Chapter II: Book V: Plays and Playwrights (2)

_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.

‘For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary
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.