My final group is formed by the chamber scenes, in which the action is clearly regarded as within the limits of an ordinary room. They are far from numerous, in proportion to the total number of scenes in the seventy-three plays, and in view of their importance in relation to staging all for which there is clear evidence must be put upon record. Most of them fall under two or three sub-types, which tend to repeat themselves. The commonest are perhaps bedchamber scenes.[190] These, like prison scenes, which are also frequent, give opportunity for tragic episodes of death and sickness.[191] There are scenes in living-rooms, often called ‘studies’.[192] A lady’s bower,[193] a counting-house,[194] an inn parlour,[195] a buttery,[196] a gallery,[197] may also be represented.
This then is the practical problem, which the manager of an Elizabethan theatre had to solve—the provision of settings, not necessarily so elaborate or decorative as those of the Court, but at least intelligible, for open country scenes, battle and siege scenes, garden scenes, street and threshold scenes, hall scenes, chamber scenes. Like the Master of the Revels, he made far less use of interior action than the modern or even the Restoration producer of plays; but he could not altogether avoid it, either on the larger scale of a hall scene, in which a considerable number of persons had occasionally to be staged for a parliament or a council or the like, or on the smaller scale when only a few persons had to be shown in a chamber, or in the still shallower enclosure which might stand as part of a mainly out-of-doors setting for a cell, a bower, a cave, a tent, a senate house, a window, a tomb, a shop, a porch, a shrine, a niche.[198] Even more than the Master of the Revels, he had to face the complication due to the taste of an English audience for romantic or historical drama, and the changes of locality which a narrative theme inevitably involved. Not for him, except here and there in a comedy, that blessed unity of place upon which the whole dramatic art of the Italian neo-classic school had been built up. Our corresponding antiquarian problem is to reconstruct, so far as the evidence permits, the structural resources which were at the Elizabethan manager’s disposal for the accomplishment of his task. As material we have the numerous indications in dialogue and stage-directions with which the footnotes to this chapter are groaning; we have such contemporary allusions as those of Dekker’s Gull’s Hornbook; we have the débris of Philip Henslowe’s business memoranda; we have the tradition inherited from the earlier Elizabethan period, for all the types of scene usual in the theatres had already made their appearance before the theatres came into existence; to a much less degree, owing to the interposition of the roofed and rectangular Caroline theatre, we have also the tradition bequeathed to the Restoration; and as almost sole graphic presentment we have that drawing of the Swan theatre by Johannes de Witt, which has already claimed a good deal of our consideration, and to which we shall have to return from time to time, as a point de repère, in the course of the forthcoming discussion. It is peculiarly unfortunate that of all the seventy-three plays, now under review, not one can be shown to have been performed at the Swan, and that the only relics of the productions at that house, the plot of England’s Joy of 1602 and Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside of 1611, stand at such a distance of time from DeWitt’s drawing as not to exclude the hypothesis of an intermediate reconstruction of its stage. One other source of information, which throws a sidelight or two upon the questions at issue, I will here deal with at more length, because it has been a good deal overlooked. The so-called ‘English Wagner Book’ of 1594, which contains the adventures of Wagner after the death of his master Faustus, although based upon a German original, is largely an independent work by an author who shows more than one sign of familiarity with the English theatre.[199] The most important of these is in chapter viii, which is headed ‘The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus seene in the Ayre, and acted in the presence of a thousand people of Wittenberg. An. 1540’. It describes, not an actual performance, but an aerial vision produced by Wagner’s magic arts for the bewilderment of an imperial pursuivant. The architecture has therefore, no doubt, its elements of fantasy. Nevertheless, it is our nearest approach to a pen picture of an Elizabethan stage, whereby to eke out that of De Witt’s pencil.
‘They might distinctly perceiue a goodlye Stage to be reard (shining to sight like the bright burnish golde) uppon many a faire Pillar of clearest Cristall, whose feete rested uppon the Arch of the broad Raynebow, therein was the high Throne wherein the King should sit, and that prowdly placed with two and twenty degrees to the top, and round about curious wrought chaires for diverse other Potentates, there might you see the ground-worke at the one end of the Stage whereout the personated divels should enter in their fiery ornaments, made like the broad wide mouth of an huge Dragon ... the teeth of this Hels-mouth far out stretching.... At the other end in opposition was seene the place where in the bloudlesse skirmishes are so often perfourmed on the Stage, the Wals ... of ... Iron attempered with the most firme steele ... environed with high and stately Turrets of the like metall and beautye, and hereat many in-gates and out-gates: out of each side lay the bended Ordinaunces, showing at their wide hollowes the crueltye of death: out of sundry loopes many large Banners and Streamers were pendant, brieflye nothing was there wanting that might make it a faire Castle. There might you see to be short the Gibbet, the Posts, the Ladders, the tiring-house, there everything which in the like houses either use or necessity makes common. Now above all was there the gay Clowdes Vsque quaque adorned with the heavenly firmament, and often spotted with golden teares which men callen Stars. There was lively portrayed the whole Imperiall Army of the faire heavenly inhabitaunts.... This excellent faire Theator erected, immediatly after the third sound of the Trumpets, there entreth in the Prologue attired in a blacke vesture, and making his three obeysances, began to shew the argument of that Scenicall Tragedy, but because it was so far off they could not understand the wordes, and having thrice bowed himselfe to the high Throne, presently vanished.’
The action of the play is then described. Devils issue from hell mouth and besiege the castle. Faustus appears on the battlements and defies them. Angels descend from heaven to the tower and are dismissed by Faustus. The devils assault the castle, capture Faustus and raze the tower. The great devil and all the imperial rulers of hell occupy the throne and chairs and dispute with Faustus. Finally,
‘Faustus ... leapt down headlong of the stage, the whole company immediatly vanishing, but the stage with a most monstrous thundering crack followed Faustus hastely, the people verily thinking that they would have fallen uppon them ran all away.’
The three salient features of the Swan stage, as depicted by De Witt, are, firstly the two pairs of folding doors in the back wall; secondly, the ‘heavens’ supported on posts, which give the effect of a division of the space into a covered rear and an uncovered front; and thirdly, the gallery or row of boxes, which occupies the upper part of the back wall. Each of these lends itself to a good deal of comment. The two doors find abundant confirmation from numerous stage-directions, which lead up to the favourite dramatic device of bringing in personages from different points to meet in the centre of the stage. The formula which agrees most closely with the drawing is that which directs entrance ‘at one door’ and ‘at the other door’, and is of very common use.[200] But there are a great many variants, which are used, as for example in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins, with such indifference as to suggest that no variation of structure is necessarily involved.[201] Thus an equally common antithesis is that between ‘one door’ and, not ‘the other door’, but ‘an other door’.[202] Other analogous expressions are ‘one way’ and ‘at an other door’, ‘one way’ and ‘another way’, ‘at two sundry doors’, ‘at diverse doors’, ‘two ways’, ‘met by’;[203] or again, ‘at several doors’, ‘several ways’, ‘severally’.[204] There is a divergence, however, from De Witt’s indications, when we come upon terminology which suggests that more than two doors may have been available for entrances, a possibility with which the references to ‘one door’ and ‘an other’ are themselves not inconsistent. Thus in one of the 2 Seven Deadly Sins variants, after other personages have entered ‘seuerall waies’, we find ‘Gorboduk entreing in the midst between’. There are other examples of triple entrance in Fair Em, in Patient Grissell, and in The Trial of Chivalry, although it is not until the seventeenth century that three doors are in so many words enumerated.[205] We get entrance ‘at every door’, however, in The Downfall of Robin Hood, and this, with other more disputable phrases, might perhaps be pressed into an argument that even three points of entrance did not exhaust the limits of practicability.[206] It should be added that, while doors are most commonly indicated as the avenue of entrance, this is not always the case. Sometimes personages are said to enter from one or other ‘end’, or ‘side’, or ‘part’ of the stage.[207] I take it that the three terms have the same meaning, and that the ‘end’ of a stage wider than its depth is what we should call its ‘side’. A few minor points about doors may be noted, and the discussion of a difficulty may be deferred.[208] Some entrances were of considerable size; an animal could be ridden on and off.[209] There were practicable and fairly solid doors; in A Knack to Know an Honest Man, a door is taken off its hinges.[210] And as the doors give admittance indifferently to hall scenes and to out-of-door scenes, it is obvious that the term, as used in the stage-directions, often indicates a part of the theatrical structure rather than a feature properly belonging to a garden or woodland background.[211]
Some observations upon the heavens have already been made in an earlier chapter.[212] I feel little doubt that, while the supporting posts had primarily a structural object, and probably formed some obstacle to the free vision of the spectators, they were occasionally worked by the ingenuity of the dramatists and actors into the ‘business’ of the plays. The hints for such business are not very numerous, but they are sufficient to confirm the view that the Swan was not the only sixteenth-century theatre in which the posts existed. Thus in a street scene of Englishmen for my Money and in an open country scene of Two Angry Women of Abingdon we get episodes in which personages groping in the darkness stumble up against posts, and the second of these is particularly illuminating, because the victim utters a malediction upon the carpenter who set the post up, which a carpenter may have done upon the stage, but certainly did not do in a coney burrow.[213] In Englishmen for my Money the posts are taken for maypoles, and there are two of them. There are two of them also in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, a post and ‘the contrarie post’, and to one of them a character is bound, just as Kempe tells us that pickpockets taken in a theatre were bound.[214] The binding to a post occurs also in Soliman and Perseda.[215] In James IV and in Lord Cromwell bills are set up on the stage, and for this purpose the posts would conveniently serve.[216] All these are out-of-door scenes, but there was a post in the middle of a warehouse in Every Man In his Humour, and Miles sits down by a post during one of the scenes in the conjurer’s cell in Bacon and Bungay.[217] I am not oblivious of the fact that there were doubtless other structural posts on the stage besides those of the heavens, but I do not see how they can have been so conspicuous or so well adapted to serve in the action.[218] Posts may have supported the gallery, but I find it difficult to visualize the back of the stage without supposing these to have been veiled by the hangings. But two of them may have become visible when the hangings were drawn, or some porch-like projection from the back wall may have had its posts, and one of these may be in question, at any rate in the indoor scenes.
The roof of the heavens was presumably used to facilitate certain spectacular effects, the tradition of which the public theatres inherited from the miracle-plays and the Court stage.[219] Startling atmospheric phenomena were not infrequently represented.[220] These came most naturally in out-of-door scenes, but I have noted one example in a scene which on general grounds one would classify as a hall scene.[221] The illusion may not have gone much beyond a painted cloth drawn under the roof of the heavens.[222] More elaborate machinery may have been entailed by aerial ascents and descents, which were also not uncommon. Many Elizabethan actors were half acrobats, and could no doubt fly upon a wire; but there is also clear evidence for the use of a chair let down from above.[223] And was the arrangement of cords and pulleys required for this purpose also that by which the chair of state, which figures in so many hall scenes and even a few out-of-door scenes, was put into position?[224] Henslowe had a throne made in the heavens of the Rose in 1595.[225] Jonson sneered at the jubilation of boyhood over the descent of the creaking chair.[226] The device would lighten the labours of the tire-man, for a state would be an awkward thing to carry on and off. It would avoid the presence of a large incongruous property on the stage during action to which it was inappropriate. And it would often serve as a convenient signal for the beginning or ending of a hall scene. But to this aspect of the matter I must return.[227] Whatever the machinery, it must have been worked in some way from the upper part of the tire-house; possibly from the somewhat obscure third floor, which De Witt’s drawing leaves to conjecture; possibly from the superstructure known as the hut, if that really stood further forward than De Witt’s drawing suggests. Perhaps the late reference to Jove leaning on his elbows in the garret, or employed to make squibs and crackers to grace the play, rather points to the former hypothesis.[228] In favour of the latter, for what it is worth, is the description, also late, of a theatre set up by the English actors under John Spencer at Regensburg in 1613. This had a lower stage for music, over that a main stage thirty feet high with a roof supported by six great pillars, and under the roof a quadrangular aperture, through which beautiful effects were contrived.[229]
There has been a general abandonment of the hypothesis, which found favour when De Witt’s drawing was first discovered, of a division of the stage into an inner and an outer part by a ‘traverse’ curtain running between the two posts, perhaps supplemented by two other curtains running from the posts back to the tire-house.[230] Certainly I do not wish to revive it. Any such arrangement would be inconsistent with the use of the tire-house doors and gallery in out-of-door scenes; for, on the hypothesis, these were played with the traverse closed. And it would entail a serious interference with the vision of such scenes by spectators sitting far round in the galleries or ‘above the stage’. It does not, of course, follow that no use at all was made of curtains upon the stage. It is true that no hangings of any kind are shown by De Witt. Either there were none visible when he drew the Swan in 1596, or, if they were visible, he failed to draw them; it is impossible to say which. We know that even the Swan was not altogether undraped in 1602, for during the riot which followed the ‘cousening prancke’ of England’s Joy in that year the audience are said to have ‘revenged themselves upon the hangings, curtains, chairs, stooles, walles, and whatsoever came in their way’.[231] It is not, indeed, stated that these hangings and curtains were upon the stage, and possibly, although not very probably, they may have been in the auditorium. Apart, however, from the Swan, there is abundant evidence for the use of some kind of stage hangings in the public theatres of the sixteenth century generally. To the references in dialogue and stage-directions quoted in the footnotes to this chapter may be added the testimony of Florio in 1598, of Ben Jonson in 1601, of Heywood in 1608, and of Flecknoe after the Restoration.[232] We can go further, and point to several passages which attest a well-defined practice, clearly going back to the sixteenth century, of using black hangings for the special purpose of providing an appropriate setting for a tragedy.[233] Where then were these hangings? For a front curtain, on the public stage, as distinct from the Court stage, there is no evidence whatever, and the precautions taken to remove dead bodies in the course of action enable us quite safely to leave it out of account.[234] There may have been hangings of a decorative kind in various places, of course; round the base of the stage, for example, or dependent, as Malone thought, from the heavens. But the only place where we can be sure that there were hangings was what Heywood calls the ‘fore-front’ of the stage, by which it seems clear from Florio that he means the fore-front of the tiring-house, which was at the same time the back wall of the stage. It is, I believe, exclusively to hangings in this region that our stage-directions refer. Their terminology is not quite uniform. ‘Traverse’ I do not find in a sixteenth-century public play.[235] By far the most common term is ‘curtain’, but I do not think that there is any technical difference between ‘curtain’ and the not infrequent ‘arras’ or the unique ‘veil’ of The Death of Robin Hood.[236] ‘Arras’ is the ordinary Elizabethan name for a hanging of tapestry used as a wall decoration, and often projected from a frame so as to leave a narrow space, valuable to eavesdroppers and other persons in need of seclusion, between itself and the wall. The stage arras serves precisely this purpose as a background to interior scenes. Here stand the murderers in King John; here Falstaff goes to sleep in 1 Henry IV; and here too he proposes to ‘ensconce’ himself, in order to avoid being confronted with both his ladyloves together in The Merry Wives.[237]
The stage-directions, however, make it quite clear that the curtains were not merely an immovable decoration of the back wall. They could be ‘opened’ and ‘shut’ or ‘closed’; and either operation could indifferently be expressed by the term ‘drawn’. This drawing was presumably effected by sliding the curtain laterally along a straight rod to which it was affixed by rings sewn on to its upper edge; there is no sign of any rise or fall of the curtain. The operator may be an actor upon the stage; in Bacon and Bungay Friar Bacon draws the curtains ‘with a white sticke’. He may be the speaker of a prologue.[238] Whether the ‘servitours’ of a theatre ever came upon the stage, undisguised, to draw the curtains, I am uncertain; but obviously it would be quite easy to work the transformation from behind, by a cord and pulley, without any visible intervention.[239] The object of the drawing is to introduce interior action, either in a mere recess, or in a larger space, such as a chamber; and this, not only where curtains are dramatically appropriate, as within a house, or at the door of a tent, but also where they are less so, as before a cave or a forest bower. One may further accept the term ‘discovered’ as indicating the unveiling of an interior by the play of a curtain, even when the curtain is not specifically mentioned;[240] and may recognize that the stage-directions sometimes use ‘Enter’ and ‘Exit’ in a loose sense of persons, who do not actually move in or out, but are ‘discovered’, or covered, by a curtain.[241]