What facilities did venues have for Shakespeares plays?

Answer 1

Productions of plays shape themselves to the available venue. Directors find ways to make the play work in the space that is available. That was true even in Shakespeare's day, even though they didn't have directors then. The Lord Chamberlain's Men had access to theatres which were built for putting on plays in, but they also performed on temporary and makeshift stages in palace ballrooms, innyards, meeting halls and guildhalls.

The theatres of the day were modeled on innyards and had some of the same features: a gallery ran all around the yard which could be a place for people to sit but could also be acted on in the section behind the stage, if the play needed a balcony or the crow's nest of a ship or the walls of a besieged city. The temporary stage could have a hole in it which could be a grave or a trench or the gate to Hell.

Permanent theatres had both of these features. They also had a hole in the ceiling that an actor could drop down out of, as a descending god or something, and a small room at the back of the stage in which spies could be concealed behind an arras, or two Chess players discovered.

As venues changed over the centuries so too did the advantages which a director could exploit. Indoor venues at first had to be lit by candlelight which meant that they had to have intermissions to trim the candles. The development of the proscenium stage, which was only visible to the audience from one direction, allowed for much more complex set pieces and attempts to more realistically portray the settings for the plays. Modern lighting technology enables modern directors to abandon these clunky sets and build sets out of light which are quickly changed. As a result, the three-sided thrust stages that Shakespeare's contemporaries used and which give much more scope for movement are coming back into style.