Because there is frustratingly scant evidence about early modern performance styles, scholars have looked for clues in the plays’ own meta-theatrical commentaries, such as Hamlet's diatribe against ham actors who ‘tear a passion to totters’ (3.2.9–10), or in rare contemporary illustrations of early modern performances, such as Henry Peacham's Titus Andronicus sketch in the Longleat manuscript. The 1997 Shakespeare's Globe and the attending Original Practices project has also offered scholars the oppor-tunity to test various hypotheses about early modern acting, at least to the extent that performance style is conditioned by a playhouse's architecture. These approaches have led to diverging conclusions, which John Wesley summed up in his 2017 article on gesture. Andrew Gurr, for example, believes that the turn of the seventeenth century marked a shift from ‘academic’ or ‘formal’ acting to a more ‘naturalistic’ style. For others, including Peter Thomson and Farah Karim-Cooper, there is evidence of ‘formal and natural styles’ coexisting. Wesley himself, pointing to a rhetorical tradition of envisaging conventional gestures as stabilised versions of naturally occurring ones, resists the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘natural’.

The limits of the ‘formal/natural’ opposition are hinted at in Karim-Cooper's discussion of Dominic Drumgoole's 2010 production of 1 Henry IV at Shakespeare's Globe. In The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage, Karim-Cooper infers from Roger Allam's performance as Falstaff that despite its size and open-air plan, the original Globe did not require excessive gesturing for purposes of clarity. Instead, she writes, ‘[a]ctors in the reconstructed Globe […] deploy a broad range of “gestural arts”, stillness being as effective in there as immoderate movement; formality as effective as instinctive or what we consider to be “natural” movement.’

The insight is extremely valuable, but the inverted commas and caveats around the word ‘natural’ are telling. One of the problems with the concept of ‘natural’ appears in early modern attempts to reconcile the ‘decorous’ and the ‘natural’, as in this locus classicus of performance theory, Hamlet's advice to the players:

In their search for novelty with which to sustain the interest of audiences in the new commercial playhouses, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights found a treasure trove of inspiration in the narrative works of Plutarch, Holinshed, Cinthio, Bandello, Lodge, and others. With this treasure came problems. Dramatising a narrative source meant devising ways of theatrically rendering an omniscient narrative voice, one with a God's eye view of extensive landscapes, hidden locations and the inside of a character's mind. The three appear in combination in the above quotation from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's principal source for Macbeth, when a gentleman is described as changing his mind about committing regicide as he rides from a witch's den to the king's castle. Leaving aside the gentleman's progression inside the castle, the two remaining difficulties combined in this line, namely how to show a character travelling over wide expanses of land and how to show a character's inner thoughts, might be rendered mimetically, with a player walking back and forth across the stage and speaking aloud to himself. This is indeed how some of Macbeth's soliloquies might be staged, such as in 1.7.1–28, when the would-be murderer voices his misgivings. However, the line quoted above does not specify how the change of mind occurred or whether travelling contributed to the gentleman's thoughts in any way. The ensuing depiction of thought as a mysterious process could not be easily conveyed by a soliloquy. Neither could it be conveyed by making no mention whatsoever of the character's inner debate, for his change of disposition would then appear absurd and unmotivated.

What appears in the above example is that Shakespeare was confronted with the problem not only of representing thought content but of representing thought as mysterious or hidden. This need can be related to the themes of the narratives he adapted, most of which involved betrayal, suspicion and deception.

In the programme for her 2006 Kneehigh/Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Cymbeline, Emma Rice wrote, ‘I want this production to celebrate the child in all of us.’ Cymbeline's affinity with children's stories has long been rec-ognised by theatre professionals and scholars alike. Peter Hall's 1957 RSC production adopted a fairy-tale aesthetic which Kennan Tynan praised as ‘a Grimm fable transmuted by the Cocteau of La Belle et la Bête’. This is consistent with Catherine Belsey's recognition of the play's Snow White motif, involving a wicked stepmother (the Queen), a reluctant hit man (Pisanio), and the poison-induced, death-like sleep of the heroine (Imogen). In addition to the fairy-tale pattern, the plot is rooted in a number of incidents going back to the protagonists’ childhoods. Imogen is heiress to the throne of Britain because her brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus, were kidnapped as toddlers. Her status as heiress is the main reason why her stepbrother, Cloten, covets her and will eventually be killed in pursuit of her. Also part of the backstory is the idyllic childhood friendship of Imogen and Posthumus, a court-raised orphan, which has blossomed into love, leading to a clandestine marriage. Posthumus's low birth is responsible for his banishment, and for the insecurity that leads him to lend his ear to slanderous accusations of his wife, and eventually to order her murder at the hands of his servant, Pisanio. Underscoring these plot features, the play has a pantomime quality, with an emphasis on gestures of approaching, giving and taking away, combined with a curious stylistic reliance on the rhetorical figure of apostrophe, involving addresses to absent people or abstract notions that are reminiscent of a child chatting with an imaginary friend.

It is partly through apostrophe that Cymbeline's fairy-tale aesthetic dovetails with more properly allegorical modes of storytelling. With their vocative addresses to ‘sleep’, ‘boldness’ or ‘Nature’, characters are shown grappling with forces unseen, giving verbal shape to numinous experience. Symbolic objects such as rings, bracelets and handkerchiefs may find themselves on the receiving end of such apostrophes, in a way that connects the magic objects of fairy tale to the symbolic signifiers of allegory. The line between fairy tale and allegory is also straddled by the play's dream sequence (5.4.29–92), which includes a mythological masque featuring Jupiter swooping down on an eagle and delivering an allegorical prophecy involving lions, trees and eagles.

Consistent with its epic theme, Troilus and Cressida begins in medias res. Instead of immediately identifying the cause of the Trojan war – the rape of Helen by Paris – the ‘Speaker of the Prologue’ opens with a description of the Greek princes’ angry reaction:

The antiquated ‘orgulous’ primes the audience to pay special attention to the second half of line 2, which identifies the ‘chaf[ing]’ of ‘high blood’ as the trigger of the war. The explanation is a socio-humoral one: ‘high blood’ means aristocratic blood, which in proud warriors is quick to react to a provocation. The ‘chafed blood’ image is allegorically amplified in the second half of the sentence, as the ‘fraught’ ships gathering around Athens recall Galen's description of anger as blood boiling around the heart. Allegorical echoes may also be detected in the reference to ‘the ministers and instruments’ of war, terms that in Galenic treatises often refer to the brain's faculties. With these opening lines, the Prologue is not only setting the stage for the upcoming action but also establishing the Trojan War as a reservoir of metaphors for characters’ emotions and states of mind in the play about to unfold. This reservoir is tapped into a mere thirty lines later, when Troilus sighs over the ‘cruel battle’ (1.1.3) between his heart and his will. On a more heroic scale, Hector describes Achilles's ‘hot blood’ (2.3.173) as the grounds of a battle between ‘his mental and active parts’ (174), in which the Greek hero ‘batters down himself’ (176).

The use of war as a metaphor for the struggle between the passions and reason is a commonplace of both classical and medieval thought. In Shakespeare's own time, it was a staple of both neo-Petrarchan love poetry and body politic imagery. It is thus not surprising to find Troilus and Cressida, a play about love, politics and war, making use of the convention. What is perhaps more striking is the way the Prologue's opening lines also set the stage for a more theatrically grounded way of allegorising the confrontation between blood and mind, one that is to be found in the play's many occurrences of blushing characters.

These words are spoken by Brutus in his garden on the eve of the assassination, as he awaits a visit from his co-conspirators. In an attempt to make sense of the inner turmoil caused by the fateful decision to kill ‘his best lover’ (3.2.45), Brutus resorts to a body politic metaphor, whereby the ‘mortal instruments’ overthrow ‘the genius’. It is also, of course, a mise en abyme of the play's main action, involving Caesar's overthrow by a group of senators, Rome's political ‘instruments’. Brutus's internalisation of the events being played out in the main action establishes the link between thought and political action as both causal and analogical, signalling that an allegorical reading of the play's action may offer insights into the main character's psyche. This is supported by the polysemy of ‘acting’, which could mean either ‘doing’ or ‘deciding’. Yet if polysemy tends to reinforce allegorical connections, it also breeds indeterminacy, as appears in editorial footnotes relating to ‘genius’ and ‘mortal instruments’. In the 1998 Arden edition, David Daniell glosses ‘genius’ as ‘guardian spirit’, and the ‘mortal instruments’, as ‘the human functions of mind and body’. These definitions are broad enough to blur the line between material and immaterial agents, consistent with the openness of ‘acting’. Is Brutus, then, referring to the brain and the hand? The soul and the brain? The heart and the will?

Though the exact referents of Brutus's metaphor may be elusive, the speech showcases allegory as a cognitive tool for exploring states of mind and the mechanics of decision-making. While the opacity of Brutus's speech, in keeping with the darkness of the night, suggests that the tool is an imperfect one, it is perhaps no accident that his musings at this juncture are repeatedly inter-rupted by a young servant with the evocative name of ‘Lucius’, who runs around performing errands for him, lets in characters from the outside, and jogs his flagging memory.

Just as Brutus's house stood for his memory, Macbeth's castle stands for his conscience. The play's foregrounding of fateful entrances and doorways, as in Lady Macbeth's ‘hoarse raven’ speech and in the porter scene, has led critics such as David Wiles and Jennifer C. Vaught to point out parallels between Shakespeare's Scottish play and such medieval morality plays as The Castle of Perseverance, where the castle stands for the soul's protection against the temptation of evil, its gates functioning both as vulnerable points of entry and strategic bulwarks. The parallels lie in great part in a moralised use of stage space, which allows characters’ movements to be read as spiritual progresses. On the medieval stage, for example, ‘the movement from left to right […] leads to hell’. Yet it does not lead there irrevocably, because of the pre-Reformation assumption that the soul is free. Macbeth, however, is a tragedy. Its movements, both physical and mental, are one-directional. In this chapter, I will argue that the play constitutes the murderous thane's castle as a tragic allegory of his mind through a poetics of thresholds. In Macbeth, doorways are powerful signifiers of irreversibility, the allegorical counterparts of a mind committed to evil. Though Macbeth can work in all kinds of venues, the following discussion will assume a seventeenth-century Globe performance, as the allegorical model I will be developing is rooted in the Globe theatre's architecture, in classical, medieval and Renaissance castle metaphors, and in the cultural moment defined by the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. These contextual elements come together in one thick knot, resulting in a vibrant ‘objective correlative’ of Macbeth's mind surrendering to evil. This chapter thus explores the ‘grounded’ dimension of Macbeth's castle allegory, arguing that its sinister vitality derives from the process of adaptation, the epistemological context, and the ritual power of the staged oath. I will begin, as Shakespeare did, with the Holinshed source.

Staging Holinshed: Vanishing, Tracking and Blending

It can safely be assumed that sometime in the early years of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare could be found poring over Raphael Holinshed's ‘Chronicles of Scotland’, with a view to adapting the story of Macbeth, the treacherous thane, for the stage.

The river Tiber runs through Shakespeare's Roman plays as it runs through Rome, and as the Thames runs through London. Both symbolising and dividing the city, the river is a rich source of allegory for Rome's historical internal conflicts, such as that between Caius Martius and the hungry plebs in Coriolanus. Beyond its evocation of division, the river's allegorical potential stems from a tradition of describing crowds as unruly bodies of water requiring management. Though this commonplace is illustrated in several of Shakespeare's plays, as in Hamlet, when Claudius describes Laertes as leading an ‘ocean’ (4.5.100) of followers, it is particularly salient in Coriolanus, where controlling the plebeian crowd is often spoken of as a water-engineering problem. As Paul Menzer and others have discussed, such imagery was also applied to playgoing audiences. In this chapter, I will argue that the structural similarities between Coriolanus's plebeians and London's playgoing crowds amplify the play's water-engineering metaphors and help turn them into allegories of thought. The leap from water as a crowd allegory to water as a mind allegory is facilitated by the Hydra figure, this chapter's master metaphor.

Much of this chapter's discussion will involve making educated assumptions about how an early seventeenth-century London audience would react to various stimuli. To reduce the specula-tive character of this approach, I will place it within the conceptual frameworks of Cognitive Metaphor Theory, which, as seen in Chapter 2, holds that metaphors grow out of embodied experience, and Jungian archetype theory, which holds that literary works strike the imagination by activating shared internalised symbols. Both theories will be modified by historical and contextual considerations. Building on these frameworks, I will submit that Coriolanus's water-based allegories of thought come into being when imagery is ‘plugged into’ a sensing and moving audience, with memory and imagination at the ready.

The Context: Hungry Plebs and Thirsty Londoners

Coriolanus's entire plot is powered by plebeian hunger, which triggers the showdown between the people and Caius Martius, later Coriolanus. The topicality of the hunger theme, in the context of the 1607–8 Midland corn riots, has long been noted in the play's critical history.