The term is not a very happy one to employ in the discussion of late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century conditions. After Godly Queen Hester it does not appear again in any play for nearly a hundred years, and then, so far as I know, is only used by Jonson in Volpone, where it appears to indicate a low movable screen, probably of a non-structural kind, and by John Webster, both in The White Devil and in The Duchess of Malfi, where it is an exact equivalent to the 'curtains' or 'arras', often referred to as screening off a recess at the back of the stage.[1] Half a century later still, it is used in the Restoration play of The Duke of Guise to indicate, not this normal back curtain, but a screen placed across the recess itself, or the inner stage which had developed out of it, behind 'the scene'.[2] Webster's use seems to be an individual one. Properly a 'traverse' means, I think, not a curtain suspended from the roof, but a screen shutting off from view a compartment within a larger room, but leaving it open above. Such a screen might, of course, very well be formed by a curtain running on a rod or cord.[3] And a 'traverse' also certainly came to mean the compartment itself which was so shut off.[4] The construction is familiar in the old-fashioned pews of our churches, and as it happens, it is from the records of the royal chapel that its Elizabethan use can best be illustrated. Thus when Elizabeth took her Easter communion at St. James's in 1593, she came down, doubtless from her 'closet' above, after the Gospel had been read, 'into her Majestes Travess', whence she emerged to
- ↑ Volpone, v. 2801 (cf. p. 111); White Devil, V. iv. 70: Cornelia, the Moore and 3 other Ladies discovered, winding Marcello's coarse'; Duchess of Malfi, IV. i. 54: Here is discover'd, behind a travers, the artificiall figures of Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead.
'Flamineo. I will see them, They are behind the travers. Ile discover Their superstitious howling.
- ↑ Duke of Guise, v. 3 (quoted by Albright, 58), 'The scene draws, behind it a Traverse', and later, 'The Traverse is drawn. The King rises from his Chair, comes forward'.
- ↑ The Revels Accounts for 1511 (Brewer, ii. 1497) include 10d. for a rope used for a 'travas' in the hall at Greenwich and stolen during a disguising. Puttenham (1589), i. 17, in an attempt to reconstruct the methods of classical tragedy, says that the 'floore or place where the players vttered . . . had in it sundrie little diuisions by curteins as trauerses to serue for seueral roomes where they might repaire vnto and change their garments and come in againe, as their speaches and parts were to be renewed'.
- ↑ There was a traverse in the nursery of Edward V in 1474; cf. H. O.
- 28, 'Item, we will that our sayd sonne in his chamber and for all nighte
