The Review of English Studies/Volume 1/A Note upon Chapters XX. and XXI. of The Elizabethan Stage
A NOTE UPON CHAPTERS XX. AND XXI. OF THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE
By Harley Granville-Barker
Dr. Chambers’ work (and if ever a book deserved the dignified term, this does) forms a magnificent museum of facts about the Elizabethan stage. Thousands of specimens are ranged through the chapters, each in its place, each, it would seem, correctly and adequately labelled. An achievement indeed, and a benefit to be conferred upon generations of scholars, who will need no other authority. But, accepting the facts, one may yet question here and there Dr. Chambers’ application of them. With the magnanimity of true learning, he gives one every chance to. For he scorns special pleading, comes charily to conclusions, opens every path by which the reader may reach his own.
I have but to deal with the two chapters upon the staging of plays in the theatres, though a glance will be needed besides at the preceding one upon staging at Court. To those students, however, for whom the plays and their artistry are the heart of the whole matter—and it is at least arguable that they are—these chapters must be the most important in the book. The greater the pity that they cannot be acclaimed the best. But the trouble is that no art lends itself wholly to scientific methods of criticism and research, and the art of the theatre least of any. For its ways are irrational, and the livelier parts of it are not to be ticketed and put in a museum. These lines upon lines of print that call themselves plays are but inadequate records of the full effect that author and actor conspired to produce. Dr. Chambers, as aforesaid, assembles his specimens, tests them, dissects them, compares them, does all that a right-minded man can be expected to do with them. It is nothing short of scandalous that they should not yield their every secret to the treatment. But they will not. And to make matters worse, we have here the art of the theatre at its wilfullest—as it survived and flourished in despite of civic regulation and æsthetic rule, under conditions which would be our despair to-day (unless we too should happily develop a high artistic resistance to respond to them), its achievement leaping in a half-century from Gorboduc to King Lear. Such a creature is unlikely to have behaved itself with any consistent regard for the interests and habits of the historian.
This is not to say that the work Dr. Chambers has done so supremely is unnecessary. It is, of course, the only sure foundation upon which we may build a knowledge of what the Elizabethan theatre in being really was. But, the foundation laid, we must, I suggest, for the next stage in the business, cut loose from the scientific method and attune ourselves imaginatively to those most unscientific persons—the Elizabethan playwright and actor. At least, it is by leaving both their vagaries and their virtues out of account as it seems to me, that in these two chapters Dr. Chambers is led, and leads us, somewhat astray.
We find, for instance, on the first page of chapter xx.:
But there is not much profit in attempting to investigate the methods of staging in the inns, of which we know nothing more than that quasi-permanent structures of carpenter’s work came in time to supplement the doors, windows, and galleries which surrounded the yards; and so far as the published plays go, it is fairly apparent that up to the date of the suppression of Paul’s, the Court, or at any rate the private interest, was the dominating one.
Surely this is a false start. Material may be lacking for a study of the staging in the inns. Nevertheless, here it was that the vitality which carried Elizabethan drama to its heights was generated, not at Court, in the Universities or at Paul’s. What was done in the inns, then, must be far more significant, will have had a far stronger influence, than any tradition which may have been carried across from the semi-scholastic, semi-clerical, more ceremonial stage. Dr. Chambers says nothing which need discountenance this. But it is evident, I think, that for a view—so to speak—of the Theatre, the Globe and the Swan he takes his own stand, almost instinctively, with Lyly in the Chapel. He tries to explain in the light of experience there things which, for all apparent likeness, had undergone by, say, 1600 an almost essential change. What was this change? To try to cover it—inadequately therefore—in a phrase: on the inn stages emotional acting began to come by its own. This, I suggest, was the making of the drama’s popularity; it was upon this that the dramatists now built up their art. Other and rarer virtues some of them acquired. But the general advance was from plays that asked for little more than recitation to plays that were opportunities for acting, for the vivid realising of character in action.
Inevitably we think of the drama of the past in terms of the play and the playwright; of the greater plays and playwrights moreover, for these have survival value. To speak of Othello as an opportunity for Burbage seems absurd. But we must not forget this contemporary view of it. Nor were all playwrights Shakespeares—though this is made clear enough even with the best of them by one glance at their pages, by one excursion with them upon the stage. And we can imagine the literary quality of what has not survived. But then as ever the immediate virtue in a play written for a popular theatre was that it should be effectively actable. Consider further the conditions of the inn performances; the makeshift stage, the work-a-day surroundings, the changes of the weather, the unruly audience. Something was needed with a stronger grip than had sufficed to hold the attention of a decorous assembly shut in the quiet of a hall. The Clown, in his way, provided it. There was nothing new, though, about the Clown. But emotional acting must have been a revelation. It was crude enough at first, no doubt, based at its best upon rhetoric, at its worst on ranting, taking example both from the preacher and the demagogue. But the great discovery had been made that an actor, deeply moved himself, could move and entrance the motliest audience by mere make-believe. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? But he had changed colour, had tears in his eyes—and so had his hearers. Then drama ceased to be a show and became an emotional experience (and under that condition and that condition only can it be expected to flourish). It took time to develop all the possibilities of the business; and up to a point—not reached, however, till the inns had been superseded—the enlargement is truly amazing. Nor, of course, did the popular theatre scorn help from anywhere. It would take plots from Plutarch or the police news, borrow traditions, costumes, properties, boy-actors, no doubt, if it could, from Paul’s—whatever came handy. In time æsthetic principles were thrust on it. And at last it found itself roofed in and respectable, playing by candlelight to the sort of audience that would sit listening to good music between the acts. And after this happens the plays—do they not?—tend to “go soft.”
This much, at least, is plain. From the outburst of activity in the inns to the height of the Globe’s and the Fortune’s fame, dramatic development produced the sort of play which concentrated attention upon the actor and his emotions. Bit by bit auxiliary aids came in; grand costumes and processions to display them, fine properties, and occasions must be made to use them. Then the actor himself was no longer asked to make quite such heroic efforts. He still had, though, to step out on the bare boards, in shine or cloud, wind or calm, and, with little but the poetry in his mouth for a weapon, to quell his audience and keep it his own. Truly when the effort was not genuinely heroic it must often have been absurd. Sophistication—sometimes called good taste—discovered this. But it was the power of moving audiences by such means which made the Elizabethan drama both at its best and its worst the thing it was. Therefore the conditions of its writing and staging during the time of its growth were, we may pretty safely suppose, closely related to this. Documents are lacking; but had Dr. Chambers hired an inn-yard and a mob (of medical students, shall we say, on holiday?), some boards and trestles and tapestry, and faced his problem there, though he might have despaired of its solution, he would have sized it up correctly.
But when he speaks of “the various types of scene sixteenth-century managers were called upon to produce,” of “the degree of use which they make of a structural background,” of “a certain number of scenes which make no use of a background at all, and may in a sense be called unlocated scenes …” and tells us that “it must be borne in mind that they were located to the audience, who saw them against a background, although, if they were kept well to the front or side of the stage, their relation to that background would be minimised”—well, I protest that the sixteenth-century manager, at any rate, would not have known what he meant by such talk. The play was acted upon a stage. The actors came on the stage and went off it. That was the basis of the business. For the action certain “practicabilities” would be needed. If it were a bed, a chair, or a table, the things themselves could be supplied. A tent, a door, a balcony, a battlement—whatever was available and would answer the purpose of the action sufficed, for it had to suffice. But—this is the point—these things existed ad hoc only, and for the actors’ convenience. They had, so to speak, no life and no rights of their own. Juliet’s room with its balcony was on the upper stage because Romeo must be down below and out of reach. It did not trouble the audience to find the same room a little later on the lower stage. The room sprang up, in effect, wherever and whenever the action required it. Nor would it trouble them that Romeo and she should be taking their farewells above, that the nurse should say, “Your lady mother’s coming to your chamber,” that Romeo should descend by his coming tackle stair, stay for a little on the main stage, leave it; then, after Juliet’s five lines alone, that she should at her mother’s call descend to that same main stage there—for she undoubtedly did. It is, perhaps, even misleading to say that she carried the scene with her. For there was no scene, nor any sense of locality implied, apart from the immediate effect required by the action. This might indeed be an important one to make and even to sustain, as in the balcony scene, as in the tomb scene; then it would be made and sustained for as long as need be and as was most practically convenient. But having had his use of it, the dramatist would neglect and obliterate a locality without further consideration. The consciousness of it in the audience’s imagination might be compared to a mirage, suddenly appearing, imperceptibly fading. The true landscape lay in the characters and the tale of themselves that they told. Or again, tell a stage staff to-day that the Elizabethan theatre used not scenes but properties, and the whole matter would seem plain to them. They would at once begin a most interesting discussion as to where the line between the two could be drawn. Every stage-manager has had to arbitrate in this perennial dispute. It is not a mere trades union matter; it affects the dignity of a craft. No one, as a matter of fact, has ever been able to draw a line; but every one will tell you that he knows the difference. Scenery is something to look at; a property is a thing to use. But—! A property is movable; scenery stands. But—! Had Dr. Chambers assisted on a few such occasions, he would have needed no better introduction to the traditional mind of the theatre and its working. It deals in effects, quite shamelessly. And it is not a logical mind, it has no need to be.
Instead, he goes to great trouble to enumerate the many sorts of places besides the ever-recurring no-particular-place-at-all which had, he contends, to be suggested to an Elizabethan audience. “This, then,” he tells us, “is the practical problem which the manager of an Elizabethan theatre had to solve—the provision of settings, not necessarily so elaborate or decorative as those of the Court, but at least intelligible, for open-country scenes, battle and siege scenes, garden scenes, street and threshold scenes, hall scenes, chamber scenes.” Once more, I don’t believe the Elizabethan manager would have admitted that a problem existed. Every now and then a playwright’s imagination might get the better of his tactical discretion; for certainly tactics are involved. It is all a question of what actors with their make-believe can convince you of, or make you forget; and they must never be let seem to be trying to convince you. Ask them to do nothing awkward, that’s all.
Is it rash to assert that while the Elizabethan drama was most itself there was no problem of locality? It had existed maybe, and it was to arise again. A self-conscious dramatist like Jonson might feel interested in raising it. Dr. Chambers’ citation of Every Man out of His Humour is suggestive. But he remarks that “the experiment was not repeated.” No, at that time it would not be. Why deliberately abandon a state of innocence and freedom? How many instances of “localisation by dialogue” in the common run of plays show any consistent consideration for the ability of the stage-manager to reinforce them? Are they not themselves, rather, mere reinforcements for the actor in his task of capturing and enlarging the audience’s imagination, and only provided if and as they will be? Marlowe takes care to emphasise the shifting of the action in Dr. Faustus from Wittenberg to Rome, to the Emperor’s Court and back to Wittenberg. Why? Because this ranging of the world is an essential part of the dramatic effect of the play. But turn to Shakespeare’s Richard II. The audience would know already about as much as it was dramatically profitable for them to know of the story’s general environment. And we find that out of nineteen scenes only nine are localised, and all but about three of these quite casually. In one case the transference from Barkloughly castle to Flint castle depends on a half line spoken by Richard which an audience might easily not hear. And if they did miss it, and thought Richard was still at Barkloughly while Shakespeare thought he was at Flint, this would make not one pennyworth of difference to the dramatic effect of the play. Nor need it dramatically follow, for that matter, because Richard said “Go to Flint Castle,” that he, or anybody listening to him, went there. Rather the contrary. But here the unfettered mind of the dramatist can be seen. Shakespeare read that Richard did go to Flint; and “go to Flint Castle,” coming where it does, gives just that effect of the wretched king being driven from pillar to post which he wants to give. But he bothered no more about it, for the next effect he wanted lay in Bolingbroke’s
Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle,
and it no longer mattered to him whether it was Flint or another.
He paints a little verbal scenery when he needs it. But, again, it is more for effect than exactitude:
I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire,
These high wild winds and rough uneven ways. …
The whole speech is upon travelling and its tediousness, the scattering and gathering of men. And it is the sense of this the actors have to convey; the fact that they are in Gloucestershire is the least important thing about it.[1] Nor would anything an Elizabethan stage-manager could do help us to realise either the locality or the high hills. We may presume an inner stage (though Richard II. can be played without one), and that, for this scene, its curtains would be better closed than open. Let so much be conceded. An inner stage did by use and wont suggest an interior of some sort, for it was the convenient place to set furniture in, or from which to bring it forth; and why distract the audience’s attention to the empty place uselessly? But there would always be the upper stage, plain to be seen, or equally to be ignored.
Nor is this cavalier treatment of background to be attributed to undeveloped stagecraft. In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare is at the height of his powers, his technical ability is at full stretch, he is opulent in his use of it. And now, in one respect, locality is of great importance to his scheme. The whole import of the play’s action lies in the contrast and clash of Egypt and Rome. To emphasise even the more that there are world affairs in hand, a scene in Parthia is added. Marlowe’s crude methods of marking a whereabouts have been far surpassed.[2] The characters themselves, their costumes, the matter of the scenes, tell us all we need to know of their whereabouts. But how little we do need to know! We are (like the soldiers in the Great War) “somewhere in Egypt,” or in Italy, or Rome. Not till we have left Alexandria is Alexandria named; not for seventy-five lines of this first scene of Cæsar’s, and then only by the indirect
Let his shames quickly
Drive him to Rome;
are we told whither we have moved. This, however, both seems natural and is dramatically sufficient. People do not name Alexandria, being in it, and for the play’s purpose where Cæsar is is Rome. Modern editors kindly tell us that Act II. Sc. i. passes in Pompey’s house in Messina. Shakespeare neither points nor hints at either house or place. Act III. Sc. iv., by the same authority, is at Athens in a room in Antony’s house. Not till two scenes later does the play itself give any colour for even half the statement. Now no dramatist leaves matters of any current importance to ex post facto disclosure. Nor—though the editors never fail us with their rooms in houses and “another room in the same”—are there through the first two acts any suggestions for interior or exterior backgrounds, nor is any problem presented of their provision, unless, as for the scene on Pompey’s galley, the action of the play absolutely requires it. Cleopatra might receive the messenger indoors or out; there must be seats for Antony and Cæsar, but they might sit outdoors or in. And when we reach the third and fourth acts the dramatic advantage in this apparent vagueness (and it might be contended that Shakespeare is a little—but only a little—more vague than usual) is to be seen, Look at Act III. Scenes viii. and ix. Enter Cæsar and Taurus with his army, marching. Six lines are spoken and the scene ends. Enter Antony and Enobarbus. Four lines are spoken and the scene ends.
Surely here all considerations of the validity of backgrounds are knocked endways. Not only can no stage-manager—Elizabethan or other—face such a material problem, but it is absurd to suppose that Shakespeare ever meant so to dissipate his play’s strength and to distract his audience by asking them positively to imagine Cæsar and Taurus and an army in a definite locality for two minutes, and then—hey presto—Antony and Enobarbus in the same locality, or any other, for the space of one. He was not that sort of a playwright. Dr. Chambers sees the difficulty. But he says that the play might almost be regarded as “a challenge to classicists,” and that “Shakespeare must surely have been in some danger, in this case, of outrunning the apprehension of his auditory….”[3]
With all respect I suggest that precisely here Dr. Chambers’ own misapprehension of the artistry of the Elizabethan stage, in its normal aspect and greatest aspect, is summed up and brought to ahead. He speaks quite rightly of Shakespeare’s “auditory.” That is just what they were, and all but nothing besides. The vision of the audience comprised the speakers and actors of the play, and such material things, as by their use of them, they brought to a momentary life, an apparent reality. Further than this it did not stray. Apart from the use that inner, outer, and upper stage were momentarily put to they were nothing, they were artistically non-existent. And scene after scene might pass with the actors moving to all intents merely in the ambit of the play’s story and of their own emotions; unless, the spell broken, they were suddenly and incongruously seen to be upon a stage.
Antony and Cleopatra may push this stagecraft to its limit; I believe it does. But that here was the essence of the stagecraft bred upon the inn stages is, I think, demonstrable. There were, of course, other influences at work; those traditions of the Court stage and of Paul’s, upon which Dr. Chambers insists. But I suggest that during the great days of the outdoor theatres these lay quiescent. They probably began to revive when the conditions which suited them were revived by the King’s company’s entry into the Blackfriars. The revival would take effect but slowly, for the accumulated weight of the other movement had to spend itself. And a further, quite important factor in the matter is that backgrounds can be made effective indoors and by a constant artificial light; outdoors they are more trouble than they are worth. But all the conditions of indoor playing made for a less robust sort of drama. Such surroundings are favourable to prettiness of every sort. So then the movement took shape which resulted in the scenic theatre as we now know it. The conventions of locality hardened more and more, and the actor became, so to speak, a collaborator with the scenery—and not always the more prominent partner. Sheer illusion did not come into question for a very long time. But the decorative tradition of the Court Mask would have been picked up where Lyly and his school had left it, and adapted to the plays then being written until plays came to be written which were themselves adapted to decoration.[4] One may surmise, though, that this movement gathered strength rather after 1616—at which date Dr. Chambers’ investigations most unluckily stop—than before. One can but wish he would continue them, and show us how scenery, as we now understand it—as he, by my contention, a little prematurely understands it—did come by its own, and what were the dramatic losses and gains in this passage from the freedom of the platform stage to our present confines of visual illusion.
And I could wish besides that for aid to such scientific research—Dr. Chambers’ and much excellent work akin to it—there existed something like a laboratory in which theories and deductions could be put to practical test. The notion is not quite a fantastic one. With its far more imperative demands well satisfied, our English theatre could easily make provision for a thing of the sort; though it is no part of my present task even to adumbrate its workings. But they would certainly spare the researchers much speculation and their critics much argument. For the playwrights of three hundred years ago were practical men—they had to be. The chief component of the medium they worked in, the human actor, is still extant, and little changed by lapse of time. And by the process of trial and error the rest of the material, puzzling as it may seem in the careless record left of it, would often fit into place with surprising ease. Even the most expert of stage-managers, even the playwright himself, will find that his own play, coming into action, surprises him by its behaviour, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes the reverse. How then should the student, working in vacuo, expect to make certain of these things? I rhetorically suggested that Dr. Chambers might have done well by hiring an inn-yard and personally exploring its theatrical possibilities. Quite seriously, if some of the theorists, whose aimless suggestions his fine, stern habit of investigation must put to shame, could be set to acting a play or so upon a stage of their devising, if they could agree upon one (and I should dearly like to have the casting of the play) they would learn more in a week than they will persuade each other of in a generation. Dr. Chambers himself, I think, would forswear his misguided allegiance to the Swan drawing if he were set to work for a little in a theatre built on its lines. It is all but inconceivable that any manager or dramatist, with a variety of plays to produce, and the conveniences of the inn-yards and the theatre for model, should deliberately handicap themselves by setting up those two foolish doors.[5] Nor, after a little experience, would he try, as, he now tries, to pin his dramatists to any consistency over their “withins” and “withouts,” “aboves” and “belows.” Sometimes, it is true, they might be writing in terms of the actual stage.
Farewell, farewell! one kiss and I’ll descend,
says Romeo. And descend he does, from the upper to the lower stage. But when, twenty lines or so later, Juliet questions about her mother—
Is she not down so late, or up so early?
she is speaking in terms of the play alone, and of Capulet’s imaginary house.
He ran this way, and leap’d this orchard wall,
says Benvolio. There may have been a wall. It is as likely there was none. It could have stood nowhere but across the opening of the inner stage. If Romeo leaped it in the right direction for his playing of the following scene, Mercutio and Benvolio must have played their scene behind it. That is possible. But nothing would worry an Elizabethan audience less than to see Romeo vanish through a door or behind a curtain, be told two lines later that he had leaped a wall, and see him another forty lines later dodge on the stage again through door or curtain. The stage was being turned from some lane or other into the orchard beneath Juliet’s window: but this information only definitely reached them when Juliet appeared, and herself absorbed their attention.
Dr. Chambers speaks of Imogen’s chamber, with Iachimo’s trunk and the elaborate fireplaces in it. The trunk, yes; for Iachimo has to emerge from one. But has he not noticed that the detailed description of the tapestries and the chimneypiece comes two long scenes later? Iachimo, in the room itself, merely refers to:
Such and such pictures; there the windows; such
The adornment of her bed; the arras, figures,
Why, such and such.…
Shakespeare carefully avoids, that is to say, calling particular attention to what is not there. When Shallow bids Falstaff “in with him” to dinner, the action will suit with the word well enough for there to be no question between the door on the stage and the door of that excellent gentleman’s house. But when we are in the tavern—as the applejohns and the dress of the Drawers and a reference to “the room where they supped” will tell us—and we hear that Ancient Pistol is “below,” Shakespeare is quite obviously writing in terms of the play’s fiction only; as anybody will quickly discover if he tries to act the scene upon an upper stage. Tiresome, inconsistent fellows, these Elizabethan playwrights!
- ↑ For a masterly piece of such painting see Macbeth III. iii.:
The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day;
Now spurs the ’lated traveller apace
To gain the timely inn. …But where is the care for locality here? As well look for it in a piece of music. And a hundred such instances could be quoted.
- ↑ It does not follow that Shakespeare thought them crude merely because they were simple. But in Antony and Cleopatra he happened to have a theme in which characters and localities fell naturally (with one exception) into “a concatertion accordingly.” ‘The whereabouts did not need explicit elucidation.
- ↑ These scenes are technically akin to such a scene as Julius Cæsar V. i., in which the armies confront one another. And Dr. Chambers himself quotes others, ranging over his whole period, which can be rounded into this convention. But had the audience been asked, any one of them, as to where precisely these generals and their armies were, it would have been thought an idle question and very disturbing to the actual illusion which was created.
- ↑ Though, of course, such plays—plays intended primarily for indoor performance—had been written, occasionally all through the intervening period. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably one of them.
- ↑ My own guess—it is, of course, no more—about the Swan drawing is that de Witt drew it from memory; and that he had also been seeing some play performed in a great hall, that of the Middle Temple or another. There is the screen, and roughly as he has drawn them those two doors would have stood. The Elizabethan stage-manager could of course fit his play to such accommodation easily enough (Mr. William Poel’s performances in all sorts of odd places are evidence enough of this). But it not follow that he would want to perpetuate it.