practice, and that consequently the stage-managers of Shakespeare in England, as well as those of Hardy in France, had to face the problem of a system of staging, which should be able rapidly and intelligibly to represent shifting localities. The French solution, as we have seen, was the so-called 'multiple' system, inherited from the Middle Ages, of juxtaposed and logically incongruous backgrounds.
Geography would be misleading if it suggested that, in the westward drift of the Renaissance, England was primarily dependent upon the mediation of France. During the early Tudor reigns direct relations with Italy were firmly established, and the classical scholars of Oxford and Cambridge drew their inspiration at first hand from the authentic well-heads of Rome and Florence. In matters dramatic, in particular, the insular had little or nothing to learn from the continental kingdom. There were French players, indeed, at the Court of Henry VII in 1494 and 1495, who obviously at that date can only have had farces and morals to contribute.[1] And thereafter the lines of stimulus may just as well have run the other way. If the academic tragedy and comedy of the Pléiade had its reaction upon the closet dramas of Lady Pembroke, Kyd, Daniel, Lord Brooke, yet London possessed its public theatres long before the Parisian makeshift of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and English, no less than Italian, companies haunted the Court of Henri IV, while it is not until Caroline days that the French visit of 1495 can be shown to have had its successor. The earliest record of a classical performance in England was at Greenwich on 7 March 1519, when 'there was a goodly commedy of Plautus plaied', followed by a mask, in the great chamber, which the King had caused 'to be staged and great lightes to be set on pillers that were gilt, with basons gilt, and the rofe was covered with blewe satyn set full of presses of fyne gold and flowers'.[2] The staging here spoken of, in association with lights, was probably for spectators rather than for actors, for in May 1527, when a dialogue, barriers, and mask were to be given in a banqueting house at Greenwich, we are told that 'thys chambre was raised with stages v. degrees on every syde, and rayled and counterailed, borne by pillars of azure, full
- ↑ Mediaeval Stage, ii. 257; Lawrence (i. 123), Early French Players in England. It is only a guess of Mr. Lawrence's that these visitors played Maistre Pierre Patelin, a farce which requires a background with more than one domus. Karl Young, in M. P. ii. 97, traces some influence of French farces on the work of John Heywood. There had been 'Fransche-*men that playt' at Dundee in 1490, and 'mynstrells of Fraunce', not necessarily actors, played before Henry VII at Abingdon in 1507.
- ↑ Halle, i. 176.
