Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/76

64 its balcony was on the upper stage because Romeo must be down below and out of reach. It did not trouble the audience to find the same room a little later on the lower stage. The room sprang up, in effect, wherever and whenever the action required it. Nor would it trouble them that Romeo and she should be taking their farewells above, that the nurse should say, “Your lady mother’s coming to your chamber,” that Romeo should descend by his coming tackle stair, stay for a little on the main stage, leave it; then, after Juliet’s five lines alone, that she should at her mother’s call descend to that same main stage there—for she undoubtedly did. It is, perhaps, even misleading to say that she carried the scene with her. For there was no scene, nor any sense of locality implied, apart from the immediate effect required by the action. This might indeed be an important one to make and even to sustain, as in the balcony scene, as in the tomb scene; then it would be made and sustained for as long as need be and as was most practically convenient. But having had his use of it, the dramatist would neglect and obliterate a locality without further consideration. The consciousness of it in the audience’s imagination might be compared to a mirage, suddenly appearing, imperceptibly fading. The true landscape lay in the characters and the tale of themselves that they told. Or again, tell a stage staff to-day that the Elizabethan theatre used not scenes but properties, and the whole matter would seem plain to them. They would at once begin a most interesting discussion as to where the line between the two could be drawn. Every stage-manager has had to arbitrate in this perennial dispute. It is not a mere trades union matter; it affects the dignity of a craft. No one, as a matter of fact, has ever been able to draw a line; but every one will tell you that he knows the difference. Scenery is something to look at; a property is a thing to use. But—! A property is movable; scenery stands. But—! Had Dr. Chambers assisted on a few such occasions, he would have needed no better introduction to the traditional mind of the theatre and its working. It deals in effects, quite shamelessly. And it is not a logical mind, it has no need to be.

Instead, he goes to great trouble to enumerate the many sorts of places besides the ever-recurring no-particular-place-at-all which had, he contends, to be suggested to an Elizabethan audience. “This, then,” he tells us, “is the practical problem which the