Mariko Ichikawa

Overlapping Exits and Entrances

When he is tricking his father about his brother’s alleged treachery, in King Lear, 2.1, Edmund calls towards the tiring-house facade. It then takes Gloucester and his servants three and a half lines to arrive after Edgar has begun to make his exit.

Time Allowed for Exits

It seems most likely that in Elizabethan public playhouses the action usually took place at front-stage to allow the audience positioned on three or four sides of the stage to see and hear best.1 Whether the stage was very deep or comparatively shallow, an actor who made his exit from the front of the stage would need some time to complete his exit and get out of sight through one of the doors in the tiring-house facade. Shakespeare and most of his fellow playwrights, men of the theatre not least in their understanding of the size of the stages their plays were acted on, were fully aware of this fact. Even in those cases where the moves of exiting characters are not clearly built into the accompanying dialogue, a certain amount of time would have been allowed for the actors to complete their exits. The number of lines delivered by other characters while those making their exits were walking towards one of the stage doors give us the basis for calculating the amount of time the exits were expected to take.

The Use of Stage Doors

As we have discussed in Chapter 1, it is almost certain that the stages of most Elizabethan playhouses had three entryways, that is, two flanking doors and a central doorway or aperture. In the preceding chapters we have considered, in an ad hoc way, particular examples of the use of stage doors, but we have postponed a discussion of the conventions and ideas that governed their use. The question now needs to be addressed. Most entrances and exits were made through the flanking doors, and the central opening was used for special occasions. In addition to the question of how the actors would have known which door to use, and how they could have registered the aptness of any particular door for a particular entry or exit, the likely choreography of the moves to or from the doors raises a number of intriguing possibilities for the original staging. First we should deal with the use of the flanking doors.