One national drama remains to be examined, that of England, where the years 1^80 to 1620 saw an extraordinary flowering of literary talent and an almost equally unexpected development of theatrical form. The reason lies partly in social conditions. Companies of players, only nominally in the service (and therefore under the protection) of noblemen, found that the best place for acting a play was the yard of an inn, with its galleries running round three or four sides and its open space in the middle for the stage and standing spectators. A few such inn yards still exist and it is easy to visualize the arrangements. When players became prosperous enough to build theatres of their own, this was the model that they followed [PL jo]. (An alternative theory is that they copied bear-baiting arenas. Probably both came into it.)

There were never very many of these open theatres, and they were all in London. The first, called simply the Theatre, was built in 1576. The Curtain followed in 1577; the Rose in 1^87; the Swan (of stone) in i£9£; the Globe in 1^99 (with timber from the Theatre, demolished at the same time) ; the Fortune in 1600; and the Hope in 1613. The Globe was burnt down in 1613 and rebuilt the next year. Our knowledge of what these theatres looked like is limited to one copy of a drawing of an interior [PL £i], and a few engravings of exteriors [PL £2], some descriptions by foreign visitors, one building contract, and what can be deduced from the plays performed in them. The pictures reproduced here are helpful but do not tell us as much as we should like. Of descriptions, one of the best is the earliest, that of Samuel Kiechel, a German, who went to the Theatre in i$&5′- ‘Comedies are given every day; it is particularly amusing to go when the Queen’s Men play, but for a foreigner who does not know the language, annoying not to understand. There are some odd houses with three galleries one on top of the other, so that a large crowd of people always comes to watch this kind of entertainment.’

Another visitor, a Swiss, had this to say about the Curtain in i ^99: ‘The theatres are so built that the players are on a raised platform and the whole audience can see everything quite well. There are separate galleries and places where you can sit in greater comfort, but you have to pay more for it.’

The stage seems to have been raised about six feet from the ground, and
the space beneath was boarded or curtained from view. Actors entered from doors at the back or at the sides. Some theatres had a space at the
back that could be used as an inner room and closed off with a curtain.
Above it, at first floor level behind the stage, was a gallery which
could
represent the upstairs of a house or a town gate. The stage itself projected
forward into the audience and contained a trapdoor by which characters
could also enter and exit. Around the central yard rose tiers of galleries,
usually three; they and the back of the stage were roofed (although the
Globe, we know, was thatched).

he most exact information on any of these theatres is provided by the contract for the Fortune Theatre, drawn up between Henslowe and Alleyn, theatre-managers, on the one hand, and Peter Streete, carpenter, on the other. (Streete’s firm had also built the Globe, and the contract is tantalizingly full of specifications saying ‘according to the manner and fashion of the said house called the Globe’.) The Fortune was to be square in plan, with sides eighty feet long. There were to be three galleries twenty-five feet in width and varying in height from nine to twelve feet. The stage was to reach to the middle of the central space and to be forty-three feet wide (in some theatres this had to be removable, so that they could be converted into bear-baiting pits) .

The conditions that these theatres imposed upon dramatists are easy to recognize in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The projec­ting ‘apron stage’ meant that an actor could come forward into the centre of the audience, talk to them directly in a soliloquy or throw sotto-voce remarks to them which the other characters did not hear. The convention of the ‘aside’, now so awkward, must have seemed perfectly natural. Characters also appear ‘above’ (i.e. on the gallery over the stage); they are ‘discovered’ (i.e. the curtain at the back is drawn back revealing them); ghosts can ‘ascend’ (i.e. come up through the trapdoor) or ‘descend’, as the witches’ cauldron does in Macbeth.

What relation, if any, was there between the Tudor playhouses and the Italianate fashions which were already strongly influential in Flanders? This is a question that has been much discussed, but the evidence provides no satisfactory answer. The form of the theatres themselves seems to owe nothing to foreign example. The stage is another matter. The records and descriptions make it clear that something more than plain oak-joinery was attempted, and there are frequent references to ‘columns’. Whether they looked at all like the elaborate street theatres of Flanders we have no means of knowing.

In the histories of English drama much less attention is paid to the indoor ‘private’ theatres, although these had existed as long as the outdoor ones. The Blackfriars dates from the same year as the Theatre, 1576. It must have been a variant of the teatro da sola which was the normal setting for aristocratic entertainments both in England and on the Continent. They offered greater scope for scenery and illusionistic effects than the so-called ‘public’ theatres. An inventory of the public theatre manager Henslowe lists the props available at the Rose in 1^98—a rock, three tombs, ‘Hell’s mouth’, ‘a tree of golden apples’, an altar, a bedstead, two ‘moss banks’ and even ‘a chain of dragons’. But these were humdrum affairs compared with the ‘divers towns and houses’, ‘monsters’, ‘great hollow trees’, ‘battlements’, ‘prisons’, ‘clouds’ and so on that appear in the accounts of the Office of Revels at the Court. This meant that a different kind of play tended to be written for the indoor theatres. The Blackfriars, for instance, put on the plays of Lyly, whose delicacy and erudition would have been swamped in the robust surroundings of the Globe. A second Blackfriars Theatre (actually the converted refectory of a Dominican convent) was opened by Burbage in 1596. Shakespeare’s later plays were written for this theatre, and it is no accident that they are more intimate in feeling than the early ones. A scene like the opening of the Tempest, which takes place on the deck of a ship, or a later one when a table of food appears and disappears, would also have more effect in such surroundings. One point of interest is the early use of the front curtain in English private theatres, at a time when it was not at all common even in Italy.

The key figure in the English court masques is Inigo Jones, who brings us back closer to the Palladian orbit than any artist outside Italy. Jones studied the Vicenza theatre carefully on his second visit to Italy, and undoubtedly nursed the hope of erecting its counterpart in England. His sketches survive. Like the Teatro Farnese (which he cannot have known), the design has one large arch instead of five smaller ones, with a permanent perspec­tive set inside it. Other sketches show fully-developed proscenium arches, possibly temporary structures for masques [PL £3]. In the event, the only real offspring of the Teatro Olimpico seems to have been Jones’s Cockpit-
in-Court Theatre at Whitehall. Much uncertainty still surrounds this
building, but the following is a plausible interpretation. The Cockpit (i.e. a real pit for cock fighting) had been part of the rambling Whitehall Palace
since Henry VII’s time. Under James I it came to be used for private
performances of plays and under Charles I (in 1630) it was remodelled by Jones as a permanent theatre. A plan and elevation at Worcester College,
Oxford, is thought to represent this remodelling though the drawing is actually in John Webb’s, not Jones’s, hand [PI. ^4]. It is a small-scale
variation on the plan of the Teatro Olimpico, with the seating arranged as a
half-octagon and the
scaenae frons
curved. Five arches are framed in an
elaborate classical facade. What was to happen behind them? There is
hardly room for perspectives and the arrangement of five independent painted flats would have presented difficulties. The fact that Jones was
never able to realize his more ambitious plans is much to be regretted.
Those opportunities came only after the Restoration, when first Webb and
then Sir Christopher Wren brought England into the mainstream of
Continental theatre building. Neither, however, had the blend of fantasy and inventiveness that Jones possessed. The Baroque theatre never took root here. For that we must return to Italy.