[1710] The Fortune company, c. 1617 (H. P. 85), offer to employ a dismissed ‘gatherer’ as ‘a nessessary atendaunt on the stage’ and to mend garments. On 27 Dec. 1624 the Master of Revels (Var. iii. 112; Herbert, 74) issued a warrant of protection for Nicholas Underhill, Robert Pallant, John Rhodes, and eighteen others ‘all imployed by the kings maiesties servantes in theire quallity of playinge as musitions and other necessary attendantes’. In Devil’s Charter (1607), 3016, is the s. d. ‘Alexander vnbraced betwixt two Cardinalls in his study looking vpon a booke, whilst a groome draweth the curtaine’. Is this ‘groom’ a character or an ‘attendant’? In any case attendants were naturally, with musicians and even ‘gatherers’ (on whom cf. ch. xi), used at need for supernumeraries; cf. the gatherers in the Frederick and Basilea plot (1597, H. P. 136) and 2 If You Know Not Me (1606), p. 297, ‘Enter ... the waits in sergeants’ gowns’. The long list of men and boys in the procession at the end of 1 Tamar Cham (1602, H. P. 148) must have taxed all such resources. For the use of boys as attendants, cf. Bartholomew Fair, V. iii. 65, ‘Ha’ you none of your pretty impudent boyes, now; to bring stooles, fill Tabacco, fetch Ale, and beg money, as they haue at other houses?’ Seventeenth-century gossip (Centurie of Prayse, 417) made Shakespeare join the stage as a ‘serviture’.
[1711] Lawrence, i. 75, ii. 159; Wegener, 150; G. H. Cowling, Music on the Shakespearian Stage, 29, 70, 80. I refer to Cowling and to E. W. Naylor, Shakespeare and Music, for discussions of the instruments used—drums, timbrels, bells (percussion instruments), sackbuts, trumpets, horns (brass instruments), cornets, hautboys, recorders, fifes (wood instruments), viols, lutes, citterns, pandores (string instruments)—of such terms as ‘flourish’, ‘sennet’, ‘tucket’, ‘peal’, ‘alarum’, ‘consort’, and of other technical matters with which I am not qualified to deal. The Admiral’s inventories of 1598 (H. P. 115, 116, 118) include ‘iij trumpettes and a drum, and a trebel viall, a basse viall, a bandore, a sytteren ... j chyme of bells ... iij tymbrells ... j sack-bute’.
[1712] Malcontent, ind. 89. The additions for the King’s are ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’. But ‘abridge’ only means shorten, and there are s. ds. for music between the acts of Sejanus (Globe, 1603) and in the plot of Dead Man’s Fortune (Admiral’s, c. 1590, H. P. 133); cf. Dekker, Belman of London (1608, Works, iii. 76), ‘These were appointed to be my Actes, in this goodly Theater, the musicke betweene, were the Singers of the Wood’. But such evidence is rare, and Lawrence, i. 75, and Cowling, 67, do not discriminate sufficiently the practice of the public theatres from that of the private theatres on the one hand and the early neo-classic court plays on the other. Here music is an integral part of the intermedii or dumb-shows, which are little more than survivals in the full-blown public drama; cf. F. A. Foster in E. S. xliv. 8, and Hamlet, III. ii. 13, ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’.
[1713] Cf. p. 551.
[1714] Alphonsus, prol., ‘after you haue sounded thrise, let Venus be let downe from the top of the Stage’; Heywood, Four Prentices, prol., ‘Do you not know that I am the prologue? Do you not see the long black velvet coat upon my back? Have I not all the signs of the prologue about me? Have you not sounded thrice?’; Dekker, Satiromastix, epist., ‘In steed of the trumpets sounding thrice, before the play begin, it shall not be amisse ... first to beholde this short Comedy of Errors’; G. H. B. (cf. App. H), ‘untill the quaking prologue hath (by rubbing) got cullor into his cheekes, and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that hee’s upon point to enter’; E. M. O. (Q1), 107, ‘Inductio, sono secundo’, 402, ‘Sound the third time. Enter Prologue’. Jonson has a similar arrangement (F1) in the private house plays Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, but probably the trumpets were here replaced by more elaborate music; cf. 1 Ant. Mellida, ind. 1, ‘the music will sound straight for entrance’; What You Will, ind. 1 (s. d.), ‘Before the music sounds for the Act’; C. Revels (Q1), 1435, ‘Like an unperfect Prologue, at third musique’. Surely this is the origin of the ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ (or ‘curtain tune’) music of the Restoration and eighteenth-century overtures, described by Lawrence, ii. 155. Exceptionally the prologue in Percy’s C. and C. Errant is between the second and third sounding.
[1715] Chaste Maid in Cheapside, V. iv. 1 (s. d.), ‘There is a sad song in the music-room’; cf. Thracian Wonder, IV. i. 182, ‘Pythia speaks in the musick Room behind the Curtain’, 186, ‘Pythia above, behind the curtains.’ But these, although early plays, are in late prints, and the other examples of a music-room ‘above’ given by Lawrence, i. 91, are Caroline. Jasper Mayne says of Jonson (1638, Jonsonus Virbius), ‘Thou laid’st no sieges to the music-room’. My own impression is that when the lord’s room over the tire-house was disused by spectators (cf. p. 537) it became indifferently available for actors and for music, and that here, rather than, as is possible, higher still in the scenic wall, was the normal place for the seventeenth-century music, when it was not needed elsewhere, or the space needed for other purposes. The introduction of the high proscenium arch at the Restoration caused difficulties, and various experiments were tried in placing the music above (Lawrence, i. 91, 161; ii. 160; W. G. Keith, The Designs for the First Movable Scenery on the English Public Stage in Burlington Magazine, xxv. 29, 85), before the modern situation was adopted.
[1716] Cf. ch. x.
[1717] R. J., prol. 12, ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’; Alchemist, prol. 1, ‘these two short hours’; Hen. VIII, prol. 13, ‘two short hours’; T. N. K., prol. 28, ‘Sceanes ... worth two houres travell’; Heywood, Apology, 11 (Beeston’s c. v.), ‘two houres well spent’; Barth. Fair, ind., ‘the space of two hours and a half and somewhat more’. Perhaps plays tended to grow shorter. Fenton (1574) and Northbrooke (1577–8) give ‘two or three houres’, and Whetstone (1578) three hours (cf. App. C), but Dekker (cf. p. 533, n. 3) seems to regard three hours as an exceptionally long period.
[1718] Cotgrave, French-English Dict. (1611), s.v. Falot, ‘a cresset light (such as they use in play-houses) made of ropes wreathed, pitched and put into small and open cages of iron’; cf. Lawrence, ii. 13, who thinks the cressets were part of the lighting of private houses. But would they not smoke and smell badly, if used indoors? There is no particular reason for translating the lucernae of Christ Church hall in 1566, with Schelling and Lawrence, as ‘cressets’.
[1719] Nashe (iii. 329), epist. to Astrophel and Stella (1591), ‘here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau’n to ouershadow the faire frame’; Wagnerbook (1594, cf. ch. xx), ‘Now aboue all was there the gay Clowdes vsque quaque adorned with the heavenly firmament, and often spotted with golden teares which men callen Stars. There was liuely portrayed the whole Imperiall Army of the faire heauenly inhabitauntes’; Birth of Hercules (1597 <), i. 1, s. d., ‘Ad comoediae magnificentiam apprime conferet ut coelum Histrionium sit luna et stellis perspicue distinctum’; Heywood, Apology (c. 1608), 34, of the Roman theatre, ‘the covering of the stage, which we call the heavens’; Cotgrave, Dict. (1611), s.v. Volerie, ‘a place over a stage, which we call the heavens’. The same word was used for the state over a throne; cf. Cotgrave, s.v. Dais, ‘a cloth of estate, canopie, or Heaven, that stands over the heads of Princes thrones’. Graves, 24, gives examples of heavens used in Tudor pageants. It is to be noted that the ‘heavens’ and ‘hell’ (cf. p. 528) of a theatre continue characteristic features of mediaeval staging (cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 86, 137, 142); cf. All Fools, prol. 1: