tion]

The peculiarities in the presentation of a play due to the arrangement
of the stage were considerable, and have been the subject of much
discussion and misunderstanding among investigators. There is, however,
no doubt that the action was largely on the front stage, and that most
of the scenes, at least in Shakespeare's lifetime, were designed for
presentation on this projecting platform. Since there was no
drop-curtain, actors had some distance to traverse, on entrances and
exits, between the doors and the front. At the end of a scene or a play,
all must retire, and the bodies of the dead must be carried out. Hence a
tragedy often ends with a funeral procession, a comedy with a dance. The
indications of scene supplied by modern editors for Shakespeare's plays
help to visualize a modern presentation, but are misleading as to
Shakespeare's intentions or an Elizabethan performance. The majority of
scenes in his plays differ strikingly from those in a modern play in
that they offer no hints as to the exact locality. Often it is not clear
from the text whether the scene is conceived as indoors or outdoors, in
the palace, or the courtyard, or before the entrance. Even when the
scene is presumably within a room, there is often no indication of the
nature of the furnishings, never any of the elaborate attention to
details of setting, such as we find in a play by Pinero or Shaw.
Sometimes placards were hung up indicating the scene of a play, but
apparently these merely gave the general scene, as "Venice" or "Verona,"
and did not often designate localities more closely. In fact the
majority of the scenes were probably written with no precise conception
of their setting. They were written to be acted on a front stage, bare
of scenery, projecting out into the audience. This did not represent a
particular locality, but rather any locality whatever.

The inner stage and the gallery above, and to some extent the doors and
the windows, were used to indicate specific localities when these were
necessary. The gallery represented the wall of a town, an upper story of
a house, or any elevated locality. The doors represented doors to houses
or gates to a city, and the windows or balconies over them were often
used for the windows of the houses. The inner stage was used in various
ways to indicate a specific locality requiring properties, and this use
apparently increased as time went on, and especially in the indoor,
artificially li