for spectators. And it did not leave room for much variety in decoration, as between play and play.[1] It appears, indeed, to have been used only for tragedy. A more important tendency was really just in the opposite direction, towards change rather than uniformity of scenic effect. Even the perspectives, however beautiful, of the comedies did not prove quite as amusing, as the opening heavens and hells and other ingeniously varied backgrounds of the mediaeval plays had been, and by the end of the sixteenth century devices were being tried for movable scenes, which ultimately led to the complete elimination of the comparatively solid and not very manageable 'case'.[2]
It is difficult to say how far the Italian perspective scene made its way westwards. Mediaeval drama—on the one hand the miracle-play, on the other the morality and the farce—still retained an unbounded vitality in sixteenth-century France. The miracle-play had its own elaborate and traditional system of staging. The morality and the farce required very little staging at all, and could be content at need with nothing more than a bare platform, backed by a semicircle or hollow square of suspended curtains, through the interstices of which the actors might come and go.[3] But from the beginning of the century there is observable in educated circles an infiltration of the humanist interest in the classical drama; and this, in course of time, was reinforced through two distinct channels. One of these was the educational influence, coming indirectly through Germany and the Netherlands, of the 'Christian Terence', which led about 1540 to the academic Latin tragedies of Buchanan and Muretus at Bordeaux.[4] The other was the direct contact with humanist civilization, which followed upon the Italian adventures of Charles VIII and Louis XII, and dominated the reigns of François I and his house, notably after the marriage of Catherine de' Medici to the future Henri II in 1533. In 1541 came Sebastiano Serlio with his comprehensive knowledge of stage-craft; and the translation of his Architettura, shortly after its publication in 1545, by Jean Martin, a friend of Ronsard, may be taken as evidence of its vogue. In 1548 the French Court may be said to have
- ↑ Probably some temporary additions to the permanent decoration of the scena was possible, as Ferrari (tav. xv) gives a design for a scenario by Scamozzi.
- ↑ Ferrari, 100.
- ↑ Engravings, by Jean de Gourmont and another, of this type of stage are reproduced by Bapst, 145, 153, and by Rigal in Petit de Julleville, iii. 264, 296; cf. M. B. Evans, An Early Type of Stage (M. P. ix. 421).
- ↑ Cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 217.
