Case study I - The dramaturgy of scenes

Summary

We are very used to analysing those moments of early modern drama when there is an intimate relationship between the audience and specific characters; in particular, we are drawn to moments of soliloquy when a one-to-one relationship is almost within our grasp with a Hamlet or a Barabas, or indeed an Isabella, who in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure looks to the audience in the ‘To whom should I complain?’ soliloquy (2.4.171–87) as the only people left in the world to whom she can speak, other than the God from whom she is estranged following her journey away from the Viennese convent in a desperate effort to save her brother's life. But what can moments of ensemble, large group scenes, featuring a large degree of movement and flow, tell us about both the architectonics of the stage and the dramatic shape of individual plays in performance?

We have had recourse on several occasions already in this study to the largely bare stage of early modern commercial theatre which could then be significantly populated with bodies, costumes and key props. In this climate, gesture has proved to be a strong maker of meaning, but gesture can be read at the level of an individual hand movement (see for example the discussion of dumb show in Case study M) or the movement of bodies and groups of bodies on the stage. Shakespeare's As You Like It, 3.2, which commences with Orlando pinning his sonnets to Rosalind on trees, is worth invoking first as an example. We ostensibly begin the scene in the realm of courtly love poetry and pastoral literature (see more detailed discussion of generic conventions in Chapter 4) but this is immediately juxtaposed with the country versus city debate between Corin the tenant shepherd and Touchstone the court jester, before we flow back to Rosalind and Celia in their respective disguises (Rosalind as the boy Ganymede) and an extended intellectual exchange between Rosalind and Orlando on the theme of love. Love is therefore debated as a theme throughout but juxtaposed with a wider context of the working agricultural world as represented by Corin.