Was there a ‘Tarras’ in Shakespeare’s Globe?

Summary

Whether there was or was not a ‘tarras’ in Shakespeare’s Globe and its successor is in itself perhaps of minor importance. But the question has a wider significance, because the arguments advanced for the tarras are typical of a distinctive point of view toward the whole of Elizabethan stagecraft, not to say of drama in general. Discussion of the tarras is possible in a limited space, but leads to conclusions of broad significance.

John C. Adams has presented the latest and longest argument in support of the existence of a tarras. He describes it as part of the balcony in the second story of the theatre, twenty-four feet long stretching across the back of the stage from one obliquely placed window to the other, and as three or four feet deep, this depth being secured by letting it project over the lower stage from the tiring-house wall. A light railing protected its front edge, and a curtain at the rear separated it from what Adams calls the * chamber'. This arrangement of the balcony is consistently thought out and sounds convincing, even obvious, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that C. Walter Hodges in his attractive little book, Shakespeare and the Players (1948), accepts it, as have also some other scholars in various modern reconstructions of the old stage.