Chapter Twenty-Two
Thomas Middleton’s Use of the Gallery Space
Christine Parker
Although Thomas Middleton is not alone among his contemporaries in expressing a general cynicism about human character in his plays, his placement in the gallery space of characters with base social status or deficient moral character may be unique as developed in a handful of his works. In “Middleton’s Use of the Upper Stage in Women Beware Women,” Marjorie Lancaster notes in Middleton “a marked absence of the ideals of romanticism that the upper stage traditionally connotes.”1 Lancaster remarks on Thomas Middleton’s reversal of theatrical conventions in his use of the gallery or upper stage, referring to one conventional use of the upper stage as a space for women looking down to their suitors on the main stage. As Lancaster points out, in Women Beware Women, the character Bianca’s social ascent and actual physical elevation on the stage mark her “moral descent.”2 According to Middleton’s stage directions, the final scene calls for several characters to sit above in the gallery to watch a masque and ends with deaths of the Duke and Bianca there. Leslie Thomson proposes in her article “‘Enter Above’: The Staging of Women Beware Women” that the characters can descend to the main stage before dying, thus maintaining and emphasizing Bianca’s final descent into moral depravity and death while providing more space for the ending action.3
Middleton uses the gallery to feature characters who have base status or behave with moral depravity in plays including The Changeling, The Witch, Women Beware Women, and A Game at Chess. Specific scenes in these plays illustrate what Lancaster refers to as Middleton’s “inversion of theatrical conventions.”4 The dramatic culmination of Middleton’s inverted staging in the space above comes in A Game at Chess, when the base and immoral Jesuit Black Bishop’s Pawn spouts Latin from the upper stage in one of the last scenes of the play. Middleton purposefully uses this space in A Game to physically and ironically elevate a lowly character and to inflame anti-Spanish/Catholic sentiment in his last and record-breaking popular play.
Traditionally, physical elevation in the theater can symbolize the levels in the actual world, from hell beneath the stage to the heavens above in the canopy or ceiling.5 Further, since the gallery above the stage often provided seating for the noble and wealthy, the audience probably associated the superiority of status or character with this elevated position. Occasionally scenes were staged above in the gallery, sharing the space with the wealthy patrons (similar to the practice in the modern Blackfriars of the American Shakespeare Center).6 As Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa note in Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres, the wealthiest patrons sat in the gallery space above the stage while the commoners who paid least stood in the yard in front of the stage, while other playgoers who could afford it paid more to be seated in the amphitheater galleries: “It was a steeply vertical sociology.”7 In an effective use of the visual stage levels linked to eminence, Shakespeare shows Richard II’s surrender of status as he descends from the upper stage to the main stage. Gurr and Ichikawa describe this physical and symbolic descent in 3.3 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, where King Richard appears in the gallery area “on the walls” and then later descends to the “base court” when Northumberland requests that he “come down” to speak with Bolingbroke.8
Although examining stage directions for any kind of pattern in Middleton’s plays cannot be conclusive because of the changing and fluid nature of play scripts of the period, Middleton likely tested his inverted use of the gallery in The Changeling and The Witch, skillfully reversed conventions in Women Beware Women, and built this inversion to a staging peak in act 5 of A Game at Chess. Middleton’s use of the gallery in his last play to feature the lowly Black Bishop’s Pawn in an “ironic inversion”9 added to the play’s popularity and success. Certainly, Middleton also staged scenes in the gallery for more traditional uses, as characters refer to lodgings above, women—and men—appear in their chambers or windows above, and characters appear in the gallery as if on the walls of a fortress.10 And Middleton is not the only playwright to use the gallery in a nonromantic way. One example of the reversal of romantic tradition that Lancaster also points out is in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: Annabella scorns her suitors as she watches from the gallery, and then admires a man for his beauty; her maid points out that the man is her brother.11
In The Changeling, the space above is used for devious schemers and plotters—and the insane. In act 3.3, the subplot, though written by Middleton’s collaborator, William Rowley, is still worth mentioning here. Because Middleton and Rowley collaborated on other plays and seemed to have closely worked together on The Changeling, scholars such as J. R. Mulryne and Lars Engle offer that there was probably a “mutual inspiration” (Engle’s phrase) in their collaboration.12 Rowley’s subplot parallels the main plot with an attempted seduction of a chaste woman and takes place in the insane asylum. Lollio, servant to the jealous doctor Alibius, is duty bound to watch over his master’s wife Isabella. Instead, he connives with Antonio, the changeling, to set Isabella up for seduction. As the scene unfolds, Lollio appears above, followed by actual lunatics acting like beasts or birds, as the original stage directions instruct. First, a stage direction reads “Enter Lollio above” as Lollio from the gallery observes Antonio and Isabella below. After he exits, Middleton places lunatics from the asylum in the gallery: “Madmen above, some as birds, others as beasts.” Their appearance disrupts the seduction scene, and Lollio’s plan fails: Isabella, because of her own moral integrity, does not fall victim to seduction.13
Furthermore, Middleton uses the gallery once in The Witch for the fallen Francisca in 4.3. Francisca has contrived to incriminate her sister-in-law Isabella in adultery to divert her brother Antonio’s attention from her own sexual transgressions. She tricks Gasper into entering Isabella’s chamber, and tells her brother when he appears that his wife is with another man. Antonio wounds Gasper and Florida, whom he thinks are his wife and her lover. Thus the noble but morally compromised Francisca hatches a plot while above in the gallery to harm the innocent Isabella and cover Francisca’s own fallen state, which Antonio uncovers despite her efforts.14
Again, Middleton inverts expectations for elevated status in the gallery and the heavens in Women Beware Women. Although there are no records of performances of this play in the period—perhaps because of the complicated last scene—much of the play illustrates Bianca’s “moral descent”15 into depravity, beginning with her seduction by the Duke in the gallery while her mother plays chess with Livia, who arranged the seduction, below on the main stage. Bianca’s social ascension is achieved through mutual lust with the Duke—and the murder of her husband, Leantio, orchestrated by the Duke. Bianca’s character corruption culminates with her prestigious marriage to the Duke and her exalted placement with him in the gallery to watch the wedding masque in the final scene.16 The wedding masque itself continues the inversion, as wicked Livia descends from the heavens as Juno with the murderous intention of pouring molten gold on Isabella below.
Scholars suggest that both The Witch and Women Beware Women allude to the corruption of real characters of King James’s court.17 That Middleton would include moral commentary on contemporary politics in his writings is further illustrated in A Game at Chess, which in August of 1624 with a booking of nine days straight18 had the longest continuous run of any early modern play, with an overall attendance of up to thirty thousand people, since the Globe could accommodate about three thousand people per performance. Several contemporaries wrote about the success of the play, including John Holles, Lord Haughton, who indicated that so many people thronged the theater that some had to be turned away. He writes to the Earl of Somerset on Wednesday, August 11: “yesterday to the globe I rowed, which hows I found so thronged, that by scores thei came away for want of place.”19 Gary Taylor suggests that approximately a seventh of the London population saw the play; the total revenue was “scandalous,” with a rumored total of an unprecedented fifteen hundred pounds.20
Don Carlos Coloma, Spanish ambassador from 1622 to 1624, sent an outraged complaint to King James—who happened to be out of town on progress during the play’s run.21 Coloma wrote: “The Actors who are called ‘the King’s’, today and yesterday presented a comedy so scandalous, impious, barbarous, and so offensive to my royal master . . . that this comedy has forced me to put my pen to paper . . . to beg. . . . for one of two things.”22 Coloma then asked the king to either punish the actors and playwright publicly, or provide Coloma with safe passage out of the country.23 A few days later, Coloma wrote to the Conde Duque Olivares: “that so many people come to see [the play], that there were more than 3.000 persons there on the day that the audience was smallest. There was such merriment, hubbub, and applause that even if I had been many leagues away it would not have been possible for me not to have taken notice of it.”24
Because of its allegorical parallel to stormy relations between King James’s court and the Spanish; the marriage negotiations between Prince Charles and the infanta; the obvious depiction of the former Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, as the Black Knight; and the complaints from the Spanish to the king, the Privy Council shut performances down and banned the play thereafter. Except for the performance of the play being forbidden, the King’s Men suffered no real adverse consequences, but the Council issued a warrant for Middleton, who eluded capture at least for a time. He may have spent some time in prison for writing the scandalous play, although definitive official records supporting this do not survive.25
Middleton was inspired to write the play by current events, including the return in 1623 of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham from Spain and the abortive marriage negotiations between Prince Charles and the Infanta Maria. When the English travelers arrived home, the English people were so happy at the failed alliance that they celebrated with bonfires in the streets.26 Although such passionate reaction to the failed marriage negotiations had subsided by the time Middleton wrote A Game, James was considering another possible Catholic match for Prince Charles; there was friction between James and Parliament over James’s passivity towards the Palatinate conflict, and the atmosphere was ripe for the fervent popular reception of a controversial anti-Spanish/Catholic play.27
A Game at Chess features characters named only by chess labels, with the white pieces depicting the English and the black pieces the Spanish. The play begins with an induction with the characters of Ignatius Loyola, patterned after the actual founder of the Jesuits, and his companion Error. Loyola comments that he would like to rule the world, capitalizing on the English fear that the Spanish Catholics plotted to take over England. 28 The principal characters in the main plot are easily identified with corresponding royal and noble persons, such as James I as the White King, Prince Charles as the White Knight, and the Duke of Buckingham as the White Duke, while the Black King corresponds to King Phillip IV of Spain, the Black Queen to the Infanta Maria, and the Machiavellian Black Knight to the ambassador Gondomar.29 The main plot dramatizes the tensions between England and Spain and Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham’s actual visit to Spain, and culminates in the last act with the White Knight checkmating the Black Knight. The White King appears with his court, and all the Black pieces end up in “the bag,” or hell, in act 5.3.30
The subplot involves deceit, schemes, plots, castration, attempted rape, and revenge, featuring the Jesuit Black Bishop’s Pawn’s attempted seduction of the White Queen’s innocent pawn. Without going into all the subplot details, I have to mention that in act 2.2, the poor White Queen’s Pawn ends up in the custody of the Black House when the weak White King at first believes the Black Knight’s concoction of an alibi for the Black Bishop’s Pawn at the time of the attempted rape. Her punishment is to kneel for hours in a room with pornographic paintings.31
In the final act, Middleton uses the gallery for the appearance of the Black Bishop’s Pawn while the Black Knight enters on the main stage in his litter. Gondomar was known for traveling in a special seat to accommodate his fistula—the King’s Men legendarily obtained articles of his clothing and maybe even the litter for their play.32 As the White Knight and the White Duke enter for a banquet at the Black court in act 5, the Black Knight notes that the Black Bishop’s Pawn is “planted above for his concise oration.”33 In all of the play, this is the only occasion when any character appears above, while the major portion of the action takes place on the main stage on a chessboard. Thus above in the gallery stands the despicable and devious Black Bishop’s Pawn, a loathed Jesuit who is both of low moral character and a person of lowly rank.
A look at the brief beginning of 5.1 using actors at the 2011 Blackfriars Conference enabled us to imagine the effect on the audience as the lascivious Jesuit Black Bishop’s Pawn recites Latin from the gallery (line references here refer to Howard-Hill’s edition). Again, the scene begins when the Black Knight is carried onstage by Black pawns in his special litter. The Black Knight observes the Black Bishop’s Pawn positioned in the gallery for his “concise oration” (5.1.3). The Black Knight notes that the Black Bishop’s Pawn speaks now only in Latin: “All Latin? Sure the oration has infected him” (5.1.8). Next, the Black King, Queen, Duke, and pawns enter to greet the entrance of the White Knight and Duke. The Black Bishop’s Pawn then launches into his Latin greeting for the White characters.34
Playgoers who were not Latin scholars could have been intimidated by Latin preached at them as from a high pulpit, suggesting the Latin of a Catholic mass, thus capitalizing on the English fear of a Spanish/Catholic domination. Others in Middleton’s audience may have bristled at the use of Latin onstage, some for the mockery of Catholicism it implies, and some due to its elite, scholarly implications. Members of the 2011 Blackfriars Conference audience likely did understand Latin and would know that the Black Bishop’s Pawn speaks innocuous—though hypocritical and hyperbolic—welcoming and congratulatory words to the White Knight and his house. The effect of this gallery staging on the Jacobean audience probably added fuel to the fire of the English abhorrence for the Spanish Catholics. This staging could have been a climactic moment of passionate audience reaction to what could have seemed like Latin preaching by a despicable and low-class character in a visually elevated and eminent position high above the audience.
Middleton probably knew what he was doing with this staging of the Black Bishop’s Pawn above. Since this scene in act 5 is the only one where the gallery space is used in the play, the elevated placement of the loathsome Black Bishop’s Pawn would be especially noticeable. Further, if wealthy patrons were seated in the gallery—which is likely, considering the crowds attending the play—the Black Bishop’s Pawn presence above could have caused additional audience reaction. Certainly, most of the “merriment, hubbub, and applause” mentioned by Ambassador Coloma in his letter to the Conde Duque Olivares35 was due to the audience’s enjoyment of the unflattering depiction of Gondomar as the Black Knight (so closely did many playgoers associate Gondomar with the play that some referred to it as “Gondomar”36). Some of the “hubbub,” however, must have been a reaction to Middleton’s placement of the Black Bishop’s Pawn’s in the gallery space alongside a likely group of wealthy playgoers seated there.
Middleton specifically inverts the implications of “above” in the gallery to suggest the extent to which the Black chess pieces have descended on a moral scale. Not only did his play capitalize on the English fear that the Spanish Catholics plotted to rule England, but the Black Bishop Pawn’s appearance in the gallery speaking Latin was an incendiary device that probably added fire to the audience’s enthusiastic anti-Spanish sentiment—so “inflamed” during the play’s run that Ambassador Coloma feared for his safety.37 Not only did the audience revel in the unflattering depiction of Gondomar as the Black Knight and the frequent anti-Spanish/Catholic elements in the play, but the fervent enjoyment by playgoers attending A Game certainly proved lucrative for the King’s Men, and secured for Middleton’s play the most successful and profitable run of the period. Middleton’s “ironic inversion” of placing base and immoral characters in the gallery, unique to Middleton among his contemporaries in the frequency and success of this inversion, added to the overwhelming commercial success of his last and most controversial play.
Notes
1. Marjorie S. Lancaster, “Middleton’s Use of the Upper Stage,” Tulane Studies in English 22 (1977), 79.
2. Leslie Thomson, “‘Enter Above’: The Staging of ‘Women Beware Women,’” in “Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 26, no. 2 (Spring 1986), 331–42. The quotation of Lancaster’s that attracted my attention is on page 332 of Thomson’s article.
3. Thomson, 332.
4. Lancaster, “Middleton’s Use of the Upper Stage,” 69.
5. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116.
6. Gurr, 123.
7. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.
8. Gurr and Ichikawa, 2.
9. Lancaster, “Middleton’s Use of the Upper Stage.” Although Lancaster does not use this exact phrasing of “ironic inversion” in her article, she often talks about the irony of Middleton’s inverted staging, so I must give her credit for this phrase.
10. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Some examples of the more traditional use of the gallery space indicated by stage directions include (also in The Collected Works) The Puritan 5.1, 540, where Moll appears above in her chamber; The Second Maiden’s Tragedy 5.1, 892, where Leonella appears above with her lover; A Trick to Catch the Old One, 4.4, 406, Niece appears above; Hengist, King of Kent 5.2, 1483, where Vortiger and Hersus appear “on the walls.”
11. Middleton, 74. Lancaster also mentions scenes in other plays that illustrate this ironic inversion on 73–74, including Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, where Abigail throws Barabas’s treasure down to her father; Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where Jessica tosses Shylock’s ducats down to Lorenzo; and Jonson’s Volpone, where Celia innocently tosses her handkerchief to the seducer Volpone, disguised as “Scoto of Mantua.”
12. J. R. Mulryne states that “both men must have been involved, at a deep level: the plots reinforce each other, and image and symbol, by a kind of osmosis, cross across the membrane that separates one writer’s work from the other’s.” See “Middleton, Thomas—J. R. Mulryne (essay date 1979),” in Literary Criticism (1400–1800), vol. 33, ed. Jennifer Allison Brostrom, Gale Cengage, 1996, eNotes.com, http://www.enotes.com/thomas-middleton-criticism/middleton-thomas-78328/j-r-mulryne-essay-date-1979. In the introduction to The Changeling, Lars Engle observes that “the consistent focus by both authors on human changefulness suggests not only collaboration but also mutual inspiration.” See Thomas Middleton, The Changeling, in English Renaissance Drama, a Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 1598.
13. Bevington, English Renaissance Drama, 1624–25.
14. Thomas Middleton, The Witch, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948; repr. Vivian Ridler, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), see act 4.3.
15. Lancaster, “Middleton’s Use of the Upper Stage,” 79.
16. Middleton, Women Beware Women, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Bevington, 1515–92. See 1.3, 2.2, and 5.2 for scenes where stage directions indicate characters appear in the gallery.
17. Anne Lancashire, “The Witch: Stage Flop or Political Mistake?” in “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 161–81.
18. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, in The Revels Plays, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 6–7. “As it was Acted nine days to gether at the Globe on the banks side” is printed under the title on the Q1 title page. The title-page illustration is featured on page 7.
19. Middleton, ed. Howard Hill, A Game, 198.
20. Middleton, ed. Taylor, The Collected Works, 1825.
21. Middleton, ed. Howard Hill, A Game, 20. Scholars speculate that the King’s Men timed the production for the king’s absence. James did complain that it was from the Spanish ambassador that he first heard of the play—since enough officials remained in town, James wondered why they had not heard of the play and informed him earlier about it.
22. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 193–94.
23. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 194.
24. Ibid.
25. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 22. In appendix 1, page 211, Howard-Hill includes the inscription in Q2 of The Game, 1625, part of which says: “the Poett Mr. Thomas Middleton that writt it committed to prisson where hee lay some Tyme.” The poem mentioned in Taylor below is also included in the inscription. See also Middleton, ed. Taylor, The Collected Works, 1895, notes and poem. Written by Middleton as an apology to the King, the poem also points to his imprisonment. Part of the poem reads: “A harmless game, raised merely for delight, / . . . I lie now under hatches in the Fleet.”
26. Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 154–55.
27. Heinemann, 152–55.
28. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 65. See the induction, where the character Ignatius Loyola indicates
often that he would like to rule the world.
29. Middleton, ed. Taylor, The Collected Works, 1830–1831. Here Taylor gives descriptions of the characters and links them to their historical equivalents.
30. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 186–91 of 5.3. See also Middleton, ed. Taylor, The Collected Works, 1881–83.
31. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 119.
32. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 24. See also 205 of appendix 1. On August 21, John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton about the props for the Black Knight: “they counterfeited his person to the life . . . and had gotten (they say) a cast sute of his aparell for the purpose, with his Lytter.” In addition, see the title page of Thomas Scott’s The Second Part of Vox Populi (upon which Middleton drew for detail, Howard-Hill, 29), which features an illustration of Gondomar and his famous chair with the hole in the seat. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 47, and Middleton, ed. Taylor, The Collected Works, 1775.
33. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 167.
34. See notes, Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 168. This “Latin Oration” given by the Black Bishop’s Pawn has been identified as “extracts from STC 12537: The Pope’s Letter to the Prince [with] a Jesuit’s Oration to the Prince, in Latin and English (London, 1623).”
35. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 194.
36. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 198. John Woolley writes to William Trumbull August 11, 1624, “The play of Gundomar is not yet suppressed but it is feared it will be eare longe.”
37. Middleton, ed. Howard-Hill, A Game, 197. Coloma writes in his letter to Conde-Duque Olivares: “All these people come out of the theatre so inflamed against Spain that, as a few Catholics have told me who went secretly to see the play, my person would not be safe in the streets.”