i. 98 (the Rose, 1598), the fatal contest at the Swan in 1602, and

Herbert, 47, 81. For acrobats cf. App. D, No. cxxiii, on the use of the Swan by Peter Bromvill in 1600. Henslowe, i. 98, 106, records loans in connexion with vaulting performances with a horse, perhaps at the Rose, in 1598 and 1599 by John Haslett or Hassett, who was also paid for court performances (App. B) in 1603 and 1608.

[1670] T. M. _Black Book_ (1604, Bullen, _Middleton_, viii. 7) opens with _Lucifer ascending, as Prologue to his own Play_:

Now is hell landed here upon the earth, When Lucifer, in limbs of burning gold, Ascends the dusty theatre of the world,...

... my tortured spleen Melts into mirthful humour at this fate, That heaven is hung so high, drawn up so far, And made so fast, nailed up with many a star; And hell the very shop-board of the earth,...

... And now that I have vaulted up so high Above the stage-rails of this earthen globe, I must turn actor and join companies.

Rails are shown in the late _Roxana_ and _Messallina_ engravings of indoor stages.

[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,

lay me ’em thus, In fine smooth threaves; look you, sir, thus, in threaves. Perhaps some tender lady will squat here, And if some standing rush should chance to prick her, She’d squeak, and spoil the songs that must be sung.’

[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):

So when thy Fox had ten times acted been, Each day was first, but that ’twas cheaper seen; And so thy Alchemist played o’er and o’er, Was new o’ the stage, when ’twas not at the door.

[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 3_d._ was the highest normal charge in the sixteenth century, the 6_d._ may represent a first night’s charge.

[1686] Most of the allusions to 6_d._ 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 1_s._ 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:

See you him yonder, who sits o’re the stage, With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth?

In _E. M. O._ (_1599_), 1390 (Q_{1}), 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_:

Rufus the Courtier at the theatre Leauing the best and most conspicuous place, Doth either to the stage himselfe transfer, Or through a grate doth show his doubtful face, For that the clamorous frie of Innes of court Filles vp the priuate roomes of greater prise: And such a place where all may haue resort He in his singularitie doth despise.

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:

‘3. Child ... Here I enter.

1. What, vpon the stage too?

2. Yes: and I step forth like one of the children, and ask you, Would you have a Stool, Sir?

3. A Stoole Boy?

2. I Sir, if you’le giue me sixe Pence, I’le fetch you one.

3. For what I pray thee? what shall I doe with it?

2. O God Sir! will you betraye your Ignorance so much? why, throne your selfe in state on the stage, as other Gentlemen vse Sir’;

_All Fools_ (_c. 1604_), prol. 30:

if our other audience see You on the stage depart before we end, Our wits go with you all and we are fools.

_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:

_Wife below Rafe below._

_Wife._ Husband, shall I come vp husband?

_Citizen._ I cunny. Rafe helpe your mistresse this way: pray gentlemen make her a little roome, I pray you sir lend me your hand to helpe vp my wife.... Boy, let my wife and I haue a cupple stooles.... Come vp Rafe.

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 (Q_{1}), ‘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.:

‘Enter W. Sly, a Tire-man following him with a stool.

_Tire-man._ Sir, the gentlemen will be angry if you sit here.

_Sly._ Why, we may sit upon the stage at the private house. Thou dost not take me for a country gentleman, dost? dost think I fear hissing?...

_Lowin._ Good sir, will you leave the stage? I’ll help you to a private room.

_Sly._ Come, coz, lets take some tobacco’;

_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]

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,