Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/160

 Northward Ho! seven, but also, although the greater part of both plays takes place in London, Westward Ho! has scenes at Brentford and Northward Ho! at Ware. The natural conclusion is that, for these plays at least, the procedure of the public theatres was adopted. It is, of course, the combination of numerous houses and changes of locality which leads me to this conclusion. Mahelot shows us that the 'multiple' staging of the Hôtel de Bourgogne permitted inconsistencies of locality, but could hardly accommodate more than five, or at most six, maisons. Once given the existence of alternative methods at Paul's, it becomes rather difficult to say which was applied in any particular case. Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois begins, like The Fawn, with an open-country scene, and thereafter uses only three houses, all in Paris; the presence-chamber at the palace ( ii; i;  ii;  i), Bussy's chamber ( iii), and Tamyra's chamber in another house, Montsurry's ( ii; i;  ii;  i, ii, iv). Both chambers are trapped for spirits to rise, and Tamyra's has in it a 'gulfe', apparently screened by a 'canopie', which communicates with Bussy's. As the interplay of scenes in Act requires transit through the passage from one chamber to the other, it is natural to assume an unchanged setting.

The most prolific contributor to the Paul's repertory was Middleton. His first play, Blurt Master Constable, needs five houses. They are all in Venice, and as in certain scenes more than one of them appears to be visible, they were' (162) 'Descendit cum suis';  i. 155, 'Ascendit Frier' (191) 'Montsurry. In, Ile after, To see what guilty light gives this cave eyes'; iv. 1, 'Intrat umbra Comolet to the Countesse, wrapt in a canapie' (23) 'D'Amboys at the gulfe'.]