like the curtains of Ferrara and Rome, but like those curtains used to mark the beginning and end of a play, rather than to facilitate any changing of scenes?[1] It is difficult to say. Wilmot, not re-writing for the stage, may have re-written loosely. Or the epilogue may after all have belonged to the first version of the play, and have dropped out of the manuscript in which that version is preserved. The Revels Accounts testify that 'great curtains' were used in Court plays, but certainly do not prove that they were used as front curtains. The nearest approach to a corroboration of Wilmot is to be found in an epigram which exists in various forms, and is ascribed in some manuscripts to Sir Walter Raleigh.[2]
What is our life? a play of passion.
Our mirth? the musick of diuision.
Our mothers wombs the tyring houses bee
Where we are drest for liues short comedy.
The earth the stage, heauen the spectator is,
Who still doth note who ere do act amisse.
Our graues, that hyde vs from the all-seeing sun,
Are but drawne curtaynes when the play is done.
If these four comedies and four tragedies were taken alone, it would, I think, be natural to conclude that, with the Italianized types of drama, the English Court had also adopted the Italian type of setting.[3] Certainly the tragedies would fit*
- ↑ There is a reference to a falling curtain, not necessarily a stage one, in Alchemist, IV. ii. 6, 'O, for a suite, To fall now, like a cortine: flap'. Such curtains were certainly used in masks; cf. ch. vi.
- ↑ Donne, Poems (ed. Grierson), i. 441; J. Hannah, Courtly Poets, 29. Graves, 20, quotes with this epigram Drummond, Cypress Grove, 'Every one cometh there to act his part of this tragi-comedy, called life, which done, the courtaine is drawn, and he removing is said to dy'. But of course many stage deaths are followed by the drawing of curtains which are not front curtains.
- ↑ Inns of Court and University plays naturally run on analogous lines. For the 'houses' at Cambridge in 1564 and at Oxford in 1566, cf. ch. vii. The three Cambridge Latin comedies, Hymenaeus (1579), Victoria (c. 1580-3), Pedantius (c. 1581), follow the Italian tradition. For Victoria, which has the same plot as Two Ital. Gent., Fraunce directs, 'Quatuor extruendae sunt domus, nimirum Fidelis, 1^a, Fortunij, 2^a, Cornelij, 3^a Octauiani, 4^a. Quin et sacellum quoddam erigendum est, in quo constituendum est Cardinalis cuiusdam Sepulchrum, ita efformatum, vt claudi aperirique possit. In Sacello autem Lampas ardens ponenda est'. The earliest extant tragedies, Grimald's Christus Redivivus (c. 1540) and Archipropheta (c. 1547), antedate the pseudo-Senecan influence. Practical convenience, rather than dramatic theory, imposed upon the former a unity of action before the tomb. Grimald says, 'Loca item, haud usque eò discriminari censebat; quin unum in proscenium, facilè & citra negocium conduci queant'. The latter was mainly before Herod's palace, but seems to have showed also John's prison at Macherus. There is an opening scene, as
