The "Messalina" Stage and Salisbury Court Plays

Abstract

For some time, the little pictures of stages which appear on the title-pages of the plays Roxana (published 1632) and Messalina (published 1640) have teased historians of the English theater with their evidence of conditions in the playhouses before the Restoration (see Figures 1-3). They show very small performing areas, leading most people to identify them with the indoor, so-called private theaters. Their depiction of curtains behind the acting platform was very important to scholars in the first half of this century who sought to present reconstructed versions of Shakespearean theaters: the pictures provided contemporary proof of the inner stage, as it was imagined by John Cranford Adams and his predecessors. Adams's influential book The Globe Playhouse. Its Design and Equipment (1943) gradually lost its prestige as its methodology and assumptions were attacked by a new generation of theater scholars, following the Second World War, and the stock of the two little pictures fell with it. The central icon of the new school was the Swan drawing of 1596, which shows a public, outdoor theater with a large squarish stage of Spartan plainness. The odd tapered shape of the little platforms in the Roxana and Messalina pictures looked particularly untrustworthy in the context of the new orthodoxy. But in 1989 crucial fresh evidence emerged from the Southwark mud in the form of the foundations of the Rose playhouse, a public theater begun in 1587 and altered in 1592. The foundations of stages from both versions of the theater were discovered: both tapered to a narrower downstage front.