In 1953 C. Walter Hodges presented an opposing image of the Globe.[45] Adhering closely to the Swan drawing, which Adams rejects, and deriving the Elizabethan stage from market place booth stages and tableaux vivants, Hodges developed a series of sketches in Renaissance style. Doors and galleries in the stage façade are flanked by columns of one of the three regular orders; obelisks and statuary appear above the cornices of the Fortune sketch; and in his drawing of the Hope, carved busts support the gallery ends of the heavens. To avoid contradicting the Swan drawing, which shows no enclosure, he devised one to project from the stage façade.
The contribution of the tableaux vivants to the design of the Elizabethan stage was first explored by George Kernodle. His thesis is that “The greatest problem of the Renaissance stage was the organization of a number of divergent scenic elements into some principle of spatial unity.” Medieval art bequeathed three forms to the theater: the side arches leaving the center clear, the center arch or pavilion with subordinate side accents, the flat arcade screen. While the Italian theater, later to be imitated by Inigo Jones in England, utilized the form of side arches in combination with central perspective to create illusion, the northern theaters of England and Flanders developed the central pavilion into a theater of architectural symbolism. The immediate predecessors of these stages were the tableaux vivants, or street pageants, erected to signalize the entry of a royal or civic personage into a city. It was “from the tableaux vivants (whose conventions they took over)” that the Flemish and English stages derived “the power to suggest, by decoration and remembered associations, the places they symbolized.” The conventions of medieval art, which persisted throughout the early Renaissance, were passed on to the street theaters where they were interwoven with Renaissance forms. Prints of the Flemish stages illustrate the conventional architecture which resulted from these influences. In parallel fashion, the English theater was subject to the same influences. “Most of the new buildings erected in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century were of the newer Renaissance architecture.” Yearly the Londoner could witness the pageants in the Lord Mayor’s Show. “A comparison [of street shows and stage drama] will make clear,” Kernodle believes, “not only that many particular scenes of Elizabethan drama were derived from the tableaux vivants but that they provided the basic pattern of the English stage façade.”[46] This basic pattern involved a central arch which conventionally represented an interior, and side arches or doors which conventionally represented an exterior. Architectural symbols as throne, arbor, arras, by general recognition could transform the façade into the symbols of palace, garden, room.
For the design of the English stage, Kernodle’s theory is provocative rather than proved. There is no clear flow of Flemish theatrical influence into Elizabethan England, and even in art, though we know many Flemish craftsmen were in London, there is no certain influence.[47] Furthermore, the medieval tradition in art, which Kernodle has shown to have persisted on the continent, was abruptly terminated in England. “The year 1531, in which the convocation of Canterbury recognized Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church of England, can be conveniently taken to mark the close of the medieval period of art in England [and the severance of] what had been the most fruitful field of subject-matter for artists in Europe for a thousand years.”[48] What followed was a court art of portraiture which does not readily yield demonstration of Kernodle’s thesis. Even in the popular forms of art, which he recommends for study, the formal medieval elements are absent. For example, the woodcuts of Wynken de Worde show no consistent use of conventional devices.
As for the street pageants, continental experience cannot be readily applied to Tudor practice. For the last half of the sixteenth century the royal entries were virtually abandoned by Elizabeth, and it was not until the coronation of James that the magnificence of the royal entry returned to London. When it did, it had all the characteristics of the flamboyant Renaissance style described by Kernodle. Until then, from 1558 to 1603, the Londoner could witness the Lord Mayor’s Show, an annual event to honor the installation of the new Lord Mayor. The central device was a single pageant supplied by the Company of which the Lord Mayor was a member.[49] Featuring child orators, it was usually carried along in the procession by porters, though from time to time we hear of frames being built to support the pageants.[50] It appears that the pageant was stored in the company hall from which it was removed when needed, with or without redecoration, though occasionally a new pageant would be ordered.[51] The fact that the pageant remained on permanent view in the company halls suggests that it may have been similar to the figures of saints carried even today in religious processions.
Allegorical in nature, the pageant depicted a theme apt for the new Lord Mayor and his company. In 1561, for example, five ancient harpers, David, Orpheus, Amphion, Arion, and Iopas, were displayed in a pageant to honor the new Lord Mayor, Sir William Harper. Often the themes of the pageants represented the trade rather than the man, the Ship, for instance, being deemed appropriate for the Merchant Tailors Company.[52] At an appropriate point in the procession, the figures in the pageant would speak commendatory verses to the Lord Mayor. From the extant texts, it is quite clear that the presentations were brief and rhetorical; they did not involve dramatic action. In fact, the very people being honored were those who most assiduously sought to destroy the public playhouses.[53]
No sketch of a sixteenth century pageant exists. The presence of mythical figures encourages the notion that Renaissance design characterized these pageants, but there is no graphic or thoroughly descriptive evidence for assuming so. Nor do the symbols which Kernodle enumerates appear prominently in these pageants. Instead the companies relied on those trade-or-personal symbols which held special significance for them. For one company the lion appears in pageant because a lion is part of the company’s coat of arms;[54] for another, a Moor rides on a lynx, which animal is deemed appropriate for the Skinners’ company.[55]
What is substantiated by these pageants and reinforced by the royal entries of the seventeenth century is the mode of presentation. Perhaps the particular symbols which Kernodle emphasizes did not have significance for the Londoner of the 1590’s, but he was familiar with presenting and interpreting theatrical forms in a symbolic manner, and I believe that to this extent the pageants may have influenced the design of the public playhouse.
In conclusion, then, one cannot verify whether the Elizabethan playhouse reflected the outgoing Tudor or the incoming Renaissance style. Roughed up by a master carpenter, such as James Burbage, Peter Streete, or Gilbert Katherens, the structure could have retained the traditions of design familiar to these men or it could have responded to the new fashions. These new fashions, however, were principally decorative; classical forms were applied to Tudor-Gothic foundations.[56] I tend to think that the pragmatic attitude of Elizabethan builders led them to erect a fundamentally Tudor structure to which they attached classical ornaments more or less at random. In such a structure the stage would certainly be the focus of such adornment.
Based solely on the evidence of the Globe plays, what then is the picture of the Globe stage? The principal part of the stage was a large rectangular platform upon which rested two pillars. At the rear of the platform two doors and a curtained recess between them provided access to the stage. The recess, which was an integral part of the tiring house, had to accommodate less than half a dozen people. Above the recess and/or doors was an upper level principally required where characters related themselves to others below. In the floor of the outer stage there was at least one substantial trap. No machinery for flying either actors or properties existed. In over-all design the stage, which was Renaissance in surface details, emphasized formal rather than realistic decoration. Altogether it was a theater that presented itself as a show place rather than as an imitation of London.
In a review once Granville-Barker remonstrated against overemphasis on the physical aspects of the stage at the expense of the imaginative. Such overemphasis has too frequently resulted. In their zeal to reconstruct the Elizabethan stage, theorists have given the impression that the theater of that day was constantly using traps, heavens, upper level, and enclosure. However, a comparison of the number of scenes which use some stage facility, be it merely a stool, with the number which use no stage facility whatsoever, neither property nor stage machinery, save merely a means to get on and off, shows that of the 345 scenes in the Shakespearean Globe plays, only 20 per cent require any facility. Fully 80 per cent need nothing but a bare space and an audience, not so much as a stool.