Hamlet at the Globe

Summary

How Hamlet was given at the Globe is a somewhat troublesome inquiry, not because it makes any particularly difficult demands, but because there are in the original texts so few specific demands of any kind. Its directions authorize no discoveries by a curtain or any scene in the balcony. One textual allusion, it is true, has been held to hint at use of the latter. Hamlet (IV, iii, 39) says of Polonius’s body, “you shall nose him as you go vp the staires into the Lobby.” But to argue that the lobby thus referred to is the one in which II, ii and III, i were played, or that such a reference means the balcony, seems to confuse a ‘dramatic’ with a ‘theatrical’ allusion. The fact is that Hamlet could if necessary be given almost anywhere, even on an arena stage, with less distortion than most Elizabethan plays. Differences of opinion on the way it was presented come mostly from our own different assumptions and inferences.