On many of the other issues we see darkly because a good proportion of the plays we presume to have premiered at the Globe – including those by Shakespeare from circa 1599 (As You Like It, Julius Caesar) to 1609 (Pericles, Coriolanus), and three by Jonson (Every Man Out of His Humour, 1599; Sejanus, 1603; and Volpone, 1606) – are strikingly thin in their stage directions and rarely call upon particularly outlandish stage facilities. It is difficult even to state categorically how many doors there were on the stage: certainly two, but we cannot rule out more. The earlier (1608) text of King Lear, for example, gives us instances of “Enter Edmund, the bastard, and Curran meeting” (Scene 6.0 SD), which strongly suggests entrance by different doors; the next scene has “Enter the Earl of Kent, disguised at one door, and Oswald the steward, at another door” (7.0 SD); Scene 8 begins “Storm. Enter the Duke [sic] of Kent disguised, and First Gentleman, at several doors” (8.0 SD). “Another” door can be one of multiple, and “several” here clearly means “separate,” without committing to how many other doors there might be – possibly only one. The folio version of the play is no more helpful; it has “severally” in all three of these examples. We do indeed finally find something that looks categorical in Pericles: “Enter Pericles at one door with all his train; Cleon and Dionysus at the other” (4.4.22 SD). But the text has already used the “at one door … at another door” formula twice (Act 2 Chorus, 16 SD) so it is difficult to be sure. Is it possible that the option of using the discovery space as an entrance on occasions led to the common use of this evasive phrasing (see p. 200)?
Rather than squeezing the details out painstakingly in this manner I shall go to the other extreme and examine the play from Shakespeare’s Globe years with by far the most detailed stage directions. This is The Devil’s Charter by Barnabe Barnes. Barnes was not a professional dramatist, but a poet, pamphleteer and hanger‐on at court, who in 1598 was tried in the Star Chamber for trying to poison someone. We have no way of knowing how he came to write for the King’s Men, much less how the play came to be performed at court, but it was, and in the same Revels season as King Lear (1606), as the title‐page tells us: “THE DEVIL’s CHARTER: A tragedy containing the Life and Death of Pope ALEXANDER the Sixth. / As it was played before the King’s Majesty, upon Candlemas night [February 2] last by his Majesty’s Servants.” There is thus the possibility that some features were only performed at court. Moreover, the title‐page continues: “But more exactly reviewed, corrected, and augmented since by the author, for the more pleasure and profit of the reader.” So there is a risk it also contains items never staged at all (which is also true, notably, of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi).
Yet nothing Barnes includes is inherently impossible or even improbable at the Globe, judging by what we know went on in other playhouses. It is only extreme in its specificity of detail by the standards of Shakespeare and Jonson, and we might say that it represents what a dramatist thought imaginatively possible in this playhouse. It gives perhaps the most vivid sustained description of any early modern play in performance, and demands attention even if some of it was not actually staged. Alexander VI was the most notorious of the Borgia Popes, and father of Caesar and Lucretia Borgia, whose evil deeds had been inflated to legendary proportions. Barnes makes of their lives a cross between Marlowe’s Dr Faustus – Alexander makes a “charter” with the devil, and there are repeated scenes of devils and magic – and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy: lust, ghoulish murder, mayhem. The Revenger’s Tragedy was itself a Globe play and had probably premiered the year before.
The Devil’s Charter begins with the Prologue who
with a silver rod moveth the air three times./ Enter, At one door betwixt two other Cardinals, Roderigo [the future Pope Alexander] in his purple habit close in conference with them, one of which he guideth to a tent, where a table is furnished with divers bags of money, which that Cardinal beareth away: and to another tent the other Cardinal, where he delivereth him a great quantity of rich plate, embraces, with joining of hands.
Exeunt Cardinal. Manet Roderigo
To whom from another place a monk with a magical book and rod, in private whispering with Roderick, whom the Monk draweth to a chair on midst of the stage which he circleth, and before it another circle, into which (after semblance of reading with exorcisms) appear exhalations of lightning and sulphurous smoke in midst whereof a Devil in most ugly shape from which Roderigo turneth his face. He being conjured down after more thunder and fire, ascends another devil like a sergeant with a mace under his girdle: Roderigo disliketh. He descendeth. After more thunder and fearful fire, ascend [another devil] in robes pontifical with a triple crown on his head, and cross keys in his hand: a devil him ensuing in black robes like a Pronotary, a cornered cap on his head, a box of lancets at his girdle, a little piece of fine parchment in his hand, who being brought unto Alexander, he willingly receiveth him; to whom he delivereth the writing; which seeming to read, presently the Pronotary strippeth up Alexander’s sleeve and letteth his arm‐blood in a saucer, and having taken a piece from the Pronotary subscribeth to the parchment; delivereth it. The remainder of the blood, the other devil seemeth to sup up; and from him disrobed is put [on Alexander]the rich cap and the tunicle, and the triple crown set upon Alexander’s head, the cross‐keys delivered into his hands; and withal a magical book. This done, with thunder and lightning the devils descend: Alexander advanceth himself, and departeth.12
So, in a sequence rich in both Catholic pageantry (the Cardinals’ “purple” robes, the Pope’s Triple Crown and keys of St Peter) and black magic (blood, the circles on the floor), the Globe’s back‐stage staff went to town with lightning (a squib, or firework – gunpowder crammed in a tube) and thunder (a cannonball, possibly stone, rolled along the ground backstage: see p. 305). In the prologue to the 1616 version of Every Man in His Humour Jonson scorns to use such devices: “Nor nimble squib is seen, to make afeard / The gentlewomen, nor rolled bullet heard / To say, it thunders, nor tempestuous drum / Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come” (2012 h, 17–20). But Barnes had no such aesthetic qualms. He also called on “sulphurous smoke” (playing on the audience’s sense of smell) and fire, and a simulation of running blood, drawn with lancets, a popular effect.
We do not know precisely what stage devils looked like, though Middleton in The Black Book says of “a villainous lieutenant” that “He had a head of hair like one of my devils in Doctor Faustus when the old Theatre cracked and frighted the audience” (2007a, lines 153, 156–7). There are several allusions to devils being satyr‐like, with the lower limbs of goats, as when Othello sees Iago as a revealed villain: “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable” (5.2.294). In Othello all the devils are far too human, with no cloven heels, but that may not have been the case for Barnes, who is drawing on older, medieval traditions. And we notice that his devils ascend and descend, making full use of one or more trapdoors. It is not clear if they used steps of some design or, as some (probably fancifully) have supposed, mechanisms with mechanical counter‐weights. But evidently the effect was meant to be spooky. The space below the stage was commonly known as “hell,” and one reason for having the stage 5 ft off the ground would be to allow movement down there without too much impediment (ES, 2: 528 n. 3). Sealing off the front of the stage – apparently unlike the Swan (see p. Frontispiece) – as the Fortune contract prescribed (“paled in below with good, strong and sufficient new oaken boards”) of course kept such activity secret.
The opening is by no means the last we see of black magic in the play. In Act 4 Scene 1, for instance, Alexander conjures devils to discover who has committed recent murders, and finds that it is his own children:
After Bernardo had censed he bringeth in coals, and Alexander fashioneth out his circle then taketh his rod … standing without the circle he waveth his rod to the East.
Conjuro, et confirmo super vos in nomine. Eye, eye, eye; haste up & ascend per nomen ya, ya, ya; he, he, he; va; hy, hy; ha, ha, ha; va, va, va; an, an, an.
Fiery exhalations, lightning, thunder. Ascend a [devil like a] King, with a red face, crowned imperial, riding upon a lion, or dragon: Alexander putteth on more perfume … (612)
It is the mix as before, with lightning and thunder and incantations; to which is added the scary spectacle of a king riding a lion or dragon (presumably an actor riding on the backs of two or more others, draped in a suitable costume). The use of strong smell is increased, with Alexander’s servant burning incense in a censer, and Alexander seeking to protect himself from noxious fumes with perfume, which he tells us is “red sandal[wood].”13
At Alexander’s command: “The devil descendeth with thunder and lightning, and after more exhalations ascends another all in armour.” One of the devils “goeth to one door of the stage, from whence he bringeth the Ghost of Candy, ghastly haunted by Caesar pursuing and stabbing it; these vanish in at another door.” So Alexander learns that Caesar has killed his own elder brother. Another devil “bringeth from the same door the Ghost of Gismond Viselli, his wounds gaping, and after him Lucrece undressed, holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding bosom: they vanish” (all 63). So he learns that Lucretia has murdered her own husband.
Lucretia’s “undressed” belongs to the convention of people wearing nightclothes to betoken night‐time; when the actual murder took place in Act 1 Scene 5 – as distinct from this ghostly recapitulation – the directions read “Enter Lucretia alone in her nightgown, untired, bringing in a chair, which she planteth on the stage” (22), while shortly afterwards, “Enter Gismond di Viselli, untrussed, in his nightcap, tying his points” (23). “Untired” may simply mean “in a state of undress,” though it could also relate to having no hair‐pieces attached (see p. 167ff); “untrussed” means with his clothes unfastened, while “points” were laces or cords which held doublets to hose in the days before buttons were widely used.14 The most famous – but in some ways least typical – example of this night‐time convention is recorded in the first quarto version (only) of Hamlet, when the ghost of the old king comes to Hamlet in his mother’s study: “Enter the ghost in his night gown.” We may note that Lucretia’s “bringing in a chair” is in preparation for tying Gismond to it while she stabs him; she carefully “conveyeth away the chair” when the deed is done – small but important attentions to stage management.
Conventions relating to night‐time were important because, performing in daytime, there was no way of altering the light to show the hour. Barnes enterprisingly uses two of these in the scene (Act 3 Scene 5) where Caesar Borgia murders his brother, Candy. One is the use of a clock – doubtless the same we have encountered before in Every Man In His Humour and Julius Caesar. Caesar’s accomplice knows his hour is come when “The clock strikes eleven” (56) and the suspension of disbelief is carried forward by the use of a lit torch, indicating the outdoors: “Enter a Page with a torch, Duke of Candy and Caesar Borgia disguised.” (Note, among properties listed by Henslowe, “4 torchbearers” suits,” p. 170.) After “the boy putteth out the torch,” Candy verbally keeps up the illusion going: “’Tis very dark” (57).15
This sequence, incidentally, draws attention to what must have been a very common piece of stage business, though rarely recorded. Caesar’s accomplice says “Here will I stand till the alarum call,” to which a stage direction adds: “He stands behind the post.” This will have been one of the two posts that held up the “heavens” over the stage, as at the Swan (see Frontispiece). We assume that most of the playhouses after the refurbishment of the Rose in 1592 will have had both a “heavens” and its posts, though the Hope contract expressly requires that there should be no posts. It was to double as a bear‐baiting arena, so it was essential that the stage be removable in its entirety; the joints and underpinnings of its “heavens” must have been significantly reinforced. Where, like the Globe, there were posts we must assume that they sometimes irritatingly obscured sightlines. But they must also have been very convenient for the actors in moments like this, where a character wanted to remain hidden. Although it is entirely possible that a property was brought on to serve as the “boxtree” behind which Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian hide to spy on Malvolio reading Maria’s letter in Twelfth Night (2.5.15ff), one of the posts would certainly serve quite adequately. They may also very well have served as the trees to which Orlando attaches his poems about Rosalind in the Forest of Arden (As You Like It, 3.4). The Admiral’s Men did have among their properties “1 bay tree,” “1 tree of golden apples” and “1 Tantalus tree” but these seem to have been items for particular productions, as the tree of golden apples was for Fortunatus (Henslowe, 319–20). In most contexts the posts would have served.
After the prologue and its dumb show, the regular action of The Devil’s Charter starts with the following direction: “Enter marching after drums & trumpets at two several places, King Charles of France, Gilbert Mompanseir, Cardinal of Saint Peter ad Vincula: soldiers. Encountering them Lodowick Sforza [and] Charles Balbiano. The King of France and Lodowike embrace” (7). Here again, two points of entry, but this does not preclude there being more. This is the first of twenty‐two references to drums in the text and stage directions, and sixteen references to trumpets. The action was kept at a high aural level throughout. For example, towards the end of Act 2 there is a dumb‐show in which the drums play continuously, while the trumpet gives way to a fife or high‐pitched flute:
Drums and Trumpets. Charles and his company make a guard … Alexander being set in state, Caesar Borgia, and Caraffa advance to fetch King Charles, who being presented unto the Pope, kisseth his foot, & then advancing two degrees higher, kisseth his cheek: then Charles bringeth[Cardinal] S. Peter ad Vincula, and Ascanio, which with all reverence kiss his feet, one of them humbly delivering up his cross‐keys, which he receiveth, blessing them and the rest of Charles his company: The drum and fife still sounding. (40)
Just as Barnes makes full use of the trapdoor(s), he also takes several opportunities to put the action on the upper stage. Much of Act 2 Scene 1, for example, takes place with Alexander on the battlements of Castell Angello, in diplomatic wrangling with the French king below. This begins:
Sounddrums, answer trumpet.
[Enter] Alexander upon the walls in his pontificals, betwixt Caesar Borgia and Caraffa (Cardinals); before him the Duke of Candy, bearing a sword; after them Piccolomini [and] Gasper de Foix. (33)
And continues:
Sounddrums and trumpets.
[Exit] Alexander with his company off the walls, ordnance going off. After a little skirmish within, he summons from the Castell with a trumpet; answer to it below. Enter Alexander upon the walls as before. (36)
Similarly in Act 4 Scene 4, in a military standoff between Caesar (with Barbarossa) and the Countess Katharine, a good deal of the action happens with her on the battlements and them down below:
Sound drum, answer trumpet.
Enter upon the walls Countess Katharine, Julio Sforza, Ensign, Soldiers.
Drums, Trumpets. (76)
Later we get:
A charge with a peal of ordnance: Caesar, after two retreats, entereth by scalado; her ensign‐bearer slain, Katharine recovereth her ensign, & fighteth with it in her hand. Here she sheweth excellent magnanimity. Caesar the third time repulsed, at length entereth by scalado, surpriseth her, bringeth her down with some prisoners.
Sound drums and trumpets. (81)
These directions call for up to six persons on the upper stage, which speaks to there more likely being an open balcony than rooms with separate windows. The level of action in the last direction speaks to the same point. Countess Katharine could hardly show “excellent magnanimity” [great courage] from the depth of a room; nor is it likely that Caesar Borgia could storm her battlement using scaling‐ladders without having reasonably free access at the top. Antony and Cleopatra also bears this out. Act 4 Scene 15 begins “Enter Cleopatra and her maids aloft, with Charmian and Iras” and subsequently “They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra” (38 SD). So there seem to be four or five boys aloft, even before they begin the inevitably clumsy business of heaving Antony up to join them. Such a space must inevitably have eaten into what was available for the lords’ rooms (see p. 235). Possibly when a play involved activity on this scale on the upper stage the audience would not be able to use the lords’ rooms, or at least be restricted to limited numbers of them.
These two sequences of The Devil’s Charter also remind us that firearms were very much a feature of the show. Both involve peals of ordnance, loud discharges of cannon, which were loaded with powder and wadding, but not shot. (In A Larum for London a direction reads: “The piece discharges. A great screeke heard within.”) These were doubtless the “chambers” (cannon) which, when fired during a performance of Henry VIII in 1613, set fire to the thatched roof and burned the house to the ground; the cannon, which would have been too cumbersome to maneuvre on stage, were kept high up above the stage roof or “heavens,” adjacent to the platform from which trumpeters gave the three “soundings” (see p. 110). That’s why the cannon wadding got into the thatch. Alexander at one point enters “with a linstock in his hand”(30), the forked stick which gunners carried from which they could draw fire for their guns. Shortly thereafter “Piccolomini, Gasper de Foix [enter], with small shot” (31), a generic term for gunners who used small arms, like arquebuses. They were presumably armed with their pieces. Most of the male gentry in the play, except the churchmen, would have worn swords – and the fighting cardinal, Caesar Borgia, would have broken that rule too; his sister, Lucretia, uses a knife to kill her husband (“Three stabs together” (25)). The tiring house must have carried a formidable armoury.
The Devil’s Charter also (to my mind) settles any doubt about the presence of a discovery space at the Globe, and gives more detailed indications of how it was used than usual. Here it mainly represents Alexander’s study; the only exception seems to be in Act 4 Scene 4 where Caesar, having defeated Katharine, “discovereth his tent where her two sons were at cards” (82). We first see it used as the study in Act 1 Scene 4, which opens with “Alexander in his study with books, coffers, his triple crown upon a cushion before him” (15). He is subsequently joined by his sons, Candy and Caesar, and talks at length with them; nothing indicates that he leaves his study at all, but subsequent examples make it likely. For example, Act 4 Scene 1 begins with “Alexander in his study beholding a magical glass with other observations.” After brief reflections, “Alexander cometh upon the stage out of his study with a book in his hand” (60). We then have the long black magic sequence we have already observed, and at the end of the scene “Exit Alexander into the study” (65). Similarly Act 4 Scene 5 opens with “Enter Alexander out of his study” (83). He confers with his trusted servant, Bernardo, about getting Astor and Philippo Manfredi drowsy with doped wine and then “Exit Alexander into his study” (84). Bernado “Knocketh at the study” (86) to confirm they are asleep, Alexander answering from within. Then “[Enter] Alexander upon the stage in his cassock and nightcap with a box under each arm.” The “upon the stage” suggests that this is once again from the study, a different status of entry from that through the all‐purpose doors. He then places “aspics,” poisonous asps, on both their breasts and they die. Finally he has a simple exit, but almost certainly back into the study (88).
There is one variation, when at the beginning of Act 3 Scene 2 the direction reads “Alexander out of a casement” (43), presumably one of the “convenient windows and lights glazed to the said tiring house” specified in the Fortune document. This is when he expresses his passion for Astor Manfredi, a delicate subject and probably safer staged with distance between the characters. But otherwise the study is consistently the center of Alexander’s machinations, the heart of his web; but for action or interactions with other people he repeatedly emerges “upon the stage.” This suggests that the discovery space was quite small and that sightlines into it were limited. It is a place where Countess Katharine’s two sons can literally be “discovered” or where Alexander on his own can be seen, possibly seated, and surrounded by symbolically potent aids: “books, coffers, his triple crown upon a cushion before him” (15), “a magical glass with other observations” (60), and the boxes with the deadly snakes. No heavy action takes place there, or interactions between characters. It was presumably quite a shallow alcove, probably created by a wooden framework draped with sheets or arrases – more for brief visual effects than for conducting the business of the plot. We must assume that it could be accessed from within the tiring house, so that actors and properties could be positioned there while a performance was taking place. Though there is no evidence for this, it is not impossible that some limited form of lighting was used to enhance those effects. Given the geographical axis of the playhouse, with the rear of the stage facing due south at midsummer, the area under the “heavens” was always likely to be in shade.
The final scene opens with “Alexander unbraced betwixt two cardinals in his study, looking upon a book, whilst a groom draweth the curtain” (104) – the curtain or arras across the face of the back of the stage, concealing the discovery space. Alexander’s loose clothing betokens his sorry state, in contrast to his earlier pontificals; he needs the cardinals to help move him around. Yet again he comes out of the study for the main business of the scene: “They place him in a chair upon the stage; a groom setteth a table before him” (105). In an ironical twist, the discovery space serves one last turn: “Alexander draweth the curtain of his study, where he discovereth the devil sitting in his pontificals. Alexander crosseth himself, starting at the sight” (106).
The music of the play is heavily dominated by the drums and trumpets, but there are calls for some other tones. As the Manfredi brothers are being put to sleep, they ask “good Barnardo” to “let it be thy labour … / To call for music.” Philippo says “Let’s hear this music” (85) and later “More music there”: “After one strain of music they fall asleep” (86). This was presumably from stringed or woodwind instruments. One wonders if Barnes had already seen King Lear when he scripted this: it essentially inverts 4.7 of Shakespeare’s play (Scene 21 in the quarto version), where Cordelia and her allies play soft music while Lear awakes from his madness; “Louder the music there,” the Gentleman calls, as he begins to stir (line 26). There are, as it happens, interesting differences in the two versions of the scene in King Lear that may speak to Shakespeare’s modest use of discovery spaces. Not only is it a “Doctor” rather than a “Gentleman” who assists Cordelia in the 1608 quarto version, but there are changes in the staging. At the call for louder music, the quarto text reads “King Lear is asleep,” which reads very much like a discovery direction, with the curtain being pulled back to reveal him. If so the long conversation between Cordelia and Lear which follows was scripted to take place in the mouth of the discovery space. The folio text, presumably scripted later, has a direction: “Enter Lear in a chair carried by servants” (21 SD). There is no indication that the discovery space is used at all. Possibly experience showed that the scene was more effective if Lear was semi‐upright and clearly visible on the stage.
This is not to say that Shakespeare never used the discovery space at the Globe, but that he used it sparingly and always with consideration of the sightlines, minimizing what went on behind the entrance. In Troilus and Cressida, for example, it likely serves as the tent in which Achilles famously sulks. A stage direction tells us “Achilles and Patroclus stand in their tent” (3.3.37 SD). There is no other indication of an entry for them, so it is likely that they draw back the curtain and emerge. Ulysses says “Achilles stands i’th’entrance of his tent” (38) – visibly outside the space itself. It is also likely that, at the end of the scene, they withdraw into the space again (there is no scripted exit for them at all, in either the quarto or the folio text).
To return briefly to what Barnes may have learned from Shakespeare’s example. In both versions of King Lear music helps restore Lear to sanity; in The Devil’s Charter it consigns the boys to death, an ironic twist on the usual associations of music and harmony. (One also wonders if Barnes had had the opportunity to see Antony and Cleopatra when he wrote, since the use of asps seems very pointed, and the text freely makes comparisons with Cleopatra’s death.) There is also further evidence of sophisticated musical stagecraft: at the end of the penultimate scene, anticipating their final triumph over Alexander, the devils resolve “Then let us for his sake a hornpipe tread. They dance an antic” (104). The hornpipe was traditionally danced to woodwind music, such as might be produced by the hautboys, ancestors of the modern oboe, which feature commonly in texts of Shakespeare’s later plays, or later versions of early ones. In the folio text of Hamlet, for example, the “Hautboys play” at the beginning of the dumb show (3.2.135).16 In Macbeth hautboys and torches usher in two successive scenes, 1.6 and 1.7 – where Duncan arrives at Macbeth’s castle, and where Lady Macbeth steels her husband’s heart to murdering the king. Later, in the last appearance of the witches, as they prepare the “show of eight kings,” the text calls for “Hautboys” (4.1.105 SD). Perhaps most poignant of all is the brief scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where for some anonymous Roman soldiers “Music of hautboys is under the stage” (4.3.12 SD). It may not be accidental that all of these instances are in fact ominous. The “hornpipe” of the devils in The Devil’s Charter is no less so. The “antic” that they dance would be a grotesque, bizarre or ludicrous action, of a kind that Jonson often built into his court entertainments, such as the 1609 Masque of Queens, as an antithesis to true order. The King’s Men performed the speaking and comic roles in such productions and may well have borrowed something suitable here from their court experience – as the “dance of twelve satyrs” in The Winter’s Tale(4.4.342 SD) was certainly borrowed from Jonson’s 1611 masque, Oberon (see p. 313).
The last, ironic musical twist in the play heralds Alexander’s demise: “sound a horn within. Enter a devil, like a post.” Such messengers often announce themselves with horns. But the message here is a summons to hell: “The devil windeth his horn in his ear and there [three?] more devils enter, with a noise, encompassing him. Alexander starteth” (112). The posthorn is thus the final instrument we hear in the play, if not quite the final noise: “Thunder and lightning, with fearful noise. The devils thrust him down, and go, triumphing” (113). There is, then, a good deal of music in the play, helping to maintain its fevered pitch. But it is in a limited range: drums, trumpets, fife, hautboys, horn, punctuated with the percussion of squibs and rolled cannonballs. There is little call for stringed instruments. That is not untypical in a play which is a history of sorts. Lutes and viols would be much more in evidence in comedies and romances (as, for example, in the music Orsino calls for at the beginning of Twelfth Night).
Barnes has thus used a very wide range of the playhouse’s facilities: the upper stage (at one point repeatedly assailed by scaling‐ladders), the traps, the discovery space, pyrotechnics, sound effects, one of the posts supporting the “heavens,” potent smells, lavish costumes, grotesque figures. The Devil’s Charter may not be great drama, but it has unmistakable energy. And – even if the text was not staged in its entirety – it is so consistent and repetitive that there is no reason to doubt that most of it reflects the Globe’s actual resources.
We may pause to note two things Barnes does not call for. One is that he does not call for any descents from the “heavens.” This is understandable, in that such entries were normally reserved for deities, and this is a play concerned with devils rather than gods. Yet, given Barnes’s liberal use of just about everything else, it was surely not beyond him to call on such machinery – if it was available. This was another stage device that Jonson scorned – no “creaking throne comes down, the boys to please” (prologue to Every Man In His Humour, 16) – so its absence in his Globe plays is not significant. But even Shakespeare seems to avoid it there. Hymen in As You Like It might well have made a descent, but apparently entered on foot, alongside Rosalind and Celia (5.4.106 SD). Even in Pericles– a play which offers a foretaste of the kinds of romances which would often use descents at the Blackfriars – it is far from clear that Shakespeare made use of it. The one possible exception is in the vision of Diana that comes to Pericles, which is often staged these days on high. But the text says merely “Diana,” which might mean any number of things (5.1.242 SD). It is a serious question whether the Globe that Shakespeare used had descent machinery at all.17
Barnes’s second apparent omission is in not specifying a “hell‐mouth” for Alexander’s final exit. Of course, “thrust down” makes it perfectly apparent where he is going, but there is no indication of that legacy of the medieval stage, a vivid representation of the ghoulish jaws of hell through which the sinner will pass. We know that the Admiral’s Men possessed “1 hell mouth,” from an inventory of their properties taken on March 10, 1598 (Henslowe, 319). Of all their extant plays the one that would seem most suited to its use is Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, but interestingly the 1604 version of the play gives no indication of it, the final direction being merely “They [the devils] exeunt with him [Faustus]” (1995, 5.2.115 SD).
The 1616 version, which most scholars now regard as based on a 1602 revision of Marlowe’s text – and so definitely a Fortune play, rather than a Rose one – is notably more explicit (see Marlowe 1995, xvi; Henslowe, 206). As the end approaches, the Good and Bad Angel pay one last visit, and we read “Music while the throne descends,” bearing them (5.2.104 SD); the Good Angel abjures Faustus to “behold / In what resplendent glory thou hadst set / In yonder throne, like those bright shining saints, / And triumphed over hell” if he had followed God’s way (109–12). And shortly thereafter “Hell is discovered” (114 SD). Was this the “hell‐mouth”? It seems quite possible, though it is apparently placed, not over a trapdoor but in the discovery space, where it can suddenly be revealed. Presumably it had been enhanced with images of suffering sinners, to contrast with “those bright shining saints.” Thus the final exeunt probably took Faustus and the devils, not down through a trapdoor, but back into the discovery space where we had first seen him “in his study” at the beginning of the play. So the 1616 Dr Faustus uses both a descent and a hell‐mouth at its climax, whereas The Devil’s Charter calls for neither. We can hardly call Barnes’s play reserved or understated in its stagecraft, yet these differences may point to some differences of general artistic policy between the Fortune and the Globe – or to differences in their facilities. The plays of Shakespeare and Jonson at the latter, in particular, seem distinctly restrained, and more focused on the spoken word, than what we know of the Admiral’s (later Prince Henry’s) Men’s repertory.
The small sampling of Globe plays we know of other than by Shakespeare and Jonson does tend to bear this out. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, for eample, does start as if it intends to emulate The Devil’s Charter, or indeed Dr Faustus. The Prologue introduces us to Peter Fabel, the “merry devil,” when he “draw[s] the curtains,” revealing the discovery space:
Behold him here, laid on his restless couch,
His fatal chime prepared at his head,
His chamber guarded with these sable slights [black arts],
And by him stands that necromantic chair …
The space is evidently just deep enough for Fabel’s couch and necromantic chair, and decorated with signs of black magic. There is also the clock we have traced from Every Man In His Humour onwards ‐‐ and the action of the play begins dramatically with its chimes (see p. 200). But having led us to expect a re‐run of The Devil’s Charter the play entirely abandons this mode, discovery space and all. It makes no further special calls on the theatre’s resources.
Thomas, Lord Cromwell (pub. 1602) makes more consistent use of the discovery space, notably in two scenes apparently meant to mirror one another. In the first we find “Cromwell in his study with bags of money before him, casting his account.” The scene opens out for him to talk at some length with a post and then Mistress Banister. While it is conceivable that all this happens in the space, it makes more stage sense that, like Pope Alexander, he would hold the conversations on the main stage. Later we find “Gardiner in his study.” The Bishop, plotting against Cromwell, is shown in this equal position of power; he then talks to witnesses from the nobility, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Bedford, which again makes more sense if it happens on the main stage.
Between these two scenes there is a comic scene that speaks to both of them. The clown, Hodge, occupies Cromwell’s study (“Hodge sits in the study”). He is disguised as the Earl of Bedford (“in his cloak and his hat”), in a plot to secrete the real earl out of the country. Cromwell negotiates with the authorities then slips away with the earl (disguised as the clown), and Hodge distracts them long enough for the scheme to work. At one point the Governor orders: “Go draw the curtains, let us see the earl. / Oh, he is writing, stand apart awhile.” The point is that the discovery space represents power in the play: whoever possesses it is dominant. Cromwell holds it in the first half of the play, and Gardiner towards the end, as Cromwell falls. Hodge’s brief, comic reign in there is a marker of the scales beginning to tip against Cromwell. It is effective stagecraft which, however, calls upon few resources. Again, there is no evidence of extensive action in the discovery space. It only has to accommodate a desk. Its symbolic role is what matters most, and to that end the company may have lined its interior with the most impressive hangings they had to signify the authority of whoever possessed it.
The play also introduces us to an important prop, which the company recycled from production to production: a severed head (“Enter one with Cromwell’s head”), presumably dripping with blood. Seasoned members of the audience would perhaps remember it as the head of Cade in 2 Henry VI, of the conveniently dead pirate, Ragozine (substituting for Claudio) in Measure for Measure, and of the youngest son of the Duchess in The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose “yet bleeding head” is presented to his deluded brothers (3.6.33). They would see it again as Macbeth’s head, and Cloten’s in Cymbeline. Presumably the make‐up team backstage (the tiremen or women?) fitted it with a wig and facial hair to suit each occasion.
Middleton’s use of his staging opportunities elsewhere in The Revenger’s Tragedy is characteristically adept.18 There is one certain and one likely use of the discovery space. The former reads:
Enter the discontented Lord Antonio, whose wife the Duchess’s youngest son ravished. He discovering the body of her dead to certain Lords; and Hippolito.
L. Antonio:
Draw nearer, lords and be sad witnesses
Of a fair comely building newly fallen,
Being falsely undermined: violent rape
Has played a glorious act. Behold, my lords,
A sight that strikes man out of me.
(2007e,1.4.0 SD‐5)
The tableau of the raped and dead woman becomes an opportunity for sententious moralizing. The next likely use of the space is nicely ironic, if I am right: “Enter in prison Junior Brother.” The formula “Enter in” some kind of confined space, like a study or a prison cell, seems generally to betoken a discovery. Junior Brother is “the Duchess’s youngest son,” who raped the woman we last saw in the discovery space, so this would be a very fitting twist – especially since, by yet another mordant twist in the plot, he will shortly be escorted out (by mistake) to execution. Neither scene uses much depth in the space: the first is still tableau; the second presumably keeps Junior at his cell bars while he talks to his gaolers.
Close to the end of the play Middleton stages a good deal of pageantry and a spectacular effect: “In a dumb show, the possessing [coronation] of the young Duke, with all his Nobles. Then sounding music. A furnished table is brought forth. Then enters the Duke and his Nobles to the banquet. A blazing‐star appeareth” (5.3.0 SD). It is uncertain how the blazing star (usually an omen of régime change) was effected. It was either a very elaborate firework, or a painted banner that could be pulled quickly across the stage under the “heavens.” This is the only surving example of a blazing star used at the Globe, though it was evidently in common use, since we find the same effect as early as The Battle of Alcazar (circa 1589) for the Admiral’s Men and as late as 1622 in Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin with Prince Charles’s Men, then at the Curtain (Herbert, 136). Here the star precipitates the climax of the play which, like many revenge plays, ends with theatricals gone awry – a masque, in which the masked dancing offers every opportunity for plots to unfold and fold in again upon themselves.
The London Prodigal (1605), a citizen comedy, calls for no elaborate staging or effects whatsoever. There is no recorded use of upper stage, trap, or discovery space. The only demands on properties are for a torch and rapiers, and costumes had to cover one simple disguise: “Enter … Luce like a Dutch Frau.” The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607) is an interesting case, since there is evidence that Shakespeare knew its author, George Wilkins – an innkeeper and pimp – outside the theatre; it seems reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare may have had some hand in involving Wilkins in writing plays and guiding him on what the players could handle (C. Nicholl, 2008, 208–11, 220–6). It is likely that he collaborated with him in Pericles (Jackson, 2003). The Miseries is another play that calls for very little in the way of special stagecraft, beyond a couple of instances of swordplay, throwing wine in a drawer’s face, and some business with letters. It calls twice for brief business above, and draws particular attention to the upper stage. A character below heavy‐handedly points it out: “We cannot mistake it, for here’s the sign of the Wolf and the bay window.”
Even the perennially popular romance, Mucedorus, calls for nothing more sophisticated than a bear suit (with a detachable head), a pot, a few swords, “a wild man” and a hermit disguise for Mucedorus himself. The revision of the play for a performance at court circa 1610 – sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare – might have offered the opportunity to open the old‐fashioned fantasy of the play to the Globe’s extensive resources; but the revised text adds nothing more challenging than a blast of trumpets (see Bate and Rasmussen 2013, 503–7). This differentiates it from the later generation of romances, where descents and discoveries are quite common, when the King’s Men had use of the Blackfriars theatre.
Shakespeare only once scripted a live animal in one of his plays. The dog, Crab, accompanies the clown, Launce, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.19 We do not know if this was ever performed by the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, but the fact that he did not repeat the experiment perhaps tells us how successful he felt it had been.20 Other playwrights, however, did bring animals on to the Globe stage. In Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour the “humorous” knight, Puntarvolo, is accompanied throughout by a greyhound, under the control of his servants; in the latter half of the play he also has a cat with him, to accompany him (because his wife refuses to go) on his planned journey to Constantinople. In his edition of the play, Randall Martin judges that while the dog is certainly a live greyhound, the cat (which is kept in a bag) “is not a live animal,” though it doubtless affords many opportunities for unscripted comedy (2012i, 1: 252). The Merry Devil of Edmonton directs “Enter Brian with his man and his hound,” not impossibly the same as Puntarvolo’s greyhound, though this was eight or nine years later.21
In this survey of Globe plays and the theatrical resources they call upon I have deliberately focused more on works that are not by Shakespeare, partly because his plays for the Globe make surprisingly few demands on its resources but also in the expectation that readers will in many cases be able to draw their own comparisons. The Devil’s Charter is truly exceptional in calling upon so many features of the stage, which it is helpful to know that the company could draw on if they wished (virtually everything we know of in the era, except for descent machinery). But most of the other plays are remarkably modest in the demands they make. Only a few of them use the discovery space, though they do so imaginatively. Even the upper stage is relatively rarely called upon, and often then only briefly, as when Brabantio is called from his bed in the first scene of Othello or Celia appears at her window to throw down her handkerchief to Volpone disguised as a mountebank (Volpone, 2012p, 2.2); either of these could be staged using only a small portion of the lords’ rooms. And the trap is almost never used: Hamlet’s gravedigger scene is the great exception, and possibly Timon’s digging in the woods, where he finds gold (Timon of Athens, 4.3), though there is no clear direction to this effect. The Devil’s Charter is certainly eccentric in that, as in the use of fireworks. We do have to bear in mind, of course, that many of the plays premiered at other playhouses we have considered would have been revived at the Globe – bodies in Titus would continue to fall into the pit, Richard II would have still have appeared on the battlements, Juliet would continue to appear at her window.22
One thing easily forgotten in reading the texts of these plays is just how much color would have been on stage at some point in all of these performances. As we have noted, the woodwork of the stage and the “heavens” was splendidly painted, while there were arrases on the tiring house wall. But, as we saw with Henslowe, the players also spent a fortune on acquiring fine costumes (see p. 170ff). This was an issue for Sir Henry Wotton, who memorably commented on the splendor of the costumes in his letter describing the burning down of the Globe in 1613, while Henry VIII was in progress: “the knights of the order with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous” (Schoenbaum, 1985, 276). He perhaps felt the fire was fitting retribution.