8
So many seemingly disparate pieces fell together so neatly in the winding up of the Blackfriars boys and the return of their theatre to Richard Burbage’s control that it would be easy to suppose some behind‐the‐scenes planning, conceivably involving the Master of the Revels. Only a month after Burbage retook possession, the Blackfriars precinct (along with several others) ceased to be a liberty and became formally part of the City of London, under the authority of the Lord Mayor and the Common Council (see p. 84, 197–8). Its playhouse was thus apparently open to all the unwelcome supervision that James Burbage had sought to avoid when he first built the Theatre outside the City walls. In fact there is no evidence that the City authorities tried to impose themselves in that way. On the other hand this change may have helped to persuade the playhouse’s neighbors that its activities would be properly regulated.
Within the King’s Men, however, the reacquisition of the Blackfriars theatre posed as many questions as it offered opportunities. If they moved their operation to it, as they had apparently planned to do in 1596/7, what would happen to the Globe? This was a matter of no small consequence, since the housekeepers of the Globe – who by this date included the Burbage brothers, Shakespeare, Heminge, Condell, and Sly – had invested significant capital in it. The only other adult players currently permanently resident in London, Prince Henry’s Men and Queen Anne’s Men, had their own playhouses, the Fortune and the Red Bull, so there was little prospect of leasing it.
Moreover, there is good evidence that the Globe had proved to be a very profitable enterprise, as the events of 1613 were to confirm (see p. 315). One detail seems particularly telling. Since reopening an embassy in London in 1603 Venetian ambassadors had been in the habit of visiting the playhouses: “Giustinian [in post January 1606 to November 1608] went with the French ambassador and his wife to a play called Pericles, which cost Giustinian more than 20 crowns. He also took the Secretary of Florence” (Chambers, 1930, 2: 335). Ambassadors carried the dignity of the state they represented, so it was a mark of the growing respectability of the playhouses –and of the Globe in particular, the first playhouse known to have had such a visitation – that three of them should have been at a performance together.1 Twenty crowns, moreover, translated to something more than £5, making it highly likely that Giustinian had hired the Globe’s entire lords’ rooms as a personal suite. This would surely only be done at at a fashionable and successful playhouse. Why abandon such success for the Blackfriars, which was about to lose its protection as a liberty?
No sooner, however, had the King’s Men finally secured the potential use of the Blackfriars than it was denied them by another sustained visitation of the plague. The playhouses did not reopen until December 1609 at the earliest, and they were closed again for the second half of 1610 (Barroll, 2005, 159). In January 1609 the king presented the company with £40 “for their private practice in the time of infection,” and £30 again the following winter; those Revels seasons they performed twelve and thirteen times at court respectively (ES, 4: 175–6). This still represented far less than they would have made if the playhouses had been open, but it is a measure of how far ahead of their rivals the King’s Men now stood. No other company received free gifts or performed more than five times in either season. Indeed, the Prince and Queen’s Men and the Children of the Whitefriars between them did not perform as often as the King’s Men.2
One possible benefit of this break in playing is that they were able to give detailed thought to how they would manage with two playhouses. It might hypothetically have been possible to expand and split the company, occupying both houses, in friendly competition with each other; that would have been most profitable to the householders, though it would have required a major investment in new costumes, properties, and plays. But it would also have required approval by the authorities, which might well not have been forthcoming.
In fact the company did resolve to continue with both houses, but playing a summer season at the Globe (April/May–September, on evidence relating to the 1630s) and the rest of the year at the Blackfriars.3 Why they should have done this is far from clear. It was a phenomenal extravagance, of a kind which would not be seen again until the subsidized theatres of the twentieth century. It may be relevant that when the boys had performed there, they were only expected to do so “the full time six months in every year” – the winter months (Smith, 514). Could it be that the Blackfriars got hot and stuffy in the summer months, with packed bodies, candles, and the windows closed to keep out sounds of traffic and trade? This arrangement would certainly give the King’s Men the opportunity to air it out during the summer months, and anyway it meant that they would always have somewhere to play if something should happen to one of the playhouses. The memory of losing the lease on the Theatre and having to fall back on the Curtain must have haunted them, and it was to prove wise policy when the Globe was destroyed by fire in 1613.
This solution involved a striking, if perhaps necessary, act of generosity on the part of Richard Burbage. He set up for the housekeepers of the Globe a similar consortium for the Blackfriars. But where earlier they had paid to join, here they were given free shares, only having to contribute to the upkeep of the building and to the annual rent on the lease of £40 – so that what they lost in profits at the Globe they would make up in profits at the Blackfriars, and vice versa. There were initially seven equal housekeeper shares in the Blackfriars consortium: one each for the Burbage brothers, and for Shakespeare, Heminge, Condell, and Sly; and one for someone named Thomas Evans. The suspicion is that this was a placeholder for Henry Evans, a figure involved in the management of the Blackfriars boys since their reemergence in 1600.4 If so, the further suspicion has to be that his share was a prearranged reward for expeditiously wrapping up the boys company and surrendering their lease (which provoked litigation from other members of the management: EPT, 517–21).
One other convenience arose from the winding up of the Blackfriars boys. Some of the boys themselves became available to join the King’s Men, whose sharer ranks were thinning. Of those named in the 1603 patent (see p. 279), Phillips had died some while back, and perhaps been replaced by Nicholas Tooley, named as his “fellow” in Phillips’ 1605 will. But William Sly died only days after becoming a housekeeper in the Blackfriars and Lawrence Fletcher about a month later. These were replaced in the company by William Ostler and John Underwood from the Blackfriars boys – but almost certainly no longer in boy roles. Both had been performing since at least Jonson’s Poetaster (1601). Tooley, Ostler and Underwood all appear in the cast‐list for Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) with the King’s Men.
We might presume that maintaining the two venues would pose the company problems in respect of which plays to perform where. As we have seen, transferring The Malcontent from the boys’ repertory to the Globe involved significant changes, which took time and money. The King’s Men certainly kept on the Blackfriars consort of musicians, who continued to play for up to an hour before performances and again during the intermissions to keep the lighting trimmed (see p. 300). So we might expect that plays written for the Globe would have to be cut at the Blackfriars, to give a manageable playing time. By the same token, we might have assumed that some plays were better suited, either by style or subject matter, for one house (or its audience) than the other. But actually the evidence on this is far less clear cut than we might have anticipated.
Pericles and Troilus and Cressida were the last two Shakespeare plays published in his lifetime; both were printed in 1609 and both title pages speak of performance at the Globe.5 None of the plays written after that date was printed until the 1623 First Folio, which says nothing about where they were staged. Othello, certainly written by 1604 but not printed before 1622, tells us that it had been played at both the Globe and the Blackfriars, but not whether the text reflects adaptations from one to the other. Similarly the 1631 Taming of the Shrew, not printed until the First Folio, names both playhouses. Love’s Labour’s Lost, reprinted in 1631, also mentions both playhouses; it offers the version of the play first printed in the Folio, but that differs little from what appeared in a 1598 quarto – which obviously relates to staging before either playhouse was in operation. From 1608 onwards reprints of Richard II associated it with performance at the Globe, as do those of Romeo and Juliet from 1609, and those associations continue into the 1630s – with no mention of the Blackfriars.6 But some of that may simply be inertia: printers always preferred to work, as far as possible, from an earlier printing. For example, all twelve editions of Mucedorus printed with title‐pages between 1610 and 1656 pronounce it to be “as it was acted before the Kings Majesty at Whitehall, on Shrove Sunday night. By his Highness’ servants usually playing at the Globe.” The reference to the actual court performance (in either 1609 or 1610) would have been meaningless to most people within a few years, while “his Highness’ servants” no longer existed by 1656, nor did the Globe – but the printers churned out the same old formula. Amid all this imperfect information, the fact remains that The Two Noble Kinsmen (printed 1634; coauthored with John Fletcher) is the only play by Shakespeare exclusively associated textually with the Blackfriars.
* * *
Before pursuing this further, let us consider the physical characteristics of the Blackfriars, in part to assess the challenges of moving from one stage to another. Scholars broadly agree that the hall James Burbage constructed out of the seven existing rooms he bought in the Blackfriars complex measured 66 ft long by 46 ft wide (just over 20 m × 14 m), less than half the total floorspace of the Globe. The size of the stage is far less certain. There were certainly boxes on either side of the stage (and possibly also behind it), “and somewhere there was a tiring house” adds Herbert Berry, a laconic reminder of how imperfect our information is (2002, 156). The entire audience was to be seated. The pit lay before the stage but was here supplied with benches for even the lowest‐paying (six‐penny) entrants, while there were tiered galleries all around the remaining three sides of the auditorium for those prepared to pay more. Whether there were two tiers or three (as at the Globe) is less certain. Marston’s reference in The Dutch Courtesan, written for the Blackfriars boys circa 1604/5, to “my worshipful friends in the middle region” (5.3.160–1; Marston, 1975a) is sometimes thought to support the argument for three, but options would have been restricted by the need to retain the use of the high Tudor windows of both long sides of the room for lighting. Seated bodies take up more space than standing ones, and since everything started with dramatically reduced floorspace, the pressure to squeeze in as much seating as possible must have been intense. The size of the stage must have been a trade‐off between that pressure and the need for sufficient space to mount impressive productions.
If the galleries were as wide as those at the Fortune (12' 6"; 3.81 m) there would barely be 21 ft (6.40 m) left for the width of the stage; by the same token, if the stage reached out halfway along the length of the hall (33 ft; 10.06 m), that might allow for a stage of 22 ft (6.71 m), with 11 ft (3.36 m) to contain the tiring house (but only 33 ft for the lowest‐priced seating on the floor of the auditorium). Irwin Smith calculated that 22 ft was the absolute minimum depth necessary to stage the battles, masques, and other setpieces of plays like Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy(circa 1610, pub. 1619) and Massinger’s The Roman Actor (pub. 1629), both printed as Blackfriars plays (1964, 306–8). Smith, however, assumed that there were no boxes adjacent to the stage, so that there would be much greater width; records, however, of a contretemps in 1632 between a Captain Essex and the Irish peer, Lord Thurles, make it clear that there were boxes immediately adjacent to the stage.7 But they were not necessarily 12'6" deep – reducing them to, say, 8' (2.44 m) would give an extra 5' (1.52 m) of usable stage, 26' across (nearly 8 m). Even this, however, does not allow for the one factor which distinguished the Blackfriars from the Globe, the more preponderant presence of spectators (like Lord Thurles) on the stage itself. I shall consider the wider implications of this shortly, but for now want simply to point out that spectators on stools (and others standing or reclining) on the stage must have reduced the usable space even further. Smith had assumed that, without galleries to the side, two rows of stools on each wing of the stage would have accommodated them. With the galleries, however, they have to be accounted for in other ways, and Ben Jonson’s testimony (see below) suggests that they were not neatly tucked away in the wings. All in all, Ralph Alan Cohen’s estimate of usable acting space as 25' by 25' (approx. 7.6 m square) seems like a reasonable best guess (2009, 214).8
The presence of the spectators on the stage is the feature of the Blackfriars which elicited most comment. As we have seen, there were almost certainly spectators on other stages too, even in public playhouses (see p. 240ff). But given the narrow confines of this stage they were a particular issue. In the Prologue to The Devil is An Ass, staged in 1616, Jonson tartly comments:
The Devil is an Ass. That is today
The name of what you are met for a new play.
Yet, grandees, would you were not come to grace
Our matter with allowing us no place.
Though you presume Satan a subtle thing,
And may have heard he’s worn in a thumb‐ring,
Do not on these presumptions force us act
In compass of a cheese‐trencher. This tract
Will ne’er admit our vice because of yours –
Anon, who, worse than you, the fault endures
That yourselves make? When you will thrust and spurn,
And knock us o’ the elbows; and bid, turn;
As if, when we had spoke, we must be gone,
Or, till we speak, must all run into one,
Like the young adders, at the old ones mouth?
(1–15; Jonson, 2012d)
The litany of thoughtless behavior by the ironically‐named “grandees” is painfully plausible. You come to grace the play, but allow the actors no room to perform, forcing us to act in confines as narrow as those of a wooden trencher used to serve cheese. Our Vice will not be able to get on, because of the vices you yourself commit – when you will push and kick, and jostle our elbows and, when someone calls you, you turn around. It’s as if you expect us to get off as soon as we have spoken, and until then we are all forced to stand in one small space.
The behavior of onstage gallants is most famously satirized in Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Horn‐Book (1609), Chapter 6, “How a Gallant should behave himself in a Playhouse.” It is worth quoting at some length for some of the doubtless acute observation of actual playhouse activity. Do note that he describes the practice of sitting on stage (to which he devotes almost the whole chapter) as one common to both public and private playhouses. We noted earlier that the evidence as to whether members of the audience sat on the stage at the Globe (and if so, when) is ambiguous; and Dekker continues that ambiguity here – he may be entirely sincere or he may be mocking those “gulls,” like Will Sly’s character in the Induction to The Malcontent, who do not understand the different conventions of public and private theatres (see pp. 283–4). But there is no ambiguity about the Blackfriars, which became the playhouse most celebrated (or notorious) for the practice.
Sithence [since] then the place is so free in entertainment, allowing a stool as well to the farmer’s son as to your Templar [inns of court lawyer]; that your stinkard has the selfsame liberty to be there in his tobacco‐fumes, which your sweet courtier hath; and that your car‐man [carter] and tinker claim as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to give judgment on the play‘s life and death, as well as the proudest Momus [Greek god of ridicule] among the tribe of critic: it is fit that he, whom the most tailors’ bills do make room for, when he comes, should not be basely, like a viol, cased up in a corner.
Whether therefore the gatherers of the public or private playhouse stand to receive the afternoon’s rent; let our gallant, having paid it, presently advance himself up to the throne of the stage; I mean not into the lords’ room [see p. 234ff], which is now but the stage’s suburbs; no, those boxes, by the iniquity of custom, conspiracy of waiting‐women and gentlemen‐ushers that there sweat together, and the covetousness of sharers, are contemptibly thrust into the rear; and much new satin is there damned, by being smothered to death in darkness.
But on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea, and under the state of Cambyses himself [Persian king, subject of an early bombastic play], must our feathered ostrich, like a piece of ordnance [artillery], be planted valiantly, because impudently, beating down the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality. For do but cast up a reckoning, what large comings‐in are pursed up by sitting on the stage. First, a conspicuous eminence is gotten; by which means the best and most essential parts of a gallant, good clothes, a proportionable leg, white hand, the Persian lock, and a tolerable beard, are perfectly revealed.
By sitting on the stage, you have a signed patent to engross [monopolize] the whole commodity of censure; may lawfully presume to be a girder [sneerer], and stand at the helm to steer the passage of scenes; yet no man shall once offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of an insolent, over‐weening coxcomb [conceited simpleton]…
By sitting on the stage, if you be a knight, you may happily get you a mistress; if a mere Fleet‐street gentleman, a wife; but assure yourself, by continual residence, you are the first and principal man in election to begin the number of “We three” … [i.e. to show yourself a fool].
By sitting on the stage, you may, with small cost, purchase the dear acquaintance of the boys; have a good stool for sixpence; at any time know what particular part any of the infants present; get your match lighted; examine the playsuits’ lace, and perhaps win wagers upon laying ’tis copper [i.e. cheap alternative to gold], etc. And to conclude: whether you be a fool or a justice of peace; a cuckold or a captain; a Lord Mayor’s son or a dawcock [jackdaw, chattering fool]; a knave or an under‐sheriff; of what stamp soever you be; current or counterfeit; the stage, like time, will bring you to most perfect light and lay you open. Neither are you to be hunted from hence; though the scarecrows in the yard hoot at you, hiss at you, spit at you, yea, throw dirt even in your teeth: ’tis most gentlemanlike patience to endure all this and to laugh at the silly animals. But if the rabble, with a full throat, cry “Away with the fool!” you were worse than a madman to tarry by it; for the gentleman and the fool should never sit on the stage together.
Marry, let this observation go hand in hand with the rest … Present not yourself on the stage, especially at a new play, until the quaking Prologue hath by rubbing got colour into his cheeks, and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that he’s upon point to enter; for then it is time, as though you were one of the properties, or that you dropped out of the hangings, to creep from behind the arras [hanging tapestry], with your tripos or three‐footed stool in one hand, and a teston [coin] mounted between a forefinger and a thumb in the other; for, if you should bestow your person upon the vulgar when the belly of the house is but half full, your apparel is quite eaten up, the fashion lost, and the proportion of your body in more danger to be devoured than if it were served up in the counter amongst the poultry. Avoid that as you would the baton [cudgel]. It shall crown you with rich commendation to laugh aloud in the midst of the most serious and saddest scene of the terriblest tragedy, and to let that clapper, your tongue, be tossed so high that all the house may ring of it … for by talking and laughing, like a ploughman in a morris [morris‐dance], you heap Pelion upon Ossa, glory upon glory; as first, all the eyes in the galleries will leave walking after the players, and only follow you …
Before the play begins, fall to cards; you may win or lose, as fencers do in a prize, and beat one another by confederacy, yet share the money when you meet at supper: notwithstanding, to gull the ragamuffins that stand aloof gaping at you, throw the cards, having first torn four or five of them, round about the stage, just upon the third sound, as though you had lost … Now, sir; if the writer be a fellow that hath either epigrammed [satirized] you, or hath had a flirt at your mistress, or hath brought either your feather or your red beard, or your little legs, etc. on the stage; you shall disgrace him worse than by tossing him in a blanket, or giving him the bastinado [beating] in a tavern, if, in the middle of his play, be it pastoral or comedy, moral or tragedy, you rise with a screwed and discontented face from your stool to be gone; no matter whether the scenes be good or no; the better they are, the worse do you distaste them. And, being on your feet, sneak not away like a coward; but salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spread either on the rushes, or on stools about you; and draw what troop you can from the stage [after] you; the mimics [actors] are beholden to you for allowing them elbow‐room …
Marry, if either the company or indisposition of the weather bind you to sit it out, my counsel is then that you turn plain ape; take up a rush, and tickle the earnest ears of your fellow gallants to make other fools fall a laughing; mew at passionate speeches; blare at merry; find fault with the music; whew at the children’s action; whistle at the songs …
Dekker’s basic point is that pride of place on the stage is open to anyone with money; class and intelligence are not requirements, and are indeed conspicuous by their absence. The typical gallant on stage will arrive just as the show is beginning, to make the strongest impression he can with his splendid clothing; he will face down ridicule from the rest of the audience; he will be a constant critic and fool; he will respond inappropriately and loudly in the course of the play; and if he takes offense at some supposed affront from the author he may leave as conspicuously as possible. Dekker also hints at inappropriate familiarity (“dear acquaintance”) between these moneyed gallants and the boy actors (see p. 188).
There is no doubt that these gallants on stage – there were perhaps no more than ten of them at a performance – were indulged for the extra sixpence they paid to get a stool. Cokes in Bartholomew Fair wonders if the puppets have “none of your pretty, impudent boys now, to bring stools, fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, as they have at other houses?” (5.3.49–51; 2012b). Such services probably did not exist at the Hope (and certainly not at puppet shows); at this date they were most widely associated with the Blackfriars, where the King’s Men’s may have continued the practice of the boy actors attending to these elite customers. Dekker blames “the covetousness of sharers” for allowing all this to happen – here doubtless meaning the housekeepers, to whom such income flowed.
In allowing this section of the audience on stage the indoor theatres recreated the effect which we have repeatedly seen in early modern staging, especially in colleges and at court, whereby the majority of the audience saw a privileged minority as it were through the action of the play. And that association may have been entirely deliberate. Dekker specifically notes that “the throne of the stage” is no longer “the lords’ room” (“which is now but the stage’s suburbs” – an insignificant backwater), nor those prime boxes, the “gentlemen’s rooms” (which he suggests are now used for rather sordid assignations); it is “on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea … [that] our feathered ostrich, like a piece of ordnance, [must] be planted valiantly.”9
The indoor auditoria became known as “private houses,” though they were in reality no more “private” than the outdoor playhouses. But they simulated something of the atmosphere of performances in the homes of aristocrats and gentry such as we saw associated with the early parts of Shakespeare’s career – and such as those nearby in the Blackfriars precinct itself (see pp. 135, 198). Such venues had never been entirely left behind; whenever the King’s Men had to tour because of plague in London (as they did in 1610) or they played in the city houses of aristocrats they would have reencountered the old status‐driven arrangement of the audiences. The critical difference here was that privileged status was conferred entirely on the basis of ability to pay, not social or institutional rank. So, in Dekker’s listings, farmers’ sons, stinkards, and tinkers were as likely as lawyers, knights, and courtiers. Yet again we see the early modern theatre strung between an older, hierarchical world of social obligation and deference and a modern one governed by markets and economic opportunism.
Also as in the houses of the nobility, lighting was a significant issue. Although there has been speculation that the King’s Men may have performed in the evenings there is no evidence of this – and significant indication that, as at the Globe, they performed in the afternoons, at least in part to allow audiences to get home at a reasonable hour. When in December 1618 neighbors of the playhouse complained of the great crush of coaches it attracted and the disruption they caused, they specified: “These inconveniences falling out almost every day in the winter time (not forbearing the time of Lent) from one or two of the clock till six at night” (EPF, 523). Nevertheless, even though the chambers which James Burbage converted into the playing space doubtless had the kinds of classic Tudor high windows that we associate, say, with the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace or with Middle Temple Hall, these would rarely have cast direct light on the stage, but at best allowed a diffuse light to filter down over the room in general (Graves, 2009, 538). And in the depths of winter even that was gone by four o’clock.
Candlelight was an essential precondition of playing at the Blackfriars. But we should not assume that this even began to approximate to the levels of lighting we are accustomed to today. Our best evidence comes from the indoor Salisbury Court playhouse in 1639, where a mix of wax and tallow candles was used at a cost of 5 shillings a day. Depending on the mix of (more expensive) wax and tallow, R. B. Graves calculates that this paid for between two and four dozen candles daily, of which he observes “—a fair quantity, one would think, but in actual brightness not equivalent even to the power of one 60‐watt light bulb” (2009, 535). 10 And these candles were not even concentrated over the stage but spread throughout the room: there was no equivalent of modern spotlights and footlights. It has been hypothesized that stage lighting might have been intensified with reflective cloths, screens, or mirrors such as may well have been used in the elaborately staged – and fabulously expensive – masques at court. But there is no actual evidence of that level of intervention in the moment‐by‐moment lighting of plays in commercial playhouses. It is perhaps best to bear in mind that the human eye adapts quickly to even the lowest levels of light, so that the mix of filtered sunlight and candlelight – a mix which would modulate as time passed through performances – may well have offered an acceptable medium for performance. Given the record of the playhouse between 1610 and 1642, when it was indisputably the most successful theatre of the era, there seems little doubt of this.
Within that medium the actors continued to use the conventions they imported from the Globe to represent the lighting conditions within the fictions they staged. The quarto text of Othello (1622), for example, which tells us that it was played at both houses, goes out of its way to emphasize that the opening scenes occur at night: “Enter Brabantio in his night‐gown, and servants with torches” (1.1.159.1); “Enter Othello, Iago, and attendants with torches” (1.2.0; the formula recurs later in the scene for “Cassio with officers”); “Enter Duke and Senators, set at a table with lights and attendants” (1.3.0). The torches and lights symbolized night; they did not enact it. Similarly, when Iachimo in Cymbeline emerges from the trunk to spy on the sleeping Imogen he tells us that the flame of a taper he carries “Bows towards her” (2.2.20). The motion of a flame is something an actor could hardly control – this is something he tells the audience to see. We believe that the play was performed at the Globe (where Simon Forman probably saw it: see p. 320, Note 15); but we might suppose that so recent a play was transferred to the Blackfriars. In the former playhouse many spectators would be too far away to see the flame at all; in the latter it would be one light among many. But the key in both moments is a suspension of disbelief, created here by the magic of the spoken word, in which light and dark are whatever the theatrical conventions say they are.
In his satirical plague pamphlet, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, Thomas Dekker describes nightfall in the City: “all the city looked like a private playhouse, when the windows are clapped down, as if some … dismal tragedy were presently to be acted” (1606, sig. D2). The suggestion seems to be that it was a convention to play tragedies entirely by candlelight, without the addition of light from outside. This was perhaps on a par with the convention of hanging the stage with black cloth for tragedies; I can, however, find no clear instance of that convention mentioned at the Blackfriars, though it certainly comes up in plays for Paul’s boys (see p. 203 and p. 228, Note 11). The critical issue here is that neither of these conventions involved changes to either decoration or lighting during the course of a performance: they were a fixed convention from the outset, not manipulated during intense moments to heighten the mood.
One clear consequence of the indoor lighting, however, was that performances had to be interrupted occasionally to allow the candelabra to be lowered and the wicks of the candles to be trimmed, to avoid hot wax falling dangerously. This meant that plays were staged with predictable intermissions for the first time in an adult commercial playhouse, thus imposing something resembling an act‐by‐act, rather than scene‐by‐scene, structure. We shall observe this shortly in the text of The Tempest, one of the few plays by Shakespeare to have come to us marked as it was probably staged at the Blackfriars.11 A detail in the folio (1623) text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, seems to reflect the changed conditions. At the end of what it marks as Act 3 it gives the direction “They sleep all the act.” This refers to Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius, who are all asleep at this point. There is no stage direction in the comparable point in the quarto text, for the simple reason that one is not necessary – it is obvious that they do not leave the stage, since the fairies enter immediately, to be followed shortly by Theseus and Hippolyta. But in the folio version there is clearly meant to be a break between Act 3 and Act 4, and normally the stage would have been cleared at the end of the former. Instead, in a little metatheatrical gesture, the lovers are directed to remain on stage, asleep, until the next act starts.
As they did so, we may assume that music played. The consort of musicans assembled by the Blackfriars boys was retained by the King’s Men (see p. 174). Their duties included offering a concert of music for up to an hour before the play began, and also playing much more briefly between the acts. When Frederic Gerschow, secretary/tutor to the Duke of Stettin‐Pomerania, saw the boy actors at the Blackfriars in 1602 he noted: “For a whole hour before the play begins there is a delightful performance with musical instruments, organs, lutes, bandores [large bass string instruments, to be plucked], mandolins, violins and flutes” (Gurr, 2004a, 80, in his own translation from the German.) John Marston’s Blackfriars play, Sophonisba (pub.1606), calls variously for “cornets, organ, and voices,” “organs, viols and voices,” “organ and recorders play to a single voice” (B. R. Smith, 1999, 221). Philip Rosseter, a musician who became part of the management of the Children of the Whitefriars in 1609, published Lessons for Consorts that same year, all arranged for a broken consort of bandora, cittern, lute, flute, and treble and bass viol – “broken” in this context meant mixing multiple families of instruments, such as woodwind and strings. This precisely matched the six instruments prescribed in Thomas Morley‘s First Book of Consort Lessons (1599) and we might hazard a guess that these were the instruments used by the core consort at the Blackfriars. But contemporary accounts of the music played while the boys were resident there all describe use of one or more organs, while some also mention cornet and hautboys, which cannot reliably be placed in the Globe before 1608. 12 There is no knowing how much doubling of instruments went on, but it is quite possible that the King’s Men inherited as many as nine musicians in total with the new playhouse.
We can in fact be even more specific than this if we look to 1624 and Sir Henry Herbert’s “Protection List” of that year, which gives us a rare insight into the body of adult males employed by the Kings Men at that time, including their musicians. That December Sir Henry, the Master of the Revels, listed twenty‐two people who “are all employed by the King’s Majesty’s servants in their quality of playing as musicians and other necessary attendants.” He separately added two others to the list, making twenty‐four. This list was to prevent those named from being “arrested, or detained under arrest, imprisoned, pressed for soldiers or any other molestation” and was backed by the Lord Chamberlain (Herbert, 158). England was going war with Spain and there was a serious risk that those employed by the King’s Men might be pressed into service. The sharers themselves, as “the King’s Majesty’s servants” – by then approximately twelve in number – were Grooms of the King’s Chamber and so exempt from impressment. 13 But these twenty‐four were separately distinguished as “musicians and other necessary attendants,” hired men, who would have been vulnerable without this protection.
The list repays attention because we can identify, or at least make informed guesses about, a surprisingly large number of the twenty‐four and their functions – only five of them escape even provisional identification. And with this information we can make some reasonable inferences about what similar lists in the 1590s or 1610 might have looked like. Only one of the nineteen more‐or‐less identifiable was not a performer, either a musician or an actor – Edward Knight, the company’s book‐keeper, who heads the list (see p. 177ff). Perhaps the other four were employed in occupations that left less of a record, such as stage‐keeper and tiremen (see p. 180, 169).
The most useful analysis of the list is that made by John P. Cutts, a musicologist, who concludes:
of the twenty‐four people mentioned in the 1624 Protection List the following seven can definitely be identified as musicians: Ambrose Byland (violinist), Henry Wilson (violinist and lutentist), William Saunders (violinist and wind instruments), William Tawyer (trumpeter), Edward Shackerly (instrument unknown), Jeffery Collins (instrument unknown) and Nicholas Underhill (trumpeter); and there is a possibility that four more were musicians too: William Chambers (singer), George Rickner (trumpeter?), John Rhodes (instrument unknown) and Alexander Bullard (recorder player; trumpeter?). (1966, 104)
This, then, (with Knight) accounts for up to twelve of the twenty‐four. Some of these names are familiar from elsewhere. In the 1623 folio text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the mechanicals enter in the final scene the direction reads “Tawyer with a trumpet before them” (5.1.125.0). Nicholas Underhill had been a boy player, apprenticed to the Ambrose Byland (or Beeland) who is the first on the list named by Cutts. 14 Cutts identifies Underhill as a trumpeter by association with other trumpeters in his family, but there is evidence that he was certainly a violinist. Both he and Byland performed as violinists in James Shirley’s 1634 masque, The Triumph of Peace (Gurr, 2004a, 219, 245). But it is entirely possible that Underhill was proficient with both instruments, which would have been used in different contexts. He is probably the “Nick” who played Barnavelt’s wife in the 1619 Fletcher/Massinger play, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, as well as the role of Shackle in The Soddered Citizen (1630) and minor roles (officer, attendants) in Believe as You List (1631). Such an adaptable performer would have been very useful to the company. By the same token, George Rickner, identified by Cutts as a possible trumpeter is almost certainly the “Geo. Rick” marked out to play a servant in The Honest Man’s Fortune(1625).
Of those Cutts does not mention, we can certainly identify the following: Richard Sharpe who, with Edward Shackerly, was one of the two not on the general list; he was a player on the point of becoming a sharer in the company, which he remained until 1632 (see p. 183, 314–15). He presumably had not yet been sworn into the king’s service and so needed protection. William Patrick is on record as acting as a senator in The Roman Actor (1626) and in various minor parts in Believe As You List (1631). William Mago similarly had small parts in Massinger’s Believe As You List, as did William Gascoyne, while George Vernon, formerly a boy player apprenticed to John Lowin, is recorded as playing small roles in The Roman Actor and John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628). Robert Pallant was another boy player, apprenticed to John Heminge in 1620, who may have played the role of Cariola in The Duchess of Malfi circa 1621/2 (Bentley, 1941–68, 2: 519). Finally, the quarto text of The Two Noble Kinsmen identifies Thomas Tuckfield as an attendant in a revival of the play circa 1625 (Shakespeare and Fletcher, 1989, 5.3.0.2n). So at least seven on the list are on record as non‐sharer actors (one still formally an apprentice), to add to Cutts’ seven probable and four possible musicians (among whom Underhill and Rickner also acted). Thus, with Knight, perhaps as many as nineteen are identified.
The Blackfriars broken consort, as we have noted, used an eclectic mix of instruments from various families. But they would not have used trumpets, which were not employed at this time in musical ensembles. Their role was to announce ceremonial entrances and exits, to give signals on the battlefield – all of which might have been highly resonant in an indoor theatre. And there is no mention in the list of drummers, who were similarly traditionally called for in ceremonial and martial scenes. Unless their use proved overpowering indoors, there must have been at least two of them, as there would be trumpeters. They also had other, offstage functions, connected with publicising the company’s performances (see p. 174–5). It is very likely, in fact, that most of the people named under the Protection List, except perhaps the core consort of musicians, would have performed multiple functions around the playhouse. If that consort used the regular number of six instruments (to which we may add up to the three other instruments known to have been used at the Blackfriars but not earlier at the Globe – cornets, hautboys and organs), that would mean that Shakespeare’s company perhaps employed sixteen or so hired men at the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Globe, in the days before they acquired use of the Blackfriars. They were used primarily as actors in lesser roles, or in a range of smaller‐scale musical positions (they certainly needed lutenists, as well as trumpeters and drummers, even before they took on the consort), but also to be available for other functions offstage. These figures may not account, however, for those like tiremen and gatherers, who may not have been deemed “necessary attendants” in Herbert’s view – though it would not have been easy to cope without someone who knew his way around all the costumes.