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In the academy, play-openings have been studied less frequently than their endings. This critical lacuna in early modern theatre scholarship is particularly surprising because, like the ending, the opening contains implications for the composition, production, and reception of a play. Considering the significance that an opening has in captivating audience attention, the construction of the opening in Shakespeare's day (but also in our own) posed practical challenges to those charged with the task of staging it.
Since the turn of the twentieth century, the subject of play-openings has received a modest amount of attention. Recently, and with specific reference to early modern theatre, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann's Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama presents interesting attempts to describe certain components of Shakespearean openings. However, critical interest in their study, as much as in those of their predecessors (Arthur Sprague, Thelma Greenfield, Tiffany Stern, and Robert Willson Jr.), has focused largely on describing the dramatic forms that typically set plays in motion (namely, prologue, induction, framing dialogue, and so on).1 My interest in this essay lies elsewhere: I shall attempt to define Shakespeare's technique of opening, as well as analyze strategies for reading openings that have a direct bearing on how they are staged.
I begin by advancing theoretical considerations on openings that are supported by an approach to reading the playtext that underscores its theatricality. Thereafter, I demonstrate my arguments by examining summarily the evidence provided by the opening of Hamlet and by a detailed study of the opening of Macbeth in the Folio text.2 My choice of plays may strike some readers as odd, since the Folio text of Macbeth and the Quarto and Folio texts of Hamlet have been subjected so often to close readings. I do so because even the most detailed and illuminating studies, such as Stephen Booth's "On the Value of Hamlet " (1969) and Marvin Rosenberg's The Masks of Macbeth (1978) and The Masks of Hamlet (1992), all present readings that fail to clearly distinguish between theatrical and literary parameters. By contrast, my reading relies upon theatrical parameters exclusively in order to show how Shakespeare constructed his openings, as well as how he communicated practical information for staging them to his actors and...