I think that when the Elizabethans spoke of 'houses' on the stage, they were perhaps regarding them primarily as the habitations of the actors rather than of the personages whom these represented. They were the tiring-houses, in which the actors remained when they were not in action and to and from which they made their exits and their entrances. At any rate, the term in its technical use seems wide enough to cover, not merely the palaces and the more humble domestic edifices which made appropriate backgrounds to the comings and goings of individual kings and citizens—of an Orestes, a Dobbyn—but also more elaborate and composite structures of 'battlements' and 'cities', of which the former doubtless represented the external view of the walls and gates of a town or castle, and the latter some internal town scene, a street or market-place, perhaps before the doors of more than one house in the narrower sense. We hear of such specialized forms of 'house' as 'pavilions' or tents, the 'Senat howse' used for Quintus Fabius in 1573-4 and the 'prison' which must have formed part of the 'cittie' for The Four Sons of Fabius in 1579-80. These, and probably other houses, were no doubt sufficiently practicable for personages to be seen, and in some cases also heard, inside them; and the senate house was veiled by curtains, which doubtless remained closed until the proper moment for interior action to take place. There are other references to curtains, the mechanism by which they were drawn, and the sarcenet of which they were made.[1] It has been suggested that some of these were front curtains, but there is no reason, so far as the evidence in the Revels Accounts is concerned, why they should not all, like the senate house curtain, have been veils for individual 'houses', such as were used in masks, and had been used in the corresponding domus of miracle-plays. It is possible, although not certain, that some of the 'great cloths' provided may have been for hangings to the back and side walls of the stage, rather than for covering houses. There is no reason why these should not have been painted in perspective, but the extent to which, if at all, perspective was employed is one of the points on which we are most in the dark.[2] Subsidiary structures, hollow trees, arbours, gibbets, altars, wells, gave variety to the action, and helped out the decorative
- ↑ In 1571-2, 'curtyn ringes' (Feuillerat, Eliz. 140); in 1573-4, 'poles and shivers for draft of the curtins before the senat howse . . . curtyn ringes . . . edging the curtins with ffrenge . . . tape and corde for the same' (200); in 1576-7, 'a lyne to draw a curteyne' (275); in 1580-1, a purchase of 8 ells of orange taffeta double sarcenet at 10^s an ell for a curtain for a play (338); in 1584-5 'one greate curteyne' of sarcenet for Phillyda and Corin (365).
- ↑ Cf. ch. xix.
