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.[1] 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.[2] 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
- [Footnote: a central one closed by curtains, and three on each side, with female
spectators. In view of their dates and doubtful provenances (cf. Bibl. Note to ch. xviii), these are no evidence for the sixteenth-century public theatre, but they show that at some plays, public or private, the audience continued to sit 'over the stage' well in to the seventeenth century.]
