During the late Middle Ages, the Confrérie de la Passion in Paris, a charitable institution that had been licensed to produce religious drama in 1402, converted a hall in the Hôpital de la Trinité into a theatre. It is unclear which of the following two configurations the theatre adopted: an end stage arrangement with an audience seated around three sides of the hall and a large standing audience on the floor in front of the stage, or an arena theatre arrangement with the actors using the central floor area as their stage with the audience seated around them. This is an early example, however, of what came to be known as a “theatre in the hall” (teatro della sala), an arrangement that became a dominant form of theatre design in the Renaissance, when formal experimentation was being undertaken by academic institutions (academies, grammar schools, Jesuit colleges, universities, etc.), by members of the nobility who competed with one another to put on lavish spectacles, and by entrepreneurs and charities who wished to make money by providing theatrical performances for the public.

Experimentation with the forms of academic theatres began with the work of Julius Pomponius Laetus, founder of the Roman Academy, who had received one of the first printed copies of Vitruvius’s De architectura in 1486 and immediately set out to discover the nature of the original staging of Roman plays. His work focused on the design and usage of the Roman scaenae frons and led to the popularization of a modified form of medieval simultaneous staging in which the back of a wide but shallow raised stage was composed of either a straight-line colonnade with curtains covering the resulting four or five openings or a colonnade that angled forward so that the central one or two openings were closer to the audience and the others were at an angle to them. In either arrangement, each curtain opening served the same purpose as a medieval mansion, but, since the openings were not differentiated visually from one another, signs were placed over them, identifying each as the home of a central character. This pattern of curtained openings became the standard for academic theatres throughout Europe.

Early professional actors who adopted this system discovered that a continuous line of curtain providing three to five openings was even more versatile. These stages, which were hybrids of Classical and medieval designs, were generally installed as end stages in existing halls or in courtyards in which audience members sat on benches around three sides, sometimes on two or more levels. The audience also sat on benches or stood in the centre area facing the stage, but this area could be left open for incidental entertainment. In 1513 Tommaso Inghirami, who had studied with Laetus, had a freestanding temporary hall built to house just such an academic theatre in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. The innovation of this building was not in the house, where the audience still sat on benches around three sides, but in the attempt to re-create a Roman scaenae frons in a more substantial form. This focused attention on the distinctly non-Classical nature of the house in these hall theatres. By 1545, when Sebastiano Serlio published book two of his Complete Works on Architecture and Perspective, some court theatres were using semicircular stepped “amphitheatre” seating in their existing halls. But in these theatres the academic interest in understanding the scaenae frons was replaced with a fascination for the recently rediscovered art of perspective.

The first known use of perspective scenery in theatre dates to 1508, when it was used on a large painted backdrop. By the 1540s, however, pairs of rectangular panels connected in the shape of an L (angled wings) were being arranged at uniform intervals along each side of the stage. Three-dimensional architectural details were put on these angled wings, which provided a continuous perspective that gave the overall picture greater depth and allowed the wing units to serve the same function as medieval mansions. At the same time, the floor of the stage, after allowing a few feet of flat space for the actors, was angled upward toward the vanishing point of the backdrop (hence the modern designation of “upstage,” meaning away from the audience, and “downstage,” meaning toward the audience). Perspective dictated that, for the first time in theatre history, stages would be deeper than they were wide, though actors still confined themselves to a wide shallow band of stage nearest the audience.

The fascination with perspective was so powerful that not even the academic theatres could resist it, as can be seen in the famous Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, the oldest existing theatre in Europe. This theatre was designed by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio to fit into an existing hall, and it opened in 1585, five years after his death. It was built for experiments in the staging of Greek tragedy, though it was clearly a Roman odeum. The stage in this theatre measures about 82 feet (25 metres) across and 22 feet (7 metres) deep. The Olimpico has the most elaborate reconstruction of a Roman scaenae frons ever attempted. It has five doors: a large one stands at its centre and is flanked by a door on each side and one door at each end. Behind four of these doors is the forced perspective vista of a city street, while behind the central door there are three such vistas. But such a theatre was too expensive to be copied by the average academic institution, did not allow for the changing of the perspective that was becoming increasingly in demand at court, and did not offer the versatility needed by professional acting companies. It was not widely imitated.

Permanent theatres are described as having been built at Ferrara in 1531 and at Rome in 1545, but little is known about them except that they are likely to have been court theatres of the theatre-in-the hall type. So dominant was this type that even when the Confrérie de la Passion opened the first purpose-built public theatre in Europe since Roman times, the Théâtre de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne, in 1548, it followed the theatre-in-the-hall model. The Bourgogne had two levels of galleries along three sides of an open floor (parterre). Parts of the first-level galleries may have been divided into boxes. The audience capacity of this theatre exceeded 1,000. It had an end stage that was around 6 feet (2 metres) high, just under 45 feet (14 metres) wide, and perhaps 35 feet (11 metres) deep. Multiple setting in the medieval manner was used there. Its most significant innovation was a second-level stage at the back of the main stage. The Bourgogne was eventually followed by purpose-built public theatres across Europe. The first public theatre in Italy was built in Venice in 1565, but it is not known if it was a freestanding theatre or one in an existing hall. In London the Red Lion (1567) was freestanding, built in a garden with seating risers and a large stage backed by a tower. The indoor playhouses of St. Paul’s (1575) and Blackfriars (1576) in London, on the other hand, were clearly adaptations of existing halls. Meanwhile, in Spain a charitable society opened a public theatre in a courtyard in the Calle de Sol in 1568, and in 1574 Spain’s first purpose-built public theatre was constructed in Sevilla as a courtyard theatre.

In 1576, however, a playhouse called The Theatre was built in London. It used the first truly innovative design to be found in a public playhouse. Unlike the others, which were rectangular, The Theatre was polygonal with perhaps as many as 20 sides, or bays. Each bay was about 12 feet (3.5 metres) deep and contained three levels of seating covered by a roof, making it look like an evolved form of the buildings shown in the Fouquet miniatures of the 1460s and ’70s. The central area of the polygon was open-air, and the audience there stood around a large stage, about 5 feet (1.5 metres) high, which was integrated into several of the bays at one end of the building. Behind the stage was a tiring-house, the backstage area of the playhouse. The tiring-house façade was used like the scaenae frons of a Roman theatre to provide a permanent architectural background that, with minimal scenic additions, could be used for a remarkable variety of plays. This basic design became the pattern for all open-air theatres in London and was one of the most successful examples of theatre design of the time. In 1598 The Theatre was taken down, and its timbers were used to build the Globe Theatre, which became famous for its association with William Shakespeare, who owned a 10 percent share in it and saw most of his greatest plays staged there.

The two most famous public theatres of Madrid, the Corral de la Cruz (1579) and the Corral del Príncipe (1583), were developed piecemeal over time out of existing courtyards. But the Spanish theatres still had many features in common with their London counterparts. They organized the audience on at least three levels (covered by a roof) around the periphery of an open-air space in which a large part of the audience stood. But the Spanish theatres were always rectangular; their stages were always smaller; and their use of medieval mansion-type scenery was more extensive than the English theatres. The audiences of the Spanish theatres were segregated by gender, women having their own galleries (cazuela), but there was no such segregation in England. The last open-air theatre to be built in England was the second Fortune Theatre of 1623; the last in Spain was the corral at Almagro (1628), the only corral theatre still in existence today. After the early 17th century, both England and Spain joined the rest of Europe in making their public theatres indoor spaces.

In Asia, theatre remained outdoors for much longer. By the 17th century, Chinese audiences had stopped standing in the central area in front of the stage and started sitting at low tables where they could be served refreshments during performances. In Japan, by the late 16th century, a design suitable for the 200-year-old Noh drama was finally being established. In its basic form, a Noh theatre was much like a Chinese theatre, with a raised square stage of about 18 feet (5.5 metres) on each side covered by a roof supported by pillars at the four corners. The Noh stage was set on the long side of an existing rectangular courtyard, and the audience sat only on the porches of the buildings that surrounded the courtyard. An orchestra occupied the rear of the stage, and a chorus occupied the side of the stage to the audience’s right. But the most distinctive feature of these theatres was a bridge (hashigakari) that connected the stage to the dressing room. It was located 33 to 52 feet (10 to 16 metres) to the audience’s left. This allowed for long dramatic entrances and exits. The only other entrance was a small “hurry door” at the back of the stage. The audience in Noh theatres rarely exceeded 500.

Soon after 1600 the newly created Kabuki theatre adopted the Noh stage for its performances, but its courtyards consisted of two levels of galleries that were built around an open space. The open space was divided into a series of square boxes where groups of audience members could sit on mats. The long bridge of the Noh stage was widened to provide extra space for Kabuki’s more gymnastic style of staging, and sometime after 1724 a new bridge (hanamichi) was built out into the audience to link the stage to the back of the house so that long entrances and exits could continue. (By the 1770s, two such bridges were in use.) Also in 1724, Kabuki theatres began to be converted to indoor playhouses, and gradually the roof structure and four posts of the old Noh stage were abandoned. A forestage was added in 1736. In that same year Kabuki theatres began using a front curtain to allow for scene changes, something never done in Noh. There was no interest in perspective scenery in Japanese theatre in the 17th or 18th century, but there was a great interest in spectacle, and the Kabuki theatres developed sophisticated elevator traps and even turntables more than 75 years before they became a regular feature of Western stages. With this interest in stage machinery, it is not surprising that Kabuki theatres began to use the proscenium stage about 1908. But the proscenium arches, still used in modern Kabuki, are very wide, as much as 93 feet (28 metres), and members of the audience, being on the long side of the rectangle, sit quite close to the stage.