other Appearances in this play were, a wood, a palace, and a castle. In every disquisition of this kind much trouble and many words might be saved, by defining the subject of dispute. Before therefore I proceed further in this inquiry, I think it proper to say, that by a scene, I mean, A painting in perspective on a cloth fastened to a wooden frame or roller; and that I do not mean by this term, " a coffin, or a tomb, or a gilt chair, or a fair chain of pearl, or a crucifix;" and I am the ratherinduced to make this declaration, because a writer,* who obliquely alluded to the position which I am now maintaining, soon after the first edition of this Essay was published, has mentioned exhibitions of this kind as a proof of the scenery of our old plays; and taking it for granted that the point is completely established by this decisive argument, triumphantly adds, "Let us for the future no more be told of the want of proper scenes and dresses in our ancient theatres." A passage which has been produced from one of the old comedies, proves that the common theatres were furnished with some rude pieces of machinery, which were used when it was necessary to exhibit the descent of some god or saint; but it is manifest from what has been already stated, as well as from all the contemporary accounts, that the mechanism of our ancient theatres seldom went beyond a tomb, a painted chair, a sinking cauldron, or a trap-door, and that none of them had moveable scenes. When King Henry VIII. is to be discovered by the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, reading in his study, the scenical direction in the first folio, 1623, (which was printed apparently from playhouse copies,) is " The King draws the curtain, [i. e. draws it open] and sits reading pensively; for, beside the principal curtains that hung in the front of the stage, they used others as substitutes for scenes, which were denominated traverses. If a bedchamber is to be represented, no change of scene * Mr. Steevens, if, as supposed, the author of the letter in the St. James's Chronicle, in which this " decisive argument" first appeared, May 1780. J is mentioned; but the property-man is simply ordered to thrust forth a bed, or, the curtains being opened, a bed is exhibited. So, in the old play on which Shakspeare formed his King Henry VI. P. II. when Cardinal Beaufort is exhibited dying, the stage direction is " Enter King and Salisbury, and then the curtaines be drawn, [i. e. drawn open,] and the Cardinal is discovered in his bed, raving and staring as if he were mad." When the fable requires the Roman capitol to be represented, we find two officers enter, " to lay cushions, as it were in the capitol." So, in King Richard II. Act IV. sc. i.; " Bolingbroke, &c. enter as to the parliament." Again, in Sir John Oldcastle, 1600: "Enter Cambridge, Scroop, and Gray, as in a chamber." When the citizens of Angiers are to appear on the walls of their town, and young Arthur to leap from the battlements, I suppose our ancestors were contented with seeing them in the balcony already described; or perhaps a few boards were tacked together, and painted so as to resemble the rude discoloured walls of an old town, behind which a platform might have been placed near the top, on which the citizens stood: but surely this can scarcely be called a scene. Though undoubtedly our poet's company were furnished with some wooden fabrick sufficiently resembling a tomb, for which they must have had occasion in several plays, yet some doubt may be entertained, whether in Romeo and Juliet any exhibition of Juliet's monument was given on the stage. Romeo perhaps only opened with his mattock one of the stage trap-doors, (which might have represented a tomb-stone,) by which he descended to a vault beneath the stage, where Juliet was deposited; and this notion is countenanced by a passage in the play, and by the poem on which the drama was founded. In all the old copies of the play last-mentioned we find the following stage-direction: "They march about the stage, and serving-men come forth with their napkins." A more decisive proof than this, that the stage was not furnished with scenes, cannot be produced. Romeo, Mercutio, &c. with their torch-bearers and attendants, are the persons who march about the stage. They are in the street, on their way to Capulet's house, where a masquerade is given; but Capulet's servants who come forth with their napkins, are supposed to be in a hall or saloon of their master's house: yet both the masquers without and the servants within appear on the same spot. In like manner in King Henry VIII. the very same spot is at once the outside and inside of the council-chamber. It is not, however, necessary to insist either upon the term itself, in the sense of a painting in perspective on cloth or canvas, being unknown to our early writers, or upon the various stage-directions which are found in the plays of our poet and his contemporaries, and which afford the strongest presumptive evidence that the stage in his time was not furnished with scenes: because we have to the same point the concurrent testimony of Shakspeare himself, of Ben Jonson, of every writer of ' the last age who has had occasion to mention this subject, and even of the very person who first introduced scenes on the publick stage. In the year 1629 Jonson's comedy, intitled The New Inn, was performed at the Blackfriars theatre, and deservedly damned. Ben was so much incensed at the town for condemning his piece, that in 1631 he published it with the following title: " The New Inne, or the light Heart, a comedy; as it was never acted, but most negligently played, by some, the kings servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the kings subjects, 1629: And now at last set at liberty to the readers, his Ma.ties servants and subjects, to be judged, 1631." In the Dedication to this piece, the author, after expressing his profound contempt for the spectators, who were at the first representation of this play, says, "What did they come for then? thou wilt ask me. I will as punctually answer: to see and to be seene. To make a general muster of themselves in their clothes of credit, and possesse the stage against the playe: to dislike all, but marke nothing: and by their confidence of rising between the actes in oblique lines, make affidavit to the whole house of their not understanding one scene. Arm'd with this prejudice, as the stage furniture or arras clothes, they were there: as spectators away; for the faces in the hangings and they beheld alike." The exhibition of plays being forbidden some time before the death of Charles I. Sir William D'Avenant in 1656 invented a new species of entertainment, which was exhibited at Rutland House, at the upper end of Aldersgate Street. The title of the piece, which was printed in the same year, is, The Siege of Rhodes, made a Representation by the Art of prospective in Scenes; and the Story sung in recitative Musick. "The original of this musick," says Dryden, " and of the scenes which adorned his work, he had from the Italian operas; but he heightened his characters (as I may probably imagine) from the examples of Corneille and some French poets." If sixty years before, the exhibition of the plays of Shakspeare had been aided on the common stage by the advantage of moveable scenes, or if the term scene had been familiar to D'Avenant's audience, can we suppose that he would have found it necessary to use a periphrastick description, and to promise that his representation should be assisted by the art of prospective in scenes? "It has been often wished," says he, in his Address to the Reader, " that our scenes (we having obliged ourselves to the variety of five changes, according to the ancient dramatick distinctions made for time,) had not been confined to about eleven feet in the height and about fifteen in depth, including the places of passage reserved for the musick." From these words we learn that he had in that piece five scenes. In 1658 he exhibited at the old theatre called the Cockpit in Drury Lane, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, express'd by vocal and instrumental Musick, and by Art of perspective in Scenes. In spring 1662, having obtained a patent from King Charles the Second, and built a new playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he opened his theatre with The First Part of the Siege of Rhodes, which since its first exhibition he had enlarged. He afterwards in the same year exhibited, The Second Part of the Siege of Rhodes, and his comedy called The Wits ; "these plays," says Downes, who himself acted in The Siege of Rhodes, " having new scenes and decorations, being the first that ever were introduced in England." Scenes had certainly been used before in the masques at Court, and in a few private exhibitions, and by D'Avenant himself in his attempts at theatrical entertainments shortly before the death of Cromwell: Downes, therefore, who is extremely inaccurate in his language in every part of his book, must have meant-the first ever exhibited in a regular drama, on a public theatre. I have said that I could produce the testimony of Sir William D'Avenant himself on his subject. His prologue to The Wits, which was exhibited in the spring of the year 1662, soon after the opening of his theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, if every other document had perished, would prove decisively that our author's plays had not the assistance of painted scenes. some," says D'Avenant, 66 - who would the world persuade, "There are And no less decisive is the different language of the licence for erecting a theatre, granted to him by King Charles I. in 1639, and the letters patent which he obtained from his son in 1662. In the former, after he is authorized " to entertain, govern, privilege, and keep such and so many players to exercise action, musical presentments, scenes, dancing, and the like, as he the said William Davenant shall think fit and approve for the said house, and such persons to permit and continue at and during the pleasure of the said W. D. to act plays in such house so to be by him erected, and exercise musick, musical presentments. scenes, dancing, or other the like, at the same or other hours, or times, or after |