Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/376

366 were used when needed, but when not in use were treated as non-existent. In the sixteenth century when playing passed from the hands of the guilds to groups of actors, the latter sought refuge from the noise and discomforts of the public square in the yards of inns. In those days galleries like the balconies of our theatres were on all four sides of such an inn yard, sometimes two and sometimes three. The players, erecting a rough platform opposite the entrance from the street, hung a curtain from the edge of the first gallery to their stage. In the room or rooms behind this they dressed. Thus they gained a front stage; a rear stage under the first gallery to be revealed when the curtain was drawn; an upper stage in the first balcony representing at will city walls, a balcony for Romeo and Juliet, or an upper room. High above all this one or more galleries rose which could be used for heavens in which gods and goddesses appeared. In the yard stood the pittites; in the side and end galleries sat the people who paid the higher prices.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN STAGE

When, in 1576, London saw its first theatre just outside Bishopsgate, it was circular, in imitation of existing bull-baiting arenas. So far as a stage projecting into the pit, the rear stage underneath the balcony, and the use of the first balcony itself were concerned, the actors merely duplicated conditions to which they had grown attached in the old inn yards. As under the older conditions, scenery was impossible except as painted cloths might be hung at the back of the balcony or under it. Hence the care of the Elizabethan dramatists to place their scene by some hint or description in the text. Moreover, a play lacking the stage settings of a century later must be given atmosphere, reality, and even charm from within. More and more, however, influenced by increasingly elaborate performances at court of the masks, the public pressed the theatre manager as far as possible to duplicate their gorgeous and illusory settings. But such settings at the court were on stages behind an arch like our modern proscenium. Consequently by 1660 the stage of 1590 to 1642 had shrunk behind a proscenium arch. Then follow two centuries of very elaborate staging by painted drops at the back,