Beds on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

Beds on the Early Modern StageBed scenes remind us how little we know about staging practices in early modern London playhouses. Stage directions often say that a bed was ' discovered' but not where or how. And if it had curtains, were they on the bed or over an opening in the tiring house wall? Was the bed a four-poster, even though such a structure would have blocked sightlines and been cumbersome? Given the extra staging demands bed scenes entailed, why did playwrights include them? This study focuses on these and related matters with reference to all bed scenes in plays written between 1580 and 1642.Leslie Thomson (l.thomson@utoronto.ca) is professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto.

Performing power and the power of performance in the bed-space of Jonson’s Volpone (1606)

“…In other cases a curtained bed creates suspense and anticipation of a discovery". 10 The entire purpose of the theatrical bed, in Thomson's terms, is to provide space for an interplay of seen and unseen, anticipation and exposure.…”

“Take up her bed”: Cleopatra’s bed in Antony and Cleopatra

“…In Leslie Thomson's comprehensive study of beds on the early modern stage, she contends that the use of beds must have been a conscious choice by playwrights, and when one considers the difficulties in staging a bed this becomes an even more salient point. 12 In the case of Cleopatra's bed, the challenges would have been mitigated by the advantageous ease of removing a body offstage through the use of the bed. Indeed, Thomson discovers that characters rarely sleep in beds but rather die or are killed in beds.…”

“…She writes, "the use of a bed is typically pivotal in a play's plot -a visual event with a significant build up and consequential effect". 13 In Sasha Roberts's study of the dramatic and symbolic properties of the bed in Shakespearean tragedy, she argues that the bed has special implications in the genre that feature "tragic loading of the bed". 14 Roberts reads beds onstage as "an intense and compelling visual and symbolic arena for acting out powerful passions and transgressions, and for mapping the disruptions and collisions of public and private space".…”

“…Thomson contends Cleopatra's bed was probably a couch or daybed (a couch is called for or referred to in nine plays between 1580-1642), but there also seems to be little difference between a couch and a bed in the period. 20 OED defines "couch" as "A frame or structure, with what is spread over it (or simply a layer of some soft substance), on which to lie down for rest or sleep; a bed". 21 In Henry Cockeram's English Dictionary of 1623, a couch is "a little bed".…”

“…Thomson cites Henslowe's inventory of props transcribed by Edmund Malone as containing a "bedstead" listed with two tombs and immediately after a rock, cage, tomb, and hell mouth. 26 At the time, a "bedstead" referred to the "wooden or metal stand on which a bed is raised" or "the framework of the bed." 27 Thomson uses this evidence to suppose that such categorisation indicates that they were large items stored together.…”