The Hope contract of 1613 provides for the heavens to be supported without the help of posts rising from the stage. For this there was a special reason at the Hope, since the stage had to be capable of removal to make room for bear-baitings. But the advantage of dispensing with the posts and the obstacle to the free vision of the spectators which they presented must have been so great, that the innovation may well have occurred to the builders of the Globe. Whether it did, I do not think that we can say. There are one or two references to posts in stage-directions, but they need not be the posts of the heavens.[343] Possibly, too, there was less use of the descending chair. One might even fancy that Jonson’s sarcasm in the prologue to Every Man In his Humour discredited it. The new type of play did not so often call for spectacular palace scenes, and perhaps some simpler and more portable kind of ‘state’ was allowed to serve the turn. There is no suggestion of a descent from the heavens in the theophanies of As You Like It and Pericles; Juno, however, descends in The Tempest.[344] This, although it has practically no change of setting, is in some ways, under the mask influence, the most spectacular performance attempted by the King’s men at Globe or Blackfriars during our period.[345] But it is far outdone by the Queen’s plays of the Golden, Silver, and Brazen Ages, which, if they were really given just as Heywood printed them, must have strained the scenic resources of the Red Bull to an extreme. Here are ascents and descents and entries from every conceivable point of the stage;[346] divinities in fantastic disguise;[347] mythological dumb-shows;[348] battles and hunting episodes and revels;[349] ingenious properties, often with a melodramatic thrill;[350] and from beginning to end a succession of atmospheric phenomena, which suggest that the Jacobeans had made considerable progress in the art of stage pyrotechnics.[351] The Globe, with its traditional ‘blazing star’, is left far behind.[352]
The critical points of staging are the recesses below and above. Some kind of recess on the level of the main stage is often required by the King’s plays; for action in or before a prison,[353] a cell,[354] a cave,[355] a closet,[356] a study,[357] a tomb,[358] a chapel,[359] a shop;[360] for the revelation of dead bodies or other concealed sights.[361] In many cases the alcove constructed in the tiring-house behind the scenic wall would give all that is required, and occasionally a mention of the ‘curtains’ or of ‘discovery’ in a stage-direction points plainly to this arrangement. The ‘traverse’ of Webster’s plays, both for the King’s and the Queen’s men, appears, as already pointed out, to be nothing more than a terminological variant.[362] Similarly, hall scenes have still their ‘arras’ or their ‘hangings’, behind which a spy can post himself.[363] A new feature, however, now presents itself in the existence of certain scenes, including some bedchamber scenes, which entail the use of properties and would, I think, during the sixteenth century have been placed in the alcove, but now appear to have been brought forward and to occupy, like hall scenes, the main stage. The usage is by no means invariable. Even in so late a play as Cymbeline, Imogen’s chamber, with Iachimo’s trunk and the elaborate fire-places in it, must, in spite of the absence of any reference to curtains, have been disposed in the alcove; for the trunk scene is immediately followed by another before the door of the same chamber, from which Imogen presently emerges.[364] But I do not think that the alcove was used for Gertrude’s closet in Hamlet, the whole of which play seems to me to be set very continuously on the outer stage.[365] Hamlet does not enter the closet direct from in front, but goes off and comes on again. A little distance is required for the vision of the Ghost, who goes out at a visible ‘portal’. When Hamlet has killed Polonius, he lugs the guts into the neighbour room, according to the ordinary device for clearing a dead body from the main stage, which is superfluous when the death has taken place in the alcove. There is an arras, behind which Polonius esconces himself, and on this, or perhaps on an inner arras disclosed by a slight parting of the ordinary one, hangs the picture of Hamlet’s father. Nor do I think, although it is difficult to be certain, that the alcove held Desdemona’s death-chamber in Othello.[366] True, there are curtains drawn here, but they may be only bed-curtains. A longish chamber, with an outer door, seems to be indicated. A good many persons, including Cassio ‘in a chaire’, have to be accommodated, and when Emilia enters, it is some time before her attention is drawn to Desdemona behind the curtains. If anything is in the alcove, it can only be just the bed itself. The best illustrations of my point, however, are to be found in The Devil’s Charter, a singular play, with full and naïve stage-directions, which perhaps betray the hand of an inexperienced writer. Much of the action takes place in the palace of Alexander Borgia at Rome. The alcove seems to be reserved for Alexander’s study. Other scenes of an intimately domestic character are staged in front, and the necessary furniture is very frankly carried on, in one case by a protagonist. This is a scene in a parlour by night, in which Lucrezia Borgia murders her husband.[367] Another scene represents Lucrezia’s toilet;[368] in a third young men come in from tennis and are groomed by a barber.[369] My impression is that in the seventeenth century, instead of discovering a bedchamber in the alcove, it became the custom to secure more space and light by projecting the bed through the central aperture on to the main stage, and removing it by the same avenue when the scene was over. As to this a stage-direction in 2 Henry VI may be significant. There was a scene in 1 Contention in which the murdered body of the Duke of Gloucester is discovered in his bedchamber. This recurs in 2 Henry VI, but instead of a full direction for the drawing of curtains, the Folio has the simple note ‘Bed put forth’.[370] This is one of a group of formulas which have been the subject of some discussion.[371] I do not think that either ‘Bed put forth’ or still less ‘Bed thrust out’ can be dismissed as a mere equivalent of ‘Enter in a bed’, which may admittedly cover a parting of the curtains, or of such a warning to the tire-man as ‘Bed set out’ or ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’.[372] There is a difference between ‘setting out’ and ‘thrusting out’, for the one does and the other does not carry the notion of a push. And if ‘Bed put forth’ is rather more colourless, ‘Bed drawn out’, which also occurs, is clear enough. Unfortunately the extant text of 2 Henry VI may be of any date up to 1623, and none of the other examples of the formulas in question are direct evidence for the Globe in 1599–1613.[373] To be sure of the projected bed at so early a date, we have to turn to the Red Bull, where we find it both in the Golden and the Silver Age, as well as the amateur Hector of Germany, or to the Swan, where we find it in The Chaste Maid of Cheapside.[374] The Golden Age particularly repays study. The whole of the last two acts are devoted to the episode of Jupiter and Danae. The scene is set in
the Darreine Tower
Guirt with a triple mure of shining brasse.
Most of the action requires a courtyard, and the wall and gate of this, with a porter’s lodge and an alarm-bell, must have been given some kind of structural representation on the stage. An inner door is supposed to lead to Danae’s chamber above. It is in this chamber, presumably, that attendants enter ‘drawing out Danae’s bed’, and when ‘The bed is drawn in’, action is resumed in the courtyard below.[375]
There are chamber scenes in the King’s plays also, which are neither in the alcove nor on the main stage, but above. This is an extension of a practice already observable in pre-Globe days. Hero’s chamber in Much Ado about Nothing is above.[376] So is Celia’s in Volpone.[377] So is Falstaff’s at the Garter Inn in The Merry Wives of Windsor.[378] In all these examples, which are not exhaustive, a reasonable amount of space is required for action.[379] This is still more the case in The Yorkshire Tragedy, where the violent scene of the triple murder at Calverley Hall is clearly located upstairs.[380] Moreover, there are two plays which stage above what one would normally regard as hall rather than chamber scenes. One is Sejanus, where a break in the dialogue in the first act can best be explained by the interpretation of a scene in an upper ‘gallery’.[381] The other is Every Man Out of his Humour, where the personages go ‘up’ to the great chamber at Court.[382] Elaborate use is also made of the upper level in Antony and Cleopatra, where it represents the refuge of Cleopatra upon a monument, to which Antony is heaved up for his death scene, and on which Cleopatra is afterwards surprised by Caesar’s troops.[383] But I do not agree with the suggestion that it was used in shipboard scenes, for which, as we learn from the presenter’s speeches in Pericles, the stage-manager gave up the idea of providing a realistic setting, and fell back upon an appeal to the imagination of the audience.[384] Nor do I think that it was used for the ‘platform’ at Elsinore Castle in Hamlet;[385] or, as it was in the sixteenth century, for scenes in a Capitoline senate overlooking the forum at Rome.[386] In Bonduca, if that is of our period, it was adapted for a high rock, with fugitives upon it, in a wood.[387] I do not find extensive chamber scenes ‘above’ in any King’s play later than 1609, and that may be a fact of significance to which I shall return.[388] But shallow action, at windows or in a gallery overlooking a hall or open space, continues to be frequent.[389] In The Devil is an Ass, which is a Blackfriars play of 1616, a little beyond the limits of our period, there is an interesting scene played out of two contiguous upper windows, supposed to be in different houses.[390]
There is other evidence to show that in the seventeenth century as in the sixteenth, the stage was not limited to the presentation of a single house only at any given moment. A multiplicity of houses would fit the needs of several plays, but perhaps the most striking instance for the Globe is afforded by The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the last act of which requires two inns on opposite sides of the stage, the signs of which have been secretly exchanged, as a trick in the working out of the plot.[391] The King’s plays do not often require any marked foreshortening of distance in journeys over the stage. Hamlet, indeed, comes in ‘a farre off’, according to a stage-direction of the Folio, but this need mean no more than at the other end of the graveyard, although Hamlet is in fact returning from a voyage.[392] In Bonduca the Roman army at one end of the stage are said to be half a furlong from the rock occupied by Caractacus, which they cannot yet see; but they go off, and their leaders subsequently emerge upon the rock from behind.[393] The old device endured at the Red Bull, but even here the flagrant example usually cited is of a very special type.[394] At the end of The Travels of the Three English Brothers, the action of which ranges widely over the inhabited world, there is an appeal to imagination by Fame, the presenter, who says,
Would your apprehensions helpe poore art,
Into three parts deuiding this our stage,
They all at once shall take their leaues of you.