Articles

1. "What Story is that Painted Vpon the Cloth?" [sic]: Some Descriptions of Hangings and their Use on the Early Modern Stage

   Mariko Ichikawa

   There are many references to curtains in the dialogue and stage directions of early modern play texts. The terms used, “curtain”, “arras”, “hangings” and “traverse”, were largely interchangeable in the stage directions, and for the most part they refer to a curtain (or pair of curtains) capable of being drawn back along a supporting rail.2 Their principal location was the central opening in the tiring-house façade where their function was to permit ceremonial entrances and exits and the carrying in and out of large properties, as well as providing both a place of concealment and a “discovery” space.

2. Wilde, Whistler and Staging "Art for Art's Sake".

   Anne Anderson

   The new comedy [The Colonel] is the result of an inevitable reaction. We have seen it coming in the inimitable and trenchant caricatures in Punch; it was foreshadowed lamely and impotently in a recent Criterion comedy; it is promised in the forthcoming Gilbert and Sullivan opera. But Mr Burnand is first in the field with a satire that is at once deliberate and good-natured, and the strongest circumstance connected with the success of the experiment is that the author’s point is apparently as much appreciated by pit and gallery as it is in the stalls and boxes. (“Prince of Wales Theatre”)

   Walter Hamilton observed, in the History of the Aesthetic Movement (1882), that nobody had heard of the aesthetes until they were made the target of “our sneering satirists” (93); Hamilton claimed his defence of Aestheticism was prompted by two theatrical productions, Francis Burnand’s The Colonel and W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s Patience, both performed on the London stage in 1881. Until then the Aesthetes, acolytes of the so-called Cult of Beauty, had been confined to a rarefied circle centred on Chelsea, the domain of the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) and James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903).