The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

In 1487 it was the turn of the Amphitrio ‘in dicto cortile a tempo di notte, con uno paradiso cum stelle et altre rode’.[8] Both the Amphitrio and the Menaechmi were revived in 1491; the former had its ‘paradiso’, while for the latter ‘nella sala era al prospecto de quattro castelli, dove avevano a uscire quilli dovevano fare la representatione’.[9] Many other productions followed, of some of which no details are preserved. For the Eunuchus, Trinummus, and Penulus in 1499 there was a stage, 4 ft. high, with decorated columns, hangings of red, white, and green cloth, and ‘cinque casamenti merlati’ painted by Fino and Bernardino Marsigli.[10] In 1502, when Lucrezia Borgia came, the stage for the Epidicus, Bacchides, Miles Gloriosus, Casina, and Asinaria was of the height of a man, and resembled a city wall, ‘sopra gli sono le case de le comedie, che sono sei, non avantagiate del consueto’.[11] The most elaborate description on record is, however, one of a theatre set up at Mantua during the carnival of 1501, for some play of which the name has not reached us. Unfortunately it is not very clearly worded, but the stage appears to have been rather wider than its depth, arcaded round, and hung at the back with gold and greenery. Its base had the priceless decoration of Mantegna’s Triumphs, and above was a heaven with a representation of the zodiac. Only one ‘casa’ is noted, a ‘grocta’ within four columns at a corner of the stage.[12]

The scanty data available seem to point to the existence of two rather different types of staging, making their appearance at Ferrara and at Rome respectively. The scene of the Ferrarese comedies, with its ‘case’ as the principal feature, is hardly distinguishable from that of the mediaeval sacre rappresentazioni, with its ‘luoghi deputati’ for the leading personages, which in their turn correspond to the ‘loci’, ‘domus’, or ‘sedes’ of the western miracle-plays.[13] The methods of the rappresentazioni had long been adopted for pieces in the mediaeval manner, but upon secular themes, such as Poliziano’s Favola d’Orfeo, which continued, side by side with the classical comedies, to form part of the entertainment of Duke Ercole’s Court.[14] The persistence of the mediaeval tradition is very clearly seen in the interspersing of the acts of the comedies, just as the rappresentazioni had been interspersed, with ‘moresche’ and other ‘intermedii’ of spectacle and dance, to which the ‘dumb-shows’ of the English drama owe their ultimate origin.[15] At Rome, on the other hand, it looks as if, at any rate by 1513, the ‘case’ had been conventionalized, perhaps under the influence of some archaeological theory as to classical methods, into nothing more than curtained compartments forming part of the architectural embellishments of the scena wall. It is a tempting conjecture that some reflex, both of the Ferrarese and of the Roman experiments, may be traced in the woodcut illustrations of a number of printed editions of Terence, which are all derived from archetypes published in the last decade of the fifteenth century. The synchronism between the revival of classical acting and the emergence of scenic features in such illustrations is certainly marked. The Terentian miniatures of the earlier part of the century show no Vitruvian knowledge. If they figure a performance, it is a recitation by the wraith Calliopius and his gesticulating mimes.[16] Nor is there any obvious scenic influence in the printed Ulm Eunuchus of 1486, with its distinct background for each separate woodcut.[17] The new spirit comes in with the Lyons Terence of 1493, wherein may be seen the hand of the humanist Jodocus Badius Ascensius, who had certainly visited Ferrara, and may well also have been in touch with the Pomponiani.[18] The Lyons woodcuts, of which there are several to each play, undoubtedly represent stage performances, real or imaginary. The stage itself is an unrailed quadrangular platform, of which the supports are sometimes visible. The back wall is decorated with statuettes and swags of Renaissance ornament, and in front of it is a range of three, four, or five small compartments, separated by columns and veiled by fringed curtains. They have rather the effect of a row of bathing boxes. Over each is inscribed the name of a character, whose ‘house’ it is supposed to be. Thus for the Andria the inscriptions are ‘Carini’, ‘Chreme[tis]’, ‘Chrisidis’, ‘Do[mus] Symonis’. On the scaffold, before the houses, action is proceeding between characters each labelled with his name. Sometimes a curtain is drawn back and a character is emerging, or the interior of a house is revealed, with some one sitting or in bed, and a window behind. It is noteworthy that, while the decoration of the back wall and the arrangement of the houses remain uniform through all the woodcuts belonging to any one play, they vary from play to play. Sometimes the line of houses follows that of the wall; sometimes it advances and retires, and may leave a part of the wall uncovered, suggesting an entrance from without. In addition to the special woodcuts for each play, there is a large introductory design of a ‘Theatrum’. It is a round building, with an exterior staircase, to which spectators are proceeding, and are accosted on their way by women issuing from the ‘Fornices’, over which the theatre is built. Through the removal of part of the walls, the interior is also made visible. It has two galleries and standing-room below. A box next the stage in the upper gallery is marked ‘Aediles’. The stage is cut off by curtains, which are divided by two narrow columns. In front of the curtains sits a flute-player. Above is inscribed ‘Proscenium’. Some of the Lyons cuts are adopted, with others from the Ulm Eunuchus, in the Strasburg Terence of 1496.[19] This, however, has a different ‘Theatrum’, which shows the exterior only, and also a new comprehensive design for each play, in which no scaffold or back wall appears, and the houses are drawn on either side of an open place, with the characters standing before them. They are more realistic than the Lyons ‘bathing boxes’ and have doors and windows and roofs, but they are drawn, like the Ulm houses, on a smaller scale than the characters. If they have a scenic origin, it may be rather in the ‘case’ of Ferrara than in the conventional ‘domus’ of Rome. Finally, the Venice Terence of 1497, while again reproducing with modifications the smaller Lyons cuts, replaces the ‘Theatrum’ by a new ‘Coliseus sive Theatrum’, in which the point of view is taken from the proscenium.[20] No raised stage is visible, but an actor or prologue is speaking from a semicircular orchestra on the floor-level. To right and left of him are two houses, of the ‘bathing-box’ type, but roofed, from which characters emerge. He faces an auditorium with two rows of seats and a gallery above.

We are moving in shadowy regions of conjecture, and if all the material were forthcoming, the interrelations of Rome and Ferrara and the Terentian editors might prove to have been somewhat different from those here sketched. After all, we have not found anything which quite explains the ‘picturatae scenae facies’ for which Cardinal Raffaelle Riario won such praise, and perhaps Ferrara is not really entitled to credit for the innovation, which is generally supposed to have accompanied the production of the first of Ariosto’s great Italian comedies on classical lines, the Cassaria of 1508. This is the utilization for stage scenery of the beloved Italian art of architectural perspective. It has been suggested, on no very secure grounds, that the first to experiment in this direction may have been the architect Bramante Lazzari.[21] But the scene of the Cassaria is the earliest which is described by contemporary observers as a prospettiva, and it evidently left a vivid impression upon the imagination of the spectators.[22] The artist was Pellegrino da Udine, and the city represented was Mytilene, where the action of the Cassaria was laid. The same, or another, example of perspective may have served as a background in the following year for Ariosto’s second comedy, I Suppositi, of which the scene was Ferrara itself.[23] But other artists, in other cities, followed in the footsteps of Pellegrino. The designer for the first performance of Bernardo da Bibbiena’s Calandra at Urbino in 1513 was probably Girolamo Genga;[24] and for the second, at Rome in 1514, Baldassarre Peruzzi, to whom Vasari perhaps gives exaggerated credit for scenes which ‘apersono la via a coloro che ne hanno poi fatte a’ tempi nostri’.[25] Five years later, I Suppositi was also revived at Rome, in the Sala d’ Innocenzio of the Vatican, and on this occasion no less an artist was employed than Raphael himself.[26] As well as the scene, there was an elaborately painted front curtain, which fell at the beginning of the performance. For this device, something analogous to which had almost certainly already been used at Ferrara, there was a precedent in the classical aulaeum. Its object was apparently to give the audience a sudden vision of the scene, and it was not raised again during the action of the play, and had therefore no strictly scenic function.[27]

The sixteenth-century prospettiva, of which there were many later examples, is the type of scenery so fully described and illustrated by the architect Sebastiano Serlio in the Second Book of his Architettura (1551). Serlio had himself been the designer of a theatre at Vicenza, and had also been familiar at Rome with Baldassarre Peruzzi, whose notes had passed into his possession. He was therefore well in the movement.[28] At the time of the publication of the Architettura he was resident in France, where he was employed, like other Italians, by Francis I upon the palace of Fontainebleau. Extracts from Serlio’s treatise will be found in an appendix and I need therefore only briefly summarize here the system of staging which it sets out.[29] This is a combination of the more or less solid ‘case’ with flat cloths painted in perspective. The proscenium is long and comparatively shallow, with an entrance at each end, and flat. But from the line of the scena wall the level of the stage slopes slightly upwards and backwards, and on this slope stand to right and left the ‘case’ of boards or laths covered with canvas, while in the centre is a large aperture, disclosing a space across which the flat cloths are drawn, a large one at the back and smaller ones on frames projecting by increasing degrees from behind the ‘case’. Out of these elements is constructed, by the art of perspective, a consistent scene with architectural perspectives facing the audience, and broken in the centre by a symmetrical vista. For the sake of variety, the action can use practicable doors and windows in the façades, and to some extent also within the central aperture, on the lower part of the slope. It was possible to arrange for interior action by discovering a space within the ‘case’ behind the façades, but this does not seem to have been regarded as a very effective device.[30] Nor is there anything to suggest that Serlio contemplated any substantial amount of action within his central recess, for which, indeed, the slope required by his principles of perspective made it hardly suitable. As a matter of fact the action of the Italian commedia sostenuta, following here the tradition of its Latin models, is essentially exterior action before contiguous houses, and some amusing conventions, as Creizenach notes, follow from this fact; such as that it is reasonable to come out-of-doors in order to communicate secrets, that the street is a good place in which to bury treasure, and that you do not know who lives in the next house until you are told.[31] In discussing the decoration of the stage, Serlio is careful to distinguish between the kinds of scenery appropriate for tragedy, comedy, and the satyric play or pastoral, respectively, herein clearly indicating his debt and that of his school to the doctrine of Vitruvius.

It must not be supposed that Serlio said the last word on Italian Renaissance staging. He has mainly temporary theatres in his mind, and when theatres became permanent it was possible to replace laths and painted cloths by a more solid architectural scena in relief. Of this type was the famous Teatro Olympico of Vicenza begun by Andrea Palladio about 1565 and finished by Vincenzo Scamozzi about 1584.[32] It closely followed the indications of Vitruvius, with its porta regia in the middle of the scena, its portae minores to right and left, and its proscenium doors in versurae under balconies for spectators. And it did not leave room for much variety in decoration, as between play and play.[33] It appears, indeed, to have been used only for tragedy. A more important tendency was really just in the opposite direction, towards change rather than uniformity of scenic effect. Even the perspectives, however beautiful, of the comedies did not prove quite as amusing, as the opening heavens and hells and other ingeniously varied backgrounds of the mediaeval plays had been, and by the end of the sixteenth century devices were being tried for movable scenes, which ultimately led to the complete elimination of the comparatively solid and not very manageable ‘case’.[34]

It is difficult to say how far the Italian perspective scene made its way westwards. Mediaeval drama—on the one hand the miracle-play, on the other the morality and the farce—still retained an unbounded vitality in sixteenth-century France. The miracle-play had its own elaborate and traditional system of staging. The morality and the farce required very little staging at all, and could be content at need with nothing more than a bare platform, backed by a semicircle or hollow square of suspended curtains, through the interstices of which the actors might come and go.[35] But from the beginning of the century there is observable in educated circles an infiltration of the humanist interest in the classical drama; and this, in course of time, was reinforced through two distinct channels. One of these was the educational influence, coming indirectly through Germany and the Netherlands, of the ‘Christian Terence’, which led about 1540 to the academic Latin tragedies of Buchanan and Muretus at Bordeaux.[36] The other was the direct contact with humanist civilization, which followed upon the Italian adventures of Charles VIII and Louis XII, and dominated the reigns of François I and his house, notably after the marriage of Catherine de’ Medici to the future Henri II in 1533. In 1541 came Sebastiano Serlio with his comprehensive knowledge of stage-craft; and the translation of his Architettura, shortly after its publication in 1545, by Jean Martin, a friend of Ronsard, may be taken as evidence of its vogue. In 1548 the French Court may be said to have been in immediate touch with the nidus of Italian scenic art at Ferrara, for when Henri and Catherine visited Lyons it was Cardinal Hippolyte d’Este who provided entertainment for them with a magnificent performance of Bibbiena’s famous Calandra. This was ‘nella gran sala di San Gianni’ and was certainly staged in the full Italian manner, with perspective by Andrea Nannoccio and a range of terra-cotta statues by one Zanobi.[37] Henceforward it is possible to trace the existence of a Court drama in France. The Italian influence persisted. It is not, indeed, until 1571 that we find regular companies of Italian actors settling in Paris, and these, when they came, probably played, mainly if not entirely, commedie dell’ arte.[38] But Court performances in 1555 and 1556 of the Lucidi of Firenzuola and the Flora of Luigi Alamanni show that the commedia sostenuta was already established in favour at a much earlier date.[39] More important, however, is the outcrop of vernacular tragedy and comedy, on classical and Italian models, which was one of the literary activities of the Pléiade. The pioneer in both genres was Étienne Jodelle, whose tragedy of Cléopâtre Captive was produced before Henri II by the author and his friends at the Hôtel de Reims early in 1553, and subsequently repeated at the Collège de Boncour, where it was accompanied by his comedy of La Rencontre, probably identical with the extant Eugène, which is believed to date from 1552. Jodelle had several successors: in tragedy, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Jacques and Jean de la Taille, Jacques Grévin, Robert Garnier, Antoine de Montchrestien; and in comedy, Rémy Belleau, Jean de Baïf, Jean de la Taille, Jacques Grévin, and Pierre Larivey. So far as tragedy was concerned, the Court representations soon came to an end. Catherine de’ Medici, always superstitious, believed that the Sophonisbe of Mellin de Saint-Gelais in 1556 had brought ill luck, and would have no more.[40] The academies may have continued to find hospitality for a few, but the best critical opinion appears to be that most of the tragedies of Garnier and his fellows were for the printing-press only, and that their scenic indications, divorced from the actualities of representation, can hardly be regarded as evidence on any system of staging.[41] Probably this is also true of many of the literary comedies, although Court performances of comedies, apart from those of the professional players, continue to be traceable throughout the century. Unfortunately archaeological research has not succeeded in exhuming from the archives of the French royal households anything that throws much light on the details of staging, and very possibly little material of this kind exists. Cléopâtre is said to have been produced ‘in Henrici II aula ... magnifico veteris scenae apparatu’.[42] The prologue of Eugène, again, apologizes for the meagreness of an academic setting:

Quand au théâtre, encore qu’il ne soit

En demi-rond, comme on le compassoit,

Et qu’on ne l’ait ordonné de la sorte

Que l’on faisoit, il faut qu’on le supporte: