Chapter III: Book V: Plays and Playwrights (3)

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]

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.

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.