Our mirth? the musick of diuision.
Our mothers wombs the tyring houses bee
Where we are drest for liues short comedy.
The earth the stage, heauen the spectator is,
Who still doth note who ere do act amisse.
Our graues, that hyde vs from the all-seeing sun,
Are but drawne curtaynes when the play is done.
If these four comedies and four tragedies were taken alone, it would, I think, be natural to conclude that, with the Italianized types of drama, the English Court had also adopted the Italian type of setting.[91] Certainly the tragedies would fit well enough into Serlio’s stately façade of palaces, and the comedies into his more homely group of bourgeois houses, with its open shop, its ‘temple’, and its discreet abode of a ruffiana.[92]
As courtly, beyond doubt, we must treat the main outlook of the choir companies during their long hegemony of the Elizabethan drama, which ended with the putting down of Paul’s in 1590. Unfortunately it is not until the last decade of this period, with the ‘court comedies’ of Lyly, that we have any substantial body of their work, differentiated from the interludes and the Italianate comedies, to go upon. The Damon and Pythias of Richard Edwardes has a simple setting before the gates of a court. Lyly’s own methods require rather careful analysis.[93] The locality of Campaspe is throughout at Athens, in ‘the market-place’ (III. ii. 56).[94] On this there are three domus: Alexander’s palace, probably represented by a portico in which he receives visitors, and from which inmates ‘draw in’ (IV. iii. 32) to get off the stage; a tub ‘turned towardes the sun’ (I. iii. 12) for Diogenes over which he can ‘pry’ (V. iii. 21); a shop for Apelles, which has a window (III. i. 18), outside which a page is posted, and open enough for Apelles to carry on dialogue with Campaspe (III. iii.; IV. iv), while he paints her within. These three domus are quite certainly all visible together, as continuous action can pass from one to another. At one point (I. iii. 110) the philosophers walk direct from the palace to the tub; at another (III. iv. 44, 57) Alexander, going to the shop, passes the tub on the way; at a third (V. iv. 82) Apelles, standing at the tub, is bidden ‘looke about you, your shop is on fire!’ As Alexander (V. iv. 71) tells Diogenes that he ‘wil haue thy cabin remoued nerer to my court’, I infer that the palace and the tub were at opposite ends of the stage, and the shop in the middle, where the interior action could best be seen. In Sapho and Phao the unity of place is not so marked. All the action is more or less at Syracuse, but, with the exception of one scene (II. iii), the whole of the first two acts are near Phao’s ferry outside the city. I do not think that the actual ferry is visible, for passengers go ‘away’ (I. i. 72; ii. 69) to cross, and no use is made of a ferryman’s house, but somewhere quite near Sibylla sits ‘in the mouth of her caue’ (II. i. 13), and talks with Phao.[95] The rest of the action is in the city itself, either before the palace of Sapho, or within her chamber, or at the forge of Vulcan, where he is perhaps seen ‘making of the arrowes’ (IV. iv. 33) during a song. Certainly Sapho’s chamber is practicable. The stage-directions do not always indicate its opening and shutting. At one point (III. iii. 1) we simply get ‘Sapho in her bed’ in a list of interlocutors; at another (IV. i. 20) ‘Exit Sapho’, which can only mean that the door closes upon her. It was a door, not a curtain, for she tells a handmaid (V. ii. 101) to ‘shut’ it. Curtains are ‘drawne’ (III. iii. 36; IV. iii. 95), but these are bed-curtains, and the drawing of them does not put Sapho’s chamber in or out of action. As in Campaspe, there is interplay between house and house. A long continuous stretch of action, not even broken by the act-intervals, begins with III. iii and extends to the end of V. ii, and in the course of this Venus sends Cupid to Sapho, and herself waits at Vulcan’s forge (V. i. 50). Presently (V. ii. 45) she gets tired of waiting, and without leaving the stage, advances to the chamber and says, ‘How now, in Saphoes lap?’ There is not the same interplay between the city houses and Sibylla’s cave, to which the last scene of the play returns. I think we must suppose that two neighbouring spots within the same general locality were shown in different parts of the stage, and this certainly entails a bolder use of dramatic foreshortening of distance than the mere crossing the market-place in Campaspe. This foreshortening recurs in Endymion. Most of the action is in an open place which must be supposed to be near the palace of Cynthia, or at the lunary bank (II. iii. 9), of Endymion’s slumber, which is also near the palace.[96] It stands in a grove (IV. iii. 160), and is called a ‘caban’ (IV. iii. 111). Somewhere also in the open space is, in Act V, the aspen-tree, into which Dipsas has turned Bagoa and from which she is delivered (V. iii. 283). But III. ii and IV. i are at the door of ‘the Castle in the Deserte’ (III. i. 41; ii. 1) and III. iv is also in the desert (cf. V. iii. 35), before a fountain. This fountain was, however, ‘hard by’ the lunary bank (IV. ii. 67), and probably the desert was no farther off than the end of the stage.[97] In Midas the convention of foreshortening becomes inadequate, and we are faced with a definite change of locality. The greater part of the play is at the Court of Midas, presumably in Lydia rather than in Phrygia, although an Elizabethan audience is not likely to have been punctilious about Anatolian geography. Some scenes require as background a palace, to which it is possible to go ‘in’ (I. i. 117; II. ii. 83; III. iii. 104). A temple of Bacchus may also have been represented, but is not essential. Other scenes are in a neighbouring spot, where the speaking reeds grow. There is a hunting scene (IV. i) on ‘the hill Tmolus’ (cf. V. iii. 44). So far Lyly’s canons of foreshortening are not exceeded. But the last scene (V. iii) is out of the picture altogether. The opening words are ‘This is Delphos’, and we are overseas, before the temple of Apollo. In Galathea and in Love’s Metamorphosis, on the other hand, unity is fully achieved. The whole of Galathea may well proceed in a single spot, on the edge of a wood, before a tree sacred to Neptune, and in Lincolnshire (I. iv. 12). The sea is hard by, but need not be seen. The action of Love’s Metamorphosis is rather more diffuse, but an all-over pastoral setting, such as we see in Serlio’s scena satirica, with scattered domus in different glades, would serve it. Or, as the management of the Hôtel de Bourgogne would have put it, the stage is tout en pastoralle. There are a tree of Ceres and a temple of Cupid. These are used successively in the same scene (II. i). Somewhat apart, on the sea-shore, but close to the wood, dwells Erisichthon. There is a rock for the Siren, and Erisichthon’s house may also have been shown.[98] Finally, Mother Bombie is an extreme example of the traditional Italian comic manner. The action comes and goes, rapidly for Lyly, in an open place, surrounded by no less than seven houses, the doors of which are freely used.
Two other Chapel plays furnish sufficient evidence that the type of staging just described was not Lyly’s and Lyly’s alone.[99] Peele’s Arraignment of Paris is tout en pastoralle. A poplar-tree dominates the stage throughout, and the only house is a bower of Diana, large enough to hold the council of gods (381, 915). A trap is required for the rising and sinking of a golden tree (489) and the ascent of Pluto (902). Marlowe’s Dido has proved rather a puzzle to editors who have not fully appreciated the principles on which the Chapel plays were produced. I think that one side of the stage was arranged en pastoralle, and represented the wood between the sea-shore and Carthage, where the shipwrecked Trojans land and where later Aeneas and Dido hunt. Here was the cave where they take shelter from the storm.[100] Here too must have been the curtained-off domus of Jupiter.[101] This is only used in a kind of prelude. Of course it ought to have been in heaven, but the Gods are omnipresent, and it is quite clear that when the curtain is drawn on Jupiter, Venus, who has been discoursing with him, is left in the wood, where she then meets Aeneas (134, 139, 173). The other side of the stage represents Carthage. Possibly a wall with a gate in it was built across the stage, dividing off the two regions. In the opening line of Act II, Aeneas says,