Their purchase is in any case a measure of the supremacy of the King’s Men in the London theatre. No adult company had ever leased an indoors theatre, and no adult company had ever before played within the walls of the city. The playhouse was in a wealthy and respectable neighbourhood, too, close to the playgoing members of the Inns of Court. Ben Jonson lived here as did Shakespeare’s friend, Richard Field; it was also a haven of painters’ studios and the workshops of feather-makers. It is also worth observing that no other company had ever boasted the proprietorship of two theatres, or extended itself to the purchase of an indoors “winter” theatre and an outdoors “summer” theatre. As it turned out, the financial gamble of the new “sharers” paid off, and their profit at the Blackfriars playhouse was almost twice that of their profit from the Globe.
The cost of a token at the Blackfriars playhouse was 6 pence for the gallery, contrasted with a penny or 2 pence for the Globe. A shilling purchased a bench in the pit, closer to the level of the stage, and a half-crown bought a box. Gallants and devotees could hire a stool and sit upon the stage for 2 shillings; this was a habit apparently detested by the actors themselves, for obvious reasons, but it seems to have made economic sense. There was no standing room. Yet the Blackfriars Theatre had attractions of its own. Its use of music, in a closed space, was more elaborate. It had indoor illumination, with candles or torches, and was much more appropriate for formal and masque-like effects. The candles were hung from candelabra which could be lowered for “mending” or trimming, but for afternoon performances the windows allowed natural light to enter the proceedings. There was no curtain and there were no “footlights”; the auditorium was as brightly illuminated as the stage.
It has often been suggested that Shakespeare’s dramaturgy changed after the removal to the Blackfriars Theatre, and that he increased the spectacular and the ritual elements of his drama. It is an interesting supposition but of course his use of Blackfriars postdates the highly ritualistic Pericles, which was performed at the Globe; it should also be remembered that in subsequent years his drama was to be seen at the Globe as well as at Blackfriars. There was no sudden or wholesale change in his art. Yet he was a skilful and professional man of the stage, and he made some alterations for the production of his plays in the private theatre. It is even possible that he added songs and music to old “favourites” such as Macbeth. The intimacy of the new theatre, which held some seven hundred spectators instead of the thousands at the Globe, may also have prompted him to make some changes in action and in dialogue. Many of these changes were not noted in the published versions of the plays, and are thus irrecoverable.
The King’s Men also now commissioned from other dramatists plays that were more suitable for the smaller space of Blackfriars. From this time forward, for example, most of Ben Jonson’s dramas were written for the company. Jonson’s success as a writer of court masques, and his previous career as the writer of plays for the children’s company, made him eminently suitable for the more refined audiences of the indoor playhouse. He wrote The Alchemist for this audience, succeeded by plays such as Catiline and The Magnetic Lady. At this juncture, also, the King’s Men employed the play-writing skills of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher; they had written all their plays for the private theatres, and were obvious candidates for the Blackfriars stage. Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare in the older dramatist’s final works. It may in fact have been Shakespeare who discerned his talent and urged his colleagues to hire him. Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster bears a striking resemblance to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, but it is not clear which came first. The important point, however, is that they were both written for the conditions of the new theatre. Indeed in later years the King’s Men would become associated with, and identified by, the Blackfriars playhouse as their principal centre of operations.
There is one other change that is associated with the use of indoor playhouses. From 1609 onwards the plays of the King’s Men were divided into acts and intervals. Earlier dramas, when published after this date, have also been artificially divided into acts. It had become the new convention, dependent entirely upon the new conditions of the indoors playhouse where musical interludes became more significant; there was also the necessity of trimming the candles, for which the interval gave a convenient opportunity. Intervals had in any case already been introduced into the performances at court and at the Inns. They had become the token of a more “polite” attitude towards the experience of play-going. They were the fashion.
It is only to be expected that Shakespeare himself accepted the theatrical innovation in his last plays, and that he handled it expertly. He even revised the structure of some of his earlier plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, in order to accommodate the use of acts; in the latter case, particularly, he used the opportunity of restaging to make large revisions to the play itself. But there is no clear or general transformation. All of his subsequent plays could have been performed either at the Globe or at Blackfriars.
Coriolanus may be a case in point. It is a play that seems naturally to form itself into acts, and the sound of cornets is demanded on two occasions. Cornets were generally supplied in private playhouses. But Coriolanus also calls for trumpets, a Globe speciality, and some of the play’s staging would suggest the larger arena of the public playhouse. So he composed it with both stages in mind. There were other Roman plays in the period, Sejanus and Catiline among them, but no one had previously treated the theme of Coriolanus, the Roman nobleman who refused to co-operate with the plebeians, and was exiled from the city only to return with an enemy army. Shakespeare had known the story from his schoolboy reading, and invoked the name of Coriolanus in the very early play of Titus Andronicus. He was one of the figures of Shakespeare’s imagination. Shakespeare found the general story in North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, one of his most constantly used and prolific source-books. By curious chance a paper survives, noting that a copy of North’s translation was borrowed from the library of Ferdinando Stanley; it was loaned to one “Wilhelmi” by Ferdinando’s wife, Alice, and returned in 1611.
Shakespeare proceeded to intensify the drama of Plutarch’s central characters. There is a spareness in the language that is reminiscent of Julius Caesar, another Roman play in which a mighty figure is raised and pulled down. There are passages, however, where he seems undecided between verse and prose; in the cauldron of creation, they were indistinguishable. He had also become more interested in the theatrical possibilities of a particular flaw or weakness in character, whether amorousness in Antony or pride in Coriolanus. Yet as with all of Shakespeare’s most important figures, Coriolanus is conceived in ambiguity. The rules or standards of interpretation are never clear, and there is no possibility of any final judgement. Like his maker, he remains opaque. He exists; he sings his high chant; and then he is ended.