As we went in, we should pay the gatherer' who stood at the door with his box. The price was not the same everywhere; often it was only a penny, but we read of sixpence as the lowest price, perhaps for a first performance, when the manager put the prices up. We should find ourselves in the yard' or 'ground', the cheapest part of the house and open to the sky. It had no seats, and the people stood right up to the stage. They enjoyed themselves with apples, nuts, and bottled ale, and they smoked. They annoyed the actors by cracking the nuts during the play; and sometimes they found another use for the apples than eating them. Vulgar, noisy, excitable -especially on a holiday afternoon when the City apprentices were there-such were the 'groundlings', as they were called; and you can fancy what the poets thought of them. Ben Jonson has a sly cut at them as the understanding gentlemen of the ground', as if standing under the stage was the only way they would ever understand anything: that joke would amuse them. Another writer of plays, Thomas Dekker, calls them the 'penny stinkards'; but he did not say that in a play. If he had, all the apples in London would not have been enough to pelt the actors with. There would have been a riot, and if the groundlings had not wrecked the building, they would have given the magistrates, who disliked plays, a good excuse for interfering and saying that the theatre was dangerous and ought to be closed.

If we did not like the 'ground', we could pay more and go into the galleries—' the twopenny room' at the top, not very convenient for seeing, or the lower galleries, sixpence or a shilling, or at most half-a-crown. But suppose we had a new suit of silk and velvet and a showy feather and a gold chain, we should like a more striking position than the galleries. In some theatres we could go on the stage and sit there while the performance went on! Entering the theatre by the stage-door and passing through the 'tiring-house' or actors' dressing-room, we should step out on the stage, call for a stool (price sixpence or a shilling) and sit down at the side; then we should take out our pipes and tobacco (three kinds of tobacco, for that was the height of fashion, and two pipes); next we should get a flint and really' strike' a light, and after all this fuss settle down to criticize, puffing smoke through

our noses rather than our mouths. We could also show off by making a face, spitting and crying' Filthy!' after a good bit of acting, and finally annoy the poet by walking out before the play was over to prove that we could stand no more of it.

It is time to look at the stage itself. In the year 1596 a Dutchman named John de Witt visited London, made notes of what he saw, and sketched the Swan Theatre on the Bankside, then new, and, he says, the finest in London. We have a copy which one of his friends made of this sketch; it is the frontispiece of this book. The stage comes out into the yard' and rests on strong supports of timber. Acting is going on in front. The back part is covered over by a tiled roof resting on two large pillars; this was called 'the heavens or the shadow'. Actors often wore very rich dresses, and this space would be useful if a shower came on suddenly. At the back of all is the 'tiring-house'; it has two doors below, and people are looking out from a five-pillared gallery above. Over the 'heavens' is a kind of attic from the top of which floats the flag of the Swan; at a small door is an actor blowing a trumpet. Below, on either side of the stage, are the entrances to the galleries.1

Just before a play began, a trumpet was sounded three times; this explains the trumpeter at the top. After the third sounding' an actor wearing a black cloak would come in and speak the 'prologue' or first speech. In the sketch, however, a scene is shown: a lady is sitting on a bench, with her waiting-woman behind her, and a man coming to them. We do not know the scene, but we may imagine, from the way in which he is walking, that it is a comedy. The two doors in the background are often mentioned in old plays. They were very useful, on that simple stage, to show that the people entering belonged to different parties. You will see in A King's Defiance (the second piece in this book) that the British King, Queen, and Lords enter 'at one door', the Roman Ambassador and his Attendants 'at another '. So in

1 The Latin words in the picture mean-planities sive arena, the ground or yard; proscenium, the front part of the stage; mimorum aedes, the actors' house; ingressus, the entrance to the galleries; orchestra, the chief seats; porticus, the gallery; and tectum, the roof.

Brutus and Caesar (XIII. iv, ll. 3, 4), when Brutus tells Cassius to 'go into the other street and part the numbers', Cassius would go out by the opposite door to that by which he entered, and would take some of the Citizens with him.

But what is the gallery above the doors? It was used for the scenes which are said to take place' above' or 'aloft'. In the play of King Henry VI, Joan of Arc relieves Orleans. She drives off the English soldiers : A short alarum, then enter the town with soldiers' (that is, she goes in at one of the doors below). The English general Talbot makes a short speech, and then 'Enter on the walls' Joan with French lords and soldiers. She would reappear in the gallery. In the next act Talbot recovers the lost ground: Enter Talbot, Bedford, Burgundy with scaling-ladders.' They put the ladders up at three different points: 'I'll to yond corner,' says Bedford; 'And I to this,' says Burgundy; 'And here will Talbot mount.' They go up, followed by their men; the sentinel gives the alarm; the English raise their war-cry, 'St. George' and 'A Talbot'. And then, 'The French leap over the walls in their shirts. Enter several ways the Bastard of Orleans, Alençon, and Reignier, half ready, and half unready' (that is, some men dressed, others not). Some would drop from the opening, others no doubt come down by the ladders, and others rush through both the doors; giving altogether a very good idea of hopeless confusion. In Brutus and Caesar again, when Brutus and Antony ascend' or 'go up' and speak from the 'pulpit' (XIII. iv, ll. 11, 62), each actor would pass out from the stage and reappear ' above'.

But where is the curtain? There was no drop-scene in front of the stage, such as we have now, but an inner curtain was used for what they called discovered' scenes. In Henry VIII, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk come to see the King; the Lord Chamberlain tells them it is 'a most unfit time to disturb him', and leaves them. 'Exit Lord Chamberlain' is the stage-note, and the King draws the curtain and sits reading pensively.' Suffolk remarks how sad he looks, and the King, as if, when he pulled the curtain, they had stepped into his private room, storms at them for coming in, and says he

wants to be quiet. Some think that the curtain used for these scenes hung from the front of the 'heavens', others that it was near the back wall.

The space underneath the stage was used, and in most theatres it must have been boarded off. In Hamlet the Ghost speaks underground, and Hamlet says: 'You hear this fellow in the cellarage.' Trap-doors were used for ghosts to 'rise' and 'vanish', or when an actor had to disappear, or a grave to be made. In Massinger's play, Believe as you List, of which we have the manuscript, there is a note, ' Gascoine and Herbert below, ready to open the trap for Mr. Taylor.'

A change of scene could not be marked by having new scenery. If one act took place in England and the next in France, an actor, called the Chorus, often came in and explained this; the noble Choruses of King Henry V are given in this book. At other times the actors themselves tell us where they are. In Robert Greene's play of George-a-Greene this is done very funnily. The scene is at Wakefield, and we have a stage-note, Enter a Shoemaker, sitting upon the stage at work'; then a man named Jenkin comes in and challenges him to a bout at quarter-staff. This is what they say :

Jenkin. But darest thou walk to the town's end with me?

Shoemaker. Aye, that I dare do, but stay till I lay in my tools, and I will go with thee to the town's end presently. [He packs away his tools. Jenkin [getting frightened]. I would I knew how to get rid of this fellow.

Shoemaker. Come, sir, will you go to the town's end now, sir?

Jenkin. Aye, sir, come. [4 pause, while they walk to the front.] Now we are at the town's end, what say you

now?

Shoemaker. Marry, come, let us even have a bout.

Just in the same way the death-scene of Julius Caesar (Brutus and Caesar, XIII. iii) opens with a procession going along a street (see line 11), and a man is told to come to the Capitol'. No time is lost, for in the next line they all are in the Capitol.

Sometimes properties', or pieces of stage furniture,

tell us what the scene is. In Hamlet a king lies down upon 'a bank of flowers', and that would be a very useful property for the wood where the Fairies live in A Midsummer Night's Dream. A tree was wanted sometimes; then an actor would climb up, hide in the branches, and, like King Charles in the oak, would overhear the people who walked and talked below. Of course they used simple furniture. Sick or dying people were brought in in a chair (this is how The Dying Prophet would appear in V), or even in a bed. 'A bed thrust out' and 'She's drawn out upon a bed' are stage-notes printed in some old plays. Squibs did for lightning, cannon-balls were rolled about to sound like thunder, a drum was beaten to make the rumble of a tempest. We have a play by John Fletcher which was printed without any author's corrections from the copy used by the actors, and we find notes like this: Pewter ready for noise (that means, have it ready behind the scenes); then in the next scene a man who is beside himself with rage is supposed to throw his furniture about and smash it, and we have a stage-note, A great noise within', and the actors on the stage wonder what is happening inside the house. You may think all this would make things very hard for the actors. Not if the actors were good, and the audience were willing to imagine things.

All actors had to belong to a company which played in the name of some royal or noble patron. They acted by his warrant and were called his 'servants'. Shakespeare's Henry V is said, on the title-page of the first edition, 1600, to be printed' As it hath been sundry times played by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants'. There was a law against actors, and they could be imprisoned and whipped as vagabonds, but nobody could interfere with noblemen's 'servants'. Another strange thing to us is that women were not allowed to act; women's parts were taken by boys. However well they acted, male Rosalinds and Juliets must have been clumsy substitutes. Shakespeare hints this when he makes Cleopatra, the great Queen of Egypt, say, after her fall, that, if she is taken to Rome as a prisoner, her story will be acted by the quick comedians', and then I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.