another more freely. A house may be used for a scene which would seem absurdly short if the setting were altered for it. More doors are perhaps available, so that some can be spared for entrance behind the houses. There is more coming and going between one house and another, although I have made it clear that even the public stage was not limited to one house at a time.[1] One point is, I think, quite demonstrable. Marston has a reference to 'the lower stage' at Paul's, but neither at Paul's nor at the Blackfriars was there an upper stage capable of holding the action of a complete scene, such as we found at the sixteenth-century theatres, and apparently on a still larger scale at the Globe and the Fortune. A review of my notes will show that, although there is action 'above' in many private house plays, it is generally a very slight action, amounting to little more than the use by one or two persons of a window or balcony. Bedchamber scenes or tavern scenes are provided for below; the public theatre, as often as not, put them above.[2] I may recall, in confirmation, that the importance of the upper stage in the plays of the King's men sensibly diminishes after their occupation of the Blackfriars.[3]
There are enigmas still to be solved, and I fear insoluble. Were the continuous settings of the type which we find in Serlio, with the unity of a consistent architectural picture, or of the type which we find at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, with independent and sometimes incongruous juxtaposed mansions? The taste of the dramatists for Italian cities and the frequent recurrence of buildings which fit so well into a Serliesque scheme as the tavern, the shop, the house of the ruffiana or courtesan, may tempt one's imagination towards the former. But Serlio does not seem to contemplate much interior action, and although the convention of a half out-of-doors cortile or loggia may help to get over this difficulty, the often crowded presences and the masks seem to call for an arrangement by which each mansion can at need become in its turn the background to the whole of the stage and attach to itself all the external doors. How were the open-country scenes managed, which we have noticed in several plays, as a prelude, or even an interruption, to the strict
- ↑ Cf. pp. 98, 117.
- ↑ I have noted bedchamber scenes as 'perhaps above' at Paul's in A Mad World, my Masters and A Trick to Catch the Old One, but the evidence is very slight and may be due to careless writing. In A Mad World, III. ii. 181, Harebrain is said to 'walke below'; later 'Harebrain opens the door and listens'. In A Trick, III. iv. 72, Dampit is told that his bed waits 'above', and IV. v is in his bedchamber.
- ↑ Cf. p. 116.
