Your poetts and your pottes
Are knit in true-love knots,
and a sixteen-line ‘song extempore’ by Posthaste follows. The verses on ‘theames’ in Gascoigne’s Posies (ed. Cunliffe, 62) are not, I think, improvisations.
[1762] Smith, Commedia dell’ Arte, 175; cf. M. J. Wolff, Shakespeare und die Commedia dell’ arte (Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvi. 1).
[1763] C. is A. II. vii. 36, of the players in Utopia (England), ‘Sebastian. And how are their plaies? as ours are? extemporall? Valentine. O no! all premeditated things’. The references of Whetstone, Heptameron (1582), Sp. Tragedy, IV. i. 163, Middleton, Spanish Gypsy, IV. ii. 38, are specifically to French and Italian practice, and so too, presumably, A. C. v. ii. 216, ‘The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us’. The interpretation of Hamlet, II. ii. 420, ‘For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men’, is open, but Falstaff says in 1 Hen. IV, II. iv. 309, ‘Shall we have a play extempore?’
[1764] Hamlet, III. ii. 42; cf. John a Kent and John a Cumber, iii, ad fin., ‘One of us Johns must play beside the book’.
[1765] In K. B. P., ind. 94, where Ralph ‘should have playd Jeronimo with a Shooemaker for a wager’; Ratseis Ghost (1605, Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 326), ‘I durst venture all the mony in my purse on thy head to play Hamlet with him for a wager’; Dekker, Jests to Make You Merrie (1607, Works, ii. 282), ‘A paire of players, growing into an emulous contention of one anothers worth, refusde to put themselves to a day of hearing (as any Players would haue done) but stood onely vpon their good parts’; cf. ch. xvi (Fortune), ch. xv (Alleyn).
[1766] Cf. ch. xi, p. 371.
[1767] 2 Ant. Mellida, prol., ‘within this round ... this ring’; cf. p. 536. Fawn (1604–6), prol., has ‘this fair-filled room’, but the play was transferred to Paul’s from Blackfriars.
[1768] For the existence of tiring-houses in private theatres, cf. inductions to Jack Drum’s Entertainment (Paul’s) and C. Revels (Blackfriars).