The Use of Booths in the Original Staging of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.

In 1631 Ben Jonson fell out with Inigo Jones and wrote a withering attack upon his former friend's work on the visual element of the court masque. 'Mythology . . . painted on slit deal' and 'y^e mere perspectiue of an Inch board' were among the terms with which Jonson's 'Expostulacion w^th Inigo Jones' deflated the desire to represent grand themes in wood and canvas¹. This attack forms part of a complex cluster of ideas which causes Jonson to be seen as a literary, somewhat untheatrical, playwright. But Jonson was, in fact, quite capable of what was called by Brian Gibbons in another context, 'ironic visual quotation'. In Romeo and Juliet 3.5, Juliet looks down from the stage balcony to her lover who has just managed to safely lower himself to stage level and she says 'Me thinkes I see thee now thou art below / Like one dead in the bottome of a Tombe'². Later, Gibbons argued, the tomb will be where Romeo is standing on the stage, and hence Juliet's presentiment is of a mise en scene that awaits the audience³. This dramatic use of elements of stage design within the dialogue of the playworld is Gibbons's 'ironic visual quotation', and in his example the inevitability that the tomb property will be placed in the upstage centre location where Romeo now stands suggests the inevitability of the fate that awaits him. Jonson plays a similar trick in Bartholomew Fair by using stage booths in a way that draws attention to the functions that these properties have served in other contexts, in other plays.

According to the date of the contract read out in the Induction (sig. A5r⁴), Jonson's Bartholomew Fair was performed, quite possibly for the first time, at the Hope theatre on 31 October 1614 by, the title-page says, the Lady Elizabeth's Men. The following night it was performed by the same company before King James at Whitehall⁵. These two facts are of special interest not only to Jonsonians but also to historians of the theatre because they can be put in conjunction with certain other evidence. We happen to have the contract for the building of the Hope theatre, dated 29 August 1613⁶, and we have the accounts which detail expenditure on the court performance⁷. This richness of background evidence concerning the practicalities of staging is unique for a play from this period and it illuminates some of Jonson's artistic choices of both subject matter and means of presentation.

The branch of the royal bureaucracy responsible for theatrical entertainment at court was the Revels Office, and its accounting records are extant. They show a payment for 'Canvas for the Boothes and other neccessaries for a play called Bartholmewe ffaire'⁸. It is easy to imagine what these booths might be. At the fair of the play's title, Ursula has a booth in which she roasts pig, and Leatherhead's puppet theatre needs a booth too. Possibly Leatherhead's shop is substantial enough to call for a booth also, although Joan Trash's seems not to be. When Cokes tries to buy both shops in 4.3, Trash values hers at only 4 shillings and 11 pence including the pitch, whereas Leatherhead asks 29 shillings 7 pence halfpenny for his, suggesting that it is visibly more substantial (sig. F4v).

In attempts to recover the original methods of staging drama of the period, scholars have been drawn to the idea that movable stage furniture could fulfil both aesthetic and functional needs. One term for a multi-function piece of stage furniture is the 'stage booth'. The first to suggest its ubiquity in the public theatres was George F. Reynolds in his book The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605-1625⁹. Reynolds interpreted the references in stage directions and in dialogue to the 'throne', the 'state', the 'pulpit', and the 'public chair' as referring to a kind of formal seat consisting of a raised dais with one or more chairs on it and a detachable canopy overhead. The whole construction, dais and chair, or chairs, could be wheeled on at need. Similar structures were used to represent shops, tents, and beds. The theorizing of movable booth properties exceeded good sense when, in 1959, Leslie Hotson seriously suggested that the tiring house was underneath the stage and that all entrances were made via a booth placed over a trap¹⁰. Warren D. Smith, C. Walter Hodges, and A. M. Nagler made more limited claims for the use of a portable structure which is variously called a 'pavilion', a 'mansion', and a 'scaffold'¹¹. The essential features of a stage booth are a three-dimensional rectilinear wooden frame large enough for several players to stand in, with curtains suspended from the top which can be drawn aside to reveal or closed to conceal the occupants, and perhaps a solid roof strong enough to support a player or two. There are good reasons to believe that such booths made of lath and canvas were a common property in Elizabethan court interludes of the mid-sixteenth century, and a case has been made for their later use in a fusion of vernacular and imported continental staging practices (Chambers, 3:1-45). Scott McMillin's work on the plays performed at the Rose theatre showed that if a play calls for use of a playing space 'above' it usually also needs an 'enclosure' space that can be concealed and revealed¹². If there is no use of an 'above' there is usually no use of an 'enclosure' either, suggesting that the same piece of stage furniture served both functions and was either present or absent for each play. Thus McMillin added new weight to the argument for the stage booth's ubiquity.

What exactly is indicated by the Revels Accounts expenditure on 'boothes'? There are many examples of earlier expenditure on booths for court performance of plays in which they represent man-made structures such as aristocratic houses, bourgeois shops, and monarchial palaces. There were also irregular structures of wood and canvas used to represent natural features such as rocks, hollow trees, and caves (Chambers, 1:229-34). The word 'booth' was clearly a theatre person's name for a piece of stage furniture, but for Bartholomew Fair what must be visually denoted is a fairground booth. When stage booths are made to represent fairground booths, something extraordinary is happening. Rather than employ the convention whereby the booth might be understood to represent a house, a shop, or a palace, Jonson used the booth to represent a booth. This shortcircuiting of theatrical convention should influence our understanding of the way in which the play's staging forms part of its meaning. By having a booth represent itself Jonson comments on the stagecraft of his time; the booth-as-booth trick contributes to an examination of the artistic conditions in which Jonson felt himself to be working.

Let us follow Eugene Waith in assuming that Ursula's booth is erected in full view of the audience during Justice Overdo's soliloquy at the start of the second act¹³. Between this erection and the arrival of Winwife and Quarlous in 2.5 the audience sees a variety of fair people and may surmise their occupations from their dialogue and the fictional setting from the structures on the stage. But it is not until the first potential customers arrive in the persons of Winwife and Quarlous that the audience hears a direct explanation of one of the stage structures. Knockem says to Quarlous 'will you sit downe, Sir? this is old Vrsla's mansion, how like you her bower? heere you may ha' your Punque, and your Pigge in state, Sir, both piping hot' (sig. D4v-E1r). Knockem does not use the correct fairground term 'booth' but rather he names three structures which stage booths were conventionally used to represent: 'mansion', 'bower', and 'state'.

Waith annotated Knockem's use of the word 'mansion' as a possible allusion to stage mansions which 'were firmly rooted in theatrical tradition' both from the mystery cycles and classical plays acted at court and at the universities (Waith, 212). Following Herford and Simpson, Waith suggested that 'bower' might indicate that Ursula's booth is covered with boughs (Waith, 77), but this a highly unlikely covering for a fairground booth, especially one in which meat is to be roasted. A booth can be called upon to represent a bower, however. The woodcut which adorned the title-page of the 1615 quarto of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy shows Horatio hanging within a free-standing booth structure which the dialogue of the play insists is a bower¹⁴.

Knockem's use of 'state' ('you may ha' your Punque, and your Pigge in state') might be merely adverbial, but more likely it alludes to the chair of state. Warren D. Smith developed Reynolds's theory that the stage booth served a variety of functions including housing the throne and suggested that the same structure which housed Caesar's state in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar might also be used not only for the 'pulpit', but also the 'rock' and 'hill' of the last act (Smith, 26). Andrew Gurr too envisaged a 'dais' or 'scaffold' to house the throne¹⁵, and there is no reason to suppose that this structure might not be stripped of its opulent hangings to be re-used for another purpose even within the same play, as Smith suggested. Although the word 'state' often meant the chair alone, the OED also records it being used to indicate the canopy over the throne (sb. 20.b) and also the raised chair together with its canopy (sb. 20.a). It is a booth that provides the dais and the canopy which transform an ordinary chair into a royal throne, and the word 'state' applies to the combined structure of booth plus chair and, by metonymy, to the booth even without the chair. This meaning of 'state' is invoked in Knockem's scathing comment on Ursula's booth which is represented by a piece of stage furniture that was more frequently seen fulfilling a royal function.

It is difficult, perhaps, for us to accept that the word 'state' could refer to the surrounding structure in which the chair is placed, rather than the chair itself. We know that even with the chair taken away the construction could still be called a 'chair', since the plebeians in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar say:

1[st Plebeian] Stay, ho and let vs heare Mark Antony.
3[rd Plebeian] Let him go vp into the publike Chaire,
(TLN 1596-7¹⁶)

Mark Antony is not a speaker at Hyde Park Corner and can hardly be expected to climb onto a chair and balance there while delivering his great speech, so we must take 'chair' as indicating the dais on which the chair rested. George F. Reynolds showed that the terms 'throne' and 'state' were used interchangeably in stage directions and dialogue (Reynolds, 54), and noted that Dekker's satirical advice to gulls about behaviour at the theatres tells them to sit on the stage 'under the state of Cambises himselfe' (Reynolds, 64). Only if the 'state' were the whole construction, dais, canopy, and all, could the gallant be said to be under it when sitting near the throne.

Jonson makes Knockem use the words 'mansion', 'bower', and 'state' for a special purpose. What is shown to the audience is a booth representing a booth, which is unusual in itself. But when this structure is first described it is given the names of three other things which it might be called upon to represent in other contexts. Most playwrights might be expected to narrow the range of meanings available to the spectator by having a character say 'that's a booth', but not Jonson. Having inverted the visual convention by his booth-as-booth trick he inverts the dialogue convention too and has the structure be called anything but a booth. He does this on the first occasion available: when the customers begin to arrive. Thereafter the joke is dropped and Ursula's booth may be called just that.

Quarlous and Winwife are potential customers who do not go on to patronise Ursula's establishment. The first actual customers arrive in John Littlewit's party in 3.2. Jonson's marginal stage direction tells us that 'Littlewit is gazing at the signe; which is the Pig's-head with a large writing vnder it' (sig. F1v). This sign advertises Ursula's trade, but it also labels the booth for the audience: the 'large writing' is presumably large enough for the audience to read. The puppet theatre of the final act is also labelled with what Leatherhead calls 'the signe of our inuention' (sig. K3r) and which Jonson's marginal stage direction calls a 'Bill' when Cokes reads it aloud (sig. L1r). William A. Armstrong suggested that the signs are needed because the booth used to represent Ursula's establishment is also used to represent the puppet theatre with the fixing of the new sign indicating the changeover¹⁷. This attractive idea is undermined by the Revels Accounts reference to a plurality of 'boothes', rather than one, unless we believe that Leatherhead has one. Also pointing away from the use of Ursula's booth as the puppet theatre is Littlewit's cry that he left his wife 'at the great woman's house . . . yonder' (sig. M3v), although it would be overly realistic to insist that there had to be something onstage for him to gesture to as 'yonder'.

Like the question of stage booths, the use of labels in Elizabethan and Jacobean staging is contested. There is strong evidence for them in the early part of the period, the 1560-80s. Sidney's The Defence of Poesie indicated their use when he asked 'What childe is there, that coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters vpon an old doore, doth beleeue that it is Thebes?'¹⁸. It is not clear whether Sidney is telling us of private theatre, public theatre, court, or university performance, or all of them, but we can be reasonably certain of the date: composition of the Defence was completed between 1581 and 1583¹⁹. The labelling of doors might invoke a different convention from the labelling of other parts of the stage. Perhaps when the first actor in a scene entered via a particular door, convention told the audience that the scene was set in the location named in the label over that door. Thus labels would facilitate movement of the imaginary location. But Sidney also complained of a different kind of staging in which the actors

haue Asia of the one side, and Affricke of the other, and so manie other vnder Kingdomes, that the Player when he comes in, must euer begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceiued (Sidney, sig. H4r).

This arrangement seems incompatible with the door labelling convention. In this kind of staging the stage simultaneously represented all the locations needed in the play and the actors walked across the stage to begin a scene at a new location. Chambers believed that the mode involving an imaginative jump to a new location, which he called 'successive staging', was increasingly used, and that the 'simultaneous staging' mode began to be neglected towards the end of the sixteenth century in all types of venues: public, private, court, university, and touring (Chambers, 3:1-154). The absence of labels in the later period is not proven and, as George F. Reynolds showed, there are late plays at the Red Bull which seem to need some kind of labelling (Reynolds, 111-2).

There is a way to avoid either 'simultaneous' and 'successive' staging, or at least to diminish the unrealistic distortion of the former: locate all the scenes of the play in one imaginary place that is about the same size as the stage. Although his reference to the labelling of doors might indicate an acceptance of spatial discontinuity in the form of successive staging, Sidney explicitly condemned spatial compression and specified the acceptable limits of temporal compression: 'the Stage should alway represent but one place, and the vttermoste time presupposed in it, should bee both by Aristotles precept, and common reason, but one day' (Sidney, sig. H4r). Unless a comically speeded-up style of playing was in use, the acceptance of temporal compression implies an acceptance of temporal discontinuity. Sidney advocated what are known as the Unity of Place and the Unity of Time and attributed them to Aristotle. An examination of Poetics will show that Aristotle formulated no such rules about unity, and that the sixteenth-century neoclassicists simply extrapolated a single demand (Unity of Action) and a single observation (that contemporary Greek drama tended to show the events of no more than one day) into a tripartite prescription concerning Action, Time, and Place. The importance attached to these rules by sixteenth-century neoclassicists was re-iterated by eighteenth-century neoclassicists who nonetheless felt the need to excuse Shakespeare's obvious violation of them. We cannot be sure that Shakespeare was aware of the Unity rules (although it would be difficult to imagine a working dramatist being ignorant of the major dramaturgical theories of his day) but we can be certain that Jonson was aware of them. The version of Every Man In His Humour which appears in the 1616 Folio has a prologue which emphasizes the play's adherence to Unity of Time and Place. Jonson promises he will not 'make a child, now swadled, to proceede / Man, and then shoote vp, in one beard, and weede, / Past threescore yeeres'. Instead

He rather prayes, you will be pleas'd to see
One such, to-day, as other playes should be.
Where neither Chorus wafts you ore the seas;
Nor creaking throne comes downe, the boyes to please;²⁰

We should be able to test Bartholomew Fair against this mocking of other dramatists' violation of the Unities. On analysis, however, it is very difficult to say whether the Unities are preserved in Bartholomew Fair. Unity of Time might be said to be preserved because the events all occur within the span of one day. But time does not operate in a linear fashion in the play. There is the usual compression in the encompassing of a day's events, from setting up the stalls in the morning to a mass departure to supper in the evening, but there is also a peculiar extension of time. As Peter Womack noted, Win Littlewit enters the back of Ursula's booth to go to the toilet at the end of 3.6 and does not emerge from it until the beginning of 4.5 some 550 lines later²¹. Even then the only reason Jonson brings her out seems to be to get laughs from Mistress Overdo's need to use the same toilet.

Concerning Unity of Place we find the contradiction of apparent conformity with underlying violation. The first act is set in Littlewit's house and we have to decide if this location used the full size of the stage. In R. B. Parker's unusual 'simultaneous' staging of the play a part of the stage was permanently dressed to represent Littlewit's house²². Leaving the first act aside, except to note that most editors reject Parker's staging, for the rest of the play the stage is made to represent a piece of land in Smithfield about the same size as itself and hence Unity of Place is preserved. And yet within this space people continually lose one another and disorientation is common. Because they represent fairground booths, the stage booths in Bartholomew Fair would be covered in canvas and might look rather like the kind of 'mansions' which, in Tudor interludes, provided the 'houses' for 'simultaneously' staged drama. Likewise, the use of labels could evoke the practices of the late sixteenth century. The Scrivener of the Induction alludes to old-fashioned drama when mocking any spectator who 'will sweare, Ieronimo, or Andronicus are the best playes, yet' (sig. A5v). He means, of course, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (written between 1582 and 1592²³), which has a famous booth-as-bower scene, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (probably written in 1592²⁴). Both plays were certainly old, and probably old-fashioned, by 1614. For his play-within-the-play given at court in The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo uses a locality label: 'hang vp the title. / Our scene is Rhodes'²⁵. If the use of booths and labels in Bartholomew Fair aroused the audience to expect old fashioned 'simultaneous' staging, Jonson frustrated this expectation. If the audience expected old fashioned violation of the dramatic Unities, Jonson in a sense preserved them. But this preservation turns out to be, on closer examination, a trick, and time and space become decidedly slippery concepts at the fair.

The Induction and the puppet theatre booth each frame a play within which occurs a radical inversion of artistic decorum. The puppet play takes Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Richard Edwards's Damon and Pythias, and thoroughly vulgarises them. Edwards's academic play of 1564 is blended with Marlowe's unfinished dramatic poem and the result is bathetically set in contemporary London. Worse still, the adaptation is staged with glove puppets before an audience which includes the most foolish patron of the arts, Bartholomew Cokes, and their most implacable enemy, Zeal-of-the-land Busy. The problem for the puppeteer is Jonson's problem: how to cope with a less than ideal audience.

The Stage-keeper and the Book-holder who begin Bartholomew Fair dramatise a change in the practices of the London public stage. This particular Stage-keeper is a relic from the late sixteenth century who displays in his references to Richard Tarlton and John Adams a knowledge of that period's achievements and bemoans the deficiencies of modern plays and players. The Book-holder who sends the Stage-keeper off represents a new theatrical practice based on a new relationship, materialised in a contract, between producers and consumers. Moreover the Book-keeper and his scrivener represent an authorial literary practice over a collective dramatic practice, the clowns Tarlton and Adams being renowned for their ad lib comments and departures from the text. The Induction introduces playmaking and playgoing as themes of the play itself by making explicit the implicit relationships and the changes in conditions. As well as reflecting different modes of production, the Stage-keeper and the Book-holder have different opinions on the play's mimetic success: the former says Jonson has not properly represented the real Bartholomew Fair, while the latter insists that the audience must decide.

In Bartholomew Fair a place of licence and excess is represented on a stage that was, in the view of many contemporary writers, a place of licence and excess. A play staged at the dual-purpose Hope theatre would necessarily be tainted by association with the highly visceral and minimally cerebral entertainment of animal torture. It has been argued that playhouse design evolved from the design of animal baiting arenas because someone had the bright idea of putting the booth stage of a group of travelling players inside one of Southwark's animal baiting rings²⁶. Oscar Brownstein demolished this theory by showing the unsuitability of an animal baiting ring for the purposes of theatrical presentation²⁷. According to Brownstein the Hope was the first dual-purpose arena and was highly unusual in its design which accommodated both kinds of entertainment. We know from the contract to build the Hope that the stage was to be demountable and supported on trestles, and stage and trestles could be packed away when not needed, leaving the pit free for the animals. Because the stage was not fixed there could be no conventional stage posts resting on it, and hence the contract calls for a stage cover that supports itself without posts (Greg, 19-22). It is reasonable to suppose that the need to provide a fairly smooth surface upon which an enraged animal could get no purchase meant that the back wall of the stage was merely the flat inner wall of the playhouse frame and furthermore that it was not elaborately decorated. The statues of classical gods which are believed by the designers of the new Bankside Globe to have adorned its original would not have been suitable for the Hope.

Jonson made use of this unique venue to represent another location where lines of social discourse intersected: the Bartholomew Fair. In the Induction the Scrivener makes the parallel explicit: 'The Play shall presently begin. And though the Fayre be not kept in the same Region, that some here, perhaps, would haue it, yet thinke, that therein the Author hath obseru'd a speciall Decorum, the place being as durty as Smithfield, and as stinking euery whit' (sig. A6r). The Stage-keeper had been concerned with the degree of realistic representation, but the Scrivener's comments suggest that more importantly the representation takes place in a venue very like the place represented. Knockem's comments on Ursula's booth have the same tenor: a booth can stand for itself, rather than for a mansion, bower, or state. By emphasizing that the means of representation are like the world represented, Jonson bypasses mimetic convention and so avoids the bathos which condemns Leatherhead's pupper play before it has begun.

The contract read out in the Induction reifies the implicit dramatic contract between audience and playmakers. We can use a fashionable critical term in its most literal sense to say that Induction 'renegotiates' that contract. Jonathan Haynes argued that in the Induction Jonson recasts his audience as a detached, sober, almost Brechtian, and heterogeneous group of spectators who contemplate but do not interfere--just the kind of audience Leatherhead's puppet play needs²⁸. This shows a new attitude toward the carnivalesque, argued Haynes, and one that is proto-bourgeois in strong contrast to the fair's residual medieval saturnalia. The real Bartholomew Fair was partaking of such a transformation, but Jonson was not merely registering this social change. Jonson was no doubt attracted to the subject matter because it provided an opportunity to comment on the changing status of playmaking and play consumption. One of the opportunities he saw in a play about a fair was a way of using stage booths to comment on the old practices. Considered together with the Induction this makes for a virtual artistic manifesto in which the old ways literally frame a theatrical disaster, the puppet play which cannot be completed, and the new knowing, self-conscious, and self-possessed ways frame an artistic success. Littlewit's script attempts to bring his subject matter down to the level of the audience but he does not anticipate how stupid the most socially elevated member of the audience, Bartholomew Cokes, will be. By contrast, Jonson's script knowingly points to its own lack of dignity by invoking the dignified uses to which the stage furniture might have been put and foregrounds its own immersion in the world of tawdry shows. This forestalls the criticism which is so easily made against any dramatic project using stage furniture: that it drags its subject matter down to 'y^e mere perspectiue of an Inch board'. Without this performance context and without the Induction, the play witnessed by King James at court was scarcely the same text performed the previous afternoon at the Hope.

In 1616 Jonson stopped writing plays after the failure of his The Devil Is An Ass, and he did not resume until 1625. During this period he devoted himself to writing court masques for which Inigo Jones provided the spectacle. It was a partnership which ended acrimoniously with a semi-public war of words, and it is often said that Jonson finally allowed himself to assert his deeply held conviction of the superiority of the poetic over the visual arts. Yet as we have seen Jonson had a highly developed visual imagination capable of complex and sustained visual puns such as the booth-as-booth trick in Bartholomew Fair. Anxiety about the value of visual effects, evident in Bartholomew Fair and in the 'Expostulacion w^th Inigo Jones', spurred Jonson's visual imagination to new heights at the same time as it undermined his confidence in its achievements.

Notes

¹No early printed text exists but a transcript of the best manuscript version is in Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925-52), 8:403-4.

²William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (London: John Danter, 1597), sig. G3v.

³Brian Gibbons, 'The Question of Place', Cahiers lisab‚thains, 50 (1996), 33-43, p. 39.

⁴Quotations of Bartholomew Fair will be from The Workes (London: J. B[eale] for R. Allot, 1631) which appears to have been intended as a continuation of the 1616 Folio and in which Bartholomew Fair was first printed.

⁵That the performance was on this day is shown by an item in the financial accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber which records payment to Nathan Field on behalf of the acting company. This item is transcribed in David Cook, and F. P. Wilson, eds, Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber 1558-1642, Malone Society Collections, 6 (Oxford: Malone Society, 1961), p. 60. That the court was at Whitehall is shown by a letter dated 11 September 1614 from the Reverend Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Pickering at Tours (transcribed in Thomas Birch, ed., The Court and Times of James the First, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848), 1:345-7) which describes James tearing up parliamentary bills at the Whitehall Banqueting House. The preceding five letters from Lorkin to Pickering make it clear that Lorkin was imparting the latest news and that the incident at Whitehall occurred after James returned from his 'progress' through Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire during August. There is no evidence of the court removing from Whitehall between 1 September and 1 November. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:129.

⁶W. W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary (London: Bullen, 1907) pp. 19-22.

⁷As well as the payment to the players mentioned in note 5 above, there is an entry amongst the Revels Accounts for the stage set, cited in note 8 below. Both are also reproduced in Chambers, 4:183.

⁸Pipe Office Declared Accounts (P.R.O. 351/2805) f. 31a, transcribed in W. R. Streitberger, ed., Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, 1603-1642, Malone Society Collections, 13 (Oxford: Malone Society, 1986), p. 70.

⁹George F. Reynolds, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605-1625, MLA General Series, 9 (New York: MLA, 1940), pp. 52-87. Reynolds also suggested that such a structure, rather than an inner (or alcove) stage, could provide the discovery space, see pp. 131-63.

¹⁰Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare's Wooden O (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959), pp. 119-54.

¹¹Warren D. Smith, 'Evidence of Scaffolding on Shakespeare's Stage', Review of English Studies, ns, 2 (1951), 22-29; C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre, 2nd edn (London: Oxford UP, 1968), pp. 54-63; A. M. Nagler, Shakespeare's Stage, enlarged edn (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1981), pp. 26-65.

¹²Scott McMillin, 'The Rose and The Swan', in The Development of Shakespeare's Theater, ed. John H. Astington, AMS Studies in the Renaissance, 24 (New York: AMS, 1992), pp. 159-83.

¹³Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Eugene M. Waith (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), p. 211.

¹⁴Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie, or, Hieronimo is Mad Againe (London: W. White for I. White and T. Langley, 1615), sig. A1r.

¹⁵Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 151-2, 192-3.

¹⁶Julius Caesar was first printed in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 and the Through Line Numbering (TLN) used here is from Charlton Hinman, ed., The Norton Facsimile of The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

¹⁷William A. Armstrong, 'Ben Jonson and Jacobean Stagecraft', in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 1, Gen. ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), 43-61, p. 54.

¹⁸Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: T. C[reede] for W. Ponsonby, 1595), sig. G1r.

¹⁹Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry: or the Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepperd, Nelson's Medieval and Renaissance Library (London: Nelson, 1965), pp. 1-4.

²⁰Benjamin Jonson, The Workes (London: Will Stansby, 1616), sig. A3r.

²¹Peter Womack, Ben Jonson, Rereading Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 150-4.

²²R. B. Parker, 'The Themes and Staging of Bartholomew Fair', University of Toronto Quarterly, 39 (1970), 293-309.

²³Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Methuen, 1959), xxi-xxvii.

²⁴Stanley Wells and others, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), pp. 113-5.

²⁵Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie (London: Edward Allde for Edward White, 1592), sig. K2v.

²⁶An example of this argument is in Richard Hosley, 'The Playhouses', in The Revels History of Drama in English, ed. Clifford Leech and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), vol 3: 1576-1613, 119-235, pp. 121-8.

²⁷Oscar Brownstein, 'Why didn't Burbage Lease the Beargarden? A Conjecture in Comparative Architecture', in The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch 1576-1598, ed. Herbert Berry (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1979), pp. 81-96.

²⁸Jonathan Haynes, 'Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair', English Literary History, 51 (1984), 645-68, pp. 658-9.