The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

That ye had bene a player.

Of a raised stage the only indication is in All for Money, a late example of the type, where one stage-direction notes (203), ‘There must be a chayre for him to sit in, and vnder it or neere the same there must be some hollowe place for one to come vp in’, while another (279) requires ‘some fine conueyance’ to enable characters to vomit each other up.

I come now to nine interludes which, for various reasons, demand special remark. In Jacob and Esau (> 1558) there is coming and going between the place and the tent of Isaac, before which stands a bench, the tent of Jacob, and probably also the tent of Esau. In Wit and Wisdom (> 1579) action takes place at the entrances of the house of Wantonness, of the den of Irksomeness, of a prison, and of Mother Bee’s house, and the prison, as commonly in plays of later types, must have been so arranged as to allow a prisoner to take part in the dialogue from within. Some realism, also, in the treatment of the den may be signified by an allusion to ‘these craggie clifts’. In Misogonus (c. 1560–77), the place of which is before the house of Philogonus, there is one scene in Melissa’s ‘bowre’ (ii. 4, 12), which must somehow have been represented. In Thersites (1537), of which one of the characters is a snail that ‘draweth her hornes in’, Mulciber, according to the stage-directions, ‘must have a shop made in the place’, which he leaves and returns to, and in which he is perhaps seen making a sallet. Similarly, the Mater of Thersites, when she drops out of the dialogue, ‘goeth in the place which is prepared for her’, and hither later ‘Thersites must ren awaye, and hyde hym behynde hys mothers backe’. These four examples only differ from the normal interlude type by some multiplication of the houses suggested in the background, and probably by some closer approximation than a mere door to the visual realization of these. There is no change of locality, and only an adumbration of interior action within the houses. Four other examples do entail some change of locality. Much stress must not be laid on the sudden conversions in the fourth act of The Conflict of Conscience (> 1581) and the last scene of Three Ladies of London of the open ‘place’ into Court, for these are very belated specimens of the moral. And the opening dialogue of the Three Ladies, on the way to London, may glide readily enough into the main action before two houses in London itself. But in The Disobedient Child (c. 1560) some episodes are before the house of the father, and others before that of the son in another locality forty miles away. In Mary Magdalene (< 1566), again, the action begins in Magdalo, but there is a break (842) when Mary and the Vice start on their travels, and it is resumed at Jerusalem, where it proceeds first in some public place, and afterwards by a sudden transition (1557) at a repast within the house of Simon. In both cases it may be conjectured that the two localities were indicated on opposite sides of the hall or stage, and that the personages travelled from one to the other over the intervening space, which was regarded as representing a considerable distance. You may call this ‘multiple staging’, if you will. The same imaginative foreshortening of space had been employed both in the miracle-plays and in the ‘Christian Terence’.[77] Simon’s house at Jerusalem was, no doubt, some kind of open loggia with a table in it, directly approachable from the open place where the earlier part of the Jerusalem action was located.

Godly Queen Hester (? 1525–9) has a different interest, in that, of all the forty-four interludes, it affords the only possible evidence for the use of a curtain. In most respects it is quite a normal interlude. The action is continuous, in a ‘place’, which represents a council-chamber, with a chair for Ahasuerus. But there is no mention of a door, and while the means of exit and entrance for the ordinary personages are unspecified, the stage-directions note, on two occasions (139, 635) when the King goes out, that he ‘entreth the trauerse’. Now ‘traverses’ have played a considerable part in attempts to reconstruct the Elizabethan theatre, and some imaginative writers have depicted them as criss-crossing about the stage in all sorts of possible and impossible directions.[78] The term is not a very happy one to employ in the discussion of late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century conditions. After Godly Queen Hester it does not appear again in any play for nearly a hundred years, and then, so far as I know, is only used by Jonson in Volpone, where it appears to indicate a low movable screen, probably of a non-structural kind, and by John Webster, both in The White Devil and in The Duchess of Malfi, where it is an exact equivalent to the ‘curtains’ or ‘arras’, often referred to as screening off a recess at the back of the stage.[79] Half a century later still, it is used in the Restoration play of The Duke of Guise to indicate, not this normal back curtain, but a screen placed across the recess itself, or the inner stage which had developed out of it, behind ‘the scene’.[80] Webster’s use seems to be an individual one. Properly a ‘traverse’ means, I think, not a curtain suspended from the roof, but a screen shutting off from view a compartment within a larger room, but leaving it open above. Such a screen might, of course, very well be formed by a curtain running on a rod or cord.[81] And a ‘traverse’ also certainly came to mean the compartment itself which was so shut off.[82] The construction is familiar in the old-fashioned pews of our churches, and as it happens, it is from the records of the royal chapel that its Elizabethan use can best be illustrated. Thus when Elizabeth took her Easter communion at St. James’s in 1593, she came down, doubtless from her ‘closet’ above, after the Gospel had been read, ‘into her Majestes Travess’, whence she emerged to make her offering, and then ‘retorned to her princely travess sumptuously sett forthe’, until it was time to emerge again and receive the communion. So too, when the Spanish treaty was sworn in 1604, ‘in the chappell weare two traverses sett up of equall state in all thinges as neare as might be’. One was the King’s traverse ‘where he usually sitteth’, the other for the Spanish ambassador, and from them they proceeded to ‘the halfe pace’ for the actual swearing of the oath.[83] The traverse figures in several other chapel ceremonies of the time, and it is by this analogy, rather than as a technical term of stage-craft, that we must interpret the references to it in Godly Queen Hester. It is not inconceivable that the play, which was very likely performed by the Chapel, was actually performed in the chapel.[84] Nor is it inconceivable, also, that the sense of the term ‘traverse’ may have been wide enough to cover the screen at the bottom of a Tudor hall.

I come now to the group of four mid-century farces, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Jack Juggler, Ralph Roister Doister, and Tom Tyler, which literary historians have distinguished from the interludes as early ‘regular comedies’. No doubt they show traces of Renaissance influence upon their dramatic handling. But, so far as scenic setting is concerned, they do not diverge markedly from the interlude type. Nor is this surprising, since Renaissance comedy, like the classical comedy upon which it was based, was essentially an affair of continuous action, in an open place, before a background of houses. Gammer Gurton’s Needle requires two houses, those of Gammer Gurton and of Dame Chat; Jack Juggler one, that of Boungrace; Ralph Roister Doister one, that of Christian Custance. Oddly enough, both Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Jack Juggler contain indications of the presence of a post, so placed that it could be used in the action.[85] Tom Tyler, which may have reached us in a sophisticated text, has a slightly more complicated staging. There are some quite early features. The locality is ‘this place’ (835), and the audience are asked (18), as in the much earlier Youth, to ‘make them room’. On the other hand, as in Mary Magdalene and in The Conflict of Conscience, there is at one point (512) a transition from exterior to interior action. Hitherto it has been in front of Tom’s house; now it is within, and his wife is in bed. An open loggia here hardly meets the case. The bed demands some discovery, perhaps by the withdrawal of a curtain.

I am of course aware that the forty-four interludes and the four farces hitherto dealt with cannot be regarded as forming a homogeneous body of Court drama. Not one of them, in fact, can be absolutely proved to have been given at Court. Several of them bear signs of having been given elsewhere, including at least three of the small number which present exceptional features.[86] Others lie under suspicion of having been written primarily for the printing-press, in the hope that any one who cared to act them would buy copies, and may therefore never have been given at all; and it is obvious that in such circumstances a writer might very likely limit himself to demands upon stage-management far short of what the Court would be prepared to meet.[87] This is all true enough, but at the same time I see no reason to doubt that the surviving plays broadly represent the kind of piece that was produced, at Court as well as elsewhere, until well into Elizabeth’s reign. Amongst their authors are men, Skelton, Medwall, Rastell, Redford, Bale, Heywood, Udall, Gascoigne, who were about the Court, and some of whom we know to have written plays, if not these plays, for the Court; and the survival of the moral as a Court entertainment is borne witness to by the Revels Accounts of 1578–9, in which the ‘morrall of the Marriage of Mind and Measure’ still holds its own beside the classical and romantic histories which had already become fashionable. As we proceed, however, we come more clearly within the Court sphere. The lawyers stand very close, in their interests and their amusements, to the Court, and with the next group of plays, a characteristically Renaissance one, of four Italianate comedies and four Senecan tragedies, the lawyers had a good deal to do. Gascoigne’s Gray’s Inn Supposes is based directly upon one of Ariosto’s epoch-making comedies, I Suppositi, and adopts its staging. Jeffere’s Bugbears and the anonymous Two Italian Gentlemen are similarly indebted to their models in Grazzini’s La Spiritata and Pasqualigo’s Il Fedele. Each preserves complete unity of place, and the continuous action in the street before the houses, two or three in number, of the principal personages, is only varied by occasional colloquies at a door or window, and in the case of the Two Italian Gentlemen by an episode of concealment in a tomb which stands in a ‘temple’ or shrine beneath a burning lamp. Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, the neo-classical inspiration of which is advertised in the prefatory epistle, follows the same formula with a certain freedom of handling. In the first part, opportunity for a certain amount of interior action is afforded by two of the three houses; one is a prison, the other a barber’s shop, presumably an open stall with a door and a flap-down shutter. The third is the courtesan’s house, on which Serlio insists. This reappears in the second part and has a window large enough for four women to sit in.[88] The other houses in this part are a temple with a tomb in it, and a pageant stage used at a royal entry. The conveniences of exterior action lead to a convention which often recurs in later plays, by which royal justice is dispensed in the street. And the strict unity of place is broken by a scene (iv. 2) which takes place, not like the rest of the action in the town of Julio, but in a wood through which the actors are approaching it. Here also we have, I think, the beginnings of a convention by which action on the extreme edge of a stage, or possibly on the floor of the hall or on steps leading to the stage, was treated as a little remote from the place represented by the setting in the background. The four tragedies were all produced at the Court itself by actors from the Inns of Court. It is a little curious that the earliest of the four, Gorboduc (1562), is also the most regardless of the unity of place. While Acts I and III-V are at the Court of Gorboduc, Act II is divided between the independent Courts of Ferrex and Porrex. We can hardly suppose that there was any substantial change of decoration, and probably the same generalized palace background served for all three. Here also the convention, classical enough, rules, by which the affairs of state are conducted in the open. By 1562 the raised stage had clearly established itself. There are no regular stage-directions in Gorboduc, but the stage is often mentioned in the descriptions of the dumb-shows between the acts, and in the fourth of these ‘there came from vnder the stage, as though out of hell, three furies’. Similarly in Jocasta (1566) the stage opens in the dumb-shows to disclose, at one time a grave, at another the gulf of Curtius. The action of the play itself is before the palace of Jocasta, but there are also entrances and exits, which are carefully specified in stage-directions as being through ‘the gates called Electrae’ and ‘the gates called Homoloydes’. Perhaps we are to infer that the gates which, if the stage-manager had Vitruvius in mind, would have stood on the right and left of the proscenium, were labelled ‘in great letters’ with their names; and if so, a similar device may have served in Gorboduc to indicate at which of the three Courts action was for the time being proceeding. Gismond of Salerne has not only a hell, for Megaera, but also a heaven, for the descent and ascent of Cupid. Like Jocasta, it preserves unity of place, but it has two houses in the background, the palace of Tancred and an independent ‘chamber’ for Gismond, which is open enough and deep enough to allow part of the action, with Gismond lying poisoned and Tancred mourning over her, to take place within it. The Misfortunes of Arthur is, of course, twenty years later than the other members of the group. But it is true to type. The action is in front of three domus, the ‘houses’ of Arthur and of Mordred, which ought not perhaps historically to have been in the same city, and a cloister. A few years later still, in 1591, Wilmot, one of the authors of Gismond of Salerne, rewrote it as Tancred and Gismund. He did not materially interfere with the old staging, but he added an epilogue, of which the final couplet runs:

Thus end our sorrowes with the setting sun:

Now draw the curtens for our Scaene is done.

If these lines had occurred in the original version of the play, they would naturally have been taken as referring to curtains used to cover and discover Gismond’s death-chamber. But in this point Wilmot has modified the original action, and has made Gismund take her poison and die, not in her chamber, but on the open stage. Are we then faced, as part of the paraphernalia of a Court stage, at any rate by 1591, with a front curtain—a curtain drawn aside, and not sinking like the curtains of Ferrara and Rome, but like those curtains used to mark the beginning and end of a play, rather than to facilitate any changing of scenes?[89] It is difficult to say. Wilmot, not re-writing for the stage, may have rewritten loosely. Or the epilogue may after all have belonged to the first version of the play, and have dropped out of the manuscript in which that version is preserved. The Revels Accounts testify that ‘great curtains’ were used in Court plays, but certainly do not prove that they were used as front curtains. The nearest approach to a corroboration of Wilmot is to be found in an epigram which exists in various forms, and is ascribed in some manuscripts to Sir Walter Raleigh.[90]

What is our life? a play of passion.