continuity of the performance is a natural inference from the fact that the act-divisions are the favourite, although not the only, points for the intervention of presenters, dumb-shows, and choruses.[1] The act-intervals cannot have been long, at any rate if the performance was to be completed in two hours. There may sometimes have been music, which would not have prevented the audience from stretching themselves and talking.[2] Short intervals, rather than none at all, are, I think, suggested by the well-known passage in the induction of The Malcontent, as altered for performance at the Globe, in which it is explained that passages have been added to the play as originally written for Revels boys, 'to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre'.[3] Some information is perhaps to be gleaned from the 'plots' of plays prepared for the guidance of the book-keeper or tire-man, of which examples are preserved at Dulwich.[4] These have lines drawn across them at points which pretty clearly correspond to the beginnings of scenes, although it can hardly be assumed that each new scene meant a change of locality. The act-divisions can in some, but not all, cases be inferred from the occurrence of dumb-shows and choruses; in one, The Dead Man's Fortune, they are definitely marked by lines of crosses, and against each such line there is the marginal note 'musique'. Other musical directions, 'sound', 'sennet', 'alarum', 'flourish', come sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle of scenes.
We do not get any encouragement to think that a change of locality was regularly heralded by notes of music, even if this may incidentally have been the case when a procession or an army or a monarch was about to enter. Possibly the lines on the plots may signify an even slighter pause than that between the acts, such as the modern stage provides
- [Footnote: *interval (cf. p. 131). So in Catiline the storm with which Act III ends is
still on at the beginning of Act IV, and in Alchemist Mammon and Lovewit are seen approaching at the ends of Acts I and IV respectively, but in both cases the actual arrival is at the beginning of the next act.]
- ↑ F. A. Foster, Dumb Show in Elizabethan Drama before 1620 (E. S. xliv. 8).
- ↑ Jonson has a 'Chorus—of musicians' between the acts of Sejanus, and the presenter of Two Lamentable Tragedies bids the audience 'Delight your eares with pleasing harmonie' after the harrowing end of Act II. Some other examples given in Lawrence, i. 75 (Music and Song in the Elizabethan Drama), seem to me no more than incidental music such as may occur at any point of a play. Malone (Var. iii. 111) describes a copy of the Q_{2} of R. J. in which the act endings and directions for inter-act music had been marked in manuscript; but this might be of late date.
- ↑ Malcontent, ind. 89.
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 127.
