Well into the yard, leaving space for the groundlings on three sides of it, projects a quadrangular stage, which is marked 'proscaenium'.[1] The breadth is perhaps rather greater than the depth.[2] This was certainly the case at the Fortune, where the stage was 43 ft. wide, and extended 'to the middle of the yarde', a distance of 27-1/2 ft. The level of the stage may be some 3 or 4 ft. above the ground. Two solid trestles forming part of its supports are visible, but at the Fortune it was paled in with oak, and in view of the common use of the space below the stage to facilitate apparitions and other episodes requiring traps, this was probably the normal arrangement.[3] It has been thought that the stage of the Swan, like that of the Hope, which was in many respects modelled upon it, may have been removable. But this is hardly consistent with the heavy pillars which, in this respect certainly unlike the Hope, it carries. Moreover,
- [Footnote: Gallery-Commoner buyes his sport by the penny . . . neither are you to
be hunted from thence, though the Scar-crows in the yard hoot at you, hisse at you, spit at you, yea, throw durt euen in your teeth'; Bartholomew Fair (1614), ind. 51, 'the vnderstanding Gentlemen o' the ground here, ask'd my iudgement', 59, 79; The Hog Has Lost His Pearl (1614), prol.:
We may be pelted off for ought we know,
With apples, egges, or stones, from thence belowe;
W. Fennor, Descriptions (1616):
the understanding, grounded, men for their just reward,
Shall gape and gaze among the fools in the yard.
So later, Vox Graculi (1623), 'they will sit dryer in the galleries then those who are the understanding men in the yard'; Shirley, The Changes (1632):
Many gentlemen
Are not, as in the days of understanding,
Now satisfied with a Jig;
Shirley, The Doubtful Heir (1640), prol.:
No shews, no frisk and, what you most delight in,
Grave understanders, here's no target-fighting.
]would have performed his prize. . . . Hell being vnder euerie one of their Stages, the Players (if they had owed him a spight) might with a false Trappe doore haue slipt him downe, and there kept him, as a laughing stocke to al their yawning spectators. . . . Tailors . . . (as well as Plaiers) haue a hell of their owne, (vnder their shop-board).']
- ↑ Proscenium is the proper classical word for the space in front of the scena; cf. p. 539.
- ↑ Albright has no justification for introducing into his reconstruction of a typical Shakespearian stage the tapering, instead of quadrangular, platform which characterizes the late engraving in The Wits, and to a less degree those in Roxana and Messallina.
- ↑ Wegener, 125, collects examples of the use of traps. They served, inter alia, for the representation of 'hell-mouth', which the Elizabethan stage inherited from the miracle-plays (cf. p. 544), and the space under the stage was known as 'hell'; cf. Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 92, 139), 'Mary the question is, in which of the Play-houses he [the Devil
