Silence, Silences, and Shakespeare’s Silence

As a theatre historian my elusive goal over four decades has been to reconstruct what the original playgoers actually saw at those first performances at the Globe or Blackfriars. Such a pursuit is fraught with problems, because the evidence, whether in stage directions, dialogue, or the rare eyewitness account, is murky or non-existent. My mantra has therefore been “the norm is silence” – and those silences can be deafening. My goal in this essay is to provide some representative examples in order to raise a series of questions. What are the limitations of the evidence that can be gleaned from stage directions? Are we missing now what would have been obvious then? To what extent have hit-the-playgoer over the head onstage images, actions, or configurations in the 1590s and early 1600s been lost or blurred today? In short, what are the implications of the various kinds of silence?[1]

What Stage Directions Do Not Tell Us

Occasionally, the surviving stage directions can be detailed and evocative, as with accounts of dumb shows (as in Hamlet, 3.2), battle scenes (as in Cymbeline, 5.2), or scenes that involve special effects or pageantry (as in The Tempest and Henry VIII). More typical are open or permissive signals, as with entrances that call for specified figures “and others” or “with as many as can be,” or a larger group that contains coded terms or formulae (vanish; they fight; enter unready or in his study) that leave much to the implementation of the players.…