Observing Shakespeare’s Lighting Effects on the Early Modern Stage

This chapter focuses entirely on how lighting effects may have been achieved in early modern theatres in which lighting was supplied by only daylight (outdoors) or a wash of universal lighting (indoors). I begin with the idea contained in Gertrude’s phrase “coinage of the brain” and use texts ranging from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to early-modern treatises on optics and illusion making (with special attention to the camera obscura) to argue that the theatre was imagined as a kind of camera obscura in which optical illusions were created through staging and verbal suggestion. I further draw connections between the perception of imaginary lighting effects in Shakespeare’s theatres with experiments and audience surveys conducted at the reconstructed Blackfriars Theatre in Virginia to argue that audience perceptions can actually be influenced by staging and language. After surveying some scenes from different plays, I focus on key moments in Romeo and Juliet to illustrate how staging and literal as well as metaphorical descriptions of light (“More light, more light!” “O she doth teach the torches to burn bright”) combine to create lighting effects that the audience might have imaginatively perceived.