would no doubt be desirable that the occupants of those rooms should be able to see anything that went on within the alcove. I do not quite know what weight to attach to Mr. Lawrence's analogy between the oblique doors which this theory involves and the familiar post-Restoration proscenium doors, with stage-boxes above them, at right angles to the plane of the footlights.[1] The roofed Caroline theatres, with their side-walls to the stage, and the proscenium arch, probably borrowed from the masks, have intervened, and I cannot pretend to have traced the history of theatrical structure during the Caroline period.
I have felt justified in dealing more briefly with the early seventeenth-century stages than with those of the sixteenth century, for, after all, the fundamental conditions, so far as I can judge, remained unaltered. I seem able to lay my finger upon two directions in which development took place, and both of these concern the troublesome problem of interior action. First of all there is the stage gallery. Of this I venture to reconstruct the story as follows. Its first function was to provide seating accommodation for dignified and privileged spectators, amongst whom could be placed, if occasion arose, presenters or divine agents supposed to be watching or directing the action of a play. Perhaps a differentiation took place. Parts of the gallery, above the doors at either end of the scene, were set aside as lord's rooms. The central part, with the upper floor of the tiring-house behind it, was used for the musicians, but was also available for such scenes as could effectively be staged above, and a curtain was fitted, corresponding to that below, behind which the recess could be set as a small chamber. Either as a result of these changes or for other reasons, the lord's rooms, about the end of the sixteenth century, lost their popularity, and it became the fashion for persons of distinction, or would-be distinction, to sit upon the stage itself instead.[2] This left additional space free above, and the architects of the Globe and Fortune took the opportunity to enlarge the accommodation for their upper scenes. Probably they left windows over the side-doors, so that the upper parts of three distinct houses could, if necessary, be represented; and it may be that spectators were not wholly excluded from these.[3] But they widened*
- ↑ Lawrence, i. 159 (Proscenium Doors: an Elizabethan Heritage).
- ↑ Cf. vol. ii, p. 534.
- ↑ At the Globe the windows appear to have been bay windows; cf. p. 116, n. 7. Lawrence, ii. 25 (Windows on the Pre-Restoration Stage), cites T. M. Black Book (1604), 'And marching forward to the third garden-house, there we knocked up the ghost of mistress Silverpin, who
