LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Coliseus sive Theatrum. From edition of Terence published by Lazarus Soardus (Venice, 1497 and 1499) | [Frontispiece] |
| Diagrams of Stages | [pp. 84, 85] |
NOTE ON SYMBOLS
I have found it convenient, especially in Appendix A, to use the symbol < following a date, to indicate an uncertain date not earlier than that named, and the symbol > followed by a date, to indicate an uncertain date not later than that named. Thus 1903 <> 23 would indicate the composition date of any part of this book. I have sometimes placed the date of a play in italics, where it was desirable to indicate the date of production rather than publication.
XIX
STAGING AT COURT
[Bibliographical Note.—Of the dissertations named in the note to ch. xviii, T. S. Graves, The Court and the London Theatres (1913), is perhaps the most valuable for the subject of the present chapter, which was mainly written before it reached me. A general account of the Italian drama of the Renaissance is in W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, vol. ii (1901). Full details for Ferrara and Mantua are given by A. D’Ancona, Origini del Teatro Italiano (1891), of which App. II is a special study of Il Teatro Mantovano nel secolo xvi. F. Neri, La Tragedia italiana del Cinquecento (1904), E. Gardner, Dukes and Poets at Ferrara (1904), and The King of Court Poets (1906), W. Smith, The Commedia dell’ Arte (1912), are also useful. Special works on staging are E. Flechsig, Die Dekorationen der modernen Bühne in Italien (1894), and G. Ferrari, La Scenografia (1902). The Terence engravings are described by M. Herrmann, Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1914). Of contemporary Italian treatises, the unprinted Spectacula of Pellegrino Prisciano is in Cod. Est. lat. d. x. 1, 6 (cf. G. Bertoni, La Biblioteca Estense, 13), and of L. de Sommi’s Dialoghi in materia di rappresentazione scenica (c. 1565) a part only is in L. Rasi, I Comici italiani (1897), i. 107. The first complete edition of S. Serlio, Architettura (1551), contains Bk. ii, on Perspettiva; the English translation was published by R. Peake (1611); extracts are in App. G; a biography is L. Charvet, Sébastien Serlio (1869). Later are L. Sirigatti, La pratica di prospettiva (1596), A. Ingegneri, Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche (1598), and N. Sabbatini, Pratica di fabricar scene e macchine ne’ Teatri (1638).
For France, E. Rigal, Le Théâtre de la Renaissance and Le Théâtre au xviie siècle avant Corneille, both in L. Petit de Julleville, Hist. de la Langue et de la Litt. Françaises (1897), iii. 261, iv. 186, and the same writer’s Le Théâtre Français avant la Période Classique (1901), may be supplemented by a series of studies in Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France—P. Toldo, La Comédie Française de la Renaissance (1897–1900, iv. 336; v. 220, 554; vi. 571; vii. 263), G. Lanson, Études sur les Origines de la Tragédie Classique en France (1903, x. 177, 413) and L’Idée de la Tragédie en France avant Jodelle (1904, xi. 541), E. Rigal, La Mise en Scène dans les Tragédies du xvie siècle (1905, xii. 1, 203), J. Haraszti, La Comédie Française de la Renaissance et la Scène (1909, xvi. 285); also G. Lanson, Note sur un Passage de Vitruve, in Revue de la Renaissance (1904), 72. Less important is E. Lintilhac, Hist. Générale du Théâtre en France (1904–9, in progress). G. Bapst, Essai sur l’Histoire du Théâtre (1893), and D. C. Stuart, Stage Decoration and the Unity of Place in France in the Seventeenth Century (1913, M. P. x. 393), deal with staging, for which the chief material is E. Dacier, La Mise en Scène à Paris au xviie siècle: Mémoire de L. Mahelot et M. Laurent in Mémoires de la Soc. de l’Hist. de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, xxviii (1901), 105. An edition by H. C. Lancaster (1920) adds Mahelot’s designs.]
We come now to the problems, reserved from treatment in the foregoing chapter, of scenic background. What sort of setting did the types of theatre described afford for the plots, often complicated, and the range of incident, so extraordinarily wide, which we find in Elizabethan drama? No subject in literary history has been more often or more minutely discussed, during the quarter of a century since the Swan drawing was discovered, and much valuable spadework has been done, not merely in the collecting and marshalling of external evidence, but also in the interpretation of this in the light of an analysis of the action of plays and of the stage-directions by which these are accompanied.[1] Some points have emerged clearly enough; and if on others there is still room for controversy, this may be partly due to the fact that external and internal evidence, when put together, have proved inadequate, and partly also to certain defects of method into which some of the researchers have fallen. To start from the assumption of a ‘typical Shakespearian stage’ is not perhaps the best way of approaching an investigation which covers the practices of thirty or forty playing companies, in a score of theatres, over a period of not much less than a century. It is true that, in view of the constant shifting of companies and their plays from one theatre to another, some ‘standardization of effects’, in Mr. Archer’s phrase, may at any one date be taken for granted.[2] But analogous effects can be produced by very different arrangements, and even apart from the obvious probability that the structural divergences between public and private theatres led to corresponding divergences in the systems of setting adopted, it is hardly safe to neglect the possibility of a considerable evolution in the capacities of stage-management between 1558 and 1642, or even between 1576 and 1616. At any rate a historical treatment will be well advised to follow the historical method. The scope of the inquiry, moreover, must be wide enough to cover performances at Court, as well as those on the regular stage, since the plays used for both purposes were undoubtedly the same. Nor can Elizabethan Court performances, in their turn, be properly considered, except in the perspective afforded by a short preliminary survey of the earlier developments of the art of scenic representation at other Renaissance Courts.
The story begins with the study of Vitruvius in the latter part of the fifteenth century by the architect Alberti and others, which led scholars to realize that the tragedies of the pseudo-Seneca and the comedies of Terence and the recently discovered Plautus had been not merely recited, but acted much in the fashion already familiar in contemporary ludi of the miracle-play type.[3] The next step was, naturally, to act them, in the original or in translations. Alberti planned a theatrum in the Vatican for Nicholas V, but the three immediate successors of Nicholas were not humanists, and it is not until the papacy of Innocent VIII that we hear of classical performances at Rome by the pupils of Pomponius Laetus. One of these was Tommaso Inghirami, who became a cardinal, without escaping the nickname of Phaedra from the part he had played in Hippolytus. This, as well as at least one comedy, had already been given before the publication (c. 1484–92) of an edition of Vitruvius by Sulpicius Verulanus, with an epistle addressed by the editor to Cardinal Raffaelle Riario, as a notable patron of the revived art. Sulpicius is allusive rather than descriptive, but we hear of a fair adorned stage, 5 ft. high, for the tragedy in the forum, of a second performance in the Castle of St. Angelo, and a third in Riario’s house, where the audience sat under umbracula, and of the ‘picturatae scenae facies’, which the cardinal provided for a comedy by the Pomponiani.[4] Performances continued after the death of Pomponius in 1597, but we get no more scenic details, and when the Menaechmi was given at the wedding of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia in 1502 it is noted that ‘non gli era scena alcuna, perchè la camera non era capace’.[5] It is not until 1513 that we get anything like a description of a Roman neo-classical stage, at the conferment of Roman citizenship on Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine kinsmen of Leo X.[6] This had a decorated back wall divided by pilasters into five spaces, in each of which was a door covered by a curtain of golden stuff. There were also two side-doors, for entrance and exit, marked ‘via ad forum’.
An even more important centre of humanistic drama than Rome was Ferrara, where the poets and artists, who gathered round Duke Ercole I of Este, established a tradition which spread to the allied courts of the Gonzagas at Mantua and the Delle Rovere at Urbino. The first neo-classical revival on record at Ferrara was of the Menaechmi in 1486, from which we learn that Epidamnus was represented by five marvellous ‘case’ each with its door and window, and that a practicable boat moved across the cortile where the performance was given.[7]