What Was The upper stage on the globe theatre?

Answer 1

All of the large open-air public theatres had, as far as we can tell, a large balcony above the stage with direct access from the tiring house (the building right behind the stage). The only actual picture of this is a picture of the Swan Theatre, built some four years before the Globe, which shows this balcony being flush with the tiring house wall at the back of the stage. In the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre which opened in 1996, the upper stage projects over the stage.

We surmise that all the public theatres had such an upper stage because of the frequency of scenes in various plays of the time which seem to have been written with the upper stage in mind. Such scenes in Shakespeare include not only the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, but scenes involving conversations between someone on city walls and someone else on the ground (Henry V, King John), or between someone on the upper and lower parts of a castle (Richard II).