curtain, on the public stage, as distinct from the Court stage, there is no evidence whatever, and the precautions taken to remove dead bodies in the course of action enable us quite safely to leave it out of account.[1] There may have been hangings of a decorative kind in various places, of course; round the base of the stage, for example, or dependent, as Malone thought, from the heavens. But the only place where we can be sure that there were hangings was what Heywood calls the 'fore-front' of the stage, by which it seems clear from Florio that he means the fore-front of the tiring-house, which was at the same time the back wall of the stage. It is, I believe, exclusively to hangings in this region that our stage-directions refer. Their terminology is not quite uniform. 'Traverse' I do not find in a sixteenth-century public play.[2] By far the most common term is 'curtain', but I do not think that there is any technical difference between 'curtain' and the not infrequent 'arras' or the unique 'veil' of The Death of Robin Hood.[3] 'Arras' is the ordinary Elizabethan name for a hang-*
Theatres (E. S. xlviii. 213). In several of the passages quoted above, the black-hung stage is a metaphor for night, but I agree with Lawrence that black hangings cannot well have been used in the theatre to indicate night scenes as well as tragedy. I do not know why he suggests that a 'prevalent idea that the stage was hung with blue for comedies', for which, if it exists, there is certainly no evidence, is 'due to a curious surmise of Malone's'. Malone (Var. iii. 108) only suggests that 'pieces of drapery tinged with blue' may have been 'suspended across the stage to represent the heavens'—quite a different thing. But, of course, there is no evidence for that either. According to Reich, Der Mimus, I. ii. 705, the colour of the siparium in the Indian theatre is varied according to the character of the play.
- ↑ Cf. p. 30; vol. i, p. 231. On the removal of bodies W. Archer (Quarterly Review, ccviii. 454) says, 'In over a hundred plays which we have minutely examined (including all Shakespeare's tragedies) there is only a small minority of cases in which explicit provision is not made, either by stage-direction or by a line in the text, for the removal of bodies. The few exceptions to this rule are clearly mere inadvertences, or else are due to the fact that there is a crowd of people on the stage in whose exit a body can be dragged or carried off almost unobserved'. In Old Fortunatus, 1206, after his sons have lamented over their dead father, 'They both fall asleepe: Fortune and a companie of Satyres enter with Musicke, and playing about Fortunatus body, take him away'. Of course, a body left dead in the alcove need not be removed; the closing curtains cover it.
- ↑ Cf. p. 26.
- ↑ Cf. p. 51, n. 3 (Downfall of R. Hood, 'curtaines' of bower 'open'); p. 51, n. 4 (Battle of Alcazar, cave behind 'curtaines'); p. 53, n. 5 (Edw. I, tent 'opens' and is closed, and Queen is 'discouered'); p. 55, n. 1 (Looking-Glass, 'curtaines' of tent drawn to shut and open); p. 63, n. 1 (Old Fortunatus, M. V., 'curtaines' drawn to reveal caskets); p. 63, n. 4 (Sir T. More, 'arras' drawn); p. 65, n. 3 (2 Tamburlaine, 'arras' drawn; Selimus, 'curtins' drawn; Battle of Alcazar, 'curtains'
