The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

Cordatus. He needs not, hauing a whole Ilande to runne through, I thinke.

Mitis. No? howe comes it then, that in some one play we see so many seas, countries, and kingdomes, past over with such admirable dexteritie?

Cordatus. O, that but shewes how well the Authors can travaile in their vocation, and out-run the apprehension of their Auditorie.

Sejanus is throughout in Rome, but five or six distinct houses are required, and it must be doubtful whether such a multiplicity of houses could be shown without a change of scene.[404] The prologue to Volpone claims for the author that ‘The laws of time, place, persons he obserueth’, and this has no more than four houses, all in Venice.[405] In Catiline the scenes in Rome, with some ten houses, are broken by two in open country.[406] In Bartholomew Fair a preliminary act at a London house is followed by four set continuously before the three booths of the fair. Absolute unity, as distinct from the unity of a single country, or even a single town, is perhaps only attained in The Alchemist. Here everything takes place, either in a single room in Lovewit’s house in the Blackfriars, or in front of a door leading from the street into the same room. Evidently advantage was taken of the fact that the scene did not have to be changed, to build a wall containing this door out on to the stage itself, for action such as speaking through the keyhole requires both sides of the door to be practicable.[407] There is also a window from which persons approaching can be seen. Inner doors, presumably in the scenic wall, lead to a laboratory and other parts of the house, but these are not discovered, and no use is made of the upper level. Jonson here is a clear innovator, so far as the English public theatre is concerned; no other play of our period reproduces this type of permanent interior setting.

Shakespeare is no classicist; yet in some of his plays, comedies and romantic tragedies, it is, I think, possible to discern at least an instinctive feeling in the direction of scenic unity. The Comedy of Errors, with its action in the streets of Syracuse, near the mart, or before the Phoenix, the Porpentine, or the priory, follows upon the lines of its Latin model, although here, as in most of Jonson’s plays, it is possible that the various houses were shown successively rather than concurrently. Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and Measure for Measure each require a single town, with two, three, and five houses respectively; Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, each a single town, with open country environs. Love’s Labour’s Lost has the unity of a park, with perhaps a manor-house as background at one end and tents at the other; The Tempest complete pastoral unity after the opening scene on shipboard. Hamlet would all be Elsinore, but for one distant open-country scene; Romeo and Juliet all Venice, but for one scene in Mantua. In another group of plays the action is divided between two towns. It alternates from Padua to near Verona in The Taming of the Shrew, from Verona to Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, from Venice to Belmont in The Merchant of Venice; in Othello an act in Venice is followed by four in Cyprus. On the other hand, in a few comedies and in the histories and historical tragedies, where Shakespeare’s sources leave him less discretion, he shifts his scenes with a readiness outdone by no other playwright. The third act of Richard II requires no less than four localities, three of which have a castle, perhaps the same castle from the stage-manager’s point of view, in the background. The second act of 1 Henry IV has as many. King John and Henry V pass lightly between England and France, All’s Well that Ends Well between France and Italy, The Winter’s Tale between Sicily and Bohemia, Cymbeline between Britain, Italy, and Wales. Quite a late play, Antony and Cleopatra, might almost be regarded as a challenge to classicists. Rome, Misenum, Athens, Actium, Syria, Egypt are the localities, with much further subdivision in the Egyptian scenes. The second act has four changes of locality, the third no less than eight, and it is noteworthy that these changes are often for quite short bits of dialogue, which no modern manager would regard as justifying a resetting of the stage. Shakespeare must surely have been in some danger, in this case, of outrunning the apprehension of his auditory, and I doubt if even Professor Thorndike’s play of curtains would have saved him.

It is to be observed also that, in Shakespeare’s plays as in those of others, no excessive pains are taken to let the changes of locality coincide with the divisions between the acts. If the second and third acts of All’s Well that Ends Well are at Paris, the fourth at Florence, and the fifth at Marseilles, yet the shift from Roussillon to Paris is in the middle and not at the end of the first act. The shift from Sicily to Bohemia is in the middle of the third act of The Winter’s Tale; the Agincourt scenes begin in the middle of the third act of Henry V. Indeed, although the poets regarded the acts as units of literary structure, the act-divisions do not appear to have been greatly stressed, at any rate on the stages of the public houses, in the actual presentation of plays.[408] I do not think that they were wholly disregarded, although the fact that they are so often unnoted in the prints of plays based on stage copies might point to that conclusion.[409] The act-interval did not necessarily denote any substantial time-interval in the action of the play, and perhaps the actors did not invariably leave the stage. Thus the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream sleep through the interval between the third and fourth acts.[410] But some sort of break in the continuity of the performance is a natural inference from the fact that the act-divisions are the favourite, although not the only, points for the intervention of presenters, dumb-shows, and choruses.[411] The act-intervals cannot have been long, at any rate if the performance was to be completed in two hours. There may sometimes have been music, which would not have prevented the audience from stretching themselves and talking.[412] Short intervals, rather than none at all, are, I think, suggested by the well-known passage in the induction of The Malcontent, as altered for performance at the Globe, in which it is explained that passages have been added to the play as originally written for Revels boys, ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’.[413] Some information is perhaps to be gleaned from the ‘plots’ of plays prepared for the guidance of the book-keeper or tire-man, of which examples are preserved at Dulwich.[414] These have lines drawn across them at points which pretty clearly correspond to the beginnings of scenes, although it can hardly be assumed that each new scene meant a change of locality. The act-divisions can in some, but not all, cases be inferred from the occurrence of dumb-shows and choruses; in one, The Dead Man’s Fortune, they are definitely marked by lines of crosses, and against each such line there is the marginal note ‘musique’. Other musical directions, ‘sound’, ‘sennet’, ‘alarum’, ‘flourish’, come sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle of scenes.

We do not get any encouragement to think that a change of locality was regularly heralded by notes of music, even if this may incidentally have been the case when a procession or an army or a monarch was about to enter. Possibly the lines on the plots may signify an even slighter pause than that between the acts, such as the modern stage provides with the added emphasis of a drop-curtain; but of this there is no proof, and an allusion in Catiline to action as rapid

As is a veil put off, a visor changed,

Or the scene shifted, in our theatres,

is distinctly against it.[415] A mere clearance of the stage does not necessarily entail a change of scene, although there are one or two instances in which the exit of personages at one door, followed by their return at another, seems to constitute or accompany such a change.[416] And even if the fact of a change could be signified in one or other of these ways, the audience would still be in the dark as to what the new locality was supposed to be. Can we then assume a continuance of the old practice of indicating localities by labels over the doors? This would entail the shifting of the labels themselves during the progress of the play, at any rate if there were more localities than entrances, or if, as might usually be expected, more entrances than one were required to any locality. But there would be no difficulty about this, and in fact we have an example of the shifting of a label by a mechanical device in the introduction to Wily Beguiled.[417] This was not a public theatre play, and the label concerned was one giving the title of the play and not its locality, but similar machinery could obviously have been applied. There is not, however, much actual evidence for the use either of title-labels or of locality-labels on the public stage. The former are perhaps the more probable of the two, and the practice of posting play-bills at the theatre door and in places of public resort would not render them altogether superfluous.[418] In favour of locality-labels it is possible to quote Dekker’s advice to those entering Paul’s, and also the praise given to Jonson by Jasper Mayne in Jonsonus Virbius: