I defer a full consideration of stage hangings to the chapters on staging; cf. vol. iii, p. 78.
[1704] For the classical sense of Scaena, cf. the passage from Vitruvius quoted in vol. iii, p. 3. Florio, Dictionary (1598), s.v. Scena, ‘a skaffold, a pavillion, or forepart of a theatre where players make them readie, being trimmed with hangings, out of which they enter upon the stage’, points to the identity of scene and tire-house front. This structure has therefore precisely the double function of the ‘domus’ of the court plays; cf. ch. xix. I owe the quotation to Graves, 15, who adds, The Englysshe Mancyne upon the foure Cardynale Vertues (c. 1520), ‘a disgyser yt goeth into a secret corner callyd a sene of the pleyinge place to chaunge his rayment’, and Palsgrave, Acolastus (1540), prol., ‘our scenes, that is to saye, our places appoynted for our players to come forth of’. The English ‘Mancyne’ is a translation, earlier than A. Barclay’s, of Dominic Mancini’s De Quatuor Virtutibus (1516), and the original has only ‘Histrio, qui in scaenam vadit’. The notion of scena as not a mere wall, but a shelter for performers, is mediaeval, and appears to go back to an early definition from σκῆνος, a hut or tent, found, e. g., side by side with the regular mediaeval misunderstanding of the classical art of acting in Hugutius, Liber Derivationum, ‘Scena est umbraculum siue locus obumbratus in theatro et cortinis coopertus similis tabernaculis mercenariorum, quae sunt asseribus vel cortinis opertae, et secundum hoc scena potest dici a scenos, quod est domus, quae in modum domus erat constructa. In umbraculo latebant personae larvatae, quae ad vocem recitatoris exigebantur ad gestus faciendos’; cf. Herrmann, 280, W. Cloetta, Komödie und Tragödie im Mittelalter (1890), 38; Mediaeval Stage, ii. 208. It is revised on humanist lines by Jodocus Badius Ascensius in the Praenotamenta to his Terence of 1502, ‘Intra igitur theatrum ab una parte opposita spectatoribus erant scenae et proscenia, id est loca lusoria ante scenas facta. Scenae autem erant quaedam umbracula seu absconsoria, in quibus abscondebantur lusores, donec exire deberent. Ante autem scenas erant quaedam tabulata, in quibus personae qui exierant ludebant.’
[1705] The Roxana engraving shows a projecting building at the back of the stage, but this can hardly be regarded as throwing light upon sixteenth-century structure.
[1706] C. Revels (1601), ind. 160. The author is not ‘in the Tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stampe at the Booke-holder, sweare for our Properties, cursse the poore Tire-man, rayle the Musique out of tune’; Bartholomew Fair (1614), ind. 8, ‘I am looking, lest the Poet heare me, or his man, Master Broome, behind the Arras.... Hee has (sirreuerence) kick’d me three, or foure times about the Tyring-house, I thanke him, for but offering to putt in, with my experience’; v. iii. 57, ‘I would be glad drinke with the young company; which is the Tiring-house?’
[1707] Every Woman in her Humour, p. 354, ‘He would ... stamp and stare (God blesse us,) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors misse their entrance’; R. J. I. iv. 7,
Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance.
The actor’s signal for entrance was already his ‘cue’; cf. M. N. D. III. i. 77, ‘And so every one according to his cue’; Isle of Gulls, ii. 2, ‘you know your que’; ii. 3, ‘She hath entred the Dutches iust at her que’.
[1708] 2 Ant. Mellida, II. i. 30, ‘The tiring man hath not glued on my beard half fast enough’. A tireman appears in the inductions to Malcontent, ‘Enter W. Sly, a Tire-man following him with a stool’, and to What You Will, ‘Enter Tire-man with lights’. ‘Steven the tyerman’ of the Admiral’s in 1596 is probably the Steven Magett of other entries by Henslowe (i. 31, 44, 45).
[1709] Speakers in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) are the Booke-Holder and the Stage-Keeper, who ‘kept the Stage in Master Tarletons time’, and whose work is ‘sweeping the Stage? or gathering vp the broken apples for the beares within?’