Given our previous clue about their destination we must presume that the Prince is saying “come away” to the court. The next line is spoken by a new character the Porter who refers to the “king’s gate” and that somebody has been “rapping” on it. No stage direction is given for the arrival of the porter or for the movement of the prince and his companions, but the internal evidence of the dialogue tells us that they have arrived at court and have knocked on the king’s gate. But how was this performed? What we have here is a textual riddle that needs to be unraveled before we can stage the scene.
What do we know? The prince is travelling to the court. A porter speaks on stage. And someone has knocked on the king’s gate. A literalist approach to staging this section would demand the presence of a stage property to represent the king’s gate. However, such a property would be expensive and difficult to transport and the expense and inconvenience hardly seems worth it for such a short section of the play. Furthermore, the action of the play would have to stop as the “king’s gate” was brought on stage. Click here to see the way we chose to stage this section of action
[Link to Video – stage one, part two – 36:35-38:14. When video ends the text below appears in the comments section. The video window might go to an image of the Porter sticking his head through the curtain.]
As a general principal in our production we looked for the simplest effective way to perform the text while staying true to the majority of the stage directions. You will note that once the prince calls his men to “come away” they simply cross the stage to exit curtain (stage right) and knock on the frame of tiring house. The Porter’s words then establish that this represents “rapping at the king’s gate” and the action is suddenly translated from “somewhere in London” to “outside the king’s court.” This simple solution is in keeping with Elizabethan stage practice as we know that Elizabethan theatre practitioners were more inclined to call on the imagination of their audience than we are today [link to other refs. MSND?]. Once we accept that the imagination of the audience is active, then there is no need for an elaborate stage structure to represent the king’ s gate.
You might also note that the Porter does not really enter; he simply sticks his head through the curtain. This was a piece of business that was generated by the actors in rehearsal. We liked it because it was quite funny, it also represented the kind of window you find in castle gates through which porter’s peer to see who wants to come in, and it saved the expense of one costume. You might also note that the Porter “enters” from stage right which breaks our basic blocking protocol. This came about because the prince and his companions were moving to new location and therefore it felt right that they should travel to the other side rather than return stage left. Here we were abiding by a sense of stage realism which I don’t think was necessary and led to a strange sequence of blocking as you will see.