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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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