It comes alive when you think of these living, human bodies smelling and yelling things. Esther French is the web producer. It also, you know, flows and it moves if you’re using any kind of liquid. So why don’t you just tell us very practically, how did Elizabethan theater companies make that effect? This is a play that’s very much about smell. And, you know, we still have that kind of notional sense. It’s an amazing prop. You know, now it’s in a different smelling environment. Throughout the early modern period, we have equal references to hearing and seeing plays. If you went to the theater, and the next day at work you told a friend about it, your friend did not respond by saying, “Oh, wow, how did it smell?” It turns out, in Shakespeare’s day, that was not such a safe bet. Thanks. STERN: I think that the chapter title is, in fact, “They Eat Each Other’s Arms” [LAUGHTER]. I mean, Julius Caesar refers to his doublet and Cleopatra wants her lace cut. She’s very interested in those. Blood Elf names - World of Warcraft . BOGAEV: I’ve seen pictures of this. Labrador BOGAEV: That’s true, but yeah, the assumptions are different, that’s right, and they are more metaphorical, but also more shocking in a way. Shakespeare loves this kind of layered metatheater, where at your most factual, you’re at your most fictional, and sort of vice versa. KARIM-COOPER: So, yeah, it was a world of paint. That was a unique and very particular theatrical experiment, which ultimately didn’t work. I mean, you know, Game of Thrones has a massive following and it’s not just because of the interesting story lines. It’s become a misconception, it’s become a thing that school teachers say, you know? I mean, I suppose it’s, as students of Shakespeare, what we always want to do is get to the bottom of his plays or to find out more, to find out what we didn’t know before. And, I think, Lucy is steering clear from saying that it is one thing, but she’s talking about the range of symbol and realism that it simultaneously covers, and the fear and joy the audience simultaneously feel when they see it, then as now. And, in fact, I think the whole book deals with Shakespeare as a man of the senses: aural, visual, and touch and taste, all the senses. FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. BOGAEV: So, The Globe, which was outdoors, and Blackfriars was indoors. The noisy, blood-soaked arenas were hugely popular, and they were later considered the main competition to the plays put on at theaters such as the Rose and the Globe. Like the theater itself, it was a form of hypocrisy. KARIM-COOPER: They’re always commercial. And, Hamlet goes, oh, I don’t know whether this is really a ghost, or is it a goblin damned. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. And, actually, there were a lot of recipe manuals being published at the same time. Ben Jonson, English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic. London’s bear pits were home to creatures with nicknames such as “Ned Whiting,” “Harry Hunks” and “Blind Bess.” Another famous bear, the great “Sackerson,” was even referenced by name in Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor. STERN: Yes. STERN: Yes. All rights reserved. And when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and the slather hanging about his physiognomy.”, Bear baiting in London in the 1820s. So why don’t we start with you, Tiffany: is there a misconception about the experience of theater in Shakespeare’s day and, if so, where does this bias or this interpretation come from? KARIM-COOPER: Well, yeah, that is the $60 million question. I’m thinking that the Queen wears cosmetics, but respectable women might not, or might be ashamed of it. Bulldogs are typically stocky, powerful, square-built animals with large, strong, brachycephalic-type muzzles. On one level, it’s femininity. Learn everything about the history of the English language, various eras in British history, and all facts about the Elizabethan era. It was the words, it was marvelously and fabulously the words, but it was the words and the other senses. Audiences delighted in watching the bulls throw the attack dogs into the air with their horns, and it was widely believed that baiting helped make the bull’s beef more tender and safe for consumption. “Awake Your Senses” was produced by Richard Paul. It was very important to them that their plays were appealing to as wide an audience as possible. We now call it make-up, we’ve made it different from the thing you put on houses, but it’s interesting that they are using the same terminology. For the Folger Shakespeare Library, I’m Folger Director Michael Witmore. But the other point I was making is that we tend, in a rather blasé way, we often talk about something that we call metatheater. She’s really interested in those, and kind of that hazy line between sort of realism and kind of unbelievable symbolism and kind of fictionality. You know, buildings or manor houses or churches? So almost certainly for an indoor theater, you’re going to use something like a thunder run, which is when you put a cannon ball in a long box. So entrances and exits and positions on stage will really have extraordinary interpretive relevance to the audience. ... as well as a constant blood flow to the site. A Midsummer Night's DreamThe TempestNathan the Wise, Streaming for freeFull performance + special features. KARIM-COOPER: Oh, god, they’re always commercial. But, she’s able to point out how careful the staging is actually, to avoid too much ruination of expensive stuffs just because the bleeding’s taken place. Or there was a debate about it? He plays with that all the time with the pillars on the stage, with the back of the stage, that was called the “scene.” So, whenever he refers to a “scene,” you’re geographically thinking about the practical stage, and you’re also metaphorically thinking about divisions in a play, and you’re also practically hearing a person who’s saying that. Bear in mind, however, that there is an additional charge for the dewclaw removal, and the puppy may have bandages on the rear legs for 7–10 days, as well as an Elizabethan collar. Due to the broad nature of the concept, most historians narrow their scope by focusing on a particular time period, a particular country or region, a particular person, group, or individual person, a particular theme, or any combination of those categories. You know, very often, either it’s on the face, or on the arms, kind of cleanable…. No one else has ever one this! So we have a drawing by Henry Peacham, which scholars have suggested is a sort of scene from Titus Andronicus. Among his major plays are the comedies Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1605), Epicoene; Reading the book, I was thinking, it brings this alive. Recovery from dewclaw removal in an older dog can cause dogs and people more headaches than recovery from the spay or neuter. BOGAEV: That’s exactly it. I mean, theater was competing with bear and dog fights, right? And, again, she’s intrigued by the interchange between those two. And so, what you see is a kind of surrogacy of paint happening in other kinds of buildings like theaters, like big country homes, where huge amounts of money were spend on paint. Garland Scott is the associate producer. We call this podcast Awake Your Senses. BOGAEV: It’s like Disney’s Mulan or something. If you’ve been enjoying Shakespeare Unlimited, I hope you’ll consider reviewing the podcasts on whatever platform you get the podcast from. People entered their own animals in these, watched, or wagered money on the outcome. We very much want to think of him as more than just a man of the word on the page. Sw-ee-vel? BOGAEV: And, it’s about stage blood. And so, paint is used not just in terms of creating femininity, but also it creates blood, ghosts… it was a useful thing for actors. STERN: Yes. BOGAEV: And, they get into the real nitty-gritty of how Shakespeare and the playwrights interwove the physical and sensual theater with the text. Firstly, I think I give a couple of examples of Shakespeare talking about spectating, but also Evelyn Tribble writes a whole interesting chapter on the importance of the visual side of Shakespeare. STERN: Well, so Lucy Munro talks marvelously about this and the very different materials you might use for stage blood, which include animal blood, paint, obviously, which Andrew Stevens talks about, vinegar, vermillion, which are used in cosmetics—So there are all kinds of different things that might be used for blood. Blood sports remained popular. Very different to todays game football had no few rules and was a … STERN: Yes, exactly. Near the end of his classic 1606 play Macbeth, William Shakespeare included a scene in which the doomed title character says that his enemies, “have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course.” The line might seem inconsequential to modern readers, but for the audiences that watched the Bard’s plays 400 years ago, it would have been an obvious reference to one of the most popular pastimes of the day: bear-baiting. That’s Lucy Munro’s amazing chapter. And, Tiffany, you wrote an essay that explains this very well, and says, and I’m going to quote from it, for instance, “Theaters at the time offered an unchanging backdrop for every play mounted within them, with universal lighting which imposed the same mode on every play.” You go on to write that, “Every play had essentially the same staging and that explains the repeated plea for imagination throughout Shakespeare.” So theater was a bit of a blank canvas. BOGAEV: So in Hamlet when the ghost is underneath the stage and he says, “Swear,” it has all of that extra meaning. Were a lot of spaces painted, period, in public space? STERN: And, that’s what Hamlet says, of course. STERN: But, its title is “They Eat Each Other’s Arms.”. KARIM-COOPER: Well, the evidence we have suggests that they would have, but that they wouldn’t necessarily have been bogged down in too much historical detail. History. Swevel? Yes, in that theater was in direct competition with bear-baiting, which also took place in round, outdoor spaces that looked very much like the round theaters, and cost similar money. So she looks at how carefully blood is used. “There are as many civil religious men here, as there are saints in hell,” one critic wrote of the bear pits. I’ve heard scholars and people like theater historians say things like, “People in Elizabethan times went to hear a play.” That implies to me that theater going used to be more about the words, rather than the whole theatrical experience of lighting and costumes and special effects. KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, the best stage direction in early modern drama. BOGAEV: It’s also interesting though to place it in the context of the culture. What’s really fascinating about that is thinking about the fact that it may be that Shakespeare was the first playwright to have ever staged a storm in such a way. BOGAEV: Well, that brings me to your chapter on smells and what the theater smelled like and how, in one case, the smells were part of the effect. Still, since bears had to be imported from abroad at great cost, steps were usually taken to ensure that they didn’t die in the ring. He’s appealing to all of them. STERN: Yes, you would come on with a bloody handkerchief, or with a bloody shirt or something. And, that’s what your space, anyway, smells of. BOGAEV: So really you’re accommodating very different settings. But, that means when Hamlet talks about this “o’erhanging firmament…fretted with golden fire,” he’s on one level being fictional, talking about fictional heaven, but, he’s also in that stage, pointing at the factual, actual heaven and talking about it. I’m Michael Witmore, the Folger’s Director. So, that space has a bit of it called “heaven” and a bit of it called “hell.” So that when plays are being rather fictional about heaven and hell, they’re also being extremely practical and factual about the stage on which they’re occurring. I really like the chapter title, “Enter Bleeding.” [LAUGH]  What did—. 10. And the way in which you know things is through the body, and it’s through the entire body. And, you know, there is evidence that they painted the theaters, and that they were very keen to upkeep that paint, because it was an important visual component of their theater-making. In fact, many of the same Londoners who flocked to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre were also patrons of the nearby “Bear Gardens,” where bears, dogs, bulls, chimps and other creatures routinely fought to the death in front of roaring crowds. MICHAEL WITMORE: Here’s something I can pretty much guarantee. From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. We had production help from Cathy Devlin and Dom Boucher at the Sound Company in London and Paul Luke and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Okay, yes. Absolutely. After a visit to the Bear Gardens in 1670, the English diarist John Evelyn pronounced the games a “rude and dirty pastime” that reveled in “barbarous cruelties.”. That these areas were called heaven and hell the same way we think about upstage and downstage? Hamlet says to Ophelia, “I have heard of your paintings… God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.” It was a source of constant fear, but that was actually because it was a constant thing. And, we’ve always been compelled by blood, but that doesn’t mean it’s just trivial. An actual, physical space, not just metaphorical? It’s not just hearing. STERN: But, there are practical differences. They’re clearly both extremely important, and the oddity of picking the word hear over the word see is traceable to a particular academic… and I don’t think I’ll go into that now. By then, shifting attitudes about animal cruelty had led many to write the games off as a vile and despicable practice. And, I think, you know, if the audience is being denied the smell of blood and urine and death from the bear-baiting, well, they’re getting it in the theater instead. KARIM-COOPER: And squibs. The very word theater, which was the name of the first, round, permanent theater in London, comes from the Greek. This podcast episode, Awake Your Senses, was produced by Richard Paul. The term English Renaissance theatre encompasses the period between 1562—following a performance of Gorboduc, the first English play using blank verse, at the Inner Temple during the Christmas season of 1561—and the ban on theatrical plays enacted by the English Parliament in 1642.. You know, so many people have this feeling like, oh, this is this dead thing, or I might have to read it in school. What’s really fascinating is thinking about Shakespeare’s repertory moving from the outdoors to the indoors and what accommodations or adjustments that Shakespeare and his company were making. For instance, Farah, did actors wear togas for the Roman plays? Blood elves are high elves who, after the Scourge invasion of their kingdom, changed their names to blood elves to reflect both their royal lineage and the loss of life they suffered because of this invasion. BOGAEV: You give a lot of examples of this. STERN: —or head. Choose from a variety of Folger events and programs, on Capitol Hill, around Washington, DC, and across the country. It isn’t just sensationalism, it is sensation. Perhaps the strangest show of all involved a chimpanzee, or “jack-an-apes,” which would be strapped onto the back of a horse and then set loose into the ring to be chased by a pack of snarling dogs. But, I was saying that there are very complicated kinds of metatheater going on in that space. Stage setting design drawing by Cyril Walter Hodges. . There were all kinds of pyrotechnics that were used in the theaters. We had production help from Cathy Devlin and Dom Boucher at the Sound Company in London and Paul Luke and Andrew Feliciano at at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our reference librarians can help you! KARIM-COOPER: I mean, the point of the book is to really make people aware of that, but also how those effects work in concert with the writing itself. I’m also thinking, besides the trap doors and on the stage the greatest effects were storms and, particularly, lightning. Various sports played during the Elizabethan Era included spectator/blood sports, team sports, simple games, and individual amusement activities.