Chapter V: Act II: of Romeo and Juliet Romeo pretty clearly comes in with his (1)

friends in some public place of the city, and then leaps a wall into an orchard, where he is lost to their sight, and finds himself under Juliet’s window. He must have a wall to leap. I mentioned _Pyramus and Thisbe_ just above with intent, for what is _Pyramus and Thisbe_ but a burlesque of the _Romeo and Juliet_ motive, which would have been all the more amusing, if a somewhat conspicuous and unusual wall had been introduced into its model? Another case in point may be the ‘close walk’ before Labervele’s house in _A Humorous Day’s Mirth_.[303] I have allowed myself to stray into the field of conjecture.

One other possible feature of action ‘above’ must not be left out of account. The use of the gallery may have been supplemented on occasion by that of some window or balcony in the space above it, which De Witt’s drawing conceals from our view. Here may have been the ‘top’ on which La Pucelle appears in the Rouen episode of _1 Henry VI_, and the towers or turrets, which are sometimes utilized or referred to in this and other plays.[304] It would be difficult to describe the central boxes of the Swan gallery as a tower.

Before any attempt is made to sum up the result of this long chapter, one other feature of sixteenth-century staging, which is often overlooked, requires discussion. In the majority of cases the background of an out-of-door scene need contain at most a single _domus_; and this, it is now clear, can be represented either by a light structure, such as a tent or arbour, placed temporarily upon the floor of the stage, or more usually by the _scena_ or back wall, with its doors, its central aperture, and its upper gallery. There are, however, certain scenes in which one _domus_ will not suffice, and two or possibly even three, must be represented. Thus, as in _Richard III_, there may be two hostile camps, with alternating action at tents in each of them.[305] There may also be interplay, without change of scene, between different houses in one town or village. In _Arden of Feversham_, Arden’s house and the painter’s are set together;[306] in _The Taming of A Shrew_, the lord’s house and the alehouse for the induction, and Polidor’s and Alphonso’s during the main play;[307] in _The Blind Beggar of Alexandria_, the houses of Elimine and Samethis;[308] in _1 Sir John Oldcastle_, Cobham’s gate and an inn;[309] in _Stukeley_, Newton’s house and a chamber in the Temple;[310] in _A Knack to Know an Honest Man_, Lelio’s and Bristeo’s for one scene, Lelio’s and a Senator’s for another, possibly Lelio’s and Servio’s, though of this I am less sure, for a third.[311] These are the most indisputable cases; given the principle, we are at liberty to conjecture its application in other plays. Generally the houses may be supposed to be contiguous; it is not so in _Stukeley_, where Old Stukeley clearly walks some little distance to the Temple, and here therefore we get an example of that foreshortening of distance between two parts of a city, with which we became familiar in the arrangement of Court plays.[312] It is not the only example. In _George a Greene_ Jenkin and the Shoemaker walk from one end to the other of Wakefield.[313] In _Arden of Feversham_, although this is an open-country and not an urban scene, Arden and Francklin travel some little way to Raynham Down.[314] In _Dr. Faustus_, so far as we can judge from the unsatisfactory text preserved, any limitation to a particular neighbourhood is abandoned, and Faustus passes without change of scene from the Emperor’s Court to his own home in Wittenberg.[315] Somewhat analogous is the curious device in _Romeo and Juliet_, where the maskers, after preparing in the open, ‘march about the stage’, while the scene changes to the hall of Capulet, which they then enter.[316]

I think, then, it must be taken that the background of a public stage could stand at need, not merely for a single _domus_, but for a ‘city’. Presumably in such cases the central aperture and the gallery above it were reserved for any house in which interior action was to proceed, and for the others mere doors in the scenic wall were regarded as adequate. I do not find any sixteenth-century play which demands either interior action or action ‘above’ in more than one house.[317] But a question arises as to how, for a scene in which the scenic doors had to represent house doors, provision was made for external entrances and exits, which certainly cannot be excluded from such scenes. Possibly the answer is, although I feel very doubtful about it, that there were never more than two houses, and that therefore one door always remained available to lead on and off the main stage.[318] Possibly also entrances and exits by other avenues than the two scenic doors, which we infer from the Swan drawing, and the central aperture which we feel bound to add, are not inconceivable. We have already had some hint that three may not have been the maximum number of entrances. If the Elizabethan theatre limited itself to three, it would have been worse off than any of the early neo-classic theatres based upon Vitruvius, in which the _porta regia_ and _portae minores_ of the scenic wall were regularly supplemented by the _viae ad forum_ in the _versurae_ to right and left of the _proscenium_.[319] No doubt such wings could not be constructed at the Swan, where a space was left on the level of the ‘yard’ between the spectators’ galleries and the right and left edges of a narrow stage. But they would be feasible in theatres with wider stages, and the arrangement, if it existed, would make the problem of seats on the stage easier.[320] It is no more than a conjecture. It has also been suggested that the heavy columns drawn by De Witt may have prevented him from showing two entrances round the extreme ends of the scenic wall, such as are perhaps indicated in some of the Terentian woodcuts of 1493.[321] Or, finally, actors might have emerged from the tiring-house into the space on the level of the yard just referred to, and thence reached the stage, as from without, by means of a short flight of steps.[322]

Working then from the Swan stage, and only departing in any essential from De Witt’s drawing by what appears to be, at any rate for theatres other than the Swan, the inevitable addition of a back curtain, we find no insuperable difficulty in accounting for the setting of all the types of scenes recognizable in sixteenth-century plays. The great majority of them, both out-of-door scenes and hall scenes, were acted on the open stage, under the heavens, with no more properties and practicable _terrains_ than could reasonably be carried on by the actors, lowered from the heavens, raised by traps, or thrust on by frames and wheels. For more permanent background they had the scenic doors, the gallery above, the scenic curtain, and whatever the tire-man might choose to insert in the aperture, backed by an alcove within the tire-house, which the drawing of the curtain discovered. For entrances they had at least the scenic doors and aperture. The comparatively few chamber scenes were set either in the alcove or in a chamber ‘above’, formed by throwing together two compartments of the gallery. A window in a still higher story could, if necessary, be brought into play. So, with all due respect to the obscurities of the evidence, I reconstruct the facts. It will, I hope, be apparent without any elaborate demonstration that this system of public staging, as practised by Burbadge at the Theatre, by Lanman at the Curtain, by Henslowe at the Rose, and perhaps with some modifications by Langley at the Swan, is very fairly in line with the earlier sixteenth-century tradition, as we have studied it in texts in which the Court methods are paramount. This is only natural, in view of the fact that the same plays continued to be presented to the public and to the sovereign. There is the same economy of recessed action, the same conspicuous tendency to dialogue on a threshold, the same unwillingness to break the flow of an act by any deliberate pause for resetting. The public theatre gets in some ways a greater variety of dramatic situation, partly owing to its free use of the open stage, instead of merely a portico, for hall scenes, partly owing to its characteristic development of action ‘above’. This, in spite of the battlements of the Revels accounts, may perhaps be a contribution of the inn-yard. The main change is, of course, the substitution for the multiple staging of the Court, with its adjacent regions for different episodes, of a principle of successive staging, by which the whole space became in turn available for each distinct scene. This was an inevitable change, as soon as the Elizabethan love for history and romance broke down the Renaissance doctrine of the unity of place; and it will not be forgotten that the beginnings of it are already clearly discernible in the later Court drama, which of course overlaps with the popular drama, itself. Incidentally the actors got elbow-room; some of the Lylyan scenes must have been very cramped. But they had to put up with a common form setting, capable only of minor modifications, and no doubt their architectural decorations and unvarying curtain were less interesting from the point of view of _spectacle_, than the diversity of ‘houses’ which the ingenuity and the resources of the Court architects were in a position to produce. In any case, however, economy would probably have forbidden them to enter into rivalry with the Revels Office. Whether the Elizabethan type of public stage was the invention of Burbadge, the ‘first builder of theatres’, or had already come into use in the inn-yards, is perhaps an idle subject for wonder. The only definite guess at its origin is that of Professor Creizenach, who suggests that it may have been adapted from the out-of-door stages, set up from time to time for the dramatic contests held by the Rederijker or Chambers of Rhetoric in Flanders.[323] Certainly there are common features in the division of the field of action into two levels and the use of curtained apertures both below and above. But the latest examples of the Flemish festivals were at Ghent in 1539 and at Antwerp in 1561 respectively; and it would be something of a chance if Burbadge or any other English builder had any detailed knowledge of them.[324]

XXI

STAGING IN THE THEATRES: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

[For _Bibliographical Note_, _vide_ ch. xviii.]

The turn of the century is also a turning-point in the history of the public theatres. In 1599 the Chamberlain’s men built the Globe, and in 1600, not to be outdone, the Admiral’s men built upon the same model the Fortune. These remained the head-quarters of the same companies, when at the beginning of the reign of James the one became the King’s and the other the Prince’s men. Worcester’s, afterwards the Queen’s, men were content for a time with the older houses, first the Rose, then the Curtain and the Boar’s Head, but by 1605 or 1606 they were occupying the Red Bull, probably a new building, but one of which we know very little. Meanwhile the earlier Tudor fashion of plays by boys had been revived, both at Paul’s, and at the Blackfriars, where a theatre had been contrived by James Burbadge about 1596 in a chamber of the ancient priory, for the purposes of a public stage.

We cannot on _a priori_ grounds assume that the structural arrangements of the sixteenth-century houses were merely carried into those of the seventeenth century without modification; the experience of twenty-five years’ working may well have disclosed features in the original plan of James Burbadge which were not altogether convenient or which lent themselves to further development. On the other hand, we have not got to take into account the possibility of any fundamental change or sharp breach of continuity. The introduction of a new type of stage, even if it escaped explicit record, would inevitably have left its mark both upon the dramatic construction of plays and upon the wording of their stage-directions. No such mark can be discerned. You cannot tell an early seventeenth-century play from a late sixteenth-century one on this kind of evidence alone; the handling and the conventions, the situations and the spectacular effects, remain broadly the same, and such differences as do gradually become apparent, concern rather the trend of dramatic interest than the external methods of stage-presentation. Moreover, it is evident that the sixteenth-century plays did not pass wholly into disuse. From time to time they were revived, and lent themselves, perhaps with some minor adaptation, to the new boards as well as to the old. In dealing with early seventeenth-century staging, then, I will assume the general continuance of the sixteenth-century plan, and will content myself with giving some further examples of its main features, and with considering any evidence which may seem to point to specific development in one or more particular directions. And on the whole it will be convenient to concentrate now mainly upon the theatres occupied by the King’s men. For this there are various reasons. One is that the possession of Shakespeare’s plays gives them a prerogative interest in modern eyes; another that the repertories of the other companies have hardly reached us in a form which renders any very safe induction feasible.

Even in the case of the King’s men, the material is not very ample, and there are complications which make it necessary to proceed by cautious steps to somewhat tentative conclusions. The Globe was probably opened in the autumn of 1599. The first play which we can definitely locate there is _Every Man Out of his Humour_; but I have decided with some hesitation to treat _Henry V_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_, for the purposes of these chapters, as Globe plays.[325] So far as we know, the Globe was the only theatre used by the company up to the winter of 1609, when they also came into possession of the Blackfriars. From 1609 to 1613 they used both houses, but probably the Globe was still the more important of the two, for when it was burnt in 1613 they found it worth while to rebuild it fairer than before. At some time, possibly about the end of James’s reign, the Blackfriars began to come into greater prominence, and gradually displaced the Globe as the main head-quarters of the London drama. This, however, is a development which lies outside the scope of these volumes; nor can I with advantage inquire in detail whether there were any important structural features in which the new Globe is likely to have differed from the old Globe. At the most I can only offer a suggestion for the historian of the Caroline stage to take up in his turn. In the main, therefore, we have to consider the staging of the Globe from 1599 to 1609, and of the Globe and the Blackfriars from 1609 to 1613. The plays available fall into four groups. There are nineteen or twenty printed and probably produced during 1599–1609, of which, however, one or two were originally written for private theatres.[326] There are two produced and printed during 1609–12, and one preserved in manuscript from the same period.[327] There are ten probably produced during 1599–1603, but not printed before 1622 or 1623.[328] There are perhaps nine or ten produced during 1609–13, and printed at various dates from 1619 to 1634.[329] It will be seen that the first group is of much the greatest value evidentially, as well as fortunately the longest, but that it only throws light upon the Globe and not upon the Blackfriars; that the value of the second and fourth groups is discounted by our not knowing how far they reflect Globe and how far Blackfriars conditions; and that the original features of the third and fourth groups may have been modified in revivals, either at the Blackfriars or at the later Globe, before they got into print. I shall use them all, but, I hope, with discrimination.[330] I shall also use, for illustration and confirmation, rather than as direct evidence, plays from other seventeenth-century theatres. The Prince’s men were at the Fortune during the whole of the period with which we are concerned, and then on to and after the fire of 1621, and the reconstruction, possibly on new lines, of 1623. We know that its staging arrangements resembled those of the Globe, for it was provided in the builder’s contract that this should be so, and also that the stage should be ‘placed and sett’ in accordance with ‘a plott thereof drawen’. Alleyn would have saved me a great deal of trouble if he had put away this little piece of paper along with so many others. Unfortunately, the Prince’s men kept their plays very close, and only five or six of our period got into print before 1623.[331] From the Queen’s men we have rather more, perhaps sixteen in all; but we do not always know whether these were given at the Red Bull or the Curtain. Nor do we know whether any structural improvements introduced at the Globe and Fortune were adopted at the Red Bull, although this is _a priori_ not unlikely.[332] From the Swan we have only _The Chaste Maid of Cheapside_, and from the Hope only _Bartholomew Fair_.

At the Globe, then, the types of scene presented are much the same as those with which we have become familiar in the sixteenth century; the old categories of open-country scenes, battle scenes, garden scenes, street scenes, threshold scenes, hall scenes, and chamber scenes will still serve. Their relative importance alters, no doubt, as the playwrights tend more and more to concern themselves with subjects of urban life. But there are plenty of battle scenes in certain plays, much on the traditional lines, with marchings and counter-marchings, alarums for fighting ‘within’, and occasional ‘excursions’ on the field of the stage itself.[333] Practicable tents still afford a convenient camp background, and these, I think, continue to be pitched on the open boards.[334] The opposing camps of _Richard III_ are precisely repeated in _Henry V_.[335] There are episodes before the ‘walls’ too, with defenders speaking from above, assaults by means of scaling ladders, and coming and going through the gates.[336] I find no example in which a wall inserted on the line of the scenic curtain would not meet the needs of the situation. Pastoral scenes are also common, for the urban preoccupation has its regular reaction in the direction of pastoral. There is plenty of evidence for practicable trees, such as that on which Orlando in _As You Like It_ hangs his love verses, and the most likely machinery for putting trees into position still seems to me to be the trap.[337] A trap, too, might bring up the bower for the play within the play of _Hamlet_, the pleached arbour of _Much Ado about Nothing_, the pulpit in the forum of _Julius Caesar_, the tombstone in the woods of _Timon of Athens_, the wayside cross of _Every Man Out of his Humour_, and other _terrains_ most easily thought of as free-standing structures.[338] It would open for Ophelia’s grave, and for the still beloved ascents of spirits from the lower regions.[339] It remains difficult to see how a riverbank or the sea-shores was represented.[340] As a rule, the edge of the stage, with steps into the auditorium taken for water stairs, seems most plausible. But there is a complicated episode in _The Devil’s Charter_, with a conduit and a bridge over the Tiber, which I do not feel quite able to envisage.[341] There is another bridge over the Tiber for Horatius Cocles in the Red Bull play of the _Rape of Lucrece_. But this is easier; it is projected from the walls of Rome, and there must be a trapped cavity on the scenic line, into which Horatius leaps.[342]

The Hope contract of 1613 provides for the heavens to be supported without the help of posts rising from the stage. For this there was a special reason at the Hope, since the stage had to be capable of removal to make room for bear-baitings. But the advantage of dispensing with the posts and the obstacle to the free vision of the spectators which they presented must have been so great, that the innovation may well have occurred to the builders of the Globe. Whether it did, I do not think that we can say. There are one or two references to posts in stage-directions, but they need not be the posts of the heavens.[343] Possibly, too, there was less use of the descending chair. One might even fancy that Jonson’s sarcasm in the prologue to _Every Man In his Humour_ discredited it. The new type of play did not so often call for spectacular palace scenes, and perhaps some simpler and more portable kind of ‘state’ was allowed to serve the turn. There is no suggestion of a descent from the heavens in the theophanies of _As You Like It_ and _Pericles_; Juno, however, descends in _The Tempest_.[344] This, although it has practically no change of setting, is in some ways, under the mask influence, the most spectacular performance attempted by the King’s men at Globe or Blackfriars during our period.[345] But it is far outdone by the Queen’s plays of the _Golden_, _Silver_, and _Brazen Ages_, which, if they were really given just as Heywood printed them, must have strained the scenic resources of the Red Bull to an extreme. Here are ascents and descents and entries from every conceivable point of the stage;[346] divinities in fantastic disguise;[347] mythological dumb-shows;[348] battles and hunting episodes and revels;[349] ingenious properties, often with a melodramatic thrill;[350] and from beginning to end a succession of atmospheric phenomena, which suggest that the Jacobeans had made considerable progress in the art of stage pyrotechnics.[351] The Globe, with its traditional ‘blazing star’, is left far behind.[352]

The critical points of staging are the recesses below and above. Some kind of recess on the level of the main stage is often required by the King’s plays; for action in or before a prison,[353] a cell,[354] a cave,[355] a closet,[356] a study,[357] a tomb,[358] a chapel,[359] a shop;[360] for the revelation of dead bodies or other concealed sights.[361] In many cases the alcove constructed in the tiring-house behind the scenic wall would give all that is required, and occasionally a mention of the ‘curtains’ or of ‘discovery’ in a stage-direction points plainly to this arrangement. The ‘traverse’ of Webster’s plays, both for the King’s and the Queen’s men, appears, as already pointed out, to be nothing more than a terminological variant.[362] Similarly, hall scenes have still their ‘arras’ or their ‘hangings’, behind which a spy can post himself.[363] A new feature, however, now presents itself in the existence of certain scenes, including some bedchamber scenes, which entail the use of properties and would, I think, during the sixteenth century have been placed in the alcove, but now appear to have been brought forward and to occupy, like hall scenes, the main stage. The usage is by no means invariable. Even in so late a play as _Cymbeline_, Imogen’s chamber, with Iachimo’s trunk and the elaborate fire-places in it, must, in spite of the absence of any reference to curtains, have been disposed in the alcove; for the trunk scene is immediately followed by another before the door of the same chamber, from which Imogen presently emerges.[364] But I do not think that the alcove was used for Gertrude’s closet in _Hamlet_, the whole of which play seems to me to be set very continuously on the outer stage.[365] Hamlet does not enter the closet direct from in front, but goes off and comes on again. A little distance is required for the vision of the Ghost, who goes out at a visible ‘portal’. When Hamlet has killed Polonius, he lugs the guts into the neighbour room, according to the ordinary device for clearing a dead body from the main stage, which is superfluous when the death has taken place in the alcove. There is an arras, behind which Polonius esconces himself, and on this, or perhaps on an inner arras disclosed by a slight parting of the ordinary one, hangs the picture of Hamlet’s father. Nor do I think, although it is difficult to be certain, that the alcove held Desdemona’s death-chamber in _Othello_.[366] True, there are curtains drawn here, but they may be only bed-curtains. A longish chamber, with an outer door, seems to be indicated. A good many persons, including Cassio ‘in a chaire’, have to be accommodated, and when Emilia enters, it is some time before her attention is drawn to Desdemona behind the curtains. If anything is in the alcove, it can only be just the bed itself. The best illustrations of my point, however, are to be found in _The Devil’s Charter_, a singular play, with full and naïve stage-directions, which perhaps betray the hand of an inexperienced writer. Much of the action takes place in the palace of Alexander Borgia at Rome. The alcove seems to be reserved for Alexander’s study. Other scenes of an intimately domestic character are staged in front, and the necessary furniture is very frankly carried on, in one case by a protagonist. This is a scene in a parlour by night, in which Lucrezia Borgia murders her husband.[367] Another scene represents Lucrezia’s toilet;[368] in a third young men come in from tennis and are groomed by a barber.[369] My impression is that in the seventeenth century, instead of discovering a bedchamber in the alcove, it became the custom to secure more space and light by projecting the bed through the central aperture on to the main stage, and removing it by the same avenue when the scene was over. As to this a stage-direction in _2 Henry VI_ may be significant. There was a scene in _1 Contention_ in which the murdered body of the Duke of Gloucester is discovered in his bedchamber. This recurs in _2 Henry VI_, but instead of a full direction for the drawing of curtains, the Folio has the simple note ‘Bed put forth’.[370] This is one of a group of formulas which have been the subject of some discussion.[371] I do not think that either ‘Bed put forth’ or still less ‘Bed thrust out’ can be dismissed as a mere equivalent of ‘Enter in a bed’, which may admittedly cover a parting of the curtains, or of such a warning to the tire-man as ‘Bed set out’ or ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’.[372] There is a difference between ‘setting out’ and ‘thrusting out’, for the one does and the other does not carry the notion of a push. And if ‘Bed put forth’ is rather more colourless, ‘Bed drawn out’, which also occurs, is clear enough. Unfortunately the extant text of _2 Henry VI_ may be of any date up to 1623, and none of the other examples of the formulas in question are direct evidence for the Globe in 1599–1613.[373] To be sure of the projected bed at so early a date, we have to turn to the Red Bull, where we find it both in the _Golden_ and the _Silver Age_, as well as the amateur _Hector of Germany_, or to the Swan, where we find it in _The Chaste Maid of Cheapside_.[374] The _Golden Age_ particularly repays study. The whole of the last two acts are devoted to the episode of Jupiter and Danae. The scene is set in

the Darreine Tower
Guirt with a triple mure of shining brasse.

Most of the action requires a courtyard, and the wall and gate of this, with a porter’s lodge and an alarm-bell, must have been given some kind of structural representation on the stage. An inner door is supposed to lead to Danae’s chamber above. It is in this chamber, presumably, that attendants enter ‘drawing out Danae’s bed’, and when ‘The bed is drawn in’, action is resumed in the courtyard below.[375]

There are chamber scenes in the King’s plays also, which are neither in the alcove nor on the main stage, but above. This is an extension of a practice already observable in pre-Globe days. Hero’s chamber in _Much Ado about Nothing_ is above.[376] So is Celia’s in _Volpone_.[377] So is Falstaff’s at the Garter Inn in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_.[378] In all these examples, which are not exhaustive, a reasonable amount of space is required for action.[379] This is still more the case in _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, where the violent scene of the triple murder at Calverley Hall is clearly located upstairs.[380] Moreover, there are two plays which stage above what one would normally regard as hall rather than chamber scenes. One is _Sejanus_, where a break in the dialogue in the first act can best be explained by the interpretation of a scene in an upper ‘gallery’.[381] The other is _Every Man Out of his Humour_, where the personages go ‘up’ to the great chamber at Court.[382] Elaborate use is also made of the upper level in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where it represents the refuge of Cleopatra upon a monument, to which Antony is heaved up for his death scene, and on which Cleopatra is afterwards surprised by Caesar’s troops.[383] But I do not agree with the suggestion that it was used in shipboard scenes, for which, as we learn from the presenter’s speeches in _Pericles_, the stage-manager gave up the idea of providing a realistic setting, and fell back upon an appeal to the imagination of the audience.[384] Nor do I think that it was used for the ‘platform’ at Elsinore Castle in _Hamlet_;[385] or, as it was in the sixteenth century, for scenes in a Capitoline senate overlooking the forum at Rome.[386] In _Bonduca_, if that is of our period, it was adapted for a high rock, with fugitives upon it, in a wood.[387] I do not find extensive chamber scenes ‘above’ in any King’s play later than 1609, and that may be a fact of significance to which I shall return.[388] But shallow action, at windows or in a gallery overlooking a hall or open space, continues to be frequent.[389] In _The Devil is an Ass_, which is a Blackfriars play of 1616, a little beyond the limits of our period, there is an interesting scene played out of two contiguous upper windows, supposed to be in different houses.[390]

There is other evidence to show that in the seventeenth century as in the sixteenth, the stage was not limited to the presentation of a single house only at any given moment. A multiplicity of houses would fit the needs of several plays, but perhaps the most striking instance for the Globe is afforded by _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, the last act of which requires two inns on opposite sides of the stage, the signs of which have been secretly exchanged, as a trick in the working out of the plot.[391] The King’s plays do not often require any marked foreshortening of distance in journeys over the stage. Hamlet, indeed, comes in ‘a farre off’, according to a stage-direction of the Folio, but this need mean no more than at the other end of the graveyard, although Hamlet is in fact returning from a voyage.[392] In _Bonduca_ the Roman army at one end of the stage are said to be half a furlong from the rock occupied by Caractacus, which they cannot yet see; but they go off, and their leaders subsequently emerge upon the rock from behind.[393] The old device endured at the Red Bull, but even here the flagrant example usually cited is of a very special type.[394] At the end of _The Travels of the Three English Brothers_, the action of which ranges widely over the inhabited world, there is an appeal to imagination by Fame, the presenter, who says,

Would your apprehensions helpe poore art,
Into three parts deuiding this our stage,
They all at once shall take their leaues of you.
Thinke this England, this Spaine, this Persia.

Then follow the stage-directions, ‘Enter three seuerall waies the three Brothers’, and ‘Fame giues to each a prospective glasse, they seme to see one another’. Obviously such a visionary dumb-show cannot legitimately be twisted into an argument that the concurrent representation of incongruous localities was a matter of normal staging. Such interplay of opposed houses, as we get in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, would no doubt seem more effective if we could adopt the ingenious conjecture which regards the scenic wall as not running in a straight line all the way, but broken by two angles, so that, while the central apertures below and above directly front the spectators, the doors to right and left, each with a room or window above it, are set on a bias, and more or less face each other from end to end of the stage.[395] I cannot call this more than a conjecture, for there is no direct evidence in its favour, and the Swan drawing, for what that is worth, is flatly against it. Structurally it would, I suppose, fit the round or apsidal ended Globe better than the rectangular Fortune or Blackfriars. The theory seems to have been suggested by a desire to make it possible to watch action within the alcove from a gallery on the level above. I have not, however, come across any play which can be safely assigned to a public theatre, in which just this situation presents itself, although it is common enough for persons above to watch action in a threshold or hall scene. Two windows in the same plane would, of course, fully meet the needs of _The Devil is an Ass_. There is, indeed, the often-quoted scene from _David and Bethsabe_, in which the King watches the Hittite’s wife bathing at a fountain; but the provenance of _David and Bethsabe_ is so uncertain and its text so evidently manipulated, that it would be very temerarious to rely upon it as affording any proof of public usage.[396] On the other hand, if it is the case, as seems almost certain, that the boxes over the doors were originally the lord’s rooms, it would no doubt be desirable that the occupants of those rooms should be able to see anything that went on within the alcove. I do not quite know what weight to attach to Mr. Lawrence’s analogy between the oblique doors which this theory involves and the familiar post-Restoration proscenium doors, with stage-boxes above them, at right angles to the plane of the footlights.[397] The roofed Caroline theatres, with their side-walls to the stage, and the proscenium arch, probably borrowed from the masks, have intervened, and I cannot pretend to have traced the history of theatrical structure during the Caroline period.

I have felt justified in dealing more briefly with the early seventeenth-century stages than with those of the sixteenth century, for, after all, the fundamental conditions, so far as I can judge, remained unaltered. I seem able to lay my finger upon two directions in which development took place, and both of these concern the troublesome problem of interior action. First of all there is the stage gallery. Of this I venture to reconstruct the story as follows. Its first function was to provide seating accommodation for dignified and privileged spectators, amongst whom could be placed, if occasion arose, presenters or divine agents supposed to be watching or directing the action of a play. Perhaps a differentiation took place. Parts of the gallery, above the doors at either end of the scene, were set aside as lord’s rooms. The central part, with the upper floor of the tiring-house behind it, was used for the musicians, but was also available for such scenes as could effectively be staged above, and a curtain was fitted, corresponding to that below, behind which the recess could be set as a small chamber. Either as a result of these changes or for other reasons, the lord’s rooms, about the end of the sixteenth century, lost their popularity, and it became the fashion for persons of distinction, or would-be distinction, to sit upon the stage itself instead.[398] This left additional space free above, and the architects of the Globe and Fortune took the opportunity to enlarge the accommodation for their upper scenes. Probably they left windows over the side-doors, so that the upper parts of three distinct houses could, if necessary, be represented; and it may be that spectators were not wholly excluded from these.[399] But they widened the music-room, so that it could now hold larger scenes, and in fact now became an upper stage and not a mere recess. Adequate lighting from behind could probably be obtained rather more easily here than on the crowded floor below. There is an interesting allusion which I have not yet quoted, and which seems to point to an upper stage of substantial dimensions in the public theatres of about the year 1607. It is in Middleton’s _Family of Love_, itself a King’s Revels play.[400] Some of the characters have been to a performance, not ‘by the youths’, and there ‘saw Sampson bear the town-gates on his neck from the lower to the upper stage’. You cannot carry a pair of town-gates into a mere box, such as the Swan drawing shows.

Meanwhile, what of the alcove? I think that it proved too dark and too cramped for the convenient handling of chamber scenes, and that the tendency of the early seventeenth century was to confine its use to action which could be kept shallow, or for which obscurity was appropriate. It could still serve for a prison, or an ‘unsunned lodge’, or a chamber of horrors. For scenes requiring more light and movement it was replaced, sometimes by the more spacious upper stage, sometimes by the main stage, on to which beds and other properties were carried or ‘thrust out’, just as they had always been on a less extensive scale for hall scenes. The difficulties of shifting were, on the whole, compensated for by the greater effectiveness and visibility which action on the main scene afforded. I do not therefore think it possible to accept even such a modified version of the old ‘alternationist’ theory as I find set out in Professor Thorndike’s recent _Shakespeare’s Theater_. The older alternationists, starting from the principle, sound enough in itself, of continuous action within an act, assumed that all interior or other propertied scenes were played behind the curtains, and were set there while unpropertied action was played outside; and they deduced a method of dramatic construction, which required the dramatists to alternate exterior and interior scenes so as to allow time for the settings to be carried out.[401] The theory breaks down, not merely because it entails a much more constant use of the curtains than the stage-directions give us any warrant for, but also because it fails to provide for the not infrequent event of a succession of interior scenes; and in its original form it is abandoned by Professor Thorndike in common with other recent scholars, who see plainly enough that what I have called hall scenes must have been given on the outer stage. I do not think that they have always grasped that the tendency of the seventeenth century was towards a decreased and not an increased reliance upon the curtained space, possibly because they have not as a rule followed the historical method in their investigations; and Professor Thorndike, although he traces the earlier employment of the alcove much as I do, treats the opening and closing of the curtains as coming in time to be used, in _Antony and Cleopatra_ for example and in _Cymbeline_, as little more than a handy convention for indicating the transference of the scene from one locality to another.[402] Such a usage would not of course mean that the new scene was played wholly or even partly within the alcove itself; the change might be merely one of background. But, although I admit that there would be a convenience in Professor Thorndike’s development, I do not see that there is in fact any evidence for it. The stage-directions never mention the use of curtains in such circumstances as he has in mind; and while I am far from supposing that they need always have been mentioned, and have myself assumed their use in one scene of _Cymbeline_ where they are not mentioned, yet mentions of them are so common in connexion with the earlier and admitted functions of the alcove, that I should have expected Professor Thorndike’s view, if it were sound, to have proved capable of confirmation from at least one unconjectural case.

The difficulty which has led Professor Thorndike to his conclusion is, however, a real one. In the absence of a _scenario_ with notes of locality, for which certainly there is no evidence, how did the Elizabethan managers indicate to their audiences the shifts of action from one place to another? This is both a sixteenth- and a seventeenth-century problem. We have noted in a former chapter that unity of place was characteristic of the earlier Elizabethan interlude; that it failed to impose itself upon the romantic narrative plots of the popular drama; that it was departed from through the device of letting two ends of a continuously set stage stand for discrete localities; that this device proved only a transition to a system in which the whole stage stood successively for different localities; and that there are hints of a convention by which the locality of each scene was indicated with the help of a label, placed over the door through which the personages in that scene made their exits and their entrances.[403] The public stage of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries experienced no re-establishment of the principle of unity; broadly speaking, it presents an extreme type of romantic drama, with an unfettered freedom of ranging from one to another of any number of localities required by a narrative plot. But the practice, or the instinct, of individual playwrights differs. Ben Jonson is naturally the man who betrays the most conscious preoccupation with the question. He is not, however, a rigid or consistent unitarian. In his two earliest plays the scene shifts from the country to a neighbouring town, and the induction to _Every Man Out of his Humour_ is in part an apology for his own liberty, in part a criticism of the licence of others.

_Mitis._ What’s his scene?

_Cordatus._ Mary _Insula Fortunata_, sir.

_Mitis._ O, the fortunate Iland? masse he has bound himself to a
strict law there.

_Cordatus._ Why so?

_Mitis._ He cannot lightly alter the scene without crossing the
seas.

_Cordatus._ He needs not, hauing a whole Ilande to runne through,
I thinke.

_Mitis._ No? howe comes it then, that in some one play we see so
many seas, countries, and kingdomes, past over with such admirable
dexteritie?

_Cordatus._ O, that but shewes how well the Authors can travaile in
their vocation, and out-run the apprehension of their Auditorie.

_Sejanus_ is throughout in Rome, but five or six distinct houses are required, and it must be doubtful whether such a multiplicity of houses could be shown without a change of scene.[404] The prologue to _Volpone_ claims for the author that ‘The laws of time, place, persons he obserueth’, and this has no more than four houses, all in Venice.[405] In _Catiline_ the scenes in Rome, with some ten houses, are broken by two in open country.[406] In _Bartholomew Fair_ a preliminary act at a London house is followed by four set continuously before the three booths of the fair. Absolute unity, as distinct from the unity of a single country, or even a single town, is perhaps only attained in _The Alchemist_. Here everything takes place, either in a single room in Lovewit’s house in the Blackfriars, or in front of a door leading from the street into the same room. Evidently advantage was taken of the fact that the scene did not have to be changed, to build a wall containing this door out on to the stage itself, for action such as speaking through the keyhole requires both sides of the door to be practicable.[407] There is also a window from which persons approaching can be seen. Inner doors, presumably in the scenic wall, lead to a laboratory and other parts of the house, but these are not discovered, and no use is made of the upper level. Jonson here is a clear innovator, so far as the English public theatre is concerned; no other play of our period reproduces this type of permanent interior setting.

Shakespeare is no classicist; yet in some of his plays, comedies and romantic tragedies, it is, I think, possible to discern at least an instinctive feeling in the direction of scenic unity. _The Comedy of Errors_, with its action in the streets of Syracuse, near the mart, or before the Phoenix, the Porpentine, or the priory, follows upon the lines of its Latin model, although here, as in most of Jonson’s plays, it is possible that the various houses were shown successively rather than concurrently. _Twelfth Night_, _Much Ado about Nothing_, and _Measure for Measure_ each require a single town, with two, three, and five houses respectively; _Titus Andronicus_, _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, _As You Like It_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _Timon of Athens_, each a single town, with open country environs. _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ has the unity of a park, with perhaps a manor-house as background at one end and tents at the other; _The Tempest_ complete pastoral unity after the opening scene on shipboard. _Hamlet_ would all be Elsinore, but for one distant open-country scene; _Romeo and Juliet_ all Venice, but for one scene in Mantua. In another group of plays the action is divided between two towns. It alternates from Padua to near Verona in _The Taming of the Shrew_, from Verona to Milan in _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, from Venice to Belmont in _The Merchant of Venice_; in _Othello_ an act in Venice is followed by four in Cyprus. On the other hand, in a few comedies and in the histories and historical tragedies, where Shakespeare’s sources leave him less discretion, he shifts his scenes with a readiness outdone by no other playwright. The third act of _Richard II_ requires no less than four localities, three of which have a castle, perhaps the same castle from the stage-manager’s point of view, in the background. The second act of _1 Henry IV_ has as many. _King John_ and _Henry V_ pass lightly between England and France, _All’s Well that Ends Well_ between France and Italy, _The Winter’s Tale_ between Sicily and Bohemia, _Cymbeline_ between Britain, Italy, and Wales. Quite a late play, _Antony and Cleopatra_, might almost be regarded as a challenge to classicists. Rome, Misenum, Athens, Actium, Syria, Egypt are the localities, with much further subdivision in the Egyptian scenes. The second act has four changes of locality, the third no less than eight, and it is noteworthy that these changes are often for quite short bits of dialogue, which no modern manager would regard as justifying a resetting of the stage. Shakespeare must surely have been in some danger, in this case, of outrunning the apprehension of his auditory, and I doubt if even Professor Thorndike’s play of curtains would have saved him.

It is to be observed also that, in Shakespeare’s plays as in those of others, no excessive pains are taken to let the changes of locality coincide with the divisions between the acts. If the second and third acts of _All’s Well that Ends Well_ are at Paris, the fourth at Florence, and the fifth at Marseilles, yet the shift from Roussillon to Paris is in the middle and not at the end of the first act. The shift from Sicily to Bohemia is in the middle of the third act of _The Winter’s Tale_; the Agincourt scenes begin in the middle of the third act of _Henry V_. Indeed, although the poets regarded the acts as units of literary structure, the act-divisions do not appear to have been greatly stressed, at any rate on the stages of the public houses, in the actual presentation of plays.[408] I do not think that they were wholly disregarded, although the fact that they are so often unnoted in the prints of plays based on stage copies might point to that conclusion.[409] The act-interval did not necessarily denote any substantial time-interval in the action of the play, and perhaps the actors did not invariably leave the stage. Thus the lovers in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ sleep through the interval between the third and fourth acts.[410] But some sort of break in the continuity of the performance is a natural inference from the fact that the act-divisions are the favourite, although not the only, points for the intervention of presenters, dumb-shows, and choruses.[411] The act-intervals cannot have been long, at any rate if the performance was to be completed in two hours. There may sometimes have been music, which would not have prevented the audience from stretching themselves and talking.[412] Short intervals, rather than none at all, are, I think, suggested by the well-known passage in the induction of _The Malcontent_, as altered for performance at the Globe, in which it is explained that passages have been added to the play as originally written for Revels boys, ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’.[413] Some information is perhaps to be gleaned from the ‘plots’ of plays prepared for the guidance of the book-keeper or tire-man, of which examples are preserved at Dulwich.[414] These have lines drawn across them at points which pretty clearly correspond to the beginnings of scenes, although it can hardly be assumed that each new scene meant a change of locality. The act-divisions can in some, but not all, cases be inferred from the occurrence of dumb-shows and choruses; in one, _The Dead Man’s Fortune_, they are definitely marked by lines of crosses, and against each such line there is the marginal note ‘musique’. Other musical directions, ‘sound’, ‘sennet’, ‘alarum’, ‘flourish’, come sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle of scenes.

We do not get any encouragement to think that a change of locality was regularly heralded by notes of music, even if this may incidentally have been the case when a procession or an army or a monarch was about to enter. Possibly the lines on the plots may signify an even slighter pause than that between the acts, such as the modern stage provides with the added emphasis of a drop-curtain; but of this there is no proof, and an allusion in _Catiline_ to action as rapid

As is a veil put off, a visor changed,
Or the scene shifted, in our theatres,

is distinctly against it.[415] A mere clearance of the stage does not necessarily entail a change of scene, although there are one or two instances in which the exit of personages at one door, followed by their return at another, seems to constitute or accompany such a change.[416] And even if the fact of a change could be signified in one or other of these ways, the audience would still be in the dark as to what the new locality was supposed to be. Can we then assume a continuance of the old practice of indicating localities by labels over the doors? This would entail the shifting of the labels themselves during the progress of the play, at any rate if there were more localities than entrances, or if, as might usually be expected, more entrances than one were required to any locality. But there would be no difficulty about this, and in fact we have an example of the shifting of a label by a mechanical device in the introduction to _Wily Beguiled_.[417] This was not a public theatre play, and the label concerned was one giving the title of the play and not its locality, but similar machinery could obviously have been applied. There is not, however, much actual evidence for the use either of title-labels or of locality-labels on the public stage. The former are perhaps the more probable of the two, and the practice of posting play-bills at the theatre door and in places of public resort would not render them altogether superfluous.[418] In favour of locality-labels it is possible to quote Dekker’s advice to those entering Paul’s, and also the praise given to Jonson by Jasper Mayne in _Jonsonus Virbius_:

Thy stage was still a stage, two entrances
Were not two parts o’ the world, disjoined by seas.[419]