Richard Fotheringham
Amphitheater Staging: In-the-Round or to the Front (and What About Asides)?
Volume 35.2, Summer 2001

Using as evidence the Rose excavations, Herbert Berry’s 1986 reconstruction of the Boar’s Head playhouse, and other visual and playscript evidence of performances in London and on the continent in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century, Fotheringham argues that, contrary to the tendency to assume actors in the public amphitheaters played to audiences on all sides, “in-the-round,” there is extensive evidence that the actors in Shakespeare’s plays used a strongly frontal presentational style, similar to that of Moliere’s theater half a century later. As example, it explores what this might mean for the staging of “asides” in the Elizabethan theater.

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