The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

I must not be taken to give any countenance to the doctrine that properties, incongruous to the particular scene that was being played, were allowed to stand on the public Elizabethan stage, and that the audience, actually or through a convention, was not disturbed by them.[264] This doctrine appears to me to rest upon misunderstandings of the evidence produced in its support, and in particular upon a failure to distinguish between the transitional methods of setting employed by Lyly and his clan, and those of the permanent theatres with which we are now concerned. The former certainly permitted of incongruities in the sense that, as the neo-classic stage strove to adapt itself to a romantic subject-matter, separate localities, with inconsistent properties, came to be set at one and the same time in different regions of the stage. But the system proved inadequate to the needs of romanticism, as popular audiences understood it; and, apart from some apparent rejuvenescence in the ‘private’ houses, with which I must deal later, it gave way, about the time of the building of the permanent theatres, to the alternative system, by which different localities were represented, not synchronously but successively, and each in its turn had full occupation of the whole field of the stage. This full occupation was not, I venture to think, qualified by the presence in any scene of a property inappropriate to that scene, but retained there because it had been used for some previous, or was to be used for some coming, scene. I do not mean to say that some colourless or insignificant property, such as a bench, may not have served, without being moved, first in an indoors and then in an out-of-doors scene. But that the management of the Theatre or the Rose was so bankrupt in ingenuity that the audience had to watch a coronation through a fringe of trees or to pretend unconsciousness while the strayed lovers in a forest dodged each other round the corners of a derelict ‘state’, I, for one, see no adequate reason to believe. It is chiefly the state and the trees which have caused the trouble. But, after all, a state which has creaked down can creak up again, just as a banquet or a gallows which has been carried on can be carried off. Trees are perhaps a little more difficult. A procession of porters, each with a tree in his arms, would be a legitimate subject for the raillery of The Admirable Bashville. A special back curtain painted en pastoralle would hardly be adequate, even if there were any evidence for changes of curtain; trees were certainly sometimes practicable and therefore quasi-solid.[265] The alcove, filled with shrubs, would by itself give the illusion of a greenhouse rather than a forest; moreover, the alcove was available in forest scenes to serve as a rustic bower or cottage.[266] Probably the number of trees dispersed over the body of the stage was not great; they were a symbolical rather than a realistic setting. On the whole, I am inclined to think that, at need, trees ascended and descended through traps; and that this is not a mere conjecture is suggested by a few cases in which the ascent and descent, being part of a conjuring action, are recorded in the stage-directions.[267] One of these shows that the traps would carry not merely a tree but an arbour. The traps had, of course, other functions. Through them apparitions arose and sank;[268] Jonah was spewed up from the whale’s belly;[269] and the old device of hell-mouth still kept alive a mediaeval tradition.[270] Only primitive hydraulics would have been required to make a fountain flow or a fog arise;[271] although it may perhaps be supposed that the episodes, in which personages pass to and from boats or fling themselves into a river, were performed upon the extreme edge of the stage rather than over a trap.[272] I do not find any clear case, in the public sixteenth-century theatres, of the convention apparently traceable in Lyly and Whetstone, by which the extreme edge of the stage is used for ‘approach’ scenes, as when a traveller arrives from afar, or when some episode has to be represented in the environs of a city which furnishes the principal setting.[273] And I think it would certainly be wrong to regard the main stage, apart from the alcove, as divided into an inner area covered by the heavens and an outer area, not so covered and appropriate to open-country scenes. Indeed, the notion that any substantial section of the stage appeared to the audience not to lie under the heavens is in my view an illusion due to the unskilful draughtsmanship of De Witt or his copyist. Skyey phenomena belong most naturally to open-country scenes, nor are these wholly debarred from the use of the state; and the machinery employed in both cases seems to imply the existence of a superincumbent heavens.[274]

I come finally to the interesting question of the gallery above the stage. This, in the Swan drawing, may project very slightly over the scenic wall, and is divided by short vertical columns into six small compartments, in each of which one or two occupants are sitting. They might, of course, be personages in the play; but, if so, they seem curiously dissociated from the action. They might be musicians, but they appear to include women, and there is no clear sign of musical instruments. On the whole, they have the air of spectators.[275] However this may be, let us recall what has already been established in an earlier chapter, that there is conclusive evidence for some use of the space above the stage for spectators, at least until the end of the sixteenth century, and for some use of it as a music-room, at least during the seventeenth century.[276] With these uses we have to reconcile the equally clear indications that this region, or some part of it, was available when needed, throughout the whole of the period under our consideration, as a field for dramatic action. For the moment we are only concerned with the sixteenth century. A glance back over my footnotes will show many examples in which action is said to be ‘above’ or ‘aloft’, or is accompanied by the ascent or descent of personages from or to the level of the main stage. This interplay of different levels is indeed the outstanding characteristic of the Elizabethan public theatre, as compared with the other systems of stage-presentment to which it stands in relation. There are mediaeval analogies, no doubt, and one would not wish to assert categorically that no use was ever made of a balcony or a house-roof in a Greek or Roman or Italian setting. But, broadly speaking, the classical and neo-classical stage-tradition, apart from theophanies, is one of action on a single level. Even in the Elizabethan Court drama, the platform comes in late and rarely, although the constant references to ‘battlements’ in the Revels Accounts enable us to infer that, by the time when the public theatres came to be built, the case of Orestes was not an isolated one. Battlements, whatever the extension which the Revels officers came to give to the term, were primarily for the beloved siege scenes, and to the way in which siege scenes were treated in the theatres I must revert. But from two plays, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and The Woman in the Moon, both of which probably represent a late development of the Court drama, we may gather at least one other definite function of the platform, as a point of vantage from which presenters, in both cases of a divine type, may sit ‘sunning like a crow in a gutter’, and watch the evolution of their puppets on the stage below.[277] This disposition of presenters ‘aloft’ finds more than one parallel in the public theatres. The divine element is retained in The Battle of Alcazar, where Henslowe’s plot gives us, as part of the direction for a dumb-show, ‘Enter aboue Nemesis’.[278] There are traces of it also in James IV and in A Looking Glass for London and England. In James IV the presenters are Bohan, a Scot, and Oberon, king of fairies. They come on the stage for an induction, at the end of which Bohan says, ‘Gang with me to the Gallery, and Ile show thee the same in action by guid fellowes of our country men’, and they ‘Exeunt’. Obviously they watch the action, for they enter again and comment upon it during act-intervals. One of their interpositions is closed with the words ‘Gow shrowd vs in our harbor’; another with ‘Lets to our sell, and sit & see the rest’.[279] In the Looking Glass we get after the first scene the direction, ‘Enters brought in by an angell Oseas the Prophet, and set downe ouer the Stage in a Throne’. Oseas is evidently a presenter; the actors ignore him, but he makes moral comments after various scenes, and at the end of Act IV comes the further direction, ‘Oseas taken away’.[280] Purely human presenters in The Taming of a Shrew are still on a raised level. Sly is removed from the main stage during the first scene of the induction. He is brought back at the beginning of the second scene, presumably above, whence he criticizes the play, for towards the end the lord bids his servants

lay him in the place where we did find him,

Just underneath the alehouse side below;

and this is done by way of an epilogue.[281]

I do not suggest that presenters were always above; it is not so when they merely furnish the equivalent of a prologue or epilogue, but only when it is desired to keep them visible during the action, and on the other hand they must not obstruct it. Sometimes, even when their continued presence might be desirable, it has to be dispensed with, or otherwise provided for. The presenters in Soliman and Perseda come and go; those in The Spanish Tragedy sit upon the stage itself. Why? I think the answer is the same in both cases. A platform was required for other purposes. In Soliman and Perseda one scene has the outer wall of a tiltyard reached by ladders from the stage; another has a tower, from which victims are tumbled down out of sight.[282] In the Spanish Tragedy, apart from some minor action ‘above’, there is the elaborate presentation of Hieronimo’s ‘play within the play’ to be provided for. This must be supposed to be part of a hall scene. It occupies, with its preparations, most of the fourth, which is the last, act; and for it the King and his train are clearly seated in an upper ‘gallerie’, while the performance takes place on the floor of the hall below, with the body of Horatio concealed behind a curtain, for revelation at the appropriate moment.[283] We are thus brought face to face with an extension on the public stage of the use of ‘above’, beyond what is entailed by the needs of sieges or of exalted presenters. Nor, of course, are the instances already cited exhaustive. The gallery overlooking a hall in the Spanish Tragedy has its parallel in the window overlooking a hall in Dr. Faustus.[284] More frequent is an external window, door, or balcony, overlooking an external scene in street or garden.[285] In these cases the action ‘above’ is generally slight. Some one appears in answer to a summons from without; an eavesdropper listens to a conversation below; a girl talks to her lover, and there may be an ascent or descent with the help of a rope-ladder or a basket. But there are a few plays in which we are obliged to constitute the existence of a regular chamber scene, with several personages and perhaps furniture, set ‘above’. The second scene of the induction to the Taming of the Shrew, just cited, is already a case in point. The presenters here do not merely sit, as spectators in the lord’s room might, and listen. They move about a chamber and occupy considerable space. Scenes which similarly require the whole interior of an upper room to be visible, and not merely its balcony or window bay, are to be found in 1 Sir John Oldcastle, in Every Man In his Humour, twice in The Jew of Malta, in 2 Henry IV, and in Look About You.[286] I do not know whether I ought to add Romeo and Juliet. Certainly the love scenes, Act II, scc. i and ii, and Act III, sc. v, require Juliet’s chamber to be aloft, and in these there is no interior action entailing more than the sound of voices, followed by the appearance of the speakers over Juliet’s shoulder as she stands at the casement or on a balcony.[287] It would be natural to assume that the chamber of Act IV, sc. iii, in which Juliet drinks her potion, and sc. v, in which she is found lying on her bed, is the same, and therefore also aloft. Obviously its interior, with the bed and Juliet, must be visible to the spectators. The difficulty is that it also appears to be visible to the wedding guests and the musicians, as they enter the courtyard from without; and this could only be, if it were upon the main level of the stage. If the scene stood by itself, one would undoubtedly assign it to the curtained recess behind the stage; and on the whole it is probable that on this occasion architectural consistency was sacrificed to dramatic effect, and Juliet’s chamber was placed sometimes above and sometimes below.[288] There is one other type of scene which requires elevated action, and that is the senate-house scene, as we find it in The Wounds of Civil War and in Titus Andronicus, where the Capitol clearly stands above the Forum, but is within ear-shot and of easy approach.[289]

I think we are bound to assume that some or all of this action ‘above’ took place in the gallery ‘over the stage’, where it could be readily approached from the tiring-house behind, and could be disposed with the minimum of obstruction to the vision of the auditorium. A transition from the use of this region for spectators to its use for action is afforded by the placing there of those idealized spectators, the presenters. So far as they are concerned, all that would be needed, in a house arranged like the Swan, would be to assign to them one or more, according to their number, of the rooms or compartments, into which the gallery was normally divided. One such compartment, too, would serve well for a window, and would be accepted without demur as forming part of the same ‘domus’ to which a door below, or, as in The Merchant of Venice, a penthouse set in the central aperture, gave access. To get a practicable chamber, it would be necessary to take down a partition and throw two of the compartments, probably the two central compartments, into one; but there would still be four rooms left for the lords. As a matter of fact, most upper chamber scenes, even of the sixteenth century, are of later date than the Swan drawing, and some architectural evolution, including the provision of a music-room, may already have taken place, and have been facilitated by the waning popularity of the lord’s rooms. It will be easier to survey the whole evolution of the upper stage in the next chapter.[290] For the present, let us think of the upper chamber as running back on the first floor of the tiring-house above the alcove, and reached from within by stairs behind the scenic wall, of which, if desired, the foot could perhaps be made visible within the alcove.[291] Borrowed light could be given by a window at the back, from which also the occupants of the room could pretend to look out behind.[292] Internal doors could of course also be made available. A scene in The Jew of Malta requires a trap in the floor of the upper chamber, over a cauldron discovered in the alcove below.[293] The upper chamber could be fitted, like the alcove itself, with an independent curtain for discoveries.[294]

Are we to conclude that all action ‘above’ was on or behind the back line of the stage? The point upon which I feel most uncertainty is the arrangement of the battlements in the stricter sense.[295] These appear to be generally regarded as running along the whole of the back line, with the gates of the town or castle represented in the central aperture below. Some writers suggest that they occupied, not the actual space of the rooms or boxes ‘over the stage’, but a narrow balcony running in front of these.[296] I cannot satisfy myself that the Swan drawing bears out the existence of any projecting ledge adequate for the purpose. On the other hand, if all the compartments of the gallery were made available and their partitions removed, all the spectators ‘over the stage’ must have been displaced; and siege scenes are early, and numerous. I do not know that it is essential to assume that the battlements extended beyond the width of two compartments. There is some definite evidence for a position of the ‘walles’ on the scenic line, apart from the patent convenience of keeping the main stage clear for besieging armies, in Jasper Mayne’s laudation of Ben Jonson:

Thou laid’st no sieges to the music-room.[297]

I am content to believe that this is where they normally stood. At the same time, it is possible that alternative arrangements were not unknown. In the Wagner Book, which must be supposed to describe a setting of a type not incredible on the public stage, we are told of a high throne, presumably at the back, of hell mouth ‘at the one end of the stage’, and of an elaborate castle ‘at the other end in opposition’. This is ‘the place where in the bloudlesse skirmishes are so often perfourmed upon the stage’, and although I should not press this as meaning that the walls were always at an ‘end’ of the stage, the passage would be absurd, if they were invariably at the back.[298] Further, there is at least one extant play in which it is very difficult to envisage certain scenes with the walls at the back. This is 1 Henry VI, the Orleans scenes of which, with the leaping over the walls, and the rapid succession of action in the market-place within the town and in the field without, seem to me clearly to point to walls standing across the main stage from back to front.[299] But if so, how were such walls put into place? The imagination boggles at the notion of masons coming in to build a wall during the action, in the way in which attendants might set up a bar or a lists, or carpenters the gibbet for an execution. Bottom’s device for Pyramus and Thisbe would hardly be more grotesque. Yet the Orleans siege scenes in 1 Henry VI are by no means coincident with acts, and could not therefore be set in advance and dismantled at leisure when done with. Can the walls have been drawn forwards and backwards, with the help of some machine, through the doors or the central aperture?[300] It is not inconceivable, and possibly we have here the explanation of the ‘j whell and frame in the Sege of London’, which figures in the Admiral’s inventories. Once the possibility of a scenic structure brought on to the main stage is mooted, one begins to look for other kinds of episode in which it would be useful. This, after all, may have been the way in which a gibbet was introduced, and the Admiral’s had also ‘j frame for the heading in Black Jone’, although nothing is said of a wheel.[301] The senate houses could, I think, have been located in the gallery, but the beacon in King Leir would not look plausible there, and the Admiral’s had a beacon, apparently as a detached property.[302] I am also inclined to think that a wall may occasionally have been drawn across the stage to make a close of part of it for a garden scene. In Act II of Romeo and Juliet Romeo pretty clearly comes in with his friends in some public place of the city, and then leaps a wall into an orchard, where he is lost to their sight, and finds himself under Juliet’s window. He must have a wall to leap. I mentioned Pyramus and Thisbe just above with intent, for what is Pyramus and Thisbe but a burlesque of the Romeo and Juliet motive, which would have been all the more amusing, if a somewhat conspicuous and unusual wall had been introduced into its model? Another case in point may be the ‘close walk’ before Labervele’s house in A Humorous Day’s Mirth.[303] I have allowed myself to stray into the field of conjecture.