companions of all corporall actions. For where the stage
should alwaies represent but one place, and the vttermost time
presupposed in it should be, both by _Aristotles_ precept and
common reason, but one day, there is both many dayes, and many
places, inartificially imagined. But if it be so in _Gorboduck_,
how much more in al the rest? where you shal haue _Asia_ of
the one side, and _Affrick_ of the other, and so many other
vnder-kingdoms, that the Player, when he commeth in, must
ever begin with telling where he is, or els the tale wil not
be conceiued. Now ye shal haue three ladies walke to gather
flowers, and then we must beleeue the stage to be a Garden. By
and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and
then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a Rock. Vpon the
backe of that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke,
and then the miserable beholders are bounde to take it for a
Caue. While in the meantime two Armies flye in, represented with
foure swords and bucklers, and then what harde heart will not
receiue it for a pitched fielde?’
It is evident that the plays which Sidney has mostly in mind, the
‘al the rest’ of his antithesis with _Gorboduc_, are precisely those
romantic histories which the noblemen’s players in particular were
bringing to Court in his day, and of which _Clyomon and Clamydes_ and
_Common Conditions_ may reasonably be taken as the characteristic
débris. He hints at what we might have guessed that, where changes
of scene were numerous, the actual visualization of the different
scenes left much to the imagination. He lays his finger upon the
foreshortening, which permits the two ends of the stage to stand
for localities separated by a considerable distance, and upon the
obligation which the players were under to let the opening phrases of
their dialogue make it clear where they were supposed to be situated.
And it certainly seems from the shorter passage, as if he was also
familiar with an alternative or supplementary device of indicating
locality by great letters on a door. The whole business remains rather
obscure. What happened if the distinct localities were more numerous
than the doors? Were the labels shifted, or were the players then
driven, as Sidney seems to suggest, to rely entirely upon the method
of spoken hints? The labelling of special doors with great letters
must be distinguished from the analogous use of great letters, as
at the _Phormio_ of 1528, to publish the title of a play.[114] That
this practice also survived in Court drama may be inferred from Kyd’s
_Spanish Tragedy_, in which Hieronimo gives a Court play, and bids
his assistant (IV. iii. 17) ‘hang up the Title: Our scene is Rhodes’.
Even if the ‘scene’ formed part of the title in such cases, it would
only name a generalized locality or localities for the play, and would
not serve as a clue to the localization of individual episodes.[115]
A retrospect over this discussion of Tudor staging, which is mainly
Court staging, up to a point well subsequent to the establishment of
the first regular theatres, seems to offer the following results. The
earliest interludes, other than revivals of Plautus and Terence or
elements in spectacular disguisings, limited themselves to the setting
of the hall in which they were performed, with its doors, hearth, and
furniture. In such conditions either exterior or interior action could
be indifferently represented. This arrangement, however, soon ceased
to satisfy, in the Court at any rate, the sixteenth-century love of
decoration; and one or more houses were introduced into the background,
probably on a Renaissance rather than a mediaeval suggestion, through
which, as well as the undifferentiated doors, the personages could
come and go. The addition of an elevated stage enabled traps to be
used (_All for Money_, _Gorboduc_, _Jocasta_, _Gismond of Salerne_,
_Arraignment of Paris_); but here, as in the corresponding device of
a descent from above (_Gismond of Salerne_, _Clyomon and Clamydes_),
it is the mediaeval grading for heaven and hell which lies behind the
Renaissance usage. With houses in the background, the normal action
becomes uniformly exterior. If a visit is paid to a house, conversation
takes place at its door rather than within. The exceptions are rare and
tentative, amounting to little more than the provision of a shallow
recess within a house, from which personages, usually one or two only,
can speak. This may be a window (_Two Italian Gentlemen_, _Promos
and Cassandra_), a prison (_Wit and Wisdom_, _Promos and Cassandra_,
_Clyomon and Clamydes_), a bower (_Misogonus_, _Endymion_, _Dido_,
_Arraignment of Paris_), a tub (_Campaspe_), a shrine or tomb (_Two
Italian Gentlemen_, _Promos and Cassandra_), a shop (_Thersites_,
_Promos and Cassandra_, _Campaspe_, _Sapho and Phao_), a bedchamber
(_Gismund of Salerne_, _Tom Tyler_, _Sapho and Phao_). Somewhat
more difficulty is afforded by episodes in which there is a banquet
(_Mary Magdalene_, _Dido_, _Cambyses_), or a law court (_Conflict
of Conscience_), or a king confers with his councillors (_Midas_,
_Cambyses_). These, according to modern notions, require the setting of
a hall; but my impression is that the Italianized imagination of the
Elizabethans was content to accept them as taking place more or less
out-of-doors, on the steps or in the cortile of a palace, with perhaps
some arcaded _loggia_, such as Serlio suggests, in the background,
which would be employed when the action was supposed to be withdrawn
from the public market-place or street. And this convention I believe
to have lasted well into the Shakespearian period.[116]
The simplicity of this scheme of staging is broken into, when a
mediaeval survival or the popular instinct for storytelling faces
the producer with a plot incapable of continuous presentation in
a single locality. A mere foreshortening of the distance between
houses conceived as surrounding one and the same open _platea_, or as
dispersed in the same wood, is hardly felt as a breach of unity. But
the principle is endangered, when action within a city is diversified
by one or more ‘approach’ episodes, in which the edge of the stage
or the steps leading up to it must stand for a road or a wood in the
environs (_Promos and Cassandra_, _Sapho and Phao_, _Dido_). It is
on the point of abandonment, when the foreshortening is carried so
far that one end of the stage represents one locality and the other
end another at a distance (_Disobedient Child_, _Mary Magdalene_,
_Endymion_, _Midas_, _Patient Grissell_). And it has been abandoned
altogether, when the same background or a part of it is taken to
represent different localities in different episodes, and ingenuity
has to be taxed to find means of informing the audience where any
particular bit of action is proceeding (_Gorboduc_, _Orestes_, _Clyomon
and Clamydes_, _Common Conditions_).[117]
After considering the classicist group of comedies and tragedies, I
suggested that these, taken by themselves, would point to a method of
staging at the Elizabethan Court not unlike that recommended by Serlio.
The more comprehensive survey now completed points to some revision
of that judgement. Two localities at opposite ends of the stage could
not, obviously, be worked into a continuous architectural façade. They
call for something more on the lines of the multiple setting of the
Hôtel de Bourgogne, although the width of the Elizabethan palace halls
may perhaps have accommodated a longer stage than that of the Hôtel,
and permitted of a less crude juxtaposition of the houses belonging to
distinct localities than Mahelot offers us. Any use of perspective, for
which there is some Elizabethan evidence, was presumably within the
limits of one locality.[118]
The indications of the Revels Accounts, scanty as they are, are not
inconsistent with those yielded by the plays.[119] If the _Orestes_
of 1567–8, as may reasonably be supposed, was Pikeryng’s, his ‘howse’
must have been the common structure used successively for Mycenae,
Crete, and Athens. The ‘Scotland and a gret Castell on thothere side’
give us the familiar arrangement for two localities. I think that the
‘city’ of the later accounts may stand for a group of houses on one
street or market-place, and a ‘mountain’ or ‘wood’ for a setting _tout
en pastoralle_. There were tents for _A Game of the Cards_ in 1582–3,
as in _Jacob and Esau_, a prison for _The Four Sons of Fabius_ in
1579–80, as in several extant plays. I cannot parallel from any early
survival the senate house for the _Quintus Fabius_ of 1573–4, but this
became a common type of scene at a later date. These are recessed
houses, and curtains, quite distinct from the front curtain, if any,
were provided by the Revels officers to open and close them, as the
needs of the action required. Smaller structures, to which the accounts
refer, are also needed by the plays; a well by _Endymion_, a gibbet by
_Orestes_, a tree by _The Arraignment of Paris_, and inferentially by
all pastoral, and many other plays. The brief record of 1567–8 does not
specify the battlement or gated wall, solid enough for Clytemnestra
to speak ‘ouer y^e wal’, which was a feature in the siege episode of
_Orestes_. Presumably it was part of the ‘howse’, which is mentioned,
and indeed it would by itself furnish sufficient background for the
scenes alike at Mycenae, Crete, and Athens. If it stood alone, it
probably extended along the back of the stage, where it would interfere
least with the arrays of Orestes and of Aegisthus. But in the accounts
of 1579–85, the plays, of which there are many, with battlements also,
as a rule, have cities, and here we must suppose some situation for
the battlement which will not interfere with the city. If it stood for
the gate and wall of some other city, it may have been reared at an
opposite end of the stage. In _Dido_, where the gate of Troy seems to
have been shown, although there is no action ‘ouer’ it, I can visualize
it best as extending across the middle of the stage from back to
front. With an unchanging setting it need not always have occupied
the same place. The large number of plays between 1579 and 1585 which
required battlements, no less than fourteen out of twenty-eight in all,
is rather striking. No doubt the assault motive was beloved in the
popular type of drama, of which _Orestes_ was an early representative.
A castle in a wood, where a knight is imprisoned, is assaulted in
_Clyomon and Clamydes_, and the Shakespearian stage never wearied of
the device. I have sometimes thought that with the Revels officers
‘battlement’ was a technical term for any platform provided for action
at a higher level than the floor of the stage. Certainly a battlement
was provided in 1585 for an entertainment which was not a play at all,
but a performance of feats of activities.[120] But as a matter of fact
raised action, so common in the Shakespearian period, is extremely
rare in these early plays. With the exceptions of Clytemnestra peering
over her wall, and the descents from heaven in _Gismond of Salerne_
and _Clyomon and Clamydes_, which may of course have been through
the roof rather than from a platform, the seventy or so plays just
discussed contain nothing of the kind. There are, however, two plays
still to be mentioned, in which use is made of a platform, and one of
these gives some colour to my suggestion. In 1582 Derby’s men played
_Love and Fortune_ at Court, and a city and a battlement, together with
some other structure of canvas, the name of which is left blank, were
provided. This may reasonably be identified with the _Rare Triumphs
of Love and Fortune_, which claims on its title-page of 1589 to have
been played before the Queen. It is a piece of the romantic type. The
action is divided between a court and a cave in a wood, which account
for the city and the unnamed structure of the Revels record. They were
evidently shown together, at opposite ends of the stage, for action
passes directly from one to the other. There is no assault scene. But
there is an induction, in which the gods are in assembly, and Tisiphone
arises from hell. At the end of it Jupiter says to Venus and Fortune:
Take up your places here, to work your will,
and Vulcan comments:
They are set sunning like a crow in a gutter.
They remain as spectators of the play until they ‘shew themselves’ and
intervene in the _dénouement_. Evidently they are in a raised place
or balcony. And this balcony must be the battlement. An exact analogy
is furnished by the one of Lyly’s plays to which I have not as yet
referred. This is _The Woman in the Moon_, Lyly’s only verse play, and
possibly of later date than his group of productions with the Paul’s
boys. The first act has the character of an induction. Nature and the
seven Planets are on the stage and ‘They draw the curtins from before
Natures shop’. During the other four there is a human action in a
pastoral setting with a cave, beneath which is a trap, a grove on the
bank of Enipeus, and a spot near the sea-shore. And throughout one or
other of the Planets is watching the play from a ‘seate’ (II. 176; III.
i. 1) above, between which and the stage they ‘ascend’ and ‘descend’
(I. 138, 230; II. 174, 236; III. ii. 35; IV. 3).
XX
STAGING IN THE THEATRES: SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[For _Bibliographical Note_, _vide_ ch. xviii.]
In dealing with the groups of plays brought under review in the
last chapter, the main problem considered has been that of their
adaptability to the conditions of a Court stage. In the present chapter
the point of view must be shifted to that of the common theatres.
Obviously no hard and fast line is to be drawn. There had been regular
public performances in London since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign
or earlier, and there is no reason to suppose that the adult companies
at least did not draw upon the same repertory both for popular and for
private representation. But there is not much profit in attempting
to investigate the methods of staging in the inns, of which we know
nothing more than that quasi-permanent structures of carpenter’s work
came in time to supplement the doors, windows, and galleries which
surrounded the yards; and so far as the published plays go, it is
fairly apparent that, up to the date of the suppression of Paul’s, the
Court, or at any rate the private, interest was the dominating one. A
turning-point may be discerned in 1576, at the establishment, on the
one hand of the Theatre and the Curtain, and on the other of Farrant’s
house in the Blackfriars. It is not likely that the Blackfriars
did more than reproduce the conditions of a courtly hall. But the
investment of capital in the Theatre and the Curtain was an incident
in the history of the companies, the economic importance of which has
already been emphasized in an earlier discussion.[121] It was followed
by the formation of strong theatrical organizations in the Queen’s men,
the Admiral’s, Strange’s, the Chamberlain’s. For a time the economic
changes are masked by the continued vogue of the boy companies; but
when these dropped out at the beginning of the ’nineties, it is clear
that the English stage had become a public stage, and that the eyes of
its controllers were fixed primarily upon the pence gathered by the
box-holders, and only secondarily upon the rewards of the Treasurer of
the Chamber.
The first play published ‘as it was publikely acted’ is the
_Troublesome Raigne of John_ of 1591, and henceforward I think it
is true to say that the staging suggested by the public texts and
their directions in the main represents the arrangements of the
public theatres. There is no sudden breach of continuity with the
earlier period, but that continuity is far greater with the small
group of popular plays typified by _Clyomon and Clamydes_ and _Common
Conditions_, than with anything which Lyly and his friends produced
at Paul’s or the Blackfriars. Again it is necessary to beware of
any exaggeration of antithesis. There is one Chapel play, _The Wars
of Cyrus_, the date of which is obscure, and the setting of which
certainly falls on the theatre rather than the Court side of any
border-line. On the other hand, the Queen’s men and their successors
continued to serve the Court, and one of the published Queen’s plays,
_The Old Wive’s Tale_, was evidently staged in a way exactly analogous
to that adopted by Lyly, or by Peele himself in _The Arraignment of
Paris_. It is _tout en pastoralle_, and about the stage are dispersed a
hut with a door, at the threshold of which presenters sit to watch the
main action (71, 128, 1163), a little hill or mound with a practicable
turf (512, 734, 1034), a cross (173, 521), a ‘well of life’ (743,
773), an inn before which a table is set (904, 916), and a ‘cell’ or
‘studie’ for the conjurer, before which ‘he draweth a curten’ (411,
773, 1060).[122] Of one other play by Peele it is difficult to take
any account in estimating evidence as to staging. This is _David and
Bethsabe_, of which the extant text apparently represents an attempt to
bring within the compass of a single performance a piece or fragments
of a piece originally written in three ‘discourses’. I mention it here,
because somewhat undue use has been made of its opening direction in
speculations as to the configuration of the back wall of the public
stage.[123] It uses the favourite assault motive, and has many changes
of locality. The title-page suggests that in its present form it was
meant for public performance. But almost anything may lie behind that
present form, possibly a Chapel play, possibly a University play, or
even a neo-miracle in the tradition of Bale; and the staging of any
particular scene may contain original elements, imperfectly adapted to
later conditions.
Counting in _The Wars of Cyrus_ then, and counting out _The Old Wive’s
Tale_ and _David and Bethsabe_, there are about seventy-four plays
which may reasonably be taken to have been presented upon common
stages, between the establishment of the Queen’s men in 1583 and the
building of the Globe for the Chamberlain’s men in 1599 and of the
Fortune for the Admiral’s men in 1600. With a few exceptions they were
also published during the same period, and the scenic arrangements
implied by their texts and stage-directions may therefore be looked
upon as those of the sixteenth-century theatres. These form the
next group for our consideration. Of the seventy-four plays, the
original production of nine may with certainty or fair probability be
assigned to the Queen’s men, of two to Sussex’s, five to Pembroke’s,
fourteen to Strange’s or the Admiral’s or the two in combination,
thirteen to the Admiral’s after the combination broke up, seventeen
to the Chamberlain’s, three to Derby’s, one to Oxford’s, and one to
the Chapel; nine must remained unassigned.[124] It is far less easy
to make a guess at the individual theatre whose staging each play
represents. The migrations of the companies before 1594 in the main
elude us. Thereafter the Admiral’s were settled at the Rose until 1600.
The Chamberlain’s may have passed from the Theatre to the Curtain
about 1597. The habitations of the other later companies are very
conjectural. Moreover, plays were carried from theatre to theatre,
and even transferred from company to company. _Titus Andronicus_,
successively presented by Pembroke’s, Strange’s, Sussex’s, and the
Chamberlain’s, is an extreme case in point. The ideal method would have
been to study the staging of each theatre separately, before coming to
any conclusion as to the similarity or diversity of their arrangements.
This is impracticable, and I propose therefore to proceed on the
assumption that the stages of the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Rose
were in their main features similar. For this there is an _a priori_
argument in the convenience of what Mr. Archer calls a ‘standardisation
of effects’, especially at a time when the bonds between companies and
theatres were so loose.[125] Moreover, the Theatre and the Curtain
were built at much the same date, and although there was room for
development in the art of theatrical architecture before the addition
of the Rose, I am unable, after a careful examination of the relevant
plays, to lay my finger upon any definite new feature which Henslowe
can be supposed to have introduced. It is exceedingly provoking that
the sixteenth-century repertory of the Swan has yielded nothing which
can serve as a _point de liaison_ between De Witt’s drawing and the
mass of extant texts.
It will be well to begin with some analysis of the various types of
scene which the sixteenth-century managers were called upon to produce;
and these may with advantage be arranged according to the degree of
use which they make of a structural background.[126] There are, of
course, a certain number of scenes which make no use of a background
at all, and may in a sense be called unlocated scenes--mere bits of
conversation which might be carried on between the speakers wherever
they happened to meet, and which give no indication of where that
meeting is supposed to be. Perhaps these scenes are not so numerous as
is sometimes suggested.[127] At any rate it must be borne in mind that
they were located to the audience, who saw them against a background,
although, if they were kept well to the front or side of the stage,
their relation to that background would be minimized.
A great many scenes are in what may be called open country--in a
road, a meadow, a grove, a forest, a desert, a mountain, a sea-shore.
The personages are travelling, or hunting, or in outlawry, or merely
taking the air. The background does not generally include a house in
the stricter sense; but there may be a cottage,[128] a hermit’s or
friar’s cell,[129] a rustic bower,[130] a cave,[131] a beacon.[132]
Even where there is no evidence, in dialogue or stage-directions,
for a dwelling, a table or board may be suddenly forthcoming for a
banquet.[133] There may be a fountain or well,[134] and a few scenes
seem to imply the presence of a river.[135] But often there is no
suggestion of any surroundings but rocks or trees, and the references
to the landscape, which are frequently put in the mouths of speakers,
have been interpreted as intended to stimulate the imagination of
spectators before whose eyes no representation, or a very imperfect
representation, of wilderness or woodland had been placed.[136] But
it is not likely that this literary artifice was alone relied upon,
and in some cases practicable trees or rocks are certainly required
by the action and must have been represented.[137] There are plays
which are set continuously in the open country throughout, or during a
succession of scenes, and are thus analogous to Court plays _tout en
pastoralle_. But there are others in which the open-country scenes are
only interspersed among scenes of a different type.[138]
Nothing was more beloved by a popular audience, especially in an
historical play or one of the _Tamburlaine_ order, than an episode
of war. A war scene was often only a variety of the open-country scene.
Armies come and go on the road, and a battle naturally takes place in
more or less open ground. It may be in a wood, or a tree or river may
be introduced.[139] Obviously large forces could not be shown on the
stage.
We shall much disgrace,
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill disposed in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt.[140]
The actual fighting tended to be sketchy and symbolical. There were
alarums and excursions, much beating of drums and blowing of trumpets.
But the stage was often only on the outskirts of the main battle.[141]
It served for a duel of protagonists, or for a flight and pursuit of
stragglers; and when all was over a triumphant train marched across it.
There may be a succession of ‘excursions’ of this kind, in which the
stage may be supposed, if you like, to stand for different parts of a
battle-field.[142] Battle scenes have little need for background; the
inn at St. Albans in _Henry VI_ is an exception due to the fulfilment
of an oracular prophecy.[143] A more natural indication of _milieu_ is
a tent, and battle scenes merge into camp scenes, in which the tents
are sometimes elaborate pavilions, with doors and even locks to the
doors. Seats and tables may be available, and the action is clearly
sometimes within an opened tent.[144] Two opposing camps can be
concurrently represented, and action may alternate between them.[145]
Another kind of background is furnished, as in _Orestes_, by the walls
of a besieged city. On these walls the defenders can appear and parley
with the besieging host. They can descend and open the gates.[146] They
can shoot, and be shot at from below.[147] The walls can be taken by
assault and the defenders can leap from them.[148] Such scenes had an
unfailing appeal, and are sometimes repeated, before different cities,
in the same play.[149]
Several scenes, analogous in some ways to those in the open country,
are set in a garden, an orchard, a park. These also sometimes utilize
tents.[150] Alternative shelter may be afforded by an arbour or bower,
which facilitates eavesdropping.[151] The presence of trees, banks, or
herbs is often required or suggested.[152] As a rule, the neighbourhood
of a dwelling is implied, and from this personages may issue, or may
hold discourse with those outside. Juliet’s balcony, overlooking
Capulet’s orchard, is a typical instance.[153] A banquet may be brought
out and served in the open.[154]
The next great group of scenes consists of those which pass in some
public spot in a city--in a street, a market-place, or a churchyard.
Especially if the play is located in or near London, this may be
a definite and familiar spot--Cheapside, Lombard Street, Paul’s
Churchyard, Westminster.[155] Often the action is self-sufficient and
the background merely suggestive or decorative. A procession passes;
a watch is set; friends meet and converse; a stranger asks his way.
But sometimes a structure comes into use. There is a scaffold for an
execution.[156] Lists are set, and there must be at least a raised
place for the judge, and probably a barrier.[157] One street scene
in _Soliman and Perseda_ is outside a tiltyard; another close to an
accessible tower.[158] Bills may be set up.[159] In _Lord Cromwell_
this is apparently done on a bridge, and twice in this play it is
difficult to resist the conclusion, already pointed to in certain
open-country scenes, that some kind of representation of a river-side
was feasible.[160] In Rome there are scenes in which the dialogue is
partly amongst senators in the capitol and partly amongst citizens
within ear-shot outside.[161] A street may provide a corner, again,
whence passers-by can be overheard or waylaid.[162] And in it, just
as well as in a garden, a lover may hold an assignation, or bring a
serenade before the window of his mistress.[163] A churchyard, or in
a Roman play a market-place, may hold a tomb.[164] Finally one or more
shops may be visible, and action may take place within them as well as
before them.[165] Such a shop would, of course, be nothing more than a
shallow stall, with an open front for the display of wares, which may
be closed by a shutter or flap from above.[166] It may also, like the
inn in _Henry VI_, have a sign.[167]
Where there is a window, there can of course be a door, and street
scenes very readily become threshold scenes. I do not think that it
has been fully realized how large a proportion of the action of
Elizabethan plays passes at the doors of houses; and as a result
the problem of staging, difficult enough anyhow, has been rendered
unnecessarily difficult. Here we have probably to thank the editors
of plays, who have freely interspersed their texts with notes of
locality, which are not in the original stage-directions, and, with
eighteenth-century models before them, have tended to assume that
action at a house is action in some room within that house. The
playwrights, on the other hand, followed the neo-classic Italian
tradition, and for them action at a house was most naturally action
before the door of that house. If a man visited his friend he was
almost certain to meet him on the doorstep; and here domestic
discussions, even on matters of delicacy, commonly took place. Here
too, of course, meals might be served.[168] A clue to this convention
is afforded by the numerous passages in which a servant or other
personage is brought on to the stage by a ‘Who’s within?’ or a call
to ‘Come forth!’ or in which an episode is wound up by some such
invitation as ‘Let us in!’ No doubt such phrases remain appropriate
when it is merely a question of transference between an outer room
and an inner; and no doubt also the point of view of the personages
is sometimes deflected by that of the actors, to whom ‘in’ means ‘in
the tiring-room’ and ‘out’ means ‘on the stage’.[169] But, broadly
speaking, the frequency of their use points to a corresponding
frequency of threshold scenes; and, where there is a doubt, they
should, I think, be interpreted in the light of that economy of
interior action which was very evident in the mid-sixteenth-century
plays, and in my opinion continued to prevail after the opening
of the theatres. The use of a house door was so frequent that the
stage-directions do not, as a rule, trouble to specify it.[170] Two
complications are, however, to be observed. Sometimes, in a scene
which employs the ‘Let us in!’ formula, or on other ground looks like
a threshold scene, we are suddenly pulled up either by a suggestion
of the host that we are ‘in’ his house or under his roof, or by an
indication that persons outside are to be brought ‘in’.[171] The first
answer is, I think, that the threshold is not always a mere doorstep
opening from the street; it may be something of the nature of a porch
or even a lobby, and that you may fairly be said to be under a man’s
roof when you are in his porch.[172] The second is that in some
threshold scenes the stage was certainly regarded as representing a
courtyard, shut off from the street or road by an outer gate, through
which strangers could quite properly be supposed to come ‘in’.[173]
Such courtyard scenes are not out of place, even before an ordinary
private house; still less, of course, when the house is a castle, and
in a castle courtyard scene we get very near the scenes with ‘walls’
already described.[174] Some prison scenes, in the Tower or elsewhere,
are apparently of this type, although others seem to require interior
action in a close chamber or even a dungeon.[175] Threshold scenes may
also be before the outer gate of a palace or castle, where another
analogy to assault scenes presents itself;[176] or before a church or
temple, a friar’s cell, an inn, a stable, or the like.[177] Nor are
shop scenes, since a shop may be a mere adjunct to a house, really
different in kind.
The threshold theory must not be pushed to a disregard of the clear
evidence for a certain amount of interior action. We have already come
across examples of shallow recesses, such as a tent, a cave, a bower, a
tomb, a shop, a window, within which, or from within which, personages
can speak. There are also scenes which must be supposed to take
place within a room. In dealing with these, I propose to distinguish
between spacious hall scenes and limited chamber scenes. Hall scenes
are especially appropriate to palaces. Full value should no doubt be
given to the extension in a palace of a porch to a portico, and to the
convention, which kings as well as private men follow in Elizabethan
plays, especially those located in Italian or Oriental surroundings, of
transacting much important business more or less out-of-doors.[178] The
characteristic Roman ‘senate house’, already described, is a case in
point.[179] But some scenes must be in a closed presence-chamber.[180]
Others are in a formal council room or parliament house. The conception
of a hall, often with a numerous company, cannot therefore be
altogether excluded. Nor are halls confined to palaces. They must be
assumed for law courts.[181] There are scenes in such buildings as the
London Exchange, Leadenhall, the Regent House at Oxford.[182] There
are scenes in churches or heathen temples and in monasteries.[183]
There are certainly also hall scenes in castles or private houses,
and it is sometimes a matter of taste whether you assume a hall scene
or a threshold scene.[184] Certain features of hall scenes may be
enumerated. Personages can go into, or come forth from, an inner room.
They can be brought in from without.[185] Seats are available, and
a chair or ‘state’ for a sovereign.[186] A law court has its ‘bar’.
Banquets can be served.[187] Masks may come dancing in.[188] Even a
play ‘within a play’ can be presented; that of Bottom and his fellows
in ‘the great chamber’ of Theseus’ palace is an example.[189]
My final group is formed by the chamber scenes, in which the action
is clearly regarded as within the limits of an ordinary room. They
are far from numerous, in proportion to the total number of scenes in
the seventy-three plays, and in view of their importance in relation
to staging all for which there is clear evidence must be put upon
record. Most of them fall under two or three sub-types, which tend to
repeat themselves. The commonest are perhaps bedchamber scenes.[190]
These, like prison scenes, which are also frequent, give opportunity
for tragic episodes of death and sickness.[191] There are scenes
in living-rooms, often called ‘studies’.[192] A lady’s bower,[193]
a counting-house,[194] an inn parlour,[195] a buttery,[196] a
gallery,[197] may also be represented.
This then is the practical problem, which the manager of an
Elizabethan theatre had to solve--the provision of settings, not
necessarily so elaborate or decorative as those of the Court, but
at least intelligible, for open country scenes, battle and siege
scenes, garden scenes, street and threshold scenes, hall scenes,
chamber scenes. Like the Master of the Revels, he made far less use
of interior action than the modern or even the Restoration producer
of plays; but he could not altogether avoid it, either on the larger
scale of a hall scene, in which a considerable number of persons had
occasionally to be staged for a parliament or a council or the like,
or on the smaller scale when only a few persons had to be shown in
a chamber, or in the still shallower enclosure which might stand as
part of a mainly out-of-doors setting for a cell, a bower, a cave, a
tent, a senate house, a window, a tomb, a shop, a porch, a shrine, a
niche.[198] Even more than the Master of the Revels, he had to face
the complication due to the taste of an English audience for romantic
or historical drama, and the changes of locality which a narrative
theme inevitably involved. Not for him, except here and there in a
comedy, that blessed unity of place upon which the whole dramatic art
of the Italian neo-classic school had been built up. Our corresponding
antiquarian problem is to reconstruct, so far as the evidence permits,
the structural resources which were at the Elizabethan manager’s
disposal for the accomplishment of his task. As material we have the
numerous indications in dialogue and stage-directions with which the
footnotes to this chapter are groaning; we have such contemporary
allusions as those of Dekker’s _Gull’s Hornbook_; we have the débris of
Philip Henslowe’s business memoranda; we have the tradition inherited
from the earlier Elizabethan period, for all the types of scene usual
in the theatres had already made their appearance before the theatres
came into existence; to a much less degree, owing to the interposition
of the roofed and rectangular Caroline theatre, we have also the
tradition bequeathed to the Restoration; and as almost sole graphic
presentment we have that drawing of the Swan theatre by Johannes de
Witt, which has already claimed a good deal of our consideration, and
to which we shall have to return from time to time, as a _point de
repère_, in the course of the forthcoming discussion. It is peculiarly
unfortunate that of all the seventy-three plays, now under review,
not one can be shown to have been performed at the Swan, and that the
only relics of the productions at that house, the plot of _England’s
Joy_ of 1602 and Middleton’s _Chaste Maid in Cheapside_ of 1611, stand
at such a distance of time from DeWitt’s drawing as not to exclude
the hypothesis of an intermediate reconstruction of its stage. One
other source of information, which throws a sidelight or two upon the
questions at issue, I will here deal with at more length, because it
has been a good deal overlooked. The so-called ‘English Wagner Book’
of 1594, which contains the adventures of Wagner after the death of
his master Faustus, although based upon a German original, is largely
an independent work by an author who shows more than one sign of
familiarity with the English theatre.[199] The most important of these
is in chapter viii, which is headed ‘The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus
seene in the Ayre, and acted in the presence of a thousand people of
Wittenberg. An. 1540’. It describes, not an actual performance, but an
aerial vision produced by Wagner’s magic arts for the bewilderment of
an imperial pursuivant. The architecture has therefore, no doubt, its
elements of fantasy. Nevertheless, it is our nearest approach to a pen
picture of an Elizabethan stage, whereby to eke out that of De Witt’s
pencil.
‘They might distinctly perceiue a goodlye Stage to be reard
(shining to sight like the bright burnish golde) uppon many a
faire Pillar of clearest Cristall, whose feete rested uppon the
Arch of the broad Raynebow, therein was the high Throne wherein
the King should sit, and that prowdly placed with two and twenty
degrees to the top, and round about curious wrought chaires for
diverse other Potentates, there might you see the ground-worke
at the one end of the Stage whereout the personated divels
should enter in their fiery ornaments, made like the broad wide
mouth of an huge Dragon ... the teeth of this Hels-mouth far
out stretching.... At the other end in opposition was seene the
place where in the bloudlesse skirmishes are so often perfourmed
on the Stage, the Wals ... of ... Iron attempered with the most
firme steele ... environed with high and stately Turrets of the
like metall and beautye, and hereat many in-gates and out-gates:
out of each side lay the bended Ordinaunces, showing at their
wide hollowes the crueltye of death: out of sundry loopes many
large Banners and Streamers were pendant, brieflye nothing was
there wanting that might make it a faire Castle. There might
you see to be short the Gibbet, the Posts, the Ladders, the
tiring-house, there everything which in the like houses either
use or necessity makes common. Now above all was there the gay
Clowdes _Vsque quaque_ adorned with the heavenly firmament, and
often spotted with golden teares which men callen Stars. There
was lively portrayed the whole Imperiall Army of the faire
heavenly inhabitaunts.... This excellent faire Theator erected,
immediatly after the third sound of the Trumpets, there entreth
in the Prologue attired in a blacke vesture, and making his
three obeysances, began to shew the argument of that Scenicall
Tragedy, but because it was so far off they could not understand
the wordes, and having thrice bowed himselfe to the high Throne,
presently vanished.’
The action of the play is then described. Devils issue from hell mouth
and besiege the castle. Faustus appears on the battlements and defies
them. Angels descend from heaven to the tower and are dismissed by
Faustus. The devils assault the castle, capture Faustus and raze the
tower. The great devil and all the imperial rulers of hell occupy the
throne and chairs and dispute with Faustus. Finally,
‘Faustus ... leapt down headlong of the stage, the whole company
immediatly vanishing, but the stage with a most monstrous
thundering crack followed Faustus hastely, the people verily
thinking that they would have fallen uppon them ran all away.’
The three salient features of the Swan stage, as depicted by De Witt,
are, firstly the two pairs of folding doors in the back wall; secondly,
the ‘heavens’ supported on posts, which give the effect of a division
of the space into a covered rear and an uncovered front; and thirdly,
the gallery or row of boxes, which occupies the upper part of the back
wall. Each of these lends itself to a good deal of comment. The two
doors find abundant confirmation from numerous stage-directions, which
lead up to the favourite dramatic device of bringing in personages from
different points to meet in the centre of the stage. The formula which
agrees most closely with the drawing is that which directs entrance
‘at one door’ and ‘at the other door’, and is of very common use.[200]
But there are a great many variants, which are used, as for example
in the plot of _2 Seven Deadly Sins_, with such indifference as to
suggest that no variation of structure is necessarily involved.[201]
Thus an equally common antithesis is that between ‘one door’ and, not
‘the other door’, but ‘an other door’.[202] Other analogous expressions
are ‘one way’ and ‘at an other door’, ‘one way’ and ‘another way’,
‘at two sundry doors’, ‘at diverse doors’, ‘two ways’, ‘met by’;[203]
or again, ‘at several doors’, ‘several ways’, ‘severally’.[204] There
is a divergence, however, from De Witt’s indications, when we come
upon terminology which suggests that more than two doors may have
been available for entrances, a possibility with which the references
to ‘one door’ and ‘an other’ are themselves not inconsistent. Thus
in one of the _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ variants, after other personages
have entered ‘seuerall waies’, we find ‘Gorboduk entreing in the midst
between’. There are other examples of triple entrance in _Fair Em_,
in _Patient Grissell_, and in _The Trial of Chivalry_, although it
is not until the seventeenth century that three doors are in so many
words enumerated.[205] We get entrance ‘at every door’, however, in
_The Downfall of Robin Hood_, and this, with other more disputable
phrases, might perhaps be pressed into an argument that even three
points of entrance did not exhaust the limits of practicability.[206]
It should be added that, while doors are most commonly indicated as the
avenue of entrance, this is not always the case. Sometimes personages
are said to enter from one or other ‘end’, or ‘side’, or ‘part’ of
the stage.[207] I take it that the three terms have the same meaning,
and that the ‘end’ of a stage wider than its depth is what we should
call its ‘side’. A few minor points about doors may be noted, and
the discussion of a difficulty may be deferred.[208] Some entrances
were of considerable size; an animal could be ridden on and off.[209]
There were practicable and fairly solid doors; in _A Knack to Know an
Honest Man_, a door is taken off its hinges.[210] And as the doors give
admittance indifferently to hall scenes and to out-of-door scenes,
it is obvious that the term, as used in the stage-directions, often
indicates a part of the theatrical structure rather than a feature
properly belonging to a garden or woodland background.[211]
Some observations upon the heavens have already been made in an earlier
chapter.[212] I feel little doubt that, while the supporting posts
had primarily a structural object, and probably formed some obstacle
to the free vision of the spectators, they were occasionally worked
by the ingenuity of the dramatists and actors into the ‘business’ of
the plays. The hints for such business are not very numerous, but they
are sufficient to confirm the view that the Swan was not the only
sixteenth-century theatre in which the posts existed. Thus in a street
scene of _Englishmen for my Money_ and in an open country scene of _Two
Angry Women of Abingdon_ we get episodes in which personages groping
in the darkness stumble up against posts, and the second of these is
particularly illuminating, because the victim utters a malediction
upon the carpenter who set the post up, which a carpenter may have
done upon the stage, but certainly did not do in a coney burrow.[213]
In _Englishmen for my Money_ the posts are taken for maypoles, and
there are two of them. There are two of them also in _Three Lords
and Three Ladies of London_, a post and ‘the contrarie post’, and
to one of them a character is bound, just as Kempe tells us that
pickpockets taken in a theatre were bound.[214] The binding to a post
occurs also in _Soliman and Perseda_.[215] In _James IV_ and in _Lord
Cromwell_ bills are set up on the stage, and for this purpose the posts
would conveniently serve.[216] All these are out-of-door scenes, but
there was a post in the middle of a warehouse in _Every Man In his
Humour_, and Miles sits down by a post during one of the scenes in the
conjurer’s cell in _Bacon and Bungay_.[217] I am not oblivious of the
fact that there were doubtless other structural posts on the stage
besides those of the heavens, but I do not see how they can have been
so conspicuous or so well adapted to serve in the action.[218] Posts
may have supported the gallery, but I find it difficult to visualize
the back of the stage without supposing these to have been veiled by
the hangings. But two of them may have become visible when the hangings
were drawn, or some porch-like projection from the back wall may have
had its posts, and one of these may be in question, at any rate in the
indoor scenes.
The roof of the heavens was presumably used to facilitate certain
spectacular effects, the tradition of which the public theatres
inherited from the miracle-plays and the Court stage.[219] Startling
atmospheric phenomena were not infrequently represented.[220] These
came most naturally in out-of-door scenes, but I have noted one example
in a scene which on general grounds one would classify as a hall
scene.[221] The illusion may not have gone much beyond a painted cloth
drawn under the roof of the heavens.[222] More elaborate machinery may
have been entailed by aerial ascents and descents, which were also
not uncommon. Many Elizabethan actors were half acrobats, and could
no doubt fly upon a wire; but there is also clear evidence for the
use of a chair let down from above.[223] And was the arrangement of
cords and pulleys required for this purpose also that by which the
chair of state, which figures in so many hall scenes and even a few
out-of-door scenes, was put into position?[224] Henslowe had a throne
made in the heavens of the Rose in 1595.[225] Jonson sneered at the
jubilation of boyhood over the descent of the creaking chair.[226] The
device would lighten the labours of the tire-man, for a state would be
an awkward thing to carry on and off. It would avoid the presence of
a large incongruous property on the stage during action to which it
was inappropriate. And it would often serve as a convenient signal
for the beginning or ending of a hall scene. But to this aspect of the
matter I must return.[227] Whatever the machinery, it must have been
worked in some way from the upper part of the tire-house; possibly from
the somewhat obscure third floor, which De Witt’s drawing leaves to
conjecture; possibly from the superstructure known as the hut, if that
really stood further forward than De Witt’s drawing suggests. Perhaps
the late reference to Jove leaning on his elbows in the garret, or
employed to make squibs and crackers to grace the play, rather points
to the former hypothesis.[228] In favour of the latter, for what it
is worth, is the description, also late, of a theatre set up by the
English actors under John Spencer at Regensburg in 1613. This had a
lower stage for music, over that a main stage thirty feet high with a
roof supported by six great pillars, and under the roof a quadrangular
aperture, through which beautiful effects were contrived.[229]
There has been a general abandonment of the hypothesis, which found
favour when De Witt’s drawing was first discovered, of a division of
the stage into an inner and an outer part by a ‘traverse’ curtain
running between the two posts, perhaps supplemented by two other
curtains running from the posts back to the tire-house.[230] Certainly
I do not wish to revive it. Any such arrangement would be inconsistent
with the use of the tire-house doors and gallery in out-of-door scenes;
for, on the hypothesis, these were played with the traverse closed. And
it would entail a serious interference with the vision of such scenes
by spectators sitting far round in the galleries or ‘above the stage’.
It does not, of course, follow that no use at all was made of curtains
upon the stage. It is true that no hangings of any kind are shown by
De Witt. Either there were none visible when he drew the Swan in 1596,
or, if they were visible, he failed to draw them; it is impossible to
say which. We know that even the Swan was not altogether undraped in
1602, for during the riot which followed the ‘cousening prancke’ of
_England’s Joy_ in that year the audience are said to have ‘revenged
themselves upon the hangings, curtains, chairs, stooles, walles,
and whatsoever came in their way’.[231] It is not, indeed, stated
that these hangings and curtains were upon the stage, and possibly,
although not very probably, they may have been in the auditorium.
Apart, however, from the Swan, there is abundant evidence for the use
of some kind of stage hangings in the public theatres of the sixteenth
century generally. To the references in dialogue and stage-directions
quoted in the footnotes to this chapter may be added the testimony
of Florio in 1598, of Ben Jonson in 1601, of Heywood in 1608, and of
Flecknoe after the Restoration.[232] We can go further, and point to
several passages which attest a well-defined practice, clearly going
back to the sixteenth century, of using black hangings for the special
purpose of providing an appropriate setting for a tragedy.[233] Where
then were these hangings? For a front curtain, on the public stage,
as distinct from the Court stage, there is no evidence whatever, and
the precautions taken to remove dead bodies in the course of action
enable us quite safely to leave it out of account.[234] There may have
been hangings of a decorative kind in various places, of course; round
the base of the stage, for example, or dependent, as Malone thought,
from the heavens. But the only place where we can be sure that there
were hangings was what Heywood calls the ‘fore-front’ of the stage,
by which it seems clear from Florio that he means the fore-front of
the tiring-house, which was at the same time the back wall of the
stage. It is, I believe, exclusively to hangings in this region that
our stage-directions refer. Their terminology is not quite uniform.
‘Traverse’ I do not find in a sixteenth-century public play.[235] By
far the most common term is ‘curtain’, but I do not think that there
is any technical difference between ‘curtain’ and the not infrequent
‘arras’ or the unique ‘veil’ of _The Death of Robin Hood_.[236] ‘Arras’
is the ordinary Elizabethan name for a hanging of tapestry used as
a wall decoration, and often projected from a frame so as to leave
a narrow space, valuable to eavesdroppers and other persons in need
of seclusion, between itself and the wall. The stage arras serves
precisely this purpose as a background to interior scenes. Here stand
the murderers in _King John_; here Falstaff goes to sleep in _1 Henry
IV_; and here too he proposes to ‘ensconce’ himself, in order to
avoid being confronted with both his ladyloves together in _The Merry
Wives_.[237]
The stage-directions, however, make it quite clear that the curtains
were not merely an immovable decoration of the back wall. They could
be ‘opened’ and ‘shut’ or ‘closed’; and either operation could
indifferently be expressed by the term ‘drawn’. This drawing was
presumably effected by sliding the curtain laterally along a straight
rod to which it was affixed by rings sewn on to its upper edge;
there is no sign of any rise or fall of the curtain. The operator
may be an actor upon the stage; in _Bacon and Bungay_ Friar Bacon
draws the curtains ‘with a white sticke’. He may be the speaker of
a prologue.[238] Whether the ‘servitours’ of a theatre ever came
upon the stage, undisguised, to draw the curtains, I am uncertain;
but obviously it would be quite easy to work the transformation from
behind, by a cord and pulley, without any visible intervention.[239]
The object of the drawing is to introduce interior action, either in
a mere recess, or in a larger space, such as a chamber; and this, not
only where curtains are dramatically appropriate, as within a house,
or at the door of a tent, but also where they are less so, as before a
cave or a forest bower. One may further accept the term ‘discovered’
as indicating the unveiling of an interior by the play of a curtain,
even when the curtain is not specifically mentioned;[240] and may
recognize that the stage-directions sometimes use ‘Enter’ and ‘Exit’
in a loose sense of persons, who do not actually move in or out, but
are ‘discovered’, or covered, by a curtain.[241]
Of what nature, then, was the space so disclosed? There was ordinarily,
as already stated, a narrow space behind an arras; and if the gallery
above the stage jutted forward, or had, as the Swan drawing perhaps
indicates, a projecting weather-board, this might be widened into a
six- or seven-foot corridor, still in front of the back wall.[242]
Such a corridor would, however, hardly give the effect of a chamber,
although it might that of a portico. Nor would it be adequate in
size to hold all the scenes which it is natural to class as chamber
scenes; such, for example, as that in _Tamburlaine_, where no less than
ten persons are discovered grouped around Zenocrate’s bed.[243] The
stage-directions themselves do not help us much; that in _Alphonsus_
alone names ‘the place behind the stage’, and as this is only required
to contain the head of Mahomet, a corridor, in this particular scene,
would have sufficed.[244] There is, however, no reason why the opening
curtains should not have revealed a quite considerable aperture in the
back wall, and an alcove or recess of quite considerable size lying
behind this aperture. With a 43-foot stage, as at the Fortune, and
doors placed rather nearer the ends of it than De Witt shows them,
it would be possible to get a 15-foot aperture, and still leave room
for the drawn curtains to hang between the aperture and the doors.
Allow 3 feet for the strip of stage between arras and wall, and a
back-run of 10 feet behind the wall, and you get an adequate chamber
of 15 feet × 13 feet. My actual measurements are, of course, merely
illustrative. There would be advantages, as regards vision, in not
making the alcove too deep. The height, if the gallery over the stage
ran in a line with the middle gallery for spectators, would be about 8
feet or 9 feet; rather low, I admit.[245] A critic may point out that
behind the back wall of the outer stage lay the tire-house, and that
the 14-foot deep framework of a theatre no greater in dimensions than
the Fortune does not leave room for an inner stage in addition to the
tire-house. I think the answer is that the ‘place behind the stage’ was
in fact nothing but an _enclave_ within the tire-house, that its walls
consisted of nothing but screens covered with some more arras, that
these were only put up when they were needed for some particular scene,
and that when they were up, although they extended to nearly the full
depth of the tire-house, they did not occupy its full width, but left
room on either side for the actors to crowd into, and for the stairs
leading to the upper floors. When no interior scene had to be set,
there was nothing between the tire-house and the outer stage but the
curtains; and this renders quite intelligible the references quoted in
an earlier chapter to actors peeping through a curtain at the audience,
and to the audience ‘banding tile and pear’ against the curtains, to
allure the actors forth.[246] I do not think it is necessary to assume
that there was a third pair of folding doors permanently fixed in the
aperture.[247] They would be big and clumsy, although no doubt they
would help to keep out noise. In any case, there is not much evidence
on the point. If Tarlton’s head was seen ‘the Tire-House doore and
tapistrie betweene’, he may very well have gone to the end of the
narrow passage behind the arras, and looked out where that was broken
by one of the side-doors. No doubt, however, the aperture is the third
place of entrance ‘in the midst’, which the stage-directions or action
of some plays require, and which, as such, came to be regarded as a
third door.[248]
[Illustration: A. SQUARE THEATRE (Proportions of Fortune)]
I conceive, therefore, of the alcove as a space which the tire-man,
behind the curtains and in close proximity to the screens and
properties stored in the tire-house, can arrange as he likes, without
any interruption to continuous action proceeding on the outer stage. He
can put up a house-front with a door, and if needed, a porch. He can
put up a shop, or for that matter, a couple of adjacent shops. He can
put up the arched gates of a city or castle. These are comparatively
shallow structures. But he can also take advantage of the whole depth
of the space, and arrange a chamber, a cave, or a bower, furnishing
it as he pleases, and adding doors at the back or side, or a back
window, which would enable him to give more light, even if only
borrowed light from the tire-house, to an interior scene.[249] One
point, however, is rather puzzling. There are some scenes which imply
entrance to a chamber, not from behind, but from the open stage in
front, and by a visible door which can be knocked at or locked. Thus
in _Romeo and Juliet_, of which all the staging is rather difficult
on any hypothesis, the Friar observes Juliet coming towards his cell,
and after they have discoursed Juliet bids him shut the door. Here,
no doubt, the Friar may have looked out and seen Juliet through a back
window, and she may have entered by a back door. But in an earlier
scene, where we get the stage-direction ‘Enter Nurse and knockes’, and
the knocking is repeated until the Nurse is admitted to the cell, we
are, I think, bound to suppose that the entry is in front, in the sight
of the audience, and antecedent to the knocking.[250] Perhaps an even
clearer case is in _Captain Thomas Stukeley_, where Stukeley’s chamber
in the Temple is certainly approached from the open stage by a door
at which Stukeley’s father knocks, and which is unlocked and locked
again.[251] Yet how can a door be inserted in that side of a chamber
which is open to the stage and the audience. Possibly it was a very
conventional door set across the narrow space between the arras and
the back wall of the main stage, at the corner of the aperture and at
right angles to its plane. The accompanying diagrams will perhaps make
my notion of the inner stage clearer.
[Illustration: B. OCTAGONAL THEATRE (e.g. Globe; size of Fortune)]
It has been suggested, by me as well as by others, that the inner stage
may have been raised by a step or two above the outer stage.[252] On
reflection, I now think this unlikely. There would be none too much
height to spare, at any rate if the height of the alcove was determined
by that of the spectators’ galleries. The only stage-direction which
suggests any such arrangement is in the _Death of Robin Hood_, where
the King sits in a chair behind the curtains, and the Queen ascends to
him and descends again.[253] But even if the tire-man put up an exalted
seat in this case, there need have been no permanent elevation. The
missing woodcut of the Anglo-German stage at Frankfort in 1597 is said
to have shown a raised inner stage; but until it is recovered, it is
difficult to estimate its value as testimony upon the structure of the
London theatres.[254]
It must not, of course, be taken for granted that every curtain,
referred to in text or stage-directions as ‘drawn’, was necessarily a
back curtain disclosing an alcove. In some, although not all, of the
bedchamber scenes the indications do not of themselves exclude the
hypothesis of a bed standing on the open stage and the revealing of the
occupant by the mere drawing of bed-curtains.[255] I do not think there
is any certain example of such an arrangement in a sixteenth-century
play.[256] But tents also could be closed by curtains, and the plot
of _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ requires Henry VI to lie asleep in ‘A tent
being plast one the stage’, while dumb-shows enter ‘at one dore’ and
‘at an other dore’.[257] However it may have been with other theatres,
we cannot, on the evidence before us, assert that the Swan had an
alcove at all; and if it had not, it was probably driven to provide for
chamber scenes by means of some curtained structure on the stage itself.
On the other hand, it must not be supposed that every case, in which
a back curtain was drawn, will have found record in the printed book
of the play concerned; and when the existence of an alcove has once
been established, it becomes legitimate to infer its use for various
chamber and analogous scenes, to the presentation of which it would
have been well adapted. But this inference, again, must not be twisted
into a theory that the stage in front of the back wall served only for
out-of-door scenes, and that all interior action was housed, wholly
or in part, in the alcove. This is, I think, demonstrably untrue, as
regards the large group of indoor scenes which I have called hall
scenes. In the first place, the alcove would not have been spacious
enough to be of any value for a great many of the hall scenes. You
could not stage spectacular action, such as that of a coronation, a
sitting of parliament, or a trial at the bar, in a box of 15 by 13 feet
and only 9 feet high. A group of even so many as ten persons clustered
round a bed is quite another thing. I admit the device of the so-called
‘split’ scene, by which action beginning in the alcove is gradually
extended so as to take the whole of the stage into its ambit.[258] This
might perhaps serve for a court of justice, with the judges in the
alcove, the ‘bar’ drawn across the aperture, and the prisoners brought
in before it. A scene in which the arras is drawn in _Sir Thomas More_
points to such a setting.[259] But a scene in which a royal ‘state’ is
the dominating feature would be singularly ineffective if the state
were wedged in under the low roof of the alcove; and if I am right
in thinking that the ‘state’ normally creaked down into its position
from the heavens, it would clearly land, not within the alcove, but
upon the open stage in front of it. Indeed, if it could be placed into
position behind a curtain, there would be no reason for bringing it
from the heavens at all. Then, again, hall scenes are regularly served
by two or more doors, which one certainly would not suppose from the
stage-directions to be any other than the doors similarly used to
approach out-of-door scenes; and they frequently end with injunctions
to ‘come in’, which would be superfluous if the personages on the
stage could be withdrawn from sight by the closing of the curtain.
Occasionally, moreover, the gallery over the stage comes into play in
a hall scene, in a way which would not be possible if the personages
were disposed in the alcove, over which, of course, this gallery
projected.[260] Some of these considerations tell more directly against
the exclusive use of the alcove for hall scenes, than against its use
in combination with the outer stage; and this combined use, where
suitable, I am quite prepared to allow. But ordinarily, I think, the
hall scenes were wholly on the outer stage; and this must necessarily
have been the case where two rooms were employed, of which one opens
out behind the other.[261]
It may be said that the main object of the curtain is to allow of
the furniture and decorations of a ‘set’ scene, which is usually an
interior scene, being put in place behind it, without any interruption
to the continuous progress of an act; and that hall scenes cannot
be set properly, unless they also are behind the curtain line. I do
not think that there is much in this argument. A hall scene does
not require so much setting as a chamber scene. It is sufficiently
furnished, at any rate over the greater part of its area, with the
state and such lesser seats as can very readily be carried on during
the opening speeches or during the procession by which the action is
often introduced. A bar can be set up, or a banquet spread, or a sick
man brought in on his chair, as part of the action itself.[262] Even
an out-of-door scene, such as an execution or a duel in the lists,
sometimes demands a similar adjustment;[263] it need no more give pause
than the analogous devices entailed by the removal of dead bodies from
where they have fallen.
I must not be taken to give any countenance to the doctrine that
properties, incongruous to the particular scene that was being played,
were allowed to stand on the public Elizabethan stage, and that the
audience, actually or through a convention, was not disturbed by
them.[264] This doctrine appears to me to rest upon misunderstandings
of the evidence produced in its support, and in particular upon a
failure to distinguish between the transitional methods of setting
employed by Lyly and his clan, and those of the permanent theatres
with which we are now concerned. The former certainly permitted of
incongruities in the sense that, as the neo-classic stage strove to
adapt itself to a romantic subject-matter, separate localities, with
inconsistent properties, came to be set at one and the same time in
different regions of the stage. But the system proved inadequate to
the needs of romanticism, as popular audiences understood it; and,
apart from some apparent rejuvenescence in the ‘private’ houses,
with which I must deal later, it gave way, about the time of the
building of the permanent theatres, to the alternative system, by
which different localities were represented, not synchronously but
successively, and each in its turn had full occupation of the whole
field of the stage. This full occupation was not, I venture to think,
qualified by the presence in any scene of a property inappropriate
to that scene, but retained there because it had been used for some
previous, or was to be used for some coming, scene. I do not mean to
say that some colourless or insignificant property, such as a bench,
may not have served, without being moved, first in an indoors and then
in an out-of-doors scene. But that the management of the Theatre or
the Rose was so bankrupt in ingenuity that the audience had to watch
a coronation through a fringe of trees or to pretend unconsciousness
while the strayed lovers in a forest dodged each other round the
corners of a derelict ‘state’, I, for one, see no adequate reason to
believe. It is chiefly the state and the trees which have caused the
trouble. But, after all, a state which has creaked down can creak up
again, just as a banquet or a gallows which has been carried on can be
carried off. Trees are perhaps a little more difficult. A procession of
porters, each with a tree in his arms, would be a legitimate subject
for the raillery of _The Admirable Bashville_. A special back curtain
painted _en pastoralle_ would hardly be adequate, even if there were
any evidence for changes of curtain; trees were certainly sometimes
practicable and therefore quasi-solid.[265] The alcove, filled with
shrubs, would by itself give the illusion of a greenhouse rather
than a forest; moreover, the alcove was available in forest scenes
to serve as a rustic bower or cottage.[266] Probably the number of
trees dispersed over the body of the stage was not great; they were a
symbolical rather than a realistic setting. On the whole, I am inclined
to think that, at need, trees ascended and descended through traps;
and that this is not a mere conjecture is suggested by a few cases in
which the ascent and descent, being part of a conjuring action, are
recorded in the stage-directions.[267] One of these shows that the
traps would carry not merely a tree but an arbour. The traps had, of
course, other functions. Through them apparitions arose and sank;[268]
Jonah was spewed up from the whale’s belly;[269] and the old device of
hell-mouth still kept alive a mediaeval tradition.[270] Only primitive
hydraulics would have been required to make a fountain flow or a fog
arise;[271] although it may perhaps be supposed that the episodes,
in which personages pass to and from boats or fling themselves into
a river, were performed upon the extreme edge of the stage rather
than over a trap.[272] I do not find any clear case, in the public
sixteenth-century theatres, of the convention apparently traceable in
Lyly and Whetstone, by which the extreme edge of the stage is used
for ‘approach’ scenes, as when a traveller arrives from afar, or when
some episode has to be represented in the environs of a city which
furnishes the principal setting.[273] And I think it would certainly
be wrong to regard the main stage, apart from the alcove, as divided
into an inner area covered by the heavens and an outer area, not so
covered and appropriate to open-country scenes. Indeed, the notion that
any substantial section of the stage appeared to the audience not to
lie under the heavens is in my view an illusion due to the unskilful
draughtsmanship of De Witt or his copyist. Skyey phenomena belong most
naturally to open-country scenes, nor are these wholly debarred from
the use of the state; and the machinery employed in both cases seems to
imply the existence of a superincumbent heavens.[274]
I come finally to the interesting question of the gallery above the
stage. This, in the Swan drawing, may project very slightly over the
scenic wall, and is divided by short vertical columns into six small
compartments, in each of which one or two occupants are sitting. They
might, of course, be personages in the play; but, if so, they seem
curiously dissociated from the action. They might be musicians, but
they appear to include women, and there is no clear sign of musical
instruments. On the whole, they have the air of spectators.[275]
However this may be, let us recall what has already been established
in an earlier chapter, that there is conclusive evidence for some use
of the space above the stage for spectators, at least until the end
of the sixteenth century, and for some use of it as a music-room, at
least during the seventeenth century.[276] With these uses we have
to reconcile the equally clear indications that this region, or some
part of it, was available when needed, throughout the whole of the
period under our consideration, as a field for dramatic action. For
the moment we are only concerned with the sixteenth century. A glance
back over my footnotes will show many examples in which action is said
to be ‘above’ or ‘aloft’, or is accompanied by the ascent or descent
of personages from or to the level of the main stage. This interplay
of different levels is indeed the outstanding characteristic of the
Elizabethan public theatre, as compared with the other systems of
stage-presentment to which it stands in relation. There are mediaeval
analogies, no doubt, and one would not wish to assert categorically
that no use was ever made of a balcony or a house-roof in a Greek
or Roman or Italian setting. But, broadly speaking, the classical
and neo-classical stage-tradition, apart from theophanies, is one of
action on a single level. Even in the Elizabethan Court drama, the
platform comes in late and rarely, although the constant references to
‘battlements’ in the Revels Accounts enable us to infer that, by the
time when the public theatres came to be built, the case of _Orestes_
was not an isolated one. Battlements, whatever the extension which
the Revels officers came to give to the term, were primarily for
the beloved siege scenes, and to the way in which siege scenes were
treated in the theatres I must revert. But from two plays, _The Rare
Triumphs of Love and Fortune_ and _The Woman in the Moon_, both of
which probably represent a late development of the Court drama, we may
gather at least one other definite function of the platform, as a point
of vantage from which presenters, in both cases of a divine type, may
sit ‘sunning like a crow in a gutter’, and watch the evolution of their
puppets on the stage below.[277] This disposition of presenters ‘aloft’
finds more than one parallel in the public theatres. The divine element
is retained in _The Battle of Alcazar_, where Henslowe’s plot gives us,
as part of the direction for a dumb-show, ‘Enter aboue Nemesis’.[278]
There are traces of it also in _James IV_ and in _A Looking Glass for
London and England_. In _James IV_ the presenters are Bohan, a Scot,
and Oberon, king of fairies. They come on the stage for an induction,
at the end of which Bohan says, ‘Gang with me to the Gallery, and Ile
show thee the same in action by guid fellowes of our country men’, and
they ‘_Exeunt_’. Obviously they watch the action, for they enter again
and comment upon it during act-intervals. One of their interpositions
is closed with the words ‘Gow shrowd vs in our harbor’; another with
‘Lets to our sell, and sit & see the rest’.[279] In the _Looking Glass_
we get after the first scene the direction, ‘Enters brought in by an
angell Oseas the Prophet, and set downe ouer the Stage in a Throne’.
Oseas is evidently a presenter; the actors ignore him, but he makes
moral comments after various scenes, and at the end of Act IV comes the
further direction, ‘Oseas taken away’.[280] Purely human presenters in
_The Taming of a Shrew_ are still on a raised level. Sly is removed
from the main stage during the first scene of the induction. He is
brought back at the beginning of the second scene, presumably above,
whence he criticizes the play, for towards the end the lord bids his
servants
lay him in the place where we did find him,
Just underneath the alehouse side below;
and this is done by way of an epilogue.[281]
I do not suggest that presenters were always above; it is not so when
they merely furnish the equivalent of a prologue or epilogue, but only
when it is desired to keep them visible during the action, and on
the other hand they must not obstruct it. Sometimes, even when their
continued presence might be desirable, it has to be dispensed with, or
otherwise provided for. The presenters in _Soliman and Perseda_ come
and go; those in _The Spanish Tragedy_ sit upon the stage itself. Why?
I think the answer is the same in both cases. A platform was required
for other purposes. In _Soliman and Perseda_ one scene has the outer
wall of a tiltyard reached by ladders from the stage; another has a
tower, from which victims are tumbled down out of sight.[282] In the
_Spanish Tragedy_, apart from some minor action ‘above’, there is
the elaborate presentation of Hieronimo’s ‘play within the play’ to
be provided for. This must be supposed to be part of a hall scene.
It occupies, with its preparations, most of the fourth, which is
the last, act; and for it the King and his train are clearly seated
in an upper ‘gallerie’, while the performance takes place on the
floor of the hall below, with the body of Horatio concealed behind a
curtain, for revelation at the appropriate moment.[283] We are thus
brought face to face with an extension on the public stage of the
use of ‘above’, beyond what is entailed by the needs of sieges or of
exalted presenters. Nor, of course, are the instances already cited
exhaustive. The gallery overlooking a hall in the _Spanish Tragedy_ has
its parallel in the window overlooking a hall in _Dr. Faustus_.[284]
More frequent is an external window, door, or balcony, overlooking an
external scene in street or garden.[285] In these cases the action
‘above’ is generally slight. Some one appears in answer to a summons
from without; an eavesdropper listens to a conversation below; a girl
talks to her lover, and there may be an ascent or descent with the help
of a rope-ladder or a basket. But there are a few plays in which we
are obliged to constitute the existence of a regular chamber scene,
with several personages and perhaps furniture, set ‘above’. The second
scene of the induction to the _Taming of the Shrew_, just cited, is
already a case in point. The presenters here do not merely sit, as
spectators in the lord’s room might, and listen. They move about a
chamber and occupy considerable space. Scenes which similarly require
the whole interior of an upper room to be visible, and not merely its
balcony or window bay, are to be found in _1 Sir John Oldcastle_, in
_Every Man In his Humour_, twice in _The Jew of Malta_, in _2 Henry
IV_, and in _Look About You_.[286] I do not know whether I ought to add
_Romeo and Juliet_. Certainly the love scenes, Act II, scc. i and ii,
and Act III, sc. v, require Juliet’s chamber to be aloft, and in these
there is no interior action entailing more than the sound of voices,
followed by the appearance of the speakers over Juliet’s shoulder as
she stands at the casement or on a balcony.[287] It would be natural
to assume that the chamber of Act IV, sc. iii, in which Juliet drinks
her potion, and sc. v, in which she is found lying on her bed, is the
same, and therefore also aloft. Obviously its interior, with the bed
and Juliet, must be visible to the spectators. The difficulty is that
it also appears to be visible to the wedding guests and the musicians,
as they enter the courtyard from without; and this could only be,
if it were upon the main level of the stage. If the scene stood by
itself, one would undoubtedly assign it to the curtained recess behind
the stage; and on the whole it is probable that on this occasion
architectural consistency was sacrificed to dramatic effect, and
Juliet’s chamber was placed sometimes above and sometimes below.[288]
There is one other type of scene which requires elevated action, and
that is the senate-house scene, as we find it in _The Wounds of Civil
War_ and in _Titus Andronicus_, where the Capitol clearly stands above
the Forum, but is within ear-shot and of easy approach.[289]
I think we are bound to assume that some or all of this action ‘above’
took place in the gallery ‘over the stage’, where it could be readily
approached from the tiring-house behind, and could be disposed with the
minimum of obstruction to the vision of the auditorium. A transition
from the use of this region for spectators to its use for action is
afforded by the placing there of those idealized spectators, the
presenters. So far as they are concerned, all that would be needed, in
a house arranged like the Swan, would be to assign to them one or more,
according to their number, of the rooms or compartments, into which the
gallery was normally divided. One such compartment, too, would serve
well for a window, and would be accepted without demur as forming part
of the same ‘domus’ to which a door below, or, as in _The Merchant
of Venice_, a penthouse set in the central aperture, gave access.
To get a practicable chamber, it would be necessary to take down a
partition and throw two of the compartments, probably the two central
compartments, into one; but there would still be four rooms left for
the lords. As a matter of fact, most upper chamber scenes, even of
the sixteenth century, are of later date than the Swan drawing, and
some architectural evolution, including the provision of a music-room,
may already have taken place, and have been facilitated by the waning
popularity of the lord’s rooms. It will be easier to survey the whole
evolution of the upper stage in the next chapter.[290] For the present,
let us think of the upper chamber as running back on the first floor of
the tiring-house above the alcove, and reached from within by stairs
behind the scenic wall, of which, if desired, the foot could perhaps be
made visible within the alcove.[291] Borrowed light could be given by
a window at the back, from which also the occupants of the room could
pretend to look out behind.[292] Internal doors could of course also be
made available. A scene in _The Jew of Malta_ requires a trap in the
floor of the upper chamber, over a cauldron discovered in the alcove
below.[293] The upper chamber could be fitted, like the alcove itself,
with an independent curtain for discoveries.[294]
Are we to conclude that all action ‘above’ was on or behind the back
line of the stage? The point upon which I feel most uncertainty is
the arrangement of the battlements in the stricter sense.[295] These
appear to be generally regarded as running along the whole of the back
line, with the gates of the town or castle represented in the central
aperture below. Some writers suggest that they occupied, not the actual
space of the rooms or boxes ‘over the stage’, but a narrow balcony
running in front of these.[296] I cannot satisfy myself that the Swan
drawing bears out the existence of any projecting ledge adequate for
the purpose. On the other hand, if all the compartments of the gallery
were made available and their partitions removed, all the spectators
‘over the stage’ must have been displaced; and siege scenes are early,
and numerous. I do not know that it is essential to assume that the
battlements extended beyond the width of two compartments. There is
some definite evidence for a position of the ‘walles’ on the scenic
line, apart from the patent convenience of keeping the main stage clear
for besieging armies, in Jasper Mayne’s laudation of Ben Jonson:
Thou laid’st no sieges to the music-room.[297]
I am content to believe that this is where they normally stood. At
the same time, it is possible that alternative arrangements were not
unknown. In the _Wagner Book_, which must be supposed to describe a
setting of a type not incredible on the public stage, we are told of
a high throne, presumably at the back, of hell mouth ‘at the one
end of the stage’, and of an elaborate castle ‘at the other end in
opposition’. This is ‘the place where in the bloudlesse skirmishes
are so often perfourmed upon the stage’, and although I should not
press this as meaning that the walls were always at an ‘end’ of the
stage, the passage would be absurd, if they were invariably at the
back.[298] Further, there is at least one extant play in which it is
very difficult to envisage certain scenes with the walls at the back.
This is _1 Henry VI_, the Orleans scenes of which, with the leaping
over the walls, and the rapid succession of action in the market-place
within the town and in the field without, seem to me clearly to point
to walls standing across the main stage from back to front.[299] But if
so, how were such walls put into place? The imagination boggles at the
notion of masons coming in to build a wall during the action, in the
way in which attendants might set up a bar or a lists, or carpenters
the gibbet for an execution. Bottom’s device for _Pyramus and Thisbe_
would hardly be more grotesque. Yet the Orleans siege scenes in _1
Henry VI_ are by no means coincident with acts, and could not therefore
be set in advance and dismantled at leisure when done with. Can the
walls have been drawn forwards and backwards, with the help of some
machine, through the doors or the central aperture?[300] It is not
inconceivable, and possibly we have here the explanation of the ‘j
whell and frame in the Sege of London’, which figures in the Admiral’s
inventories. Once the possibility of a scenic structure brought on to
the main stage is mooted, one begins to look for other kinds of episode
in which it would be useful. This, after all, may have been the way in
which a gibbet was introduced, and the Admiral’s had also ‘j frame for
the heading in Black Jone’, although nothing is said of a wheel.[301]
The senate houses could, I think, have been located in the gallery,
but the beacon in _King Leir_ would not look plausible there, and the
Admiral’s had a beacon, apparently as a detached property.[302] I am
also inclined to think that a wall may occasionally have been drawn
across the stage to make a close of part of it for a garden scene. In