The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

To the Jacobean repertory not less than nine writers contributed. Chapman still takes the lead with three more comedies and two tragedies of his own. In the comedies he tends somewhat to increase the number of his houses, although without any change of general locality. M. d’Olive has five houses.[483] May Day has four.[484] The Widow’s Tears has four.[485] But in all cases there is a good deal of interplay of action between one house and another, and all the probabilities are in favour of continuous setting. The tragedies are perhaps another matter. The houses are still not numerous; but the action is in each play divided between two localities. The Conspiracy of Byron is partly at Paris and partly at Brussels; the Tragedy of Byron partly at Paris and partly at Dijon.[486] Jonson’s Case is Altered has one open-country scene (V. iv) near Milan. The other scenes require two houses within the city. One is Farneze’s palace, with a cortile where servants come and go, and a colonnade affording a private ‘walk’ for his daughters (II. iii; IV. i). Hard by, and probably in Italian fashion forming part of the structure of the palace itself, is the cobbler’s shop of Farneze’s retainer, Juniper.[487] Near, too, is the house of Jaques, with a little walled backside, and a tree in it.[488] A link with Paul’s is provided by three Blackfriars plays from Marston. Of these, the Malcontent is in his characteristic Italian manner. There is a short hunting scene (III. ii) in the middle of the play. For nearly all the rest the scene is the ‘great chamber’ in the palace at Genoa, with a door to the apartment of the duchess at the back (II. i. 1) and the chamber of Malevole visible above.[489] Part of the last act, however, is before the citadel of Genoa, from which the action passes direct to the palace.[490] The Dutch Courtesan is a London comedy with four houses, of the same type as What You Will, but less crowded.[491] In the tragedy of Sophonisba, on the other hand, we come for the first time at Blackfriars to a piece which seems hopelessly unamenable to continuous setting. It recalls the structure of such early public plays as the Battle of Alcazar. ‘The scene is Libya’, the prologue tells us. We get the camps of Massinissa (II. ii), Asdrubal (II. iii), and Scipio (III. ii; V. iv). We get a battle-field with a ‘mount’ and a ‘throne’ in it (V. ii). We get the forest of Belos, with a cave’s mouth (IV. i). The city scenes are divided between Carthage and Cirta. At Carthage there is a council-chamber (II. i) and also the chamber of Sophonisba (I. ii), where her bed is ‘discovered’.[492] At Cirta there is the similar chamber of Syphax (III. i; IV. ii) with a trapped altar.[493] A curious bit of continuous action, difficult to envisage, comprehends this and the forest at the junction of Acts IV and V. From a vault within it, a passage leads to the cave. Down this, in III. i, Sophonisba descends, followed by Syphax. A camp scene intervenes, and at the beginning of IV Sophonisba emerges in the forest, is overtaken by Syphax, and sent back to Cirta. Then Syphax remembers that ‘in this desert’ lives the witch Erichtho. She enters, and promises to charm Sophonisba to his bed. Quite suddenly, and without any Exit or other indication of a change of locality, we are back in the chamber at Cirta. Music sounds within ‘the canopy’ and ‘above’. Erichtho, disguised as Sophonisba, enters the canopy, as to bed. Syphax follows, and only discovers his misadventure at the beginning of Act V.[494] Even if the play was staged as a whole on public theatre methods, it is difficult not to suppose that the two entrances to the cave, at Cirta and in the forest, were shown together. It is to be added that, in a note to the print, Marston apologizes for ‘the fashion of the entrances’ on the ground that the play was ‘presented by youths and after the fashion of the private stage’. Somewhat exceptional also is the arrangement of Eastward Ho!, in which Chapman, Jonson, and Marston collaborated. The first three acts, taken by themselves, are easy enough. They need four houses in London. The most important is Touchstone’s shop, which is ‘discovered’.[495] The others are the exteriors of Sir Petronel’s house and Security’s house, with a window or balcony above, and a room in the Blue Anchor tavern at Billingsgate.[496] But throughout most of Act IV the whole stage seems to be devoted to a complicated action, for which only one of these houses, the Blue Anchor, is required. A place above the stage represents Cuckold’s Haven, on the Surrey side of the Thames near Rotherhithe, where stood a pole bearing a pair of ox-horns, to which butchers did a folk-observance. Hither climbs Slitgut, and describes the wreck of a boat in the river beneath him.[497] It is the boat in which an elopement was planned from the Blue Anchor in Act III. Slitgut sees passengers landed successively ‘even just under me’, and then at St. Katharine’s, Wapping, and the Isle of Dogs. These are three places on the north bank, all to the east of Billingsgate and on the other side of the Tower, but as each rescue is described, the passengers enter the stage, and go off again. Evidently a wild foreshortening is deliberately involved. Now, although the print obscures the fact, must begin a new scene.[498] A night has passed, and Winifred, who landed at St. Katharine’s, returns to the stage, and is now before the Blue Anchor.[499] From IV. ii onwards the setting is normal again, with three houses, of which one is Touchstone’s. But the others are now the exterior of the Counter and of the lodging of Gertrude. One must conclude that in this play the Blackfriars management was trying an experiment, and made complete, or nearly complete, changes of setting, at the end of Act III and again after IV. i. Touchstone’s, which was discovered, could be covered again. The other houses, except the tavern, were represented by mere doors or windows, and gave no trouble. The tavern, the introduction of which in the early acts already entailed foreshortening, was allowed to stand for IV. i, and was then removed, while Touchstone’s was discovered again.

Middleton’s tendency to multiply his houses is noticeable, as at Paul’s, in Your Five Gallants. There are eight, in London, with an open-country scene in Combe Park (III. ii, iii), and one cannot be confident of continuous setting.[500] But a group of new writers, enlisted at Blackfriars in Jacobean days, conform well enough to the old traditions of the house. Daniel’s Philotas has the abstract stage characteristic of the closet tragedies to the type of which it really belongs. Any Renaissance façade would do; at most a hall in the court and the lodging of Philotas need be distinguished. Day’s Isle of Gulls is tout en pastoralle.[501] His Law Tricks has only four houses, in Genoa.[502] Sharpham’s Fleir, after a prelude at Florence, which needs no house, has anything from three to six in London.[503] Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, again, is tout en pastoralle.[504] Finally, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is, in the strict sense, an exception which proves the rule. Its shifts of locality are part of the burlesque, in which the popular plays are taken off for the amusement of the select audience of the Blackfriars. Its legitimate houses are only two, Venturewell’s shop and Merrithought’s dwelling, hard by one another.[505] But the adventures of the prentice heroes take them not only over down and through forest to Waltham, where the Bell Inn must serve for a knightly castle, and the barber’s shop for Barbaroso’s cave, but also to the court of Moldavia, although the players regret that they cannot oblige the Citizen’s Wife by showing a house covered with black velvet and a king’s daughter standing in her window all in beaten gold, combing her golden locks with a comb of ivory.[506] What visible parody of public stage methods heightened the fun, it is of course impossible to say.

I do not propose to follow the Queen’s Revels to the Whitefriars, or to attempt any investigation into the characteristics of that house. It was occupied by the King’s Revels before the Queen’s Revels, and probably the Lady Elizabeth’s joined the Queen’s Revels there at a later date. But the number of plays which can definitely be assigned to it is clearly too small to form the basis of any satisfactory induction.[507] So far as the Blackfriars is concerned, my conclusion must be much the same as for Paul’s—that, when plays began in 1600, the Chapel revived the methods of staging with which their predecessors had been familiar during the hey-day of the Court drama under Lyly; that these methods held their own in the competition with the public theatres, and were handed on to the Queen’s Revels; but that in course of time they were sometimes variegated by the introduction, for one reason or another, of some measure of scene-shifting in individual plays. This reason may have been the nature of the plot in Sophonisba, the desire to experiment in Eastward Ho!, the restlessness of the dramatist in Your Five Gallants, the spirit of raillery in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Whether Chapman’s tragedies involved scene-shifting, I am not quite sure. The analogy of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where a continuous setting was not inconsistent with the use of widely distant localities, must always be kept in mind. On the other hand, what did not appear absurd in Paris, might have appeared absurd in London, where the practice of the public theatres had taught the spectators to expect a higher degree of consistency. I am far from claiming that my theory of the survival of continuous setting at Paul’s and the Blackfriars has been demonstrated. Very possibly the matter is not capable of demonstration. Many, perhaps most, of the plays could be produced, if need be, by alternative methods. It is really on taking them in the mass that I cannot resist the feeling that ‘the fashion of the private stage’, as Marston called it, was something different from the fashion of the public stage. The technique of the dramatists corresponds to the structural conditions. An increased respect for unity of place is not the only factor, although it is the most important. An unnecessary multiplicity of houses is, except by Dekker and Middleton, avoided. Sometimes one or two suffice. There is much more interior action than in the popular plays. One hall or chamber scene can follow upon another more freely. A house may be used for a scene which would seem absurdly short if the setting were altered for it. More doors are perhaps available, so that some can be spared for entrance behind the houses. There is more coming and going between one house and another, although I have made it clear that even the public stage was not limited to one house at a time.[508] One point is, I think, quite demonstrable. Marston has a reference to ‘the lower stage’ at Paul’s, but neither at Paul’s nor at the Blackfriars was there an upper stage capable of holding the action of a complete scene, such as we found at the sixteenth-century theatres, and apparently on a still larger scale at the Globe and the Fortune. A review of my notes will show that, although there is action ‘above’ in many private house plays, it is generally a very slight action, amounting to little more than the use by one or two persons of a window or balcony. Bedchamber scenes or tavern scenes are provided for below; the public theatre, as often as not, put them above.[509] I may recall, in confirmation, that the importance of the upper stage in the plays of the King’s men sensibly diminishes after their occupation of the Blackfriars.[510]

There are enigmas still to be solved, and I fear insoluble. Were the continuous settings of the type which we find in Serlio, with the unity of a consistent architectural picture, or of the type which we find at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, with independent and sometimes incongruous juxtaposed mansions? The taste of the dramatists for Italian cities and the frequent recurrence of buildings which fit so well into a Serliesque scheme as the tavern, the shop, the house of the ruffiana or courtesan, may tempt one’s imagination towards the former. But Serlio does not seem to contemplate much interior action, and although the convention of a half out-of-doors cortile or loggia may help to get over this difficulty, the often crowded presences and the masks seem to call for an arrangement by which each mansion can at need become in its turn the background to the whole of the stage and attach to itself all the external doors. How were the open-country scenes managed, which we have noticed in several plays, as a prelude, or even an interruption, to the strict unity of place?[511] Were these merely played on the edge of the stage, or are we to assume a curtain, cutting off the background of houses, and perhaps painted with an open-country or other appropriate perspective? And what use, if any, can we suppose to have been made of title or locality labels? The latter would not have had much point where the locality was unchanged; but Envy calls out ‘Rome’ three times in the prologue to the Poetaster, as if she saw it written up in three places. Percy may more naturally use them in Cuckqueans and Cuckolds, on a stage which represents a foreshortening of the distance between three distinct towns. Title-labels seem fairly probable. Cynthia’s Revels and The Knight of the Burning Pestle bear testimony to them at the Blackfriars; Wily Beguiled perhaps at Paul’s.[512] And if the prologues none the less thought it necessary to announce ‘The scene is Libya’, or ‘The scene Gargaphia, which I do vehemently suspect for some fustian country’, why, we must remember that there were many, even in a select Elizabethan audience, that could not hope to be saved by their book.

BOOK V
PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited.—Hamlet.

XXII
THE PRINTING OF PLAYS

[Bibliographical Note.—The records of the Stationers’ Company were utilized by W. Herbert in Typographical Antiquities (1785–90), based on an earlier edition (1749) by J. Ames, and revised, but not for the period most important to us, by T. F. Dibdin (1810–19). They are now largely available at first hand in E. Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, 1554–1640 (1875–94), and G. E. B. Eyre, Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1640–1708 (1913–14). Recent investigations are to be found in the Transactions and other publications of the Bibliographical Society, and in the periodicals Bibliographica and The Library. The best historical sketches are H. R. Plomer, A Short History of English Printing (1900), E. G. Duff, The Introduction of Printing into England (1908, C. H. ii. 310), H. G. Aldis, The Book-Trade, 1557–1625 (1909, C. H. iv. 378), and R. B. McKerrow, Booksellers, Printers, and the Stationers’ Trade (1916, Sh. England, ii. 212). Of somewhat wider range is H. G. Aldis, The Printed Book (1916). Records of individual printers are in E. G. Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade, 1457–1557 (1905), R. B. McKerrow, Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 1557–1640 (1910), and H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 1641–67 (1907). Special studies of value are R. B. McKerrow, Printers and Publishers’ Devices (1913), and Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students (1914). P. Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (1909), is not very accurate. The early history of the High Commission (1558–64) is studied in H. Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy and the Settlement of Religion (1898). The later period awaits fuller treatment than that in An Account of the Courts Ecclesiastical by W. Stubbs in the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts (1883), i. 21. J. S. Burn, The High Commission (1865), is scrappy.

For plays in particular, W. W. Greg, List of English Plays (1900), gives the title-pages, and Arber the registration entries. Various problems are discussed by A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909) and Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates (1917, ed. 2, 1920), and in connexion with the Shakespearian quartos of 1619 (cf. ch. xxiii). New ground is opened by A. W. Pollard and J. D. Wilson, The ‘Stolne and Surreptitious’ Shakespearian Texts (T. L. S. Jan.–Aug. 1919), and J. D. Wilson, The Copy for Hamlet, 1603, and the Hamlet Transcript, 1593 (1918). Other studies are C. Dewischeit, Shakespeare und die Stenographie (1898, Jahrbuch, xxxiv. 170), B. A. P. van Dam and C. Stoffel, William Shakespeare, Prosody and Text (1900), Chapters in English Printing, Prosody, and Pronunciation (1902), P. Simpson, Shakespearian Punctuation (1911), E. M. Albright, ‘To be Staied’ (1915, M. L. A. xxx. 451; cf. M. L. N., Feb. 1919), A. W. Pollard, Ad Imprimendum Solum (1919, 3 Library, x. 57), H. R. Shipheard, Play-Publishing in Elizabethan Times (1919, M. L. A. xxxiv. 580); M. A. Bayfield, Shakespeare’s Versification (1920); cf. T. L. S. (1919–20).

The nature of stage-directions is considered in many works on staging (cf. Bibl. Note to ch. xviii), and in N. Delius, Die Bühnenweisungen in den alten Shakespeare-Ausgaben (1873, Jahrbuch, viii. 171), R. Koppel, Scenen-Einteilung und Orts-Angaben in den Shakespeareschen Dramen (1874, Jahrbuch, ix. 269), Die unkritische Behandlung dramaturgischer Angaben und Anordnungen in den Shakespeare-Ausgaben (1904, E. S. xxxiv. 1). The documents printed by Arber are so fundamental as to justify a short description. Each of his vols. i-iv gives the text, or most of the text, of four books, lettered A-D in the Company’s archives, interspersed with illustrative documents from other sources; vol. v consists of indices. Another series of books, containing minutes of the Court of Assistants from 1603 onwards, remains unprinted (ii. 879). Book A contains the annual accounts of the wardens from 1554 to 1596. The Company’s year began on varying dates in the first half of July. From 1557 to 1571 the accounts include detailed entries of the books for which fees were received and of the fines imposed upon members of the Company for irregularities. Thereafter they are abstracts only, and reference is made for the details of fees to ‘the register in the clarkes booke’ (i. 451). Unfortunately this book is not extant for 1571–6. After the appointment of Richard Collins in place of George Wapull as clerk in 1575, a new ‘booke of entrances’ was bought for the clerk (i. 475). This is Book B, which is divided into sections for records of different character, including book entries for 1576–95, and fines for 1576–1605. There are also some decrees and ordinances of the Court, most of which Arber does not print, and a few pages of miscellaneous memoranda at the beginning and end (ii. 33–49, 884–6). Book C, bought ‘for the entrance of copies’ in 1594–5 (i. 572), has similar memoranda (iii. 35–8, 677–98). It continues the book entries, and these alone, for 1595–1620. Book D continues them for 1620–45. Arber’s work stops at 1640. Eyre prints a transcript by H. R. Plomer of the rest of D and of Books E, F, and G, extending to 1708.]