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That is, they attempt to recreate the physical stage work for which whoever first presented the play had to plan with extremely detailed analyses of stage directions and the action implicit in the dialogue. This entails a certain amount of literary and/or cultural analysis of the texts in order to discover how the theme or underlying meaning relates to the visual environment and what seems to be required of it to interpret the play. The resulting arguments are not, therefore, necessarily selected producible interpretations.
The Sources
Although academic studies of the court masque have mainly concentrated on the artistic influences and sources seen in the pictures and prints of masque designs or on the philosophical or political arguments or on allegories and the possible meaning of the masque texts, several scholars have written on different aspects of staging the masques. Lily B. Campbell traces the use of scenery on the English stage from the ideas of Vitruvius, devoting a chapter to the work of Inigo Jones and the English masques, and exploring the ways in which he applied the theories of perspective and his use of shutters in the ways suggested by Serlio, Scamozzi, and others. She concludes he probably used Italian sources for his machinery.1 Southern examines methods of presentation such as the use of a curtain, the need for a frontispiece, the management of “scenes of relieve”, and the shutter provision in great detail. His examples range from 1603 to 1640 and include Florimène, the plays The Shepherd’s Paradise and The Queen of Aragon, as well as The Siege of Rhodes. He analyses a possible presentation of Salmacida Spolia to show how the methods might have been used in practice in Davenant’s masque.2
Leacroft discusses the arrangements of the venues for presentations of Florimène and Salmacida Spolia and the different ways in which they may have been staged in the spaces available.3