The Private Theatre Auditorium

Abstract

What shape was the Blackfriars' auditorium? Those reconstructions that have been made to date are agreed that it was rectangular, the galleries following the line of the walls of the Upper Frater or Parliament Chamber, the large rectangular room in which the theatre was fitted up by James Burbage in 1596. Because the room was oblong, so was the auditorium. Yet the sparse material evidence about the playhouse is silent on this point, and no serious study has been made in an attempt to justify the usual interpretation. The matter is far from trivial, for a rectangular house suggests kinship with the routine fitting-out of the various halls at Court for the performance of plays and masques, while the alternative – that the Blackfriars had a segmental or U-shaped auditorium – would almost certainly indicate derivation from a European theatre tradition most readily available in the woodcut designs published by Sebastiano Serlio in the second book of hisArchitettura(Paris, 1545), and stemming originally from the rounded form of the ancient Roman theatre.