THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE
VOL. III

Oxford University Press

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Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University

OXFORD: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
M.CMXXIII

I have found it convenient, especially in Appendix A, to use the symbol < following a date, to indicate an uncertain date not earlier than that named, and the symbol > followed by a date, to indicate an uncertain date not later than that named. Thus 1903 <> 23 would indicate the composition date of any part of this book. I have sometimes placed the date of a play in italics, where it was desirable to indicate the date of production rather than publication.

We come now to the problems, reserved from treatment in the foregoing chapter, of scenic background. What sort of setting did the types of theatre described afford for the[2] plots, often complicated, and the range of incident, so extraordinarily wide, which we find in Elizabethan drama? No subject in literary history has been more often or more minutely discussed, during the quarter of a century since the Swan drawing was discovered, and much valuable spadework has been done, not merely in the collecting and marshalling of external evidence, but also in the interpretation of this in the light of an analysis of the action of plays and of the stage-directions by which these are accompanied.[1] Some points have emerged clearly enough; and if on others there is still room for controversy, this may be partly due to the fact that external and internal evidence, when put together, have proved inadequate, and partly also to certain defects of method into which some of the researchers have fallen. To start from the assumption of a ‘typical Shakespearian stage’ is not perhaps the best way of approaching an investigation which covers the practices of thirty or forty playing companies, in a score of theatres, over a period of not much less than a century. It is true that, in view of the constant shifting of companies and their plays from one theatre to another, some ‘standardization of effects’, in Mr. Archer’s phrase, may at any one date be taken for granted.[2] But analogous effects can be produced by very different arrangements, and even apart from the obvious probability that the structural divergences between public and private theatres led to corresponding divergences in the systems of setting adopted, it is hardly safe to neglect the possibility of a considerable evolution in the capacities of stage-management between 1558 and 1642, or even between 1576 and 1616. At any rate a historical treatment will be well advised to follow the historical method. The scope of the inquiry, moreover, must be wide enough to cover performances at Court, as well as those on the regular stage, since the plays used for both purposes were undoubtedly the same. Nor can Elizabethan Court performances, in their turn, be properly considered, except in the perspective afforded by a short preliminary survey of the earlier developments of the art of scenic representation at other Renaissance Courts.

The story begins with the study of Vitruvius in the latter part of the fifteenth century by the architect Alberti and others, which led scholars to realize that the tragedies of the pseudo-Seneca and the comedies of Terence and the recently discovered Plautus had been not merely recited, but acted much in the fashion already familiar in contemporary ludi of[3] the miracle-play type.[3] The next step was, naturally, to act them, in the original or in translations. Alberti planned a theatrum in the Vatican for Nicholas V, but the three immediate successors of Nicholas were not humanists, and it is not until the papacy of Innocent VIII that we hear of classical performances at Rome by the pupils of Pomponius Laetus. One of these was Tommaso Inghirami, who became a cardinal, without escaping the nickname of Phaedra from the part he had played in Hippolytus. This, as well as at least one comedy, had already been given before the publication (c. 1484–92) of an edition of Vitruvius by Sulpicius Verulanus, with an epistle addressed by the editor to Cardinal Raffaelle Riario, as a notable patron of the revived art. Sulpicius is allusive rather than descriptive, but we hear of a fair adorned stage, 5 ft. high, for the tragedy in the forum, of a second performance in the Castle of St. Angelo, and a third in Riario’s house, where the audience sat under umbracula, and of the ‘picturatae scenae facies’, which the cardinal provided for a comedy by the Pomponiani.[4][4] Performances continued after the death of Pomponius in 1597, but we get no more scenic details, and when the Menaechmi was given at the wedding of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia in 1502 it is noted that ‘non gli era scena alcuna, perchè la camera non era capace’.[5] It is not until 1513 that we get anything like a description of a Roman neo-classical stage, at the conferment of Roman citizenship on Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine kinsmen of Leo X.[6] This had a decorated back wall divided by pilasters into five spaces, in each of which was a door covered by a curtain of golden stuff. There were also two side-doors, for entrance and exit, marked ‘via ad forum’.

An even more important centre of humanistic drama than Rome was Ferrara, where the poets and artists, who gathered round Duke Ercole I of Este, established a tradition which spread to the allied courts of the Gonzagas at Mantua and the Delle Rovere at Urbino. The first neo-classical revival on record at Ferrara was of the Menaechmi in 1486, from which we learn that Epidamnus was represented by five marvellous ‘case’ each with its door and window, and that a practicable boat moved across the cortile where the performance was given.[7]

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][5] 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]

[6]

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[7] 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,[8] 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[9] 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[10] 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[11] 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[12] 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[13] 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,[14] 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:

Hangings round the stage probably sufficed for the colleges, and possibly even on some occasions for royal châteaux.[43] But Jodelle evidently envisaged something more splendid as possible at Court, and a notice, on the occasion of some comedies given before Charles IX at Bayonne in 1565, of ‘la bravade et magnificence de la dite scène ou théâtre, et des feux ou verres de couleur, desquelles elle etait allumée et enrichie’ at once recalls a device dear to Serlio, and suggests a probability that the whole method of staging, which Serlio expounds, may at least have been tried.[44] Of an actual theatre ‘en demi-rond’ at any French palace we have no clear proof. Philibert de l’Orme built a salle de spectacle for Catherine in the Tuileries, on a site afterwards occupied by the grand staircase, but its shape and dimensions are not[15] on record.[45] There was another in the pleasure-house, which he planned for Henri II in the grounds of Saint-Germain, and which was completed by Guillaume Marchand under Henri IV. This seems, from the extant plan, to have been designed as a parallelogram.[46] The hall of the Hôtel de Bourbon, hard by the Louvre, in which plays were sometimes given, is shown by the engravings of the Balet Comique, which was danced there in 1581, to have been, in the main, of similar shape. But it had an apse ‘en demi-rond’ at one end.[47] It may be that the Terence illustrations come again to our help, and that the new engravings which appear, side by side with others of the older tradition, in the Terence published by Jean de Roigny in 1552 give some notion of the kind of stage which Jodelle and his friends used.[48] The view is from the auditorium. The stage is a platform, about 3½ ft. high, with three shallow steps at the back, on which actors are sitting, while a prologue declaims. There are no hangings or scenes. Pillars divide the back of the stage from a gallery which runs behind and in which stand spectators. Obviously this is not on Italian lines, but it might preserve the memory of some type of academic stage.

If we know little of the scenic methods of the French Court, we know a good deal of those employed in the only public theatre of which, during the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth, Paris could boast. This was the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a rectangular hall built by the Confrérie de la Passion in 1548, used by that body for the representation of miracle-plays and farces up to 1598, let between 1598 and 1608 to a succession of visiting companies, native and foreign, and definitively occupied from the latter year by the Comédiens du Roi, to whom Alexandre Hardy was dramatist in chief.[49] The Mémoire pour la décoration des pièces qui se représentent par les comediens du roy, entretenus de sa Magesté is one of the[16] most valuable documents of theatrical history which the hazard of time has preserved in any land. It, or rather the earlier of the two sections into which it is divided, is the work of Laurent Mahelot, probably a machinist at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and contains notes, in some cases apparently emanating from the authors, of the scenery required for seventy-one plays belonging to the repertory of the theatre, to which are appended, in forty-seven cases, drawings showing the way in which the requirements were to be met.[50] It is true that the Mémoire is of no earlier date than about 1633, but the close resemblance of the system which it illustrates to that used in the miracle-plays of the Confrèrie de la Passion justifies the inference that there had been no marked breach of continuity since 1598. In essence it is the mediaeval system of juxtaposed ‘maisons’, corresponding to the ‘case’ of the Italian and the ‘houses’ of the English tradition, a series of independent structures, visually related to each other upon the stage, but dramatically distinct and serving, each in its turn, as the background to action upon the whole of the free space—platea in mediaeval terminology, proscenium in that of the Renaissance—which stretched before and between them. The stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne had room for five such ‘maisons’, one in the middle of the back wall, two in the angles between the back and side-walls, and two standing forward against the side-walls; but in practice two or three of these compartments were often devoted to a ‘maison’ of large size. A ‘maison’ might be a unit of architecture, such as a palace, a senate house, a castle, a prison, a temple, a tavern; or of landscape, such as a garden, a wood, a rock, a cave, a sea.[51] And very often it[17] represented an interior, such as a chamber with a bed in it.[52] A good illustration of the arrangement may be found in the scenario for the familiar story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as dramatized about 1617 by Théophile de Viaud.[53]

The Pandoste of Alexandre Hardy required different settings for the two parts, which were given on different days.[54] On the first day,

The needs of the second day were more simply met by ‘deux palais et une maison de paysan et un bois’.

Many examples make it clear that the methods of the Hôtel de Bourgogne did not entirely exclude the use of perspective, which was applied on the back wall, ‘au milieu du théâtre’; and as the Italian stage, on its side, was slow to abandon altogether the use of ‘case’ in relief, it is possible that under favourable circumstances Mahelot and his colleagues may have succeeded in producing the illusion of a consistently built up background much upon the lines contemplated by Serlio.[55] There were some plays whose plot called for nothing more than a single continuous scene in a street, perhaps a known and nameable street, or a forest.[56][18] Nor was the illusion necessarily broken by such incidents as the withdrawal of a curtain from before an interior at the point when it came into action, or the introduction of the movable ship which the Middle Ages had already known.[57] It was broken, however, when the ‘belle chambre’ was so large and practicable as to be out of scale with the other ‘maisons’.[58] And it was broken when, as in Pandoste and many other plays, the apparently contiguous ‘maisons’ had to be supposed, for dramatic purposes, to be situated in widely separated localities. It is, indeed, as we shall find to our cost, not the continuous scene, but the need for change of scene, which constitutes the problem of staging. It is a problem which the Italians had no occasion to face; they had inherited, almost unconsciously, the classical tradition of continuous action in an unchanged locality, or in a locality no more changed than is entailed by the successive bringing into use of various apertures in a single façade. But the Middle Ages had had no such tradition, and the problem at once declared itself, as soon as the matter of the Middle Ages and the manner of the Renaissance began to come together in the ‘Christian Terence’. The protest of Cornelius Crocus in the preface to his Joseph (1535) against ‘multiple’ staging, as alike intrinsically absurd and alien to the practice of the ancients, anticipates by many years that law of the unity of place, the formulation of which is generally assigned to Lodovico Castelvetro, and which was handed down by the Italians to the Pléiade and to the ‘classical’ criticism of the seventeenth century.[59] We are not here concerned with the unity of place as a law of dramatic structure, but we are very much concerned with the fact that the romantic drama of western Europe did not observe unity of place in actual[19] practice, and that consequently the stage-managers of Shakespeare in England, as well as those of Hardy in France, had to face the problem of a system of staging, which should be able rapidly and intelligibly to represent shifting localities. The French solution, as we have seen, was the so-called ‘multiple’ system, inherited from the Middle Ages, of juxtaposed and logically incongruous backgrounds.

Geography would be misleading if it suggested that, in the westward drift of the Renaissance, England was primarily dependent upon the mediation of France. During the early Tudor reigns direct relations with Italy were firmly established, and the classical scholars of Oxford and Cambridge drew their inspiration at first hand from the authentic well-heads of Rome and Florence. In matters dramatic, in particular, the insular had little or nothing to learn from the continental kingdom. There were French players, indeed, at the Court of Henry VII in 1494 and 1495, who obviously at that date can only have had farces and morals to contribute.[60] And thereafter the lines of stimulus may just as well have run the other way. If the academic tragedy and comedy of the Pléiade had its reaction upon the closet dramas of Lady Pembroke, Kyd, Daniel, Lord Brooke, yet London possessed its public theatres long before the Parisian makeshift of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and English, no less than Italian, companies haunted the Court of Henri IV, while it is not until Caroline days that the French visit of 1495 can be shown to have had its successor. The earliest record of a classical performance in England was at Greenwich on 7 March 1519, when ‘there was a goodly commedy of Plautus plaied’, followed by a mask, in the great chamber, which the King had caused ‘to be staged and great lightes to be set on pillers that were gilt, with basons gilt, and the rofe was covered with blewe satyn set full of presses of fyne gold and flowers’.[61] The staging here spoken of, in association with lights, was probably for spectators rather than for actors, for in May 1527, when a dialogue, barriers, and mask were to be given in a banqueting-house at Greenwich, we are told that ‘thys chambre was raised with stages v. degrees on every syde, and rayled and counterailed, borne by pillars of azure, full[20] of starres and flower delice of gold; every pillar had at the toppe a basin silver, wherein stode great braunches of white waxe’.[62] In this same year 1527, Wolsey had a performance of the Menaechmi at his palace of York Place, and it was followed in 1528 by one of the Phormio, of which a notice is preserved in a letter of Gasparo Spinelli, the secretary to the Italian embassy in London.[63] Unfortunately, Spinelli’s description proves rather elusive. I am not quite clear whether he is describing the exterior or the interior of a building, and whether his zoglia is, as one would like to think, the framework of a proscenium arch, or merely that of a doorway.[64] One point, however, is certain. Somewhere or other, the decorations displayed in golden letters the title of the play which was about to be given. Perhaps this explains why, more than a quarter of a century later, when the Westminster boys played the Miles Gloriosus before Elizabeth in January 1565, one of the items of expenditure was for ‘paper, inke and colores for the wryting of greate letters’.[65]

Investigation of Court records reveals nothing more precise than this as to the staging of plays, whether classical or mediaeval in type, under Henry VIII. It is noticeable, however, that a play often formed but one episode in a composite entertainment, other parts of which required the elaborate pageantry which was Henry’s contribution to the development of the mask; and it may be conjectured that in these cases the structure of the pageant served also as a sufficient background for the play. Thus in 1527 a Latin tragedy celebrating the deliverance of the Pope and of France by Wolsey was given in the ‘great chamber of disguysings’, at the end of which stood a fountain with a mulberry and a hawthorn tree, about which sat eight fair ladies in strange attire upon ‘benches of rosemary fretted in braydes layd on gold, all the sydes sette wyth roses in braunches as they wer growyng about this fountayne’.[66] The device[21] was picturesque enough, but can only have had an allegorical relation to the action of the play. The copious Revels Accounts of Edward and of Mary are silent about play settings. It is only with those of Elizabeth that the indications of ‘houses’ and curtains already detailed in an earlier chapter make their appearance.[67] The ‘houses’ of lath and canvas have their analogy alike in the ‘case’ of Ferrara, which even Serlio had not abandoned, and in the ‘maisons’ which the Hôtel de Bourgogne inherited from the Confrérie de la Passion. We are left without guide as to whether the use of them at the English Court was a direct tradition from English miracle-plays, or owed its immediate origin to an Italian practice, which was itself in any case only an outgrowth of mediaeval methods familiar in Italy as well as in England. Nor can we tell, so far as the Revels Accounts go, whether the ‘houses’ were juxtaposed on the stage after the ‘multiple’ fashion of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, or were fused with the help of perspective into a continuous façade or vista, as Serlio bade. Certainly the Revels officers were not wholly ignorant of the use of perspective, but this is also true of the machinists of the Hôtel de Bourgogne.[68] Serlio does not appear to have used curtains, as the Revels officers did, for the discovery of interior scenes, but if, on the other hand, any of the great curtains of the Revels were front curtains, these were employed at Ferrara and Rome, and we have no knowledge that they were employed at Paris. At this point the archives leave us fairly in an impasse.

It will be well to start upon a new tack and to attempt to ascertain, by an analysis of such early plays as survive, what kind of setting these can be supposed, on internal evidence, to have needed. And the first and most salient fact which emerges is that a very large number of them needed practically no setting at all. This is broadly true, with exceptions which shall be detailed, of the great group of interludes which extends over about fifty years of the sixteenth century, from the end of Henry VII’s reign or the beginning of Henry VIII’s, to a point in Elizabeth’s almost coincident with the opening of the theatres. Of these, if mere fragments[22] are neglected, there are not less than forty-five. Twenty are Henrican;[69] perhaps seven Edwardian or Marian;[70] eighteen Elizabethan.[71] Characteristically, they are morals, presenting abstract personages varied in an increasing degree with farcical types; but several are semi-morals, with a sprinkling of concrete personages, which point backwards to the miracle-plays, or forward to the romantic or historical drama. One or two are almost purely miracle-play or farce; and towards the end one or two show some traces of classical influence.[72] Subject, then, to the exceptions, the interludes—and this, as already indicated, is a fundamental point for staging—call for no changes of locality, with which, indeed, the purely abstract themes of moralities could easily dispense. The action proceeds continuously in a locality, which is either wholly undefined, or at the most vaguely defined as in London (Hickscorner), or in England (King Johan). This is referred to, both in stage-directions and in dialogue, as ‘the place’, and with such persistency as inevitably to suggest a term of art, of which the obvious derivation is from the platea of the miracle-plays.[73] It may be either an exterior or an interior place, but often it is not clearly envisaged as either. In Pardoner and Friar and possibly in Johan the Evangelist[23] it is a church; in Johan Johan it is Johan’s house. Whether interior or exterior, a door is often referred to as the means of entrance and exit for the characters.[74] In Johan Johan a door is supposed to lead to the priest’s chamber, and there is a long colloquy at the ‘chamber dore’. In exterior plays some kind of a house may be suggested in close proximity to the ‘place’. In Youth and in Four Elements the characters come and go to a tavern. The ‘place’ of Apius and Virginia is before the gate of Apius. There is no obvious necessity why these houses should have been represented by anything but a door. The properties used in the action are few and simple; a throne or other seat, a table or banquet (Johan Johan, Godly Queen Hester, King Darius), a hearth (Nature, Johan Johan), a pulpit (Johan the Evangelist), a pail (Johan Johan), a dice-board (Nice Wanton). My inference is that the setting of the interludes was nothing but the hall in which performances were given, with for properties the plenishing of that hall or such movables as could be readily carried in. Direct hints are not lacking to confirm this view. A stage-direction in Four Elements tells us that at a certain point ‘the daunsers without the hall syng’. In Impatient Poverty (242) Abundance comes in with the greeting, ‘Joye and solace be in this hall!’ All for Money (1019) uses ‘this hall’, where we should expect ‘this place’. And I think that, apart from interludes woven into the pageantry of Henry VIII’s disguising chambers, the hall contemplated was at first just the ordinary everyday hall, after dinner or supper, with the sovereigns or lords still on the dais, the tables and benches below pushed aside, and a free space left for the performers on the floor, with the screen and its convenient doors as a background and the hearth ready to hand if it was wanted to figure in the action. If I am right, the staged dais, with the sovereign on a high state in the middle of the hall, was a later development, or a method reserved for very formal entertainments.[75] The actors of the more homely interlude would have had to rub shoulders all the time with the inferior members of their audience. And so they did. In Youth (39) the principal character enters, for all the world like the St. George of a village mummers’ play, with an

[24]

In Like Will to Like the Vice brings in a knave of clubs, which he ‘offreth vnto one of the men or boyes standing by’. In King Darius (109) Iniquity, when he wants a seat, calls out

A similar and earlier example than any of these now presents itself in Fulgens and Lucres, where there is an inductive dialogue between spectators, one of whom says to another

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[25] 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][26] 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[27] 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[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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:

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[31] 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]

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[32] 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!’[33] 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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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,

and we must think of him as advancing through the wood to the gate.[102] He is amazed at a carved or printed representation of Troy, which Virgil placed in a temple of Juno, but which Marlowe probably thought of as at the gate. He meets other Trojans who have already reached the city, and they call his attention to Dido’s servitors, who ‘passe through the hall’ bearing a banquet. Evidently he is now within the city and has approached a domus representing the palace. The so-called ‘hall’ is probably an open loggia. Here Dido entertains him, and in a later scene (773) points out to him the pictures of her suitors. There is perhaps an altar in front of the palace, where Iarbas does his sacrifice (1095), and somewhere close by a pyre is made for Dido (1692). Either within or without the walls may be the grove in which Ascanius is hidden while Cupid takes his place.[103] If, as is more probable, it is without, action passes through the gate when Venus beguiles him away. It certainly does at the beginning (912, 960) and end (1085) of the hunt, and again when Aeneas first attempts flight and Anna brings him back from the sea-shore (1151, 1207).

The plays of the Lylyan school, if one may so call it, seem to me to illustrate very precisely, on the side of staging, that blend of the classical and the romantic tempers which is characteristic of the later Renaissance. The mediaeval instinct for a story, which the Elizabethans fully shared, is with difficulty accommodated to the form of an action coherent in place and time, which the Italians had established on the basis of Latin comedy. The Shakespearian romantic drama is on the point of being born. Lyly and his fellow University wits deal with the problem to the best of their ability. They widen the conception of locality, to a city and its environs instead of a street; and even then the narrative[37] sometimes proves unmanageable, and the distance from one end of the stage to the other must represent a foreshortening of leagues, or even of the crossing of an ocean. In the hands of less skilful workmen the tendency was naturally accentuated, and plays had been written, long before Lyly was sent down from Magdalen, in which the episodes of breathless adventure altogether overstepped the most elastic confines of locality. A glance at the titles of the plays presented at Court during the second decade of Elizabeth’s reign will show the extent to which themes drawn from narrative literature were already beginning to oust those of the old interlude type.[104] The new development is apparent in the contributions both of men and of boys; with this distinction, that the boys find their sources mainly in the storehouse of classical history and legend, while the men turn either to contemporary events at home and abroad, or more often to the belated and somewhat jaded versions, still dear to the Elizabethan laity, of mediaeval romance. The break-down of the Italian staging must therefore be regarded from the beginning, as in part at least a result of the reaction of popular taste upon that of the Court. The noblemen’s players came to London when the winter set in, and brought with them the pieces which had delighted bourgeois and village audiences up and down the land throughout the summer; and on the whole it proved easier for the Revels officers to adapt the stage to the plays than the plays to the stage. Nor need it be doubted that, even in so cultivated a Court as that of Elizabeth, the popular taste was not without its echoes.

Of all this wealth of forgotten play-making, only five examples survive; but they are sufficient to indicate the scenic trend.[105] Their affiliation with the earlier interludes is direct. The ‘vice’ and other moral abstractions still mingle with the concrete personages, and the proscenium is still the ‘place’.[106] The simplest setting is that of Cambyses. All is at or within sight of the Persian Court. If any domus was represented, it was the palace, to which there are departures (567, 929). Cambyses consults his council (1–125) and there is a banquet (965–1042) with a ‘boorde’, at the[38] end of which order is given to ‘take all these things away’.[107] In other episodes the Court is ‘yonder’ (732, 938); it is only necessary to suppose that they were played well away from the domus. One is in a ‘feeld so green’ (843–937), and a stage-direction tells us ‘Heere trace up and downe playing’. In another (754–842) clowns are on their way to market.[108] The only other noteworthy point is that, not for the first nor for the last time, a post upon the stage is utilized in the action.[109] Patient Grissell, on the other hand, requires two localities. The more important is Salucia (Saluzzo), where are Gautier’s mansion, Janickell’s cottage, and the house of Mother Apleyarde, a midwife (1306). The other is Bullin Lagras (Bologna), where there are two short episodes (1235–92, 1877–1900) at the house of the Countess of Pango. There can be little doubt that all the domus were staged at once. There is direct transfer of action from Gautier’s to the cottage and back again (612–34; cf. 1719, 2042, 2090). Yet there is some little distance between, for when a messenger is sent, the foreshortening of space is indicated by the stage-direction (1835), ‘Go once or twise about the Staige’.[110] Similarly, unless an ‘Exiunt’ has dropped out, there is direct transfer (1900) from Bullin Lagras to Salucia. In Orestes the problem of discrete localities is quite differently handled. The play falls into five quasi-acts of unequal length, which are situated successively at Mycenae, Crete, Mycenae, Athens, Mycenae. For all, as in Gorboduc, the same sketchy palace background might serve, with one interesting and prophetic exception. The middle episodes (538–925), at Mycenae, afford the first example of those siege scenes which the Shakespearian stage came to love. A messenger brings warning to Aegisthus and Clytemnestra of the purpose of Orestes ‘to inuade this Mycoene Citie stronge’. Aegisthus goes into the ‘realme’, to take up men, and Clytemnestra will defend the city. There is a quarrel between a soldier and a woman and the Vice sings a martial song. Then ‘Horestes entrith with his bande and marcheth about the stage’. He instructs a Herald, who advances with his trumpeter.[39] ‘Let y^e trumpet go towarde the Citie and blowe.’ Clytemnestra answers. ‘Let y^e trumpet leaue soundyng and let Harrauld speake and Clytemnestra speake ouer y^e wal.’ Summons and defiance follow, and Orestes calls on his men for an assault. ‘Go and make your liuely battel and let it be longe, eare you can win y^e Citie, and when you haue won it, let Horestes bringe out his mother by the armes, and let y^e droum sease playing and the trumpet also, when she is taken.’ But now Aegisthus is at hand. ‘Let Egistus enter and set hys men in a raye, and let the drom play tyll Horestes speaketh.’ There is more fighting, which ends with the capture and hanging of Aegisthus. ‘Fling him of y^e lader, and then let on bringe in his mother Clytemnestra; but let her loke wher Egistus hangeth’. Finally Orestes announces that ‘Enter now we wyll the citie gate’. In the two other plays the changes of locality come thick and fast. The action of Clyomon and Clamydes begins in Denmark, and passes successively to Swabia, to the Forest of Marvels on the borders of Macedonia, to the Isle of Strange Marshes twenty days’ sail from Macedonia, to the Forest again, to the Isle again, to Norway, to the Forest, to the Isle, to the Forest, to a road near Denmark, to the Isle, to Denmark. Only two domus are needed, a palace (733) in the Isle, and Bryan Sans Foy’s Castle in the Forest. This is a prison, with a practicable door and a window, from which Clamydes speaks (872). At one point Providence descends and ascends (1550–64). In one of the Forest scenes a hearse is brought in and it is still there in the next (1450, 1534), although a short Isle scene has intervened. This looks as though the two ends of the stage may have been assigned throughout to the two principal localities, the Forest and the Isle. Some care is taken to let the speakers give the audience a clue when a new locality is made use of for the first time. Afterwards the recurrence of characters whom they had already seen would help them. The Norway episode (1121) is the only one which need have much puzzled them. But Clyomon and Clamydes may have made use of a peculiar device, which becomes apparent in the stage-directions of Common Conditions. The play opens in Arabia, where first a spot near the Court and then a wood are indicated; but the latter part alternates between Phrygia, near the sea-shore, and the Isle of Marofus. No domus is necessary, and it must remain uncertain whether the wood was represented by visualized trees. It is introduced (295) with the stage-direction, ‘Here enter Sedmond with Clarisia and Condicions out of the wood’. Similarly Phrygia is introduced (478) with ‘Here entreth Galiarbus out of Phrygia’,[40] and a few lines later (510) we get ‘Here enter Lamphedon out of Phrygia’. Now it is to be noted that the episodes which follow these directions are not away from, but in the wood and Phrygia respectively; and the inference has been drawn that there were labelled doors, entrance through one of which warned the spectators that action was about to take place in the locality whose title the label bore.[111] This theory obtains some plausibility from the use of the gates Homoloydes and Electrae in Jocasta; and perhaps also from the inscribed house of the ruffiana in Serlio’s scena comica, from the early Terence engravings, and from certain examples of lettered mansions in French miracle-plays.[112] But of course these analogies do not go the whole way in support of a practice of using differently lettered entrances to help out an imagined conversion of the same ‘place’ into different localities. More direct confirmation may perhaps be derived from Sidney’s criticism of the contemporary drama in his Defence of Poesie (c. 1583). There are two passages to be cited.[113] The first forms part of an argument that poets are not liars. Their feigning is a convention, and is accepted as such by their hearers. ‘What Childe is there’, says Sidney, ‘that, comming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters vpon an olde doore, doth beleeue that it is Thebes?’ Later on he deals more formally with the stage, as a classicist, writing after the unity of place had hardened into a doctrine. Even Gorboduc is no perfect tragedy.

It is evident that the plays which Sidney has mostly in mind, the ‘al the rest’ of his antithesis with Gorboduc, are precisely those romantic histories which the noblemen’s players in particular were bringing to Court in his day, and of which Clyomon and Clamydes and Common Conditions may reasonably be taken as the characteristic débris. He hints at what we might have guessed that, where changes of scene were numerous, the actual visualization of the different scenes left much to the imagination. He lays his finger upon the foreshortening, which permits the two ends of the stage to stand for localities separated by a considerable distance, and upon the obligation which the players were under to let the opening phrases of their dialogue make it clear where they were supposed to be situated. And it certainly seems from the shorter passage, as if he was also familiar with an alternative or supplementary device of indicating locality by great letters on a door. The whole business remains rather obscure. What happened if the distinct localities were more numerous than the doors? Were the labels shifted, or were the players then driven, as Sidney seems to suggest, to rely entirely upon the method of spoken hints? The labelling of special doors with great letters must be distinguished from the analogous use of great letters, as at the Phormio of 1528, to publish the title of a play.[114] That this practice also survived in Court drama may be inferred from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, in which Hieronimo gives a Court play, and bids his assistant (IV. iii. 17) ‘hang up the Title: Our scene is Rhodes’. Even if the ‘scene’ formed part of the title in such cases, it would only name a generalized locality or localities for the play, and would not serve as a clue to the localization of individual episodes.[115][42] A retrospect over this discussion of Tudor staging, which is mainly Court staging, up to a point well subsequent to the establishment of the first regular theatres, seems to offer the following results. The earliest interludes, other than revivals of Plautus and Terence or elements in spectacular disguisings, limited themselves to the setting of the hall in which they were performed, with its doors, hearth, and furniture. In such conditions either exterior or interior action could be indifferently represented. This arrangement, however, soon ceased to satisfy, in the Court at any rate, the sixteenth-century love of decoration; and one or more houses were introduced into the background, probably on a Renaissance rather than a mediaeval suggestion, through which, as well as the undifferentiated doors, the personages could come and go. The addition of an elevated stage enabled traps to be used (All for Money, Gorboduc, Jocasta, Gismond of Salerne, Arraignment of Paris); but here, as in the corresponding device of a descent from above (Gismond of Salerne, Clyomon and Clamydes), it is the mediaeval grading for heaven and hell which lies behind the Renaissance usage. With houses in the background, the normal action becomes uniformly exterior. If a visit is paid to a house, conversation takes place at its door rather than within. The exceptions are rare and tentative, amounting to little more than the provision of a shallow recess within a house, from which personages, usually one or two only, can speak. This may be a window (Two Italian Gentlemen, Promos and Cassandra), a prison (Wit and Wisdom, Promos and Cassandra, Clyomon and Clamydes), a bower (Misogonus, Endymion, Dido, Arraignment of Paris), a tub (Campaspe), a shrine or tomb (Two Italian Gentlemen, Promos and Cassandra), a shop (Thersites, Promos and Cassandra, Campaspe, Sapho and Phao), a bedchamber (Gismund of Salerne, Tom Tyler, Sapho and Phao). Somewhat more difficulty is afforded by episodes in which there is a banquet (Mary Magdalene, Dido, Cambyses), or a law court (Conflict of Conscience), or a king confers with his councillors (Midas, Cambyses). These, according to modern notions, require the setting of a hall; but my impression is that the Italianized imagination of the Elizabethans was content[43] to accept them as taking place more or less out-of-doors, on the steps or in the cortile of a palace, with perhaps some arcaded loggia, such as Serlio suggests, in the background, which would be employed when the action was supposed to be withdrawn from the public market-place or street. And this convention I believe to have lasted well into the Shakespearian period.[116]

The simplicity of this scheme of staging is broken into, when a mediaeval survival or the popular instinct for storytelling faces the producer with a plot incapable of continuous presentation in a single locality. A mere foreshortening of the distance between houses conceived as surrounding one and the same open platea, or as dispersed in the same wood, is hardly felt as a breach of unity. But the principle is endangered, when action within a city is diversified by one or more ‘approach’ episodes, in which the edge of the stage or the steps leading up to it must stand for a road or a wood in the environs (Promos and Cassandra, Sapho and Phao, Dido). It is on the point of abandonment, when the foreshortening is carried so far that one end of the stage represents one locality and the other end another at a distance (Disobedient Child, Mary Magdalene, Endymion, Midas, Patient Grissell). And it has been abandoned altogether, when the same background or a part of it is taken to represent different localities in different episodes, and ingenuity has to be taxed to find means of informing the audience where any particular bit of action is proceeding (Gorboduc, Orestes, Clyomon and Clamydes, Common Conditions).[117]

After considering the classicist group of comedies and tragedies, I suggested that these, taken by themselves, would point to a method of staging at the Elizabethan Court not unlike that recommended by Serlio. The more comprehensive survey now completed points to some revision of that judgement. Two localities at opposite ends of the stage could not, obviously, be worked into a continuous architectural façade. They call for something more on the lines of the multiple setting of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, although the width of the Elizabethan palace halls may perhaps have accommodated[44] a longer stage than that of the Hôtel, and permitted of a less crude juxtaposition of the houses belonging to distinct localities than Mahelot offers us. Any use of perspective, for which there is some Elizabethan evidence, was presumably within the limits of one locality.[118]

The indications of the Revels Accounts, scanty as they are, are not inconsistent with those yielded by the plays.[119] If the Orestes of 1567–8, as may reasonably be supposed, was Pikeryng’s, his ‘howse’ must have been the common structure used successively for Mycenae, Crete, and Athens. The ‘Scotland and a gret Castell on thothere side’ give us the familiar arrangement for two localities. I think that the ‘city’ of the later accounts may stand for a group of houses on one street or market-place, and a ‘mountain’ or ‘wood’ for a setting tout en pastoralle. There were tents for A Game of the Cards in 1582–3, as in Jacob and Esau, a prison for The Four Sons of Fabius in 1579–80, as in several extant plays. I cannot parallel from any early survival the senate house for the Quintus Fabius of 1573–4, but this became a common type of scene at a later date. These are recessed houses, and curtains, quite distinct from the front curtain, if any, were provided by the Revels officers to open and close them, as the needs of the action required. Smaller structures, to which the accounts refer, are also needed by the plays; a well by Endymion, a gibbet by Orestes, a tree by The Arraignment of Paris, and inferentially by all pastoral, and many other plays. The brief record of 1567–8 does not specify the battlement or gated wall, solid enough for Clytemnestra to speak ‘ouer y^e wal’, which was a feature in the siege episode of Orestes. Presumably it was part of the ‘howse’, which is mentioned, and indeed it would by itself furnish sufficient background for the scenes alike at Mycenae, Crete, and Athens. If it stood alone, it probably extended along the back of the stage, where it would interfere least with the arrays of Orestes and of Aegisthus. But in the accounts of 1579–85, the plays, of which there are many, with battlements also, as a rule, have cities, and here we must suppose some situation for the battlement which will not interfere with the city. If it stood for the gate and wall of some other city, it may have been reared at an opposite end of the stage. In Dido, where the gate of Troy seems to have been shown, although there is no action ‘ouer’ it, I can visualize it best as extending across the middle of the stage from back to front. With an unchanging setting it need not[45] always have occupied the same place. The large number of plays between 1579 and 1585 which required battlements, no less than fourteen out of twenty-eight in all, is rather striking. No doubt the assault motive was beloved in the popular type of drama, of which Orestes was an early representative. A castle in a wood, where a knight is imprisoned, is assaulted in Clyomon and Clamydes, and the Shakespearian stage never wearied of the device. I have sometimes thought that with the Revels officers ‘battlement’ was a technical term for any platform provided for action at a higher level than the floor of the stage. Certainly a battlement was provided in 1585 for an entertainment which was not a play at all, but a performance of feats of activities.[120] But as a matter of fact raised action, so common in the Shakespearian period, is extremely rare in these early plays. With the exceptions of Clytemnestra peering over her wall, and the descents from heaven in Gismond of Salerne and Clyomon and Clamydes, which may of course have been through the roof rather than from a platform, the seventy or so plays just discussed contain nothing of the kind. There are, however, two plays still to be mentioned, in which use is made of a platform, and one of these gives some colour to my suggestion. In 1582 Derby’s men played Love and Fortune at Court, and a city and a battlement, together with some other structure of canvas, the name of which is left blank, were provided. This may reasonably be identified with the Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, which claims on its title-page of 1589 to have been played before the Queen. It is a piece of the romantic type. The action is divided between a court and a cave in a wood, which account for the city and the unnamed structure of the Revels record. They were evidently shown together, at opposite ends of the stage, for action passes directly from one to the other. There is no assault scene. But there is an induction, in which the gods are in assembly, and Tisiphone arises from hell. At the end of it Jupiter says to Venus and Fortune:

and Vulcan comments:

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[46] 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).

[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[48] 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[49] 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[50] 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[51] 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[52] 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]

Nothing was more beloved by a popular audience, especially in an historical play or one of the Tamburlaine order, than an episode of war. A war scene was often only a variety of the open-country scene. Armies come and go on the road, and a battle naturally takes place in more or less open ground. It may be in a wood, or a tree or river may be introduced.[139] Obviously large forces could not be shown on the stage.

[53]

The actual fighting tended to be sketchy and symbolical. There were alarums and excursions, much beating of drums and blowing of trumpets. But the stage was often only on the outskirts of the main battle.[141] It served for a duel of protagonists, or for a flight and pursuit of stragglers; and when all was over a triumphant train marched across it. There may be a succession of ‘excursions’ of this kind, in which the stage may be supposed, if you like, to stand for different parts of a battle-field.[142] Battle scenes have little need for background; the inn at St. Albans in Henry VI is an exception due to the fulfilment of an oracular prophecy.[143] A more natural indication of milieu is a tent, and battle scenes merge into camp scenes, in which the tents are sometimes elaborate pavilions, with doors and even locks to the doors. Seats and tables may be available, and the action is clearly sometimes within an opened tent.[144] Two opposing[54] camps can be concurrently represented, and action may alternate between them.[145] Another kind of background is furnished, as in Orestes, by the walls of a besieged city. On these walls the defenders can appear and parley with the besieging host. They can descend and open the gates.[146] They can shoot, and be shot at from below.[147] The walls can be taken by assault and the defenders can leap from them.[148] Such scenes had an unfailing appeal, and are sometimes repeated, before different cities, in the same play.[149]

[55]

Several scenes, analogous in some ways to those in the open country, are set in a garden, an orchard, a park. These also sometimes utilize tents.[150] Alternative shelter may be afforded by an arbour or bower, which facilitates eavesdropping.[151][56] The presence of trees, banks, or herbs is often required or suggested.[152] As a rule, the neighbourhood of a dwelling is implied, and from this personages may issue, or may hold discourse with those outside. Juliet’s balcony, overlooking Capulet’s orchard, is a typical instance.[153] A banquet may be brought out and served in the open.[154]

The next great group of scenes consists of those which pass in some public spot in a city—in a street, a market-place, or a churchyard. Especially if the play is located in[57] or near London, this may be a definite and familiar spot—Cheapside, Lombard Street, Paul’s Churchyard, Westminster.[155] Often the action is self-sufficient and the background merely suggestive or decorative. A procession passes; a watch is set; friends meet and converse; a stranger asks his way. But sometimes a structure comes into use. There is a scaffold for an execution.[156] Lists are set, and there must be at least a raised place for the judge, and probably a barrier.[157] One street scene in Soliman and Perseda is outside a tiltyard; another close to an accessible tower.[158] Bills may be set up.[159] In Lord Cromwell this is apparently done on a bridge, and twice in this play it is difficult to resist the conclusion, already[58] pointed to in certain open-country scenes, that some kind of representation of a river-side was feasible.[160] In Rome there are scenes in which the dialogue is partly amongst senators in the capitol and partly amongst citizens within ear-shot outside.[161] A street may provide a corner, again, whence passers-by can be overheard or waylaid.[162] And in it, just as well as in a garden, a lover may hold an assignation, or bring a serenade before the window of his mistress.[163] A churchyard,[59] or in a Roman play a market-place, may hold a tomb.[164] Finally one or more shops may be visible, and action may take place within them as well as before them.[165] Such a shop would, of course, be nothing more than a shallow stall, with an open front for the display of wares, which may be closed by a shutter or flap from above.[166] It may also, like the inn in Henry VI, have a sign.[167]

Where there is a window, there can of course be a door, and street scenes very readily become threshold scenes. I do not think that it has been fully realized how large a proportion[60] of the action of Elizabethan plays passes at the doors of houses; and as a result the problem of staging, difficult enough anyhow, has been rendered unnecessarily difficult. Here we have probably to thank the editors of plays, who have freely interspersed their texts with notes of locality, which are not in the original stage-directions, and, with eighteenth-century models before them, have tended to assume that action at a house is action in some room within that house. The playwrights, on the other hand, followed the neo-classic Italian tradition, and for them action at a house was most naturally action before the door of that house. If a man visited his friend he was almost certain to meet him on the doorstep; and here domestic discussions, even on matters of delicacy, commonly took place. Here too, of course, meals might be served.[168] A clue to this convention is afforded by the numerous passages in which a servant or other personage is brought on to the stage by a ‘Who’s within?’ or a call to ‘Come forth!’ or in which an episode is wound up by some such invitation as ‘Let us in!’ No doubt such phrases remain appropriate when it is merely a question of transference between an outer room and an inner; and no doubt also the point of view of the personages is sometimes deflected by that of the actors, to whom ‘in’ means ‘in the tiring-room’ and ‘out’ means ‘on the stage’.[169] But, broadly speaking, the frequency of their use points to a corresponding frequency of threshold scenes; and, where there is a doubt, they should, I think, be interpreted in the light of that economy of interior action which was very evident in the mid-sixteenth-century plays, and in my opinion continued to prevail after the opening of the theatres. The use of a house door was so frequent that the stage-directions do not, as a rule, trouble to specify it.[170] Two complications are, however, to be observed.[61] Sometimes, in a scene which employs the ‘Let us in!’ formula, or on other ground looks like a threshold scene, we are suddenly pulled up either by a suggestion of the host that we are ‘in’ his house or under his roof, or by an indication that persons outside are to be brought ‘in’.[171] The first answer is, I think, that the threshold is not always a mere doorstep opening from the street; it may be something of the nature of a porch or even a lobby, and that you may fairly be said to be under a man’s roof when you are in his porch.[172] The second is that in some threshold scenes the stage was certainly regarded as representing a courtyard, shut off from the street or road by an outer gate, through which strangers could quite properly be supposed to come ‘in’.[173] Such courtyard scenes are not out of place, even[62] before an ordinary private house; still less, of course, when the house is a castle, and in a castle courtyard scene we get very near the scenes with ‘walls’ already described.[174] Some prison scenes, in the Tower or elsewhere, are apparently of this type, although others seem to require interior action in a close chamber or even a dungeon.[175] Threshold scenes may also be before the outer gate of a palace or castle, where another analogy to assault scenes presents itself;[176] or before a church or temple, a friar’s cell, an inn, a stable, or the like.[177] Nor are shop scenes, since a shop may be a mere adjunct to a house, really different in kind.

[63]

The threshold theory must not be pushed to a disregard of the clear evidence for a certain amount of interior action. We have already come across examples of shallow recesses, such as a tent, a cave, a bower, a tomb, a shop, a window, within which, or from within which, personages can speak. There are also scenes which must be supposed to take place within a room. In dealing with these, I propose to distinguish between spacious hall scenes and limited chamber scenes. Hall scenes are especially appropriate to palaces. Full value should no doubt be given to the extension in a palace of a porch to a portico, and to the convention, which kings as well as private men follow in Elizabethan plays, especially those located in Italian or Oriental surroundings, of transacting much important business more or less out-of-doors.[178] The characteristic Roman ‘senate house’, already described, is a case in point.[179] But some scenes must be in a closed presence-chamber.[180] Others are in a formal council room or parliament house. The conception of a hall, often with a numerous company, cannot therefore be altogether excluded. Nor are halls confined to palaces. They must be assumed for law courts.[181] There are scenes in such buildings as the[64] London Exchange, Leadenhall, the Regent House at Oxford.[182] There are scenes in churches or heathen temples and in monasteries.[183] There are certainly also hall scenes in castles or private houses, and it is sometimes a matter of taste whether you assume a hall scene or a threshold scene.[184] Certain features of hall scenes may be enumerated. Personages can go into, or come forth from, an inner room. They can be brought in from without.[185] Seats are available, and a chair or ‘state’ for a sovereign.[186] A law court has its ‘bar’. Banquets can be served.[187] Masks[65] may come dancing in.[188] Even a play ‘within a play’ can be presented; that of Bottom and his fellows in ‘the great chamber’ of Theseus’ palace is an example.[189]

My final group is formed by the chamber scenes, in which the action is clearly regarded as within the limits of an ordinary room. They are far from numerous, in proportion to the total number of scenes in the seventy-three plays, and in view of their importance in relation to staging all for which there is clear evidence must be put upon record. Most of them fall under two or three sub-types, which tend to repeat themselves. The commonest are perhaps bedchamber scenes.[190] These, like prison scenes, which are also frequent,[66] give opportunity for tragic episodes of death and sickness.[191][67] There are scenes in living-rooms, often called ‘studies’.[192][68] A lady’s bower,[193] a counting-house,[194] an inn parlour,[195] a buttery,[196] a gallery,[197] may also be represented.

[69]

This then is the practical problem, which the manager of an Elizabethan theatre had to solve—the provision of settings,[70] not necessarily so elaborate or decorative as those of the Court, but at least intelligible, for open country scenes, battle and siege scenes, garden scenes, street and threshold scenes, hall scenes, chamber scenes. Like the Master of the Revels, he made far less use of interior action than the modern or even the Restoration producer of plays; but he could not altogether avoid it, either on the larger scale of a hall scene, in which a considerable number of persons had occasionally to be staged for a parliament or a council or the like, or on the smaller scale when only a few persons had to be shown in a chamber, or in the still shallower enclosure which might stand as part of a mainly out-of-doors setting for a cell, a bower, a cave, a tent, a senate house, a window, a tomb, a shop, a porch, a shrine, a niche.[198] Even more than the Master of the Revels, he had to face the complication due to the taste of an English audience for romantic or historical drama, and the changes of locality which a narrative theme inevitably involved. Not for him, except here and there in a comedy, that blessed unity of place upon which the whole dramatic art of the Italian neo-classic school had been built up. Our corresponding antiquarian problem is to reconstruct, so far as the evidence permits, the structural resources which were[71] at the Elizabethan manager’s disposal for the accomplishment of his task. As material we have the numerous indications in dialogue and stage-directions with which the footnotes to this chapter are groaning; we have such contemporary allusions as those of Dekker’s Gull’s Hornbook; we have the débris of Philip Henslowe’s business memoranda; we have the tradition inherited from the earlier Elizabethan period, for all the types of scene usual in the theatres had already made their appearance before the theatres came into existence; to a much less degree, owing to the interposition of the roofed and rectangular Caroline theatre, we have also the tradition bequeathed to the Restoration; and as almost sole graphic presentment we have that drawing of the Swan theatre by Johannes de Witt, which has already claimed a good deal of our consideration, and to which we shall have to return from time to time, as a point de repère, in the course of the forthcoming discussion. It is peculiarly unfortunate that of all the seventy-three plays, now under review, not one can be shown to have been performed at the Swan, and that the only relics of the productions at that house, the plot of England’s Joy of 1602 and Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside of 1611, stand at such a distance of time from DeWitt’s drawing as not to exclude the hypothesis of an intermediate reconstruction of its stage. One other source of information, which throws a sidelight or two upon the questions at issue, I will here deal with at more length, because it has been a good deal overlooked. The so-called ‘English Wagner Book’ of 1594, which contains the adventures of Wagner after the death of his master Faustus, although based upon a German original, is largely an independent work by an author who shows more than one sign of familiarity with the English theatre.[199] The most important of these is in chapter viii, which is headed ‘The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus seene in the Ayre, and acted in the presence of a thousand people of Wittenberg. An. 1540’. It describes, not an actual performance, but an aerial vision produced by Wagner’s magic arts for the bewilderment of an imperial pursuivant. The architecture has therefore, no doubt, its elements of fantasy. Nevertheless,[72] it is our nearest approach to a pen picture of an Elizabethan stage, whereby to eke out that of De Witt’s pencil.

The action of the play is then described. Devils issue from hell mouth and besiege the castle. Faustus appears on the battlements and defies them. Angels descend from heaven to the tower and are dismissed by Faustus. The devils assault the castle, capture Faustus and raze the tower. The great devil and all the imperial rulers of hell occupy the throne and chairs and dispute with Faustus. Finally,

The three salient features of the Swan stage, as depicted by De Witt, are, firstly the two pairs of folding doors in the back wall; secondly, the ‘heavens’ supported on posts, which give the effect of a division of the space into a covered rear[73] and an uncovered front; and thirdly, the gallery or row of boxes, which occupies the upper part of the back wall. Each of these lends itself to a good deal of comment. The two doors find abundant confirmation from numerous stage-directions, which lead up to the favourite dramatic device of bringing in personages from different points to meet in the centre of the stage. The formula which agrees most closely with the drawing is that which directs entrance ‘at one door’ and ‘at the other door’, and is of very common use.[200] But there are a great many variants, which are used, as for example in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins, with such indifference as to suggest that no variation of structure is necessarily involved.[201] Thus an equally common antithesis is that between ‘one door’ and, not ‘the other door’, but ‘an other door’.[202] Other analogous expressions are ‘one way’ and ‘at an other door’, ‘one way’ and ‘another way’, ‘at two sundry doors’, ‘at diverse doors’, ‘two ways’, ‘met by’;[203] or again, ‘at several doors’, ‘several ways’, ‘severally’.[204] There is a divergence, however, from De Witt’s indications, when we come upon terminology which suggests that more than two doors may have been available for entrances, a possibility with which the references to ‘one door’ and ‘an other’ are themselves not inconsistent. Thus in one of the 2 Seven Deadly Sins variants, after other personages have entered ‘seuerall waies’, we find ‘Gorboduk entreing in the midst between’. There are other examples of triple entrance in Fair Em, in Patient Grissell, and in The[74] Trial of Chivalry, although it is not until the seventeenth century that three doors are in so many words enumerated.[205] We get entrance ‘at every door’, however, in The Downfall of Robin Hood, and this, with other more disputable phrases, might perhaps be pressed into an argument that even three points of entrance did not exhaust the limits of practicability.[206] It should be added that, while doors are most commonly indicated as the avenue of entrance, this is not always the case. Sometimes personages are said to enter from one or other ‘end’, or ‘side’, or ‘part’ of the stage.[207] I take it that the three terms have the same meaning, and that the ‘end’ of a stage wider than its depth is what we should call its ‘side’. A few minor points about doors may be[75] noted, and the discussion of a difficulty may be deferred.[208] Some entrances were of considerable size; an animal could be ridden on and off.[209] There were practicable and fairly solid doors; in A Knack to Know an Honest Man, a door is taken off its hinges.[210] And as the doors give admittance indifferently to hall scenes and to out-of-door scenes, it is obvious that the term, as used in the stage-directions, often indicates a part of the theatrical structure rather than a feature properly belonging to a garden or woodland background.[211]

Some observations upon the heavens have already been made in an earlier chapter.[212] I feel little doubt that, while the supporting posts had primarily a structural object, and probably formed some obstacle to the free vision of the spectators, they were occasionally worked by the ingenuity of the dramatists and actors into the ‘business’ of the plays. The hints for such business are not very numerous, but they are sufficient to confirm the view that the Swan was not the only sixteenth-century theatre in which the posts existed. Thus in a street scene of Englishmen for my Money and in an open country scene of Two Angry Women of Abingdon we get episodes in which personages groping in the darkness stumble up against posts, and the second of these is particularly illuminating, because the victim utters a malediction upon the carpenter who set the post up, which a carpenter may have done upon the stage, but certainly did not do in a coney burrow.[213] In Englishmen for my Money the posts are taken for maypoles, and there are two of them. There[76] are two of them also in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, a post and ‘the contrarie post’, and to one of them a character is bound, just as Kempe tells us that pickpockets taken in a theatre were bound.[214] The binding to a post occurs also in Soliman and Perseda.[215] In James IV and in Lord Cromwell bills are set up on the stage, and for this purpose the posts would conveniently serve.[216] All these are out-of-door scenes, but there was a post in the middle of a warehouse in Every Man In his Humour, and Miles sits down by a post during one of the scenes in the conjurer’s cell in Bacon and Bungay.[217] I am not oblivious of the fact that there were doubtless other structural posts on the stage besides those of the heavens, but I do not see how they can have been so conspicuous or so well adapted to serve in the action.[218] Posts may have supported the gallery, but I find it difficult to visualize the back of the stage without supposing these to have been veiled by the hangings. But two of them may have become visible when the hangings were drawn, or some porch-like projection from the back wall may have had its posts, and one of these may be in question, at any rate in the indoor scenes.

The roof of the heavens was presumably used to facilitate certain spectacular effects, the tradition of which the public theatres inherited from the miracle-plays and the Court stage.[219] Startling atmospheric phenomena were not infrequently represented.[220] These came most naturally in out-of-door scenes, but I have noted one example in a scene which on general grounds one would classify as a hall scene.[221] The[77] illusion may not have gone much beyond a painted cloth drawn under the roof of the heavens.[222] More elaborate machinery may have been entailed by aerial ascents and descents, which were also not uncommon. Many Elizabethan actors were half acrobats, and could no doubt fly upon a wire; but there is also clear evidence for the use of a chair let down from above.[223] And was the arrangement of cords and pulleys required for this purpose also that by which the chair of state, which figures in so many hall scenes and even a few out-of-door scenes, was put into position?[224] Henslowe had a throne made in the heavens of the Rose in 1595.[225] Jonson sneered at the jubilation of boyhood over the descent of the creaking chair.[226] The device would lighten the labours of the tire-man, for a state would be an awkward thing to carry on and off. It would avoid the presence of a large incongruous property on the stage during action to which it was inappropriate. And it would often serve as a convenient[78] signal for the beginning or ending of a hall scene. But to this aspect of the matter I must return.[227] Whatever the machinery, it must have been worked in some way from the upper part of the tire-house; possibly from the somewhat obscure third floor, which De Witt’s drawing leaves to conjecture; possibly from the superstructure known as the hut, if that really stood further forward than De Witt’s drawing suggests. Perhaps the late reference to Jove leaning on his elbows in the garret, or employed to make squibs and crackers to grace the play, rather points to the former hypothesis.[228] In favour of the latter, for what it is worth, is the description, also late, of a theatre set up by the English actors under John Spencer at Regensburg in 1613. This had a lower stage for music, over that a main stage thirty feet high with a roof supported by six great pillars, and under the roof a quadrangular aperture, through which beautiful effects were contrived.[229]

There has been a general abandonment of the hypothesis, which found favour when De Witt’s drawing was first discovered, of a division of the stage into an inner and an outer part by a ‘traverse’ curtain running between the two posts, perhaps supplemented by two other curtains running from the posts back to the tire-house.[230] Certainly I do not wish to revive it. Any such arrangement would be inconsistent with the use of the tire-house doors and gallery in out-of-door scenes; for, on the hypothesis, these were played with the traverse closed. And it would entail a serious interference with the vision of such scenes by spectators sitting far round in the galleries or ‘above the stage’. It does not, of course, follow that no use at all was made of curtains upon the stage. It is true that no hangings of any kind are shown by De Witt. Either there were none visible when he drew the Swan in 1596, or, if they were visible, he failed to draw them; it is impossible to say which. We know that even the Swan was not altogether undraped in 1602, for during the riot which followed the ‘cousening prancke’ of England’s Joy in that year the audience are said to have[79] ‘revenged themselves upon the hangings, curtains, chairs, stooles, walles, and whatsoever came in their way’.[231] It is not, indeed, stated that these hangings and curtains were upon the stage, and possibly, although not very probably, they may have been in the auditorium. Apart, however, from the Swan, there is abundant evidence for the use of some kind of stage hangings in the public theatres of the sixteenth century generally. To the references in dialogue and stage-directions quoted in the footnotes to this chapter may be added the testimony of Florio in 1598, of Ben Jonson in 1601, of Heywood in 1608, and of Flecknoe after the Restoration.[232] We can go further, and point to several passages which attest a well-defined practice, clearly going back to the sixteenth century, of using black hangings for the special purpose of providing an appropriate setting for a tragedy.[233] Where then were these hangings? For a front[80] curtain, on the public stage, as distinct from the Court stage, there is no evidence whatever, and the precautions taken to remove dead bodies in the course of action enable us quite safely to leave it out of account.[234] There may have been hangings of a decorative kind in various places, of course; round the base of the stage, for example, or dependent, as Malone thought, from the heavens. But the only place where we can be sure that there were hangings was what Heywood calls the ‘fore-front’ of the stage, by which it seems clear from Florio that he means the fore-front of the tiring-house, which was at the same time the back wall of the stage. It is, I believe, exclusively to hangings in this region that our stage-directions refer. Their terminology is not quite uniform. ‘Traverse’ I do not find in a sixteenth-century public play.[235] By far the most common term is ‘curtain’, but I do not think that there is any technical difference between ‘curtain’ and the not infrequent ‘arras’ or the unique ‘veil’ of The Death of Robin Hood.[236] ‘Arras’ is the ordinary Elizabethan name for a hanging[81] of tapestry used as a wall decoration, and often projected from a frame so as to leave a narrow space, valuable to eavesdroppers and other persons in need of seclusion, between itself and the wall. The stage arras serves precisely this purpose as a background to interior scenes. Here stand the murderers in King John; here Falstaff goes to sleep in 1 Henry IV; and here too he proposes to ‘ensconce’ himself, in order to avoid being confronted with both his ladyloves together in The Merry Wives.[237]

The stage-directions, however, make it quite clear that the curtains were not merely an immovable decoration of the back wall. They could be ‘opened’ and ‘shut’ or ‘closed’; and either operation could indifferently be expressed by the term ‘drawn’. This drawing was presumably effected by sliding the curtain laterally along a straight rod to which it was affixed by rings sewn on to its upper edge; there is no sign of any rise or fall of the curtain. The operator may be an actor upon the stage; in Bacon and Bungay Friar Bacon draws the curtains ‘with a white sticke’. He may be the speaker of a prologue.[238] Whether the ‘servitours’ of a theatre ever came upon the stage, undisguised, to draw the curtains, I am uncertain; but obviously it would be quite easy to work the transformation from behind, by a cord and pulley, without any visible intervention.[239] The object of the drawing is to introduce interior action, either in a mere recess, or in a larger space, such as a chamber; and this, not only where curtains are dramatically appropriate, as within a house, or at the door of a tent, but also where they are less so, as before a cave or a forest bower. One may further accept the term ‘discovered’ as indicating the unveiling of an interior by the play of a curtain, even when the curtain is not specifically mentioned;[240] and may recognize that the stage-directions sometimes use ‘Enter’ and ‘Exit’[82] in a loose sense of persons, who do not actually move in or out, but are ‘discovered’, or covered, by a curtain.[241]

Of what nature, then, was the space so disclosed? There was ordinarily, as already stated, a narrow space behind an arras; and if the gallery above the stage jutted forward, or had, as the Swan drawing perhaps indicates, a projecting weather-board, this might be widened into a six- or seven-foot corridor, still in front of the back wall.[242] Such a corridor would, however, hardly give the effect of a chamber, although it might that of a portico. Nor would it be adequate in size to hold all the scenes which it is natural to class as chamber scenes; such, for example, as that in Tamburlaine, where no less than ten persons are discovered grouped around Zenocrate’s bed.[243] The stage-directions themselves do not help us much; that in Alphonsus alone names ‘the place behind the stage’, and as this is only required to contain the head of Mahomet, a corridor, in this particular scene, would have sufficed.[244] There is, however, no reason why the opening curtains should not have revealed a quite considerable aperture in the back wall, and an alcove or recess of quite considerable size lying behind this aperture. With a 43-foot stage, as at the Fortune, and doors placed rather nearer the ends of it than De Witt shows them, it would be possible to get a 15-foot aperture, and still leave room for the drawn curtains to hang between the aperture and the doors. Allow 3 feet for the strip of stage between arras and wall, and a back-run of 10 feet behind the wall, and you get an adequate chamber of 15 feet × 13 feet. My actual measurements are, of course, merely illustrative. There would be advantages, as regards vision, in not making the alcove too deep. The height, if the gallery over the stage ran in a line with the middle gallery for spectators, would be about 8 feet or 9 feet; rather low, I admit.[245] A critic may point out that behind the back wall of the outer stage lay the tire-house, and that the 14-foot deep framework of a theatre no greater in dimensions than the Fortune does not leave room for an inner stage in addition to the tire-house. I think the answer is that the ‘place behind the stage’ was in fact nothing but an enclave within the tire-house, that its walls consisted of nothing but screens covered with some more arras, that these were only put up when they were needed for some particular scene, and that[83] when they were up, although they extended to nearly the full depth of the tire-house, they did not occupy its full width, but left room on either side for the actors to crowd into, and for the stairs leading to the upper floors. When no interior scene had to be set, there was nothing between the tire-house and the outer stage but the curtains; and this renders quite intelligible the references quoted in an earlier chapter to actors peeping through a curtain at the audience, and to the audience ‘banding tile and pear’ against the curtains, to allure the actors forth.[246] I do not think it is necessary to assume that there was a third pair of folding doors permanently fixed in the aperture.[247] They would be big and clumsy, although no doubt they would help to keep out noise. In any case, there is not much evidence on the point. If Tarlton’s head was seen ‘the Tire-House doore and tapistrie betweene’, he may very well have gone to the end of the narrow passage behind the arras, and looked out where that was broken by one of the side-doors. No doubt, however, the aperture is the third place of entrance ‘in the midst’, which the stage-directions or action of some plays require, and which, as such, came to be regarded as a third door.[248]

I conceive, therefore, of the alcove as a space which the tire-man, behind the curtains and in close proximity to the screens and properties stored in the tire-house, can arrange as he likes, without any interruption to continuous action proceeding on the outer stage. He can put up a house-front with a door, and if needed, a porch. He can put up a shop, or for that matter, a couple of adjacent shops. He can put up the arched gates of a city or castle. These are comparatively shallow structures. But he can also take advantage of the whole depth of the space, and arrange a chamber, a cave, or a bower, furnishing it as he pleases, and adding doors at the back or side, or a back window, which would enable him to give more light, even if only borrowed light from the tire-house, to an interior scene.[249] One point, however, is rather puzzling. There are some scenes which imply entrance to a chamber, not from behind, but from the open stage in front, and by a visible door which can be knocked at or locked. Thus in Romeo and Juliet, of which all the staging is rather difficult on any hypothesis, the Friar observes Juliet coming towards his cell, and after they have discoursed[84] Juliet bids him shut the door. Here, no doubt, the Friar may have looked out and seen Juliet through a back window, and she may have entered by a back door. But in an earlier scene, where we get the stage-direction ‘Enter Nurse and knockes’, and the knocking is repeated until the Nurse is admitted to the cell, we are, I think, bound to suppose that the entry is in front, in the sight of the audience, and antecedent to the knocking.[250] Perhaps an even clearer case is in Captain Thomas Stukeley, where Stukeley’s chamber in the Temple is certainly approached from the open stage by a door at which Stukeley’s father knocks, and which is unlocked and locked again.[251] Yet how can a door be inserted in that side of a chamber which is open to the stage and the audience. Possibly it was a very conventional door set across the narrow space between the arras and the back wall[85] of the main stage, at the corner of the aperture and at right angles to its plane. The accompanying diagrams will perhaps make my notion of the inner stage clearer.

It has been suggested, by me as well as by others, that the inner stage may have been raised by a step or two above the outer stage.[252] On reflection, I now think this unlikely. There would be none too much height to spare, at any rate if the height of the alcove was determined by that of the spectators’ galleries. The only stage-direction which suggests any such arrangement is in the Death of Robin Hood, where the King sits in a chair behind the curtains, and the Queen ascends to him and descends again.[253] But even if the tire-man put up an exalted seat in this case, there need have been no permanent elevation. The missing woodcut of the Anglo-German stage at Frankfort in 1597 is said to have shown a raised inner stage;[86] but until it is recovered, it is difficult to estimate its value as testimony upon the structure of the London theatres.[254]

It must not, of course, be taken for granted that every curtain, referred to in text or stage-directions as ‘drawn’, was necessarily a back curtain disclosing an alcove. In some, although not all, of the bedchamber scenes the indications do not of themselves exclude the hypothesis of a bed standing on the open stage and the revealing of the occupant by the mere drawing of bed-curtains.[255] I do not think there is any certain example of such an arrangement in a sixteenth-century play.[256] But tents also could be closed by curtains, and the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins requires Henry VI to lie asleep in ‘A tent being plast one the stage’, while dumb-shows enter ‘at one dore’ and ‘at an other dore’.[257] However it may have been with other theatres, we cannot, on the evidence before us, assert that the Swan had an alcove at all; and if it had not, it was probably driven to provide for chamber scenes by means of some curtained structure on the stage itself.

On the other hand, it must not be supposed that every case, in which a back curtain was drawn, will have found record in the printed book of the play concerned; and when the existence of an alcove has once been established, it becomes legitimate to infer its use for various chamber and analogous scenes, to the presentation of which it would have been well adapted. But this inference, again, must not be twisted into a theory that the stage in front of the back wall served only for out-of-door scenes, and that all interior action was housed, wholly or in part, in the alcove. This is, I think, demonstrably untrue, as regards the large group of indoor scenes which I have called hall scenes. In the first place, the alcove would not have been spacious enough to be of any value for a great many of the hall scenes. You could not stage spectacular action, such as that of a coronation, a sitting of parliament, or a trial at the bar, in a box of 15 by 13 feet and only 9 feet high. A group of even so many as ten persons clustered round a bed is quite another thing. I admit the device of the so-called ‘split’ scene, by which action[87] beginning in the alcove is gradually extended so as to take the whole of the stage into its ambit.[258] This might perhaps serve for a court of justice, with the judges in the alcove, the ‘bar’ drawn across the aperture, and the prisoners brought in before it. A scene in which the arras is drawn in Sir Thomas More points to such a setting.[259] But a scene in which a royal ‘state’ is the dominating feature would be singularly ineffective if the state were wedged in under the low roof of the alcove; and if I am right in thinking that the ‘state’ normally creaked down into its position from the heavens, it would clearly land, not within the alcove, but upon the open stage in front of it. Indeed, if it could be placed into position behind a curtain, there would be no reason for bringing it from the heavens at all. Then, again, hall scenes are regularly served by two or more doors, which one certainly would not suppose from the stage-directions to be any other than the doors similarly used to approach out-of-door scenes; and they frequently end with injunctions to ‘come in’, which would be superfluous if the personages on the stage could be withdrawn from sight by the closing of the curtain. Occasionally, moreover, the gallery over the stage comes into play in a hall scene, in a way which would not be possible if the personages were disposed in the alcove, over which, of course, this gallery projected.[260] Some of these considerations tell more directly against the exclusive use of the alcove for hall scenes, than against its use in combination with the outer stage; and this combined use, where suitable, I am quite prepared to allow. But ordinarily, I think, the hall scenes were wholly on the outer stage; and this must necessarily have been the case where two rooms were employed, of which one opens out behind the other.[261]

It may be said that the main object of the curtain is to allow of the furniture and decorations of a ‘set’ scene, which is usually an interior scene, being put in place behind it, without any interruption to the continuous progress of an[88] act; and that hall scenes cannot be set properly, unless they also are behind the curtain line. I do not think that there is much in this argument. A hall scene does not require so much setting as a chamber scene. It is sufficiently furnished, at any rate over the greater part of its area, with the state and such lesser seats as can very readily be carried on during the opening speeches or during the procession by which the action is often introduced. A bar can be set up, or a banquet spread, or a sick man brought in on his chair, as part of the action itself.[262] Even an out-of-door scene, such as an execution or a duel in the lists, sometimes demands a similar adjustment;[263] it need no more give pause than the analogous devices entailed by the removal of dead bodies from where they have fallen.

I must not be taken to give any countenance to the doctrine that properties, incongruous to the particular scene that was being played, were allowed to stand on the public Elizabethan stage, and that the audience, actually or through a convention, was not disturbed by them.[264] This doctrine appears to me to rest upon misunderstandings of the evidence produced in its support, and in particular upon a failure to distinguish between the transitional methods of setting employed by Lyly and his clan, and those of the permanent theatres with which we are now concerned. The former certainly permitted of incongruities in the sense that, as the neo-classic stage strove to adapt itself to a romantic subject-matter, separate localities, with inconsistent properties, came to be set at one and the same time in different regions of the stage. But the system proved inadequate to the needs of romanticism, as popular audiences understood it; and, apart from some apparent rejuvenescence in the ‘private’ houses, with which I must deal later, it gave way, about the time of the building of the permanent theatres, to the alternative system, by which different localities were represented, not synchronously but successively, and each in its turn had full occupation of the whole field of the stage. This full occupation[89] was not, I venture to think, qualified by the presence in any scene of a property inappropriate to that scene, but retained there because it had been used for some previous, or was to be used for some coming, scene. I do not mean to say that some colourless or insignificant property, such as a bench, may not have served, without being moved, first in an indoors and then in an out-of-doors scene. But that the management of the Theatre or the Rose was so bankrupt in ingenuity that the audience had to watch a coronation through a fringe of trees or to pretend unconsciousness while the strayed lovers in a forest dodged each other round the corners of a derelict ‘state’, I, for one, see no adequate reason to believe. It is chiefly the state and the trees which have caused the trouble. But, after all, a state which has creaked down can creak up again, just as a banquet or a gallows which has been carried on can be carried off. Trees are perhaps a little more difficult. A procession of porters, each with a tree in his arms, would be a legitimate subject for the raillery of The Admirable Bashville. A special back curtain painted en pastoralle would hardly be adequate, even if there were any evidence for changes of curtain; trees were certainly sometimes practicable and therefore quasi-solid.[265] The alcove, filled with shrubs, would by itself give the illusion of a greenhouse rather than a forest; moreover, the alcove was available in forest scenes to serve as a rustic bower or cottage.[266] Probably the number of trees dispersed over the body of the stage was not great; they were a symbolical rather than a realistic setting. On the whole, I am inclined to think that, at need, trees ascended and descended through traps; and that this is not a mere conjecture is suggested by a few cases in which the ascent and descent, being part of a conjuring action, are recorded in the stage-directions.[267] One of these shows that the traps would carry not merely a tree but an arbour. The traps had, of course, other functions. Through them[90] apparitions arose and sank;[268] Jonah was spewed up from the whale’s belly;[269] and the old device of hell-mouth still kept alive a mediaeval tradition.[270] Only primitive hydraulics would have been required to make a fountain flow or a fog arise;[271] although it may perhaps be supposed that the episodes, in which personages pass to and from boats or fling themselves into a river, were performed upon the extreme edge of the stage rather than over a trap.[272] I do not find any clear case, in the public sixteenth-century theatres, of the convention apparently traceable in Lyly and Whetstone, by which the extreme edge of the stage is used for ‘approach’ scenes, as when a traveller arrives from afar, or when some episode has to be represented in the environs of a city which furnishes the principal setting.[273] And I think it would certainly be wrong to regard the main stage, apart from the alcove, as divided into an inner area covered by the heavens and an outer area, not so covered and appropriate to open-country scenes. Indeed, the notion that any substantial section of the stage appeared to the audience not to lie under the heavens is in my view an illusion due to the unskilful draughtsmanship of De Witt or his copyist. Skyey phenomena belong most naturally to open-country scenes, nor are these wholly debarred from the use of the state; and the machinery employed in both cases seems to imply the existence of a superincumbent heavens.[274]

I come finally to the interesting question of the gallery above the stage. This, in the Swan drawing, may project very slightly over the scenic wall, and is divided by short vertical columns into six small compartments, in each of which one or two occupants are sitting. They might, of course, be personages in the play; but, if so, they seem curiously dissociated from the action. They might be musicians, but they appear to include women, and there is no clear sign of musical instruments. On the whole, they have the air of spectators.[275] However this may be, let us recall[91] what has already been established in an earlier chapter, that there is conclusive evidence for some use of the space above the stage for spectators, at least until the end of the sixteenth century, and for some use of it as a music-room, at least during the seventeenth century.[276] With these uses we have to reconcile the equally clear indications that this region, or some part of it, was available when needed, throughout the whole of the period under our consideration, as a field for dramatic action. For the moment we are only concerned with the sixteenth century. A glance back over my footnotes will show many examples in which action is said to be ‘above’ or ‘aloft’, or is accompanied by the ascent or descent of personages from or to the level of the main stage. This interplay of different levels is indeed the outstanding characteristic of the Elizabethan public theatre, as compared with the other systems of stage-presentment to which it stands in relation. There are mediaeval analogies, no doubt, and one would not wish to assert categorically that no use was ever made of a balcony or a house-roof in a Greek or Roman or Italian setting. But, broadly speaking, the classical and neo-classical stage-tradition, apart from theophanies, is one of action on a single level. Even in the Elizabethan Court drama, the platform comes in late and rarely, although the constant references to ‘battlements’ in the Revels Accounts enable us to infer that, by the time when the public theatres came to be built, the case of Orestes was not an isolated one. Battlements, whatever the extension which the Revels officers came to give to the term, were primarily for the beloved siege scenes, and to the way in which siege scenes were treated in the theatres I must revert. But from two plays, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and The Woman in the Moon, both of which probably represent a late development of the Court drama, we may gather at least one other definite function of the platform, as a point of vantage from which presenters, in both cases of a divine type, may sit ‘sunning like a crow in a gutter’, and watch the evolution of their puppets on the stage below.[277] This disposition of presenters ‘aloft’ finds more than one parallel in the public theatres. The divine element is retained in The Battle of Alcazar, where Henslowe’s plot gives us, as part of the[92] direction for a dumb-show, ‘Enter aboue Nemesis’.[278] There are traces of it also in James IV and in A Looking Glass for London and England. In James IV the presenters are Bohan, a Scot, and Oberon, king of fairies. They come on the stage for an induction, at the end of which Bohan says, ‘Gang with me to the Gallery, and Ile show thee the same in action by guid fellowes of our country men’, and they ‘Exeunt’. Obviously they watch the action, for they enter again and comment upon it during act-intervals. One of their interpositions is closed with the words ‘Gow shrowd vs in our harbor’; another with ‘Lets to our sell, and sit & see the rest’.[279] In the Looking Glass we get after the first scene the direction, ‘Enters brought in by an angell Oseas the Prophet, and set downe ouer the Stage in a Throne’. Oseas is evidently a presenter; the actors ignore him, but he makes moral comments after various scenes, and at the end of Act IV comes the further direction, ‘Oseas taken away’.[280] Purely human presenters in The Taming of a Shrew are still on a raised level. Sly is removed from the main stage during the first scene of the induction. He is brought back at the beginning of the second scene, presumably above, whence he criticizes the play, for towards the end the lord bids his servants

and this is done by way of an epilogue.[281]

I do not suggest that presenters were always above; it is not so when they merely furnish the equivalent of a prologue or epilogue, but only when it is desired to keep them visible during the action, and on the other hand they must not obstruct it. Sometimes, even when their continued presence might be desirable, it has to be dispensed with, or otherwise provided for. The presenters in Soliman and Perseda come and go; those in The Spanish Tragedy sit upon the stage itself. Why? I think the answer is the same in both cases. A platform was required for other purposes. In Soliman and Perseda one scene has the outer wall of a tiltyard reached by ladders from the stage; another has a tower, from which victims are tumbled down out of sight.[282] In the Spanish[93] Tragedy, apart from some minor action ‘above’, there is the elaborate presentation of Hieronimo’s ‘play within the play’ to be provided for. This must be supposed to be part of a hall scene. It occupies, with its preparations, most of the fourth, which is the last, act; and for it the King and his train are clearly seated in an upper ‘gallerie’, while the performance takes place on the floor of the hall below, with the body of Horatio concealed behind a curtain, for revelation at the appropriate moment.[283] We are thus brought face to face with an extension on the public stage of the use of ‘above’, beyond what is entailed by the needs of sieges or of exalted presenters. Nor, of course, are the instances already cited exhaustive. The gallery overlooking a hall in the Spanish Tragedy has its parallel in the window overlooking a hall in Dr. Faustus.[284] More frequent is an external window, door, or balcony, overlooking an external scene in street or garden.[285] In these cases the action ‘above’ is generally slight. Some one appears in answer to a summons from without; an eavesdropper listens to a conversation below; a girl talks to her lover, and there may be an ascent or descent with the help of a rope-ladder or a basket. But[94] there are a few plays in which we are obliged to constitute the existence of a regular chamber scene, with several personages and perhaps furniture, set ‘above’. The second scene of the induction to the Taming of the Shrew, just cited, is already a case in point. The presenters here do not merely sit, as spectators in the lord’s room might, and listen. They move about a chamber and occupy considerable space. Scenes which similarly require the whole interior of an upper room to be visible, and not merely its balcony or window bay, are to be found in 1 Sir John Oldcastle, in Every Man In his Humour, twice in The Jew of Malta, in 2 Henry IV, and in Look About You.[286] I do not know whether I ought to add Romeo and Juliet. Certainly the love scenes, Act II, scc. i and ii, and Act III, sc. v, require Juliet’s chamber to be aloft, and in these there is no interior action entailing more than the sound of voices, followed by the appearance of the speakers over Juliet’s shoulder as she stands at the casement or on a balcony.[287] It would be natural to assume that the chamber of Act IV, sc. iii, in which Juliet drinks her potion, and sc. v, in which she is found lying on her bed, is the same, and therefore also aloft. Obviously its interior, with the bed and Juliet, must be visible to the spectators. The difficulty is that it also appears to be visible to the wedding guests and the musicians, as they enter the courtyard from without; and this could only be, if it were upon the main[95] level of the stage. If the scene stood by itself, one would undoubtedly assign it to the curtained recess behind the stage; and on the whole it is probable that on this occasion architectural consistency was sacrificed to dramatic effect, and Juliet’s chamber was placed sometimes above and sometimes below.[288] There is one other type of scene which requires elevated action, and that is the senate-house scene, as we find it in The Wounds of Civil War and in Titus Andronicus, where the Capitol clearly stands above the Forum, but is within ear-shot and of easy approach.[289]

I think we are bound to assume that some or all of this action ‘above’ took place in the gallery ‘over the stage’, where it could be readily approached from the tiring-house behind, and could be disposed with the minimum of obstruction to the vision of the auditorium. A transition from the use of this region for spectators to its use for action is afforded by the placing there of those idealized spectators, the presenters. So far as they are concerned, all that would be needed, in a house arranged like the Swan, would be to assign to them one or more, according to their number, of the rooms or compartments, into which the gallery was normally divided. One such compartment, too, would serve well for a window, and would be accepted without demur as forming part of the same ‘domus’ to which a door below, or, as in The Merchant of Venice, a penthouse set in the central aperture, gave access. To get a practicable chamber, it would be necessary to take down a partition and throw two of the compartments, probably the two central compartments, into one; but there would still be four rooms left for the lords. As a matter of fact, most upper chamber scenes, even of the sixteenth century, are of later date than the Swan drawing, and some architectural evolution, including the provision of a music-room, may already have taken place, and have been facilitated by the waning popularity of the lord’s rooms. It will be easier to survey the whole evolution of the upper stage in the next chapter.[290] For the present, let us think of the upper chamber as running back on the first floor of the tiring-house above the alcove, and reached from within by stairs behind the scenic wall, of which, if desired, the foot could perhaps be made visible within the alcove.[291] Borrowed light could be[96] given by a window at the back, from which also the occupants of the room could pretend to look out behind.[292] Internal doors could of course also be made available. A scene in The Jew of Malta requires a trap in the floor of the upper chamber, over a cauldron discovered in the alcove below.[293] The upper chamber could be fitted, like the alcove itself, with an independent curtain for discoveries.[294]

Are we to conclude that all action ‘above’ was on or behind the back line of the stage? The point upon which I feel most uncertainty is the arrangement of the battlements in the stricter sense.[295] These appear to be generally regarded as running along the whole of the back line, with the gates of the town or castle represented in the central aperture below. Some writers suggest that they occupied, not the actual space of the rooms or boxes ‘over the stage’, but a narrow balcony running in front of these.[296] I cannot satisfy myself that the Swan drawing bears out the existence of any projecting ledge adequate for the purpose. On the other hand, if all the compartments of the gallery were made available and their partitions removed, all the spectators ‘over the stage’ must have been displaced; and siege scenes are early, and numerous. I do not know that it is essential to assume that the battlements extended beyond the width of two compartments. There is some definite evidence for a position of the ‘walles’ on the scenic line, apart from the patent convenience of keeping the main stage clear for besieging armies, in Jasper Mayne’s laudation of Ben Jonson:

I am content to believe that this is where they normally stood. At the same time, it is possible that alternative arrangements were not unknown. In the Wagner Book, which must be supposed to describe a setting of a type not incredible on the public stage, we are told of a high throne,[97] presumably at the back, of hell mouth ‘at the one end of the stage’, and of an elaborate castle ‘at the other end in opposition’. This is ‘the place where in the bloudlesse skirmishes are so often perfourmed upon the stage’, and although I should not press this as meaning that the walls were always at an ‘end’ of the stage, the passage would be absurd, if they were invariably at the back.[298] Further, there is at least one extant play in which it is very difficult to envisage certain scenes with the walls at the back. This is 1 Henry VI, the Orleans scenes of which, with the leaping over the walls, and the rapid succession of action in the market-place within the town and in the field without, seem to me clearly to point to walls standing across the main stage from back to front.[299] But if so, how were such walls put into place? The imagination boggles at the notion of masons coming in to build a wall during the action, in the way in which attendants might set up a bar or a lists, or carpenters the gibbet for an execution. Bottom’s device for Pyramus and Thisbe would hardly be more grotesque. Yet the Orleans siege scenes in 1 Henry VI are by no means coincident with acts, and could not therefore be set in advance and dismantled at leisure when done with. Can the walls have been drawn forwards and backwards, with the help of some machine, through the doors or the central aperture?[300] It is not inconceivable, and possibly we have here the explanation of the ‘j whell and frame in the Sege of London’, which figures in the Admiral’s inventories. Once the possibility of a scenic structure brought on to the main stage is mooted, one begins to look for other kinds of episode in which it would be useful. This, after all, may have been the way in which a gibbet was introduced, and the Admiral’s had also ‘j frame for the heading in Black Jone’, although nothing is said of a wheel.[301] The senate houses could, I think, have been located in the gallery, but the beacon in King Leir would not look plausible there,[98] and the Admiral’s had a beacon, apparently as a detached property.[302] I am also inclined to think that a wall may occasionally have been drawn across the stage to make a close of part of it for a garden scene. In Act II of Romeo and Juliet Romeo pretty clearly comes in with his friends in some public place of the city, and then leaps a wall into an orchard, where he is lost to their sight, and finds himself under Juliet’s window. He must have a wall to leap. I mentioned Pyramus and Thisbe just above with intent, for what is Pyramus and Thisbe but a burlesque of the Romeo and Juliet motive, which would have been all the more amusing, if a somewhat conspicuous and unusual wall had been introduced into its model? Another case in point may be the ‘close walk’ before Labervele’s house in A Humorous Day’s Mirth.[303] I have allowed myself to stray into the field of conjecture.

One other possible feature of action ‘above’ must not be left out of account. The use of the gallery may have been supplemented on occasion by that of some window or balcony in the space above it, which De Witt’s drawing conceals from our view. Here may have been the ‘top’ on which La Pucelle appears in the Rouen episode of 1 Henry VI, and the towers or turrets, which are sometimes utilized or referred to in this and other plays.[304] It would be difficult to describe the central boxes of the Swan gallery as a tower.

Before any attempt is made to sum up the result of this long chapter, one other feature of sixteenth-century staging, which is often overlooked, requires discussion. In the majority of cases the background of an out-of-door scene need contain at most a single domus; and this, it is now clear, can be represented either by a light structure, such as a tent or arbour, placed temporarily upon the floor of the stage, or more usually by the scena or back wall, with its doors, its central aperture, and its upper gallery. There are, however, certain scenes in which one domus will not suffice, and two or possibly even three, must be represented. Thus, as in Richard III, there may be two hostile camps, with alternating action at tents in each of them.[305] There may also be interplay, without change of scene, between different houses in[99] one town or village. In Arden of Feversham, Arden’s house and the painter’s are set together;[306] in The Taming of A Shrew, the lord’s house and the alehouse for the induction, and Polidor’s and Alphonso’s during the main play;[307] in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, the houses of Elimine and Samethis;[308] in 1 Sir John Oldcastle, Cobham’s gate and an inn;[309] in Stukeley, Newton’s house and a chamber in the Temple;[310] in A Knack to Know an Honest Man, Lelio’s and Bristeo’s for one scene, Lelio’s and a Senator’s for another, possibly Lelio’s and Servio’s, though of this I am less sure, for a third.[311] These are the most indisputable cases; given the principle, we are at liberty to conjecture its application in other plays. Generally the houses may be supposed to be contiguous; it is not so in Stukeley, where Old Stukeley clearly walks some little distance to the Temple, and here therefore we get an example of that foreshortening of distance between two parts of a city, with which we became familiar in the arrangement of Court plays.[312] It is not the only example. In George a Greene Jenkin and the Shoemaker walk from one end to the other of Wakefield.[313] In Arden of Feversham, although this is an open-country and not an urban scene, Arden and Francklin travel some little way to Raynham Down.[314] In Dr. Faustus, so far as we can judge from the unsatisfactory text preserved, any limitation to a particular neighbourhood is abandoned, and Faustus passes without change of scene from the Emperor’s Court to his own home in Wittenberg.[315] Somewhat analogous is the curious device in Romeo and Juliet, where the maskers, after preparing[100] in the open, ‘march about the stage’, while the scene changes to the hall of Capulet, which they then enter.[316]

I think, then, it must be taken that the background of a public stage could stand at need, not merely for a single domus, but for a ‘city’. Presumably in such cases the central aperture and the gallery above it were reserved for any house in which interior action was to proceed, and for the others mere doors in the scenic wall were regarded as adequate. I do not find any sixteenth-century play which demands either interior action or action ‘above’ in more than one house.[317] But a question arises as to how, for a scene in which the scenic doors had to represent house doors, provision was made for external entrances and exits, which certainly cannot be excluded from such scenes. Possibly the answer is, although I feel very doubtful about it, that there were never more than two houses, and that therefore one door always remained available to lead on and off the main stage.[318] Possibly also entrances and exits by other avenues than the two scenic doors, which we infer from the Swan drawing, and the central aperture which we feel bound to add, are not inconceivable. We have already had some hint that three may not have been the maximum number of entrances. If the Elizabethan theatre limited itself to three, it would have been worse off than any of the early neo-classic theatres based upon Vitruvius, in which the porta regia and portae minores of the scenic wall were regularly supplemented by the viae ad forum in the versurae to right and left of the proscenium.[319] No doubt such wings could not be constructed at the Swan, where a space was left on the level of the ‘yard’ between the spectators’ galleries and the right and left edges of a narrow stage. But they would be feasible in theatres with wider stages, and the arrangement, if it existed, would make the problem of seats on the stage easier.[320] It is no more than a conjecture. It has also been suggested that the heavy[101] columns drawn by De Witt may have prevented him from showing two entrances round the extreme ends of the scenic wall, such as are perhaps indicated in some of the Terentian woodcuts of 1493.[321] Or, finally, actors might have emerged from the tiring-house into the space on the level of the yard just referred to, and thence reached the stage, as from without, by means of a short flight of steps.[322]

Working then from the Swan stage, and only departing in any essential from De Witt’s drawing by what appears to be, at any rate for theatres other than the Swan, the inevitable addition of a back curtain, we find no insuperable difficulty in accounting for the setting of all the types of scenes recognizable in sixteenth-century plays. The great majority of them, both out-of-door scenes and hall scenes, were acted on the open stage, under the heavens, with no more properties and practicable terrains than could reasonably be carried on by the actors, lowered from the heavens, raised by traps, or thrust on by frames and wheels. For more permanent background they had the scenic doors, the gallery above, the scenic curtain, and whatever the tire-man might choose to insert in the aperture, backed by an alcove within the tire-house, which the drawing of the curtain discovered. For entrances they had at least the scenic doors and aperture. The comparatively few chamber scenes were set either in the alcove or in a chamber ‘above’, formed by throwing together two compartments of the gallery. A window in a still higher story could, if necessary, be brought into play. So, with all due respect to the obscurities of the evidence, I reconstruct the facts. It will, I hope, be apparent without any elaborate demonstration that this system of public staging, as practised by Burbadge at the Theatre, by Lanman at the Curtain, by Henslowe at the Rose, and perhaps with some modifications by Langley at the Swan, is very fairly in line with the earlier sixteenth-century tradition, as we have studied it in texts in which the Court methods are paramount. This is only natural, in view of the fact that the same plays continued to be presented to the public and to the sovereign. There is the same economy of recessed action, the same conspicuous tendency to dialogue on a threshold, the same unwillingness to break the flow of an act by any deliberate pause for resetting. The public theatre gets in some ways a greater variety of dramatic situation, partly[102] owing to its free use of the open stage, instead of merely a portico, for hall scenes, partly owing to its characteristic development of action ‘above’. This, in spite of the battlements of the Revels accounts, may perhaps be a contribution of the inn-yard. The main change is, of course, the substitution for the multiple staging of the Court, with its adjacent regions for different episodes, of a principle of successive staging, by which the whole space became in turn available for each distinct scene. This was an inevitable change, as soon as the Elizabethan love for history and romance broke down the Renaissance doctrine of the unity of place; and it will not be forgotten that the beginnings of it are already clearly discernible in the later Court drama, which of course overlaps with the popular drama, itself. Incidentally the actors got elbow-room; some of the Lylyan scenes must have been very cramped. But they had to put up with a common form setting, capable only of minor modifications, and no doubt their architectural decorations and unvarying curtain were less interesting from the point of view of spectacle, than the diversity of ‘houses’ which the ingenuity and the resources of the Court architects were in a position to produce. In any case, however, economy would probably have forbidden them to enter into rivalry with the Revels Office. Whether the Elizabethan type of public stage was the invention of Burbadge, the ‘first builder of theatres’, or had already come into use in the inn-yards, is perhaps an idle subject for wonder. The only definite guess at its origin is that of Professor Creizenach, who suggests that it may have been adapted from the out-of-door stages, set up from time to time for the dramatic contests held by the Rederijker or Chambers of Rhetoric in Flanders.[323] Certainly there are common features in the division of the field of action into two levels and the use of curtained apertures both below and above. But the latest examples of the Flemish festivals were at Ghent in 1539 and at Antwerp in 1561 respectively; and it would be something of a chance if Burbadge or any other English builder had any detailed knowledge of them.[324]

[For Bibliographical Note, vide ch. xviii.]

The turn of the century is also a turning-point in the history of the public theatres. In 1599 the Chamberlain’s men built the Globe, and in 1600, not to be outdone, the Admiral’s men built upon the same model the Fortune. These remained the head-quarters of the same companies, when at the beginning of the reign of James the one became the King’s and the other the Prince’s men. Worcester’s, afterwards the Queen’s, men were content for a time with the older houses, first the Rose, then the Curtain and the Boar’s Head, but by 1605 or 1606 they were occupying the Red Bull, probably a new building, but one of which we know very little. Meanwhile the earlier Tudor fashion of plays by boys had been revived, both at Paul’s, and at the Blackfriars, where a theatre had been contrived by James Burbadge about 1596 in a chamber of the ancient priory, for the purposes of a public stage.

We cannot on a priori grounds assume that the structural arrangements of the sixteenth-century houses were merely carried into those of the seventeenth century without modification; the experience of twenty-five years’ working may well have disclosed features in the original plan of James Burbadge which were not altogether convenient or which lent themselves to further development. On the other hand, we have not got to take into account the possibility of any fundamental change or sharp breach of continuity. The introduction of a new type of stage, even if it escaped explicit record, would inevitably have left its mark both upon the dramatic construction of plays and upon the wording of their stage-directions. No such mark can be discerned. You cannot tell an early seventeenth-century play from a late sixteenth-century one on this kind of evidence alone; the handling and the conventions, the situations and the spectacular effects, remain broadly the same, and such differences as do gradually become apparent, concern rather the trend of dramatic interest than the external methods of [104]stage-presentation. Moreover, it is evident that the sixteenth-century plays did not pass wholly into disuse. From time to time they were revived, and lent themselves, perhaps with some minor adaptation, to the new boards as well as to the old. In dealing with early seventeenth-century staging, then, I will assume the general continuance of the sixteenth-century plan, and will content myself with giving some further examples of its main features, and with considering any evidence which may seem to point to specific development in one or more particular directions. And on the whole it will be convenient to concentrate now mainly upon the theatres occupied by the King’s men. For this there are various reasons. One is that the possession of Shakespeare’s plays gives them a prerogative interest in modern eyes; another that the repertories of the other companies have hardly reached us in a form which renders any very safe induction feasible.

Even in the case of the King’s men, the material is not very ample, and there are complications which make it necessary to proceed by cautious steps to somewhat tentative conclusions. The Globe was probably opened in the autumn of 1599. The first play which we can definitely locate there is Every Man Out of his Humour; but I have decided with some hesitation to treat Henry V and Much Ado about Nothing, for the purposes of these chapters, as Globe plays.[325] So far as we know, the Globe was the only theatre used by the company up to the winter of 1609, when they also came into possession of the Blackfriars. From 1609 to 1613 they used both houses, but probably the Globe was still the more important of the two, for when it was burnt in 1613 they found it worth while to rebuild it fairer than before. At some time, possibly about the end of James’s reign, the Blackfriars began to come into greater prominence, and gradually displaced the Globe as the main head-quarters of the London drama. This, however, is a development which lies outside the scope of these volumes; nor can I with advantage inquire in detail whether there were any important structural features in which the new Globe is likely to have differed from the old Globe. At the most I can only offer a suggestion for the historian of the Caroline stage to take up in his turn. In the main, therefore, we have to consider the staging of the Globe from 1599 to 1609, and of the Globe and the Blackfriars from 1609 to 1613. The plays available fall into four groups.[105] There are nineteen or twenty printed and probably produced during 1599–1609, of which, however, one or two were originally written for private theatres.[326] There are two produced and printed during 1609–12, and one preserved in manuscript from the same period.[327] There are ten probably produced during 1599–1603, but not printed before 1622 or 1623.[328] There are perhaps nine or ten produced during 1609–13, and printed at various dates from 1619 to 1634.[329] It will be seen that the first group is of much the greatest value evidentially, as well as fortunately the longest, but that it only throws light upon the Globe and not upon the Blackfriars; that the value of the second and fourth groups is discounted by our not knowing how far they reflect Globe and how far Blackfriars conditions; and that the original features of the third and fourth groups may have been modified in revivals, either at the Blackfriars or at the later Globe, before they got into print. I shall use them all, but, I hope, with discrimination.[330] I shall also use, for illustration and confirmation, rather than as direct evidence, plays from other seventeenth-century theatres. The Prince’s men were at the Fortune during the whole of the period with which we are concerned, and then on to and after the fire of 1621, and the reconstruction, possibly on new lines, of 1623. We know that its staging arrangements resembled those of the Globe, for it was provided in the builder’s contract that this should be so, and also that the stage should be ‘placed and sett’ in accordance with ‘a plott thereof drawen’. Alleyn would have saved me a great deal of trouble if he had put away this little piece of paper along with so many others. Unfortunately, the Prince’s men kept their plays very close, and only five or[106] six of our period got into print before 1623.[331] From the Queen’s men we have rather more, perhaps sixteen in all; but we do not always know whether these were given at the Red Bull or the Curtain. Nor do we know whether any structural improvements introduced at the Globe and Fortune were adopted at the Red Bull, although this is a priori not unlikely.[332] From the Swan we have only The Chaste Maid of Cheapside, and from the Hope only Bartholomew Fair.

At the Globe, then, the types of scene presented are much the same as those with which we have become familiar in the sixteenth century; the old categories of open-country scenes, battle scenes, garden scenes, street scenes, threshold scenes, hall scenes, and chamber scenes will still serve. Their relative importance alters, no doubt, as the playwrights tend more and more to concern themselves with subjects of urban life. But there are plenty of battle scenes in certain plays, much on the traditional lines, with marchings and counter-marchings, alarums for fighting ‘within’, and occasional ‘excursions’ on the field of the stage itself.[333] Practicable tents still afford a convenient camp background, and these, I think, continue to be pitched on the open boards.[334] The opposing camps of Richard III are precisely repeated in Henry V.[335] There are episodes before the ‘walls’ too, with defenders speaking from above, assaults by means of scaling ladders, and coming and going through the gates.[336] I find no example in which[107] a wall inserted on the line of the scenic curtain would not meet the needs of the situation. Pastoral scenes are also common, for the urban preoccupation has its regular reaction in the direction of pastoral. There is plenty of evidence for practicable trees, such as that on which Orlando in As You Like It hangs his love verses, and the most likely machinery for putting trees into position still seems to me to be the trap.[337] A trap, too, might bring up the bower for the play within the play of Hamlet, the pleached arbour of Much Ado about Nothing, the pulpit in the forum of Julius Caesar, the tombstone in the woods of Timon of Athens, the wayside cross of Every Man Out of his Humour, and other terrains most easily thought of as free-standing structures.[338] It would open for Ophelia’s grave, and for the still beloved ascents of spirits from the lower regions.[339] It remains difficult to see how a riverbank or the sea-shores was represented.[340] As a rule, the edge of the stage, with steps into the auditorium taken for water stairs, seems most plausible. But there is a complicated episode in The Devil’s Charter, with a conduit and a bridge over the Tiber, which I do not feel quite able to envisage.[341] There is another bridge over the Tiber for Horatius Cocles in the Red Bull play of the Rape of Lucrece. But this is easier; it is projected from the walls of Rome, and there must be a trapped cavity on the scenic line, into which Horatius leaps.[342]

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The Hope contract of 1613 provides for the heavens to be supported without the help of posts rising from the stage. For this there was a special reason at the Hope, since the stage had to be capable of removal to make room for bear-baitings. But the advantage of dispensing with the posts and the obstacle to the free vision of the spectators which they presented must have been so great, that the innovation may well have occurred to the builders of the Globe. Whether it did, I do not think that we can say. There are one or two references to posts in stage-directions, but they need not be the posts of the heavens.[343] Possibly, too, there was less use of the descending chair. One might even fancy that Jonson’s sarcasm in the prologue to Every Man In his Humour discredited it. The new type of play did not so often call for spectacular palace scenes, and perhaps some simpler and more portable kind of ‘state’ was allowed to serve the turn. There is no suggestion of a descent from the heavens in the theophanies of As You Like It and Pericles; Juno, however, descends in The Tempest.[344] This, although it has practically no change of setting, is in some ways, under the mask influence, the most spectacular performance attempted by the King’s men at Globe or Blackfriars during our period.[345] But it is far outdone by the Queen’s plays of the Golden, Silver,[109] and Brazen Ages, which, if they were really given just as Heywood printed them, must have strained the scenic resources of the Red Bull to an extreme. Here are ascents and descents and entries from every conceivable point of the stage;[346] divinities in fantastic disguise;[347] mythological dumb-shows;[348] battles and hunting episodes and revels;[349] ingenious properties, often with a melodramatic thrill;[350] and from[110] beginning to end a succession of atmospheric phenomena, which suggest that the Jacobeans had made considerable progress in the art of stage pyrotechnics.[351] The Globe, with its traditional ‘blazing star’, is left far behind.[352]

The critical points of staging are the recesses below and above. Some kind of recess on the level of the main stage is often required by the King’s plays; for action in or before a prison,[353] a cell,[354] a cave,[355] a closet,[356] a study,[357] a tomb,[358] a chapel,[359] a shop;[360] for the revelation of dead bodies or other concealed[111] sights.[361] In many cases the alcove constructed in the tiring-house behind the scenic wall would give all that is required, and occasionally a mention of the ‘curtains’ or of ‘discovery’ in a stage-direction points plainly to this arrangement. The ‘traverse’ of Webster’s plays, both for the King’s and the Queen’s men, appears, as already pointed out, to be nothing more than a terminological variant.[362] Similarly, hall scenes have still their ‘arras’ or their ‘hangings’, behind which a spy can post himself.[363] A new feature, however, now presents itself in the existence of certain scenes, including some bedchamber scenes, which entail the use of properties and would, I think, during the sixteenth century have been placed in the alcove, but now appear to have been brought forward and to occupy, like hall scenes, the main stage. The usage is by no means invariable. Even in so late a play as Cymbeline, Imogen’s chamber, with Iachimo’s trunk and the elaborate fire-places in it, must, in spite of the absence of any reference to curtains, have been disposed in the alcove; for the trunk scene is immediately followed by another before[112] the door of the same chamber, from which Imogen presently emerges.[364] But I do not think that the alcove was used for Gertrude’s closet in Hamlet, the whole of which play seems to me to be set very continuously on the outer stage.[365] Hamlet does not enter the closet direct from in front, but goes off and comes on again. A little distance is required for the vision of the Ghost, who goes out at a visible ‘portal’. When Hamlet has killed Polonius, he lugs the guts into the neighbour room, according to the ordinary device for clearing a dead body from the main stage, which is superfluous when the death has taken place in the alcove. There is an arras, behind which Polonius esconces himself, and on this, or perhaps on an inner arras disclosed by a slight parting of the ordinary one, hangs the picture of Hamlet’s father. Nor do I think, although it is difficult to be certain, that the alcove held Desdemona’s death-chamber in Othello.[366] True, there are curtains drawn here, but they may be only bed-curtains. A longish chamber, with an outer door, seems to be indicated. A good many persons, including Cassio ‘in a chaire’, have to be accommodated, and when Emilia enters, it is some time before her attention is drawn to Desdemona behind the curtains. If anything is in the alcove, it can only be just the bed itself. The best illustrations of my point, however, are to be found in The Devil’s Charter, a singular play, with full and naïve stage-directions, which perhaps betray the hand of an inexperienced writer. Much of the action takes place in the palace of Alexander Borgia at Rome. The alcove seems to be reserved for Alexander’s study. Other scenes of an intimately domestic character are staged in front, and the necessary furniture is very frankly carried on, in one case by a protagonist. This is a scene in a parlour by night, in which Lucrezia Borgia[113] murders her husband.[367] Another scene represents Lucrezia’s toilet;[368] in a third young men come in from tennis and are groomed by a barber.[369] My impression is that in the seventeenth century, instead of discovering a bedchamber in the alcove, it became the custom to secure more space and light by projecting the bed through the central aperture on to the main stage, and removing it by the same avenue when the scene was over. As to this a stage-direction in 2 Henry VI may be significant. There was a scene in 1 Contention in which the murdered body of the Duke of Gloucester is discovered in his bedchamber. This recurs in 2 Henry VI, but instead of a full direction for the drawing of curtains, the Folio has the simple note ‘Bed put forth’.[370] This is one of a group of formulas which have been the subject of some discussion.[371] I do not think that either ‘Bed put forth’ or still less ‘Bed thrust out’ can be dismissed as a mere equivalent of ‘Enter in a bed’, which may admittedly cover a parting of the curtains, or of such a warning to the tire-man as ‘Bed set out’ or ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’.[372] There is a difference between ‘setting out’ and ‘thrusting out’, for the one does and the other does not carry the notion of a push. And if ‘Bed put forth’ is rather more colourless, ‘Bed drawn out’, which also occurs, is clear enough. Unfortunately the extant text of 2 Henry VI may be of any date up to 1623, and none of the other examples of the formulas in question are direct evidence for the Globe in 1599–1613.[373] To be sure of the projected bed at so early[114] a date, we have to turn to the Red Bull, where we find it both in the Golden and the Silver Age, as well as the amateur Hector of Germany, or to the Swan, where we find it in The Chaste Maid of Cheapside.[374] The Golden Age particularly repays study. The whole of the last two acts are devoted to the episode of Jupiter and Danae. The scene is set in

Most of the action requires a courtyard, and the wall and gate of this, with a porter’s lodge and an alarm-bell, must have been given some kind of structural representation on the stage. An inner door is supposed to lead to Danae’s chamber above. It is in this chamber, presumably, that attendants enter ‘drawing out Danae’s bed’, and when ‘The bed is drawn in’, action is resumed in the courtyard below.[375]

[115]

There are chamber scenes in the King’s plays also, which are neither in the alcove nor on the main stage, but above. This is an extension of a practice already observable in pre-Globe days. Hero’s chamber in Much Ado about Nothing is above.[376] So is Celia’s in Volpone.[377] So is Falstaff’s at the Garter Inn in The Merry Wives of Windsor.[378] In all these examples, which are not exhaustive, a reasonable amount of space is required for action.[379] This is still more the case in The Yorkshire Tragedy, where the violent scene of the triple murder at Calverley Hall is clearly located upstairs.[380] Moreover, there are two plays which stage above what one would normally regard as hall rather than chamber scenes. One is Sejanus, where a break in the dialogue in the first act can best be explained by the interpretation of a scene in an upper ‘gallery’.[381] The other is Every Man Out of his Humour, where the personages go ‘up’ to the great chamber at Court.[382] Elaborate use is also made of the upper level in Antony and[116] Cleopatra, where it represents the refuge of Cleopatra upon a monument, to which Antony is heaved up for his death scene, and on which Cleopatra is afterwards surprised by Caesar’s troops.[383] But I do not agree with the suggestion that it was used in shipboard scenes, for which, as we learn from the presenter’s speeches in Pericles, the stage-manager gave up the idea of providing a realistic setting, and fell back upon an appeal to the imagination of the audience.[384] Nor do I think that it was used for the ‘platform’ at Elsinore Castle in Hamlet;[385] or, as it was in the sixteenth century, for scenes in a Capitoline senate overlooking the forum at Rome.[386] In Bonduca, if that is of our period, it was adapted for a high rock, with fugitives upon it, in a wood.[387] I do not find extensive chamber scenes ‘above’ in any King’s play later than 1609, and that may be a fact of significance to which I shall return.[388] But shallow action, at windows or in a gallery overlooking a hall or open space, continues to be frequent.[389][117] In The Devil is an Ass, which is a Blackfriars play of 1616, a little beyond the limits of our period, there is an interesting scene played out of two contiguous upper windows, supposed to be in different houses.[390]

There is other evidence to show that in the seventeenth century as in the sixteenth, the stage was not limited to the presentation of a single house only at any given moment. A multiplicity of houses would fit the needs of several plays, but perhaps the most striking instance for the Globe is afforded by The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the last act of which requires two inns on opposite sides of the stage, the signs of which have been secretly exchanged, as a trick in the working out of the plot.[391] The King’s plays do not often require any marked foreshortening of distance in journeys over the stage. Hamlet, indeed, comes in ‘a farre off’, according to a stage-direction of the Folio, but this need mean no more than at the other end of the graveyard, although Hamlet is in fact returning from a voyage.[392] In Bonduca the Roman army at one end of the stage are said to be half a furlong from the rock occupied by Caractacus, which they cannot yet see; but they go off, and their leaders subsequently emerge upon the rock from behind.[393] The old device endured at the Red Bull, but even here the flagrant example usually cited is of a very special type.[394] At the end of The Travels of the Three English Brothers, the action of[118] which ranges widely over the inhabited world, there is an appeal to imagination by Fame, the presenter, who says,

Then follow the stage-directions, ‘Enter three seuerall waies the three Brothers’, and ‘Fame giues to each a prospective glasse, they seme to see one another’. Obviously such a visionary dumb-show cannot legitimately be twisted into an argument that the concurrent representation of incongruous localities was a matter of normal staging. Such interplay of opposed houses, as we get in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, would no doubt seem more effective if we could adopt the ingenious conjecture which regards the scenic wall as not running in a straight line all the way, but broken by two angles, so that, while the central apertures below and above directly front the spectators, the doors to right and left, each with a room or window above it, are set on a bias, and more or less face each other from end to end of the stage.[395] I cannot call this more than a conjecture, for there is no direct evidence in its favour, and the Swan drawing, for what that is worth, is flatly against it. Structurally it would, I suppose, fit the round or apsidal ended Globe better than the rectangular Fortune or Blackfriars. The theory seems to have been suggested by a desire to make it possible to watch action within the alcove from a gallery on the level above. I have not, however, come across any play which can be safely assigned to a public theatre, in which just this situation presents itself, although it is common enough for persons above to watch action in a threshold or hall scene. Two windows in the same plane would, of course, fully meet the needs of The Devil is an Ass. There is, indeed, the often-quoted scene from David and Bethsabe, in which the King watches the Hittite’s wife bathing at a fountain; but the provenance of David and Bethsabe is so uncertain and its text so evidently manipulated, that it would be very temerarious to rely upon it as affording any proof of public usage.[396] On the other hand, if it is the case, as seems almost certain, that the boxes over the doors were originally the lord’s rooms, it[119] would no doubt be desirable that the occupants of those rooms should be able to see anything that went on within the alcove. I do not quite know what weight to attach to Mr. Lawrence’s analogy between the oblique doors which this theory involves and the familiar post-Restoration proscenium doors, with stage-boxes above them, at right angles to the plane of the footlights.[397] The roofed Caroline theatres, with their side-walls to the stage, and the proscenium arch, probably borrowed from the masks, have intervened, and I cannot pretend to have traced the history of theatrical structure during the Caroline period.

I have felt justified in dealing more briefly with the early seventeenth-century stages than with those of the sixteenth century, for, after all, the fundamental conditions, so far as I can judge, remained unaltered. I seem able to lay my finger upon two directions in which development took place, and both of these concern the troublesome problem of interior action. First of all there is the stage gallery. Of this I venture to reconstruct the story as follows. Its first function was to provide seating accommodation for dignified and privileged spectators, amongst whom could be placed, if occasion arose, presenters or divine agents supposed to be watching or directing the action of a play. Perhaps a differentiation took place. Parts of the gallery, above the doors at either end of the scene, were set aside as lord’s rooms. The central part, with the upper floor of the tiring-house behind it, was used for the musicians, but was also available for such scenes as could effectively be staged above, and a curtain was fitted, corresponding to that below, behind which the recess could be set as a small chamber. Either as a result of these changes or for other reasons, the lord’s rooms, about the end of the sixteenth century, lost their popularity, and it became the fashion for persons of distinction, or would-be distinction, to sit upon the stage itself instead.[398] This left additional space free above, and the architects of the Globe and Fortune took the opportunity to enlarge the accommodation for their upper scenes. Probably they left windows over the side-doors, so that the upper parts of three distinct houses could, if necessary, be represented; and it may be that spectators were not wholly excluded from these.[399] But they widened[120] the music-room, so that it could now hold larger scenes, and in fact now became an upper stage and not a mere recess. Adequate lighting from behind could probably be obtained rather more easily here than on the crowded floor below. There is an interesting allusion which I have not yet quoted, and which seems to point to an upper stage of substantial dimensions in the public theatres of about the year 1607. It is in Middleton’s Family of Love, itself a King’s Revels play.[400] Some of the characters have been to a performance, not ‘by the youths’, and there ‘saw Sampson bear the town-gates on his neck from the lower to the upper stage’. You cannot carry a pair of town-gates into a mere box, such as the Swan drawing shows.

Meanwhile, what of the alcove? I think that it proved too dark and too cramped for the convenient handling of chamber scenes, and that the tendency of the early seventeenth century was to confine its use to action which could be kept shallow, or for which obscurity was appropriate. It could still serve for a prison, or an ‘unsunned lodge’, or a chamber of horrors. For scenes requiring more light and movement it was replaced, sometimes by the more spacious upper stage, sometimes by the main stage, on to which beds and other properties were carried or ‘thrust out’, just as they had always been on a less extensive scale for hall scenes. The difficulties of shifting were, on the whole, compensated for by the greater effectiveness and visibility which action on the main scene afforded. I do not therefore think it possible to accept even such a modified version of the old ‘alternationist’ theory as I find set out in Professor Thorndike’s recent Shakespeare’s Theater. The older alternationists, starting from the principle, sound enough in itself, of continuous action within an act, assumed that all interior or other propertied scenes were played behind the curtains, and were set there while unpropertied action was played outside; and they deduced a method of dramatic construction, which required the dramatists to alternate exterior and interior scenes so as to allow time for the settings to be carried out.[401] The theory breaks down, not merely because it entails a much more constant[121] use of the curtains than the stage-directions give us any warrant for, but also because it fails to provide for the not infrequent event of a succession of interior scenes; and in its original form it is abandoned by Professor Thorndike in common with other recent scholars, who see plainly enough that what I have called hall scenes must have been given on the outer stage. I do not think that they have always grasped that the tendency of the seventeenth century was towards a decreased and not an increased reliance upon the curtained space, possibly because they have not as a rule followed the historical method in their investigations; and Professor Thorndike, although he traces the earlier employment of the alcove much as I do, treats the opening and closing of the curtains as coming in time to be used, in Antony and Cleopatra for example and in Cymbeline, as little more than a handy convention for indicating the transference of the scene from one locality to another.[402] Such a usage would not of course mean that the new scene was played wholly or even partly within the alcove itself; the change might be merely one of background. But, although I admit that there would be a convenience in Professor Thorndike’s development, I do not see that there is in fact any evidence for it. The stage-directions never mention the use of curtains in such circumstances as he has in mind; and while I am far from supposing that they need always have been mentioned, and have myself assumed their use in one scene of Cymbeline where they are not mentioned, yet mentions of them are so common in connexion with the earlier and admitted functions of the alcove, that I should have expected Professor Thorndike’s view, if it were sound, to have proved capable of confirmation from at least one unconjectural case.

The difficulty which has led Professor Thorndike to his conclusion is, however, a real one. In the absence of a scenario with notes of locality, for which certainly there is no evidence, how did the Elizabethan managers indicate to their audiences the shifts of action from one place to another? This is both a sixteenth- and a seventeenth-century problem. We have noted in a former chapter that unity of place was characteristic of the earlier Elizabethan interlude; that it failed to impose itself upon the romantic narrative plots of the popular drama; that it was departed from through the device of letting two ends of a continuously set stage stand for discrete localities; that this device proved only a transition to a system in which the whole stage stood successively for different localities;[122] and that there are hints of a convention by which the locality of each scene was indicated with the help of a label, placed over the door through which the personages in that scene made their exits and their entrances.[403] The public stage of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries experienced no re-establishment of the principle of unity; broadly speaking, it presents an extreme type of romantic drama, with an unfettered freedom of ranging from one to another of any number of localities required by a narrative plot. But the practice, or the instinct, of individual playwrights differs. Ben Jonson is naturally the man who betrays the most conscious preoccupation with the question. He is not, however, a rigid or consistent unitarian. In his two earliest plays the scene shifts from the country to a neighbouring town, and the induction to Every Man Out of his Humour is in part an apology for his own liberty, in part a criticism of the licence of others.

Sejanus is throughout in Rome, but five or six distinct houses are required, and it must be doubtful whether such a multiplicity of houses could be shown without a change of scene.[404] The prologue to Volpone claims for the author that ‘The laws of time, place, persons he obserueth’, and this has no more than four houses, all in Venice.[405] In Catiline the scenes in Rome, with some ten houses, are broken by two in open country.[406] In Bartholomew Fair a preliminary act at a London[123] house is followed by four set continuously before the three booths of the fair. Absolute unity, as distinct from the unity of a single country, or even a single town, is perhaps only attained in The Alchemist. Here everything takes place, either in a single room in Lovewit’s house in the Blackfriars, or in front of a door leading from the street into the same room. Evidently advantage was taken of the fact that the scene did not have to be changed, to build a wall containing this door out on to the stage itself, for action such as speaking through the keyhole requires both sides of the door to be practicable.[407] There is also a window from which persons approaching can be seen. Inner doors, presumably in the scenic wall, lead to a laboratory and other parts of the house, but these are not discovered, and no use is made of the upper level. Jonson here is a clear innovator, so far as the English public theatre is concerned; no other play of our period reproduces this type of permanent interior setting.

Shakespeare is no classicist; yet in some of his plays, comedies and romantic tragedies, it is, I think, possible to discern at least an instinctive feeling in the direction of scenic unity. The Comedy of Errors, with its action in the streets of Syracuse, near the mart, or before the Phoenix, the Porpentine, or the priory, follows upon the lines of its Latin model, although here, as in most of Jonson’s plays, it is possible that the various houses were shown successively rather than concurrently. Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and Measure for Measure each require a single town, with two, three, and five houses respectively; Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, each a single town, with open country environs. Love’s Labour’s Lost has the unity of a park, with perhaps a manor-house as background at one end and tents at the other; The Tempest complete pastoral unity after the opening scene on shipboard. Hamlet would all be Elsinore, but for one distant open-country scene; Romeo and Juliet all Venice, but for one scene in Mantua. In another group of plays the action is divided between two towns. It alternates from Padua to near Verona in The Taming of the Shrew, from Verona to Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, from Venice to Belmont in The Merchant of Venice; in Othello an act in Venice is followed by four in Cyprus. On the other hand, in[124] a few comedies and in the histories and historical tragedies, where Shakespeare’s sources leave him less discretion, he shifts his scenes with a readiness outdone by no other playwright. The third act of Richard II requires no less than four localities, three of which have a castle, perhaps the same castle from the stage-manager’s point of view, in the background. The second act of 1 Henry IV has as many. King John and Henry V pass lightly between England and France, All’s Well that Ends Well between France and Italy, The Winter’s Tale between Sicily and Bohemia, Cymbeline between Britain, Italy, and Wales. Quite a late play, Antony and Cleopatra, might almost be regarded as a challenge to classicists. Rome, Misenum, Athens, Actium, Syria, Egypt are the localities, with much further subdivision in the Egyptian scenes. The second act has four changes of locality, the third no less than eight, and it is noteworthy that these changes are often for quite short bits of dialogue, which no modern manager would regard as justifying a resetting of the stage. Shakespeare must surely have been in some danger, in this case, of outrunning the apprehension of his auditory, and I doubt if even Professor Thorndike’s play of curtains would have saved him.

It is to be observed also that, in Shakespeare’s plays as in those of others, no excessive pains are taken to let the changes of locality coincide with the divisions between the acts. If the second and third acts of All’s Well that Ends Well are at Paris, the fourth at Florence, and the fifth at Marseilles, yet the shift from Roussillon to Paris is in the middle and not at the end of the first act. The shift from Sicily to Bohemia is in the middle of the third act of The Winter’s Tale; the Agincourt scenes begin in the middle of the third act of Henry V. Indeed, although the poets regarded the acts as units of literary structure, the act-divisions do not appear to have been greatly stressed, at any rate on the stages of the public houses, in the actual presentation of plays.[408] I do not think that they were wholly disregarded, although the fact that they are so often unnoted in the prints of plays based on stage copies might point to that conclusion.[409] The act-interval did not necessarily denote any substantial time-interval in the action of the play, and perhaps the actors did not invariably leave the stage. Thus the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream sleep through the interval between the third and fourth acts.[410] But some sort of break in the[125] continuity of the performance is a natural inference from the fact that the act-divisions are the favourite, although not the only, points for the intervention of presenters, dumb-shows, and choruses.[411] The act-intervals cannot have been long, at any rate if the performance was to be completed in two hours. There may sometimes have been music, which would not have prevented the audience from stretching themselves and talking.[412] Short intervals, rather than none at all, are, I think, suggested by the well-known passage in the induction of The Malcontent, as altered for performance at the Globe, in which it is explained that passages have been added to the play as originally written for Revels boys, ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’.[413] Some information is perhaps to be gleaned from the ‘plots’ of plays prepared for the guidance of the book-keeper or tire-man, of which examples are preserved at Dulwich.[414] These have lines drawn across them at points which pretty clearly correspond to the beginnings of scenes, although it can hardly be assumed that each new scene meant a change of locality. The act-divisions can in some, but not all, cases be inferred from the occurrence of dumb-shows and choruses; in one, The Dead Man’s Fortune, they are definitely marked by lines of crosses, and against each such line there is the marginal note ‘musique’. Other musical directions, ‘sound’, ‘sennet’, ‘alarum’, ‘flourish’, come sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle of scenes.

We do not get any encouragement to think that a change of locality was regularly heralded by notes of music, even if this may incidentally have been the case when a procession or an army or a monarch was about to enter. Possibly the lines on the plots may signify an even slighter pause than that between the acts, such as the modern stage provides[126] with the added emphasis of a drop-curtain; but of this there is no proof, and an allusion in Catiline to action as rapid

is distinctly against it.[415] A mere clearance of the stage does not necessarily entail a change of scene, although there are one or two instances in which the exit of personages at one door, followed by their return at another, seems to constitute or accompany such a change.[416] And even if the fact of a change could be signified in one or other of these ways, the audience would still be in the dark as to what the new locality was supposed to be. Can we then assume a continuance of the old practice of indicating localities by labels over the doors? This would entail the shifting of the labels themselves during the progress of the play, at any rate if there were more localities than entrances, or if, as might usually be expected, more entrances than one were required to any locality. But there would be no difficulty about this, and in fact we have an example of the shifting of a label by a mechanical device in the introduction to Wily Beguiled.[417] This was not a public theatre play, and the label concerned was one giving the title of the play and not its locality, but similar machinery could obviously have been applied. There is not, however, much actual evidence for the use either of title-labels or of locality-labels on the public stage. The former are perhaps the more probable of the two, and the practice of posting play-bills at the theatre door and in places[127] of public resort would not render them altogether superfluous.[418] In favour of locality-labels it is possible to quote Dekker’s advice to those entering Paul’s, and also the praise given to Jonson by Jasper Mayne in Jonsonus Virbius:

These, however, are rather vague and inconclusive allusions on which to base a whole stage practice, and there is not much to be added to them from the texts and stage-directions of the plays themselves. Signs are of course used to distinguish particular taverns and shops, just as they would be in real life.[420] Occasionally, moreover, a locality is named in a stage-direction in a way that recalls Common Conditions, but this may also be explained as no more than a descriptive touch such as is not uncommon in stage-directions written by authors.[421] It is rather against the theory of labels that care is often taken, when a locality is changed, to let the personages themselves declare their whereabouts. A careful reader of such rapidly shifting plays as Edward I, James IV, The Battle of Alcazar, or King Leir will generally be able to orientate himself with the aid of the opening passages of dialogue in each new scene, and conceivably a very attentive spectator might do the same. Once the personages have got themselves grouped in the mind in relation to their localities, the recurrence of this or that group would help. It would require a rather careful examination of texts to enable one to judge how far this method of localization by dialogue[128] continues throughout our period. I have been mainly struck by it in early plays. The presenters may also give assistance, either by declaring the general scene in a prologue, or by intervening to call attention to particular shifts.[422] Thus in Dr. Faustus the original scene in Wittenberg is indicated by the chorus, a shift to Rome by speeches of Wagner and Faustus, a shift to the imperial court by the chorus, and the return to Wittenberg by a speech of Faustus.[423] Jonson makes a deliberate experiment with this method in Every Man Out of his Humour, which it is worth while following in detail. It is the Grex of presenters, Mitis and Cordatus, who serve as guides. The first act is in open country without background, and it is left to the rustic Sogliardo to describe it (543) as his lordship. A visit to Puntarvolo’s is arranged, and at the beginning of the second act Cordatus says, ‘The Scene is the countrey still, remember’ (946). Presently the stage is cleared, with the hint, ‘Here he comes, and with him Signior Deliro a merchant, at whose house hee is come to soiourne. Make your owne obseruation now; only transferre your thoughts to the Cittie with the Scene; where, suppose they speake’ (1499). The next scene then is at Deliro’s. Then, for the first scene of the third act, ‘We must desire you to presuppose the Stage, the middle Isle in Paules; and that, the West end of it’ (1918). The second scene of this act is in the open country again, with a ‘crosse’ on which Sordido hangs himself; we are left to infer it from the reappearance of the rustic characters. It is closed with ‘Let your minde keepe companie with the Scene stil, which now remoues it selfe from the Countrie to the Court’ (2555). After a scene at Court, ‘You vnderstand where the scene is?’ (2709), and presumably the entry of personages already familiar brings us back for the first scene of Act IV to Deliro’s. A visit to ‘the Notaries by the Exchange’ is planned, and for the second and third scenes the only note is of the entry of Puntarvolo and the Scrivener; probably a scrivener’s shop was discovered. Act V is introduced by ‘Let your imagination be swifter than a paire of oares, and by this, suppose Puntarvolo, Briske, Fungoso, and the Dog, arriu’d at the court gate, and going vp to the great chamber’ (3532). The action of the next scene begins in the great chamber and then shifts to the court gate again. Evidently the two localities were in some way staged together, and a guide is not[129] called upon to enlighten us. There are yet two more scenes, according to the Grex. One opens with ‘Conceiue him but to be enter’d the Mitre’ (3841), and as action shifts from the Mitre to Deliro’s and back again without further note, these two houses were probably shown together. The final scene is introduced by ‘O, this is to be imagin’d the Counter belike’ (4285). So elaborate a directory would surely render any use of labels superfluous for this particular play; but, so far as we know, the experiment was not repeated.[424]

When Cordatus points to ‘that’, and calls it the west end of Paul’s, are we to suppose that the imagination of the audience was helped out by the display of any pictorial background? It is not impossible. The central aperture, disclosed by the parting curtains, could easily hold, in place of a discovered alcove or a quasi-solid monument or rock, any kind of painted cloth which might give colour to the scene. A woodland cloth or a battlement cloth could serve for play after play, and for a special occasion something more distinctive could be attempted without undue expense. Such a back-cloth, perhaps for use in Dr. Faustus, may have been ‘the sittie of Rome’ which we find in Henslowe’s inventory of 1598.[425] And something of this kind seems to be required in 2 If You Know not Me, You Know Nobody, where the scene is before Sir Thomas Gresham’s newly completed Burse, and the personages say ‘How do you like this building?’ and ‘We are gazing here on M. Greshams work’.[426] Possibly Elizabethan imaginations were more vivid than a tradition of scene-painters allows ours to be, but that does not mean that an Elizabethan audience did not like to have its eyes tickled upon occasion. And if as a rule the stage-managers relied mainly upon garments and properties to minister to this instinct, there is no particular reason why they should not also have had recourse to so simple a device as a back-cloth. This conjecture is hardly excluded by the very general terms in which post-Restoration writers deny ‘scenes’ and all decorations other than ‘hangings’ to the earlier stage.[427] By ‘scenes’ they no doubt mean the complete settings with[130] shuttered ‘wings’ as well as back-cloths which Inigo Jones had devised for the masks and the stage had adopted. Even these were not absolutely unknown in pre-Restoration plays, and neither this fact nor the incidental use of special cloths over the central aperture would make it untrue that the normal background of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play was an arras.[428]

The discussions of the last chapter and a half have envisaged the plays presented, exclusively in open theatres until the King’s took over the Blackfriars, by professional companies of men. I must deal in conclusion, perhaps more briefly than the interest of the problem would itself justify, with those of the revived boy companies which for a time carried on such an active rivalry with the men, at Paul’s from 1599 to 1606 and at the Blackfriars from 1600 to 1609. It is, I think, a principal defect of many investigations into Jacobean staging, that the identity of the devices employed in the so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ houses has been too hastily assumed, and a uniform hypothesis built up upon material taken indifferently from both sources, without regard to the logical possibility of the considerable divergences to which varying conditions of structure and of tradition may have given rise. This is a kind of syncretism to which an inadequate respect for the historic method naturally tends. It is no doubt true that the ‘standardization’ of type, which I have accepted as likely to result from the frequent migration of companies and plays from one public house to another, may in a less degree have affected the private houses also. James Burbadge originally built the Blackfriars for public performances, and we know that Satiromastix was produced both at the Globe and at Paul’s in 1601, and that in 1604 the Revels boys and the King’s men were able to effect mutual piracies of Jeronimo and The Malcontent. Nor is there anything in the general character of the two groups of ‘public’ and ‘private’ plays, as they have come down to us, which is in any obvious way inconsistent with some measure of standardization. It is apparent, indeed, that the act-interval was of far more importance at both Paul’s and the Blackfriars than elsewhere. But this is largely a matter of degree. The inter-acts of music and song and dance were more universal and longer.[429] But[131] the relation of the acts to each other was not essentially different. The break in the representation may still correspond to practically no interval at all in the time-distribution of the play; and there are examples in which the action continues to be carried on by the personages in dumb-show, while the music is still sounding.[430] In any case this particular distinction, while it might well modify the methods of the dramatist, need only affect the economy of the tire-house in so far as it would give more time for the preparation of[132] an altered setting at the beginning of an act. When The Malcontent was taken over at the Globe, the text had to be lengthened that the music might be abridged, but there is no indication of any further alteration, due to a difficulty in adapting the original situations to the peculiarities of the Globe stage. The types of incident, again, which are familiar in public plays, reappear in the private ones; in different proportions, no doubt, since the literary interest of the dramatists and their audiences tends rather in the directions, on the one hand of definite pastoral, and on the other of courtly crime and urban humour, than in that of chronicle history. And there is a marked general analogy in the stage-directions. Here also those who leave the stage go ‘in’, and music and voices can be heard ‘within’. There are the same formulae for the use of several doors, of which one is definitely a ‘middle’ door.[431] Spirits and so forth can ‘ascend’ from under the stage by the convenient traps.[432] Possibly they can also ‘descend’ from the heavens.[433] The normal backing[133] of the stage, even in out-of-door scenes, is an arras or hanging, through which at Paul’s spectators can watch a play.[434] At the Blackfriars, while the arras, even more clearly than in the public theatres, is of a decorative rather than a realistic kind, it can also be helped out by something in the nature of perspective.[435] There is action ‘above’, and interior action, some of which is recessed or ‘discovered’. It must be added, however, that these formulae, taken by themselves, do not go very far towards determining the real character of the staging. They make their first appearance, for the most part, with the interludes in which the Court influence is paramount, and are handed down as a tradition to the public and the private plays alike. They would hardly have been sufficient, without the Swan drawing and other collateral evidence, to disclose even such a general conception of the various uses and interplay, at the Globe and elsewhere, of main stage, alcove, and gallery, as we believe ourselves to have succeeded in adumbrating. And it is quite possible that at Paul’s and the Blackfriars they may not—at any rate it must not be taken for granted without inquiry that they do—mean just the same things. Thus, to take the doors alone, we infer with the help of the Swan drawing, that in the public[134] theatres the three main entrances were in the scenic wall and on the same or nearly the same plane. But the Blackfriars was a rectangular room. We do not know that any free space was left between its walls and the sides of the stage. And it is quite conceivable that there may have been side-doors in the planes of these walls, and at right angles to the middle door. Whether this was so or not, and if so how far forward the side-doors stood, there is certainly nothing in the formulae of the stage-directions to tell us. Perhaps the most noticeable differentiation, which emerges from a comparative survey of private and public plays, is that in the main the writers of the former, unlike those of the latter, appear to be guided by the principle of unity of place; at any rate to the extent that their domus are generally located in the same town, although they may be brought for purposes of representation into closer contiguity than the actual topography of that town would suggest. There are exceptions, and the scenes in a town are occasionally broken by one or two, requiring at the most an open-country background, in the environs. The exact measure in which the principle is followed will become sufficiently evident in the sequel. My immediate point is that it was precisely the absence of unity of place which drove the public stage back upon its common form background of a curtained alcove below and a curtained gallery above, supplemented by the side-doors and later the windows above them, and convertible to the needs of various localities in the course of a single play.

Let us now proceed to the analysis, first of the Paul’s plays and then of the Chapel and Revels plays at the Blackfriars; separately, for the same caution, which forbids a hasty syncretism of the conditions of public and private houses, also warns us that divergences may conceivably have existed between those of the two private houses themselves. But here too we are faced with the fact that individual plays were sometimes transferred from one to the other, The Fawn from Blackfriars to Paul’s, and The Trick to Catch the Old One in its turn from Paul’s to Blackfriars.[436]

Seventeen plays, including the two just named and Satiromastix, which was shared with the Globe, are assigned to Paul’s by contemporary title-pages.[437] To these may be[135] added, with various degrees of plausibility, Histriomastix, What You Will, and Wily Beguiled. For Paul’s were also certainly planned, although we cannot be sure whether, or if so when, they were actually produced, the curious series of plays left in manuscript by William Percy, of which unfortunately only two have ever been published. As the company only endured for six or seven years after its revival, it seems probable that a very fair proportion of its repertory has reached us. Jack Drum’s Entertainment speaks of the ‘mustie fopperies of antiquitie’ with which the company began its career, and one of these is no doubt to be found in Histriomastix, evidently an old play, possibly of academic origin, and recently brought up to date.[438] The staging of Histriomastix would have caused no difficulty to the Revels officers, if it had been put into their hands as a Paul’s play of the ’eighties. The plot illustrates the cyclical progression of Peace, Plenty, Pride, Envy, War, Poverty, each of whom in turn occupies a throne, finally resigned to Peace, for whom in an alternative ending for Court performance is substituted Astraea, who is Elizabeth.[439] This arrangement recalls that of The Woman in the Moon, but the throne seems to have its position on the main stage rather than above. Apart from the abstractions, the whole of the action may be supposed to take place in a single provincial town, largely in an open street, sometimes in the hall of a lord called Mavortius, on occasion in or before smaller domus representing the studies of Chrisoganus, a scholar, and Fourcher, a lawyer, the shop of Velure, a merchant, a market-cross, which is discovered by a curtain, perhaps a tavern.[440] Certainly in the ’eighties these would have been disposed together around the stage, like the domus of Campaspe about the market-place at Athens.[136] And I believe that this is in fact how Histriomastix was staged, more particularly as at one point (v. 259) the action appears to pass directly from the street to the hall without a clearance. Similarly The Maid’s Metamorphosis is on strictly Lylyan lines. It is tout en pastoralle, in a wood, about whose paths the characters stray, while in various regions of it are located the cave of Somnus (II. i. 148), the cottage of Eurymine (IV. ii. 4), and a palace where ‘Phoebus appeares’ (V. ii. 25), possibly above. Wily Beguiled needs a stage of which part is a wood, and part a village hard by, with some suggestion of the doors of the houses of Gripe, Ploddall, Churms, and Mother Midnight. Somewhat less concentration is to be found in The Wisdom of Dr. Dodipoll. Here too, a space of open country, a green hill with a cave, the harbourage and a bank, is neighboured by the Court of Alphonso and the houses of Cassimere and of Flores, of which the last named is adapted for interior action.[441] All this is in Saxony, but there is also a single short scene (I. iii) of thirty-two lines, not necessarily requiring a background, in Brunswick. The plays of William Percy are still, it must be admitted, rather obscure, and one has an uneasy feeling that the manuscript may not yet have yielded up all its indications as to date and provenance. But on the assumption that the conditions contemplated are those of Paul’s in 1599–1606, we learn some curious details of structure, and are face to face with a technique which is still closely reminiscent of the ’eighties. Percy, alone of the dramatists, prefixes to his books, for the guidance of the producer, a note of the equipment required to set them forth. Thus for Cuckqueans and Cuckolds Errant he writes:

The house at Colchester is the Tarlton Inn, and here the ghost of Tarlton prologizes, ‘standing at entrance of the doore and right under the Beame’. That at Harwich is the house of Floredin, and the ladder leads to the window of his wife Arvania. Thus we have the concurrent representation of three localities, in three distinct towns of Essex. To each[137] is assigned one of three doors and, as in Common Conditions of old, entry by a particular door signifies that a scene is to take place at the locality to which it belongs.[442] One is at liberty to conjecture that the doors were nominated by labels, but Percy does not precisely say so, although he certainly provides for a title label. Journeys from one locality to another are foreshortened into a crossing of the stage.[443] For The Aphrodysial there were at least two houses, the palace of Oceanus ‘in the middle and alofte’, and Proteus Hall, where interior action takes place.[444] For The Faery Pastoral there is an elaborate note:

Having written so far, Percy is smitten with a doubt. The stage of Paul’s was a small one, and spectators sat on it. If he clutters it up like this with properties, will there be room to act at all? He has a happy thought and continues:

Whether the master of Paul’s was prepared to avail himself of this ingenious device, I do not know. There is no other reference to it, and I do not think it would be safe to assume that it was in ordinary use upon either the public or the private stage. There is no change of locality in The Faery Pastoral, which is tout en pastoralle, but besides the title label, there was a general scenic label and a special one for[138] the fairy chapel. This, which had seats on ‘degrees’ (v. 5), occupied the ‘Canopie, Fane or Trophey’, which I take to have been a discovered interior under the ‘Beame’ named in the other play, corresponding to the alcove of the public theatres. The other properties were smaller ‘practicables’ standing free on the stage, which is presumably what Percy means by ‘outward’. The arrangement must have closely resembled that of The Old Wive’s Tale. The ‘Fowen Cott’ is later described as ‘tapistred with cats and fowëns’—a gamekeeper’s larder. Some kind of action from above was possible; it may have been only from a tree.[445]

The plays so far considered seem to point to the use at Paul’s of continuous settings, even when various localities had to be shown, rather than the successive settings, with the help of common form domus, which prevailed at the contemporary Globe and Fortune. Perhaps there is rather an archaistic note about them. Let us turn to the plays written for Paul’s by more up-to-date dramatists, by Marston, Dekker and Webster, Chapman, Middleton, and Beaumont. Marston’s hand, already discernible in the revision of Histriomastix, appears to be dominant in Jack Drum’s Entertainment, although neither play was reclaimed for him in the collected edition of 1633. Unity of locality is not observed in Jack Drum. By far the greater part of the action takes place on Highgate Green, before the house of Sir Edward Fortune, with practicable windows above.[446] But there are two scenes (I. 282–428; IV. 207–56) in London, before a tavern (I. 345), which may be supposed to be also the house where Mistress Brabant lies ‘private’ in an ‘inner chamber’ (IV. 83, 211). And there are three (II. 170–246; III. 220–413; V) in an open spot, on the way to Highgate (II. 228) and near a house, whence a character emerges (III. 249, 310). It is described as ‘the crosse stile’ (IV. 338), and is evidently quite near Fortune’s house, and still on the green (V. 96, 228). This suggests to me a staging closely analogous to that of Cuckqueans and Cuckolds, with Highgate at one end of the stage, London at the other, and the cross stile between them. It is true that there is no very certain evidence of direct transference of action from one spot to another, but the use of two doors at the beginning of the first London scene is consistent, on my theory, with the fact that one entrant comes from Highgate, whither also he goes at the end of the scene, and the similar use at the beginning of the second cross-stile scene is consistent[139] with the fact that the two entrants are wildly seeking the same lady, and one may well have been in London and the other at Highgate. She herself enters from the neighbouring house; that is to say, a third, central, door. With Marston’s acknowledged plays, we reach an order of drama in which interior action of the ‘hall’ type is conspicuous.[447] There are four plays, each limited to a single Italian city, Venice or Urbino. The main action of 1 Antonio and Mellida is in the hall of the doge’s palace, chiefly on ‘the lower stage’, although ladies discourse ‘above’, and a chamber can be pointed to from the hall.[448] One short scene (V. 1–94), although near the Court, is possibly in the lodging of a courtier, but probably in the open street. And two (III. i; IV) are in open country, representing ‘the Venice marsh’, requiring no background, but approachable by more than one door.[449] The setting of 2 Antonio and Mellida is a little more complicated. There is no open-country scene. The hall recurs and is still the chief place of action. It can be entered by more than one door (V. 17, &c.) and has a ‘vault’ (II. 44) with a ‘grate’ (II. ii. 127), whence a speaker is heard ‘under the stage’ (V. 1). The scenes within it include several episodes discovered by curtains. One is at the window of Mellida’s chamber above.[450] Another, in Maria’s chamber, where the discovery is only of a bed, might be either above or below.[451] A third involves the appearance of a ghost ‘betwixt the music-houses’, probably above.[452] Concurrently, a fourth[140] facilitates a murder in a recess below.[453] Nor is the hall any longer the only interior used. Three scenes (II. 1–17; III. 1–212; IV. ii) are in an aisle (III. 128) of St. Mark’s, with a trapped grave.[454] As a character passes (ii. 17) directly from the church to the palace in the course of a speech, it is clear that the two ‘houses’, consistently with actual Venetian topography, were staged together and contiguously. The Fawn was originally produced at Blackfriars and transferred to Paul’s. I deal with it here, because of the close analogy which it presents to 1 Antonio and Mellida. It begins with an open-country scene within sight of the ‘far-appearing spires’ of Urbino. Thereafter all is within the hall of the Urbino palace. It is called a ‘presence’ (I. ii. 68), but one must conceive it as of the nature of an Italian colonnaded cortile, for there is a tree visible, up which a lover climbs to his lady’s chamber, and although both the tree and the chamber window might have occupied a bit of façade in the plane of the aperture showing the hall, they appear in fact to have been within the hall, since the lovers are later ‘discovered’ to the company there.[455] What You Will, intermediate in date between Antonio and Mellida and The Fawn, has a less concentrated setting than either of them. The principal house is Albano’s (I; III. ii; IV; V. 1–68), where there is action at the porch, within the hall, and in a discovered room behind.[456] But there are also scenes in a shop (III. ii), in Laverdure’s lodging (II. ii), probably above, and in a schoolroom (II. ii). The two latter are also discovered.[457][141] Nevertheless, I do not think that shifting scenes of the public theatre type are indicated. Albano’s house does not lend itself to public theatre methods. Act I is beneath his wife Celia’s window.[458] Similarly III. ii is before his porch. But III. iv is in his hall, whence the company go to dinner within, and here they are disclosed in V. Hence, from V. 69 onwards, they begin to pass to the street, where they presently meet the duke’s troop. I do not know of any public play in which the porch, the hall, and an inner room of a house are all represented, and my feeling is that Albano’s occupied the back corner of a stage, with the porch and window above to one side, at right angles to the plane of the hall. At any rate I do not see any definite obstacle to the hypothesis that all Marston’s plays for Paul’s had continuous settings. For What You Will the ‘little’ stage would have been rather crowded. The induction hints that it was, and perhaps that spectators were on this occasion excluded, while the presenters went behind the back curtains.

Most of the other Paul’s plays need not detain us as long as Marston’s. He has been thought to have helped in Satiromastix, but that must be regarded as substantially Dekker’s. Obviously it must have been capable of representation both at Paul’s and at the Globe. It needs the houses of Horace, Shorthose, and Vaughan, Prickshaft’s garden with a ‘bower’ in it, and the palace. Interior action is required in Horace’s study, which is discovered,[459] the presence-chamber at the palace, where a ‘chaire is set under a canopie’,[460] and Shorthose’s hall.[461] The ordinary methods at the Globe would be adequate. On the other hand, London, in spite of Horace, is the locality throughout, and at Paul’s the setting may have been continuous, just as well as in What You Will. Dekker is also the leading spirit in Westward Ho! and Northward Ho!, and in these we get, for the first time at Paul’s, plays for which a continuous setting seems quite impossible. Not only does Westward Ho! require no less than ten houses and[142] Northward Ho! seven, but also, although the greater part of both plays takes place in London, Westward Ho! has scenes at Brentford and Northward Ho! at Ware.[462] The natural conclusion is that, for these plays at least, the procedure of the public theatres was adopted. It is, of course, the combination of numerous houses and changes of locality which leads me to this conclusion. Mahelot shows us that the ‘multiple’ staging of the Hôtel de Bourgogne permitted inconsistencies of locality, but could hardly accommodate more than five, or at most six, maisons. Once given the existence of alternative methods at Paul’s, it becomes rather difficult to say which was applied in any particular case. Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois begins, like The Fawn, with an open-country scene, and thereafter uses only three houses, all in Paris; the presence-chamber at the palace (I. ii; II. i; III. ii; IV. i), Bussy’s chamber (V. iii), and Tamyra’s chamber in another house, Montsurry’s (II. ii; III. i; IV. ii; V. i, ii, iv). Both chambers are trapped for spirits to rise, and Tamyra’s has in it a ‘gulfe’, apparently screened by a ‘canopie’, which communicates with Bussy’s.[463] As the interplay of scenes in Act V requires transit through the passage from one chamber to the other, it is natural to assume an unchanged setting.[464]

The most prolific contributor to the Paul’s repertory was Middleton. His first play, Blurt Master Constable, needs five houses. They are all in Venice, and as in certain scenes more than one of them appears to be visible, they were[143] probably all set together.[465] Similarly, The Phoenix has six houses, all in Ferrara;[466] and Michaelmas Term has five houses, all in London.[467] On the other hand, although A Mad World, my Masters has only four houses,[468] and A Trick to Catch the Old One seven,[469] yet both these plays resemble Dekker’s, in that the action is divided between London and one or more places in the country; and this, so far as it goes, seems to suggest settings on public theatre lines. I do not know whether Middleton wrote The Puritan, but I think that this play clearly had a continuous setting with only four houses, in London.[470] And although Beaumont’s Woman Hater requires[144] seven houses, these are all within or hard by the palace in Milan, and action seems to pass freely from one to another.[471]

The evidence available does not dispose one to dogmatism. But this is the general impression which I get of the history of the Paul’s staging. When the performances were revived in 1599, the master had, as in the days before Lyly took the boys to Blackfriars, to make the best of a room originally designed for choir-practices. This was circular, and only had space for a comparatively small stage. At the back of this, entrance was given by a curtained recess, corresponding to the alcove of the public theatres, and known at Paul’s as the ‘canopy’.[472] Above the canopy was a beam, which bore the post of the music-tree. On this post was a small stand, perhaps for the conductor of the music, and on each side of it was a music-house, forming a gallery,[473] which could represent a window or balcony. There were at least two other doors, either beneath the music-houses or at right angles to these, off the sides of the stage. The master began with continuous settings on the earlier sixteenth-century court model, using the doors and galleries as far as he could to represent houses, and supplementing these by temporary structures; and this plan fitted in with the general literary trend of his typical dramatists, especially Marston, to unity of locality. But in time the romantic element proved too much for him, and when he wanted to enlist the services of writers of the popular school, such as Dekker, he had to compromise. It may be that some structural change was carried out during the enforced suspension of performances in 1603. I do not think that there is any Paul’s play of earlier date which could not have been given in the old-fashioned manner. In any event, the increased number of houses and the not infrequent shiftings of locality from town to country, which are apparent in the Jacobean plays, seem to me, taken together, to be more than can be accounted for[145] on a theory of clumsy foreshortening, and to imply the adoption, either generally or occasionally, of some such principle of convertible houses, as was already in full swing upon the public stage.[474]

I do not think that the history of the Blackfriars was materially different from that of Paul’s. There are in all twenty-four plays to be considered; an Elizabethan group of seven produced by the Children of the Chapel, and a Jacobean group of seventeen produced by the successive incarnations of the Revels company.[475] Structural alterations during 1603 are here less probable, for the house only dated from Burbadge’s enterprise of 1596. Burbadge is said to have intended a ‘public’ theatre, and it may be argued on a priori grounds that he would have planned for the type of staging familiar to him at the Theatre and subsequently elaborated at the Globe. The actual character of the plays does not, however, bear out this view. Like Paul’s, the Blackfriars relied at first in part upon revivals. One was Love’s Metamorphosis, already produced by Lyly under Court conditions with the earlier Paul’s boys, and tout en pastoralle.[476] Another, or if not, quite an archaistic play, was Liberality and Prodigality, the abstract plot of which only needs an equally abstract scene, with a ‘bower’ for Fortune, holding a throne and scaleable by a ladder (30, 290, 903, 932, 953), another ‘bower’ for Virtue (132), an inn (47, 192, 370), and a high seat for a judge with his clerks beneath him (1245).[477] The two new playwrights may reasonably be supposed to have conformed to the traditional methods. Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels has a preliminary act of open country, by the Fountain of Self-Love, in Gargaphia. The rest is all at the Gargaphian palace, either in the presence, or in an ante-chamber thereto, perhaps before a curtain, or for one or two scenes in the[146] nymphs’ chamber (IV. i-v), and in or before the chamber of Asotus (III. v).[478] Poetaster is all at Rome, within and before the palace, the houses of Albius and Lupus, and the chamber of Ovid.[479] There is certainly no need for any shifting of scenes so far. Nor does Chapman demand it. Sir Giles Goosecap, except for one open-country scene, has only two houses, which are demonstrably contiguous and used together.[480] The Gentleman Usher has only two houses, supposed to be at a little distance from each other, and entailing a slight foreshortening, if they were placed at opposite ends of the stage.[481] All Fools adopts the Italian convention of action in an open city space before three houses.[482]

To the Jacobean repertory not less than nine writers contributed. Chapman still takes the lead with three more comedies and two tragedies of his own. In the comedies he tends somewhat to increase the number of his houses, although without any change of general locality. M. d’Olive has five houses.[483][147] May Day has four.[484] The Widow’s Tears has four.[485] But in all cases there is a good deal of interplay of action between one house and another, and all the probabilities are in favour of continuous setting. The tragedies are perhaps another matter. The houses are still not numerous; but the action is in each play divided between two localities. The Conspiracy of Byron is partly at Paris and partly at Brussels; the Tragedy of Byron partly at Paris and partly at Dijon.[486] Jonson’s Case is Altered has one open-country scene (V. iv) near Milan. The other scenes require two houses within the city. One is Farneze’s palace, with a cortile where servants come and go, and a colonnade affording a private ‘walk’ for his daughters (II. iii; IV. i). Hard by, and probably in Italian fashion forming part of the structure of the palace itself, is the cobbler’s shop of Farneze’s retainer, Juniper.[487] Near, too, is the house of Jaques, with a little walled backside, and a tree in it.[488] A link with Paul’s is provided by three Blackfriars plays from Marston. Of these, the Malcontent is in his characteristic Italian manner. There is a short hunting scene (III. ii) in the middle of the play. For nearly all the rest the scene is the ‘great chamber’ in the palace at Genoa, with a door to the apartment of the duchess at the back (II. i. 1) and the chamber of Malevole visible above.[489] Part[148] of the last act, however, is before the citadel of Genoa, from which the action passes direct to the palace.[490] The Dutch Courtesan is a London comedy with four houses, of the same type as What You Will, but less crowded.[491] In the tragedy of Sophonisba, on the other hand, we come for the first time at Blackfriars to a piece which seems hopelessly unamenable to continuous setting. It recalls the structure of such early public plays as the Battle of Alcazar. ‘The scene is Libya’, the prologue tells us. We get the camps of Massinissa (II. ii), Asdrubal (II. iii), and Scipio (III. ii; V. iv). We get a battle-field with a ‘mount’ and a ‘throne’ in it (V. ii). We get the forest of Belos, with a cave’s mouth (IV. i). The city scenes are divided between Carthage and Cirta. At Carthage there is a council-chamber (II. i) and also the chamber of Sophonisba (I. ii), where her bed is ‘discovered’.[492] At Cirta there is the similar chamber of Syphax (III. i; IV. ii) with a trapped altar.[493] A curious bit of continuous action, difficult to envisage, comprehends this and the forest at the junction of Acts IV and V. From a vault within it, a passage leads to the cave. Down this, in III. i, Sophonisba descends, followed by Syphax. A camp scene intervenes, and at the beginning of IV Sophonisba emerges in the forest, is overtaken by Syphax, and sent back to Cirta. Then Syphax remembers that ‘in this desert’ lives the witch Erichtho. She enters, and promises to charm Sophonisba to his bed. Quite suddenly, and without any Exit or other indication of a change of locality, we are back in the chamber at Cirta. Music sounds within ‘the canopy’ and ‘above’. Erichtho, disguised as Sophonisba, enters the canopy, as to bed. Syphax[149] follows, and only discovers his misadventure at the beginning of Act V.[494] Even if the play was staged as a whole on public theatre methods, it is difficult not to suppose that the two entrances to the cave, at Cirta and in the forest, were shown together. It is to be added that, in a note to the print, Marston apologizes for ‘the fashion of the entrances’ on the ground that the play was ‘presented by youths and after the fashion of the private stage’. Somewhat exceptional also is the arrangement of Eastward Ho!, in which Chapman, Jonson, and Marston collaborated. The first three acts, taken by themselves, are easy enough. They need four houses in London. The most important is Touchstone’s shop, which is ‘discovered’.[495] The others are the exteriors of Sir Petronel’s house and Security’s house, with a window or balcony above, and a room in the Blue Anchor tavern at Billingsgate.[496] But throughout most of Act IV the whole stage seems to be devoted to a complicated action, for which only one of these houses, the Blue Anchor, is required. A place above the stage represents Cuckold’s Haven, on the Surrey side of the Thames near Rotherhithe, where stood a pole bearing a pair of ox-horns, to which butchers did a folk-observance. Hither climbs Slitgut, and describes the wreck of a boat in the river beneath him.[497] It is the boat in which an elopement was planned from the Blue Anchor in Act III. Slitgut sees[150] passengers landed successively ‘even just under me’, and then at St. Katharine’s, Wapping, and the Isle of Dogs. These are three places on the north bank, all to the east of Billingsgate and on the other side of the Tower, but as each rescue is described, the passengers enter the stage, and go off again. Evidently a wild foreshortening is deliberately involved. Now, although the print obscures the fact, must begin a new scene.[498] A night has passed, and Winifred, who landed at St. Katharine’s, returns to the stage, and is now before the Blue Anchor.[499] From IV. ii onwards the setting is normal again, with three houses, of which one is Touchstone’s. But the others are now the exterior of the Counter and of the lodging of Gertrude. One must conclude that in this play the Blackfriars management was trying an experiment, and made complete, or nearly complete, changes of setting, at the end of Act III and again after IV. i. Touchstone’s, which was discovered, could be covered again. The other houses, except the tavern, were represented by mere doors or windows, and gave no trouble. The tavern, the introduction of which in the early acts already entailed foreshortening, was allowed to stand for IV. i, and was then removed, while Touchstone’s was discovered again.

Middleton’s tendency to multiply his houses is noticeable, as at Paul’s, in Your Five Gallants. There are eight, in London, with an open-country scene in Combe Park (III. ii, iii), and one cannot be confident of continuous setting.[500] But a group of new writers, enlisted at Blackfriars in Jacobean days, conform well enough to the old traditions of the house. Daniel’s Philotas has the abstract stage characteristic of the closet tragedies to the type of which it really belongs. Any Renaissance façade would do; at most a hall in the court and the lodging of Philotas need be distinguished. Day’s Isle of Gulls is tout en pastoralle.[501] His Law Tricks has[151] only four houses, in Genoa.[502] Sharpham’s Fleir, after a prelude at Florence, which needs no house, has anything from three to six in London.[503] Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, again, is tout en pastoralle.[504] Finally, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is, in the strict sense, an exception which proves the rule. Its shifts of locality are part of the burlesque, in which the popular plays are taken off for the amusement of the select audience of the Blackfriars. Its legitimate houses are only two, Venturewell’s shop and Merrithought’s dwelling, hard by one another.[505] But the adventures of the prentice heroes take them not only over down and through forest to Waltham, where the Bell Inn must serve for a knightly castle, and the barber’s shop for Barbaroso’s cave, but also to the court of Moldavia, although the players regret that they cannot oblige the Citizen’s Wife by showing a house covered with black velvet and a king’s daughter standing in her window all in beaten gold, combing her golden locks with a comb of ivory.[506] What visible parody of public stage methods heightened the fun, it is of course impossible to say.

I do not propose to follow the Queen’s Revels to the Whitefriars, or to attempt any investigation into the characteristics of that house. It was occupied by the King’s Revels before the Queen’s Revels, and probably the Lady Elizabeth’s[152] joined the Queen’s Revels there at a later date. But the number of plays which can definitely be assigned to it is clearly too small to form the basis of any satisfactory induction.[507] So far as the Blackfriars is concerned, my conclusion must be much the same as for Paul’s—that, when plays began in 1600, the Chapel revived the methods of staging with which their predecessors had been familiar during the hey-day of the Court drama under Lyly; that these methods held their own in the competition with the public theatres, and were handed on to the Queen’s Revels; but that in course of time they were sometimes variegated by the introduction, for one reason or another, of some measure of scene-shifting in individual plays. This reason may have been the nature of the plot in Sophonisba, the desire to experiment in Eastward Ho!, the restlessness of the dramatist in Your Five Gallants, the spirit of raillery in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Whether Chapman’s tragedies involved scene-shifting, I am not quite sure. The analogy of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where a continuous setting was not inconsistent with the use of widely distant localities, must always be kept in mind. On the other hand, what did not appear absurd in Paris, might have appeared absurd in London, where the practice of the public theatres had taught the spectators to expect a higher degree of consistency. I am far from claiming that my theory of the survival of continuous setting at Paul’s and the Blackfriars has been demonstrated. Very possibly the matter is not capable of demonstration. Many, perhaps most, of the plays could be produced, if need be, by alternative methods. It is really on taking them in the mass that I cannot resist the feeling that ‘the fashion of the private stage’, as Marston called it, was something different from the fashion of the public stage. The technique of the dramatists corresponds to the structural conditions. An increased respect for unity of place is not the only factor, although it is the most important. An unnecessary multiplicity of houses is, except by Dekker and Middleton, avoided. Sometimes one or two suffice. There is much more interior action than in the popular plays. One hall or chamber scene can follow upon[153] another more freely. A house may be used for a scene which would seem absurdly short if the setting were altered for it. More doors are perhaps available, so that some can be spared for entrance behind the houses. There is more coming and going between one house and another, although I have made it clear that even the public stage was not limited to one house at a time.[508] One point is, I think, quite demonstrable. Marston has a reference to ‘the lower stage’ at Paul’s, but neither at Paul’s nor at the Blackfriars was there an upper stage capable of holding the action of a complete scene, such as we found at the sixteenth-century theatres, and apparently on a still larger scale at the Globe and the Fortune. A review of my notes will show that, although there is action ‘above’ in many private house plays, it is generally a very slight action, amounting to little more than the use by one or two persons of a window or balcony. Bedchamber scenes or tavern scenes are provided for below; the public theatre, as often as not, put them above.[509] I may recall, in confirmation, that the importance of the upper stage in the plays of the King’s men sensibly diminishes after their occupation of the Blackfriars.[510]

There are enigmas still to be solved, and I fear insoluble. Were the continuous settings of the type which we find in Serlio, with the unity of a consistent architectural picture, or of the type which we find at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, with independent and sometimes incongruous juxtaposed mansions? The taste of the dramatists for Italian cities and the frequent recurrence of buildings which fit so well into a Serliesque scheme as the tavern, the shop, the house of the ruffiana or courtesan, may tempt one’s imagination towards the former. But Serlio does not seem to contemplate much interior action, and although the convention of a half out-of-doors cortile or loggia may help to get over this difficulty, the often crowded presences and the masks seem to call for an arrangement by which each mansion can at need become in its turn the background to the whole of the stage and attach to itself all the external doors. How were the open-country scenes managed, which we have noticed in several plays, as a prelude, or even an interruption, to the strict[154] unity of place?[511] Were these merely played on the edge of the stage, or are we to assume a curtain, cutting off the background of houses, and perhaps painted with an open-country or other appropriate perspective? And what use, if any, can we suppose to have been made of title or locality labels? The latter would not have had much point where the locality was unchanged; but Envy calls out ‘Rome’ three times in the prologue to the Poetaster, as if she saw it written up in three places. Percy may more naturally use them in Cuckqueans and Cuckolds, on a stage which represents a foreshortening of the distance between three distinct towns. Title-labels seem fairly probable. Cynthia’s Revels and The Knight of the Burning Pestle bear testimony to them at the Blackfriars; Wily Beguiled perhaps at Paul’s.[512] And if the prologues none the less thought it necessary to announce ‘The scene is Libya’, or ‘The scene Gargaphia, which I do vehemently suspect for some fustian country’, why, we must remember that there were many, even in a select Elizabethan audience, that could not hope to be saved by their book.

A historian of the stage owes so much of his material to the printed copies of plays, with their title-pages, their prefatory epistles, and their stage-directions, that he can hardly be dispensed from giving some account of the process by which plays got into print. Otherwise I should have been abundantly content to have left the subject with a reference to the researches of others, and notably of that accomplished bibliographer, my friend Mr. A. W. Pollard, to whom in any event the debt of these pages must be great. The earliest attempts to control the book-trade are of the nature of commercial restrictions, and concern themselves with the regulation of alien craftsmanship.[513] But when Tudor policy had to deal with expressions of political and religious opinion, and in particular when the interlude as well as the pamphlet, not without encouragement from Cranmer and Cromwell, became an instrument of ecclesiastical controversy, it was not long before the State found itself committed to the methods of a literary censorship. We have already followed in detail the phases of the control to which the spoken play was subjected.[514] The story of the printed play was closely analogous; and in both cases the ultimate term of the evolution, so far as our period is concerned, was the establishment of the authority of the Master of the Revels. The[159] printing and selling of plays, however, was of course only one fragment of the general business of book-production. Censorship was applied to many kinds of books, and was also in practice closely bound up with the logically distinct problem of copyright. This to the Elizabethan mind was a principle debarring one publisher from producing and selling a book in which another member of his trade had already a vested interest. The conception of a copyright vested in the author as distinct from the publisher of a book had as yet hardly emerged.

The earliest essay in censorship in fact took the form of an extension of the procedure, under which protection had for some time past been given to the copyright in individual books through the issue of a royal privilege forbidding their republication by any other than the privileged owner or printer.[515] Three proclamations of Henry VIII against heretical or seditious books, in 1529, 1530, and 1536, were followed in 1538 by a fourth, which forbade the printing of any English book except with a licence given ‘upon examination made by some of his gracis priuie counsayle, or other suche as his highnes shall appoynte’, and further directed that a book so licensed should not bear the words ‘Cum priuilegio regali’ without the addition of ‘ad imprimendum solum’, and that ‘the hole copie, or els at the least theffect of his licence and priuilege be therwith printed’.[516] The intention was apparently to distinguish between a merely regulative privilege or licence to print, and the older and fuller type of privilege which also conveyed a protection of copyright. Finally, in 1546, a fifth proclamation laid down that every ‘Englishe boke, balet or playe’ must bear the names of the printer and author and the ‘daye of the printe’, and that an advance copy must be placed in the hands of the local mayor two days before publication.[517] It is not quite[160] clear whether these requirements were intended to replace, or merely to reinforce, that of a licence. Henry’s proclamations lost their validity upon his death in 1547, but the policy of licensing was continued by his successors. Under Edward VI we get, first a Privy Council order of 1549, directing that all English books printed or sold should be examined and allowed by ‘M^r Secretary Peter, M^r Secretary Smith and M^r Cicill, or the one of them’, and secondly a proclamation of 1551, requiring allowance ‘by his maiestie, or his priuie counsayl in writing signed with his maiesties most gratious hand or the handes of sixe of his sayd priuie counsayl’.[518] Mary in her turn, though with a different emphasis on the kind of opinion to be suppressed, issued three proclamations against heretical books in 1553, 1555, and 1558, and in the first of these limited printers to books for which they had ‘her graces speciall licence in writynge’.[519] It is noteworthy that both in 1551 and in 1553 the printing and the playing of interludes were put upon exactly the same footing.

Mary, however, took another step of the first importance for the further history of publishing, by the grant on 4 May 1557 a charter of incorporation to the London Company of Stationers.[520] This was an old organization, traceable as far back as 1404.[521] By the sixteenth century it had come to include the printers who manufactured, as well as the stationers who sold, books; and many, although not all of its members, exercised both avocations. No doubt the issue of the charter had its origin in mixed motives. The stationers wanted the status and the powers of economic regulation within their trade which it conferred; the Government wanted the aid of the stationers in establishing a more effective control over the printed promulgation of inconvenient doctrines. This preoccupation is clearly manifested in the preamble to the charter, with its assertion that ‘seueral seditious and heretical books’ are ‘daily published’; and the objects of both parties were met by a provision that ‘no person shall practise or exercise the art or mystery of printing or stamping any book unless the same person is, or shall be,[161] one of the society of the foresaid mystery of a stationer of the city aforesaid, or has for that purpose obtained our licence’. This practically freed the associated stationers from any danger of outside competition, and it immensely simplified the task of the heresy hunters by enlisting the help of the Company against the establishment of printing-presses by any but well-known and responsible craftsmen. Registration is always half-way towards regulation. The charter did not, however, dispense, even for the members of the Company, with the requirement of a licence; nor did it give the Company any specific functions in connexion with the issue of licences, and although Elizabeth confirmed her sister’s grant on 10 November 1559, she had already, in the course of the ecclesiastical settlement earlier in the year, taken steps to provide for the continuance of the old system, and specifically laid it down that the administration of the Company was to be subordinate thereto. The licensing authority rested ultimately upon the Act of Supremacy, by which the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction for the ‘reformation, order, and correction’ of all ‘errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offences, contempts, and enormities’ was annexed to the Crown, and the Crown was authorized to exercise its jurisdiction through the agency of a commission appointed under letters patent.[522] This Act received the royal assent on 8 May 1559, together with the Act of Uniformity which established the Book of Common Prayer, and made it an offence ‘in any interludes, plays, songs, rhymes, or by other open words’ to ‘declare or speak anything in the derogation, depraving, or despising’ of that book.[523] In the course of June followed a body of Injunctions, intended as a code of ecclesiastical discipline to be promulgated at a series of diocesan visitations held by commissioners under the Act of Supremacy. One of these Injunctions is directly concerned with the abuses of printers of books.[524] It begins by forbidding any book or paper to be printed without an express written licence either from the Queen herself or from six of the Privy Council, or after perusal from two persons being either the Archbishop of Canterbury or York, the Bishop of London, the Chancellor of Oxford or Cambridge, or the Bishop or Archdeacon for the place of printing. One of the two must always be the Ordinary, and the names of the licensers are to be ‘added in the end’ of every book. This seems sufficiently to cover the ground, but the Injunction goes on to make a special reference to ‘pamphlets, plays and ballads’, from which anything[162] ‘heretical, seditious, or unseemly for Christian ears’ ought to be excluded; and for these it prescribes a licence from ‘such her majesty’s commissioners, or three of them, as be appointed in the city of London to hear and determine divers causes ecclesiastical’. These commissioners are also to punish breaches of the Injunction, and to take and notify an order as to the prohibition or permission of ‘all other books of matters of religion or policy, or governance’. An exemption is granted for books ordinarily used in universities or schools. The Master and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company are ‘straitly’ commanded to be obedient to the Injunction. The commission here referred to was not one of those entrusted with the diocesan visitations, but a more permanent body sitting in London itself, which came to be known as the High Commission. The reference to it in the Injunction reads like an afterthought, but as the principal members of this commission were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, there is not so much inconsistency between the two forms of procedure laid down as might at first sight appear. The High Commission was not in fact yet in existence when the Injunctions were issued, but it was constituted under a patent of 19 July 1559, and was renewed from time to time by fresh patents throughout the reign.[525] The original members, other than the two prelates, were chiefly Privy Councillors, Masters of Requests, and other lawyers. The size of the body was considerably increased by later patents, and a number of divines were added. The patent of 1559 conferred upon the commissioners a general power to exercise the royal jurisdiction in matters ecclesiastical. It does not repeat in terms the provisions for the ‘allowing’ of books contained in the Injunctions, but merely recites that ‘divers seditious books’ have been set forth, and empowers the commissioners to inquire into them.

The Injunctions and the Commission must be taken as embodying the official machinery for the licensing of books up to the time of the well-known Star Chamber order of 1586, although the continued anxiety of the government in the matter is shown by a series of proclamations and orders which suggest that no absolutely effective method of suppressing undesirable publications had as yet been attained.[526][163] Mr. Pollard, who regards the procedure contemplated by the Injunctions as ‘impossible’, believes that in practice the Stationers’ Company, in ordinary cases, itself acted as a licensing authority.[527] Certainly this is the testimony, as regards the period 1576–86, of a note of Sir John Lambe, Dean of the Arches, in 1636, which is based wholly or in part upon information derived from Felix Kingston, then Master of the Company.[528] Kingston added the detail that in the case of a divinity book of importance the opinion of theological experts was taken. Mr. Pollard expresses a doubt whether Lambe or Kingston had much evidence before them other than the registers of the Company which are still extant, and to these we are in a position to turn for confirmation or qualification of their statements.[529] Unfortunately, the ordinances or constitutions under which the master and wardens acted from the time of the incorporation have not been preserved, and any additions made to these by the Court of Assistants before the Restoration have not been printed.[530] We have some revised ordinances of 1678–82, and these help us by recording as of ‘ancient usage’ a practice of entering all publications, other than those under letters patent, in ‘the register-book of this company’.[531][164] It is in fact this register, incorporated from 1557 to 1571 in the annual accounts of the wardens and kept from 1576 onwards as a subsidiary book by the clerk, which furnishes our principal material. During 1557–71 the entries for each year are collected under a general heading, which takes various forms. In 1557–8 it is ‘The entrynge of all such copyes as be lycensed to be prynted by the master and wardyns of the mystery of stacioners’; in 1558–9 simply ‘Lycense for pryntinge’; in 1559–60, for which year the entries are mixed up with others, ‘Receptes for fynes, graunting of coppyes and other thynges’; in 1560–1 ‘For takynge of fynes for coppyes’. This formula lasts until 1565–6, when ‘The entrynge of coopyes’ takes its place. The wording of the individual entries also varies during the period, but generally it indicates the receipt of a money payment in return for a license.[532] In a very few cases, by no means always of divinity books, the licence is said to be ‘by’, or the licence or perhaps the book itself, to be ‘authorized’ or ‘allowed’ or ‘perused’ or ‘appointed’ by the Bishop of London; still more rarely by the Archbishop of Canterbury or by both prelates; once by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York; once by the Council.[533]

[165]

Richard Collins, on his appointment as Clerk of the Company in 1575, records that one of his duties was to enter ‘lycences for pryntinge of copies’ and one section of his register is accordingly devoted to this purpose.[534] It has no general heading, but the summary accounts of the wardens up to 1596 continue to refer to the receipts as ‘for licencinge of copies’.[535] The character of the individual entries between 1576 and 1586 is much as in the account books. The name of a stationer is given in the margin and is followed by some such formula as ‘Receyved of him for his licence to prynte’ or more briefly ‘Lycenced vnto him’, with the title of the book, any supplementary information which the clerk thought relevant, and a note of the payment made. Occasional alternatives are ‘Allowed’, ‘Admitted’, ‘Graunted’ or ‘Tolerated’ ‘vnto him’, of which the three first appear to have been regarded as especially appropriate to transfers of existing copyrights;[536] and towards the end of the period appears the more important variant ‘Allowed vnto him for his copie’.[537] References to external authorizers gradually become rather more frequent, although they are still the exception and not the rule; the function is fulfilled, not only by the bishop, the archbishop, or the Council, but also upon occasion by the Lord Chancellor or the Secretary, by individual Privy Councillors, by the Lord Mayor, the Recorder or the Remembrancer of the City, and by certain masters and doctors, who may be the ministers mentioned by Felix Kingston, and who probably held regular deputations from a proper ecclesiastical authority as ‘correctors’ to the printers.[538] It is certain that such a post was held in 1571 by one Talbot, a servant of the Archbishop of Canterbury. On the other hand the clerk, at first tentatively and then as a matter of[166] regular practice, begins to record the part taken by the master and wardens. The first example is a very explicit entry, in which the book is said to be ‘licensed to be printed’ by the archbishop and ‘alowed’ by the master and a warden.[539] But the formula which becomes normal does not dwell on any differentiation of functions, and merely states the licence as being ‘under the hands of’ the wardens or of one of them or the master, or of these and of some one who may be presumed to be an external corrector. To the precise significance of ‘under the hands of’ I must return. Increased caution with regard to dangerous books is also borne witness to during this period by the occasional issue of a qualified licence. In 1580 Richard Jones has to sign his name in the register to a promise ‘to bring the whole impression’ of The Labyrinth of Liberty ‘into the Hall in case it be disliked when it is printed’.[540] In 1583 the same stationer undertakes ‘to print of his own perill’.[541] In 1584 it is a play which is thus brought into question, Lyly’s Sapho and Phao, and Thomas Cadman gets no more than ‘yt is graunted vnto him yat yf he gett ye commedie of Sappho laufully alowed vnto him, then none of this cumpanie shall interrupt him to enjoye yt’. Other entries direct that lawful authority must be obtained before printing, and in one case there is a specific reference to the royal Injunctions.[542] Conditions of other kinds are also sometimes found in entries; a book must be printed at a particular press, or the licence is to be voided if it prove to be another man’s copy.[543] The caution of the Stationers may have been motived by dissatisfaction on the part of the government which finally took shape in the issue of the Star Chamber order of 23 June 1586. This was a result of the firmer policy towards Puritan indiscipline initiated by Whitgift and the new High Commission which he procured on his succession to the primacy in 1583.[544] It had two main[167] objects. One, with which we are not immediately concerned, was to limit the number of printers and their presses; the other, to concentrate the censorship of all ordinary books, including plays, in the hands of the archbishop and the bishop. It is not clear whether the prelates were to act in their ordinary capacity or as High Commissioners; anyhow they had the authority of the High Commission, itself backed by the Privy Council, behind them. The effect of the order is shown in a bustle amongst the publishers to get on to the register a number of ballads and other trifles which they had hitherto neglected to enter, and in a considerable increase in the submissions of books for approval, either to the prelates themselves, or to persons who are now clearly acting as ecclesiastical deputies.[545] On 30 June 1588 an official list of deputies was issued by the archbishop, and amongst these were several who had already authorized books before and after 1586. These deputies, and other correctors whose names appear in the register at later dates, are as a rule traceable as episcopal chaplains, prebendaries of St. Paul’s, or holders of London benefices.[546] Some of them were themselves[168] members of the High Commission. Occasionally laymen were appointed.[547] The main work of correction now fell to these officials, but books were still sometimes allowed by the archbishop or bishop in person, or by the Privy Council or some member of that body.

The reaction of the changes of 1586–88 upon the entries in the register is on the whole one of degree rather than of kind. Occasionally the wording suggests a differentiation between the functions of the wardens and those of the ecclesiastical licensers, but more often the clerk contents himself with a mere record of what ‘hands’ each book was under.[548] Some shifting of the point of view is doubtless involved in the fact that ‘Entered vnto him for his copie’ and ‘Allowed vnto him for his copie’ now become the normal formulas, and by 1590–1 ‘Licenced vnto him’ has disappeared altogether.[549] But a great number of books, including most ballads and pamphlets and some plays, are still entered without note of any authority other than that of the wardens, and about 1593 the proportion of cases submitted to the ecclesiastical deputies sensibly begins to slacken, although the continuance of conditional entries shows that some caution was exercised. An intervention of the prelates in 1599 reversed the tendency again.[550] As regards plays in particular,[169] the wardens received a sharp reminder, ‘that noe playes be printed except they be allowed by suche as haue authority’; and although they do not seem to have interpreted this as requiring reference to a corrector in every case, conditional entries of plays become for a time numerous.[551] They stop altogether in 1607, when the responsibility for play correction appears to have been taken over, presumably under an[170] arrangement with the prelates, by the Master of the Revels.[552] Henceforward and to the end of Buck’s mastership, nearly all play entries are under the hands not only of the wardens, but of the Master or of a deputy acting on his behalf. Meanwhile, for books other than plays, the ecclesiastical authority succeeded more and more in establishing itself, although even up to the time of the Commonwealth the wardens never altogether ceased to enter ballads and such small deer on their own responsibility.

A little more may be gleaned from the ‘Fynes for breakinge of good orders’, which like the book entries were recorded by the wardens in their annual accounts up to 1571 and by the clerk in his register from 1576 to 1605.[553] But many of these were for irregularities in apprenticeship and the like, and where a particular book was concerned, the book is more often named than the precise offence committed in relation to it. The fine is for printing ‘contrary to the orders of this howse’, ‘contrary to our ordenaunces’, or merely ‘disorderly’. Trade defects, such as ‘stechyng’ of books, are sometimes in question, and sometimes the infringement of other men’s copies.[554] But the character of the books concerned suggests that some at least of the fines for printing ‘without lycense’, ‘without aucthoritie’, ‘without alowance’, ‘without entrance’, ‘before the wardyns handes were to yt’ were due to breaches of the regulations for censorship, and in a few instances the information is specific.[555] The book is a ‘lewde’ book, or ‘not tolerable’, or has already been condemned to be burnt, or the printing is contrary to ‘her maiesties prohibicon’ or ‘the decrees of the star chamber’.[556] More rarely a fine was accompanied by the sequestration of the offending books, or the breaking up of a press, or even imprisonment. In these cases the company may have been acting under stimulus[171] from higher powers; in dealing with a culprit in 1579, they direct that ‘for his offence, so farre as it toucheth ye same house only, he shall paye a fine’.[557]

Putting together the entries and the fines, we can arrive at an approximate notion of the position occupied by the Stationers’ Company as an intermediary between the individual stationers and the higher powers in Church and State. That it is only approximate and that many points of detail remain obscure is largely due to the methods of the clerk. Richard Collins did not realize the importance, at least to the future historian, of set diplomatic formulas, and it is by no means clear to what extent the variations in the phrasing of his record correspond to variations in the facts recorded. But it is my impression that he was in substance a careful registrar, especially as regards the authority under which his entries were made, and that if he did not note the presence in any case of a corrector’s ‘hand’ to a book, it is fair evidence that such a hand was not before him. On this assumption the register confirms the inference to be drawn from the statements of Lambe and Kingston in 1636, that before 1586 the provision of the Injunctions for licensing by the High Commission for London was not ordinarily operative, and that as a rule the only actual licences issued were those of the Stationers’ Company, who used their own discretion in submitting books about which they felt doubtful to the bishop or the archbishop or to an authorized corrector.[558] That books licensed by the Company without such reference were regarded as having been technically licensed under the Injunctions, one would hesitate to say. Licence is a fairly general term, and as used in the Stationers’ Register it does not necessarily cover anything more than a permit required by the internal ordinances of the Company itself. Certainly its officials claimed to issue licences to its members for other purposes than printing.[559] What Lambe and Kingston do not tell us, and perhaps ought to have told us, is that, when the master and wardens did call in the assistance of expert referees, it was not to ‘ministers’ merely chosen by themselves that they applied, but to official correctors nominated by the High Commission, or by the archbishop or bishop on[172] its behalf. Nor must it be supposed that no supervision of the proceedings of the company was exercised by the High Commission itself. We find that body writing to the Company to uphold a patent in 1560.[560] It was upon its motion in 1566 that the Privy Council made a Star Chamber order calling attention to irregularities which had taken place, and directing the master and wardens to search for the offenders.[561] And its authority, concurrent with that of the Privy Council itself, to license books, is confirmed by a letter of the Council to the company in 1570.[562] So much for the period before 1586. Another thing which Lambe and Kingston do not tell us, and which the register, if it can be trusted, does, is that the effective change introduced by the Star Chamber of that year was only one of degree and not of kind. It is true that an increasing number of books came, after one set-back, to be submitted to correctors; that the clerk begins to lay emphasis in his wording upon entrance rather than upon licence; that there are some hints that the direct responsibility of the wardens was for a kind of ‘allowance’ distinct from and supplementary to that of censorship. But it does not appear to be true that, then or at any later time, they wholly refused to enter any book except after taking cognizance of an authority beyond their own.

In fact the register, from the very beginning, was not purely, or perhaps even primarily, one of allowances. It had two other functions, even more important from the point of view of the internal economy of the Company. It was a fee-book, subsidiary to the annual accounts of the wardens, and showing the details of sums which they had to return in those accounts.[563] And it was a register of copyrights. A stationer[173] brought his copy to the wardens and paid his fee, in order that he might be protected by an official acknowledgement of his interest in the book against any infringement by a trade competitor. No doubt the wardens would not, and under the ordinances of the company might not, give this acknowledgement, unless they were satisfied that the book was one which might lawfully be printed. But copyright was what the stationer wanted, for after all most books were not dangerous in the eyes even of an Elizabethan censorship, whereas there would be little profit in publishing, if any rival were at liberty to cut in and reprint for himself the result of a successful speculation. It is a clear proof of this that the entrances include, not only new books, but also those in which rights had been transferred from one stationer to another.[564] Obviously no new allowance by a corrector would be required in such cases. And as regards copyright and licence alike, the entry in the register, although convenient to all concerned, was in itself no more than registration, the formal putting upon record of action already taken upon responsible authority. This authority did not rest with the clerk. In a few cases, indeed, he does seem to have entered an unimportant book at his own discretion.[565] But his functions were really subordinate to those of the wardens, as is shown by his practice from about 1580, of regularly citing the ‘hands’ or signed directions of those officers, as well as of the correctors, upon which he was acting. These ‘hands’ are not in the register, and there is sufficient evidence that they were ordinarily endorsed upon the manuscript or a printed copy of the book itself.[566][174] Exceptionally there might be an oral direction, or a separate letter or warrant of approval, which was probably preserved in a cupboard at the company’s hall.[567] Here too were kept copies of prints, although not, I think, the endorsed copies, which seem to have remained with the stationers.[568] I take it that the procedure was somewhat as follows. The stationer would bring his book to a warden together with the fee or some plausible excuse for deferring payment to a later date. The warden had to consider the questions both of property and of licence. Possibly the title of each book was published in the hall, in order that any other stationer who thought that he had an interest in it might make his claim.[569] Cases of disputed interest would go for determination to the Court of Assistants, who with the master and wardens for the year formed the ultimate governing body of the company, and had power in the last resort to revoke an authority to print already granted.[570] But if no difficulty as to ownership arose,[175] and if the book was already endorsed as allowable by a corrector, the warden would add his own endorsement, and it was then open to the stationer to take the book to the clerk, show the ‘hands’, pay the fee if it was still outstanding, and get the formalities completed by registration.[571] If, however, the warden found no endorsement by a corrector on the copy, then there were three courses open to him. He might take the risk of passing an obviously harmless book on his own responsibility. He might refuse his ‘hand’ until the stationer had got that of the corrector. Or he might make a qualified endorsement, which the clerk would note in the register, sanctioning publication so far as copyright was concerned, but only upon condition that proper authority should first be obtained. The dates on the title-pages of plays, when compared with those of the entries, suggest that, as would indeed be natural, the procedure was completed before publication; not necessarily before printing, as the endorsements were sometimes on printed copies.[572] Several cases of re-entry after a considerable interval may indicate that copyright lapsed unless it was exercised within a reasonable time. As a rule, a play appeared within a year or so after it was entered, and was either printed or published by the stationer who had entered it, or by some other to whom he is known, or may plausibly be supposed, to have transferred his interest. Where a considerable interval exists between the date of an entry and that of the first known print, it is sometimes possible that an earlier print has been lost.[573]

[176]

I do not think that it can be assumed that the absence of an entry in the register is evidence that the book was not duly licensed, so far as the ecclesiastical authorities were concerned. If its status was subsequently questioned, the signed copy could itself be produced. Certainly, when a conditional entry had been made, requiring better authority to be obtained, the fulfilment of the condition was by no means always, although it was sometimes, recorded. Possibly the ‘better authority’ was shown to the warden rather than the clerk. On the other hand, it is certain that, under the ordinances of the Company, publication without entrance exposed the stationer to a fine, and it is therefore probable that entrance was also necessary to secure copyright.[574] Sometimes the omission was repaired on the occasion of a subsequent transfer of interest. So far as plays are concerned, there seems to have been greater laxity in this respect as time went on. Before 1586, or at any rate before 1584, there are hardly any unentered plays, if we make the reasonable assumption that certain prints of 1573 and 1575 appeared in the missing lists for 1571–5.[575] Between 1584 and 1615 the number is considerable, being over fifty, or nearly a quarter of the total number of plays printed during that period. An examination of individual cases does not disclose any obvious reason why some plays should be entered and others not. The unentered plays are spread over the whole period concerned. They come from the repertories of nearly all the theatres. They include ‘surreptitious’ plays, which may be supposed to have been printed without the consent of the authors or owners, but they also include plays to which prefaces by authors or owners are prefixed. They were issued by publishers of good standing as well as by others less reputable; and as a rule their publishers appear to have been entering or not entering, quite indifferently, at about the same[177] date. To this generalization I find an exception, in Thomas Archer, who printed six plays without entry between 1607 and 1613 and entered none.[576] The large number of unentered plays is rather a puzzle, and I do not know the solution. In some cases, as we shall see, the publishers may have preferred not to court publicity for their enterprises by bringing them before the wardens. In others they may merely have been unbusinesslike, or may have thought that the chances of profit hardly justified the expenditure of sixpence on acquiring copyright. Yet many of the unentered plays went through more than one edition, including Mucedorus, a book of enduring popularity, and they do not appear to have been particularly subject to invasion by rival publishers. I will leave it to Mr. Pollard.

These being the conditions, let us consider what number and what kinds of plays got into print. It will be convenient to deal separately with the two periods 1557–85 and 1586–1616. The operations of the Company under their charter had hardly begun before Mary died. The Elizabethan printing of plays opens in 1559 and for the first five years is of a retrospective character. Half a dozen publishers, led by John King, who died about 1561, and Thomas Colwell, who started business in the same year, issued or entered seventeen plays. Of these one is not extant. One is a ‘May-game’, perhaps contemporary. Five are translations; four are Marian farces of the school of Udall, one a débat by John Heywood, and five Protestant interludes of the reigns of Henry and Edward, roughly edited in some cases so as to adapt them to performance under the new queen.[577] One more example of earlier Tudor drama, Ralph Roister Doister, in addition to mere reprints, appeared after 1565.[578] And with that year, after a short lull of activity, begins the genuine Elizabethan harvest, which by 1585 had yielded forty-two[178] plays, of which thirty-nine are extant, although two only in the form of fragments. On analysis, the greater number of these, seventeen in all, fall into a group of moral interludes, often controversial in tone, and in some cases approximating, through the intermingling of concrete with abstract personages, on the one hand to classical comedy, on the other to the mediaeval miracle-play. There are also twelve translations or adaptations, including two from Italian comedy. There is one neo-classical tragedy. And there are nine plays which can best be classified as histories, of which seven have a classical and two a romantic colouring.[579] It is of interest to compare this output of the printing-press with the chronicle of Court performances over the same years which is recorded in the Revels Accounts.[580] Here we get, so far of course as can be judged from a bare enumeration of titles, fourteen morals, twenty-one classical histories, mainly shown by boys, twenty-two romantic histories, mainly shown by men, and perhaps three farces, two plays of contemporary realism, with one ‘antick’ play and two groups of short dramatic episodes. It is clear that the main types are the same in both lists. But only one of the printed plays, Orestes, actually appears in the Court records, although Damon and Pythias, Gorboduc, Sapho and Phao, Campaspe, and The Arraignment of Paris were also given at Court, and the Revels Accounts after[179] all only cover comparatively few years out of the whole period.[581] And there is a great discrepancy in the proportions in which the various types are represented. The morals, which were obsolescent at Court, are far more numerous in print than the classical and romantic histories, which were already in enjoyment of their full vogue upon the boards. My definite impression is that these early printed morals, unlike the prints of later date, were in the main not drawn from the actual repertories of companies, but were literary products, written with a didactic purpose, and printed in the hope that they would be bought both by readers and by schoolmasters in search of suitable pieces for performance by their pupils. They belong, like some similar interludes, both original and translated, of earlier date, rather to the tradition of the humanist academic drama, than to that of the professional, or even quasi-professional, stage. There are many things about the prints which, although not individually decisive, tend when taken in bulk to confirm this theory. They are ‘compiled’, according to their title-pages; sometimes the author is declared a ‘minister’ or a ‘learned clerke’.[582] Nothing is, as a rule, said to indicate that they have been acted.[583] They are advertised, not only as ‘new’, ‘merry’, ‘pretty’, ‘pleasant’, ‘delectable’, ‘witty’, ‘full of mirth and pastime’, but also as ‘excellent’, ‘worthy’, ‘godly’, ‘pithy’, ‘moral’, ‘pityfull’, ‘learned’, and ‘fruitfull’, and occasionally the precise didactic intention is more elaborately expounded either on the title-page or in a prologue.[584] They are furnished with analyses showing the number of actors necessary to take all the parts, and in one case there is a significant note that the arrangement is ‘most convenient for such as be disposed, either to shew this comedie in priuate houses, or otherwise’.[585] They often conclude with a generalized[180] prayer for the Queen and the estates of the realm, which omits any special petition for the individual lord such as we have reason to believe the protected players used.[586] The texts are much better than the later texts based upon acting copies. The stage-directions read like the work of authors rather than of book-keepers, notably in the use of ‘out’ rather than of ‘in’ to indicate exits, and in the occasional insertion both of hints for ‘business’ and of explanatory comments aimed at a reader rather than an actor.[587] It should be added that this type of play begins to disappear at the point when the growing Calvinist spirit led to a sharp breach between the ministry and the stage, and discredited even moral play-writing amongst divines. The latest morals, of which there are some even during the second period of play-publication, have much more the look of rather antiquated survivals from working repertories.[588] The ‘May-game’ of[181] Robin Hood seems to me to be of a literary origin similar to that of the contemporary ‘morals’.

Towards the end of the period a new element is introduced with Lyly and Peele, who, like Edwardes before them, were not divines but secular scholars, and presumably desired a permanent life for their literary achievements. The publication of Lyly’s plays for Paul’s carries us on into the period 1586–1616, and the vaunting of their performance before the Queen is soon followed by that of other plays, beginning with The Troublesome Reign of John, as publicly acted in the City of London. During 1586–1616 two hundred and thirty-seven plays in all were published or at least entered on the Stationers’ Register, in addition to thirteen printed elsewhere than in London. Of many of these, and of some of those earlier published, there were one or more reprints. It is not until the last year of the period that the first example of a collective edition of the plays of any author makes its appearance. This is The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, which is moreover in folio, whereas the prints of individual plays were almost invariably in quarto.[589] A second volume of Jonson’s Works was begun in 1631 and completed in 1640. Shakespeare’s plays had to wait until 1623 for collective treatment, Lyly’s until 1632, Marston’s until 1633, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s until 1647 and 1679, although a partial collection of Shakespearian plays in quarto has been shown to have been contemplated and abandoned in 1619.[590] Of the two hundred and thirty-seven plays proposed for publication two hundred and fourteen are extant. Twenty-three are only known by entries in the Stationers’ Register, and as plays were not always entered, it is conceivable that one or two may have been published, and have passed into oblivion. Of the two hundred and fourteen extant plays, six are translations from the Latin, Italian, or French, and seven may reasonably be suspected of being merely closet plays, intended for the eye of the reader alone. The other two hundred and one may be taken to have undergone the test[182] of actual performance. Six were given by amateurs, at Court or elsewhere, and eleven, of which three are Latin and eight English, are University plays. So far as the professional companies are concerned, the repertories which have probably been best preserved, owing to the fact that the poets were in a position to influence publication, are those of the boys. We have thirty-one plays which, certainly or probably, came to the press from the Chapel and Queen’s Revels boys, twenty-five from the Paul’s boys, and eight from the King’s Revels boys. To the Queen’s men we may assign eleven plays, to Sussex’s three, to Pembroke’s five, to Derby’s four, to Oxford’s one, to Strange’s or the Admiral’s and Henry’s thirty-two, to the Chamberlain’s and King’s thirty-four, to Worcester’s and Anne’s sixteen, to Charles’s one. Some of these had at earlier dates been played by other companies. Fifteen plays remain, not a very large proportion, which cannot be safely assigned.[591] There are twenty-seven manuscript English plays or fragments of plays or plots of plays, and twenty-one Latin ones, mostly of a university type, which also belong to the period 1586–1616. There are fifty-one plays which were certainly or probably produced before 1616, but were not printed until later, many of them in the Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher folios. And there are some twenty-two others, which exist in late prints, but may be wholly, or more often partially, of early workmanship. The resultant total of three hundred and seven is considerable, but there is reason to suppose that it only represents a comparatively small fraction of the complete crop of these thirty pullulating dramatic years. Of over two hundred and eighty plays recorded by Henslowe as produced or commissioned by the companies for whom he acted as banker between 1592 and 1603, we have only some forty and perhaps revised versions of a few others.[592] Thomas Heywood claimed in 1633 to have had ‘an entire hand, or at least a maine finger’, in not less than two hundred and twenty plays, and of these we can only identify or even guess at about two score, of which several are certainly lost. That any substantial number of plays got printed, but have failed to reach us, is improbable. From time to time an unknown print, generally of early date, turns up in some bibliographical backwater, but of the seventy-five titles which I have brought together under the head of ‘Lost Plays’ some[183] probably rest upon misunderstandings and others represent works which were not plays at all, while a large proportion are derived from late entries in the Stationers’ Register by Humphrey Moseley of plays which he may have possessed in manuscript but never actually proceeded to publish.[593] Some of the earlier unfulfilled entries may be of similar type. An interesting piece of evidence pointing to the practically complete survival at any rate of seventeenth-century prints is afforded in a catalogue of his library of plays made by Sir John Harington in or about 1610.[594] Harington possessed 129 distinct plays, as well as a number of duplicates. Only 9 of these were printed before 1586. He had 14 out of 38 printed during 1588–94, and 15 out of 25 printed during 1595–99. His absence in Ireland during 1599 probably led him to miss several belonging to that year, and his most vigorous period as a collector began with 1600. During 1600–10 he secured 90 out of 105; that is to say exactly six-sevenths of the complete output of the London press. I neglect plays printed outside London in these figures. There is only one play among the 129 which is not known to us. Apparently it bore the title Belinus and Brennus.

It is generally supposed, and I think with justice, that the acting companies did not find it altogether to their advantage to have their plays printed. Heywood, indeed, in the epistle to his English Traveller (1633) tells us that this was sometimes the case.[595] Presumably the danger was not so much that readers would not become spectators, as that other companies might buy the plays and act them; and of this practice there are some dubious instances, although at any rate by Caroline times it had been brought under control by the Lord Chamberlain.[596] At any rate, we find the Admiral’s[184] in 1600 borrowing 40s. ‘to geue vnto the printer, to staye the printing of Patient Gresell’.[597] We find the King’s Revels syndicate in 1608 entering into a formal agreement debarring its members from putting any of the play-books jointly owned by them into print. And we find the editor and publisher of Troilus and Cressida, although that had in fact never been played, bidding his readers in 1609 ‘thanke fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you; since by the grand possessors wills I beleeue you should have prayd for them rather than beene prayd’. The marked fluctuation in the output of plays in different years is capable of explanation on the theory that, so long as the companies were prosperous, they kept a tight hold on their ‘books’, and only let them pass into the hands of the publishers when adversity broke them up, or when they had some special need to raise funds. The periods of maximum output are 1594, 1600, and 1607. In 1594 the companies were reforming themselves after a long and disastrous spell of plague; and in particular the Queen’s, Pembroke’s, and Sussex’s men were all ruined, and their books were thrown in bulk upon the market.[598] It has been suggested that the sales of 1600 may have been due to Privy Council restrictions of that year, which limited the number of companies, and forbade them to play for more than two days in the week.[599] But it is very doubtful whether the limitation of days really became operative, and many of the plays published belonged to the two companies, the Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s, who stood to gain by the elimination of competitors. An alternative reason might be found in the call for ready money involved by the building of the Globe in 1599 and the Fortune in 1600. The main factor in 1607 was the closing of Paul’s and the sale of the plays acted there.

Sometimes the companies were outwitted. Needy and unscrupulous stationers might use illegitimate means to[185] acquire texts for which they had not paid as a basis for ‘surreptitious’ or ‘piratical’ prints.[600] A hired actor might be bribed to disclose his ‘part’ and so much as he could remember of the ‘parts’ of others. Dr. Greg has made it seem probable that the player of the Host was an agent in furnishing the text of the Merry Wives.[601] A player of Voltimand and other minor parts may have been similarly guilty as regards Hamlet.[602] Long before, the printer of Gorboduc had succeeded in ‘getting a copie thereof at some yongmans hand that lacked a little money and much discretion’. Or the poet himself might be to blame. Thomas Heywood takes credit in the epistle to The Rape of Lucrece that it had not been his custom ‘to commit my playes to the presse’, like others who ‘have vsed a double sale of their labours, first to the stage, and after to the presse’. Yet this had not saved his plays from piracy, for some of them had been ‘copied only by the eare’ and issued in a corrupt and mangled form. A quarter of a century later, in writing a prologue for a revival of his If You Know not Me, You Know Nobody, he tells us that this was one of the corrupt issues, and adds that

Modern critics have sought in shorthand the source of other ‘bad’ and probably surreptitious texts of plays, and one has gone so far as to trace in them the peculiarities of a particular system expounded in the Characterie (1588) of Timothy Bright.[603] The whole question of surreptitious prints has naturally been explored most closely in connexion with the textual criticism of Shakespeare, and the latest investigator, Mr. Pollard, has come to the conclusion that, in spite of the general condemnation of the Folio editors, the only Shakespearian Quartos which can reasonably be labelled as surreptitious or as textually ‘bad’ are the First Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, and[186] Pericles, although he strongly suspects that there once existed a similar edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost.[604] I have no ground for dissenting from this judgement.

The question whether the actors, in protecting their property from the pirates, could look for any assistance from the official controllers of the press is one of some difficulty. We may perhaps infer, with the help of the conditional entries of The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and The Spanish Tragedy, and the special order made in the case of Dr. Faustus, that before assigning a ‘copy’ to one stationer the wardens of the Company took some steps to ascertain whether any other stationer laid a claim to it. It does not follow that they also inquired whether the applicant had come honestly or dishonestly by his manuscript.[605] Mr. Pollard seems inclined to think that, although they were under no formal obligation to intervene, they would not be likely, as men of common sense, to encourage dishonesty.[606] If this argument stood alone, I should not have much confidence in it. There is a Publishers’ Association to-day, doubtless composed of men of common sense, but it is not a body to which one[187] would naturally commit interests which might come into conflict with those of members of the trade. It would be another matter, however, if the actors were in a position to bring outside interest to bear against the pirates, through the licensers, or through the Privy Council on whom ultimately the licensers depended. And this in fact seems to have been the way in which a solution of the problem was gradually arrived at. Apart altogether from plays, there are instances upon record in which individuals, who were in a position to command influence, successfully adopted a similar method. We find Fulke Greville in 1586 writing to Sir Francis Walsingham, on the information of the stationer Ponsonby, to warn him that the publication of the Arcadia was being planned, and to advise him to get ‘made stay of that mercenary book’ by means of an application to the Archbishop or to Dr. Cosin, ‘who have, as he says, a copy to peruse to that end’.[607] Similarly we find Francis Bacon, in the preface to his Essayes of 1597, excusing himself for the publication on the ground that surreptitious adventurers were at work, and ‘to labour the staie of them had bin troublesome and subiect to interpretation’. Evidently he had come to a compromise, of which the Stationers’ Register retains traces in the cancellation by a court of an entry of the Essayes to Richard Serger, and a re-entry to H. Hooper, the actual publisher, ‘under the handes of Master Francis Bacon, Master Doctor Stanhope, Master Barlowe, and Master Warden Lawson’.[608] The actors, too, were not wholly without influence. They had their patrons and protectors, the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral, in the Privy Council, and although, as Mr. Pollard points out, it certainly would not have been good business to worry an important minister about every single forty-shilling piracy, it may have been worth while to seek a standing protection, analogous to the old-fashioned ‘privilege’, against a series of such annoyances. At any rate, this is what, while the Admiral’s contented themselves with buying off the printer of Patient Grissell, the Chamberlain’s apparently attempted, although at first with indifferent success, to secure. In 1597 John Danter, a stationer of the worst reputation, had printed a surreptitious and ‘bad’ edition of Romeo and Juliet, and possibly, if[188] Mr. Pollard’s conjecture is right, another of Love’s Labour’s Lost. He had made no entry in the Register, and it was therefore open to another publisher, Cuthbert Burby, to issue, without breach of copyright, ‘corrected’ editions of the same plays.[609] This he did, with suitable trumpetings of the corrections on the title-pages, and presumably by arrangement with the Chamberlain’s men. It was this affair which must, I think, have led the company to apply for protection to their lord. On 22 July 1598 an entry was made in the Stationers’ Register of The Merchant of Venice for the printer James Roberts. This entry is conditional in form, but it differs from the normal conditional entries in that the requirement specified is not an indefinite ‘aucthoritie’ but a ‘lycence from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen’. Roberts also entered Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose on 27 May 1600, A Larum for London on 29 May 1600, and Troilus and Cressida on 7 February 1603. These also are all conditional entries but of a normal type. No condition, however, is attached to his entry of Hamlet on 26 July 1602. Now comes a significant piece of evidence, which at least shows that in 1600, as well as in 1598, the Stationers’ Company were paying particular attention to entries of plays coming from the repertory of the Chamberlain’s men. The register contains, besides the formal entries, certain spare pages upon which the clerk was accustomed to make occasional memoranda, and amongst these memoranda we find the following:[610]

My lord chamberlens menns plaies Entred
viz
A moral of ‘clothe breches and velvet hose’

[189]

There are possibly two notes here, but we may reasonably date them both in 1600, as Every Man In his Humour was entered to Cuthbert Burby and Walter Burre on 14 August 1600 and Much Ado about Nothing to Andrew Wise and William Aspley on 23 August 1600, and these plays appeared in 1601 and 1600 respectively. Henry V was published, without entry and in a ‘bad’ text by Thomas Millington and John Busby, also in 1600, while As You Like It remained unprinted until 1623. Many attempts have been made to explain the story of 4 August. Mr. Fleay conjectured that it was due to difficulties of censorship; Mr. Furness that it was directed against James Roberts, whom he regarded on the strength of the conditional entries as a man of ‘shifty character’.[611] But there is no reason to read Roberts’s name into the August memorandum at all; and I agree with Mr. Pollard that the evidence of dishonesty against him has been exaggerated, and that the privilege which he held for printing all play-bills for actors makes it prima facie unlikely that his relations with the companies would be irregular.[612] On the other hand, I hesitate to accept Mr. Pollard’s counter-theory that the four conditional Roberts entries were of the nature of a deliberate plan ‘in the interest of the players in order to postpone their publication till it could not injure the run of the play and to make the task of the pirates more difficult’. One would of course suppose that any entry, conditional or not, might serve such a purpose, if the entering stationer was in league with the actors and deliberately reserved publication. This is presumably what the Admiral’s men paid Cuthbert Burby to do for Patient Grissell. Mr. Pollard applies the same theory to Edward Blount’s unconditional entries of Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra in 1608, and it would certainly explain the delays in the publication of Troilus and Cressida from 1603 to 1609 and of Antony and Cleopatra from 1608 to 1623, and the absence of any edition of Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose. But it does not explain why Hamlet, entered by Roberts in 1602, was issued by others in the ‘bad’ text of 1603, or why Pericles was issued by Henry Gosson in the ‘bad’ text of 1609.[613] Mr. Pollard’s interpretation of the facts appears to be influenced by the conditional character of four out of Roberts’s five entries[190] during 1598–1603, and I understand him to believe that the ‘further aucthoritie’ required for Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose and A Larum for London and the ‘sufficient aucthoritie’ required for Troilus and Cressida were of the same nature as the licence from the Lord Chamberlain specifically required for The Merchant of Venice.[614] It is not inconceivable that this may have been so, but one is bound to take the Roberts conditional entries side by side with the eight similar entries made between 1601 and 1606 for other men, and in three at least of these (The Dutch Courtesan, Sir Giles Goosecap, The Fleir) it is obvious that the authority demanded was that of the official correctors. Of course, the correctors may themselves have had a hint from the Lord Chamberlain to keep an eye upon the interests of his servants, but if the eleven conditionally entered plays of 1600–6 be looked at as a group, it will be seen that they are all plays of either a political or a satirical character, which might well therefore call for particular attention from the correctors in the discharge of their ordinary functions. I have already suggested that the normal conditional entries represent cases in which the wardens of the Stationers’ Company, while not prepared to license a book on their own responsibility, short-circuited as far as they could the procedure entailed. Properly they ought to have seen the corrector’s hand before adding their own endorsement. But if this was not forthcoming, the applicant may have been allowed, in order to save time, to have the purely trade formalities completed by a conditional entry, which would be a valid protection against a rival stationer, but would not, until the corrector’s hand was obtained, be sufficient authority for the actual printing. No doubt the clerk should have subsequently endorsed the entry after seeing the corrector’s hand, but he did not always do so, although in cases of transfer the transferee might ask for a record to be made, and in any event the owner of the copy had the book with the ‘hand’ to it. The Lord Chamberlain’s ‘stay’ was, I think, another matter. I suppose it to have been directed, not to the correctors, but to the wardens, and to have taken the form of a request not to enter any play of the Chamberlain’s men, otherwise entitled to licence or not, without satisfying themselves that the actors were assenting parties to the transaction. Common sense would certainly dictate compliance with such a request, coming from such a source. The plan seems to have worked well enough so far as As You Like It, Every Man In his[191] Humour, and Much Ado about Nothing were concerned, for we have no reason to doubt that the subsequent publication of two of these plays had the assent of the Chamberlain’s men, and the third was effectively suppressed. But somehow not only Hamlet but also The Merry Wives of Windsor slipped through in 1602, and although the actors apparently came to some arrangement with Roberts and furnished a revised text of Hamlet, the other play seems to have gone completely out of their control. Moreover, it was an obvious weakness of the method adopted, that it gave no security against a surreptitious printer who was in a position to dispense with an entry. Danter, after all, had published without entry in 1597. He had had to go without copyright; but an even more audacious device was successfully tried in 1600 with Henry V. This was one of the four plays so scrupulously ‘staied’ by the Stationers’ clerk on 4 August. Not merely, however, was the play printed in 1600 by Thomas Creede for Thomas Millington and John Busby, but on 21 August it was entered on the Register as transferred to Thomas Pavier amongst other ‘thinges formerlye printed and sett ouer to’ him. I think the explanation is that the print of 1600 was treated as merely a reprint of the old play of The Famous Victories of Henry V, which was indeed to some extent Shakespeare’s source, and of which Creede held the copyright.[615] Similarly, it is conceivable that the same John Busby and Nathaniel Butter forced the hands of the Chamberlain’s men into allowing the publication of King Lear in 1608 by a threat to issue it as a reprint of King Leir.[616] Busby was also the enterer of The Merry Wives, and he and Butter, at whose hands it was that Heywood suffered, seem to have been the chief of the surreptitious printers after Danter’s death.

The Chamberlain’s men would have been in a better position if their lord had brought his influence to bear, as Sidney’s friends had done, upon the correctors instead of the Stationers’ Company. Probably the mistake was retrieved in 1607 when the ‘allowing’ of plays for publication passed to the Master of the Revels, and he may even have extended his protection to the other companies which, like the Chamberlain’s, had now passed under royal protection. I do not suggest that the convenience of this arrangement was the sole[192] motive for the change; the episcopal correctors must have got into a good deal of hot water over the affair of Eastward Ho![617] Even the Master of the Revels did not prevent the surreptitious issue of Pericles in 1609. In Caroline times we find successive Lord Chamberlains, to whom the Master of the Revels continued to be subordinate, directing the Stationers’ Company not to allow the repertories of the King’s men or of Beeston’s boys to be printed, and it is implied that there were older precedents for these protections.[618]

A point might come at which it was really more to the advantage of the actors to have a play published than not. The prints were useful in the preparation of acting versions, and they saved the book-keepers from the trouble of having to prepare manuscript copies at the demand of stage-struck amateurs.[619] The influence of the poets again was on the side of publication, and it is perhaps due to the greater share which they took in the management of the boys’ companies that so disproportionate a number of the plays preserved are of their acting. Heywood hints that thereby the poets sold their work twice. It is more charitable to assume that literary vanity was also a factor; and it is with playwrights of the more scholarly type, Ben Jonson and Marston, that a practice first emerges of printing plays at an early date after publication, and in the full literary trappings of dedicatory epistles and commendatory verses. Actor-playwrights, such as Heywood himself and Dekker, followed suit; but not Shakespeare, who had long ago dedicated his literary all to Southampton and penned no prefaces. The characteristic Elizabethan apologies, on such grounds as the pushfulness of publishers or the eagerness of friends to see the immortal work in type, need not be taken at their full face value.[620] Opportunity was afforded on publication to restore passages which had been ‘cut’ to meet the necessities of stage-presentation, and of this, in the Second Quarto of Hamlet, even Shakespeare may have availed himself.[621]

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The conditions of printing therefore furnish us with every variety of text, from the carefully revised and punctuated versions of Ben Jonson’s Works of 1616 to the scrappy notes, from memory or shorthand, of an incompetent reporter. The average text lies between these extremes, and is probably derived from a play-house ‘book’ handed over by the actors to the printer. Mr. Pollard has dealt luminously with the question of the nature of the ‘book’, and has disposed of the assumption that it was normally a copy made by a ‘play-house’ scrivener of the author’s manuscript.[622] For this assumption there is no evidence whatever. There is, indeed, little direct evidence, one way or other; but what there is points to the conclusion that the ‘original’ or standard copy of a play kept in the play-house was the author’s autograph manuscript, endorsed with the licence of the Master of the Revels for performance, and marked by the book-keeper or for his use with indications of cuts and the like, and with stage-directions for exits and entrances and the disposition of properties, supplementary to those which the author had furnished.[623] Most of the actual manuscripts of this type which remain in existence are of Caroline, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, date.[624] But we have one of The Second Maid’s Tragedy, bearing Buck’s licence of 1611, and one of Sir Thomas More, belonging to the last decade of the sixteenth century, which has been submitted for licence without success, and is marked with instructions by the[194] Master for the excision or alteration of obnoxious passages. It is a curious document. The draft of the original author has been patched and interpolated with partial redrafts in a variety of hands, amongst which, according to some palaeographers, is to be found that of Shakespeare. One wonders that any licenser should have been complaisant enough to consider the play at all in such a form; and obviously the instance is a crucial one against the theory of scrivener’s copies.[625] It may also be argued on a priori grounds that such copies would be undesirable from the company’s point of view, both as being costly and as tending to multiply the opportunities for ‘surreptitious’ transmission to rivals or publishers. Naturally it was necessary to copy out individual parts for the actors, and Alleyn’s part in Orlando Furioso, with the ‘cues’, or tail ends of the speeches preceding his own, can still be seen at Dulwich.[626] From these ‘parts’ the ‘original’ could be reconstructed or ‘assembled’ in the event of destruction or loss.[627] Apparently the book-keeper also made a ‘plot’ or scenario of the action, and fixed it on a peg for his own guidance and that of the property-man in securing the smooth progress of the play.[628] Nor could the companies very well prevent the poets from keeping transcripts or at any rate rough copies, when they handed over their ‘papers’, complete or in instalments, as they drew their ‘earnests’ or payments ‘in full’.[629] It does not follow that they always did so. We know that Daborne made fair copies for Henslowe;[630] but the Folio editors tell us that what Shakespeare thought ‘he vttered with that easinesse,[195] that we haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers’, and Mr. Pollard points out that there would have been little meaning in this praise if what Shakespeare sent in had been anything but his first drafts.[631]

The character of the stage-directions in plays confirm the view that many of them were printed from working play-house ‘originals’. They are primarily directions for the stage itself; it is only incidentally that they also serve to stimulate the reader’s imagination by indicating the action with which the lines before him would have been accompanied in a representation.[632] Some of them are for the individual guidance of the actors, marginal hints as to the ‘business’ which will give point to their speeches. These are not very numerous in play-house texts; the ‘kneeling’ and ‘kisses her’ so frequent in modern editions are merely attempts of the editors to show how intelligently they have interpreted the quite obvious implications of the dialogue. The more important directions are addressed rather to the prompter and the tire-man; they prescribe the exits and the entrances, the ordering of a procession or a dumb-show, the use of the curtains or other structural devices, the introduction of properties, the precise moment for the striking up of music or sounds ‘within’. It is by no means always possible, except where a manuscript betrays differences of handwriting, to distinguish between what the author, often himself an actor familiar with the possibilities of the stage, may have originally written, and what the book-keeper may have added. Either may well use the indicative or the imperative form, or merely an adverbial, participial, or substantival expression.[633] But it is natural to trace the hand of the book-keeper where the direction reduces itself to the bare name of a property noted in the margin; even more so when it is followed by some such phrase as ‘ready’, ‘prepared’, or ‘set out’;[634] and still more so when the note occurs at the point when the property has to be brought from the tire-room,[196] and some lines before it is actually required for use.[635] The book-keeper must be responsible, too, for the directions into which, as not infrequently happens, the name of an actor has been inserted in place of that of the personage whom that actor represented.[636] On the other hand, we may perhaps safely assign to the author directions addressed to some one else in the second person, those which leave something to be interpreted according to discretion, and those which contain any matter not really necessary for stage guidance.[637] Such superfluous matter is only rarely found in texts of pure play-house origin, although even here an author may occasionally insert a word or two of explanation or descriptive colouring, possibly taken from the source upon which he has been working.[638] In the main, however, descriptive stage-directions are characteristic of texts which, whether ultimately based upon play-house copies or not, have undergone a process of editing by the author or his representative, with an eye[197] to the reader, before publication. Some literary rehandling of this sort is traceable, for example, in the First Folio of Shakespeare, although the hearts of the editors seem to have failed them before they had got very far with the task.[639] Yet another type of descriptive stage-direction presents itself in certain ‘surreptitious’ prints, where we find the reporter eking out his inadequately recorded text by elaborate accounts of the details of the business which he had seen enacted before him.[640] So too William Percy, apparently revising plays some of which had already been acted and which he hoped to see acted again, mingles his suggestions to a hypothetical manager with narratives in the past tense of how certain actors had carried out their parts.[641]

It must not be assumed that, because a play was printed from a stage copy, the author had no chance of editing it. Probably the compositors treated the manuscript put before them very freely, modifying, if they did not obliterate, the individual notions of the author or scribe as to orthography and punctuation; and the master printer, or some press corrector in his employment, went over and ‘improved’ their work, perhaps not always with much reference to the original ‘copy’.[642] This process of correction continued during the printing off of the successive sheets, with the result that different examples of the same imprint often show the same sheet in corrected and in uncorrected states.[643] The trend of modern criticism is in the direction of regarding Shakespeare’s plays as printed, broadly speaking, without any editorial assistance from him; the early quartos from play-house manuscripts, the later quartos from the earlier quartos, the folio partly from play-house manuscripts, partly from earlier quartos used in the play-house instead of manuscripts, and bearing marks of adaptation to shifting stage requirements.[644] On this theory, the aberrations of the printing-house, even with the author’s original text before them, have to account in the main for the unsatisfactory condition in which, in spite of such posthumous editing, not very[198] extensive, as was done for the folio, even the best texts of the plays have reached us. Whether it is sound or not—I think that it probably is—there were other playwrights who were far from adopting Shakespeare’s attitude of detachment from the literary fate of his works. Jonson was a careful editor. Marston, Middleton, and Heywood all apologize for misprints in various plays, which they say were printed without their knowledge, or when they were urgently occupied elsewhere; and the inference must be that in normal circumstances the responsibility would have rested with them.[645] Marston, indeed, definitely says that he had ‘perused’ the second edition of The Fawn, in order ‘to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression’.[646]

The modern editions, with their uniform system of acts and scenes and their fanciful notes of locality—‘A room in the palace’, ‘Another room in the palace’—are again misleading in their relation to the early prints, especially those based upon the play-house. Notes of locality are very rare. Occasionally a definite shift from one country or town to another is recorded;[647] and a few edited plays, such as Ben Jonson’s, prefix, with a ‘dramatis personae’, a general indication of ‘The scene’.[648] For the rest, the reader is left to his own inferences, with such help as the dialogue and the presenters give him; and the modern editors, with a post-Restoration tradition of staging in their minds, have often inferred wrongly. Even the shoulder-notes appended to the accurate reprints of the Malone Society, although they do not attempt localities, err by introducing too many new scenes. In the[199] early prints the beginnings of scenes are rarely marked, and the beginnings of acts are left unmarked to an extent which is rather surprising. The practice is by no means uniform, and it is possible to distinguish different tendencies in texts of different origin. The Tudor interludes and the early Elizabethan plays of the more popular type are wholly undivided, and there was probably no break in the continuity of the performances.[649] Acts and scenes, which are the outward form of a method of construction derived from the academic analysis of Latin comedy and tragedy, make their appearance, with other notes of neo-classic influence, in the farces of the school of Udall, in the Court tragedies, in translated plays, in Lyly’s comedies, and in a few others belonging to the same milieu of scholarship.[650] Ben Jonson and a few other later writers adopt them in printing plays of theatrical origin.[651] But the great majority of plays belonging to the public theatres continue to be printed without any divisions at all, while plays from the private houses are ordinarily divided into acts, but not into scenes, although the beginning of each act has usually some such heading as ‘Actus Primus, Scena prima’.[652] This distinction corresponds to the greater significance of the act-interval in the performance of the boy companies; but, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, it is difficult to suppose that the public theatres paid no regard to act-intervals, and one cannot therefore quite understand why neither the poets nor the book-keepers were in the habit of showing them in the play-house ‘originals’ of plays.[653][200] Had they been shown there, they would almost inevitably have got into the prints. It is a peculiarity of the surreptitious First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, that its later sheets, which differ typographically from the earlier ones, although they do not number either acts or scenes, insert lines of ornament at the points at which acts and scenes may be supposed to begin. It must be added that, so far as an Elizabethan playwright looked upon his work as made up of scenes, his conception of a scene was not as a rule that familiar to us upon the modern stage. The modern scene may be defined as a piece of action continuous in time and place between two falls of a drop-curtain. The Elizabethans had no drop-curtain, and the drawing of an alcove curtain, at any rate while personages remain on the stage without, does not afford the same solution of continuity. The nearest analogy is perhaps in such a complete clearance of the stage, generally with a shift of locality, as enables the imagination to assume a time interval. A few texts, generally of the seventeenth century, are divided into scenes on this principle of clearance; and it was adopted by the editors of the First Folio, when, in a half-hearted way, they attempted to divide up the continuous texts of their manuscripts and quartos.[654] But it was not the principle of the neo-classic dramatists, or of Ben Jonson and his school. For them a scene was a section, not of action, but of dialogue; and they started a new scene whenever a speaker, or at any rate a speaker of importance, entered or left the stage. This is the conception which is in the mind of Marston when he regrets, in the preface to The Malcontent, that ‘scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read’. It is also the conception of the French classicist drama, although the English playwrights do not follow the French rule of liaison, which requires at least one speaker from each scene to remain on into the next, and thus secures continuity throughout each act by making a complete clearance of the stage impossible.[655]

[In this chapter I give under the head of each playwright (a) a brief sketch of his life in relation to the stage, (b) a list of contemporary and later collections of his dramatic works, (c) a list of dissertations (books, pamphlets, articles in journals) bearing generally upon his life and works. Then I take each play, mask, &c., up to 1616 and give (a) the MSS. if any; (b) the essential parts of the entry, if any, on the Stationers’ Register, including in brackets the name of any licenser other than an official of the Company, and occasionally adding a note of any transfer of copyright which seems of exceptional interest; (c) the essential parts of the title-page of the first known print; (d) a note of its prologues, epilogues, epistles, and other introductory matter; (e) the dates and imprints of later prints before the end of the seventeenth century with any new matter from their t.ps. bearing on stage history; (f) lists of all important 18th-20th century editions and dissertations, not of the collective or general type already dealt with; (g) such notes as may seem desirable on authorship, date, stage history and the like. Some of these notes are little more than compilations; others contain the results of such work as I have myself been able to do on the plays concerned. Similarly, I have in some cases recorded, on the authority of others, editions and dissertations which I have not personally examined. The section devoted to each playwright concludes with lists of work not extant and of work of which his authorship has, often foolishly, been conjectured. I ought to make it clear that many of my title-pages are borrowed from Dr. Greg, and that, while I have tried to give what is useful for the history of the stage, I have no competence in matters of minute bibliographical accuracy.]

WILLIAM ALABASTER (1567–1640)

Alabaster, or Alablaster, was born at Hadleigh, Suffolk, in 1567 and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from Westminster in 1583. His Latin poem Eliseis is mentioned by Spenser in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (1591). He was incorporated M.A. of Oxford in 1592, and went as chaplain to Essex in the Cadiz expedition of 1596. On 22 Sept. 1597 Richard Percival wrote to Sir Robert Cecil (Hatfield MSS. vii. 394), ‘Alabaster has made a tragedy against the Church of England’. Perhaps this is not to be taken literally, but only refers to his conversion to Catholicism. Chamberlain, 7, 64, records that he was ‘clapt up for poperie’, had escaped from the Clink by 4 May 1598, but was recaptured at Rochelle. This was about the beginning of Aug. 1599 (Hatfield MSS. ix. 282). Later he was reconverted and at his death in 1640 held the living of Therfield, Herts. He wrote on mystical theology, and a manuscript collection of 43 sonnets, mostly unprinted, is described by B. Dobell in Athenaeum (1903), ii. 856.

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Roxana. c. 1592

[MSS.] T. C. C. MS. (‘Authore Domino Alabaster’); Camb. Univ. MS. Ff. ii. 9; Lambeth MS. 838 (‘finis Roxanae Alabastricae’).

S. R. 1632, May 9 (Herbert). ‘A Tragedy in Latyn called Roxana &c.’ Andrew Crooke (Arber, iv. 277).

1632. Roxana Tragædia olim Cantabrigiae, Acta in Col. Trin. Nunc primum in lucem edita, summaque cum diligentia ad castigatissimum exemplar comparata. R. Badger for Andrew Crook. [At end is Herbert’s imprimatur, dated ‘1 March, 1632’.]

1632. Roxana Tragædia a plagiarii unguibus vindicata, aucta, & agnita ab Authore Gulielmo Alabastro. William Jones. [Epistle by Gulielmus Alabaster to Sir Ralph Freeman; commendatory verses by Hugo Hollandius and Tho. Farnabius; engraved title-page, with representation of a stage (cf. ch. xviii, Bibl. Note).]

The Epistle has ‘Ante quadraginta plus minus annos, morticinum hoc edidi duarum hebdomadarum abortum, et unius noctis spectaculo destinatum, non aevi integri’. The play is a Latin version of Luigi Groto’s La Dalida (1567).

SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER, EARL OF STIRLING (c. 1568–1640).

William Alexander of Menstrie, after an education at Glasgow and Leyden and travel in France, Spain, and Italy, was tutor to Prince Henry before the accession of James, and afterwards Gentleman extraordinary of the Privy Chamber both to Henry and to Charles. He was knighted about 1609, appointed a Master of Requests in 1614 and Secretary for Scotland in 1626. He was created Earl of Stirling in 1633. He formed literary friendships with Michael Drayton and William Drummond of Hawthornden, but Jonson complained (Laing, 11) that ‘Sir W. Alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected him, because a friend to Drayton’. His four tragedies read like closet plays, and his only connexion with the stage appears to be in some verses to Alleyn after the foundation of Dulwich in 1619 (Collier, Memoirs of Alleyn, 178).

Collections

S. R. 1604, April 30 (by order of Court). ‘A booke Called The Woorkes of William Alexander of Menstrie Conteyninge The Monarchicke Tragedies, Paranethis to the Prince and Aurora.’ Edward Blunt (Arber, iii. 260).

1604. The Monarchicke Tragedies. By William Alexander of Menstrie. V. S. for Edward Blount. [Croesus and Darius (with a separate t.p.).]

1607. The Monarchick Tragedies; Croesus, Darius, The Alexandraean, Iulius Caesar, Newly enlarged. By William Alexander, Gentleman of the Princes priuie Chamber. Valentine Simmes for Ed. Blount. [New issue, with additions. Julius Caesar has separate t.p. Commendatory verses, signed ‘Robert Ayton’.]

1616. The Monarchicke Tragedies. The third Edition. By S^r. W. Alexander Knight. William Stansby. [Croesus, Darius, The Alexandraean[209] Tragedy, Julius Caesar, in revised texts, the last three with separate t.ps.]

1637. Recreations with the Muses. By William Earle of Sterline. Tho. Harper. [Croesus, Darius, The Alexandraean Tragedy, Julius Caesar.]

1870–2. Poetical Works. 3 vols.

1921. L. E. Kastner and H. B. Charlton, The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Vol. i. The Dramatic Works.—Dissertations: C. Rogers, Memorials of the Earl of S. and the House of A. (1877); H. Beumelburg, Sir W. A. Graf von S., als dramatischer Dichter (1880, Halle diss.).

Darius > 1603

1603. The Tragedie of Darius. By William Alexander of Menstrie. Robert Waldegrave. Edinburgh. [Verses to James VI; Epistle to Reader; Commendatory verses by ‘Io Murray’ and ‘W. Quin’.]

1604. G. Elde for Edward Blount. [Part of Coll. 1604, with separate t.p.; also in later Colls. Two sets of verses to King at end.]

Croesus > 1604

1604. [Part of Coll. 1604; also in later Colls. Argument; Verses to King at end.]

The Alexandraean Tragedy > 1607

1605? [Hazlitt, Manual, 7, and others cite a print of this date, which is not confirmed by Greg, Plays, 1.]

1607. (Running Title). The Alexandraean Tragedie. [Part of Coll. 1607; also in later Colls. Argument.]

Julius Caesar > 1607

1607. The Tragedie of Iulius Caesar. By William Alexander, Gentleman of the Princes priuie Chamber. Valentine Simmes for Ed. Blount. [Part of Coll. 1607, with separate t.p.; also in later Colls. Argument.]

Edition in H. H. Furness, Julius Caesar (1913, New Variorum Shakespeare, xvii).

WILLIAM ALLEY (c. 1510–70).

Alley’s Πτωχὸμυσεῖον. The Poore Mans Librarie (1565) contains three and a half pages of dialogue between Larymos and Phronimos, described as from ‘a certaine interlude or plaie intituled Aegio. In the which playe ij persons interlocutorie do dispute, the one alledging for the defence of destenie and fatall necessitie, and the other confuting the same’. P. Simpson (9 N. Q. iii. 205) suggests that Alley was probably himself the author. The book consists of praelectiones delivered in 1561 at St. Paul’s, of which Alley had been a Prebendary. He became Bishop of Exeter in 1560. On his attitude to the public stage, cf. App. C. No. viii. It is therefore odd to find the Lord Bishop’s players at Barnstaple and Plymouth in 1560–1 (Murray, ii. 78).

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ROBERT AMERIE (c. 1610).

The deviser of the show of Chester’s Triumph (1610). See ch. xxiv (C).

ROBERT ARMIN (> 1588–1610 <). For biography see Actors (ch. xv).

The Two Maids of Moreclacke. 1607–8 (?)

1609. The History of the two Maids of Moreclacke, With the life and simple maner of Iohn in the Hospitall. Played by the Children of the Kings Maiesties Reuels. Written by Robert Armin, seruant to the Kings most excellent Maiestie. N. O. for Thomas Archer. [Epistle to Reader, signed ‘Robert Armin’.]

Editions in A. B. Grosart, Works of R. A. Actor (1880, Choice Rarities of Ancient English Poetry, ii), 63, and J. S. Farmer (1913, S. F. T.). The epistle says that the play was ‘acted by the boyes of the Reuels, which perchaunce in part was sometime acted more naturally in the Citty, if not in the hole’, that the writer ‘would haue againe inacted Iohn my selfe but ... I cannot do as I would’, and that he had been ‘requested both of Court and Citty, to show him in priuate’. John is figured in a woodcut on the title-page, which is perhaps meant for a portrait of Armin. As a King’s man, and no boy, he can hardly have played with the King’s Revels; perhaps we should infer that the play was not originally written for them. All their productions seem to date from 1607–8.

Doubtful Play

Armin has been guessed at as the R. A. of The Valiant Welshman.

THOMAS ASHTON (ob. 1578).

Ashton took his B.A. in 1559–60, and became Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge. He was appointed Head Master of Shrewsbury School from 24 June 1561 (G. W. Fisher, Annals of Shrewsbury School, 4). To the same year a local record, Robert Owen’s Arms of the Bailiffs (17th c.), assigns ‘M^r Astons first playe upon the Passion of Christ’, and this is confirmed by an entry in the town accounts (Owen and Blakeway, Hist. of Shrewsbury, i. 353) of 20s. ‘spent upon M^r Aston and a other gentellmane of Cambridge over pareadijs’ on 25 May 1561. Whitsuntide plays had long been traditional at Shrewsbury (Mediaeval Stage, ii. 250, 394, where the dates require correction). A local chronicle (Shropshire Arch. Soc. Trans. xxxvii. 54) has ‘Elizabeth 1565 [i. e. 1566; cf. App. A], The Queen came to Coventry intending for Salop to see M^r Astons Play, but it was ended. The Play was performed in the Quarry, and lasted the Whitson [June 2] hollydays’. This play is given in Mediaeval Stage, from local historians, as Julian the Apostate, but the same chronicle assigns that to 1556. Another chronicle (Taylor MS. of 16th-17th c.) records for 1568–9 (Shropshire Arch. Soc. Trans. iii. 268), ‘This yeare at Whytsoontyde [29 May] was a notable stage playe playeed in Shrosberie in a place there callyd the quarrell which lastid all the hollydayes unto the which cam greate number of people of noblemen and others the which[211] was praysed greatlye and the chyff aucter therof was one Master Astoon beinge the head scoolemaster of the freescole there a godly and lernyd man who tooke marvelous greate paynes therin’. Robert Owen, who calls this Aston’s ‘great playe’ of the Passion of Christ, assigns it to 1568, but it is clear from the town accounts that 1569 is right (Fisher, 18). This is presumably the play referred to by Thomas Churchyard (q.v.) in The Worthiness of Wales (1587, ed. Spenser Soc. 85), where after describing ‘behind the walles ... a ground, newe made Theator wise’, able to seat 10,000, and used for plays, baiting, cockfights, and wrestling, he adds:

In the margin he comments, ‘Maister Aston was a good and godly Preacher’. A ‘ludus in quarell’ is noted in 1495, and this was ‘where the plases [? playes] have bine accustomyd to be usyd’ in 1570 (Mediaeval Stage, ii. 251, 255). Ashton resigned his Mastership about 1571 and was in the service of the Earl of Essex at Chartley in 1573. But he continued to work on the Statutes of the school, which as settled in 1578, the year of his death, provide that ‘Everie Thursdaie the Schollers of the first forme before they goo to plaie shall for exercise declame and plaie one acte of a comedie’ (Fisher, 17, 23; E. Calvert, Shrewsbury School Register). It is interesting to note that among Ashton’s pupils were Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who entered the school together on 16 Nov. 1564.

JAMES ASKE (c. 1588).

Author of Elizabetha Triumphans (1588), an account of Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury. See ch. xxiv (C).

THOMAS ATCHELOW (c. 1589).

The reference to him in Nashe’s Menaphon epistle (App. C, No. xlii) rather suggests that he may have written plays.

FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626).

Bacon was son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, by Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke. He was at Trinity, Cambridge, from April 1573 to March 1575, and entered Gray’s Inn in June 1576. He sat in the Parliaments of 1584 and 1586, and about 1591 attached himself to the rising fortunes of the Earl of Essex, who in 1595 gave him an estate at Twickenham. His public employment began as a Queen’s Counsel about 1596. He was knighted on 23 July 1603, became Solicitor-General on 25 June 1607, Attorney-General on 27 Oct. 1613, Lord Keeper on 7 March 1617, and Lord Chancellor on 7 Jan. 1618. He was created Lord Verulam on 12 July 1618, and Viscount St. Albans on 27 Jan. 1621. Later in the same year he was disgraced for bribery. The edition of his Works (with his Letters and Life) by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (1857–74) is exhaustive. Many papers of his brother Anthony are at Lambeth, and are drawn on by T. Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Elizabeth (1754). F. J. Burgoyne, Facsimile of a Manuscript at Alnwick (1904), reproduces[212] the Northumberland MS. which contains some of his writings, with others that may be his, and seems once to have contained more. Apart from philosophy, his chief literary work was The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, of which 10 appeared in 1597, and were increased to 38 in 1612 and 58 in 1625. Essay xxxvii, added in 1625, is Of Masks and Triumphs, and, although Bacon was not a writer for the public stage, he had a hand, as deviser or patron, in several courtly shows.

(i) He helped to devise dumb-shows for Thomas Hughes’s Misfortunes of Arthur (q.v.) given by Gray’s Inn at Greenwich on 28 Feb. 1588.

(ii) The list of contents of the Northumberland MS. (Burgoyne, xii) includes an item, now missing from the MS., ‘Orations at Graies Inne Revells’, and Spedding, viii. 342, conjectures that Bacon wrote the speeches of the six councillors delivered on 3 Jan. 1595 as part of the Gesta Grayorum (q.v.).

(iii) Rowland Whyte (Sydney Papers, i. 362) describes a device on the Queen’s day (17 Nov.), 1595, in which the speeches turned on the Earl of Essex’s love for Elizabeth, who said that, ‘if she had thought there had been so much said of her, she would not have been there that night’. A draft list of tilters, of whom the challengers were led by the Earl of Cumberland and the defendants by the Earl of Essex, is in Various MSS. iv. 163, and a final one, with descriptions of their appearance, in the Anglorum Feriae of Peele (q.v.). They were Cumberland, Knight of the Crown, Essex, Sussex, Southampton, as Sir Bevis, Bedford, Compton, Carew, the three brothers Knollys, Dudley, William Howard, Drury, Nowell, John Needham, Skydmore, Ratcliffe, Reynolds, Charles Blount, Carey. The device took place partly in the tiltyard, partly after supper. Before the entry of the tilters a page made a speech and secured the Queen’s glove. A dialogue followed between a Squire on one hand, and a Hermit, a Secretary, and a Soldier, who on the entry of Essex tried to beguile him from love. A postboy brought letters, which the Secretary gave to Essex. After supper, the argument between the Squire and the three tempters was resumed. Whyte adds, ‘The old man [the Hermit] was he that in Cambridg played Giraldy; Morley played the Secretary; and he that plaid Pedantiq was the soldior; and Toby Matthew acted the Squires part. The world makes many untrue constructions of these speaches, comparing the Hermitt and the Secretary to two of the Lords [Burghley and Robert Cecil?]; and the soldier to Sir Roger Williams.’ The Cambridge reference is apparently to Laelia (q.v.) and the performers of the Hermit and Soldier were therefore George Meriton and George Mountaine, of Queen’s. Morley might perhaps be Thomas Morley, the musician, a Gentleman of the Chapel.

Several speeches, apparently belonging to this device, are preserved. Peele speaks of the balancing of Essex between war and statecraft as indicated in the tiltyard by ‘His mute approach and action of his mutes’, but they may have presented a written speech.

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(a) Lambeth MS. v. 118 (copied by Birch in Sloane MS. 4457, f. 32) has, in Bacon’s hand, a speech by the Squire in the tiltyard, and four speeches by the Hermit, Soldier, Secretary, and Squire ‘in the Presence’. These are printed by Birch (1763), Nichols, Eliz. iii. 372, and Spedding, viii. 378.

(b) Lambeth MS. viii. 274 (copied by Birch in Addl. MS. 4164, f. 167) has, in Bacon’s hand, the beginning of a speech by the Secretary to the Squire, which mentions Philautia and Erophilus, and a letter from Philautia to the Queen. These are printed in Spedding, viii. 376.

(c) The Northumberland MS. ff. 47–53 (Burgoyne, 55) has ‘Speeches for my Lord of Essex at the tylt’. These deal with the attempts of Philautia to beguile Erophilus. Four of them are identical with the four speeches ‘in the Presence’ of (a); the fifth is a speech by the Hermit in the tiltyard. They were printed by Spedding, separately, in 1870, as A Conference of Pleasure composed for some festive occasion about the year 1592 by Francis Bacon; but 1592 is merely a guess which Whyte’s letter corrects.

(d) S. P. D. Eliz. ccliv. 67, 68, docketed ‘A Device made by the Earl of Essex for the Entertainment of her Majesty’, has a speech by the Squire, distinct from any in the other MSS., a speech by the Attendant on an Indian Prince, which mentions Philautia, and a draft by Edward Reynolds, servant to Essex, of a French speech by Philautia. The two first of these are printed by Spedding, viii. 388, and Devereux, Lives of the Earls of Essex, ii. 501. The references to Philautia are rather against Spedding’s view that these belong to some occasion other than that of 1595.

Sir Henry Wotton says of Essex (Reliquiae Wottonianae, 21), ‘For his Writings, they are beyond example, especially in his ... things of delight at Court ... as may be yet seen in his Impresses and Inventions of entertainment; and above all in his darling piece of love, and self love’. This, for what it is worth—and Wotton was secretary to Essex in 1595, suggests that the Earl himself, rather than Bacon, was the author of the speeches, which in fact none of the MSS. directly ascribe to Bacon. But it is hard to distinguish the literary productions of a public man from those of his staff.

(iv) The Northumberland MS. (Burgoyne, 65) has a speech of apology for absence, headed ‘ffor the Earle of Sussex at y^e tilt an: 96’, which might be Bacon’s, especially as he wrote from Gray’s Inn to the Earl of Shrewsbury on 15 Oct. 1596, ‘to borrow a horse and armour for some public show’ (Lodge, App. 79).

(v) Beaumont (q.v.) acknowledges his encouragement of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn mask on 20 Feb. 1613, for the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding.

(vi) He bore the expenses of the Gray’s Inn Mask of Flowers (q.v.) on 6 Jan. 1614 for the Earl of Somerset’s wedding. To this occasion probably belongs an undated letter signed ‘Fr. Bacon’, and addressed to an unknown lord (M. S. C. i. 214 from Lansdowne MS. 107, f. 13; Spedding, ii. 370; iv. 394), in which he expresses regret that ‘the joynt maske from the fowr Innes of Cowrt faileth’, and offers a mask[214] for ‘this occasion’ by a dozen gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, ‘owt of the honor which they bear to your lordship, and my lord Chamberlayne, to whome at theyr last maske they were so much bownde’. The last mask would be (v) above, and the then Lord Chamberlain was Suffolk, prospective father-in-law of Somerset, to whom the letter may be supposed to be addressed. But it is odd that the letter is endorsed ‘M^r’ Fr. Bacon, and bound up with papers of Burghley, and it is just possible, although not, I think, likely, that the reference may be to some forgotten Elizabethan mask.

(vii) A recent attempt has been made to assign to Bacon the academic Pedantius (cf. App. K).

JOHN BADGER (c. 1575).

A contributor to the Kenilworth entertainment (cf. ch. xxiv, C). Gascoigne calls him ‘Master Badger of Oxenforde, Maister of Arte, and Bedle in the same Universitie’. A John Badger of Ch. Ch. took his M.A. in 1555, and a superior bedel of divinity of the same name made his will on 15 July 1577 (Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, i. 54).

WILLIAM BARKSTED.

For biography, cf. ch. xv (Actors), and for his share in The Insatiate Countess, s.v. Marston.

There is no reason to regard him as the ‘William Buckstead, Comedian’, whose name is at the end of a Prologue to a playe to the cuntry people in Bodl. Ashm. MS. 38 (198).

BARNABE BARNES (c. 1569–1609).

Barnes was born in Yorkshire, the son of Richard Barnes, bishop of Durham. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1586, but took no degree, accompanied Essex to France in 1591, and dedicated his poems Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) to William Percy (q.v.). He was a friend of Gabriel Harvey and abused by Nashe and Campion. In 1598 he was charged with an attempt at poison, but escaped from prison (Athenaeum, 1904, ii. 240). His Poems were edited by A. B. Grosart in Occasional Issues (1875). Hazlitt, Manual, 23, states that a manuscript of a play by him with the title The Battle of Hexham was sold with Isaac Reed’s books in 1807, but this, which some writers call The Battle of Evesham, has not been traced. As Barnes was buried at Durham in Dec. 1609, it is probable that The Madcap ‘written by Barnes’, which Herbert licensed for Prince Charles’s men on 3 May 1624, was by another of the name.

The Devil’s Charter. 2 Feb. 1607

S. R. 1607, Oct. 16 (Buck). ‘The Tragedie of Pope Alexander the Sixt as it was played before his Maiestie.’ John Wright (Arber, iii. 361).

1607. The Divils Charter: A Tragedie Conteining the Life and Death of Pope Alexander the sixt. As it was plaide before the Kings Maiestie, vpon Candlemasse night last: by his Maiesties Seruants. But more exactly reuewed, corrected and augmented since by the Author, for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader. G. E. for[215] John Wright. [Dedication by Barnabe Barnes to Sir William Herbert and Sir William Pope; Prologue with dumb-show and Epilogue.]

Extracts by A. B. Grosart in Barnes’s Poems (1875), and editions by R. B. McKerrow (1904, Materialien, vi) and J. S. Farmer (1913, S. F. T.)—Dissertation: A. E. H. Swaen, G. C. Moore Smith, and R. B. McKerrow, Notes on the D. C. by B. B. (1906, M. L. R. i. 122).

DAVID, LORD BARRY (1585–1610).

David Barry was the eldest son of the ninth Viscount Buttevant, and the ‘Lo:’ on his title-page represents a courtesy title of ‘Lord’, or ‘Lording’ as it is given in the lawsuit of Androwes v. Slater, which arose out of the interest acquired by him in 1608 in the Whitefriars theatre (q.v.). Kirkman’s play-lists (Greg, Masques, ci) and Wood, Athenae Oxon. ii. 655, have him as ‘Lord’ Barrey, which did not prevent Langbaine (1691) and others from turning him into ‘Lodowick’.—Dissertations: J. Q. Adams, Lordinge (alias Lodowick) Barry (1912, M. P. ix. 567); W. J. Lawrence, The Mystery of Lodowick Barry (1917, University of North Carolina Studies in Philology, xiv. 52).

Ram Alley. 1607–8

S. R. 1610, Nov. 9 (Buck). ‘A booke called, Ramme Alley, or merry trickes. Robert Wilson (Arber, iii. 448).

1611. Ram-Alley: Or Merrie-Trickes. A Comedy Diuers times heretofore acted. By the Children of the Kings Reuels. Written by Lo: Barrey. G. Eld for Robert Wilson. [Prologue and Epilogue.]

1636; 1639.

Editions in Dodsley⁴ (1875, x) and by W. Scott (1810, A. B. D. ii) and J. S. Farmer (1913, S. F. T.).

Fleay, i. 31, attempts to place the play at the Christmas of 1609, but it is improbable that the King’s Revels ever played outside 1607–8. Archer’s play-list of 1656 gives it to Massinger. There are references (ed. Dodsley, pp. 280, 348, 369) to the baboons, which apparently amused London about 1603–5 (cf. s.v. Sir Giles Goosecap), and to the Jacobean knightings (p. 272).

FRANCIS BEAUMONT (c. 1584–1616).

Beaumont was third son of Francis Beaumont, Justice of Common Pleas, sprung from a gentle Leicestershire family, settled at Grace Dieu priory in Charnwood Forest. He was born in 1584 or 1585 and had a brother, Sir John, also known as a poet. He entered Broadgates Hall, Oxford, in 1597, but took no degree, and the Inner Temple in 1600. In 1614 or 1615 he had a daughter by his marriage, probably recent, to Ursula Isley of Sundridge Hall, Kent, and another daughter was born after his death on 6 March 1616. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Beaumont contributed a humorous grammar lecture (preserved in Sloane MS. 1709, f. 13; cf. E. J. L. Scott in Athenaeum for 27 Jan. 1894) to some Inner Temple Christmas revels of uncertain date. This has allusions to ‘the most plodderly plotted shew of Lady Amity’[216] given ‘in this ill-instructed hall the last Christmas’, and to seeing a play at the Bankside for sixpence. His poetical career probably begins with the anonymous Salmacis and Hermaphroditus of 1602. His non-dramatic poems, of which the most important is an epistle to Elizabeth Countess of Rutland in 1612, appeared after his death in volumes of 1618, 1640, and 1653, which certainly ascribe to him much that is not his. His connexion with the stage seems to have begun about 1606, possibly through Michael Drayton, a family friend, in whose Eglogs of that year he appears as ‘sweet Palmeo’. But his first play, The Woman Hater, written independently for Paul’s, shows him under the influence of Ben Jonson, who wrote him an affectionate epigram (lv), told Drummond in 1619 that ‘Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses’ (Laing, 10), and according to Dryden (Essay on Dramatick Poesie) ‘submitted all his writings to his censure, and, ’tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots’. To Jonson’s Volpone (1607) commendatory verses were contributed both by Beaumont, whose own Knight of the Burning Pestle was produced in the same year, and by John Fletcher, whose names are thus first combined. Jonson and Beaumont, in their turn, wrote verses for Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, probably written in 1608 or 1609 and published in 1609 or 1610. About 1608 or 1609 it may also be supposed that the famous literary collaboration began. This, although it can only be proved to have covered some half-dozen plays, left the two names so closely associated that when, in 1647 and 1679, the actors and publishers issued collections of fifty-three pieces, in all or most of which Fletcher had had, or was supposed to have had, a hand, they described them all as ‘by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’, and thus left to modern scholarship a task with which it is still grappling. A contemporary protest by Sir Aston Cockaine pointed out the small share of Beaumont and the large share of Massinger in the 1647 volume; and the process of metrical analysis initiated by Fleay and Boyle may be regarded as fairly successful in fixing the characteristics of the very marked style of Fletcher, although it certainly raises more questions than it solves as to the possible shares not only of Massinger, but of Jonson, Field, Tourneur, Daborne, Middleton, Rowley, and Shirley, as collaborators or revisers, in the plays as they have come down to us. Since Fletcher wrote up to his death in 1625, much of this investigation lies outside my limits, and it is fortunate that the task of selecting the plays which may, certainly or possibly, fall before Beaumont’s death in 1616 is one in which a fair number of definite data are available to eke out the slippery metrical evidence. It would seem that the collaboration began about 1608 and lasted in full swing for about four or five years, that in it Beaumont was the ruling spirit, and that it covered plays, not only for the Queen’s Revels, for whom both poets had already written independently, and for their successors the Lady Elizabeth’s, but also, and concurrently, for the King’s. According to Dryden, two or three plays were written ‘very unsuccessfully’ before the triumph of Philaster, but these may include the independent[217] plays, of which we know that the Knight of the Burning Pestle and the Faithful Shepherdess failed. The Folios contain a copy of verses written by Beaumont to Jonson (ed. Waller, x. 199) ‘before he and M^r. Fletcher came to London, with two of the precedent Comedies then not finish’d, which deferr’d their merry meetings at the Mermaid’, but this probably relates to a temporary villeggiatura and cannot be precisely dated. It is no doubt to this period of 1608–13 that we may refer the gossip of Aubrey, i. 96, who learnt from Sir James Hales and others that Beaumont and Fletcher ‘lived together on the Banke-Side, not far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c., betweene them’. Obviously these conditions ended when Beaumont married an heiress about 1613, and it seems probable that from this date onwards he ceased to be an active playwright, although he contributed a mask to the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding at Shrovetide of that year, and his hand can be traced, perhaps later still, in The Scornful Lady. At any rate, about 1613 Fletcher was not merely writing independent plays—a practice which, unlike Beaumont, he may never have wholly dropped—but also looking about for other contributors. There is some converging evidence of his collaboration about this date with Shakespeare; and Henslowe’s correspondence (Henslowe Papers, 66) shows him quite clearly as engaged on a play, possibly The Honest Man’s Fortune, with no less than three others, Daborne, Field, and Massinger. It is not probable that, from 1616 onwards, Fletcher wrote for any company but the King’s men. Of the fifty-two plays included in the Ff., forty-four can be shown from title-pages, actor-lists, licences by the Master of the Revels, and a Lord Chamberlain’s order of 1641 (M. S. C. i. 364) to have belonged to the King’s, six by title-pages and another Lord Chamberlain’s order (Variorum, iii. 159) to have belonged to the Cockpit theatre, and two, Wit at Several Weapons and Four Plays in One, together with The Faithful Friends, which does not appear in the Ff., cannot be assigned to any company. But some of the King’s men’s plays and some or all of the Cockpit plays had originally belonged to Paul’s, the Queen’s Revels, or the Lady Elizabeth’s, and it is probable that all these formed part of the Lady Elizabeth’s repertory in 1616, and that upon the reorganization of the company which then took place they were divided into two groups, of which one passed with Field to the King’s, while the other remained with his late fellows and was ultimately left with Christopher Beeston when their occupation of the Cockpit ended in 1625.

I classify the plays dealt with in these notes as follows: (a) Plays wholly or substantially by Beaumont—The Woman Hater, The Knight of the Burning Pestle; (b) Plays of the Beaumont-Fletcher collaboration—Philaster, A Maid’s Tragedy, A King and No King, Four Plays in One, Cupid’s Revenge, The Coxcomb, The Scornful Lady; (c) Plays wholly or substantially by Fletcher—The Woman’s Prize, The Faithful Shepherdess, Monsieur Thomas, Valentinian, Bonduca, Wit Without Money; (d) Plays of doubtful authorship and, in some[218] cases, period—The Captain, The Honest Man’s Fortune, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Faithful Friends, Thierry and Theodoret, Wit at Several Weapons, Love’s Cure, The Night Walker. Full treatment of The Two Noble Kinsmen, as of Henry VIII, in which Fletcher certainly had a hand, is only possible in relation to Shakespeare. I have not thought it necessary to include every play which, or a hypothetical version of which, an unsupported conjecture, generally from Mr. Oliphant, puts earlier than 1616. The Queen of Corinth, The Noble Gentleman, The Little French Lawyer, The Laws of Candy, The Knight of Malta, The Fair Maid of the Inn, The Chances, Beggar’s Bush, The Bloody Brother, Love’s Pilgrimage, Nice Valour, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife are omitted on this principle, and I believe I might safely have extended the same treatment to some of those in my class (d).

Collections

S. R. 1646, Sept. 4 (Langley). ‘These severall Tragedies & Comedies hereunder mencioned (viz^t.) ... [thirty plays named] ... by M^r. Beamont and M^r. Flesher.’ H. Robinson and H. Moseley (Eyre, i. 244).

1660, June 29. ‘The severall Plays following, vizt.... [names] ... all six copies written by Fra: Beamont & John Fletcher.’ H. Robinson and H. Moseley (Eyre, ii. 268).

F₁, 1647. Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher Gentlemen. Never printed before, And now published by the Authours Originall Copies. For H. Robinson and H. Moseley. [Twenty-nine plays of the 1646 entry, excluding The Wildgoose Chase, and the five plays and one mask of the 1660 entry, none but the mask previously printed; Portrait of Fletcher by W. Marshall; Epistle to Philip Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, signed ‘John Lowin, Richard Robinson, Eylaerd Swanston, Hugh Clearke, Stephen Hammerton, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Thomas Pollard, William Allen, Theophilus Bird’; Epistle to the Reader, signed ‘Ja. Shirley’; The Stationer to the Readers, signed ‘Humphrey Moseley’ and dated ‘Feb. 14^th 1646’; Thirty-seven sets of Commendatory verses, variously signed; Postscript; cf. W. W. Greg in 4 Library, ii. 109.]

F₂, 1679. Fifty Comedies and Tragedies. Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen. All in one Volume. Published by the Authors Original Copies, the Songs to each Play being added. J. Macock, for John Martyn, Henry Herringman, Richard Marriot. [The thirty-four plays and one mask of F₁, with eighteen other plays, all previously printed; Epistle by the Stationers to the Reader; Actor Lists prefixed to many of the plays.]

1711. The Works of B. and F. 7 vols. Jacob Tonson.

Editions by Theobald, Seward and Sympson (1750, 10 vols.), G. Colman (1778, 10 vols.; 1811, 3 vols.), H. Weber (1812, 14 vols., adding The Faithful Friends), G. Darley (1839, 2 vols.; 1862–6, 2 vols.), A. Dyce (1843–6, 11 vols.; 1852, 2 vols.).

1905–12. A. Glover and A. R. Waller. The Works of F. B. and[219] J. F. 10 vols. (C. E. C.). [Text of F₂, with collations of F₁ and Q_q.]

1904–12 (in progress). A. H. Bullen, The Works of F. B. and J. F. Variorum Edition. 4 vols. issued. [Text based on Dyce; editions of separate plays by P. A. Daniel, R. W. Bond, W. W. Greg, R. B. McKerrow, J. Masefield, M. Luce, C. Brett, R. G. Martin, E. K. Chambers.]

Selections

1887. J. S. L. Strachey, The Best Plays of B. and F. 2 vols. (Mermaid Series). [Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, Thierry and Theodoret, K. B. P., King and No King, Bonduca, Faithful Shepherdess, Valentinian, and later plays.]

1912. F. E. Schelling, Beaumont and Fletcher (M. E. D.). [Philaster, Maid’s Tragedy, Faithful Shepherdess, Bonduca.]

Dissertations: A. C. Swinburne, B. and F. (1875–94, Studies in Prose and Poetry), The Earlier Plays of B. and F. (1910, English Review); F. G. Fleay, On Metrical Tests as applied to Dramatic Poetry: Part ii, B., F., Massinger (1874, N. S. S. Trans. 51, 23*, 61*, reprinted, 1876–8, with alterations in Shakespeare Manual, 151), On the Chronology of the Plays of F. and Massinger (1886, E. S. ix. 12), and in B. C. (1891), i. 164; R. Boyle, B., F., and Massinger (1882–7, E. S. v. 74, vii. 66, viii. 39, ix. 209, x. 383), B., F., and Massinger (1886, N. S. S. Trans. 579), Mr. Oliphant on B. and F. (1892–3, E. S. xvii. 171, xviii. 292), Daborne’s Share in the B. and F. Plays (1899, E. S. xxvi. 352); G. C. Macaulay, F. B.: a Critical Study (1883), B. and F. (1910, C. H. vi. 107); E. H. C. Oliphant, The Works of B. and F. (1890–2, E. S. xiv. 53, xv. 321, xvi. 180); E. Koeppel, Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson’s, John Marston’s und B. und F.’s (1895, Münchener Beiträge, xi); C. E. Norton, F. B.’s Letter to Ben Jonson (1896, Harvard Studies and Notes, v. 19); A. H. Thorndike, The Influence of B. and F. on Shakspere (1901); O. L. Hatcher, J. F.: a Study in Dramatic Method (1905); R. M. Alden, Introduction to B.’s Plays (1910, B. L.); C. M. Gayley, F. B.: Dramatist (1914); W. E. Farnham, Colloquial Contractions in B., F., Massinger and Shakespeare as a Test of Authorship (1916, M. L. A. xxxi. 326).

Bibliographies: A. C. Potter, A Bibl. of B. and F. (1890, Harvard Bibl. Contributions, 39); B. Leonhardt, Litteratur über B. und F. (1896, Anglia, xix. 36, 542).

The Woman Hater, c. 1606

S. R. 1607, May 20 (Buck). ‘A booke called “The Woman Hater” as it hath ben lately acted by the Children of Powles.’ Eleazar Edgar and Robert Jackson (Arber, iii. 349). [A note ‘Sir George Buckes hand alsoe to it’.]

1607. The Woman Hater. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Children of Paules. Sold by John Hodgets. [Prologue in prose.]

1607. R. R. sold by John Hodgets. [A reissue.]

[220]

S. R. 1613, April 19. Transfer of Edgar’s share to John Hodgettes (Arber, iii. 521).

1648.... As it hath beene Acted by his Majesties Servants with great Applause. Written by John Fletcher Gent. For Humphrey Moseley.

1649. The Woman Hater, or the Hungry Courtier. A Comedy ... Written by Francis Beamont and John Fletcher, Gent. For Humphrey Moseley. [A reissue. Prologue in verse, said by Fleay, i. 177, to be Davenant’s, and Epilogue, used also for The Noble Gentleman.]

Fleay, i. 177, and Gayley, 73, put the date in the spring of 1607, finding a reference in ‘a favourite on the sudden’ (I. iii) to the success of Robert Carr in taking the fancy of James at the tilt of 24 March 1607, to which Fleay adds that ‘another inundation’ (III. i) recalls a flood of 20 Jan. 1607. Neither argument is convincing, and it is not known that the Paul’s boys went on into 1607; they are last heard of in July 1606. The prologue expresses the author’s intention not to lose his ears, perhaps an allusion to Jonson’s and Chapman’s peril after Eastward Ho! in 1605. Gayley notes in II. iii what certainly looks like a reminiscence of Antony and Cleopatra, IV. xiv. 51 and xv. 87, but it is no easier to be precise about the date of Antony and Cleopatra than about that of The Woman Hater. The play is universally regarded as substantially Beaumont’s and the original prologue only speaks of a single author, but Davenant in 1649 evidently supposed it to be Fletcher’s, saying ‘full twenty yeares, he wore the bayes’. Boyle, Oliphant, Alden, and Gayley suggest among them III. i, ii; IV. ii; V. i, ii, v as scenes to which Fletcher or some other collaborator may have given touches.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle. 1607

1613. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. For Walter Burre. [Epistle to Robert Keysar, signed ‘W. B.’, Induction with Prologue, Epilogue.]

1635.... Full of Mirth and Delight. Written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher, Gent. As it is now Acted by Her Maiesties Servants at the Private house in Drury Lane. N. O. for I. S. [Epistle to Readers, Prologue (from Lyly’s Sapho and Phaon).]

1635.... Francis Beamont....

Editions by F. W. Moorman (1898, T. D.), H. S. Murch (1908, Yale Studies, xxxiii), R. M. Alden (1910, B. L.), W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.).—Dissertations: R. Boyle, B. and F.’s K. B. P. (1889, E. S. xiii. 156); B. Leonhardt, Ueber B. und F.’s K. B. P. (1885, Annaberg programme), Die Text-Varianten von B. und F.’s K. B. P. (1896, Anglia, xix. 509).

The Epistle tells us that the play was ‘in eight daies ... begot and borne’, ‘exposed to the wide world, who ... utterly reiected it’, preserved by Keysar and sent to Burre, who had ‘fostred it priuately in my bosome these two yeares’. The play ‘hopes his father will beget him a yonger brother’. Burre adds, ‘Perhaps it will be thought to bee of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his elder aboue a yeare’. The references to the actors in the induction as boys and the known connexion of Keysar with the Queen’s[221] Revels fix the company. The date is more difficult. It cannot be earlier than 1607, since the reference to a play at the Red Bull in which the Sophy of Persia christens a child (IV. i. 46) is to Day’s Travels of Three English Brothers of that year. With other allusions, not in themselves conclusive, 1607 would agree well enough, notably with Ind. 8, ‘This seuen yeares there hath beene playes at this house’, for it was just seven years in the autumn of 1607 since Evans set up plays at the Blackfriars. The trouble is IV. i. 73, ‘Read the play of the Foure Prentices of London, where they tosse their pikes so’, for this implies that the Four Prentices was not merely produced but in print, and the earliest extant edition is of 1615. It is, however, quite possible that the play may have been in print, even as far back as 1594 (cf. s.v. Heywood). Others put it, and with it the K. B. P., in 1610, in which case the production would have been at the Whitefriars, the history of which can only be traced back two or three years and not seven years before 1610. On the whole, I think the reference to Don Quixote in the Epistle is in favour of 1607 rather than 1610. It is, of course, conceivable that Burre only meant to claim that the K. B. P. was a year older than Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote, which was entered in S. R. on 19 Jan. 1611 and published in 1612. Even this brings us back to the very beginning of 1610, and the boast would have been a fairly idle one, as Shelton states in his preface that the translation was actually made ‘some five or six yeares agoe’. Shelton’s editor, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, has shown that it was based on the Brussels edition of 1607. If we put it in 1608 and the K. B. P. in 1607 the year’s priority of the latter is preserved. Most certainly the K. B. P. was not prior to the Spanish Don Quixote of 1605. Its dependence on Cervantes is not such as necessarily to imply that Beaumont had read the romance, but he had certainly heard of its general drift and of the particular episodes of the inn taken for a castle and the barber’s basin. Fleay, Boyle, Moorman, Murch, and Alden are inclined to assign to Fletcher some or all of the scenes in which Jasper and Luce and Humphrey take part; but Macaulay, Oliphant and Gayley regard the play, except perhaps for a touch or two, as wholly Beaumont’s. Certainly the Epistle suggests that the play had but one ‘father’.

The Faithful Shepherdess. 1608–9

N.D. The Faithfull Shepherdesse. By John Fletcher. For R. Bonian and H. Walley. [Commendatory verses by N. F. (‘Nath. Field’, Q₂), Fr. Beaumont, Ben Jonson, G. Chapman; Dedicatory verses to Sir Walter Aston, Sir William Skipwith, Sir Robert Townsend, all signed ‘John Fletcher’; Epistle to Reader, signed ‘John Fletcher’.]

S. R. 1628, Dec. 8. Transfer from Walley to R. Meighen (Arber, iv. 206).

1629.... newly corrected ... T. C. for R. Meighen.

1634.... Acted at Somerset House before the King and Queene on Twelfe night last, 1633. And divers times since with great applause[222] at the Private House in Blacke-Friers, by his Majesties Servants.... A. M. for Meighen. [Verses to Joseph Taylor, signed ‘Shakerley Marmion’, and Prologue, both for the performance of 6 Jan. 1634.]

1656; 1665.

Editions by F. W. Moorman (1897, T. D.), W. W. Greg (1908, Bullen, iii), W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.).

Jonson told Drummond in the winter of 1618–19 (Laing, 17) that ‘Flesher and Beaumont, ten yeers since, hath written the Faithfull Shipheardesse, a Tragicomedie, well done’. This gives us the date 1608–9, which there is nothing to contradict. The undated Q₁ may be put in 1609 or 1610, as Skipwith died on 3 May 1610 and the short partnership of the publishers is traceable from 22 Dec. 1608 to 14 Jan. 1610. It is, moreover, in Sir John Harington’s catalogue of his plays, which was made up in 1609 or 1610 (cf. ch. xxii). The presence of Field, Chapman, and Jonson amongst the verse-writers and the mentions in Beaumont’s verses of ‘the waxlights’ and of a boy dancing between the acts point to the Queen’s Revels as the producers. It is clear also from the verses that the play was damned, and that Fletcher alone, in spite of Drummond’s report, was the author. This is not doubted on internal grounds.

The Woman’s Prize, or, The Tamer Tamed. 1604 <

1647. The Womans Prize, or The Tamer Tam’d. A Comedy. [Part of F₁. Prologue and Epilogue.]

1679. [Part of F₂.]

Fleay, i. 198, Oliphant, and Thorndike, 70, accumulate inconclusive evidence bearing on the date, of which the most that can be said is that an answer to The Taming of the Shrew would have more point the nearer it came to the date of the original, and that the references to the siege of Ostend in I. iii would be topical during or not long after that siege, which ended on 8 Sept. 1604. On the other hand, Gayley (R. E. C. iii, lxvi) calls attention to possible reminiscences of Epicoene (1609) and Alchemist (1610). I see no justification for supposing that a play written in 1605 would undergo revision, as has been suggested, in 1610–14. A revival by the King’s in 1633 got them into some trouble with Sir Henry Herbert, who claimed the right to purge even an old play of ‘oaths, prophaness, and ribaldrye’ (Variorum, iii. 208). Possibly the play is also The Woman is too Hard for Him, which the King’s took to Court on 26 Nov. 1621 (Murray, ii. 193). But the original writing was not necessarily for this company. There is general agreement in assigning the play to Fletcher alone.

Philaster > 1610

S. R. 1620, Jan. 10 (Taverner). ‘A Play Called Philaster.’ Thomas Walkley (Arber, iii. 662).

1620. Phylaster, Or Loue lyes a Bleeding. Acted at the Globe by his Maiesties Seruants. Written by Francis Baymont and Iohn Fletcher. Gent. For Thomas Walkley.

1622.... As it hath beene diuerse times Acted, at the Globe, and[223] Blacke-friers, by his Maiesties Seruants.... The Second Impression, corrected, and amended. For Thomas Walkley. [Epistle to the Reader by Walkley. Different text of I. i; V. iv, v.]

1628. A. M. for Richard Hawkins. [Epistle by the Stationer to the Understanding Gentry.]

1634; 1639; 1652; N.D. [1663]; 1687.

Editions by J. S. L. Strachey (1887, Mermaid, i), F. S. Boas (1898, T. D.), P. A. Daniel (1904, Variorum, i), A. H. Thorndike (1906, B. L.), W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.).—Dissertations: B. Leonhardt, Über die Beziehungen von B. und F.’s P. zu Shakespeare’s Hamlet und Cymbeline (1885, Anglia, viii. 424) and Die Text-Varianten von B. und F.’s P. (1896, Anglia, xix. 34).

The play is apparently referred to in John Davies of Hereford, Scourge of Folly (S. R. 8 Oct. 1610), ep. 206:

If so, the date 1608–10 is suggested, and I do not think that it is possible to be more precise. No trustworthy argument can be based with Gayley, 342, on the fact that Davies’s epigram follows that praising Ostler as ‘Roscius’ and ‘sole king of actors’; and I fear that the view of Thorndike, 65, that 1608 is a ‘probable’ conjecture is biased by a desire to assume priority to Cymbeline. There were two Court performances in the winter of 1612–13, and Fleay, i. 189, suggests that the versions of I. i and V. iv, v which appear in Q₁ were made for these. The epistle to Q₂ describes them as ‘dangerous and gaping wounds ... received in the first impression’. There is general agreement that most of the play, whether Davies knew it or not, is Beaumont’s. Most critics assign V. iii, iv and some the whole or parts of I. i, ii, II. ii, iv, and III. ii to Fletcher.

The Coxcomb. 1608 < > 10

1647. The Coxcomb. [Part of F₁. Prologue and Epilogue.]

1679. [Part of F₂. ‘The Principal Actors were Nathan Field, Joseph Taylor, Giles Gary, Emanuel Read, Rich. Allen, Hugh Atawell, Robert Benfeild, Will Barcksted.’]

Dissertation: A. S. W. Rosenbach, The Curious Impertinent in English Dramatic Literature (1902, M. L. N. xvii. 179).

The play was given at Court by the Queen’s Revels on 2 or 3 Nov. 1612. It passed, doubtless, through the Lady Elizabeth’s, to whom the actor-list probably belongs, to the King’s, who took it to Court on 5 March 1622 (Murray, ii. 193) and again on 17 Nov. 1636 (Cunningham, xxiv). There was thus more than one opportunity for the prologue, which speaks of the play as having a mixed reception at first, partly because of its length, then ‘long forgot’, and now revived[224] and shortened. The original date may be between the issue in 1608 of Baudouin’s French translation of The Curious Impertinent from Don Quixote, which in original or translation suggested its plot, and Jonson’s Alchemist (1610), IV. vii. 39, ‘You are ... a Don Quixote. Or a Knight o’ the curious coxcombe’. The prologue refers to ‘makers’, and there is fair agreement in giving some or all of I. iv, vi, II. iv, III. iii, and V. ii to Beaumont and the rest to Fletcher. Fleay, Boyle, Oliphant, and Gayley think that there has been revision by a later writer, perhaps Massinger or W. Rowley.

The Maid’s Tragedy > 1611

S. R. 1619, April 28 (Buck). ‘A play Called The maides tragedy.’ Higgenbotham and Constable (Arber, iii. 647).

1619. The Maides Tragedy. As it hath beene divers times Acted at the Blacke-friers by the King’s Maiesties Seruants. For Francis Constable.

1622.... Newly perused, augmented, and inlarged, This second Impression. For Francis Constable.

1630.... Written by Francis Beaumont, and Iohn Fletcher Gentlemen. The Third Impression, Reuised and Refined. A. M. for Richard Hawkins.

1638; 1641; 1650 [1660?]; 1661.

Editions by J. S. L. Strachey (1887, Mermaid, i), P. A. Daniel (1904, Variorum, i), A. H. Thorndike (1906, B. L.), W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.).—Dissertation: B. Leonhardt, Die Text-Varianten in B. und F.’s M. T. (1900, Anglia, xxiii. 14).

The play must have been known by 31 Oct. 1611 when Buck named the Second Maiden’s Tragedy (q.v.) after it, and it was given at Court during 1612–13. An inferior limit is not attainable and any date within c. 1608–11 is possible. Gayley, 349, asks us to accept the play as more mature than, and therefore later than, Philaster. Fleay, i. 192, thinks that the mask in I. ii was added after the floods in the winter of 1612, but you cannot bring Neptune into a mask without mention of floods. As to authorship there is some division of opinion, especially on II. ii and IV. iii; subject thereto, a balance of opinion gives I, II, III, IV. ii, iv and V. iv to Beaumont, and only IV. i and V. i, ii, iii to Fletcher.

An episode (I. ii) consists of a mask at the wedding of Amintor and Evadne, with an introductory dialogue between Calianax, Diagoras, who keeps the doors, and guests desiring admission. ‘The ladies are all placed above,’ says Diagoras, ‘save those that come in the King’s troop.’ Calianax has an ‘office’, evidently as Chamberlain. ‘He would run raging among them, and break a dozen wiser heads than his own in the twinkling of an eye.’

The maskers are Proteus and other sea-gods; the presenters Night, Cinthia, Neptune, Aeolus, Favonius, and other winds, who ‘rise’ or come ‘out of a rock’. There are two ‘measures’ between hymeneal songs, but no mention of taking out ladies.

In an earlier passage (I. i. 9) a poet says of masks, ‘They must[225] commend their King, and speak in praise Of the Assembly, bless the Bride and Bridegroom, In person of some God; th’are tyed to rules Of flattery’.

A King and No King. 1611

S. R. 1618, Aug. 7 (Buck). ‘A play Called A king and noe kinge.’ Blount (Arber, iii. 631).

1619. A King and no King. Acted at the Globe, by his Maiesties Seruants: Written by Francis Beamount and Iohn Flecher. For Thomas Walkley. [Epistle to Sir Henry Nevill, signed ‘Thomas Walkley’.]

1625.... Acted at the Blacke-Fryars, by his Maiesties Seruants. And now the second time Printed, according to the true Copie.... For Thomas Walkley.

1631; 1639; 1655; 1661; 1676.

Editions by R. W. Bond (1904, Bullen, i), R. M. Alden (1910, B. L.).—Dissertation: B. Leonhardt, Die Text-Varianten von B.’s und F.’s A K. and No K. (1903, Anglia, xxvi. 313).

This is a fixed point, both for date and authorship, in the history of the collaboration. Herbert records (Var. iii. 263) that it was ‘allowed to be acted in 1611’ by Sir George Buck. It was in fact acted at Court by the King’s on 26 Dec. 1611 and again during 1612–13. A performance at Hampton Court on 10 Jan. 1637 is also upon record (Cunningham, xxv). The epistle, which tells us that the publisher received the play from Nevill, speaks of ‘the authors’ and of their ‘future labours’; rather oddly, as Beaumont was dead. There is practical unanimity in assigning I, II, III, IV. iv, and V. ii, iv to Beaumont and IV. i, ii, iii and V. i, iii to Fletcher.

Cupid’s Revenge > 1612

S. R. 1615, April 24 (Buck). ‘A play called Cupid’s revenge.’ Josias Harrison (Arber, iii. 566).

1615. Cupid’s Revenge. As it hath beene diuers times Acted by the Children of her Maiesties Reuels. By Iohn Fletcher. Thomas Creede for Josias Harrison. [Epistle by Printer to Reader.]

1630.... As it was often Acted (with great applause) by the Children of the Reuells. Written by Fran. Beaumont & Io. Fletcher. The second edition. For Thomas Jones.

1635.... The third Edition. A. M.

The play was given by the Queen’s Revels at Court on 5 Jan. 1612, 1 Jan. 1613, and either 9 Jan. or 27 Feb. 1613. It was revived by the Lady Elizabeth’s at Court on 28 Dec. 1624, and is in the Cockpit list of 1639. It cannot therefore be later than 1611–12, while no close inferior limit can be fixed. Fleay, i. 187, argues that it has been altered for Court, chiefly by turning a wicked king, queen, and prince into a duke, duchess, and marquis. I doubt if this implies revision as distinct from censorship, and in any case it does not, as Fleay suggests, imply the intervention of a reviser other than the original authors. The suggestion has led to chaos in the distribution of authorship, since various critics have introduced Daborne, Field, and Massinger as[226] possible collaborators or revisers. The stationer speaks of a single ‘author’, meaning Fletcher, but says he was ‘not acquainted with him’. And the critics at least agree in finding both Beaumont and Fletcher, pretty well throughout.

The Captain. 1609 < > 12

1647. The Captain. [Part of F₁. Prologue and Epilogue.]

1679. The Captain. A Comedy. [Part of F₂.] ‘The principal Actors were, Richard Burbadge, Henry Condel, William Ostler, Alexander Cooke.’

The play was given by the King’s at Court during 1612–13, and presumably falls between that date and the admission of Ostler to the company in 1609. The 1679 print, by a confusion, gives the scene as ‘Venice, Spain’, but this hardly justifies the suggestion of Fleay, i. 195, that we have a version of Fletcher’s work altered for the Court by Barnes. He had formerly conjectured collaboration between Fletcher and Jonson (E. S. ix. 18). The prologue speaks of ‘the author’; Fleay thinks that the mention of ‘twelve pence’ as the price of a seat indicates a revival. Several critics find Massinger; Oliphant finds Rowley; and Boyle and Oliphant find Beaumont, as did Macaulay, 196, in 1883, but apparently not in 1910 (C. H. vi. 137).

Two Noble Kinsmen. 1613

S. R. 1634, April 8 (Herbert). ‘A Tragicomedy called the two noble kinsmen by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare.’ John Waterson (Arber, iv. 316).

1634. The Two Noble Kinsmen: Presented at the Black-friers by the Kings Maiesties servants, with great applause: Written by the memorable Worthies of their time; Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare. Gent. Tho. Cotes for Iohn Waterson. [Prologue and Epilogue.]

1679. [Part of F₂ of Beaumont and Fletcher.]

Editions by W. W. Skeat (1875), H. Littledale (1876–85, N. S. S.), C. H. Herford (1897, T. D.), J. S. Farmer (1910, T. F. T.), and with Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, Sh. Apocrypha, and sometimes Works of Shakespeare.—Dissertations: W. Spalding, A Letter on Sh.’s Authorship of T. N. K. (1833; 1876, N. S. S.); S. Hickson, The Shares of Sh. and F. in T. N. K. (1847, Westminster Review, xlvii. 59; 1874, N. S. S. Trans. 25*, with additions by F. G. Fleay and F. J. Furnivall); N. Delius, Die angebliche Autorschaft des T. N. K. (1878, Jahrbuch, xiii. 16); R. Boyle, Sh. und die beiden edlen Vettern (1881, E. S. iv. 34), On Massinger and T. N. K. (1882, N. S. S. Trans. 371); T. Bierfreund, Palamon og Arcite (1891); E. H. C. Oliphant (1892, E. S. xv. 323); B. Leuschner, Über das Verhältniss von T. N. K. zu Chaucer’s Knightes Tale (1903, Halle diss.); O. Petersen, The T. N. K. (1914, Anglia, xxxviii. 213); H. D. Sykes, The T. N. K. (1916, M. L. R. xi. 136); A. H. Cruickshank, Massinger and T. N. K. (1922).

The date of T. N. K. is fairly well fixed to 1613 by its adaptation of[227] Beaumont’s wedding mask of Shrovetide in that year; there would be a confirmation in Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614), iv. 3,

did not the juxtaposition of the Arcadia suggest that the allusion may be, not to the Palamon of T. N. K. but to the Palaemon of Daniel’s The Queen’s Arcadia (1606). In spite of the evidence of the t.p. attempts have been made to substitute Beaumont, or, more persistently, Massinger, for Shakespeare as Fletcher’s collaborator. This question can only be discussed effectively in connexion with Shakespeare.

The Honest Man’s Fortune. 1613

[MS.] Dyce MS. 9, formerly in Heber collection.

1647. The Honest Mans Fortune. [Part of F₁. After play, verses ‘Upon an Honest Mans Fortune. By M^r. John Fletcher’, beginning ‘You that can look through Heaven, and tell the Stars’.]

1679. The Honest Man’s Fortune. A Tragicomedie. [Part of F₂. ‘The principal actors were Nathan Field, Joseph Taylor, Rob. Benfield, Will Eglestone, Emanuel Read, Thomas Basse.’]

Dissertation: K. Richter, H. M. F. und seine Quellen (1905, Halle diss.).

On the fly-leaf of the MS. is ‘The Honest Man’s Fortune, Plaide in the yeare 1613’, and in another hand at the end of the text, ‘This Play, being an olde one, and the Originall lost was reallow’d by mee this 8 Febru. 1624. Att the intreaty of Mr.   .’ The last word is torn off, but a third hand has added ‘Taylor’. The MS. contains some alterations, partly by the licenser, partly by the stage-manager or prompter. The latter include the names of three actors, ‘G[eorge] Ver[non]’, ‘J: R Cro’ and ‘G. Rick’. The ending of the last scene in the MS. differs from that of the Ff. The endorsement is confirmed by Herbert’s entry in his diary (Variorum, iii. 229), ‘For the King’s company. An olde play called The Honest Mans Fortune, the originall being lost, was re-allowed by mee at M^r. Taylor’s intreaty, and on condition to give mee a booke [The Arcadia], this 8 Februa. 1624.’ The actor-list suggests that the original performers were Lady Elizabeth’s men, after the Queen’s Revels had joined them in March 1613. Fleay, i. 196, suggests that this is the play by Fletcher, Field, Massinger, and Daborne which is the subject of some of Henslowe’s correspondence and was finally delivered on 5 Aug. 1613 (Greg, Henslowe Papers, 65, 90). Attempts to combine this indication with stylistic evidence have led the critics to some agreement that Fletcher is only responsible for V and that Massinger is to be found in III, and for the rest into a quagmire of conjecture amongst the names of Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Field, Daborne, Tourneur, and Cartwright. The appended verses of the Ff. are not in the Dyce MS., but they are in Addl. MS. 25707, f. 66, and Bodl. Rawlinson Poet. MS. 160, f. 20, where they are ascribed to Fletcher, and in Beaumont’s Poems (1653).

[228]

Bonduca. 1609 < > 14

1647. Bonduca, A Tragedy. [Part of F₁.]

1679. [Part of F₂. ‘The Principal Actors were Richard Burbadge, Henry Condel, William Eglestone, Nich. Toolie, William Ostler, John Lowin, John Underwood, Richard Robinson.’]

Dissertations: B. Leonhardt, Die Text-Varianten von B. und F.’s B. (1898, Anglia, xx. 421) and Bonduca (E. S. xiii. 36).

The actor-list is of the King’s men between 1609–11 or between 1613–14, as these are the only periods during which Ecclestone and Ostler can have played together. The authorship is generally regarded as substantially Fletcher’s; and the occasional use of rhyme in II. i and IV. iv hardly justifies Oliphant’s theory of an earlier version by Beaumont, or the ascription by Fleay and Macaulay of these scenes to Field, whose connexion with the King’s does not seem to antedate 1616.

Monsieur Thomas. 1610 < > 16

S. R. 1639, Jan. 22 (Wykes). ‘A Comedy called Monsieur Thomas, by master John Fletcher.’ Waterson (Arber, iv. 451).

1639. Monsieur Thomas. A Comedy. Acted at the Private House in Blacke Fryers. The Author, Iohn Fletcher, Gent. Thomas Harper for John Waterson. [Epistle to Charles Cotton, signed ‘Richard Brome’ and commendatory verses by the same.]

N.D. [c. 1661]. Fathers Own Son. A Comedy. Formerly Acted at the Private House in Black Fryers; and now at the Theatre in Vere Street by His Majesties Servants. The Author John Fletcher Gent. For Robert Crofts. [Reissue with fresh t.p.]

Edition by R. G. Martin (1912, Bullen, iv).—Dissertations: H. Guskar, Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas und seine Quellen (1905, Anglia, xxviii. 397; xxix. 1); A. L. Stiefel, Zur Quellenfrage von John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (1906, E. S. xxxvi. 238); O. L. Hatcher, The Sources of Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (1907, Anglia, xxx. 89).

The title-page printed at the time of the revival by the King’s men of the Restoration enables us to identify Monsieur Thomas with the Father’s Own Son of the Cockpit repertory in 1639, and like the other plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher series in that repertory it was probably written by 1616, and either for the Queen’s Revels or for the Lady Elizabeth’s. An allusion in II. iii. 104 to ‘all the feathers in the Friars’ might indicate production at Porter’s Hall in the Blackfriars about that year. The play cannot be earlier than its source, Part ii (1610) of H. d’Urfé’s Astrée, and by 1610 the more permanent Blackfriars house had passed to the King’s, by whom the performances referred to on the original title-page must therefore have been given. Perhaps the explanation is that there had been some misunderstanding about the distribution of the Lady Elizabeth’s men’s plays between the King’s and the Cockpit, and that a revival by the King’s in 1639 led the Cockpit managers to get the Lord Chamberlain’s order of 10 Aug. 1639 (Variorum, iii. 159) appropriating their repertory to them. The authorship is ascribed with general assent to Fletcher alone.

[229]

Valentinian. 1610 < > 14

1647. The Tragedy of Valentinian. [Part of F₁. Epilogue.]

1679. [Part of F₂. ‘The principal Actors were, Richard Burbadge, Henry Condel, John Lowin, William Ostler, John Underwood.’]

Edition by R. G. Martin (1912, Bullen, iv).

The actor-list is of the King’s men before the death of Ostler on 16 Dec. 1614, and the play must fall between this date and the publication of its source, Part ii (1610) of H. d’Urfé’s Astrée. There is general agreement in assigning it to Fletcher alone.

Wit Without Money, c. 1614

S. R. 1639, April 25 (Wykes). ‘These fiue playes ... Witt without money.’ Crooke and William Cooke (Arber, iv. 464).

1639. Wit Without Money. A Comedie, As it hath beene Presented with good Applause at the private house in Drurie Lane, by her Majesties Servants. Written by Francis Beamount and John Flecher. Gent. Thomas Cotes for Andrew Crooke and William Cooke.

1661.... The Second Impression Corrected. For Andrew Crooke.

Edition by R. B. McKerrow (1905, Bullen, ii).

Allusions to the New River opened in 1613 (IV. v. 61) and to an alleged Sussex dragon of Aug. 1614 (II. iv. 53) suggest production not long after the latter date. There is general agreement in assigning the play to Fletcher alone. It passed into the Cockpit repertory and was played there both by Queen Henrietta’s men and in 1637 by Beeston’s boys (Variorum, iii. 159, 239). Probably, therefore, it was written for the Lady Elizabeth’s.

The Scornful Lady. 1613 < > 17

S. R. 1616, March 19 (Buck). ‘A plaie called The scornefull ladie written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.’ Miles Partriche (Arber, iii. 585).

1616. The Scornful Ladie. A Comedie. As it was Acted (with great applause) by the Children of Her Maiesties Reuels in the Blacke-Fryers. Written by Fra. Beaumont and Io. Fletcher, Gent. For Miles Partriche.

1625.... As it was now lately Acted (with great applause) by the Kings Maiesties seruants, at the Blacke-Fryers.... For M. P., sold by Thomas Jones.

1630, 1635, 1639, 1651 (bis).

Edition by R. W. Bond (1904, Bullen, i).

References to ‘talk of the Cleve wars’ (V. iii. 66) and ‘some cast Cleve captain’ (V. iv. 54) cannot be earlier than 1609 when the wars broke out after the death of the Duke of Cleves on 25 March, and there can hardly have been ‘cast’ captains until some time after July 1610 when English troops first took part. Fleay, i. 181, calls attention to an allusion to the binding by itself of the Apocrypha (I. ii. 46) which was discussed for the A. V. and the Douay Version, both completed in 1610; and Gayley to a reminiscence (IV. i. 341)[230] of Epicoene which, however, was acted in 1609, not, as Gayley thinks, 1610. None of these indications, however, are of much importance in view of another traced by Gayley (III. ii. 17):

Don Diego Sarmiento’s negotiations for a Spanish match with Prince Charles began on 27 May 1613. The play must therefore be 1613–16. In any case the ‘Blackfriars’ of the title-page must be the Porter’s Hall house of 1615–17. Even if the end of 1609 were a possible date, Murray, i. 153, is wrong in supposing that the Revels were then at Blackfriars. There is fair unanimity in assigning I, the whole or part of II, and V. ii to Beaumont, and the rest to Fletcher, but Bond and Gayley suggest that III. i, at least, might be Massinger’s.

Thierry and Theodoret (?)

1621. The Tragedy of Thierry King of France, and his Brother Theodoret. As it was diuerse times acted at the Blacke-Friers by the Kings Maiesties Seruants. For Thomas Walkley.

1648.... Written by John Fletcher Gent. For Humphrey Moseley.

1649.... Written by Fracis Beamont and John Fletcher Gent. For Humphrey Moseley. [A reissue, with Prologue and Epilogue, not written for the play; cf. Fleay, i. 205.]

Dissertation: B. Leonhardt, Die Text-Varianten von B. und F.’s T. and T. (1903, Anglia, xxvi. 345).

Fleay, i. 205, dates the play c. 1617, supposing it to be a satire on the French Court, and the name De Vitry to be that of the slayer of the Maréchal d’Ancre. Thorndike, 79, has little difficulty in disposing of this theory, although it may be pointed out that the Privy Council did in fact intervene to suppress a play about the Maréchal in 1617 (Gildersleeve, 113); but he is less successful in attempting to show any special plausibility in a date as early as 1607. A former conjecture by Fleay (E. S. ix. 21) that III and V. i are fragments of the anonymous Branholt of the Admiral’s in 1597 may also be dismissed with Greg (Henslowe, ii. 188). Most critics find, in addition to Fletcher, Massinger, as collaborator or reviser, according to the date given to the play, and some add Field or Daborne. Oliphant and Thorndike find Beaumont. So did Macaulay, 196, in 1883, but apparently not in 1910 (C. H. vi. 138).

The Nightwalker or The Little Thief (?)

S. R. 25 April 1639 (Wykes). ‘These fiue playes ... Night walters.... Crooke and William Cooke (Arber, iv. 464).

1640. The Night-Walker, or the Little Theife. A Comedy, As it was presented by her Majesties Servants, at the Private House in Drury Lane. Written by John Fletcher. Gent. Tho. Cotes for Andrew Crooke and William Cooke. [Epistle to William Hudson, signed ‘A. C.’.]

1661. For Andrew Crook.

Herbert licensed this as ‘a play of Fletchers corrected by Sherley’[231] on 11 May 1633 and it was played at Court by Queen Henrietta’s men on 30 Jan. 1634 (Variorum, iii. 236). The only justification for placing Fletcher’s version earlier than 1616 is the suspicion that the only plays of Beaumont or Fletcher which passed to the Cockpit repertory were some of those written for the Queen’s Revels or the Lady Elizabeth’s before that date.

Four Plays in One (?)