AN APPROACH TO THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

Abstract

The Elizabethan stage must have passed from living memory somewhere about 1700,» At that times or soon thereafter^ one at least of its distinguishing characteristics was lost sight of for more than a century. In I79O Edmund Malone supposed that the Elizabethan stage had a front curtain^, for he writes of "the principal curtains that hung in the front of the stage," as distinguished from other curtains at the back of the stage, used in effecting "discoveries" (Boswell* s Variorum Shakespeare t 1821, I, 88, 78)0 Thus the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the eighteenth century did not know that the Elizabethan stage was "open" to the audience on three sides i This is not to disparage Malone, but merely to suggest how easily a gross error may entrench itself in our general view of a difficult historical problem«