The Comical Scene: Perspective and Civility on the Renaissance Stage

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A B S T R A C T Neo-Aristotelian unity is often represented as a set of rules in restraint of theatrical in-vention. In Serlios drawing of the comical scene, we can see the stage the rules imply, and so imagineunity, not just as a negation of diversity, but as a positive theatrical form, with its own logic, energy, andpolitics. This in turn suggests what is at stake when Ben Jonson refuses the Shakespearean fluidity ofthe English theater. / R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S 101. Winter 2008 2008 The Regents of the University of Cal-ifornia. ISSN 07346018, electronic ISSN 1533855X, pages 3256. All rights reserved. Direct requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2008.101.1.32.

PETER WOMACK

The Comical Scene:Perspective and Civilityon the Renaissance Stage

Reading the Picture

There is something unsettling about Sebastiano Serlios fa-mous drawing of the comical scene (fig. 1). At once crowded and empty,prosaic and fantastical, it lacks unambiguous indications of how it is sup-posed to be looked at, or even what exactly it is a picture of. On the onehand it is, as John Orrell has demonstrated, a kind of blueprint; togetherwith some accompanying diagrams, it contains the information needed tobuild the stage it depicts; its genre is the instruction manual.1 On the otherhand, its whimsical mixture of facades and its vertiginous recession to-ward the vanishing point, overlay that function with a dreamlike effect ofperceptual wrongness. So what we see is oxymoronic: this is a practicablehallucination.

One immediate source of the uncertainty is that the picture has a dou-bled referent, since it is a graphic representation of a stage representation ofa street. The scene (what we would today call the set) is itself a piece of per-spectival illusion: the houses are three-dimensional constructions made bystretching linen over wooden frames, but they are angled and scaled accord-ing to a rather complicated geometrical formula to give the impression ofgreater height and depth than the stage actually affords.2 This cunning sim-ulation of urban space is then simulated in its turn by the two-dimensionaldrawing in the book, which works by applying the rules of perspective allover again. It is a technical tour de force, leaving viewers literally unsure wherethey are.

The disorientation is compounded, for students of English theater, by adifficulty in placing the picture historically. It is from the second of SerliosFive Books of Architecture and is one of a set of three exemplary theatrical

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FIGURE 1. Comical scene, from Sebastiano Serlio, The first booke of architecture,made by Sebastian Serly, entreating of geometrie. Translated out of Italian intoDutch, and out of Dutch into English (London, 1611), fol. 25r.

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designs illustrating the scenic use of perspective, the others being the morearchitecturally magnificent tragical scene, and the sylvan satyrical scene.The first English edition of Serlios work, translated from a Dutch intermedi-ary, was published by Robert Peake, Sergeant Painter to James I, in 1611.3 Atjust this time, the visual culture of the Jacobean court was becoming Italian-ized under the growing influence of Inigo Jones, and the appearance ofthese images in London can be understood as part of that process.4 How-ever, they do not depict what was happening on English stages. There wereof course no perspective effectsand little scenery of any kindin the pro-fessional playhouses of the time: Shakespearean theater, in the year of TheTempest, looked nothing like this. And the visual innovations in court enter-tainment were different again. On New Years Day 1611, for example, inOberon, one of the masques Jones devised with Ben Jonson,

the whole palace opened, and the nation of fays were discovered . . . and within,afar off in perspective, the knights masquers sitting in their several sieges. At thefurther end of all, Oberon, in a chariot, which to a loud triumphant music began tomove forward, drawn by two white bears.5

Certainly there are connections. Joness mastery of perspective was basedon his study of various cinquecento classicists including Serlio; PrinceHenry, the star performer in Oberon, was also the dedicatee of the 1611translation. But this is not really the stage Serlio is thinking of. For onething, its register is visionary: it presents fairies and exotic creatures and en-chanted palaces, and produces phantasmagoric disproportions by placinghuman actors at the far end of a perspective vista. And for another, its vitalprinciple is transformationthe opening up of the palace, the spectacularapproach of the chariot. Perspective staging here arrives at the same time aschangeable scenerychangeable not merely in the sense that you see anumber of different scenes in the course of the evening, but also in thesense that watching the scenery change is a central part of the entertain-ment. This contrast identifies the Serlian comic scene as resolutely unmagi-cal and static. It represents a designedly normal city street, and its soliditymeans, both semiotically and practically, that it furnishes the single locationfor the whole of the play: whatever happens must happen here. This rigidspecification of place is at odds not only with the courtly poetics of transfor-mation but also with the fluidity of Shakespearean theater, where the actioncan be located or shifted by a word, and with the staging of Restoration andlater comedy, which used flats and painted cloths to move between boudoir,public room, and park. There are no phases of English theater in which thisdesign is truly at home.

To English eyes, then, the Serlian street has, besides its inherent strange-ness, the look of something unrealized; it seems an imaginary scene, as if

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from a toy theater or a model. But then it is just as a modela mechanical aidto seeing and thinkingthat it makes itself useful. What kind of theater is thisthe setting for? What are the principles that render it incompatible, as itseems to be, with the actual development of Elizabethan and Jacobeandrama? What can we discover about the English stage tradition from thiscompelling picture of what it is not?

Unity

Serlios picture has a very specific theoretical context. It was firstpublished in 1545that is, it is exactly contemporary with the first Italianhumanist exegeses of Aristotles Poetics: in the course of the 1540s, in lec-tures and commentaries, Giraldi Cintio, Francesco Robortello and otherssystematized the Poetics into an authoritative code for tragedy and comedy,famously including the doctrine that the action of a drama should be con-fined to a single day.6 In other words, the perspective set and the unities oftime and place are historical twins.7

By the early seventeenth century, the Unities, restated by successiveAristotelians such as Lodovico Castelvetro and Daniel Heinsius, had estab-lished themselves throughout humanist Europe as a simple piece of dra-matic common sense.8 At the same time the basic Serlian scenethe streetreceding in perspectivehad become the new standard frame for woodcutsillustrating Italian editions of both classical and modern comedies.9 TheEnglish reception of both innovations was of course more partial, but it wassimultaneous in the same way. The earliest recorded perspective scenery inEngland was shown in 1605, and during the following decade Ben Jonson,the dramatist most closely associated with Inigo Jones, wrote not only theCourt masques that defined the genre but also his major comedies, which alldisplay a masterly if slightly idiosyncratic unity of time and place, consciouslyrefusing the conventions of the theater where they were performed.10 SoSerlios appearance in 1611 again suggests a connection between the draw-ing and the doctrine.

They are linked not only by chronology but also by their belonging tothe same canons of learning, the same patronage networks, the same cul-ture. As Rudolf Wittkower demonstrated long ago, humanist architecturewas a philosophical and rhetorical system as well as a visual one: literatureformed part of an architects education.11 And conversely, architecture wascentral to the Roman legacy revered by poets and philologists: Ben Jonsonhimself was an attentive reader of Vitruvius.12 Physical and verbal structureswere being developed and judged by a common set of criteria.

In particular, humanist dramaturgy and Serlian scenery grew out of thesame paradoxical relationship with antiquity. The unities were attributed to

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Aristotle; but as has often been pointed out, all it actually says in the Poetics isthat whereas epic poems tell stories that extend over years, tragedy tries asfar as possible to keep within a single revolution of the sun, or only slightly toexceed it.13 A creative labor of interpretation was required to develop thatmodest empirical observation into an iron law of dramaturgy. Analogously,Serlio, like most humanist architectural writers, defers constantly to Vitru-vius, who is the source of the tripartite classification into comic, tragic, andsatyric, and also of the information that Attic tragedy employed a kind ofpictorial deception whereby buildings painted on a flat vertical surface ap-peared to advance and recede.14 But it is a very long way from that generalproposition to the idea of a three-dimensional trompe loeil set governed bysingle, fixed-point perspective. Serlio studied archaeology and clearly be-lieved that the Roman theater had an architectural frons scenae, a structurethat is physically incompatible with a unified perspective stage.15 Althoughthe three generic scenes appear as marginal notes to Vitruviusliterally soin at least one casethey are not reconstructions of his meaning; they areinventions.16

Both Aristotle and Vitruvius were subject to this creative misreading notdespite their prestige but because of it. Their canonical status was a reasonfor devoting any amount of time and energy to the recovery of their most ca-sual remarks; but then, precisely because the interpretation of the canon-ized texts was so painstaking and enthusiastic, it went decisively beyondthem. This logic makes the veneration of antiquity into a mechanism for in-novation; what links the unities and the Serlian stage is the paradox of a newidea with an ancient authorization.

The new idea is verisimilitude. Giorgio Vasari puts it very clearly in hislife of Baldassare Peruzzi. In about 1514, Bernardo Dovicio da Bibbienascomedy La Calandra was played before the Pope on a stage decorated byPeruzzi with houses so well made, that they appeared not feigned, but gen-uine, and the piazza not something depicted and small, but real and fullsized.17 This language, which probably describes a direct source for Serliosdrawing, is close to that of Castelvetro, for whom the events of a play

are to be narrated or presented on the stage as things that have happened, withnever a sign that they are the productions of the poets imagination. . . . [Thepoets] greatest praise is that he employs every means at his command to give fictionthe appearance of fact.18

The function of the unities of time and place, on this view, is to protectthe appearance of fact. To ask the spectators to re-imagine the stage as adifferent place halfway through the show, or to require them to supposethat a character they saw a moment ago has been absent for a week, isforcibly to remind them that they are watching the products of the poets


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imaginationjust as an error in the design of the perspective will remindthem that the grand piazza is in fact a row of mis-shapen Wendy houses.They know these truths, of course, but their pleasurewhich Castelvetro,in particular, insists is the proper end of the whole enterprisedepends onvigilantly maintaining the illusion.

And this depends, in turn, on establishing a single point of view. Per-spective in the theater, as in architecture more generally, generates a stationpoint as well as a vanishing point. If the scene is viewed from too near or toohigh or too low, the optical relationship breaks down. That is why Serlio sup-plies drawings for the auditorium as well as the stagethe position of thespectators is integral to his design. This integration distinguishes neoclassi-cal theater from, say, a simple booth setup, or from the pageant staging ofmedieval sacred drama. In those cases, the actor performs in open space,and the spectators gather round him to hear what he has to say and see whathe has to show. The perspective stage cannot permit such informality; it putsthe spectators in a pre-arranged and consistent position. There is only oneway to see this street.

Once again analogously, the unities work to ensure that there is only oneway to see the persons of the drama. Because everything happens in one city,the characters stay in the same community and under the same jurisdiction:nobody can be seen in more than one social situation. Because everything iscompleted in one day, no one can age, or form habits, or experience histori-cal difference. Because the action runs from morning in the first act tonightfall in the fifth, the characters never sleep: they are continuously con-scious, continuously visible, held in their positions by the architecture of theplot.19 The splittages in the dramatic universe that are typical of medievaltheater are systematically proscribed: the unity of place makes it impossibleto stage both the city and the wilderness; the separation of genres rules outthe juxtaposition of seriousness and clowning; the insistence on naturalnessmeans that there can be no meeting of sacred and profane. Relentlessly andingeniously, this is the drama of a unitary world, a fixed perspective.

Complication

But the trouble with that way of putting it is that it makes dra-matic classicism appear merely as that which says no to the open stage, lim-iting its freedoms, cramping its mobility, impoverishing its imaginativerichness. It is as if the medieval tradition consisted of nothing but sponta-neous practices, and Renaissance humanism of nothing but codified regu-lations.20 This is a comfortable English myth, and, as we have alreadyacknowledged in passing, it is not true. The unities were fathered on Aristotle,but he was not their origin: rather, they reflected the activities of learned


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amateurs at ducal courts around cinquecento Italy, staging first the surviv-ing comedies of classical Rome, and then, quite soon, their own free imita-tions. The makers of the unitary stage, in other words, were Terence, Plautus,Machiavelli, Ariosto, Aretino; and they made it not by prohibiting some-thing but by producing something.21 It seemed obvious to sixteenth-centuryItalian readers that Aristotle was talking about single-day, single-locationplays, because those were the plays they themselves were doing.

If we think about the unity of Renaissance commedia erudita from thispractical point of view, we notice at once that one of its important artisticcategories is complication.22 Certainly the play is expected to end in a res-olution of inclusive simplicity, but what makes the resolution admirable isthe amount of confusion it has to resolve. A playwrights excellence isseen in the extent to which his plot can accumulate frustrations and mis-understandings until the situation seems inextricable, and then hit on asingle coupa device, a revelationthat surprisingly but naturally sorts itout. Dnouement depends for its power to delight on the intricacy withwhich everything was nou.

This injunction to complicate does not override the principle of unity,but sets it up as one pole of a structural opposition. The aim is first to bemaximally disintegral (none of the lovers can obtain satisfaction, neighborsare refusing to talk to one another, precious objects are lost, identities aremuddled to the point of madness: everything is in a mess) and then to bemaximally centripetal (all the elements of the plot are brought into intelligi-ble relations with one another, all the pieces of the puzzle are assembled inthis very street, on this very afternoon: now everything makes sense). In dra-matic practice, then, unity is not just a formal regulation, like the stipulationthat a play should have five acts. On the contrary, it is thematized as the ob-ject of a frantic and seemingly hopeless quest. If only there were a unitaryworld, a fixed perspective!most of the characters would like nothing bet-ter, but uncontrollable diversity keeps breaking in and confounding them,until finally, with relief, they all come to see things in the same way and theshow can end. In short, it is not that unity is a given characteristic of thedrama; it is rather that arriving at unity is what the play is about.

This dialectic of unity and diversity is a generator of invention, manifest-ing itself all over the drama. It bears for example on the strict and literal uni-ties of place and time. We see only one town, but often at least one crucialcharacter is a stranger, and the plot turns on the fact that he, or she, comesfrom, or is going to, or ought to be, somewhere else.23 The place we see hasmeaning only through its charged relationship with other places that wedont see. In the same way, it is not uncommon for the dramatic situation tohave been produced, and to be resolved, by something that happened whenthe protagonists were babies or some object that went missing years ago.24


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In that case, the twelve hours of the drama are not an arbitrary block of time;they are the unique day when the dispersed events of a lifetime all becomepresent. The point of the stages oneness, in other words, is that here the af-fairs of disparate times and places are brought together and made one. Theunities of time and place are not autonomous values; they work because theyare in dialogue with multiplicity.

The same dialectic shapes the relationships between characters. Themost obvious illustration of this is the identical-twins plot.25 This recurs inRenaissance comedy to an extent that is inexplicable from a naturalisticpoint of view, and the reason is the efficiency with which it generates bothconfusion and resolution. On the one hand, the presence of two identicalpersons is a sort of machine for dislocating the unity of the stage. Betweenthem, they form a character who emerges from houses he never entered, hasno memory of what he did ten minutes ago, fails to recognize his own wife,and so on. He is an epicenter of discontinuity: because of him, it starts tolook as if the world of the play is just the kind of jumble of incompatibleviewpoints that the rules of dramatic unity are designed to correct. His inter-locutors struggle to construct a narrative to cover all his behavior and alwaysend up resorting to theories of sorcery or alienationin other words, theyrevert to a multilayered universe, abandoning the single-point perspectivethat shapes the stage they are on. But on the other hand, once the secret isrevealed, the twins are exactly what negate all this disruption. It is not onlythat they supply an explanation that restores the consistency of the dramaticworld, as apparent impossibilities dwindle into understandable mistakes. It isalso that they have the effect of transforming disjunction into relatedness.The freakish stranger becomes a pair of reunited siblings; the altercationturns into a wedding; the society of the stage, which had seemed so atom-ized, is redefined as an extended family. So in a human as well as a represen-tational and structural sense, what had looked chaotically multiple is revealedto be one thing.26

For the sake of clarity, I have been presenting the opposition diachroni-cally: the muddle first, the unifying claircissement afterwards. But of course itdoesnt simply work like that. Many of these plays begin with a comprehen-sive exposition, so that the knowledge that confers coherence on the appar-ent confusion, and which is not vouchsafed to the dramatis personae untilthe end, is in the possession of the audience all along. For the spectators,then, diversity and unity are not successive but superimposed: we see therandom contingencies the characters think they are encountering, but atthe same time we see, through those appearances, the real pattern under-neath.

Strikingly, the Serlian scene is a diagram of just this relationship. In a way,the street we see is extremely, even excessively, miscellaneous. Nine buildings


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are crammed into the narrow compass of the prospect, their shapes, sizes,and functions quite unrelated one to another. But the impression is not justhiggledy-piggledy, because it is equally obvious that the underlying design isfirmly symmetrical: everything is based on an isosceles triangle whose baseis the front of the stage, and whose apex is on the perpendicular line thatruns dead center, from the keystone of the little arch beneath the prosce-nium steps up to the crack between the double doors of the church. The ef-fect of the triangle is to make the miscellaneity look superficial: theasymmetrical facades are really only top dressing to distract the eye fromthe essential mathematical severity. Just like the plays for which this stage isdesigned, the picture sets up a formal tension between unity and hetero-geneity, which offers not only the pleasure of seeing both principles simul-taneously in the same object but also the reassurance that what is fundamentalis unity.

The City

Clearly, then, Serlios set is not realistic: it is illusionistic, un-doubtedly, but it is not designed to create the impression that we are look-ing at an actual street. Its symmetry and its miscellaneity both in theirdifferent ways advertise its artifice; and both, as we have seen, serve anequally artificial dramaturgy, whose totalizing images of order and chaoshave nothing to do with the observation of everyday life. This is not thekind of drawing that starts from an al fresco sketch.

This perception is substantiated in another way by the reminder, in theaccompanying text, that the choice of buildings is generic. The comic scene,according to Serlio, must of necessity include an inn, a church, a brothel,and a private house or two. In other words the buildings locate some of thetypical motifs of comedy: private property, sex, religion, the reception ofstrangers. So what has determined the scene, apart from purely optical con-siderations, is not any referential original, but the requirements of thegenre. This is neither a picture of a particular place nor the set for a particu-lar play, but the universal space of comedy as such.

In other words, the design is a kind of generalization, and this has twofurther consequences for its handling of place. First, the street stands, in aloosely metonymic way, for the city as a whole. That is why it is permissiblefor the brothel to be implausibly sandwiched between a church and a re-spectable bourgeois residence. Cities really are made up of the diverse func-tions these buildings denote, so a street in which they all stand side by sidetruthfully represents the city, even if it fails to resemble any actually existingstreet. But then, second, the city itself is a generalization too. As Plautus him-self puts it, in a joke copied more than once in the Renaissance,


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haec urbs Epidamnus est dum haec agitur fabula:quando alia agetur aliud fiet oppidum

This city is Epidamnus while this story is being acted: when another one is acted itwill become another town.27

The place shown in the drawing is said to be Athens or Florence as lightly asan actor puts on a costume: it is easily changed. What it more permanentlyencodes is whatever it is that Athens and Florence have in common: the ideaof a cityurban-ness, or perhaps more ambitiously, urbanity, civilization.

But then what is it that fits these two generalizations together? Why is theuniversal comic space also the universal city? For Serlio, as we have seen, thesimple answer is that Vitruvius says it is. But we have also seen that this is onlyone piece of a larger cultural configuration. Most surviving Roman come-dies do indeed have urban settings, but not all: it is, once again, Renaissanceinterpretation that makes the empirical preponderance into an orthodoxy.28

We can see this, for instance, by returning to Ben Jonson. All his great comicdemonstrations of unity in time and place are also minutely urban in charac-ter, whereas Shakespearean comedy not only ignores the unities but is also,with one or two exceptions, an anthology of strategies for getting the plotout of the city and into somewhere else. The city location is not adventitious;it is an integral part of the neoclassical comic package.

The nature of the connection is interestingly suggested by Castelvetro.The dramatis personae of tragedy, he observes, are heroic and extreme intheir actions:

Comic agents, on the other hand, are faint hearted. They are in the habit of obeyingthe magistrates, of conforming to the laws, of submitting to injuries and losses, and ofseeking redress for the loss of honour or possessions from the authorities and theirordinances. They never take matters in their own hands, nor resort to the slaying ofstrangers, kinsmen or themselves for the reasons that such measures are resorted toby kings. Being poor and of low condition, they need not fall from a former felicitybefore they can rise to a happy state, for their happiness is far from total and can beaugmented by a moderate stroke of good fortune, such as a desired marriage.29

Castelvetro is here making sense of Aristotles conception of comedy aslower than tragedy, dealing with citizens rather than kings, and with com-monplace mishaps and satisfactions rather than heroic crimes and virtues.When these relatively ignoble people are wronged they dont go to war, theygo to the police (a distinction that relates, in turn, to the rule that comedyshould not contain any deaths). In other words, comedy is imagined here asa set of possibilities bounded by the institutions of civil life. Vice is going tothe brothel, happiness is marrying well, misery is being sent to jail, and soon. The vicissitudes of the plot do not lead to encounters with the natural,the infinite, or the absolute, but remain well within human society.


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This principle joins up with another normative feature of comedy: itsprogrammatic opposition to supernatural causation. A pseudo-Ciceroniantag that makes comedy imitationem vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imaginem ver-itatis (imitation of life, mirror of custom, image of truth) was widely invokedto contrast it with dramatic forms that allowed gods and devils and miraclesto have an effect upon the action.30 The contrast is seen not only in criticalreflections but even more insistently in the comedies themselves: from Man-dragola to The Alchemist and beyond, a powerful motif of Renaissance comedyis the apparently magical event whose real explanation is basely naturalistic.That these are human transactions, caused and dealt with by people stand-ing on the same ground as ourselves, is not merely an underlying rule but anexplicit theme.

The Serlian street is the visible form of this firmly bounded dramaticworld. The perspective never opens on infinite distance: in every version ofthis scene, there is a church or an arch or a bend in the road to ensure thatthe architecture meets in the middle, and nothing can be seen that is notman-made. This is what comic space looks likenot only in the specificsense that the church for the wedding, the brothel for the misdemeanor, themagistrates house for the judgment, are physically there and can be en-tered, but also that these assorted buildings are artfully grouped together sothat between them they form a plenitude, a complete scene that systemati-cally excludes solitude, divinity, natural growth, the weatherin short, thatrecognizes only what is social. The staged city announces that the properstudy of mankind is man.

Houses

We have been discussing Serlios picture as a novelty, and that iscertainly how perspective sets seem to have struck beholders in the earliersixteenth century. But in at least one way it is profoundly traditional: it con-ceives of the stage for drama as an open space surrounded by houses.

As is well known, one of the basic units of medieval theatrical syntax wasthe mansion: the built structure where a person in the play was located.Within the performance, his mansion was his base: he presented himself infront of it, ventured out from it into neutral space to interact with other per-sons, and went back to it when not engaged in the action. A house in thissense does not necessarily signify a house in the story of the play; rather, it isa technical term for a part of the stage. Thus one account of English aca-demic drama, at Oxford in 1566, praises comoedis ac personatis magnifica pala-tia aedesque apparatissimae (magnificent palaces and well appointed housesfor the comedians and masked persons)the mansions are understood tobelong not to the characters, but to the actors.31 With countless variations,


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this system seems to have been readable to audiences across Europe wellinto the Renaissance, so that every language of the theatre included a termaedes, casa, mansionto denote this necessary element.32

One of the variations, clearly, was the Elizabethan stage, which consistedessentially of an open platform in front of a permanent edifice which actorscalled the tiring house and which De Witt, to whom it was an unfamiliarsight, labelled mimorum aedes, the actors house. Visually and in other ways,the effect is very different from that of the Italian scene, but the two kinds ofacting space do share an insistent externality. For Serlio, houses are the lim-its of the acting area: everything happens in the street.33 At the Swan or theGlobe, the house is covered and the stage is literally open to the sky; al-though the stage is capable of representing exterior and interior locationsindifferently, the normal term for offstage is within. This shared struc-ture implies a striking distinction between the Renaissance stage and mod-ern realism. In the latter, the natural dramatic location is a room: that is thealias that best covers the enclosed character of the actual theatrical space, andthe offstage world is a kind of outside, threatening or inviting. The Renais-sance stage, on the other hand, is outside. When you exit you go in.

In comedy particularly, the most obvious referent of this outside/insidebinarism is sexual. The young man is out in the street, and the object of hisdesire is inside one of the houses, either because it is her house and shedoesnt want him, or because it is the house of a blocking father or husband.The plays problem is thus physically focused on the door: the hero mustfind a way of getting himself in through it, or of getting the girl out throughit.34 And if he succeeds, the door is theatrically highlighted in another sense,as the audience are invited to imagine what the young couple are doing onthe far side of it.35 The structure underlying these energies and jokes is theopposition between the houses as separate and private and the street as com-mon and public. Several discrete private interests, each assigned to its ownexit, its own screened-off interior, debouch into the shared space of thestreet, where they collide, are negotiated through discussion or trickery, andultimately are resolved. It is, as we have seen in other ways, a highly socialconception of drama; the action takes place not in private space, but in thecommunal space where privacies encounter one another. The most extremeinstance of the principle is in those Roman comedies, such as TerencesAndria and Plautuss Casina, where the eponymous heroine never appears atall: she is so completely the object of contest and negotiation between theother characters that there is nothing for her to do. She is a wholly privateand domestic being, and therefore invisible however important she is.

In the end this logic is metatheatrical. The open place where privatematters are expressed publicly, and conflicting interests argued out in fullview of everybody, is essentially the theatre itself. By arranging them into a


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street, Serlio gives his houses a sort of fictional alibi, but in practice theyare still those of the pre-illusionistic stagenot dwellings, but dramatic func-tions.36 It is not so much that the stage represents a street, but rather that thestreet serves as a metaphor for the stage.

The Material World

So the walls that circumscribe the acting area are a double bar-rier: by enclosing the actors in a man-made universe, they close off the nat-ural world; and by keeping them in the street, they close off the privateworld. Shut away behind the facades there are domestic interiors, and, atthe same time, shut away behind the houses there is open country. Apartfrom anything else, this double closure is a natural corollary of the metathe-atrical character of the scene. After all, the two things that everybody knowsabout the stage of a theater are, first, that it is an artificial construction, and,second, that it is there to be looked at by hundreds of peopleso to dress itup as a social space that excludes the natural and the private is in a senseto do no more than make it look like what it is. However, if the set is a self-reflexive proposition of this kind, it states more than the obvious.

For what the two excluded dimensions have in common, different asthey are in scale, is that between them they constitute material life. In there,in the rooms we almost glimpse through teasingly practicable doors and win-dows, meals are cooked and eaten, clothes are put on and taken off, loversembrace, babies are born. And out there, in the world beyond, lie the re-moter determinants of the action: the crowd where the twins were separated,the death that produced the contested legacy, the war in which the mer-chant lost his wealth. The offstage world is full of concrete things and inci-dents; the stage is the place where they are discussed.

In other words, not for the first time, we can see that the theatrical imag-ination here is profoundly, not just opportunistically, Aristotelian: it worksthrough the idea that a tragedy or comedy essentially consists of imitation.The real, substantial thing is elsewhere, and what the audience see in frontof them is a depiction of it in words and gestures. Embracing the unities,then, means that drama accepts its own secondariness. This stage followsafter the material world, as it were: it agrees to be the sphere not of primaryaction, but of representation and reflection.

For David Riggs, in a brilliant Foucauldian essay, what this means is thatthe neoclassical stage is essentially a mentalistic space.37 He finds its ultimatetheoretical source in the proposition that reality becomes knowable onlywhen the observer has a proper sense of the distance between himself andthe thing observed (179). This epistemological assumption, he argues, iscommon to many fields of Renaissance enquiry: in visual terms, it takes the


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form of perspective painting and architecture; in science, it governs the es-tablishment of consistent conventions of measurement; in the theater(which incidentally makes use of both of the other instances), it producesthe artificially devised moment of crisis whereby the dramatist pulls eventsout of their inherent linearity and arranges them in an order that shouldmirror the economy of his mind as he recasts experience into art (165). Inother words, the unity of the plays form reflects the unity of the subject towhich its world is intelligible; the separation from material things that isguaranteed by the walls, and by the rules, is the separation of the mind fromits objects, through which alone the latter can be known.

But I would want to add to this productive idea that the stage is not onlyan epistemic structure; it is also, at the same time, a social one. For example:to confine the action to the street is to impose on the actors the code ofmanners appropriate to interactions with neighbors and strangers in publicspace. This imposition is dramatized comically whenever a character is in thegrip of an impulse incompatible with the code: overcome with rage, or lust,or jealousy, he struggles to conceal his true state of mind and body and totranslate the animal cries he would naturally utter into the language of re-spectable society. From a modern naturalistic point of view, this discursiveregime looks like another dramatic disability, closing off all depth of feeling,and arbitrarily constraining the expressive possibilities of the play. But mostof these shows were presented to the courts and humanist societies of a self-consciously civilized elite; it is not just a coincidence that the producer of thespectacular first production of La Calandra was Baldassare Castiglione.38 In aperforming context like that, expressive restraint is part of the point: thecomedy is an exercise in civility, its dialogue an element in which passionsand needs are purified of their immediate grossness and violence. Thebounded urban scene here connotes a norm of rational, or at any rate ratio-nalized, interaction, whose distance from the material world is a measure ofits refinement.

Cities themselves, after all, were aspiring to the same heights of artifice.In just these decades in Italy, urban space was being transformed by con-scious design, very frequently on the drawing boards of artists and architectsand, less often but nevertheless substantially, in the real world.39 The princi-ples of symmetry, perspective, and intelligibility that were shaping the stagewere also informing the layout of avenues, vistas, piazzas. In Venice in the1520s and 30s, for example, the unifying redesign of the buildings aroundthe Doges Palace was accompanied by orders to remove beggars and street-tradersas the central urban space became more consciously representa-tional, it sought to increase its distance from the messiness of material life.40

Underlying this logic of separation is a radical division of labor. The city weare looking at is not, like the modern city, a place of industrial production;


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rather it is a center for the exchange, consumption, and administration ofthe surpluses from agriculture and trade. Food grown elsewhere is sold here;wealth produced elsewhere is transferred here; estates that lie elsewhere ap-pear here in the form of their owners social status. The city, like the stage, isnot the site of material production but the place where it is represented. Be-tween these artfully constructed walls, great expanses of space and time canbe concentrated into a single prospect, a single decisive conversation.

Not Crossing the Sea

In England, the most forceful exponent of humanist drama wasBen Jonson. The immense national presence of Shakespeare can still havethe effect of making Jonson seem eccentric, but if the center is the TeatroOlimpico rather than the Globe, the relationship looks different. He ap-pears not as a dissenting pedant but as the European theaters English trans-lator, rewriting its principles for the London stage. One such translation isintroduced by the two watching critics in Every Man Out Of His Humour:

MITIS: Whats his scene?CORDATUS: Marry, insula fortunata, sir.MITIS: Oh, the fortunate island? Mass, he has bound himself to a strict lawthere.CORDATUS: Why so?MITIS: He cannot lightly alter the scene, without crossing the seas.CORDATUS: He needs not, having a whole island to run through, I think.MITIS: No? How comes it then that in some one play, we see so many seas,countries, and kingdoms passed over with such admirable dexterity?CORDATUS: Oh, that but shows how well the authors can travail in theirvocation, and outrun the apprehension of their auditory.41

This is at first sight a puzzling compromise. The friends agree that the play-wright may run through a whole island. So already this is not the comicstage of Castelvetro and Serlio; they do not allow the location to move evenas far as the next street. There is no compelling reason why they should: ineffect, as we have seen, their scene is a fictionalized version of the actingarea itself, and the logic that assembles everything there for its crisis is inte-gral to the dramatic structure as a whole, so that the action is localized notby a strict law but by a formal inevitability. Once Jonson has abandonedthis conception, one could argue that there is nothing to stop him embrac-ing the topographical free-for-all of the theater around him. But he refusesto go native in that way. Instead, he adopts an alternative law, less strict, butbuttressed with sarcasms at the expense of playwrights who fail to observe it:that the action of the play must not cross the sea.


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It is not a casual opinion. Jonsons best-known stage manifesto reassuredthe audience that he would not subject them to a play in which a Choruswafts you oer the seas, and decades later one of his admirers recalled thathis stage never showed two parts oth world, disjoind by seas, so that noprince was found / To swim a whole scene out, then oth stage drownd.42

Both these declarations appeared alongside other and more familiar neo-classical prohibitions: evidently the principle was intended to have juridicalweight. And in Jonsons practice, too, it has an almost polemical insistence.Venice, for example, which in Shakespeare is connected to the ocean by An-tonios ventures or Othellos voyage, appears in Volpone as a self-containedcity with canals: there are only a few brief allusions to sea travel, and eventhose are discredited by association with the gullible Sir Politick Would-Be.43

A similar mockery shapes the more thematic construction of the sea in theLondon comedy Eastward Ho! where maritime adventure is a fantasy encour-aged by con-men and entertained by debtors and drunks.44 To cross the sea,it seems, is to enter a zone of unregulated illusion that drama excludes in or-der to safeguard its truth claims. What is the logic of this English equivalentfor the unity of place?

For Jonson, the main point of the unities is not so much verisimilitude asproportion. As he writes in Discoveries, paraphrasing Heinsius:

In every action it behoves the poet to know which is his utmost bound, how far withfitness, and a necessary proportion, he may produce, and determine it. . . . For, as abody without proportion cannot be goodly, no more can the action, either thecomedy, or tragedy, without his fit bounds.45

Boundedness is the condition of all proportion and fitness; nothing can begood without its proper limits. It is a principle that goes beyond poetics,informing for example these comedies preoccupation with the idea of hu-mor. Asper, the authorial mouthpiece of Every Man Out, defines humor aswhatsoeer hath fluxure and humidity, / As wanting power to contain it-self, and explains that the medical humors (choler, melancholy, and so on)are so called By reason that they flow continually / In some one part, andare not continent (Grex, ll. 96101). The follies we are about to see,then, are types of incontinence, ugly and absurd because of their lack ofany limiting principle. A comedy that wandered whimsically from countryto country would be complicit with the humors it displayed. Rather, itshould emulate the wise men who rule their lives by knowledge, and canbecalm / All sea of humour with the marble trident / Of their strong spir-its (The Poetaster, 4.6.7476). Although his plays were not written for a Ser-lian stage, Jonson reproduces its boundedness at the level of theirconstruction through his self-imposed limitations of place and time.46 Theclassical architecture of the dramatic form, with its firm symmetries and


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commanding point of view, stands in for the perspective scene. It is true thatthis formal restraint cuts across the fierce career of the plot: in the later actsof the great comedies, it seems that the characters have to move faster andfaster in order to squeeze all the logical consequences of their situation inbefore the deadline. But that conflict does not compromise the principle ofboundedness: on the contrary, it dramatizes it, making it into somethingthat is not simply given, but actively performed, against the odds, in thenick of time. It is the high-pressure conflict between controlling frameworkand proliferating incident that generates both the energy and the meaningof the show.

It is easy to be specific about what Jonson is rejecting because, of course,a Chorus really does waft you oer the seas in Henry V, first performed by thesame company, and in the same year, as Every Man Out:

Suppose that you have seenThe well-appointed King at Hampton pierEmbark his royalty, and his brave fleetWith silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning.Play with your fancies, and in them beholdUpon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing;Hear the shrill whistle, which doth order giveTo sounds confused; behold the threaden sails,Borne with thinvisible and creeping wind,Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea,Breasting the lofty surge. O do but thinkYou stand upon the rivage and beholdA city on thinconstant billows dancing,For so appears this fleet majestical,Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow!Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy,And leave your England.47

This theatrical language is so completely opposed to that of the humaniststage as to provide a detailed gloss on Jonsons reluctance to cross the sea.Most obviously, it negates the idea of a single, fixed point of view. We are inthe crowd at the embarkation, then on the deck looking up at the climbingboys and the sails, then tracking the hulls through the water, then on theshore contemplating the entire fleetthe speech describes the movementof many ships from a point of view that is itself similarly multiple and mo-bile. Not only that, but it freely transgresses the boundary between thoughtand the material world. The vivid composition of the scene is punctuated byacknowledgments that it is all in the mindplay with your fancies, do butthinkand then the extraordinary conceit Grapple your minds to ster-nage of this navy makes the mental connection into an abrasively physical


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one, as the spectators follow the story by throwing grappling hooksaboard the ships and being towed through the imaginary water like barges.The idea that reality becomes knowable only when the observer has aproper sense of the distance between himself and the thing observed isnegated in detail: to know this reality, the wafting chorus insists, the mindmust forego its detachment and get in among things.

As we would expect, this disintegration of perspective also destabilizesthe image of the city. The street of humanist comedy is a solid, enclosingframe within which the whole of the action coheres: it represents civil lifeas such. The city on thinconstant billows dancing subverts that closurein every way. So far from demarcating a purely social space, it advertises byits movement a perilous encounter between human arrangement and nat-ural force. So far from establishing a consistent reality against which illu-sions can be plotted, it is explicitly phantasmagoric, not what is but whatappears. And whereas the comic scene is metonymic, reducing the city to asingle intelligible vista, this is hyperbolic, magnifying the object so as to de-feat comprehension.

Hyperbole, in fact, is the Choruss defining rhetorical figure. Jonson sar-donically supposes that playwrights transport their scene across the sea evenwhen their plots dont require it, in order to show how well they can outrunthe apprehension of their auditory. Accidentally or not, the phrase is anacute description of what is happening here. The play doesnt need this voy-age; the conventions of chronicle drama would allow Shakespeare to switchthe action from England to France without so much as mentioning the jour-ney; the evocation of its sights and sounds is strictly gratuitous. Crossing thesea is not (as Jonson implies it ought to be) a reluctant concession to theneeds of the story, but a fully intentional project of outrunning the appre-hension of the auditory, inviting them to see what the theater cannot showthem and to follow where it cannot take them. That the representation fallsshort is the point, because it intimates an object too exalted or too vast torealize. Just as the unities themselves are not arbitrary restrictions but thetraces of an actual theatrical practice, so here, conversely, the refusal ofboundedness is not casually the breaking of a rule, but coherently the con-struction of a different model of drama.

The model has two crucial components, the first of which is popular in-volvement. The immediate source of the Choruss swashbuckling refusal ofunity is the social and spatial miscellaneity of the audience in the playhouse;his point of view is metaphorically multiple because theirs is literally so; thesea in his story is made out of the sea of faces he tells it to.48 Hence his noteof urgent courtesy: for its grandeur, its suggestion of unlimited scope, theshow explicitly needs what the crowd brings to it. And hence, again, Jonsonshostility. For him, the Chorus expresses a shameful dependence on vulgar


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credulitythe unboundedness of the spectacle reflects that of the multi-tude, who love nothing that is right and proper.49 It also happens in Jonso-nian comedy, after all, that we are hyperbolically invited to transform anunimpressive reality by the power of imagination. However, the invitationcomes not from an authorial representative, but from seducers and mono-maniacsVolpone, Subtle, Mammon. The audience are not supposed to en-ter the fantasy, but to observe the fantasizing from that carefully maintaineddistance that allows the observer to see things as they are. In that sense, Jon-sons model of theater is not simply the opposite of the Choruss, but activelya critique of it.

But besides being populist, the Choruss model is also theophanicthatis, it proposes a stage on which the visible and finite objects are supposed notto form a comprehensible whole in their own right, but to mediate an invisi-ble and infinite truth. The Serlian comic scene, as we saw, secures its internalcompleteness by ruling out every nonhuman determinant; in an opposingapplication of the same logic, theophanic theater advertises its own incom-pleteness in order to invoke the divine. The secular world fails to join up,and the breaks in its continuity are the portals of the sacred. In Shakespeare,the sea is a recurrent sign of this incompleteness. Thus, both The Comedy ofErrors and Twelfth Night come from the humanist line of twins comedies Iglanced at earlier, but both transform it by giving their recognition scenesthe force of a numinous revelation; and in both, this daring shift of dramaticlevel, from classical comedy to miracle play, is made possible partly by thevividness of the sea in the plot and the imagery. Not that the sea itself func-tions as the god, but that it re-admits all the dimensions the civic stage estab-lished itself by excluding: nature, the weather, solitude, infinity, inhumanpower.

If we take this hypothesis back into the reading of the Henry V Chorus,we can immediately identify the god that is being invoked. The reason theinconstant billows are in no danger of degenerating into a Jonsonian specta-cle of incontinence is that the fleet majestical is holding due course acrossthem, giving sovereign order to their confusion. The object that the sea-crossing so elaborately exalts is the monarch: the space is neither secular nordevotional, but is a theater of sacred kingship. It is here that the politics ofJonsons critique become visible. Shakespeares idiom is popular and royalistin the same breath, inviting the crowd to participate in the mystique of thecrown. The participation is quasi-religious: whereas Jonson seeks to elicit thevirtues of the notional humanist audiencedetachment, discrimination,judgmentthe Chorus solicits only belief, which appears from Jonsonspoint of view as a foolish eagerness to be deceived. It is Jonson, then, who isworking, implicitly against Shakespeare, to invent an authentically secularand critical dramatic language.


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It can hardly have been difficult for him to recognize what Shakespearewas doing, for he does the same thing himself, albeit in a different theatricallanguage, in the context of the court masque. Here, no less ostentatiouslythan in Henry V, the law against sea-crossings is overturned:

An artificial sea was seen to shoot forth, as if it flowed to the land, raised with waves whichseemed to move, and in some places the billows to break, as imitating that orderly disorderwhich is common in nature. . . . [T]he scene behind seemed a vast sea, and united with thisthat flowed forth, from the termination or horizon of which (being the level of the state, whichwas placed in the upper end of the hall) was drawn, by the lines of perspective, the whole workshooting downwards from the eye; which decorum made it more conspicuous, and caught theeye afar off with a wandering beauty.50

In this description of the scenic effects in The Masque of Blackness (1605), theas ifs, the oxymorons, and even the moments of descriptive opacity,amount to a rhetoric of wonder. It seems that the act of crossing the sea isno less significant when it is displayed than when it is prohibited. What itsignifies in either case is a departure from a merely human point of view. Inthe masque, as in Henry V, the departure is a way of substantiating the god-like presence of the king: it is to visit his blessed realm that the nymphs havecrossed the ocean, and it is the radiance of the royal eye that confers orderon the waves. But in drama, the same cognitive break is a solecism, becauseit is precisely the primacy of the human point of view that the unities, likethe street in perspective, are designed to establish. The rigorously finiteconstruction of dramatic time and place is analogous to the closed-off vistaof the stage picture: both declare that these are the works of humanity, de-signed for human beings to enjoy. There is no place for gods or miracles inthis ultimately sociable and reasonable space.

That Jonson personally is found on both sides of this divide makes itclear that this is a story about cultural institutions rather than authors. Whatwe see in Serlios drawing is not an individual vision, but the product of atheatrical movement lodged in the ducal courts and learned academies ofsixteenth-century Italy, where the revival of classical comedy was sponsoredand theorized by wealthy amateurs. Both the geometry and the economics ofthe comical scene imply that powerful, conscious patronage. More thanonce, Jonson specifically imagines such a context for writing: in The PoetasterVirgil and Horace appear as cultural lawgivers at the enlightened court ofAugustus, and in The New Inn, Castigliones Urbino is implausibly replicatedin a Barnet pub. But both these fantasies have something defeatedly self-parodic about them: they are full of the bitter awareness that Jonsons realconditions of production were nothing like that. Rather, what he had was onthe one hand the professional theater, with its heterogeneous paying audi-ence, and on the other the courts of Elizabeth and James, with their baroque


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apotheoses of monarchy. These two sharply different performing contextswere linked by patronage, and we have seen Shakespeare joining them virtu-osically together at the level of style. But neither of them corresponds to thehumanist scene that Serlio envisages.

Consequently Jonsons stage is embattled. The generic space for

deeds, and language, such as men do use:And persons, such as Comedy would choose51

is not given; he has to carve it out again, as if from hostile territory, for eachnew play. The resultant space is threatened by disgraceful counterthe-atersthe ciarlatani in Volpone, the obscene puppets of Bartholomew Fair, thearchaic morality convention of The Devil Is an Ass. Faced with this cacophonyit tends to retreat indoors, so that the one place, the unified location thatcorresponds to the stage, is in any case no longer the social street but aparanoid interior, like the cave of cozenage in The Alchemist, or the housein Epicoene that Morose defends vainly against the noise of the city aroundit. Each new set-up is at the same time a polemic against the bad theatrical-ity it must negate in order to clear the stage for action; each script has inge-niously inscribed across its surface the complaint that it is not at home inthe theater where it is played. Jonsons dramatic distinction is that profoundand as it were structural discontent. He imagined a theater quite differentfrom the ones he was compelled to write fora theater that, if it could haveassumed visual form, would have looked something like Serlios. In practicethere was no way of getting the set across the English Channel; Jonsonsplays register, without ever accepting, that impossibility.

Notes

1. John Orrell, Serlios Practical Theatre Scheme, Essays in Theatre 3 (1984):1329. This important article also forms chapter 13 of John Orrell, The HumanStage: English Theatre Design, 15671640 (Cambridge, 1988).

2. This is explained in the accompanying text, translated into English in The firstbooke of architecture, made by Sebastian Serly, entreating of geometrie. Translated out ofItalian into Dutch, and out of Dutch into English (London, 1611), fol. 25r. Despiteits title page, this edition translates all five books.

3. The five books were originally published separately, not in their eventual order,between 1537 and 1547; the Second Book, containing the earliest printing of thetheatrical designs, appeared in Paris in 1545. All five were published together inItalian in Venice in 1584; this volume was translated into Dutch for an Amster-dam edition of 1606, which was the immediate source of the 1611 English trans-lation. There were numerous other sixteenth-century reprints and translations,


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reflecting Serlios European reputation. As Orrell points out in some detail, theillustrations do not survive equally well in all the various editions.

4. See John Harris, Stephen Orgel, and Roy Strong, The Kings Arcadia: Inigo Jonesand the Stuart Court (London, 1973), and R. Malcom Smuts, Court Culture andthe Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987).

5. Oberon, lines 21317, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel(New Haven, 1969).

6. See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance(Chicago, 1961), 1:383423, and, on the unity of time, for example, 415, 453.

7. Lily B. Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance:A Classical Revival (New York, 1923) is still a rich source of ideas about the rele-vant connections.

8. Francisco Robortellos edition of the Poetics was published in 1548, LudovicoCastelvetros translation and commentary in 1570; Daniel Heinsius publishedhis treatise on tragedy in 1611, and his edition of Terence, with an essay oncomedy, in 1618. The unities made an early appearance in English in PhilipSidneys Defence of Poetry (written c.1581, published 1595); Heinsius dominatesJonsons notes on the topic in Timber, or, Discoveries, first published in 1640.

9. T. E. Lawrenson and Helen Purkis, Les ditions illustres de Terence danslhistoire du thtre, in Jean Jacquot, ed., Le lieu thtral la Renaissance (Paris,1964), 123; and see illustrations in L. G. Clubb, Italian Drama in ShakespearesTime (New Haven, 1989).

10. The first Jacobean court entertainment with perspective effects was The Masqueof Blackness, Whitehall, Twelfth Night, 1605; the following August, perspectivescenery featured in a series of dramatic performances, again before the king,in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford. See John Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jonesand John Webb (Cambridge, 1985), 2438. The comedies are Volpone (1606),Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614), and, at somepoint before 1616, the anglicized version of Every Man In His Humour. All fivebegin their action in the morning and complete it by the evening of the sameday, with careful markers of time to hold the sequence together. All observe asa matter of course a rule that confines them to one cityVenice in Volpone,London in the othersand most develop, beyond that, an incomplete but in-tenser concentration on a single place: for example the fairground in acts 25of Bartholomew Fair, or the overcrowded houses of Volpone, Morose, and Love-wit. I have more to say about Jonsons version of the unities in the final sectionof this paper.

11. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (first publishedby the Warburg Institute, 1949), 5th ed. (London, 1998).

12. See A. W. Johnson, Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture (Oxford, 1994), 135.13. Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, in T. S. Dorsch, ed. and trans., Classical Literary Crit-

icism (Harmondsworth, 1965), 38.14. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Dowland (Cambridge, 1999),

70 and 86.15. For Serlios studies of Roman theater buildings, see The first booke of architecture,

Third Book, fols. 2126. The difficulties of interpreting Vitruvius for sixteenth-century theatrical purposes are discussed in Robert Klein and Henri Zerner,Vitruve et le thtre de la Renaissance italienne, in Jean Jacquot, ed., Le lieuthtral la Renaissance (Paris, 1964), 4960.


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16. Comic, tragic, and satyric scenes were sketched in the margin of the relevantpage of a copy of Vitruvius by Battista da Sangallo, probably around the sametime as Serlios. The page is reproduced in Klein and Zerner, Vitruve et lethtre de la Renaissance italienne.

17. cos ben fatte, che parevano non finte, ma verissime, e la piazza non una cosadipinta e picciola, ma vera e grandissima; Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piu eccel-lenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Milan, 1963) 4:266. The equivalent point in thecomplete English translation, by A. B. Hinds, is at Giorgio Vasari, The Lives ofthe Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London, 1927), 2:297, but it renders the de-scription very approximately.

18. Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry: An Abridged Translation of Ludovico Castelvetros Poet-ica dAristotele Vulgarizzata et Sposta, by Andrew Bongiorno (Binghamton, NY,1984), 99.

19. Night is permissible in a comedy, as Machiavelli mischievously points out inMandragola (c.1518), on the basis that the characters are not going to use itfor sleeping. See Bruce Penman, ed., Five Italian Renaissance Comedies (Har-mondsworth, 1978), 51.

20. This myth is detectable for example in Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Mod-ern Experience on the English Stage, 15001700 (Princeton, 1988), an erudite andpowerfully argued book in which, nevertheless, native medieval theatricalforms appear as if they were not formal at all, but organic and immediate,whereas Renaissance theater is geometric and constructed.

21. The story is told in detail in Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Birth of Modern Com-edy in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1969), and, with an illuminating attention topractical production, in Richard C. Beacham, The Roman Theatre and Its Audi-ence (London, 1991), 199213.

22. This point is persuasively made in Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeares Time, 33.23. For example, the Andria of Terence, named for the woman from Andros who

complicates the social relations of Athens; or those Renaissance seduction plots(Machiavellis Mandragola, Aretinos La Cortigiana, Shakespeares The Taming ofthe Shrew) where the seducer is a visitor or returning exile.

24. E.g., Terence, Phormio, Hecyra; Plautus, Rudens, Aulularia.25. Plautuss twins play Menaechmi seems to have been the first classical comedy to

be revived in the Renaissance, in Ferrara in 1486; its descendants include Bib-bienas La Calandra (1513) and Glingannati, written by the Academy of theIntronati of Siena (1532), as well as a version called I Simillimi (1548) by thepolymathic patron of the arts Giangiorgio Trissino. In England, of course, itreappears in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. La Calandra, which wasstaged with elaborate trompe loeil scenery at least twice, and Glingannati,which was endlessly revived, are both translated in Laura Giannetti and GuidoRuggiero, ed. and trans., Five Comedies of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore,2003).

26. Glingannati is an exceptionally articulate example. At the beginning of the lastact, one of the plots fathers emerges from his house with a retinue of servants,ready to mount an armed attack on the house of the other one. A comic ser-vant joins them, armed with a long spit with a joint of meat on it, so that the vi-olence becomes explicitly grotesque and festive (the play was written to beperformed at carnival time). Both civic and generic order appear to be break-ing down but then are miraculously rescued by the revelation that the two old


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men are already relatives, so that Its time to laugh, not fight; Five ItalianRenaissance Comedies, 269.

27. Menaechmi, prologue. Pointed out by Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Plautus, andthe Discovery of New Comic Space, in Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor,eds., Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge, 2004), 12240.

28. Terences Heautontimorumenos is set in the country, and Plautuss Rudens by thesea.

29. Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, 152.30. The phrase is not found in Ciceros works, but attributed to him in Donatuss

commentary on Terence. Quoted in Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeares Time,34.

31. From a description by John Bereblock, reprinted in many places, includingGlynne Wickham, Early English Stages, vol. 1, 13001576 (London, 1959),35559.

32. Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery (London, 1952), 2531.33. The same point is forcefully made about sixteenth-century English stagings of

academic drama in Alan H. Nelson, Early Staging in Cambridge, John D. Coxand David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York,1997), 5967. Both classical and neoclassical dramatists are at pains to offerplausible reasons why what would normally be indoor transactions should betaking place in the street. Some of the reasons are felicitous, some not; eitherway they reflect the power of the convention.

34. There is a virtuoso example in Mandragola, where the cuckold is tricked intokidnapping the lover and physically dragging him through the door.

35. Again, Glingannati wittily externalizes the structural idea: There seem to bespirits of some kind haunting that downstairs room! I can hear the bed movingabout and rattling as if a ghost or something was shaking it. Oh, its so frighten-ing! Oh! I can hear one of them talking now. It sounds like a soul in pain, andits speaking very softly. Oh! Oh! Not so hard! Not so hard! it says. . . . But Icant make out the rest of itId like to knock, if I dared; Five Italian Renais-sance Comedies, 276.

36. This reading is polemically argued in Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experi-ence, 5997.

37. David Riggs, The Artificial Day and the Infinite Universe, Journal of Medievaland Renaissance Studies 5 (1975): 15585.

38. His account of the performance is reprinted in English in The Portable Renais-sance Reader, ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York,1953), 46065.

39. A. E. J. Morris, History of Urban Form, 3rd ed. (London, 1994), 16490. See alsoGail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, GA, 1985).

40. Tom Nichols, The Cultural Dynamics of Representational Space in VenetianRenaissance Painting, in Alexander Cowan, ed., Mediterranean Urban Culture,14001700 (Exeter, 2000), 16596.

41. Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, Grex, ll. 26273, in The CompletePlays of Ben Jonson, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford, 1981), vol. 1. All references to Jon-sons plays are to this edition.

42. Jonsons own declaration is from the prologue to Every Man In His Humour, line15; Ben Jonson, Every Man In His Humour, in Complete Plays, vol. 1. Although thefirst version of the play was staged in 1598, this prologue did not appear in


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print until 1616, and so is more or less contemporary with the English editionof Serlio. The admirer writes in Jonsonus Virbius (London, 1638), 31.

43. See Volpone, 4.1.100131; 5.4.8286.44. See Eastward Ho, 3.3. The play is included in the cited collected edition of

Jonson, though it was of course cowritten with Chapman and Marston.45. Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries, lines 338391, in The Complete Poems, ed.

George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1975), 456.46. This view of Jonsons poetics is developed in L. A. Beaurline, Ben Jonson and

the Illusion of Completeness, PMLA 84 (1969): 5159.47. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London, 1995), 3.0.319.48. Cf. the description of the playhouse, seen from the stage, in Thomas Middle-

ton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Elizabeth Cook (London, 2002),1.2.3032: The very floor, as twere, waves to and fro, / And like a floating islandseems to move, / Upon a sea bound in with shores above.

49. Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries, lines 329192, in Complete Poems, 453. Jonsons sus-picion of the crowd hardly needs documenting: its decisive statement is perhapsthe epigraph to the deliberately monumental edition of his Works (1616):neque, me ut miretur turba laboro: contentus paucis lectoribusI do not labor sothat the crowd will admire me; I am content with a few readersadopted (andadapted from the second to the first person) from Horace, Satires, 1.10.7374.

50. From Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness (1605), ll. 2170, in Complete Masques,4850. There were also scenic evocations of the sea in The Masque of Beauty, Nep-tunes Triumph for the Return of Albion, and The Fortunate Isles.

51. Jonson, Every Man In His Humour, Prologue, ll. 2122.


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The Comical Scene: Perspective and Civility on the Renaissance Stage

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