needed as the Elizabethan player emerged from the itinerant tradition, and how Shakespeare transformed it into a pivot of character interaction, presenting in concrete terms what had hitherto been purely verbal. Mann stresses the centrality of the actor in the newly-built theatres, modelled on the simple demands of the earlier playing places in which he had developed his art. The concept of 'scenic units', he suggests, is inimical to the fast-moving production process of Elizabethan theatre which argues instead for the simplest solutions to staging cruces; often relying on the suggestive possibilities of the theatre structures themselves to suggest locale, or on poetic description to engage the audience's imagination and give greater flexibility to its staging.Unlike most previous scholars, this study finds much that is useful in Henslowe's Inventory, with an annotated index revealing hitherto undiscovered property-costumes for miraculous transformations, together with a complete armoury with which to mount their simulated combat.