THE PAVED COURT THEATRE ATSOMERSET HOUSE

JOHN ORRELL

B.L. LANSDOWNE MS. 1171 is a collection of careful drawings of early English stagesequipped with various kinds of scenery.^ All but one have been identified, howevertentatively, and among them are what have hitherto been accepted as the earliest detaileddesigns for an English scenic stage - that erected in the Great Hall at Whitehall for a per-formance of Florimene in 1635. Fols. 5-6 give a full account of the layout of the hall onthat occasion, while fols. 7-8 and 13* -16 show the mechanics of the scenery more closely.

The unidentified drawing, fols.g^'-io^ (fig. i), is of the same kind as the others, for itis a plan of a theatre with stage, scenery, and an auditorium in which there are degreesand a 'state'. It is a routine piece of work, lacking the careful finish of those plans anddrawings in the collection that are certainly by John Webb; rather it resembles the hallplan for Florimene, which W. G, Keith attributed to Inigo Jones.^ Both drawings are inink on a groundwork of scored lines, and there are explanatory notes on both in the samehand, which is not Jones's. On the verso of the unidentified plan (i.e. fol. 9 ) the nameInigo Jones has been written in what appears to be a later hand.

As Surveyor of the Works, Jones was responsible for fitting up a good many theatresfor the Jacobean and Caroline Courts, usually in one or other of the several halls used formasques and shows in the royal palaces. Because none of the known halls had the shapeand size of the building shown in fols. 9^-10^, the design has remained unidentified. Itshows a T-shaped room with thick walls at the head and foot and much thinner walls atthe sides. The internal length, measured against the scale which accompanies the plan,is 76 ft, while the width is 50 ft at the head and about 34 ft 10 in. at the foot. The exteriorwidths are approximately 51 ft 6 in. at the head and 36 ft 4 in. at the foot. These measure-ments coincide very closely with those of a temporary theatre put up by Jones in the PavedCourt at Somerset House in the winter of 1632/3.

A warrant to Jones dated 3 November 1632 ordered that ' . . . a roome must be purposelymade, And therein y* Timber worke of y* Sceane w *' y Stage & degrees to bepperly doneby y* officers of his Ma!' ^ workes'.^ The accounts relating to the building of the housesurvive, and have been published by Professor Glynne Wickham as Appendix D of hisEarly English Stages, 11, part 2. Among much interesting information, they give us thesize of the building and its location:

. . . to Richard Ryder Carpenter for framing and razing a greate house of firtimber and Dealeborde

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/ The Paved Court Theatre. BL. Lansdowne MS. 1171, fols. 9^ I0^ The words at the headare: ^passage behind the backcloth'; and on the stairs on the left: 'musickhouse

in the paved Court Ixxvj fo: long xxxvj fo: wide and xxv fo: high w[ith] two outletts at the endwhere the Sceane was [,] putting vp Degrees in the said house and ioisting and bourding thelower roome hee finding all manner of stuife and workemanshipp iiii'*'' xviij" x . making a lardgeScaffold all of his owne stufe over all the lower parte of the said house to put vp the Cloth inthe Ceeling and to put vp the State xl*' taking downe the Degrees at the Lower end of the saidhouse after the said pastorall were performed altering them for more Conueniency of the houseand inlarding the roome with ioisting and bourding it for a Maske he finding all manner of stuffeand workmanshipp vij'* framing and putting vp two Outletts xxxviij fo: long the peece with twofloores to them over the Degrees on the sides of the said House finding all materialls and work-manshipp xiij'* vj viij? fitting and putting vp railes round aboute the Stadge at the foote of theDegrees hee finding stuffe and workmanshipp xij^. . .

A plan of Somerset House, sometimes called Denmark House, was included in the fifthpart of Samuel Pegge's Curialia,^ and purports to show the layout of the buildings as theystood in 1706. There is no scale on the plan, but a very rough one may be deduced fromthe length of the centre section of the South Gallery front, which is given as 91 ft 6 in. inthe elevation engraved for Vitruvius Britannicus.^ This feature appears on Pegge's plan,where it measures 36 mm. The Paved, or Lower Court is shown lying to the east of theUpper Court, and measured across its inner walls it is 2975 mm by 265 mm, or the scaledequivalent of 76 ft by 67 ft, calculated to the nearest foot. On the evidence of Pegge's planalone it is impossible to be more precise, but there is little doubt that a theatre of the sizegiven in the works accounts could have been built in the Court only provided the existingwest and east walls were incorporated into the design.

The drawing in fols. 9* -10 shows thick walls, evidently of brick or masonry, at thehead and foot of the plan, while the 9-in. side walls represent the 'house of firtimber andDealeborde' put up (and later pulled down again) by Richard Ryder. The wall at the head,though marked on the plan only by a line indicating one surface, was some i ft 3 in. thick,as is shown by the door reveal to one end of it. The drawing of the i8-in.-thick wall at thefoot is not quite consistent with the reading suggested above, for it shows the thin timberwalls intersecting the surface where they should merely abut on to it, a discrepancy forwhich I can offer no satisfactory explanation.

While the drawing and the works accounts agree precisely on the length of the house,there is some difficulty about its width. First, the accounts mention a width of 36 ft, whilethe drawing shows the greater part of the house a little wider than that, about 36 ft 4 in.This small discrepancy may represent a minor change in design between the plan and itsexecution, but it more probably reflects a common tendency of the works accounts to roundout over-all dimensions. A more serious difficulty lies in the apparent omission from theaccounts of the 51 ft 6 in. exterior width of the head of the plan, or stage end of the theatre.The lower part of the room may reasonably be described as 36 ft wide, but this upper partmay not.

The accounts do mention that 'two outletts' were built 'at the end where the Sceanewas . . .'. Guided only by the Oxford English Dictionary one would take these to be exitsof some sort, but the use of the word 'outlett' later in the same account suggests that quite

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another sort of structure may be meant. The theatre was built first for a pastoral and thensubstantially modified for a masque.' The alterations, which are not shown in the drawing,entailed taking down the degrees and 'framing and putting vp two Outletts xxxviij fo: longthe peece with two floores to them over the Degrees on the sides of the said House . ..'.Evidently outlets could be quite substantial structures.

Fortunately a satisfactory definition of the term lies close to hand. Between 1630 and1635 the chapel at Somerset House was built to designs by Jones, and among the accountsrelating to its construction is one that mentions outlets:

. . . new building a Chappell of Brickes & Stone there ciiij foote longe xxxvj ^^' brode and lj footehigh to the tope of the roofe w" twoe Outletts for staires & litle Chappells xij foote one way andxxxvj **** th'other way . . }

Comparison of these dimensions with the reconstructed plan published by Sir JohnSummerson^ shows that the outlets are what we should call transepts. They are outwardextensions from the main body of the building.

The 'two outletts at the end where the Sceane was' are clearly shown in the LansdowneMS. drawing. They project a little over 7 ft 6 in. beyond the walls of the auditorium, givinga total exterior width at the stage end of 51 ft 6 in. But their presence makes for one moredifficulty of interpretation. Samuel Pegge's plan of Somerset House as it was in 1706 showsthe main area of the Paved Court diminished by extruded corners on the west side anda pair of projecting windows on the east. Although the narrower end of the theatre in thedrawing would fit neatly within the extruded corners, the stage end would run foul ofthe windows opposite. Of course the drawing is not orientated, and the auditorium endmight have been placed between the windows on the east wall, but in that case the stageend would have tangled with the corners. Either the corners or the windows must havebeen built after the masking house was pulled down, and since the extruded corners canhardly have been an addition it is likely that the east wall of the Court, innocent of itswindows, formed the back wall of Jones's stage.

The west wall therefore formed the rear of the auditorium, communicating at an upperlevel with the ground floor of the Upper Court, which was two storeys higher than thePaved Court. The drawing shows an access door leading directly to the highest of thedegrees in the auditorium, and necessarily coming in at a high level.

Finally, if the extruded corners fianked the auditorium on either side for some 10 ft ofits length - and Pegge's plan marks them that size - only 23 ft would have been left forthe introduction of the new outlets which were to convert the theatre into a masking house.The remainder of the length was taken up by the original outlets at the stage end. SinceRyder was paid for building outlets 38 ft long, it is not at all clear how he managed tosqueeze them into the available space.

To find the answer to this conundrum we must look to Jones's customary technique ofdesigning to a modular system. The interior dimensions of the plan without the outletsare 76 ft by 34 ft 10 in., which are in the ratio 24:11. Jones evidently developed his designusing a module of one twenty-fourth part of the given length of 76 ft, or 38 in. The stage

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front divides the house in the ratio i : 2, giving 8 modules to the stage (25 ft 4 in.) and 16 tothe auditorium (50 ft 8 in.). The auditorium itself is divided into an approximatelyU-shaped arrangement of degrees at the front and a part at the back where the degreesrange straight across from wall to wall. This rear part takes up 4 modules (12 ft 8 in.),leaving 12 modules (38 ft) between the back of the U-shaped section and the front of thestage. The logic of this design suggests that the new outlets were constructed to flankthe house on either side of the middle section. Those parts of the original outlets reservedfor the 'Musickhouse' were demolished in the reconstruction, and the musicians movedelsewhere, probably on to the stage.

The plan of the Paved Court theatre can now take its place alongside the other drawingsin Lansdowne MS. 1171 as a significant document in the history of the English stage. Itdisplaces the Florimene plan for Whitehall as the earliest detailed and measured drawingof an English auditorium and stage set with scenery. *^ It contradicts the generalization ofS. Orgel and R. Strong, made on the slender evidence of the plans for the Florimene andSalmacida Spolia stages, that plays were given deeper settings than those customary formasques." Combined with the works accounts, indeed, it gives a very good idea of whatJones thought to be the necessary distinction between a scenic theatre and a maskinghouse: in the latter there was to be a major change in the auditorium, but no alterationsare recorded for the stage.

The name of the masque played in the house after its modification is not known, butthe play acted in the theatre shown in the drawing was Walter Montagu's The Shepherd'sParadise. This long neo-PIatonic pastoral, in which the queen played the leading part,was staged on 9 January 1632/3, some two months after the warrant for the constructionof the theatre was issued to Jones.'^ The text was not published until 1659 (though somecopies were misdated 1629), but several manuscripts survive.'^ From one of these (B.L.Stowe MS. 976) and from the stage designs associated with the play, Orgel and Stronghave abstracted a series of indications of scene changes, which leads them to draw sometentative conclusions about the nature of the stage involved:

One can deduce from the annotations on the drawings that there were at least eight changes ofscene, and probably several more. There were apparently three types of setting, presumablysimilar to the arrangements recorded in the ground plan for Florimene . . .:

1 A standing scene . . .2 A series of back shutter and wing changes . . .3 A small number of scenes of relieve placed between the back shutters and the backcloth . . . ^

With the single exception of the wing changes, which entail no more than the thrustingout of a temple between the wings of the standing scene, this arrangement is the one shownin the plan of the Paved Court theatre. There is a proscenium behind which are ranged thefour pairs of flat wings, the back shutter grooves and the three pairs of posts whose functionis to support the three layers of the relieve scenes in front of the backcloth. The plan differsfrom that of the Florimene stage chiefly in its use of flat, rather than angled, wings, and inits comparatively shallow recession.

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Fig. 2. Setting for The Shepherd^s Paradise^ Chatsworth

Among the drawings belonging to the production of The Shepherd^s Paradise is one ofa standing scene of trees with the title of the play inscribed on the skin at the centre of theproscenium (fig. 2). The supporting pilasters shown at either side differ from most ofJones's designs in that they are very slender, perhaps to suit the femininity of a play actedby the queen and her ladies. The Paved Court plan also shows slender pilasters in theproscenium; indeed they read on the scale at a little less than 2 ft 6 in. wide, while the gapbetween them is 30 ft, giving an over-all width of 34 ft 10 in. This proportion closelyapproximates the design as reproduced full-size by Orgel and Strong,^^ where the over-allwidth is 199 mm and each pilaster is 15 mm wide. Given that the, gap between the pilastersis 30 ft, as in the plan, the aspect ratio of the proscenium allows one to estimate its heightat about 24 ft. 10 in. over all. The height of the theatre according to the works accountswas 25 ft.

The stage in the proscenium design is an unusually low one, about i ft 6 in. high if thecalculations above are correct. Steps descend from its front centre to the floor of the audi-torium, and although they are shallow there is room for only five risers. Five risers areshown in the plan, but where the elevation places all of them in front of the stage, the planshows the three upper ones cut into the stage with only the lowest and widest tread pro-jecting on to the floor of the house.

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The works accounts show that the Paved Court theatre was truly a temporary structure,unlike the masking house built at Whitehall in 1638, which had a substantial tiled roof.Richard Ryder was paid both for putting up and for razing the building, and it seems tohave been roofed with timber rather than tile. But although it was temporary, it lives onin an unusually complete set of records. The fullness of the works accounts and the largenumber of designs for the production of The Shepherd's Paradise enable us to visualizeit comparatively clearly. It is fortunate that these documents relate to a design executedfully under Jones's control, and not simply fitted up in an existing hall. My object in thispaper has been merely to secure the identification of the plan in Lansdowne MS. 1171; thereader may now wish to bring the theatre more fully before him by comparing the planwith the designs published by Orgel and Strong and the accounts printed by GlynneWickham.

1 The fullest account of the drawings is by RichardSouthern, Changeable Scenery {London, 1952),pp. 44-56. They have also been discussed byPaul Reyher, Les Masques Anglais (Paris, 1909),pp.359-60, 369-71; Lily B.Campbell, Scenesand Machines on the English Stage during theRenaissance {Cambridge, 1923), pp. 178-82;Allardyce NicoU, Stuart Masques and the Renais-sance Stage {London, 1937), pp. 79-80, 112-13;and S. Orgel and R. Strong, Inigo Jones: theTheatre of the Stuart Court {London, 1973),n.638-45.

2 'The designs for the First Movable Scenery onthe English Public Stage', Burlington Magazine.,

3 P.R.O. L.C.5/132/309, printed in Malone SocietyCollections, 11 {part 3), 359.

4 (London, 1972), pp. 223-4. The document,P.R.O. E351/3266, was cited and brieflydescribed by Reyher, op. cit., pp. 356 n. and530. Since then it has gone unnoticed byhistorians of the masque.

5 (London, 1806), plate facing p. 93. Engraved byLongmate the Younger. The survey on which itis based appears to be lost.

6 Colin Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus (London,1717-25), I, plate 16.

7 This point is proved by the works accounts andwas understood by Reyher, op. cit., p. 530.Entries in the Revels accounts (P.R.O. A.O.3/908/18) for 9 January, 3 February, and 5 March1632/3 indicate that shows took place at SomersetHouse on those dates. The last was the queen'sShrove Tuesday masque mentioned by JohnFlower in a newsletter to Sir John Scudamore.

See J. P. Feil, 'Dramatic References from theScudamore Papers', Shakespeare Survey, 11{1958), no. It is also noted in a dispatch fromthe Florentine Resident in London, who calls it*il balletto della Regina', as distinct from the'pastorale' of 9 January. B.L. Add. MS. 27962 F,fols. 405^ and 409^; cf. fol. 384 "* . Orgel andStrong, who misread the Revels account, wronglyconclude that 'it does not imply, as Reyherbelieved, that the play was followed by a masque'.Op.cit.ir. 505.

8 P.R.O. A.O.i/2490/383.9 Inigo Jones (Hzrmonds-woTth, 1966), p. 76.

10 It is anticipated only by the rough sketch byJones for an unknown masque of 1621 (Orgel andStrong, no. i n verso).

11 Op. cit. 1.17.12 The play was originally intended for the king's

birthday on 19 November 1632, but was re-peatedly postponed. Each delay was carefullynoted in the correspondence of Amerigo Salvetti,the Florentine Resident in London. See B.L.Add. MS. 27962 F, fols. 360^, 368^, 370*', 372*,377^ 382* -383*, and 384 -**. In a dispatch of19 November 1632 {9 November o.s.), Salvettiremarked that the production would have tobe postponed because of the unreadiness ofTapparato della scena' (fol.368''); the decisionto build a special theatre for the productionevidently came rather late in the day.

13 Those in the British Library are Stowe MS. 976,Sloane MS. 3649, and Add. MS. 41617.

14 Op. cit. 11. 506.15 Orgel and Strong, no. 245.