Did the people involved in Shakespeare's plays use many props on stage and why?

Answer 1

The stages of all theatres in Shakespeare's time, as well as many if not most newly built ones nowadays, are called "thrust stages", that is, the stage thrusts forward from a back wall and the audience sits or stands on three sides of it. Exits and entrances are generally from the back wall, although they could be through the audience. This kind of stage makes for a very different kind of performance than a proscenium stage, where the audience is seated on one side of the stage only, as if they were watching through a large picture window. One of those differences is in stage dressing. On a thrust stage, large stage props like wardrobes can seriously interfere with the sight lines of parts of the audience. In addition, set changes are difficult because there are no wings on the sides of the stage to store props, although some could be above the stage in the roof (what we would now call the flies) or below it on a trapdoor. That is where the cauldron in Macbeth's famous cauldron scene came from. In addition, the playwriting conventions in the Elizabethan theatre called for a large number of changes of scene, some of which were accomplished by focussing the audience's attention on different parts of the stage alternately, but others, such as the scenes in Eastcheap in the Henry IV plays, required chairs, tables and the like. Clearly it was in the production's interest to minimise the number of stage props to cut down on scene change time. Therefore they were unlikely to use props for decorative or mood effects. For example, in the graveyard scene in Hamlet, Ophelia's grave would have been represented by the trapdoor onto which stagehands had placed a number of skulls which the gravedigger will throw out of the grave. The gravedigger entered with the hand prop of a shovel. But the stage would not have been decorated with fake tombstones or an elaborate mausoleum in order to tell the audience that the action was going on in a graveyard. The dialogue and the behaviour of the characters will establish that.