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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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] 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 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 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 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 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 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] 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.