Appendix: The “Houses” in Academic Drama

1. At Oxford and Cambridge plays were produced in collegiate dining halls. An important difference between academic dram and the plays of the professional London theaters, therefore, is that the venues in which academic plays were originally performed are preserved intact (albeit, of course, subject to subsequent alterations), and much more can be ascertained of these venues than of any London popular theater, based both on physical and archaeological examinations and on the rather copious records that have been preserved, since Oxford and Cambridge suffered no equivalent of the Great Fire. The reader curious about academic venues can be referred to works by the preeminent modern historian of Cambridge academic drama, Alan H. Nelson, who has both conducted detailed researches about the physical particulars of stage resources at Cambridge, particularly at Trinity College, elsewhere has collected the archival materials pertinent to Cambridge dramatic performances. NOTE 1 In his study of dramatic venues, Nelson adopted the methodology of relying strictly on physical remains. He wrote (p. 5) “taking a warning from scholars who have experienced qualified success at best in using play texts as evidence of London theater construction…I have mostly (though not entirely) shunned texts as evidence of production techniques, trusting instead that documentary evidence will serve more successfully to shed eventual light on the texts.” While this may be a sound first step, surely the next one is to use the evidence of plays (both their explicit stage-directions and what can reasonably be inferred from the words of dramatic texts). as a control on archaeological conclusions. This is especially necessary regarding one issue where the evidence of archaeology and that of plays seems to conflict. In the absence of a permanent scaenae frons academic tragedy and comedy employed temporary structures called “houses,” no doubt an inheritance of the booths employed in mystery plays. The question is how many such “houses” would have been employed in a given play. In examining the evidence for the large dining halls such as those of Trinity, Queens, and St. John’s Colleges, in which most plays were produced, Nelson concluded that there was a raised stage area with a “house” on either side. The main argument in favor of this arrangement was that the area at the back of the stage was used for the seating of particularly distinguished spectators: if more structures were built on the stage, the view of these honored gentlemen would be blocked, and the actors would be obliged to play with their backs turned toward them.
2. This conclusion, however, comes up against the fact that some academic plays appear to require more than two “houses.” Take, for example, George Ruggle’s 1615 comedy Ignoramus, performed at Trinity College. That play employs settings before, or occasionally within, three households (for at least one “house” was constructed in such a way as to permit interior scenes), those of Theodorus, Torcol, and Cupes, as indicated in initial commentary notes on its individual scenes. This in itself would not be bothersome, as one could imagine that in the course of a play a “house” might be employed to represent more than one fictive location. But a problem seems to be raised by Act III: in III.7 Cupes escorts Rosabella across the stage from Torcol’s house to his own. The setting of III.8 is unclear: a street in front of either Cupes’ house or that of Theodorus. III.9 and III.10 are located at Cupes’ house (surely III.10 is meant to be an interior scene); then the setting shifts to Theodorus’ household (III.11). An uninstructed reader might naturally assume this sequence of scenes would best be managed using a three-“house” set: Torcol’s house would be at one side of the stage, Cupes’ in the middle, and Theodorus’ at the other side, so that the focus of action would progressively shift from one side of the stage to its center and then to the other side. But, according to Nelson’s view, evidently we must think that Act III was staged using two “houses”. The possibility that a single stage structure could represent more than one fictive location in a play, is itself plausible. But it more surprising to discover that a given fictive location could have been represented by more than one “house.” Yet this is precisely what we would be required to accept: Act I requires two “houses” to represent the households of Theodorus and Torcol, whereas a two-“house” staging of Act III would require one of these structures to represent, at different times, the households of Theodorus and Torcol, and the other to represent that of Cupes. There is also an evident problem involving audience orientation. Absent explicit textual marking, how could the spectators be counted on to appreciate that a “house” has suddenly changed its fictive identity? Ignoramus is no freak play in this respect, for the problem of more than two fictive houses being employed in a single act arises in other plays too. For example, in Act II of Robert Ward’s comedy Fucus sive Histriomastix, acted at Queens College in 1623, the houses of Villanus, Iudicium, and Ingenium are all employed. And again, in the 1578 comedy Hymenaeus, perhaps also written by Fraunce, three venues (the houses of Alphonsus, Fabius, and an inn) are employed in Act IV. Again, one wonders if these plays require employing a “house” to represent more than a one fictive venue within a single Act.
3. Aware with this problem, we now turn to Victoria, which requires no less than five onstage structures. The initial stage-direction is as follows:

Quatuor extruendae sunt domus, nimirum Fidelis, 1^a
Fortunii, 2^a
Cornelii, 3^a
Octaviani, 4^a

Quin et sacellum quoddam erigendum est, in quo constituendum est Cardinalis cuiusdam sepulchrum, ita efformatum ut claudi aperirique possit. In sacello autem lampas ardens ponenda est.

[“Four houses are to be constructed, namely those of 1.) Fidelis, 2.) Fortunius, 3.) Cornelius, 4.) Octavianus. And also a certain chapel is to be built, in which is to be placed a certain Cardinal’s tomb, thus constructed that it can be opened and closed. And in the chapel is to be placed a burning lamp.”]

Here the word extruendae excludes the possibility of a given “house” being used to represent more than one fictive venue in the course of the play, for it seems to call for the actual erection of these structures. It may be pointed out, incidentally, that this stage direction reflects the instruction in Il Fidele’s Prologue, Questa, che voi videte qui, è la Città di N[apoli], questa la contrada di N[apoli], questa la casa di Vittoria, questa di Fidele, quella di Virginia, et quell’altra di Fortunio. The Italian play, however, calls for no chapel or monumentum (as this structure is repeatedly called in the text), which is Fraunce’s own contribution. It also deserves to be pointed out that this evidence deserves to be taken seriously. In the Introduction, I have given my reasons for thinking that, although there is no evidence that Victoria was performed, Fraunce wrote with production in mind. Blume (p. 31) wrote “It is not easy to imagine a stage background like this with four houses next to each other, plus a sepulchral monument. The unusual scenery rather supports the assumption that Victoria had never been acted.” But Fraunce had acted the parts of Lord Hastings and the Second Citizen in Thomas Legge’s 1579 Richardus Tertius trilogy, and that of Ferdinandus in the comedy Hymenaeus acted at about the same time. NOTE 2 Both of these works were acted at St. John’s College, so he was intimately familiar with the physical facilities at his disposal, and it is therefore hard to believe that he would write a play that could not have been performed with these resources. Speaking of Richardus Tertius, it is worth pointing out that the stage direction that introduces the coronation procession at the end of the second play contains the words let the singers sing etc., being placed on the toppe of some of the houses. The one play in which we know Fraunce to have acted, therefore, appears to have had more than two such structures. Our task, therefore, is to figure out how Victoria might have been staged as best we may on the basis of the internal evidence of the text.
4. The best such evidence is in Act III. According to the analysis of Blume (p. 31 — in the following quote I have substituted line-numbers from the present edition from those he cited),

This may not be quite right. In III.iv Narcissus may make his initial entrance from Fidelis’ house, or perhaps he may simply turn up on the street in front of that of Fortunius. But no matter. The salient point is that we need not imagine four houses lined up with Narcissus going down the row. Such an arrangement would further aggravate the difficulty mentioned above, caused by those honored spectators sitting at the back of the stage area. I should like to suggest an alternative arrangement: a stage with two houses on either side, rather than Nelson’s single flanking houses. Probably we should imagine those of Cornelius and Fidelis on one side, and those of Fortunius and Octavianus on the other. This conclusion is recommended by the ease and swiftness with which Narcissus passes from Fortunius’ house to Octavianus’ in the course of III.v. On the other hand, his crossing the stage for the beginning of III.iv, if such occurred, and his re-crossing of the stage to Cornelius’ house for the beginning of III.vi, which would in any event require only a few suggestions unless the actor chose to indulge in a bit of silent stage-business, occur between scenes. Surely if they were built small these houses could exist two to a side, and there may be reason for thinking they were. Blume (pp. 31f.) detected signs of dramaturgic clumsiness that “twice in this play Fraunce has to cope with the difficulty that any event must be transferred from inside a house into the street in order to make it visible to the audience.” The first is that Medusa is obliged to manufacture her love-charm in the open in II.iii, although earlier she has proclaimed it safer to do such things indoors (387). The second example of what he calls an “inverted indoor scene” is the dramatic encounter between Fidelis and Victoria in V.ii, which he believes would be more plausible as an indoor scene. If we can bring ourselves to ignore the objection that the outdoor performance of a furtive magical rite has an excellent precedent in Seneca’s Medea and agree that there is something faintly implausible about these scenes, we are then entitled to asks (as Blume did not) why Fraunce elected to give them outdoor settings, since plenty of academic plays of the time feature interior scenes. The answer, I submit, may be that a “house” constructed so as to facilitate an interior scene would have had to be larger than an ordinary one, and that the need to cram two such structures on either side of the stage precluded the use of such a building. I return now to Ruggle’s Ignoramus. If we postulate a similar arrangement, with the houses of Torcol and Theodorus on one side, and that of Cupes on the other, then Cupes and Rosabella leave Torcol’s house, cross the stage to Cupes’, and then re-cross to Theodorus.’ Cupes house, standing alone on its side of the stage, is large enough to accommodate an interior scene.
5. This understanding of Victoria’s physical arrangements leaves outstanding the tomb-containing monument, a feature that must be sufficiently large that the actor playing Onophrius can enter it. This structure appears to have been located close enough to Cornelius’ house that Onophrius, who has been lurking to catch sight of Victoria, can quickly hide there at the end of II.i and from there, in the following scene, spy on and overhear Fidelis and Narcissus as they too appear before Cornelius’ house. This structure figures again in the tomb-robbing scene, III.viii, and the previous exchange between Onophrius and Pegasus, III.vii, is presumably played in its vicinity. The tomb presents two difficulties: 1.) its presence on the stage during the three Acts in which it is not used might become a nuisance, and 2.) having three structures crammed to one side of the stage would obviously be problematic. This feature has no equivalent in Il Fidele and is Fraunce’s own invention, and surely he would not have introduced this structure if he were not confident that these problems were soluble, even if I am not certain what the solution is. Maybe it was only a coffin-shaped object surrounded by a low wall or railing, which would not do much to obstruct the audience’s view. And perhaps it was placed on stage only during the Acts in which it figured (the stage-direction at 332, Intrat Onophrius, et latens auscultat, might mean that Onophrius ducks into the doorway of Fidelis’ house, so does not establish that the tomb is present in Act I, and there is no mention of it in Acts IV and V). It may be added that at least one other academic comedy, the anonymous Laelia (performed at Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1595) requires four “houses” in a single Act: see the analysis of use of stage-buildings in my Introduction to that play.
6. One final detail is that, unlike the three others, Cornelius’ house comes equipped with a window, through which Victoria jumps to avoid the unwelcome Fidelis (176), and through which she later hands him a letter (415). It is a small point, but one perhaps worth making, that in summarizing the play’s action Blume (p. 39) erroneously wrote “Suddenly, from a window above, Victoria laments over the insensibility of Fortunius…” Surely, for Victoria to jump in it and hand out a letter, the window must be on the ground floor. This is the same kind of mistake I have pointed out that G. C. Moore Smith  made in misinterpreting the staging of Robert Ward’s Fucus Histriomastix II.5 (see my note ad loc.): where is there any evidence that these stage “houses” were more than a single storey high? It is true that in Laelia (1815) Clemens says to Flaminius Faciam ad te ut descendat quia videre expetis [“I’ll make her come downstairs to you, since you wish to see her”], but, according to my understanding of what a “house” was, we need not think that the second storey of Clemens’ house was necessarily visible to the audience. In some academic plays, it might be added, (for example, in the coronation scene from Thomas Legge’s 1579 trilogy Richardus Tertius, in which a stage direction requires actors to stand on the roof of a “house,” which would presumably not be necessary if two-storey structures were available.
7. The one possible artistic representation of an academic “theater,” at the bottom of the frontispiece of William Alabaster’s tragedy Roxana (to see it click here) only shows the central acting area, evidently with spectators seated at the back of the stage, and so offers no evidence for “houses.” One possibility we must consider is that only two actual structures were used, with temporary inscriptions posted to indicated to the audience what each one was intended to represent at given points of the play. That such a system was occasionally used in academic drama is undeniable. At the beginning of the anonymous comedy Risus Anglicanus preserved in Folger Library m. J.a.1, NOTE 3 a list of the fictitious places represented by the “houses” for that play is introduced by the heading Inscriptiones in Scaena. And it is worth noting that the stage directions of that play call for three fictitious locales in Act II: the Vatican, the Forum Romanum, and the Forum Exoticum. So it cannot be denied that such a use of inscriptiones was known to academic drama; it would have been especially useful for productions in smaller collegiate dining halls, or when it was desirable to minimize production costs. But the evidence for the use of such inscriptiones scarcely seems sufficient to support the conclusion that such was the only or even the standard solution for producing plays whose scripts required more than two fictitious locales within single Acts. And such a conclusion seems positively contradicted by the use of the word extruendae in connection with Victoria’s structures, for this word implies Fraunce’s expectation that each of these fictitious locales was going to be represented by an individually constructed “house.” So, as an alternative to the use of inscriptiones, we might conjecture that a “house” was not a free-standing three-dimensional structure, but rather a false front of the kind favored by Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, set at about a forty-five degree angle from the plane of the stage. This would serve three purposes: a.) maximize visibility to spectators seated both in front of and behind the stage; b.) create adequate space for the presence of two “houses” side-by-side when the play required it; c.) create triangular spaces between the facades of the “houses” and the walls of the dining hall which could serve as tiring rooms. There are plays in which a character figures in an interior scene and then exits by withdrawing further into a “house” (I have discussed this phenomenon in connection with Ruggle’s Ignoramus.) Such an arrangement would bring the actor comfortably into the tiring room, but I fail to understand how such an exit could be arranged if the “house” were a free-standing structure.

NOTE 1 Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464 - 1720 (Cambridge, 1994). For archival material see the same author’s Cambridge (Records of Early English Drama series, Toronto, 1989), particularly II.714 - 22. For these temporary stage buildings erected in collegiate dining halls, see also. Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500 - 1700 (Princeton, 1988) 74-76.

NOTE 2 Nelson, op. cit. 1989 II.944f.

NOTE 3 Photographically reproducted in Risus Anglicanus, John Hacket, Loiola, Prepared with an Introduction by Malcom M. Brennan (Renaissance Latin Drama in England series 2:6, Hildesheim, 1988).