The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

‘The Properties

‘Highest, aloft, and on the Top of the Musick Tree the Title The Faery Pastorall, Beneath him pind on Post of the Tree The Scene Elvida Forrest. Lowest of all over the Canopie ΝΑΠΑΙΤΒΟΔΑΙΟΝ or Faery Chappell. A kiln of Brick. A Fowen Cott. A Hollowe Oake with vice of wood to shutt to. A Lowe well with Roape and Pullye. A Fourme of Turves. A greene Bank being Pillowe to the Hed but. Lastly A Hole to creepe in and out.’

Having written so far, Percy is smitten with a doubt. The stage of Paul’s was a small one, and spectators sat on it. If he clutters it up like this with properties, will there be room to act at all? He has a happy thought and continues:

‘Now if so be that the Properties of any These, that be outward, will not serve the turne by reason of concourse of the People on the Stage, Then you may omitt the sayd Properties which be outward and supplye their Places with their Nuncupations onely in Text Letters. Thus for some.’

Whether the master of Paul’s was prepared to avail himself of this ingenious device, I do not know. There is no other reference to it, and I do not think it would be safe to assume that it was in ordinary use upon either the public or the private stage. There is no change of locality in The Faery Pastoral, which is tout en pastoralle, but besides the title label, there was a general scenic label and a special one for the fairy chapel. This, which had seats on ‘degrees’ (v. 5), occupied the ‘Canopie, Fane or Trophey’, which I take to have been a discovered interior under the ‘Beame’ named in the other play, corresponding to the alcove of the public theatres. The other properties were smaller ‘practicables’ standing free on the stage, which is presumably what Percy means by ‘outward’. The arrangement must have closely resembled that of The Old Wive’s Tale. The ‘Fowen Cott’ is later described as ‘tapistred with cats and fowëns’—a gamekeeper’s larder. Some kind of action from above was possible; it may have been only from a tree.[445]

The plays so far considered seem to point to the use at Paul’s of continuous settings, even when various localities had to be shown, rather than the successive settings, with the help of common form domus, which prevailed at the contemporary Globe and Fortune. Perhaps there is rather an archaistic note about them. Let us turn to the plays written for Paul’s by more up-to-date dramatists, by Marston, Dekker and Webster, Chapman, Middleton, and Beaumont. Marston’s hand, already discernible in the revision of Histriomastix, appears to be dominant in Jack Drum’s Entertainment, although neither play was reclaimed for him in the collected edition of 1633. Unity of locality is not observed in Jack Drum. By far the greater part of the action takes place on Highgate Green, before the house of Sir Edward Fortune, with practicable windows above.[446] But there are two scenes (I. 282–428; IV. 207–56) in London, before a tavern (I. 345), which may be supposed to be also the house where Mistress Brabant lies ‘private’ in an ‘inner chamber’ (IV. 83, 211). And there are three (II. 170–246; III. 220–413; V) in an open spot, on the way to Highgate (II. 228) and near a house, whence a character emerges (III. 249, 310). It is described as ‘the crosse stile’ (IV. 338), and is evidently quite near Fortune’s house, and still on the green (V. 96, 228). This suggests to me a staging closely analogous to that of Cuckqueans and Cuckolds, with Highgate at one end of the stage, London at the other, and the cross stile between them. It is true that there is no very certain evidence of direct transference of action from one spot to another, but the use of two doors at the beginning of the first London scene is consistent, on my theory, with the fact that one entrant comes from Highgate, whither also he goes at the end of the scene, and the similar use at the beginning of the second cross-stile scene is consistent with the fact that the two entrants are wildly seeking the same lady, and one may well have been in London and the other at Highgate. She herself enters from the neighbouring house; that is to say, a third, central, door. With Marston’s acknowledged plays, we reach an order of drama in which interior action of the ‘hall’ type is conspicuous.[447] There are four plays, each limited to a single Italian city, Venice or Urbino. The main action of 1 Antonio and Mellida is in the hall of the doge’s palace, chiefly on ‘the lower stage’, although ladies discourse ‘above’, and a chamber can be pointed to from the hall.[448] One short scene (V. 1–94), although near the Court, is possibly in the lodging of a courtier, but probably in the open street. And two (III. i; IV) are in open country, representing ‘the Venice marsh’, requiring no background, but approachable by more than one door.[449] The setting of 2 Antonio and Mellida is a little more complicated. There is no open-country scene. The hall recurs and is still the chief place of action. It can be entered by more than one door (V. 17, &c.) and has a ‘vault’ (II. 44) with a ‘grate’ (II. ii. 127), whence a speaker is heard ‘under the stage’ (V. 1). The scenes within it include several episodes discovered by curtains. One is at the window of Mellida’s chamber above.[450] Another, in Maria’s chamber, where the discovery is only of a bed, might be either above or below.[451] A third involves the appearance of a ghost ‘betwixt the music-houses’, probably above.[452] Concurrently, a fourth facilitates a murder in a recess below.[453] Nor is the hall any longer the only interior used. Three scenes (II. 1–17; III. 1–212; IV. ii) are in an aisle (III. 128) of St. Mark’s, with a trapped grave.[454] As a character passes (ii. 17) directly from the church to the palace in the course of a speech, it is clear that the two ‘houses’, consistently with actual Venetian topography, were staged together and contiguously. The Fawn was originally produced at Blackfriars and transferred to Paul’s. I deal with it here, because of the close analogy which it presents to 1 Antonio and Mellida. It begins with an open-country scene within sight of the ‘far-appearing spires’ of Urbino. Thereafter all is within the hall of the Urbino palace. It is called a ‘presence’ (I. ii. 68), but one must conceive it as of the nature of an Italian colonnaded cortile, for there is a tree visible, up which a lover climbs to his lady’s chamber, and although both the tree and the chamber window might have occupied a bit of façade in the plane of the aperture showing the hall, they appear in fact to have been within the hall, since the lovers are later ‘discovered’ to the company there.[455] What You Will, intermediate in date between Antonio and Mellida and The Fawn, has a less concentrated setting than either of them. The principal house is Albano’s (I; III. ii; IV; V. 1–68), where there is action at the porch, within the hall, and in a discovered room behind.[456] But there are also scenes in a shop (III. ii), in Laverdure’s lodging (II. ii), probably above, and in a schoolroom (II. ii). The two latter are also discovered.[457] Nevertheless, I do not think that shifting scenes of the public theatre type are indicated. Albano’s house does not lend itself to public theatre methods. Act I is beneath his wife Celia’s window.[458] Similarly III. ii is before his porch. But III. iv is in his hall, whence the company go to dinner within, and here they are disclosed in V. Hence, from V. 69 onwards, they begin to pass to the street, where they presently meet the duke’s troop. I do not know of any public play in which the porch, the hall, and an inner room of a house are all represented, and my feeling is that Albano’s occupied the back corner of a stage, with the porch and window above to one side, at right angles to the plane of the hall. At any rate I do not see any definite obstacle to the hypothesis that all Marston’s plays for Paul’s had continuous settings. For What You Will the ‘little’ stage would have been rather crowded. The induction hints that it was, and perhaps that spectators were on this occasion excluded, while the presenters went behind the back curtains.

Most of the other Paul’s plays need not detain us as long as Marston’s. He has been thought to have helped in Satiromastix, but that must be regarded as substantially Dekker’s. Obviously it must have been capable of representation both at Paul’s and at the Globe. It needs the houses of Horace, Shorthose, and Vaughan, Prickshaft’s garden with a ‘bower’ in it, and the palace. Interior action is required in Horace’s study, which is discovered,[459] the presence-chamber at the palace, where a ‘chaire is set under a canopie’,[460] and Shorthose’s hall.[461] The ordinary methods at the Globe would be adequate. On the other hand, London, in spite of Horace, is the locality throughout, and at Paul’s the setting may have been continuous, just as well as in What You Will. Dekker is also the leading spirit in Westward Ho! and Northward Ho!, and in these we get, for the first time at Paul’s, plays for which a continuous setting seems quite impossible. Not only does Westward Ho! require no less than ten houses and Northward Ho! seven, but also, although the greater part of both plays takes place in London, Westward Ho! has scenes at Brentford and Northward Ho! at Ware.[462] The natural conclusion is that, for these plays at least, the procedure of the public theatres was adopted. It is, of course, the combination of numerous houses and changes of locality which leads me to this conclusion. Mahelot shows us that the ‘multiple’ staging of the Hôtel de Bourgogne permitted inconsistencies of locality, but could hardly accommodate more than five, or at most six, maisons. Once given the existence of alternative methods at Paul’s, it becomes rather difficult to say which was applied in any particular case. Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois begins, like The Fawn, with an open-country scene, and thereafter uses only three houses, all in Paris; the presence-chamber at the palace (I. ii; II. i; III. ii; IV. i), Bussy’s chamber (V. iii), and Tamyra’s chamber in another house, Montsurry’s (II. ii; III. i; IV. ii; V. i, ii, iv). Both chambers are trapped for spirits to rise, and Tamyra’s has in it a ‘gulfe’, apparently screened by a ‘canopie’, which communicates with Bussy’s.[463] As the interplay of scenes in Act V requires transit through the passage from one chamber to the other, it is natural to assume an unchanged setting.[464]

The most prolific contributor to the Paul’s repertory was Middleton. His first play, Blurt Master Constable, needs five houses. They are all in Venice, and as in certain scenes more than one of them appears to be visible, they were probably all set together.[465] Similarly, The Phoenix has six houses, all in Ferrara;[466] and Michaelmas Term has five houses, all in London.[467] On the other hand, although A Mad World, my Masters has only four houses,[468] and A Trick to Catch the Old One seven,[469] yet both these plays resemble Dekker’s, in that the action is divided between London and one or more places in the country; and this, so far as it goes, seems to suggest settings on public theatre lines. I do not know whether Middleton wrote The Puritan, but I think that this play clearly had a continuous setting with only four houses, in London.[470] And although Beaumont’s Woman Hater requires seven houses, these are all within or hard by the palace in Milan, and action seems to pass freely from one to another.[471]

The evidence available does not dispose one to dogmatism. But this is the general impression which I get of the history of the Paul’s staging. When the performances were revived in 1599, the master had, as in the days before Lyly took the boys to Blackfriars, to make the best of a room originally designed for choir-practices. This was circular, and only had space for a comparatively small stage. At the back of this, entrance was given by a curtained recess, corresponding to the alcove of the public theatres, and known at Paul’s as the ‘canopy’.[472] Above the canopy was a beam, which bore the post of the music-tree. On this post was a small stand, perhaps for the conductor of the music, and on each side of it was a music-house, forming a gallery,[473] which could represent a window or balcony. There were at least two other doors, either beneath the music-houses or at right angles to these, off the sides of the stage. The master began with continuous settings on the earlier sixteenth-century court model, using the doors and galleries as far as he could to represent houses, and supplementing these by temporary structures; and this plan fitted in with the general literary trend of his typical dramatists, especially Marston, to unity of locality. But in time the romantic element proved too much for him, and when he wanted to enlist the services of writers of the popular school, such as Dekker, he had to compromise. It may be that some structural change was carried out during the enforced suspension of performances in 1603. I do not think that there is any Paul’s play of earlier date which could not have been given in the old-fashioned manner. In any event, the increased number of houses and the not infrequent shiftings of locality from town to country, which are apparent in the Jacobean plays, seem to me, taken together, to be more than can be accounted for on a theory of clumsy foreshortening, and to imply the adoption, either generally or occasionally, of some such principle of convertible houses, as was already in full swing upon the public stage.[474]

I do not think that the history of the Blackfriars was materially different from that of Paul’s. There are in all twenty-four plays to be considered; an Elizabethan group of seven produced by the Children of the Chapel, and a Jacobean group of seventeen produced by the successive incarnations of the Revels company.[475] Structural alterations during 1603 are here less probable, for the house only dated from Burbadge’s enterprise of 1596. Burbadge is said to have intended a ‘public’ theatre, and it may be argued on a priori grounds that he would have planned for the type of staging familiar to him at the Theatre and subsequently elaborated at the Globe. The actual character of the plays does not, however, bear out this view. Like Paul’s, the Blackfriars relied at first in part upon revivals. One was Love’s Metamorphosis, already produced by Lyly under Court conditions with the earlier Paul’s boys, and tout en pastoralle.[476] Another, or if not, quite an archaistic play, was Liberality and Prodigality, the abstract plot of which only needs an equally abstract scene, with a ‘bower’ for Fortune, holding a throne and scaleable by a ladder (30, 290, 903, 932, 953), another ‘bower’ for Virtue (132), an inn (47, 192, 370), and a high seat for a judge with his clerks beneath him (1245).[477] The two new playwrights may reasonably be supposed to have conformed to the traditional methods. Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels has a preliminary act of open country, by the Fountain of Self-Love, in Gargaphia. The rest is all at the Gargaphian palace, either in the presence, or in an ante-chamber thereto, perhaps before a curtain, or for one or two scenes in the nymphs’ chamber (IV. i-v), and in or before the chamber of Asotus (III. v).[478] Poetaster is all at Rome, within and before the palace, the houses of Albius and Lupus, and the chamber of Ovid.[479] There is certainly no need for any shifting of scenes so far. Nor does Chapman demand it. Sir Giles Goosecap, except for one open-country scene, has only two houses, which are demonstrably contiguous and used together.[480] The Gentleman Usher has only two houses, supposed to be at a little distance from each other, and entailing a slight foreshortening, if they were placed at opposite ends of the stage.[481] All Fools adopts the Italian convention of action in an open city space before three houses.[482]