Wikisource

Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/124

This page needs to be proofread.

six of our period got into print before 1623.[1] From the Queen's men we have rather more, perhaps sixteen in all; but we do not always know whether these were given at the Red Bull or the Curtain. Nor do we know whether any structural improvements introduced at the Globe and Fortune were adopted at the Red Bull, although this is a priori not unlikely.[2] From the Swan we have only The Chaste Maid of Cheapside, and from the Hope only Bartholomew Fair.

At the Globe, then, the types of scene presented are much the same as those with which we have become familiar in the sixteenth century; the old categories of open-country scenes, battle scenes, garden scenes, street scenes, threshold scenes, hall scenes, and chamber scenes will still serve. Their relative importance alters, no doubt, as the playwrights tend more and more to concern themselves with subjects of urban life. But there are plenty of battle scenes in certain plays, much on the traditional lines, with marchings and counter-marchings, alarums for fighting 'within', and occasional 'excursions' on the field of the stage itself.[3] Practicable tents still afford a convenient camp background, and these, I think, continue to be pitched on the open boards.[4] The opposing camps of Richard III are precisely repeated in Henry V.[5] There are episodes before the 'walls' too, with defenders speaking from above, assaults by means of scaling ladders, and coming and going through the gates.[6] I find no example in which*

  1. ↑ 1 Honest Whore, When You See Me You Know Me, Whore of Babylon, Roaring Girl, and possibly Two Lamentable Tragedies. The extant text of Massacre at Paris may also represent a revival at the Fortune.
  2. ↑ Nobody and Somebody, Travels of Three English Brothers, Woman Killed With Kindness, Sir Thomas Wyat, Rape of Lucrece, Golden Age, If It Be Not Good the Devil is in It, White Devil, Greene's Tu Quoque, Honest Lawyer, and probably 1, 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Fair Maid of the Exchange, Silver Age, Brazen Age. How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad is probably a Rose or Boar's Head play.
  3. ↑ Hen. V, IV. iv-viii; T. C. V. iv-x; J. C. V. i-v; Lear, IV. iii, iv, vii; V. i-iii; A. C. III. vii-x, xii; IV. i, iii, v-xiv; V. i, &c.
  4. ↑ Hen. V, IV. viii; J. C. IV. ii, iii; T. C. I. iii; II. i, iii; III. iii; IV. v; V. i, ii, apparently with tents in one or other scene of Agamemnon (I. iii. 213), Ulysses (I. iii. 305), Ajax (II. i), Achilles (II. iii. 84; III. iii. 38; V. i. 95), and Calchas (V. i. 92; V. ii); Devil's Charter, IV. iv. 2385, 'He discouereth his Tent where her two sonnes were at Cardes'; and in d.s. of Prol. 29 (not a battle scene) 'Enter, at one doore betwixt two other Cardinals, Roderigo . . . one of which hee guideth to a Tent, where a table is furnished . . . and to another Tent the other'.
  5. ↑ Hen. V, III. vi, vii; IV. i-iii.
  6. ↑ Hen. V, III. i. 1, 'Scaling Ladders at Harflew'; III. iii. 1, 'Enter the King and all his Traine before the Gates'. . . . (58) 'Flourish, and enter the Towne'; Cor. I. iv. 13, 'Enter two Senators with others on the Walles of Corialus'. . . . (29) 'The Romans are beat back to their Trenches'. . . .
Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:The_Elizabethan_stage_(Volume_3).pdf/124&oldid=11814994"