E. K. Chambers

“ 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. ”

“ It is worth while, therefore, to attempt to recover something of the atmosphere of the Tudor Court, and to define the conditions under which the presentation of plays formed a recurring interest in its bustling many-coloured life.
In every court the personality of the sovereign is naturally a dominant factor. Who shall say with what bitter discretion learnt in the hard school of adversity, or with what burden of secret policy for the shaping of the nation's destiny in critical hours, Elizabeth mounted the steps of her throne when her summons came in 1558. ”

“ The sacrificial banquet, the great chines of flesh, and the beakers of ale, cider, and mead, endured, but the central rite of the old festival, the ceremonial slaying of the animal, vanished. The exceptions, however, are not so rare as might at first sight be thought, and naturally they are of singular interest. It has already been pointed out that in times of stress and trouble, the thinly veneered heathenism of the country folk long tended to break out, and in particular that up to a very late date the primitive need-fire was occasionally revived to meet the exigencies of a cattle-plague. ”

“ To turne to our domesticke hystories: what English blood, seeing the person of any bold Englishman presented, and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as beeing wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the personator were the man personated? so bewitching a thing is lively and well-spirited action, that it hath power to new-mold the harts of the spectators, and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt. ”

“ Were the continuous settings of the type which we find in Serlio, with the unity of a consistent architectural picture, or of the type which we find at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, with independent and sometimes incongruous juxtaposed mansions? The taste of the dramatists for Italian cities and the frequent recurrence of buildings which fit so well into a Serliesque scheme as the tavern, the shop, the house of the ruffiana or courtesan, may tempt one’s imagination towards the former. ”

“ The Revels children started gaily on the new phase of their career, and the Hamlet allusion is echoed in Middleton’s advice to a gallant, ‘if his humour so serve him, to call in at the Blackfriars, where he should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man’. ”

“ THE mask is not primarily a drama; it is an episode in an indoor revel of dancing. Masked and otherwise disguised persons come, by convention unexpectedly, into the hall, as a compliment to the hosts or the principal guests. Often they bring them gifts; always they dance before them, and then invite them to join the dance. They bring torch-bearers and musicians, who light and accompany the choric evolutions. Their intention lends itself to elaboration by spokesmen or presenters, and to such spectacular decoration as a pageant or scene affords; thus it readily assumes a mimetic setting. ”

“ When the animal ceased to be recognized as the god, the need of a punishment for slaying it disappeared. But the human death could not be left meaningless, and its meaning was assimilated to that of the animal sacrifice itself. It also became an oblation, the greatest that could be offered by the tribe to its protector and its judge. And no doubt this was the conscious view taken of the matter by Kelts and Teutons at the time when they appear in history. The human sacrifice was on the same footing as the animal sacrifice, but it was a more binding, a more potent, a more solemn appeal. ”

“ The King, queen, prince, Palatine and Lady Elizabeth sat at table by themselves, and the great lords and ladies, with the maskers, above four score in all, sat at another long table, so that there was no room for them that made the feast, but they were fain to be lookers on, which the young Lady Rich took no great pleasure in, to see her husband, who was one that paid, not so much as drink for his money. ”

“ But it must be admitted that this sharply sloping roof, coming down low and considerably impeding the vision of the spectators at any rate in the top gallery, does not agree very well with the notion of a heavens dominating the stage, elaborately decorated, and serving for the display of spectacular effects, which were surely meant to be visible to all. ”

“ Doubtless there is a certain instability of temperament, which the life of the theatre, with its ups and downs of fortune, its unreal sentiments and its artificially stimulated emotions, is well calculated to encourage; and we may perhaps find the victims of such a temperament in certain actors who, although clearly of standing in their profession, seem to have been constantly shifting from company to company, without attaining any secure position or, as one may conjecture, reaping any substantial harvest from their labour and their skill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The places are so built, that they play on a raised platform, and every one can well see it all. There are, however, separate galleries and there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny: but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a further door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he gives yet another English penny at another door. ”

“ There were an Embassage from Lubberland, a Creation of White Knights of the Order of Aristotle’s Well, a Triumph of all the Founders of Colleges in Oxford, not to speak of a lottery ‘for matters of mirth and witt’ and a court leet and baron to be held by the Prince. So much energy and invention in one small college is astonishing, and it was hard that Mr. Griffin Higgs should have to complain of the treatment meted out to its entertainers by the University at large. ”

“ Elizabethan drama is abundantly spectacular, and often enough the spectacle is irrelevant or excessive, but as a rule it is, formally at least, within the plot. There are the drums and tramplings of battles and trials and funerals. There are the divine epiphanies in mythological pieces. There are the endless opportunities afforded [186] for song and dance by banquets, weddings, and rustic merry-makings. And if all else fails, what more easy than to introduce a dumb-show in a dream or as a specimen of the magician's art? ”

“ It went from the Rolls, all up Fleet Street and the Strand, and made such a gallant and glorious show, that it is highly commended. They had forty gentlemen of best choice out of both houses, and the twelve maskers, with their torchbearers and pages, rode likewise upon horses exceedingly well trapped and furnished, besides a dozen little boys, dressed like baboons, that served for an antimask, and, they say, performed it exceedingly well when they came to it; and three open chariots, drawn with four horses apiece, that carried their musicians and other personages that had parts to speak. ”

“ These spirits are the active forces dimly discerned by human imagination as at work behind the shifting and often mysterious natural phenomena—forces of the moving winds and waters, of the skies now clear, now overcast, of the animal races of hill and plain, of the growth waxing and waning year by year in field and woodland. ”

“ Plays, they declared, are the snares of the devil set to catch souls. By plays the imagination of youth is corrupted, and matronly chastity first turned to thoughts of sin. With their ready touch upon vituperative rhetoric, they found for the theatre a string of nicknames of which Gosson's 'the school of abuse' was the model, and 'the school of bawdery', 'the nest of the devil', 'the consultorie of Satan', may serve as further samples. And what the plays began, they held that the surroundings of the playhouses were only too well adapted to finish. ”

“ The ‘mumming’ or ‘disguising,’ then, as it took shape at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a form of court revel, in which, behind the accretions of literature and pageantry, can be clearly discerned a nucleus of folk-custom in the entry of the band of worshippers, with their sacrificial exuviae, to bring the house good luck. The mummers are masked and disguised folk who come into the hall uninvited and call upon the company gathered there to dice and dance. ”

“ Whether Chapman’s tragedies involved scene-shifting, I am not quite sure. The analogy of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where a continuous setting was not inconsistent with the use of widely distant localities, must always be kept in mind. On the other hand, what did not appear absurd in Paris, might have appeared absurd in London, where the practice of the public theatres had taught the spectators to expect a higher degree of consistency. I am far from claiming that my theory of the survival of continuous setting at Paul’s and the Blackfriars has been demonstrated. ”

“ But whether the action be merry or mournful, grave or lascivious, the ultimate object is edification, even as the bee sucks honey from flowers and weeds alike. 'By the rewarde of the good, the good are encowraged in well doinge; and with the scowrge of the lewde, the lewde are feared from evil attempts.' Comedy, no doubt, aims at delight, but it is a delight which, on the Horatian principle, is mingled with the useful. This appears to have been the especial theme of the Play of Plays and Pastimes, in which the actors essayed their own defence on the boards of the Theatre. ”

“ The vegetation spirit would again be abroad, no longer, as in spring or summer, in the form of flowers and fresh green boughs, but in that of the last sheaf or ‘kern-baby’ saved from harvest, or in that of such evergreens or rarer blossoms as might chance to brave the snows. The particular ‘intention’ of the festival would be to secure the bounty of the divine powers for the coming year, and a natural superstition would find omens for the whole period in the events of the initial day. The feast, however, would be domestic, as well as seasonal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When Jonson has to celebrate the wedding of James Ramsay and Elizabeth Radcliffe in 1608 he proceeds very differently. Even the curtain introduces the hymeneal theme with its graceful symbolism of a red cliff. From the top of this Venus descends with her Graces. She is in search of her son, and bids the Graces ask whether he is concealed in the eyes or between the swelling breasts of the ladies in the audience. The Graces sing their appeal for the discovery of 'Venus' runaway'. Cupid now emerges, with a train of Joci and Risus, each bearing two torches, who dance a dance of triumph. ”

“ It is natural to ask whether, side by side with the observances of a natural religion, there were any of a more spiritual type; whether the village gods of our Keltic and Teutonic ancestors were approached on festival occasions solely as the givers of the good things of earth, or whether there was also any recognition of the higher character which in time they came to have as the guardians of morality, such as we can trace alike in the ritual of Eleusis and in the tribal mysteries of some existing savage peoples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Heywood dwells, of course, upon the established position to which by his time actors had attained in the favour both of English and of foreign sovereigns. But he is not blind to the abuses of his profession, and while lauding many of his fellows as men 'of substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-keepers, and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', regrets the licentiousness of others, as well as a growing tendency to inveigh upon the stage both against 'the state, the court, the law, the citty', and against 'private men's humors'. ”

“ Such interplay of opposed houses, as we get in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, would no doubt seem more effective if we could adopt the ingenious conjecture which regards the scenic wall as not running in a straight line all the way, but broken by two angles, so that, while the central apertures below and above directly front the spectators, the doors to right and left, each with a room or window above it, are set on a bias, and more or less face each other from end to end of the stage. ”

“ In Italy, in Gaul, in southern Germany, apparently also in Spain and in England, men decked themselves for riot in the heads and skins of cattle and the beasts of the chase, blackened their faces or bedaubed them with filth, or wore masks fit to terrify the demons themselves. ”

“ 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. ”