Chapter XXXIII: Introduction: The Public Theatres (15)

Yet, Grandee’s, would you were not come to grace
Our matter, with allowing vs no place.
Though you presume Satan a subtill thing,
And may haue heard hee’s worne in a thumbe-ring;
Doe not on these presumptions, force vs act,
In compasse of a cheese-trencher. This tract
Will ne’er admit our vice, because of yours.
Anone, who, worse than you, the fault endures
That your selues make? when you will thrust and spurne,
And knocke vs o’ the elbowes, and bid, turne;
As if, when wee had spoke, wee must be gone,
Or, till wee speake, must all runne in, to one,
Like the young adders, at the old ones mouth?
Would wee could stand due North; or had no South,
If that offend: or were Muscouy glasse,
That you might looke our Scenes through as they passe.
We know not how to affect you. If you’ll come
To see new Playes, pray you affoord vs roome.

[1696] Wallace, ii. 142.

[1697] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (1609), ‘You may ... haue a good stoole for sixpence ... creepe from behind the Arras, with your Tripos or three-footed stoole in one hand, and a teston mounted betweene a forefinger and a thumbe in the other’; cf. pp. 535, n. 3, 536, n. 2.

[1698] Cf. ch. xx.

[1699] Godfrey (_Architectural Review_, xxiii. 239) has no authority for his internal roofed staircases and landings in the narrow spaces between the galleries and the sides of the stage.

[1700] Henslowe made a ‘penthowsse shed at the tyeringe howsse doore’ of the Rose in 1591. Doubtless the stage could also be reached from in front; cf. the _K. B. P._ passage on p. 536.

[1701] Gosson, _P. C._ (1582, App. C, No. xxx), tells how youths are wont ‘to go first into the yarde, and to carry theire eye through euery gallery’ in search of attractive company; cf. p. 532.

[1702] Cf. p. 541, and ch. xi.

[1703] Peacham, however, may be merely versifying the story of the choleric justice and the provincial audience which laughed when he ‘first peept out his head’ in Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (_Works_, i. 188), and reading in a feature, in the process, of the stage as known to himself; and the same applies to Davenant, _The Unfortunate Lovers_ (_c. 1638_), prol., on the play-goers of old times:

For they, he swears, to the theatre would come,
Ere they had din’d, to take up the best room;
There sit on benches, not adorn’d with mats,
And graciously did vail their high-crown’d hats
To every half-dress’d player, as he still
Through the hangings peeped to see how the house did fill.

For Caroline practice, cf. T. Goffe, _Careless Shepherdess_ ind.:

I never saw Rheade peeping through the curtain,
But ravishing joy entered into my heart;

also Tatham’s prologue for the Fortune players, when they moved to the Red Bull in 1640:

Forbear
Your wonted custom, banding tile and pear
Against our curtains, to allure us forth;
I pray, take notice, these are of more worth;
Pure Naples silk, not worsted.

I defer a full consideration of stage hangings to the chapters on staging; cf. vol. iii, p. 78.

[1704] For the classical sense of _Scaena_, cf. the passage from Vitruvius quoted in vol. iii, p. 3. Florio, _Dictionary_ (1598), s.v. _Scena_, ‘a skaffold, a pavillion, or forepart of a theatre where players make them readie, being trimmed with hangings, out of which they enter upon the stage’, points to the identity of scene and tire-house front. This structure has therefore precisely the double function of the ‘domus’ of the court plays; cf. ch. xix. I owe the quotation to Graves, 15, who adds, _The Englysshe Mancyne upon the foure Cardynale Vertues_ (_c._ 1520), ‘a disgyser yt goeth into a secret corner callyd a sene of the pleyinge place to chaunge his rayment’, and Palsgrave, _Acolastus_ (1540), prol., ‘our scenes, that is to saye, our places appoynted for our players to come forth of’. The English ‘Mancyne’ is a translation, earlier than A. Barclay’s, of Dominic Mancini’s _De Quatuor Virtutibus_ (1516), and the original has only ‘Histrio, qui in scaenam vadit’. The notion of scena as not a mere wall, but a shelter for performers, is mediaeval, and appears to go back to an early definition from σκῆνος, a hut or tent, found, e. g., side by side with the regular mediaeval misunderstanding of the classical art of acting in Hugutius, _Liber Derivationum_, ‘Scena est umbraculum siue locus obumbratus in theatro et cortinis coopertus similis tabernaculis mercenariorum, quae sunt asseribus vel cortinis opertae, et secundum hoc scena potest dici a scenos, quod est domus, quae in modum domus erat constructa. In umbraculo latebant personae larvatae, quae ad vocem recitatoris exigebantur ad gestus faciendos’; cf. Herrmann, 280, W. Cloetta, _Komödie und Tragödie im Mittelalter_ (1890), 38; _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 208. It is revised on humanist lines by Jodocus Badius Ascensius in the _Praenotamenta_ to his Terence of 1502, ‘Intra igitur theatrum ab una parte opposita spectatoribus erant scenae et proscenia, id est loca lusoria ante scenas facta. Scenae autem erant quaedam umbracula seu absconsoria, in quibus abscondebantur lusores, donec exire deberent. Ante autem scenas erant quaedam tabulata, in quibus personae qui exierant ludebant.’

[1705] The _Roxana_ engraving shows a projecting building at the back of the stage, but this can hardly be regarded as throwing light upon sixteenth-century structure.

[1706] _C. Revels_ (1601), ind. 160. The author is not ‘in the Tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stampe at the Booke-holder, sweare for our Properties, cursse the poore Tire-man, rayle the Musique out of tune’; _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), ind. 8, ‘I am looking, lest the _Poet_ heare me, or his man, Master Broome, behind the Arras.... Hee has (sirreuerence) kick’d me three, or foure times about the Tyring-house, I thanke him, for but offering to putt in, with my experience’; v. iii. 57, ‘I would be glad drinke with the young company; which is the Tiring-house?’

[1707] _Every Woman in her Humour_, p. 354, ‘He would ... stamp and stare (God blesse us,) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors misse their entrance’; _R. J._ I. iv. 7,

Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance.

The actor’s signal for entrance was already his ‘cue’; cf. _M. N. D._ III. i. 77, ‘And so every one according to his cue’; _Isle of Gulls_, ii. 2, ‘you know your que’; ii. 3, ‘She hath entred the Dutches iust at her que’.

[1708] _2 Ant. Mellida_, II. i. 30, ‘The tiring man hath not glued on my beard half fast enough’. A tireman appears in the inductions to _Malcontent_, ‘Enter W. Sly, a Tire-man following him with a stool’, and to _What You Will_, ‘Enter Tire-man with lights’. ‘Steven the tyerman’ of the Admiral’s in 1596 is probably the Steven Magett of other entries by Henslowe (i. 31, 44, 45).

[1709] Speakers in the induction to _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614) are the Booke-Holder and the Stage-Keeper, who ‘kept the _Stage_ in Master _Tarletons_ time’, and whose work is ‘sweeping the _Stage_? or gathering vp the broken apples for the beares within?’

[1710] The Fortune company, _c._ 1617 (_H. P._ 85), offer to employ a dismissed ‘gatherer’ as ‘a nessessary atendaunt on the stage’ and to mend garments. On 27 Dec. 1624 the Master of Revels (_Var._ iii. 112; Herbert, 74) issued a warrant of protection for Nicholas Underhill, Robert Pallant, John Rhodes, and eighteen others ‘all imployed by the kings maiesties servantes in theire quallity of playinge as musitions and other necessary attendantes’. In _Devil’s Charter_ (1607), 3016, is the s. d. ‘Alexander vnbraced betwixt two Cardinalls in his study looking vpon a booke, whilst a groome draweth the curtaine’. Is this ‘groom’ a character or an ‘attendant’? In any case attendants were naturally, with musicians and even ‘gatherers’ (on whom cf. ch. xi), used at need for supernumeraries; cf. the gatherers in the _Frederick and Basilea_ plot (1597, _H. P._ 136) and _2 If You Know Not Me_ (1606), p. 297, ‘Enter ... the waits in sergeants’ gowns’. The long list of men and boys in the procession at the end of _1 Tamar Cham_ (1602, _H. P._ 148) must have taxed all such resources. For the use of boys as attendants, cf. _Bartholomew Fair_, V. iii. 65, ‘Ha’ you none of your pretty impudent boyes, now; to bring stooles, fill Tabacco, fetch Ale, and beg money, as they haue at other houses?’ Seventeenth-century gossip (_Centurie of Prayse_, 417) made Shakespeare join the stage as a ‘serviture’.

[1711] Lawrence, i. 75, ii. 159; Wegener, 150; G. H. Cowling, _Music on the Shakespearian Stage_, 29, 70, 80. I refer to Cowling and to E. W. Naylor, _Shakespeare and Music_, for discussions of the instruments used--drums, timbrels, bells (percussion instruments), sackbuts, trumpets, horns (brass instruments), cornets, hautboys, recorders, fifes (wood instruments), viols, lutes, citterns, pandores (string instruments)--of such terms as ‘flourish’, ‘sennet’, ‘tucket’, ‘peal’, ‘alarum’, ‘consort’, and of other technical matters with which I am not qualified to deal. The Admiral’s inventories of 1598 (_H. P._ 115, 116, 118) include ‘iij trumpettes and a drum, and a trebel viall, a basse viall, a bandore, a sytteren ... j chyme of bells ... iij tymbrells ... j sack-bute’.

[1712] _Malcontent_, ind. 89. The additions for the King’s are ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’. But ‘abridge’ only means shorten, and there are s. ds. for music between the acts of _Sejanus_ (Globe, _1603_) and in the plot of _Dead Man’s Fortune_ (Admiral’s, _c._ 1590, _H. P._ 133); cf. Dekker, _Belman of London_ (1608, _Works_, iii. 76), ‘These were appointed to be my Actes, in this goodly Theater, the musicke betweene, were the Singers of the Wood’. But such evidence is rare, and Lawrence, i. 75, and Cowling, 67, do not discriminate sufficiently the practice of the public theatres from that of the private theatres on the one hand and the early neo-classic court plays on the other. Here music is an integral part of the _intermedii_ or dumb-shows, which are little more than survivals in the full-blown public drama; cf. F. A. Foster in _E. S._ xliv. 8, and _Hamlet_, III. ii. 13, ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’.

[1713] Cf. p. 551.

[1714] _Alphonsus_, prol., ‘after you haue sounded thrise, let Venus be let downe from the top of the Stage’; Heywood, _Four Prentices_, prol., ‘Do you not know that I am the prologue? Do you not see the long black velvet coat upon my back? Have I not all the signs of the prologue about me? Have you not sounded thrice?’; Dekker, _Satiromastix_, epist., ‘In steed of the trumpets sounding thrice, before the play begin, it shall not be amisse ... first to beholde this short Comedy of Errors’; _G. H. B._ (cf. App. H), ‘untill the quaking prologue hath (by rubbing) got cullor into his cheekes, and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that hee’s upon point to enter’; _E. M. O._ (Q_{1}), 107, ‘Inductio, sono secundo’, 402, ‘Sound the third time. Enter Prologue’. Jonson has a similar arrangement (F_{1}) in the private house plays _Cynthia’s Revels_ and _Poetaster_, but probably the trumpets were here replaced by more elaborate music; cf. _1 Ant. Mellida_, ind. 1, ‘the music will sound straight for entrance’; _What You Will_, ind. 1 (s. d.), ‘Before the music sounds for the Act’; _C. Revels_ (Q_{1}), 1435, ‘Like an unperfect Prologue, at third musique’. Surely this is the origin of the ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ (or ‘curtain tune’) music of the Restoration and eighteenth-century overtures, described by Lawrence, ii. 155. Exceptionally the prologue in Percy’s _C. and C. Errant_ is between the second and third sounding.

[1715] _Chaste Maid in Cheapside_, V. iv. 1 (s. d.), ‘There is a sad song in the music-room’; cf. _Thracian Wonder_, IV. i. 182, ‘Pythia speaks in the musick Room behind the Curtain’, 186, ‘Pythia above, behind the curtains.’ But these, although early plays, are in late prints, and the other examples of a music-room ‘above’ given by Lawrence, i. 91, are Caroline. Jasper Mayne says of Jonson (1638, _Jonsonus Virbius_), ‘Thou laid’st no sieges to the music-room’. My own impression is that when the lord’s room over the tire-house was disused by spectators (cf. p. 537) it became indifferently available for actors and for music, and that here, rather than, as is possible, higher still in the scenic wall, was the normal place for the seventeenth-century music, when it was not needed elsewhere, or the space needed for other purposes. The introduction of the high proscenium arch at the Restoration caused difficulties, and various experiments were tried in placing the music above (Lawrence, i. 91, 161; ii. 160; W. G. Keith, _The Designs for the First Movable Scenery on the English Public Stage_ in _Burlington Magazine_, xxv. 29, 85), before the modern situation was adopted.

[1716] Cf. ch. x.

[1717] _R. J._, prol. 12, ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’; _Alchemist_, prol. 1, ‘these two short hours’; _Hen. VIII_, prol. 13, ‘two short hours’; _T. N. K._, prol. 28, ‘Sceanes ... worth two houres travell’; Heywood, _Apology_, 11 (Beeston’s c. v.), ‘two houres well spent’; _Barth. Fair_, ind., ‘the space of two hours and a half and somewhat more’. Perhaps plays tended to grow shorter. Fenton (1574) and Northbrooke (1577–8) give ‘two or three houres’, and Whetstone (1578) three hours (cf. App. C), but Dekker (cf. p. 533, n. 3) seems to regard three hours as an exceptionally long period.

[1718] Cotgrave, _French-English Dict._ (1611), s.v. Falot, ‘a cresset light (such as they use in play-houses) made of ropes wreathed, pitched and put into small and open cages of iron’; cf. Lawrence, ii. 13, who thinks the cressets were part of the lighting of private houses. But would they not smoke and smell badly, if used indoors? There is no particular reason for translating the _lucernae_ of Christ Church hall in 1566, with Schelling and Lawrence, as ‘cressets’.

[1719] Nashe (iii. 329), epist. to _Astrophel and Stella_ (1591), ‘here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau’n to ouershadow the faire frame’; _Wagnerbook_ (1594, cf. ch. xx), ‘Now aboue all was there the gay Clowdes vsque quaque adorned with the heavenly firmament, and often spotted with golden teares which men callen Stars. There was liuely portrayed the whole Imperiall Army of the faire heauenly inhabitauntes’; _Birth of Hercules_ (1597 <), i. 1, s. d., ‘Ad comoediae magnificentiam apprime conferet ut coelum Histrionium sit luna et stellis perspicue distinctum’; Heywood, _Apology_ (_c. 1608_), 34, of the Roman theatre, ‘the covering of the stage, which we call the heavens’; Cotgrave, _Dict._ (1611), s.v. _Volerie_, ‘a place over a stage, which we call the heavens’. The same word was used for the state over a throne; cf. Cotgrave, s.v. _Dais_, ‘a cloth of estate, canopie, or Heaven, that stands over the heads of Princes thrones’. Graves, 24, gives examples of heavens used in Tudor pageants. It is to be noted that the ‘heavens’ and ‘hell’ (cf. p. 528) of a theatre continue characteristic features of mediaeval staging (cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 86, 137, 142); cf. _All Fools_, prol. 1:

The fortune of a stage (like Fortunes selfe)
Amazeth greatest judgments; and none knowes
The hidden causes of those strange effects
That rise from this Hell, or fall from this Heaven.

The theory of J. Corbin in _Century_ (1911), 267, that the heavens was a mere _velarium_ or cloud of canvas thrown out from the hut, will not fit the evidence; cf. Lawrence, ii. 6.

[1720] Cf. vol. iii, p. 78. Is this, or the hut, the ‘garret’ of R. M.’s _A Player_ (cf. p. 546)?

[1721] I do not now regard as tenable my suggestion in _The Stage of the Globe_ (_Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 351) that De Witt represented as outstanding columns what were really mere pilasters in the tire-house wall.

[1722] Kempe, _Nine Days Wonder_, 6, ‘I remembred one of them to be a noted Cut-purse, such a one as we tye to a poast on our stage, for all people to wonder at, when at a play they are taken pilfring’; cf. _Nobody and Somebody_, 1893,

_Somebody_
Once pickt a pocket in this Play-house yard,
Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it;

also ch. xx, p. 75; ch. xxi, pp. 108, 141.

[1723] For criticism of the drawing of the heavens and hut, cf. Graves, 22, and Brereton in _Homage_, 204.

[1724] Henslowe paid in 1595 for ‘mackinge the throne in the heuenes’ at the Rose; cf. R. M., _Micrologia_ (1629), in Morley, _Character Writings_, 285, _A Player_, ‘If his action prefigure passion, he raves, rages, and protests much by his painted heavens, and seems in the height of this fit ready to pull Jove out of the garret where perchance he lies leaning on his elbows, or is employed to make squibs and crackers to grace the play’. Wegener, 133, gives examples of the use of machines; for the throne, cf. vol. iii, p. 77.

[1725] Field (1583, App. C, No. xxxi), ‘Those flagges of defiance against God’; Vennar’s apology (1614) for _England’s Joy_ (1602, cf. ch. xxiii). ‘The report of gentlemen and gentlewomens actions, being indeed the flagge to our theatre, was not meerely falcification’; _A Mad World, my Masters_ (1604–6), I. i. 38, III. iii. 143, ‘’Tis Lent in your cheeks; the flag’s down’.... ‘The hair about the hat is as good as a flag upo’ th’ pole, at a common play-house, to waft company’; Dekker, _Raven’s Almanac_ (1609, _Works_, iv. 210), ‘Another ciuill warre doe I finde will fal betweene players.... For it is thought that Flag will be aduanced (as it were in mortall defiance against Flag)’; _Work for Armourers_ (1609, _Works_, iv. 96), ‘Play-houses stand ... the dores locked vp, the flagges ... taken down’; _Curtain-Drawer of the World_ (1612), ‘Each play-house advanceth his flag in the aire, whither quickly at the waving thereof are summoned whole troops of men, women, and children’. The maps regularly show flags on the theatres. The Globe fire in 1613 ‘did not spare the silken flagg’ (cf. p. 421). Heywood, _Apology_, 22, mistranslates Ovid’s ‘Tunc neque marmoreo pendebant vela theatro’ as:

In those days from the marble house did waive
No sail, no silken flag, no ensign brave.

[1726] Cf. p. 542; _Cynthia’s Revels_, ind., where the boys struggle for the cloak; _Woman Hater_, prol. 1, ‘Gentlemen, Inductions are out of date, and a Prologue in Verse, is as stale as a black Velvet Cloak, and a Bay Garland’; _Birth of Hercules_ (1597 <), prol. 5, ‘Thepilogue is in fashion; prologues no more’; and much later. _Coronation_, prol. 4,

he
That with a little Beard, a long black Cloak,
With a starch’d face, and supple leg hath spoke
Before the plays the twelvemonth.

The prologue appears to be a composite figure, partly representing the poet, and deriving also in part from the presenter of dumb-shows, in part from the Chorus of neo-classic tragedy, and in part from the ‘exposytour in doctorys wede’, developed by miracle-plays and moralities out of the Augustine of the _Prophetae_; cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 52, 72, 153, 417, 423, 426, 429, 448; F. A. Foster in _E. S._ xliv. 13; F. Lüders, _Prolog und Epilog bei Shakespeare_ (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, v. 274); Creizenach, 275. The short dramatic inductions, often introducing actors _in propria persona_, favoured by Jonson, Marston, and others about the beginning of the seventeenth century, attempt to give new life to a waning convention.

[1727] Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 141, 156. Drums and trumpets were used as advertisements in the city at any rate until 1587 (App. C, Nos. xvii, xxxi, xxxviii), and were traditional in the provinces up to the middle of the eighteenth century (Lawrence, ii. 58). Parolles tells us (_All’s Well_, IV. iii. 298) that Captain Dumain ‘has led the drum before the English tragedians’. Henslowe (i. 118) bought a drum and two trumpets for the Admiral’s ‘when to go into the contry’ in Feb. 1600. In _Histriomastix_, ii. 80, ‘One of them steppes on the Crosse, and cryes, A Play’.

[1728] H. Moseley, pref. verses to F_{1} of Beaumont and Fletcher (1647):

As after th’ Epilogue there comes some one
To tell spectators what shall next be shown;
So here am I.

This is, of course, only Caroline evidence; for the continuance of the practice after the Restoration, cf. Lawrence, ii. 187.

[1729] _Grindal to Cecil_ (1564, App. D, No. xv), ‘these Histriones, common playours who now daylye, butt speciallye on holydayes, sett vp bylles’; _Merry Tales, &c._ (1567; cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Vennar), ‘billes ... vpon postes about London’; Northbrooke (1577, App. C, No. xvi), ‘they use to set vp their billes vpon postes certain dayes before’; Gosson, _S. A._ (1579, App. C, No. xxii), 44, ‘If players can ... proclame it in their billes, and make it good in theaters’; Rankins (1587, App. C, No. xxxviii), ‘sticking of their bills in London’; Marston, _Scourge of Villainy_ (Bullen, iii. 302), ‘Go read each post, view what is play’d to-day’; _Histriomastix_, v. 69, ‘Text-bills must now be turned to iron bills’; _Warning for Fair Women_, (> 1599):

’Tis you have kept the Theatres so long,
Painted in play-bills upon every post.
That I am scorned of the multitude.

Wither, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ (1613), ii. 2:

But, by the way, a Bill he doth espy,
Which showes theres acted some new Comedy.

In _Bartholomew Fair_, v. iii. 6, Cokes ‘reads the Bill’ of the motion; cf. Lawrence (ii. 55), _The Origin of the Theatre Programme_.

[1730] _Devil an Ass_, I. iv. 43, ‘Hee giues him the Play-bill’.

[1731] Arber, ii. 477; iii. 575.

[1732] _Henslowe Papers_, 106.

[1733] Lawrence, ii. 240.

[1734] Jonson, in printing plays, and following him the editors of the Beaumont and Fletcher F_{1} often give the scene and the actors’ names, and casts appear in _Duchess of Malfi_ (1623). But these are not necessarily taken from any documents put before the audiences.

[1735] Lawrence, ii. 154; cf. the stipulation in Burbadge’s lease (p. 387), and W. Fennor, _Compter’s Commonwealth_ (1617), 8, ‘he that first comes in is first seated, like those that come to see playes’.

[1736] Cf. p. 540 (Tatham), and the notices of Hentzner and Platter (ch. xvi, introd.). In _K. B. P._ the wife comes with her pockets full of sweetmeats, which she bestows upon the actors, liquorice (i. 77), green ginger (ii. 279), sugar-candy (ii. 366), and her husband brings beer (iii. 631). The liquorice would open Ralph’s pipes; cf. ch. xii (Westminster) and _C. Revels_, ind. 215, ‘I would thou hadst some sugar candyed, to sweeten thy mouth’; Overbury, _Characters_ (ed. Rimbault, 113, _A Puny-Clarke_), ‘Hee eats ginger-bread at a play-house’.

[1737] Cf. pp. 534, 536 and Hentzner (ch. xvi, introd.); _C. Revels_, ind. 122, ‘I haue my three sorts of Tabacco, in my Pocket, my light by me’; _K. B. P._ i. 224, ‘Fie, this stinking Tobacco kils men, would there were none in _England_, now I pray Gentlemen, what good does this stinking Tobacco? do you nothing, I warrant you make chimnies a your faces’; Dekker, _G. H. B._, ‘By sitting on the stage, you may ... get your match lighted’; _Scornful Lady_, I. ii. 52, ‘They wear swords to reach fire at a play’; _Sir Giles Goosecap_, IV. ii. 87 (street-scene), ‘By this fire, they do, my lord’. Burn, 84, cites a note by Sir J. Caesar in _Lansd. MS._ 160, p. 302, of a speech by James in a Star Chamber case of 1613, in which he advised gentlemen of the Temple not to frequent plays, whence the smoke of tobacco and the presence of painted ladies should deter them.

[1738] W. Fennor, _Descriptions_ (1616), ‘I suppose this Pamphlet will hap into your hands before a Play begin, with the importunate clamour of “Buy a new Booke!” by some needy companion that will be glad to furnish you with worke for a turned teaster’. Dekker, _G. H. B._ (cf. App. H), recommends cards.

[1739] _V. P._ xiv. 593, 599, records a charge against the ambassador Foscarini (1611–15) of pursuing a woman, and ‘sometimes attending the public comedies and standing among the people on the chance of seeing her’. Foscarini said he only went three or four times to the play and that the archduke’s ambassador and his wife did the same. It was given in evidence that the ambassador Giustiniani (Dec. 1605–Oct. 1608) went with the French ambassador and his wife to see _Pericles_ at a cost of 20 crowns. This must have been at the Globe. For the presence of harlots, cf. pp. 534, 535; vol. i, p. 255.

[1740] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (1609, _Works_, ii. 201), ‘you can neither shake our _Comick Theater_ with your stinking breath of hisses, nor raise it with the thunder-claps of your hands’ (cf. also App. H); _Isle of Gulls_, ind., ’Tis growne into a custome at playes if anyone rise (especially of any fashionable sort) about what serious busines soeuer, the rest thinking it in dislike of the play, tho he neuer thinks it, cry “Mew! by Jesus, vilde!” and leaue the poore hartlesse children to speake their Epilogue to the emptie seates’. Later a Gent. says, ‘See it be baudy, or by the light I and all my friends will hisse’, and the Prologue replies, ‘You shoulde not deale gentlemanlike with us els’; E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), prol. to Sat., ‘It is the grand hisse to a filthy play’; _Roaring Girl_, prol., ‘If that he finds not here, he mews at it’; _T. and C._, epil.:

my fear is this,
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss;

_Downfall of Robin Hood_, _ad fin._:

if I fail in this,
Then let my pains be baffled with a hiss;

_Devil an Ass_, III. v. 41:

If I could but see a piece...
Come but to one act, and I did not care--
But to be seene to rise, and goe away,
To vex the Players, and to punish their _Poet_--
Keepe him in awe!

[1741] _Isle of Gulls_, ind., ‘a prepared company of gallants to aplaud his iests and grace out his play’; _Histriomastix_, ii. 137, ‘_Belch._’ ‘What’s an Ingle? _Posthaste._ One whose hands are hard as battle doors with clapping at baldness’. For the special use of ‘ingle’ (= ‘intimate’) in the sense of a patron of players, cf. _Poetaster_, I. ii. 18, ‘What! shall I have my sonne a stager now? an enghle for players? a gull? a rooke? a shot-clogge? to make suppers, and bee laught at?’

[1742] Cf. p. 547, n. 1.

[1743] _K. to K. a Knave_ (1594), _ad fin._; _Looking-Glass_, 2282; _Locrine_, 2276; _2 Hen. IV_, epil. 35, ‘And so kneele down before you; but indeed, to pray for the Queene’; _Two Wise Men and All the Rest Fools_ (1619), epil., ‘It resteth that we render you very humble and hearty thanks, and that all our hearts pray for the king and his family’s enduring happiness, and our country’s perpetual welfare. _Si placet, plaudite_’; cf. ch. xxii.

[1744] Cf. ch. x.

[1745] _M. N. D._ v. i. 360, ‘Will it please you to see the epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company?’; _Much Ado_, v. i. 130, ‘Strike vp, pipers. _Dance_’; _A. Y. L._ V. iv. 182.

[1746] Cf. ch. xiii (Leicester’s).

[1747] Murray, ii. 206, 293, 304, 367, ‘upon the Q. players at the dancing on the rop’ (1590, Bridgnorth), ‘vnto the Torkey Tumblers’ (1589–90, Ipswich), ‘to certen playars, playinge uppon ropes at the Crosse Keyes’ (1590, Leicester), ‘to the Quenes men when the Turke wente vpon roppes at Newhall’ (22 April 1590, Norwich); _Coventry Corp. MS._ A 7 (b), ‘the Queens players & the turk’ (1589–90, Coventry); cf. Nashe, _Epistle to Strange Newes_ (1592, _Works_, i. 262), ‘Say I am as verie a Turke as hee that three yeeres ago ranne vpon ropes’. A Gloucester payment of 1594–5 for ‘a wagon in the pageant for the Turke’ (Murray, ii. 285) may or may not refer to the acrobat of 1590.

[1748] Cf. ch. xiv.

[1749] Both Hentzner (1598) and Platter (1599) describe it; cf. ch. xvi, introd. Platter saw it at both the Globe and the Curtain, where it was ‘Englisch unndt Irlendisch’. Von Wedel also describes something very much like a well-developed jig after a baiting on the Bankside in 1584 (cf. ch. xvi, Hope).

[1750] Gosson, _P. C._ (1582; cf. App. C, No. xxx), ‘daunsing of gigges’; _Much Ado_, II. i. 78, ‘Wooing ... is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical’; _Hamlet_, III. ii. 132, ‘O God, your only jig-maker’; _E. M. O._ (Q_{1}), 1147, ‘a thing studied, and rehearst as ordinarily at his comming from hawking, or hunting, as a Iigge after a play’; _Jack Drum_, i. 404, ‘as the Iigge is cal’d for when the play is done’; R. Knolles, _Six Bookes of a Commonweal_ (1606), 645, ‘Now adayes they put at the end of euerie Tragedie (as poyson into meat) a comedie or jigge’ (translating Bodin’s ‘obscoena quadam fabula turpissimis ac sordidissimis narrationibus condita’); Cotgrave (1611), ‘Farce ... also, the Iyg at the end of an Enterlude, wherein some pretie knauerie is acted’; Dekker, _A Strange Horse Race_ (1613, _Works_, iii. 340), ‘As I haue often seene, after the finishing of some worthy Tragedy, or Catastrophe in the open Theaters, that the sceane after the Epilogue hath been more blacke (about a nasty bawdy jigge) then the most horrid sceane in the play was: The stinkards speaking all things, yet no man understanding any thing’; cf. the late Shirley allusion on p. 528. The term is sometimes more loosely used. In _James IV_, 82, 88, 620, 636, 661, 666, 673, 1116, the speakers of the Induction call the main action a jig; cf. _1 Tamburlaine_, prol. 1, ‘iygging vaines of riming mother wits’. Swaen (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlvi. 122) points out that a tune known as _The Cobler’s Jig_ would fit the dialogue song by cobblers in _Locrine_, 569. Naylor, 124, gives some account of jig tunes and derives the term from _giga_, an instrument of the fiddle type.

[1751] Cf. the quotation from _K. B. P._ on p. 557, and ch. v.

[1752] Tarlton and Kempe (cf. ch. xv) are spoken of as acting in ‘merriments’. I doubt whether anything more technical is meant than a farcical episode in a play, perhaps helped out with such ‘gags’ as _Hamlet_, III. ii. 42, deprecates.

[1753] Arber, ii. 297, 298, 571, 600, 601, 669, 670, 671; iii. 49, 50, ‘a newe Northerne Jigge’ (5 Jan. 1591), ‘the seconde parte of the gigge betwene Rowland and the Sexton’ (16 Dec. 1591), ‘the thirde and last parte of Kempes Jigge’ (28 Dec. 1591), ‘a merrie newe Jigge betwene Jenkin the Collier and Nansie’ (14 Jan. 1592), ‘a plesant newe Jigge of the broome-man’, ascribed in the margin to Kempe (16 Jan. 1595), ‘a pleasant Jigge betwene a tincker and a Clowne’ (4 Feb. 1595), ‘a ballad of Cuttinge George and his hostis beinge a Jigge’ (17 Feb. 1595), ‘Master Kempes Newe Jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman’ (2 May 1595), ‘Phillips his gigg of the slyppers’ (26 May 1595), ‘a pretie newe Jigge betwene Ffrancis the gentleman Richard the farmer and theire wyves’ (14 Oct. 1595), and ‘Kemps newe Jygge betwixt a Souldiour and a Miser and Sym the clown’ (21 Oct. 1595); cf. ch. xv (Tarlton). Creizenach, 312, cites a list of jig titles by Hoenig in _Anzeiger für deutsches Altertum_, xxii. 304.

[1754] _Have With You to Saffron Walden_ (_Works_, iii. 114).

[1755] Henslowe, i. 70, 82.

[1756] E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_, Sat. v.

[1757] App. D, No. cl; cf. the quotation from Dekker, _supra_; _Hamlet_, II. ii. 522, of Polonius, ‘He ’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps’; Wither, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ (1613), ii. 3, ‘a Curtaine Iigge, a Libell, or a Ballet’. Possibly the Middlesex order has a bearing on the curious variant in the Epistle to Jonson’s _Alchemist_ (1612), where some copies lament ‘the concupiscence of jigges and daunces’, others of ‘daunces and antikes’.

[1758] _The Black Man_ is in Kirkman’s _The Wits_ (1672), and _Singing Simpkin_ is ascribed in undated texts to the Caroline Robert Cox, but a tune of this name was known in Basle in 1592, and a German jig of 1620 seems to be a translation; cf. Herz, 132; F. Bolte, _Die Singspiele der englischen Komödianten und ihrer Nachfolger_ (1893, _Theatergeschichtliche Forschungen_, vii); W. J. Lawrence (_T. L. S._ 3 July 1919).

[1759] A. Clark, _Shirburn Ballads_, 244 (cf. S. R. list, _supra_, s. a. 1595), ‘M^r Attowel’s Jigge: betweene Francis, a Gentleman; Richard, a farmer; and their wives’. It is in four scenes, sung respectively to the tunes of ‘Walsingham’, ‘The Jewishe Dance’, ‘Buggle-boe’, and ‘Goe from my windo’. In _Roxburghe Ballads_, i. 201; ii. 101, are ‘Clod’s Carroll, a proper new jigg’, and ‘A mery new Jigge’. Collier’s ‘Jigge of a Horse Loade of Fooles’ (_New Facts_, 18; cf. Halliwell, _Tarlton_, xx) is probably a fake.

[1760] Clark, 354, from _Bodl. Rawlinson Poet. MS._ 185 (_c._ 1590), ‘A proper new ballett, intituled Rowland’s god-sonne’. It is to the tune of ‘Loth to departe’. Nashe, _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_, 76, mentions this jig. Two parts of a ‘Rowlandes godson moralised’ were entered in S. R. on 18 and 29 April 1592. Rowland is not a character, and numerous German allusions to and adaptations of a jig beginning ‘Oh neighbour Rowland’ (Herz, 134) have probably some other original. A ‘Roland and the Sexton’ is in the S. R. list, _supra_. A verse dialogue in _Alleyn Papers_, 8, mentions ‘bonny Rowland’ and is probably a jig of his cycle; another (p. 29) does not read to me like a jig.

[1761] Cf. ch. xv (Tarlton, Wilson) and Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (_Works_, i. 244), ‘the queint Comaedians of our time, That when their Play is doone, do fal to ryme’. Armin’s (q.v.) _Quips Upon Questions_ (1600) are probably themes, or based upon the conception of themes. A theme is introduced in _Histriomastix_, ii. 293. The Lord sets it:

Your poetts and your pottes
Are knit in true-love knots,

and a sixteen-line ‘song extempore’ by Posthaste follows. The verses on ‘theames’ in Gascoigne’s _Posies_ (ed. Cunliffe, 62) are not, I think, improvisations.

[1762] Smith, _Commedia dell’ Arte_, 175; cf. M. J. Wolff, _Shakespeare und die Commedia dell’ arte_ (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlvi. 1).

[1763] _C. is A._ II. vii. 36, of the players in Utopia (England), ‘_Sebastian._ And how are their plaies? as ours are? extemporall? _Valentine._ O no! all premeditated things’. The references of Whetstone, _Heptameron_ (1582), _Sp. Tragedy_, IV. i. 163, Middleton, _Spanish Gypsy_, IV. ii. 38, are specifically to French and Italian practice, and so too, presumably, _A. C._ v. ii. 216, ‘The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us’. The interpretation of Hamlet, II. ii. 420, ‘For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men’, is open, but Falstaff says in _1 Hen. IV_, II. iv. 309, ‘Shall we have a play extempore?’

[1764] Hamlet, III. ii. 42; cf. _John a Kent and John a Cumber_, iii, _ad fin._, ‘One of us Johns must play beside the book’.

[1765] In _K. B. P._, ind. 94, where Ralph ‘should have playd Jeronimo with a Shooemaker for a wager’; _Ratseis Ghost_ (1605, Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 326), ‘I durst venture all the mony in my purse on thy head to play Hamlet with him for a wager’; Dekker, _Jests to Make You Merrie_ (1607, _Works_, ii. 282), ‘A paire of players, growing into an emulous contention of one anothers worth, refusde to put themselves to a day of hearing (as any Players would haue done) but stood onely vpon their good parts’; cf. ch. xvi (Fortune), ch. xv (Alleyn).

[1766] Cf. ch. xi, p. 371.

[1767] _2 Ant. Mellida_, prol., ‘within this round ... this ring’; cf. p. 536. _Fawn_ (1604–6), prol., has ‘this fair-filled room’, but the play was transferred to Paul’s from Blackfriars.

[1768] For the existence of tiring-houses in private theatres, cf. inductions to _Jack Drum’s Entertainment_ (Paul’s) and _C. Revels_ (Blackfriars).

[1769] Cf. ch. xvii.

[1770] _Dutch Courtesan_ (_c. 1603_, Blackfriars), V. iii. 162, ‘my very fine Heliconian gallants, and you my worshipful friends in the middle region’.

[1771] Cf. Wright (App. I). For the origin of the term, cf. the c. v. of L. Digges to Shakespeare’s _Poems_ (1640):

Let but Beatrice
And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice
The cockpit, galleries, boxes, are all full,
To hear Malvoglio that crosse-garterd gull.

[1772] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (cf. App. H), with its mingling of ‘public’ and ‘private’ features, cannot be relied on. The _Roxana_ and _Wits_ engravings show spectators ‘over the stage’, but cannot be treated as evidence for the private houses. The _Messallina_ engraving only shows a window closed by curtains.

[1773] Cf. p. 556, _infra._

[1774] _1 Ant. Mellida_ (Paul’s), prol., ‘select and most respected auditors’; _What You Will_ (Paul’s), ind., ‘the female presence, the genteletza, the women’; _Jack Drum’s Entertainment_ (Paul’s), ind., ‘this choise selected influence’. But it was still mixed enough; cf. Jonson’s c. v. to _Faithful Shepherdess_ (Revels, _c._ 1608–9):

The wise and many-headed bench that sits
Upon the life and death of plays and wits--
Composed of gamester, captain, knight, knight’s man,
Lady or pusill that wears mask or fan,
Velvet or taffata cap, rank’d in the dark
With the shop’s foreman, or some such brave spark,
That may judge for his sixpence.

[1775] Cf. chh. i, x, and _M. L. R._ ii. 12.

[1776] Jonson, _supra_; _Mich. Term_ (_c._ 1606, Paul’s), ‘sixpenny fees all the year long’; Otho of Hesse-Cassel (1611, Whitefriars), ‘hier kostet der eingang einen halben schilling nur, da an andern orten wohl eine halbe kron’; _Scornful Lady_ (1613–16,? Whitefriars), IV. i. 238, ‘I ... can see a play For eighteen-pence again: I can, my lady’; _Wit Without Money_ (? 1614, Whitefriars), i. 1, ‘And who extoled you in the halfcrown boxes, where you might sit and muster all the beauties’. So later, Jonson, _Magnetic Lady_ (_1632_, Blackfriars), ind., ‘the faeces or grounds of your people, that sit in the oblique caves and wedges of your house, your sinful sixpenny mechanicks’. I am rather puzzled by Percy, _C. and C. Errant_, ‘Poules steeple stands in the place it did before; and twopence is the price for the going into a newe play there’. Even in 1589 (cf. p. 532) the price at Paul’s was 4_d._ according to a Marprelate tract, and William Darrell in that year paid 6_d._ (Hall, _Society in Elizabethan Age_, 211).

[1777] In _Isle of Gulls_ (1606, Blackfriars), ind., a Gent. can only see an act or two out, for ‘I lay in bed till past three a clock, slept out my dinner and my stomache will toule to supper afore fiue’. Otho of Hesse-Cassel (1611) says that the Whitefriars plays were at three, and from Michaelmas to Easter only. Percy, on the other hand (cf. ch. xii), says that the Paul’s boys were not allowed to begin before four, after prayers, and the gates of Paul’s shut at six. So, too, _Ram Alley_ (King’s Revels), epil., ‘Thus two hours have brought to end’. Gerschow in 1602 (cf. ch. xii) says that the Chapel acted once a week; cf. _Eastward Hoe_ (1605, Blackfriars), epil., ‘May this attract you hither once a week’.

[1778] Dekker, _Seven Deadly Sins_ (1606, Works, ii. 41), ‘All the Citty lookt like a priuate Play-house, when the windowes are clapt downe, as if some _Nocturnall_, or dismal _Tragedy_ were presently to be acted’.

[1779] _What You Will_ (1601, Paul’s), ‘Enter Atticus, Doricus, and Philomuse, they sit a good while on the stage before the Candles are lighted.... Enter Tier-man with lights’; _Mich. Term_ (1607, Paul’s), ‘Ours [terms] haue but sixpenny fees all the year long, yet we dispatch you in two hours without demur: your suits hang not long here after candles be lighted’; _Faithful Shepherdess_ (1608–9, Blackfriars), Beaumont’s c. v., ‘Some like, if the wax lights be new that day’. Otho of Hesse-Cassel (1611) says that the Whitefriars plays were ‘nur bei lichtern’. Later we have G. Wither, _Fair Virtue_ (1622), 1781:

those lamps which at a play
Are set up to light the day;

Lenton, _The Young Gallants Whirligig_ (1629):

spangled, rare perfumed attires,
Which once so glister’d at the torchy Friars.

Cf. Lawrence (ii. 1), _Light and Darkness in the Elizabethan Theatre_; also _E. S._ xlviii. 213.

[1780] Cf. ch. xii; and for evidence of inter-act music, Lawrence, i. 81; Cowling, 68. Papers on _Early Elizabethan Stage Music_ in _Musical Antiquary_ (Oct. 1909, Jan. 1913) show the origin of the musical tradition in the earlier boy companies; for its seventeenth-century development, cf. Wallace, ii. 114.

[1781] _Faithful Shepherdess_ (1608–9, Blackfriars), Beaumont’s c. v.:

Nor wants there those who, as the boy doth dance
Between the acts, will censure the whole play.

In _K. B. P._ (1607, Blackfriars) a boy dances after Acts i and iii, and the citizens comment, ‘I will haue him dance _Fading_; _Fading_ is a fine Iigge’. After Act ii there are fiddlers. After Act iv Ralph intervenes with a May Day speech.

[1782] _2 Ant. Mellida_, V. i. 50, ‘Andrugio’s ghost is placed betwixt the music-houses’; _Faery Pastoral_, s. ds., ‘Highest aloft and on the Top of the Musick Tree the Title The Faery Pastoral. Beneath him pind on Post of the Tree The Scene Eluida Forest Lowest of all ouer the Canopie ΝΑΠΑΙΤΒΟΔΑΙΟΝ or Faery Chappell’.... ‘Here they shutt both into the Canopie Fane or Trophey’; _Cuck Queenes and Cuckolds Errants_, prol. by Tarlton, ‘standing at entrance of the doore and right vnder the Beame I think Graves, 14, rightly explains ‘Trophey’ as ‘arch’, on the analogy of its use for a triumphal arch in Dekker, _Coronation Pageant_ (1603). The only other use of ‘canopy’ for a structural part of a theatre seems to be in _Sophonisba_, iv. 1, ‘Play softly within the canopy’.... ‘Syphax hasteneth within the canopy, as to Sophonisba’s bed’. This is a Blackfriars play, but it might conceivably have been written for Paul’s.

Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.

2. Where necessary, original spelling has been retained.

3. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the
original.

4. Hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been
retained as in the original.

5. Some words seem to have been written as one word, e.g.
thexecutor. These have been retained as in the original.

6. Superscripts are represented using the caret character, e.g.
D^r. or X^{xx}.

7. Italics are shown as _xxx_.