IMOGEN. I have read three hours, then; mine eyes are weak.
Fold down the leaf where I have left! To bed!
By-and-by, when Iachimo steals from his trunk to "note the
chamber," he observes the book, examines it, and proclaims its nature:
She hath been reading late
The tale of Tereus! here's the leaf turned down
Where Philomel gave up.
Brutus reads within his tent:
Let me see, let me see; is not the leaf turned down
Where I left reading? Here it is, I think.
How ill this taper burns! Ha! Who comes here?
And thereupon enters the ghost of Cæsar, and appoints a meeting at Philippi.
In the third act of "The Third Part of King Henry VI.," that monarch enters, "disguised, with a prayer-book." Farther on, when a prisoner in the Tower, he is "discovered sitting with a book in his hand, the Lieutenant attending;" when Gloucester enters, abruptly dismisses the Lieutenant, and forthwith proceeds to the assassination of the king.
But Gloucester himself is by-and-by to have dealings with the "book of the play." In the seventh scene of the third act of "King Richard III.," a stage direction runs: "Enter Gloucester in a gallery above, between two bishops." Whereupon the Lord Mayor, who has come with divers aldermen and citizens to beseech the duke to accept the crown of England, observes:
See where his grace stands 'tween two clergymen!