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The Private Theatre Auditorium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

John Orrell
John Orrell
Affiliation:
Professor of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
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Extract

What shape was the Blackfriars' auditorium? Those reconstructions that have been made to date are agreed that it was rectangular, the galleries following the line of the walls of the Upper Frater or Parliament Chamber, the large rectangular room in which the theatre was fitted up by James Burbage in 1596. Because the room was oblong, so was the auditorium. Yet the sparse material evidence about the playhouse is silent on this point, and no serious study has been made in an attempt to justify the usual interpretation. The matter is far from trivial, for a rectangular house suggests kinship with the routine fitting-out of the various halls at Court for the performance of plays and masques, while the alternative – that the Blackfriars had a segmental or U-shaped auditorium – would almost certainly indicate derivation from a European theatre tradition most readily available in the woodcut designs published by Sebastiano Serlio in the second book of his Architettura (Paris, 1545), and stemming originally from the rounded form of the ancient Roman theatre.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1984 , pp. 79 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1984

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References

Notes

1. B. L. Lansdowne MS 1171, fols. 5–6, reproduced in Leacroft, Richard, The Development of the English Playhouse (London, 1973), p. 57.Google Scholar

2. B. L. Lansdowne MS 1171, fols. 9–10. For the identification see my article, ‘Paved Court Theatre at Somerset House,’ British Library Journal 3 (1977), pp. 13–19.Google Scholar

3. See ‘Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Office of Works 1560–1640,’ Malone Society Collections 10 (1977).Google Scholar

4. Children of the Revels: the Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and their Plays (New York, 1977), p. 34.Google Scholar G. Topham Forrest's reconstruction of the Blackfriars drawn by J. H. Farrar and presented at a meeting of the English Association at the University of Aberdeen in 1921, was printed without further documentation in The Times, 21 11 1921, p. 5.Google Scholar It shows double galleries flanking the lateral walls of the chamber, and is framed by a bay of the straight range of galleries attached to the wall opposite the stage. Irwin Smith's elaborate reconstruction in Shakespeare's Blackfriars (New York, 1964)Google Scholar is heavily influenced by the contract for the building of the Fortune, a square public playhouse (see pp. 290–4). Hosley, Richard, in The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume III 1576–1613, edited by Leech, Clifford and Craik, T. W. (London, 1975)Google Scholar, likewise draws many of his dimensions from the Fortune contract, but alludes also to the Florimene scheme in his consideration of the Blackfriars galleries (pp. 211–12).

5. Reproduced in Leacroft, , p. 84.Google Scholar

6. For Ryder's involvement with the Paved Court theatre see ‘The Paved Court Theatre at Somerset House’, pp. 13–15.Google Scholar That he was the builder and possibly the designer of the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, was first suggested by Sheppard, F. H. W., The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Survey of London (London, 1970), pp. 41–2.Google Scholar See also Oliver, H. J., ‘The Building of the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street: Some Details of Finance’, Notes and Queries n.s. 217 (1972), pp. 464–6.Google Scholar

7. Magalotti claimed to be describing the Theatre Royal, but in fact confused it with the Duke's. See my ‘Filippo Corsini and the Restoration Theatre’, Theatre Notebook 34 (1980), pp. 4–9.Google Scholar

8. Harris, John and Tail, A. A., Catalogue of the Drawings by Inigo Jones, John Webb and Isaac de Caus at Worcester College Oxford (Oxford, 1979), pp. 17, 18, 92–3Google Scholar and plate 126. Unfortunately Harris and Tait print the Aldritch copy instead of the Webb original; for the latter see Rowan, D. F., ‘Inigo Jomes and the Teatro Olimpico’, in The Elizabethan Theatre VII, edited by George Hibbard (Port Credit, 1980), p. 68.Google Scholar

9. Harris, and Tait, , p. 17.Google Scholar

10. While Serlio gives no specific scale in his woodcut, he does make marks bisecting the six central front squares of the forestage, and in the accompanying text suggests their measurement: ‘et ponian caso che vno quadro sia dua piedi’ (Paris, 1545, fol. 65V). Measured between the fronts of its circumference seats the orchestra is 21½ squares wide, or 43 ft.

11. See Mackintosh, Iain, ‘Inigo Jones – Theatre Architect’, TABS 31 (1973), pp. 99–105Google Scholar; my ‘Inigo Jones at the Cockpit’, Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), pp. 157–68Google Scholar; Harris, and Tait, , pp. 14–15Google Scholar, citing an unpublished communication from Per Palme; and most recently Richard Hosley, ‘An Analysis of Inigo Jones's Designs for the Phoenix Playhouse’, a seminar paper presented at the conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Cambridge, Mass., in April 1980.

12. Wright, James, Historia Histrionica (1699; reprint New York, 1974), p. 7.Google Scholar

13. See Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage 1 vols. (Oxford, 1941–1968), VI, 87–92.Google Scholar

14. B. L. Additional MS 15505, fol. 21. See my article, ‘The Theatre at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1605’, Shakespeare Survey 35 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 129–40.Google Scholar

15. A Cambridge man, Philip Stringer, reported that ‘For the better contrivinge and finishinge of their stages, scales, and scaffoldes in S. Maries and Christchurch, they intertayned two of his Mats Mr Carpenters, and they had the advise of the Comptroler of his workes’. Cambridge University Library, Additional MS 34, fol. 44V.

16. Tutte l'opera d'architettura (Venice, 1561), fol. 43v.

17. See Boas, F. S., ‘James I at Oxford in 1605’, Malone Society Collections I (part 3), pp. 247–59Google Scholar and, for the Revels Office, P.R.O. A01/2046/11.

18. The Globe Playhouse: its Design and Equipment, 2nd edition (New York, 1961), p. 35.Google Scholar

19. (London, 1959), pp. 179–82.

20. Serlio (Paris, 1545), fol. 65V.

21. Not all plays may confidently be assigned to particular playhouses on the evidence of their title-pages alone, as T. J. King has pointed out in ‘Staging of Plays at the Phoenix in Drury Lane, 1617–42’, Theatre Notebook 19 (1964–1965), pp. 148–52.Google Scholar But since my aim is to show that private theatres were alike one another I have not felt the need to reject those texts whose title-page information is not confirmed from other sources and have in general accepted the views of Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (JCS)Google Scholar and Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar (ES). Stevens, David, ‘The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre, 1630–1642’, Theatre Journal 31 (1979), pp. 511–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes a similar point as regards the Salisbury Court; most of the examples I cite come from his Category A, of texts which may reliably be connected with that theatre.

22. Middleton, Thomas, Hengist, King of Kent, or the Major of Queenborough, edited by Bald, R. C. (New York, 1938), p. 5.Google Scholar

23. Rex Platonicus (Oxford, 1607), pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

24. Marston, John, Antonio's Revenge, edited by Gair, W. Reavley, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1978), p. 54n.Google Scholar

25. See, for example, Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell'idea dell'Archiiettura (Venice, 1615), Part 1, p. 40.Google Scholar

26. Ben Jonson, edited by Herford, C. H. and Percy, and Simpson, Evelyn, vol. 10 (Oxford, 1950), p. 491.Google Scholar

27. (Paris, 1545), fol. 65V.