Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?

More on cockfighting and unseemly theatres. We might note that the 'Chorus' introducing Henry V explicitly reminds us that the heroic action of the play will take place on an "unworthy scaffold" in a space that could double as a "cockpit". (Remember that the playspaces immediately preceeding the permanent theatres of London made use both of temporary scaffolds and of amphitheatres that could double as theatres of torment for animals.)

Shakespeare seems to draw attention to the poverty of material resources in his theatre. He won't let us forget this, making jokes at the expense of his "wooden O" -- which glances not only at the theatre's round shape and its small size but also at its nothingness, its status as a cipher.

Yet this is a bareness, a nothingness that has great potential. The Chorus to Henry V makes this clear in a metaphor from accounting:

O pardon! since a crooked figure
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

Just as a series of 0's added to 1 can make a million -- 1,000,000 --- so too the imperfections of Shakespeare's theatre, pieced out with the imagination, can create grand scenes, kingdoms, princes.

Of course, this is a self-deprecating boast. It is not just the audience that makes something from nothing: their thoughts are shaped in the crucible of Shakespeare's dramatic art. So "O pardon!" is really "See what I can do!"

What is the effect of these metatheatrical moments in Shakespeare's plays? These are the moments which playfully jostle us from any state of suspension of disbelief, reminding the audience of itself and of the world underlying the one conjured by the play. "This green plot shall be our stage" (MND); "the groundlings ... capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise" (Hamlet); "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that please me" ('Rosalind' in AYLII). These reminders that the play is a play seem not to detach us but rather to draw us further in.

The noisy, smelly enjoyments of Shakespeare's London

A Swiss tourist, Thomas Platter, gives us a rare eyewitness account of what Shakespeare's theatre -- and Shakespeare's London -- was like. Platter writes in his travel diary of 1599

On September 21st after lunch, about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar with a cast of some fifteen people; when the play was over, they danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.

This account suggests that the audiences of the brand new Globe Theatre found nothing incongruous in a merry jig to close off a tragedy. Nor did audiences sit in a reverent hush. Platter remarks that during the two or three afternoon performances in London theatres (each vying to be the most popular), audiences could buy the food and drink that were carried round for sale, indulge in the notorious English habit of taking tobacco, and perhaps even make overtures to the "great swarms" of prostitutes who frequented the playhouses.

We should not forget that the London theatres in which Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote were primarily about pleasure. Yet the "pleasure" experienced by Shakespeare's audiences might not necessarily be familiar to us. Platter also gives an account of a rival diversion -- cockfighting -- where spectators watch "with eager pleasure the fierce and angry fight between the cocks, as these wound each other to death with spurs and beaks." The master of the cockfighting told Platter of the practice of giving the cocks brandy before they fought, "adding what wonderful pleasure there was in watching them."

To read a more extended account of Platter's pleasures in London, see The Norton Anthology of English Literature's "Norton Topics Online" http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/topic_4/tplatter.htm