3The few non-sexualized references to the Great Bed, however, reveal fear as well as titillation. Some accounts deploy the imagined act of “lodg[ing] … a childe of two dayes old in the great bed of Ware” as a figure for folly, and the bed’s “miscellan[eous]” crowding, its bodies ranged anonymously side-by-side, as a sign of horrific social breakdown, as in this broadside account of the chaos wreaked on Londoners by the Great Fire of London:

• 10 William Jenkyn, The blind guide, or, The doting doctor, London, M.B. for Christopher Meridith, 1648 (...)

But then (alas!) men had no time to talk,
No more but so, Take up your Bed and walk,
Into the Fields on that bleak dew-dropt Grass,
Where the Earth Bed, and Heaven its Teaster was.
Infants and aged quarter’d row by row,
Never more Quarters had More-fields then now.
The Miscellany made in every square,
The Counterfeit of the Great Bed of Ware.10

4“Take up your Bed and walk” quotes with deep irony the Biblical Gospel of John (5:8), in which Jesus miraculously heals a sick man at the pool of Bethesda. The anonymous broadside author contrasts the damp grass with the dry feathers of a warm mattress, the open sky to the rich canopy (“Teaster”) of a gentleman’s four-poster, and (in a metalepsis) the outdoor bedchamber of newly homeless and vulnerable Londoners (infants and the elderly) to an army barracks that itself mocks or parodies the unexpected or incongruous sleeping partners put into proximity in the Great Bed of Ware.

6Motion’s poem begins with the bed itself:

Take the Great Bed of Ware
this never fell
through a thousand feet
of blistered air,
shaking its sleepers out like a
leaf-squall.
That’s why it’s here.

8In this way we can connect the literary and theatrical history of beds to complex attitudes towards beds and bedchambers in the early modern era and, indeed, now; we can see how beds and bedchambers evoke fantasies of warm communion on the one hand and of cold-hearted violence (whether averted or expressed) on the other. Ruth Goodman’s excellent and practical How To Be a Tudor reminds us that, in an era where few couples could enjoy private chambers dedicated solely for their own use, a curtained and canopied bed replaced our modern bedroom as the locus of sleep, sex, and secrecy, a rare haven of quiet amidst what might be a busy thoroughfare of household activity.

11Michelle Perrot’s engaging The Bedroom: An Intimate History expresses itself more lyrically:

• 17 Michelle Perrot, The Bedroom: An Intimate History (2009), trans. Lauren Elkin, New Haven, Yale Univ (...)

A number of issues crop up around the bedroom, whether it be of canvas or of stone; vault, cradle, gallery, or cave; through its associations with rest, with sleep, nocturnal or eternal; with transport; with death. In each case it is linked to limits, to enclosure, to safety, even secrecy; it exists to protect young girls and women, the upper classes, and the deceased.17

12The essays in this issue of Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus likewise foreground beds and bedchambers as scenes for the transitional rites and mysteries of human life, made sacred through this combination of outward display and inward joy or heartbreak. Thus Jonson’s Volpone histrionically receives visitors from his purported sickbed in Sarah Mayo’s and Dominic Sevieri’s essays, or John Fletcher’s Livia tricks the wife-taming Petruchio, only to be tricked by him again, in Elizabeth Sharrett’s. Thus Amy Acker’s Beatrice (in Joss Whedon’s 2013 film of Much Ado About Nothing, in Christy Desmet’s contribution) awakens to an empty bedchamber after a night of love, her Benedick having fled, or Thomas Heywood’s Lucrece and Thomas Middleton’s Beatrice-Joanna encounter violent desecration, in Janice Valls-Russell’s and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin’s essays respectively.

13The issue opens with Pierre Degott’s essay, “When Eros meets Thanatos: The bedchamber scenes in Congreve/Eccles’s and Handel/Hamilton’s Semele(s)”. Degott’s contribution foregrounds the histrionicism of the bed itself through theatre history, especially the tensions between opera and oratorio; the bed itself becomes almost a miniature stage within the musical theatre. Degott traces the bedchamber’s expanding roles across William Congreve’s 1707 libretto Semele and Handel’s rather operatic oratorio version of 1744, wherein the language of fire characterizes both the excessive ardour of Semele and Jupiter as well as the destructive, godly force that literalizes Semele’s passionate burning. The bedchamber is a consuming space, one in which consummation quickly becomes consumption, and Semele’s passion is both stoked and smothered by a greater force. So too, Degott suggests, is the operatic genre that the contemporary theatrical market demands Handel sacrifice in favour of the English oratorio.

14Dominic Sevieri’s contribution to this issue, “Menacing objects: Non-human agency in Volpone’s bedchamber”, takes us from the bed as a site of erotic destruction to the other objects within Volpone’s chamber that are materially implicated in broader social and economic networks that, Sevieri argues, Volpone largely overlooks or defies. Each object – a pillow, a plate, a coin – has played other parts and transformed itself within these networks prior to their reaching Volpone’s grasp, and whatever agency he exerts over these objects, these items still retain within themselves latent, minatory actions. At any moment, as Sevieri argues, these objects threaten Volpone’s control over deceit by working in another capacity: the amassed coin in the chamber that represents Volpone’s successful plot could always “mutiny” by returning to its function as currency.

17Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize uses the bed or couch to mark three of our rites of passage: marriage, illness, and death. In “Marriage bed manoeuvrings: Sociopolitical functions of the bed in the 1647 Folio text of John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, Or The Tamer Tamed”, Elizabeth Sharrett sees the bedchamber as a platform of gendered control: in The Woman’s Prize, Or The Tamer Tamed, this sphere of control is domestic rather than political. As one daughter, Maria, defies her marital contract by barring Petruchio from her bed, the other, Livia, achieves negotiating power in a future marital contract by, like Volpone, making her bed masquerade as a sick-bed. Sharrett concludes, however, that even through this masquerade, Livia pays some obeisance to marriage rituals so that the sick-bed can become the marriage bed without fracturing her existing familial and social networks or reducing her marriage to an illegitimate act of theatricality – a bed-trick.

18Like Sharrett’s essay, Lori Leigh’s contribution reads the bedroom as a battlefield between men and women who struggle for power. “‘Take up her bed’: Cleopatra’s bed in Antony and Cleopatra” recuperates Cleopatra’s bed not only as the appropriate alternative to productions of Antony and Cleopatra that place her death upon a throne, but as a kind of throne itself, from which Cleopatra creates a form of conquering and rulership operating at the slow pace of seduction, in contrast to the swift motions and manipulations of Roman men. Leigh argues that as Cleopatra dies upon her bed at the end of the play, staging herself as her own royal effigy, she monumentalizes herself as a queen and monumentalizes as well her version of queenship, embodied in the bed as an erotic, combative, and political space.

19Leigh’s essay figures death, as Cleopatra herself does, as the great queen’s final scene. Perrot writes, again elegantly, of the inherent theatricality of the deathbed:

• 21 Ibid., p. 217.

The terrestrial ending to human life, the solemn entrance into the world to come, whose existence was not in question, is as much the concern of the group, of the community, as the individual. This explains the public nature of death [with] [t]he ‘deathbed’…its central (and only) scene.21

20The bed thus becomes a shifting threshold between life and death, private and public. Nathalie Oziol’s “Death sentences in Shakespearean deathbed scenes” focuses on the bed’s liminal role in the physical and spiritual transformation from life into death, a transition preceded by verbal and communal preparatory rituals like Katherine’s blessed vision and interpretation in Henry VIII. Cardinal Beaufort’s death in Henry VI Part 2, in contrast, shows a failed performance of dying caused by unresolved guilt and a selfish attempt to bribe death for painlessness, an attempt that signifies his corruption to onlookers. The bedchamber is thus part of personal negotiations of faith and heavenly aspiration as well as an exemplary performance for the to-be-bereaved, a self-memorialization that precedes and aesthetically echoes the epitaph.

21Our three final essays explicitly connect the bed’s theatrical potential as a signifier of both la petite mort and la grande mort, as it were. In “The ‘bed’s scandal’ in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling”, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin examines the bedchamber “unscenes” of The Changeling made “scenes” again in performance, from Beatrice-Joanna and Deflores’s first disturbing affair and Alsemero and Diaphanta’s imagined consummation to the final removal of Beatrice-Joanna and Deflores to the closet, an unseen stage where they must rehearse the deeds of the bedchamber, which encompass, as in Handel’s Semele, both death and sex. Vienne-Guerrin suggests that the chaste marital bed can never be brought into view, receding further from imagination as both Beatrice-Joanna and Alsemero fail in their consummation and Diaphanta’s lust alights both Alsemero’s bed and, through Deflores’s fire-setting in her bedchamber, her own.

22Janice Valls-Russell’s “Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece” connects Livy, Ovid, Shakespeare, and Heywood through their depictions of the repeated violation of Lucrece’s privacy. The trajectory of domestic intrusion that chases Lucrece from hall to bedchamber in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece follows her husband’s verbal violation of privacy to Tarquin’s militaristic invasion, the two of which, Valls-Russell argues, are materially linked by the presentation of Collatine’s ring as the token that grants Tarquin access to the house. The play uses material staging and physical space to give immediacy to Ovid and Shakespeare’s emotional resonances, and Heywood’s Lucrece resists Tarquin’s control by making her bedchamber, where he promises privacy and secrecy before his rape, the very place from which she publishes it to her husband and father. No longer private or secure, the bedchamber, Valls-Russell concludes, becomes a declarative space with effects that push further outward, to Rome itself.

23Alban Déléris’s contribution, “Lits d’amour, lits de mort : « scènes » de chambre dans des tragédies françaises et anglaises au début du xvii^e siècle”, offers us some welcome French context to the bedchamber and the bed on stage. Considering French plays by François du Souhait, Nicolas Chrestien des Croix, Pierre Troterel, Jean-Gilbert Durval, and Alexandre Hardy, and English ones by John Ford, Cyril Tourneur, and William Shakespeare, Déléris connects the bedchamber’s paradoxical and liminal status as the site of both joy and dread, life and death, with the emergence of a new theatrical genre: tragicomedy or romance. Scenes with dead bodies (or bodies thought to be dead) function, he suggests, as dramatic pivots or hinges, episodes that evoke what he calls the tragic grotesque. Such beds, he concludes, are clad in not the pristine linen of the wedding-night but the winding-sheets of the dead.

• 23 Michelle Perrot, The Bedroom: An Intimate History (2009), trans. Lauren Elkin, New Haven, Yale Univ (...)

In a society that is ever more locked down and controlled, the bedroom retains its absolute right to secrecy. It represents the possibility of escaping the world, even more so as communication technologies improve to the point of putting the world on the computer screen. Connected in this way, the bedroom of the future will have infinite means of exploring the world. The door opens to desire, to other people, to the world; it invites us to discover them, to go outside.23

25The curtained bed and the enclosed bedchamber offer the greatest solace and space for rest and recreation when we return to them after a day “outside”, a day’s adventure in a world that we discover, uncover, and recover for our own, perhaps from within the bedchamber itself.