OTHER CHRISTMAS BOOKS
MR. HODGES'S study of the Elizabethan theatre appears at a time when interest in the subject has been stimulated by the findings of Dr. Leslie Hotson as well as by produc- tions on reconstructed "Elizabethan" stages. Nevertheless, The Globe Restored does not require these adventitious aids to hold our interest, for it sets forth a calmly reasoned and extremely full account, of what we may claim to know, and of what we must admit to be conjecture about those "gor- geous playing places" so often referred to collectively as "the Elizabethan stage." The book is packed with material, in its text, in the numerous plates from Renaissance sources, in the explanatory notes to these plates, and in the appendices: in all there is everything that the layman needs in order to understand the essentials of the subject, and it is presented in a manner which persuades the expert to look again and see afresh what familiarity has taken for granted.
Mr. Hodges is to be congratulated on the scholarly way in which he handles this large mass of material. He does not give the impression of a man deploying selected evidence to prove a case, but of somebody asking us to understand why he has come to develop towards his subject an attitude which strikes me for one as reasonable and justifiable. With the greatest good nature, he emphasizes how much has come to be taken for granted without any evidence. Of the inner stage, that hotly debated feature of modern reconstructions, Mr. Hodges remarks that "the occasional use, however often, of a place recognised as being behind but not of the stage proper, does not constitute an 'inner stage' in the sense of an alternative acting area for special pur- poses, such as to represent interior' scenes, which is the theory offered by Cran- ford Adams and others." Experience of producing on reconstructed "Elizabethan" stages leads me to agree with Mr. Hodges that the "exaggeration of the importance, and also of the size, of the so-called inner stage in many reconstructions has perhaps been due to an erroneous theory that the inner stage was the embryo of our modern proscenium stage."
When the "upper stage" is treated we again find a course steered between extremes. Aware that the mediaeval system of "houses," thrones and other set-pieces, was used possibly as late as the second decade of the seventeenth century, Mr. Hodges still does not abandon belief in some kind of per- manent or possibly "fit-up" upper-stage projecting from the tiring-house wall, convenient of height and with good sight- lines; and he suggests for Cleopatra's monument and The Taming of The Shrew, the use of a structure like that which actually existed in similar Flemish theatres.
In addition to suggesting what the structure of the Globe may have been, Mr. Hodges emphasizes the important point that it was a colourful place, not, "bare" in the sense of plain and primitive ; and he treats the subject of costume, though here I wish .he had gone more deeply into the matter. -Finally, having told us 'how he would .reconstruct the Globe, he shows his modera- tion yet again by insisting that there is room in our theatre today for both the "platform stage" and the "picture-frame stage." A review of this size, however, cannot do justice to the book; it needs to be read and thought over carefully.
BERTRAM JOSEPH
Previous page
