Nor wants there those who, as the boy doth dance
Between the acts, will censure the whole play.
In K. B. P. (1607, Blackfriars) a boy dances after Acts i and iii, and the citizens comment, ‘I will haue him dance Fading; Fading is a fine Iigge’. After Act ii there are fiddlers. After Act iv Ralph intervenes with a May Day speech.
[1782] 2 Ant. Mellida, V. i. 50, ‘Andrugio’s ghost is placed betwixt the music-houses’; Faery Pastoral, s. ds., ‘Highest aloft and on the Top of the Musick Tree the Title The Faery Pastoral. Beneath him pind on Post of the Tree The Scene Eluida Forest Lowest of all ouer the Canopie ΝΑΠΑΙΤΒΟΔΑΙΟΝ or Faery Chappell’.... ‘Here they shutt both into the Canopie Fane or Trophey’; Cuck Queenes and Cuckolds Errants, prol. by Tarlton, ‘standing at entrance of the doore and right vnder the Beame I think Graves, 14, rightly explains ‘Trophey’ as ‘arch’, on the analogy of its use for a triumphal arch in Dekker, Coronation Pageant (1603). The only other use of ‘canopy’ for a structural part of a theatre seems to be in Sophonisba, iv. 1, ‘Play softly within the canopy’.... ‘Syphax hasteneth within the canopy, as to Sophonisba’s bed’. This is a Blackfriars play, but it might conceivably have been written for Paul’s.
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected silently.
2. Where necessary, original spelling has been retained. 3. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the original.
4. Hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been retained as in the original. 5. Some words seem to have been written as one word, e.g. thexecutor. These have been retained as in the original.
6. The heading hierarchy used follows the original publication and consequently in some chapters the h4 level has been skipped.