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 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 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] 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] 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]

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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] 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 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 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 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 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 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