The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

Of what nature, then, was the space so disclosed? There was ordinarily, as already stated, a narrow space behind an arras; and if the gallery above the stage jutted forward, or had, as the Swan drawing perhaps indicates, a projecting weather-board, this might be widened into a six- or seven-foot corridor, still in front of the back wall.[242] Such a corridor would, however, hardly give the effect of a chamber, although it might that of a portico. Nor would it be adequate in size to hold all the scenes which it is natural to class as chamber scenes; such, for example, as that in Tamburlaine, where no less than ten persons are discovered grouped around Zenocrate’s bed.[243] The stage-directions themselves do not help us much; that in Alphonsus alone names ‘the place behind the stage’, and as this is only required to contain the head of Mahomet, a corridor, in this particular scene, would have sufficed.[244] There is, however, no reason why the opening curtains should not have revealed a quite considerable aperture in the back wall, and an alcove or recess of quite considerable size lying behind this aperture. With a 43-foot stage, as at the Fortune, and doors placed rather nearer the ends of it than De Witt shows them, it would be possible to get a 15-foot aperture, and still leave room for the drawn curtains to hang between the aperture and the doors. Allow 3 feet for the strip of stage between arras and wall, and a back-run of 10 feet behind the wall, and you get an adequate chamber of 15 feet × 13 feet. My actual measurements are, of course, merely illustrative. There would be advantages, as regards vision, in not making the alcove too deep. The height, if the gallery over the stage ran in a line with the middle gallery for spectators, would be about 8 feet or 9 feet; rather low, I admit.[245] A critic may point out that behind the back wall of the outer stage lay the tire-house, and that the 14-foot deep framework of a theatre no greater in dimensions than the Fortune does not leave room for an inner stage in addition to the tire-house. I think the answer is that the ‘place behind the stage’ was in fact nothing but an enclave within the tire-house, that its walls consisted of nothing but screens covered with some more arras, that these were only put up when they were needed for some particular scene, and that when they were up, although they extended to nearly the full depth of the tire-house, they did not occupy its full width, but left room on either side for the actors to crowd into, and for the stairs leading to the upper floors. When no interior scene had to be set, there was nothing between the tire-house and the outer stage but the curtains; and this renders quite intelligible the references quoted in an earlier chapter to actors peeping through a curtain at the audience, and to the audience ‘banding tile and pear’ against the curtains, to allure the actors forth.[246] I do not think it is necessary to assume that there was a third pair of folding doors permanently fixed in the aperture.[247] They would be big and clumsy, although no doubt they would help to keep out noise. In any case, there is not much evidence on the point. If Tarlton’s head was seen ‘the Tire-House doore and tapistrie betweene’, he may very well have gone to the end of the narrow passage behind the arras, and looked out where that was broken by one of the side-doors. No doubt, however, the aperture is the third place of entrance ‘in the midst’, which the stage-directions or action of some plays require, and which, as such, came to be regarded as a third door.[248]

A. SQUARE THEATRE (Proportions of Fortune)

I conceive, therefore, of the alcove as a space which the tire-man, behind the curtains and in close proximity to the screens and properties stored in the tire-house, can arrange as he likes, without any interruption to continuous action proceeding on the outer stage. He can put up a house-front with a door, and if needed, a porch. He can put up a shop, or for that matter, a couple of adjacent shops. He can put up the arched gates of a city or castle. These are comparatively shallow structures. But he can also take advantage of the whole depth of the space, and arrange a chamber, a cave, or a bower, furnishing it as he pleases, and adding doors at the back or side, or a back window, which would enable him to give more light, even if only borrowed light from the tire-house, to an interior scene.[249] One point, however, is rather puzzling. There are some scenes which imply entrance to a chamber, not from behind, but from the open stage in front, and by a visible door which can be knocked at or locked. Thus in Romeo and Juliet, of which all the staging is rather difficult on any hypothesis, the Friar observes Juliet coming towards his cell, and after they have discoursed Juliet bids him shut the door. Here, no doubt, the Friar may have looked out and seen Juliet through a back window, and she may have entered by a back door. But in an earlier scene, where we get the stage-direction ‘Enter Nurse and knockes’, and the knocking is repeated until the Nurse is admitted to the cell, we are, I think, bound to suppose that the entry is in front, in the sight of the audience, and antecedent to the knocking.[250] Perhaps an even clearer case is in Captain Thomas Stukeley, where Stukeley’s chamber in the Temple is certainly approached from the open stage by a door at which Stukeley’s father knocks, and which is unlocked and locked again.[251] Yet how can a door be inserted in that side of a chamber which is open to the stage and the audience. Possibly it was a very conventional door set across the narrow space between the arras and the back wall of the main stage, at the corner of the aperture and at right angles to its plane. The accompanying diagrams will perhaps make my notion of the inner stage clearer.

B. OCTAGONAL THEATRE (e.g. Globe; size of Fortune)

It has been suggested, by me as well as by others, that the inner stage may have been raised by a step or two above the outer stage.[252] On reflection, I now think this unlikely. There would be none too much height to spare, at any rate if the height of the alcove was determined by that of the spectators’ galleries. The only stage-direction which suggests any such arrangement is in the Death of Robin Hood, where the King sits in a chair behind the curtains, and the Queen ascends to him and descends again.[253] But even if the tire-man put up an exalted seat in this case, there need have been no permanent elevation. The missing woodcut of the Anglo-German stage at Frankfort in 1597 is said to have shown a raised inner stage; but until it is recovered, it is difficult to estimate its value as testimony upon the structure of the London theatres.[254]

It must not, of course, be taken for granted that every curtain, referred to in text or stage-directions as ‘drawn’, was necessarily a back curtain disclosing an alcove. In some, although not all, of the bedchamber scenes the indications do not of themselves exclude the hypothesis of a bed standing on the open stage and the revealing of the occupant by the mere drawing of bed-curtains.[255] I do not think there is any certain example of such an arrangement in a sixteenth-century play.[256] But tents also could be closed by curtains, and the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins requires Henry VI to lie asleep in ‘A tent being plast one the stage’, while dumb-shows enter ‘at one dore’ and ‘at an other dore’.[257] However it may have been with other theatres, we cannot, on the evidence before us, assert that the Swan had an alcove at all; and if it had not, it was probably driven to provide for chamber scenes by means of some curtained structure on the stage itself.

On the other hand, it must not be supposed that every case, in which a back curtain was drawn, will have found record in the printed book of the play concerned; and when the existence of an alcove has once been established, it becomes legitimate to infer its use for various chamber and analogous scenes, to the presentation of which it would have been well adapted. But this inference, again, must not be twisted into a theory that the stage in front of the back wall served only for out-of-door scenes, and that all interior action was housed, wholly or in part, in the alcove. This is, I think, demonstrably untrue, as regards the large group of indoor scenes which I have called hall scenes. In the first place, the alcove would not have been spacious enough to be of any value for a great many of the hall scenes. You could not stage spectacular action, such as that of a coronation, a sitting of parliament, or a trial at the bar, in a box of 15 by 13 feet and only 9 feet high. A group of even so many as ten persons clustered round a bed is quite another thing. I admit the device of the so-called ‘split’ scene, by which action beginning in the alcove is gradually extended so as to take the whole of the stage into its ambit.[258] This might perhaps serve for a court of justice, with the judges in the alcove, the ‘bar’ drawn across the aperture, and the prisoners brought in before it. A scene in which the arras is drawn in Sir Thomas More points to such a setting.[259] But a scene in which a royal ‘state’ is the dominating feature would be singularly ineffective if the state were wedged in under the low roof of the alcove; and if I am right in thinking that the ‘state’ normally creaked down into its position from the heavens, it would clearly land, not within the alcove, but upon the open stage in front of it. Indeed, if it could be placed into position behind a curtain, there would be no reason for bringing it from the heavens at all. Then, again, hall scenes are regularly served by two or more doors, which one certainly would not suppose from the stage-directions to be any other than the doors similarly used to approach out-of-door scenes; and they frequently end with injunctions to ‘come in’, which would be superfluous if the personages on the stage could be withdrawn from sight by the closing of the curtain. Occasionally, moreover, the gallery over the stage comes into play in a hall scene, in a way which would not be possible if the personages were disposed in the alcove, over which, of course, this gallery projected.[260] Some of these considerations tell more directly against the exclusive use of the alcove for hall scenes, than against its use in combination with the outer stage; and this combined use, where suitable, I am quite prepared to allow. But ordinarily, I think, the hall scenes were wholly on the outer stage; and this must necessarily have been the case where two rooms were employed, of which one opens out behind the other.[261]

It may be said that the main object of the curtain is to allow of the furniture and decorations of a ‘set’ scene, which is usually an interior scene, being put in place behind it, without any interruption to the continuous progress of an act; and that hall scenes cannot be set properly, unless they also are behind the curtain line. I do not think that there is much in this argument. A hall scene does not require so much setting as a chamber scene. It is sufficiently furnished, at any rate over the greater part of its area, with the state and such lesser seats as can very readily be carried on during the opening speeches or during the procession by which the action is often introduced. A bar can be set up, or a banquet spread, or a sick man brought in on his chair, as part of the action itself.[262] Even an out-of-door scene, such as an execution or a duel in the lists, sometimes demands a similar adjustment;[263] it need no more give pause than the analogous devices entailed by the removal of dead bodies from where they have fallen.