SOURCE: “Some Shakespearean Openings: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Tempest,” in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama, edited by Murray Biggs et al., pp. 84-95, Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

In the essay below, Nuttall evaluates the opening scenes of Hamlet, Twelfth Night,and the Tempest in terms of the challenge presented to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists by the absence of a distinct, visual threshold between the playgoers and the actors on stage. He demonstrates how, in the early lines of these three plays, Shakespeare exploits this drawback—even heightens the sense of uncertainty—by creating openings that emphasize the indeterminacy of the dramatic action.

It is said that those musical works which begin with a high distant call on the French horn are very hard on the performers. Openings are naturally anxious affairs, but horn-playing is peculiarly vulnerable to nervous tension; a catch in the breath...