of their audience.  However to be commended on the score of its fidelity to the author’s intentions, the scene had assuredly its ludicrous side.  The rival tents wore the aspect of opposition shower-baths.  It was exceedingly difficult to humour the idea that the figures occupying the stage could neither see nor hear one another.  Why, if they but outstretched their arms they could have touched each other; and they were supposed to be mutually eager for combat to the death!  It became manifest, indeed, that the spectators had lost greatly their ancestors’ old power of “making believe.”  They could no longer hold their reason in suspense for the sake of enhancing the effect of a theatrical performance, though prepared to be indulgent in that respect.  What is called “realism” had invaded the stage since Shakespeare’s time, and could not now be repelled or denied.  Hints and suggestions did not suffice; the positive and the actual had become indispensable.

There can be no doubt, however, that Shakespeare’s battles had oftentimes the important aid of real gunpowder.  The armies might be small; but the noise that accompanied their movements was surely very great.  The stage direction “alarums and chambers go off” occurs more than once in “King Henry V.”  The Chorus to the play expressly states: 

Behold the ordnance on their carriages,
With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur;
... and the nimble gunner
With linstook now the devilish cannon touches,
And down goes all before them.

Gunpowder was even employed in plays wherein battles were not introduced.  Thus at the close of “Hamlet,” Fortinbras says:  “Go bid the soldiers shoot,” and the stage direction runs:  “A dead march. Exeunt bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.”  And just as, in 1846, the Garrick Theatre, in Goodman’s Fields, was destroyed by fire, owing to some wadding lodging in the flies after a performance of the Battle of Waterloo, so in 1613, the Globe Theatre, in Southwark, was burnt to the ground from the firing of “chambers” during a representation of “King Henry VIII.”  Howes, in his additions to “Stowe’s Chronicle,” thus describes the event:  “Also upon St. Peter’s Day, 1613, the playhouse or theatre called the Globe, upon the Bankside, near London, by negligent discharging of a peal of ordnance, close to the south side thereof, the theatre took fire, and the wind suddenly dispersed the flame round about, and in a very short space the whole building was quite consumed and no man hurt; the house being filled with people to behold the play, namely, of ‘Henry VIII.;’ and the next spring it was new builded in a far fairer manner than before.”