the Chapel were primarily choristers, it is not surprising that music played a considerable part in the entertainment provided. Musical interludes were given between the acts, and Gerschow records a preliminary concert of an hour in length before the play began at the Blackfriars in 1602.[1] Sometimes also a boy came forward and danced between the acts.[2] At Paul's there was at the back of the stage a 'musick tree', which apparently rose out of a 'canopie' and bore a 'musick house' on either side of it.[3]or Faery Chappell'. . . . 'Here they shutt both into the Canopie Fane or Trophey'; Cuck Queenes and Cuckolds Errants, prol. by Tarlton, 'standing at entrance of the doore and right vnder the Beame I think Graves, 14, rightly explains 'Trophey' as 'arch', on the analogy of its use for a triumphal arch in Dekker, Coronation Pageant (1603). The only other use of 'canopy' for a structural part of a theatre seems to be in Sophonisba, iv. 1, 'Play softly within the canopy'. . . . 'Syphax hasteneth within the canopy, as to Sophonisba's bed'. This is a Blackfriars play, but it might conceivably have been written for Paul's.]
- ↑ Cf. ch. xii; and for evidence of inter-act music, Lawrence, i. 81; Cowling, 68. Papers on Early Elizabethan Stage Music in Musical Antiquary (Oct. 1909, Jan. 1913) show the origin of the musical tradition in the earlier boy-companies; for its seventeenth-century development, cf. Wallace, ii. 114.
- ↑ Faithful Shepherdess (1608-9, Blackfriars), Beaumont's c. v.:
Nor wants there those who, as the boy doth dance
Between the acts, will censure the whole play.In K. B. P. (1607, Blackfriars) a boy dances after Acts i and iii, and the citizens comment, 'I will haue him dance Fading; Fading is a fine Iigge'. After Act ii there are fiddlers. After Act iv Ralph intervenes with a May Day speech.
- ↑ 2 Ant. Mellida, V. i. 50, 'Andrugio's ghost is placed betwixt the music-houses'; Faery Pastoral, s. ds., 'Highest aloft and on the Top of the Musick Tree the Title The Faery Pastoral. Beneath him pind on Post of the Tree The Scene Eluida Forest Lowest of all ouer the Canopie [Greek: NAPAITBODAION
