‘Flamineo.I will see them,
They are behind the travers. Ile discover
Their superstitious howling.
Cornelia, the Moore and 3 other Ladies discovered, winding Marcello’s coarse’;
Duchess of Malfi, IV. i. 54:
‘Here is discover’d, behind a travers, the artificiall figures of Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead.’
[80] Duke of Guise, v. 3 (quoted by Albright, 58), ‘The scene draws, behind it a Traverse’, and later, ‘The Traverse is drawn. The King rises from his Chair, comes forward’.
[81] The Revels Accounts for 1511 (Brewer, ii. 1497) include 10d. for a rope used for a ‘travas’ in the hall at Greenwich and stolen during a disguising. Puttenham (1589), i. 17, in an attempt to reconstruct the methods of classical tragedy, says that the ‘floore or place where the players vttered ... had in it sundrie little diuisions by curteins as trauerses to serue for seueral roomes where they might repaire vnto and change their garments and come in againe, as their speaches and parts were to be renewed’.
[82] There was a traverse in the nursery of Edward V in 1474; cf. H. O. *28, ‘Item, we will that our sayd sonne in his chamber and for all nighte lyverye to be sette, the traverse drawne anone upon eight of the clocke’.
[83] Rimbault, 150, 167. There is an elaborate description of ‘a fayer traverse of black taffata’ set up in the chapel at Whitehall for the funeral of James in 1625 and afterwards borrowed for the ceremony in Westminster Abbey.