[Sig. G4]
Under the stimulus of competition, Ilford is willing to rush into marriage without seeing the dowry of his wife-to-be. After sending the couple “below,” Butler calls to Bartley and Wentloe to arrange to meet them below, timing matters so that they will arrive after the marriage ceremony is completed.
Location is here treated very loosely. In the course of the scene, action shifts from one place to another. Sometimes the characters seem to be at a window, sometimes in an upper chamber, but there is no exact indication where they are at any one time. Indeed this is a generalized setting, for we know that we are at Scarborrow’s house. The scene clearly shows that an extended action could be played above, but only when related to action below.
Altogether there are twelve scenes in ten Globe plays that utilize the above. Ten have been cited. The other two, the monument scene in Antony and Cleopatra (IV, xiv) and the observation scene in Julius Caesar (V, iii) where Pindarus witnesses the distant battle, are discussed in Appendix B, chart iii. To sum up the evidence for the above, the limited study of the Globe plays substantiates Richard Hosley’s broader studies of the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, Marlowe, and others as well as of the Red Bull plays.[33] He shows that 46 per cent of all the plays examined do not employ a raised production area. At the Globe 66 per cent do not employ such an area. Wherever, in the remaining 34 per cent of the plays, action is set above, invariably it is related to action below, either through actual communication or through persons on one level observing persons on the other.
Several stage facilities remain to be considered: the traps, the heavens, and the pillars. Upon these subjects there is less disagreement amongst scholars. Both J. C. Adams and George Reynolds, opponents in many matters of Elizabethan staging, agree that Elizabethan stages contained more than one trap.[34] In the Globe plays traps are used seven times. From this list I exclude the use of a trap for the Ghost in the first act in Hamlet.[35] Of the seven instances four occur in one play, The Devil’s Charter. Three of these can be definitely placed at a trap near the front of the platform (prologue; IV, i; V, vi), for preceding each use of the trap a stage direction specifies movement forward. The other scene in The Devil’s Charter (III, v) is similar to one in A Larum for London (sc. xii). In each case a figure peering into a river or a vault respectively is pushed down into the void. The two remaining instances of trap use occur in Macbeth (the cauldron scene, IV, i) and Hamlet (the gravediggers scene, V, i). In light of the character of the enclosure, these too must have been played forward. Confirmation of this assumption can be found in Hamlet. Stage productions often begin the gravediggers scene with one or both of the diggers already in a half-dug grave. However, a close reading of the first part of the text rules out such a beginning. Early in the Folio text, the second gravedigger advises the first to make the grave straight. But a little later the first calls to the other, “Come, my Spade.” If he has been digging all along, this remark is unnecessary. Only after the two clowns come in, chat, and then the one calls to the other, “Come, my Spade,” does the digging begin. This action occurs forward on the platform. To summarize, it is certain that the Globe plays require a trap, a trap of sufficient size to raise and lower a cauldron or a man on a property dragon (The Devil’s Charter, IV, i), but at no time do they demand more than one trap located on the platform.
About the machinery in the heavens the Globe plays offer no evidence whatsoever. No hint exists from which one can surmise that either actors or properties were dropped from above. Nor is there any evidence for such action from the pre-Globe plays of the Lord Chamberlain’s company. This may be coincidental. Plays containing flying scenes may have perished. But a suggestion that this finding for the Globe may have a more general application comes from two sources. Jonson’s contempt for the “creaking thrones” which come down “the boys to please” is expressed in the prologue to the Folio version of Every Man In His Humour (1616). Although the prologue does not appear in the Quarto of 1601, scholars have assumed that the scornful attack refers to stage devices of that period. But Jonson revised Every Man In His Humour thoroughly, recasting the entire setting of the play. The addition of the prologue is certain, for it is in keeping with the Anglicized setting. Furthermore, the first use of flying in the King’s men’s repertory is recorded in the dream sequence in Cymbeline (V, iv), immediately after the company began to play at Blackfriars. It is pertinent that a dream scene, very similar to the one in Cymbeline, occurs in Pericles (V, i), one of the last plays to be produced before the King’s men took over Blackfriars. Instead of Jupiter, Diana appears but does not descend. Nor did the god Hymen in the last scene of As You Like It. Could it have been that the company lacked means for flying actors until it moved to Blackfriars? Actually the history of flying apparatuses in the Elizabethan theater needs further study. For the Globe, at least so far as the plays demonstrate, no machinery for flying existed.
It is generally conceded that the posts supporting the heavens not only did exist, but were introduced into the action. Against the evidence of the Fortune and Hope contracts and the DeWitt drawing, there is no effective argument. Assuming, therefore, the presence of the two pillars, a number of scenes do exist where one was probably employed in the story, either as a post or a tree. However, to suppose that a pillar is used, let us say, for the tree upon which Orlando hangs his verse, reduces the likelihood that property trees were placed on stage for incidental action. Our old friend, the ubiquitous Butler, climbs a tree in Miseries of Enforced Marriage. J. C. Adams suggests that what he climbed was a stage pillar. Hodges doubts that an actor could climb a main pillar, but he suggests that a decorative pillar might have been used. So far as staging practice is concerned, it matters little which pillar serves as a tree. The principle is the same. When the actors could use a ready-to-hand stage post instead of a prop, they did so. Inconclusive but provocative is a hint we have that prop trees were introduced when they had symbolic meaning. The tree that arises in A Warning for Fair Women represents the life of Sanders which has been hewn down. And the titles of the trees in Henslowe’s inventory, such as “j tree of gowlden apelles,” and “Tantelouse tre,” support this possibility.
Although we have covered all those structural parts of the stage which are required by the Globe plays, we must deal with the theory that in addition to or in place of the enclosure, mansions, that is, free-standing wooden frames, curtained on one or more sides, usually removable, were employed to suggest specific locations in Elizabethan plays. Except for the tents in The Devil’s Charter, no evidence exists for such units on the Globe stage. Even the tents are in a special class, for they may be similar to a property such as a scaffold rather than to stage scenery. Reynolds has found instances for removable structures on the Red Bull stage and Hotson would place mansions on all stages, but there is no warrant for supposing that they were used at the Globe. Henslowe, who claims to include all the properties belonging to the Lord Admiral’s men in his inventory of 1598, lists nothing that can be construed as a mansion, and though evidence for the Lord Admiral’s men is not necessarily evidence for the Lord Chamberlain’s men, nevertheless, it indicates that one playhouse at least seems not to have used temporary structures. For the Globe company not only the absence of evidence but also the system of localization rules out such a method of staging.
A unique theory combining the presence of mansions with the rearrangement of the spectators has been devised by Leslie Hotson. Not content to modify current thinking about Elizabethan staging, he reveals, messiah-like, that after two hundred years of bafflement, the world will be able “now for the first time to understand and visualize the stage of the Globe” because of his discoveries.[36] Citing a compote of evidence from the English and Spanish theaters, he asserts that the essential relationship between actor and audience maintained at Court, playhouse, and college, was one in which the actor performed between two masses of audience, with the privileged audience sitting on one side. In the Globe this privileged audience sat in the gallery over the stage and on the stage between the stage doors. The tiring house, contrary to accepted thought, was below the stage. At either end of the stage two-tiered wooden frames with transparent curtains served as mansions. Actors entered through trap doors into these mansions and from thence onto the stage. Masked attendants drew the curtains as the action required.