ABSTRACT
Across much of the sixteenth century, the norm in money-raising theatre was for a collection to be taken from spectators at some juncture during the performance or directly after it, since performance venues were continuously open to access. But the Theatre’s founding in 1576 marked the consolidation of a relatively novel institutional arrangement: spectators paid to enter a building specifically designed for theatrical performance, and what they encountered in this building differed in several ways from what they were likely to find in the public spaces which surrounded it. The theatre is a space for action, but one closed off from generally accessed space; the action for which it is prepared spans what occurs onstage and what can be conceived as occurring out of sight, beyond doors at the rear of the stage through which players make their entrances and exits. Recent essays by Richard Preiss and Peter Womack have explored the implications for drama of the construction of interior, out-of-view spaces (the theatre space itself as separated from its inhabited surroundings, and also within that the area which the tiring house closes from view), and of the stage as a representational threshold space treated as abutting on spaces around it.1
