but until it is recovered, it is difficult to estimate its value as testimony upon the structure of the London theatres.[1]
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.[2] I do not think there is any certain example of such an arrangement in a sixteenth-century play.[3] 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'.[4] 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
- ↑ Cf. vol. ii, p. 520.
- ↑ Of the examples cited on p. 80, n. 3, bed curtains could only suffice for Selimus, Battle of Alcazar, 1 Rich. II, and possibly R. J. and Bacon and Bungay; in the others either there is no bed, or there is a clear indication of a discovered chamber. The curtains in Sp. Trag. need separate consideration; cf. p. 93, n. 1.
- ↑ The s.ds. of 2 Hen. VI, in so far as they vary from 1 Contention, may date from the seventeenth century; cf. ch. xxi, p. 113.
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 130.
