- tions, divorced from the actualities of representation, can
hardly be regarded as evidence on any system of staging.[1] Probably this is also true of many of the literary comedies, although Court performances of comedies, apart from those of the professional players, continue to be traceable throughout the century. Unfortunately archaeological research has not succeeded in exhuming from the archives of the French royal households anything that throws much light on the details of staging, and very possibly little material of this kind exists. Cléopâtre is said to have been produced 'in Henrici II aula . . . magnifico veteris scenae apparatu'.[2] The prologue of Eugène, again, apologizes for the meagreness of an academic setting:
Quand au théâtre, encore qu'il ne soit
En demi-rond, comme on le compassoit,
Et qu'on ne l'ait ordonné de la sorte
Que l'on faisoit, il faut qu'on le supporte:
Veu que l'exquis de ce vieil ornement
Ores se voue aux Princes seulement.
Hangings round the stage probably sufficed for the colleges, and possibly even on some occasions for royal châteaux.[3] But Jodelle evidently envisaged something more splendid as possible at Court, and a notice, on the occasion of some comedies given before Charles IX at Bayonne in 1565, of 'la bravade et magnificence de la dite scène ou théâtre, et des feux ou verres de couleur, desquelles elle etait allumée et enrichie' at once recalls a device dear to Serlio, and suggests a probability that the whole method of staging, which Serlio expounds, may at least have been tried.[4] Of an actual theatre 'en demi-rond' at any French palace we have no clear proof. Philibert de l'Orme built a salle de spectacle for Catherine in the Tuileries, on a site afterwards occupied by the grand staircase, but its shape and dimensions are not
- ↑ E. Rigal in Rev. d'Hist. Litt. xii. 1, 203; cf. the opposite view of J. Haraszti in xi. 680 and xvi. 285.
- ↑ Sainte-Marthe, Elogia (1606), 175.
- ↑ G. Lanson in Rev. d'Hist. Litt. x. 432. In Northward Hoe, iv. 1, Bellamont is writing a tragedy of Astyanax, which he will have produced 'in the French court by French gallants', with 'the stage hung all with black velvet'.
- ↑ Lanson, loc. cit. 422. A description of a tragi-comedy called Genièvre,
based on Ariosto, at Fontainebleau in 1564 neglects the staging, but gives
a picture of the audience as
une jeune presse
De tous costez sur les tapis tendus,
Honnestement aux girons espandus
De leur maîtresse.B. Rossi's Fiammella was given at Paris in 1584 with a setting of 'boschi'.
