Ren+Notes

The Elizabethan Age




 * There are different levels of seating in the theaters the verry top was for high class people who could afford those seats. The next level, the mid balcony was for middle class people. The bottom balcony was for people with not a lot of money and they werent very good seats. There was also the groundlings, the people who stood around the stage.


 * This is the inside of the globe theatre
 * This is shakespears famouse Globe Theater it was built in 1599. Its an open-aired circular theatre that could house 3,000 audience members. It was 3 stories high, and 100 feet wide. The stage alone was 28 feet deep, 5 feet tall, and 43 feet wide. The stage was cleverly positioned, so that the sun would not be too bright for the actors while they were performing.


 * The Globe Theare attracted many different types of audiences. It brought the young and old, male and female. This was mainly because of the variety of plays that were performed there. Two plays were done every day, and that both of them were done in the afternoon. They were not done earlier because the sun was too bright. It was not done at night because there was no artificial lighting. This is why the plays were done during the afternoon.


 * In 1613 The Globe burnt down when a spark from a cannon during a performance of Henry VIII (8), burnt the highly flammable thatched roof. A new Globe was built the following year.


 * People didnt just go to the theatres to watch plays they went to socialize.
 * They used a system called Cue Acting. This would have meant somebody sitting behind the curtain whispering the lines to the actors. From this technique it led to another system called Cue Scripting. This meant that the actors taking part in the play received only their lines and not the script for the whole play. Obviously this was because they were working under a time schedule. There was very little time for the actors to learn what they had to say, so 'Cue Scripting' was the 'norm'. It has to be said, that there were no female actors during the time of Shakespeare.The roles of women had to be played by boys who had not gone through puberty because they would have had higher voices - and would sound feminine.


 * The theaters were noisy and crowded. They where nothing like the theatres we know of today. Shakespear wrote his plays so that the 'Common' Man or Woman could enjoy them too, and not just for the rich and famous.

[] [] "[|Globe Theatre]." __The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition__. 2008. //Encyclopedia.com.// 9 Feb. 2010 <[]>.