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Between around 1908 and 1914, there is a big progress in the technology of the time, but basically, the way of putting Shakespeare on a screen for an audience started and finished with what that audience would have seen

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from the stalls if they were watching a piece of theatre. So the camera is almost always at the eye level of the audience looking into the scene, and people are walking into the scene to perform it.

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There may be things going on in the background, famously with the Tempest, for instance, where you have a wonderful magic lantern show of Prospero and watching out to see the storm.

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In our instance, in Cleopatra we have Cleopatra arriving in her barge, and the barge comes in at the back of the stage, exactly as it would have done in a big staging of the play

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and she then walks down to play her part. But what you tend to notice is that everybody moves to the foreground to actually do the performances. The other thing is that they tend

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to be very theatrical spaces, even when they've taken the camera out into locations, which of course, was one of the big things about cinema. There were multiple Merchant of Venices shot in Venice

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because they were able to say to people, not only do you get a travelogue of Venice, but you get to see Shakespeare's great play, which you already know performed in the very spaces where it could have

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happened all those years ago. So even when they're on location, there is a sense that you're looking at a depth of scale that is only the size of a stage.

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People will be coming in from forests, but they will come down to a four stage area. In Hamlet, for the burial of Ophelia, they come out of the forest, a huge, great parade of people

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for the funeral of Ophelia. And yet all of our concentration is really on that front area. That area nearest the camera, where then all of the scene will be played out.

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Doesn't mean there's no movement. There's bits and bobs of movement. The Forbes-Robertson, Hamlet, for instance, you can see the camera moves just fractionally

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to take in movement that's happening off to one side and then moves back again. And I suspect that's not particularly planned. That's a camera operator realising that the action is

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getting a bit close to one side of the camera and he's having to move it around. Whether they went as far, which they did in Griffith's films, for instance, of marking out the stage

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so that there was an area, if you were in front of the front line were out of focus. If you were behind the back line were out of focus, or if you were on outside of either of the two lines

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weren't in shot at all whether they went that far, I don't. But the lenses at the time could give quite a depth of focus. There's an extraordinary depth of focus to the Cleopatra. It has to be said, because that's a very long throw.