signal for the beginning or ending of a hall scene. But to this aspect of the matter I must return.[1] Whatever the machinery, it must have been worked in some way from the upper part of the tire-house; possibly from the somewhat obscure third floor, which De Witt's drawing leaves to conjecture; possibly from the superstructure known as the hut, if that really stood further forward than De Witt's drawing suggests. Perhaps the late reference to Jove leaning on his elbows in the garret, or employed to make squibs and crackers to grace the play, rather points to the former hypothesis.[2] In favour of the latter, for what it is worth, is the description, also late, of a theatre set up by the English actors under John Spencer at Regensburg in 1613. This had a lower stage for music, over that a main stage thirty feet high with a roof supported by six great pillars, and under the roof a quadrangular aperture, through which beautiful effects were contrived.[3]
There has been a general abandonment of the hypothesis, which found favour when De Witt's drawing was first discovered, of a division of the stage into an inner and an outer part by a 'traverse' curtain running between the two posts, perhaps supplemented by two other curtains running from the posts back to the tire-house.[4] Certainly I do not wish to revive it. Any such arrangement would be inconsistent with the use of the tire-house doors and gallery in out-of-door scenes; for, on the hypothesis, these were played with the traverse closed. And it would entail a serious interference with the vision of such scenes by spectators sitting far round in the galleries or 'above the stage'. It does not, of course, follow that no use at all was made of curtains upon the stage. It is true that no hangings of any kind are shown by De Witt. Either there were none visible when he drew the Swan in 1596, or, if they were visible, he failed to draw them; it is impossible to say which. We know that even the Swan was not altogether undraped in 1602, for during the riot which followed the 'cousening prancke' of England's Joy in that year the audience are said to have
- ↑ Cf. p. 89.
- ↑ Cf. vol. ii, p. 546.
- ↑ Mettenleiter, Musikgeschichte von Regensburg, 256; Herz, 46, 'ein Theater darinnen er mit allerley musikalischen Instrumenten auf mehr denn zehnerley Weise gespielt, und über der Theaterbühne noch eine Bühne 30 Schuh hoch auf 6 grosse Säulen, über welche ein Dach gemacht worden, darunter ein viereckiger Spund, wodurch die sie schöne Actiones verrichtet haben'; cf. ch. xiv and C. H. Kaulfuss-Diesch, Die Inszenierung des deutschen Dramas an der Wende des sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (1905).
- ↑ Prölss, 73; Brodmeier, 5, 43, 57; cf. Reynolds, i. 7, and in M. P. ix. 59; Albright, 151; Lawrence, i. 40.
