ABSTRACT
Sixty or so years ago, in discussions of the Elizabethan public-theater stage, emphasis was chiefly on an acting area behind an assumed front curtain. Today, in many quarters, emphasis has shifted to an acting area in front of an assumed rear curtain. William Poel, actor and director, sick of the elaborate mutilation of Shakespeare in the Victorian theater, set himself, in the eighties and nineties, to discover and use again the way the plays had been given in Shakespeare's own time. A basic difference of opinion on the Elizabethan stage concerns the size and importance of the discoverable spaces. The advantages of the open stage have been stated with special insight by Richard Southern in The Open Stage, and by Tyrone Guthrie in "Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario" and My Life in the Theatre. The actor is close to his audience, and thus can easily establish and maintain an intimacy of acting style.
