and Vulcan comments:
They are set sunning like a crow in a gutter.
They remain as spectators of the play until they ‘shew themselves’ and intervene in the dénouement. Evidently they are in a raised place or balcony. And this balcony must be the battlement. An exact analogy is furnished by the one of Lyly’s plays to which I have not as yet referred. This is The Woman in the Moon, Lyly’s only verse play, and possibly of later date than his group of productions with the Paul’s boys. The first act has the character of an induction. Nature and the seven Planets are on the stage and ‘They draw the curtins from before Natures shop’. During the other four there is a human action in a pastoral setting with a cave, beneath which is a trap, a grove on the bank of Enipeus, and a spot near the sea-shore. And throughout one or other of the Planets is watching the play from a ‘seate’ (II. 176; III. i. 1) above, between which and the stage they ‘ascend’ and ‘descend’ (I. 138, 230; II. 174, 236; III. ii. 35; IV. 3).
XX
STAGING IN THE THEATRES: SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[For Bibliographical Note, vide ch. xviii.]
In dealing with the groups of plays brought under review in the last chapter, the main problem considered has been that of their adaptability to the conditions of a Court stage. In the present chapter the point of view must be shifted to that of the common theatres. Obviously no hard and fast line is to be drawn. There had been regular public performances in London since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign or earlier, and there is no reason to suppose that the adult companies at least did not draw upon the same repertory both for popular and for private representation. But there is not much profit in attempting to investigate the methods of staging in the inns, of which we know nothing more than that quasi-permanent structures of carpenter’s work came in time to supplement the doors, windows, and galleries which surrounded the yards; and so far as the published plays go, it is fairly apparent that, up to the date of the suppression of Paul’s, the Court, or at any rate the private, interest was the dominating one. A turning-point may be discerned in 1576, at the establishment, on the one hand of the Theatre and the Curtain, and on the other of Farrant’s house in the Blackfriars. It is not likely that the Blackfriars did more than reproduce the conditions of a courtly hall. But the investment of capital in the Theatre and the Curtain was an incident in the history of the companies, the economic importance of which has already been emphasized in an earlier discussion.[121] It was followed by the formation of strong theatrical organizations in the Queen’s men, the Admiral’s, Strange’s, the Chamberlain’s. For a time the economic changes are masked by the continued vogue of the boy companies; but when these dropped out at the beginning of the ’nineties, it is clear that the English stage had become a public stage, and that the eyes of its controllers were fixed primarily upon the pence gathered by the box-holders, and only secondarily upon the rewards of the Treasurer of the Chamber.
The first play published ‘as it was publikely acted’ is the Troublesome Raigne of John of 1591, and henceforward I think it is true to say that the staging suggested by the public texts and their directions in the main represents the arrangements of the public theatres. There is no sudden breach of continuity with the earlier period, but that continuity is far greater with the small group of popular plays typified by Clyomon and Clamydes and Common Conditions, than with anything which Lyly and his friends produced at Paul’s or the Blackfriars. Again it is necessary to beware of any exaggeration of antithesis. There is one Chapel play, The Wars of Cyrus, the date of which is obscure, and the setting of which certainly falls on the theatre rather than the Court side of any border-line. On the other hand, the Queen’s men and their successors continued to serve the Court, and one of the published Queen’s plays, The Old Wive’s Tale, was evidently staged in a way exactly analogous to that adopted by Lyly, or by Peele himself in The Arraignment of Paris. It is tout en pastoralle, and about the stage are dispersed a hut with a door, at the threshold of which presenters sit to watch the main action (71, 128, 1163), a little hill or mound with a practicable turf (512, 734, 1034), a cross (173, 521), a ‘well of life’ (743, 773), an inn before which a table is set (904, 916), and a ‘cell’ or ‘studie’ for the conjurer, before which ‘he draweth a curten’ (411, 773, 1060).[122] Of one other play by Peele it is difficult to take any account in estimating evidence as to staging. This is David and Bethsabe, of which the extant text apparently represents an attempt to bring within the compass of a single performance a piece or fragments of a piece originally written in three ‘discourses’. I mention it here, because somewhat undue use has been made of its opening direction in speculations as to the configuration of the back wall of the public stage.[123] It uses the favourite assault motive, and has many changes of locality. The title-page suggests that in its present form it was meant for public performance. But almost anything may lie behind that present form, possibly a Chapel play, possibly a University play, or even a neo-miracle in the tradition of Bale; and the staging of any particular scene may contain original elements, imperfectly adapted to later conditions.
Counting in The Wars of Cyrus then, and counting out The Old Wive’s Tale and David and Bethsabe, there are about seventy-four plays which may reasonably be taken to have been presented upon common stages, between the establishment of the Queen’s men in 1583 and the building of the Globe for the Chamberlain’s men in 1599 and of the Fortune for the Admiral’s men in 1600. With a few exceptions they were also published during the same period, and the scenic arrangements implied by their texts and stage-directions may therefore be looked upon as those of the sixteenth-century theatres. These form the next group for our consideration. Of the seventy-four plays, the original production of nine may with certainty or fair probability be assigned to the Queen’s men, of two to Sussex’s, five to Pembroke’s, fourteen to Strange’s or the Admiral’s or the two in combination, thirteen to the Admiral’s after the combination broke up, seventeen to the Chamberlain’s, three to Derby’s, one to Oxford’s, and one to the Chapel; nine must remained unassigned.[124] It is far less easy to make a guess at the individual theatre whose staging each play represents. The migrations of the companies before 1594 in the main elude us. Thereafter the Admiral’s were settled at the Rose until 1600. The Chamberlain’s may have passed from the Theatre to the Curtain about 1597. The habitations of the other later companies are very conjectural. Moreover, plays were carried from theatre to theatre, and even transferred from company to company. Titus Andronicus, successively presented by Pembroke’s, Strange’s, Sussex’s, and the Chamberlain’s, is an extreme case in point. The ideal method would have been to study the staging of each theatre separately, before coming to any conclusion as to the similarity or diversity of their arrangements. This is impracticable, and I propose therefore to proceed on the assumption that the stages of the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Rose were in their main features similar. For this there is an a priori argument in the convenience of what Mr. Archer calls a ‘standardisation of effects’, especially at a time when the bonds between companies and theatres were so loose.[125] Moreover, the Theatre and the Curtain were built at much the same date, and although there was room for development in the art of theatrical architecture before the addition of the Rose, I am unable, after a careful examination of the relevant plays, to lay my finger upon any definite new feature which Henslowe can be supposed to have introduced. It is exceedingly provoking that the sixteenth-century repertory of the Swan has yielded nothing which can serve as a point de liaison between De Witt’s drawing and the mass of extant texts.
It will be well to begin with some analysis of the various types of scene which the sixteenth-century managers were called upon to produce; and these may with advantage be arranged according to the degree of use which they make of a structural background.[126] There are, of course, a certain number of scenes which make no use of a background at all, and may in a sense be called unlocated scenes—mere bits of conversation which might be carried on between the speakers wherever they happened to meet, and which give no indication of where that meeting is supposed to be. Perhaps these scenes are not so numerous as is sometimes suggested.[127] At any rate it must be borne in mind that they were located to the audience, who saw them against a background, although, if they were kept well to the front or side of the stage, their relation to that background would be minimized.
A great many scenes are in what may be called open country—in a road, a meadow, a grove, a forest, a desert, a mountain, a sea-shore. The personages are travelling, or hunting, or in outlawry, or merely taking the air. The background does not generally include a house in the stricter sense; but there may be a cottage,[128] a hermit’s or friar’s cell,[129] a rustic bower,[130] a cave,[131] a beacon.[132] Even where there is no evidence, in dialogue or stage-directions, for a dwelling, a table or board may be suddenly forthcoming for a banquet.[133] There may be a fountain or well,[134] and a few scenes seem to imply the presence of a river.[135] But often there is no suggestion of any surroundings but rocks or trees, and the references to the landscape, which are frequently put in the mouths of speakers, have been interpreted as intended to stimulate the imagination of spectators before whose eyes no representation, or a very imperfect representation, of wilderness or woodland had been placed.[136] But it is not likely that this literary artifice was alone relied upon, and in some cases practicable trees or rocks are certainly required by the action and must have been represented.[137] There are plays which are set continuously in the open country throughout, or during a succession of scenes, and are thus analogous to Court plays tout en pastoralle. But there are others in which the open-country scenes are only interspersed among scenes of a different type.[138]