It is important to note that none of our production decisions are definitive nor should they be taken as so. It was part of the purpose of our project to experiment with staging solutions to the company’s plays. We tried to satisfy the evidence of the text as far as possible and to work within conditions that approximated Elizabethan practice, but the process above should show that our decisions were always based to a certain extent on speculation and surmise. Our understanding of Elizabethan theatrical practice is also limited by the scarcity of pictorial records, and the relationship between what is printed in a play and what was performed on stage is far from clear. That said, our process brought the primary source on performance (the surviving texts) into contact with the latest understanding of the conditions of performance, and the pragmatic demands of theatrical performance today. The solutions we came up with have allowed us to imagine the theatrical past in a vivid manner and forced us to confront the many staging challenges presented by these texts.
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-- StaceyWheal - 21 Jun 2007