from theatre to theatre, and even transferred from company to company. Titus Andronicus, successively presented by Pembroke's, Strange's, Sussex's, and the Chamberlain's, is an extreme case in point. The ideal method would have been to study the staging of each theatre separately, before coming to any conclusion as to the similarity or diversity of their arrangements. This is impracticable, and I propose therefore to proceed on the assumption that the stages of the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Rose were in their main features similar. For this there is an a priori argument in the convenience of what Mr. Archer calls a 'standardisation of effects', especially at a time when the bonds between companies and theatres were so loose.[1] Moreover, the Theatre and the Curtain were built at much the same date, and although there was room for development in the art of theatrical architecture before the addition of the Rose, I am unable, after a careful examination of the relevant plays, to lay my finger upon any definite new feature which Henslowe can be supposed to have introduced. It is exceedingly provoking that the sixteenth-century repertory of the Swan has yielded nothing which can serve as a point de liaison between De Witt's drawing and the mass of extant texts.
It will be well to begin with some analysis of the various types of scene which the sixteenth-century managers were called upon to produce; and these may with advantage be arranged according to the degree of use which they make of a structural background.[2] There are, of course, a certain number of scenes which make no use of a background at all, and may in a sense be called unlocated scenes—mere bits of conversation which might be carried on between the speakers wherever they happened to meet, and which give no indication of where that meeting is supposed to be. Perhaps these scenes are not so numerous as is sometimes suggested.[3] At any rate it must be borne in mind that they were located
- ↑ Quarterly Review, ccviii. 446.
- ↑ I here use 'scene' in the sense of a continuous section of action in an unchanged locality, and do not follow either the usage of the playwrights, which tends to be based upon the neo-classical principle that the entrance or exit of a speaker of importance constitutes a fresh scene, or the divisions of the editors, who often assume a change of locality where none has taken place; cf. ch. xxii. I do not regard a scene as broken by a momentary clearance of the stage, or by the opening of a recess in the background while speakers remain on the stage, or by the transference of action from one point to another of the background if this transference merely represents a journey over a foreshortened distance between neighbouring houses.
- ↑ Albright, 114; Thorndike, 102.
