The exact location of Paul’s is obscure, but we know that its auditorium was round and its stage small.[1767] Whitefriars and both the earlier and the later Blackfriars were in rooms which had formed part of mediaeval conventual buildings, rectangular, roofed, and more analogous to courtly halls than to popular rings. No room at Farrant’s disposal would have given him a stage of a greater width than 27 ft. Burbadge’s theatre was 66 ft. from north to south, and 46 ft. from east to west. It was on the second story of his purchase that he could have best constructed it. The stage, which stood on a paved floor, was probably towards the south end, and as the whole space available was something like 100 ft. long by 52 wide, we may guess that partitions had been put up to screen off a tiring-house behind it and a passage by which the tiring-house could be reached.[1768] The entrance would be at the north end, where a great flight of stairs led up from a yard large enough for coaches to turn in. There were galleries, but not necessarily three distinct tiers of galleries, as in the public theatres, for which, indeed, there would hardly have been height enough.[1769] And there was a ‘middle region’ in which the spectators sat, instead of standing as they did in the public ‘yards’.[1770] This, which was a feature also of the later private houses, came to be known as the ‘pit’, but as the derivation of this term is from ‘cockpit’, it may not be of earlier origin than the building of the Cockpit or Phoenix theatre in Drury Lane about 1617.[1771] A roofed theatre would not require a specially constructed ‘heavens’, as descents could be worked through the ceiling from a room above. There is no clear evidence for a lord’s room at any of the private houses.[1772] But there were ‘boxes’, at any rate at the Whitefriars.[1773] Evidence for seats on the stage has already been furnished. There is much to suggest that the audience was a more select one than that of the public theatres.[1774] Elizabeth cannot be shown to have ever attended the Blackfriars, but Anne certainly did.[1775] And the price of the seats, which ranged from 6d. to 2s. 6d., was of itself sufficient to keep out persons of the ‘groundling’ or ‘stinkard’ type.[1776] Performances did not necessarily take place every day, and they could begin rather later and go on rather longer than those out of doors, since they were not dependent on daylight.[1777] Windows were certainly used, for we hear of them being clapped down to give the illusion of night scenes.[1778] But candles and torches supplied an artificial lighting.[1779] As both the Paul’s boys and those of the Chapel were primarily choristers, it is not surprising that music played a considerable part in the entertainment provided. Musical interludes were given between the acts, and Gerschow records a preliminary concert of an hour in length before the play began at the Blackfriars in 1602.[1780] Sometimes also a boy came forward and danced between the acts.[1781] At Paul’s there was at the back of the stage a ‘musick tree’, which apparently rose out of a ‘canopie’ and bore a ‘musick house’ on either side of it.[1782]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] E. J. L. Scott, Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey (Camden Soc.), 67.
[2] Cf. App. D, No. lxxviii.
[3] Cf. ch. xi.
[4] G. Dugdale, Time Triumphant (1604), sig. B, ‘Nay, see the beauty of our all kinde soveraigne! not onely to the indifferent of worth, and the worthy of honor, did he freely deale about thiese causes, but to the meane gave grace, as taking to him the late Lord Chamberlaines servants, now the Kings acters; the Queene taking to her the Earle of Worsters servants, that are now her acters; and the Prince, their sonne, Henry, Prince of Wales full of hope, tooke to him the Earle of Nottingham his servants, who are now his acters.’
[5] Cf. ch. xvi, introd., and App. C, No. lviii.
[6] Flecknoe (App. I) perhaps exaggerates the share of moral sentiment in bringing to an end the formal connexion of the choirs with plays (cf. p. 52).
[7] De la Boderie, in 1608 (cf. vol. i, p. 327), speaks of five companies in London. These would be the King’s, Queen’s, Prince’s, Revels, and King’s Revels.
[8] Archaeologia, lxii. 1. 216, from statutes collected in the decanate of Ralph of Baldock (1294–1304), ‘Cantoris officium est ... pueros introducendos in chorum et ad cantum intitulatos examinare ... Magistrum Scolae Cantus in ecclesia Sancti Gregorii, salva Decano et Capitulo ipsius collacione, preficere’; Dugdale, St. Paul’s (1818), 347, from fifteenth-or early sixteenth-century manuscript of statutes, ‘Magistrum Scholae Cantus constituit Cantor. Ad eum pertinet eos qui canere nequeunt instruere, pueros diligenter docere, eis non solum magistrum Cantus, sed etiam bonorum morum esse.’