Actors

• Expert fencers• Expert dancers• Excellent speakers• Most trained from birth• Dangerous during fight scenes• Played many roles in a play• Boys played girls and women roles• Never did the same play two days in a row (Repertory

system)

Scenery/Setting/Props

• Elaborate costumes, platform stage

• No scenery, rather audiences used their imaginations

• Sound effects & special effects (cranes used to remove actors)

The Globe

• Was taken apart timber by timber and rowed across the river, where it was later reconstructed

• Nicknamed the “Wooden O”• Front part had a trapdoor• Rear part had a curtained area with an upper

stage called “The Heavens”• Shakespeare’s greatest plays were performed

there.• Burnt down in 1613

Shakespeare’s Life• His birthday is celebrated April 23 because

he died on that day in 1616

• He married Anne Hathaway and they had 3 children

• He was one of few people who wrote and acted in plays

• Before retiring, he wrote 37 plays

Elizabethan Theater/Audience

• Called arena stages, thrust stages, and open stages

• Made audience a part of the action

• Plat forms set up where ever possible, courtyard inns

• Audience= 3 side, more money means more chairs and balconies (eat & drink)

• James Burbage made the first theater in 1576 outside London called “The Theater”

Poetic Style

• Shakespeare used many different techniques in his play writes such as:

• Blank Verse- unrhymed iambic pentameter• Iambic Pentameter- Each line of poetry in the play is

built on five iambs• Iamb- Consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a

stressed syllable (like the word “prepare”)• Pentameter- Five iambs in a line• End-Stopped Line- Lines that end with a punctuation

mark• Run-On Lines- Lines that do not end with punctuation

marks