on record.[1] There was another in the pleasure-house, which he planned for Henri II in the grounds of Saint-Germain, and which was completed by Guillaume Marchand under Henri IV. This seems, from the extant plan, to have been designed as a parallelogram.[2] The hall of the Hôtel de Bourbon, hard by the Louvre, in which plays were sometimes given, is shown by the engravings of the Balet Comique, which was danced there in 1581, to have been, in the main, of similar shape. But it had an apse 'en demi-rond' at one end.[3] It may be that the Terence illustrations come again to our help, and that the new engravings which appear, side by side with others of the older tradition, in the Terence published by Jean de Roigny in 1552 give some notion of the kind of stage which Jodelle and his friends used.[4] The view is from the auditorium. The stage is a platform, about 3-1/2 ft. high, with three shallow steps at the back, on which actors are sitting, while a prologue declaims. There are no hangings or scenes. Pillars divide the back of the stage from a gallery which runs behind and in which stand spectators. Obviously this is not on Italian lines, but it might preserve the memory of some type of academic stage.
If we know little of the scenic methods of the French Court, we know a good deal of those employed in the only public theatre of which, during the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth, Paris could boast. This was the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a rectangular hall built by the Confrérie de la Passion in 1548, used by that body for the representation of miracle-plays and farces up to 1598, let between 1598 and 1608 to a succession of visiting companies, native and foreign, and definitively occupied from the latter year by the Comédiens du Roi, to whom Alexandre Hardy was dramatist in chief.[5] The Mémoire pour la décoration des pièces qui se représentent par les comediens du roy, entretenus de sa Magesté is one of the
- ↑ Lanson, loc. cit. 424.
- ↑ The plan is in J. A. Du Cerceau, Les Plus Excellens Bastimens de France (1576-9), and is reproduced in W. H. Ward, French Châteaux and Gardens in the Sixteenth Century, 14; cf. R. Blomfield, Hist. of French Architecture, i. 81, who, however, thinks that Du Cerceau's 'bastiment en manière de théâtre' was not the long room, but the open courtyard, in the form of a square with concave angles and semicircular projections on each side, which occupies the middle of the block.
- ↑ Prunières, Ballet de Cour, 72, 134.
- ↑ Bapst, 147, reproduces an example. This is apparently the type of French stage described by J. C. Scaliger, Poetice (1561), i. 21, 'Nunc in Gallia ita agunt fabulas, ut omnia in conspectu sint; universus apparatus dispositis sublimibus sedibus. Personae ipsae nunquam discedunt: qui silent pro absentibus habentur'.
- ↑ Rigal, 36, 46, 53.
