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.[1] Even an out-of-door scene, such as an execution or a duel in the lists, sometimes demands a similar adjustment;[2] 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.[3] 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 occupa-*
- ↑ Cf. p. 64, n. 6. W. Archer (Quarterly Review, ccviii. 457) suggests that convention allowed properties, but not dead or drunken men, to be moved in the sight of the audience by servitors. But as a rule the moving could be treated as part of the action, and need not take place between scenes.
- ↑ Rich. II, I. iii; 2 Edw. IV, II. iv, 'This while the hangman prepares, Shore at this speech mounts vp the ladder . . . Shoare comes downe'. The Admiral's inventories of 1598 (Henslowe Papers, 116) include 'j payer of stayers for Fayeton'.
- ↑ The dissertations of Reynolds (cf. Bibl. Note to ch. xviii) are largely devoted to the exposition of this theory.
