There is one more source for the Elizabethan theater and the kinds of plays Shakespeare wrote for it: a love of spectacle and special effects. In this picture we see the moat around the castle of a rich nobleman, transformed into a kind of Water World Theme Park, with miniature ships, Neptunes and floating islands. A display like this was very expensive to mount and was usually done to impress people. This particular event took place near Stratford when Shakespeare was a boy, and he may have witnessed it. Certainly he included a number of special effects in his plays: disappearing witches, ghosts and severed heads in Macbeth; people with the heads of animals in Midsummer Night's Dream; even strange aliens in The Tempest. Shakespeare the showman was always careful to attract the attention of the kinds of people who in 1999 flock to see the latest Bruce Willis action flick.

The stage was now set for the emergence of the professional theater in England. The first permanent structure for performance, called simply the Theatre, was built in 1576 on the outskirts of London. This picture, although it is of the Swan, shows what the Theatre probably looked like. The stage is in a structure that resembles a courtyard. Even the façade at the back of the stage creates the illusion. The stage is raised to give a better sight line to those who stood on the ground. Other people sat on benches in the balconies, including at the back of the stage in this contemporary drawing. Actors entered and exited through the doors at the back of the stage. Depending on the overall dimensions of the building the theater could hold up to several thousand people.