To give you for a fairing, true delight.
[THE INDUCTION.]
THE STAGE.
Enter the Stage-keeper.
Stage. Gentlemen, have a little patience, they are e’en upon coming, instantly. He that should begin the play, master Littlewit, the proctor, has a stitch new fallen in his black silk stocking; ’twill be drawn up ere you can tell twenty: he plays one o’ the Arches that dwells about the hospital, and he has a very pretty part. But for the whole play, will you have the truth on’t?—I am looking, lest the poet hear me, or his man, master Brome, behind the arras—it is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English. When’t comes to the Fair once, you were e’en as good go to Virginia, for any thing there is of Smithfield. He has not hit the humours, he does not know them; he has not conversed with the Bartholomew birds, as they say; he has ne’er a sword and buckler-man in his Fair; nor a little Davy, to take toll o’ the bawds there, as in my time; nor a Kindheart, if any body’s teeth should chance to ache in his play; nor a juggler with a well-educated ape, to come over the chain for a king of England, and back again for the prince, and sit still on his arse for the pope and the king of Spain. None of these fine sights! Nor has he the canvas-cut in the night, for a hobby-horse man to creep into his she-neighbour, and take his leap there. Nothing! No: an some writer that I know had had but the penning o’ this matter, he would have made you such a jig-a-jog in the booths, you should have thought an earthquake had been in the Fair! But these master poets, they will have their own absurd courses; they will be informed of nothing. He has (sir reverence) kick’d me three or four times about the tiring-house, I thank him, for but offering to put in with my experience. I’ll be judged by you, gentlemen, now, but for one conceit of mine: would not a fine pomp upon the stage have done well, for a property now? and a punk set under upon her head, with her stern upward, and have been soused by my witty young masters o’ the Inns of Court? What think you of this for a show, now? he will not hear o’ this! I am an ass! I! and yet I kept the stage in master Tarleton’s time, I thank my stars. Ho! an that man had lived to have played in Bartholomew Fair, you should have seen him have come in, and have been cozen’d in the cloth-quarter, so finely! and Adams, the rogue, have leaped and capered upon him, and have dealt his vermin about, as though they had cost him nothing! and then a substantial watch to have stolen in upon them, and taken them away, with mistaking words, as the fashion is in the stage-practice.
Enter the Bookholder with a Scrivener.
Book. How now! what rare discourse are you fallen upon, ha? have you found any familiars here, that you are so free! what’s the business?
Stage. Nothing, but the understanding gentlemen o’ the ground here ask’d my judgment.