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.