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The third chapter discusses the clandestine entertainments which took place after the closure of the theatres in 1642 and then draws together the circumstances during the Interregnum which allowed Davenant to present entertainments with scenery designed by John Webb and describes and discusses what is known of those presentations and how they laid the foundations for the work at Lincoln’s Inn Fields after the Restoration.
The Restoration theatre stages had to accommodate sliding side and back shutters, cut-out relieve pieces, an upper stage and various mechanisms as well as the stagehands required to move and control the scenery, which meant that staging practices would have changed substantially from those of the thrust platform of the pre-Commonwealth theatres to the scenic stage of the Restoration public theatres.
The fourth chapter, therefore, discusses the fitting out of the tennis court theatre at Lincolns Inn Fields of which Davenant was the manager after 1660 and suggests that there was a legacy from the masque stage as well as links with the Hall theatre that John Webb built at Whitehall.
Davenant understood the relation of scene development to dramaturgy, genre and performance, and it is suggested that he actively used this relationship in productions of plays after the Restoration and encouraged other dramatists to understand the ways in which the scenic stage could affect the reception of their plays by adding elements in ways not possible on a bare stage. It is argued that The Playhouse to Let was a deliberate advertisement by Davenant of the several ways the scenic stage could be used and that from this, dramatists began to find how they could involve the scenery in their plots, particularly to provide for disclosures and discoveries in ways not possible before. It is suggested that Killigrew’s theatre at Bridges Street must have had basically the same stage fitments but that Killigrew presented more spectacle there by drawing on the masque stage techniques of “flying” characters, set pieces, and transformation scenes to embellish the heroic drama by Dryden and others, whereas Davenant was contriving to present plays with which the scenery was integral.