Shakespeare was a man of wit and wisdom. He was not well educated and well read. But he has the natural common sense in uncommon degree. He was a man of sensibility, sensitivity and conation. He believed in destiny fate and Luck. In the Tempest’ also you see that by Luck prosper got everything again this is his sense of destiny.
It has been said about Shakespeare’s Theatre-“when Shakespeare came up to London, sometime in the late 1580’s there were already in existence two fairly well-defined theatre districts. Both were outside the city limits, because of the opposition to such godless entertainment on the part of the Lord Mayor and the civic council. The first of these districts was Fins bury Field, a holiday section north of the city just outside Bishopsgate, where picnics, athletic contests and other innocent pastimes were held. Here the Theatre (1576) and the Curtain (1577), the first structures in England expressly erected for theatrical entertainment, had been set up only about ten or a dozen years before. The second theatre district was the Bankside, across the Thames, sough of the city, and long notorious as a pleasure resort of a less innocent kind. Here the Rose (1587) had been erected and as the inaccessibility of the earlier theatre section caused it to decline in popularity, here new play-houses, such as the Swan (1595) and the celebrated Globe (1595), were built. In addition, during Shakespeare’s lifetime there were scattered about the suburbs close to London several other playhouses. Like the Fortune (1600), and the Red Bull (1605), and within the city, Blackfrairs, which, under the guise of a “private” theatre, managed to evade the civic ordinances against playhouses. Shakespeare’s company controlled the Theatre, the Globe, and after 1608, Blackfriars, which they used as a winter house. It was at these three theatres that Shakespeare’s plays were first produced.
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The Elizabethan playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote had little in common with the theatre of today. To the modern play-goer, familiar with the seating arrangements and the picture frame stage of the present, Shakespeare’s playhouse would seem more like a stadium than a theatre. His theatre was a circular of polygonal wooden structure of galleries surrounding an open court into the middle of which projected a covered platform. About this platform most of the audience stood rather than sat, though some of the more affluent found seats in the galleries or even on the stage itself. Most of the action of Elizabethan play took place upon the platform, which had no front curtain and was backed on each side by the “tiring-house” or actors, dressing rooms, so constructed as to give the illusion of a house fronting a street, for which the platform often stood. In the centre of this back wall and between the entrance doors were two annexes to the platform which could be brought into use when necessary-an inner stage for propertied interiors, such as studies, tents, caves, cells or shops and directly above this a love, an upper stage for scenes requiring elevation. Both the inner and the upper stages were fitted with traverse curtains which could be closed when the annexes were no in use, and which created the illusion of at pastries wall when the platform represented hall in castle.
Naturally, painted scenery and properties in the modern sense were used only sparingly in the theatre of Shakespeare’s day, the object being not so much completely to realize a setting as to suggest or symbolize it. Little in the way of artificial lighting was possible, yet spectacular effects of no mean kind were obtained by the page entry of mass scenes and by rich costumes, for which actors were famous form very early times.
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