Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567 - 1642

7. Theatrical Lighting at Court

7 THEATRICAL LIGHTING AT COURT Long before they established professional indoor playhouses, troupes of adult and boy players had acted frequently before Tudor monarchs under artificial light in the halls of state. By the time of Queen Elizabeth, responsibility for the lighting of these performances fell primarily to the Revels Office in the queen’s household, and since many of its accounts survive, we can reconstruct a good deal of typical lighting arrangements at court. Undoubtedly , these accounts give us clues as to what professional private theater lighting was like, but we cannot assume that court methods inevitably filtered down (or up) to the playhouses catering to the general public. I offer a summary of the artificial light at court by way of describing court lighting techniques and contemporary theatrical equipment and in hopes that Revels Office records will place the more scattered references to professional playhouse lighting in understandable contexts. Performance Times The extensive use of artificial illumination at court was primarily a function of the wintertime season and late hours at which most performances were given. Under both Tudor and Stuart monarchs, plays and masques at court normally began around 10 p.m. and routinely stretched well beyond midnight . Tarleton is said to have acted before Elizabeth until one o’clock in the morning, and foreign ambassadors occasionally complained of 10 p.m. starting times and revels extending until 1:30 and 2 in the morning. When Jon158 son’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue ended early on the morning of 17 January 1618, for example, Orazio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian embassy, grumbled about wending his way home at 2 a.m. “half disgusted and exhausted.”1 Given the lack of complete records, however, Chambers’s conclusion that “court performances were always at night” may be too categorical and, at any rate, does not apply to late Jacobean and Caroline practice, which fell beyond his scope.2 According to later accounts, the King’s men performed Fletcher’s Rollo, Duke of Normandy at the Cockpit-in-Court during the “day time at Whitehall” on 21 February 1631 and Lodowick Carlell’s 1 Arviragus and Philicia at Hampton Court on the “Afternoon” of 26 December 1636, for example.3 How many other Caroline plays and masques had daytime presentations at court is difficult to say because the best source of information in this regard, the master of the revels, Sir Henry Herbert, did not always bother to note the times of performances precisely. Of the nearly six dozen plays and masques at court mentioned in his office book, Herbert indicates that 52 percent were at “night,” 5 percent on a given “day,” and 2 percent on an “afternoon,” while 42 percent of his records give no indication of the time of performance.4 Other sources, like the Declared Accounts of the Chamber, also rarely list performance times at court, but they occasionally indicate two separate performances on the same day. For instance, the King’s men performed twice on both 6 and 17 January 1608.5 Because most of these multiple performances were in February, matinees may or may not have been performed after sunset , which occurred around 4:45 p.m. at the beginning of the month and after 5:30 p.m. at the end. The first performance of a play on 1 January 1604 must have started early enough to allow not only for another play (presumably A Midsummer Night’s Dream) but also for a masque and banquet afterwards.6 And because both plays were acted by the same company (the King’s men)— who would have required some sort of break between performances—the first play may well have been performed before sunset. Although most court productions in the winter must have been performed without benefit of natural light, we should nevertheless recall that the halls in which these productions came to life were, as a rule, generously fenestrated . We have already noted that the hall at Hampton Court is illuminated by sixteen large and four small windows. The Elizabethan banqueting house at Whitehall had at least sixty-three casement windows in addition to two Theatrical Lighting at Court 159 great bay windows.7 The walls of the first Jacobean banqueting house were pierced with forty-six double-casement windows in two orders, and Jones’s surviving banqueting house is magnificently lit by...