Shirley, The Doubtful Heir (1640), prol.:
No shews, no frisk and, what you most delight in,
Grave understanders, here’s no target-fighting.
[1666] Proscenium is the proper classical word for the space in front of the scena; cf. p. 539.
[1667] Albright has no justification for introducing into his reconstruction of a typical Shakespearian stage the tapering, instead of quadrangular, platform which characterizes the late engraving in The Wits, and to a less degree those in Roxana and Messallina.
[1668] Wegener, 125, collects examples of the use of traps. They served, inter alia, for the representation of ‘hell-mouth’, which the Elizabethan stage inherited from the miracle-plays (cf. p. 544), and the space under the stage was known as ‘hell’; cf. Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 92, 139), ‘Mary the question is, in which of the Play-houses he [the Devil] would have performed his prize.... Hell being vnder euerie one of their Stages, the Players (if they had owed him a spight) might with a false Trappe doore haue slipt him downe, and there kept him, as a laughing stocke to al their yawning spectators.... Tailors ... (as well as Plaiers) haue a hell of their owne, (vnder their shop-board).’
[1669] Cf. Graves, 41. The register of the association of Masters of Defence (Sloane MS. 2530; cf. extracts in A. Hutton, The Sword and the Centuries, 259) records many ‘prizes’ played at theatres and theatrical inns during the sixteenth century; cf. App. D, Nos. lx-lxii, Case is Altered, II. vii. 28, ‘First they [maisters of defence] are brought to the publicke Theater’, and for later periods Henslowe, 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,