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

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

Of a raised stage the only indication is in All for Money, a late example of the type, where one stage-direction notes (203), ‘There must be a chayre for him to sit in, and vnder it or neere the same there must be some hollowe place for one to come vp in’, while another (279) requires ‘some fine conueyance’ to enable characters to vomit each other up.

I come now to nine interludes which, for various reasons, demand special remark. In Jacob and Esau (> 1558) there is coming and going between the place and the tent of Isaac, before which stands a bench, the tent of Jacob, and probably also the tent of Esau. In Wit and Wisdom (> 1579) action takes place at the entrances of the house of Wantonness, of the den of Irksomeness, of a prison, and of Mother Bee’s house, and the prison, as commonly in plays of later types, must have been so arranged as to allow a prisoner to take part in the dialogue from within. Some realism, also, in the treatment of the den may be signified by an allusion to ‘these craggie clifts’. In Misogonus (c. 1560–77), the place of which is before the house of Philogonus, there is one scene in Melissa’s ‘bowre’ (ii. 4, 12), which must somehow have been represented. In Thersites (1537), of which one of the characters is a snail that ‘draweth her hornes in’, Mulciber, according to the stage-directions, ‘must have a shop made in the place’, which he leaves and returns to, and in which he is perhaps seen making a sallet. Similarly, the Mater of Thersites, when she drops out of the dialogue, ‘goeth in the place which is prepared for her’, and hither later ‘Thersites must ren awaye, and hyde hym behynde hys mothers backe’. These four examples only differ from the normal interlude type by some multiplication of the houses suggested in the background, and probably by some closer approximation than a mere door to the visual realization of these. There is no change of locality, and only an adumbration of interior action within the houses. Four other examples do entail some change of locality. Much stress must not be laid on the sudden conversions in the fourth act of The Conflict of Conscience (> 1581) and the last scene of Three Ladies of London of the open ‘place’ into Court, for these are very belated specimens of the moral. And the opening dialogue of the Three Ladies, on the way to London, may glide readily enough into the main action before two houses in London itself. But in The Disobedient Child (c. 1560) some episodes are before the house of the father, and others before that of the son in another locality forty miles away. In Mary Magdalene (< 1566), again, the action begins in Magdalo, but there is a break (842) when Mary and the Vice start on their travels, and it is resumed at Jerusalem, where it proceeds first in some public place, and afterwards by a sudden transition (1557) at a repast within the house of Simon. In both cases it may be conjectured that the two localities were indicated on opposite sides of the hall or stage, and that the personages travelled from one to the other over the intervening space, which was regarded as representing a considerable distance. You may call this ‘multiple staging’, if you will. The same imaginative foreshortening of space had been employed both in the miracle-plays and in the ‘Christian Terence’.[77] Simon’s house at Jerusalem was, no doubt, some kind of open loggia with a table in it, directly approachable from the open place where the earlier part of the Jerusalem action was located.

Godly Queen Hester (? 1525–9) has a different interest, in that, of all the forty-four interludes, it affords the only possible evidence for the use of a curtain. In most respects it is quite a normal interlude. The action is continuous, in a ‘place’, which represents a council-chamber, with a chair for Ahasuerus. But there is no mention of a door, and while the means of exit and entrance for the ordinary personages are unspecified, the stage-directions note, on two occasions (139, 635) when the King goes out, that he ‘entreth the trauerse’. Now ‘traverses’ have played a considerable part in attempts to reconstruct the Elizabethan theatre, and some imaginative writers have depicted them as criss-crossing about the stage in all sorts of possible and impossible directions.[78] The term is not a very happy one to employ in the discussion of late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century conditions. After Godly Queen Hester it does not appear again in any play for nearly a hundred years, and then, so far as I know, is only used by Jonson in Volpone, where it appears to indicate a low movable screen, probably of a non-structural kind, and by John Webster, both in The White Devil and in The Duchess of Malfi, where it is an exact equivalent to the ‘curtains’ or ‘arras’, often referred to as screening off a recess at the back of the stage.[79] Half a century later still, it is used in the Restoration play of The Duke of Guise to indicate, not this normal back curtain, but a screen placed across the recess itself, or the inner stage which had developed out of it, behind ‘the scene’.[80] Webster’s use seems to be an individual one. Properly a ‘traverse’ means, I think, not a curtain suspended from the roof, but a screen shutting off from view a compartment within a larger room, but leaving it open above. Such a screen might, of course, very well be formed by a curtain running on a rod or cord.[81] And a ‘traverse’ also certainly came to mean the compartment itself which was so shut off.[82] The construction is familiar in the old-fashioned pews of our churches, and as it happens, it is from the records of the royal chapel that its Elizabethan use can best be illustrated. Thus when Elizabeth took her Easter communion at St. James’s in 1593, she came down, doubtless from her ‘closet’ above, after the Gospel had been read, ‘into her Majestes Travess’, whence she emerged to make her offering, and then ‘retorned to her princely travess sumptuously sett forthe’, until it was time to emerge again and receive the communion. So too, when the Spanish treaty was sworn in 1604, ‘in the chappell weare two traverses sett up of equall state in all thinges as neare as might be’. One was the King’s traverse ‘where he usually sitteth’, the other for the Spanish ambassador, and from them they proceeded to ‘the halfe pace’ for the actual swearing of the oath.[83] The traverse figures in several other chapel ceremonies of the time, and it is by this analogy, rather than as a technical term of stage-craft, that we must interpret the references to it in Godly Queen Hester. It is not inconceivable that the play, which was very likely performed by the Chapel, was actually performed in the chapel.[84] Nor is it inconceivable, also, that the sense of the term ‘traverse’ may have been wide enough to cover the screen at the bottom of a Tudor hall.

I come now to the group of four mid-century farces, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Jack Juggler, Ralph Roister Doister, and Tom Tyler, which literary historians have distinguished from the interludes as early ‘regular comedies’. No doubt they show traces of Renaissance influence upon their dramatic handling. But, so far as scenic setting is concerned, they do not diverge markedly from the interlude type. Nor is this surprising, since Renaissance comedy, like the classical comedy upon which it was based, was essentially an affair of continuous action, in an open place, before a background of houses. Gammer Gurton’s Needle requires two houses, those of Gammer Gurton and of Dame Chat; Jack Juggler one, that of Boungrace; Ralph Roister Doister one, that of Christian Custance. Oddly enough, both Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Jack Juggler contain indications of the presence of a post, so placed that it could be used in the action.[85] Tom Tyler, which may have reached us in a sophisticated text, has a slightly more complicated staging. There are some quite early features. The locality is ‘this place’ (835), and the audience are asked (18), as in the much earlier Youth, to ‘make them room’. On the other hand, as in Mary Magdalene and in The Conflict of Conscience, there is at one point (512) a transition from exterior to interior action. Hitherto it has been in front of Tom’s house; now it is within, and his wife is in bed. An open loggia here hardly meets the case. The bed demands some discovery, perhaps by the withdrawal of a curtain.

I am of course aware that the forty-four interludes and the four farces hitherto dealt with cannot be regarded as forming a homogeneous body of Court drama. Not one of them, in fact, can be absolutely proved to have been given at Court. Several of them bear signs of having been given elsewhere, including at least three of the small number which present exceptional features.[86] Others lie under suspicion of having been written primarily for the printing-press, in the hope that any one who cared to act them would buy copies, and may therefore never have been given at all; and it is obvious that in such circumstances a writer might very likely limit himself to demands upon stage-management far short of what the Court would be prepared to meet.[87] This is all true enough, but at the same time I see no reason to doubt that the surviving plays broadly represent the kind of piece that was produced, at Court as well as elsewhere, until well into Elizabeth’s reign. Amongst their authors are men, Skelton, Medwall, Rastell, Redford, Bale, Heywood, Udall, Gascoigne, who were about the Court, and some of whom we know to have written plays, if not these plays, for the Court; and the survival of the moral as a Court entertainment is borne witness to by the Revels Accounts of 1578–9, in which the ‘morrall of the Marriage of Mind and Measure’ still holds its own beside the classical and romantic histories which had already become fashionable. As we proceed, however, we come more clearly within the Court sphere. The lawyers stand very close, in their interests and their amusements, to the Court, and with the next group of plays, a characteristically Renaissance one, of four Italianate comedies and four Senecan tragedies, the lawyers had a good deal to do. Gascoigne’s Gray’s Inn Supposes is based directly upon one of Ariosto’s epoch-making comedies, I Suppositi, and adopts its staging. Jeffere’s Bugbears and the anonymous Two Italian Gentlemen are similarly indebted to their models in Grazzini’s La Spiritata and Pasqualigo’s Il Fedele. Each preserves complete unity of place, and the continuous action in the street before the houses, two or three in number, of the principal personages, is only varied by occasional colloquies at a door or window, and in the case of the Two Italian Gentlemen by an episode of concealment in a tomb which stands in a ‘temple’ or shrine beneath a burning lamp. Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, the neo-classical inspiration of which is advertised in the prefatory epistle, follows the same formula with a certain freedom of handling. In the first part, opportunity for a certain amount of interior action is afforded by two of the three houses; one is a prison, the other a barber’s shop, presumably an open stall with a door and a flap-down shutter. The third is the courtesan’s house, on which Serlio insists. This reappears in the second part and has a window large enough for four women to sit in.[88] The other houses in this part are a temple with a tomb in it, and a pageant stage used at a royal entry. The conveniences of exterior action lead to a convention which often recurs in later plays, by which royal justice is dispensed in the street. And the strict unity of place is broken by a scene (iv. 2) which takes place, not like the rest of the action in the town of Julio, but in a wood through which the actors are approaching it. Here also we have, I think, the beginnings of a convention by which action on the extreme edge of a stage, or possibly on the floor of the hall or on steps leading to the stage, was treated as a little remote from the place represented by the setting in the background. The four tragedies were all produced at the Court itself by actors from the Inns of Court. It is a little curious that the earliest of the four, Gorboduc (1562), is also the most regardless of the unity of place. While Acts I and III-V are at the Court of Gorboduc, Act II is divided between the independent Courts of Ferrex and Porrex. We can hardly suppose that there was any substantial change of decoration, and probably the same generalized palace background served for all three. Here also the convention, classical enough, rules, by which the affairs of state are conducted in the open. By 1562 the raised stage had clearly established itself. There are no regular stage-directions in Gorboduc, but the stage is often mentioned in the descriptions of the dumb-shows between the acts, and in the fourth of these ‘there came from vnder the stage, as though out of hell, three furies’. Similarly in Jocasta (1566) the stage opens in the dumb-shows to disclose, at one time a grave, at another the gulf of Curtius. The action of the play itself is before the palace of Jocasta, but there are also entrances and exits, which are carefully specified in stage-directions as being through ‘the gates called Electrae’ and ‘the gates called Homoloydes’. Perhaps we are to infer that the gates which, if the stage-manager had Vitruvius in mind, would have stood on the right and left of the proscenium, were labelled ‘in great letters’ with their names; and if so, a similar device may have served in Gorboduc to indicate at which of the three Courts action was for the time being proceeding. Gismond of Salerne has not only a hell, for Megaera, but also a heaven, for the descent and ascent of Cupid. Like Jocasta, it preserves unity of place, but it has two houses in the background, the palace of Tancred and an independent ‘chamber’ for Gismond, which is open enough and deep enough to allow part of the action, with Gismond lying poisoned and Tancred mourning over her, to take place within it. The Misfortunes of Arthur is, of course, twenty years later than the other members of the group. But it is true to type. The action is in front of three domus, the ‘houses’ of Arthur and of Mordred, which ought not perhaps historically to have been in the same city, and a cloister. A few years later still, in 1591, Wilmot, one of the authors of Gismond of Salerne, rewrote it as Tancred and Gismund. He did not materially interfere with the old staging, but he added an epilogue, of which the final couplet runs:

If these lines had occurred in the original version of the play, they would naturally have been taken as referring to curtains used to cover and discover Gismond’s death-chamber. But in this point Wilmot has modified the original action, and has made Gismund take her poison and die, not in her chamber, but on the open stage. Are we then faced, as part of the paraphernalia of a Court stage, at any rate by 1591, with a front curtain—a curtain drawn aside, and not sinking like the curtains of Ferrara and Rome, but like those curtains used to mark the beginning and end of a play, rather than to facilitate any changing of scenes?[89] It is difficult to say. Wilmot, not re-writing for the stage, may have rewritten loosely. Or the epilogue may after all have belonged to the first version of the play, and have dropped out of the manuscript in which that version is preserved. The Revels Accounts testify that ‘great curtains’ were used in Court plays, but certainly do not prove that they were used as front curtains. The nearest approach to a corroboration of Wilmot is to be found in an epigram which exists in various forms, and is ascribed in some manuscripts to Sir Walter Raleigh.[90]

If these four comedies and four tragedies were taken alone, it would, I think, be natural to conclude that, with the Italianized types of drama, the English Court had also adopted the Italian type of setting.[91] Certainly the tragedies would fit well enough into Serlio’s stately façade of palaces, and the comedies into his more homely group of bourgeois houses, with its open shop, its ‘temple’, and its discreet abode of a ruffiana.[92]

As courtly, beyond doubt, we must treat the main outlook of the choir companies during their long hegemony of the Elizabethan drama, which ended with the putting down of Paul’s in 1590. Unfortunately it is not until the last decade of this period, with the ‘court comedies’ of Lyly, that we have any substantial body of their work, differentiated from the interludes and the Italianate comedies, to go upon. The Damon and Pythias of Richard Edwardes has a simple setting before the gates of a court. Lyly’s own methods require rather careful analysis.[93] The locality of Campaspe is throughout at Athens, in ‘the market-place’ (III. ii. 56).[94] On this there are three domus: Alexander’s palace, probably represented by a portico in which he receives visitors, and from which inmates ‘draw in’ (IV. iii. 32) to get off the stage; a tub ‘turned towardes the sun’ (I. iii. 12) for Diogenes over which he can ‘pry’ (V. iii. 21); a shop for Apelles, which has a window (III. i. 18), outside which a page is posted, and open enough for Apelles to carry on dialogue with Campaspe (III. iii.; IV. iv), while he paints her within. These three domus are quite certainly all visible together, as continuous action can pass from one to another. At one point (I. iii. 110) the philosophers walk direct from the palace to the tub; at another (III. iv. 44, 57) Alexander, going to the shop, passes the tub on the way; at a third (V. iv. 82) Apelles, standing at the tub, is bidden ‘looke about you, your shop is on fire!’ As Alexander (V. iv. 71) tells Diogenes that he ‘wil haue thy cabin remoued nerer to my court’, I infer that the palace and the tub were at opposite ends of the stage, and the shop in the middle, where the interior action could best be seen. In Sapho and Phao the unity of place is not so marked. All the action is more or less at Syracuse, but, with the exception of one scene (II. iii), the whole of the first two acts are near Phao’s ferry outside the city. I do not think that the actual ferry is visible, for passengers go ‘away’ (I. i. 72; ii. 69) to cross, and no use is made of a ferryman’s house, but somewhere quite near Sibylla sits ‘in the mouth of her caue’ (II. i. 13), and talks with Phao.[95] The rest of the action is in the city itself, either before the palace of Sapho, or within her chamber, or at the forge of Vulcan, where he is perhaps seen ‘making of the arrowes’ (IV. iv. 33) during a song. Certainly Sapho’s chamber is practicable. The stage-directions do not always indicate its opening and shutting. At one point (III. iii. 1) we simply get ‘Sapho in her bed’ in a list of interlocutors; at another (IV. i. 20) ‘Exit Sapho’, which can only mean that the door closes upon her. It was a door, not a curtain, for she tells a handmaid (V. ii. 101) to ‘shut’ it. Curtains are ‘drawne’ (III. iii. 36; IV. iii. 95), but these are bed-curtains, and the drawing of them does not put Sapho’s chamber in or out of action. As in Campaspe, there is interplay between house and house. A long continuous stretch of action, not even broken by the act-intervals, begins with III. iii and extends to the end of V. ii, and in the course of this Venus sends Cupid to Sapho, and herself waits at Vulcan’s forge (V. i. 50). Presently (V. ii. 45) she gets tired of waiting, and without leaving the stage, advances to the chamber and says, ‘How now, in Saphoes lap?’ There is not the same interplay between the city houses and Sibylla’s cave, to which the last scene of the play returns. I think we must suppose that two neighbouring spots within the same general locality were shown in different parts of the stage, and this certainly entails a bolder use of dramatic foreshortening of distance than the mere crossing the market-place in Campaspe. This foreshortening recurs in Endymion. Most of the action is in an open place which must be supposed to be near the palace of Cynthia, or at the lunary bank (II. iii. 9), of Endymion’s slumber, which is also near the palace.[96] It stands in a grove (IV. iii. 160), and is called a ‘caban’ (IV. iii. 111). Somewhere also in the open space is, in Act V, the aspen-tree, into which Dipsas has turned Bagoa and from which she is delivered (V. iii. 283). But III. ii and IV. i are at the door of ‘the Castle in the Deserte’ (III. i. 41; ii. 1) and III. iv is also in the desert (cf. V. iii. 35), before a fountain. This fountain was, however, ‘hard by’ the lunary bank (IV. ii. 67), and probably the desert was no farther off than the end of the stage.[97] In Midas the convention of foreshortening becomes inadequate, and we are faced with a definite change of locality. The greater part of the play is at the Court of Midas, presumably in Lydia rather than in Phrygia, although an Elizabethan audience is not likely to have been punctilious about Anatolian geography. Some scenes require as background a palace, to which it is possible to go ‘in’ (I. i. 117; II. ii. 83; III. iii. 104). A temple of Bacchus may also have been represented, but is not essential. Other scenes are in a neighbouring spot, where the speaking reeds grow. There is a hunting scene (IV. i) on ‘the hill Tmolus’ (cf. V. iii. 44). So far Lyly’s canons of foreshortening are not exceeded. But the last scene (V. iii) is out of the picture altogether. The opening words are ‘This is Delphos’, and we are overseas, before the temple of Apollo. In Galathea and in Love’s Metamorphosis, on the other hand, unity is fully achieved. The whole of Galathea may well proceed in a single spot, on the edge of a wood, before a tree sacred to Neptune, and in Lincolnshire (I. iv. 12). The sea is hard by, but need not be seen. The action of Love’s Metamorphosis is rather more diffuse, but an all-over pastoral setting, such as we see in Serlio’s scena satirica, with scattered domus in different glades, would serve it. Or, as the management of the Hôtel de Bourgogne would have put it, the stage is tout en pastoralle. There are a tree of Ceres and a temple of Cupid. These are used successively in the same scene (II. i). Somewhat apart, on the sea-shore, but close to the wood, dwells Erisichthon. There is a rock for the Siren, and Erisichthon’s house may also have been shown.[98] Finally, Mother Bombie is an extreme example of the traditional Italian comic manner. The action comes and goes, rapidly for Lyly, in an open place, surrounded by no less than seven houses, the doors of which are freely used.

Two other Chapel plays furnish sufficient evidence that the type of staging just described was not Lyly’s and Lyly’s alone.[99] Peele’s Arraignment of Paris is tout en pastoralle. A poplar-tree dominates the stage throughout, and the only house is a bower of Diana, large enough to hold the council of gods (381, 915). A trap is required for the rising and sinking of a golden tree (489) and the ascent of Pluto (902). Marlowe’s Dido has proved rather a puzzle to editors who have not fully appreciated the principles on which the Chapel plays were produced. I think that one side of the stage was arranged en pastoralle, and represented the wood between the sea-shore and Carthage, where the shipwrecked Trojans land and where later Aeneas and Dido hunt. Here was the cave where they take shelter from the storm.[100] Here too must have been the curtained-off domus of Jupiter.[101] This is only used in a kind of prelude. Of course it ought to have been in heaven, but the Gods are omnipresent, and it is quite clear that when the curtain is drawn on Jupiter, Venus, who has been discoursing with him, is left in the wood, where she then meets Aeneas (134, 139, 173). The other side of the stage represents Carthage. Possibly a wall with a gate in it was built across the stage, dividing off the two regions. In the opening line of Act II, Aeneas says,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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