Текст книги "William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition"

Автор книги: William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Professional Career

We do not know when Shakespeare joined the theatre after his marriage, or how he was employed in the mean time. In 1587 an actor of the Queen’s Men—the most successful company of the 1580s—died as a result of manslaughter shortly before the company visited Stratford. That Shakespeare may have taken his place is an intriguing speculation. Nor do we know when he began to write. It seems likely (though not certain) that he became an actor before starting to write plays; at any rate, none of his extant writings certainly dates from his youth or early manhood. One of his less impressive sonnets—No. 145—apparently plays on the name ‘Hathaway’ (‘ “I hate” from hate away she threw’), and may be an early love poem; but this is his only surviving non-dramatic work that seems at all likely to have been written before he became a playwright. Possibly his earliest efforts in verse or drama are lost; just possibly some of them survive anonymously. It would have been very much in keeping with contemporary practice if he had worked in collaboration with other writers at this stage in his career. We believe that other writers, including Thomas Nashe, contributed to I Henry VI, that George Peele is part-author of Titus Andronicus, and that Shakespeare wrote part of Edward III (not included in the first edition of the Complete Works). Other writers’ hands have been plausibly detected in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) and Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI).

The first printed allusion to Shakespeare dates from 1592, in the pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, published as the work of Robert Greene, writer of plays and prose romances, shortly after he died. Mention of an ‘upstart crow’ who ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’ and who ‘is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’ suggests rivalry; though parody of a line from Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) shows that Shakespeare was already known on the London literary scene, the word ‘upstart’ does not suggest a long-established author.

It seems likely that Shakespeare’s earliest surviving plays date from around 1590, possibly earlier: they include comedies (The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew), history plays based on English chronicles (The First Part of the Contention, Richard Duke of York), and a pseudo-classical tragedy (Titus Andronicus). We cannot say with any confidence which company (or companies) of players these were written for; Titus Andronicus, at least, seems to have gone from one company to another, since according to the title-page of the 1594 edition it had been acted by the Earl of Derby‘s, the Earl of Pembroke’s, and the Earl of Sussex’s Men. Early in his career, Shakespeare may have worked for more than one company. A watershed was the devastating outbreak of plague which closed London’s theatres almost entirely from June 1592 to May 1594. This seems to have turned Shakespeare’s thoughts to the possibility of a literary career away from the theatre: in spring 1593 appeared his witty narrative poem Venus and Adonis, to be followed in 1594 by its tragic counterpart, The Rape of Lucrece. Both carry dedications over Shakespeare’s name to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, who, though aged only twenty in 1593, was already making a name for himself as a patron of poets. Patrons could be important to Elizabethan writers; how Southampton rewarded Shakespeare for his dedications we do not know, but the affection with which Shakespeare speaks of him in the dedication to Lucrece suggests a strong personal connection and has encouraged the belief that Southampton may be the young man—or one of the young men—addressed so lovingly in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

3. Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (1573-1624), at the age of twenty: a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard

Whether Shakespeare began to write the Sonnets at this time is a vexed question. Certainly it is the period at which his plays make most use of the formal characteristics of the sonnet: Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet, for example, both incorporate sonnets into their structure; but Henry V, probably dating from 1599, has a sonnet as an Epilogue, and in All’s Well That Ends Well (1606-7) a letter is cast in this form, and so is Jupiter’s speech in Cymbeline (1610). Allusions within the Sonnets suggest that they were written over a period of at least three years. At some later point they seem to have been rearranged into the order in which they were printed. Behind them—if indeed they are autobiographical at all—lies a tantalizingly elusive story of Shakespeare’s personal life. Many attempts have been made to identify the poet’s friend (or friends), the rival poet (or poets), and the dark woman (or women) who is both the poet’s mistress and the seducer of his friend; none has achieved any degree of certainty.

After the epidemic of plague dwindled, a number of actors who had previously belonged to different companies amalgamated to form the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In the first official account that survives, Shakespeare is named, along with the famous comic actor Will Kemp and the tragedian Richard Burbage, as payee for performances at court during the previous Christmas season. The Chamberlain’s Men rapidly became the leading dramatic company, though rivalled at first by the Admiral’s Men, who had Edward Alleyn as their leading tragedian. Shakespeare stayed with the Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men for the rest of his career as actor, playwright, and administrator. He is the only prominent playwright of his time to have had so stable a relationship with a single company.

With the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s career was placed upon a firm footing. It is not the purpose of this Introduction to describe his development as a dramatist, or to attempt a thorough discussion of the chronology of his writings. The Introductions to individual works state briefly what is known about when they were composed, and also name the principal literary sources on which Shakespeare drew in composing them. More detailed discussion of dating is to be found in the Textual Companion. The works themselves are arranged in a conjectured order of composition. There are many uncertainties about this, especially in relation to the early plays. The most important single piece of evidence is a passage in a book called Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, by a minor writer, Francis Meres, published in 1598. Meres wrote:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labour’s Lost, his Love Labour’s Won, his Midsummer’s Night Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.

Some of the plays that Meres names had already been published or alluded to by 1598; but for others, he supplies a date by which they must have been written. Meres also alludes to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’, which suggests that some, if not all, of the poems printed in 1609 as Shakespeare’s Sonnets were circulating in manuscript by this date. Works not mentioned by Meres that are believed to have been written by 1598 are the three plays concerned with the reign of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, Edward III, and the narrative poems.

Shakespeare seems to have had less success as an actor than as a playwright. We cannot name any of his roles for certain, though seventeenth-century traditions have it that he played Adam in As You Like It, and Hamlet’s Ghost—and more generally that he had a penchant for ‘kingly parts’. Ben Jonson listed him first among the ‘principal comedians’ in Every Man in his Humour, acted in 1598, when he reprinted it in his 1616 Folio, and Shakespeare is also listed among the performers of Jonson’s tragedy Sejanus in 1603. He was certainly one of the leading administrators of the Chamberlain’s Men. Until 1597, when their lease expired, they played mainly in the Theatre, London’s first important playhouse, situated north of the River Thames in Shoreditch, outside the jurisdiction of the City fathers, who exercised a repressive influence on the drama. It had been built in 1576 by James Burbage, a joiner, the tragedian’s father. Then the company seems to have played mainly at the Curtain until some time in 1599. Shakespeare was a member of the syndicate responsible for building the first Globe theatre, in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, out of the dismantled timbers of the Theatre in 1599. Initially he had a ten-per-cent financial interest in the enterprise, fluctuating as other shareholders joined or withdrew. It was a valuable share, for the Chamberlain’s Men won great acclaim and made substantial profits. After Queen Elizabeth died, in 1603, they came under the patronage of the new king, James I; the royal patent of 19 May 1603 names Shakespeare along with other leaders of the company. London was in the grip of another severe epidemic of plague which caused a ban on playing till the following spring. The King’s processional entry into London had to be delayed; when at last it took place, on 15 March 1604, each of the company’s leaders was granted four and a half yards of scarlet cloth for his livery as one of the King’s retainers; but the players seem not to have processed. Their association with the King was far from nominal; during the next thirteen years—up to the time of Shakespeare’s death—they played at court more often than all the other theatre companies combined. Records are patchy, but we know, for instance, that they gave eleven plays at court between I November 1604 and 31 October 1605, and that seven of them were by Shakespeare: they included older plays—The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost—and more recent ones—Othello and Measure for Measure. The Merchant of Venice was played twice.

Some measure of Shakespeare’s personal success during this period may be gained from the ascription to him of works not now believed to be his; Locrine and Thomas Lord Cromwell were published in 1595 and 1602 respectively as by ‘W.S.’; in 1599 a collection of poems, The Passionate Pilgrim, containing some poems certainly by other writers, appeared under his name; so, in 1606 and 1608, did The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Since Shakespeare’s time, too, many plays of the period, some published, some surviving only in manuscript, have been attributed to him. In modern times, the most plausible case has been made for parts, or all, of Edward III, which was entered in the registers of the Stationers’ Company (a normal, but not invariable, way of setting in motion the publication process) in 1595 and published in 1596. It was first ascribed to Shakespeare in 1656. When this edition of the Complete Works first appeared, we said that if any play deserved to be added to the canon, this was it. Since then the scholarly case for Shakespeare having written part, or even all, of the play has grown, and we reprint it here according to its conjectural date of composition.

4. King James I (1566-1625): a portrait 1621) by Daniel Mytens

In August 1608 the King’s Men took up the lease of the smaller, ‘private’ indoor theatre, the Blackfriars; again, Shakespeare was one of the syndicate of owners. The company took possession in 1609. The Blackfriars served as a winter home; in better weather, performances continued to be given at the Globe. By now, Shakespeare was at a late stage in his career. Perhaps he realized it; he seems to have been willing to share his responsibilities as the company’s resident dramatist with younger writers. Timon of Athens, tentatively dated to early 1606, seems on internal evidence to be partly the work of Thomas Middleton (1580-1627). Another collaborative play, very successful in its time, was Pericles (c. 1607-8), in which Shakespeare probably worked with George Wilkins, an unscrupulous character who gave up his brief career as a writer in favour of a longer one as a tavern (or brothel) keeper. But Shakespeare’s most fruitful collaboration was with John Fletcher, his junior by fifteen years. Fletcher was collaborating with Francis Beaumont on plays for the King’s Men by about 1608. Beaumont stopped writing plays when he married, in about 1613, and it is at this time that Fletcher began to collaborate with Shakespeare. A lost play, Cardenio, acted by the King’s Men some time before 20May 1613, was plausibly ascribed to Shakespeare and Fletcher in a document of 1653; All is True (Henry VIII), first acted about June 1613, is generally agreed on stylistic evidence to be another fruit of the same partnership; and The Two Noble Kinsmen, also dated 1613, which seems to be the last play in which Shakespeare had a hand, was ascribed to the pair on its publication in 1634. One of Shakespeare’s last professional tasks was the minor one of devising an impress—which has not survived—for the Earl of Rutland to bear at a tournament held on 24 March 1613 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the King’s accession. An impresa was a paper or pasteboard shield painted with an emblematic device and motto which would be carried and interpreted for a knight by his squire; such a ceremony is portrayed in Pericles (Sc. 6). Shakespeare received forty-four shillings for his share in the work; Richard Burbage was paid the same sum ‘for painting and making it’.

The Drama and Theatre of Shakespeare’s Time

Shakespeare came upon the theatrical scene at an auspicious time. English drama and theatre had developed only slowly during the earlier part of the sixteenth century; during Shakespeare’s youth they exploded into vigorous life. It was a period of secularization; previously, drama had been largely religious in subject matter and overtly didactic in treatment; as a boy of fifteen, Shakespeare could have seen one of the last performances of a great cycle of plays on religious themes at Coventry, not far from his home town. 1567 saw the building in London of the short-lived Red Lion, and in 1576 the Theatre went up, to be rapidly followed by the Curtain: England’s first important, custom-built playhouses. There was a sudden spurt in the development of all aspects of theatrical art: acting, production, playwriting, company organization, and administration. Within a few years the twin arts of drama and theatre entered upon a period of achievement whose brilliance remains unequalled.

The new drama was literary and rhetorical rather than scenic and spectacular: but its mainstream was theatrical too. Its writers were poets. Prose was only beginning to be used in plays during Shakespeare’s youth; a playwright was often known as a ‘poet’, and most of the best playwrights of the period wrote with distinction in other forms. Shakespeare’s most important predecessors and early contemporaries, from whom he learned much, were John Lyly (c.1554-1606), pre-eminent for courtly comedy and elegant prose, Robert Greene (1558-92), who helped particularly to develop the scope and language of romantic comedy, the tragedian Thomas Kyd (1558-94),and Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), whose ‘mighty line’ put heroism excitingly on the stage and who shares with Shakespeare credit for establishing the English history play as a dramatic mode. As Shakespeare’s career progressed, other dramatists displayed their talents and, doubtless, influenced and stimulated him. George Chapman (c.1560-1634) emerged as a dramatist in the mid-1590s and succeeded in both comedy and tragedy. He was deeply interested in classical themes, as was Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who became Shakespeare’s chief rival. Jonson was a dominating personality, vocal about his accomplishments (and about Shakespeare, who, he said, ‘wanted art’), and biting as a comic satirist. Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632) wrote comedies that are more akin to Shakespeare’s than to Jonson’s in their romantic warmth; the satirical plays of John Marston (c.1575-1634) are more sensational and cynical than Jonson’s. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) brought a sharp wit to the portrayal of contemporary London life, and developed into a great tragic dramatist. Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) came upon the scene; the affinity between Shakespeare’s late tragicomedies and some of Fletcher’s romances is reflected in their collaboration.

The companies for which these dramatists wrote were organized mainly from within. They were led by the sharers: eight in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at first, twelve by the end of Shakespeare’s career. Collectively they owned the joint stock of play scripts, costumes, and properties; they shared both expenses and profits. All were working members of the company. Exceptionally, the sharers of Shakespeare’s company owned the Globe theatre itself; more commonly, actors rented theatres from financial speculators such as Philip Henslowe, financier of the Admiral’s Men. Subordinate to the sharers were the ‘hired men’—lesser actors along with prompters (‘bookholders’), stagekeepers, wardrobe keepers (‘tiremen’), musicians, and money-collectors (‘gatherers’). Even those not employed principally as actors might swell a scene at need. The hired men were paid by the week. Companies would need scribes to copy out actors’ parts and to make fair copies from the playwrights’ foul papers (working manuscripts), but they seem mainly to have been employed part-time. The other important group of company members were the apprentices. These were boys or youths each serving a formal term of apprenticeship to one of the sharers. They played female and juvenile roles.

The success of plays in the Elizabethan theatres depended almost entirely on the actors. They had to be talented, hard-working, and versatile. Above all they had to have extraordinary memories. Plays were given in a repertory system on almost every afternoon of the week except during Lent. Only about two weeks could be allowed for rehearsal of a new play, and during that time the company would be regularly performing a variety of other plays. Lacking printed copies, the actors worked from ‘parts’ written out on scrolls giving only the cue lines from other characters’ speeches. The bookholder, or prompter, had to make sure that actors entered at the right moment, properly equipped. Many of them would take several parts in the same play: doubling and more was a necessary practice. The strain on the memory was great, demanding a high degree of professionalism. Conditions of employment were carefully regulated: a contract of 1614 provides that an actor and sharer, Robert Dawes (not in Shakespeare’s company), be fined one shilling for failure to turn up at the beginning of a rehearsal, two shillings for missing a rehearsal altogether, three shillings if he was not ‘ready apparelled’ for a performance, ten shillings if four other members of the company considered him to be ‘overcome with drink’ at the time he should be acting, and one pound if he simply failed to turn up for a performance without ‘licence or just excuse of sickness’.

There can be no doubt that the best actors of Shakespeare’s time would have been greatly admired in any age. English actors became famous abroad; some of the best surviving accounts are in letters written by visitors to England: the actors were literally ‘something to write home about’, and some of them performed (in English) on the Continent. Edward Alleyn, the leading tragedian of the Admiral’s Men, renowned especially for his performances of Marlowe’s heroes, made a fortune and founded Dulwich College. All too little is known about the actors of Shakespeare’s company and the roles they played, but many testimonies survive to Richard Burbage’s excellence in tragic roles. According to an elegy written after he died, in 1619,

No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo;

Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside

That lived in him have now for ever died.

There is no reason to suppose that the boy actors lacked talent and skill; they were highly trained as apprentices to leading actors. Most plays of the period, including Shakespeare’s, have far fewer female than male roles, but some women’s parts—such as Rosalind (in As You Like It) and Cleopatra—are long and important; Shakespeare must have had confidence in the boys who played them. Some of them later became sharers themselves.

The playwriting techniques of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were intimately bound up with the theatrical conditions to which they catered. Theatre buildings were virtually confined to London. Plays continued to be given in improvised circumstances when the companies toured the provinces and when they acted at court (that is, wherever the sovereign and his or her entourage happened to be—in London, usually Whitehall or Greenwich). In 1602, Twelfth Night was given in the still-surviving hall of one of London’s Inns of Court, the Middle Temple. Acting companies could use guildhalls, the halls of great houses, the yards of inns, or even churches. (In 1608, Richard II and Hamlet were performed by ships’ crews at sea off the coast of Sierra Leone.) Many plays of the period require no more than an open space and the costumes and properties that the actors carried with them on their travels. Others made more use of the expanding facilities of the professional stage. No doubt texts were adapted as circumstances required.

5. Richard Burbage: reputedly a self-portrait

6. The hall of the Middle Temple, London

Permanent theatres were of two kinds, known now as public and private. Most important to Shakespeare were public theatres such as the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Globe. Unfortunately, the only surviving drawing (reproduced opposite) portraying the interior of a public theatre in any detail is of the Swan, not used by Shakespeare’s company. Though theatres were not uniform in design, they had important features in common. They were large wooden buildings, usually round or polygonal; the Globe, which was about 100 feet in diameter and 36 feet in height, could hold over three thousand spectators. Between the outer and inner walls—a space of about 12 feet—were three levels of tiered benches extending round most of the auditorium and roofed on top; after the Globe burnt down, in 1613, the roof, formerly thatched, was tiled. The surround of benches was broken on the lowest level by the stage, broad and deep, which jutted forth at a height of about 5 feet into the central yard, where spectators (‘groundlings’) could stand. Actors entered mainly, perhaps entirely, from openings in the wall at the back of the stage. At least two doors, one on each side, could be used; stage directions frequently call for characters to enter simultaneously from different doors, when the dramatic situation requires them to be meeting, and to leave ‘severally’ (separately) when they are parting. The depth of the stage meant that characters could enter through the stage doors some moments before other characters standing at the front of the stage might be expected to notice them.

Also in the wall at the rear of the stage there appears to have been some kind of central aperture which could be used for the disclosing and putting forth of Desdemona’s bed (Othello, 5.2) or the concealment of the spying Polonius (Hamlet, 3.4) or of the sleeping Lear (The History of King Lear, Sc. 20). Behind the stage wall was the tiring-house—the actors’ dressing area.

On the second level the seating facilities for spectators seem to have extended even to the back of the stage, forming a balcony which at the Globe was probably divided into five bays. Here perhaps was the ‘lords’ room’, which could be taken over by the actors for plays in which action took place ‘above’ (or ‘aloft’), as in Romeo’s wooing of Juliet or the death of Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. It seems to have been possible for actors to move from the main stage to the upper level during the time taken to speak a few lines of verse, as we may see in The Merchant of Venice (2.6.51-8) or Julius Caesar (5.3.33-5). Somewhere above the lords’ room was a window or platform known as ‘the top’; Joan la Pucelle appears there briefly in I Henry VI (3.3), and in The Tempest, Prospero is seen ‘on the top, invisible’ (3.3).

Above the stage, at a level higher than the second gallery, was a canopy, probably supported by two pillars (which could themselves be used for concealment) rising from the stage. One function of the canopy was to shelter the stage from the weather; it also formed the floor of one or more huts housing the machinery for special effects and its operators. Here cannon-balls could be rolled around a trough to imitate the sound of thunder, and fire crackers could be set off to simulate lightning. And from this area actors could descend in a chair operated by a winch. Shakespeare uses this facility mainly in his late plays: in Cymbeline for the descent of Jupiter (5.5), and, probably, in Pericles for the descent of Diana (Sc. 21) and in The Tempest for Juno’s appearance in the masque (4.1). On the stage itself was a trap which could be opened to serve as Ophelia’s grave (Hamlet, 5.1) or as Malvolio’s dungeon (Twelfth Night, 4.2).

7. The Swan Theatre: a copy, by Aernout van Buchel, of a drawing made about 1596 by Johannes de Witt, a Dutch visitor to London

Somewhere in the backstage area, perhaps in or close to the gallery, must have been a space for the musicians who played a prominent part in many performances. No doubt then, as now, a single musician was capable of playing several instruments. Stringed instruments, plucked (such as the lute) and bowed (such as viols), were needed. Woodwind instruments included recorders (called for in Hamlet, 3.2) and the stronger, shriller hautboys (ancestors of the modern oboe); trumpets and cornetts were needed for the many flourishes and sennets (more elaborate fanfares) played especially for the comings and goings of royal characters. Sometimes musicians would play on stage: entrances for trumpeters and drummers are common in battle scenes. More often they would be heard but not seen; from behind the stage (as, perhaps, at the opening of Twelfth Night or in the concluding dance of Much Ado About Nothing), or even occasionally under it (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.3). Some actors were themselves musicians: the performers of Feste (in Twelfth Night) and Ariel (in The Tempest) must sing and, probably, accompany themselves on lute and tabor (a small drum slung around the neck). Though traditional music has survived for some of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays (such as Ophelia’s mad songs, in Hamlet), we have little music which was certainly composed for them in his own time. The principal exception is two songs for The Tempest by Robert Johnson, a fine composer who was attached to the King’s Men.

Shakespeare’s plays require few substantial properties. A ‘state’, or throne on a dais, is sometimes called for, as are tables and chairs and, occasionally, a bed, a pair of stocks (King Lear, Sc. 7/2.2), a cauldron (Macbeth, 4.1), a rose brier (I Henry VI, 2.4), and a bush (Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.3). No doubt these and other such objects were pushed on and off the stage by attendants in full view of the audience. We know that Elizabethan companies spent lavishly on costumes, and some plays require special clothes; at the beginning of 2 Henry IV, Rumour enters ‘painted full of tongues’; regal personages, and supernatural figures such as Hymen in As You Like It (5.4) and the goddesses in The Tempest (4.1), must have been distinctively costumed; presumably a bear-skin was needed for The Winter’s Tale (3.3). Probably no serious attempt was made at historical realism. The only surviving contemporary drawing of a scene from a Shakespeare play, illustrating Titus Andronicus (reproduced on the following page), shows the characters dressed in a mixture of Elizabethan and classical costumes, and this accords with the often anachronistic references to clothing in plays with a historical setting. The same drawing also illustrates the use of head-dresses, of varied weapons as properties—the guard to the left appears to be wearing a scimitar—of facial and bodily make-up for Aaron, the Moor, and of eloquent gestures. Extended passages of wordless action are not uncommon in Shakespeare. Dumb shows feature prominently in earlier Elizabethan plays, and in Shakespeare the direction ‘alarum’ or ‘alarums and excursions’ may stand for lengthy and exciting passages of arms. Even in one of Shakespeare’s latest plays, Cymbeline, important episodes are conducted in wordless mime (see, for example, 5.2-4).

Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career his company regularly performed in a private theatre, the Blackfriars, as well as at the Globe. Like other private theatres, this was an enclosed building, using artificial lighting, and so more suitable for winter performances. Private playhouses were smaller than the public ones—the Blackfriars held about 600 spectators—and admission prices were much higher—a minimum of sixpence at the Blackfriars against one penny at the Globe. Facilities at the Blackfriars must have been essentially similar to those at the Globe since some of the same plays were given at both theatres. But the sense of social occasion seems to have been different. Audiences were more elegant (though not necessarily better behaved); music featured more prominently.

8. A drawing, attributed to Henry Peacham, illustrating Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

It seems to have been under the influence of private-theatre practice that, from about 1609 onwards, performances of plays customarily marked the conventional five-act structure by a pause, graced with music, after each act. The need to trim the candles was a practical reason for introducing act breaks. Previously, though dramatists often showed awareness of five-act structure (as Shakespeare conspicuously does in Henry V, with a Chorus before each act), public performances seem to have been continuous, making the scene the main structural unit. None of the editions of Shakespeare’s plays printed in his lifetime (which do not include any written after 1609) marks either act or scene divisions. The innovation of act-pauses threw more emphasis on the act as a unit, and made it possible for dramatists to relax their observance of what has come to be known as ‘the law of re-entry’, according to which a character who had left the stage at the end of one scene would not normally make an immediate reappearance at the beginning of the next. Thus, if Shakespeare had been writing The Tempest before 1609, it is unlikely that Prospero and Ariel, having left the stage at the end of Act 4, would have instantly reappeared at the start of Act 5. We attempt to reflect this feature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy by making no special distinction between scene-breaks and act-breaks except in those later plays in which Shakespeare seems to have observed the new convention (and in Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth, since the texts of these plays apparently reflect theatre practice after they were first written, and in The Comedy of Errors, a neo-classically structured play in which the act-divisions appear to be authoritative, and to represent a private performance).