The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

Thy stage was still a stage, two entrances

Were not two parts o’ the world, disjoined by seas.[419]

These, however, are rather vague and inconclusive allusions on which to base a whole stage practice, and there is not much to be added to them from the texts and stage-directions of the plays themselves. Signs are of course used to distinguish particular taverns and shops, just as they would be in real life.[420] Occasionally, moreover, a locality is named in a stage-direction in a way that recalls Common Conditions, but this may also be explained as no more than a descriptive touch such as is not uncommon in stage-directions written by authors.[421] It is rather against the theory of labels that care is often taken, when a locality is changed, to let the personages themselves declare their whereabouts. A careful reader of such rapidly shifting plays as Edward I, James IV, The Battle of Alcazar, or King Leir will generally be able to orientate himself with the aid of the opening passages of dialogue in each new scene, and conceivably a very attentive spectator might do the same. Once the personages have got themselves grouped in the mind in relation to their localities, the recurrence of this or that group would help. It would require a rather careful examination of texts to enable one to judge how far this method of localization by dialogue continues throughout our period. I have been mainly struck by it in early plays. The presenters may also give assistance, either by declaring the general scene in a prologue, or by intervening to call attention to particular shifts.[422] Thus in Dr. Faustus the original scene in Wittenberg is indicated by the chorus, a shift to Rome by speeches of Wagner and Faustus, a shift to the imperial court by the chorus, and the return to Wittenberg by a speech of Faustus.[423] Jonson makes a deliberate experiment with this method in Every Man Out of his Humour, which it is worth while following in detail. It is the Grex of presenters, Mitis and Cordatus, who serve as guides. The first act is in open country without background, and it is left to the rustic Sogliardo to describe it (543) as his lordship. A visit to Puntarvolo’s is arranged, and at the beginning of the second act Cordatus says, ‘The Scene is the countrey still, remember’ (946). Presently the stage is cleared, with the hint, ‘Here he comes, and with him Signior Deliro a merchant, at whose house hee is come to soiourne. Make your owne obseruation now; only transferre your thoughts to the Cittie with the Scene; where, suppose they speake’ (1499). The next scene then is at Deliro’s. Then, for the first scene of the third act, ‘We must desire you to presuppose the Stage, the middle Isle in Paules; and that, the West end of it’ (1918). The second scene of this act is in the open country again, with a ‘crosse’ on which Sordido hangs himself; we are left to infer it from the reappearance of the rustic characters. It is closed with ‘Let your minde keepe companie with the Scene stil, which now remoues it selfe from the Countrie to the Court’ (2555). After a scene at Court, ‘You vnderstand where the scene is?’ (2709), and presumably the entry of personages already familiar brings us back for the first scene of Act IV to Deliro’s. A visit to ‘the Notaries by the Exchange’ is planned, and for the second and third scenes the only note is of the entry of Puntarvolo and the Scrivener; probably a scrivener’s shop was discovered. Act V is introduced by ‘Let your imagination be swifter than a paire of oares, and by this, suppose Puntarvolo, Briske, Fungoso, and the Dog, arriu’d at the court gate, and going vp to the great chamber’ (3532). The action of the next scene begins in the great chamber and then shifts to the court gate again. Evidently the two localities were in some way staged together, and a guide is not called upon to enlighten us. There are yet two more scenes, according to the Grex. One opens with ‘Conceiue him but to be enter’d the Mitre’ (3841), and as action shifts from the Mitre to Deliro’s and back again without further note, these two houses were probably shown together. The final scene is introduced by ‘O, this is to be imagin’d the Counter belike’ (4285). So elaborate a directory would surely render any use of labels superfluous for this particular play; but, so far as we know, the experiment was not repeated.[424]

When Cordatus points to ‘that’, and calls it the west end of Paul’s, are we to suppose that the imagination of the audience was helped out by the display of any pictorial background? It is not impossible. The central aperture, disclosed by the parting curtains, could easily hold, in place of a discovered alcove or a quasi-solid monument or rock, any kind of painted cloth which might give colour to the scene. A woodland cloth or a battlement cloth could serve for play after play, and for a special occasion something more distinctive could be attempted without undue expense. Such a back-cloth, perhaps for use in Dr. Faustus, may have been ‘the sittie of Rome’ which we find in Henslowe’s inventory of 1598.[425] And something of this kind seems to be required in 2 If You Know not Me, You Know Nobody, where the scene is before Sir Thomas Gresham’s newly completed Burse, and the personages say ‘How do you like this building?’ and ‘We are gazing here on M. Greshams work’.[426] Possibly Elizabethan imaginations were more vivid than a tradition of scene-painters allows ours to be, but that does not mean that an Elizabethan audience did not like to have its eyes tickled upon occasion. And if as a rule the stage-managers relied mainly upon garments and properties to minister to this instinct, there is no particular reason why they should not also have had recourse to so simple a device as a back-cloth. This conjecture is hardly excluded by the very general terms in which post-Restoration writers deny ‘scenes’ and all decorations other than ‘hangings’ to the earlier stage.[427] By ‘scenes’ they no doubt mean the complete settings with shuttered ‘wings’ as well as back-cloths which Inigo Jones had devised for the masks and the stage had adopted. Even these were not absolutely unknown in pre-Restoration plays, and neither this fact nor the incidental use of special cloths over the central aperture would make it untrue that the normal background of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play was an arras.[428]

The discussions of the last chapter and a half have envisaged the plays presented, exclusively in open theatres until the King’s took over the Blackfriars, by professional companies of men. I must deal in conclusion, perhaps more briefly than the interest of the problem would itself justify, with those of the revived boy companies which for a time carried on such an active rivalry with the men, at Paul’s from 1599 to 1606 and at the Blackfriars from 1600 to 1609. It is, I think, a principal defect of many investigations into Jacobean staging, that the identity of the devices employed in the so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ houses has been too hastily assumed, and a uniform hypothesis built up upon material taken indifferently from both sources, without regard to the logical possibility of the considerable divergences to which varying conditions of structure and of tradition may have given rise. This is a kind of syncretism to which an inadequate respect for the historic method naturally tends. It is no doubt true that the ‘standardization’ of type, which I have accepted as likely to result from the frequent migration of companies and plays from one public house to another, may in a less degree have affected the private houses also. James Burbadge originally built the Blackfriars for public performances, and we know that Satiromastix was produced both at the Globe and at Paul’s in 1601, and that in 1604 the Revels boys and the King’s men were able to effect mutual piracies of Jeronimo and The Malcontent. Nor is there anything in the general character of the two groups of ‘public’ and ‘private’ plays, as they have come down to us, which is in any obvious way inconsistent with some measure of standardization. It is apparent, indeed, that the act-interval was of far more importance at both Paul’s and the Blackfriars than elsewhere. But this is largely a matter of degree. The inter-acts of music and song and dance were more universal and longer.[429] But the relation of the acts to each other was not essentially different. The break in the representation may still correspond to practically no interval at all in the time-distribution of the play; and there are examples in which the action continues to be carried on by the personages in dumb-show, while the music is still sounding.[430] In any case this particular distinction, while it might well modify the methods of the dramatist, need only affect the economy of the tire-house in so far as it would give more time for the preparation of an altered setting at the beginning of an act. When The Malcontent was taken over at the Globe, the text had to be lengthened that the music might be abridged, but there is no indication of any further alteration, due to a difficulty in adapting the original situations to the peculiarities of the Globe stage. The types of incident, again, which are familiar in public plays, reappear in the private ones; in different proportions, no doubt, since the literary interest of the dramatists and their audiences tends rather in the directions, on the one hand of definite pastoral, and on the other of courtly crime and urban humour, than in that of chronicle history. And there is a marked general analogy in the stage-directions. Here also those who leave the stage go ‘in’, and music and voices can be heard ‘within’. There are the same formulae for the use of several doors, of which one is definitely a ‘middle’ door.[431] Spirits and so forth can ‘ascend’ from under the stage by the convenient traps.[432] Possibly they can also ‘descend’ from the heavens.[433] The normal backing of the stage, even in out-of-door scenes, is an arras or hanging, through which at Paul’s spectators can watch a play.[434] At the Blackfriars, while the arras, even more clearly than in the public theatres, is of a decorative rather than a realistic kind, it can also be helped out by something in the nature of perspective.[435] There is action ‘above’, and interior action, some of which is recessed or ‘discovered’. It must be added, however, that these formulae, taken by themselves, do not go very far towards determining the real character of the staging. They make their first appearance, for the most part, with the interludes in which the Court influence is paramount, and are handed down as a tradition to the public and the private plays alike. They would hardly have been sufficient, without the Swan drawing and other collateral evidence, to disclose even such a general conception of the various uses and interplay, at the Globe and elsewhere, of main stage, alcove, and gallery, as we believe ourselves to have succeeded in adumbrating. And it is quite possible that at Paul’s and the Blackfriars they may not—at any rate it must not be taken for granted without inquiry that they do—mean just the same things. Thus, to take the doors alone, we infer with the help of the Swan drawing, that in the public theatres the three main entrances were in the scenic wall and on the same or nearly the same plane. But the Blackfriars was a rectangular room. We do not know that any free space was left between its walls and the sides of the stage. And it is quite conceivable that there may have been side-doors in the planes of these walls, and at right angles to the middle door. Whether this was so or not, and if so how far forward the side-doors stood, there is certainly nothing in the formulae of the stage-directions to tell us. Perhaps the most noticeable differentiation, which emerges from a comparative survey of private and public plays, is that in the main the writers of the former, unlike those of the latter, appear to be guided by the principle of unity of place; at any rate to the extent that their domus are generally located in the same town, although they may be brought for purposes of representation into closer contiguity than the actual topography of that town would suggest. There are exceptions, and the scenes in a town are occasionally broken by one or two, requiring at the most an open-country background, in the environs. The exact measure in which the principle is followed will become sufficiently evident in the sequel. My immediate point is that it was precisely the absence of unity of place which drove the public stage back upon its common form background of a curtained alcove below and a curtained gallery above, supplemented by the side-doors and later the windows above them, and convertible to the needs of various localities in the course of a single play.

Let us now proceed to the analysis, first of the Paul’s plays and then of the Chapel and Revels plays at the Blackfriars; separately, for the same caution, which forbids a hasty syncretism of the conditions of public and private houses, also warns us that divergences may conceivably have existed between those of the two private houses themselves. But here too we are faced with the fact that individual plays were sometimes transferred from one to the other, The Fawn from Blackfriars to Paul’s, and The Trick to Catch the Old One in its turn from Paul’s to Blackfriars.[436]

Seventeen plays, including the two just named and Satiromastix, which was shared with the Globe, are assigned to Paul’s by contemporary title-pages.[437] To these may be added, with various degrees of plausibility, Histriomastix, What You Will, and Wily Beguiled. For Paul’s were also certainly planned, although we cannot be sure whether, or if so when, they were actually produced, the curious series of plays left in manuscript by William Percy, of which unfortunately only two have ever been published. As the company only endured for six or seven years after its revival, it seems probable that a very fair proportion of its repertory has reached us. Jack Drum’s Entertainment speaks of the ‘mustie fopperies of antiquitie’ with which the company began its career, and one of these is no doubt to be found in Histriomastix, evidently an old play, possibly of academic origin, and recently brought up to date.[438] The staging of Histriomastix would have caused no difficulty to the Revels officers, if it had been put into their hands as a Paul’s play of the ’eighties. The plot illustrates the cyclical progression of Peace, Plenty, Pride, Envy, War, Poverty, each of whom in turn occupies a throne, finally resigned to Peace, for whom in an alternative ending for Court performance is substituted Astraea, who is Elizabeth.[439] This arrangement recalls that of The Woman in the Moon, but the throne seems to have its position on the main stage rather than above. Apart from the abstractions, the whole of the action may be supposed to take place in a single provincial town, largely in an open street, sometimes in the hall of a lord called Mavortius, on occasion in or before smaller domus representing the studies of Chrisoganus, a scholar, and Fourcher, a lawyer, the shop of Velure, a merchant, a market-cross, which is discovered by a curtain, perhaps a tavern.[440] Certainly in the ’eighties these would have been disposed together around the stage, like the domus of Campaspe about the market-place at Athens. And I believe that this is in fact how Histriomastix was staged, more particularly as at one point (v. 259) the action appears to pass directly from the street to the hall without a clearance. Similarly The Maid’s Metamorphosis is on strictly Lylyan lines. It is tout en pastoralle, in a wood, about whose paths the characters stray, while in various regions of it are located the cave of Somnus (II. i. 148), the cottage of Eurymine (IV. ii. 4), and a palace where ‘Phoebus appeares’ (V. ii. 25), possibly above. Wily Beguiled needs a stage of which part is a wood, and part a village hard by, with some suggestion of the doors of the houses of Gripe, Ploddall, Churms, and Mother Midnight. Somewhat less concentration is to be found in The Wisdom of Dr. Dodipoll. Here too, a space of open country, a green hill with a cave, the harbourage and a bank, is neighboured by the Court of Alphonso and the houses of Cassimere and of Flores, of which the last named is adapted for interior action.[441] All this is in Saxony, but there is also a single short scene (I. iii) of thirty-two lines, not necessarily requiring a background, in Brunswick. The plays of William Percy are still, it must be admitted, rather obscure, and one has an uneasy feeling that the manuscript may not yet have yielded up all its indications as to date and provenance. But on the assumption that the conditions contemplated are those of Paul’s in 1599–1606, we learn some curious details of structure, and are face to face with a technique which is still closely reminiscent of the ’eighties. Percy, alone of the dramatists, prefixes to his books, for the guidance of the producer, a note of the equipment required to set them forth. Thus for Cuckqueans and Cuckolds Errant he writes:

‘The Properties.

‘Harwich, In Midde of the Stage Colchester with Image of Tarlton, Signe and Ghirlond under him also. The Raungers Lodge, Maldon, A Ladder of Roapes trussed up neare Harwich. Highest and Aloft the Title The Cuck-Queanes and Cuckolds Errants. A Long Fourme.’

The house at Colchester is the Tarlton Inn, and here the ghost of Tarlton prologizes, ‘standing at entrance of the doore and right under the Beame’. That at Harwich is the house of Floredin, and the ladder leads to the window of his wife Arvania. Thus we have the concurrent representation of three localities, in three distinct towns of Essex. To each is assigned one of three doors and, as in Common Conditions of old, entry by a particular door signifies that a scene is to take place at the locality to which it belongs.[442] One is at liberty to conjecture that the doors were nominated by labels, but Percy does not precisely say so, although he certainly provides for a title label. Journeys from one locality to another are foreshortened into a crossing of the stage.[443] For The Aphrodysial there were at least two houses, the palace of Oceanus ‘in the middle and alofte’, and Proteus Hall, where interior action takes place.[444] For The Faery Pastoral there is an elaborate note: