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Shenandoah Shakespeare's mission, from the company's beginning, has been to show today's audiences what they have been missing almost since Shakespeare's lifetime. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century theatre is almost entirely in thrall to proscenium staging and the fourth wall, with "reality" the goal of sets and effects. Alternately, avant-garde and meta-theatrical, or self-referential, drama is often comprehensible only to a small group of theatre practitioners who are themselves consciously, and smugly, "in the know." Neither these mainstream nor fringe movements add to Shakespeare's contemporary staging, the conditions for which he wrote his plays. Shenandoah Shakespeare, on tour since 1988 and at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton since 2001, reproduces those conditions: a visible audience that is also involved in the action onstage and whose location and trappings are spoken rather than shown. Shenandoah Shakespeare now plans a Staunton Globe. To inaugurate this stage, I propose a production of Hamlet in which "The Mousetrap," the Prince's play within Shakespeare's tragedy, re-educates the audience, both with what they have been missing, Elizabethan staging, and with what they have become used to, Broadway-style verisimilitude. The three components of this "Mousetrap" that I wish to highlight are self-referential acting, a visually obstructed stage configuration, and a physical set.
 

First, like not only a great deal of modern but also early modern drama, "The Mousetrap," Prince Hamlet's modification of "The Murder of Gonzago," is extremely metatheatrical. As practitioners of the newly evolved phenomenon of professional theatre, Elizabethan dramatists were extremely self-aware, especially since they were often under attack for their immoral influence on audiences. Likewise, those audiences were highly attuned to the new form of entertainment, which commented on the changing political, social and linguistic climates as well as on the evolving theatre itself, with in-jokes about the playhouses, the actors and their audiences. The opening of not only a new theatre but a new kind of theatre in Staunton is a perfect opportunity for such commentary's revival.
 

Hamlet, for instance, draws many connections to London circa 1600. In Hamlet's famous joke on Polonius just after the players arrive at Elsinore, the actor playing Polonius complains through his character of his previous character's death at the hands of a character played by the actor playing his present interlocutor, a layered wink to the Globe's regular audience. Shenandoah Shakespeare actors performing this passage can update it for their twenty-first-century audience. John Harrell, who did enact Julius Caesar in the 2002-03 season, might, as some other character onstage in Hamlet's Act 3, register indignation at Polonius' line; if Harrell plays Polonius he might turn to the audience significantly on or after "I did enact." Nor need the device be so literal. An entirely different company than Julius Caesar's might play the joke: Polonius' actor might shoot a malevolent look to an unrelated character to make him the former Brutus for a moment, and Rosencrantz or Guildenstern might pull out a program and check Polonius' assertion--a nod to those characters' confusion in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which Shenandoah Shakespeare Express toured in 2000-01. When an audience attends a play, they enter into a contract with the production, and "I did enact Julius Caesar" offers an opportunity to acknowledge that contract, and that--nudge nudge, wink wink--we're all in on this joke together.
 

Second, the company should use "The Mousetrap" to draw attention to the new physical space of the Globe. The Lords' Room, at the back of the stage, does not initially sound like desirable seating, but this is largely a result of our training in proscenium theatre. The "back" and "front" of the stage are inadequate terms for Renaissance playhouses, which operated much more like theatre in the round than do proscenium stages. The Lords' Room offered the best seats, with a close birds-eye vantage of the action onstage. The seats' top pricing ensured that the Lord Chamberlain's Men played to them, as Shenandoah Shakespeare actors will also.
 

In light of these considerations, I suggest following Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa's placement of "The Mousetrap" in their book Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres: in front of the tiring house, facing the yard. Gertrude, Claudius and their courtiers should sit facing that set and the Lords' Room, with their backs to the yard (140). This arrangement, while it will almost certainly occasion the craning of heads and some grousing from Hamlet's groundlings, can demonstrate both the relative status of various playgoers and an alternative--Elizabethan--method of attention. First, the characters of the king and queen face their social "equals" (Claudius might wave to a Lords' Room peer), and the Lords' Room's occupants have a priviledged direct view of the court's reaction to "The Mousetrap." That reaction should initially lampoon rowdy and inattentive audiences; Gurr and Ichikawa assert that Claudius allows the offensive dumbshow to proceed unstopped and unremarked because he is not attending (141). Instead he should exhibit the same sort of purposeful distraction that Thomas Dekker prescribes for young gallants in The Gull's Hornbook: "turn plain ape: take up a rush, and tickle the earnest ears of your fellow gallants" (55).
 

While the Lords in the Staunton Globe audience are watching the court, the groundlings in the yard and many of those seated in the galleries will be unable to get an unobstructed view of Hamlet's play, because the court is in their way. They should find no barrier to their hearing, however--while we speak today of going to see plays, Shakespeare's contemporaries went to hear them, and an obstructed "Mousetrap" will turn our playgoers from spectators back into a true audience. While the dumbshow is silent, its story will be immediately replicated, with accompanying verbal explication from Hamlet, and during the dumbshow the really interesting action is taking place in the dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia: "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?"(3.2.101). In rehearsals for the London Globe's 2000 production of Hamlet, director Giles Block experimented with Hamlet and Ophelia at opposite pillars, making Hamlet's sexual comments extremely public and embarrassing for Ophelia. Shenandoah Shakespeare should use this placement in its show, which would take Hamlet and Ophelia's exchange to the entire house and align them with the lower status groundlings. While the audience in the Lords' Room watches the court watch, or ignore, the dumbshow and "Mousetrap," those in the yard and galleries can watch Hamlet and Ophelia and then hear the play procede as Hamlet paces the stage's periphery and gives his own commentary on both "The Mousetrap" and its royal audience. This unconventional configuration, in which no audience member can see "The Mousetrap" to the advantage reserved for Claudius and Gertrude, will actually show that audience what Prince Hamlet's play is doing to its audience, depending on their status and attention.
 

Finally, I propose a set for "The Mousetrap." As Shakespeare's plays' actions are in the lines rather than in stage directions, so are the locations in the language rather than in physical sets. Today's audiences, however, are used to realistic sets indicating bedrooms and to lighting effects mimicking night. "The Mousetrap" is a perfect opportunity to give Shavian-trained audiences what they expect in a set, and simultaneously to make fun of the convention and to show that it is unnecessary. Giles Block used a mound mounted on castors, and Jaq Bessell notes "The effect was naïve and charming" (24/5/00). Mark Rylance, playing Hamlet in the London Globe's 2000 production, worried that setting up this mound would pull focus from the action onstage. Beyond pulling focus, we would do better to actively disrupt the action preceding the play, which fittingly enough is Hamlet's direction to the players. During this production phase of "The Mousetrap," Elsinore stagehands should be setting up for the play in an orgy of verisimilitude, with not only the mound but also draperies, a couch, a side table with brandy snifters, a rug, and so on reductio ad absurdum. Rather than going about their task in an organized and subdued manner, the stagehands should be crashing about and disturbing the players' preparations, illustrating both the standard tension between crew and cast, and the just-pre-show chaos that every cast and crew has experienced. Likewise, striking the set will necessarily involve confusion and a reiteration of its extraneous and invasive nature, but before the crew returns to clear it away, and to prevent this staging point overwhelming the plot, its disorder should provide the set for Hamlet's volatile interactions with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Polonius, as well as Claudius' attempt at prayer and Hamlet's movements toward and from murder, giving a visual echo to the extreme disorder in the court and its inhabitants' minds. After Claudius' exit at the end of 3.3, the stagehands should strike the set at the start of the closet scene, behind and also getting in the way of Gertrude and Polonius, which would heighten that exchange's urgency, and be resolved by the crew's exit and by Polonius' concealment behind the arras. Such hubbub would be comic, counterpointing the somberness of Claudius' guilt that precedes it and the darkness of Hamlet's rage that follows it.
 

Like this counterpoint between comic and tragic, contrasting a bare-boards staging of Hamlet with an overly realistic set for "The Mousetrap" will throw both into sharp relief. While not historical, such a contrast offers a lesson in history by showing Hamlet's audience the relative merits of the two styles, the superiority of Shakespeare's original staging, and the joys of imaginative involvement. Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy includes his audience in his mental turmoil. Likewise, the devices of gesturing to the play's performance by the actors, physically directing the audience's attention to "The Mousetrap's" effect on its audience, and mocking realistic sets bring the Globe audience in on the game of theatre. These devices are exercises in exaggeration, whose innovative, educational and humorous appeal will give Shenandoah Shakespeare's patrons a compelling reason to attend and to return to a venue whose players play the game not only to their audiences but also with them.
 

Works Cited
 

Jaq Bessell, "Hamlet--The White Company, 2000," New Globe. http://www.rdg.ac.uk/globe/research/1999/Hamlet2000.htm#VerseWork, 12 March 2003.
 

Thomas Dekker, The Gull's Hornbook. London: De La More Press, 1904.
 

Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.