Sameenah Ahmed

STAGING OF MACBETHThe plays would have started in the afternoons so that they could make the best use of daylight. There would be very little in terms of scenery.

In Macbeth there are many different lines referring to the time of day that events take place or the weather. These lines all help to set the scene for the audience and use their imagination. The openness and simplicity of Shakespeare’s Globe is free to the imagination, that all you need is for an actor to walk onstage with a candle and to say,“How goes the night, boy? (Act 2 Scenes 1) The audience would imagine the scene happening during the night even though it was performed in daylight.

There would have been two doors set into the back wall of the stage and these would have been the exits and entrances, allowing actors to enter and exit from different entrances and for the scenes to flow continuously from one location to another. There would also have been a central curtain or double door on the back wall in the centre. This curtain might have been used to show internal scenes with characters coming out of or going into private rooms. This might be used in Macbeth for Act 1 Scene 7 as the Macbeths have a private conversation during Duncan’s banquet or the route into Duncan’s bedchamber. If you had a seat in the third tier of the playhouse you were sitting 'in the Gods'.

It was very popular for the actors to have a swordfight and Macbeth has a lot of fight scenes in it. In Shakespeare's time, because of the lack of set, lights and sound effects, and because the women were played by men, the audience had to rely on their imaginations. Shakespeare had to create the imagination of the audience through his words. This is why, in Elizabethan times, you would talk about going to hear a play, instead of going to watch a play.