CHAPTER IV. دو Information as to stage-usages contained in prologues and epilogues —The various parts of the theatre, and their respective tenants -Allusions to the tariff of the playhouse-The “sinful sixpenny mechanics "-The ". 'twopenny gallery "-The "scaffolders "The stools on the stage-The "yard "—The "understanding gentlemen of the ground "-The "private room The half-crown pit of the Restoration—Allusions to the curtain -The "Naples silk" of the "Red Bull"; "Banding tile and pear" against it "to allure the actors "-The curtain before the stage balcony-The "three blasts of the trumpet summoning the "quaking Prologue"-The incidental music-The duration of a play-The "two hours' traffic of our stage "— Allusions in prologues and epilogues to the scenery, the properties, the dresses, and superior embellishment of masques -Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones-The "thunder machine"Shakespeare's "squibs" and "rolled bullet" in Ben Jonson's prologues-References to theatrical customs; to wagers on actors; to "table-books"; to the author's "second day" and "third day"; to the time of the commencement of the play; to the title of the play; "hanging up the title;" to the first women-actors; apologies for the innovation-The "nurseries " of young Maximins referred to in prologues-Allusions to the morals of the contemporary stage and of contemporary society -Loyal prologues-Party prologues-Political prologues. THE interest which a study of the Prologue, and of its various changes in form and substance, must possess for one who is employed in investigating the characters and literary aims of the successive dramatists, will always be considerable. Even more valuable must such a study be for the purposes of the minute historian of the English stage of the art of acting, that is, as opposed to dramatic composition, and of its various accessories, customs, and appliances. What copious use may be made of prologues and epilogues for the illustration of the usages of the Shakespearian theatres is apparent from the constant references to them in the pages of Malone and Mr. Collier. Later periods furnish a similar abundance of material, though up to the present, at any rate, no Collier of the Restoration drama has appeared to ransack the numerous prologues of Dryden and his contemporaries with the same results as have been achieved by researches into the prologues of Shakespeare and the playwrights of his day. I now propose to touch very briefly on a few instances of stage-usages and conventions recorded or hinted at in some of the addresses to the audience written by the dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The general appearance and several divisions of the auditorium in an Elizabethan playhouse are now sufficiently well known. To the pit (or "yard" as it really was in the inns out of which in pre-Shakespearian times theatres were frequently extemporized),—the galleries, or "scaffolds," surrounding the pit,-the "rooms" or private boxes underneath the galleries,—and the stools set apart for the gallants and critics on the stage itself, the allusions in our earliest prologues are frequent, and I too familiar to need quotation here. But besides these well-marked provinces appertaining to the various classes of playgoers, we find references to certain very badly placed and low-priced boxes at each side of the balcony which formed a sort of fixed property of the stage, and was placed at its back. From their obscurity, we are told in Dekker's Gul's Hornebooke, that "much new satten was there dampned by being smothered to death in darkness." But the very peculiarity of sitting in such an out-of-the-way place tempted, as was natural, some of the more exquisite spirits; and in an old prologue we find a reference to a "private box" in this position being "taken up at a new play" for a gentleman of the period and "his retinue," which proceeding is described as Of a fashion never seen before, to draw This latter class, the "gallants, that sit upon the stage,” their stools, their tobacco, and their pages, are perhaps more frequently made the subject of allusion, for purposes of ridicule or otherwise, than any other, in the prefatory couplets which the poet confided to the "black cloak." Thus in the induction to The Malcontent we are introduced to William Sly (the player), "followed by a tireman with a stool." William Sly takes his seat, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the tireman, on the stage, explaining that this was allowable at "the private house" (as Blackfriars was), and leading us to suppose that it was not customary at the less select theatres known as "public playhouses." Sly and Lowin, as spectators in the course of this same Induction, invite one another to take tobacco on the stage, according to the practice of the day, and the "private rooms are also mentioned. The arrangement of the auditorium continued much the same till Dryden's time, as appears from the phrase of his contemporary Howard of which so much use is made in The Rehearsal. This dramatist, whenever he wished to prophecy the complete success of a play in a single comprehensive expression, used to vow that it would "box, pit and gallery it, 'egad, with any play in Europe." The audience on the stage held their position, and asserted their prescriptive rights, till the reformer Garrick, to the intense relief of his brother actors, finally swept them and their stools away.' * But though the "scientific frontiers" remained the same, the taxation changed. The managers of Dryden's time exacted a considerably heavier tribute than the Elizabethans. The materials for estimating the prices of admission to the different parts of the theatre in the pre-Restoration period, which may be gathered from contemporary prologues and epilogues, are exceedingly abundant, but unfortunately also exceedingly conflicting and unsatisfactory: conflicting, because the houses for which the various prologues were written were of various characters, and consequently prescribed various tariffs; and unsatisfactory, sometimes, because * Royal proclamations had been issued with this object, in 1664 first, and in subsequent years, but apparently without any lasting effect. In France, too, Voltaire, as Mr. Collier tells us, complains of "la foule de spectateurs confondue sur la scène avec les acteurs," even so late as his own time. the prices at first nights, for which, of course the prologues were composed, were often not the normal prices, but raised for the occasion. However, checking the prologues by other evidences, we arrive at the following usual tariff of the playhouses which flourished before the Puritan domination:-(Common) "Rooms," Scaffold or Gallery, 2d. (sometimes Id., sometimes 6d.); Ground, Yard, or Pit, 6d.; Private Rooms, Is. (sometimes Is. 6d., 2s., or even 2s. 6d.); Stools on the Stage, 6d. or Is. The "twopenny tenants" are addressed in the epilogue (already quoted) to Dekker's Satiromastix; and the prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Woman Hater more specifically talks of "the utter discomfiture of all twopenny Gallery men." On the other hand, the lowest class of Bankside theatres, such as the Hope and Rose, provided "penny rows" for the "gallery commoners," while Jasper Mayne, in his epilogue to The City Match is clearly alluding to the humblest branch of the audience, that is the "scaffolders" or "gallery commoners," where he disdains any fear that "... his name can suffer much, From those who sixpence pay and sixpence crack." But this was at the Blackfriars, a somewhat select theatre, where the prices would naturally be higher than at the more popular riverside houses. The "sinful sixpenny mechanics" of the pit, the "understanders" who sat in the "oblique caves and wedges of the house," are made the subject of some of Ben Jonson's pleasant animadversions in the induction to The Magnetic Lady, not to mention numerous other |