A retrospect over this discussion of Tudor staging, which is mainly Court staging, up to a point well subsequent to the establishment of the first regular theatres, seems to offer the following results. The earliest interludes, other than revivals of Plautus and Terence or elements in spectacular disguisings, limited themselves to the setting of the hall in which they were performed, with its doors, hearth, and furniture. In such conditions either exterior or interior action could be indifferently represented. This arrangement, however, soon ceased to satisfy, in the Court at any rate, the sixteenth-century love of decoration; and one or more houses were introduced into the background, probably on a Renaissance rather than a mediaeval suggestion, through which, as well as the undifferentiated doors, the personages could come and go. The addition of an elevated stage enabled traps to be used (All for Money, Gorboduc, Jocasta, Gismond of Salerne, Arraignment of Paris); but here, as in the corresponding device of a descent from above (Gismond of Salerne, Clyomon and Clamydes), it is the mediaeval grading for heaven and hell which lies behind the Renaissance usage. With houses in the background, the normal action becomes uniformly exterior. If a visit is paid to a house, conversation takes place at its door rather than within. The exceptions are rare and tentative, amounting to little more than the provision of a shallow recess within a house, from which personages, usually one or two only, can speak. This may be a window (Two Italian Gentlemen, Promos and Cassandra), a prison (Wit and Wisdom, Promos and Cassandra, Clyomon and Clamydes), a bower (Misogonus, Endymion, Dido, Arraignment of Paris), a tub (Campaspe), a shrine or tomb (Two Italian Gentlemen, Promos and Cassandra), a shop (Thersites, Promos and Cassandra, Campaspe, Sapho and Phao), a bed-chamber (Gismund of Salerne, Tom Tyler, Sapho and Phao). Somewhat more difficulty is afforded by episodes in which there is a banquet (Mary Magdalene, Dido, Cambyses), or a law court (Conflict of Conscience), or a king confers with his councillors (Midas, Cambyses). These, according to modern notions, require the setting of a hall; but my impression is that the Italianized imagination of the Elizabethans was content
- [Footnote: for No Man has the s.d. (1439), 'Christianity must enter with a sword,
with a title of pollicy, but on the other syde of the tytle, must be written gods word, also a shield, wheron must be written riches, but on the other syde of the shield must be Fayth'. Later on (1501) Faithful 'turneth the titles'. Prologues, such as those of Damon and Pythias, Respublica, and Conflict of Conscience, which announce the names of the plays, tell rather against the use of title-boards for those plays. For the possible use of both title- and scene-boards at a later date, cf. pp. 126, 154.]
