Nor was the illusion necessarily broken by such incidents as the withdrawal of a curtain from before an interior at the point when it came into action, or the introduction of the movable ship which the Middle Ages had already known.[1] It was broken, however, when the 'belle chambre' was so large and practicable as to be out of scale with the other 'maisons'.[2] And it was broken when, as in Pandoste and many other plays, the apparently contiguous 'maisons' had to be supposed, for dramatic purposes, to be situated in widely separated localities. It is, indeed, as we shall find to our cost, not the continuous scene, but the need for change of scene, which constitutes the problem of staging. It is a problem which the Italians had no occasion to face; they had inherited, almost unconsciously, the classical tradition of continuous action in an unchanged locality, or in a locality no more changed than is entailed by the successive bringing into use of various apertures in a single façade. But the Middle Ages had had no such tradition, and the problem at once declared itself, as soon as the matter of the Middle Ages and the manner of the Renaissance began to come together in the 'Christian Terence'. The protest of Cornelius Crocus in the preface to his Joseph (1535) against 'multiple' staging, as alike intrinsically absurd and alien to the practice of the ancients, anticipates by many years that law of the unity of place, the formulation of which is generally assigned to Lodovico Castelvetro, and which was handed down by the Italians to the Pléiade and to the 'classical' criticism of the seventeenth century.[3] We are not here concerned with the unity of place as a law of dramatic structure, but we are very much concerned with the fact that the romantic drama of western Europe did not observe unity of place in actual
- ↑ 'Il faut que cela soit caché durant le premier acte, et l'on ne faict paroistre cela qu'au second acte, et se referme au mesme acte' (116), 'un eschaffaut qui soit caché' (117), 'le vaisseau paraist au quatriesme acte' (120). For the use of curtains to effect these discoveries, cf. Rigal, 243, 253, who, however, traces to a guess of Lemazurier, Galerie Historique, i. 4, the often repeated statement that to represent a change of scene 'on levait ou on tirait une tapisserie, et cela se faisait jusqu'à dix ou douze fois dans la même pièce'.
- ↑ It is so, e.g., in the design for Agarite.
- ↑ 'Non sic tolerari potest, ut longe lateque dissita loca in unum subito proscenium cogantur; qua in re per se absurdissima et nullo veterum exemplo comprobata nimium sibi hodie quidam indulserunt'; cf. Creizenach, ii. 102. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 89, 206, 290, discusses the origin of the unities, and cites Castelvetro, Poetica (1570), 534, 'La mutatione tragica non può tirar con esso seco se non una giornata e un luogo', and Jean de la Taille, Art de Tragédie (1572), 'Il faut toujours représenter l'histoire ou le jeu en un même jour, en un même temps, et en un même lieu'.
