action within the houses. Four other examples do entail some change of locality. Much stress must not be laid on the sudden conversions in the fourth act of The Conflict of Conscience (> 1581) and the last scene of Three Ladies of London of the open 'place' into Court, for these are very belated specimens of the moral. And the opening dialogue of the Three Ladies, on the way to London, may glide readily enough into the main action before two houses in London itself. But in The Disobedient Child (c. 1560) some episodes are before the house of the father, and others before that of the son in another locality forty miles away. In Mary Magdalene (< 1566), again, the action begins in Magdalo, but there is a break (842) when Mary and the Vice start on their travels, and it is resumed at Jerusalem, where it proceeds first in some public place, and afterwards by a sudden transition (1557) at a repast within the house of Simon. In both cases it may be conjectured that the two localities were indicated on opposite sides of the hall or stage, and that the personages travelled from one to the other over the intervening space, which was regarded as representing a considerable distance. You may call this 'multiple staging', if you will. The same imaginative foreshortening of space had been employed both in the miracle-plays and in the 'Christian Terence'.[1] Simon's house at Jerusalem was, no doubt, some kind of open loggia with a table in it, directly approachable from the open place where the earlier part of the Jerusalem action was located.
Godly Queen Hester (? 1525-9) has a different interest, in that, of all the forty-four interludes, it affords the only possible evidence for the use of a curtain. In most respects it is quite a normal interlude. The action is continuous, in a 'place', which represents a council-chamber, with a chair for Ahasuerus. But there is no mention of a door, and while the means of exit and entrance for the ordinary personages are unspecified, the stage directions note, on two occasions (139, 635) when the King goes out, that he 'entreth the trauerse'. Now 'traverses' have played a considerable part in attempts to reconstruct the Elizabethan theatre, and some imaginative writers have depicted them as criss-crossing about the stage in all sorts of possible and impossible directions.[2]
- ↑ Cf. M. L. Spencer, Corpus Christi Pageants in England, 184; Creizenach, ii. 101.
- ↑ Wallace, ii. 48, 'The Blackfriars stage was elastic in depth as well as width, and could according to the demands of the given play be varied by curtains or traverses of any required number placed at any required distance between the balcony and the front of the stage'; Prölss, 89; Albright, 58; cf. p. 78.
