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.[1] 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
- ↑ 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.
