not necessarily so elaborate or decorative as those of the Court, but at least intelligible, for open country scenes, battle and siege scenes, garden scenes, street and threshold scenes, hall scenes, chamber scenes. Like the Master of the Revels, he made far less use of interior action than the modern or even the Restoration producer of plays; but he could not altogether avoid it, either on the larger scale of a hall scene, in which a considerable number of persons had occasionally to be staged for a parliament or a council or the like, or on the smaller scale when only a few persons had to be shown in a chamber, or in the still shallower enclosure which might stand as part of a mainly out-of-doors setting for a cell, a bower, a cave, a tent, a senate house, a window, a tomb, a shop, a porch, a shrine, a niche.[1] Even more than the Master of the Revels, he had to face the complication due to the taste of an English audience for romantic or historical drama, and the changes of locality which a narrative theme inevitably involved. Not for him, except here and there in a comedy, that blessed unity of place upon which the whole dramatic art of the Italian neo-classic school had been built up. Our corresponding antiquarian problem is to reconstruct, so far as the evidence permits, the structural resources which were
- [Footnote: Falstaff is found 'a sleepe behind the Arras'. This looks like a hall
scene, and with it III. iii, where Mrs. Quickly is miscalled (72) 'in mine owne house' and Falstaff says (112) 'I fell a sleepe here, behind the Arras', is consistent. But in 2 Hen. IV, II. iv, Falstaff and Doll come out of their supper room. The Drawer announces (75) 'Antient Pistol's belowe', and is bid (109) 'call him vp' and (202) 'thrust him downe staires'. Later (381) 'Peyto knockes at doore'; so does Bardolph (397), to announce that 'a dozen captaines stay at doore'. This is clearly an upper parlour. In Look About You, scc. ix, x (continuous action), Gloucester, disguised as Faukenbridge, and a Pursuivant have stepped into the Salutation tavern (1470), and are in 'the Bel, our roome next the Barre' (1639), with a stool (1504) and fire (1520). But at 1525 the action shifts. Skink enters, apparently in a room called the Crown, and asks whether Faukenbridge was 'below' (1533). Presumably he descends, for (1578) he sends the sheriff's party 'vp them stayres' to the Crown. This part of the action is before the inn, rather than in the Bell. Humorous Day's Mirth, scc. viii, x-xii, in Verone's ordinary, with tables and a court cupboard, seems to be a hall scene; at viii. 254 'convey them into the inward parlour by the inward room' does not entail any action within the supposed inward room.]
- ↑ Cf. pp. 51, 53, 55-6, 58-9, 62.
