BOOK V. PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

VOL. III

Oxford University Press

_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_

_New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_

_Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_

Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

[Illustration: FROM THE VENICE TERENCE OF 1499]

THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

BY E. K. CHAMBERS. VOL. III

OXFORD: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

M.CMXXIII

Printed in England

CONTENTS

VOLUME III

PAGE

XIX. STAGING AT COURT 1

XX. STAGING IN THE THEATRES: SIXTEENTH CENTURY 47

XXI. STAGING IN THE THEATRES: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 103

BOOK V. PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

XXII. THE PRINTING OF PLAYS 157

XXIII. PLAYWRIGHTS 201

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Coliseus sive Theatrum. From edition of Terence

published by Lazarus Soardus (Venice, 1497

and 1499) _Frontispiece_

Diagrams of Stages pp. 84, 85

NOTE ON SYMBOLS

I have found it convenient, especially in Appendix A, to use the symbol

< following a date, to indicate an uncertain date not earlier than that

named, and the symbol > followed by a date, to indicate an uncertain

date not later than that named. Thus 1903 <> 23 would indicate the

composition date of any part of this book. I have sometimes placed the

date of a play in italics, where it was desirable to indicate the date

of production rather than publication.

XIX

STAGING AT COURT

[_Bibliographical Note._--Of the dissertations named in the

_note_ to ch. xviii, T. S. Graves, _The Court and the London

Theatres_ (1913), is perhaps the most valuable for the subject

of the present chapter, which was mainly written before it

reached me. A general account of the Italian drama of the

Renaissance is in W. Creizenach, _Geschichte des neueren

Dramas_, vol. ii (1901). Full details for Ferrara and Mantua

are given by A. D’Ancona, _Origini del Teatro Italiano_

(1891), of which App. II is a special study of _Il Teatro

Mantovano nel secolo xvi_. F. Neri, _La Tragedia italiana del

Cinquecento_ (1904), E. Gardner, _Dukes and Poets at Ferrara_

(1904), and _The King of Court Poets_ (1906), W. Smith, _The

Commedia dell’ Arte_ (1912), are also useful. Special works

on staging are E. Flechsig, _Die Dekorationen der modernen

Bühne in Italien_ (1894), and G. Ferrari, _La Scenografia_

(1902). The Terence engravings are described by M. Herrmann,

_Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters

und der Renaissance_ (1914). Of contemporary Italian treatises,

the unprinted _Spectacula_ of Pellegrino Prisciano is in

_Cod. Est. lat._ d. x. 1, 6 (cf. G. Bertoni, _La Biblioteca

Estense_, 13), and of L. de Sommi’s _Dialoghi in materia di

rappresentazione scenica_ (c. 1565) a part only is in L.

Rasi, _I Comici italiani_ (1897), i. 107. The first complete

edition of S. Serlio, _Architettura_ (1551), contains Bk. ii,

on _Perspettiva_; the English translation was published by

R. Peake (1611); extracts are in App. G; a biography is L.

Charvet, _Sébastien Serlio_ (1869). Later are L. Sirigatti, _La

pratica di prospettiva_ (1596), A. Ingegneri, _Della poesia

rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche_

(1598), and N. Sabbatini, _Pratica di fabricar scene e macchine

ne’ Teatri_ (1638).

For France, E. Rigal, _Le Théâtre de la Renaissance_ and _Le

Théâtre au xvii^e siècle avant Corneille_, both in L. Petit

de Julleville, _Hist. de la Langue et de la Litt. Françaises_

(1897), iii. 261, iv. 186, and the same writer’s _Le Théâtre

Français avant la Période Classique_ (1901), may be supplemented

by a series of studies in _Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la

France_--P. Toldo, _La Comédie Française de la Renaissance_

(1897–1900, iv. 336; v. 220, 554; vi. 571; vii. 263), G. Lanson,

_Études sur les Origines de la Tragédie Classique en France_

(1903, x. 177, 413) and _L’Idée de la Tragédie en France avant

Jodelle_ (1904, xi. 541), E. Rigal, _La Mise en Scène dans les

Tragédies du xvi^e siècle_ (1905, xii. 1, 203), J. Haraszti,

_La Comédie Française de la Renaissance et la Scène_ (1909,

xvi. 285); also G. Lanson, _Note sur un Passage de Vitruve_,

in _Revue de la Renaissance_ (1904), 72. Less important is E.

Lintilhac, _Hist. Générale du Théâtre en France_ (1904–9, in

progress). G. Bapst, _Essai sur l’Histoire du Théâtre_ (1893),

and D. C. Stuart, _Stage Decoration and the Unity of Place in

France in the Seventeenth Century_ (1913, _M. P._ x. 393), deal

with staging, for which the chief material is E. Dacier, _La

Mise en Scène à Paris au xvii^e siècle: Mémoire de L. Mahelot

et M. Laurent_ in _Mémoires de la Soc. de l’Hist. de Paris et

de l’Ile-de-France_, xxviii (1901), 105. An edition by H. C.

Lancaster (1920) adds Mahelot’s designs.]

We come now to the problems, reserved from treatment in the foregoing

chapter, of scenic background. What sort of setting did the types

of theatre described afford for the plots, often complicated, and

the range of incident, so extraordinarily wide, which we find in

Elizabethan drama? No subject in literary history has been more often

or more minutely discussed, during the quarter of a century since the

Swan drawing was discovered, and much valuable spadework has been done,

not merely in the collecting and marshalling of external evidence,

but also in the interpretation of this in the light of an analysis of

the action of plays and of the stage-directions by which these are

accompanied.[1] Some points have emerged clearly enough; and if on

others there is still room for controversy, this may be partly due to

the fact that external and internal evidence, when put together, have

proved inadequate, and partly also to certain defects of method into

which some of the researchers have fallen. To start from the assumption

of a ‘typical Shakespearian stage’ is not perhaps the best way of

approaching an investigation which covers the practices of thirty or

forty playing companies, in a score of theatres, over a period of not

much less than a century. It is true that, in view of the constant

shifting of companies and their plays from one theatre to another, some

‘standardization of effects’, in Mr. Archer’s phrase, may at any one

date be taken for granted.[2] But analogous effects can be produced

by very different arrangements, and even apart from the obvious

probability that the structural divergences between public and private

theatres led to corresponding divergences in the systems of setting

adopted, it is hardly safe to neglect the possibility of a considerable

evolution in the capacities of stage-management between 1558 and 1642,

or even between 1576 and 1616. At any rate a historical treatment

will be well advised to follow the historical method. The scope of

the inquiry, moreover, must be wide enough to cover performances at

Court, as well as those on the regular stage, since the plays used for

both purposes were undoubtedly the same. Nor can Elizabethan Court

performances, in their turn, be properly considered, except in the

perspective afforded by a short preliminary survey of the earlier

developments of the art of scenic representation at other Renaissance

Courts.

The story begins with the study of Vitruvius in the latter part of

the fifteenth century by the architect Alberti and others, which led

scholars to realize that the tragedies of the pseudo-Seneca and the

comedies of Terence and the recently discovered Plautus had been

not merely recited, but acted much in the fashion already familiar

in contemporary _ludi_ of the miracle-play type.[3] The next step

was, naturally, to act them, in the original or in translations.

Alberti planned a _theatrum_ in the Vatican for Nicholas V, but the

three immediate successors of Nicholas were not humanists, and it

is not until the papacy of Innocent VIII that we hear of classical

performances at Rome by the pupils of Pomponius Laetus. One of these

was Tommaso Inghirami, who became a cardinal, without escaping the

nickname of Phaedra from the part he had played in _Hippolytus_. This,

as well as at least one comedy, had already been given before the

publication (_c._ 1484–92) of an edition of Vitruvius by Sulpicius

Verulanus, with an epistle addressed by the editor to Cardinal

Raffaelle Riario, as a notable patron of the revived art. Sulpicius is

allusive rather than descriptive, but we hear of a fair adorned stage,

5 ft. high, for the tragedy in the forum, of a second performance in

the Castle of St. Angelo, and a third in Riario’s house, where the

audience sat under _umbracula_, and of the ‘picturatae scenae facies’,

which the cardinal provided for a comedy by the Pomponiani.[4]

Performances continued after the death of Pomponius in 1597, but we

get no more scenic details, and when the _Menaechmi_ was given at the

wedding of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia in 1502 it is noted that

‘non gli era scena alcuna, perchè la camera non era capace’.[5] It

is not until 1513 that we get anything like a description of a Roman

neo-classical stage, at the conferment of Roman citizenship on Giuliano

and Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine kinsmen of Leo X.[6] This had a

decorated back wall divided by pilasters into five spaces, in each of

which was a door covered by a curtain of golden stuff. There were also

two side-doors, for entrance and exit, marked ‘via ad forum’.

An even more important centre of humanistic drama than Rome was

Ferrara, where the poets and artists, who gathered round Duke Ercole

I of Este, established a tradition which spread to the allied courts

of the Gonzagas at Mantua and the Delle Rovere at Urbino. The first

neo-classical revival on record at Ferrara was of the _Menaechmi_

in 1486, from which we learn that Epidamnus was represented by five

marvellous ‘case’ each with its door and window, and that a practicable

boat moved across the _cortile_ where the performance was given.[7]

In 1487 it was the turn of the _Amphitrio_ ‘in dicto cortile a tempo

di notte, con uno paradiso cum stelle et altre rode’.[8] Both the

_Amphitrio_ and the _Menaechmi_ were revived in 1491; the former had

its ‘paradiso’, while for the latter ‘nella sala era al prospecto

de quattro castelli, dove avevano a uscire quilli dovevano fare la

representatione’.[9] Many other productions followed, of some of

which no details are preserved. For the _Eunuchus_, _Trinummus_,

and _Penulus_ in 1499 there was a stage, 4 ft. high, with decorated

columns, hangings of red, white, and green cloth, and ‘cinque casamenti

merlati’ painted by Fino and Bernardino Marsigli.[10] In 1502, when

Lucrezia Borgia came, the stage for the _Epidicus_, _Bacchides_, _Miles

Gloriosus_, _Casina_, and _Asinaria_ was of the height of a man, and

resembled a city wall, ‘sopra gli sono le case de le comedie, che sono

sei, non avantagiate del consueto’.[11] The most elaborate description

on record is, however, one of a theatre set up at Mantua during the

carnival of 1501, for some play of which the name has not reached us.

Unfortunately it is not very clearly worded, but the stage appears to

have been rather wider than its depth, arcaded round, and hung at the

back with gold and greenery. Its base had the priceless decoration of

Mantegna’s _Triumphs_, and above was a heaven with a representation of

the zodiac. Only one ‘casa’ is noted, a ‘grocta’ within four columns at

a corner of the stage.[12]

The scanty data available seem to point to the existence of two

rather different types of staging, making their appearance at Ferrara

and at Rome respectively. The scene of the Ferrarese comedies, with

its ‘case’ as the principal feature, is hardly distinguishable from

that of the mediaeval _sacre rappresentazioni_, with its ‘luoghi

deputati’ for the leading personages, which in their turn correspond

to the ‘loci’, ‘domus’, or ‘sedes’ of the western miracle-plays.[13]

The methods of the _rappresentazioni_ had long been adopted for

pieces in the mediaeval manner, but upon secular themes, such as

Poliziano’s _Favola d’Orfeo_, which continued, side by side with

the classical comedies, to form part of the entertainment of Duke

Ercole’s Court.[14] The persistence of the mediaeval tradition is very

clearly seen in the interspersing of the acts of the comedies, just

as the _rappresentazioni_ had been interspersed, with ‘moresche’ and

other ‘intermedii’ of spectacle and dance, to which the ‘dumb-shows’

of the English drama owe their ultimate origin.[15] At Rome, on the

other hand, it looks as if, at any rate by 1513, the ‘case’ had been

conventionalized, perhaps under the influence of some archaeological

theory as to classical methods, into nothing more than curtained

compartments forming part of the architectural embellishments of the

_scena_ wall. It is a tempting conjecture that some reflex, both of the

Ferrarese and of the Roman experiments, may be traced in the woodcut

illustrations of a number of printed editions of Terence, which are all

derived from archetypes published in the last decade of the fifteenth

century. The synchronism between the revival of classical acting and

the emergence of scenic features in such illustrations is certainly

marked. The Terentian miniatures of the earlier part of the century

show no Vitruvian knowledge. If they figure a performance, it is a

recitation by the wraith Calliopius and his gesticulating mimes.[16]

Nor is there any obvious scenic influence in the printed Ulm _Eunuchus_

of 1486, with its distinct background for each separate woodcut.[17]

The new spirit comes in with the Lyons _Terence_ of 1493, wherein may

be seen the hand of the humanist Jodocus Badius Ascensius, who had

certainly visited Ferrara, and may well also have been in touch with

the Pomponiani.[18] The Lyons woodcuts, of which there are several to

each play, undoubtedly represent stage performances, real or imaginary.

The stage itself is an unrailed quadrangular platform, of which the

supports are sometimes visible. The back wall is decorated with

statuettes and swags of Renaissance ornament, and in front of it is a

range of three, four, or five small compartments, separated by columns

and veiled by fringed curtains. They have rather the effect of a row of

bathing boxes. Over each is inscribed the name of a character, whose

‘house’ it is supposed to be. Thus for the _Andria_ the inscriptions

are ‘Carini’, ‘Chreme[tis]’, ‘Chrisidis’, ‘Do[mus] Symonis’. On the

scaffold, before the houses, action is proceeding between characters

each labelled with his name. Sometimes a curtain is drawn back and a

character is emerging, or the interior of a house is revealed, with

some one sitting or in bed, and a window behind. It is noteworthy

that, while the decoration of the back wall and the arrangement of the

houses remain uniform through all the woodcuts belonging to any one

play, they vary from play to play. Sometimes the line of houses follows

that of the wall; sometimes it advances and retires, and may leave

a part of the wall uncovered, suggesting an entrance from without.

In addition to the special woodcuts for each play, there is a large

introductory design of a ‘Theatrum’. It is a round building, with

an exterior staircase, to which spectators are proceeding, and are

accosted on their way by women issuing from the ‘Fornices’, over which

the theatre is built. Through the removal of part of the walls, the

interior is also made visible. It has two galleries and standing-room

below. A box next the stage in the upper gallery is marked ‘Aediles’.

The stage is cut off by curtains, which are divided by two narrow

columns. In front of the curtains sits a flute-player. Above is

inscribed ‘Proscenium’. Some of the Lyons cuts are adopted, with others

from the Ulm _Eunuchus_, in the Strasburg _Terence_ of 1496.[19] This,

however, has a different ‘Theatrum’, which shows the exterior only, and

also a new comprehensive design for each play, in which no scaffold

or back wall appears, and the houses are drawn on either side of an

open place, with the characters standing before them. They are more

realistic than the Lyons ‘bathing boxes’ and have doors and windows

and roofs, but they are drawn, like the Ulm houses, on a smaller scale

than the characters. If they have a scenic origin, it may be rather

in the ‘case’ of Ferrara than in the conventional ‘domus’ of Rome.

Finally, the Venice _Terence_ of 1497, while again reproducing with

modifications the smaller Lyons cuts, replaces the ‘Theatrum’ by a new

‘Coliseus sive Theatrum’, in which the point of view is taken from the

proscenium.[20] No raised stage is visible, but an actor or prologue is

speaking from a semicircular orchestra on the floor-level. To right and

left of him are two houses, of the ‘bathing-box’ type, but roofed, from

which characters emerge. He faces an auditorium with two rows of seats

and a gallery above.

We are moving in shadowy regions of conjecture, and if all the material

were forthcoming, the interrelations of Rome and Ferrara and the

Terentian editors might prove to have been somewhat different from

those here sketched. After all, we have not found anything which

quite explains the ‘picturatae scenae facies’ for which Cardinal

Raffaelle Riario won such praise, and perhaps Ferrara is not really

entitled to credit for the innovation, which is generally supposed

to have accompanied the production of the first of Ariosto’s great

Italian comedies on classical lines, the _Cassaria_ of 1508. This

is the utilization for stage scenery of the beloved Italian art of

architectural perspective. It has been suggested, on no very secure

grounds, that the first to experiment in this direction may have been

the architect Bramante Lazzari.[21] But the scene of the _Cassaria_

is the earliest which is described by contemporary observers as a

_prospettiva_, and it evidently left a vivid impression upon the

imagination of the spectators.[22] The artist was Pellegrino da

Udine, and the city represented was Mytilene, where the action of the

_Cassaria_ was laid. The same, or another, example of perspective may

have served as a background in the following year for Ariosto’s second

comedy, _I Suppositi_, of which the scene was Ferrara itself.[23]

But other artists, in other cities, followed in the footsteps of

Pellegrino. The designer for the first performance of Bernardo

da Bibbiena’s _Calandra_ at Urbino in 1513 was probably Girolamo

Genga;[24] and for the second, at Rome in 1514, Baldassarre Peruzzi, to

whom Vasari perhaps gives exaggerated credit for scenes which ‘apersono

la via a coloro che ne hanno poi fatte a’ tempi nostri’.[25] Five

years later, _I Suppositi_ was also revived at Rome, in the Sala d’

Innocenzio of the Vatican, and on this occasion no less an artist was

employed than Raphael himself.[26] As well as the scene, there was an

elaborately painted front curtain, which fell at the beginning of the

performance. For this device, something analogous to which had almost

certainly already been used at Ferrara, there was a precedent in the

classical _aulaeum_. Its object was apparently to give the audience

a sudden vision of the scene, and it was not raised again during the

action of the play, and had therefore no strictly scenic function.[27]

The sixteenth-century _prospettiva_, of which there were many later

examples, is the type of scenery so fully described and illustrated

by the architect Sebastiano Serlio in the Second Book of his

_Architettura_ (1551). Serlio had himself been the designer of a

theatre at Vicenza, and had also been familiar at Rome with Baldassarre

Peruzzi, whose notes had passed into his possession. He was therefore

well in the movement.[28] At the time of the publication of the

_Architettura_ he was resident in France, where he was employed,

like other Italians, by Francis I upon the palace of Fontainebleau.

Extracts from Serlio’s treatise will be found in an appendix and I need

therefore only briefly summarize here the system of staging which it

sets out.[29] This is a combination of the more or less solid ‘case’

with flat cloths painted in perspective. The proscenium is long and

comparatively shallow, with an entrance at each end, and flat. But from

the line of the _scena_ wall the level of the stage slopes slightly

upwards and backwards, and on this slope stand to right and left the

‘case’ of boards or laths covered with canvas, while in the centre is

a large aperture, disclosing a space across which the flat cloths are

drawn, a large one at the back and smaller ones on frames projecting

by increasing degrees from behind the ‘case’. Out of these elements

is constructed, by the art of perspective, a consistent scene with

architectural perspectives facing the audience, and broken in the

centre by a symmetrical vista. For the sake of variety, the action can

use practicable doors and windows in the façades, and to some extent

also within the central aperture, on the lower part of the slope. It

was possible to arrange for interior action by discovering a space

within the ‘case’ behind the façades, but this does not seem to have

been regarded as a very effective device.[30] Nor is there anything

to suggest that Serlio contemplated any substantial amount of action

within his central recess, for which, indeed, the slope required by

his principles of perspective made it hardly suitable. As a matter of

fact the action of the Italian _commedia sostenuta_, following here

the tradition of its Latin models, is essentially exterior action

before contiguous houses, and some amusing conventions, as Creizenach

notes, follow from this fact; such as that it is reasonable to come

out-of-doors in order to communicate secrets, that the street is a good

place in which to bury treasure, and that you do not know who lives in

the next house until you are told.[31] In discussing the decoration

of the stage, Serlio is careful to distinguish between the kinds of

scenery appropriate for tragedy, comedy, and the satyric play or

pastoral, respectively, herein clearly indicating his debt and that of

his school to the doctrine of Vitruvius.

It must not be supposed that Serlio said the last word on Italian

Renaissance staging. He has mainly temporary theatres in his mind, and

when theatres became permanent it was possible to replace laths and

painted cloths by a more solid architectural _scena_ in relief. Of

this type was the famous _Teatro Olympico_ of Vicenza begun by Andrea

Palladio about 1565 and finished by Vincenzo Scamozzi about 1584.[32]

It closely followed the indications of Vitruvius, with its _porta

regia_ in the middle of the _scena_, its _portae minores_ to right

and left, and its proscenium doors in _versurae_ under balconies for

spectators. And it did not leave room for much variety in decoration,

as between play and play.[33] It appears, indeed, to have been used

only for tragedy. A more important tendency was really just in the

opposite direction, towards change rather than uniformity of scenic

effect. Even the perspectives, however beautiful, of the comedies

did not prove quite as amusing, as the opening heavens and hells and

other ingeniously varied backgrounds of the mediaeval plays had been,

and by the end of the sixteenth century devices were being tried for

movable scenes, which ultimately led to the complete elimination of the

comparatively solid and not very manageable ‘case’.[34]

It is difficult to say how far the Italian perspective scene made its

way westwards. Mediaeval drama--on the one hand the miracle-play, on

the other the morality and the farce--still retained an unbounded

vitality in sixteenth-century France. The miracle-play had its own

elaborate and traditional system of staging. The morality and the

farce required very little staging at all, and could be content at

need with nothing more than a bare platform, backed by a semicircle

or hollow square of suspended curtains, through the interstices of

which the actors might come and go.[35] But from the beginning of

the century there is observable in educated circles an infiltration

of the humanist interest in the classical drama; and this, in course

of time, was reinforced through two distinct channels. One of these

was the educational influence, coming indirectly through Germany and

the Netherlands, of the ‘Christian Terence’, which led about 1540 to

the academic Latin tragedies of Buchanan and Muretus at Bordeaux.[36]

The other was the direct contact with humanist civilization, which

followed upon the Italian adventures of Charles VIII and Louis XII,

and dominated the reigns of François I and his house, notably after

the marriage of Catherine de’ Medici to the future Henri II in 1533.

In 1541 came Sebastiano Serlio with his comprehensive knowledge of

stage-craft; and the translation of his _Architettura_, shortly after

its publication in 1545, by Jean Martin, a friend of Ronsard, may be

taken as evidence of its vogue. In 1548 the French Court may be said to

have been in immediate touch with the _nidus_ of Italian scenic art

at Ferrara, for when Henri and Catherine visited Lyons it was Cardinal

Hippolyte d’Este who provided entertainment for them with a magnificent

performance of Bibbiena’s famous _Calandra_. This was ‘nella gran sala

di San Gianni’ and was certainly staged in the full Italian manner,

with perspective by Andrea Nannoccio and a range of terra-cotta statues

by one Zanobi.[37] Henceforward it is possible to trace the existence

of a Court drama in France. The Italian influence persisted. It is not,

indeed, until 1571 that we find regular companies of Italian actors

settling in Paris, and these, when they came, probably played, mainly

if not entirely, _commedie dell’ arte_.[38] But Court performances in

1555 and 1556 of the _Lucidi_ of Firenzuola and the _Flora_ of Luigi

Alamanni show that the _commedia sostenuta_ was already established

in favour at a much earlier date.[39] More important, however, is the

outcrop of vernacular tragedy and comedy, on classical and Italian

models, which was one of the literary activities of the Pléiade.

The pioneer in both _genres_ was Étienne Jodelle, whose tragedy of

_Cléopâtre Captive_ was produced before Henri II by the author and his

friends at the Hôtel de Reims early in 1553, and subsequently repeated

at the Collège de Boncour, where it was accompanied by his comedy of

_La Rencontre_, probably identical with the extant _Eugène_, which is

believed to date from 1552. Jodelle had several successors: in tragedy,

Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Jacques and Jean de la Taille, Jacques Grévin,

Robert Garnier, Antoine de Montchrestien; and in comedy, Rémy Belleau,

Jean de Baïf, Jean de la Taille, Jacques Grévin, and Pierre Larivey.

So far as tragedy was concerned, the Court representations soon came

to an end. Catherine de’ Medici, always superstitious, believed that

the _Sophonisbe_ of Mellin de Saint-Gelais in 1556 had brought ill

luck, and would have no more.[40] The academies may have continued to

find hospitality for a few, but the best critical opinion appears to

be that most of the tragedies of Garnier and his fellows were for the

printing-press only, and that their scenic indications, divorced from

the actualities of representation, can hardly be regarded as evidence

on any system of staging.[41] Probably this is also true of many of the

literary comedies, although Court performances of comedies, apart from

those of the professional players, continue to be traceable throughout

the century. Unfortunately archaeological research has not succeeded in

exhuming from the archives of the French royal households anything that

throws much light on the details of staging, and very possibly little

material of this kind exists. _Cléopâtre_ is said to have been produced

‘in Henrici II aula ... magnifico veteris scenae apparatu’.[42] The

prologue of _Eugène_, again, apologizes for the meagreness of an

academic setting:

Quand au théâtre, encore qu’il ne soit

En demi-rond, comme on le compassoit,

Et qu’on ne l’ait ordonné de la sorte

Que l’on faisoit, il faut qu’on le supporte:

Veu que l’exquis de ce vieil ornement

Ores se voue aux Princes seulement.

Hangings round the stage probably sufficed for the colleges, and

possibly even on some occasions for royal _châteaux_.[43] But Jodelle

evidently envisaged something more splendid as possible at Court,

and a notice, on the occasion of some comedies given before Charles

IX at Bayonne in 1565, of ‘la bravade et magnificence de la dite

scène ou théâtre, et des feux ou verres de couleur, desquelles elle

etait allumée et enrichie’ at once recalls a device dear to Serlio,

and suggests a probability that the whole method of staging, which

Serlio expounds, may at least have been tried.[44] Of an actual

theatre ‘en demi-rond’ at any French palace we have no clear proof.

Philibert de l’Orme built a _salle de spectacle_ for Catherine in the

Tuileries, on a site afterwards occupied by the grand staircase, but

its shape and dimensions are not on record.[45] There was another in

the pleasure-house, which he planned for Henri II in the grounds of

Saint-Germain, and which was completed by Guillaume Marchand under

Henri IV. This seems, from the extant plan, to have been designed as

a parallelogram.[46] The hall of the Hôtel de Bourbon, hard by the

Louvre, in which plays were sometimes given, is shown by the engravings

of the _Balet Comique_, which was danced there in 1581, to have been,

in the main, of similar shape. But it had an apse ‘en demi-rond’ at

one end.[47] It may be that the Terence illustrations come again to

our help, and that the new engravings which appear, side by side with

others of the older tradition, in the _Terence_ published by Jean de

Roigny in 1552 give some notion of the kind of stage which Jodelle and

his friends used.[48] The view is from the auditorium. The stage is

a platform, about 3½ ft. high, with three shallow steps at the back,

on which actors are sitting, while a prologue declaims. There are no

hangings or scenes. Pillars divide the back of the stage from a gallery

which runs behind and in which stand spectators. Obviously this is not

on Italian lines, but it might preserve the memory of some type of

academic stage.

If we know little of the scenic methods of the French Court, we know

a good deal of those employed in the only public theatre of which,

during the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth,

Paris could boast. This was the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a rectangular hall

built by the Confrérie de la Passion in 1548, used by that body for the

representation of miracle-plays and farces up to 1598, let between 1598

and 1608 to a succession of visiting companies, native and foreign, and

definitively occupied from the latter year by the Comédiens du Roi, to

whom Alexandre Hardy was dramatist in chief.[49] The _Mémoire pour la

décoration des pièces qui se représentent par les comediens du roy,

entretenus de sa Magesté_ is one of the most valuable documents of

theatrical history which the hazard of time has preserved in any land.

It, or rather the earlier of the two sections into which it is divided,

is the work of Laurent Mahelot, probably a machinist at the Hôtel de

Bourgogne, and contains notes, in some cases apparently emanating from

the authors, of the scenery required for seventy-one plays belonging

to the repertory of the theatre, to which are appended, in forty-seven

cases, drawings showing the way in which the requirements were to be

met.[50] It is true that the _Mémoire_ is of no earlier date than about

1633, but the close resemblance of the system which it illustrates to

that used in the miracle-plays of the Confrèrie de la Passion justifies

the inference that there had been no marked breach of continuity since

1598. In essence it is the mediaeval system of juxtaposed ‘maisons’,

corresponding to the ‘case’ of the Italian and the ‘houses’ of the

English tradition, a series of independent structures, visually related

to each other upon the stage, but dramatically distinct and serving,

each in its turn, as the background to action upon the whole of the

free space--_platea_ in mediaeval terminology, _proscenium_ in that of

the Renaissance--which stretched before and between them. The stage

of the Hôtel de Bourgogne had room for five such ‘maisons’, one in

the middle of the back wall, two in the angles between the back and

side-walls, and two standing forward against the side-walls; but in

practice two or three of these compartments were often devoted to a

‘maison’ of large size. A ‘maison’ might be a unit of architecture,

such as a palace, a senate house, a castle, a prison, a temple, a

tavern; or of landscape, such as a garden, a wood, a rock, a cave, a

sea.[51] And very often it represented an interior, such as a chamber

with a bed in it.[52] A good illustration of the arrangement may be

found in the _scenario_ for the familiar story of Pyramus and Thisbe,

as dramatized about 1617 by Théophile de Viaud.[53]

‘Il faut, au milieu du théâtre, un mur de marbre et pierre

fermé; des ballustres; il faut aussi de chasque costé deux ou

trois marches pour monster. A un des costez du théâtre, un

murier, un tombeau entouré de piramides. Des fleurs, une éponge,

du sang, un poignard, un voile, un antre d’où sort un lion,

du costé de la fontaine, et un autre antre à l’autre bout du

théâtre où il rentre.’

The _Pandoste_ of Alexandre Hardy required different settings for the

two parts, which were given on different days.[54] On the first day,

‘Au milieu du théâtre, il faut un beau palais; à un des costez,

une grande prison où l’on paroist tout entier. A l’autre costé,

un temple; au dessous, une pointe de vaisseau, une mer basse,

des rozeaux et marches de degrez.’

The needs of the second day were more simply met by ‘deux palais et une

maison de paysan et un bois’.

Many examples make it clear that the methods of the Hôtel de Bourgogne

did not entirely exclude the use of perspective, which was applied

on the back wall, ‘au milieu du théâtre’; and as the Italian stage,

on its side, was slow to abandon altogether the use of ‘case’ in

relief, it is possible that under favourable circumstances Mahelot

and his colleagues may have succeeded in producing the illusion of

a consistently built up background much upon the lines contemplated

by Serlio.[55] There were some plays whose plot called for nothing

more than a single continuous scene in a street, perhaps a known and

nameable street, or a forest.[56] Nor was the illusion necessarily

broken by such incidents as the withdrawal of a curtain from before an

interior at the point when it came into action, or the introduction of

the movable ship which the Middle Ages had already known.[57] It was

broken, however, when the ‘belle chambre’ was so large and practicable

as to be out of scale with the other ‘maisons’.[58] And it was broken

when, as in _Pandoste_ and many other plays, the apparently contiguous

‘maisons’ had to be supposed, for dramatic purposes, to be situated in

widely separated localities. It is, indeed, as we shall find to our

cost, not the continuous scene, but the need for change of scene, which

constitutes the problem of staging. It is a problem which the Italians

had no occasion to face; they had inherited, almost unconsciously, the

classical tradition of continuous action in an unchanged locality,

or in a locality no more changed than is entailed by the successive

bringing into use of various apertures in a single façade. But the

Middle Ages had had no such tradition, and the problem at once declared

itself, as soon as the matter of the Middle Ages and the manner of

the Renaissance began to come together in the ‘Christian Terence’.

The protest of Cornelius Crocus in the preface to his _Joseph_ (1535)

against ‘multiple’ staging, as alike intrinsically absurd and alien

to the practice of the ancients, anticipates by many years that law

of the unity of place, the formulation of which is generally assigned

to Lodovico Castelvetro, and which was handed down by the Italians

to the Pléiade and to the ‘classical’ criticism of the seventeenth

century.[59] We are not here concerned with the unity of place as a

law of dramatic structure, but we are very much concerned with the

fact that the romantic drama of western Europe did not observe unity

of place in actual practice, and that consequently the stage-managers

of Shakespeare in England, as well as those of Hardy in France, had to

face the problem of a system of staging, which should be able rapidly

and intelligibly to represent shifting localities. The French solution,

as we have seen, was the so-called ‘multiple’ system, inherited from

the Middle Ages, of juxtaposed and logically incongruous backgrounds.

Geography would be misleading if it suggested that, in the westward

drift of the Renaissance, England was primarily dependent upon the

mediation of France. During the early Tudor reigns direct relations

with Italy were firmly established, and the classical scholars of

Oxford and Cambridge drew their inspiration at first hand from the

authentic well-heads of Rome and Florence. In matters dramatic, in

particular, the insular had little or nothing to learn from the

continental kingdom. There were French players, indeed, at the Court

of Henry VII in 1494 and 1495, who obviously at that date can only

have had farces and morals to contribute.[60] And thereafter the

lines of stimulus may just as well have run the other way. If the

academic tragedy and comedy of the Pléiade had its reaction upon the

closet dramas of Lady Pembroke, Kyd, Daniel, Lord Brooke, yet London

possessed its public theatres long before the Parisian makeshift of

the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and English, no less than Italian, companies

haunted the Court of Henri IV, while it is not until Caroline days that

the French visit of 1495 can be shown to have had its successor. The

earliest record of a classical performance in England was at Greenwich

on 7 March 1519, when ‘there was a goodly commedy of Plautus plaied’,

followed by a mask, in the great chamber, which the King had caused

‘to be staged and great lightes to be set on pillers that were gilt,

with basons gilt, and the rofe was covered with blewe satyn set full

of presses of fyne gold and flowers’.[61] The staging here spoken of,

in association with lights, was probably for spectators rather than

for actors, for in May 1527, when a dialogue, barriers, and mask were

to be given in a banqueting-house at Greenwich, we are told that ‘thys

chambre was raised with stages v. degrees on every syde, and rayled

and counterailed, borne by pillars of azure, full of starres and

flower delice of gold; every pillar had at the toppe a basin silver,

wherein stode great braunches of white waxe’.[62] In this same year

1527, Wolsey had a performance of the _Menaechmi_ at his palace of York

Place, and it was followed in 1528 by one of the _Phormio_, of which

a notice is preserved in a letter of Gasparo Spinelli, the secretary

to the Italian embassy in London.[63] Unfortunately, Spinelli’s

description proves rather elusive. I am not quite clear whether he is

describing the exterior or the interior of a building, and whether his

_zoglia_ is, as one would like to think, the framework of a proscenium

arch, or merely that of a doorway.[64] One point, however, is certain.

Somewhere or other, the decorations displayed in golden letters the

title of the play which was about to be given. Perhaps this explains

why, more than a quarter of a century later, when the Westminster boys

played the _Miles Gloriosus_ before Elizabeth in January 1565, one

of the items of expenditure was for ‘paper, inke and colores for the

wryting of greate letters’.[65]

Investigation of Court records reveals nothing more precise than

this as to the staging of plays, whether classical or mediaeval in

type, under Henry VIII. It is noticeable, however, that a play often

formed but one episode in a composite entertainment, other parts of

which required the elaborate pageantry which was Henry’s contribution

to the development of the mask; and it may be conjectured that in

these cases the structure of the pageant served also as a sufficient

background for the play. Thus in 1527 a Latin tragedy celebrating the

deliverance of the Pope and of France by Wolsey was given in the ‘great

chamber of disguysings’, at the end of which stood a fountain with a

mulberry and a hawthorn tree, about which sat eight fair ladies in

strange attire upon ‘benches of rosemary fretted in braydes layd on

gold, all the sydes sette wyth roses in braunches as they wer growyng

about this fountayne’.[66] The device was picturesque enough, but can

only have had an allegorical relation to the action of the play. The

copious Revels Accounts of Edward and of Mary are silent about play

settings. It is only with those of Elizabeth that the indications of

‘houses’ and curtains already detailed in an earlier chapter make their

appearance.[67] The ‘houses’ of lath and canvas have their analogy

alike in the ‘case’ of Ferrara, which even Serlio had not abandoned,

and in the ‘maisons’ which the Hôtel de Bourgogne inherited from the

Confrérie de la Passion. We are left without guide as to whether the

use of them at the English Court was a direct tradition from English

miracle-plays, or owed its immediate origin to an Italian practice,

which was itself in any case only an outgrowth of mediaeval methods

familiar in Italy as well as in England. Nor can we tell, so far as the

Revels Accounts go, whether the ‘houses’ were juxtaposed on the stage

after the ‘multiple’ fashion of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, or were fused

with the help of perspective into a continuous façade or vista, as

Serlio bade. Certainly the Revels officers were not wholly ignorant of

the use of perspective, but this is also true of the machinists of the

Hôtel de Bourgogne.[68] Serlio does not appear to have used curtains,

as the Revels officers did, for the discovery of interior scenes, but

if, on the other hand, any of the great curtains of the Revels were

front curtains, these were employed at Ferrara and Rome, and we have no

knowledge that they were employed at Paris. At this point the archives

leave us fairly in an _impasse_.

It will be well to start upon a new tack and to attempt to ascertain,

by an analysis of such early plays as survive, what kind of setting

these can be supposed, on internal evidence, to have needed. And

the first and most salient fact which emerges is that a very large

number of them needed practically no setting at all. This is broadly

true, with exceptions which shall be detailed, of the great group

of interludes which extends over about fifty years of the sixteenth

century, from the end of Henry VII’s reign or the beginning of Henry

VIII’s, to a point in Elizabeth’s almost coincident with the opening

of the theatres. Of these, if mere fragments are neglected, there

are not less than forty-five. Twenty are Henrican;[69] perhaps seven

Edwardian or Marian;[70] eighteen Elizabethan.[71] Characteristically,

they are morals, presenting abstract personages varied in an increasing

degree with farcical types; but several are semi-morals, with a

sprinkling of concrete personages, which point backwards to the

miracle-plays, or forward to the romantic or historical drama. One or

two are almost purely miracle-play or farce; and towards the end one

or two show some traces of classical influence.[72] Subject, then, to

the exceptions, the interludes--and this, as already indicated, is a

fundamental point for staging--call for no changes of locality, with

which, indeed, the purely abstract themes of moralities could easily

dispense. The action proceeds continuously in a locality, which is

either wholly undefined, or at the most vaguely defined as in London

(_Hickscorner_), or in England (_King Johan_). This is referred to,

both in stage-directions and in dialogue, as ‘the place’, and with

such persistency as inevitably to suggest a term of art, of which the

obvious derivation is from the _platea_ of the miracle-plays.[73] It

may be either an exterior or an interior place, but often it is not

clearly envisaged as either. In _Pardoner and Friar_ and possibly in

_Johan the Evangelist_ it is a church; in _Johan Johan_ it is Johan’s

house. Whether interior or exterior, a door is often referred to as the

means of entrance and exit for the characters.[74] In _Johan Johan_ a

door is supposed to lead to the priest’s chamber, and there is a long

colloquy at the ‘chamber dore’. In exterior plays some kind of a house

may be suggested in close proximity to the ‘place’. In _Youth_ and in

_Four Elements_ the characters come and go to a tavern. The ‘place’ of

_Apius and Virginia_ is before the gate of Apius. There is no obvious

necessity why these houses should have been represented by anything

but a door. The properties used in the action are few and simple;

a throne or other seat, a table or banquet (_Johan Johan_, _Godly

Queen Hester_, _King Darius_), a hearth (_Nature_, _Johan Johan_), a

pulpit (_Johan the Evangelist_), a pail (_Johan Johan_), a dice-board

(_Nice Wanton_). My inference is that the setting of the interludes

was nothing but the hall in which performances were given, with for

properties the plenishing of that hall or such movables as could be

readily carried in. Direct hints are not lacking to confirm this view.

A stage-direction in _Four Elements_ tells us that at a certain point

‘the daunsers without the hall syng’. In _Impatient Poverty_ (242)

Abundance comes in with the greeting, ‘Joye and solace be in this

hall!’ _All for Money_ (1019) uses ‘this hall’, where we should expect

‘this place’. And I think that, apart from interludes woven into the

pageantry of Henry VIII’s disguising chambers, the hall contemplated

was at first just the ordinary everyday hall, after dinner or supper,

with the sovereigns or lords still on the dais, the tables and benches

below pushed aside, and a free space left for the performers on the

floor, with the screen and its convenient doors as a background and

the hearth ready to hand if it was wanted to figure in the action. If

I am right, the staged dais, with the sovereign on a high state in the

middle of the hall, was a later development, or a method reserved for

very formal entertainments.[75] The actors of the more homely interlude

would have had to rub shoulders all the time with the inferior members

of their audience. And so they did. In _Youth_ (39) the principal

character enters, for all the world like the St. George of a village

mummers’ play, with an

A backe, felowes, and gyve me roume

Or I shall make you to auoyde sone.[76]

In _Like Will to Like_ the Vice brings in a knave of clubs, which he

‘offreth vnto one of the men or boyes standing by’. In _King Darius_

(109) Iniquity, when he wants a seat, calls out

Syrs, who is there that hath a stoole?

I will buy it for thys Gentleman;

If you will take money, come as fast as you can.

A similar and earlier example than any of these now presents itself in

_Fulgens and Lucres_, where there is an inductive dialogue between

spectators, one of whom says to another

I thought verely by your apparel,

That ye had bene a player.

Of a raised stage the only indication is in _All for Money_, a late

example of the type, where one stage-direction notes (203), ‘There must

be a chayre for him to sit in, and vnder it or neere the same there

must be some hollowe place for one to come vp in’, while another (279)

requires ‘some fine conueyance’ to enable characters to vomit each

other up.

I come now to nine interludes which, for various reasons, demand

special remark. In _Jacob and Esau_ (> 1558) there is coming and going

between the place and the tent of Isaac, before which stands a bench,

the tent of Jacob, and probably also the tent of Esau. In _Wit and

Wisdom_ (> 1579) action takes place at the entrances of the house of

Wantonness, of the den of Irksomeness, of a prison, and of Mother Bee’s

house, and the prison, as commonly in plays of later types, must have

been so arranged as to allow a prisoner to take part in the dialogue

from within. Some realism, also, in the treatment of the den may be

signified by an allusion to ‘these craggie clifts’. In _Misogonus_

(_c._ 1560–77), the place of which is before the house of Philogonus,

there is one scene in Melissa’s ‘bowre’ (ii. 4, 12), which must somehow

have been represented. In _Thersites_ (1537), of which one of the

characters is a snail that ‘draweth her hornes in’, Mulciber, according

to the stage-directions, ‘must have a shop made in the place’, which he

leaves and returns to, and in which he is perhaps seen making a sallet.

Similarly, the Mater of Thersites, when she drops out of the dialogue,

‘goeth in the place which is prepared for her’, and hither later

‘Thersites must ren awaye, and hyde hym behynde hys mothers backe’.

These four examples only differ from the normal interlude type by some

multiplication of the houses suggested in the background, and probably

by some closer approximation than a mere door to the visual realization

of these. There is no change of locality, and only an adumbration of

interior action within the houses. Four other examples do entail

some change of locality. Much stress must not be laid on the sudden

conversions in the fourth act of _The Conflict of Conscience_ (> 1581)

and the last scene of _Three Ladies of London_ of the open ‘place’

into Court, for these are very belated specimens of the moral. And

the opening dialogue of the _Three Ladies_, on the way to London, may

glide readily enough into the main action before two houses in London

itself. But in _The Disobedient Child_ (_c._ 1560) some episodes are

before the house of the father, and others before that of the son in

another locality forty miles away. In _Mary Magdalene_ (< 1566), again,

the action begins in Magdalo, but there is a break (842) when Mary

and the Vice start on their travels, and it is resumed at Jerusalem,

where it proceeds first in some public place, and afterwards by a

sudden transition (1557) at a repast within the house of Simon. In both

cases it may be conjectured that the two localities were indicated on

opposite sides of the hall or stage, and that the personages travelled

from one to the other over the intervening space, which was regarded

as representing a considerable distance. You may call this ‘multiple

staging’, if you will. The same imaginative foreshortening of space

had been employed both in the miracle-plays and in the ‘Christian

Terence’.[77] Simon’s house at Jerusalem was, no doubt, some kind of

open _loggia_ with a table in it, directly approachable from the open

place where the earlier part of the Jerusalem action was located.

_Godly Queen Hester_ (? 1525–9) has a different interest, in that, of

all the forty-four interludes, it affords the only possible evidence

for the use of a curtain. In most respects it is quite a normal

interlude. The action is continuous, in a ‘place’, which represents

a council-chamber, with a chair for Ahasuerus. But there is no

mention of a door, and while the means of exit and entrance for the

ordinary personages are unspecified, the stage-directions note, on

two occasions (139, 635) when the King goes out, that he ‘entreth the

trauerse’. Now ‘traverses’ have played a considerable part in attempts

to reconstruct the Elizabethan theatre, and some imaginative writers

have depicted them as criss-crossing about the stage in all sorts of

possible and impossible directions.[78] The term is not a very happy

one to employ in the discussion of late sixteenth-century or early

seventeenth-century conditions. After _Godly Queen Hester_ it does

not appear again in any play for nearly a hundred years, and then, so

far as I know, is only used by Jonson in _Volpone_, where it appears

to indicate a low movable screen, probably of a non-structural kind,

and by John Webster, both in _The White Devil_ and in _The Duchess of

Malfi_, where it is an exact equivalent to the ‘curtains’ or ‘arras’,

often referred to as screening off a recess at the back of the

stage.[79] Half a century later still, it is used in the Restoration

play of _The Duke of Guise_ to indicate, not this normal back curtain,

but a screen placed across the recess itself, or the inner stage which

had developed out of it, behind ‘the scene’.[80] Webster’s use seems

to be an individual one. Properly a ‘traverse’ means, I think, not a

curtain suspended from the roof, but a screen shutting off from view

a compartment within a larger room, but leaving it open above. Such

a screen might, of course, very well be formed by a curtain running

on a rod or cord.[81] And a ‘traverse’ also certainly came to mean

the compartment itself which was so shut off.[82] The construction is

familiar in the old-fashioned pews of our churches, and as it happens,

it is from the records of the royal chapel that its Elizabethan use can

best be illustrated. Thus when Elizabeth took her Easter communion at

St. James’s in 1593, she came down, doubtless from her ‘closet’ above,

after the Gospel had been read, ‘into her Majestes Travess’, whence

she emerged to make her offering, and then ‘retorned to her princely

travess sumptuously sett forthe’, until it was time to emerge again and

receive the communion. So too, when the Spanish treaty was sworn in

1604, ‘in the chappell weare two traverses sett up of equall state in

all thinges as neare as might be’. One was the King’s traverse ‘where

he usually sitteth’, the other for the Spanish ambassador, and from

them they proceeded to ‘the halfe pace’ for the actual swearing of

the oath.[83] The traverse figures in several other chapel ceremonies

of the time, and it is by this analogy, rather than as a technical

term of stage-craft, that we must interpret the references to it in

_Godly Queen Hester_. It is not inconceivable that the play, which was

very likely performed by the Chapel, was actually performed in the

chapel.[84] Nor is it inconceivable, also, that the sense of the term

‘traverse’ may have been wide enough to cover the screen at the bottom

of a Tudor hall.

I come now to the group of four mid-century farces, _Gammer Gurton’s

Needle_, _Jack Juggler_, _Ralph Roister Doister_, and _Tom Tyler_,

which literary historians have distinguished from the interludes as

early ‘regular comedies’. No doubt they show traces of Renaissance

influence upon their dramatic handling. But, so far as scenic setting

is concerned, they do not diverge markedly from the interlude type.

Nor is this surprising, since Renaissance comedy, like the classical

comedy upon which it was based, was essentially an affair of continuous

action, in an open place, before a background of houses. _Gammer

Gurton’s Needle_ requires two houses, those of Gammer Gurton and of

Dame Chat; _Jack Juggler_ one, that of Boungrace; _Ralph Roister

Doister_ one, that of Christian Custance. Oddly enough, both _Gammer

Gurton’s Needle_ and _Jack Juggler_ contain indications of the presence

of a post, so placed that it could be used in the action.[85] _Tom

Tyler_, which may have reached us in a sophisticated text, has a

slightly more complicated staging. There are some quite early features.

The locality is ‘this place’ (835), and the audience are asked (18), as

in the much earlier _Youth_, to ‘make them room’. On the other hand, as

in _Mary Magdalene_ and in _The Conflict of Conscience_, there is at

one point (512) a transition from exterior to interior action. Hitherto

it has been in front of Tom’s house; now it is within, and his wife is

in bed. An open _loggia_ here hardly meets the case. The bed demands

some discovery, perhaps by the withdrawal of a curtain.

I am of course aware that the forty-four interludes and the four farces

hitherto dealt with cannot be regarded as forming a homogeneous body

of Court drama. Not one of them, in fact, can be absolutely proved to

have been given at Court. Several of them bear signs of having been

given elsewhere, including at least three of the small number which

present exceptional features.[86] Others lie under suspicion of having

been written primarily for the printing-press, in the hope that any

one who cared to act them would buy copies, and may therefore never

have been given at all; and it is obvious that in such circumstances a

writer might very likely limit himself to demands upon stage-management

far short of what the Court would be prepared to meet.[87] This is all

true enough, but at the same time I see no reason to doubt that the

surviving plays broadly represent the kind of piece that was produced,

at Court as well as elsewhere, until well into Elizabeth’s reign.

Amongst their authors are men, Skelton, Medwall, Rastell, Redford,

Bale, Heywood, Udall, Gascoigne, who were about the Court, and some

of whom we know to have written plays, if not these plays, for the

Court; and the survival of the moral as a Court entertainment is borne

witness to by the Revels Accounts of 1578–9, in which the ‘morrall of

the _Marriage of Mind and Measure_’ still holds its own beside the

classical and romantic histories which had already become fashionable.

As we proceed, however, we come more clearly within the Court sphere.

The lawyers stand very close, in their interests and their amusements,

to the Court, and with the next group of plays, a characteristically

Renaissance one, of four Italianate comedies and four Senecan

tragedies, the lawyers had a good deal to do. Gascoigne’s Gray’s

Inn _Supposes_ is based directly upon one of Ariosto’s epoch-making

comedies, _I Suppositi_, and adopts its staging. Jeffere’s _Bugbears_

and the anonymous _Two Italian Gentlemen_ are similarly indebted

to their models in Grazzini’s _La Spiritata_ and Pasqualigo’s _Il

Fedele_. Each preserves complete unity of place, and the continuous

action in the street before the houses, two or three in number, of the

principal personages, is only varied by occasional colloquies at a door

or window, and in the case of the _Two Italian Gentlemen_ by an episode

of concealment in a tomb which stands in a ‘temple’ or shrine beneath

a burning lamp. Whetstone’s _Promos and Cassandra_, the neo-classical

inspiration of which is advertised in the prefatory epistle, follows

the same formula with a certain freedom of handling. In the first part,

opportunity for a certain amount of interior action is afforded by

two of the three houses; one is a prison, the other a barber’s shop,

presumably an open stall with a door and a flap-down shutter. The third

is the courtesan’s house, on which Serlio insists. This reappears in

the second part and has a window large enough for four women to sit

in.[88] The other houses in this part are a temple with a tomb in it,

and a pageant stage used at a royal entry. The conveniences of exterior

action lead to a convention which often recurs in later plays, by which

royal justice is dispensed in the street. And the strict unity of place

is broken by a scene (iv. 2) which takes place, not like the rest of

the action in the town of Julio, but in a wood through which the actors

are approaching it. Here also we have, I think, the beginnings of a

convention by which action on the extreme edge of a stage, or possibly

on the floor of the hall or on steps leading to the stage, was treated

as a little remote from the place represented by the setting in the

background. The four tragedies were all produced at the Court itself

by actors from the Inns of Court. It is a little curious that the

earliest of the four, _Gorboduc_ (1562), is also the most regardless

of the unity of place. While Acts I and III-V are at the Court of

Gorboduc, Act II is divided between the independent Courts of Ferrex

and Porrex. We can hardly suppose that there was any substantial change

of decoration, and probably the same generalized palace background

served for all three. Here also the convention, classical enough,

rules, by which the affairs of state are conducted in the open. By 1562

the raised stage had clearly established itself. There are no regular

stage-directions in _Gorboduc_, but the stage is often mentioned in the

descriptions of the dumb-shows between the acts, and in the fourth of

these ‘there came from vnder the stage, as though out of hell, three

furies’. Similarly in _Jocasta_ (1566) the stage opens in the dumb-shows

to disclose, at one time a grave, at another the gulf of Curtius.

The action of the play itself is before the palace of Jocasta, but

there are also entrances and exits, which are carefully specified in

stage-directions as being through ‘the gates called Electrae’ and ‘the

gates called Homoloydes’. Perhaps we are to infer that the gates which,

if the stage-manager had Vitruvius in mind, would have stood on the

right and left of the proscenium, were labelled ‘in great letters’ with

their names; and if so, a similar device may have served in _Gorboduc_

to indicate at which of the three Courts action was for the time being

proceeding. _Gismond of Salerne_ has not only a hell, for Megaera, but

also a heaven, for the descent and ascent of Cupid. Like _Jocasta_, it

preserves unity of place, but it has two houses in the background, the

palace of Tancred and an independent ‘chamber’ for Gismond, which is

open enough and deep enough to allow part of the action, with Gismond

lying poisoned and Tancred mourning over her, to take place within it.

_The Misfortunes of Arthur_ is, of course, twenty years later than

the other members of the group. But it is true to type. The action

is in front of three _domus_, the ‘houses’ of Arthur and of Mordred,

which ought not perhaps historically to have been in the same city,

and a cloister. A few years later still, in 1591, Wilmot, one of the

authors of _Gismond of Salerne_, rewrote it as _Tancred and Gismund_.

He did not materially interfere with the old staging, but he added an

epilogue, of which the final couplet runs:

Thus end our sorrowes with the setting sun:

Now draw the curtens for our Scaene is done.

If these lines had occurred in the original version of the play, they

would naturally have been taken as referring to curtains used to cover

and discover Gismond’s death-chamber. But in this point Wilmot has

modified the original action, and has made Gismund take her poison and

die, not in her chamber, but on the open stage. Are we then faced,

as part of the paraphernalia of a Court stage, at any rate by 1591,

with a front curtain--a curtain drawn aside, and not sinking like the

curtains of Ferrara and Rome, but like those curtains used to mark the

beginning and end of a play, rather than to facilitate any changing

of scenes?[89] It is difficult to say. Wilmot, not re-writing for the

stage, may have rewritten loosely. Or the epilogue may after all have

belonged to the first version of the play, and have dropped out of the

manuscript in which that version is preserved. The Revels Accounts

testify that ‘great curtains’ were used in Court plays, but certainly

do not prove that they were used as front curtains. The nearest

approach to a corroboration of Wilmot is to be found in an epigram

which exists in various forms, and is ascribed in some manuscripts to

Sir Walter Raleigh.[90]

What is our life? a play of passion.

Our mirth? the musick of diuision.

Our mothers wombs the tyring houses bee

Where we are drest for liues short comedy.

The earth the stage, heauen the spectator is,

Who still doth note who ere do act amisse.

Our graues, that hyde vs from the all-seeing sun,

Are but drawne curtaynes when the play is done.

If these four comedies and four tragedies were taken alone, it

would, I think, be natural to conclude that, with the Italianized

types of drama, the English Court had also adopted the Italian type

of setting.[91] Certainly the tragedies would fit well enough into

Serlio’s stately façade of palaces, and the comedies into his more

homely group of bourgeois houses, with its open shop, its ‘temple’, and

its discreet abode of a _ruffiana_.[92]

As courtly, beyond doubt, we must treat the main outlook of the choir

companies during their long hegemony of the Elizabethan drama, which

ended with the putting down of Paul’s in 1590. Unfortunately it is not

until the last decade of this period, with the ‘court comedies’ of

Lyly, that we have any substantial body of their work, differentiated

from the interludes and the Italianate comedies, to go upon. The _Damon

and Pythias_ of Richard Edwardes has a simple setting before the gates

of a court. Lyly’s own methods require rather careful analysis.[93] The

locality of _Campaspe_ is throughout at Athens, in ‘the market-place’

(III. ii. 56).[94] On this there are three _domus_: Alexander’s palace,

probably represented by a portico in which he receives visitors, and

from which inmates ‘draw in’ (IV. iii. 32) to get off the stage; a

tub ‘turned towardes the sun’ (I. iii. 12) for Diogenes over which he

can ‘pry’ (V. iii. 21); a shop for Apelles, which has a window (III.

i. 18), outside which a page is posted, and open enough for Apelles

to carry on dialogue with Campaspe (III. iii.; IV. iv), while he

paints her within. These three _domus_ are quite certainly all visible

together, as continuous action can pass from one to another. At one

point (I. iii. 110) the philosophers walk direct from the palace to the

tub; at another (III. iv. 44, 57) Alexander, going to the shop, passes

the tub on the way; at a third (V. iv. 82) Apelles, standing at the

tub, is bidden ‘looke about you, your shop is on fire!’ As Alexander

(V. iv. 71) tells Diogenes that he ‘wil haue thy cabin remoued nerer

to my court’, I infer that the palace and the tub were at opposite

ends of the stage, and the shop in the middle, where the interior

action could best be seen. In _Sapho and Phao_ the unity of place is

not so marked. All the action is more or less at Syracuse, but, with

the exception of one scene (II. iii), the whole of the first two acts

are near Phao’s ferry outside the city. I do not think that the actual

ferry is visible, for passengers go ‘away’ (I. i. 72; ii. 69) to cross,

and no use is made of a ferryman’s house, but somewhere quite near

Sibylla sits ‘in the mouth of her caue’ (II. i. 13), and talks with

Phao.[95] The rest of the action is in the city itself, either before

the palace of Sapho, or within her chamber, or at the forge of Vulcan,

where he is perhaps seen ‘making of the arrowes’ (IV. iv. 33) during a

song. Certainly Sapho’s chamber is practicable. The stage-directions

do not always indicate its opening and shutting. At one point (III.

iii. 1) we simply get ‘Sapho in her bed’ in a list of interlocutors;

at another (IV. i. 20) ‘Exit Sapho’, which can only mean that the door

closes upon her. It was a door, not a curtain, for she tells a handmaid

(V. ii. 101) to ‘shut’ it. Curtains are ‘drawne’ (III. iii. 36; IV.

iii. 95), but these are bed-curtains, and the drawing of them does not

put Sapho’s chamber in or out of action. As in _Campaspe_, there is

interplay between house and house. A long continuous stretch of action,

not even broken by the act-intervals, begins with III. iii and extends

to the end of V. ii, and in the course of this Venus sends Cupid to

Sapho, and herself waits at Vulcan’s forge (V. i. 50). Presently (V.

ii. 45) she gets tired of waiting, and without leaving the stage,

advances to the chamber and says, ‘How now, in Saphoes lap?’ There is

not the same interplay between the city houses and Sibylla’s cave, to

which the last scene of the play returns. I think we must suppose that

two neighbouring spots within the same general locality were shown

in different parts of the stage, and this certainly entails a bolder

use of dramatic foreshortening of distance than the mere crossing the

market-place in _Campaspe_. This foreshortening recurs in _Endymion_.

Most of the action is in an open place which must be supposed to be

near the palace of Cynthia, or at the lunary bank (II. iii. 9), of

Endymion’s slumber, which is also near the palace.[96] It stands in a

grove (IV. iii. 160), and is called a ‘caban’ (IV. iii. 111). Somewhere

also in the open space is, in Act V, the aspen-tree, into which Dipsas

has turned Bagoa and from which she is delivered (V. iii. 283). But

III. ii and IV. i are at the door of ‘the Castle in the Deserte’ (III.

i. 41; ii. 1) and III. iv is also in the desert (cf. V. iii. 35),

before a fountain. This fountain was, however, ‘hard by’ the lunary

bank (IV. ii. 67), and probably the desert was no farther off than

the end of the stage.[97] In _Midas_ the convention of foreshortening

becomes inadequate, and we are faced with a definite change of

locality. The greater part of the play is at the Court of Midas,

presumably in Lydia rather than in Phrygia, although an Elizabethan

audience is not likely to have been punctilious about Anatolian

geography. Some scenes require as background a palace, to which it is

possible to go ‘in’ (I. i. 117; II. ii. 83; III. iii. 104). A temple

of Bacchus may also have been represented, but is not essential. Other

scenes are in a neighbouring spot, where the speaking reeds grow. There

is a hunting scene (IV. i) on ‘the hill Tmolus’ (cf. V. iii. 44). So

far Lyly’s canons of foreshortening are not exceeded. But the last

scene (V. iii) is out of the picture altogether. The opening words are

‘This is Delphos’, and we are overseas, before the temple of Apollo. In

_Galathea_ and in _Love’s Metamorphosis_, on the other hand, unity is

fully achieved. The whole of _Galathea_ may well proceed in a single

spot, on the edge of a wood, before a tree sacred to Neptune, and in

Lincolnshire (I. iv. 12). The sea is hard by, but need not be seen.

The action of _Love’s Metamorphosis_ is rather more diffuse, but an

all-over pastoral setting, such as we see in Serlio’s _scena satirica_,

with scattered _domus_ in different glades, would serve it. Or, as

the management of the Hôtel de Bourgogne would have put it, the stage

is _tout en pastoralle_. There are a tree of Ceres and a temple of

Cupid. These are used successively in the same scene (II. i). Somewhat

apart, on the sea-shore, but close to the wood, dwells Erisichthon.

There is a rock for the Siren, and Erisichthon’s house may also have

been shown.[98] Finally, _Mother Bombie_ is an extreme example of the

traditional Italian comic manner. The action comes and goes, rapidly

for Lyly, in an open place, surrounded by no less than seven houses,

the doors of which are freely used.

Two other Chapel plays furnish sufficient evidence that the type of

staging just described was not Lyly’s and Lyly’s alone.[99] Peele’s

_Arraignment of Paris_ is _tout en pastoralle_. A poplar-tree dominates

the stage throughout, and the only house is a bower of Diana, large

enough to hold the council of gods (381, 915). A trap is required

for the rising and sinking of a golden tree (489) and the ascent of

Pluto (902). Marlowe’s _Dido_ has proved rather a puzzle to editors

who have not fully appreciated the principles on which the Chapel

plays were produced. I think that one side of the stage was arranged

_en pastoralle_, and represented the wood between the sea-shore and

Carthage, where the shipwrecked Trojans land and where later Aeneas

and Dido hunt. Here was the cave where they take shelter from the

storm.[100] Here too must have been the curtained-off _domus_ of

Jupiter.[101] This is only used in a kind of prelude. Of course it

ought to have been in heaven, but the Gods are omnipresent, and it

is quite clear that when the curtain is drawn on Jupiter, Venus, who

has been discoursing with him, is left in the wood, where she then

meets Aeneas (134, 139, 173). The other side of the stage represents

Carthage. Possibly a wall with a gate in it was built across the stage,

dividing off the two regions. In the opening line of Act II, Aeneas

says,

Where am I now? these should be Carthage walles,

and we must think of him as advancing through the wood to the

gate.[102] He is amazed at a carved or printed representation of Troy,

which Virgil placed in a temple of Juno, but which Marlowe probably

thought of as at the gate. He meets other Trojans who have already

reached the city, and they call his attention to Dido’s servitors, who

‘passe through the hall’ bearing a banquet. Evidently he is now within

the city and has approached a _domus_ representing the palace. The

so-called ‘hall’ is probably an open _loggia_. Here Dido entertains

him, and in a later scene (773) points out to him the pictures of her

suitors. There is perhaps an altar in front of the palace, where Iarbas

does his sacrifice (1095), and somewhere close by a pyre is made for

Dido (1692). Either within or without the walls may be the grove in

which Ascanius is hidden while Cupid takes his place.[103] If, as is

more probable, it is without, action passes through the gate when Venus

beguiles him away. It certainly does at the beginning (912, 960) and

end (1085) of the hunt, and again when Aeneas first attempts flight and

Anna brings him back from the sea-shore (1151, 1207).

The plays of the Lylyan school, if one may so call it, seem to me to

illustrate very precisely, on the side of staging, that blend of the

classical and the romantic tempers which is characteristic of the later

Renaissance. The mediaeval instinct for a story, which the Elizabethans

fully shared, is with difficulty accommodated to the form of an action

coherent in place and time, which the Italians had established on the

basis of Latin comedy. The Shakespearian romantic drama is on the

point of being born. Lyly and his fellow University wits deal with

the problem to the best of their ability. They widen the conception

of locality, to a city and its environs instead of a street; and even

then the narrative sometimes proves unmanageable, and the distance

from one end of the stage to the other must represent a foreshortening

of leagues, or even of the crossing of an ocean. In the hands of less

skilful workmen the tendency was naturally accentuated, and plays had

been written, long before Lyly was sent down from Magdalen, in which

the episodes of breathless adventure altogether overstepped the most

elastic confines of locality. A glance at the titles of the plays

presented at Court during the second decade of Elizabeth’s reign will

show the extent to which themes drawn from narrative literature were

already beginning to oust those of the old interlude type.[104] The

new development is apparent in the contributions both of men and of

boys; with this distinction, that the boys find their sources mainly

in the storehouse of classical history and legend, while the men turn

either to contemporary events at home and abroad, or more often to the

belated and somewhat jaded versions, still dear to the Elizabethan

laity, of mediaeval romance. The break-down of the Italian staging must

therefore be regarded from the beginning, as in part at least a result

of the reaction of popular taste upon that of the Court. The noblemen’s

players came to London when the winter set in, and brought with them

the pieces which had delighted _bourgeois_ and village audiences up

and down the land throughout the summer; and on the whole it proved

easier for the Revels officers to adapt the stage to the plays than the

plays to the stage. Nor need it be doubted that, even in so cultivated

a Court as that of Elizabeth, the popular taste was not without its

echoes.

Of all this wealth of forgotten play-making, only five examples

survive; but they are sufficient to indicate the scenic trend.[105]

Their affiliation with the earlier interludes is direct. The ‘vice’ and

other moral abstractions still mingle with the concrete personages,

and the proscenium is still the ‘place’.[106] The simplest setting is

that of _Cambyses_. All is at or within sight of the Persian Court.

If any _domus_ was represented, it was the palace, to which there are

departures (567, 929). Cambyses consults his council (1–125) and there

is a banquet (965–1042) with a ‘boorde’, at the end of which order

is given to ‘take all these things away’.[107] In other episodes the

Court is ‘yonder’ (732, 938); it is only necessary to suppose that they

were played well away from the _domus_. One is in a ‘feeld so green’

(843–937), and a stage-direction tells us ‘Heere trace up and downe

playing’. In another (754–842) clowns are on their way to market.[108]

The only other noteworthy point is that, not for the first nor for

the last time, a post upon the stage is utilized in the action.[109]

_Patient Grissell_, on the other hand, requires two localities. The

more important is Salucia (Saluzzo), where are Gautier’s mansion,

Janickell’s cottage, and the house of Mother Apleyarde, a midwife

(1306). The other is Bullin Lagras (Bologna), where there are two short

episodes (1235–92, 1877–1900) at the house of the Countess of Pango.

There can be little doubt that all the _domus_ were staged at once.

There is direct transfer of action from Gautier’s to the cottage and

back again (612–34; cf. 1719, 2042, 2090). Yet there is some little

distance between, for when a messenger is sent, the foreshortening of

space is indicated by the stage-direction (1835), ‘Go once or twise

about the Staige’.[110] Similarly, unless an ‘Exiunt’ has dropped

out, there is direct transfer (1900) from Bullin Lagras to Salucia.

In _Orestes_ the problem of discrete localities is quite differently

handled. The play falls into five quasi-acts of unequal length, which

are situated successively at Mycenae, Crete, Mycenae, Athens, Mycenae.

For all, as in _Gorboduc_, the same sketchy palace background might

serve, with one interesting and prophetic exception. The middle

episodes (538–925), at Mycenae, afford the first example of those siege

scenes which the Shakespearian stage came to love. A messenger brings

warning to Aegisthus and Clytemnestra of the purpose of Orestes ‘to

inuade this Mycoene Citie stronge’. Aegisthus goes into the ‘realme’,

to take up men, and Clytemnestra will defend the city. There is a

quarrel between a soldier and a woman and the Vice sings a martial

song. Then ‘Horestes entrith with his bande and marcheth about the

stage’. He instructs a Herald, who advances with his trumpeter. ‘Let

y^e trumpet go towarde the Citie and blowe.’ Clytemnestra answers. ‘Let

y^e trumpet leaue soundyng and let Harrauld speake and Clytemnestra

speake ouer y^e wal.’ Summons and defiance follow, and Orestes calls

on his men for an assault. ‘Go and make your liuely battel and let it

be longe, eare you can win y^e Citie, and when you haue won it, let

Horestes bringe out his mother by the armes, and let y^e droum sease

playing and the trumpet also, when she is taken.’ But now Aegisthus

is at hand. ‘Let Egistus enter and set hys men in a raye, and let the

drom play tyll Horestes speaketh.’ There is more fighting, which ends

with the capture and hanging of Aegisthus. ‘Fling him of y^e lader,

and then let on bringe in his mother Clytemnestra; but let her loke

wher Egistus hangeth’. Finally Orestes announces that ‘Enter now we

wyll the citie gate’. In the two other plays the changes of locality

come thick and fast. The action of _Clyomon and Clamydes_ begins in

Denmark, and passes successively to Swabia, to the Forest of Marvels

on the borders of Macedonia, to the Isle of Strange Marshes twenty

days’ sail from Macedonia, to the Forest again, to the Isle again,

to Norway, to the Forest, to the Isle, to the Forest, to a road near

Denmark, to the Isle, to Denmark. Only two _domus_ are needed, a

palace (733) in the Isle, and Bryan Sans Foy’s Castle in the Forest.

This is a prison, with a practicable door and a window, from which

Clamydes speaks (872). At one point Providence descends and ascends

(1550–64). In one of the Forest scenes a hearse is brought in and it

is still there in the next (1450, 1534), although a short Isle scene

has intervened. This looks as though the two ends of the stage may

have been assigned throughout to the two principal localities, the

Forest and the Isle. Some care is taken to let the speakers give the

audience a clue when a new locality is made use of for the first time.

Afterwards the recurrence of characters whom they had already seen

would help them. The Norway episode (1121) is the only one which need

have much puzzled them. But _Clyomon and Clamydes_ may have made use of

a peculiar device, which becomes apparent in the stage-directions of

_Common Conditions_. The play opens in Arabia, where first a spot near

the Court and then a wood are indicated; but the latter part alternates

between Phrygia, near the sea-shore, and the Isle of Marofus. No

_domus_ is necessary, and it must remain uncertain whether the wood

was represented by visualized trees. It is introduced (295) with the

stage-direction, ‘Here enter Sedmond with Clarisia and Condicions

out of the wood’. Similarly Phrygia is introduced (478) with ‘Here

entreth Galiarbus out of Phrygia’, and a few lines later (510) we get

‘Here enter Lamphedon out of Phrygia’. Now it is to be noted that the

episodes which follow these directions are not away from, but in the

wood and Phrygia respectively; and the inference has been drawn that

there were labelled doors, entrance through one of which warned the

spectators that action was about to take place in the locality whose

title the label bore.[111] This theory obtains some plausibility from

the use of the gates Homoloydes and Electrae in _Jocasta_; and perhaps

also from the inscribed house of the _ruffiana_ in Serlio’s _scena

comica_, from the early Terence engravings, and from certain examples

of lettered _mansions_ in French miracle-plays.[112] But of course

these analogies do not go the whole way in support of a practice of

using differently lettered entrances to help out an imagined conversion

of the same ‘place’ into different localities. More direct confirmation

may perhaps be derived from Sidney’s criticism of the contemporary

drama in his _Defence of Poesie_ (_c._ 1583). There are two passages to

be cited.[113] The first forms part of an argument that poets are not

liars. Their feigning is a convention, and is accepted as such by their

hearers. ‘What Childe is there’, says Sidney, ‘that, comming to a Play,

and seeing _Thebes_ written in great letters vpon an olde doore, doth

beleeue that it is _Thebes_?’ Later on he deals more formally with the

stage, as a classicist, writing after the unity of place had hardened

into a doctrine. Even _Gorboduc_ is no perfect tragedy.