The Jacobean Banqueting House As A Performance Space

chapter 14
The Jacobean Banqueting House as a Performance

Space
John H. Astington
The grand chamber commissioned by King James in 1606, and first used
for a court occasion in January 1608 (The Masque of Beauty), lasted for
rather more than a decade before being destroyed by fire in January 1619,
immediately following another masque (The Masque of the Twelve Months)
performed on the preceding Twelfth Night (Butler 2007). The wooden
stage and painted canvas scenery, including an elaborate descent machine
with its ropes and winches, still in place some days later for an intended
repeat performance, helped spread the blaze, started by clumsy workmen
with a lamp. Though painted to look like more substantial stonework, the
interior colonnades were also made of wood, as was the elaborately carved
roof. The building was reduced to a scorched shell, and it was demolished
to its foundations to make way for the elegant replacement designed by
Inigo Jones, finished over the next couple of years and still to be seen, if in
a somewhat altered state, in Whitehall, London. The first Jacobean
Banqueting House shared the fate of the Globe playhouse five and a half
years earlier; like the Globe, the Banqueting House was to rise again in
a more substantial form.
The Banqueting House and The Court

The successor to the destroyed building today stands on a busy thorough-
fare, filled with buses and other traffic, and it takes some imagination to see
it as it once was: a major accent in pale stone set against the now vanished
Tudor palace, built chiefly of red brick. Its original setting, also that of its
less substantial predecessors that occupied the site before it, was immedi-
ately south of the Court Gate, the principal land entry to the palace
precincts. Its western flank, as at present, faced the public street, quieter
then than now, and its eastern side the enclosed squarish courtyard, the
Preaching Place or Pebble Court, defined by ranges of the other palace
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204 john h. astington
buildings: the Council Chamber and the Great Chamber overlooked the
southern and eastern sides of that area, which was also a place of perfor-
mance, as we shall observe. King James entered the Banqueting House
from the direction of his private chambers, at the southern (high) end; the
general entry for members of the court and guests (the low end) lay at
the northeast corner, via a covered wooden walkway or terrace from the
complex of palace buildings lying to the east. This hierarchical layout
would have had some consequences when the Banqueting House was
prepared for theatrical occasions, and I shall examine them below.
Little remains to help our reimagining of this important court place, the
grandest assembly chamber at Whitehall for almost half King James’s
reign: some foundations still lie under the building that replaced it, and
some fragments of the stone casement windows, scorched by fire, were
excavated in 1967 (Thurley 1999, 80–1). No exterior views of the building
survive, but a valuable ground plan was made by the architect Robert
Smythson in about 1609, and may be found in accessible reproduction in
various publications (Colvin 1982, Plate 21; Thurley 1999, 79; Astington
1999b, 52). It confirms what we know from verbal accounts of various
kinds: the Banqueting House was a rectangular hall, the main floor raised
above ground level over a basement, built of brick with stone window
casements at three levels, with interior upper galleries supported on col-
umns rising from the main floor, rather more than twice as long as its
width, at 120 feet by 53 feet, exactly the dimensions of its successor, and it
had the largest area for assemblies of the court within the entire palace. It
perhaps had a height similar to that of the building that replaced it (75 feet
from ground to pitch of roof). Seven ranges of windows lit each long side,
but differently disposed, with four projecting bays facing the street (west)
and three the court (east). As in the Inigo Jones building there were
basement chambers below the main floor, some of them apparently used
as changing rooms at the time of masque performances.
The building appears to have been the initiative of the king, concerned
to make his mark as a European monarch of some consequence, with
physical surroundings to match. Such had been royal policy for a hundred
years before him, but as a ruler with marriageable children, unlike his
predecessor, he had an eye to forging advantageous international alliances,
with conspicuous architectural patronage as one sign of his power and
status. It has been suggested that the new Banqueting House was designed
to showcase the fashionable Stuart masques, which also had a role in
international diplomacy, fostered by James’s consort Queen Anne, and
to give them a more up-to-date performance environment than that of the
The Jacobean Banqueting House as a Performance Space 205
old Tudor Hall, with its late-Gothic character. It seems unlikely that this
was the only projected purpose for the building, however. Its name alone
indicates a traditional function of such a structure, and during the decade
of its existence it held the dinner in honour of James’s brother-in-law, the
King of Denmark, in July 1614, as well as several of the annual St George’s
Feasts, on April 23 each year, central ceremonies of the Order of the Garter,
the honorary degree of nobility in which James took a particular interest.
The room also functioned as a grand reception chamber: the new
bridegroom, Frederick, Elector Palatine, was received there in state on
his arrival from Germany in late December 1612, and ambassadors and
envoys might be granted royal audience there amid an impressive assembly
of the entire court. Simon Thurley has suggested that royal thinking about
the function of the Banqueting House moved away from a place for the
performance of court entertainments and towards one of ceremonial
occasions (Thurley 1999, 82–7). Certainly in the following reign Inigo
Jones’s building ceased to hold the masques, following the installation of
the Rubens painted ceiling celebrating the power and dignity of King
James.
During the years with which I am concerned here, however, the
Banqueting House saw a remarkable variety of uses, as, traditionally,
court halls always had. Planned in the first few years of the king’s reign,
the design of the interior in particular seems to have aimed to create a new
style at Whitehall Palace, which had not been altered much since the reign
of Henry VIII. The architect was probably Robert Stickells, who seems to
have drawn his inspiration for the interior from an engraving by the Dutch
designer Vredeman de Vries, ‘Ionica Super Dorica’ (1606), which shows
a colonnaded hall with Doric columns supporting upper galleries of Ionic
columns; such was the scheme at the Banqueting House (Colvin 1982, 323;
Thurley 1999, 79–80). Set on stone bases, the columns were turned wood,
finished with marbling to give the effect of stonework, as were the upper
gallery railings, while the details of the capitals and surface decorations on
the columns were painted and gilded. The general effect of such an interior
would have been of an elegant classicism; the building when empty would
also have been quite light, since a considerable area of the side walls was
glazed, facing the sun in both directions, morning and afternoon. Its roof
was flat, crenellated on the exterior, but with a rather fanciful interior
ceiling probably owing more to the flights of mannerism than to strict
classicism. It featured ‘pendants’, to hang chandeliers, and a cohort of
carved, painted, and gilded wooden ‘boys’, as they are called in the building
accounts: cherubs or putti, most likely. The space overhead was thus a kind
of decorative ‘heavens’, as well as a source of light for events taking place in
the evening, as well as in the daytime in the darker days of winter.
A traditional decoration for court rooms during holidays and ceremonial
events involved hanging the walls with figurative tapestries, of which the
English court was distinguished by its enormous and valuable collection
(Campbell 2007). Henry Peacham, writing in 1622, suggests that formerly
the great suite of The Acts of the Apostles, designed by Raphael and acquired
by King Henry VIII, was to be seen in the Banqueting House (Campbell
2007, 261–7). He is likely to have observed the hangings in the years he was
pursuing the patronage of Prince Henry, before late 1612 (Peacham 1622,
137). In the Banqueting House tapestries would have been hung against the
wall line, blocking the windows, and in the daytime thus darkening the main
floor, consequently causing the lighting of the interior from above – an effect
frequently to be observed in churches and cathedrals. For assemblies, how-
ever, the upper windows also might have been partially blocked by the
audience and the seating provided to accommodate them, increasing the
likelihood of the use of candlelight even for daytime events.
The Banqueting House in Use

Such was the general character of the Banqueting House. Its rectangular
plan was suited to traditional court spatial hierarchy, with the monarch and
his immediate entourage occupying one (‘high’) end, the assembled cour-
tiers and nobility the sides, and the visitors – entertainers or foreign
dignitaries – the opposite (‘low’) end, approaching the monarch, as eti-
quette allowed, through the central space remaining. The open floor
between the colonnades was some 34 feet wide by rather more than 100
feet in length, suitable for a processional entry, for example. When used as
a theatrical performance space, such a general layout is likely to have been
followed: the obvious place to set up a temporary stage, whether for plays
or masques, was across the width of the hall at the north end, probably in
front of the two central columns supporting the gallery. For plays, one
might think, the king and his family might have wanted to be nearer to the
actors; a royal seat brought forward to nearer the middle of the hall would
have allowed space for rising ranks of seating to the rear, as at the theatrical
conversion of the hall at Christ Church, Oxford, for James’s visit in 1605
(Orrell 1983, 129–36). For masques the area in front of the scenic stage was
required for both orchestra and singers, and principally for the dancers,
who performed in the area formed by the central floor of the building.
The chief eyewitness account of such a performance in the Banqueting
House – that of the Venetian attaché Horatio Busino at Pleasure Reconciled
to Virtue in early January 1618, quoted later in the chapter – confirms the
general physical terms of such arrangements at masque performances. As at
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue so at The Masque of Beauty ten years earlier, we
may assume.
Across the intervening decade at least eleven other masques were per-
formed in the Banqueting House, both on the traditional holidays of
Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, as well as at special events: Tethys’ Festival
in June 1610 to celebrate the installation of Prince Henry as Prince of
Wales, for example. Other entertainments mounted there would have been
configured to suit their particular requirements, within the constraints of
the rectangular space and the hierarchical nature of seating for an audience:
the monarch always had to be provided with a prominent position, to be
seen as much as to see. It may be that audience members in the side galleries
had a rather better view of the choreography of masque dancing, say, than
did the king, from his position at the far end of the dancing floor, directly
facing the scenic stage.1
From soon after it was ready, in early 1608, the Banqueting House was
the site of other kinds of entertainment and show: in March of that year,
for example, for the exhibition of a dancing ass and goat, the kind of
popular street theatre and sideshow that evidently also held some elite
appeal (Cook and Wilson 1961, 103). Whether this show was actually
mounted inside the Banqueting House itself, with the entire array of
seating habitually constructed for a court assembly, seems doubtful in
the light of other evidence to which I will come. The show was probably
not protracted, and was probably mounted in the daytime rather than the
evening, the latter the usual time for more elaborate entertainments.
James’s low threshold for tedium is attested to by a number of anecdotes,
although he may have enjoyed the opportunity to make jokes about
dancing asses, glancing at his courtiers’ performances in the masques.
On 18 April 1609, the Banqueting House saw a performance by rope
dancers; preparations would have involved the securing of upright poles
between which the ropes were stretched, perhaps across the width of the
room, braced against the pillars on either side. Rope walkers and dancers,
again, were an entertainment to be seen at the popular venues of fairs and
markets; since speech was not a required part of the performers’ skills
a number of them might have travelled from the European continent, or
further afield. The 1609 entertainers were English, however, a company
1
See Barroll, Chapter 11 in this volume.
providing ‘feats of activity’ and led by William Peadle and his son, also
William (Cook and Wilson 1961, 47, 103). The Peadles performed again in
the Banqueting House in 1616 on the Tuesday of Easter Week (5 April),
after having entertained Queen Anne at Greenwich in February and March
(Cook and Wilson 1961, 61, 113, 144). Widely shared popular amusements,
then, formed part of court pastime, in the Banqueting House and
elsewhere.
More surprising, perhaps, is that in the same month and year of
April 1609 the room was prepared for bearbaiting, certainly a popular
London show, though traditionally with a not very high reputation, and
also, traditionally, an outdoor event (Cook and Wilson 1961, 103). In
London, the bear gardens and arenas of the south bank were where one
would go to watch such a spectacle; at court, in the Elizabethan years,
bearbaiting had been shown in the royal parks and in enclosed courtyards.
A certain physical distance from enraged bears and mastiffs would seem to
have been what prudent observers of such cruel aggression might have
expected, as well as a fairly secure perimeter between the arena and the
audience stands. The 1609 event is the first I know of at which, the bare
Chamber accounts suggest, bearbaiting was held indoors. It was, as Ben
Jonson noted, a ‘stinking’ event, with a good deal of associated noise and
mess (Jonson 1963, 34). James was certainly a fan, however; by bringing the
sport (using that word in its strictly Jacobean sense) within the elegant
setting of his new hall, James would have been proclaiming the high status
of bearbaiting as a royal amusement, in the classical tradition of the
venationes, for those learned enough to recognise it, or else cocking
a snook at court snobbery. And the Banqueting House bearbaitings con-
tinued, annually, so far as records note them, from 1611 to 1614.
On the 1609 occasion, the bears and dogs were the king’s own, looked
after by none other than Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, known
chiefly in theatrical history for other activities. They jointly secured the
court post of Master of the Bears in late 1604, Alleyn holding it solely from
Henslowe’s death in 1616 until his own ten years later (Cerasano 1991).
They would have presided at court bearbaitings, assuring their care and
good management were observed and admired by their patron, and thus
would have been present at the Banqueting House from 1609 onwards.
The physical requirements for a match between bears and dogs, setting
aside the question of stands for the observers, were fairly simple. The bear
arena was circular, defined by the stake at its centre to which the bear was
attached by a chain or rope, preferably with a pivot, allowing it to move in
a circular range defined by the length of the chain as a radius. The stake had
to be stout and immovable: a timber post of hefty dimensions which
outdoors would have been driven firmly into the ground; indoors, some
kind of mortice or recess might have secured it.
The puzzle of the seeming anomaly and difficulty of arranging animal
baitings within the Banqueting House is clarified by the survival of one of
the ‘particular books’ of the Office of Works for the spring and summer
months of 1614: detailed records of activity in construction and mainte-
nance from which the more general annual accounts were distilled. Among
other events, the book records how the Banqueting House was prepared for
St George’s Feast in April 1614, and suggests what the rather mysterious
‘device’ shown by ‘the Dutchman’ there in May is likely to have been. The
work involved ‘inclosing a roome in a great windowe in ye banketthouse for
a dutchman to show the King a device there’: probably some kind of
camera obscura (Orrell 1979, 4). In July 1614, King Christian IV of
Denmark, James’s brother-in-law, visited London unexpectedly, and
entertainments for him were hastily arranged, including bearbaiting at
Whitehall. The Works account book covering the preparations describes
what was no doubt the regular practice for other bearbaitings recorded as
happening at the Banqueting House: ‘Carpenters . . . fitting and setting vp
a footepace vnder the kings windowe in the banketthouse; making and
setting vp of degrees and a standing before the kings windowe for the
Master of the bares’ (Orrell 1979, 4). That is to say, the king watched the
baiting through an open gallery window (probably), raised on a dais
(footpace), while the baiting arena was established in the courtyard to
the east, defined by temporary stands erected outside. Henslowe and
Alleyn stood deferentially below James, managing the spectacle. For bear-
baitings, the Banqueting House therefore served as a royal viewing stand
rather than a place of performance proper. That such arrangements were
the practice from early in the life of the building is suggested by lines from
Jonson’s Epicene (1609), as Mistress Otter berates her unfortunate hus-
band: ‘Were you ever so much as looked upon by a lord or a lady before
I married you, but on the Easter or Whitsun holidays? And then out of the
Banqueting House window, when Ned Whiting or George Stone were at
the stake?’ (CWBJ, 3:432). Otter, a bearbaiting fan, has followed two
famous bears to the court.
On Saturday 30 July 1614, the two kings also watched an exhibition of
fencing by the Masters of Defence John Bradshaw and Daniel Carter,
among others, from the same vantage point of a Banqueting House
window (Cook and Wilson 1961, 60). A large temporary platform forty-
six feet square, railed around the perimeter, was built in the courtyard
below, and a canvas velarium suspended over it, likely at the southern end,
‘to hang before the ffencers to keep the Sun from their eies’ (Orrell 1979,
4–5). Meanwhile, joiners were at work mending and setting up the cup-
board to hold the gold plate for the feast to be held in the Banqueting
House the following day.
Some risk of harm to observers attended other events mounted in the
Banqueting House which we might think more usually suited to an out-
door setting, such as the 1614 fencing. The martial contests of the Tudor
and Stuart courts were something of a chivalric game, but a game, certainly
in the case of jousting, with considerable risk of personal injury: the
weapons and the blows were real enough, although King Henry VIII, an
enthusiastic participant, probably always enjoyed something of an advan-
tage purely by rank. After Henry got older, fatter, and stiffer, no subse-
quent monarch, for reasons of gender, health, or inclination, threw
themselves into such activity with his gusto, and the Elizabethan tilts
celebrating the queen’s Accession Day each 17 November were the respon-
sibility of her leading male courtiers. James was a horseman, but principally
on the hunting field, restricting himself to the non-combatant display of
accurate skill with a weapon in running at the ring, in which a rider at
a gallop attempts to place his spearpoint within a suspended metal ring,
carrying it off. On the other hand, James’s teenaged son Henry, suitably
named after a line of martial English kings, had either a taste or a self-
determined ambition for personal involvement in adversarial combat of
the ritualised kind practised by the Renaissance aristocracy.
Even in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, certain kinds of performative combat
were occasionally mounted indoors. Foot combat at ‘barriers’ was an
activity which could be exhibited either outdoors or in; opponents wearing
suitable armour and helmets attempted to strike each other with a variety
of weapons – swords, spears, and pikes – across a waist-high pole extended
horizontally between them. It prevented combat getting too close and
overheated, and might be used for defensive dodges. An arcane scoring
system was administered by observing judges, as in modern fencing (Young
1987, 48).
Barriers were mounted three times within the Banqueting House: twice
in the 1609/10 Christmas season, and in November 1616 as part of the
celebrations of the investiture of James’s second son Charles as Prince of
Wales. On Twelfth Night 1610, a distinctly theatricalised version of the
sport involved the then heir to the throne, Prince Henry, rising to political
prominence in the last couple of years of his life; he was to be created Prince
of Wales some months later that year. Ben Jonson wrote speeches for
a dramatised eulogy of the martial virtue on display, and the physical
layout of the hall thus included not only the barrier itself, with space for
the contestants to wait between the bouts of fighting, but also a scenic stage
designed by Inigo Jones on or from which the framing characters, played
perhaps by actors from Prince Henry’s company, appeared and spoke
(Orgel and Strong 1973, 158–67). One might therefore think of this
particular occasion as similar in its spatial dynamics to a masque, with
the dancing replaced by fighting; such are the terms of the speculative plan
of the Banqueting House set up for this event illustrated in Stephen Orgel
and Roy Strong’s Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Orgel and
Strong 1973, 167).
Barriers presented certain hazards to an observing audience: weapons
might fracture on impact (indeed might have been designed to fracture, in
the case of pikes, spears, and lances), and sharp-edged fragments could fly
through the air at odd angles. To prevent injury to the important people
watching, then, safety nets made of wire mesh were set up between the
participants and the viewing stands, impeding the view somewhat but
improving the odds of being involved in the action involuntarily. An
illuminated drawing from the late sixteenth century shows Queen
Elizabeth seated in state, watching contests at barriers with a mesh frame
between her and the fighters (Young 1987, 78–9). Such precautions no
doubt continued in preparing indoor chambers for barriers, while experi-
enced courtiers might have secured seats in the upper galleries of the
Banqueting House. In the drawing, the queen sits facing the barrier,
with the consequence that one of the fighters has his back to her. It
seems more likely that in the Banqueting House the barrier was arranged
as Orgel and Strong (1973) show it in their plan of the 1610 event, in the
centre of the hall, parallel to its length; the king would then have had as
clear a view as possible, through the protective netting, of both fighters.
One further use of the room throughout its history was simply for
‘dancing’, as designated in the accounts of the Chamber in preparing the
room for special events. That the room had to be prepared indicates
something more than a casual social gathering: the dance was an assembly
of the court at festival seasons, and it is likely that the usual provisions for
seated observers were made around the sides of the central floor. Partly
a social dance, in which the king and queen and leading nobles might
participate, it probably also included a certain amount of rehearsed dan-
cing by dancing masters and virtuosos to enliven the display.2 Apart from
2
See Daye, Chapter 9 in this volume.
space for musicians it seems likely that, as at the masques, a special dancing
floor was laid down, built of wood, possibly padded with felt, and tradi-
tionally covered with green baize, well tacked down, like an enormous
billiard table. The end was to improve comfort and grip for the feet: stone,
likely the floor surface of the Banqueting House, or bare timber are not
particularly friendly bases for dancing. Even the large stage made for
fencing in 1614 was covered in buckram, a linen cloth, with the same end
of improved stability and manoeuvrability for the feet.
The Banqueting House as a Theatre

Having surveyed something of the variety of uses to which the Banqueting
House was put, I turn in the second half of this chapter to some specific
events, principally for theatrical occasions, both amateur and professional.
As a theatre, we might observe, to professional actors it would have been
both familiar and unfamiliar. As a large court chamber it conformed to the
conventions known to actors throughout Shakespeare’s working life, and
for several decades before that. How different, we might ask, would have
been the conditions surrounding the performance of Othello before the
king and court in the old Elizabethan Banqueting House on
1 November 1604 and those of The Tempest in James’s new building on
the same date seven years later? In larger terms, we would be inclined to say
not much. The traditional treatment of temporary stage directly facing the
monarch, with audience in ranks of seating behind her or him and to either
side, persisted in larger and smaller court rooms. But whereas in any of the
great halls at the English palaces near London (Whitehall, Greenwich,
Richmond, and Hampton Court, all of them early Tudor stone buildings
in Gothic style) seats for the audience had to be built up from floor level in
rising ranks (‘degrees’), like gymnasium bleachers, with the result that
those in the highest seats were furthest from the stage, in the Banqueting
House an audience in the galleries, especially at the northern end, were
relatively nearer to the performers. From the stage the effect must have
been more like that of a playhouse, whether in the larger Globe or smaller
Blackfriars (at which theatre the King’s Men began playing at about the
same time as the Banqueting House came into use). In all three spaces,
faces of the observers filled something like the full height of the building,
rather than its lower third or so, as in the court halls.
The side galleries and columns must also have had a favourable effect on
the acoustics of the space, particularly as they were made of wood, while the
walls between the windows were decorated with wooden wainscotting. The
vast and cavernous space of the surviving Great Hall at Hampton Court,
with its high pitched roof and its stone walls, is not actor-friendly, and the
players must have steeled themselves to perform their plays audibly and
comprehensibly within such a resonant area: the Hall at Whitehall was of
a similar size and character. A full audience in the galleries of the
Banqueting House must have helped in softening the acoustics, and
what seems to have been a somewhat lower wood and plaster ceiling
would also have contributed. The room was consequently a better one in
which to listen to the music of the masques than were the stone halls, even
when hung with tapestries.
One further difference may have lain in the lighting and its diffusion.
Theatrical events at court happened in the evening hours, and traditionally
during the darker months of winter and early spring; sometimes they did
not finish until the early hours of the morning. Court theatricals, then,
inevitably entailed lighting, principally from candles in suspended chan-
deliers distributed over the entire space of the room. Audience and stage
were fairly evenly lit, if attempts were made, especially in the transition
effects in masques, to concentrate illumination on the stage and scenery,
although the difference in levels must have been both relative and slight.
The effect of many scintillating candles, however, with their soft yellowish
glow fluctuating and shifting in the air currents, must have been quite
remarkable, and is likely to have formed part of courtiers’ memories of
Othello and The Tempest in performance.
Where the Banqueting House is likely to have differed from other court
spaces under such conditions lay in its reflective character. Columns and
gallery balustrades were marbled – that is, in a pale grey or tan tone, with
painted veining – and likely glazed with a varnish finish. The frieze that
crowned the lower Doric order was decorated with gilding, set off against
a blue background. Decorative gilded details adorned the columns of the
Ionic order, while their bases and capitals were also gilded (Colvin 1982,
323). With many chandeliers suspended from the pendants of the roof the
room would have been alive with reflected light, its columns and balconies
picked out as defining vertical and horizontal accents around the central
space of the hall, and the gilding twinkling in response to the movement of
the candles.
On the first occasion that the Banqueting House was used as a theatrical
auditorium, we learn of a plan that probably formed a model for similar
subsequent events. In preparation for The Masque of Beauty in December
and January 1607/8, workmen erected ‘a greate nomber of Degrees . . . on
either syde of the Banquetting house both belowe and in the galleries’
(Wilson and Hill 1975, 22). Seating in the galleries, with their fairly shallow
depth, was possibly raised to improve the view over the level of the
balustrades; on the main floor it seems unlikely that seating was restricted
to the same narrow confines, and probably it extended somewhat beyond
the line of the columns. The columns, we might note, would have created
problems of ‘restricted view’, in modern box-office parlance, for many seats
in the galleries and for any on the main floor lying behind them, nearest the
windows.
The Stuart masques regularly employed two performance spaces: the
scenic stage, on which the masquers first were revealed, and the dancing
floor in front of it, to which they descended to perform. The king’s seat and
those around and behind it faced the stage, centrally aligned, with the
disadvantage of being at some distance; audience in the side seats looked at
the scenic effects obliquely. For The Masque of Beauty, ‘a greate Stage fower
foote high from the ground’ probably entirely filled the northern end of the
room, although a passage to its side is likely to have been left free to admit
audience entering by the north-eastern door (Wilson and Hill 1975, 22).
The masque was a sequel, paired with The Masque of Blackness danced three
years earlier, with the queen and her ladies costumed and made up as the
Daughters of Niger, African exotics, performed in the rather smaller space
of the Elizabethan Banqueting House. Its scenery, designed by Inigo Jones,
had been on a similarly grand scale to that of Beauty, with a stage forty feet
square and ‘wth wheles to go on’. The chief mechanical effect was a moving
throne, in the shape of ‘a great concave shell’, in which the masquers sat
and which appeared to be drawn downstage by attendant sea monsters
(Orgel and Strong 1973, 88–90). The wheels, then, probably supported this
device at the hall floor level (the considerably large and heavy stage not
having been engineered to be mobile as one unit), the entire thing moving
in slots constructed through the centre of the platform and powered by
sub-stage ropes running through pulleys at the downstage limit and
returning to winches behind the line of the backdrop.
The scenery built in 1607/8 was evidently meant to recall that of 1605,
and although Inigo Jones receives no mention in either Jonson’s text of the
masque or in other surviving documentation his general conception was
probably followed both by Jonson and by William Portington, the master
carpenter who supervised its construction. The ‘great Stage’ was probably
similar in dimensions to its predecessor, thus taking up most of the width
of the room and about a third of its length. The dancing floor was probably
narrower than the stage itself, but it would have extended to at least the
middle of the length of the room, and possibly rather more. The staging
provisions for masques in the Banqueting House, then, might lay claim to
something like half the area of the main floor; stage players would not have
needed so much space, and audience seating for plays might consequently
have been more generous.
The mechanical effect in The Masque of Beauty was made to recall
that of the moving shell and its attendants in Blackness. It was con-
ceived as a floating island, featuring a throne of beauty holding the
masquers, an octagonal structure with a central pillar and ‘diverse
wheeles and Devices for the moving rounde thereof’ (Wilson and
Hill 1975, 22). Not only did this structure advance from upstage to
down, as on the previous occasion, but it also revolved as it did so, in
two distinct directions, the steps to the pergola-like throne moving
counterclockwise while the upper part turned in a clockwise motion.
Whether the machinery functioned exactly as Jonson describes it in his
text we might doubt, but he specifically thanks Portington for his
work: ‘The order of this scene was carefully and ingeniously disposed,
and as happily put in act, for the motions, by the King’s master
carpenter’ (Orgel and Strong 1973, 95).
What it was like to attend a masque, for those privileged to do so, is
illuminated by the surviving account of Horatio Busino, a member of the
Venetian diplomatic delegation to the English court, who was present at
the performance of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue on 6 January 1618, late in
the career of the Banqueting House as a performance space, and who also
wrote at some length about his impressions. As one of the most significant
eyewitness accounts of early modern English performance we possess, this
document has been much cited and discussed; it is published in full, in
both the original Italian and modern English translation, in Orgel and
Strong’s Inigo Jones (Orgel and Strong 1973, 279–84). In this context I wish
to draw particular attention to some parts of it. First, Busino confirms the
habitual layout of stage and auditorium in court halls: ‘the stage is placed at
one end, and facing it at the other end, his majesty’s chair under a large
canopy’ (Orgel and Strong 1973, 282). The Venetian party arrived at
Whitehall in the afternoon, and were admitted to what Busino calls
a ‘box’, probably an enclosed section of degrees somewhere near the
royal end of the main floor, uncomfortably packed full of people, as was,
Busino notes, the entire house, including the ladies’ seats (perhaps at the
sides), holding ‘600 and more in number’ (Orgel and Strong 1973, 282).
That women sat together at masques is confirmed by other sources of
information, and they appear to have constituted roughly half of the entire
audience; some years later, the similarly sized Inigo Jones Banqueting
House held temporary seating for about 1,300 people (Astington 1999b,
163, 171).
In 1618 such a packed audience waited for two hours for the king to
appear, ‘about the 6th hour of the night’ (Orgel and Strong 1973, 282).
Only then was the full effect of the performance space revealed: ‘The Lord
Chamberlain then had the way cleared, and in the middle of the room
there appeared a fine and spacious area all covered with green cloth’: the
dancing floor (Orgel and Strong 1973, 282, 283). The audience from the
seats on the main floor had been milling about somewhat during the wait,
and were reduced to order only after the king had taken his seat. It was also
then, presumably, that the main overhead lights, noted by Busino as
constituting ‘two rows . . . to be lit at the proper time’, were lowered, lit,
and raised again, an operation that would have been difficult before the
floor was clear (Orgel and Strong 1973, 282). The beginning of the masque,
then, was marked by the light level of the hall going up, rather than down:
precisely the opposite effect of the beginning of a modern performance at
the Metropolitan Opera, say. The entire event, Busino finally notes, ended
with a rather unruly supper in another palace room, ‘two hours after
midnight’ (Orgel and Strong 1973, 284). The published texts of masques,
usually amounting to a few pages recording dialogue, some lyrics, and
descriptive stage directions, therefore give a quite misleading impression of
their duration in performance, and of their function as a court holiday
occasion, with more than a few people at least slightly drunk.3
No such account, regrettably, records the atmosphere of a performance
by the professional players in the Banqueting House. As has been observed,
a temporary auditorium made for plays could have contained a rather
larger audience than those for the masques, nearer to the capacity of the
Globe than the Blackfriars, for example. Plays we either know or can infer
to have been performed within the Banqueting House are The Tempest,
A King and No King, Greene’s Tu Quoque, and The Almanac (November–
December 1611), and, in November 1614, Bartholomew Fair. Between 1610
and 1617, it appears, at least thirty plays were presented within the cham-
ber; we might guess at the identity of the remaining unnamed 83 per cent
by consulting the repertory lists of the leading acting companies during
these years. Since the Elizabethan years, players had been used to adapting
the staging of their plays from the playhouses to court conditions, and we
can take it that the transition was a matter of course. Any particular
requirements regarding properties, stage effects, and items of scenery
3
See Barroll, Chapter 11 in this volume.
were met either by the actors bringing their gear with them, accompanying
the costume baskets, or by the provision of the Revels Office, consulting if
necessary with the Office of the Works, the latter habitually responsible for
constructing the entire temporary timber-built stage and auditorium.
Some general characteristics of these temporary theatre spaces can be
gleaned from the relevant accounts of their preparation. In later 1615, for
example, James Maxwell, gentleman usher, was paid for supervising the
preparation of the Banqueting House ‘for the Plaies . . . with the Chamber
next adioyninge’ (Cook and Wilson 1961, 112). This was a common provi-
sion for masque performances, at which backstage space was commonly
taken up with machinery and its operators; masque theatres had no tiring
house, in the sense of that term as combined dressing room and green
room. That at least on occasion professional players at court may not have
had all the backstage space they may have counted on in their playhouses
(because of more extensive provision for audience space?) is suggested by
the 1615 account.
One particular structure usually prepared by the Revels Office was
a ‘music house’,4 which at first glance would suggest a feature connected
to the masques, except that playhouses also had a ‘music room’, usually the
gallery of the tiring house, on the second storey of the stage facade. Thus,
when in the 1610/11 season the Revels recorded expenditure on ‘Painted
cloths for the musicke house and Stage at the Courte’, what may have been
referenced was an actors’ stage and tiring house decorated with imitation
tapestry, around the perimeter of the platform and across the facade
(Streitberger 1986, 112). A ‘music house’, then, was a two-storey tiring
house, with musicians, masked by a light curtain, occupying the second
level, and making way as necessary for players involved in the occasional
action ‘above’; the stage level of the structure was used as the point(s) of
entry and exit for the majority of the play. In 1618/19 such a provision seems
to be confirmed by a phrase in the Works accounts, when the Revels Office
was in a state of some disarray, with suspension of operations: ‘making of
a musicke and attyring house for plaies’ (Wilson and Hill 1975, 29). One
structure, then, serving related but distinct functions in the presentation of
plays, and what the king and his courtiers observed at plays in court rooms,
was in its general physical aspect similar to the stage of a playhouse.
The Revels Office had also traditionally looked after lighting for court
entertainments: transporting, erecting, and taking down suspension wires;
4
For further developments on the ‘music house’ and the Revels expenditures, I refer to Olson,
Chapter 16 in this volume.
and hanging chandeliers and the various reflective decorations accompa-
nying them. The design of the Banqueting House suggests that it was well
provided with its own permanent lighting, as confirmed by Busino’s
account. None the less, supplementary lighting was brought in by the
Revels for shows of one kind and another. In 1611/12, in addition to
providing their habitual hanging lights, the Revels bought six dozen
candlesticks, as well as four dozen ‘large pasteboards’ ‘to save the
Colloumes in the Bancketing House’; this detail continues to be provided
for in subsequent years (Streitberger 1986, 51, 57, 64, 70, 77). Flickering
candles placed near to the expensively decorated columns might have
scorched them, although pasteboard does not sound a particularly safe
means of protecting them. The danger of fire, the building’s eventual fate,
was always present at large and lavishly illuminated gatherings.
The performance of The Tempest before the king and court on
1 November 1611, with Richard Burbage likely to have been playing
Prospero, was the first we know of. We can guess that the play had entered
the repertory of the King’s Men rather earlier in the year, perhaps not much
before the royal performance, and perhaps that its premiere took place at
the indoor Blackfriars playhouse. These are guesses rather than established
facts; no doubt the play was also presented at the Globe, as The Winter’s
Tale and Cymbeline certainly were, during its career in the company’s
repertory: certainly, Shakespeare was thinking of a metatheatrical reso-
nance in composing Prospero’s words about ‘the great globe itself’ fading
into nothing (4.1.153). Although the play has frequently been imagined to
have had some special relationship to the Blackfriars (in its reliance on
musical effects, for example) and also with the court, in its mythological
wedding masque, it is in fact, like many plays of the period, quite unde-
manding in its reliance on stage resources, could quite easily have been
mounted in any of the contemporary playhouses or performance spaces we
know of, and can today be presented either rich or poor, to use Peter
Brook’s terms, as it indeed has been (Brook 1968). As regards the masque, it
perhaps alludes to contemporary court fashion, although equally
Shakespeare had been interested in the trope of the inset court entertain-
ment from his early career onwards: witness Love’s Labour’s Lost,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet.
The temporary court stage in 1611, in short, need not have been provided
with much more than the basic provisions actors would have expected in
playing anywhere: the playing platform itself (the ‘bare island’), and a space
behind it from which to enter and to return in exiting the scene, perhaps
through openings in painted cloth, a facade of coloured and decorated
fabric.5 A music house, such a space with a screened second storey, would
have been appropriate to The Tempest, and may have been used by
Burbage, appearing through the musicians’ curtains, in 3.3 of the play:
‘Solemn and strange music. Enter Prosper on the top, invisible’ (17). As
regards the descent of Juno in 4.1, it seems far from certain that the text
as we have it in the Folio is prescriptive about flying machinery for the
theophany. The marginal direction ‘Iuno descends’ is evidently not placed
in the appropriate dramatic position (TLN 1730–1; Hinman 1968, 32),
leading to some modern editorial ingenuity in rationalising it. Further,
immediately prior to Juno’s first lines Ceres sees her coming, recognising
her ‘by her gait’ (4.1.102). Taken as a whole, then, Juno may simply have
entered the stage in the regular way when Ceres says she does, the descent
direction being permissive (do it ‘if you can conveniently’, as another
contemporary stage direction puts it) and the printed text conflating two
possible stagings of the scene (Dessen and Thomson 1999, 229). If the
actors calculated that the spectacle would have suited court taste they
perhaps prevailed on the Master of the Revels to provide for the construc-
tion of a stage ceiling and attendant machinery. It has to be said, however,
that the effect is largely extraneous to the shape of the dramatic text, unlike
the descent of Jupiter in Cymbeline, for example (5.4.29–123).
Special provisions by the Office of the Revels certainly were made for the
court performance of Bartholomew Fair in the Banqueting House three
years later. Jonson composed a new prologue, addressed to the king, for the
occasion, and as a familiar and well-patronised court writer over the
preceding decade perhaps he had some input into the physical preparations
to show his play to advantage. The play itself was brand new, having been
premiered at the Hope playhouse on the preceding day, 31 October 1614.
The Hope was a fairly new building, planned for the double purpose of
stage playing and animal baiting, its stage designed to be removable. Its
polygonal plan was based on the earlier Swan playhouse; modern archae-
ology has revealed that it had a yard rather more than 50 feet across:
possibly its stage was similar in dimensions to that at the Rose, roughly
40 feet wide by 20 deep (Bowsher 2012, 109–13). A platform of that size
would have been readily accommodated in the Banqueting House, and the
actors might have counted on the movement and grouping worked out in
rehearsal being directly reproducible at court.
That they may have allowed themselves a rather more expansive use of
space at court is a possibility suggested by the records of the Revels
5
See Olson, Chapter 16 in this volume.
provisions: ‘Canvas for the Boothes and other necċies for a play called
Bartholomewe ffaire’ (Streitberger 1986, 70). In the same list appear pay-
ments for ‘Musickhouses’, so probably the basic layout of the theatre was
the same as it had been for The Tempest. The fiction of the play moves to
the fair only in the second act, so some relatively neutral stage space is
required for Littlewit’s house, the venue of act 1. Thereafter, the booths
come into their own, crucially so the focal pig booth of Ursula. Within the
considerable available floor area of the Banqueting House it may have been
possible to create a ‘fair’ area beyond the boundaries of the stage platform
itself and to play, as in a masque, on the hall floor in front of it, with the
booths creating an evocative atmosphere, particularly if one of them was
scenting the air with barbecue, amusingly at odds with the style of the hall
itself, the low brought within the high, scruffy urban London into
Whitehall, and the vernacular into the place of the elite. A dispersed setting
of the various booths – Leatherhead’s, Trash’s, and Ursula’s – might thus
be seen, as Eugene Waith has described it, as a ‘survival . . . of the essentially
medieval tradition of simultaneous staging’ (Jonson 1963, 217).
As to what the other ‘necessaries’ provided by the Revels may have been,
we are left to guess. Perhaps they made a theatrical set of stocks, required in
4.1 and 4.6, for example. Why the actors did not bring their own properties
and scenic units with them, the common procedure, is something of
a puzzle perhaps to be explained by Jonson’s ambition to impress. In
‘The Induction to the Stage’ published in the 1631 text of the play,
Jonson writes himself in as an angry and impatient presence ‘behind the
arras’ as the immediate preliminaries to the performance are coming
together (Jonson 1963, 27–8). It is easy to imagine him in a similar back-
stage role at the Banqueting House performance; he had been a habitué of
the building from its beginning, testily observing the slow progress of the
decorators in finishing the details of the king’s grand assembly hall before
The Masque of Beauty could be shown to the court. As a playing place for
rather more than a decade, the Banqueting House was, amongst its other
functions, the largest and most elegant of the Jacobean indoor theatres,
eclipsing the Blackfriars and the Phoenix, let alone the tiny space used by
Paul’s Boys. After its destruction there was no court theatre quite like it,
even with the advent of the considerably smaller converted Cockpit in
1630. Grand, brilliant, and classical, the Jacobean Banqueting House must
have been an impressive place in which to perform.

The Jacobean Banqueting House As A Performance Space

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chapter 14

The Jacobean Banqueting House as a Performance

The Banqueting House and The Court

The Banqueting House in Use

The Banqueting House as a Theatre

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