[1671] Cf. H. Logeman in Anglia, xix. 117.

[1672] Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), ‘on the very Rushes where the Commedy is to daunce ... must our fethered Estridge ... be planted’ ... ‘Salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spred either on the rushes, or on stooles about you ... take vp a rush, and tickle the earnest eares of your fellow gallants’; 1 Hen. IV, III. i. 214, ‘She bids you on the wanton rushes lay you down’. In The Gentleman Usher (c. 1604, Blackfriars), II. i. 72, ‘Enter Bassiolo with Servants, with rushes and a carpet’, and Bassiolo says,

[1673] Lawrence, i. 39, 161.

[1674] G. Harvey (1579, Letter Book, 67), ‘sum maltconceivid comedye fitt for the Theater, or sum other paintid stage whereat thou and thy liuely copesmates in London may lawghe ther mouthes and bellyes full for pence or twoepence apeece’; Spenser, Tears of the Muses (1591), 176, ‘That wont with comick sock to beautefie The painted Theaters’; cf. Graves, 68. Coryat, i. 386, in 1608, found a Venice play-house ‘very beggarly and base in comparison of our stately Play-houses in England: neyther can their Actors compare with us for apparell, shewes and musicke’. So in Case is Altered, II. vii. 30, the plays in Utopia (= England) are ‘set foorth with as much state as can be imagined’.

[1675] App. I; but cf. p. 524, n. 1.

[1676] Malcontent (1604, Globe), ind., ‘Good sir, will you leave the stage? I’ll help you to a private room’; cf. Sir J. Davies’ epigram, infra.

[1677] Wright, Hist. Hist. 407, ‘The prices were small (there being no scenes)’.

[1678] L. Wager’s Mary Magdalene (1566) has a prologue which says that the actors will take ‘halfpence or pence’ from the audience, but this was probably used by strolling actors and continues the miracle-play tradition. At almost the same date, a jest in Merry Tales, Wittie Questions and Quick Answers (1567, Hazlitt, Jest Books, i. 145) tells how men stood at the gate of a play at Northumberland Place, ‘with a boxe (as the facion is) who toke of euery persone that came in a peny or an half peny at the least’.

[1679] J. Mayne in Jonsonus Virbius (1638):

[1680] G. Harvey (p. 530, supra); Lyly, Pappe with an Hatchet (Works, iii. 408); cf. Martin’s Month’s Mind (1589, App. C, No. xl). Lodge, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), will not ‘tie my pen to Pennie-knaves delight’, and S. Rowlands, Letting of Humour’s Blood in the Head Vein (1600), bids poets not ‘To teach stage parrots speak for penny pleasure’; cf. Case is Altered, I. i. 104, ‘Tut, giue me the penny, giue me the peny, I care not for the Gentlemen, I, let me haue a good ground’.

[1681] Cf. ch. xvi, introd. Field says in 1583 (App. C, No. xxxi), ‘Euery dore hath a payment, & euery gallerie maketh a yearely stipend’.

[1682] E. M. O. (1599), ind. 425, ‘Let me neuer liue to looke as highe as the two-pennie roome, againe’; T. Garzoni, Hospitall of Incurable Fooles (tr. 1600), epist., ‘a Player that in speaking an Epilogue makes loue to the two pennie roume for a plaudite’; Satiromastix (1602), epil. 2690, ‘Are you pleas’d?... if you be not, by’th Lord Ile see you all—heere for your two pence a peice agen before Ile loose your company.... Good night, my two-penny Tenants’; Mad World, my Masters (c. 1604–6), v. ii. 36, ‘some ... that ... took a good conceit of their parts into th’ two-penny room’; Woman Hater (1607), prol. 5, ‘I do pronounce this, to the utter discomfort of all two-penny Gallery men, you shall have no bawdery’; Fleire (1607), ii. 30, ‘They (like your common players) let men come in for twopence a peece’; Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 96), ‘You may take him ... in the afternoones, in the twopeny roomes of a Play-house, like a Puny, seated Cheeke by Iowle with a punke’, Seven Deadly Sins (1606, ii. 53), ‘Sloth ... will come and sit in the two-pennie galleries amongst the gentlemen, and see their knaveries and their pastimes’, The Dead Term (1608, iv. 55), ‘Players ... prostitute themselues to the pleasures of euery two-penny drunken Plebeian’, Lanthorn and Candle-Light (1608, iii. 216), ‘Pay thy twopence to a Player, in his gallerie maist thou sitte by a Harlot’, Raven’s Almanac (1609, iv. 184), ‘As if you sat in the moste perspicuous place of the two-penny gallerie in a play-house’; Roaring Girl (1611), v. 1, ‘One of them is a nip; I took him once i’ the two-penny gallerie at the Fortune’; &c., &c.

[1683] Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins (1606, Works, ii. 53), ‘Their houses smoakt euery after noone with Stinkards who were so glewed together in crowdes with the steames of strong breath, that when they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had beene per boyld’, Raven’s Almanac (1609, iv. 194), ‘Hee shall be glad to play three houres for two pence to the basest stinkard in London, whose breth is stronger than garlicke, and able to poison all the twelve penny roomes’, Work for Armourers (1609, iv. 96), ‘tearme times, when the Twopeny Clients and Peny Stinkards swarme together to heere the Stagerites’; vide n. 2, infra, and p. 534, n. 1.

[1684] Satiromastix (1602), 1669, ‘a Gentleman or an honest Cittizen shall not sit in your pennie-bench Theaters, with his Squirrell by his side cracking nuttes ... but he shall be Satyr’d and Epigram’d vpon’; T. M. Black Book (1604), ‘penny-rooms at theatres’; T. M. Ant and Nightingale (1604), ‘stinkards sitting in the penny galleries of a theatre, and yawning upon the players’; Dekker, Gull’s Horn Book (1609, Works, ii. 208), ‘thou ... hast vouchsafed to be acquainted with penny galleries’; Wit Without Money (c. 1614), iv. 1, ‘break in at plays like prentices for three a groat, and crack nuts with the scholars in peny rooms again’.

[1685] A. Copley, Wits, Fits and Fancies (1595; ed. 1614, p. 124), tells of a man cast off by his brother, an actor, who sent him sixpence in a sheet of paper, to show that, ‘though his brother had vowed not in seven years to see him, yet he for his sixpence could come and see him upon the stage at his pleasure’. If Platter’s 3d. was the highest normal charge in the sixteenth century, the 6d. may represent a first night’s charge.

[1686] Most of the allusions to 6d. charges relate to private houses (cf. p. 556), but Beaumont’s grammar lecture (cf. ch. xxiii) gives this price for the Bankside, and T. M. Black Book (1604, Bullen, Middleton, viii. 41) has ‘I give and bequeath to you Benedick Bottomless, most deep cut-purse, all the benefit of ... the sixpenny rooms in play-places, to cut, dive and nim’. Later, The Actors Remonstrance (1643) professes that the players will not admit into their ‘sixpenny rooms those unwholesome enticing harlots that sit there merely to be taken up by prentices or lawyers’ clerks’; cf. Lawrence, i. 36, who thinks that the lord’s rooms became the sixpenny rooms. For the 1s. charge, cf. p. 533, n. 1, and Malcontent (1604), ind. 63, ‘I say, any man that hath wit may censure, if he sit in the twelve-penny room’; Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), ‘When at a new play you take up the twelve-penny rome next the stage; (because the Lords and you may seeme to be haile fellow wel-met) there draw forth this booke, read alowd, laugh alowd, and play the Antickes, that all the garlike mouthed stinkards may cry out, Away with the fool’; Hen. VIII (1613), prol., ‘may see away their shilling’; Overbury, Characters (ed. Rimbault, 154, The Proud Man), ‘If he have but twelvepence in ’s purse he will give it for the best room in a play-house’.

[1687] They include women, and certainly look more like spectators than actors or musicians.

[1688] E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), ep. 53:

In E. M. O. (1599), 1390 (Q₁), Brisk is said to speak of lords ‘as familiarlie as if hee had ... ta’ne tabacco with them ouer the stage i’ the Lords roome’. Dekker-Wilkins, Jests to Make you Merry (1607, Works, ii. 292), has a jest of ‘one that sat ouer the stage’ on a wench in the two-penny room. Farmer-Chetham MS. (seventeenth-century, ed. Grosart, i. 104) has an epigram on Spongus, who ‘Plays at Primero over the stage’.

[1689] Satiromastix (1602), 2612, ‘You must forsweare to venter on the stage when your play is ended, and to exchange curtezies and complements with gallants in the Lordes roomes’. The subject is well discussed by Lawrence (i. 29), The Situation of the Lords’ Room.

[1690] Sir J. Davies, Epigrams (prob. < 1596), ep. 28, In Sillam, ‘He that dares take Tobacco on the stage’; ep. 3, In Rufum:

It is not, I think, sitting on the stage that is satirized in J. Hall, Virgedemiarum (1597), i. 3, but a performance by illiterate amateurs on a ‘hired Stage’.

[1691] C. Revels (1601), ind. 138:

All Fools (c. 1604), prol. 30:

Isle of Gulls (1606), ind., ‘But come boy, furnish us with stools’.... ‘He [the author] is not on the stage amongst gallants preparing a bespoke Plaudite’.

K. B. P. (1607), ind. 41:

It must not be assumed from this burlesque that women usually sat on the stage, even at the private houses.

[1692] What You Will (1602), ind., ‘Let’s place ourselves within the curtains, for good faith the stage is so very little, we shall wrong the general eye else very much’; Faery Pastoral (1603), author’s note, ‘If so be that the Properties of any of These, that be outward, will not serue the turne by reason of concourse of the People on the Stage, Then you may omit the sayd Properties’. In Wily Beguiled (possibly a Paul’s play), 2021, comes the s. d. ‘Stands vpon a stoole’, in a wood scene.

[1693] E. M. O. (1599), 585 (Q₁), ‘Sit o’ the stage and flout; prouided, you haue a good suit’; 1784, ‘rich apparell ... takes possession of your stage at your new play’; A Mad World, my Masters (c. 1604–6), v. ii. 38, ‘The actors have been found i’ th’ morning in a less compass than their stage, though it were ne’er so full of gentlemen’; Woman Hater (1607), i. 3, ‘All the Gallants on the stage rise, vail to me, kiss their hand, offer me their places’. It is true that Roaring Girl (1611), ii. 1, has ‘the private stages audience, the twelve-penny stool gentlemen’, but this may only point to a higher price for a stool at the private house, and in any case cannot outweigh the allusions of Davies and Jonson before the Blackfriars, or probably Paul’s, were reopened, or T. M. Black Book (1604, Bullen, Middleton, viii. 42), ‘Barnaby Burning-glass, arch tobacco-taker of England, in ordinaries, upon stages both common and private’; Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), ‘Whether therefore the gatherers of the publique or priuate Play-house stand to receiue the afternoones rent, let our Gallant (hauing paid it) presently aduance himselfe vp to the Throne of the Stage’ (cf. the whole passage on the procedure and advantages of sitting on the stage, where Dekker clearly mingles traits of both types of house, in App. H). Wallace, ii. 130, argues that the custom was started at Blackfriars and was confined to the private houses, but is hopelessly confuted by C. R. Baskervill in M. P. viii. 581.

[1694] Malcontent (1604, Globe), ind.:

M. D’Olive (1606, Blackfriars), IV. ii. 173, ‘I’ll take up some other fool for the Duke to employ: every ordinary affords fools enow; and didst not see a pair of gallants sit not far hence like a couple of bough-pots to make the room smell?’

[1695]

[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 Caroline practice, cf. T. Goffe, Careless Shepherdess ind.:

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

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,

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. (Q₁), 107, ‘Inductio, sono secundo’, 402, ‘Sound the third time. Enter Prologue’. Jonson has a similar arrangement (F₁) 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 (Q₁), 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 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,

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:

[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,

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 F₁ of Beaumont and Fletcher (1647):

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