ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways the special effects made possible by the move indoors may have contributed to the realization of the thematic preoccupations of John Webster's Duchess of Malfi. A set of architectural drawings discovered in Worcester College, Oxford, in the 1960s. The drawings however displayed a number of architectural features associated with the earlier Jacobean period. They therefore became the basis for the design of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a simulacrum of The Blackfriars, adjacent to London's Globe. Art and artifice play tricks on the eye of the beholder. Scenographic innovations and experiments adapted from painting by Italian theatre designers like the architect Baldessare Peruzzi in the sixteenth century had been widely disseminated in the writings of Sebastiano Serlio. Consideration of the material aspects of production is shedding new light on the processes through which plays were realized in performance in the Early Modern period.
