The Stage in the Middle
Shakespeare's Wooden 0. By Leslie Hotson. (Hart-Davis, 30s.) WHETHER Mr. Hotson has his inspirations in the bath or in the Public Records Office, they are more frequent and more surprising than those of any other scholarly investigator; and this new book contains his most revolutionary thesis so far. The scene is one of precise Ptolemaic scholars trying to fit into what they think they know is the basic pattern of the Elizabethan playhouse dozens of awkward bits of evidence; in - rushes the Copernican Mr. Hotson saying, in effect, 'Roll up those epicycles! You'll never get it right unless you see that the stage was in the middle.' A decade or so ago we were all much taken with J. C. Adams's elaborate book The Globe Playhouse, and even built models with two inner stages, window stages and so on, trying to understand that the show of kings in Macbeth took place in a corridor behind the inner stage where nobody could see it. Quietly giving this up, we wondered if there was no typical play- house to be found or, if there were, whether the theory of movable 'houses' set up like tents on stage wasn't more probable. Not that this was the only problem; there was, for instance, the famous contemporary drawing by de Witt, which shows the Swan with no inner stage at all, and spectators where you would expect it to be. Briefly in 1953, and now at triumphant length, Mr. Hotson undertakes to show that all this bewilderment derives from the false supposition of a ..`scenic wall' at the back of the stage. Imagine instead an oblong stage cutting the audience in two, with the best seats 'behind' it. The stage being at the south-west end, the quality was therefore protected from afternoon sun and rain, and right on top of the stage, like the gallery in a squash court. The 'houses,' direct descendants of those on the medieval pageants or play-waggons, were at the east and west sides of the stage, better called the 'Heaven' (Stage R.) and `Hell' (Stage L.) sides. The tiring-house, as in the pageants, was under the stage, and the actors came up through traps into the houses, which were really 'three-dimensional booths,' visible from all sides but curtained as necessary. That there were stages like this Mr. Hotson, I think, proves. He argues that this was the normal arrangement in public and private theatres until the Restoration. So we have to think of the actors working primarily for the dear seats under cover, but doing what they could for the masses on the other three sides.
These points, and more arising, are made with all , Mr. Hotson's usual polemical energy. He makes his new stage historically probable, and draws interesting analogies with the Spanish theatre. He is a brilliant catcher of glancing allu- sions and a researcher of genius. Beyond doubt hiS book marks an epoch in these studies; we shall have to visualise Shakespeare on the Elizabethan stage differently, and 'forget what we thought we knew about it.' But, of course; it is not the end of the story. There is still, for instance,
the de Witt drawing: why are the actors all downstage with their backs to the shilling seats? Where are the houses? Where, above all, is the tiring-house? The stage looks about two feet high, and what Mr. Hotson calls windows are evidently nothing of the kind. At the Swan they evidently tired somewhere else; and perhaps, with all respect for Mr. Hotson's point about the persistence of medieval traditions and structures, we should ex- pect to find a great many more mutations than he allows for.
In his enthusiasm Mr. Hotson makes this the only kind of stage worth bothering about, and pretends to hate the Italianate picture-stage that usurped it and the masques which helped it to do so; he makes the point against masques by mis- reporting Jonson. But more dangerous than this chivalrous extravagance is the argument that this is the kind of stage on which we must do Shakespeare now. I should agree that it is a matter of academic importance to try this, but not that we shall never get Shakespeare right until we can provide an archaeological reconstruc- tion of the Globe. This has been the cry of some directors for years. They have more urgent busi- ness, such as teaching the actors to speak verse and directing .them with a minimum of respon- sibility. Climbing up and down ladders and spinning like tops they would look no odder than they did at the Stratford Follies last year, but Mr. Hotson need not encourage this. I hope his remarkable book is ignored by everybody
connected with the theatre. FRANK KERMODE
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