Vaulting the Rails

Summary

In Thomas Middleton’s Black Book, Lucifer, “as Prologue to his own Play”,

…vaulted up so high

Above the stage-rails of this earthen globe,

to ascend “this dusty theatre of the world”. Remembering the ‘vaulting’ Herods and Lucifers of Miracle tradition, readers of Elizabethan drama must have often wondered whether in Shakespeare’s time players ever stepped beyond the confines of their platform stages, or whether the stage-rails constituted a frail but sure barrier between the demesnes of actor and audience, a sacrosanct frontier between two inviolable territories, like the line of footlights on the modern ‘picture’ stage.

A clear case can, I think, be made out for some continuity of tradition and convention between the Miracle and Elizabethan theatres in these matters: gesture, delivery, contemporary costuming, sound and light effects, machinery, affection for gruesome properties, spectacles, music, songs and dancing, soliloquies and asides, 'simultaneous' setting, trapwork, unlocalized settings, attitude to the Unities, fusion of the Tragic and Comic, and other aspects of production. It is clear too that the two theatres shared the same basic tradition of intimacy between actor and audience.