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.
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