Evidence of Scaffolding on Shakespeare's Stage

Thomas Platter's Account of an Unknown Play at the Curtain or the Boar's Head

“…W. W. Greg conjectured that Henry "is represented as dreaming that he is still encamped on the field of battle" (Greg 1931, 114), which suggests that a stage booth represented both the bed in which Henry slept and the tent of which he dreamt. The provenance of the `plot' of 2 Seven Deadly Sins is uncertain, but David Bradley (Bradley 1992, 101) added weight to Scott McMillin's suggestion (McMillin 1988, 61) that it might be the Henry 6 play mentioned in Henslowe's records (Foakes & Rickert 1961, 16-20) rather than Richard Tarlton's Seven Deadly Sins mentioned by Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe (Greg 1931, 2:107-113 (Reynolds 1940, 52-87;Smith 1951;Hodges 1968, 54-63;Nagler 1981, 26-65;McMillin 1992). As I have shown elsewhere, the ability of this stage property to represent various kinds of domestic and ceremonial furniture (bed, shop, pulpit, state) was, for Ben Jonson at least, a compelling example of the mutability of theatrical signs (Egan 1998).…”