he may well have omitted or misrepresented features. Certainly he can hardly have seen the trumpeter sounding when the action had already begun. And the draughtsmanship is bad, and may have been made worse by the copyist.[1] The upper part is done, with an attempt at perspective, as he may have seen it from a point in the middle, or perhaps the upper, gallery somewhat to the right of the centre; the lower part as from full face, so that the pillars stand equi-*distant from the edges of the stage, as they would not have appeared to him in perspective. His doors and the compartments of his stage gallery are of uneven sizes.[2] But, with all its faults, the drawing is the inevitable basis of any comprehensive account of the main structural features of a play-*house, and I propose, leaving aside for the present the question of the possible hangings which it does not show, to take its parts one by one and illustrate them from other sources, and in particular from Henslowe's contracts for the construction of the Fortune in 1600 and the Hope in 1614.[3]
The outline of the building is round, or slightly ovoid.[4] The floor, which shows no traces of seating, is marked 'planities siue arena'. This is the space ordinarily known as the 'yard', a name which it may fairly be taken to have inherited from the inn-yards, surrounded by galleries and open overhead, in which, in the days before the building of the Theatre in 1576, more or less permanent play-houses had grown up.[5] Spectators in the yard always stood, and the more unstable psychology of a standing, as compared with a seated, crowd must always be taken into account in estimating the temperament of an Elizabethan audience. These are the 'groundlings', and the poets take their revenge for occasional scenes of turbulence in open or covert sneers at their 'understanding'.[6]*
- ↑ There is a dot in Wheatley's facsimile over the second well-marked 'r' of the word 'orchestra'. Is it possible that Van Buchell misread it 'orchestia'?
- ↑ Cf. Brereton in Homage, 204.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xvi.
- ↑ The Theatrum of Jonson's 1616 Folio t.p. is oval, rather than round, but it is safer to take this, in spite of its hut, as representing Jonson's notion of a classical theatre.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xvi. Graves, 32, tries to minimize the structural influence of inn-yards on the theatres, and even doubts whether the actors preferred to act in these 'rather than in the great halls'. But I do not think that he makes much of a case. Had the inns, indeed, 'great halls' at all?
- ↑ Gosson, P. C. (1582), 'it is the fashion of youthes to go first into the yarde, and to carry theire eye through every gallery'; Hamlet, III. ii. 10, 'tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise'; Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), 'your Groundling and
