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The Origins of the So-called Elizabethan Multiple Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2022
Extract
The so-called Elizabethan multiple stage is perhaps best illustrated in the reconstruction by John Cranford Adams. This consists of the following elements: an “outer stage,” an “inner stage” or “study,” obliquely set tiring-house doors (one on either side of the inner stage), obliquely set second-story “window-stages” (one above each of the tiring-house doors), an “upper stage” or “chamber” directly above the inner stage, a “tarras” or balcony running in front of the upper-stage curtains, a third-story musicroom directly above the upper stage, and a system of six traps set in the outer and inner stages. At one time or another (one supposes) most students of the Elizabethan stage have accepted this complex combination of separate playing-areas as more or less “Elizabethan“; and most of them have also, in time, come to be more or less disillusioned with the conception.
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- Copyright © The Drama Review 1968
References
1 John Cranford Adams, The Globe Playhouse (Cambridge: Harvard, 1942; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961). Cf. Irwin Smith, Shakespeare's Globe Playhouse (New York: Scribner, 1956) and Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse (New York: NYU Press, 1964).
2 See my “Reconstitution du théâtre du Swan,” in Le Lieu théâtral a la Renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot (1964), pp. 295-316.
3 The “tarras,” an element of the so-called Elizabethan multiple stage originating with Adams, is a narrow, second-story apron stage lying between the “chamber” curtains and a balustrade at the front of the upper stage. The concept, since it stands or falls with that of the upper stage or “chamber,” need not be discussed in detail. There is no Elizabethan evidence for the “tarras” (the word being simply an archaic form of terrace) other than a few fictional references in stage directions. These, like references to action “at a window” or “upon the walls,” do indeed indicate action above. Thus (ironically) the “tarras” satisfies the evident requirements of the plays for action above, although there is no external evidence for it. Cf. George F. Reynolds, “Was There a ‘Tarras’ in Shakespeare's Globe?” Shakespeare Survey 4 (1951), pp. 97-100.
4 See Glynne Wickham, “The Cockpit Reconstructed,” New Theatre Magazine, 7 (1966-7), pp. 26-36.
5 A resemblance may be noted between tiring-house doors framed in the concave tiring-house facade of the Cockpit-in-Court and obliquely set proscenium doors framed in the concave proscenium arch of such late Georgian theatres as the Haymarket (1807) and Drury Lane (1808); see Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), figs. 204, 243.
6 C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored (New York: Coward-McCann, 1953), Plate 1.
7 The reader may wish to compare a 16-sided reconstruction influenced by the same architectural principle, G. Topham Forrest's reconstruction of the Globe; “The Architecture of the First Globe Theatre,” in W. W. Baines, The Site of the Globe Playhouse (London: London County Council, 1921), pp. 35-43. Here the angle of return of adjoining faces of the structure is of course 22½°, and the tiring-house doors, each framed in an inner face of the building, are accordingly set at an angle of 22½°.
8 I. A. Shapiro, “The Bankside Theatres: Early Engravings,” Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948), Plate 8B.
9 Poel's drawings for this reconstruction, preserved in the Richard Southern Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol, are in process of being published.
10 Archer, “The Fortune Theatre, 1600,” London Tribune, October 12, 1907, reprinted in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XLIV (1908), pp. 159-66; Godfrey, “An Elizabethan Theatre,” Architectural Review, XXIII (1908), pp. 239-44.
11 Edward A. Langhans, “Wren's Restoration Playhouse,” Theatre Notebook, XVIII (1963-64), Plate 2. Cf. the reconstruction by Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), plate 28.
12 Changeable Scenery, plate 35.
13 Richard Southern, The Georgian Playhouse (London: Pleiades Books, 1948), plates 22, 23.
14 The Georgian Playhouse, plates 3, 4.
15 Photograph and plan in the Richard Southern Theatre Collection.
16 W. J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), plate facing p. 189.
17 Drawing in the Richard Southern Theatre Collection.
18 Dennis Arundell, The Story of Sadler's Wells (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), plate facing p. 82 (two of Cruikshank's Grimaldi drawings).
19 Examples and illustrations in my “Origins of the Shakespearian Playhouse,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XV (1964), pp. 29-39.
20 A possible exception is the First Globe play Macbeth, which certainly requires one trap through which the Apparitions “rise” in III.iii and which may require a second trap through which, in the same scene, the caldron is said to “sink.” The first use is provided for in a stage-direction of the folio text (in fact there is a stage-direction for the entrance by trap of each of the three Apparitions), whereas the second is not. This may indicate that the sinking of the caldron is fictional coloring which was not intended to be realized. The evidence is suggestive but doubtful and, in any case, would require only two traps. There seems no compelling evidence elsewhere for the use of more than one trap. Evidence cited by Lawrence and Adams for entrances at four corners of the stage presumably relates to entrances from the yard, the actors climbing up over the sides of the stage.
21 W. J. Lawrence, Pre-Restoration Stage Studies (Cambridge: Harvard, 1927), p. 145.
22 The Georgian Playhouse, fig. 17.
23 Changeable Scenery, fig. 15.
24 Friedrich Kranich, Bühnentechnik der Gegenwart (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenberg, 1933), vol. II, fig. 95. The familiar 19th-century terms “grave trap” and “caldron trap” (used of the Elizabethan stage by Lawrence and Adams) are not found in pre-Restoration sources.
25 The Georgian Playhouse, plate 11.
26 J. Britton and A. Pugin, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London (London: J. Taylor, 1825), vol. I, plate facing p. 225.
27 Some late 19th-century American theatres equipped with multiple traps are noted by A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Harvard, 1949), pp. 1-30. Niblo's Theatre in New York, fifteen traps (p. 2), the People's Theatre in New York, ten traps (p. 4), the Opera House at Franklin, Pennsylvania, four traps (p. 6), and the Bowdoin Square Theatre in Boston, ten traps (p. 30). Vardac cites a New York newspaper account of 1872 which says of traps that “the ordinary theatrical average is five” (p. 2).
28 See my “Discovery-space in Shakespeare's Globe,” Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959), pp. 35-46.
29 George Altman, Ralph Freud, Kenneth Macgowan, and William Melnitz, Theater Pictorial (Berkeley: University of California, 1953), plates 278, 279.
30 Compare Theater Pictorial, plate 277.
31 Theater Pictorial, plate 273.
32 Stage to Screen, diagram and discussion on p. 28.
33 Cf. John Corbin, who calls the inner stage “in effect a proscenium-stage“; “Shakespeare His Own Stage-Manager,” Century Magazine, LXXXIII (1911-12), p. 263.
34 Arthur J. Harris, “William Poel's Elizabethan Stage: The First Experiment,” Theatre Notebook, XVIII (1962-63), plates 1, 2.
35 Robert Speaight, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival (London: Heinemann, 1954), pp. 245-247.
36 Brodmeier, Die Shakespeare-Bühne nach den alten Bühnenanweisungen (Weimar: 1904); Reynolds, “Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging, Part I,” Modem Philology, II (1904-05), pp. 581-614.
37 See the anonymous article, “Movable Theatre Stages,” Scientific American, April 5, 1884, pp. 207-208.
38 Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz, The Living Stage (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1955), p. 441.
39 Bühnentechnik der Gegenwart, vol. I, fig. 398.
40 See my “Gallery over the Stage in the Public Playhouse of Shakespeare's Time,” Shakespeare Quarterly, VIII (1957), pp. 15-31.
41 See my “Shakespeare's Use of a Gallery over the Stage,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957), pp. 77-89.
42 Jonsonus Virbius (1638), p. 39.
43 Further criticism of the “chamber” theory in “Shakespeare's Use of a Gallery over the Stage,” pp. 83-85.
44 The Living Stage, p. 491.
45 The Living Stage, p. 351.
46 Theater Pictorial, plate 209.
47 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), vol. IV, p. 37; M. St. Clare Byrne, “Early Multiple Settings in England,” Theatre Notebook, VIII (1953-54), plate 1. Nicoll also notes a two-story set for Edward Stirling's Above and Below at the Lyceum in 1846.
48 The Living Stage, p. 472.
49 A more detailed engraving than that reproduced may be found in The London Illustrated News for March 2, 1861, p. 195.
50 The London Illustrated News, April 27, 1844, p. 277.
51 Theater Pictorial, plates 207. 208.
52 “Early Multiple Settings in England,” plate 2.
53 Stage to Screen, p. 21.
54 Further discussion in my “Was There a Music-room in Shakespeare's Globe?” Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960), pp. 113-23.
55 See Montague Summers, The Restoration Theatre (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1934), p. 111. The stage boxes of the frontispiece to Wit at Several Weapons apparently correspond to the “low window” (accessible from stage level) required by some of the plays; see The Restoration Theatre, pp. 128-29.
56 Compare John Webb's section drawing of a scenic stage for Mustapha in the Great Hall at Whitehall in 1665; The Development of the Theatre, fig. 190.
57 J. Q. Adams, A Life of William Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923)
58 The Globe Restored, pp. 31-32; further criticism of the third-story music-room in “Was There a Music-room in Shakespeare's Globe?” pp. 119-23.
59 Wolf grafen von Baudissin, tr., Ben Jonson und seine Schule, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus 1836); illustration reproduced also by Max Forster in “Altenglische Bühnenrekonstruktionen von 1836,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, LII (1916), pp. 189-90.
60 The Story of Sadler's Wells, plate facing p. 83.
61 W. Bridges-Adams, The British Theatre (London: for the British Council by Longmans-Green, 1948), plate facing p. 14.
62 Theater Pictorial, plate 479.
63 Bühnentechnik der Gegenwart, vol. II, fig. 134.
64 See note 37. At the Lyceum in New York Mackaye again placed a music-room above (but behind) the proscenium arch.
65 See Richard Southern, The Open Stage and the Modern Theatre in Research and Practice (London: Faber and Faber, 1953).
66 Further discussion in my “Shakespearian Stage Curtains: Then and Now,” College English, XXV (1963-64), 488-92.
67 This paper was presented at the 1966 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research. For helpful criticism the author wishes to thank Professor James H. Butler, Professor Allan S. Jackson, and Dr. Richard Southern; and he is especially grateful to Dr. Southern for preparing the drawings which illustrate the paper.