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
