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Who does not see, that Shakspeare in the passage here quoted uses the word scene in the same sense in which it was used two thousand years before he was born; that is, for the place of action represented by the stage; and not for that moveable hanging or painted cloth, strained on a wooden frame, or rolled round a cylinder, which is now called a SCENE? If the smallest doubt could be entertained of his meaning, the following lines in the same play would remove it:

"The king is set from London, and the scene
Is now transported to Southampton."

This, and this only, was the shifting that was meant ; a movement from one place to another in the progress of the drama; nor is there found a single passage in his plays in which the word scene is used in the sense required to support the argument of those who suppose that the common stages were furnished with moveable scenes in his time. He constantly uses the word either for a stage-exhibition in general, or the component part of a play, or the place of action represented by the stage:

"For all my life has been but as a scene
Acting that argument."

King Henry IV. Part II. "At your industrious scenes and acts of death."

"What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?"

King John.

King Henry VI. Part. III.

"Thus with imagin'd wing our swift scene flies,

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King Henry V.

"To give our scene such growing,

Ibid.

"And so our scene must to the battle fly,

Ibid.

"That he might play the woman in the scene.'

Coriolanus.

"A queen in jest, only to fill the scene." King Richard III.

I shall add but one more instance from All's well that

ends well:

"Our scene is alter'd from a serious thing,

And now chang'd to the Beggar and the King."

from which lines it might, I conceive, be as reasonably inferred that scenes were changed in Shakspeare's time, as from the passage relied on in King Henry V. and perhaps by the same mode of reasoning it might be proved, from a line above quoted from the same play, that the technical modern term, wings, or side-scenes, was not unknown to our great poet.

The various circumstances which I have stated, and the accounts of the contemporary writers, furnish us, in my apprehension, with decisive and incontrovertible proofs, that the stage of Shakspeare was not furnished with moveable painted scenes, but merely decorated with curtains, and arras or tapestry hangings, which, when decayed, appear to have been sometimes ornamented with pictures; and some passages in our old dramas incline me to think, that when tragedies were performed, the stage was hung with black.

In the early part, at least, of our author's acquaintance with the theatre, the want of scenery seems to have been supplied by the simple expedient of writing the names of the different places where the scene was laid in the progress of the play, which were disposed in such a manner as to be visible to the audience.

Though the apparatus for theatrick exhibitions was thus scanty, and the machinery of the simplest kind, the invention of trap-doors appears not to be modern; for in an old Morality, entitled, All for Money, we find a marginal direction, which implies that they were very early in use.

We learn from Heywood's Apology for Actors, that the covering, or internal roof, of the stage, was anciently termed the heavens. It was probably painted of a skyblue colour; or perhaps pieces of drapery tinged with blue, were suspended across the stage, to represent the heavens.

It appears from the stage-directions given in The Spanish Tragedy, that when a play was exhibited within a play, (if I may so express myself,) as is the case in that piece and in Hamlet, the court or audience before whom the interlude was performed, sat in the balcony, or upper stage already described; and a curtain or

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traverse being hung across the stage for the nonce, the performers entered between that curtain and the general audience, and on its being drawn, began their piece, addressing themselves to the balcony, and regardless of the spectators in the theatre, to whom their backs must have been turned during the whole of the performance.

From a plate prefixed to Kirkman's Drolls, printed in 1672, in which there is a view of a theatrical booth, it should seem that the stage was formerly lighted by two large branches, of a form similar to those now hung in churches; and from Beaumont's Verses prefixed to Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, which was acted before the year 1611, we find that wax lights were used.

These branches having been found incommodious, as they obstructed the sight of the spectators, gave place at a subsequent period to small circular wooden frames, furnished with candles, eight of which were hung on the stage, four at either side; and these within a few years were wholly removed by Mr. Garrick, who, on his return from France in 1765, first introduced the present commodious method of illuminating the stage by lights not visible to the audience.

The body of the house was illuminated by cressets, or large open lanterns of nearly the same size with those which are fixed in the poop of a ship.

If all the players whose names are enumerated in the first folio edition of our author's works, belonged to the same theatre, they composed a numerous company; but it is doubtful whether they all performed at the same period, or always continued in the same house. Many of the companies, in the infancy of the stage, certainly were so thin, that the same person played two or three parts; and a battle on which the fate of an empire supposed to depend, was decided by half a dozen combatants. It appears to have been a common practice in their mock engagements, to discharge small pieces of ordnance on or behind the stage.

was

Before the exhibition began, three flourishes were played, or, in the ancient language, there were three soundings. Musick was likewise played between the acts. The instruments chiefly used, were trumpets, cornets,

The

hautboys, lutes, recorders, viols, and organs. band, which, I believe, did not consist of more than eight or ten performers, sat (as I have been told by a very ancient stage-veteran, who had his information from Bowman, the contemporary of Betterton,) in an upper balcony, over what is now called the stage-box.

From Sir Henry Herbert's Manuscript I learn, that the musicians belonging to Shakspeare's company were obliged to pay the Master of the Revels an annual fee for a licence to play in the theatre.

Not very long after our poet's death the Blackfriars' band was more numerous; and their reputation was so high as to be noticed by Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, in an account which he has left of the splendid Masque given by the four Inns of Court on the second of February, 1633-4, intitled The Triumph of Peace, and intended, as he himself informs us, "to manifest the difference of their opinion from Mr. Prynne's new learning, and to confute his Histriomastix against interludes."

A very particular account of this masque is found in his Memorials; but that which Dr. Burney has lately given in his very curious and elegant History of Musick, from a manuscript in the possession of Dr. Moreton, of the British Museum, contains some minute particulars not noticed in the former printed account, and among others an eulogy on our poet's band of musicians.

"For the Musicke," says Whitelocke, "which was particularly committed to my charge, I gave to Mr. Ives, and to Mr. Lawes, 100l. a piece for their rewards: for the four French gentlemen, the queen's servants, I thought that a handsome and liberall gratifying of them would be made known to the queen, their mistris, and well taken by her. I therefore invited them one morning to a collation att St. Dunstan's taverne, in the great room, the Oracle of Apollo, where each of them had his plate lay'd by him, covered, and the napkin by it, and when they opened their plates, they found in each of them forty pieces of gould, of their master's coyne, for the first dish, and they had cause to be much pleased with this surprisall.

"The rest of the musitians had rewards answereable to their parts and qualities; and the whole charge of the musicke came to about one thousand pounds. The clothes of the horsemen reckoned one with another at 1001. a suit, att the least, amounted to 10,000l. - The charges of all the rest of the masque, which were borne by the societies, were accounted to be above twenty thousand pounds.

"I was so conversant with the musitians, and so willing to gain their favour, especially at this time, that I composed an aier my selfe, with the assistance of Mr. Ives, and called it Whitelock's Coranto; which being cried up, was first played publiquely by the Blackefryars Musicke, who were then esteemed the best of common musitians in London. Whenever I came to that house, (as I did sometimes in those dayes, though not often,) to see a play, the musitians would presently play Whitelocke's Coranto: and it was so often called for, that they would have it played twice or thrice in an afternoone. The queen hearing it, would not be persuaded that it was made by an Englishman, bicause she said it was fuller of life and spirit than the English aires used to be; butt she honoured the Coranto and the maker of it with her majestyes royall commendation. It grew to that request, that all the common musitians in this towne, and all over the kingdome, gott the composition of itt, and played it publiquely in all places for above thirtie years after."

The stage, in Shakspeare's time, seems to have been separated from the pit only by pales. Soon after the Restoration, the band, I imagine, took the station which they have kept ever since, in an orchestra placed between the stage and the pit.

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...The person who spoke the prologue, who entered immediately after the third sounding, usually wore a long black velvet cloak, which, I suppose, was sidered as best suited to a supplicatory address. Of this custom, whatever may have been its origin, some traces remained till very lately; a black coat having been, if I mistake not, within these few years, the constant stage-habiliment of our modern prologue-speakers. The

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