apparitions arose and sank;[1] Jonah was spewed up from the whale's belly;[2] and the old device of hell-mouth still kept alive a mediaeval tradition.[3] Only primitive hydraulics would have been required to make a fountain flow or a fog arise;[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7]
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.[8] However this may be, let us recall*
- ↑ 1 Contention, sc. ii (cf. p. 56, n. 3); John a Kent, III. i (cf. p. 74, n. 3); &c.
- ↑ Looking Glass, IV. ii, s.d. 'Jonas the Prophet cast out of the Whales belly vpon the Stage'.
- ↑ Dr. Faustus, 1450, s.d. (addition of 1616 text), 'Hell is discouered'; cf. p. 72 for the description of the imaginary stage in the Wagner Book. The Admiral's inventories of 1598 (Henslowe Papers, 116) include 'j Hell mought'.
- ↑ Arden of Feversham, IV. ii, iii.
- ↑ Cf. p. 51.
- ↑ Cf. p. 43.
- ↑ Cf. p. 76.
- ↑ Of the late woodcuts, Roxana shows 'above' two compartments, clearly with spectators; Messalina one, closed by curtains; The Wits
