In our group discussion during class I brought up the idea of costuming and staging in The Tempest, especially the feast scene where a table full of food disappears from before Alonso and company and there are misshapen spirits and fantastical beings. I was wondering how they would have accomplished these things in the Renaissance and how the production we are going to see this weekend might do it differently. I didn't do much research because I wanted to use this blog a bit creatively and focus more on how I think it could be done.
Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and, with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes.
In class, we talked about possibly having the table full of food lifted up into the air and out of view. That's possible for a production today, but in the Renaissance the typical place for these performances was the Globe Theatre, which is outdoors, and has no roof to hoist a table up to. For Shakespeare's time I picture someone out of sight making loud banging noises for thunder as shadows were made in whatever lighting they had to represent lightning. There could have been a long, thin table, so that the feast could appear large and appetizing. The table could be stationed over the trapdoor so that when Ariel hits it with his wings it folds in the middle and falls down through the trapdoor and out of sight.
There are many other ways it could have been done. The only thing we get from the text is that a "quaint device" was used. My footnotes indicate that the word quaint meant something different in those days, and that it was some sort of mechanism or person designed to make the banquet disappear with a blend of "imagination, skill, and elegance."
When the spirits and strange beings perform, we get these descriptions from the text:
Enter several strange shapes.
"Who would believe that there were mountaineers,
Dewlapped like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em
Wallets of flesh, or that there were such men
Whose heads stood in their breasts" -Gonzalo
There's more description here than there are with many other fantastical things in The Tempest, which potentially makes it harder for productions to live up the Gonzalo's words and Shakespeare's original plan for this play. With this I am mostly curious to see if the production we go to this weekend will include these people with heads in their breasts and fleshy throats, or if they will simplify the spirits for convenience's sake. I hope they keep it in, because I am really curious to see how it would be done.
I know I don't have much experience in planning and creating things like this, I've always been on the observer side of things. So I could use your input. How do you think people from the Renaissance could have pulled this off and made it a thing of spectacle without any kind of modern special effects? And what are you hoping to see this weekend?
Erik | October 26, 2011 at 10:37 PM
First of all, I think that if I see anything remotely similar to the artist's interpretation of Caliban that figures in the picture above, my wish for Halloween scare will have been fulfilled. I am most anxious this weekend to see what they will use for his costume. As far as the renaissance production goes, that question about the table had me perplexed, too. I think at least to the actor's credit it must have taken a lot of talent to pull something like that off without much in the way of special effects; then again maybe they were able to drop a table off the globe theatre roof for the spectacle?
acorkin | November 2, 2011 at 8:09 AM
I think it turned out incredibly don't you? I really felt like the supernatural elements were excellently executed. WE talked about in class how some people felt like it was over-done. I disagree! I thought it was cool. caliban was less monsterous and more clowny. which i liked.