The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

Thinke this England, this Spaine, this Persia.

Then follow the stage-directions, ‘Enter three seuerall waies the three Brothers’, and ‘Fame giues to each a prospective glasse, they seme to see one another’. Obviously such a visionary dumb-show cannot legitimately be twisted into an argument that the concurrent representation of incongruous localities was a matter of normal staging. Such interplay of opposed houses, as we get in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, would no doubt seem more effective if we could adopt the ingenious conjecture which regards the scenic wall as not running in a straight line all the way, but broken by two angles, so that, while the central apertures below and above directly front the spectators, the doors to right and left, each with a room or window above it, are set on a bias, and more or less face each other from end to end of the stage.[395] I cannot call this more than a conjecture, for there is no direct evidence in its favour, and the Swan drawing, for what that is worth, is flatly against it. Structurally it would, I suppose, fit the round or apsidal ended Globe better than the rectangular Fortune or Blackfriars. The theory seems to have been suggested by a desire to make it possible to watch action within the alcove from a gallery on the level above. I have not, however, come across any play which can be safely assigned to a public theatre, in which just this situation presents itself, although it is common enough for persons above to watch action in a threshold or hall scene. Two windows in the same plane would, of course, fully meet the needs of The Devil is an Ass. There is, indeed, the often-quoted scene from David and Bethsabe, in which the King watches the Hittite’s wife bathing at a fountain; but the provenance of David and Bethsabe is so uncertain and its text so evidently manipulated, that it would be very temerarious to rely upon it as affording any proof of public usage.[396] On the other hand, if it is the case, as seems almost certain, that the boxes over the doors were originally the lord’s rooms, it would no doubt be desirable that the occupants of those rooms should be able to see anything that went on within the alcove. I do not quite know what weight to attach to Mr. Lawrence’s analogy between the oblique doors which this theory involves and the familiar post-Restoration proscenium doors, with stage-boxes above them, at right angles to the plane of the footlights.[397] The roofed Caroline theatres, with their side-walls to the stage, and the proscenium arch, probably borrowed from the masks, have intervened, and I cannot pretend to have traced the history of theatrical structure during the Caroline period.

I have felt justified in dealing more briefly with the early seventeenth-century stages than with those of the sixteenth century, for, after all, the fundamental conditions, so far as I can judge, remained unaltered. I seem able to lay my finger upon two directions in which development took place, and both of these concern the troublesome problem of interior action. First of all there is the stage gallery. Of this I venture to reconstruct the story as follows. Its first function was to provide seating accommodation for dignified and privileged spectators, amongst whom could be placed, if occasion arose, presenters or divine agents supposed to be watching or directing the action of a play. Perhaps a differentiation took place. Parts of the gallery, above the doors at either end of the scene, were set aside as lord’s rooms. The central part, with the upper floor of the tiring-house behind it, was used for the musicians, but was also available for such scenes as could effectively be staged above, and a curtain was fitted, corresponding to that below, behind which the recess could be set as a small chamber. Either as a result of these changes or for other reasons, the lord’s rooms, about the end of the sixteenth century, lost their popularity, and it became the fashion for persons of distinction, or would-be distinction, to sit upon the stage itself instead.[398] This left additional space free above, and the architects of the Globe and Fortune took the opportunity to enlarge the accommodation for their upper scenes. Probably they left windows over the side-doors, so that the upper parts of three distinct houses could, if necessary, be represented; and it may be that spectators were not wholly excluded from these.[399] But they widened the music-room, so that it could now hold larger scenes, and in fact now became an upper stage and not a mere recess. Adequate lighting from behind could probably be obtained rather more easily here than on the crowded floor below. There is an interesting allusion which I have not yet quoted, and which seems to point to an upper stage of substantial dimensions in the public theatres of about the year 1607. It is in Middleton’s Family of Love, itself a King’s Revels play.[400] Some of the characters have been to a performance, not ‘by the youths’, and there ‘saw Sampson bear the town-gates on his neck from the lower to the upper stage’. You cannot carry a pair of town-gates into a mere box, such as the Swan drawing shows.

Meanwhile, what of the alcove? I think that it proved too dark and too cramped for the convenient handling of chamber scenes, and that the tendency of the early seventeenth century was to confine its use to action which could be kept shallow, or for which obscurity was appropriate. It could still serve for a prison, or an ‘unsunned lodge’, or a chamber of horrors. For scenes requiring more light and movement it was replaced, sometimes by the more spacious upper stage, sometimes by the main stage, on to which beds and other properties were carried or ‘thrust out’, just as they had always been on a less extensive scale for hall scenes. The difficulties of shifting were, on the whole, compensated for by the greater effectiveness and visibility which action on the main scene afforded. I do not therefore think it possible to accept even such a modified version of the old ‘alternationist’ theory as I find set out in Professor Thorndike’s recent Shakespeare’s Theater. The older alternationists, starting from the principle, sound enough in itself, of continuous action within an act, assumed that all interior or other propertied scenes were played behind the curtains, and were set there while unpropertied action was played outside; and they deduced a method of dramatic construction, which required the dramatists to alternate exterior and interior scenes so as to allow time for the settings to be carried out.[401] The theory breaks down, not merely because it entails a much more constant use of the curtains than the stage-directions give us any warrant for, but also because it fails to provide for the not infrequent event of a succession of interior scenes; and in its original form it is abandoned by Professor Thorndike in common with other recent scholars, who see plainly enough that what I have called hall scenes must have been given on the outer stage. I do not think that they have always grasped that the tendency of the seventeenth century was towards a decreased and not an increased reliance upon the curtained space, possibly because they have not as a rule followed the historical method in their investigations; and Professor Thorndike, although he traces the earlier employment of the alcove much as I do, treats the opening and closing of the curtains as coming in time to be used, in Antony and Cleopatra for example and in Cymbeline, as little more than a handy convention for indicating the transference of the scene from one locality to another.[402] Such a usage would not of course mean that the new scene was played wholly or even partly within the alcove itself; the change might be merely one of background. But, although I admit that there would be a convenience in Professor Thorndike’s development, I do not see that there is in fact any evidence for it. The stage-directions never mention the use of curtains in such circumstances as he has in mind; and while I am far from supposing that they need always have been mentioned, and have myself assumed their use in one scene of Cymbeline where they are not mentioned, yet mentions of them are so common in connexion with the earlier and admitted functions of the alcove, that I should have expected Professor Thorndike’s view, if it were sound, to have proved capable of confirmation from at least one unconjectural case.

The difficulty which has led Professor Thorndike to his conclusion is, however, a real one. In the absence of a scenario with notes of locality, for which certainly there is no evidence, how did the Elizabethan managers indicate to their audiences the shifts of action from one place to another? This is both a sixteenth- and a seventeenth-century problem. We have noted in a former chapter that unity of place was characteristic of the earlier Elizabethan interlude; that it failed to impose itself upon the romantic narrative plots of the popular drama; that it was departed from through the device of letting two ends of a continuously set stage stand for discrete localities; that this device proved only a transition to a system in which the whole stage stood successively for different localities; and that there are hints of a convention by which the locality of each scene was indicated with the help of a label, placed over the door through which the personages in that scene made their exits and their entrances.[403] The public stage of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries experienced no re-establishment of the principle of unity; broadly speaking, it presents an extreme type of romantic drama, with an unfettered freedom of ranging from one to another of any number of localities required by a narrative plot. But the practice, or the instinct, of individual playwrights differs. Ben Jonson is naturally the man who betrays the most conscious preoccupation with the question. He is not, however, a rigid or consistent unitarian. In his two earliest plays the scene shifts from the country to a neighbouring town, and the induction to Every Man Out of his Humour is in part an apology for his own liberty, in part a criticism of the licence of others.

Mitis.What’s his scene?

Cordatus. Mary Insula Fortunata, sir.

Mitis. O, the fortunate Iland? masse he has bound himself to a strict law there.

Cordatus. Why so?

Mitis. He cannot lightly alter the scene without crossing the seas.