shuttered 'wings' as well as back-cloths which Inigo Jones had devised for the masks and the stage had adopted. Even these were not absolutely unknown in pre-Restoration plays, and neither this fact nor the incidental use of special cloths over the central aperture would make it untrue that the normal background of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play was an arras.[1]
The discussions of the last chapter and a half have envisaged the plays presented, exclusively in open theatres until the King's took over the Blackfriars, by professional companies of men. I must deal in conclusion, perhaps more briefly than the interest of the problem would itself justify, with those of the revived boy companies which for a time carried on such an active rivalry with the men, at Paul's from 1599 to 1606 and at the Blackfriars from 1600 to 1609. It is, I think, a principal defect of many investigations into Jacobean staging, that the identity of the devices employed in the so-called 'public' and 'private' houses has been too hastily assumed, and a uniform hypothesis built up upon material taken indifferently from both sources, without regard to the logical possibility of the considerable divergences to which varying conditions of structure and of tradition may have given rise. This is a kind of syncretism to which an inadequate respect for the historic method naturally tends. It is no doubt true that the 'standardization' of type, which I have accepted as likely to result from the frequent migration of companies and plays from one public house to another, may in a less degree have affected the private houses also. James Burbadge originally built the Blackfriars for public performances, and we know that Satiromastix was produced both at the Globe and at Paul's in 1601, and that in 1604 the Revels boys and the King's men were able to effect mutual piracies of Jeronimo and The Malcontent. Nor is there anything in the general character of the two groups of 'public' and 'private' plays, as they have come down to us, which is in any obvious way inconsistent with some measure of standardization. It is apparent, indeed, that the act-interval was of far more importance at both Paul's and the Blackfriars than elsewhere. But this is largely a matter of degree. The inter-acts of music and song and dance were more universal and longer.[2] But*
- ↑ 'Scenes' were used in the public performances of Nabbes's Microcosmus (1637), Suckling's Aglaura (1637), and Habington's Queen of Arragon (1640); cf. Lawrence, ii. 121 (The Origin of the English Picture-Stage); W. G. Keith, The Designs for the First Movable Scenery on the English Stage (Burlington Magazine, xxv. 29, 85).
- ↑ For Paul's, C. and C. Errant (after each act), 'Here they knockt up the Consort'; Faery Pastorall; Trick to Catch the Old One (after I and
