[1699] Godfrey (Architectural Review, xxiii. 239) has no authority for his internal roofed staircases and landings in the narrow spaces between the galleries and the sides of the stage.
[1700] Henslowe made a ‘penthowsse shed at the tyeringe howsse doore’ of the Rose in 1591. Doubtless the stage could also be reached from in front; cf. the K. B. P. passage on p. 536.
[1701] Gosson, P. C. (1582, App. C, No. xxx), tells how youths are wont ‘to go first into the yarde, and to carry theire eye through euery gallery’ in search of attractive company; cf. p. 532.
[1702] Cf. p. 541, and ch. xi.
[1703] Peacham, however, may be merely versifying the story of the choleric justice and the provincial audience which laughed when he ‘first peept out his head’ in Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (Works, i. 188), and reading in a feature, in the process, of the stage as known to himself; and the same applies to Davenant, The Unfortunate Lovers (c. 1638), prol., on the play-goers of old times:
For they, he swears, to the theatre would come,
Ere they had din’d, to take up the best room;
There sit on benches, not adorn’d with mats,
And graciously did vail their high-crown’d hats
To every half-dress’d player, as he still