A history of the theatres would not be complete without some account of their general structure and economy in the disposition of auditorium and stage. I propose to begin with the more assured or less important points, as a clearing of the way for the difficult and controverted problems of scenic setting, on some of which I am afraid that no very secure conclusion can be reached.

It is necessary, in the forefront, to appreciate the distinction between the ‘common’ or ‘public’ play-houses and the ‘private’ houses, which, so far as our period is concerned, were Paul’s, the Blackfriars, and the Whitefriars. This distinction is in its origin somewhat a technical one, for there is no reason to suppose that in the private houses the performances were private, in the sense that access to them could not be obtained, on payment, by members of the general public. Probably it is to be explained in relation to the Elizabethan system of State control of theatres, and represents an attempt to evade the limitations on the location and the number of play-houses which had been established through the action, first of the civic authorities and later of the Privy Council itself. This view receives support from the allegations made during the campaign for the suppression of the Blackfriars in 1619 that the owner ‘doth vnder the name of a private howse (respectinge indeed private comoditie only) convert the said howse to a publique play-house’.[1643]

It can hardly be supposed, however, that Burbadge could have hoodwinked the Privy Council merely by calling the Blackfriars a ‘private’ house, without finding any other means of differentiating it from the ‘public’ houses, and it is quite possible that the technical distinction, for which modern analogies could be found, consisted in the fact that admission was paid for in advance and no money taken at the doors.[1644] Mr. Lawrence has very appropriately quoted in this connexion the Common Council regulations of 1574, in which an exception is made for performances ‘withowte publique or comen collection of money of the auditorie, or behoulders theareof’; and though I do not suggest that the extension of this principle to Paul’s or the Blackfriars fell within the intention of the order, the evasion may have been allowed, within the gates of Paul’s or in a liberty, and for a well-conducted house attended by a well-to-do audience, to hold.[1645] If so, it is probable that Paul’s from the beginning and the earlier Blackfriars were in effect private houses. But the actual terminology does not emerge before the revival of the boy companies in 1599 and 1600. For some years past the title-pages of plays had vaunted them as ‘publikely acted’.[1646] A corresponding ‘priuately acted’ appears for Blackfriars in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1601) and Poetaster (1602), and for Paul’s in Middleton’s Blurt Master Constable (1602), while the antithesis is complete in Dekker’s Satiromastix (1602), which was presented ‘publikely’ by the Chamberlain’s and ‘priuately’ by Paul’s. Somewhat later we find Field’s Woman a Weathercock (1612) acted ‘priuately’, and Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) ‘at the priuate Play-house’ in the Whitefriars.[1647] But by this time the distinction may be taken for granted as well established in general use.[1648]

From the point of view, however, of stage arrangements, the technical differentia of a private house is less important than certain subsidiary characteristics.[1649] The private houses were all in closed buildings, were occupied by boys, and charged higher prices than the ordinary theatres. These facts entailed variations of structure and method, which will require attention at more than one point. They naturally became less fundamental, but did not entirely disappear, after the transfer of the Blackfriars to the King’s men in 1609, and probably passed still further into the background after the introduction of roofed public houses in the Caroline age.[1650] The title-pages generally describe the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court as ‘private’ houses right up to the closing of the theatres, but the term, in so far as it connotes anything different from ‘public’, seems to have lost what little meaning it ever had.[1651]

De Witt, about 1596, describes the Theatre, Curtain, Rose, and Swan as ‘amphiteatra’, and Hentzner in 1598 adds that they were all ‘lignea’.[1652] The Globe and the Hope were built later on the same structural model. The Fortune was also of wood, but square. Of the shape and material of the Red Bull we know nothing. Prologues and epilogues often refer to the internal appearance of the auditorium as presenting a ‘round’, ‘ring’, ‘circuit’, ‘circumference’, or ‘O’.[1653] If we can rely upon the draughtsmanship of the London maps, the external outline was rather that of a polygon. This evidence must not be pressed too far, for there is probably an element of cartographic symbolism to be reckoned with. The same house may appear in one map as a hexagon, in another as an octagon or decagon, and the late Hollar group differs from its predecessors in using a completely circular form. But there is confirmation in the Paris Garden manor map of 1627, which shows the ground-plan of the Swan decagonal, and in the statement of Mrs. Thrale that the ruins of the Globe still visible in the eighteenth century were hexagonal without and round within. This was of course the later Globe built in 1613, and there is some reason for thinking that the earlier Globe may have been of rather different design. The verses on the fire by which it was destroyed speak of the stage-house ‘as round as taylers clewe’, and the early Hondius map, while it shows the Rose as polygonal, shows the Globe as circular, with the upper half of less diameter than the lower. This construction reappears in the Delaram drawings, and is so peculiar that the representation may well be realistic. There was an obvious precedent for the amphitheatrical form in the bear and bull rings which preceded the public theatres, and I do not know that we need go back with Ordish to a tradition of round mediaeval play-places, Cornish or English, or to the remains of Roman occupation. A ring is the natural form in which the maximum number of spectators can press about an object of interest.[1654]

There is nothing to show that, for the main fabric, any material but timber was used, until the Fortune was rebuilt of brick in 1623. Timber is provided for in the contracts for the earlier Fortune and the Hope, and these were modelled on the Globe and Swan. Oak was to be mainly used for the Hope; no fir in the lower or middle stories. Burbadge’s lawsuits show that timber was the chief object of his expenditure on the Theatre, although some ironwork was also employed, presumably to tie the woodwork together. The dismantled fabric of the Theatre was used for the Globe. Henslowe used a good deal of timber for the repairs of the Rose in 1592–3, and did the house ‘about with ealme bordes’ in 1595. There was also some brickwork, and the Fortune and Hope were to have brick foundations, a foot above the ground. The Fortune was to be covered with lath, lime, and hair without. Henslowe also used plaster, and I do not see anything inconsistent with a substantially wooden structure in De Witt’s statement that the Swan was ‘constructum ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide ... ligneis suffultum columnis’. This has been regarded as an error which prejudices the reliability of De Witt’s observations, but the description is too precise to be disproved by Hentzner’s generalized ‘lignea’, and after all the strength of the building was naturally in the columns, and the flints and mortar—a common form of walling in the chalk districts of England—may well have filled up the interstices between these. De Witt adds that the columns might deceive the shrewdest ‘ob illitum marmoreum colorem’.[1655]

De Witt has also been criticized for giving the seating capacity of the Swan as 3,000. I dare say this is merely the exaggerated round estimate of a casual visitor, but Wheatley calculates from the drawing that the galleries might hold 2,000, and it would not be surprising if our rude forefathers sat a bit closer than we care to do. Moryson speaks even more largely of theatres ‘more remarkable for the number, and the capacity, than for the building’, and ‘capable of many thousands’, while no less than 2,000 got into Trinity College hall for the academic plays of 1615.[1656] The frame of the Fortune was 80 ft. square without and 55 ft. square within. This allows a depth of 12½ ft. for the galleries, and Corbin calculates a seating capacity, allowing 18 in. for a seat and 18 in. square for a standing man, of 2,138 or 2,558 at a pinch.[1657] We do not know that the Swan was not larger than the Fortune, and have therefore no right to assume that De Witt was seriously out. Wright tells us that the Globe, Fortune, and Red Bull were ‘large’ houses; he is comparing them with the private houses of Caroline days.[1658] The allusion in Old Fortunatus to the ‘small circumference’ of the Rose perhaps hardly indicates that it was below the average size.

The Swan drawing is our one contemporary picture of the interior of a public play-house, and it is a dangerous business to explain away its evidence by an assumption of inaccurate observation on the part of De Witt, merely because that evidence conflicts with subjective interpretations of stage-directions, arrived at in the course of the pursuit of a ‘typical’ stage. Still less can it be discredited on the ground that it was merely made by Van Buchell on ‘hearsay evidence’ from the instructions of De Witt.[1659] It is a copy, like the accompanying description on the same piece of paper, of De Witt’s original, which De Witt says he drew (‘adpinxi’) in order to bring out an analogy which had struck him between the English and the Roman theatres. It was for this reason also, no doubt, that he marked certain features of the structure on the drawing with the names of what he thought to be their classical prototypes. I do not, of course, suggest that the drawing has the authority of a photographic record. De Witt is more likely to have made it as an afterthought in his inn than during the actual performance, and he may well have omitted or misrepresented features. Certainly he can hardly have seen the trumpeter sounding when the action had already begun. And the draughtsmanship is bad, and may have been made worse by the copyist.[1660] The upper part is done, with an attempt at perspective, as he may have seen it from a point in the middle, or perhaps the upper, gallery somewhat to the right of the centre; the lower part as from full face, so that the pillars stand equidistant from the edges of the stage, as they would not have appeared to him in perspective. His doors and the compartments of his stage gallery are of uneven sizes.[1661] But, with all its faults, the drawing is the inevitable basis of any comprehensive account of the main structural features of a play-house, and I propose, leaving aside for the present the question of the possible hangings which it does not show, to take its parts one by one and illustrate them from other sources, and in particular from Henslowe’s contracts for the construction of the Fortune in 1600 and the Hope in 1614.[1662]

The outline of the building is round, or slightly ovoid.[1663] The floor, which shows no traces of seating, is marked ‘planities siue arena’. This is the space ordinarily known as the ‘yard’, a name which it may fairly be taken to have inherited from the inn-yards, surrounded by galleries and open overhead, in which, in the days before the building of the Theatre in 1576, more or less permanent play-houses had grown up.[1664] Spectators in the yard always stood, and the more unstable psychology of a standing, as compared with a seated, crowd must always be taken into account in estimating the temperament of an Elizabethan audience. These are the ‘groundlings’, and the poets take their revenge for occasional scenes of turbulence in open or covert sneers at their ‘understanding’.[1665]

Well into the yard, leaving space for the groundlings on three sides of it, projects a quadrangular stage, which is marked ‘proscaenium’.[1666] The breadth is perhaps rather greater than the depth.[1667] This was certainly the case at the Fortune, where the stage was 43 ft. wide, and extended ‘to the middle of the yarde’, a distance of 27½ ft. The level of the stage may be some 3 or 4 ft. above the ground. Two solid trestles forming part of its supports are visible, but at the Fortune it was paled in with oak, and in view of the common use of the space below the stage to facilitate apparitions and other episodes requiring traps, this was probably the normal arrangement.[1668] It has been thought that the stage of the Swan, like that of the Hope, which was in many respects modelled upon it, may have been removable. But this is hardly consistent with the heavy pillars which, in this respect certainly unlike the Hope, it carries. Moreover, the Hope had to be available for bear-baiting, which entailed an open arena, and there is no evidence, and very little likelihood, that baiting ever took place at the Swan. Like other theatres, it sometimes accommodated gymnasts and fencers, but these would use the stage.[1669] There are no rails round the stage, such as we may infer the existence of at the Globe.[1670] The only scenic apparatus visible is a large bench, on which a lady sits, while another stands behind her in an attitude of surprise, at the rapid approach from an outer corner of the stage of a man in an affected attitude, with a hat on his head and a long staff in his hand. You might take him for Malvolio cross-gartered, were there any chance that Twelfth Night could have been written when the drawing was made, or produced at the Swan.[1671] Probably he is a returning traveller or a messenger bringing news. The floor of the stage is apparently bare. Sometimes rushes were laid down, at any rate for interior scenes.[1672] The Globe produced Henry VIII in 1613 ‘with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage’.

Circling the yard and raised above it are three tiers of galleries, each containing three rows of seats. Beneath the first gallery De Witt wrote ‘orchestra’, above its seats ‘sedilia’, and between the middle and upper galleries ‘porticus’. In the classical theatre ‘porticus’ was the name for a covered gallery, and the classical analogy also makes it clear that by ‘orchestra’ De Witt meant to indicate the position occupied by the spectators of highest rank, corresponding to the seats of Roman senators, to which the name of the obsolete dancing place immediately in front of them had been transferred. It was not until the Restoration that the orchestra was allocated to the music.[1673] The fronts of the galleries are supported by a number of turned posts. In the Fortune all the chief supports, presumably both in the auditorium and on the stage, were to be square and made ‘palasterwise, with carved proporcions called Satiers’. Internal painting was contemplated, but was not covered by the contract. Other references to painted theatres suggest that the Elizabethan builders were not content with bare scaffolds, but aimed at a decorative effect.[1674] Three seems to have been the regular number of galleries. Kiechel bears witness to it for the Theatre and Curtain in 1585; and there were three at the Fortune and at the Hope. The lowest gallery at the Fortune was 12 ft. high, the next 11 ft., and the uppermost 9 ft., and each of the two latter jutted out 10 in. beyond that below. This gives a total height of 32 ft., about three-fifths of the interior width of the house. The maps, therefore, make the buildings rather disproportionately high. The uppermost gallery has a roof, marked ‘tectum’. This in the earlier Globe was of thatch, which caused the fire of 1613, and left the unlucky King’s men with little but ‘wit to cover it with tiles’. I think the Rose was also thatched; but the Fortune and Hope were tiled. In view of the jetties, such a roof would give some protection to those in the galleries, but the groundlings had none. Both the drawing and the maps confirm the statement of Wright that the Globe, Fortune, and Red Bull were ‘partly open to the weather’, and this was doubtless also the case with their predecessors.[1675]

De Witt does not indicate any internal gallery partitions, but the Swan had these by 1614, for they were to be the model for ‘two boxes in the lowermost storie fitt and decent for gentlemen to sitt in’, which were to be constructed at the Hope. Similarly the Fortune was to have ‘ffower convenient divisions for gentlemens roomes, and other sufficient and convenient divisions for twoe pennie roomes, with necessarie seates’. These were to be ceiled with lath and plaster. An earlier example of the technical use of the term ‘room’ for a division of the auditorium occurs in the draft Theatre lease of 1585, which gave the landlord a right to sit or stand in ‘some one of the upper romes’, if the places were not already taken up. If the clause, like the rest of the draft, merely reproduced the covenants of the 1576 lease, the term was of long standing. Probably the divisions were of varying sizes. There would not have been much point in cutting up the space available for ‘two-pennie roomes’ into very small sections, but there were also ‘priuate roomes’, which are perhaps the same as the ‘gentlemens roomes’ of the contracts.[1676] If so, these were probably to the right and left of the stage in the lowest gallery. But the whole question of seating and prices is rather difficult, and it is further complicated by obscurely discerned changes of fashion, which involved the adoption of the very inconvenient custom of sitting on the stage, and the consequent abandonment by the gentry of what was called the lord’s room. Prices also, no doubt, tended to grow, at any rate for the better seats; the ‘popular’ prices always remained low.[1677] I do not know whether the professional actors ever contented themselves, after their establishment in London, with merely sending round the hat, or, in mediaeval phrase, making a ‘gatheryng’.[1678] Fixed prices must certainly have been the rule by the time of Kiechel’s visit in 1585, for he tells us that, on the occasion of a new play, double prices were charged. This practice helps to explain the fluctuating receipts in Henslowe’s diary, and was still in force in the seventeenth century.[1679] Spenser and his friends could have their laugh at a play for 1d. or 2d. in 1579, and ten years later Martin Marprelate could be seen for 2d. at the Theatre and 4d. at Paul’s.[1680] Higher prices are already characteristic of the private houses. In 1596 Lambarde informs us of a regular scale, apparently applicable to all public entertainments. None, he says, who ‘goe to Paris Gardein, the Bell Savage or Theatre, to beholde beare baiting, enterludes or fence play, can account of any pleasant spectacle unlesse they first pay one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the scaffolde and the thirde for a quiet standing’. Platter, in 1599, reports the same scale and adds a distinction, not made by Lambarde, between standings and seats. You paid 1d. to stand on the level, 1d. at an inner door to sit, and 1d. at a third door for one of the best places with a cushion.[1681] The two-penny galleries or rooms long continued to be the resort of the ordinary playgoer, if he was not satisfied to stand in the yard for a penny.[1682] He sat close, and the insolent poets and pamphleteers classed him with the groundlings as a ‘stinkard’.[1683] His domain certainly included the top gallery, but about the other galleries I am not sure. There are some puzzling allusions to penny galleries and rooms, but probably, these are not distinct from the ‘two-penny’ ones, and the explanation is to be found in the practice of paying the twopence in two instalments, one on entrance, the other at the gallery door.[1684] It did not long remain possible to get one of the best seats for the 3d. quoted by Platter, even if there was not already in his time a higher charge for ‘the priuate roomes of greater price’.[1685] There were both sixpenny and twelve-penny rooms by 1604.[1686] These may have been the same private rooms at varying prices, according as the play was old or new. I take it that you only got a single seat, even in a ‘private’ room, for your 6d. or 12d., and not the whole room. Overbury or another gives 12d. as the price of the ‘best room’ as late as about 1614, but in the same year the ordinary scale of charges was greatly exceeded throughout the house on the production of Bartholomew Fair at the Hope, where a speaker in the induction says, ‘it shall be lawful to judge his six-penny-worth, his twelve-penny-worth, so to his eighteen-pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place, provided always his place get not above his wit’. This must have been a quite exceptional occasion, not merely a new play, but a new play at a new house. Similarly, when Richard Vennar brought the gulls to his swindle of England’s Joy in 1602, ‘the price at cumming in was two shillings or eighteen-pence at least’.

A special compartment in one of the galleries was not the only privilege offered to the more fashionable playgoer. He might, at one time or another, sit ‘over the stage’ and on the stage. De Witt’s drawing shows, at the back of the stage, a raised gallery divided into six small boxes, in each of which one or two spectators appear to be placed.[1687] It is reasonable to suppose that these are sitting ‘over the stage’.[1688] And some or all of those ‘over the stage’ again, appear to have sat in ‘the lords room’ or ‘rooms’.[1689] Of such a room we first hear in 1592, when Henslowe, repairing the Rose, paid 10s. ‘for sellynge of the Rome ouer the tyerhowsse’ and 13s. ‘for sellinges my lords Rome’. The entry rather suggests that this was not so much a room for ‘lords’, as a room primarily reserved for the particular ‘lord’, under whose patronage the actors played; but however this may be, it was probably available by courtesy for other persons of distinction. The practice of sitting on the stage itself first emerges about 1596.[1690] It was general by the seventeenth century, and was apparently most encouraged at the Blackfriars, where it perhaps lent itself best to the structural character of the building.[1691] It was known at Paul’s, but was inconvenient on so small a stage.[1692] And, as it certainly originated at the public houses, so it maintained itself there, in spite of the grumbles of the ordinary spectators, with whose view of the action the throng of feathered and restless gallants necessarily interfered.[1693] It may have been profitable to the actors as sharers, but as actors they resented the restriction of the space available for their movements which it entailed.[1694] The prologue to Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass of 1616 contains a vigorous protest.[1695] But the gallant liked to be seen as well as to see, and liked to slip in and out of the tiring-house and hob-nob with the players. It was not until Caroline times that the custom became intolerable.[1696] On the stage stools were provided for those who did not care to sit on the rushes, and for these they paid at least sixpence and sometimes a shilling.[1697] One result of the introduction of sitting on the stage appears to have been that the lord’s room lost its attractiveness and consequently its status. It fell into the background, and became the haunt of a rather disreputable class of playgoer. The lords were now to be found either on the stage itself, or in the private rooms of the lower gallery. Presumably the ‘grate’ to which the courtier of Sir John Davies’ epigram relegated himself, was in the lord’s room, perhaps fitted with a casement for scenic purposes.[1698] The change is chronicled by Dekker in the passage of The Gull’s Horn Book, in which the gull is instructed how to behave himself in a play-house. He must by all means advance himself up to the throne of the stage.

I return to the guidance of De Witt. The boarding between the yard and the lower gallery, which in the Fortune was overlaid with iron pikes, presumably to prevent the groundlings from climbing over, shows two apertures, to right and left of the stage, one of which is marked ‘ingressus’. From these steps lead to the lower gallery itself, and we may infer the presence of a passage to staircases behind, by which the upper galleries were reached. The contracts show that the Fortune, like the Globe, and the Hope, like the Swan, were to have external staircases.[1699] Perhaps this accounts for the greater diameter of the lower part of the Globe in the London maps. Of external doors there were only two at the Globe, which caused trouble at the time of the fire, and two also at the Fortune, when Alleyn leased a share of it to Henslowe in 1601. One of these would in each case have been a door to the tiring-house, giving access to the stage and the lord’s room, while the other served the body of the theatre.[1700] Those bound for the galleries paid their pennies at the theatre door, passed through the yard to the ‘ingressus’, and made additional payments there and in the ‘rooms’, according to the places selected.[1701] The custom explains itself by the arrangement between the sharers of companies and the housekeepers of theatres, which gave the latter a proportion of gallery takings in lieu of rent. ‘Gatherers’, appointed by the persons interested, collected the money, and although this was put into a locked box, whence the modern term ‘box-office’, there were abundant opportunities for fraud. At need, the gatherers could serve as supernumeraries on the stage.[1702]

At the back of the stage, and forming a chord to an arc of the circular structure of the play-house, runs a straight wall, pierced by two pairs of folding doors, on which De Witt has written ‘mimorum aedes’. Above it is the gallery or lord’s room already described. This wall is the ‘scene’, in the primary sense; it is also the front of the ‘tire-house’, or in modern phrase ‘green-room’, a necessary adjunct of every theatre. The Theatre depositions of 1592 speak of this as ‘the attyring housse or place where the players make them readye’. The drawing indicates nothing in the way of hangings over either wall or doors, but in some theatres these certainly existed. Thus Peacham, in his Thalia’s Banquet (1620) referring to much earlier days, tells us that