In 1576, James Burbage, father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, and himself a member of the Earl of Leicester's company, built the first London playhouse, the Theater in Shoreditch. In the next year a second playhouse, the Curtain, was erected nearby, and these seem to have remained the only theaters until 1587-1588, when probably the Rose, on the Bankside, was built by Henslowe. In 1599 Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, after some difficulty over their lease, demolished the old Theater and used the timber for the Globe, near the Rose, on the Bankside. The Swan, another theater, had been built there in 1594, somewhat to the west; and in 1614 the Hope was erected hard by the old Rose and the new Globe, which in 1613 had replaced the old Globe. Meantime the Fortune had been built by Henslowe and Alleyn in 1600 in Golden Lane to the north of Cripplegate, on the model of the Globe, and the Red Bull was erected in the upper end of St. John's Street about 1603-1607. These were all public theaters, open to the air, built of wood, outside the city limits and the jurisdiction of the city corporation.

Before the Theater, plays had been acted in various places about the city, and especially in inn-yards, some of which long continued to be used for dramatic performances. At an early date also, the companies of children actors connected with the choirs of St. Paul's and the Queen's Chapel had given public performances, probably indoors, at places near St. Paul's and in Blackfriars. When the Burbages were in difficulties about the Theater, they had leased certain rooms in the dismantled monastery of Blackfriars, but had then released these to a company of children which acted there for some years. In 1608 the Burbages regained possession of this property, and Shakespeare's company began acting there. This Blackfriars theater was known as a private theater in order to avoid the application of certain statutes directed against the public theaters, but it differed from them merely in being indoors, with artificial lights, and higher prices. It was used by Shakespeare's company as a winter theater, while the Globe served for summer performances, and it was the model for various other private theaters, two of which survived the Protectorate and became in turn the models for the Restoration Theater. Drury Lane and Covent Garden, indeed, trace their ancestry back directly to the Blackfriars through the Cockpit and the Salisbury Court playhouses.

The companies of actors which occupied these theaters were coÖperative organizations. Eight or ten actors formed a company, leased a theater, hired supernumeraries, Companies of Actorsbought plays, and shared in the profits. In Elizabeth's reign they secured a legal position by obtaining a license from some nobleman, and so were known as the Earl of Leicester's men, Lord Admiral's men, and so on. On the accession of James I, the leading London companies were taken directly under patronage of members of the royal family. During Shakespeare's time there were innumerable companies, but the tendency was for the best actors to become associated in a few companies, and for each company to keep to a particular theater; so that at the accession of James I, there were only five adult companies in London with permanent theaters. The best companies were frequently employed to act at court, and during the summer or when the plague was raging in London, they often toured the country. The children's companies flourished from time to time, and especially from 1599-1607 they were, as we learn from Hamlet, formidable rivals of the men.

The history of the adult companies shows the growth of two distinct interests, that of Henslowe and Alleyn, and that of the Burbages. Henslowe, whose diary is one of the chief documents for the history of the theater, built the Rose, and in partnership with his son-in-law, the famous actor Alleyn, controlled the Fortune and the Hope, and the companies known as the Admiral's and the Earl of Worcester's men, and later on the Queen's and the Prince's men. The Burbages owned the Theater, the Globe, and the Blackfriars, and were in control of Shakespeare's company. This company, at first the Earl of Leicester's men, was known by the names of its various patrons, Strange's, Derby's, Hunsdon's, and the Lord Chamberlain's, until in 1603 it became the King's men. For a short time, as Lord Strange's men, it acted at the Rose, and apparently later at the playhouse in Newington Butts, but its regular theaters were the Theater, the Globe, and Blackfriars. With this company Shakespeare was connected from the beginning, and he aided in making it the chief London company. For a time, Alleyn and the Admiral's men were its close rivals, but even before the accession of James I, Shakespeare and Burbage had given it a supremacy that it maintained to the closing of the theaters.

There are various pictures of the exterior of Elizabethan theaters in the contemporary maps or views of London, the best representation of the four Bankside theaters being the engraving of Hollar printed in the Tudor edition of Twelfth Night. This was first published in Londinopolis, 1657, but represents the Bankside as it was about 1620. Four pictures of interiors have been preserved, that from Kirkman's Drolls, those from the title-pages of Roxana and Messalina, and the DeWitt drawing of the Swan, reproduced in the Tudor Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI. The drawing from Kirkman's Drolls is usually known as the Red Bull stage, but it was not issued until 1679, and does not seem to have anything to do with the Red Bull or with Public Theatersany other regular theater. The Messalina and Roxana pictures are small, and both show a rear curtain and a projecting stage. The DeWitt drawing was done from hearsay evidence, is inaccurate in details, and represents a theater with a movable stage, probably not long regularly used for plays; it gives little idea of the stage, but does afford a good general notion of the interior of a public theater. The contract for the Fortune theater, built on the model of the Globe, except that it was square instead of octagonal, has been preserved and enables us to complete this view of the interior in detail.

The public theaters were usually round, or nearly round, wooden buildings of three stories. These stories were occupied by tiers of galleries encircling the pit, which was open to the air. The stage projected halfway into the pit, and was provided with dressing rooms in the rear, and a protecting roof overhead, supported in some cases by pillars. At the top was the 'hut', a room used to provide apparatus for raising and lowering persons or properties from the stage, Light when needed was provided by torches. Admission to standing room in the pit was usually only a penny, but seats in the gallery or boxes or on the stage cost much more, rising as high as half a crown. Performances were given on every fair day except Sunday, and a flag flying from the hut indicated that a play was to be performed. Some of the public playhouses were used for acrobats, fencing, or even bear-baiting as well as for plays; but the better theaters, as the Globe and Fortune, seem to have been limited to dramatic performances.

The size and arrangement of the stage doubtless varied somewhat with the different theaters, and considerable changes seem to have been introduced by the indoor private theaters. But the Curtain was used from 1577 to 1642, some new theaters were modeled closely on the old, and the same plays were acted on different stages, so it is apparent that in all the stage was the same in its main features. For clearness these may be again enumerated. The stage was a platform projecting into the pit, open on three sides, and without any front curtain. In the rear were two doors, and between them, an alcove, or inner stage, separated from the front stage by curtains. Above the inner stage was a gallery, also provided with curtains, and over the doors were windows or balconies. The arrangement of doors, inner stage, gallery, and curtain may have varied somewhat, but the essential elements are a curtained space at the rear, and a gallery above. Trap-doors were also provided, and the hut overhead supplied the machinery for ascents and descents of gods and goddesses.

Our diagram for the ground floor of the Fortune shows a square-cornered stage with doors flat on the rear, while the perspective drawing from Dr. Albright's Shaksperian Stage shows a tapering stage, as in the Messalina picture, with doors on the bias. Some stagesThe Fortune Theater may have had rounded corners with doors in the side. The pillars were not necessary in the private theaters; or in some public houses where other means were found for supporting the roof.

The performance of a play differed in many ways from one to-day. There was no scenery and there were no women actors. Though scenes were used in court performances as early as 1604, they do not seem to have been employed by the professional companies to any extent until after the Restoration. Female parts were taken by boys, and, except in plays acted by the children's companies, there were rarely more than two important female characters in a play. Though without scenery, the Elizabethan stage was by no means devoid of spectacle. Processions, battles, all kinds of mythological beings, ascents to heaven, descents to hell, fire-works, and elaborate properties, were employed. Numerous contemporary plays indicate that neither the fairyland of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, nor the magnificent court of Henry VIII, was devised without an eye to the resources of the stage. Large sums of money were lavished on costumes, the cost of a coat often exceeding the price paid an author for a play. Costume was anachronistic; Cleopatra was impersonated by a boy in stays and farthingale; and CÆsar, probably by Burbage, in a costume much like that worn by the Earl of Essex. Some attention, however, was paid to appropriateness. Shepherds were clothed in white, hunters in green; and doubtless mermaids, Stage Presentationfairies, Venuses, and satyrs were given as appropriate a dress as fancy could devise. The action of a play seems usually to have been completed in two hours. There was sometimes music between the acts, but there were no long waits, and little stage business.

The peculiarities in the presentation of a play due to the arrangement of the stage were considerable, and have been the subject of much discussion and misunderstanding among investigators. There is, however, no doubt that the action was largely on the front stage, and that most of the scenes, at least in Shakespeare's lifetime, were designed for presentation on this projecting platform. Since there was no drop-curtain, actors had some distance to traverse, on entrances and exits, between the doors and the front. At the end of a scene or a play, all must retire, and the bodies of the dead must be carried out. Hence a tragedy often ends with a funeral procession, a comedy with a dance. The indications of scene supplied by modern editors for Shakespeare's plays help to visualize a modern presentation, but are misleading as to Shakespeare's intentions or an Elizabethan performance. The majority of scenes in his plays differ strikingly from those in a modern play in that they offer no hints as to the exact locality. Often it is not clear from the text whether the scene is conceived as indoors or outdoors, in the palace, or the courtyard, or before the entrance. Even when the scene is presumably within a room, there is often no indication of the nature of the furnishings, never any of the elaborate attention to details of setting, such as we find in a play by Pinero or Shaw. Sometimes placards were hung up indicating the scene of a play, but apparently these merely gave the general scene, as "Venice" or "Verona," and did not often designate localities more closely. In fact the majority of the scenes were probably written with no precise conception of their setting. They were written to be acted on a front stage, bare of scenery, projecting out into the audience. This did not represent a particular locality, but rather any locality whatever.

The inner stage and the gallery above, and to some extent the doors and the windows, were used to indicate specific localities when these were necessary. The gallery represented the wall of a town, an upper story of a house, or any elevated locality. The doors represented doors to houses or gates to a city, and the windows or balconies over them were often used for the windows of the houses. The inner stage was used in various ways to indicate a specific locality requiring properties, and this use apparently increased as time went on, and especially in the indoor, artificially lighted private theaters. In any case, however, when the curtains were opened, the inner stage became a part of the main stage, and while action might take place there, it might also serve as a background for action proceeding in the front. Properties could be brought on and off the inner stage, behind the closed curtains, hence large properties were confined to its precincts. Inner StageFurniture, as chairs, tables, or even beds, could, however, be pushed or carried out from the inner to the outer stage. A play might be given on the front stage without using the curtained recess at all, but numerous references to curtains make it clear that the inner stage was used from the early days of the theater.

The uses of the inner stage have been much discussed and are still in dispute, but they may be summarized briefly. First, the inner stage was used for a specific, restricted, and usually propertied locality—a cave, a study, a shop, a prison. Second, the inner stage was used for scenes requiring discovery or tableaux. Numerous stage directions indicate the drawing of the curtains to present a scene set on the inner stage, as Bethsabe at her bath, Friar Bungay in bed with his magical apparatus about him, Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Third, the use of the inner stage was extended so that it represented any propertied background, especially for scenes in a forest, church, or temple. In As You Like It, for example, the last four acts are located in the Forest of Arden. "This is the Forest of Arden," says Rosalind as soon as she arrives there; and even before this, Duke senior alludes to "these woods," and later we learn that there are practicable trees on which Orlando hangs his verses. The forest setting, consisting of trees and rocks, was placed on the inner stage and served to give a scenic background. Of course, different places in the forest are to be presumed, but one forest background would be sufficient for all. In the course of the four acts, however, there are three scenes (II. ii; II. iii; III. i) that are not in the forest, but at unspecified and unpropertied places about the palace and Oliver's house. For these scenes the curtain would be closed, shutting off the forest background and transferring the spectators to the unspecified localities of Act I, i.e., to the bare front stage. Fourth. An extension of this last use made it possible to employ the curtain to indicate change of scene. Several scenes, where no heavy properties were required, might succeed one another on the front stage with the curtains closed; but the opening of the curtains would reveal a special background and a manifest change of scene. One instance of this use of the inner stage is seen in the immediate change from an outdoor to an indoor scene, or vice versa. The scene is in the street, i.e., on the front stage; the person knocks at one of the doors and is admitted to a house; when he reappears, it is through the inner stage, the curtains of which have been drawn, disclosing the setting of a room. Or this process is reversed. In A Yorkshire Tragedy, there is an interesting case of such an alternation from indoors to outdoors, with one character remaining on the stage all of the time. A more extensive use of this "alternation" could be employed to indicate marked changes of place. As long as the action remains in Venice, the bare front stage will do, but a transfer to Portia's house at Belmont can be made by means of the curtains and the inner stage. Evolution of the TheaterIn the later plays at the private theaters this use of the inner stage, then better lighted, seems to have increased, especially in the change from a street or general hall to special apartments.

These uses of the inner stage, together with that of the upper stage or gallery, gave a chance for considerable variety in the action, and rendered the rapid succession of scenes less bewildering than one would at first suppose. Shakespeare's stage was the outcome of the peculiar conditions of acting by professionals in the sixteenth century, but it was also a natural step in the evolution from the medieval to the modern stage. On the medieval stage there was a neutral place or platea and special localized and propertied places called sedes, domus, loca. On the Elizabethan stage the front stage is the platea, the inner and upper stages the domus or loca. In the Restoration theater the scenery was placed on the inner stage and shut off from the outer stage by a curtain. With the use of scenery, the inner stage became more important, and the projecting apron of the front stage was gradually cut down. The proscenium doors in front of the curtain long survived their original use as entrances, but, as a rule, they have now finally disappeared with the front stage. The modern picture-frame stage of to-day is the evolution of the inner stage of the Elizabethans. Similarly the method of stage presentation has changed only gradually from Shakespeare's day to ours. The alternation from outer to inner stage was very common in the Restoration theaters, where flat scenes were used instead of a curtain, and it may still be seen in the production of melodrama or of Shakespeare's plays. A painted drop shuts off a few feet of the stage, which becomes a street or a hall, while properties and scenery are being arranged in the rear. When the drop goes up, we pass from the street or the court of the wicked Duke to the Forest of Arden, just as the Elizabethans did.

The Elizabethan stage affected Shakespeare's dramatic art in many ways. The absence of scenery, of women actors, and of a front curtain, the use of a bare stage that served for neutral or unspecified localities, naturally influenced the composition of every play. But the theatrical presentation was by no means as crude or as medieval as these differences from modern practice seem to indicate. The intimacy established between actors and audience by the projecting stage, the rapidity of action hastened by the lack of scenery or furniture, the possibilities of rapid changes of scene rendered intelligible by the use of the inner stage, were all manifest advantages in encouraging dramatic invention. The traditions formed in this theater for the presentation of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and the other plays, were handed on from Shakespeare and Burbage to Lowin and Taylor, to Betterton, Cibber, and Garrick, down to the present day; and have perhaps been less revolutionized by scenery and electric lights than we might imagine.