and a few lines later (510) we get 'Here enter Lamphedon out of Phrygia'. Now it is to be noted that the episodes which follow these directions are not away from, but in the wood and Phrygia respectively; and the inference has been drawn that there were labelled doors, entrance through one of which warned the spectators that action was about to take place in the locality whose title the label bore.[1] This theory obtains some plausibility from the use of the gates Homoloydes and Electrae in Jocasta; and perhaps also from the inscribed house of the ruffiana in Serlio's scena comica, from the early Terence engravings, and from certain examples of lettered mansions in French miracle-plays.[2] But of course these analogies do not go the whole way in support of a practice of using differently lettered entrances to help out an imagined conversion of the same 'place' into different localities. More direct confirmation may perhaps be derived from Sidney's criticism of the contemporary drama in his Defence of Poesie (c. 1583). There are two passages to be cited.[3] The first forms part of an argument that poets are not liars. Their feigning is a convention, and is accepted as such by their hearers. 'What Childe is there', says Sidney, 'that, comming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters vpon an olde doore, doth beleeue that it is Thebes?' Later on he deals more formally with the stage, as a classicist, writing after the unity of place had hardened into a doctrine. Even Gorboduc is no perfect tragedy.
'For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions
of all corporall actions. For where the stage should alwaies
represent but one place, and the vttermost time presupposed in it
should be, both by Aristotles precept and common reason, but
one day, there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially
imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduck, how much more in al the
rest? where you shal haue Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other,
and so many other vnder-kingdoms, that the Player, when he commeth
in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or els the tale wil not be
conceiued. Now ye shal haue three ladies walke to gather flowers, and
then we must beleeue the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare
- ↑ Lawrence (i. 41), Title and Locality Boards on the Pre-Restoration Stage.
- ↑ Lawrence, i. 55. No English example of an inscribed miracle-play domus has come to light.
- ↑ Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i. 185, 197 (cf. App. C, No. xxxiv). Sidney's main argument is foreshadowed in Whetstone's Epistle to Promos and Cassandra (1578; cf. App. C, No. xix), 'The Englishman in this quallitie, is most vaine, indiscreete, and out of order; he fyrst groundes his worke on impossibilities: then in three howers ronnes he throwe the worlde: marryes, gets children, makes children men, men to conquer kingdomes, murder monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heaven, and fetcheth Divels from Hel'.
