My copy of Julius Caesar for HS English class had a photo on the back of a performance of same at the Folger Shakespeare Library. But the actors weren’t wearing Roman tunics and togas, they were wearing Elizabethan hose and doublets, and the scenery was like Elizabethan London. The implication being, that is how it would have been staged at the Globe. Not as deliberate “updating,” like setting Richard III in the 1930s or Romeo and Juliet in Miami, but simply because people on those days did not really understand, the way any educated person does to day, how things change over the centuries. Shakespeare even wrote in a striking clock.
But, what if the Globe were staging one of Shakespeare’s histories set in a comparatively recent time? Would the actors in Richard III be wearing the fashions of a hundred years before – of which there might still be some cultural memory – or, Elizabethan costumes?
Ok, this is really old info from undergrad a million years back, but the way it was explained to me was not that they didn’t understand, but that they didn’t really care.
We think of Shakespeare as high art. It’s taught in school, it’s this super high standard of epic theatre, it’s the most important written corpus in English history besides the Bible, etc, etc. etc.
Actors forgot their lines or improved off of each other, and the changes got written into the play for the next performance. Edits happened on the spot to take advantage of insulting the families of nobles or important people who were actually THERE that night. Audience members yelled and heckled and tried to climb on the stage.
Now, yes, some of the plays were much more serious than that, and some of them are downright tragic, but even there we have the comic relief to play off the audience and keep them from getting too rowdy.
The point is that the contemporary audiences were used to not taking plays seriously. In a very real way, costuming and scenic design simply weren’t as important to them. It wasn’t that the nobility didn’t know that Romans wore togas (although the peasantry might not have) but they didn’t give a crap, any more than we get upset when someone doing standup doesn’t change costumes when he starts impersonating someone. Robin Williams doesn’t have to wear overalls and a hayseed in his mouth to get across the idea of a southern hick.
Likewise, actors then used all sorts of common mannerisms and quick “caricatures” of types of people to get the same message across, and that took less effort on the part of the stage crew. (Less stage crew also, and since the cut was divided between the players, that meant a lot.)
What’s most likely for those productions is that unless an “exotic” character or location was determined by the play, everyone just wore pieces of stock costumes (most likely donations, castoffs, and bits of real clothing from the last few decades, sprinkled with a liberal assortment of fake ornamentation that happened to fit them well enough, and portray the general idea of that character concept.
It wasn’t just the equivalent to TV, for the most part it was the local version of Three’s Company and Another World - low-brow comedy and cheap melodrama, to entertain the largest number of people as possible, and put paying butts in seats (even though most of them wouldn’t actually get seats). Yeah, the nobility liked it, not just the uneducated rabble, and the playwrights would stick in references that only the educated people would get…but the educated folk still liked the cheap comedy, melodrama, and violence that drew the less educated droves, so that stuff was mostly just bonuses.
Anachronism made it easier for the playwright to write the play, the company to put together costumes and sets, the crowd (both educated and not) to follow the story.
And it’s not like anachronisms were the biggest inaccuracies in Shakespeare’s non-contemporary-set plays - politically motivated lies were common (Richard III and MacBeth come to mind immediately - when you’re writing a play about the losers of a conflict for the descendants of the winner, you don’t say ‘yeah, your grampa was a bit of a bastard, and the guy he knocked off the throne wasn’t all that bad’), and stories were altered in many different ways to make the plays more interesting, or easier to stage, or funnier, or more tragic.
The other thing to keep in mind is that costumes are expensive, most theaters operated on a very narrow margin, and most plays didn’t have very long runs. If you’re running Julius Caesar one week, and King John the next, you’re not going to bother buying a lot of period-specific outfits for each show. You just stuff your actors into the doublets and hose you use for every performance, and get them out on stage to recite their lines.
He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes:
no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has
the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry,
which is strange; with such delicate burdens of dildos
and fadings, jump her and thump her; and where some
stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief,
and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the
maid to answer, ‘ Whoop, do me no harm, good man ’;
puts him off, slights him, with ‘ Whoop, do me no harm,
good man.’*
As far as scenery goes, at that time in history, England just didn’t really care. Italy went nuts with all sorts of crazy machinery for changing flats and stuff and that was slowly trickling through the rest of Europe, but England’s ideas about scenery really came from their history of medieval cycle plays and dispersed decor.
Interest in historical costuming didn’t really make an appearance until the 1700s although there were a few attempts at recreating more accurate costumes earlier. Basically, you had 4 different styles of costuming in Shakespeare’s time: contemporary clothing, archaic (which would be slightly out of fashion to denote a character who was older or stuck in their ways), antique (which meant from bygone years) and supernatural for classical gods, spectres and such.
The better and more famous actors often owned their own costumes which were usually more sumptuous than anything the company might own and their wardrobe doubled as an insurance in case their career went south and they’d have to sell their wardrobe for cash. Often lords would donate old clothes to a troupe they liked or a servant who had acquired his master’s castoffs would sell them to a troupe or actor. I can’t imagine much of the aristocracy had togas floating around!
When biblical figures were in robes, such as those in Leonardo’s The Last Supper, they’re draped in layers of silk and satin in vibrant colors of the sort Israeli peasants (in the case of Jesus and contemporaries) could never have afforded and still with a Renaissance era style to them, and Old Testament kings are draped in almost a burlesque of Oriental exotic garb, almost something like a mummer might have worn to show “from a rich and exotic land that’s not here”. They also frequently have Renaissance era buildings and landscapes behind them, and even though the artists of the time would have had some idea of what the Holy Land looked like due to the chronicles from the Crusades it’s often depicted as tropical and lush, almost like a Riviera resort.
Today if you wore a toga costume on Halloween even grade schoolers would pick up on “ancient Rome”, but I wonder if they would in the 17th century. I’m sure they had an idea that ancients had worn robes and Muslims still did in the East, but they probably wouldn’t have known a toga from a maharajah’s ceremonial robe.
Actually, there is excellent evidence that at least some attempt would have been made to present a play with a Roman setting in ‘Roman’ costume. The famous drawing by Henry Peacham of Titus Andronicus, which is usually thought to depict an actual performance, possibly one of those at the Rose in 1594, clearly shows Titus in an non-contemporary outfit approximating to late-sixteenth century conceptions of Classical dress. Of course, the two figures behind him are equally clearly wearing outfits that are unambiguously contemporary. Tamora, the woman kneeling before Titus, isn’t wearing a dress in a contemporary style, more one that was generically theatrical. The figure on the far right is simply dressed as a stock Moor.
In other words, there was at least some concept (however inaccurate) of how Romans were supposed to look and some characters could be dressed accordingly. But, with limited resources, this was probably more true for the principal characters, with no one being that bothered if the rest of the cast wore more contemporary styles.
So (getting back to the OP), there would be no significant difference in period-costuming between a Globe or Rose production of Richard III (set a century before Shakespeare’s time) and one of Henry VIII (about half-a-century) and one of The Merry Wives of Windsor (contemporary, despite the presence of Prince Hal’s friend Falstaff)?
I wonder what sort of padding the boys/men who played female roles would have worn under their gowns, and if it was attached to the gown or to the actor.
If I were designing the costumes, the major roles would be attached to the actor, while minor roles would be attached to the costume. Easier that way if some youth is playing several parts, male and female as needed. Juliet wouldn’t be playing anything else, so the padding can go on the actor.
Moving on to scenery (having beaten costuming to within an inch of its life), the term that comes to mind is “minimalist.”
For one thing, the architecture of a typical Elizabethan theater — a thrust stage with a three-arch façade behind — didn’t lend itself to the flats, drops, etc that are typical of the proscenium or “picture frame” stage. And while there were one or more derricks/cranes above the stage for “flying” characters such as Ariel, they weren’t suited for moving set pieces. In addition, they didn’t have room to store a great deal of set pieces or props.
So a costumed stagehand might set out a somewhat ornate chair to indicate that the scene takes place in a throne room. Put a potted tree on stage, and voila! we’re in Arden Forest or Birnam Wood.
The idea seems to have been to provide a minimum of clues to the audience and let them fill in the blanks. Since they were used to the practice they probably did it quite well.
(A minor experiment on giving clues that we did in Theatre History years ago: listen to a radio show from the 30’s or 40’s, then listen to a television show without watching it. You’ll find that the difference is striking.)
